I also would like us to return to respecting the prerogative of the elected president. If a justice is qualified, then the justice should be confirmed. That means Garland should be in Gorsuch’s chair, but also that Kavanaugh and Coney Barrett should still be in theirs, without all the confirmation drama.

Kav and CB raise interesting related points - if objections from Kav’s past were raised during the long vetting process, fine, but the way it played out was a circus and damaged the integrity of the court and the confirmation process. I also don’t think a justice should be confirmed for life by a pres about to face re-election, but technically nothing prevents it, and if repubs hadn’t shat all over presidential prerogative for a full 1/4 of O’s 2nd term, the CB affair would not have been nearly as egregious as it was.

I do agree that repubs have made the SC all about power for the last 5 or 6 yrs. But the best ways to begin to deal with this imo are term limits such that every pres term gets at least 1 nomination, and a return to the true meaning of senate “advising and consenting” on nominations, rather then obstructing on partisan grounds, which is what it morphed into fairly recently.


[Post edited by hoolstoptheheels at 02/06/2022 4:54PM]