Quo Vadis the Supreme Court . For Justices may not outlive the #OyVeyDonaldTrump Presidency. Ruth Ginsburg will certainly try

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg Wakes Up Long Enough to Issue This Threat to Trump!


One of the main reasons Donald Trump was elected over Hillary Clinton as our president: Supreme Court justices. Americans did NOT want Hillary Clinton nominating the next Supreme Court justice(s). With the seat vacancy of the late Justice Antonin Scalia, who was appointed by Reagan, Americans wanted a conservative to fill the vacancy.

The Supreme Court already has 4 justices appointed by Democrats and Americans want a justice who is loyal to the Constitution and has a strong commitment to pro-life. President Trump’s first choice, Federal Appeals Court Judge Neil Gorsuch has just that. He will also help break for the most part, the current 4-4 tie on the Supreme Court.


It’s no surprise Supreme Court Justice, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, appointed by Bill Clinton, is no fan of Donald Trump’s. Most would say it’s past time for Justice Ginsburg to retire, including Donald Trump.



But Democrats are going to try to keep her on for as long as they can, because the retirement of Justice Ginsburg would give President Trump one more conservative appointment to the Supreme Court; that’s not something Democrats are looking forward to.

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, whose job it is to uphold the Constitution is calling for a change in the Electoral College. As the code of conduct for US judges states: Canon 2: A Judge Should Avoid Impropriety and the Appearance of Impropriety in all Activities (A) Respect for Law. A judge should respect and comply with the law and should act at all times in a manner that promotes public confidence in the integrity and impartiality of the judiciary.

CBSNews Reports: STANFORD, Calif. — U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg lamented partisanship in Congress during a talk at Stanford University on Monday and said she hoped it would return to an era when “it was working for the good of the country and not just along party lines.” Ginsburg did not address the nomination of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court seat vacated by the late Justice Antonin Scalia or President Trump’s travel ban, which could end up before the high court. But she did say she would like to change the Electoral College, a comment that drew applause from the packed, 1,200-seat Stanford Memorial Church. She did not elaborate.

Ginsburg said during the presidential campaign that she presumed Democrat Hillary Clinton would win and have the opportunity to make a few appointments to the court.

She said at the time she did not want to think about the possibility of a Trump victory, calling Trump in one interview a “faker” who “really has an ego.”



She later apologized and said her remarks were ill-advised.



It’s highly inappropriate that a United States Supreme Court justice get involved personally in politics. As I said earlier, Ginsburg was appointed by Bill Clinton and is a typical liberal on the Supreme Court. Supreme Court Justices are suppose to judge on the side of the law – the Constitution. They are there to make sure our nation is governed by the law and the law – the Constitution – is enforced, but it’s been somewhat of a “free-for-all” the last 8 years with Obama in charge.

Democrats must be really freaking out now with the possibility that President Trump may not only have the opportunity to appoint 2 justices to the Supreme Court, but maybe even more. Ginsburg is 83, Kennedy is 80 and Breyer is 78.

Either way, no judges including Justice Ginsburg, should be making personal statements about immigration or anything else outside of the US Supreme Court. Ginsburg’s remarks underscore the need for Supreme Court justices to keep their political opinions to themselves.

Maybe Justice Ginsburg should listen to her own advice:

“I wish there was a way I could wave a magic wand and put back when people were respectful of each other and the Congress was working for the good of the country and not just along party lines,…Someday there will be great people, great elected representatives who will say, ‘enough of this nonsense, let’s be the kind of legislature the United States should have,”….

#RIPUSA #RIPSUPREME COURT under Donald Trump

The Supreme Court operates in counterpoint to the rest of the government. The Justices do not initiate; they respond. Every major political issue of the day eventually winds up in their courtroom, and they either embrace or resist what’s happening in the rest of the world. When Franklin D. Roosevelt pushed the New Deal through Congress, the conservatives on the Court, for a time, fought him to a standstill. When the civil-rights movement gathered steam, the Justices gave first a hesitant and then a fuller endorsement of the cause. But resistance from the Justices never lasts too long. The truism that the Supreme Court follows the election returns happens to be true. Elections have consequences.

