Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., has added schoolyard taunts to his call to pack the Supreme Court with an instant liberal majority. Last week, Whitehouse denounced former President Joe Biden and other Democrats for being “too chicken” to pack the Court and, in the view of many of us, destroy the institution that has been critical to the success of this Republic for 250 years.
The Lever’s David Sirota, a former speechwriter and adviser to Bernie Sanders, set the table for Whitehouse by asking him about how the public can join the resistance to the Court, which is “enabling an anti-democratic project.” With that, Whitehouse was off to the chicken races:
“Well, I think it starts with truth telling and I think the chief executive of the United States has the proverbial bully, the bulliest of all pulpits, and should be prepared to make the argument about what has gone wrong with the courts. The Biden administration was highly reluctant to do that. They completely chickened out. Biden set up that lame committee commission on the Supreme Court and then squelched both Judge Gertner and Professor Tribe when they wanted to describe some of the actual problems at the court so that they couldn’t even get that into the report.”
He then added:
“The Biden people didn’t want to go there. They were completely chicken about all that. They wanted no part of that. And it — really wasn’t until the very end, in his last speech after he and Harris had both lost that Biden seemed to have at least somewhat awakened to the fact that the Supreme Court had a real integrity problem.”
The one thing upon which we agree is that the Biden commission was a sham. At the time, I wrote a piece entitled “Is Biden’s Supreme Court Commission Packed to Fail?” I wrote about how the Administration assembled an array of far-left faculty to debate radical changes to the Court. It was breathlessly followed by the press and many on the left as figures like Tribe denounced the Court as fundamentally broken. Of course, few of these voices, including Tribe, held those views when the Court ruled their way with a liberal majority.
The commission appeased the rising radical left in the Democratic Party in a classic Washington death-by-commission strategy. They produced a report that few read and then went back to their respective faculties as happy social warriors.
It is also not surprising that Whitehouse would single out Laurence Tribe, who has attacked conservatives in vulgar terms (as well as other professors like myself). This has included religious attacks and false statements that required public corrections. He has also called for Trump and others to be charged with an endless array of crimes from attempted murder to treason.
Whitehouse was an early champion of the partisan court-packing scheme. His obsession with the plan is telling. Whitehouse has actively spread the false narrative that the justices are, to use Dean Erwin Chemerinsky’s description, partisan “hacks.” (Chemerinsky was also a member of the ill-considered commission).
It is a narrative that is entirely unconnected to reality. As I discussed in a recent column, the Court continues not only to rule against this president in major cases but also to rule unanimously or nearly unanimously in the vast majority of cases.
The portrayal of the voting pattern of conservatives as raw politics is an old saw on Capitol Hill. In the confirmation hearing for Kavanaugh, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse raised this issue, asking, “When is a pattern evidence of bias?” Whitehouse noted a voting pattern by the five conservative justices who “go raiding off together.” Whitehouse denounced how the “Roberts Five” of “Republican appointees” join in such decisions and “no Democratic appointee joins them.” He simply ignored the “Ginsburg Four” on the other side of most of those opinions. Those liberal justices are not ideologues because they are treated as manifestly right.
The false narrative is part of a concerted effort by Democratic politicians to condition voters into accepting court packing. Professors and pundits are now demanding that court-packing be an actual litmus test for Democratic candidates.
The reason is a sad statement about the state of American politics. Presented with the prospect of guaranteeing power for years by rejecting our constitutional values and traditions, politicians like Whitehouse are choosing power.
James Carville wants Democrats to hide this intended move from the public (which continues to oppose court packing). Carville told Democratic candidates: “If the Democrats win the presidency and both houses of Congress, I think on day one, they should expand the Supreme Court to 13. F—k it. Eat our dust. Don’t run on it. Don’t talk about it. Just do it.”
Former Obama Attorney General Eric Holder has put packing the Supreme Court front and center, explaining, “[We’re] talking about the acquisition and the use of power if there is a Democratic trifecta in 2028.”
It is the Nike School of Constitutional Law. Democratic leaders are pledging to “just do it” to appease the mob.
Years ago, Harvard professor Michael Klarman laid out a radical agenda to change the system to guarantee Republicans “will never win another election.” However, he warned that “the Supreme Court could strike down everything I just described.” Therefore, the court must be packed in advance to make these changes possible.
Notably, the far left is now turning on those establishment politicians who are not showing commitment to this agenda, even when they are mouthing the same rhetoric. It is the historic problem with pandering to the left. These demands create an insatiable appetite for radical change, and figures like Whitehouse will continue to fuel the rage against those, even in his own party, who show any hesitation or qualms at this moment.
