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Notes -
"The Democrats' new sunny vibes"
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-democrats-new-sunny-vibes
Noah Smith argues that with Kamala Harris and her surge in the polls gave the Democrats more chill and optimistic vibes. Going back to normalcy. The only thing missing is a "It's morning again in America" ad.
Case in point: I read right now the headline that Joe Biden warns about the "bloodbath" Trump allegedly promised if he loses the election. It is like soothing cool aid for /r/politics, but it does sound a bit hollow from a cranky old Biden, doesn't it? I don't think Harris will make the same doom & gloom attack. Maybe there is a bit good cop / bad cop dynamic here.
Regarding her VP pick Tim Walz I read the worst about him here, but looking at pictures of that guy I just don't feel it. He looks harmless and nice. Noah says the record shows that Walz is a pro market Yimby guy who is pro-nuclear. When the biggest problem of America is that it can't build anymore than you want a guy like him at the top. And mirroring the tone change of the Democrats Walz message is not an angry "kill the rich!" like from blue-haired-Antifa-communists, but a pragmatic "help the poor".
Walz may not appeal to social conservatives, but the aim is to appeal to independents/undecided anyway. And he is the sort of guy who both signals that woke is over, because woke won:
"Post-protestant middle-American orthodoxy" is quite mouthful. But it is not quite the professional–managerial class, instead a bit more folksy.
Regarding the lefty fringes, neoliberalism is back on the menu:
Certainly the corporate news media has been spinning wildly in hopes of a Trump defeat.
I have a number of criticisms of Harris, but historically, the most consequential impact of most Presidents has been through Supreme Court nominations. And Harris has always been a "no friends to the right of me, no enemies to the left of me" sort of politician. The independents/undecideds are rarely sufficiently dialed in to understand or care about the intricacies of law and its long-term impact on culture. Justice Jackson has already shown herself to be an unsophisticated jurist who simply votes for whatever seems Wokest, and Harris would appoint more of the same.
The fact that we've reached a point in our political history where every cultural disagreement turns into a Constitutional Question does not really bode well, I think. We are supposed to have a federal system; not every question of importance is supposed to be answered the same way for the entire nation. To the contrary--questions of importance are precisely the questions that states should be free to disagree about. Trump's nominees have moved the needle in the right direction, albeit only slightly. Harris would move us more toward totalitarianism and ruin than Trump could ever hope to manage, assuming she gets an even slightly sympathetic Congress (and I do expect her to win in November, as a direct result of the corporate news media being the propaganda arm of the Democratic Party--the fix is clearly in).
I don't like Trump, I've never liked Trump, and he has been a disaster for the Republican Party. But he was genuinely a kind of bland president who made okay SCOTUS picks. I would expect Harris to be essentially his equal-but-opposite--actually a much more boring President than one might expect from her public buffoonery, but something of a jurisprudential catastrophe in the long run.
I think, our ongoing series of Supreme Court analysis has indicated otherwise no? She has sided with the conservatives against the other liberal justices on multiple occasions particularly in criminal cases like the January 6th case.
Indeed she has been slightly less liberal than Sotomayor or Kagan:
" Jackson has voted slightly less liberal than the other two non-conservatives on the bench—59 percent of the time to Sotomayor's 63 percent and Kagan's 65 percent"
In fact to the extent there are op ed pieces about her not living up to expectations as a liberal appointment.
"Jackson, the most recent addition to the bench, joining in 2022, has surprised some since taking her seat on the Supreme Court. This term, President Joe Biden's appointee, and the first Black female justice, unexpectedly sided with her conservative colleagues on a number of cases, including Fischer vs. United States, a major case pertaining to January 6."
I'm pretty skeptical of the use of the word "liberal" in such contexts, and cases where justices don't line up with what the news media "expects" of them often come out that way precisely because the case does not neatly align with orthodoxies like "Woke." I suspect SCOTUS analysis carried out along "blue tribe/red tribe" metrics could be more helpful than "Republican/Democrat" or "conservative/liberal" metrics--but I haven't actually done the work, so that is only a suspicion.
(With specific respect to the 2020 protest, I did see some discussion of Jackson and Barrett "swapping places" but in the end I think far less attention was paid to that peculiarity than was maybe warranted.)
