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It almost sounds like a bad joke: What did the 78-year-old male senator say to the 69-year-old female justice?

RETIRE!

Thats effectively what happened recently when U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut suggested that Sonia Sotomayor the first Hispanic and third woman Supreme Court justice retire so that President Joe Biden could appoint a younger and presumably healthier replacement.

Blumenthal is not alone. Fearing a repeat of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburgs death in September 2020 just weeks before Election Day progressives such as Josh Barro, Mehdi Hasan and Nate Silver want to ensure that if Donald Trump does defeat Biden in November, he would not have another opportunity to replace a departed liberal justice with a young conservative ideologue.

If Sotomayor is indeed ill, she could justifiably choose to retire. But such calls are not clear-eyed assessments of the justices health. Blumenthal and the progressive columnists calling for Sotomayors retirement arent medical doctors who have reviewed the justices records.

Instead, in my view as a political scientist who studies the Supreme Court, these calls are gimmicks really designed to keep a seat on the Supreme Court in the hands of a liberal justice.

Dont get me wrong. As I write in my new book, A Supreme Court Unlike Any Other: The Deepening Divide Between the Justices and the People, the increasingly long tenure of justices is a serious problem for American democracy. The confirmation of younger justices who stay far longer than they once did prevents the courts membership from changing organically.

Consider, for example, a hypothetical I pose in my book. Justice Clarence Thomas once said that he intends to serve until he is 86 years old because, as he put it, The liberals made my life miserable for 43 years, and Im going to make their lives miserable for 43 years.

If Thomas, who at 75 is the oldest sitting justice, is able to fulfill that promise and no younger justice leaves the court before him, the U.S. would not see another vacancy until 2034.

A court unchanged for 12 years would be unprecedented in American history. This is just one of the factors that has deepened the democracy gap between the justices and the people, which I define in the book as the distance between the court and the electoral processes that endow it with democratic legitimacy.

Some reforms would prevent justices from remaining on the high bench for three-plus decades, on average. But publicly requesting an ideologically aligned justice to retire isnt one of them. It isnt likely to work, and in the case of Sotomayor, it has been viewed as sexist.

Perhaps more importantly, it misses the point.

When it comes to the Supreme Court, progressives are now in the position where conservatives found themselves for many years. Theyre on the outside looking in.

Instead of advancing gimmicks that are unlikely to work, progressives could take a page from the playbook of conservatives who learned from liberals of the previous era: Take the argument to the people.

Winning on Election Day is the best path for any party to remake the court. Recall how the conservatives came to dominate the court. In election after election, Republican presidential nominees rallied conservative voters to the polls by critiquing the courts most politically divisive decisions, such as Roe, and promising a different type of justice if given the opportunity to fill a seat.

Democrats often stayed silent about the Supreme Court during these campaigns, preferring to motivate voters to the polls with other issues. A 2016 exit poll question asked respondents about the importance of Supreme Court appointments in determining their vote for president. Twenty-one percent answered that it was the most important issue for them. And significantly, 56% of that 21% supported Trump, 15 percentage points more than those who backed Hillary Clinton.

In fact, when Trump named Neil Gorsuch as his first high court nominee mere days after his presidential inauguration, he highlighted this data, saying that millions of voters had supported him based on his promise to appoint conservatives to the court.

Progressives have already shown that the politically astute response to the conservative Supreme Court and its decisions isnt to go after one of their own. It is to take advantage of the great distaste many Americans have toward some of the courts decisions, particularly its 2022 Dobbs ruling uprooting Roe.

Just weeks after the Dobbs decision, Kansans overwhelmingly rejected a proposed constitutional amendment that would have denied women a right to obtain an abortion in their state. In the 2022 midterm elections, the expected red wave turned into a ripple as Democrats highlighted the abortion issue. And as the 2024 campaign season heats up, Democrats are primed to highlight their pro-Roe views to rally voters to the polls.

History shows that parties can win elections after losing the Supreme Court. Those parties have done so by strategically focusing on convincing voters to support them, not persuading justices to retire.

Original post:
Justice Sotomayor's health isn't the real problem for Democrats winning elections is - The Conversation

WASHINGTON Speaker Mike Johnson on Wednesday easily batted down an attempt by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia to oust him from his post, after Democrats linked arms with most Republicans to fend off a second attempt by GOP hard-liners to strip the gavel from their party leader.

The vote to kill the effort was an overwhelming 359-43, with seven voting present. Democrats flocked to Johnsons rescue, with all but 39 of them voting with Republicans to block the effort to oust him.

