Re: SCOTUS Justice Stephen Breyer retires.

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Whatever issues Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema have caused for President Joe Biden's legislative agenda, their records on Biden's judicial confirmation efforts are a positive signal for the President as he seeks to replace the retiring Justice Stephen Breyer.

Neither Manchin nor Sinema has voted against any of Biden's lower court nominees so far -- including Biden's picks for the federal judiciary who have attracted significant Republican heat.

Manchin and Sinema stuck with the rest of the Democratic caucus when Republicans were united against the confirmation of Jennifer Sung to the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals -- a confirmation that required the tie-breaking vote of Vice President Kamala Harris to move forward.

Manchin in particular has attracted liberal ire for holding up Biden's Build Back Better spending plan, and both the West Virginia Democrat and Sinema voted against Democrats' efforts to end the use of the 60-vote filibuster on voting rights legislation. But the filibuster isn't in play for Supreme Court votes anymore.

Since Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell pushed through a change in filibuster rules in 2017 to confirm Neil Gorsuch, it just requires a party-line, simple majority vote to advance a Supreme Court nominee. In the 50-50 Senate, all Democrats need to do is stay united, with Harris breaking a potential tie in the event no Republicans break ranks.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/26/politics ... index.html


Breyer's resignation letter.
https://www.scribd.com/document/5553567 ... from_embed
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts." - Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Re: SCOTUS Justice Stephen Breyer retires.

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highdesert wrote: Thu Jan 27, 2022 12:22 pmBiden was chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee so he's presided over SCOTUS confirmations like that of Clarence Thomas.
Fun fact - Biden presided over Breyer's nomination, making him the first President to nominate the replacement for a Justice he got through the committee.

Many political resignations come with contingency clauses waiting for confirmation of their successor - as in Breyer's case. He'd stay on the Court until death if Manchin choked on a, let's say cigar, and Mitch took over the Senate tomorrow. That said, Harris was meant tongue-in-cheek.

No, the best case for Mitch and the GOP is to be extraordinarily gracious here, and approve whoever Biden nominates, no matter what. They don't lose anything from it in practical terms, except maybe support in a primary. They then get to claim the moral high ground of "we supported your nominee, elections have consequences, quit yer bitching about our nominees." Okay, as moral high ground goes, it's a turd on a hockey rink, but it's still an elevated position.

Re: SCOTUS Justice Stephen Breyer retires.

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That is an interesting fun fact, Breyers nomination was during the Clinton administration. As long as Biden finds a good candidate and the person is thoroughly vetted by the FBI and Schumer doesn't rush it, there is probably little Republicans can do. Being vetted for SCOTUS is different than being vetted for a federal district or circuit vacancy. Manchin said he has no problem voting for someone more liberal than he is. And I expect the nominee will get a few Republican votes like Collins, Murkowski and maybe Romney.

So now the new precedent is that presidential nominees state the race and gender of the person they are going to nominate to SCOTUS? Ronald Reagan did campaign that he would put the first woman on SCOTUS and he did, Sandra Day O'Connor who was on the AZ Court of Appeals. If Biden was interested in making SCOTUS look more like the US, he would be nominating an Asian-American or a Native American or... It's all politics.
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts." - Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Re: SCOTUS Justice Stephen Breyer retires.

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Ben Carson Calls Joe Biden's Plan To Nominate Black Woman For Supreme Court 'Abominable'

Former Housing Secretary Ben Carson accused President Joe Biden of “identity politics” for his intent to pick a Black woman as the next Supreme Court justice.

Biden called the appointment “long overdue” on Thursday as Justice Stephen Breyer announced he would be retiring after nearly 28 years on the high court.

Carson, a Black Republican who served in former President Donald Trump’s cabinet, has long opposed progressive views on race.

“This is America. Many people fought and gave their lives to bring equality, and now we’re reverting back to identity politics,” he said later Thursday on WMAL radio’s Vince Coglianese Show when asked about the impending court vacancy. “And as we continue to do that, we’re bringing more division into our country.”

Carson said Biden could be setting a “detrimental” precedent by focusing on a woman of color.