I am not sure about Barrett, but Jackson has sided with conservatives on reading criminal statues narrowly in a few cases. I am not saying she is conservative by any means, but she does have a very specific jurisprudence that can lean what has been described as libertarian on criminal matters. Now she was a public defender, so it maybe her experiences there with perhaps the over-reach of the prosecutorial state have aligned her somewhat that way. She is also very concerned with the practicalities of rulings. As in, how easy is it for an average person to know what they should or should not be doing with any given statute or law. She thinks the courts should be doing more to clarify and help citizens there.
Obviously you are not likely to agree with a lot of her opinions, but I think she is a far better justice than she has been painted, even with that expectation.
To the extent that "Woke" is downstream of stuff like BLM, this would appear to be a case-in-point of my read on her decisions. A consistent libertarianism (e.g. on Murthy, where the Democrat appointees sided with Roberts, Barrett, and Kavanaugh to empower the federal government against the First Amendment) would have shown some sophistication. Someone who is libertarian when it protects petty criminals from local LEOs but statist when the federal government wants to bully corporations into doing things the federal government is forbidden from doing, does not have a sophisticated jurisprudence. They have a results-oriented political agenda.
And I do think that Murthy shook out in approximately that way, split between plausibly principled jurists and mere creatures of the state. Barrett is the one I have the hardest time pinning down, it seems I am as often disappointed by her as I am impressed. They all get it right sometimes, and they all get it wrong sometimes, and that's to be expected. But the "freedom contingent" is small, and gains allies only inconsistently.
Then she should have sided against J6 surely? That was a Federal case.
In any case, i think you are quite right in one respect, she is results orientated. Which is something I think is needed on the court. The courts are made for men, not men for the courts in other words. Very technical rulings in order to make the smallest possible change to a statute without providing any guidance to how that impacts the statute over all, are very common currently as are punting things back to lower courts on narrow grounds. Whether that is Roberts just not wanting to rock the boat too hard or just being slightly too beholden to previous decisions. I see Jackson and Thomas as being antidotes to that, though in clearly different directions.
I'd rather have a decision go against my political side as long as it results in clear ideas of what can or can't be done, than some wishy-washy dismissal on providence grounds. That is one of the reasons I like Jackson, she consistently pushes for them to make actual real decisions, even when it is likely (as in the Idaho case) that her preferred outcome would not be the one a conservative leaning court would actually make, if it was willing to make a decision. Notably Thomas also does this as well. Which is why even though I disagree with a lot his decisions, I think he adds a good balance to the court.
It was still "local LEOs" on the ground, though. DC's unique character makes it a special case.
The extent to which we agree or disagree on this probably depends on what you ultimately mean by "real decisions" and "results oriented." In legal theory, "results oriented" is a term of art specifically connoting "uses the law to achieve particular outcomes (whether in the particular case or in more general sociocultural ways), rather than pursuing a consistent jurisprudence grounded in clear principles." So for example, Roe v. Wade was a badly-decided case (even RBG thought so), but the clear outcome was so desired by certain people that they enshrined it in their jurisprudence anyway. Was that better than a wishy-washy dismissal? Maybe, but I'm skeptical, and "wishy-washy dismissal" is of course not the only alternative.
The problem with a results oriented jurisprudence is that a clear answer to this question may actually muddy the waters on many other questions. That's the point of principle: if I know how the Court has ruled in relevant principle, I can get a sense of how the Court is likely to rule on similar and related questions that are not answered by the case under immediate consideration. And one of the most important principles of American governance is the doctrine of enumerated powers, which has not been carefully adhered to since, well, maybe ever... but the accrual of power to the federal government certainly accelerated through the 20th century in a trend that seems to be continuing into the 21st.
Exactly, if it wasn't carefully adhered to, from very early on, there is no reason it should be now. All of that is just a framework for decisions that benefit the people. If your rules don't work and have to be ignored, then the rules are no good and should be ignored.
Now that does allow for decisions to be made in partisan ways, and that is another problem I completely agree. But the rules didn't stop that happening anyway. So you are no worse off. But having actual enumerated decisions at least let people know what the ground under their feet is doing now. Sure maybe that changes on the next case, but that is ok. Knowing what the next step looks like is enough for 90% of people.
Personally I'd prevent the Supreme court from punting or making very minor narrow decisions. If a law is unconstitutional then they force the government to rewrite it until it is. Give them some powers to enforce that on the executive and legislative branches. Give them some actual teeth to really be a check and balance. Their job is to determine that and punting it back and forth helps no-one except prolonging things. Even if that means my side would lose a lot of cases given the ideological make up of the court, I would far prefer that.
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