The conservative justice was not present for oral arguments on Monday, but the court did not provide a reason why.
Conservative Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas was not present at the court for oral arguments on Monday, with the court giving no reason for his absence.
Chief Justice John Roberts said in court that Thomas “is not on the bench today” but would “participate fully” in the two cases being argued based on the briefs and transcripts.
A court spokeswoman had no further information.
Thomas, 75, is the eldest of the nine justices. The court has a 6-3 conservative majority.
We’re not lucky enough to have this ghoul drop dead in the next 9 months.
Imagine if he already was and they were weekend at Bernie’s-ing him so they could inflate the conservative numbers?
I mean 5-3 is still a majority so this makes zero sense but like, we live in the bizzaro world where I honestly wouldn’t put it past them
On any given roll of the dice, it’s very difficult to say how lucky we are.
Even if he did, the Democrats would probably give the pick to the Republicans again
The democrats currently control the senate which was not the case when Obama’s pick was tabled by McConnell. There’s plenty of legitimate stuff to criticize democrats for, but don’t blame them for republican fuckery.
The Democrats had the chance to bypass the Senate to get their SC pick in. There was a procedural loophole they could have used to install their pick without a full vote while the Senate was in recess. Obama specifically addressed this option and said he didn’t like using anti-democratic loopholes to get around the issue. If he had said, “OK, the Republicans are refusing to even vote on this so we are going to force it without a vote” then we wouldn’t have had the drunken rapist on the SC. He took the high road and allowed the people who took the low road to make lives for everyone worse. If Sandra Day O’Connor had retired earlier, when she was repeatedly asked to retire while under Obama, we wouldn’t have had Handmaid’s Tale put in the SC.
EDIT: Wrong person. I meant RBG. I swear I’m not sexist and lump all women together, I’m just a moron who is bad with names regardless of their gender.
If Sandra Day O’Connor had retired any earlier she’d still have notified George W. Bush.
You mean Ruth Bader Ginsberg
Whoops!
Pretty much this. Obama sat on his hands with regard to the whole “you can’t appoint justices in an election year” thing, despite having options. I get not wanting to give your opposition reasons to beat the “they’re ALL TYRANTS” drum, but he really should’ve seen that was going to happen regardless.
Right, I’ll blame them for being milquetoast, waffling, and ineffectual when it comes to Republican fuckery.
Because being milquetoast, waffling, and ineffectual essentially enables Republican fuckery.
I hear this opinion a lot, and I always ask what specifically would you have them do? They don’t control the house, so if they can’t get Republicans to go along they can’t pass any legislation. That’s just reality.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/12/16/politics/immigration-senate-democrats-parliamentarian-build-back-better/index.html
I’m sorry, but the Republicans would have fucking just steamrolled the parliamentarian, and the fact that the Democrats wouldn’t shows their milquetoast, waffling, ineffectual cowardice.
This is just one of many examples where they are unwilling to fight when and where it matters.
We could also talk about the recent immigration bill, a bill that hands Republicans exactly what they want in respect to immigration, a bill that basically says “Fuck them DREAMers” that the Democrats leaned on so hard in the last few election cycles. I get that the immigration bill was paired with Ukraine aid as a “poison pill” to get it passed, but there’s the rub: is passing bad legislation because Republicans want it and we think it’s the only way to get “good legislation” passed really the best solution if it leaves us with bad legislation as law?
I think it’s pretty straightforwardly fuckin clear that it is not in our best interests to hand them whatever they want when it comes to their LIES about the border and immigration. But what do I know, I guess I must just be talking out of my ass or something. Give me a break.
There was also the unwillingness to prosecute Bush & Cheney for war crimes. “We need to look forward, not backward.” Why do you think they are so hesitant to prosecute Trump? They didn’t want to prosecute war crimes when it came to Bush & Cheney.
I could keep going…
Democrats have literally spent my entire adult life PRETENDING that Republicans are operating in good faith when every available piece of evidence screams bloody murder that the Republicans are not acting in good faith.
Why do we keep praising Democrats for trying to shake hands with people who keep kicking them in the balls?
So they should have violated the rules of the Senate? They have a razor thin majority, 48 Dems and 3 independents. You would need all of them to be willing to violate the Senate rules to pass immigration as a reconciliation bill.
So you go from being upset that they didn’t try to pass an immigration bill to upset that they did. The Democrats negotiated with Republicans to achieve one of two outcomes, either the Republicans go along with it and it removes the issue from the election or the Republicans torpedo it and they go into the election season having been given everything they wanted and refused it. It’s gamesmanship.
And what court exactly would have allowed the destruction of presidential immunity for official presidential acts? The correct answer is none.
Who has claimed this? The Republicans have become a party of obstructionism. They do not care if the government functions. That means they aren’t willing to compromise and they will use every lever of government to sabotage any work done.
If the Republicans control either chamber of the legislature, nothing can get done. If there is a republican president, nothing will get done. Your solutions are ill conceived and don’t address reality. If you just want to be angry, go ahead. Throw in a “both sides are the same” while you’re at it. I prefer pragmatism and reality.
I don’t know, I’m not a lifelong politician or law expert. But c’mon, they are! Do some fucking politicking! I find it beyond reason that there was nothing they could do, but also nothing they could do to stop Trump. As far as I care, Obama just gave it away for absolutely nothing. They didn’t fight it because they thought Hilary would win and now we’re just legally fucked for decades.
So you are completely ignorant as to how Congress functions, but you’re also somehow positive they could have done something? That’s such confused thinking. Perhaps figure out what could have been done before complaining that it wasn’t done.