For the past eight years, the Court has been called upon to respond to President Obama’s agenda. In certain crucial ways, a majority of the Justices have upheld the work of the Administration, most notably in two cases that posed existential threats to the Affordable Care Act. In other cases, the Court has rebuked the President. In Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, the Court rejected the Administration’s view that the A.C.A. required closely held corporations to subsidize forms of birth control that the owners opposed on religious grounds. Over all, the Court has reflected the fierce partisan divisions in the country. Conservatives won many cases (striking down campaign-finance regulations and gutting the core of the Voting Rights Act), while liberals won others (expanding gay rights and reaffirming abortion rights). The Trump Presidency will shape the Justices’ work even before they decide a case. If Trump succeeds in overturning the Affordable Care Act, the Court’s two landmark endorsements of that law, in 2012 and 2015, will become nullities, like rave reviews of a closed restaurant.

George W. Bush, the previous Republican President, had to wait until his second term to make his first appointment to the Supreme Court. Trump will have a vacancy to fill as soon as he takes the oath of office. Antonin Scalia died in February, but Mitch McConnell, the Senate Majority Leader, decreed that the seat would be held open, to be filled by the next President. The voters mostly ignored this brazen defiance of institutional norms, but its consequences, as McConnell intended, have been enormous. In an unusual move for a Presidential candidate, Trump released a list of twenty-one people whom he might consider as nominees. The list includes some curiosities, such as Mike Lee, the senator from Utah (who revealed, the morning after the election, that he had voted for the Independent Evan McMullin), and Margaret Ryan, who serves on the United States Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces. But most are Republican appointees to the federal courts of appeal or state supreme courts, and all appear to be strongly conservative in outlook. If one is nominated and confirmed, the new Justice will probably vote much as Scalia did. McConnell’s blockade prevented the creation of the first liberal majority since the Nixon Administration. Instead, there will be a conservative majority of five Justices, with Anthony Kennedy occasionally and John Roberts rarely voting with the liberals.

Confirmation of any Trump nominee should be a mere formality. When Hillary Clinton appeared to be the likely winner, several Republican senators suggested that they would keep Scalia’s seat open throughout her term; eight Justices were enough for them. Democrats take a more genteel approach to judicial confirmations of nominees from the opposition party. At confirmation hearings, the senators from the Democratic minority will doubtless ask the nominee a series of questions about such issues as gay rights, Roe v. Wade, and the Citizens United case, regarding campaign finance. The nominee will answer with generalities and evasions. Trump’s party narrowly controls the Senate, but any Republican defections on a matter of this magnitude are unlikely. Democrats have never mounted a successful filibuster against a Republican Supreme Court nominee, and McConnell would probably abolish the practice if they even tried. So Trump will have his Justice in short order.

The new Court will then begin confronting the Trump agenda. Two issues are likely to stand out. In the period leading up to the 2016 election, Republican-dominated state legislatures passed a series of voter-suppression initiatives, including photo-identification requirements and limitations on early voting and absentee voting. (These efforts may have limited Democratic turnout in several battleground states, including Wisconsin, Ohio, and North Carolina.) Some lower federal courts, especially those with judges appointed by President Obama, began interpreting what was left of the Voting Rights Act as justification for curtailing these practices. A conservative majority on the Court would likely give the states a free hand, which would allow them to enact even greater restrictions.

The other area is immigration. Trump made the building of a wall along the Mexican border and the eviction of roughly eleven million undocumented immigrants the centerpiece of his campaign. He has not detailed how he plans to round up so many people, but he will surely tighten immigration enforcement; just as surely, the targets will turn to the courts for relief. Undocumented immigrants by definition enjoy fewer rights than citizens, and their fate is likely to become a defining issue for the new Court.

Looking farther ahead involves playing a high-stakes game of actuarial roulette. The Court’s senior liberals, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer, are eighty-three and seventy-eight, respectively; Kennedy is eighty. The chances for dramatic change on such issues as abortion rights and affirmative action hinge on their continued service. The one certainty about the Court is that it never stands in the way for long. In broad terms, it reflects the political tenor of its era. If Trump and the ideological tendency he represents remain ascendant, the Court will mirror those views, too, and probably sooner rather than later. Presidents shape Supreme Courts, not the other way around, and it is Donald Trump’s turn now.

#RIPUSA Every Vote Will Not Be Counted

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8 COMMENTS

The naïve view of democracy has long held that "every vote counts," and that close elections can be decided by "counting every vote" and by inferring the "will of the people" from an election result where the winner's vote tally beats the loser's vote tally by as few as a single vote.

In practice, however, no large-scale election has ever involved counting every vote. In real life, there are numerous obstacles to counting every vote including spoiled ballots, questionable ballots, human error, provisional ballots, and a myriad of other votes that exist in a gray area. 

The US presidential election of 2000 offers an instructional example in how votes are really counted. 

