He was shaking so many hands over the holiday, he was using both hands to do it!

Recall on Trump? In what scenario would this happen?

God has the final word on Donald Trump. Someday, when he eats his last cheeseburger.

If God issues His Ultimate Recall vote on Trump, Vance immediately becomes President, and the office of the VP becomes vacant.

To fill it, President Vance would need to nominate someone, who would have to be approved by both the House and Senate.

But McConnell started a precedent that says that Congress can keep the position vacant by simply refusing to hold the vote.

Even so, a very good election night for Democrats in the upper chamber would only bring the Senate to 50-50, with a Republican VP serving as the tie-breaker,” he said.

If I were writing the script, I would have the Democrats win that 50/50 split in the Senate, then have the President eat his final cheeseburger. Then, Schumer will invoke the “McConnell” doctrine to sit on the VP appointment and not bring it to a vote at all. We lived without a SC Justice for nearly a year, and they are much more important than the VP.

The only poll that matters is in November

They get permission to hate the people they want to hate. See? They think it is a fair deal.

Wait, you mean the guy who owned a beauty pageant was part of the sex trafficking operation? Who would have guessed that?

He’s not being self aware at all, he’s just whining. It’s a justification for a decision he’s already made.

“We have to do it because nobody else will”. That’s probably the same logic he used to put his name on the Kennedy Center, or his picture on all of his buildings. Doesn’t he want to put his face on a quarter? And Mt Rushmore? Seems to me we’re being forced to memorialize him everywhere.

Congress? That body currently run by Mike Johnson and John Thune?

We’ll get a special prosecutor, all right, and it will be Matt Gaetz.

I look forward to the “Donald J. Trump Memorial” anything.

Not just any Republican, she was Trump’s nominee for UN Ambassador, until that got withdrawn because the Republicans were losing too many House seats to Presidential appointments.

So, she decided to run for Governor, until a better connected male candidate decided to run instead, so she backed out of that.

It seems like her entire year can be summed up by getting screwed over by other Republicans. No wonder she wants out.

When the President does it, it’s not illegal…

“illegitimate” is different than “illegal”. In some context they are the same, but “illegitimate” can also mean “against rules” or “against custom”.

The President nominates these officials, but they take office “with the advice and consent of the Senate”. I take that to mean that after the President consults with the Senate, he makes an appointment, and the Senate is obligated to give an up-or-down vote on it.

I remember that time well, and Merrick Garland (yes, that guy) was the compromise candidate that Obama picked because he had the respect, of a lot of Republican Senators. The Senate had a constitutional duty to put it to an up or down vote, which Mitch ignored, because he would not like the outcome. (If Garland didn’t have any Republican support, after all, they could have just held the vote, and voted it down. But that would have given Obama another chance to nominate someone else.)

There is no law that says “the Senate must act within this period of time”. We can’t haul McConnell to the brig because of it. Yet, it is clear to me that he flat out ignorea something the Constitution obligated him to do. It can be clearly seen as illegitimate, especially when he changed those rules a few years later.

It’s illegitimate because Mitch McConnell refused to hold a vote on Obama’s last SC pick, because he knew it would pass if that vote was held. So he left the SC one member short until Trump won, and they confirmed his pick instead. Basically, he (and the chairman of the Judiciary Committee) exercised a two-person veto on the pick.

He claimed it was too close to an election to act, but then when RBG passed away with even less time before an election, he pressed ahead with Trump’s pick anyway.

He made up a new rule, then abandoned it when it was expedient to do so. If rules mattered, one of those picks would have been different.

A boy can dream, can’t he?

I bet they can’t get any contractor to work on that, because the Administration has already stiffed the demolition crew and nobody wants to touch a job they will never get paid for.

The real problem is the lifetime tenure of the justices. The Founders did that for good reason, to insulate the Court from the immediate politics of the time. But people are simply living longer now, and Republicans figured out how to ratfuck the Court to stack it in their favor. (Helped in no small part by RBG, who could not be convinced to retire at the right time). Openings on the Court are so rare that it is worth expending significant political effort to get them to go your way.

If Democrats ever get control of the Presidency and Congress again, they should immediately move to blow up the Court to 13 members. They can do it by immediately turning it up to 11, and then making it 13 two years later, in order to stagger the changes. But this is important enough that they should blow up the filibuster to do it.

(13 is a magic number because it matches the number of Federal district courts.)

And then, after the bill is passed, they should work with Republicans on a framework to add term limits to the Constitution. Each of the 13 justices gets a 13 year term, each justice could serve up to two terms, consecutive or not, and would have to be re-appointed and re-confirmed for their second term. They can even tie the number of justices directly to the number of Federal circuits, so that it is harder to ratfuck on the future. 26 years is long enough to insulate a justice from politics. And out of our 116 justices to date, only 28 have served more than 26 years.

But by giving every President the right to nominate one justice per year, it makes the process more regular, and the political payoff for engineering a single appointment becomes less attractive. Supreme Court turnover becomes a predictable thing.

At this point, Republicans may be willing to support that amendment, because the alternative would be for President Newsom to appoint 4 Liberals to the court for Life in quick succession, and wait for their own full control to ratfuck it again. That might take a while.

No, Gavin has a key asset that the last two Democratic losing candidates (who were also the Next Ones Up) lacked…

A penis.

Republicans complain that government is ineffective and corrupt, then they get elected and prove it.