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maketheman | 8 months ago

Given the current balance of the court, I'd say it's about even odds we end the entire century without ever having had a liberal court the entire time. Best reasonable case we're a solid couple of decades from it, and even that's not got great odds.

We'd have a better chance if anyone with power were talking about court reform to make the Supreme Court justices e.g. drawn by lot for each session from the district courts, but approximately nobody is. It'd be damn good and long overdue reform, but oh well.

And the thing is, we've already had a fairly conservative court for decades. I'm pretty likely to die, even if of old age, never having seen an actually-liberal court in the US my entire life. Like, WTF. Frankly, no wonder so much of our situation is fucked up, backwards, and authoritarianism-friendly. And (sigh) any serious attempts to fix that are basically on hold for many decades more, assuming rule of law survives that long anyway.

[EDIT] My point, in short, is that "we still have [thing], we just have to wait for a liberal court that'll support it" is functionally indistinguishable from not having [thing].

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fallingknife|8 months ago

A liberal court will probably start drawing exceptions to 1A out of thin air like "misinformation" and "hate speech." I'd rather stick with what we have.