Quote :

"Here’s how Dems can + must do more than wait for an election. Let’s start w/ why: - 7 of the 9 justices were appointed by a party that hasn’t won a popular vote more than once in 30 years - 1 of those seats was stolen - Several lied to Congress to secure their appointment… - 1 justice’s family (Thomas) was paid by right wing groups for years and he never disclosed it, violating Federal law - Same justice’s spouse participated in 1/6 and he used his SCOTUS seat to vote to keep potential info related to his wife from investigators in Congress… - 2 justices stand very credibly accused of sexual assault And that’s the tip of the iceberg. Election or not, the Supreme Court has a legitimacy crisis and the public reaffirms it: 75% of the US public reports lacking confidence in SCOTUS, & those numbers were *pre-Roe ruling* In a legitimacy crisis, the solution Biden + Dem leaders must offer can’t just be one of voting, but of statute & authority. Compared to Exec + Leg branch, checks on Court overreach and misconduct are little to none. Leaders must share their plans for Roe AND a rogue court. Past Presidents, from Lincoln to FDR, understood the dangerous stakes of allowing an unchecked Court overreach its authority and threaten our democracy. Lincoln ignored the court to issue the emancipation proclamation. FDR, in the plunges of the Great Depression, also sought… to confront the Court’s structure (and core gerontocracy problem of lifetime appointments) via public appeal. While he did not succeed, that check came from the ppl & Congress, NOT scotus. The ruling is Roe, but the crisis is democracy. Leaders must share specific plans for both The President & Dem leaders can no longer get away with familiar tactics of “committees” and “studies” to avoid tackling our crises head-on anymore: - Restrain judicial review - Open clinics on federal lands - Court expansion - Expand Fed access/awareness of pill abortions - etc For the moments when we DO insist on elections, we must be PRECISE with what we need and we will do with that power: How many seats does the party need to Codify Roe? Dems must SAY THAT. Not just “go vote” or “give us $6 to win.” That is demoralizing, losing, unfocused nonsense Dem leaders must tell voters the plan: What’s the *actual* need? Which specific seats are we focused on? WHAT votes do we need & WHERE (what states + races?) And, what’s the return? What is Biden/Congress ACTUALLY willing+able to do at 52/60 seats? Be honest. Details motivate So let’s wake up everybody! What’s good Democrats! If you don’t like what I’ve laid out here, then please present YOUR plan instead of little “why we can’t” lists!! Let’s cut the handwringing and get moving! Chop chop! No more showtunes till November unless it’s for GOTV!!"

@aoc

6/25/2022 6:27:45 PM

Details don't motivate, if that was the case more people would have Pokémon gone to the polls in 2016. Clinton had a metric fuck ton of policy. Warren had a ton of policy.

6/25/2022 9:55:38 PM

Also, shit, what details did you need in 2016 besides "if the Democrat doesn't win, Roe is on the chopping block". We got 3 Conservative justices because people sat out because Bernie didn't fucking win.

6/25/2022 10:19:08 PM

^Higher percentage of 2016 Bernie primary voters showed up for Hillary than 2008 Hillary primary voters showed up for Obama. Maybe it's time to drop the narrative that Bernie supporters lost the 2016 election, as opposed to the broken system that allows for a minority of voters to win.

6/26/2022 1:30:42 AM

People wanting Bernie in 2016 were left leaning voters. In 2008, a sizable minority of Clinton voters were racists. Don’t be obtuse.

6/26/2022 2:07:29 AM

^^ why not both?

Seriously, it's pretty accepted that Bernie-Trump voters, Bernie-Stein, or Bernie-I'm sitting the fuck at home voters were a huge impact which easily could have swayed the election. I mean, you had Bernies press secretary screaming for everyone to vote for Stein and she accused Clinton of overreacting about SCOTUS.

Now look where the fuck we are.

