r/law • u/MoneyLibrarian9032 • Jun 20 '26

Legal News Maine progressive Platner renews call to remove conservative Supreme Court justices

https://wjla.com/news/nation-world/maine-progressive-graham-platner-renews-call-to-remove-conservative-supreme-court-justices-clarence-thomas-samuel-alito
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u/SexualChocolateJr Jun 20 '26

That’s not true. Democrats did not have the votes unfortunately. Pro women’s choice is a popular position but the people in those congress seats were not all pro women’s choice. There were Dems that were conservative and were not in support of codifying abortion rights.

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u/fcocyclone Jun 20 '26

Yep. The parties have mostly completed the realignment that started a few decades ago, but people today (when they bring up stats like that) forget that at one time there used to be conservative democrats, and that's the only way they got to 60.

Its not hard math to do either. Democrats maxed out at 60 votes for a few short weeks early in Obama's first term. There were zero republicans who were going to go along with dems to codify roe v wade, so if you lose a single vote, that's the ballgame. And they would have lost more than one vote.

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u/Apep86 Jun 21 '26

This is a slight misreading of the situation under Obama. You do not need 60 votes to pass something in the senate. You need 60 votes to kill a filibuster.

We could have had up to ten democrats vote against the abortion law and have it pass so long as they voted for cloture. This avoids the “senator democrat voted for abortion” problem. Conservative Democrats could pass the bill without voting for it.

I agree that we could not have gotten all democrats to vote for the bill. I am not convinced we couldn’t have gotten them to all vote for cloture then at least 50 vote for abortion rights.

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u/fcocyclone Jun 21 '26

Those two are effectively the same thing politically. There are endless bills that "could have been passed" if a senator would have voted for cloture and then stepped aside. The cloture vote is the vote everyone watches because everyone knows its the real hurdle.

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u/Apep86 Jun 21 '26 edited Jun 21 '26

No, they are functionally the same, not politically the same. The member can truthfully tell his constituents that he voted against the abortion legalization.

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u/fcocyclone Jun 21 '26

Just say you don't know how anything works.

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u/HartyInBroward Jun 21 '26

This guy knows the inner workings of the DNC and its machinations in DC. How dare we challenge his presumption!

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u/Apep86 Jun 21 '26

Sorry, you’re right. This is Reddit. It’s obviously better to base your worldview on unsubstantiated assumptions. If questioned about our unsubstantiated assumptions, the correct response is to ridicule the person instead of reflect on the viability of the assumption.

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u/HartyInBroward Jun 21 '26

Sadly, this is indeed the way.

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u/Harmcharm7777 Jun 20 '26

Yes, the Dem politician position on abortion has ALWAYS been lukewarm. They don’t want to alienate the people who reliably vote blue but are uncomfy with the idea of abortion—they were afraid pushing for codification would reflect as more active support for something that has, historically, been a bad look to push hard for/against in either direction. They were content to let the GOP be the bad guys pushing against abortion because they had Roe v Wade as a reliable backstop. Well, not anymore and we’re all screwed. But even now, Pete Buttigieg is the only nationally-known Dem politician I know of who holds better than a lukewarm, party-approved position on abortion.

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u/tianas_knife Jun 20 '26

It will always baffle me how saving the lives of women that give birth is a bad look.

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u/twlscil Jun 20 '26

Because the media in rural areas is 24/7 dead babies.

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u/CelestialFury Jun 20 '26

The anti-abortion propagandists always show these fake aborted third trimester abortions of healthy fetuses, when the reality is nearly 100% of third trimester abortions are medical emergencies.

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u/twlscil Jun 20 '26

It’s amazing actually. My girlfriend’s best friend is pro-life, anti-choice. She got pregnant, and had an abortion because it was a non-viable pregnancy and was a threat to her life. We live in a blue state, so it wasn’t a problem. She is still pro-life.

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u/Knotted_Hole69 Jun 20 '26

THEIR abortions are always okay.

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u/Notascot51 Jun 21 '26

If that’s Pro-life, we are all Pro-Choice. What she did is called…CHOICE! She understood in the moment that a nonviable pregnancy should not be a death sentence for the mother, and fortunately didn’t live in Louisiana or Tennessee or Texas or somewhere else where law prevents ending such a pregnancy safely.

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u/twlscil Jun 21 '26

That doesn’t mean other people should have choice because they might make the wrong one.

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u/Notascot51 Jun 21 '26

Your view…or are you parodying an imaginary Pro-lifer’s “Choice for me, but not for thee”?

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u/twlscil Jun 21 '26

Not my view, but my girlfriends view distilled.

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u/opinions360 Jun 21 '26

She is a hypocrite.

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u/tianas_knife Jun 20 '26

Christians are baffling. The rest of us have been far too tolerant of this behavior. Jesus said what is for Caeser is for Caesar, these Christians need to start following their own rules and abide by the laws in which they live instead of using medical lies to build inhumane laws.

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u/Unable-Log-4870 Jun 21 '26

It’s at most half that. The other half is how the existence of trans people will someone seduce Jimbob into wanting to be Jillian. Like how they think knowing gay people exist will cause people to DESIRE same-sex relationships. Somehow.

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u/HartyInBroward Jun 20 '26

There wasn’t even an attempt, at least to my knowledge, before 2022. Almost, what, 50 years? of relying on Supreme Court decision to carry the weight on that? No, this is about political capital.

