27 October 2020 — 0702 mdt

Blame Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s selfishness and the
Democrats’ nomination of Hillary for Amy Coney Barrett

Justice Clarance Thomas administered the oath of office to Amy Cooney Barrett last night. Chief Justice John Roberts will administer the judicial oath to her this morning, after which she will take her seat on the U.S. Supreme Court. At 48 years of age, she could be there for thirty years or more.

Unless she demonstrates an astonishing capacity to break out of the right wing bubble in which she’s lived all her life, she may provide a reliable conservative vote to reverse Roe. v. Wade, gut or kill the Affordable Care Act, blur the line between church and state, favor the rich over the poor, and over time, dismantle Ginsburg’s liberal legacy.

Ginsburg’s refusal to retire early in Obama’s second term, when a liberal replacement could have been confirmed, made possible Barrett’s ascension to our nation’s highest court. So did the Democratic Party’s insistence in 2016 on nominating Hillary Clinton, the Democrat most likely to lose to Donald Trump. Arrogant, contemptuous of the white working class that once was the bedrock of the Democratic Party, and less likable than Lady MacBeth at her worst, Clinton ran an incompetent campaign and lost to a sociopathic reality show star.

he vote confirming Barrett’s nomination occurred yesterday, but the vote that preordained the outcome of her nomination occurred on 8 November 2016.

Now SCOTUS is packed with reactionary justices, many groomed by the reactionary Federalist Society, who are not averse to turning back the calendar to the era of Lochner. It may be a court more agreeable to protecting the wealth and status of billionaires and giant corporations than the backward looking court in place on 4 March 1933 when Franklin Roosevelt was sworn in for his first term as president.

There were nine justices when FDR became president. There were nine when Teddy Roosevelt became president. And there were nine in 1869, when Congress reduced the number of justices from the Civil War high of ten to the current nine.

Americans numbered 39 million in 1869. We now number approximately 330 million. The number of courts and cases has multiplied many times. There’s a good argument for adding at least four justices to the supreme court merely to handle the increased workload. At least one of those justices could be appointed to compensate for the seat stolen by Mitch McConnell and the Republicans in 2016, when they refused to hold a confirmation vote on Merrick Garland, Obama’s choice to fill the vacancy created when Justice Antonin Scalia died.

SCOTUS can be reformed and improved, but only if Joe Biden beats Donald Trump and Democrats win working majorities in both houses of Congress. The Overton Window for doing that will span only 2021, so if the donkey party runs the table on 3 November, it will to take up court reform immediately and work fast.