If you had to pick the marquee political contest for 2025, the Virginia governorship election would be a good choice. The current Governor of that state is a Republican, who can’t run again because of Virginia’s one-term law. But the trend line in Virginia seems to favor Democrats. Here’s what Kyle Kondik writes about it in his latest update at Sabato’s Crystal Ball: “Former Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D, VA-7) led Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears (R-VA) by roughly 10 points apiece in a trio of nonpartisan polls released over the past week from Emerson College, George Mason University’s Schar School/Washington Post, and the Wason Center at Christopher Newport University, and Spanberger remains clearly favored to flip the Virginia governorship…About 390,000 votes have already been cast in Virginia as of Tuesday, about 12% of the total votes cast in the last gubernatorial cycle, 2021 (3.29 million). Voter data firm L2 models the early votes cast so far as clearly Democratic leaning, which is unsurprising in Virginia…Prior to this story, polling generally suggested Spanberger was doing better than Jones and state Sen. Ghazala Hashmi (D), the party’s lieutenant governor nominee. However, all three were leading. While Emerson did not ask about the down-ballot races, the Schar School and Wason Center polls are illustrative: the former showed Spanberger up 55%-43%, Hashmi up 49%-45%, and Jones up 51%-45%; the latter had the Democrats leading 52%-42%, 48%-39%, and 49%-43% respectively.” You can read more about this race here.
In “Democrats push for probe of shady border czar’s alleged bribe scandal,” at Daily Kos, Oliver Willis writes: “House Judiciary Committee Democrats are demanding a federal investigation into President Donald Trump’s decision to hire “border czar” Tom Homan, despite an ongoing FBI bribery probe…On Wednesday, the committee’s Democrats, led by Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, sent a letter to Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward, who led the effort to vet Trump’s candidates earlier in the year…“Who knew about the Homan cash bribery scandal, when did they know it, and why was Mr. Homan appointed ‘Border Czar’ even in the face of such damning evidence of his taking bribes for government contracts?” the letter says…The inquiry follows up Attorney General Pam Bondi’s effort to stonewall on the issue, dodging questions from Democratic senators during a hearing on Tuesday. Bondi was asked about the $50,000 that Homan reportedly received as part of a sting operation after he allegedly agreed to help undercover FBI agents get border security contracts.” More here.
James D. Zirin profiles “The Roberts Court at 20: John Roberts, the “institutionalist” chief justice, has given the president kingly powers, overturned a Reagan-era regulation doctrine, and issued two decades of wrecking ball opinions. It’s only going to get worse” at Washington Monthly and writes: “As the Supreme Court begins its new term this first Monday in October, it’s worth noting that an important anniversary went largely unnoticed on September 29. It was the 20th anniversary of John Roberts being sworn in as chief justice of the United States and the beginning of the Roberts Court…Roberts’s appointment came during George W. Bush’s annus horribilis—a year after the president’s 2004 reelection, when his administration mishandled Hurricane Katrina, watched its invasion of Iraq unravel, and made an ill-fated run at partially privatizing Social Security. Roberts was initially tapped to replace Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who had announced her pending retirement on July 1, 2005. However, when Chief Justice William Rehnquist died in September 2005, Bush only waited two days to tap Roberts for the Chief’s seat and his White House Counsel, Harriet Miers, for the O’Connor vacancy. In case you’ve forgotten or are too young to remember, Miers withdrew after conservatives decried her lack of experience and worried about her right-wing bona fides. Bush got the message, dispensed with appointing another woman (or cipher) to the Court, and named a right-wing favorite, Samuel Alito of the Second Circuit, to fill the associate justice’s seat…Twenty years into the Roberts Court, the Court’s public approval is close to its lowest since such measures began.”