“If he can do that, then who else can do it in the future using the criteria that they want and completely ignoring all the progress that’s been made?” he said. “It makes absolutely no sense, and I hope people will be incensed about it.”

Despite Biden’s pledge that “the person I will nominate will be somebody of extraordinary qualifications, character and integrity,” Carson remained concerned.

“We need a Supreme Court where we have the best candidates who understand the Constitution and are not trying to legislate from the bench,” he continued. “Things have gotten so partisan, at least on the left side.”

“To create that kind of situation in the highest court in the land is really abominable and very detrimental to our freedoms,” he added.

Carson has previously drawn rebukes from Black leaders for his views on race. In 2020, former gubernatorial candidate and activist Stacey Abrams called him “infantile” for suggesting Americans were too sensitive on racial matters.

He also made misguided comments about NFL players kneeling during the national anthem in protest over police brutality and racism, and once called Obamacare the worst thing to happen to America “since slavery.”
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/ben-cars ... cbfa1bdaae

Ignorance abounds in all areas. No matter the Race, Creed, or Color of the person.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.-Huxley
"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both." ~ Louis Brandeis,

Re: SCOTUS Justice Stephen Breyer retires.

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sikacz wrote: Fri Jan 28, 2022 10:20 am Seems like a Native American female would be most appropriate.
Yes and a good candidate is at hand, Biden's current Interior Secretary Deb Haaland. She's Native American from the West, a lawyer and a former congresswoman from New Mexico. She was already through a tough vetting process for her cabinet position.

There is already an African-American on SCOTUS, he's just not the right political party for Democrats. Biden needed black votes in 2020 after they didn't turn out for HRC, so he set a precedent.
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts." - Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Re: SCOTUS Justice Stephen Breyer retires.

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GOP Senator Dismisses Black Woman SCOTUS Nominee As Affirmative Action Pick

Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) said he is already skeptical of President Joe Biden’s not-yet-announced Supreme Court nominee, after the president reaffirmed his pledge to nominate a Black woman this week.

Biden will pick a replacement for Justice Stephen Breyer, the liberal-leaning member of the court who announced his retirement plans on Thursday.

During an appearance on a Mississippi radio program on Friday, Wicker dismissed Biden’s eventual choice as a “beneficiary” of “affirmative racial discrimination,” lamenting that the court would be saying goodbye to a “nice, stately” justice.

“I hope it’s at least someone who will at least not misrepresent the facts. I think that it will misinterpret the law,” the senator said.

Biden has not even hinted at who he will nominate yet; he said on Friday that he will make a decision by the end of February. Any nominee is reviewed by the American Bar Association’s Standing Committee on the Federal Judiciary, which shares its evaluation with Congress.

“The irony is that the Supreme Court is, at the very time, hearing cases about this sort of affirmative racial discrimination while adding someone who is the beneficiary of this sort of quota,” Wicker told SuperTalk Mississippi’s Paul Gallo.

In the fall, the Supreme Court is expected to hear a case challenging the concept of affirmative action at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina, where plaintiffs say Asian Americans are discriminated against.

“The majority of the court may be saying writ large, ‘it’s unconstitutional,’ but see how that irony works out,” Wicker said.

The senator of 15 years predicted with dread that Biden’s pick would be similar to Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who was nominated by President Barack Obama in 2009.

“We’re gonna go from a nice, stately left-wing liberal to a someone who’s probably more in the style of Sonia Sotomayor. The votes will be the same, so it’s a lateral move,” he told Gallo.

“I’ll tell you, I hope it’s not someone like Sotomayor,” Wicker went on, citing the justice’s recent mischaracterization of the danger that the omicron COVID-19 variant poses to children.

He praised President Donald Trump’s three Supreme Court picks, and admonished members of his party who refused to vote for Trump a second time, saying, “For those people who vote Republican and were just a little uncomfortable voting for Trump last time because they had a problem with his demeanor, this is what you get.”

The White House responded to Wicker’s criticism in a statement on Saturday pointing out that prior to nominating Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, President Ronald Reagan had pledged to choose a woman to sit on the high court. Like Biden, Reagan made this promise during his presidential campaign.

