They'll be very likely to get them the day after the election once reelected senators have 6 more years in their jobs and ousted senators want to express their bitterness. It's doubtful any of the remainder will actually stand up and tell McConnell no and then vote that way, regardless of what empty words they're spewing today.

How do you "teach" someone to love something? Maybe I'm naive, but it seems to me that love is different than math and geography. Love is not instructively instilled from without; it is inductively arrived at from within.

You think that because you are a rational person. Most people are not rational, and believe whatever they are told to believe by authority figures. And they find that not only valid, but the only valid means of coming to belief in anything. Any other means of arriving at a belief is suspicious, and probably evil.

Let's see: on what occasions in the past has Trump failed to seize a personal advantage due to concerns it might make his enemies think bad things about him?

Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski has said she will not support an attempt to nominate a justice to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg. But Murkowski has also indicated she won't support trump in November. trump knows that and said in 2022 he will go to Alaska to campaign against her reelection.
But before we start fitting Murkowski for a halo:
Senator Susan Collins of Maine -- who has also indicated she might not vote for a replacement for Ginsburg prior to the November election -- also voted to acquit trump during the impeachment vote. So even if (if) Collins and Murkowski follow though and vote no, in order to defeat a nominee, there will need to be two more Republican Senators who won't support a replacement. With trump and mcconnell undoubtedly working behind-the-scenes to exert as much pressure as humanly possible on GOP senators to insure they 'toe the line,' those two additional GOP senators may be hard to find.

I think there's a good chance they might, simply because cramming through a supreme court nominee before the election would risk a political backlash.

Better to wait until after the election, then cram it through in the lame duck session.

One would think a professional liar would have a better vocabulary or understanding of English

Trump would have us believe that these fictious world leaders meant “[what you have done)] is amazingly good.

It could just as easily be that they called Trump and said “we look at what you have done and are amazed and dumbfounded - even flabbergasted and shocked.”

ETA
I kind of cannot tear my eyes away. I looking at a burning train wreck next to a fireworks warehouse while a 10-passenger commuter flight is about crash on top of it all and an earthquake has formed an ever-widening chasm right in front of some tornadoes. (D’oh what am I thinking? Sharknadoes)

If four GOP senators with enough backbone can be found to stand up to McConnell, I'll eat my hat.

I think your hat is safe.

My whip count right now is that Collins and Murkowski will oppose. Graham has said he doesn't think it's possible to do hearings and a vote in a lame duck session. Graham though has shown the backbone of jellyfish, so his assessment could change.

I'm curious to see what Grassley will do. He's a Senate institutionalist and may balk at rushing a nominee. Romney is his own man and we'll have to see who the nominee is. If it's a TV judge from Fox, Romney will oppose. Ben Sasse could be a spoiler as well. I could see a coalition of Sasse and Romney (never Trumpers) and Collins and Murkowski if the nominee is a true Trump loyalist.

Trump will likely want a true Trump loyalist, eyeing court fights for when he goes totally off the rails in an unlikely second term.

For the GOP, the smart thing to do would be to NOT nominate someone before the election.

Then, if Trump loses and/or the Democrats retake the Senate, nominate and confirm a judge in the lame duck session. And yes, they'll have the votes in the lame duck (just to reassure Stacyhs' hat).

Even more than the electoral college, this is the one thing about US government that I found absolutely jaw-dropping. In parliamentary systems, when the election is called the House (of Commons) is dissolved and doesn't sit. No new legislation can be passed until after the election is decided and a new Parliament sworn in.

It should be the same in the US: on the day after the election the old House of Representatives should be considered dismissed in toto and cannot sit until the entire slate of 438 new members is sworn in, which should happen concurrently with the President.

I believe the process for the electoral college votes and certification are laid out in the constitution, but I don't know if the time lines are. If they are, then the ten weeks where there isn't a sitting House would be problematic. If they aren't, they should be tightened up, especially if the election results are clear. Of course time needs to be set aside for the transition teams to do their work, but they don't need a sitting House for that. The new House, Senate, and President could be sworn in on December 15.

wrong thread

I don't think Trump will be able to be that patient.

There is a good argument to be made that, should Trump lose, he has no incentive to pander to the "losers" who didn't vote in sufficient numbers for him.

IF Trump loses, Trump could be bribed by a full pardon from Pence.
But I agree that Trump will probably like to tout his new magnificent judge during the campaign.

Conservatives who claimed that "yes, Trump is disgusting and unfit, but SCOTUS" will have a big problem, though.


No, joking of course: they'll find a new rationale why they have to vote for Trump (something like "why did the Dems nominate AOC's puppet?").

