The Supreme Court Should Be Less of a Ghoulish Parlor Game In Which We Try To Guess When People Will Die
A proposal for court reform
I’ve spent the past year thinking: “There is no possible way that Stephen Breyer is too dumb to not know that he has to retire before the 2022 midterms.” And, indeed, he is not too dumb; all credit to Justice Breyer. If nothing else, he’s saved me from the prospect of having to spend another Republican presidency keeping tabs on the health of an octogenarian liberal Justice. That’s huge — I was dreading a repeat of this absolute fucking nonsense:
How the fuck did liberals convince ourselves that you can beat cancer by doing dumbbell curls? You cannot. The fact that we spent three and a half years imagining that it’s possible to GirlBoss cancer into remission is one of the more pathetic cases of mass delusion in recent memory.
Every recent Justice other than Ginsburg and Scalia understood that you need to retire when “your party” (another delusion that I choose not to indulge is that Justices don’t have parties) controls the White House, and preferably also the Senate. We live in an era of strategically timed retirements, which is also an era in which Senate norms have been shattered and the Grim Reaper leans conservative. Those factors are the main reasons why this chart looks the way it does:
