Sitting at my desk imagining a world in which Democrats used political power when they have it, instead of spending all their time worrying about what might happen when they don’t ballsandstrikes.org/nominations/...
I am absolutely aghast at how awful Durbin has been leading the Senate Judiciary Committee this session. I guess he's going to simply ignore the fact that Leonard Leo has been buying and selling GOP appointed judges to billionaires for years—easily the worst scandal US courts have seen in decades.
A successful Dick Durbin primary would do this country a lot of good. There are a lot of primary fights people are spoiling for that I think misunderstand the politics involved, and it would be tough to unseat him as well, but he's one of the last of the reflexively centrist Democrats
The worst part is holding onto the notion that they get to use this check when they're in the minority even as Republicans selectively weakened their ability to do that last go around. Gobsmackingly obvious ratchet effect.
Ah, I see you suffer from the common fallacy of believing the Dems are a political party, when in fact they're a PAC. Dems would rather raise money on "protecting" some set of rights/fighting Reps than engage in the actual work of politics - which they've proven to be really bad at in recent memory.
The blue slips allowed Biden to reload all the judges in Blue states that otherwise would have been filled by Trump. If they were going to nuke it it had to be much earlier. As is, Biden will end with more judges appointed than Trump, and those circuit appointments will pay dividends for generations
Ds still have not figured out that nothing is politics as usual anymore. Maybe when the younger senators are finally committee chairs, they’ll start using the power we’ve given them.