6/26/2022 9:53:49 AM

https://centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/articles/did-bernie-sanders-cost-hillary-clinton-the-presidency/

Quote :

"And if you want Democrats to win back the presidency in 2020, wouldn’t it make more sense to dwell on issues that had a bigger impact, and focus on the ones that you can control going forward? "

^^Bernie-Clinton, also more racist
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2017/08/24/did-enough-bernie-sanders-supporters-vote-for-trump-to-cost-clinton-the-election/

6/26/2022 11:09:18 AM

If you still need a detailed point by point agenda to go vote, you're an idiot. Court Expansion (like what AOC wants) will never happen and AOC continuing to push these absurd pipedreams is a problem. FDR with more than a super majority couldn't do it.

Every election matters. Show up and vote. It's that simple.

6/26/2022 12:46:15 PM

Do you really think AOC saying the Justices lied under oath and should be impeached actually helps? It gets her followers to expect that and be disappointed at dems when it doesn't happen.

They didn't lie. They gave bullshit lawyer responses that one expects.

AOC needs to focus entirely on getting people out to vote. Stacy Abrams is a fantastic example of someone who led the charge for voter turnout.

6/26/2022 1:50:28 PM

Quote :

"you're an idiot"

Unfortunately democrats need votes from people across the intelligence spectrum.

6/26/2022 1:55:44 PM

It's truly unfortunate.

6/26/2022 2:09:15 PM

Those people are looking for excuses on why they didn't vote and I seriously doubt anything will change their mind.

Like go look at a sub like LSC. Go look at our resident tankie. Go look at what Bernie surrogates were saying in 2016. They simply won't vote for someone who they don't agree with 100%.

I wanted Bernie to win in 2016. Still showed up to vote.
I wanted Warren or Pete to win in 2020. Still showed up to vote.

This both sides are the same shit is just so fundamentally wrong and when AOC says crap like "Biden is historically weak on Abortion" its just wtf.

What does she want him to do? Make promises like expanding the court that he can't do?

6/26/2022 2:13:09 PM

Quote :

"you don’t like what I’ve laid out here, then please present YOUR plan"

The chances of getting 60 Dem senators are close to 0, what will you do with less than 60?

The chances of losing senate majority are prob coin flip what will do now in case of that scenario?

The chances of flipping deep red state governments are close to zero what will you do for residents of those states?

If scotus based solutions are non starters, what are the congressional/executive based solutions and how do you plan on implementing them?

How do you plan the convince the people that didn't/haven't voted for you, vote for you?

6/26/2022 2:23:38 PM

Yes.

6/26/2022 2:23:53 PM

Step 1: not call Biden weak on abortion

Seriously does AOC realize the President doesn't have God like authority?

6/26/2022 3:29:24 PM

he’s does have one hell of a bully pulpit, tho

I enjoyed this from Chris Hayes:

http://twitter.com/chrislhayes/status/1540404247103037440

Quote :

"Our two greatest presidents - Lincoln and FDR - were great precisely because they both recognized there’s something precious and worth fighting for in America’s institutions, but that saving and redeeming those institutions sometimes requires truly radical action."

6/26/2022 7:16:55 PM

I mean, it's just so easy for people like AOC to list their plans when it's unobtainable. It's like saying your goal for retirement is to just win powerball and getting mad when someone calls you out.

Blue states are already putting protections in place for people seeking abortion.

Purple/Swing states deserve all our focus to keep/get control of the legislature.

Deep red states? Probably fucked, but continue to explore options like travel vouchers or something.

It's a shitty situation, but it's triage at this point. The swing states all need a movement in them like Abrams had in Georgia.

6/26/2022 8:31:38 PM

Most of its unobtainable bc dems don't want to obtain it. But if they produced their obtainable plans maybe it would drown out the unobtainable ones.

"Deep red states? Probably fucked"
- Vote Harris/Buttigieg '24!

[Edited on June 26, 2022 at 9:49 PM. Reason : Im radical bc I expect my elected leaders to make plans to solve problems ]

Quote :

"Here's what Jean-Pierre said according to transcript: “I mean, look, if we got more members of Congress who support Roe, then the thinking would be that we would be able to pass a law to get that done. I don't think the - I don't think the filibuster would play a role there” 2/4"

60 democrats in the Senate is almost definitely unobtainable too btw
https://twitter.com/ValerioCNN/status/1540891270373146624

[Edited on June 26, 2022 at 10:11 PM. Reason : E]

6/26/2022 9:48:35 PM

Expanding the court was unobtrusive when FDR had 70+ Senate seats and 300+ seats in the house.

