The Supreme Court must be destroyed

[superrific]

Super is also right about the Project 2025 aspect.

The left has to stop thinking winning the narrative is the same as winning power. It is not. You don’t beat the right simply with viral posts. This is why the “we need a Joe Rogan on the left” thing is so stupid. We already have those people, it’s just that the Democratic Party doesn’t recognize and bring in independent media in the same way Republicans have.

You need people who are trained, organized, and ready to govern.

Trump and the right get this. Project 2025 was their plan to take over every agency with loyalists who will enforce their agenda. It is dangerous and effective. The left should be learning from it.

We need our own version of Project 2025. One that is democratic, multiracial, and rooted in the working class. A left bench that knows how to write policy, staff government, and fight for real change. Not just candidates, but staffers, lawyers, communicators.

The Democratic establishment will not build this without being forced to. If we want to win and use power, we need to start now.

And here we get back to the problem: multiracial, rooted in the working class. Not too easy to bring those two groups together - BUT, in a bad economy it could be possible (see Obama '08).

The biggest failing of Obama's first term, and I'm pretty sure he would say the thing, was moving too slowly in the first year. I mean, we didn't because the filibuster, but there could have been a lot more progress if Obama didn't fuck around trying to get Collins and Olympia Snowe on board with the stimulus and then he listened to the GOP nonsense on health care and then they gave the finance piece to Max Baucus.

Or, another way of looking at it, they should have blown up the filibuster as soon as it was obvious that the GOP had no intention for bipartisanship. If we had gotten the Obamacare we wanted, and then tackle other issues as well, we might not have lost so much in 10 and especially 14.

It's easy to forget that Obama didn't really run as a radical. He ran as a "let's bring both sides together and be reasonable together" candidate, which is what he did at the time. I think liberals still have Obama hangover, in the sense that we continue to laud bipartisanship as some sort of virtue (in a filibuster age, it is not). We see voters saying "we want bipartisanship" but I don't think that's really what they want. Or, put it differently, they want that until you put a shiny object in front of them that they like more. Like get rid of all the immigrants and solve all the country's problems in one month.

We have plenty of fucking staffers, policy wonks, lawyers, etc. There, we're covered. In fact, we have too many of them and they argue with each other too much. What we need is a Federalist Society -- i.e. an organization where we gather and trade ideas without the public seeing it and getting scared. The FedSoc always says, "we're open to everyone" and that's sort of true, but the problem is that few people want to attend their conferences because they were full of lunatic ideas like "competitive federalism" (this is where states, not bound meaningfully by the 14th, "compete" to attract residents. Usually this entails some combination of displacing minorities and installing official religion). I knew a guy who clerked for Clarence whose view was that the First Amendment only restricts Congress, and the states remain free to establish official religions -- he wanted Virginia and North Carolina to become officially Baptist. How can you carry on a conversation about that? You don't, so you don't go to the conference and you don't realize that 20 other fools who sort of teach quasi-law are jumping on the bandwagon.

We have organizations like that, but they are mostly leftie and they have scary names like Jacobin or other references to left-wing ideas. Who could argue with the idea of a Federalist Society? People who don't much about it probably don't realize how nefarious it is. This is not a major issue, but it came to mind recently as I realized how much of the Federalist Society bullshit the Supreme Court has swallowed. It's not only the legal theories -- it's that Federalist Society framing governs everything -- which is how we got Justices believing that Jack Smith was the threat to rule of law and not the insurrectionist.

 

[farce©]

Another [new] poster just looking for some good faith dialogue, I see.

 

[superrific]

You're right that there is no shortage of liberal staffers, lawyers, and policy wonks. But that is actually the problem. Most of them are technocrats, not ideologues. They are trained to manage the system, not transform it. When push comes to shove, they default to consensus, not confrontation.

That is why in moments of crisis like 2009 they ended up deferring to people like Max Baucus or chasing Collins and Snowe instead of pushing through bold change.

What we need is not more liberal lawyers. We need leftists. People who are grounded in class politics, who understand power, and who will not blink when the donor class screams.

A left version of the Federalist Society, yes, but not one obsessed with sounding reasonable in elite company. We need one that builds ideological discipline, trains people in how to actually govern, and feeds a pipeline into future administrations that will not roll over the second the Chamber of Commerce complains.

