What does a TRUMP presidency look like?

[OttoVonBismarck]

Any constitutional amendment is highly unlikely, so it can't be a practical solution.  And if you have enough consensus for an amendment, then you may as well add on an an 18 year term limit for every seat, so that we're not playing an actuarial lottery with an important branch of government.

I normally would agree, and "mostly" agree, that a constitutional amendment is unlikely. But I also think a lot of stuff that we'd consider low-likelihood political events are right now happening, and have happened, in the past couple of years. I personally have not in my lifetime seen a constitutional amendment "campaign", so it's easy I think to just imagine them as things that don't really happen. When the 27th Amendment was passed in the early 90s it was basically a weird curiosity, an amendment proposed 200 years before that, unlike many later amendments didn't contain provisions sunsetting itself if it wasn't ratified by a certain date. It got some interest in wonk circles and got ratified with relatively little fanfare by a series of states that pushed it up to 3/4ths in 1992. The last real Amendment that had a national "campaign" was the 26th, to extend the vote down to 18 year olds nationwide. That amendment was proposed and ratified pretty damn quickly, and the campaign around it was highly effective and difficult to argue against. My understanding is a significant portion of the argument was simply "our boys are dying in Vietnam but many of them aren't even old enough to vote, if they're old enough to fight and die for their country, they should be able to vote." Across the entire political spectrum this was a strongly compelling, and difficult to rebut argument.

Anyone who watches Supreme Court nominations know that we've been roughly on an upward trajectory in terms of how bitter the fights over these justices have become, particularly since the scope of our expectations of the SCOTUS in our society has increased. While judgeships have always been appointed with politics in mind (there's a reason John Adams appointed a slew of Federalist-leaning Federal judges in the twilight days of his Presidency), the two sides now are at extreme levels of hatred for the judges of the other party. We've broken a lot of norms in judicial nominations since the W. Bush Presidency. Due to the insane opposition among the activist left to both Gorsuch and Kavanaugh, I would not be at all surprised that if a Democrat wins control of the White House, Senate, and House in 2020 a "court packing" scheme becomes a very real possibility--in fact I think it's at least as likely to happen as not. Once that happens things basically implode, because the Republicans are going to promise to pack the court again when they get power back, and things are going to run off the rails in an unsustainable way.

A solution would in fact be a constitutional amendment that busts this process up--and since a packed court, say increasing its size to 15 and appointing 6 liberal justices will cause conservatives heads to actually explode, they could very well sign on to some sort of amendment that prevents this sort of thing in the future--and they'd probably be very willing to sign on to an amendment that actually found a way to limit the scope of the SCOTUS's power, it's generally the conservatives that don't like the expansionist powers of the court in the first place.

[OttoVonBismarck]

Trump will never ever take responsibility for anything he does. Every mistake is somebody else trying to screw him. Every criticism is a lie. Every praise is truth. And as our country is full of victims who always blame everybody else for their own fuckups I guess we got the President we deserve.

But he has always been like that. It is what I really hated about him in the 1980s.

I mean Trump is a garbage can and retarded, but the big difference when it comes to fuck ups between him and Obama is that Obama tried to either gloss over or ignore his mistakes as much as possible, while Trump outright rejects them. While Obama's approach is more sane, it's not any more forthright, I can't really think of any of Obama's significant blunders that he's really stood up and "owned" as a mistake. Nor can I think of many from GWB's administration he has owned up to either.

[Syt]

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-36013703

President Obama: Libya aftermath 'worst mistake' of presidency

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/jan/26/barack-obama-state-of-union

Barack Obama has admitted mishandling the bitter political debate around healthcare reform and other mistakes that have contributed to diving poll numbers.

https://edition.cnn.com/2014/09/28/politics/obama-isis-congress/

Obama admits ISIS threat was misjudged as U.S. splits emerge

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/barackobama/7040999/Massachusetts-vote-Barack-Obama-admits-mistakes-after-loss.html

President Barack Obama has admitted that he had lost touch with the American people because he was too absorbed by policy-making in his first year.

