Is Kennedy's retirement karma?
5-4 right-leaning decisions go to 6-3 right-leaning decisions with trump's sure-to-be ultra-conservative pick to replace Kennedy.
If RGB retires or passes the decisions become 7-2 right-leaning judgments.
Not any difference for us.
Kennedy, the alleged swing vote, showed he's just another repug, partisan hack by serving up this opportunity for trump, the imposter, to codify right wing dogma for a generation. and of course undo historic and just SCOTUS decisions like Roe v Wade, civil rights decisions, LGBTQ decisions and maybe even Brown v Board of Ed.
And it shows to me that the way SCOTUS justices are picked is flawed. The political leanings of the presiding president decides who serves on the court thus rendering justice anything but blind.
Parties were anathema to many of the founding fathers but they are now a reality. I know it's considered heresy to even suggest a change in the Constitution but this should be changed, along with ditching the effin Electoral College.
Or course none of that will happen. We are truly fucked. What the hell is going on? Everything is falling into place for this orange debacle to move us closer and closer to fascism.
Is karma punishing the country for the original sins of enslavement of Africans and the genocide of Native Americans, with those of us on the left being just collateral damage?
= new reply since forum marked as read
according to the RW taliban. 
Karma is bullshit.
John Roberts Will Probably Be The Supreme Court’s Next Swing Justice
By Ritchie King, Oliver Roeder and Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux
Justice Anthony Kennedy is retiring, which means the makeup of the Supreme Court is about to shift dramatically. For the past 12 years, since Justice Sandra Day O’Connor retired from the bench, Kennedy has been the court’s median justice, with four justices to the left of him and four to the right. During that time, he has vexed both liberals and conservatives with sweeping, high-profile rulings on issues such as gay rights and campaign finance. And now President Trump will replace him with a judge who will almost certainly be more right-wing than Kennedy, decisively tipping the balance toward the court’s conservative faction. This will likely bring an end to the delicate equilibrium we’ve become accustomed to over the past decade.
Trump has announced that he will choose Kennedy’s successor from the shortlist of 25 contenders that he made public during the campaign and updated last year. Many of the people on this list are federal appeals court judges, so we have some sense of how they might vote if they made it onto the Supreme Court. If almost any of them are appointed, Chief Justice John Roberts will be the court’s new median justice. When the court hears a case that touches on the most contentious issues of American life, a conservative majority will be all but assured.
It’s easy to see why Kennedy’s departure could lead to such a seismic shift for the court. Although Kennedy is certainly not a moderate on many issues, his willingness to vote with both wings of the court made him the court’s median justice during every term since 2005. In that time, his score drifted toward the liberal bloc — think of his tiebreaking votes on important issues such as abortion and gay rights — while the other justices, with the notable exception of Roberts, remained more entrenched in their separate positions. Since Kennedy became the reliably median justice, the ideological range between the middle five justices has been wider than it was at any other time in modern Supreme Court history.
A Supreme Court with someone like Roberts in the ideological middle would not be unprecedented. O’Connor, for example, was in the middle before Kennedy, and she often scored as more conservative than Roberts does now. The same goes for Lewis Powell, a Nixon appointee, and Byron White, a Kennedy appointee, both of whom were the median justice of their day and clocked scores to the right of Roberts’ score today. And back in the late 1940s and early ’50s, many members of the court sat tightly bunched around an ideology score that’s slightly more conservative than that of Roberts in recent years.
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https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/john-roberts-will-probably-be-the-supreme-courts-next-swing-justice/
BUT the website "above the law" begs to differ!
Just because there are four justices to your left, and four justices to your right does not make you a centrist.
By Kathryn Rubino
If you’re like a lot of people, distraught over the imminent retirement of Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, you may have spent the morning trawling the internet for good news — something to reassure you that the country is not headed towards a right-wing hellscape. You may have even come across my colleague David Lat’s piece on the Supreme Court. But as much as that may comfort you in the short term, I’m afraid it is nothing short of mainstream centrist porn designed to take you out of the fight before us.
Lat pins a lot of hope on Chief Justice John Roberts and his supposed centrist leanings, as evidenced by his decision in National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius (the Obamacare case), where the Chief Justice cast the deciding vote that saved the law. But that downplays the way the decision was really a backdoor effort to undermine the commerce clause (which under America’s curious jurisprudence forms the foundation of many civil rights cases). And just because there are four justices to your left, and four justices to your right does not make you a centrist. When Trump nominates, and the Senate inevitably confirms, any of the FedSoc acolytes on the short list, the “middle” of the Court will be shifted to the right and that is dangerous for a whole shit ton of reasons, including gay rights and reproductive freedom.
In his article, Lat argues that two cornerstone civil rights cases — Obergefell and Roe — will be safe from an overturn. And it is certainly true, no matter who becomes the next Supreme Court justice, those cases are likely to remain good law — avoiding the red flag treatment, if you will — for at least 5 – 10 years. But to act like those rights won’t be under attack when the middle of the Court moves to Roberts’s worldview is a short-sighted case of ostriching.
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https://abovethelaw.com/2018/06/john-roberts-will-not-save-us/
