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Julie Kay's avatar

Happy weekend! I am starting with a big hug to help you with your ongoing journey of grief 💜.

The way you begin this reminds of when I get a nasty email from a parent and have to respond. This usually means writing two replies, one no one will see, laden with profanity and commentary on their parenting skills, and the other professional one I send.

It's fascinating, sad, weird that Biden could use the same powers and reasoning trump used for his BS wall in order to protect women's rights. Our system is broken, so expanding the court is one very helpful solution. As we know, the only way to do this is to have a clear majority, now and in 2024. Plus, we really need to vote out every single POS who promoted propaganda about the 9 year-old rape victim. (I have had students who are survivors of sexual assault. It takes a lot of love, support, and therapy for them to recover.)

Have a great weekend! Here, it's the annual Deep River muster, the largest gathering of fife and drum corps in the country. Senator Blumenthal always marches in the parade too. Love him!

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Peter Barnes's avatar

Filey, First a huge thank you for your efforts and energy and continuing public service! I've been an avid reader and follower since the early Sean Spicer days, and your multiple erasures and reincarnations, and I'm delighted that you're still with us... Now, to the matter at hand. I have two concerns with your proposals; the first is that while there may be excellent logistical and judicial reasons for expanding the bench, it will only ever be seen as a political move in the current climate, and while it might fix the former problems it will never fix the root cause of a politicized bench, which is dirt, or more clearly, the Senate. I wrote my own article on that, here https://infinite8horizon.wordpress.com/2022/07/06/dirt-liars-and-roe-v-wade/

The second issue is using precedents set by Trump (and endorsed by the Supremes) to address newer problems. The danger here, I think, is that you can easily become engaged in a race to the bottom. Just because Trump got away with it doesn't mean the Democrats should happily now abuse the same mechanisms for their own ends, because in the end the loser is democracy, not one party or the other... I'll admit that desperate times may call for desperate measures, but the reductio ad absurdum conclusion of that is "the end justifies the means", and then you have lunatics in furs and horns storming the barricades... I'm not suggesting your proposal will inexorably lead to that, but I'd urge caution in using any of Trump's dirty tricks. My $.02 anyway.

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