Senate hearings related to the confirmation of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court have begun, and Democrats aren’t handling it well. Frankly, there are really no good reasons to deny him confirmation (by “good” I mean “legitimate questions about his qualifications, character, temperament or intellect”), so they have resorted to a series of irrelevant, misconstrued or just plain silly tactics. And hey, look, I am going to link to Slate non-ironically on this idea: Neil Gorsuch is Not a Villain.
Some have tried to find questionable legal opinions…like “The Case of the Frozen Trucker” (which is NOT an episode of Scooby Doo, but rather an actual court case), or Gorsuch’s Hobby Lobby opinion. However, they already seem resigned to the poor efficacy of these lines of attack. Their personal attacks – that Gorsuch made some sexist comments to a class he taught (a charge that seems to be somewhat fabricated), for example, – are equally weak and unlikely to move the needle anywhere. That leaves only one final criticism: that Neil Gorsuch is not Merrick Garland. That he is an interloper who is participating in a GOP plot to “steal” the seat that rightfully belongs to Obama’s nominee of February 2016. Both Dianne Feinstein and Patrick Leahy made reference to Garland in their opening remarks of the Gorsuch hearings, and other Senators can be expected to do the same. To many on the left, Mitch McConnell led a revolt against Constitutional norms and the intentions of the founders by refusing to consider any Obama nominee a full 11 months before Obama’s term expired, and they feel like a refusal to consider Gorsuch now is a fair response to that. And you know what? As I wrote two months ago, I don’t think they’re wrong, at least about the first part. The Senate is empowered by the Constitution to provide “advice and consent,” a perfectly vague phrase that allows for a pretty broad interpretation. I don’t think for a second that Madison and Jefferson intended for the Senate to simply refuse to consider a nominee for nearly a year in hopes of their party winning an election. But, there is absolutely no doubt that the Constitution allows the Senate that right. Is it in the spirit of the clause? I don’t think so, but it is certainly within the letter. Is that 11 month window going to be extended to 18 months and then 24 months at some point in the future? Probably. The Senate is not *required* to hold hearings on anyone appointed to the court. The Constitution gives them the right to do pretty much anything other than the outright ban of the judicial branch. If they so decide to, they can leave these seats empty forever, or they can just go ahead and reduce the size of the Court to 8, or 7 or even just 1 member if they so choose (although THAT would be an actual Constitutional Crisis). So, yes, Republicans were unfair to President Obama and to Judge Garland, an unquestionably qualified, entirely reasonable jurist who was certainly intellectually fit for the court. And yes, Republicans refused to hold a hearing because, had they held those hearings, they likely would have come up with very few good reasons to ultimately vote against Judge Garland. Democrats are entirely justified in criticizing the political maneuverings of their Republican colleagues. Blah, blah, blah. None of that matters at all. There was one clear and easily understood remedy available to Democrats for the Republican’s overreach: win elections. The Constitutionally prescribed path to hold the Republicans accountable for their expansion of the definition of “advice and consent” is really pretty easy: make it a campaign issue, inform voters of the dereliction of duties by the GOP, and then let the voters decide what they think. Alternately, they could have won a Presidential election on the grounds that their proposed justice was not being given his fair hearing, and that only by electing another Democrat would Republican Senators be forced to finally consider the rightful nominee. We can argue about whether Democrats didn’t make this argument effectively or the voters simply rejected the idea as it was presented, but the voters’ verdict was clear. The unwillingness to hear the nominee was barely an issue in any campaign that mattered, and voters proved to be unfazed by the GOP’s tactics. In other words, Mitch McConnell gambled on the outcome of the Presidential election, and on the willingness of voters to care about his gamble, and he won on both counts. Democrats had their chance. They didn’t/couldn’t make this a campaign issue, at least not to a degree that voters were willing to send enough Senators to Washington to rectify it. I happen to agree with their logic – the Senate should have heard Garland – but there simply were not enough voters willing to cast a vote in support of that idea. Democrats lost that argument, and there are no pithy slogans or indignant refusals to consider Gorsuch as “legitimate” that can change that. As one unnamed politician of recent years once said, “Elections have consequences.” The good news for Democrats, I suppose, is that they should now have learned that voters are not going to hold procedural shenanigans against them. It seems unlikely that efforts to filibuster Gorsuch (or key legislation, for that matter) will come back to hurt them in future elections. That, of course, will probably be of little consequence beyond forcing the GOP to permanently end Senate filibusters, another procedural change unlikely to have electoral consequences. Ultimately, in a Democratic Republic, the voters get the final say on most issues. It may happen directly or it may take some time, but elected officials have to win the support of their constituents to get and keep their jobs. I’m sure that it is frustrating when those voters refuse to hold your political opponents accountable in a way that you think they should but, as they say, “them’s the breaks.” Merrick Garland should have gotten a hearing and an up or down vote from the Senate. But he didn’t, and the voters decided that they were ultimately OK with that. It is not his seat to have and it was not Obama’s seat to fill. The seat belongs to the people of the United States, and the people get to pass judgment on those who fill that seat. The Democrats may have held the moral high ground in that argument, but the ultimate arbiters decided that that moral high ground was not worth firing their Senators and replacing them with Democrats over. Pat Leahy and Dianne Feinstein and their colleagues are welcome to continue harping on this as long as they want, but it will remain little more than a waste of breath. The argument is over, and they lost.