The right did not win the court just by training judges. They built a long-term ideological project. We need to do the same, only this time rooted in working-class priorities, not Harvard credentials.

1. The way the right won the court was mostly luck. If Thurgood had been able to hold out one more year, Clarence would never have happened. There's of course the Scalia/McConnell nonsense, but if HRC had won then we'd have a majority as well. Five justices have been appointed by GOP presidents who barely barely squeaked out electoral victories. It's not that difficult to see how things could have gone differently based on chance alone.

And, the Supreme Court has also contributed heavily to the GOP cause -- not just now, but going back to campaign finance and Shelby County. Contrary to public perception, Citizens United was less of a thunderstroke than it was a court taking the logic of previous nonsense decisions to gut the BCRA, essentially overturning McConnell v. FEC sub silentio.

So there has been a lot of luck, and that deflates my spirits at least. It's like, again? They luck out again?

2. Maybe it would be good to cut out the sniping toward allies. "Will not roll over the second Chamber of Commerce complains" describes no Democrats now that Sinema is history. I'm not going to snipe in return but you know that sort of caricature irritates me to no end.

3. We face another problem when trying to take cues from MAGA. To the extent the right-wing succeeds, it's with monstrous policies. They lose some educated folks in the suburbs but they gain all the previously disengaged racist pieces of shit who care about little else than cultural identity. We don't have that on the left. I mean, we have a little bit of it, but our base is educated. There's not a huge swell of hatred or animus just waiting to be unleashed. That's why moving left doesn't help us very much.

As we've talked about before, do young people (for instance) really want class politics? Do they really want to smash everything like MAGA? I don't think so. They want interest rates to go down so they can buy a home. They want a little bit of financial security. A functioning social safety net that isn't a welfare state. Our biggest recent victory, and our best talking point remains Obamacare, and health care more generally. Obamacare was pretty technocratic, right?

4. Another problem with the go left approach is the other asymmetry: MAGA loves to break shit because they don't actually care if it works. Their elites want to destroy government; their base has no idea how much they actually get from the government because they are too busy punching at minorities. Our party has to make government work. And that means we need technocrats.

If we have a party of ideologues, then maybe we can win a few elections but those ideologues have to be able to govern effectively. Governments staffed with the types of ideologues you're talking about are rarely competent. I suppose it's better to win and step in one's own doo doo than lose and have to eat theirs -- but if we fuck up when we have control, it will be difficult to win elections in the future.

 

[superrific]

I hear you on the role of luck, but we cannot keep chalking the court’s right-wing dominance up to bad breaks. The Federalist Society did not win just by chance. They spent decades cultivating a pipeline of judges, clerks, and legal theory. Yes, they caught some lucky breaks, but they were ready when those breaks came. That is the whole point. We were not.

My comment about Democrats folding under pressure was not meant as a cheap shot. It is about how structurally constrained the party is. Even the best-intentioned Democrats often end up governing from a defensive crouch because they are surrounded by institutions like media, think tanks, and donors that punish confrontation and reward managerialism. That is not about individual character, it is about political architecture. We need to build something different.

We do not need a left-wing version of MAGA’s hatred. What we need is MAGA’s discipline. Its ability to centralize message, reward loyalty, and punish defectors. Its willingness to actually wield power, not just hold office. The left’s base is different, sure. But if young people want affordable housing, healthcare, and security, then we better start organizing politics around delivering that, not just managing expectations. That is class politics. We do not have to smash everything. We just have to stop deferring to a status quo that has already failed.

No one is saying we should toss out competence. But competence without vision is how we got Obamacare instead of a public option. It is how we got climate policy carved up by Joe Manchin. It is how we got a student debt plan that fell to the court because it was structured through executive memo rather than legislation. Ideology is not the opposite of competence. It is what makes competence matter. Without it, you just end up making the machine run a little smoother while inequality grows.

I am not saying this is easy. But if we do not build a bench of people who know what they believe and have the skills to govern on those beliefs, we will keep losing the long game even when we win the election.

1. The student debt plan was structured with legislation. The Court chose to ignore it by making up doctrines. Just like they ignored the 2007 renewal of the Voting Rights Act by a margin of [checks notes] 98-0 in the Senate.

2. What you're calling discipline, I would call unmoored fascism. We are going to have trouble competing with that "discipline" because of personalities. Authoritarian personalities -- i.e. the types of people who gladly submit to that sort of discipline -- gravitate to the right wing. Liberals are, by personality, less conflict-oriented, more open to experience, less willing to sacrifice personal beliefs for organizational standing. Liberals are skeptical by nature, due to some combination of education, experience and personality.

3. I don't agree that the status quo failed. It partly failed, but there are also a lot of institutions that are taken for granted, in part because they are not visible. For instance: the small business administration has helped tens of thousands of American start and run businesses. Fannie and Freddie and the CRA have helped millions buy new homes. There's plenty of good stuff that exists -- and hopefully it still will exist in a couple of years -- and the danger of running against the status quo in its entirety is that we will fuck up the good things that we have instead of improving them.

Now, I admit that "make things incrementally better" is not an exciting political slogan. We also agree that principled losers are still losers, and winning has to be priority #1. So yeah, that's our messaging challenge.

4. I'm not sure if you remember this or studied it, but it wasn't that long ago that old people were a Dem constituency -- largely because of SS and Medicare and the GOPs incessant efforts to cut those programs. They became Republican in the 00s because of cultural factors (being old, they were old-fashioned), but there have been signs in recent elections that they are turning on the GOP. These are people who actually remember the old days, rather than only myths. They grew up hating fascism and they are more capable overall, I think, of seeing through Trump's bullshit than their Gen X kids.

Well, those voters aren't likely to be receptive to the type of class politics that you're talking about. You're young; your world is mostly defined by young person things; and you have young person energy. You also have a long time horizon. If it takes a decade of realigning politics to get to a just society, you'll sign up for that in a hurry. I would too. But someone who is 75 maybe just wants to make sure they get their Medicare and SS.

Which brings us back to our other weakness: young people don't vote. This is such a frustrating political reality. I keep wanting it to be untrue. We keep seeing bursts of organizing energy among young people, issues that you'd think they would be super passionate about and . . . it never gets reflected in the numbers. Because young people have better things to do than vote, which for any individual person is an irrational activity.

5. I mean, if it were that simple to do what you are calling for, we would have done it already. I think you have the causality backwards. We don't eschew class politics because we rely on donors. We rely on donors because the non-donor stuff doesn't work. That it didn't work before doesn't mean it can't work in the future. It does mean we have to grapple with these problems, and they are tough. As I always say, being a liberal is about rejecting the easy way out. We're liberal because the world is complex, because it's hard.

 

[Heelsandeers]

For those in favor of ending the current version of the SC via expansion/major reform

What is stopping the same cycle repeating at lower court levels?

Until you defacto invalidate the entire federal judiciary. Is that better than the status quo?

 

[superrific]

For those in favor of ending the current version of the SC via expansion/major reform

What is stopping the same cycle repeating at lower court levels?

Until you defacto invalidate the entire federal judiciary. Is that better than the status quo?

With a new appeals court, it could be set up to have rotating members. Picked randomly from a list of select judges. There are ways to get this done.

 

[superrific]

So another unexplained decision today. It bears repeating: a court that does not explain itself is not a court. These six corrupt reactionary theocrats have usurped the judicial power. They should be convicted of conspiracy against the United States. They cannot hide behind the immunity doctrines because they are not a court. The moment they decided to give Trump all the power he wants without bothering to establish any precedent other than "might makes right" is the moment that their immunity ended. All we need is the presidency and the guts to do what needs to be done.

 

[Centerpiece]

So another unexplained decision today. It bears repeating: a court that does not explain itself is not a court. These six corrupt reactionary theocrats have usurped the judicial power. They should be convicted of conspiracy against the United States. They cannot hide behind the immunity doctrines because they are not a court. The moment they decided to give Trump all the power he wants without bothering to establish any precedent other than "might makes right" is the moment that their immunity ended. All we need is the presidency and the guts to do what needs to be done.