Even before I wrote my previous message last evening, mitch mcconnell had already announced that yes, they WILL vote on a trump nominee (not named yet) to fill Justice Ginsburg's seat on the Supreme Court prior to the November election. From an NPR news report:
This is raw partisan politics. The reason for pushing the nomination through before the election is simple: to get the kind of judge on the court that Republican voters want. That's essentially the same reason mcconnell WOULDN'T hold a vote in 2016. But that time it was to prevent the nomination of the kind of judge on the court that Republican voters didn't want. mcconnell made that clear last evening, explaining:

There is a second reason. The presidential election may again be decided by SCOTUS.

Trump will be torn. Announcing the name gives him the look-at-me moment that he lives for. But the showman (huckster) that he is willl lead him to say “I’ve narrowed it down to 3, tune in tomorrow for a nominee revelation that will shock you.”

Trump lives his life as if he were click bait.
Perhaps Trump himself is click bait.

The American version of seperation of power has shown itself to be a huge failure.

Propaganda and indoctrination.

More specifically, that's fairly certainly what the actual intent is. Of some note, a number of right-wingers have been accusing schools of doing exactly that - mostly falsely, but frequently with a small grain of truth mixed in - albeit largely because schools are teaching things that they don't want to be taught. So, in the usual result of their projection, they're trying to do exactly what they're projecting onto others. I'm also reminded of a particular right-wing father that I watched, though, who specifically stated that he thinks that the only thing that he thinks that his kid needs to have as a takeaway from school is that the US is the best country in the world.

"He loved Big Brother."

Neither Collins nor Murkowski will oppose. They'll make "concerned" faces and pretend to be about propriety right up until the vote, then they'll vote for whatever their fuhrer wants while hoping that nobody's looking.

Collins in particular should have had her image of independence shattered years ago. She's a spineless yes woman.

Exactly what I think :(

You can’t complain he’s inconsistent.

"If you can't love something, love the something you're with ..." Aldous Huxley

I still think the Senate won't vote until after the election. If McConnell keeps pressing for an earlier vote it will be to give vulnerable senators something to push back against for the purposes of political theater. They can paint themselves as mavericks then after the election "reluctantly" vote for a candidate who is just too good not to put on the bench.

On September 9th trump released an updated list of potential nominees for the Supreme Court. The front runners according to CNN are:

• Amy Coney Barrett
• Amul Thapar
• Former US Solicitors General Paul Clement and Noel Francisco
• Barbara Lagoa
• Sen. Tom Cotton

Here is a link to the CNN story from this morning about the frontrunners: Link. Here is a link to the CNN story about trump's updated list that appeared on September 9th: Link

trump updated his list ten days ago? Maybe trump knew something nobody else did. ;)

I think it's more a matter of gaming the system has become a science.

Meanwhile:

https://twitter.com/AnthonyTilghman/...817736705?s=20

In the thread, there's footage of them trying to prevent people reaching the polling stations.

... which is a serious crime.

If anyone enforces it.

Supporters of the president physically prevent people from voting.
What would you call it in another country?

It would not happen in a country with democracy.

Hans

In some countries, it's business as usual.

In an extended riff, Colbert created fake Trump ads and presented them to a "focus group" of Trump supporters. The ads promoted, among other things, putting children to work in dangerous jobs because they can't get covid, and building human-size microwaves to kill the virus. The Trumpers ate it all up. Even if they had mild reservations, they were voting for Trump, and they never caught on to the gag.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/triump...efend-anything

Part 2:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-7W5BCIFdg

These people just can't be saved.

"It was the most beautiful thing, it's called law and order" Trump gloats at his rally about Ali Velshi getting hit by a rubber bullet in Minneapolis. Sick stuff.

A statement from MSNBC:
“Freedom of the press is a pillar of our democracy. When POTUS mocks a journalist for the injury he sustained while putting himself in harm’s way to inform the public, he endangers thousands of other journalists and undermines our freedoms.”

Please tell me I don't live on the same planet as these people.

Ali Veshni is noticably brown-skinned.

As I've said many times now, when white supremacists like Dolt 45 say "law and order", what they mean is "straight white men should rule the US and everyone else, particularly black and indigenous people, along with LGBT people, should be kept as pariah castes via state violence and terrorism."

That's the "order" part, and it's why they also venerate murderers like George Zimmerman, Kyle Rittenhouse, the Proud Boys, and so forth, while describing black children as "thugs", and nonviolent groups like BLM and the DAPL protestors as "terrorists".

Shouldn't the police be there dispersing them with rubber bullets to the face and pepper spray? I thought that was how the US dealt with protests now.

These are not protestors, they are exuberant patriots.

The pepper spray and rubber bullets were only used on seditious thugs.