The 2000 Election: Not All Ballots Are Created Equal 

On election night 2000, the presidential election came down to close elections in three states: Oregon, New Mexico, and Florida. But, by the next day, it became clear that whoever won Florida would win the presidency. 

The close margin of votes in Florida (the initial spread amounted to fewer than 1,800 votes out of nearly six million votes cast in Florida). By November 12, officials in several Florida counties were hand counting hundreds of thousands of ballots. By November 13, both campaigns are involved in a variety of legal actions seeking to bar recounts or allow recounts, or challenge the legal claims of the opposing campaign. 

In late November, the Florida election had largely become a matter of obtaining legal rulings determining which votes would be counted, and from where. Legal disputes over what votes to count involved a wide variety of minuscule details including the question of whether or not to count overseas ballots that lacked a postmark as required by Florida law. A judge rules they can be counted. 

Over time, the Bush campaign concluded it wanted to prevent a manual recount in Florida and entered into a legal battle to stop the recount. After a number of conflicting court rulings, the US Supreme Court overturned the pro-recount position of the Florida Supreme Court and effectively declared Bush the winner. 

Although a winner was indeed eventually chosen, the election was, for all intents and purposes, a tie. 

Both Bush and Gore received approximately 48 percent of the votes cast, and — since many recounts never occurred — there has never been any clear resolution to the question of who really won the most votes in Florida. 

The fact that a winner was chosen to the satisfaction of the legal and political authorities is not in dispute. But, the Supreme Court's arbitrary selection of some votes over others reminds us that in terms of the supposed moral authority of majoritarian rule that undergirds American democracy, no actual winner was ever demonstrated, and elections to do not come down to a simple matter of counting votes.   

Fortunately for the United States government, US residents at the time were willing to peacefully accept this outcome, and were willing to have the president chosen by the federal courts. This blasé attitude toward the election was no doubt helped along by the unusually strong economy enjoyed by many Americans in the late 1990s. Whether or not Americans would so willingly accept a similar situation today remains unclear. 

#ImWithHer #VoteClintonKaineforthe45th Hillary Clinton and the LGBT Movement

The LGBT Movement  was one of the very first large voter alliance movement to endorse Hillary Clinton. An Endorsement she welcomed immediately.



In June 2000, Hillary Clinton, then a candidate for U.S. Senate, walks in New York’s annual gay pride parade. She became the first first lady to do so.



During her first run for president in 2008, Hillary Clinton had an opportunity to become an undisputed leader in the gay rights movement.

As she prepared for a forum on the gay-oriented Logo network, she reached out to her friend Hilary Rosen, a political consultant who is a lesbian. Rosen expressed frustration that so many mainstream political figures opposed legalized same-sex marriage, and she challenged Clinton to speak out for a community that had strongly supported her.

“I’m struggling with how we can support this with a religious and family context,’’ Rosen recalled Clinton telling her. Clinton just wanted to know the best way to explain the position.
Hilary Rosen, at left in 2013 in New York, said she was disappointed that her friend Hillary Clinton did not vocally support same-sex marriage in 2008. (Amy Sussman/Invision/AP)

The exchange was painful for Rosen, who had known Clinton since they worked on children’s issues together in the 1980s.

“We took it personally,” Rosen said. “You try not to because it’s politics, but in this case, the politics is personal.”

Rosen remains a Clinton friend and supporter, saying, “I know her heart is in the right place.” And Clinton eventually got where her friends wanted her to go, though her change of heart came when the political risk had disappeared — close to a year after similar shifts by President Obama and Vice President Biden.

This year, as the Democratic presidential nominee, she is running as a forceful advocate for the LGBT community and a full-fledged supporter of same-sex marriage. The country’s leading gay rights group, the Human Rights Campaign, endorsed her early in the campaign, lauding her as a “champion” for its cause.

Clinton’s path to get to this point frustrated many of her supporters. While most national politicians have been slow to evolve on gay marriage, Clinton’s handling of it was particularly saddening to some activists because they had expected more. Clinton and her husband, Bill, had stood out as being among the first to actively court the gay community as an interest group and donor base — and yet they were unwilling to stand with the community on one of its biggest civil rights issues.

“You could see the powerful way she has leveraged her influence on behalf of women and children or other issues,” said Alan van Capelle, a former director of the now-disbanded Empire State Pride Agenda. “In terms of LGBT rights and marriage, there were people who led and people who followed. And on that issue, she followed.”

Clinton’s approach to same-sex marriage illustrates the caution that has come to define her political career. It also reflects a central challenge for the 68-year-old candidate, who along with her husband helped to shape an era of centrist politics designed to appeal to culturally conservative voters but has struggled to adapt to a generation of Democrats who have moved further to the left.