“President Biden’s promise that he would nominate and confirm the first Black woman to the Supreme Court is in line with the best traditions of both parties and our nation,” White House spokesman Andrew Bates told HuffPost.

The statement continued:

When President Reagan honored his campaign pledge to place the first woman on the court, he said it “symbolized” the unique American opportunity “that permits persons of any sex, age, or race, from every section and every walk of life to aspire and achieve in a manner never before even dreamed about in human history.”

President Biden has established one of the strongest track records ever when it comes to choosing extraordinarily qualified and groundbreaking nominees ― as the American Bar Association ratings for his 42 confirmed nominees demonstrate.

What’s more, when the previous president followed through on his own promise to place a woman on the Supreme Court, Senator Wicker said, “I have five granddaughters, the oldest one is 10. I think Justice Amy Coney Barrett will prove to be an inspiration to these five granddaughters and to my grown daughters.” We hope Senator Wicker will give President Biden’s nominee the same consideration he gave to then-Judge Barrett.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/republic ... 9a12bde42d

Just what we could expect from a Mississippi Repug Senator, playing to his voters.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.-Huxley
"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both." ~ Louis Brandeis,

Re: SCOTUS Justice Stephen Breyer retires.

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During a Harvard Law School lecture last April, Justice Stephen G. Breyer made clear that he viewed the judiciary as divorced from politics. Once a judge takes an oath, the Supreme Court jurist said, “They are loyal to the rule of law, not to the political party that helped to secure their appointment.”

But just three days later, a new phase in an extraordinary year-long campaign was launched to pressure Breyer to rethink his loyalties and focus far more on the political party that helped secure his appointment and the court’s dwindling liberal minority. A group of Democratic operatives circulated an online petition. Activists protested his events. Op-eds appeared in newspapers. A truck circled the Supreme Court building with a billboard that read: “Breyer, retire.”

It was the start of a remarkably public push on the political left to pressure Breyer, 83, the high court’s oldest justice and one of its three liberals, to retire while Democrats controlled the White House and Senate and make way for a younger nominee installed by President Biden. Activists were motivated by the experience of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the liberal icon who died in office in 2020 and was replaced by President Donald Trump’s nominee, conservative Amy Coney Barrett.

The campaign was carried out by various groups and politicians — not always acting together, and with some delivering their messages far more discreetly than others — that culminated this past week with Breyer’s announcement that he would soon step down after serving since 1994.

Breyer’s brother, U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer, said in an interview, “Of course he was aware of this campaign. I think what impressed him was not the campaign but the logic of the campaign. And he thought he should take into account the fact that this was an opportunity for a Democratic president — and he was appointed by a Democratic president — to fill his position with someone who is like-minded.”

“He did not want to die on the bench,” Charles Breyer added.

A court spokeswoman said Justice Breyer is not giving interviews at this time about his decision to retire.

The ghosts of nominations past hung over Breyer’s deliberations. Many Democrats recall how President Barack Obama was stymied before the 2016 election by Republicans who refused to hold hearings on Merrick Garland, his nominee to fill the seat of the late Antonin Scalia.

Then there was Ginsburg. The experience of her remaining on the bench throughout Obama’s presidency and denying Democrats the opportunity to fill her seat with a younger liberal, only to pass in the waning weeks of the Trump presidency, caused many Democrats to rethink how forcefully they would press for Breyer to retire.

Rep. Mondaire Jones (D-N.Y.), who last April became the first member of Congress to call on Breyer to retire, said, “I don’t like talking about it because it’s a sensitive subject. People adore Ruth Bader Ginsburg. But the fact is, due to decisions or non-decisions around retirement, made by her, we got Amy Coney Barrett.”

In the case of Breyer, the mission for Democrats was complicated because Breyer, despite having once been a staffer in the office of Democratic Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, prized the notion of keeping the court free of politics and talked about the importance of the separation of powers. It was further complicated in that Biden — who as the nation’s oldest president often talks about age as more how old you feel than how old you are — was not in a firm position to push the idea that an elderly judge step aside.

Inside the White House, senior officials had known for months that Breyer’s retirement was almost imminent, long before he officially announced his decision in a letter to Biden last Thursday, according to two people with knowledge of the matter.