Careful... advocating for "what needs to be done" gets your wrist slapped on this board and brings DOJFBI and probably ICE (for good measure) to your door.

Surely I jest.

But still ignorant over here... what happened today in the land of Alice and the Queen of Hearts court? Surely the King of Hearts (Trump) will quietly pardon many of his subjects when the Queen (SCOTUS) is not looking.

 

[superrific]

Careful... advocating for "what needs to be done" gets your wrist slapped on this board and brings DOJFBI and probably ICE (for good measure) to your door.

Surely I jest.

But still ignorant over here... what happened today in the land of Alice and the Queen of Hearts court? Surely the King of Hearts (Trump) will quietly pardon many of his subjects when the Queen (SCOTUS) is not looking.

Nope. I am advocating for a trial. When they are found guilty, they will get the punishment coming to them by law. After, of course, we strip the Supreme Court's appellate jurisdiction.

 

[superrific]

Careful... advocating for "what needs to be done" gets your wrist slapped on this board and brings DOJFBI and probably ICE (for good measure) to your door.

Surely I jest.

But still ignorant over here... what happened today in the land of Alice and the Queen of Hearts court? Surely the King of Hearts (Trump) will quietly pardon many of his subjects when the Queen (SCOTUS) is not looking.

With no explanation, they stayed a lower court injunction preventing the dismantling of the Department of Education. In other words, they gave the president the right to unliterally cancel statutes. You can read the dissent.

These stays are infuriating. They aren't saying anything because they know they can't explain themselves. They don't want to articulate a rule that might turn around and hurt their side. They have arrogated the power to state the law per their own personal prejudices and rank political desires, stoked by Fox News bullshit.

The worst thing Joe Biden ever did had nothing to with the 2024 election. It was allowing the Clarence Thomas nomination to go forward.

 

[Centerpiece]

Nope. I am advocating for a trial. When they are found guilty, they will get the punishment coming to them by law. After, of course, we strip the Supreme Court's appellate jurisdiction.

Still ignorant over here. What happened today? (ETA: thanks for the edification, pun intended, I see it now)
I'd love to see a real trial, SCOTUS found guilty and punishment distributed accordingly.
But how do you strip their appellate jurisdiction? Shouldn't it be "modified" jurisdiction whereby they can't simply stay lower courts - they have to distinctly rule over the head of the lower courts and duly submit detailed explanations?

 

[superrific]

Still ignorant over here. What happened today? (ETA: thanks for the edification, pun intended, I see it now)
I'd love to see a real trial, SCOTUS found guilty and punishment distributed accordingly.
But how do you strip their appellate jurisdiction? Shouldn't it be "modified" jurisdiction whereby they can't simply stay lower courts - they have to distinctly rule over the head of the lower courts and duly submit detailed explanations?

Article III Sec 1: "The judicial Power of the United States, shall be vested in one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish." So the judicial power is not in fact concentrated in the Supreme Court; it is vested in the court system. District and Circuit courts are the inferior courts referred to in this section.

Article III, Sec 2: "The judicial Power shall extend to all Cases, in Law and Equity, arising under this Constitution, the Laws of the United States, and Treaties made, or which shall be made, under their Authority;" So the cases have to be heard by a court. That's the only requirement.

Article III, Section 2: "In all Cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, and those in which a State shall be Party, the supreme Court shall have original Jurisdiction. In all the other Cases before mentioned, the supreme Court shall have appellate Jurisdiction, both as to Law and Fact, with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make."

So the constitution says that the supreme court must have original jurisdiction over those three categories of cases: ambassadors, public ministers and where the state is Party. IIRC my federal courts correctly, this only applies to states acting in their sovereign capacity -- i.e. when they are suing other states.

The constitution also says that the appellate jurisdiction shall be subject to exceptions and regulations as the Congress shall make. In other words, it can be regulated to have no appellate jurisdiction at all.

 

[heelinhell]

With SCOTUS giving Trump immunity for all official acts, a Dem president should proclaim removing the 6 Trump conservatives from the court as an official act taken invoking the National Emergencies Act because those 6 justices have threatened and continue to threaten the safety and national security of the country.

Then appoint make interim appointments for 6 justices who will abide by our Constitution.

easy peasy