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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 29, 2024

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Recommending a constitutional amendment when your own personal approval rating is probably sub 30% is some balls-out "FUCK IT WE'LL DO IT LIVE" levels of confidence. Or 4th quarter hail marying.

Or...what this really is, which is a goofy signal boost to the progressive / Big-L-Liberal base. This goes nowhere and is DoA.

Term limitis with rolling appointments will just make SCOTUS much like congress in that it will gridlock. People forget that the overwhelming majority of SCOTUS cases are 9-0 or 8-1. 5-4 cases are incredibly rare and often do deal with pretty big issues. With the ability to "wait 2 years" for another judge to show up, SCOTUS would probably stop taking any borderline cases at all (remember, they get to take up a case or not. No one tells them what to put on the agenda). The practical effect is that when a circuit court (all the way from the 5th to the 9th) makes a decision ... that's pretty much it. You can hope and pray your appeal makes it to the court, but it probably won't and, if it does, it will take years and years and be delayed countless times.

Liberals love ambiguity and grey area because their preferred solution is to build in more expansive interpretations. Conservatives will default "back" to a minimally scoped or traditionally supported interpretation of a law. Leaving something unsettled allows for it to grow, metastisize, and become embedded within the system.

On point number 3, I have no idea what "enforceable" means. I guess everyone is very upset that a black Republican went to Alaska?

I'm not following the gridlock part. Wouldn't there still be an old number of justices?

Enforceable means making a weapon to take justices they don't like off the court.

I think it would be gridlock in a game theoretic sense.

"Should we take this case, which might come down to 5-4 or 6-3 with the court the way it is right now, or wait 2 years when it's a little more lopsided?"

If everyone starts to employ that thinking (both the justices on the court as well as the White House appointing them) you get into situations where the court really isn't every doing anything because they're always waiting for that next justice to be appointed again and again.

That's my theory anyway

I think they'd just take the case, if they thought they had the votes.

Yes, at this point they're just burning Biden as fuel for leftist turnout in a way that doesn't implicate kamela. I wonder if we'll get a sudden hard left shift from him on Palestine if they think there's still some meat left to gnaw there.