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Seth Meyers: Trump Ignores COVID Spike, Says He'll Leave the Country if He Loses

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ipsos10/19/2020 8:38:41 pm PDT

re: #73 LeftyRambles2413 (HappyWarrior)

It makes you wonder, just a smidge, about the long-term sense of appointing someone as young and green as Coney Barrett to a lifetime SCOTUS seat.

If she’s really smart (and I know I’m delving into the counterfactual here), she’ll realize that once she’s seated, she owes her backers nothing. She will be on the court long after McConnell and Graham and even Sasse and Rubio are out of office, forgotten and maybe even dead.

And because she comes in with such thin experience on the bench, sure, she’ll probably start out looking to Alito and Thomas and Gorsuch as models for how to judge… but who’s to say she doesn’t learn from Sotomayor and Kagan and Breyer along the way, too?

I’m probably overestimating her, and she really is as shallow and predictable and programmed as she appears to be. But I know if someone handed me a lifetime job and I knew I’d never have to answer to them again, I’d find it WAY more engaging to be an iconoclast than I would be to spend the next 30 or 40 years rubber-stamping things just like I was told to when I was barely 40.

(Not to mention that the judges who go the first route tend to be remembered much better in history than the ones who go the second route. Beyond the drama of their confirmation hearings, what history book will have more than a few lines on Thomas or Kavanaugh?)