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Brett Kavanaugh has been confirmed as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. The vote was 50-48 in favor of Kavanaugh.
Senators Collins, Flake, and Manchin had already announced their intentions to confirm Kavanaugh before the vote was held. Senator Lisa Murkowski, who was previously ready to vote "no", agreed to vote "present" instead so that Senator Steve Daines could attend his daughter's wedding instead of being present in the Senate to support Kavanaugh.
SCOTUSBlog: Kavanaugh confirmed as 114th justice
Nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court
Previously: SCOTUS's Justice Anthony Kennedy to Retire
President Trump Nominates Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the US Supreme Court
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 06 2018, @08:41PM (13 children)
Sooo much wrong, that, like, I can't even think of one specific thing to point out. Schumer, is that you?
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 06 2018, @08:47PM
Yes. We shouldn't look for solutions outside of the uniparty. Instead we should just hope for change. Staying home and not voting is probably the best strategy to effect that change. I'm sure that will cause them to see the error of their ways.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 06 2018, @09:33PM (11 children)
We'll have to wait until Monday to get WSWS' reporting of the confirmation. In the meantime, Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh clears crucial hurdle to confirmation [wsws.org]:
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Snotnose on Sunday October 07 2018, @12:51AM (9 children)
I'm so fucking sick of this shit spewed by assholes who don't understand the system. We have an electoral college. Candidates know this and base their entire campaign on getting electoral votes, not popular votes.
Guess what? If you change it so the popular vote wins then candidates will change their strategy. Then you'll hear people whining that the cities are taking over the country, ignoring the rural voters.
If you don't like it then work on changing the system. But for $diety's sake quit bitching when the system works like it was designed to.
My ducks are not in a row. I don't know where some of them are, and I'm pretty sure one of them is a turkey.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 07 2018, @01:22AM (5 children)
No, you won't. That already happens*, and you don't hear people whining about it. Not necessarily because rural people don't whine+, but because the voices that get heard are all urban, even the ones that claim to identify with rural values in order to exploit rural people (e.g. Republican party, Fox News).
*Consider the state laws the rural people of southern Illinois or upstate New York suffer under. Even states without a megapolis are often politically dominated by their two or three largest cities, and rural people often have to put up with (or ignore) laws that could only make sense to a city slicker.
+We don't whine; we air our well-justified grievances. Only a city slicker would accuse us of whining.
(Score: 2) by Snotnose on Sunday October 07 2018, @02:56AM
And you completely miss my point. With or without the electoral college, and I'm not gonna argue either way, there will be winners and losers. As it is you can win the election without the majority of the popular vote. Don't like it? Work to change it.
My ducks are not in a row. I don't know where some of them are, and I'm pretty sure one of them is a turkey.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Snotnose on Sunday October 07 2018, @03:01AM (2 children)
You completely miss my point. With or without the electoral college, and I'm not gonna argue that one either way, there will be winners and losers. Don't like it? Change it. But quit bitching that more people voted for the other guy, cuz it's irrelevant.
Me? I think unless you have the money to "donate" tens or hundreds of thousands of $$$ then your voice really doesn't matter. The 1%ers have figured out how to slice and dice the voters, and they screw the average person over in every election.
IMHO, more effective than changing the electoral college is getting the big money out of politics. I'm more likely to vote for a candidate that gets a thousand $10 donations than I am one who gets 10 $1000 donations. I don't care where they stand on the issues, it means they haven't yet drunk the kool aid.
My ducks are not in a row. I don't know where some of them are, and I'm pretty sure one of them is a turkey.
(Score: 2) by Snotnose on Sunday October 07 2018, @03:20AM
That's odd. I was composing my post and got email. Read it and went back to my post. Now I see my half formed post got posted a few minutes before my final draft.
Whatever, I've been sick for a couple days and I probably fucked up somewhere.
My ducks are not in a row. I don't know where some of them are, and I'm pretty sure one of them is a turkey.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 07 2018, @03:23AM
Wolf-PAC [wikipedia.org] is still a thing [wolf-pac.com].
