Quote (Black XistenZ @ Jul 11 2022 10:47pm)
This so much.
I think it could also work with the Senate. Imagine somene assassinates 2-3 Republican Senators, followed by Democrats nuking the filibuster and passing a federal right to abortion, a federal gun control law, grant statehood to Puerto Rico and DC, pass some sort of BBB, pass some sort of amnesty bill, pass Supreme Court "reform" which enacts term limits and expands the court, etc. pp. - all against the protestation of Manchin and Sinema.
The midterms might be too close by now for such a scenario to pan out, but it's totally within the realm of the thinkable whenever there is a slim but ideologically united trifecta in Washington which is only held back by 1-2 mavericks in the Senate.
But I mean, fundamentally senators like congressmen and even presidents are
replaceable representatives. If James Hodgkinson had actually managed to assassinate Steve Scalice and Rand Paul, the voters of Kentucky and Louisiana would simply replace them with likeminded Republicans and the balance of power would be unchanged. The very minimal bar for our democracy would be what, making sure Democrats don't try to seize upon a missing quorum or ram through legislation while they're temporarily down a seat and unable to filibuster or something? It requires some real proactive whoring on their part.
The supreme court has been so politicized, largely as a result of Roe and what both the majority and even Robert's dissent all wanted to push back against in the long term, even if they inflamed it in the short term. And with lifetime appointments falling luck of the draw to partisan executives, there's an obvious perverse incentive in any game theory analysis for an administration to murder opposition judges to gain their seats and stack the court to get their wishlist enacted. The qanon quacks even started conspiracies about this when Scalia died even though Trump got to install a mini-me, and we're fortunate RGB was so obviously past her due date and had known cancers, else progressives might have thought the same.
If someone murdered a conservative justice and it fell to Biden to pick a replacement, and he nominated anyone to the left of Ann Coulter, it would unravel our republic. The minute our government becomes ruled by murder-for-power, is the minute we start brushing up on the history of the early roman empire and the praetorian guard. Forget tit-for-tat assassinations of liberal justices under a republican president, we'd never reach that point, our country just has no function. Save for the grace of a benevolent president willing to cross the aisle and heal divides. And of all the deep space we just photographed with the james webb telescope, the vacuum occupied between Joe Biden's ears is the least likely candidate for that