Members of the minority party in the House have never propped up the other partys speaker, and when the last Republican to hold the post, Kevin McCarthy, faced a removal vote last fall, Democrats voted en masse to allow the motion to move forward and then to jettison him, helping lead to his historic ouster.

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This time, the Democratic support made the critical difference, allowing Johnson, who has a minuscule majority, to avoid a removal vote altogether. While for weeks Greene had appeared to be on a political island in her drive to get rid of yet another GOP speaker, 11 Republicans ultimately voted to allow her motion to move forward.

That was the same number of Republicans who voted in October to allow the bid to remove McCarthy to advance but back then, they were joined by every Democrat.

I appreciate the show of confidence from my colleagues to defeat this misguided effort, Johnson told reporters shortly after Wednesdays vote. As Ive said from the beginning and Ive made clear here every day, I intend to do my job. I intend to do what I believe to be the right thing, which is what I was elected to do, and Ill let the chips fall where they may. In my view, that is leadership.

Hopefully, he added, this is the end of the personality politics and the frivolous character assassination that has defined the 118th Congress.

The lopsided vote solidified the dynamic that has defined Johnsons speakership, like McCarthys before him: Each time the Republican leader has been faced with a critical task, such as averting a government shutdown or a catastrophic default on the nations debt, he has relied on a bipartisan coalition of mainstream lawmakers to steer around far-right opposition and provide the votes to accomplish it.

The result has been the empowerment of Democrats at the expense of the hard right, the very phenomenon that Greene raged against as she rose on the House floor Wednesday drawing boos from some of her colleagues to lay out a scathing case against Johnson and what she called the uniparty he empowered.

Our decision to stop Marjorie Taylor Greene from plunging the House of Representatives and the country into further chaos is rooted in our commitment to solve problems for everyday Americans in a bipartisan manner, Rep. Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the Democratic leader, told reporters shortly after the vote. We will continue to govern in a reasonable, responsible and results-oriented fashion, and put people over politics all day and every day.

Greenes move to oust Johnson came roughly three weeks after the speaker pushed through a long-stalled $95 billion national security spending package to aid Israel, Ukraine and other U.S. allies over the objections of Greene and other right-wing Republicans who staunchly opposed sending additional aid to Ukraine.

Lawmakers loudly jeered Greene as she called up the resolution and read it aloud. As she recited the measure, a screed that lasted more than 10 minutes, Republicans lined up on the House floor to shake Johnsons hand and pat him on the back.

Given a choice between advancing Republican priorities or allying with Democrats to preserve his own personal power, Johnson regularly chooses to ally himself with Democrats, Greene said, reading from her resolution.

She concluded with the official call for his removal: Now, therefore be it resolved that the office of the speaker of the House of Representatives is hereby declared to be vacant.

It marked the second time in less than a year that Republicans have sought to depose their own speaker, coming about seven months after GOP rebels succeeded, with Democratic support, in removing McCarthy.

Earlier in the week, Greene had seemed to hesitate over whether she would actually call the ouster vote. For two consecutive days, she met for hours with Johnson, flanked by her chief ally, Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, and floated a list of demands in exchange for not calling the vote.

Among the demands were cutting off all future U.S. aid to Ukraine, defunding the Justice Department and imposing a 1% across the board cut on all spending bills if lawmakers are unable to negotiate a deal to fund the government in September.

But Johnson had remained cool to their entreaties, and told reporters that he was not negotiating with Greene and Massie.

That put Greene, whose combative political brand is premised on her unrelenting appetite to fight with the establishment of her party, out on a limb. She had little choice but to call up a vote she knew would fail, but had been threatening for weeks. Even after Jeffries made it clear that Democrats would vote to block any ouster attempt, she was still determined to undermine Johnson publicly and force Democrats to bail him out.

This is exactly what the American people needed to see, she told reporters on the House steps after the vote. I didnt run for Congress to come up here and join the uniparty, and the uniparty was on full display today.

The Democrats now control Speaker Johnson, she added.

Just 32 Democrats voted to allow Greenes motion to move forward, while another seven voted present, registering no position.

Greene initially filed the motion against Johnson in late March, just as lawmakers were voting on a $1.2 trillion spending bill he pushed through the House over the opposition of the majority of Republicans. She called the move a betrayal and said she wanted to send the speaker a warning, then left the threat dangling for weeks.

Johnson plowed ahead anyway, putting together an aid package for Ukraine a move Greene previously said was a red line that would prompt her to seek his ouster, but which did not lead her to immediately make good on her threat.