(Score: 2) by termigator on Sunday October 07 2018, @06:21PM
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/21/upshot/as-american-as-apple-pie-the-rural-votes-disproportionate-slice-of-power.html [nytimes.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 07 2018, @03:33PM (1 child)
Cities should take over that's where most of the people live these days.
I hear the same whining currently here in WA about how their votes don't count for state races. Their votes do count, it's just that they keep supporting GOP candidates that can't possibly win.
The electoral college is inherently anti-democratic. As it stands, you basically don't see Presidential candidates coming to states like California or Washington very often, if ever, because they don't feel the need to earn our votes. They do show up in armpit states like Florida and Ohio regularly because the margin is much tighter.
Fuck you for trying to pretend like this is a good thing. We shouldn't have a system where a small number of votes in specific areas can decide the entire election. Especially since certain states like Ohio have notoriously unreliable systems in place where in a single election they had hundreds of thousands of votes get weird.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 07 2018, @04:08PM
The way I see it, the problem as concerns the electoral college is that the federal government has become very powerful. Whether that's a problem in general is beyond the scope of this comment. The electoral college is meant to elect the president of a limited federal government in a system where states' rights matter.
It wasn't set up envisioning, for example, that an income tax would be passed and then a federal government would play games with DOT funding (note: the creation of post roads, at least, is one of the enumerated powers of congress) and welfare funding (we really should have had an amendment for this... personally I think we need it but the proper process should have been followed). In general, congress has grown far beyond its enumerated powers, and the Ninth and Tenth Amendments are all but forgotten. For example, the Ninth Amendment came up for Roe v. Wade, but the decision was ultimately based on a right to privacy affirmed by the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
Then there are other abuses such as the interstate commerce clause being used to justify federal prohibitions such as the Controlled Substance Act, in spite of the fact that there was already precedent with the prohibition of alcohol requiring an amendment. I suppose we shall see if the interstate commerce clause can be used to violate the will of voters in states that have legalized cannabis, and it's likely that with Kavanaugh's confirmation that SCOTUS could very well rule that the sale of cannabis products produced entirely within a state where it is legal somehow constitutes interstate commerce.
My point is that if we are to have a strong federal government and if the Ninth and Tenth Amendments are to be completely ignored, then we should do away with the electoral college. If the federal government has a powerful influence on the lives on the people, then the people must have a more direct say. On the other hand, if we were to somehow reign in the federal government, then it would make sense to keep the college and also repeal the Seventeenth Amendment. In that scenario, the federal government could go back to concerning itself only with diplomatic matters and matters concerning the several states.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 08 2018, @07:30AM
The Democrats and their supporters are just sore losers and are still trying to blame everyone for their losses.
They didn't complain when a BLACK guy WON TWICE with about the same crappy electoral college and about the same racist voters.
They want to change stuff so they don't have to provide much better candidates and instead can win with candidates that couldn't even beat Trump!
They're still blaming Facebook for their loss when the FACT was most of Facebook was against Trump. https://gizmodo.com/facebook-employees-asked-mark-zuckerberg-if-they-should-1771012990 [gizmodo.com]
If Facebook helped it's more like Facebook was a neutral (or even anti Trump biased) tool and the Republicans used/abused Facebook better than the Democrats.
It's likely that many voters wanted a change - and the problem was Clinton wouldn't have delivered change but just "more of the same" (a slow suffocation for them). Trump would have been something different. And has proven to be different so far. Different bad, but different nonetheless. And he's even delivering some of what they want (just because we don't want the same things as those voters doesn't mean Trump will lose and not get reelected).
In contrast what are the Democrats bringing to the table to win the next election? More fingerpointing and whining?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 08 2018, @12:50PM
And here it is, for anybody reading the archived discussion (or still watching the row between two of our more passionate regulars down there). US Senate elevates right-wing judge Brett Kavanaugh to Supreme Court [wsws.org]. First we begin with a summary of the status of the court, which I will place in a spoiler section:
So anyway, on with the Trotskyist analysis, which shares many of the themes that came out in the discussion below, including the spectre of civil war: