Instead of the millionth thread arguing about Bernie and Hillary and 2016, how about some of you dudes make donations to state/regional abortion funds:

Abortion Funds in Every State

EDIT: There's now a more direct link based on the info in this Google doc:

https://donations4abortion.com/

motorbike guy wrote: Wed May 04, 2022 10:48 am Being pissed off at the lack of progressiveness in the Democratic party is no excuse for handing the election over to the insanity that is the Republican party.

And here we go again with blaming progressives instead of laying blame at the feet of the DNC and Hillary Clinton. So very glad I'm not beholden to this party.

Chris is right. This isn’t the time or place to rehash 2016. I deleted my post about that.

One of the million things that scares me about this decision—beyond the decision itself, which sickens me the most, without question—is the doors that it opens for further oppression.

Interracial marriage is safe, and gay marriage likely is too (some conservatives on the court recognize that the 14th Amendment protects it). But this ruling definitely opens the door to bans on birth control, bans on sodomy, and bans on sex toys. Bans on sex, basically, that would never be enforced evenly. And I’m not at all confident about how this court would rule in an obscenity case.

rsmurphy wrote: Wed May 04, 2022 12:02 pm

motorbike guy wrote: Wed May 04, 2022 10:48 am Being pissed off at the lack of progressiveness in the Democratic party is no excuse for handing the election over to the insanity that is the Republican party.

And here we go again with blaming progressives instead of laying blame at the feet of the DNC and Hillary Clinton. So very glad I'm not beholden to this party.

Randy, if you don't vote for the lesser of two evils, you can wind up with the worse one. Its really that simple. If HRC had won the 2016 election, we wouldn't be in this mess. We would likely be in a different less-worse mess, but not this one.

Wood Goblin wrote: Wed May 04, 2022 12:14 pm Chris is right. This isn’t the time or place to rehash 2016. I deleted my post about that.

One of the million things that scares me about this decision—beyond the decision itself, which sickens me the most, without question—is the doors that it opens for further oppression.

Interracial marriage is safe, and gay marriage likely is too (some conservatives on the court recognize that the 14th Amendment protects it). But this ruling definitely opens the door to bans on birth control, bans on sodomy, and bans on sex toys. Bans on sex, basically, that would never be enforced evenly. And I’m not at all confident about how this court would rule in an obscenity case.

After writing this, I realized that I’d forgotten that Roberts wrote the primary dissent on Obergefell. By both he and Gorsuch sided with the liberals on a more recent LGBTQ+ rights case.

motorbike guy wrote: Wed May 04, 2022 12:27 pm Randy, if you don't vote for the lesser of two evils, you can wind up with the worse one. Its really that simple.

It's always this, isn't it? Kind of like it was baked into the situation by the two major parties.

It's useless to think of where we are in terms of the DNC sabotaging Bernie Sanders, or ending up with some centrist/neoliberal garbage monster like Joe Biden because ultimately all the president gets to do is nominate a candidate for the court; even talking about people staying home on election day in 2016 in protest of Hillary Clinton is a bit misguided because she won the popular vote--the real problem continues to be the electoral college.

It's far more useful to consider the democratic party's complete inability (more likely an unwillingness) to exert power in the same way that republicans do in the Senate: The democrats rolled over when the republicans implemented their historically unprecedented obstruction of Merrick Garland's nomination after that fucking ghoul Scalia died. Then, when given the opportunity to utilize that same tactic against the republicans as karmic retribution after Saint Ginsburg croaked the democrats rolled over again and we got Amy Coney Barrett.

But the best way of looking at things--the one most people seem to resist despite all evidence to the contrary--is to understand this very simple concept: the United States supreme court has always sucked, that the Warren Court was an anomaly, and we should have never allowed it to acquire then retain any patina of authority or legitimacy--Marbury v. Madison was a power grab by John Marshall pure and simple, it was a case that didn't have to turn out the way it did, but Marshall made it seem that judicial review was a necessity implicit in the Constitution.

Throughout its history the supreme court has done everything in its power to restrict peoples abilities to be heard by the court (through idiotic doctrines of "standing", "abstention", "federal question jurisdiction", and "state sovereign immunity"/"abrogation"), to enforce the subjugation of indigenous people/people of color and deny them their rights. Why does anyone care what the supreme court does? It's a fucking shadow aristocracy that should be considered an abomination, a cancer at the heart of our dogshit constitution.

We need to reform the court into oblivion by increasing the amount of justices (there are many benefits to this beyond mere "court packing"), instituting mandatory retirement ages, or by restricting its appellate power and turning it back into the political graveyard it was at the very beginning. That's the one good thing that comes from these narcissistic assholes going so far, having their heads so far up their asses: maybe people will finally open their eyes to what the court is and has always been.

rsmurphy wrote: Wed May 04, 2022 12:51 pm

motorbike guy wrote: Wed May 04, 2022 12:27 pm Randy, if you don't vote for the lesser of two evils, you can wind up with the worse one. Its really that simple.

It's always this, isn't it? Kind of like it was baked into the situation by the two major parties.

Yes. And I don't like it either. But that doesn't mean I am going to stand back and watch the Fascists burn it down.

Hairy Caul, the Republicans had 54 Senate seats in Obama’s last year, and they had 53 in Trump’s. They also eliminated the filibuster for Supreme Court slots in 2017 after Democrats tried to use it to stop Gorsuch.

Democrats didn’t roll over on either nomination. They simply didn’t have the votes.

motorbike guy wrote: Wed May 04, 2022 12:27 pm

rsmurphy wrote: Wed May 04, 2022 12:02 pm

motorbike guy wrote: Wed May 04, 2022 10:48 am Being pissed off at the lack of progressiveness in the Democratic party is no excuse for handing the election over to the insanity that is the Republican party.

And here we go again with blaming progressives instead of laying blame at the feet of the DNC and Hillary Clinton. So very glad I'm not beholden to this party.

Randy, if you don't vote for the lesser of two evils, you can wind up with the worse one. Its really that simple. If HRC had won the 2016 election, we wouldn't be in this mess. We would likely be in a different less-worse mess, but not this one.

If HRC had won in 2016, she would not have confirmed any justices to the supreme court. McConnell made it clear that he would not hold a vote on any of her judicial nominations, and the democrats would not have won back the senate in 2016 or 2018, and she would most likely be defeated by a competent fascist in 2020, with large republican majorities in both houses and three vacant supreme court seats to fill. Maybe I'm wrong and the democrats could have won back both houses in the 2018 midterms, but under either outcome of 2016, the last chance we had to keep a rightwing supermajority out of the court was when Ginsburg refused to retire in 2013/2014 when the democrats still had control of the senate. If there's anyone or anything to shoulder most of the blame for this fiasco, it's RBG and her astounding hubris, and not some random group of voters who were not feeling inspired by the democrats' weak track record over the previous 8 years.