Scalito
I don't know what to say about the Alito confirmation that shouldn't already be obvious to anyone with two brain cells to rub together.
I mean, how do you start talking about something like this? I could go the "The Democratic Party is a useless, shambling parody of a political party" route, but, I mean... duh. I could rail about how obvious it is that Alito's an ultraconservative of the sort that you'd swear that conservative thinktanks had been growing him in a lab for the past few decades, programming him with single-minded focus on taking their agenda to the Supreme Court, but, again, duh.
Look, here's the problem in a nutshell. Alito has every intention of doing away with abortion rights, and perhaps more frighteningly, doing away with every restriction on executive power he can find. These things couldn't be more obvious if he had a glowing neon sign over his head, but no one had the power to stop him. Anywhere.
The confirmation hearings were a sham because anyone who's going to make it to the point where he's sitting behind that desk is going to know how to keep his cool and give evasive non-answers to anything the committee throws at him. No matter how much Joe Biden hollered at him, he wasn't going to crack and say anything that they could use as a justification for shooting him down. The whole expectation that Senators place more emphasis on the hearings and not prior decisions or documents from his early career, coupled with the Gang of 14 filibuster deal, pretty much killed any possible opposition before it started. The Democrats didn't have the votes to do anything but filibuster, and agreed not to do that unless the candidate was an extremist, so all the Republicans had to do was orchestrate a little theatrical presentation for the committee that presented him as a moderate and it was over.
Alito's confirmation was basically a foregone conclusion once they realized they could nominate a far right justice without anyone being able to stop them. How did we get to that point? It's pretty basic: they have a machine, and we don't. They've been working for this for decades, while we've been twiddling our thumbs and watching our power erode. They've used their incredible media leverage to encourage the rightward tilt in the electorate. When the vacancy came up, they were ready to go to war and we weren't anywhere near it.
How do we get out? I don't know. We don't really have a few spare decades to catch up, and there aren't really any signs that anyone's trying to catch up at all. The Democratic Party is basically engaged in a craven game of trying to preserve their own cushy jobs and institutional status by playing nice and sliding to the right, but there's no other party apparatus to work with. None of the small independent parties have anything resembling a political organization that can win elections, and any time they get close to developing on, they're stomped on by the Big Two.
Blah. Hate. Frustration.
I mean, how do you start talking about something like this? I could go the "The Democratic Party is a useless, shambling parody of a political party" route, but, I mean... duh. I could rail about how obvious it is that Alito's an ultraconservative of the sort that you'd swear that conservative thinktanks had been growing him in a lab for the past few decades, programming him with single-minded focus on taking their agenda to the Supreme Court, but, again, duh.
Look, here's the problem in a nutshell. Alito has every intention of doing away with abortion rights, and perhaps more frighteningly, doing away with every restriction on executive power he can find. These things couldn't be more obvious if he had a glowing neon sign over his head, but no one had the power to stop him. Anywhere.
The confirmation hearings were a sham because anyone who's going to make it to the point where he's sitting behind that desk is going to know how to keep his cool and give evasive non-answers to anything the committee throws at him. No matter how much Joe Biden hollered at him, he wasn't going to crack and say anything that they could use as a justification for shooting him down. The whole expectation that Senators place more emphasis on the hearings and not prior decisions or documents from his early career, coupled with the Gang of 14 filibuster deal, pretty much killed any possible opposition before it started. The Democrats didn't have the votes to do anything but filibuster, and agreed not to do that unless the candidate was an extremist, so all the Republicans had to do was orchestrate a little theatrical presentation for the committee that presented him as a moderate and it was over.
Alito's confirmation was basically a foregone conclusion once they realized they could nominate a far right justice without anyone being able to stop them. How did we get to that point? It's pretty basic: they have a machine, and we don't. They've been working for this for decades, while we've been twiddling our thumbs and watching our power erode. They've used their incredible media leverage to encourage the rightward tilt in the electorate. When the vacancy came up, they were ready to go to war and we weren't anywhere near it.
How do we get out? I don't know. We don't really have a few spare decades to catch up, and there aren't really any signs that anyone's trying to catch up at all. The Democratic Party is basically engaged in a craven game of trying to preserve their own cushy jobs and institutional status by playing nice and sliding to the right, but there's no other party apparatus to work with. None of the small independent parties have anything resembling a political organization that can win elections, and any time they get close to developing on, they're stomped on by the Big Two.
Blah. Hate. Frustration.