If you can't admit that it would be essentially impossible to do so now, you're not being honest.

6/27/2022 6:49:28 AM

Unobtainable*

6/27/2022 9:03:00 AM

http://twitter.com/MattNegrin/status/1541416698955309057

Quote :

" Democrats should start impeachment proceedings even if these justices didn't actually lie under oath, because when Republicans take the House they're going to impeach Biden over "Hunter laptop photo" so they can get 600 headlines saying BIDEN IMPEACHED, so just... do stuff!"

Quote :

" Anything that makes it clear to people who don’t normally pay attention to the news that the supreme court is not the holy impartial body of demigods described in high school textbooks is a productive action for democrats to do even if it’s just a media campaign with one message"

6/27/2022 10:13:50 AM

"We should impeach them even if we know the charges are bullshit" is a fantastic idea.

6/27/2022 11:10:35 AM

you seem to be advocating for the status quo, which is quite the position considering where that has gotten us

6/27/2022 12:14:03 PM

I'm against trying to impeach people when there aren't charges to do so.

I'm 100% in trying to kill the Hyde Ammendment, making it easier to send drugs across state, for States to do everything they can to protect abortion in their states and to help out people in deep red states.

I'm for change. This ruling is a fucking joke and I'm pissed about it. "Impeach him anyways!" Is nothing more than a feel good soundbite. Like what will thay accomplish?

6/27/2022 12:44:09 PM

Seems like there is smoke surrounding the Ginni Thomas affair. Investigating her seditious text messages, or her conservative advocacy, or the Thomas clerk family email chain is gonna produce something either illegal or highly unethical. From there you gotta pray a line of investigation into another majority justice or into the federalist society opens up.

Follow that investigation and in the meantime you trash the court every chance you get. I doubt that gets you to impeachment, but it does build interest in term limits. The hope is we only have to live with this hack majority for ~10 years before we can get some reasonable people rotated on the court.

6/27/2022 12:46:24 PM

Yes, and I've stated before, let Congress or the DoJ investigate the hell out of Thomas and his bat shit wife.

The moment you start trying to impeach people for stuff YOU WILLING ADMIT IS MADE UP you invalidate any other time you want to do it

6/27/2022 12:49:33 PM

http://twitter.com/moshik_temkin/status/1541459157576040456

Quote :

" I will repeat this as long as I have to, when the Supreme Court said in 1937 that the Social Security Act was “unconstitutional”, FDR didn’t ask people to vote harder in the next election, he told the Court he’d add more justices until they backed off, which they did."

6/27/2022 1:16:00 PM

Holy fucking [citation needed]

6/27/2022 1:22:25 PM

Quote :

"Blue states are already putting protections in place for people seeking abortion. Purple/Swing states deserve all our focus to keep/get control of the legislature."

Blue states - fat lot of good it will do them when the Republicans have majorities and the White House and pass a national ban.

Purple/Swing States - OK, yeah, we want to get out the vote there. But there's a lot of people sick of hearing "Just go vote!" when they have been voting, when they have taken control of the White House and Congress, and in spite of that we can't seem to move anything forward and in fact have taken giant strides backwards. You've got to give these people something more than "Just go vote!" And the first thing to give them would be something that looks even a little bit like action.

To that end, even some of the more outlandish proposals strike me as better than doing nothing.

6/27/2022 1:27:34 PM

So again, to be 100% clear, you are for impeachment of someone when you know the articles would be bullshit?

That's what we want now?

6/27/2022 1:48:53 PM

Quote :

"The moment you start trying to impeach people for stuff YOU WILLING ADMIT IS MADE UP you invalidate any other time you want to do it"

1) I admit no such thing. "High crimes and misdemeanors" is a broad, ill-defined net, into which I think Thomas could comfortably fall. Will it work? No, but we've done two impeachments lately in spite of the knowledge that it wouldn't work, so clearly that's no obstacle.

