Two items on corporatist jurists as a problem in a pluralist society; The Atlantic and The New Yorker expanding on the theme. Read both. Understand why Schumer will not be putting anything on the line to stop Trump putting another corporatist onto the Court in filling the Ginsberg seat, his way. McConnell and Schumer know donors, and without taking time to check, the bet here is that the Venn diagram of donors for one and the other will have a large overlap segment.
No justice, no peace, seems to have more spunk than Schumer.
_________UPDATE________
Sirota posts on the same foreseeable outcome of another Trumpster on board:
One huge question now is: How would adding another Donald Trump appointee to the court potentially change the judicial system’s attitude towards corporate power?
Bloomberg News reports that “the prospect of Republicans increasing their majority to 6-3, after the death of liberal icon Ruth Bader Ginsburg, could make the court more favorable for business.”
For a deeper look at the situation, I spoke with UCLA law professor Adam Winkler, the author of the book We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights. He has also written a series of articlesfor The Atlantic about corporations’ winning streak at the high court.
What follows is an edited transcript of my discussion with Winkler about the current situation on the court and how the judicial system could ultimately be reformed.
Q: In general, how much is the high court dealing with business and economic issues?
A: While the high profile, controversial cases over issues like abortion or gay rights take up all the headlines, most of the Supreme court's docket is focused on ordinary business disputes and disputes that affect businesses and business people. They're not all corporate power cases directly in the sense that they're not like Citizens United (and) about whether corporations can spend money on elections, but they're issues like how do we read employment discrimination laws.
The Supreme Court just this past year narrowly read federal employment discrimination laws to make it harder for employees to bring an employment discrimination action. You don't necessarily read that when you read it in the newspaper as a corporate power issue, but it's clearly a corporate power case. It's giving powers to corporate management and corporate employers and making it easier for them to discriminate without the threat of significant legal liability.
Then there are cases that don't seem like they touch upon corporations at all, but have a huge impact on the ability of government to regulate corporations.
So for instance, if the court has what seems like a rather esoteric case about whether Congress can structure a federal agency in a particular way so that it's commissioners are appointed... there's a move afoot among conservatives to outlaw appointments so that every executive appointment should be subject to being fired by the president at the president's whim. That doesn't seem like a business case, but the effect of it is to make it harder for government agencies that regulate businesses to function.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau would be a good example. The director can't be fired by the president (and) serves a certain term of years. If you call that into question, it makes it easier for businesses to escape regulation by the CFPB.
Q: You’ve written about the Supreme Court’s rulings on speech issues have strengthened corporate power. How does that matter to regular people in their daily lives?
[... the link is above so follow it] In terms of no justice, no peace, Sirota is on record, cogently, calling out sophistry:
In the modern vernacular, that word “looting” is loaded -- it comes with all sorts of race and class connotations. And we have to understand that terms like “looting” are an example of the way our media often imperceptibly trains us to think about economics, crime and punishment in specific and skewed ways.
Working-class people pilfering convenience-store goods is deemed “looting.” By contrast, rich folk and corporations stealing billions of dollars during their class war is considered good and necessary “public policy” -- aided and abetted by arsonist politicians in Washington lighting the crime scene on fire to try to cover everything up.
To really understand the deep programming at work here, consider how the word “looting” is almost never used to describe the plundering that has become the routine policy of our government at a grand scale that is far larger than a vandalized Target store.
Indeed, if looting is defined in the dictionary as “to rob especially on a large scale” using corruption, then these are 10 examples of looting that we rarely ever call “looting”:
1. The Fed Bailed Out the Investor Class: “Thanks to this massive government subsidy, large companies like Boeing and Carnival Cruises were able to avoid taking money directly -- and sidestep requirements to keep employees on.”
2. Millionaires To Reap 80% of Benefit From Tax Change In Coronavirus Stimulus: “The change -- which alters what certain business owners are allowed to deduct from their taxes -- will allow some of the nation’s wealthiest to avoid nearly $82 billion of tax liability in 2020.”
[... the link is above so follow it]
BOTTOM LINE: Trump's appointee will favor "looting" in the sense Sirota derides, and will therefore be confirmed with Dem lip service to opposition, not burning any political capital, whatever the dimensions of "political capital" is these days in DC.
For all I know, "political capital" might be what, out of office, you use to get Martha's Vineyard key housing, acreage and a mansion. Just saying . . .
__________FURTHER UPDATE__________
Does "political capital" mean that unlike Italy, Spain and Germany in the '30s you can have effective two-party fascism in long running lockstep control of a nation?
Sirota again, a friend emailed:
Sirota nails it.