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Welcome back to "Ask Alex", where I answer all of your stupid questions with even dumber answers. Have a question you need answered? Tweet it, email it or submit it here and I will get to it (maybe) next week.
-------------------------------- This week we’re talking about ALL CAPS, drinking at work, making friends with co-workers, Lite Bright and then Alex gets way off track talking about terrible Baby Boomers and Tori Amos, so she ends up kind of crying at her desk, cuts the column short and leaves to have a drink. Happy St. Patrick's Day, and happy reading! Submitted by: @Schadenfreudelish Is there ever a good time to use the CAPS LOCK during political discussion on Twitter? Also, SWIDT?? And again?? In my opinion, the only time it is appropriate to use Caps Lock on Twitter is if it is to declare that a certain policy will LITERALLY LEAVE PEOPLE DYING IN THE STREETS. I guess the problem with this is that, if my progressive friends are to be believed, this is the expected result of even the slightest cut to any proposed budget to any governmental program at any level. Has your local library asked for a 4% budget increase next year but the Town Meeting only voted them 3.5%? “Why do you promote youth illiteracy? Children that can’t read are unemployable and they will LITERALLY DIE IN THE STREETS.” Maybe your Senator has suggested a more accurate measure of inflation for the indexing of entitlements. “Senator McDuck voted to let seniors DIE ALONE IN THE STREETS”. Still, that is substantially better than the misuse of Caps that we see from White Nationalists. This, more than the haircuts and the pepe Avatars, is the tell-tale sign of a full-blown alt-righter: an apparently genetic inability to use the Caps Lock Key properly. First, there are people who just use it all the time...they tweet like Jacob Silj speaks. Every single tweet is a screaming announcement about the DEEP STATE and OBAMA’S ILLEGAL SILENT COUP WAKE UP SHEEPLE. Also, I imagine that this is what the subtitles on any show featuring Alex Jones look like. My personal favorite are the random capitalizers. Similar to the random hashtaggers, they put the focus on really unimportant words in sentences…”Trump #making America GREAT Again. pATRIOTS uNITE! Globalists #are SOROS paid TREASON!” Throw in a #MAGA or two, and you will fit right in. Submitted by: John Phipps How can I learn better punctuation skill,s faste.r I would suggest drinking a lot less vodka while tweeting...that is a really easy way to improve punctuation, I find. Or, get a secretary! That works really, well, too...I can barely even guess as to how much my written grammar is improved by my admins. You know, now that I think of it, why am I writing this…? Shouldn’t I have them help? Submitted by: Ross Since St Patrick's tomorrow any tips on drinking, what to drink, how to avoid a hangover and what to do if one shows up uninvited anyways? Funny you mention this, because I feel kinda like I was trampled by an angry horde of leprechauns today. As I have mentioned before, I have a standing Thursday dinner date with my little sister. She is, however, enjoying her last collegiate Spring Break in Turks & Caicos, and was therefore unavailable for dinner. Never fear, though, because my husband is more than willing to pinch hit for her! He is also, it turns out, willing to leave work at 3:00 and sit in a bar watching basketball all afternoon, which made it a really good thing that I forced him to stop at eat at dinner;-). One other relevant fact here...I weigh somewhere between 98 and 102 pounds, and I drink like it. Yada, yada, yada, Alex is kinda hungover. I think I am more tired than I am hungover, but I have definitely felt better… Also, we just skipped ahead by four hours, it’s now 2:45 and I am kinda drunk again, so the rest of this column should go really well...and OMG, there are mint chocolate brownies and a chocolate Babka in the office and I am in heaven. To answer your question, though, the key to avoiding hangovers is hydration. You can’t just drink beer or wine, because you’ll get too dried out and wake up with an army of nail-pounding ants living in your skull. If you do, you need to fit in at least three glasses of water during your night. Mixed drinks can work better, so long as you don’t get so drunk that you render any precautions to be useless. Mixed drinks with fruit in them are probably better for you, cuz of the Vitamin C, or something (note: Alex is not a doctor). My standard recipe, that seems to work pretty well (today excluded) is to drink a Vitamin Water and take a couple of Advil before bed. That’s the best advice I have for you. Submitted by: Anonymous I've really been enjoying my 20 min tea break at work, alone, in quiet contemplation. Yesterday, I was called aside by a colleague, she relayed a sad tale of another colleague next door to me who is apparently lonely during her 20 minutes of solitude , and suggested I join her for our mutual break. All day long I have to be smiley and chatty, is it too much to ask just to be left alone for 20 minutes to frown into my cup of tea? Is it Alex? I can’t answer this without knowing: a) do you dig on