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/feb/04/obama-admits-mistakes-as-two-nominees-bow-out/

Obama admits mistakes with nominees

That's already five more than Trump.

And he took a lot of responsibility:

https://pando.com/2015/04/24/the-apologiator-president-obama-takes-responsibility-again-and-again-and-again/

[The Minsky Moment]

The problem with the Supreme Court is that Democratic presidents keep nominating middle of the roader types like Breyer and Kagan, while Republicans increasingly nominate extreme partisans like Alito and Gorsuch. The result is that the Court keeps drifting right even if no seats get flipped. 

[OttoVonBismarck]

I mean the first one listed he said in 2016 when nothing mattered because he was riding out his second term.

The second he's not really admitting anything wrong.

On ISIS he appears to be saying the "government" misassessed ISIS, not him personally, if anything that's him putting the blame elsewhere.

The fourth he appears to be patting himself on the back and saying the problem is he works so hard:

If there's one thing that I regret this year is that we were so busy just getting stuff done and dealing with the immediate crises that were in front of us that I think we lost some of that sense of speaking directly to the American people

The one from 2009 about failed cabinet nominees appears to be a genuine mea culpa. But still, he was President for 8 years, this isn't exactly evidence of him commonly falling on his sword, especially since he dissembles in a lot of the examples.

[Valmy]

Trump will never ever take responsibility for anything he does. Every mistake is somebody else trying to screw him. Every criticism is a lie. Every praise is truth. And as our country is full of victims who always blame everybody else for their own fuckups I guess we got the President we deserve.

But he has always been like that. It is what I really hated about him in the 1980s.

I mean Trump is a garbage can and retarded, but the big difference when it comes to fuck ups between him and Obama is that Obama tried to either gloss over or ignore his mistakes as much as possible, while Trump outright rejects them. While Obama's approach is more sane, it's not any more forthright, I can't really think of any of Obama's significant blunders that he's really stood up and "owned" as a mistake. Nor can I think of many from GWB's administration he has owned up to either.

There is a difference between minimizing your mistakes and trying to politically spin them and outright blaming everybody else for them. And Trump did this for years in private business.

I don't expect sack cloth and self-flagellation or anything but come on.

[Admiral Yi]

The problem with the Supreme Court is that Democratic presidents keep nominating middle of the roader types like Breyer and Kagan, while Republicans increasingly nominate extreme partisans like Alito and Gorsuch. The result is that the Court keeps drifting right even if no seats get flipped.

You left out Sotomayor. 

Have Breyer and Kagan voted with the conservative majority a bunch of times that I missed?

[The Minsky Moment]

For the current term Breyer's voting agreement rates are: 70% with Roberts, 60% Gorsuch, 55% with Thomas, 54% with Alito
.Kagan's numbers are similar actually a few percentage points higher.

Ideological impact isn't just manifested in votes of course, arguably the biggest impact is on what cases are taken or not taken in the first place.

Sotomayor is definitely left of the center, but she has a corporate law background, is pragmatic. She is not as far left as Gorsuch, Alito and Thomas are rght.  It's been decades e since a justice as left as those guys are right has been appointed.

[Barrister]

For the current term Breyer's voting agreement rates are: 70% with Roberts, 60% Gorsuch, 55% with Thomas, 54% with Alito
.Kagan's numbers are similar actually a few percentage points higher.

Would it be fair to say though that a large number of USSC cases aren't very "political" in nature?

[The Minsky Moment]

It depends what you mean by political.  I wouldn't say a large number. 

[The Minsky Moment]

One high profile recent example is that Kagan and Breyer voted with the conservative majority on the Colorado cake baker case.  I would consider that political.  There are several other 7-2 cases this term alone with that alignment, including a police shooting case where the Court ruled the firing officer had immunity from civil liability.

[jimmy olsen]

Holocaust denial logic, straight from the President's mouth. Sickening.

[Eddie Teach]

Holocaust denial logic, straight from the President's mouth. Sickening.

Let's hear it.

[jimmy olsen]

Did you miss the last page?

EDIT: I was refering to style, not the holocaust in specific.

[Eddie Teach]

The hurricane tweet?