Late last fall, senior White House aides were informed Breyer was close to a decision, and they had expected him to make the announcement he would retire in early 2022, according to the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to disclose private conversations.

The news of Breyer’s expected retirement, a closely held matter inside the White House, reassured senior Biden aides that the president was extremely likely to have the opportunity to nominate a replacement justice before the midterm elections in November and allow him to fulfill a campaign promise to nominate the first Black woman to the Supreme Court.


Once White House officials knew Breyer’s retirement was likely imminent, they felt less pressure to ask emissaries to engage in conversations with the justice about stepping down at the end of this term, the people said.

Biden himself never asked Breyer, whom he has known since the 1970s and whose nomination Biden oversaw when he was chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, about retiring. In fact, since Biden took office, the president and Breyer had not spoken directly before their joint event at the White House on Thursday, according to two people with direct knowledge of their interactions, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe internal matters.

A White House spokesperson declined to comment.

Charles Breyer said, “The White House decided, I guess, to leave him alone. That it’s his decision and he shouldn’t be subjected to White House pressure — and that it could have a negative effect.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics ... er-retire/
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts." - Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Re: SCOTUS Justice Stephen Breyer retires.

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sikacz wrote: Sun Jan 30, 2022 11:13 am rbg did the country a disservice by hanging on. The problem to me is too many people think they are irreplaceable and only they are capable of upholding views they ascribe to.
Yes, the problem with lifetime appointments. We need term limits for all federal judges.


Meanwhile a new poll is out.
A new ABC News/Ipsos poll finds that a plurality of Americans view the Supreme Court as motivated by partisanship, while President Joe Biden's campaign trail vow to select a Black woman to fill a high-court vacancy without reviewing all potential candidates evokes a sharply negative reaction from voters.

The ABC News/Ipsos poll, which was conducted by Ipsos in partnership with ABC News using Ipsos' KnowledgePanel, comes days after the most senior member of the Supreme Court, Justice Stephen G. Breyer, announced his retirement at the end of the current term. Breyer's announcement provides Biden the opportunity to change the demographic makeup of the conservative-leaning bench.
Although the poll's sample size was not large enough to break out results for Black people, only a little more than 1 in 4 nonwhite Americans (28%) wish for Biden to consider only Black women for the vacancy. Democrats are more supportive of Biden's vow (46%) than Americans as a whole, but still a majority of Democrats (54%) also prefer that Biden consider all possible nominees.

Democrats hope that the nomination will re-engage Democrats, who are sorely in need of a boost in the run-up to what is shaping up to be a very challenging midterm election for the party.

Also, when it comes to assessments of the Supreme Court, 43% of voters believe justices rule "on the basis of their partisan political views" rather than "on the basis of the law," a position held by only 38% of respondents. Eighteen percent did not know enough to express a view one way or the other.

And this new ABC/Ipsos poll shows high disapproval of Biden's handling of a range of issues.

A glaring weak spot for Biden is inflation, where 69% of Americans disapprove of his handling of this key issue. Speaking in Pittsburgh Friday, Biden acknowledged the crush of inflation, pitching his Build Back Better social spending plan as part of the remedy.

"Inflation is a problem," said Biden. "It's real and a lot of people are being hurt by it."

Troublingly for the White House, only 1% of Americans view the state of the nation's economy as "excellent,"and only 23% say it's "good." Three out of four Americans said the state of the economy was "not so good / poor."

Biden sees other troublesome disapproval numbers surrounding his handling of gun violence (69%), crime (64%), immigration (64%), the situation with Russia and Ukraine (56%) and the country's economic recovery (56%.)

The country is split on his handling of the coronavirus pandemic, with 50% approving and 49% disapproving. And while support from Democrats trends higher than the population as a whole, Biden's support within his own ranks is softening. In August, 91% of Democrats approved of Biden's handling of the pandemic. Now, that figure has dropped to 82%. The drop in support among Democrats around Biden's handling of the economic recovery is even clearer, from 89% in August to 73% now.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/majority-amer ... d=82553398
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts." - Daniel Patrick Moynihan

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