Democratic presumptive nominee Hillary Clinton greets a throng of people attending the gay pride parade in New York City. (Reuters)

Among the Bill Clinton-era policies that Hillary Clinton has disavowed on the presidential campaign trail is the Defense of Marriage Act, the law signed by then-President Bill Clinton in the lead-up to his 1996 reelection effort that prohibited the federal government from recognizing same-sex marriage.

As Bill Clinton sought the 1992 Democratic nomination, LGBT activists were eager to align with the Clintons. The community had a strained relationship with the previous Democratic nominee, Michael Dukakis, whom activists heckled at a campaign event when he said he didn’t see the need to issue an order banning discrimination against gays in the federal government.

Bill Clinton sought to include the community as a part of his coalition. He thrilled hundreds when he spoke at an LGBT fundraiser at the Palace nightclub in West Hollywood.

“I have a vision and you’re a part of it,” Bill Clinton told the crowd, recalled Richard Socarides, who advised the Clinton White House on lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender issues.

He spoke about increasing funding for AIDS research and ending discrimination against gay men and lesbians. Most provocative was his unequivocal promise to lift the ban on gay people serving in the military. He didn’t speak about marriage, which had not yet emerged as a major political issue.

As Bill Clinton focused on policy, Hillary Clinton developed friendships with LGBT activists. She would talk with same-sex couples about their children and share stories of parenthood. She’d acknowledge staffers with a smile if she saw them holding hands with their partners at their church and was comfortable asking for details about relationships.

Rosen said that Clinton, even as she grappled with her views of marriage, was personally supportive when Rosen adopted her children. “I saw up close her struggle with this in conversations that she and I had, and I believe [she had] the same genuine struggle that many people of her generation felt, and so I don’t ever think it came from a cruel place, or a prejudicial place,” Rosen said.

The night before Roberta Achtenberg, then a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, was scheduled to make history at the 1992 Democratic National Convention as the first openly lesbian person to ever address the gathering, Hillary Clinton called to give her a pep talk.

“I’m rooting for you,” Achtenberg recalled Clinton saying.

In 1993, Bill Clinton’s first year in office, relations began to fray. Members of Congress and military officials were arguing against lifting the ban on gays serving in the military. Many strategists thought the president didn’t have the political capital to push through his idea, so he had to compromise. The result was the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, which allowed gay men and women to serve in the military as long as they were not open about their sexual orientation.

Those who spoke to Hillary Clinton at the time said she encouraged her husband to find more support in Congress to avoid the compromise. But there was little she could do. “Bill knew the issue was a political loser,” she wrote later in her 2003 autobiography, “Living History.”

Three years after “don’t ask, don’t tell,” the president faced another question about gay rights. Lawmakers were crafting legislation mandating that the federal government recognize only heterosexual marriage. Some White House strategists worried that if Clinton didn’t back the legislation, he might lose the support of the centrists who had helped propel him to the White House in the first place. LGBT staffers tried to change the president’s mind.


Hillary Clinton, whose influence had dwindled after her failed attempt to overhaul the health-care system, mostly stayed out of those discussions, Socarides said. Still, some gay activists hoped that she might be a voice for them in the West Wing.

Rosen, who at the time headed the recording industry trade association, asked Clinton whether she could help change her husband’s mind.

Hillary Clinton was not receptive, Rosen recalled, because she thought she needed to stand with her husband while making tough choices.

“No one said it was going to be easy,” Rosen said she told her, “but politicians have to make decisions. Someone has to be first.”

When the president signed DOMA, activists were livid.

“It was like a dagger to the heart,” Rosen reflected. “And at that point, it made supporting his reelection very difficult.”

Still, with Republican leadership threatening to take away funding for AIDS research, the Clintons offered the best opportunity to have any influence at all. Rosen and other gay rights activists hoped that Hillary Clinton might undo some of her husband’s legacy when she started to run for the Senate.

Clinton’s potential opponent, New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, had made inroads with the city’s affluent gay community, opposing the military’s ban on openly gay members. Clinton followed suit, announcing at a fundraiser in the SoHo art studio of a gay donor that she, too, was against “don’t ask, don’t tell.”

“Fitness to serve should be based on an individual’s conduct, not their sexual orientation,” Clinton said in a statement the next evening.

A month later, she demonstrated the limits to her support for LGBT rights — declaring that she was unwilling to support legalized marriage.

“Marriage has got historic, religious and moral content that goes back to the beginning of time, and I think a marriage is as a marriage has always been, between a man and woman,” she said during a January 2000 news conference.