Im actually going to let my colleagues go home and hear from their constituents, Greene said following the vote, predicting that Republicans would join her bid to get rid of Johnson after getting an earful from voters irate about the foreign aid bill. Instead, many of them heard just the opposite and returned to Washington voicing skepticism about removing Johnson.

If she had been successful Wednesday, Greene would have prompted only the second vote on the House floor in more than 100 years on whether to oust the speaker. When Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida instigated McCarthys removal in October, such a spectacle had not been seen in the chamber since 1910.

But this time, Greene had a more difficult time finding support for removing the speaker. House Republicans were wary of throwing the chamber into another period of chaos like the one that paralyzed the House for weeks after McCarthys ouster, and have privately seethed about the public disarray Greenes threat has sown.

Even ultraconservatives like Gaetz expressed uneasiness with firing another speaker, suggesting that the move risked handing over control of the House to Democrats given Republicans rapidly narrowing margin of control.

Former President Donald Trump also came to Johnsons defense, urging Republicans on social media minutes after the vote to kill Greenes effort, arguing that polling showed Republicans doing well in the November elections, and that a show of division would undermine the party.

If we show DISUNITY, which will be portrayed as CHAOS, it will negatively affect everything! he wrote.

He called Johnson a good man who is trying very hard, but did not slam the door altogether on the idea of removing him.

Were not in a position to do so now, with such a small Republican majority in the House, Trump wrote. At some point, we may very well be, but this is not the time.

c.2024 The New York Times Company

Excerpt from:
Johnson Survives Greene's Ouster Attempt as Democrats Join GOP to Kill It - Yahoo! Voices

MAYS LANDING Democrats are criticizing Atlantic County Clerk Joe Giralo, a Republican, over what they call delays in getting mail-in ballots out for the June 7 primary, and for not posting sample vote-by-mail ballots to the web page.

But Giralo said Thursday his office has done an amazing job of meeting every state deadline, even though a federal lawsuit challenging use of the "county line" on ballots wasn't settled until the last minute, leaving clerks unable to finalize layouts.

"The vote-by-mail ballots didnt hit (get delivered) until about 10 days after commencement date," said Atlantic County Democratic Chair Michael Suleiman on Thursday. "We are one of the only counties without a vote-by-mail sample on the website."

Giralo said he commenced the mailing a day before he was required to by law, dropping off 3,788 ballots to the Mays Landing post office himself.

He posted photos April 19 of himself preparing the ballots for mailing to his Facebook page.

Most of the rest of about 30,000 mail-in-ballots were mailed by the printer through a third-party mailer, Giralo said.

"We have met every statute, even with what we were up against we still managed to meet every deadline in this office," Giralo said.

On April 17, a federal appeals court affirmed a lower court's decision ordering New Jersey Democrats to stop using the county line design. Clerks had just two days to finalize new ballots, get them printed and start mailing them.

The new "office block" format for vote-by-mail ballots is easy to read, according to Atlantic County Clerk Joe Giralo, and going out to voters on about 20,000 vote-by-mail ballots now.

State law requires mailing begin by 45 days before the June 7 election, which was April 20. It does not require all mail-in ballots to go out by then, and does not require delivery by a specific date.

Giralo said he is not posting sample vote-by-mail ballots to the web page because they are different than the regular sample ballots and may cause confusion.

He and his staff are proofreading 60+ regular sample ballots for all municipalities, and those will be posted as soon as the proofing is done, he said.

The office just got the proofs to examine Wednesday, Giralo said.

He also willbe posting the machine fronts online, to show voters exactly what they will see this year when they vote in the primary.

The website does, however, now have a list of primary candidates.

Other counties in South Jersey do have sample vote-by-mail ballots on their websites, including Cape May, Cumberland and Camden counties.

Ocean County does not, but like Atlantic has a list of primary candidates.

A federal appeals court has affirmed a lower courts decision to order New Jersey Democrats to scrap a ballot design widely viewed as helping candidates with establishment backing.

Suleiman, who said he didn't get his mail-in ballot until April 29, said his Open Public Records Act request for proof of the mailing of all of the ballots was denied.

Giralo said he doesn't have that proof, as it is in the hands of a third party mailer contracted by the county's printer.

"People had already received them Saturday (April 21) in Buena," Giralo said. "We have no control (over how long they take to be delivered) after they leave here."

Suleiman also said there was a mistake on some mail-in ballots sent to Brigantine, with an unopposed Democratic City Council candidate in the 4th Ward mistakenly listed as a 1st Ward candidate.

But Giralo said that was not his office's mistake.

"It was an unfortunate mistake made by the municipal clerk," Giralo said. "She certified the candidate in the wrong ward."

