Justice Kagan Warns the Supreme Court May No Longer Have a Middle Position

[DonViejo]

Source: Mediate




by Tamar Auber | Oct 5th, 2018, 7:39 pm

Speaking at Princeton University on Friday, Associate Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan warned that the Supreme Court may no longer have a middle position.

“Starting with Justice O’Connor and continuing with Justice Kennedy, there has been a person who people — who’s found the center or people couldn’t predict in that sort of way,” she said. “It’s not so clear that, you know, I think going forward, that sort of middle position, you know, it’s not so clear whether we’ll have it.”

Justice Kagan did not mention Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh by name but her comments came on the same day as Sen. Susan Collins‘ announcement made it very likely the GOP has the votes to push his nomination through securing his SCOTUS seat. Weighing in on Kagan’s remarks, CNN’s Supreme Court analyst Joan Biskupic explained that it seems that Kagan is aware “the middle is gone right now, as it used to exist.”

Biskupic further pointed out that even before O’Connor and Kennedy “we always had this sort of steadying influence at the center so the court didn’t swing too far to the left or too far to the right and without Anthony Kennedy, we don’t have that kind of middle as we know it.”

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Read more: https://www.mediaite.com/tv/justice-kagan-warns-the-supreme-court-may-no-longer-have-a-middle-position/

[oberliner]

1. John Roberts?

He's the only hope at this point.

[Maxheader]

4. As a swing vote?

I need to start keeping up with events..Roberts has
cast pivotal liberal decisions...not very often though.

[oberliner]

5. Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh are far right

That leaves Roberts as the only potential swing (though he is pretty darn conservative too).

[Lucky Luciano]

12. Maybe Thomas will die soon! (But after 2020)

[oberliner]

15. He is 15 years younger than Ginsburg

And 10 years younger than Breyer.

[Lucky Luciano]

16. He looks quite overweight.

[Maeve]

10. That has been my thought, too

He seems the last chance for an old-fashioned moderate Republican on this court (in part because I can't see him comfortable with wing-nuts)

[watoos]

2. Just a crazy idea

but maybe Democrats should have nominated someone farther to the left. Isn't Merrick Garland a Republican? Maybe there would have been a bigger uproar, a bigger fight, to confirm someone who Democrats could identify with? The time for civility needs to come to an end for Democrats. We certainly don't need to become what the Republican party represents today, but c'mon man, it's time to get mad, and fight, and vote.

Don't fall for the narratives the corporate media is deluging us with. I was flipping channels and caught Tucker Carlson just ripping Avenatti a new one. That is one of the big narratives the right is pushing now, please don't fall for it, united we stand, divided we fall.

[Harker]

3. Hardly sounds crazy to me.

Efforts to find common ground with republicans, or to work peaceably with them, nearly always result in Democrats looking like Neville Chamberlains, waving their useless scraps of paper as they give away the farm.

[BumRushDaShow]

6. "maybe Democrats should have nominated someone farther to the left"

It didn't fucking matter. Once the GOP took the Senate in 2014, thanks to the purveyors of purity, the GOP was NOT going to let the "n****r" President have any more nominees. Period. He could have nominated the zombie Scalia and they would have said "no" (so that THEY would do the same later under THEIR President). He could have nominated the zombie Earl Warren, and they would have said "no" (again because THEY were going to decide to put their own activist judges in and they had the power to make that so).

No foot-stomping, podium pounding, breaking down doors of GOP office-holders, chasing them out of restaurants, or other "protest" (as we have seen the past almost 2 years where the "protests" have yielded little or nothing) was going to change that fact. The POWER is at the ballot box and not just every 2 or 4 years and ignore the state elections for governors and state reps/Senators.

The hope however, is that these "protests" will wake those up who don't post on DU or dKOS or any political forum or who don't sit in front of MSNBC or CNN all day (which is 99% of the electorate) in order to encourage them to get involved (including running for office themselves, which is finally happening).

I don't know why this is so fucking difficult for DUers to understand.

[vi5]

9. The power is at the ballot box but also in public opinion....

..We are partly and I would say largely in this position we are in because people have been allowed to hold these reprehensible opinions and still exist in our polite civilized society.

