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. . . by appointing four additional Justices to it. Senator Markey (D. Mass.) is introducing such legislation. All it takes is nomination by the President and a simple majority in the Senate. Then the Court could properly go about monitoring the ethics of its members, something it fails to do effectively now.
The latest news about very
generous unreported gifts over the years to Justices Thomas and Alito by
friends who, coincidentally, have cases before the Supreme Court, demands
serious investigation, and it is up to the other Justices to see that that
takes place. Corrupt Justices can be
impeached.
The Constitution grants Congress the power to determine how many justices sit on the Supreme Court. This number has ranged between five and ten, the number that it was by the end of George Washinton’s second term. Since 1869 the number has been set at nine.
The number of justices on the Supreme Court has been politically manipulated over the years. Its brief reduction from ten seats to seven after the Civil War was to weaken the appointive powers of Abraham Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson, whom Congress feared because of his Southern sympathies. That was quickly revised up to eight, and once Johnson was out of office in 1869, it was increased to the present nine. And Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s threatened expansion of the SCOTUS during 1930’s were enough to sway the Court in the direction of his New Deal reforms.
Since its present number
was established, the nation's population has increased tenfold, as has its case
load, so the four more Justices are indeed needed to get its work done, and
many feel that the SCOTUS is out of step with where the majority of the
American stand, a condition four more Justices might remedy. As you can see, a nine seat Court is not
engraved in stone.
Don’t be spooked by
Republican charges that this would amount to ‘packing’ the Court! They are experts at such things. In regard to the Supreme Court, the Republican Party epitomizes hypocrisy.
Led by Mitch McConnell
in 2016, they refused to even consider President Obama’s appointment of Merrick
Garland to fill the seat of the deceased Antonin Scalia for over nine months under
the pretense of it being an ‘election year.’ This was a ‘bullshit’ excuse. It took them only a few days to appoint
Justice Neil Gorsuch to that post, quickly nominated by the new president,
right after he took the oath of office.
This was a ‘stolen’ seat on the SCOTUS that rightfully belongs to a
progressive Obama appointee rather than to a conservative Justice.
If Republicans actually believed in their ‘bullshit’ reason for not even considering Garland for the Court in 2016, the appointment of Justice Amy Barrett, approved by the Senate just ten days before the 2020 elections, which the incumbent president who appointed her lost, was another ‘stolen’ seat.
These two ‘stolen’ seats made possible decisions limiting a women’s right to choose to have an abortion, caused legislation to reduce gun violence to languish, and allowed State laws making voting more difficult to grow.
This Republican ‘packing’ of the Court’ represent positions out of step with those of the majority of the Americans people! Therefore, Americans should not have any hesitation about appointing four additional justices to the SCOTUS right now.
JL
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 |
| Vladimir Putin and the Belarus President |
David Leonhardt wrote in Sunday’s New York Times that ‘Putin evidently lacks the military strength or political consensus to arrest somebody who started an armed mutiny against him.’ In my opinion, I see his having turned to a puppet, Belarus' Lukashenko, to bail him out as a tactic that would not emphsize this personal weakness on his part.
This is a continuing story, in which for every action, there is a reaction, and the actions are still taking place. The motives of Yevgeny Prigozhin, the Wagner Group leader, are really unclear at this point. He could not have seriously contemplated overthrowing Putin. In any event, particularly because the parties involved have nuclear weapons, what happens in Russia really matters.
To read Leonhardt’s full column, CLICK HERE or copy and paste this on your browser line:
One lesson for us is that dependence upon independent
militias by any group that governs or aspires to govern compromises that group.
Vladimir Putin has just learned that. Some right-wing Republicans might wish their
‘Proud Boys’ and similar groups were as strong as Russia’s ‘Wagner Group’ while
most others, regardless of party, see that as a danger of its own.
JL
I occasionally get email
from one of the extreme right-wingers in my community. To illustrate what a piece of garbage this
particular person is, here is a relatively mild email I received from him
Thursday evening concerning the submersible that imploded in exploring the
Titanic wreckage, killing its occupants.
He was passing it on from the sewer of extremist sites from which he
gets his news. I do not routinely delete
his emails because it is important to be aware of the levels to which these
people sink. I do make it my business to
look at some of them, like this one. Know thy enemy.
‘‘Navy knew the sub was lost last Sunday....they heard it
implode with their detectors in the Ocean....Biden held the news back so he
could control the news cycle for his retarded son. Criminal”
Some suspect items like this to be of foreign origin, intentionally designed to create dissent in this country by planting it on social media sites. Those who spread them are the people that the Republican Party depends upon for their margins of victory in many Congressional and local elections.