They could have “convinced” Mitch McConnell not to block the nomination by any thousands of legal, illegal, and extra-legal means. All I’m saying is, when corporate America is in trouble, it truly seems like anything is possible. When actual American lives are at stake, they just shrug and bemoan the rules they’re in charge of making and enforcing.
No, they couldn’t.
Yes, because Democrats want to help people, and Republicans only care about ultra wealthy people and corporations. Corporate America is the overlap in this particular Venn diagram.
Republicans do that and block help. See Republicans with the recent bridge collapse all the way back to super storm Sandy.
Hillary literally had a strategy to elevate Donald Trump in the primaries because she thought he would be easier to beat than Geb Bush, who is who she (incorrectly) assumed she would be up against.
I think people really underestimate how pissed people were that we were about to have another Bush v. Clinton match up and didn’t want political dynasties.
Of course, the people most angry about it seemingly voted in a man who wants nothing but to create his own endless political dynasty of the Dictatorship variety.
Geb Bush?
Please clap.
Can’t happen this time because Mitch isn’t running the Senate…
BUT…
Here’s a scenario…
Thomas drops dead.
Sinema or Manchin change party to Republican.
Senate flips to Republican leadership and Mitch is back in charge because he doesn’t step down from the leadership role until the term ends.
Mitch blocks the nominee just like he did with Merrick Garland.
Trump wins and gets a 4th Supreme Court pick… which doesn’t change the balance, since Thomas is right wing, but it locks in the 6-3 majority for decades.
It would take both of them to pull this off, the split in the Senate is 51-49 and whats-her-name breaks any 50/50 tie
Senate is 49 R, 48 D, with 3 I. Sanders, King and Sinema.
So if Sinema or Manchin flipped, that would be 50 R and Mitch is back.
No, those 3 Independents caucus with Democrats and vote with Democrats for the purposes of organizing the Senate. So it is effectively 51-49 for the purpose of establishing the Senate Leadership. One flip makes it 50-50, and then Harris spends a lot more time in the Senate.
Again? When did they give it to them the first time?
When they confirmed Clarence Thomas in 1991.
When they didn’t avoid the situation that allowed turtleman to obstruct Obama’s nomination for almost a year by not beinging it before the Senate in a blatant abuse of power.
Then they didn’t keep another Republican nominee from being rammed through in the last few months before Biden took office.
Since then they have not addressed the underlying issue of whether congress is obligated to consider nominees. They also won’t get rid of the filibuster, which would take a simple majority to remove.
Avoid it how? What specifically would you have liked them to do?
Was that just a mass hallucination?
2016, when Scalia died? The Republicans were like, “you can’t fill a supreme court position in an election year” and the Democrats said “oh, okay” and let Trump get it. Then they let Trump fill another seat in an election year(!) and the Democrats just said, “oh, okay” again.
There really wasnt much that Democrats could do. Mitch controlled the agenda in the Senate at the time (and his friend Lindsey controlled the agenda in the Judiciary Committee). Every prior nominee, even the ones who were controversial, still got hearings and a vote, even if that vote failed. (The one exception might have been the absolute moron that GWB nominated, who was so clueless she failed the written questions* that the committee gave her, but I think she backed out after that so it never got a chance to progress).
The problem with Garland is that he was the compromise candidate. If Mitch let his nomination go to a vote, it would have passed. So he simply ignored it. The only person who might have been able to get around it was Graham, if he had progressed the nomination out of committee, but he didn’t.
The Senate doesn’t have any avenues to force a vote if the Leadership doesn’t want that vote to happen.
Edit: found it
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harriet_Miers_Supreme_Court_nomination
There was, they just chose not to use an anti-democratic loophole to do it. They took the high road by not using a recess appointment. Sure, that appointment would have only been temporary but it would have allowed some votes to get passed the 4/4 split at the time. It also would have been less of a campaign talking point for Trump to be able to appoint someone immediately (the temporary appointment would have been until 2018 I think??).
I don’t know if they could have filibustered the vote on Trump’s final pick during the election year. I’m not completely caught up on those rules.
You need a recess in order to make a recess appointment, and both houses of Congress often keep a few legislators around the Capitol just to pound the gavel so the Senate never actually goes into recess.
And in regards to judicial appointments, Harry Reid killed its use for judicial appointments when the Republicans in the minority during Obama’s time in office filibustered everything. Reid kept it in place for SC justices, though. Mitch removed it for SC justices, too, when Democrats started making noise about filibustering Gorsuch.
And that’s the weird thing about the Fillibuster. It institutes a 60 vote threshold to get most things done, but it was always just a Senate rule and Senate rules are set by a simple majority. It can go away tomorrow if 51 Senators agree to get rid of it.
I don’t trust dems to not fuck this up. I can see them again trying to take the “high road”
And for getting fucked over by the Republicans, the Democrats decided to make this Republican the most ineffectual AG in fucking history, so desperate to avoid looking like he’s making decisions for political reasons that he’s practically blasting it from the rooftops that he was avoiding prosecuting Trump for political reasons.
This is literally proof in the pudding that Democrats are fucking weak willed pussies who keep giving into the same psycho fascist fucks who keep ostensibly fucking over the Democrats. The inability of the Democrats to choose their own fucking AG and not give Garland this fucking consolation prize is part and parcel to why our Democracy is falling apart and Trump has a chance to be elected again.
Garland waited TWO YEARS before starting an investigation into Trump.
We’ll never know if that’s true, they didn’t try anything.
Impossible this time. Dems have the Senate. They didn’t when Scalia died.
The Denialist Liberal’s Mantra, keep saying it and it might come true.
A dem speaker would absolutely bring this to a vote and Biden wouldn’t bring forward a candidate that he couldn’t get past the pains in the asses like Manchin.
All of these judicial candidates have been pre-vetted to high hell.
This would be a layup.