There have been reduced consequences over the years because we were less concerned with calling a racist a racist, or calling a misogynist pig a misogynist pig, or a rapist a rapist, and on and on and on. Instead we continued with this charade that they were just "our friends across the aisle". We continued this folly that we could just "reach out to them" or "compromise with them". We were told that if we allowed our elected representatives EVEN WHEN WE HELD THE POWER AND CONTROL to just compromise and work the way our wonderful institutions were designed to work, that we would all be rewarded for our reasonable behavior and being the adults in the room. HA!

And THAT is just as fucking much a reason of why were are here as voting is. Because people were lied to and made to believe that these horrible, hateful positions were reasonable things that needed to be understood and reached out to. Because people were lied to and believed that "values voters" were a thing that actually existed.

Not only have people been told to just work through the proper channels and be nice and treat this evil people with respect, we've been told we need to REACH OUT to them or COMPROMISE with them. They don't want to be reached out to. They don't want to compromise.

Meanwhile the right raged, and screamed and yelled and protested and harassed while we behaved like the adults in the room and trusted that if we just let our very calm, very reasonable leaders handle it, that "they got this".

So yes we absolutely, most definitely need the ballot box. No disagreement whatsoever. But the yelling and the screaming works too, because the right and the GOP base sure as shit did more than just vote quietly.

[BumRushDaShow]

13. I think that part of the reason why what you describe was done

was because going full bore with the alternative would guarantee a repeat of 1861. There are many who are in this country today whose families were NOT here back that far (they only came here after it was over and/or during WW1 or WW2). No one wants to have to have the U.S. go through that again. It still ranks number one as our worst war in terms of casualties.

There are generations of pent-up hate going on and it won't take much at this point to spark it.

What does often happen though, is that "society", from small towns/rural areas to big cities, re-asserts "decorum" (it happened after Gingrich made the first attempt at hyper-partisan discourse, bolstered back then, by the likes of a Sununu or a D'Souza, and even by the likes of so-called "journalists" like Bill Kristol and George Will, who you now notice have left their party behind because it has gone too far).

However, what I and a few others have posted over and over and over again - WEALTHY "liberals/progressives/Democrats" (and they exist) need to take their money and buy up some media outlets - and YES "AM RADIO".

There is this persistent nonsense from "our side" that keeps getting repeated about "no one listens to AM radio", completely ignoring the fact that in the rural areas, where they can barely get TV reception (other than satellite) and often have no "internet" outside of dial-up - the thing that reaches the furthest (outside of print) is AM. AM radio signals can travel hundreds of miles which is WAY more than the typical FM signal that has a range of up to about 50 miles. I used to routinely listen to stations in Chicago (WLS) or Cincinnati (WLW) for years, which are stations that are literally almost 800 and 600 miles away (respectively) from here in Philly. The various NYC stations like WABC & WOR were a given for me (less than 100 miles away) as were stations in D.C. metro like WTOP or WRC (~150 miles away).

Buying stations and pre-programming them will ALSO need the owners to realize that these will HAVE to be operated "at a loss". But they should consider it a "donation" rather than a "loss" because it gets the info out there and WE have control over what gets played (just as Sinclair has recently now required their owned stations to READ Sinclair-crafted statements on-air or get fired).

Link to tweet

TEXT
Deadspin
✔
@Deadspin

How America's largest local TV owner turned its news anchors into soldiers in Trump's war on the media: https://theconcourse.deadspin.com/how-americas-largest-local-tv-owner-turned-its-news-anc-1824233490 …
4:11 PM - Mar 31, 2018

Watching the video at the above tweet is EXTREMELY horrifying.

"We" (editorial "we" ) constantly whine about our "leaders" not being "out there". But in many cases they ARE out there but no media outlet will cover them because it is not in their interest to do so, being RW-owned.

It will need to be a multi-pronged strategy but it is do-able. We just have to put aside some of our dismissive attitudes about obtaining our own media outlets. One of my mother's favorite sayings was "Bless the child who has his own".

[vi5]

17. You mean like Air America?

Yeah, that didn't work out so well.

And as for your 1861 analogy that is coming whether we want it or not. It doesn't matter how nice we have been or how reasonable we are or any of that. These people are delusional and living in another world. An alternate reality filled with rage and hatred and anger at things that just do not exist and are not true. Whether we are nice or not, whether we "reach out to them" or not will not matter. What matters to them is what they are told. And they will not listen to any other sources other than the ones that they trust.

So being nice and being reasonable and trusting our wonderful institutions has gotten us literally nothing. Nothing at all. It's angered and annoyed many of the people who have counted on us, and depressed enthusiasm among people who we need to be enthused, while gaining us absolutely nothing.

