Someone's going to come along and tell me that the vitriol is necessary and good because the Supreme Court is so clearly and unequivocally evil, but that's just the point. Even the threads on the Israel-Hamas war have had better-quality discussions with more nuance than the hot takes and hatred that have been plaguing HN the last few weeks on these threads.

We can do better. I've seen it.

For the first time in American history a select group of people are immune from the law as long as the acts occur while carrying out their jobs. That’s a big deal. I can see that soon someone will claim immunity because they carried out an order of the President and their immunity extends to those carrying out “official acts” of the President.

That’s the sad part? We have different perceptions reality.

It does not mean that Congress can't have political qualifications for justices, and in fact George Washington had a failed nomination because his nominee was politically unpopular.

Additionally, supreme court nominees are not selected at random--it's no accident that conservative presidents nominate conservative justices and liberal presidents nominate liberal justices. Nominees are selected by the president because the president thinks they'll like the way the nominee would rule in the future.

Qualified judges have a broad spectrum of opinions. When faced with the question, "should _this_ person have a lifetime supreme court appointment," I don't see how a senator could avoid considering how a nominee might rule in the future.

Impeachment is a difficult process. Given that Trump survived (twice), I'm not sure this would work:

https://www.axios.com/2024/06/14/scotus-supreme-court-claren...

> [Kavanaugh] lied about it during his confirmation

Kavanaugh said Roe was "entitled the respect under principles of stare decisis" and similar remarks. But that still leaves it in a category that can and has been overturned by past courts. Here are a few such examples where they overturned settled precedents entitled to deference under the principles of stare decisis: https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/a-short-list-of-overturn...

Once you know that such rulings can and have been overturned before, you can see that he never once said anything at all like "I won't (or can't) overturn Roe" in his comments. You can find his comments in full here:

https://www.factcheck.org/2022/05/what-gorsuch-kavanaugh-and...

You can say that this makes his comments misleading to people who don't realize that stare decisis doesn't mean that SCOTUS can't or won't overturn a past ruling, but the fact that "everyone said he would" overturn Roe really cuts against that his statements actually mislead anyone.

> So I think the first thing that makes a good judge is independence, not being swayed by political or public pressure. That takes some backbone. That takes some judicial fortitude.

> The great moments in American judicial history, the judges had backbone and independence. You think about Youngstown Steel. You think about, for example, Brown v. Board of Education, where the Court came together and knew they were going to face political pressure and still enforced the promise of the Constitution.

> You think about United States v. Nixon, which I have identified as one of the greatest moments in American judicial history, where Chief Justice Burger, who had been appointed by President Nixon, brought the Court together in a unanimous decision to order President Nixon, in response to a criminal trial subpoena, to disclose information. Those great moments of independence and unanimity are important.

[0] https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CHRG-115shrg32765/pdf/CH...

[0] https://transcripts.cnn.com/show/cnr/date/2018-09-05/segment...

[1] https://scholarship.law.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3383...