Bruce Steinberg

@johnbrayton I’ve been offline for a while, so apologies for a reply out of nowhere. But it takes the trifecta to expand the Court as it requires Congress passing a law and the President signing it. As long as the Dems hold the House (which a renewed Voting Rights Act and a Court that will protect the right to vote would make far more likely), the GOP can’t retaliate.

I also found Dahlia Lithwick’s and Mark Joseph Stern’s argument persuasive. They are both judicial traditionalists and if they are screaming the house is on fire, I believe them. //@endonend

@rnv What is this “enough books” concept? Those words don’t belong anywhere near each other. 🤓

@Ron Sending light your way. 💡

@Miraz Hey now. Keep the bragging to a minimum for those of us living in dysfunctional nations. 😁

@mjdescy I feel the anger she describes. And at the same time my heart breaks knowing the regret Ginsberg surely felt when she realized she wasn’t going to make it.

@DiplomaticDiva Might you share the fabulousness? 😃 (No worries if not).

@endonend I think there’s a chance he’s drinking from a poisoned chalice though. I was commiserating with my 73 year-old mother this morning and mentioned packing the Court in response to McConnell pushing a nominee through. She thought it was a great idea. She votes in the Philadelphia suburbs and specifically mentioned the idea in her letters to Casey and Toomey.

Enough women like her urging their Dem. Senators on, we could end up with a 7-6 liberal majority on the Court.

@macgenie The screenwriters have pulled out all the stops for 2020. I’m dreading the season finale.

On a more seriously note, it was really hard to wish my mother a happy birthday this morning. We had a long talk though and she reminisced about getting to meet RBG in person. 💙//@kimberlyhirsh

@hawaiiboy And then we will all need to push our Dem. Senators to pack the Court in response. ”Tit for tat” is a very effective method for ensuring fairness in game theory. If one side is certain that an escalation will be met by an equal response, there’s a strong incentive not to escalate. The GOP (for a host of reasons) hasn’t had to face that yet and has rationally continued to escalate.

@mjdescy @ron Rebecca Traister has an excellent article on this point:

It should never have come down to her, even in our collective imagination, and whether you are absolutely sure that that’s right it shouldn’t; she was selfish and stupid for not having retired or that that’s right it shouldn’t; she was a brilliant justice who had every right to keep her job and the pushback she received for it was terribly unfair … they actually come down to the same thing: The fate of American democracy and the planet should never have rested on this one woman’s small, old shoulders.

@hollyhoneychurch Beautiful! 💛

@Miraz Science -> 🤯

@hollyhoneychurch I don’t know about kids being pure and non judgmental (I certainly wasn’t an easy child), but they definitely haven’t absorbed too much of society’s prejudices yet. (Though I believe infants start picking up on gender around 5 months so gender norms start being internalized before children have a sense of their own gender).

@adders Better than the US where ICE is now sterilizing women. Godwin’s law has completely collapsed here.

@simonwoods I woke up this morning to 40°. It was in the 80s a few days back. Hurrah for Global Weirding!

@simonwoods Fastmail is still working great for me. I really appreciate being able to easily make disposable addresses.

@susan Looks like he’s still a puppy at heart! 💛🐶💛

@mjdescy @pratik Amen. It’s pretty hard to sit with the truth that one is looking for the least-worst option. 😕

@pratik The founders thought it the least-worst option because they thought politics would be state-based, not party-based. After Washington, they thought most elections would end up in the House, because states would all vote for their favorite sons. They didn’t want the President to be directly responsible to Congress, so the Electoral College was a method to restrict the candidates the House could choose between. It literally started out as a hack and they had to readjust it after only three elections because there was no easy method to determine who would be President and who would be VP if there was a tie.

But the central problem is Presidental republics are extremely prone to dictatorships. Having so many different groups that can claim a popular mandate leads to deadlock and Constitutional crises in which there is no constitutional way to resolve the problem. So extra-constitutional means get normalized and that usually ends up with men with guns deciding things.

The US has been a real outlier in that regard, but, given the past 20 years (and especially the last four), our luck may be running out.

@jamesdasher Only for the primaries though. sigh. You got my hopes up that they were endorsing it for general elections.

@pratik Ugh. No fun. 😕

@pratik Also, when we install democracy, we don’t install “our amazing, best in the world system”. We set up a parliamentary government because it is much, much more democratic and stable. (I mean, our Constitution was written in the 18th century and there were no contemporary examples to work from. Benjamin Rush was a great doctor at the time, but I wouldn’t use his lecture notes to run a modern hospital. Why should I think his ideas about government to be different?)

@hollyhoneychurch W.E.B. Du Bois talked about the “psychic wages” of Jim Crow. “You may be downtrodden, you may be suffering, but at least you’re not a {slur}.”

BLM is asking white people to give up the psychic wage of systematic racism. It feels like something that has always been theirs is being torn away. //@jgmac1106

@hollyhoneychurch @jemostrom Yikes, moose! 🤪

@twweaver @cheri The way, this is.