[BumRushDaShow]

19. "You mean like Air America? Yeah, that didn't work out so well. "

Exactly AND like CurrentTV. What "works well" or not IS IRRELVANT.

THIS is what I wrote about how you handle it -

Buying stations and pre-programming them will ALSO need the owners to realize that these will HAVE to be operated "at a loss". But they should consider it a "donation" rather than a "loss" because it gets the info out there and WE have control over what gets played (just as Sinclair has recently now required their owned stations to READ Sinclair-crafted statements on-air or get fired).

The Washington Times literally published (and continues to publish) AT A LOSS for over 30 years.

10/16/2015 08:27 am ET
After $1 Billion In Losses Over 33 Years, Washington Times Reaches Profitability
Washington Times

Some said it could never be done. Ever. But it’s done. The Washington Times announced Wednesday it achieved in September the first profitable month in its 33-year history, successfully transforming a traditional money-losing print publication into a leaner multimedia company with diverse revenue streams and a growing national audience.

“The hard-working employees and patient owners of The Washington Times have waited for this day for a long time,” President and CEO Larry Beasley said after surprising his staff Wednesday afternoon with an impromptu champagne celebration in the company ballroom.

The media landscape has been particularly unforgiving in recent years. Cutbacks, job losses and “newspaper death watches” have been the norm since 2009 as the Internet proved to be a profound game-changer in the news business. The Times went into reinvention mode, but never abandoned its original calling as a credible news source with a conservative backbone.

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/after-1-billion-in-losses-over-33-years-washington-times-reaches-profitability_us_5620ec85e4b06462a13b95c6

Yet it continues to this day with the plan to spend billions more to keep the propaganda coming, and is oft-cited even here (until someone reminds the posters who what it is). It was one of the oldest "modern mainstream" RW newspapers (thanks to the head of the Moonies) since Murdoch bought the New York Post (and later the WSJ) to spew his propaganda.

What you are describing about the sentiment of the electorate who put these hateful people in office - it was as a result of a media feed with a little something called "brain-washing". A media that WE don't own, that pounded propaganda for 30 years after the elimination of the "Fairness Doctrine", and heralded what would be a persistent march towards complete deregulation of the broadcast industry, culminating in the most recent change, where one owner could buy multiple stations in the same media market with identical types of programming.

I really don't think "enthusiasm" is depressed except maybe among a subset of the party. The issues are deeper than that to the point where we need to come to an understanding that even here on DU, there is a complete lack of knowledge of Civics 101, where people have no fucking clue how a bill becomes a law, how their municipal government works, or even who their elected officials are... So some spend hours in hysteria following a blind RW-owned media down the path of stupidity. The average person is NOT watching politics on TV nor do they care unless they get impacted. They are watching entertainment and maybe their local news and might hit a bit of the national news, but will throw up their hands because the states they live in make it harder for them to bring about a change.

There are fortunately groups out there like Indivisible TRAINING people about how it all works and the hope is that this can get passed onto the electorate at-large. But that electorate ALSO must understand that just because they "lose" one election that it's not worth coming out for the next one. There are millions of us who don't care what the result is because we will STILL vote anyway the next time, as that next time could be the charm. However if you don't "play", then you will never "win".

And note - there is a difference between "being nice" and being "assertive" and "being rude".

[Salviati]

20. This

[demsocialist]

7. more good news

[vi5]

8. "Too far to the left" Oh fucking spare me.....

When at any point in our history has anything ever swung "too far left"?

The Supreme Court has always had members who were either far right, or moderately left leaning, reasonable jurists.

"Far left". Any time I hear that fucking phrase (and sadly I hear it from people on "our side" just as much as anywhere else) it makes me want to retch.

[Autumn]

11. Anthony Kennedy? The guy Trump bought? Yeah I can see him

being a sort of steadying influence. In covering up Trumps crimes. Time for this court to go.

[Scarsdale]

14. No middle position,

just a middle finger from the gop again. The WH has been taken over by a sexual, lying predator and his grifting family. Now the gop is planning on installing a sexual, drunken, lying ass onto the SC for LIFE!!

[Racerdog1]

18. SC No longer relevant

Time take matters into our hands. It will get bad enough that will be the only way to rid ourselves of these vermin. There was a civil war here for those that don't know their history. Could be time for another.

[ancianita]

21. This was the plan all along, and the no-middle problem will now expand across the judicial system.