chicks? and b) is she cute? Because it is entirely possible that you are being set up with a fellow tea drinker without even knowing it. And we are starting from a place where you both have no friends and like tea...if that’s not the foundation of a healthy relationship, what is?! If that is not the case, however, might I suggest a very tactful and refined “I hate most people. That includes you. I will talk to you all exactly as much as is contractually required. So, how about you fuck off and leave me to my tea?” That is probably how Emily Post would handle it. Also, how do you not know that the person in the office right next to you is also sitting by herself drinking tea 20 minutes at a time? Are you possibly that obtuse to have not picked up on this? I mean, c’mon, look around once in awhile...it won’t kill you. Submitted by: KDJF I'm ten pink Lite-Brite pegs short of finishing my piece, should I try to etsy them or just give up performance art? You are missing your own accomplishment here...while you have been trying to finish your performance art piece, you have accidentally coined a truly fantastic phrase to describe a stupid person. Not the sharpest knife in the drawer? A few clowns short of a circus? A couple of beers short of a six pack? A few checkers short of a full set? All good...but I am going to work “A few pink pegs short of a Lite Brite rainbow” into regular conversation from now on. Lite Brite pegs are, it turns out, super cheap, so I would suggest you just go ahead and buy them. But, if you buy them, definitely make sure that you don’t accidentally knock over the box and spill the pegs all over your kids floor and spend four days stepping on them and finding them hidden in every corner of their room. How does a Lite Brite peg travel around a wall and behind a dresser that is 25 feet away from where it was dropped? Do I have peg-toting mice in my house? These are things that even I can’t answer. Submitted by: Jimmy’s Incorrigible (4 questions) 1) In the song "Shut Down" by the Beach Boys there is a fictional race between a 1962 SuperStock Dart with a 413 and a 1963 fuel-injected Stingray. In the race, the Corvette wins. In real-life depictions of this race, the SS Dart wins. Is this simply because people like how Vettes look, or do you think the Beach Boys had some kind of "product placement" deal with Chevrolet (This song, plus "409", etc). IF they did have a deal with Chevy, then isn't this one of the first happenings of fake news? You haven’t thought that maybe the Corvette had a better driver? Or a better crew chief who employed better pit strategy and won the race on fuel mileage? Or, like my favorite NASCAR driver Kurt Busch, he simply avoided trouble, missed “The Big One” and then took advantage of the inexperienced remaining racers to claim his first Daytona 500 win? {Note to self: have @jholmsted work on a cocktail featuring Monster Energy Drink and Miller Lite.} I’m gonna get off track and talk about the Beach Boys, though, because my initial reaction to this is “Oh, the Beach Boys made a song about racing cars? I find this really stunning…(snooze).” Those of you who have ever paid attention to me know that I am anti-Baby Boomer. They are, collectively, the worst people to ever live (individually I like many of them just fine). And one of the things that bothers me about them is that everything they went through as young people is totally the greatest thing ever...especially music. I mean, have you ever listened to the recordings of Woodstock? Baby Boomers will tell you that this was the greatest concert ever put together, full of really important, world-changing artists that fostered peace and love and ended a war and ushered in a new era of peace and love and awareness and blah blah blah and no...just shut the fuck up, you are all terrible and the music sucked just like everything else about your beloved childhood. There. I said it. I feel better already. The Beach Boys are one of about 50 thoroughly mediocre acts from the 1960’s that Baby Boomers have convinced themselves are just the most importantest and swellest thing they’ve ever heard. But seriously, get over it. You’re not that special and it was 50 years ago and it is time to move on and start acting like adults. This has me thinking about “The Big Chill”, which is as quintessentially Baby Boomer as just about anything ever made (and somewhat timely, given William Hurt’s recent death...) It may be the ultimate in Boomer-schlock, be chock full of more whining than my kids' first grade class and feature an absurdly overrated soundtrack, but it does include one absolutely brilliant moment that sums up all of the false-nostalgia about the 60’s that too many Boomers are unwilling to acknowledge. The woman who became the public defender, hoping to defend the Civil Rights warriors of her day, finds herself disillusioned with her job and the kinds of people she has to defend. The friend asks “Who did you think your clients would be?” and someone suggests “Huey (Newton) and Bobby (Seale)?”