2) To the extent that futile impeachments erode the credibility of future impeachments, it's probably just as well. They've proven an ineffective tool to protect democracy twice in recent memory. Since the Republicans will inevitably move to impeach as soon as they have a majority and as frequently as they can come up with reasons, I'd just as soon finish the process of turning it into a joke.

6/27/2022 2:15:22 PM

Quote :

" Holy fucking [citation needed]"

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/when-franklin-roosevelt-clashed-with-the-supreme-court-and-lost-78497994/

Quote :

" The court, however, would spring some surprises of its own. On March 29, by 5 to 4, in West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish, it validated a minimum wage law from the state of Washington, a statute essentially no different from the New York state act it had struck down only months before. As a result, a hotel in Wenatchee, Washington, would be required to pay back wages to Elsie Parrish, a chambermaid. Two weeks later, in several 5 to 4 rulings, the court sustained the National Labor Relations Act. A tribunal that in 1936 had held that coal mining, although conducted in many states, did not constitute interstate commerce, now gave so broad a reading to the Constitution that it accepted intervention by the federal government in the labor practices of a single Virginia clothing factory. On May 24, the court that in 1935 had declared that Congress, in enacting a pension law, had exceeded its powers, found the Social Security statute constitutional. This set of decisions came about because one justice, Owen Roberts, switched his vote. Ever since, historians have argued about why he did so. We know that he changed his mind on the validity of minimum wage laws for women before Roosevelt delivered his court-packing message, so FDR’s proposal could not have been the proximate cause. Since there is no archival evidence to account for his abrupt change on the minimum wage cases, scholars have been reduced to speculation. Perhaps, during a visit to Roberts’ country retreat in Pennsylvania, Chief Justice Hughes had warned his younger colleague that the court was placing itself in jeopardy. Perhaps Roberts was impressed by the dimensions of FDR’s landslide, which indicated that the president, not the court’s majority, spoke for the nation. Perhaps he was affected by the biting criticism from within the legal community. It is even harder to account for why Roberts, in his subsequent votes in the Wagner Act and Social Security cases, supported such a vast extension of federal power—but the pressure exerted by the court-packing bill may very likely have been influential."

6/27/2022 3:56:32 PM

Yeah, and that's on the Parish case which was 5-4. Helvering was 7-2 and was argued in May, a few months after the court packing bill. It built on earlier decision (US v. Butler) which was already decided in 36 by a 6-3 margin.

At no point did SCOTUS tell FDR that Social Security was unconstitutional. And as that article you linked says, it says FDR ultimately lost his gamble.

6/27/2022 4:34:02 PM

from the same article:

Quote :

" The nasty fight over court packing turned out better than might have been expected. The defeat of the bill meant that the institutional integrity of the United States Supreme Court had been preserved—its size had not been manipulated for political or ideological ends. On the other hand, Roosevelt claimed that though he had lost the battle, he had won the war. And in an important sense he had: he had staved off the expected invalidation of the Social Security Act and other laws. More significantly, the switch in the court that spring resulted in what historians call “the constitutional revolution of 1937”—the legitimation of a greatly expanded exercise of powers by both the national and state governments that has persisted for decades. The 168-day contest also has bequeathed some salutary lessons. It instructs presidents to think twice before tampering with the Supreme Court. FDR’s scheme, said the Senate Judiciary Committee, was “a measure which should be so emphatically rejected that its parallel will never again be presented to the free representatives of the free people of America.” And it never has been. At the same time, it teaches the justices that if they unreasonably impede the functioning of the democratic branches, they may precipitate a crisis with unpredictable consequences. In his dissent in the AAA case in 1936, Justice Stone reminded his brethren, “Courts are not the only agency of government that must be assumed to have capacity to govern.” These are lessons— for the president and for the court—as salient today as they were in 1937."

[Edited on June 27, 2022 at 4:47 PM. Reason : .]

6/27/2022 4:46:14 PM

Go read the entire article and not cherry pick sentences.

