Most ironic political demand of the year . . .

Most ironic political demand of the year . . .

It's time to retire! Democrats are shouting this at supreme court justices Elena Kagan (age 62), and Sonia Sotomayor (68).

No $hit. 100% true. Democrats really, really, are begging for these retirements, according to pieces in “Vox” and elsewhere. For those insulated from a diversity of political views, Vox is “progressive/left of center”, and in addition to its website promotes ifs views through YouTube, Netflix, podcasts, Twitter, etc.

So where's the irony? That an 80-year-old president with either senile dementia or sleeping sickness should remain in office, and appoint successors to SCOTUS justices decades younger than himself?

Or that Vox and similar sites are too effing stupid to be believed?

I'm going with “stupid”

By all accounts justices Kagan (the supreme court's first openly “enthusiastic female softball player”) and Sottomayor (“smarter than a typical wise Latino grandmother”) are more alert, harder working, and better able to speak without cue cards and easter bunny escorts than the president.

And if they decline in vigor – which probably won't be soon – hopefully they will do the right thing, and resign.

Does anyone believe Biden – given the chance – would discover and appoint replacement justices of higher caliber?

I don't regularly follow who votes how on the supreme court. So I can't cite a list of the decisions by left – or right leaning – justices that I disagree with. But I'm sure that if Kagan and Sottomayor were communists or Taleban apologists, someone would have told us.

All this conniving (getting rid of Kagan and Sottomayor) is of course predicated on worry that not only will Biden lose the white house to some republican in 2024, but congress might flip again too.

Hey, Vox unpopuli – the answer to that problem is straightforward. Run a democrat presidential candidate capable of actually governing and explaining his or her decisions.

Unless you don't have any . . . ?

This page is a permanent link to the reply below and its nested replies. See all post replies »

MistyCee

I'm not enamoured with this piece or with Vox in general, but there's more to it, and if Democrats are begging for Sotomayor and Kagan to resign in great numbers, I've missed it.

That being said, I think calling the piece "stupid" on just this basis is a little simplistic.

Ginsburg's hanging on was politically disastrous for Dems and maybe even the Country, and I think there are some decent points in here, even though I don't agree with all of them.

At the end of the day, it seems like this guy needs exposure for his books and Vox gave it to him.

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/23507944/supreme-court-sonia-sotomayor-elena-kagan-ruth-bader-ginsburg-retire

SusanInFlorida · 31-35, F

@MistyCee i never claimed that the majority of democrats supported this. in fact, i specifically called it "stupid and ironic" because the progressive minority was attempting to put Biden in the position of looking as foolish as them.

I don't consider Justice Ginsberg's death in office a "political tragedy". if someone thinks the only function of a SCOTUS justice is to obey demands to step down upon request so that one side or the other can attain a "court majority" - people like that are THE REASON we don't have much faith in our courts. They don't exist solely to advance someone's political agenda. They are supposed to objectively hear evidence, and pass judgement based on the constitution and precedents of past cases.

JP1119 · 36-40, M

@SusanInFlorida But that’s how the Supreme Court got six conservatives and why it has lurched so sharply to the right in the last couple of decades: because Republicans appointed justices solely to advance their political agenda, especially overturning Roe. The idea of an apolitical Supreme Court that objectively hears evidence and passes judgment based on the Constitution and legal precedents is a myth that only the Democrats were foolish enough to buy into, and they got screwed because of it. The Supreme Court has too much power and desperately needs to be reformed.

MistyCee

@JP1119 Respectfully, not all Democrats walked into that trap or believed the myth.

Some of us remember the Bork hearings, which, trust me, were not about naive Democrats.

Imo, there are no innocents here, and both parties, along with other constituencies within and without them, have recognized the Court as a political power to be influenced.

The judicial branch has always been a political football of sorts, of course, but how we play the game has changed, along with the importance of the rules and the scoring.

LeopoldBloom · M

@SusanInFlorida Ginsburg didn’t retire when she could have been replaced with a younger liberal because she felt Sandra Day O’Connor had been pressured into retiring early, and wasn’t going to let that happen to her.

SusanInFlorida · 31-35, F

@LeopoldBloom i did not know that. was she so quoted in an interview?

LeopoldBloom · M

@SusanInFlorida Not a direct quote from an interview with RBG exactly. More like a knowledgeable inference.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/01/why-rbg-did-not-retire-obama-presidency.html

I mean, I guess she’s become this feminist icon. And I wonder if it just sort of prevents us from seeing the 85-year-old woman that she is in some ways. A friend of mine who’s a lawyer posted—and I thought this was thoughtful—that there’s this liberal debate of, well, should she have retired while Obama was president? And she was like, you know you’ve got to be careful with that. Because part of feminism is letting people do what they want, and we’ve let these guys work until they’re 90.

Well, that’s what she said. One of the things she says in response to that is like, Weird. Nobody was demanding that John Paul Stevens retire. Nobody was demanding that Stephen Breyer retire. So I think she does see this valence of sexism around it. There was this laser focus on why she wasn’t stepping down, and I think that offends her. For what it’s worth anecdotally, a lot of people have said that she watched Sandra Day O’Connor get forced off the court. That’s itself an amazing feminist story that doesn’t get told, right? Where Chief Justice Rehnquist is incredibly sick. And O’Connor’s husband is incredibly sick. So much so that she said, I’m going to have to next year, she said to the chief justice, I’m going to step down so that I can care for my husband.