Whitehouse is right that many in the Democratic Party do not “want to go” where he wants to lead them. After 250 years of the most successful Republic in history, Sheldon Whitehouse wants others to join him in a fevered demolition project. If you even pump the brakes, you are chicken in Sheldon Whitehouse’s mad rush for the constitutional cliff.
Jonathan Turley is a law professor and the New York Times best-selling author of “Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution.”
All I ever hear out of Whitehouse’s mouth is loser talk.
Whale blubber being flensed.
Another MAGA tactic: accusing El Sayed, the Michigan Senatorial candidate, of being; a jihadist, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, of being anti -Semitic, of being against the United States and they make fun of his name, all of which are false.
In Texas, they accused Talarico of being gay, and of having been admitted to a psychiatric hospital when he was at home recovering from the flu. They just make up lies.
MAGA has become totally sleazy, willing to lie, to attack a child survivor of abuse, neglect and sexual assault, and will continue stooping to new lows to avoid dealing with the fact that they don’t have anything to run on and will do anything to hang onto power.
They can’t run on Trump’s economy, and voters know Trump is lying when he tries to blame Biden for the cost of everything going higher. Voters see the corruption and the Trump family enriching themselves from the presidency and we don’t like it.
This is right. I would vote for a corrupt Democrat scoundrel like Hunter Biden before I would the red hat gang now. A gay, leftist, muslim, trans, socialist whatever Dem too. Just to say F U for breaking all those promises. And letting a foreign president into the situation room, Netanyahu, in case you cult clowns didn’t know Trump’s version of “MAGA” is let Netanyahu and the Mossad chief tell him when to pull the trigger.
ANOTHER ANON CLOWN!!
All of which are false? ha ha ha ha ha
Daily lies from ANON!!
ANON is El Sayed???
There is no question El Sayed and his family are a claque of malicious sectaries. He’s not only unfit for public office, he is unfit to be living here.
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As for Talarico, he is 36 years old, has never married, has never fathered children. had a distended period in higher education (nine years) without acquiring any distinct skills, enrolled in Teach for America for two years after which he made rent when hired for generic staff positions at minor NGOs. He has a peculiar affection for sexual deviants and imaginary sexual deviants (“trans kids”) and a peculiar affection for drag acts. He’s a rather unserious chap who is alienated from his own masculinity.
Boy , you really sold your soul to the filth of the demonrat Hate America Party. You insult millions who truly believe in MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN , because your brain is so warped by CONTINUOUS DEMORAT / COMMUNIST FILTH. Real voters see the corruption of the demorat party Every Day , Every Hour and Every Minute. Too bad your doctors haven’t found the disease that has corrupted your mind because the answer is EASY…. It’s the Demorat Party
..another full-out delusional inverted-Reality post (‘Another Maga tactic..) from Anon. from the Darkside.. Chief Wonker Troll here, smoking some really bad skunk……….
On September 2, 1944, twenty-year-old U.S. Navy pilot George H.W. Bush was shot down over the Pacific Ocean and spent about four hours in an inflatable raft before being rescued.
My grandfather, an admiral in the navy, was responsible for the evacuation of all the wounded on Okinawa. What have you done Ms. Patriotic non-blue blood?
What do your grandfather’s actions in WE II have to do with Vivek Ramaswamy using Dr. Amy Acton’s mother to call her a liar? BTW: Amy and her brother were removed from their mother’s home for abuse, neglect and sexual abuse, and the stepfather was arrested and charged with raping Amy.
Why don’t you address the tactic of Ramaswamy attacking Dr. Acton by using her sad, pathetic, neglectful and abusive mother to attack her and to call her a liar after siding with her daughter’s rapist? That is the issue.
What’s distressing about bluebloods like Whitehouse is that they’re very seldom advocates of the country’s heritage. The best you seem to do among them would be multidirectional placators like Amory Houghton and Christine Todd Whitman. The Bush clan give you a family full of them.
What’s distressing about bluebloods like Whitehouse is that they’re very seldom advocates of the country’s heritage. The best you seem to do among them would be multidirectional placators like Amory Houghton and Christine Todd Whitman. The Bush clan give you a family full of them.
Trump and MAGA are so desperate to prevent the trouncing Vivek Ramaswamy has coming that they’ve stooped to calling his opponent, Dr. Amy Acton, who was sexually assaulted by her stepfather, a liar.
They trotted out her pathetic mother, from whom Dr. Acton and her brother have been estranged for years because the mother sided with her sexually abusive husband. That pathetic woman accused her own daughter, Dr. Acton, of lying. Dr, Acton’s brother has come to her defense and pointed out that if his sister hadn’t been there for him, he doesn’t know how he would have survived.
Instead of this tactic working, it has drawn intense criticism and proves how strong and resilient Dr. Acton is and what a great governor she will make.