6/27/2022 5:21:09 PM

What are we even arguing here?

6/27/2022 5:26:03 PM

Like it doesn't support what that random twitter guy says at all. Even if it did, it's a completely idle threat since Biden doesn't have the same majority as FDR did.

6/27/2022 5:26:16 PM

^^ some random guy on Twitter says that Biden can just threaten to expand the court and SCOTUS will start giving better rulings (he can't), because that's what FDR did (he didn't)

FDRs threat to expand the court was pretty much deemed a failure and at most, was 'maybe a little influence' on swaying Roberts on a vote that went 5-4. The Social Security vote was 7-2 and the threat to reform the court had zero impact on it. Court packing was never going to work for FDR and it certainly won't for Biden.

6/27/2022 5:44:45 PM

randomtwitterguy3

6/28/2022 6:38:48 AM

https://twitter.com/PaulMSparrow1/status/1541729961190514689?s=20&t=irjomy9RXTg-dOgZitbzuw

good FDR court packing thread from the former director of the FDR Library

6/28/2022 1:35:15 PM

https://www.wral.com/more-than-1-million-voters-switch-to-gop-in-warning-for-dems/20349290/

I wonder if this is normal for this type of election cycle?

6/28/2022 3:42:21 PM

I like how in that article, the guy they interviewed to illustrate their point switched to being a Republican from...being a Libertarian.

Overall nothing in that article should come as a surprise. Suburban voters are fundamentally conservative, in the broad rather than political sense - they want stability for their relatively cozy lives. They shifted away from Trump for the same reason that some people, particularly aggrieved whites, shifted towards him: he represented a destabilizing departure from the status quo.

Now we're in a midterm cycle, with all the opposition party advantage that entails, and what I'll bet are suburban Republican candidates who aren't so far out on the fringe. Plus - and this is what is more problematic - the Trump years have shifted the Overton window so that some of those "fringe" ideas no longer seem so destabilizing.

6/29/2022 8:36:16 AM

some percentage of that number is probably people just fucking with the primaries.

6/29/2022 3:02:05 PM

There’s been an uptick on my social media of poor whites expressing displeasure with leftwing cultural issues. They frame it as distaste for supporting transgender people, but it likely encompasses trumps undertones that democrats are coming for white people, and only MAGAs can defend the white race

Democrats have an opportunity to counter this IMO by embracing pro union candidates, and Biden has sort of done this, but I think it should be core to their messaging in addition to roe, and I’m not seeing this

6/29/2022 11:42:13 PM

Quote :

"THE WHITE RACE"

6/30/2022 5:13:34 AM

Quote :

"California is going to make its own insulin. It’s simple. People should not go into debt to get life-saving medication. https://t.co/yB4mpGjtQO"

https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/insulin-gavin-newsom-california-state-makes-own-to-fight-rising-prices/
Been really down on Newsome trying to make himself the next front runner, but if hits 'candidacy' means he does lots of cool things like this, then hell yea. Good start.

7/7/2022 11:09:26 PM

https://www.levernews.com/fdrs-lesson-about-the-supreme-court-rampage/

fuck the norms. pack the court.

7/8/2022 12:52:23 PM

That didn't really work for FDR and articles you've shared Pointed out that it was a failed gamble by FDR.

7/8/2022 2:48:53 PM

from the piece:

Quote :

"Buried on the Social Security Administration’s website is an accurate summary of what really happened: “The debate on this [expansion] proposal was heated, widespread and over in six months. The president would be decisively rebuffed, his reputation in history tarnished for all time. But the court, it seemed, got the message and suddenly shifted its course… the court would sustain a series of New Deal legislation, producing a ‘constitutional revolution in the age of Roosevelt.’” As Roosevelt himself put it after the fight was over: “We obtained 98 percent of all the objectives intended by the court plan.” He was also overwhelmingly reelected to a historic third term a few years after the battle."

[Edited on July 8, 2022 at 2:55 PM. Reason : .]

7/8/2022 2:55:10 PM

Lol okay

7/8/2022 3:50:06 PM