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Cake day: August 7th, 2023

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  • Most likely you’d have to allow the sitting president to appoint an acting justice to serve out the remainder of that justice’s term. Yeah we’d still have the problem of RBG dying under Trump and giving us a 6-3 conservative majority, but if she only had a few years left on her term when she died the damage would at least be limited.

    As for what McConnell did to Garland, having term endings scheduled would make that a lot harder. If their terms are staggered such that they always end 1 year and 3 years into each president’s term it destroys the argument that it’s too close to an election and the people should get to decide who makes the appointment. They’d be forced to outright deny the nominee and let the president try again. That’s much harder to maintain.


  • The idea would essentially be that they wouldn’t all hear every case. You’d randomly assign a panel of say 5 justices from the pool and each panel would hear their own cases.

    That way we stop bullshit like what Thomas did in his Dobbs concurrence where he straight up said he thinks cases like Obergefell (gay marriage), Lawrence (can’t criminalize gay sexual acts), and Griswold (contraception) also need to be reversed and all but instructed conservative legal circles to back challenges to those cases. Since there’d be no guarantee that a baseless partisan legal challenge would end up in front of favorable justices they would be much less likely to succeed.

    This does potentially introduce a problem with consistency, but such a problem isn’t unsolvable. You could institute a rule that allows for basically an appeal on a SCOTUS ruling to be heard by either a different panel of justices or the entire body as a whole, for example. It obviously wouldn’t be perfect, but we don’t need perfection. We need SCOTUS to not be some unaccountable council of high priests who can act with blatant partisan interest and we can’t do anything about it.


  • Not really. Using % of forecast area as % chance of rain inherently gives equal weight to your position being anywhere within that area. Even if you limit the forecast area to the 5m or whatever it is radius that smartphone GPS is typically accurate to which a weather app could theoretically do, simply using % of the forecast area covered as % chance of rain inherently gives equal probability of you being literally anywhere within that 5m radius. It would obviously still be more accurate, but those numbers wouldn’t be the same thing.




  • Maybe I worded something poorly there and caused some miscommunication. I was responding to someone equating unverified with made up. What I was trying to say is that it’s unverified right now because the only statements on it were from what seems to be the same primary source(s) that wish to remain anonymous. That doesn’t necessarily mean the reporting is false, only that there hasn’t been a separate source saying the same thing. I wasn’t trying to say “it’s true actually, they just have to say it’s unverified because no one wants to put their name on saying it”

    I then separately wanted to explain what seems to be the thought process behind people saying that Biden wouldn’t endorse Kamala going into the convention if he dropped out.


  • To my knowledge it’s only unverified because the people saying it are doing so on the condition of anonymity. The idea seems to be that they want to go into an open convention with Biden at most saying something like “I have the utmost faith in the delegates to pick the best candidate to be our nominee,” because if he’s too involved in the choice whoever ends up being the nominee will have that looming specter of the narrative of Biden’s cognitive decline haunting them. “How could he pick a good replacement when he doesn’t even know where he is?” and all that.








  • For a couple reasons. Some cynically wanted to continue to use abortion as a political football. Codifying Roe in any meaningful way in their minds would have meant they had to find a new wedge issue to drive turnout and donations. We saw this on the other side when SCOTUS actually overturned it and the right didn’t know what to do with themselves for a while.

    Then maybe in part because of the former, there were a bunch of people that naively didn’t believe they’d actually entirely destroy Roe. They genuinely thought the worst that could possibly happen was some minor restrictions at the margins. So those people were not motivated enough to actually do something about it.