Last night I started a spirited conversation on Twitter concerning the Supreme Court Justice nomination, my Twitter handle is @mike_settino if you would like to follow me.
The tweet that started it all was this:
Trump has politicized the Supreme Court. The court can no longer be counted on as an impartial entity. The republicans have bought and paid for the last three judges.
From that there was some good discussion as well as some of the normal insults that don’t affect me. As a note, I was a PIAA Wrestling Official for 31 years, so I have a very thick skin.
My point was when Mitch McConnell lowered the threshold to becoming a Justice to a simple majority, that decision forever made the Court partisan. One of the comments from a Trump supporter pointed out that Harry Reid started the mess we are in by lowering the threshold for lower court justices to a simple majority. I tweeted back they are correct, and in doing that I acknowledged that the mess we are in started before Donald Trump. If I can give an opinion, I don’t think Trump would have the patience or the intelligence to pull off what the republicans have done with the Justices. And from a neutral stance you must applaud the republicans for their strategy.
Before a Justice needed 60 votes to be confirmed, that was true for the Supreme Court as well as the lower courts. For the history or our country that was the rule until November 2013 when Harry Reid invoked the nuclear option. In my opinion the court justices on all levels where to be the adult in the room. Judges reflected the country, either leaning left or right from center. That way if the congress went to far left or right the courts were there to make sure there was no harm to the Constitution.
We can no longer say that, you can bet when the democrats become the majority they will in turn place justices on all court levels that are far left just as the republicans are placing far right justices at all levels now. This is where the Trump supporters in the conversation are short sighted. Imagine if the situation were switched. A majority liberal court and congress and the presidency in democrat control. The Democrat president could sign an executive order that bans the ownership of guns with the exception of the police and military. The republicans would fight the executive order in the courts. And a liberal Supreme Court will rule in favor to outlaw guns. That is why what is happening now is so dangerous.
What is happening today relates indirectly on the sub-plot to my book Wave Rider. To give some background and where I formed my ideas on how government works. I worked for 30 years as a Systems Analyst for the state of PA and now I work as an IT Contractor for the PA government. Wave Rider takes place in the early 22nd century after the government has imploded under its own corruption. The United States has a Constitution that depends on people of moral commitment to abide by unwritten rules and norms. As we see in the events of today people in both parties respond poorly when the administration does not follow the norms. And I swear I wrote most of this before the current administration. In my sub-plot I assume that those norms are pushed aside in favor of an authoritarian government.
It is interesting, most Americans don’t think about our democracy, they assume it will always be there. The thing is, every great superpower that has existed at some point collapsed. So why do we think we are different? Because God is on our side? I would bet all those other superpowers before us thought the same.
That at least was my premise in writing my book. That people will slowly give up freedoms in the name of security, or national patriotism, or whatever else. We give up hard fought wins all the time. How many folks work in the evenings without compensation? My grandfather fought in the streets to join the steelworker’s union and I gave up asking for just compensation without objection. My book takes place at about the time when people look around and see there is no upward mobility, when their existence is torture. Then the government placed the chips in everyone’s neck the Wave Riders became the resistance, that’s when it got fun.
Mike Settino 