• somename [she/her]@hexbear.net
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    5 months ago

    If you pack the court, the point is to then ram through laws that strengthen your position so that it’s harder for the other side to feasibly challenge it, to pack the court in the other direction. You can’t change things without exerting power, and the court is a tool of authority. You gotta use and abuse that.

    • notabot
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      5 months ago

      That’s fair, but ‘harder for the other side to feasibly challenge it’ doesn’t mean impossible, and so it’ll inevitably get pushed back the other way at some point, and then you’re the other side in that equation. Yes, the Democrats should be much more willing to exert power when they have it, and much more willing to entrench that power when they can. It seems to be a weakness in most mainstream left wing (left compared to the parties they stand against, not necessarily actual left), they always seem to squabble amongst themselves and refuse the easy wins in front of them.

      • somename [she/her]@hexbear.net
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        5 months ago

        Well, yes, the opposition might successfully wrest power back, and pack the court back in their direction. But where does that end up? Right to where we are now. There’s nothing lost by trying. The court is already reactionary. We might as well try to change something.

        • notabot
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          5 months ago

          If you’re talking about increasing the number on the supreme court, then you get into a crazy level of one-upsmanship. Each president adds more justices until it becomes entirely unmanageable, with dozens of them, all appointed for life, doing their own thing. Replacing justices who haven’t upheld the highest standards of behaviour, or have, for instance, blatantly taken bribes, should absolutely happen. Hopefully you put in people who don’t fall to those sorts of behaviours, so the opposite party can’t easily replace them.

        • notabot
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          5 months ago

          Yes, that’s certainly the case, but the Dems do seem to also provide some level of friction to the Republicans cranking the wheel right. The question is whether to remove that friction and give the Republicans more leverage, or to increase it, knowing that it probably wont turn much back, but might stop things getting worse so quickly in the hope that next time around enough (as in an electorally significant number of) people are angry enough that they actually push the Dems for what they want at the beginning of the term, not right at the end.

          • MolotovHalfEmpty [he/him]@hexbear.net
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            5 months ago

            in the hope that next time around enough (as in an electorally significant number of) people are angry enough that they actually push the Dems

            You are demonstrating that you do not understand the most basic point of the analogy.

            next time around enough (as in an electorally significant number of) people are angry enough that they actually push the Dems for what they want at the beginning of the term, not right at the end.

            This is your thesis throughout this thread so please give examples of when the Democratic party have done inverted their position on a policy they didn’t support at the election, on the basis that people lobbied for the change only immediately after the election.