. She sighs and notes “I don't know. I just didn't think they'd be...so guilty”. OK. This is maybe a little harsh, and I already want to walk back my comments on the Beach Boys, who are actually not terrible, and made “God Only Knows”, which is just exquisitely perfect. (I will first direct you to Jeff B at Decision Desk Headquarters, who sent a tweetstorm about the Beach Boys about two months ago that included, I believe, 3,814 tweets detailing every bar of every song ever written.) More importantly, though, is that the YouTube suggestions attached to that video include “Silent All These Years”, and that is just going to suck me into an emotional hole that I am not going to get out of this afternoon. It’s hard to describe how much Tori Amos spoke to neglected, angsty, confused 14 year old Alex. I mean, I kinda want to meet her some day and just give her a hug and tell her how many nights I listened to Little Earthquakes and felt like, just maybe, if I made it through one more day, one more week, that there was a bigger, better world out there. So, I am saving Jimmy’s last three questions and one more for next week because I am too drunk to answer any more questions and I am now feeling very, very emotional. Plus, my adorable husband is waiting for me to meet him for a drink before we get our two healthy, happy kids from school, and my absolutely perfect sister is packing up to head back home tomorrow and I shouldn’t spend much more time reminiscing about sad things I shouldn’t be thinking about. Until next week, then...sorry to end on a serious note. But, as I learned a long time ago, when you don’t feel like there is anything you can do, just put your head down and keep working. Baby, don’t look up...the sky is falling.
A little more than a year ago, I was invited to join a Twitter direct message group (‘Group DM’) with some people who thought I might fit in with them and their merry band of jokers. I hadn’t known before then that it was possible to have more than two people in a DM conversation. I was flattered, I admit. I was also intrigued, since I was already following everyone mentioned in the invitation. So despite my abiding misanthropy and general lack of enthusiasm for group dynamics, I agreed to join this troupe. And it is among the five best decisions I ever made. Fifth, but that’s still top five.
I’m a retired veteran of 23+ years in the United States Air Force. A wide variance in the makeup of a group is not a thing with which I am unfamiliar. Not that most of these slackers could have been military (save one other who was)… but I digress. SWIDT? A brief time after I joined the DM group, the idea that we give ourselves a name was suggested. We are a decidedly mismatched grouping of people from all backgrounds and representing a wide range of age, geography, and social status. Given that, “Misfits” seemed to come to us naturally. The idea of a website was spitballed, and maybe someday a podcast. If you’re reading this, you know the website has become a really fun and (some might say) useful place to check in on regularly. And you may have seen rumors about the aforementioned podcast. On this, more in a bit. Anyway, these people... these ‘Misfits’ have become family to me. I’ve never met any of them in meatspace (look up “Hackers” on Altavista kids). Most of us haven’t met each other, though there are a couple of exceptions. The point is, there are often arguments as to whether ‘twitter friends’ (or whatever other social media network) are real friends or just digital facsimiles. This is a point that can be fairly argued among reasonable people both online and off. I take people as I find them, wherever I find them. But the Misfits? These people are my friends. We laugh a lot. We argue. We joke about stupidity. We even get pissed off at each other. Really pissed off sometimes. And we’re still friends. That’s how it is to be friends. If you have a friend who never disagrees with you or who never tells you ‘you are but a man,’ that person is a groupie. That’s cool, but it isn’t friendship.
Yeah, we enjoy joking around. A lot. We also engage on issues of import (see www.misfitspolitics.com for details). But we’re mostly in this deal for the joking around. And the recipes.
Now, back to the podcast question: Back off, bro! We’re working on it over here already. Seriously, we’re working on it between bouts of paying gigs and resting up for the next paying gig. We’re working on the technical stuff (for a given value of “we”), and we will find time to make it happen soon. Even if we don’t, we’ll always have #MisfitMischief. Which is pretty damn cool, if I do say so myself. The following is simple disclosure and in no way constitutes pissing or moaning: None of us are recompensed in any way for what we do with @MisfitsPolitics. We do it because we are having fun at it. Most of us have jobs and children and legal issues and MI-6 dossiers and / or Cosa Nostra contracts out on us… well, you get the idea. We’re busy. And we like martinis. We came here to run a faro game and live off our former glory. Wait. Shit. I meant this:
#AlwaysMisfits,
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MisfitsJust a gaggle of people from all over who have similar interests and loud opinions mixed with a dose of humor. We met on Twitter. Archives
January 2024
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