Giuliani dropped out of the race, but Clinton’s embrace of the gay community carried on. She spoke in favor of civil unions gaining equal legal status as marriage, as well as efforts to end employment discrimination against homosexuals.

In June 2000, she strolled along Fifth Avenue behind a man on roller skates wearing only a thong and another in a pink tutu. Waving along to onlookers shouting, “I love you,” Clinton became the first first lady to walk in the city’s raucous gay pride parade.

Yet, as she was celebrating same-sex relationships, some activists in New York were losing patience.

In 2004, the mayor of San Francisco started approving marriage licenses for same-sex couples. Courts in Massachusetts had endorsed marriage rights. President George W. Bush called for a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, energizing a conservative base that would help him secure a second term.

Clinton said she opposed amending the Constitution but said in a Senate floor speech that she took “umbrage at anyone who might suggest that those of us who worry about amending the Constitution are less committed to the sanctity of marriage or to the fundamental bedrock principle that it exists between a man and a woman.”

Clinton’s perpetual balancing act unnerved some supporters.

When Clinton began holding fundraisers for her Senate reelection campaign in 2006, van Capelle urged gay donors to withhold their checks because “she didn’t earn it.”

“If an environmental group [had] asked me to write a check for Hillary I would, and if reproductive rights group asked I would,” van Capelle said. “There was a strange relationship between politicians and fundraisers, and they thought they could use [LGBT activists] as an ATM machine and we didn’t want to be a part of it. I thought it set a bad example. What it said was you could do as little as you could at that time to get our support.”

Clinton’s position was softening. She supported states that legalized same-sex marriage. As for her position on the federal ban, her staff noted that her position was in a “state of evolution.”

Rosen, her longtime friend, said she pleaded with Clinton to stop discussing marriage in religious terms. The position seemed dogmatic and uncompromising, Rosen said.

“I encouraged her just to say she’s not fully comfortable with it,” Rosen said.

Some of Clinton’s allies tried to avoid the issue entirely. Allida Black, a historian and longtime friend, said she chose to focus her conversations with Clinton on pressing for policies to allow gay people to visit their partners in the hospital or bury their deceased loved ones. Nevertheless, Black said she never doubted that Clinton respected her relationship with her partner, Judy.

“You trusted her because of the way she treated us,” Black said.

Jason Collins, a professional basketball player who became friends with Chelsea Clinton while living in Wilbur Hall with her at Stanford University, marveled at how comfortable Bill and Hillary were dancing among gay couples at an ’80s prom that Chelsea had in the West Village to celebrate her 30th birthday in 2010.

“Chelsea kept a diverse inner circle,” Collins said, “and you know that probably had an effect on her parents’ thinking.”

When Collins decided he was ready to become the first major professional athlete to come out in 2013, he looked to Bill and Hillary Clinton for advice.

“There’s going to be a moment where everything is going so fast it feels like it’s moving at a million miles per second,” Collins recalled Hillary Clinton telling him. “At those moments, just take a breath, and keep going forward.”

As secretary of state, Clinton allowed same-sex partners of Foreign Service officers the same travel benefits at married couples.

She gave a speech in Geneva in 2011 in which she said, “Gay rights are human rights and human rights are gay rights,” an echo of the women’s rights speech she had delivered in China as first lady.

By May 2012, as polls showed more than half of the country supporting same-sex marriage, top Democrats began indicating their support. Biden declared in a television interview that he was “absolutely comfortable” with same-sex marriage. Obama followed soon after, saying that “same-sex couples should be able to get married.”

Clinton stayed silent.

Chad Griffin, the executive director of the Human Rights Campaign, said he privately pressed Clinton to shift her position. Griffin, who grew up in Hope, Ark., writing letters to then-Arkansas first lady Hillary Clinton, said her resistance on same-sex marriage was “really hard.”

Months after Obama’s statement of support, Griffin ran into Clinton on an Amtrak barreling from New York to Washington. She told him she wanted his ideas for the best way to show her support for same-sex marriage.

Griffin said he had long known that she would come around eventually, but “the moment felt like such a relief.”

In 2013, before the Supreme Court struck down a key part of DOMA, Clinton released a video with the Human Rights Campaign stating that she had reconciled her feelings. She was fully behind marriage.

Black, now a fundraiser for Clinton, could only smile when she saw Clinton’s video. But she had known it was coming. After she married her partner, Judy, in April 2012 — nearly a year before Clinton’s public announcement — Black came home to a note attached to her door. It was from Clinton.

“At long last!” it read.