Zirin adds, “During Roberts’s tenure, the law has shifted significantly toward fulfilling many of the conservative legal movement’s main priorities, such as the doctrine of the “unitary executive,” which it has nearly fully embraced. This weakens the separation of powers that has served as a check and balance against a “man on horseback” for over 230 years. The largest number of Americans ever surveyed says the Court is now too conservative. Iconic liberal Justices Oliver Wendell Holmes, Louis Brandeis, Hugo Black, William O. Douglas, Earl Warren, and William Brennan must all be turning over in their graves. Justices who favored a humble, modest court that deferred to legislatures wherever possible, such as Felix Frankfurter, must also be spinning…Now, the Roberts court may be tilting even further to the right. The doctrine of stare decisis has always been the keystone of our common law, which we inherited from England. Stare decisis means that courts must stand by what they decide. The doctrine ensures consistency and predictability in the law…Stare decisis is sensible because, among other reasons, it protects those who have organized their affairs based on a court’s existing rulings. Why make a will or cut a business agreement unless you are confident the courts will enforce its provisions?…there’s reason to fear stare decisis is disappearing. It didn’t stop the Court from overturning Roe v. Wadeand decades of case law on regulation. Just last week, the Court ignored stare decisis, almost overruling the 1935 case Humphrey’s Executor by allowing Trump to remove, at least temporarily, a commissioner on the Federal Trade Commission—the same agency involved in that New Deal-era decision…Now the Court seems ready to go after Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, a permanent nationwide provision of the 1965 statute that bars electoral practices with a discriminatory “effect.” The Rehnquist Court upheld the discriminatory effect standard that Congress wrote into Section 2 in 1982, and that President Ronald Reagan signed. The Roberts Court seems eager to strike it down 43 years later.” Read more here.
Most of the New Deal jurisprudence went against stare decisis. This is a fact.
It was the choice of New Dealers to pressure the Court to change its jurisprudence rather than amend the Constitution.
And from a certain point of view there is nothing wrong with that. Actually, according to the living document doctrine favoured by the left, this is exactly how constitutional jurisprudence should work.
I don’t know at what point all the contradictions coming from the left will be noticed and addressed by all the very educated people pundits making one sided arguments.
(Including the contradiction of supporting the rule of law but opposing the enforcement of immigration laws except with a silk glove and with no state and local backup. How did liberals feel about the South being a sanctuary of discrimination and having to send federal troops for enforcement? This is why despite the abuses Republicans are still more trusted than Democrats on immigration.)
The unitary executive is not some new far fetched theory. This is how government always operated. The notion of independent executive agencies was a compromise accepted by the New Dealers so that the concentration of regulatory power in the Executive was diluted with some measure of input from the opposition party in multimember boards (specially the Federal Reserve). The notion of a separation of powers doesn’t make all that sense because the executive wasn’t meant to have all that power.
From a doctrinal perspective, Roe vs Wade never became stare decisis. It was modified almost immediately after adoption and was never truly accepted by either the nation or the legal community as a whole. What Roe managed to do was turn the abortion movement from political activism to litigation and damaged long term the political culture of the states and of the left. Taking this issue away from politics only weakened the right in the end.
Business confidence is not the kind of argument the left should be using. Yes in term of the rule of law, but not in terms of the stability of the law. Saying this is basically saying the law shouldn’t be amended.
All the talk around Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act is legally speaking mostly hyperbole. The 1980s amendments are a miniscule part of the Act is legal/statutory terms.
It was Democrats who accepted and inserted the notion that “results” don’t matter. Now they want a strictly results based interpretation to protect the minority majority districts that have contributed so much to the disfunctionality of politics.
Packing Democratic/minority voters in deep blue districts contributes to the sense of a divided nation with no common culture or experiences.
Yes, from a historical perspective this was the only way to get minority representation several decades ago. But things continue changing.
The arguments for packing Hispanic and Asian voters are very much questionable, including from a historical perspective.
Only Blacks continue to be the most loyal Democrats so far. But making Blacks the cornerstone of the Democratic coalition hasn’t worked out well for either Blacks or the party.
Unpacking Black voters could make Republicans again have to take their interests into account.
Making congressional districts competitive is key to fixing politics.
Also, majority minority districts have a particularly big problem with money in politics and radicalism.
These poorer districts are more prone to the influence of outside campaign contributions as well as small numbers of radical advocates.
Electoral turnout is lower in these districts both in primaries and the general elections.
They are at the core of working class distrust in the political system.
The Virginia Attorney General’s race is showing some deep problems with Democratic discourse, not because of what one person said but due to the lack of a common message to explain how to deal with those expressions.