The Republican war on us. Taxes and court packing.

[Cyrano]

Everyone knows about the tax heist working it's way toward a Senate vote and many know it will screw 99% of us for the foreseeable future.

But Trump and the Republicans are also packing the courts with unqualified, wingnut people, who will be federal judges for decades to come. Many have been pronounced "Unfit" by the American Bar Association.

Forget the country you grew up in. The Republican court-packing plot will screw America forever:

Conservatives have a new court-packing plan, and in the spirit of the holiday, it’s a turducken of a scheme: a regulatory rollback hidden inside a civil rights reversal stuffed into a Trumpification of the courts. If conservatives get their way, President Trump will add twice as many lifetime members to the federal judiciary in the next 12 months (650) as Barack Obama named in eight years (325). American law will never be the same.

The “outer turkey” in the plan is the ongoing Trumpification of the courts. In the final two years of Obama’s presidency, Senate Republicans engaged in tenacious obstruction to leave as many judicial vacancies unfilled as possible. The Garland-to-Gorsuch Supreme Court switch is the most visible example of this tactic but far from the only one: Due to GOP obstruction, “the number of [judicial] vacancies . . . on the table when [Trump] was sworn in was unprecedented,” White House Counsel Donald McGahn recently boasted to the conservative Federalist Society.

Trump is wasting no time in filling the 103 judicial vacancies he inherited. In the first nine months of Obama’s tenure, he nominated 20 judges to the federal trial and appellate courts; in Trump’s first nine months, he named 58. Senate Republicans are racing these nominees through confirmation; last week, breaking a 100-year-old tradition, they eliminated the “blue slip” rule that allowed home-state senators to object to particularly problematic nominees. The rush to Trumpify the judiciary includes nominees rated unqualified by the American Bar Association, nominees with outrageously conservative views and nominees significantly younger (and, therefore, likely to serve longer) than those of previous presidents. As a result, by sometime next year, 1 in 8 cases filed in federal court will be heard by a judge picked by Trump. Many of these judges will likely still be serving in 2050.

snip

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/conservatives-have-a-breathtaking-plan-for-trump-to-pack-the-courts/2017/11/21/b7ce90d4-ce43-11e7-9d3a-bcbe2af58c3a_story.html?utm_term=.4b2fcd6ec316

[BlueCaliDem]

1. As Turtle McConnell has said, "winners make policy, losers go home". We need to keep that in

mind as the GOP launch their attacks on Democrats in both House and Senate.

[vi5]

2. It's amazing how much a political party can get done without 60 votes.

But hey, at least Democrats respected tradition, "reached across the aisle", and were civil during Obama's first 2 years. So we've got that going for us.....which is nice.