The Brigantine clerk's office confirmed the mistake was theirs Thursday.

Giralo called Lynn Sweeney a "great clerk" and said "a mistake can happen to anybody."

The new Democratic chairman of the Atlantic County Board of Elections says he's facing space and manpower shortages that could threaten the security of the presidential election, while a Republican leader claims a hostile work environment is the real problem there.

"Rick DeLucry has been on council for well over 10 years. Someone in the clerk's office ... could and should have caught that he was listed in the wrong ward," Suleiman countered.

Corrected ballots have already gone out to about 160 voters in Brigantine's 1st and 4th wards, Giralo said. If a voter returns both the original and the corrected ballot, the corrected one will be counted.

If only the incorrect ballot is returned, it will be counted for all offices above the ward races, he said.

Giralo is going out most nights to community groups explaining what this year's ballots will look like and why the change was required.

"Since the vote-by-mails went out, we have fielded hundreds of phone calls. People are very confused," Giralo said.

The office block format lists candidates under the office sought. They are listed in random order determined by a drawing.

In the past, candidates were listed under slogans for groups supporting them. The "county line" advantage went to those supported by county organizations, so local candidates endorsed by the party were listed under leaders for president, national and state office, giving them what critics have called an unfair advantage.

Giralo said he decided to scrap the county line for Republicans as well, to organize both parties' ballots the same and save time and money for county taxpayers.

REPORTER: Michelle Brunetti Post

609-841-2895

mpost@pressofac.com

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Link:
Atlantic County Democrats want faster mailing of ballots - Press of Atlantic City

House Speaker Mike Johnson narrowly avoided being removed from his position, largely due to the backing of House Democrats.

On Wednesday, the House voted to set aside Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greenes motion to remove Johnson from his role, with both Republicans and Democrats supporting this decision.

Although 11 Republicans sided with Greenes motion, the majority of representatives, totaling a 359-43 vote with seven Democrats abstaining, upheld retaining Johnson as House Speaker.

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This vote came unexpectedly, as Greene had initially withdrawn her threat on Tuesday but then resurfaced with a surprise attempt to unseat Johnson on Thursday.

Despite predictions that Greenes effort would fail due to lack of support from her own party, Democratic leaders stood firm in their decision to support Johnson, citing a need to prevent disruption within the House.

While most Democrats aligned with their leaderships stance, some disagreed, arguing that Johnsons political ideology should not be endorsed without concessions from their party.

Related Story: RFK Jr. Says a Worm Ate Part of His Brain, but Hes Better Now

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York emphasized the importance of sending a clear message against what she termed Johnsons extremism.

The future of Greenes attempts to challenge Johnson remains uncertain, leaving questions about potential further votes on his removal.

To read more and to see how House Democrats voted, click here.

Continue reading here:
163 House Democrats Voted to Protect Speaker Mike Johnson's Job - GV Wire

Donald Trump once called Bill Barr, his former attorney general, Weak, Slow Moving, Lethargic, Gutless, and Lazy. When Mr. Barr recently endorsed Mr. Trump, rather than express gratitude or graciousness, the former president said, Based on the fact that I greatly appreciate his wholehearted Endorsement, I am removing the word Lethargic from my statement. Thank you Bill. MAGA2024!

This is the sort of thing Mr. Trump is known for, even with people who came around and bent the knee. It is a critical part of his politics and its an area that pollsters arent fully measuring and Democratic strategists rarely take into consideration.

Politics is a dominance competition, and Mr. Trump is an avid and ruthless practitioner of it. He offers a striking contrast with most Democrats, who are more likely to fret over focus-group data and issue ever more solemn pledges to control prescription drug prices.

What these Democrats seem to have forgotten is that they have their own liberal tradition of dominance politics and if they embrace it, they would improve their chances of defeating Trumpism. But unlike Mr. Trump, whose lies and conduct after the 2020 election were damaging to democracy, leaders like Franklin Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. exerted dominance in liberal ways and to prodemocratic ends. They obeyed the law, told the truth, and honored liberal values.

Psychologists have noted the effectiveness of dominance in elections and governing. My recent research also finds that what I call Mr. Trumps high-dominance strategy is far and away his most formidable asset.

High-dominance leaders shape reality. They embrace conflict, chafe at playing defense and exhibit self-assurance even in pursuit of unpopular goals. By contrast, low-dominance leaders accept reality as it is and shun conflict. They tell people what they think they want to hear and prefer mollification to confrontation.

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Opinion | Trump Knows Dominance Wins. Someone Tell Democrats. - The New York Times