The point is just how low Trump and MAGA are willing to stoop to get power.
Tin soldiers and Clinton lying
1 million dead in R wan da
We really are on our own
Multiple daily TDS posts from Anon!
Judges and justices must be inexorably compelled to support the “manifest tenor” of the Constitution.
Since 1789 they have failed to do so.
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“…courts…must…declare all acts contrary to the manifest tenor of the Constitution void.”
“…men…do…what their powers do not authorize, [and] what [their powers] forbid.”
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“[A] limited Constitution … can be preserved in practice no other way than through the medium of courts of justice, whose duty it must be to declare all acts contrary to the manifest tenor of the Constitution void. Without this, all the reservations of particular rights or privileges would amount to nothing … To deny this would be to affirm … that men acting by virtue of powers may do not only what their powers do not authorize, but what they forbid.”
– Alexander Hamilton
Note, Prof. Klarman’s remarks were as follows:
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If Democrats win, as they are likely to do, they would have to pass democracy-entrenching legislation, by which I mean simply making it easier to vote, doing away with partisan gerrymandering, making Election Day a holiday, making voter registration automatic, ensuring more days of early voting, and making sure that Black people in Atlanta don’t have to wait five hours to vote while white people in Cambridge wait just 30 seconds to vote. If you do all of that, the Republican Party will never win another election unless Republicans change their policies to make them more appealing to people.
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This is rather fanciful, of course.
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You can reduce queues at voting stations by expanding the number of precincts in states which are cheaping out. Georgia sets up one precinct per 6,000 residents, Massachusetts one per 3,000 residents, and New York one per 1,000 residents.
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You don’t need to make election day a holiday. Keeping the polls open for 15 hours (6:00 to 10:00 pm on Friday, 7:00 am to 6:00 pm on Saturday) will suffice. Saturday is a regular work day for only about 12% of the adult population and those for whom it is can vote Friday evening.
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You don’t need to make voter registration ‘automatic’. Just put hard copy registration forms in post offices and other locations.
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You don’t need early voting at all. About 13% of the population has an abiding impediment to voting in person which can be addressed by allowing them to set up quadrennially renewable standing orders for a postal ballot and ensuring those ballots are in the mail to them by 15 September; they can be subject to signature verification as they are returned and then placed in pigeonholes in locked cabinets which have two keys – one for the Republican county elections commissioner and one for the Democratic commissioner. Ballots rejected would be placed in a separate locked cabinet. Ballots arriving Friday morning the day in-person voting was due to begin would be the last batch subject to verification. Ballots arriving later would be locked away and returned to sender after the final canvas. The cabinets holding the returned ballots which passed signature verification would be transferred to a central facility on Saturday and tabulated that afternoon, so the referenda and first-past-the-post tabulations and the first round of tabulation on ranked-choice ballots would be complete by the time the polls closed.
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What the professor wants is a wider avenue for vote fraud, which might prevent Republicans from winning elections, but not for the reasons to which he cares to admit.
The taunts of Sheldon Whitehouse and his DSA comrades may be their last words come November’s election. With Americans armed to the teeth and sick and tired of the Left orchestrating violence in America, Whitehouse and his DSA comrades should worry that their brown shirts follow the path of France, Italy and elsewhere. They will have “unleashed a whirlwind, and you will pay the price,”
Schumer said as the judges hear opening arguments on the case Wednesday“You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.”It’s a wonder far-left French newspaper Le Monde didn’t list climate change and trans-rights
Italy, Spain, Belgium, Portugal: Social unrest spreads across Europe amid soaring energy prices and a housing crisis
France is not the only country where the cost of living is driving people into the streets. Images of protests, some violent, are multiplying across Europe. Italians have been called to a general strike on November 20, while similar actions are planned for November 11 in Spain and Portugal.
In Rome, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni held an emergency security council meeting on Monday afternoon to assess the situation after the weekend’s riots and looting. On Sunday, she took to social media to denounce the “gangs of thugs” who “set cities ablaze,” such as Milan, where clashes broke out between youths and the police, and where 271 rioters were arrested, including 220 minors – scenes of “urban guerrilla warfare,” according to RAI, the public broadcaster.
Since the beginning of October, many high schools across Italy have gone on strike, especially in Turin and Rome. Protesters have condemned not only the dilapidated state of some school buildings but also the policies of Prime Minister Meloni’s government, which they accused of failing to curb energy prices and of funding the war in Ukraine instead of investing in education. A draft decree from the education minister, which would limit the number of foreign students per class and ban the full-face veil, has also sparked anger among many young people, particularly in far-left circles.
Le Monde
“. . . particularly in far-left circles.”
They buried the lede.