Whether or not you think Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg should strategically retire from the Supreme Court, her rationale for staying on the Court is worthy of discussion:
“I think it’s going to be another Democratic President” after Obama, Ginsburg told The Washington Post. “The Democrats do fine in presidential elections; their problem is they can’t get out the vote in the midterm elections.”
Professor Seth Masket questions her prescience since Democrats have historically won the presidency only about 50% of the time, but more recent history is more instructive. Since 1988, the Democrats have only lost the Electoral College twice, and the score should really only show one defeat since the 2000 election was a fluke based on a flawed ballot design in Palm Beach County and an aborted recount. Let’s look at the numbers by year:
1992: Democrats 370, Republicans 168
1996: Democrats 379, Republicans 159
2000: Republicans 271, Democrats 266
2004: Republicans 286, Democrats 251
2008: Democrats 365, Republicans 173
2012: Democrats 332, Republicans 206
You can see that the Republicans haven’t cracked 300 votes in 25 years. In that same stretch of time, they have cracked 48% of the popular vote exactly once, in 2004. As I’ve written before, the Electoral College becomes almost unwinnable for Republicans if they can’t win Virginia, which they may not be able to do again anytime soon. Demographic changes in states like Virginia, Colorado, New Mexico, and Nevada are moving those states out of the purple and into the blue.
Things can certainly change, and it’s never a safe bet to just assume that a political party is going to win the next presidential election, but the country has become polarized in a way that strongly benefits the Democratic Party in presidential elections. In the six presidential elections since 1988, there are 18 states plus the District of Columbia that have voted for the Democrats every single time. Collectively, that’s 238 out of the 270 votes needed to win the presidency that the Republicans have basically no chance of getting. In order to win, a Republican candidate has to either completely run the table in competitive states (which will give them the narrowest of victories) or they must overcome a quarter-century of futility and win some truly blue states.
Justice Ginsburg isn’t stupid. She understands these trends and this history. The Democrats have a far better chance of winning the 2016 presidential elections than the Republicans, and that’s irrespective of the eventual candidates. If you’re asking her to step down because of the risk that she might die during a Republican presidency, she has the right to ask you why the hell you think she’ll live to see another Republican presidency.
The internal debate within the Republican Party about immigration reform and social issues is really just a recognition by the monied interests and political consultants that the GOP as it is presently constituted cannot win a national election. Of course, “cannot” is a bit too strong. We can never be certain what constellation of events might come together in 2016 to change our analysis, but it seems extremely unlikely that the Republicans will win. And when you begin to think about the likely candidates, it looks even bleaker for the them.
The GOP has some advantages that they are not making use of, and a disadvantage that is holding them back.
The advantage is that they are completely disconnected from “truth”, so consistency of platform is not something that holds them back. Total spin-weasel.
The disadvantage is the no-brain teabagger faction is now a solid anchor on their the flexibility noted above.
It’ll take a Night Of The Long Knives internal coup to change the dynamic.
RBG should ask Sandra Day O’Connor how her succession plans worked out. Just because you have reached the peak of your profession doesn’t mean you have anywhere near the control of future events you might somehow imagine.
Perhaps Justice Ginsburg sees the likelihood of a GOP takeover of the Senate in 2014 and the resultant unlikelihood of Obama being able to get any Supreme Court nominee through the resultant morass of oppositional defiant disordered senators that will result; perhaps she assumes that in 2016 the Democratic Presidential candidate will have sufficiently powerful coattails to bring in another Democratically controlled Senate that will enable the confirmation of an acceptable replacement for her.
They think they will live forever, they think their cognitive abilities will last forever, they think they are smarter than anybody who could replace them, they think that being physically feeble has nothing to do with their job, and they think (because they say so) that one of their minions will tell them when they are done.
But the bottom line is that their egos are so huge that it needs to be fed on a daily basis. She is going to stay because she does not give a shit about her legacy, she only cares that she has young people kiss her ass every single day. It feeds her ego.
nalbar
maybe she just knows that Obama can’t replace her with someone from the ACLU.
>>maybe she just knows that Obama can’t replace her with someone from the ACLU.
whether Obama can replace her with a progressive or not doesn’t matter, he wouldn’t if he could.
Why can’t he? He only needs 51 votes now, not 60.
Not for the Supreme Court. That was explicitly excluded under Reid new rules. If he wants to bust that line, I suppose he can. But Ginsburg isn’t assuming that he will.
Now, wasn’t that a clever, squeamish move by Harry Reid?
The Senate Republican caucus’ obstructionism has broken a lot of past precedence, but one thing they haven’t done is filibuster any of Obama’s Supreme Court nominees. Harry and the Dem Caucus calibrated their filibuster reform to respond to what the GOP has done. If the Senate GOP filibusters Obama’s next SCOTUS nominee, that will be a new level of obstruction which would invite further filibuster reform.
And as far as blaming it on Harry: he didn’t have the votes for filibuster reform until this fall. It would have been stupid and weak for him to bring filibuster reform to the floor and have it fail. Reid’s been expressing an understanding of what the GOP is doing for quite a while in many forums, including speeches on the Senate floor.
I laugh and shake my head hearing liberals bitch about the major filibuster reforms which have been passed by saying “IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN DONE EARLIER AND BETTER!!!”. There’s a skit that gets to the bottom of this absurdity:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hZ56mHlKB0
“How can we help you, sir?”
“Give me my bill when I ask for it!!”
“Make up his bill.” “I have it.”
“You’re not LISTENING!! I don’t want it now, I wanted it 20 minutes ago!!”
And Reid set a sunset in the rules(aka filibuster change) that they end Dec 31, 2016, right?
By constitutional definition, each incoming senate gets to set their own rules.
Right, except they rarely change them. Any major changes anyway. The point being that the rule, as such, was written in a way that they would have to reapprove it come Jan. 2015, not just vote to continue as is.