There are millions of these misguided folks in the United States, depending on sources like this to get their news. It is pointless to try to reason with them. They are too far gone. They are democracy’s Achilles heel. Until the G.O.P. denounces such right-wing supporters, including those in Congress who think at this level, the nation is in great danger.
The only immediate solution that I see is to vote for Democrats, who often are not without blemishes themselves, for national, State, and local offices whenever you have the opportunity. At a minimum, they are not out to destroy our system of government, an accusation applicable to many Republicans.
Try to keep up with what these foes of democracy are saying. Know thy enemy. Misinformation and outright lies are their tools. Under the guise of phony populism, they are dedicated to contradicting the bipartisan message stating that our government is ‘of the people, by the people, and for the people,’ principles clearly stated by Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg.
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More on More
The June 8 posting of
Jackspotpourri featured a piece about Sir Thomas More, sixteenth-century
English statesman and politician, centering on his book ‘Utopia.’ (You can access that posting through the
Archives off to the right of your screen.) That posting indicated that further comments on
‘Utopia,’ not an easy read, would follow.
(Despite More’s high government position, Lord
High Chancellor, somewhat analogous to a combination of the roles of our
Attorney General and that of our Supreme Court Chief Justice, his independent
way of thinking was climaxed by his beheading by King Henry VIII in 1535. Henry had divorced Catherine of Aragon because
she had failed to produce the male heir he wanted, defying the Roman Catholic
Church’s prohibition of the divorce.
More refused to acquiesce to Henry’s action, died for it and was
eventually sainted by the Church. His
writing of ‘Utopia’ predates that phase of his iife and is totally
non-religious in nature, although in 2000, the Pope designated him as the
patron saint of statesmen and politicians.)
At one point in ‘Utopia,’ I find More saying that when political matters are not going one’s way, and cannot be changed, going along with things as best you can, ‘not forsaking a ship in a storm because you cannot command the winds,’ may not be a wise approach. If you cannot make things go well, trying to manage them to do as little ill as possible is not such a great idea because in doing this, the ‘ill company’ one must work with to accomplish this will sooner or later corrupt those who engage in it.
This amounts to an argument against compromise and wrong or right, is a common position among extremists of all stripes today. We see it every day in our Congress. Right-wing Republicans call ‘corrupted’ Republicans who are open to compromise ‘Rinos’ and Democrats who don’t hew to their party’s line such as Senators Manchin and Sinema are also condemned. More was way ahead of his time, or perhaps it is times that have not changed.
Thomas More had a
left-wing perspective that becomes clear when one of the characters in ‘Utopia’
states that “Though
to speak plainly my real sentiments: I
must freely own that as long as there is any property, and while money is the
standard of all other things, I cannot think that a nation can be governed
either justly or happily: not justly,
because the best things will fall to the share of the worst men; nor happily,
because all things will be divided among a few, the rest being left to be
absolutely miserable.”
I believe More’s
referring to ‘property’ in this quote means ‘private property.’ Karl Marx, who came along three centuries
later could not express such ‘socialist’ ideas any better! And Adam Smith was not yet around to argue
with Thomas More. In any event, Thomas More
then goes on to explain how and why such problems were non-existent in Utopia,
which I will get to the next time we again include commentary on More’s
‘Utopia’ in our postings.
JL
Housekeeping on the Blog
Email Alerts: If you are NOT receiving emails from me alerting you each time there is a new posting on Jackspotpourri, just send me your email address and we’ll see that you do. And if you are forwarding a posting to someone, you might suggest that they do the same, so they will be similarly alerted. (You can pass those email addresses to me by email at jacklippman18@gmail.com .)
Forwarding Postings: Please forward this posting to anyone you think might benefit from reading it.
If you want to send someone the blog, exactly as you are now seeing it, with all of its bells and whistles, you can just tell folks to check it out by visiting https://jackspotpourri.blogspot.com or by providing a link to that address in your email to them. I think this is the best method of forwarding Jackspotpourri.
There’s another, perhaps easier, method of forwarding it
though! Google Blogspot, the platform on which Jackspotpourri is
prepared, makes that possible. If you click on the tiny envelope with the
arrow at the bottom of every posting, you will have the opportunity to
list up to ten email addresses to which the blog will be forwarded, along with
a comment from you. Each will receive
a link to the textual portion only of the blog that you now are reading, but without
the illustrations, colors, variations in typography, or the ‘sidebar’ features
such as access to the blog’s archives.
Either way will work, sending them the link to https://jackspotpourri.blogspot.com, or clicking on the envelope at the bottom of this posting, but I recommend sending them the link.
Again, I urge you to forward this posting to anyone you think might benefit from reading it.
Have a nice day!
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