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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 7th, 2023

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  • Most likely you’d have to allow the sitting president to appoint an acting justice to serve out the remainder of that justice’s term. Yeah we’d still have the problem of RBG dying under Trump and giving us a 6-3 conservative majority, but if she only had a few years left on her term when she died the damage would at least be limited.

    As for what McConnell did to Garland, having term endings scheduled would make that a lot harder. If their terms are staggered such that they always end 1 year and 3 years into each president’s term it destroys the argument that it’s too close to an election and the people should get to decide who makes the appointment. They’d be forced to outright deny the nominee and let the president try again. That’s much harder to maintain.


  • The idea would essentially be that they wouldn’t all hear every case. You’d randomly assign a panel of say 5 justices from the pool and each panel would hear their own cases.

    That way we stop bullshit like what Thomas did in his Dobbs concurrence where he straight up said he thinks cases like Obergefell (gay marriage), Lawrence (can’t criminalize gay sexual acts), and Griswold (contraception) also need to be reversed and all but instructed conservative legal circles to back challenges to those cases. Since there’d be no guarantee that a baseless partisan legal challenge would end up in front of favorable justices they would be much less likely to succeed.

    This does potentially introduce a problem with consistency, but such a problem isn’t unsolvable. You could institute a rule that allows for basically an appeal on a SCOTUS ruling to be heard by either a different panel of justices or the entire body as a whole, for example. It obviously wouldn’t be perfect, but we don’t need perfection. We need SCOTUS to not be some unaccountable council of high priests who can act with blatant partisan interest and we can’t do anything about it.


  • Not really. Using % of forecast area as % chance of rain inherently gives equal weight to your position being anywhere within that area. Even if you limit the forecast area to the 5m or whatever it is radius that smartphone GPS is typically accurate to which a weather app could theoretically do, simply using % of the forecast area covered as % chance of rain inherently gives equal probability of you being literally anywhere within that 5m radius. It would obviously still be more accurate, but those numbers wouldn’t be the same thing.





  • Of course. It’s not political if it’s just The Way Things Should Be™

    • The two Races: White and Political
    • The two Genders: Male and Political
    • The two Sexualities: Straight and Political

    Their views are never “political” because theirs is the “natural state” of things. They’re on top because they deserve to be, and they deserve to be on top because they are. It’s anything that deviates from that so-called natural state that’s being political.


  • A couple things. First, you might need to freshen up on your Schoolhouse Rock, because this is not true:

    The 60 vote thing is true. It’s referring to the filibuster and cloture procedures in the Senate.

    When a bill comes up for consideration in the Senate, first it gets brought up for debate. A filibuster is when someone usually opposed to the bill makes this debate go on as long as possible to delay a vote on the bill. This process has been shorthanded a lot in recent years so senators merely need to indicate intent to filibuster so that the Senate can still attend to other business such as committee hearings and the whole chamber isn’t locked in by the filibuster.

    Since the entire GOP is bent on obstructing the Democratic party agenda this means in practice that you need to use Cloture to end the filibuster and bring the bill up for a vote. This is why we see so many things crammed into the Budget Reconciliation bill. It’s one of the only bills that can’t be filibustered like that. For pretty much all other things if you don’t have 60 senators willing to vote for Cloture the bill is dead on arrival.






  • Maybe I worded something poorly there and caused some miscommunication. I was responding to someone equating unverified with made up. What I was trying to say is that it’s unverified right now because the only statements on it were from what seems to be the same primary source(s) that wish to remain anonymous. That doesn’t necessarily mean the reporting is false, only that there hasn’t been a separate source saying the same thing. I wasn’t trying to say “it’s true actually, they just have to say it’s unverified because no one wants to put their name on saying it”

    I then separately wanted to explain what seems to be the thought process behind people saying that Biden wouldn’t endorse Kamala going into the convention if he dropped out.