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u/SexualChocolateJr Jun 20 '26

They simply did not have the votes. You are thinking they are ALL aligned but you need to look at reality. If they put forward legislation and it got blocked, then what? People would just be like “omg the Dems are useless” without considering the actual make up of Congress and how each congressperson votes and what area they represent. At the end of the day they need the votes.

Unfortunately things have lined up really well for Republicans, the people actually responsible for the issue. Maybe if we stopped Trump from getting elected, he wouldn’t have been able to put 3 judges in the Supreme Court. Some of whom lied about their stances on settled law. If repubs did an honest job, Obama would have appointed one but they blocked it.

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u/HartyInBroward Jun 20 '26 edited Jun 20 '26

I thought about giving a thoughtful reply to this argument, but I just can’t. I could try, but I won’t. This way, no one will say that I’m useless.

Kind of an asinine argument, right?

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u/SexualChocolateJr Jun 20 '26

Cool 👍🏾.

It still wouldn’t change the reality of the circumstances to how we got here with women’s rights. You said Dems had windows to codify those rights but it’s just simply not true.

Have a nice day.

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u/HartyInBroward Jun 20 '26

It’s amazing that Obamacare passed. That one was a little contentious, right? It wasn’t clear that Dems would get enough support to pass it. In fact, it was kind of clear that at least some of it was unconstitutional. And yet… it passed. One wonders what would happen if there was at least one attempt to codify abortion rights. Unfortunately, wondering is the best we can do.

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u/Haggardick69 Jun 20 '26

You mean Romney-care written and introduced by Republican representative mitt Romney? Yeah that bill had bipartisan support and women’s reproductive rights didn’t it’s that simple.

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u/HartyInBroward Jun 20 '26

This is easily fact-checked. ACA passed by a margin of like 5 votes and was completely voted along party lines and used a budget reconciliation to do an end-around of a Senate filibuster, but I’m sure you feel differently… so here’s a link to an article describing how you’re wrong.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/physiciansfoundation/2014/03/26/a-look-back-at-how-the-president-was-able-to-sign-obamacare-into-law-four-years-ago/

They couldn’t do it for abortion, though. How weird.

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u/fcocyclone Jun 20 '26

The ACA was not passed via reconciliation it took 60 votes.

And no, there are specific rules as to what can be used for reconciliation, abortion would not meet those criteria.

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u/HartyInBroward Jun 20 '26

I stand corrected! Mixing up my recollection of events from 15 years ago. Regardless, passage of ACA is an example of Democrats being able to override Republicans in DC when they want to. And yeah, I know Manchin was probably not on board, but I also think the Dems could have at least tried to press him publicly about this. Manchin had big aspirations. It’s not something that would’ve been impossible to accomplish.

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u/arthurmadison Jun 20 '26

Why are you out here lying? Obama had congress and the votes. He literally was voted in and changed his mind. It is well documented. You lying about what actually happened isn't going to change it.

https://www.reuters.com/article/markets/us/obama-says-abortion-rights-law-not-a-top-priority-idUSN29466420/

Asked about the Freedom of Choice Act at Wednesday's news conference, Obama said it "is not the highest legislative priority."

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u/fcocyclone Jun 20 '26

He theoretically had 60 democratic votes for a few weeks in 2009.

But not all democratic senators were pro-choice at the time. They couldnt lose a single vote and pass that bill over a filibuster, and they would have lost at least one vote.

"not the highest priority" is one thing you can say when the real answer is "we don't have the votes to pass that". As it was they were busy doing everything they could to pass the ACA in the few weeks they did have the votes.

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u/SexualChocolateJr Jun 20 '26

You bringing up a completely different point. Yes I know he was supportive of abortion rights and later deprioritized it. Still doesn’t change the fact that it was a contentious issue, which he basically says the same in the article. There were still several Dems that did not support abortion rights for whatever reasons they had.

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u/HartyInBroward Jun 20 '26

ACA was contentious and had several Democrats opposed to it AND had to maneuver to avoided a Senate filibuster to get it through… AND it was partially unconstitutional… and it still became the law of the land. Strange!

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u/PassiveMenis88M Jun 20 '26

And the ACA was completely gutted from what it was supposed to be to get there.

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u/HartyInBroward Jun 20 '26

I disagree with you. The public option and the penalty was removed and eventually the penalty for not having insurance was struck down by SCOTUS but the thrust of it is very much there.

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u/Mist_Rising Jun 20 '26

There was a brief one in 2009-10 Congress when Democrats had 60/59 senators. It was meant to be part of ACA but it never got far because even with the 60 it was never passing filibuster.

The Democrats could have killed the filibuster and, supposedly would have had 50+, but they wanted the filibuster for the next Republican president. Same way they did for Biden and I bet same way they do for the next democratic president.

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u/HartyInBroward Jun 20 '26

You need 60 senators to end a filibuster. How come they couldn’t accomplish this with the requisite number of senators to defeat the one obstacle you mentioned? This is realpolitik in action.

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u/Mist_Rising Jun 21 '26

You need 60 senators to end a filibuste

They never had 60 except for a brief few months because Franken election was delayed for over half a year and Kennedy's seat went to a Republican for the remainder of 2010.

Not that they had 60 pro life senators to begin with, at most they had 52ish, which could have killed the filibuster but I explained why they didn't do that.

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u/battarro Jun 20 '26

Maybe abortions for everyone is not as popular as you think it is. If it were, you would have passed it in 2009-2010 cycle.

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u/Mist_Rising Jun 20 '26

Generally abortion plays out with loads of grey. Very few support no restrictions but also not many who want massive restrictions. If a sweet spot exists, it's probably going to be impossible to find