05-14-2016, 05:20 PM
(05-14-2016, 05:10 PM)Odin Wrote:(05-14-2016, 04:56 PM)Bronco80 Wrote: I'm staking out territory on this thread since this tends to be up my wheelhouse, and we're likely to get a bunch of opinions over the next six weeks.
I feel guilty about feeling hopeful about a death (Scalia), but unfortunately the Constitution forces those kind of feelings when it comes to the Supreme Court. The biggest short term stake in this presidential election is far and away the balance of power at the Court. If Scalia does get replaced by Garland or (hopefully) someone further left, there's going to be a long laundry list of terrible precedents that I'd like to see overturned ASAP.
First among them Citizens United.
We need to go even further back: this whole mess started with Buckley v. Valeo allowing some campaign expenditures to be constitutionally protected in the first place.
#1 on my list is Shelby County, but I don't know if the political capital will be there for Congress to do something that would trigger a lawsuit. Ideally we would require all state and local elections to be precleared, but that seems ambitious in the current climate.
The most likely U-turn I see soon is on abortion, since so many states are passing ridiculous laws that will provide plenty of ripe opportunities for court challenges. Ideally, I'd like to see the Court go as far as to overrule Casey, jettisoning Sandra Day O'Connor's bourgeois-tilted take on abortion in favor of the brighter line of Roe v. Wade.
I've got a lot of other cases I want to see overturned but I don't know how interested people would be in such a list at the moment.