A Good Start

Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) is proposing a sweeping changes to the Supreme Court, including adding 6 justices.

This is a good thing:

A sweeping bill introduced by a Democratic senator Wednesday would greatly increase the size of the Supreme Court, make it harder for the justices to overturn laws, require justices to undergo audits and remove roadblocks for high court nominations.

The legislation by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) is one of the most ambitious proposals to remake a high court that has suffered a sharp decline in its public approval after a string of contentious decisions and ethics scandals in recent years. It has little chance of passing at the moment, since Republicans have generally opposed efforts to overhaul the court.

Wyden, who chairs the Senate Finance Committee, said the goal of the bill is to restore public confidence in a battered institution. He said he hopes to get parts of the bill passed, even if the whole package is not embraced by lawmakers.

………

The bill’s most significant measure would increase the number of justices from nine to 15 over the course of 12 years. The staggered format over two or three administrations is aimed at diminishing the chance that one political party would pack the courts with its nominees.

………

The bill would also require a ruling by two-thirds of the high court and the circuit courts of appeals, rather than a simple majority, to overturn a law passed by Congress. Wyden said the current court has been too quick to discard precedent and curtail rights by narrow majorities.

The legislation would also require Supreme Court nominees to be automatically scheduled for a vote in the Senate if their nominations have lingered in committee for more than 180 days.

The measure would prevent senators from blocking a president’s nominees by refusing to hold a vote on them, as then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) did after President Barack Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland in 2016.

………

Another provision in Wyden’s bill would expand the number of federal judicial circuits from 13 to 15, adding more than 100 district court judges and more than 60 appellate-level judges.

Supreme Court justices must report income, dividends, property sales and gifts, among other things, but the bill would bolster financial checks, disclosures and other transparency measures. It would require the IRS to initiate an audit of the justices’ tax returns each year, release the results and make the tax filings public. Nominees to the court would have to disclose three years of tax returns.

It's a good start, but considering the blatant corruption on the court, I'd like to see criminal investigations and justices being marched out of their offices in handcuffs.

 

Headline of the Day

MAGA Is Claiming “Political Violence” Over a Giant Nude Trump Statue

—The New Republic

Seriously, the MAGAts are such snowflakes. 

You can get images at the link, but I am not posting here.

Just let me say that the anonymous artists have depicted him as less than, "Heroic."

It's On

For the first time in 47 years, Biden has flatly ruled out invoking Taft-Hartley to stop the strike, and is accusing the shipping companies, particularly foreign ones, as profiteering: 

Earlier today, over 45,000 members of the International Longshoremen's Association (ILA) went on strike against the United States Maritime  Alliance(USMX), an association of various shipping employers dominated by multinational shippers.

The strike was the first time that workers in East Coast ports went on strike since 1977.

Unlike previous decades, when the presidential administration would invoke Taft-Hartley to stop a strike, the Biden Administration has vowed not to do this.

"There's collective bargaining, and I don't believe in Taft-Hartley," Biden told reporters on Monday.

………

"We're gonna win this f%$#ing thing," said ILA President Harold Daggett at a rally of dockworkers earlier today. "Trust me, they can't survive too long and we're gonna get what the f*ck we deserve. Believe me."

(%$# mine)

………

As a Vice President of the ILA, who has been at the table with the port employers, Riley says he is impressed by the way the Biden Administration has handled things.

Biden has publicly called out the port employer association United States Maritime Alliance (USMX), whose board is dominated by foreign-flag carriers Mediterranean Shipping Company (MSC), Maersk, CMA CGM, and Cosco Shipping.  

"Now is not the time for ocean carriers to refuse to negotiate a fair wage for these essential workers while raking in record profits," Biden said in a public statement, "My Administration will be monitoring for any price gouging activity that benefits foreign ocean carriers, including those on the USMX board."

Even behind closed doors, Riley says that Biden has applied heavy pressure on the foreign owned carriers at the bargaining table.

Here's hoping that the ILA has the USMX's lunch.

BTW, the New York Times coverage is horrible, with the reporters (and their editors) attempting to portray the longshoremen as pampered princesses.

As Atrios says, that f%$#ing paper. 

No clue about the potential repercussions politically though.

God Help Me

I'm desperately trying to wrap things up at work before I take two days off for Rosh Hashanah, so I ended up leaving work late, so I had to drive home, Sober listening toe the Vice Presidential debate.

When I got home, I just wasn't up to catching up on the booze, so I listened to the whole thing while I went through my blogroll for interesting stories, again I was Sober.

The horror ………

My overall take is that Vance was glib but evasive, and, yes,  kind of weird, and that Walz appeared very sincere.

The moderators were crap, but not as bad crap as the white hot dense neutron star of awfulness that was Jake Tapper and Dana Bash at the CNN debate between Biden and Trump.

In terms of providing a summary as to the effect, I'm probably not a good person for this.

A lot of people seem to find the candidates telling their personal life stories to justify policies to be a positive thing, and I simply find it contrived and meaningless.

Vance did this more often than Walz, but they both did it a lot, and it pissed me off.

Also, I found that they were far too solicitous toward each other, and so they minimized the policy differences between them.

That being said, even while Vance was more disciplined than Trump (So are my cats in the presence of catnip) I think that you still got the Opus Dei adjacent weirdness that has been a feature for him for a rather long time.

Who won?

¯\_(ツ)_/¯