BUT…perspective. Yes, he blocked Garland, but he was facing the problem that the Congress of 2014 had managed to control both chambers for 2 years and had done nothing that was popular with the voting base. Business priorities, yes, pretending to fight Obama while actually giving in, yes, but nothing accomplished that the voters really cared about.

So he had to do something, and blocking Garland was a pretty darned good something.

Likewise, finishing the rules changes Reid had started to get Gorsuch confirmed. That was something.

But McConnell has been making a habit of doing the absolute bare minimum he can get away with doing, while working away behind the scenes at his real agenda. That’s catching up with him. The recent omnibus spending bill is a classic example. So is his active sabotage of GOP candidates in various elections.

McConnell is not as bad as Schumer, but the GOP base has plenty of solid reason to distrust him.

Begging your pardon — didn’t look past the Y 🙂

It’s okay, being the enemy of the world was part of the contract.

Obviously, they already assume they know the answer, and it isn’t the one Ymar gave.

You were replying to Yankee, not me, in case you were doing what I thought you were doing.

Supporters of the Red team will get on my case for dropping a letter off Trum’s name as my personal nickname for him. They’ll start labeling it as an insult and trying to tell me what to think, via some kind of political police thing.

This is how normal neutral people react, in case people had forgotten how to be neutral in Red vs Blue.

I like watching Pine’s self transformation as he realizes what the world is like now.

It’s almost like flash back to 2007 for me.

I’ve actually been thinking about that issue lately, and about writing a post (or a book—it’s so long and complicated it could be a book!) about it.

It’s one of the criticisms of the legal system originally mounted by the critical legal studies folks, and of course critical studies is the leftist POV that law is not about legal principles at all but about power, and that there is no truth.

So I don’t completely agree with the idea that judges come to the conclusions first and then work the reasoning out to get there. I understand that that’s often the way it looks, but I think there’s a meta-principle of law at work that drives the whole thing, and that could be called a judge’s general legal philosophy.

Also, sometimes judges rule the opposite of the conclusion they want, because they are trying to follow the law.

It’s very complicated, but that’s the very simplified version.

Up until Pound showed up, U.S. legal education was modeled on the English System, and followed the Common Law, and the Constitution–they were the fixed beacons, and what was to be consulted first, and to govern.

After Pound, more and more it was case law–which enabled judges and lawyers to propose more and more novel legal theories, and to to move further and further away from what the Constitution said, and what our Founders actually intended.

Thus, we’ve driven deeper and deeper into the territory of the ”living,” ever changing Constitution.

I recall hearing Sonia Sotomayor blathering about the First Amendment during the hearing. That may indicate what position she will take, and the reasoning she will use, but it will be one that is completely wrong. She will end up arriving at a decision that has no basis in the law because it leads to the outcome that she wants. If Justice Sotomayor rules that the First Amendment prohibits the “Muslim ban”, then she will turn the concept of national sovereignty upside down, over-ride every precedent of immigration law and previous examples of restriction of immigration, and will still be completely oblivious to the long-term consequences of such a ruling. That’s how bad it could get.

As for the mention of Mr. Trump’s various tweets, and how that might indicate antipathy toward Muslims, the Supreme Court has judicial review, but that in no way extends to Twitter posts. A tweet is not the law. Only the American people can pass judgment on any politician’s tweets, and they already did for Donald Trump, voting for him as President in 2016.

“Sentence first—verdict afterward.”

So, the game was, first, come to your conclusion, then, hunt around for a line of cases or a particular decision you could hook up with to justify that conclusion.

It could be very tenuous, it didn’t have to be logical, just switch that ol’ legal train onto a new line of track, and head off in a new direction.