Last Call For Endless Blockheads

But please, tell me again how Republicans are bluffing when they talk about never allowing another Democratic Supreme Court nominee ever again when it's now the stated position of conservative think tanks like the Heritage Foundation?

The conservative group Heritage Action is pushing Republican senators to keep the Supreme Court at eight justices if Democrat Hillary Clinton is elected president.

In a Thursday morning briefing at the Heritage Foundation’s Washington headquarters on Capitol Hill, the group said Republicans should embrace the idea of leaving the Supreme Court without its ninth justice, perhaps for as long as five years. 

Dan Holler, Heritage Action’s vice president of communications and government relations, signaled that this year’s Republican blockade of President Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland, is just the beginning of a fight that could last the entire first term of a Clinton presidency.

“You’ve seen John McCain and others talk about the need to not confirm any liberal nominated to the Supreme Court,” Holler said. “That’s exactly the right position to have.”

It’s “unacceptable,” he added, for moderate Republican senators to roll over and allow a President Clinton to shift the court radically to the left.

Holler said the obstruction of any Clinton Supreme Court appointee is going to require “an immense amount of willpower” from Senate Republicans.

Republicans have normalized racism, misogyny, religious bigotry, anti-LGBT hatred and violent persecution of political opponents.  What's the normalization of a eight-person Supreme Court among friends, right?

Pressed on whether he was comfortable going five years without a ninth Supreme Court justice, Holler said there’s “nothing sacrosanct about the number of nine justices.”

“The system that we have set up is one of checks and balances,” he said on Thursday. “The president can certainly nominate somebody, but it’s incumbent upon the Senate to say ‘yes, this person is suitable for that role.’"

“And it’s perfectly within the realm of Republican senators’ rights and prerogatives and with the Constitution and what they campaigned on,” he added, “to say ‘this person will not uphold the Constitution and therefore they don’t deserve to be appointed to the bench.’”

What all this means for Clinton, should she win the presidency, rides to a large extent on which party controls the Senate.

If Democrats win control over the Senate, the likely new majority leader, Charles Schumer (N.Y.), could deploy the so-called nuclear option for a Supreme Court nomination. That would mean changing Senate rules to allow nominees to be confirmed with a simple majority of 51 votes instead of the 60 required to break a Republican filibuster. It’s an extreme move, but not unimaginable given the stakes.

If Republicans hang on to the Senate, however, they can cause huge headaches for Clinton if enough of them buy into the Cruz-Heritage approach.

Holler wouldn’t discuss his private conversations and planning, but it seems clear that Heritage Action, the activist arm of the group, is going to aggressively take up this Supreme Court fight if Clinton wins.

He said he doesn’t accept the view — advanced by Democrats and the media — that obstructing Supreme Court justices is an electoral killer for Republicans. 

He's right.  Republicans control the majority of the Senate, have the largest margin of control in the House since the Great Depression, control a majority of governor's mansions and a majority of state legislatures.  Literally the only thing they don't control in American politics is the White House, and they can happily neuter the presidency all they want to until frustrated Dems simply give up.

If Republicans still control the Senate in January, there will be at least two years of a blockade on everything, and they'll just blame Clinton for doing nothing and get away with it.

In a lot of ways control of the Senate is just as important as the White House, and this is why.

Istanbul Not Constanti-No-Coup, Con't

More than three months after the abortive military coup against Turkish President Erdogan failed miserably, my prediction that "It's going to get nasty in Turkey" has panned out in very unfortunate ways.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has taken advantage of the failed coup attempt in July to carry out a coup of his own.

In the past three months, more than 110,000 people have been purged and nearly 40,000 have been imprisoned in Turkey, a NATO member and close Western ally. The increasingly authoritarian President Erdogan is implementing a slow-motion coup, restructuring the government and civil society through a mass purge of the political opposition.

People from all sectors of society have been targeted — those working in the government, military, courts, media and academia. Over the weekend, more than 10,000 civil servants were fired en masse. Among the purged were health workers and at least 1,200 academics. New government decrees granted Erdogan the power to appoint university officials, while simultaneously stripping lawyer-client confidentiality rights from those detained.

Opposition figures like Sezgin Tanrikulu, a member of parliament from the left-leaning, secular Republican People’s Party, are alarmed. “What the government and Erdogan are doing right now is a direct coup against the rule of law and democracy,” Tanrikulu warned on a Periscope broadcast.

Independent, critical journalism is on the verge of extinction. Outlets that oppose Erdogan’s right-wing, Islamist and neoliberal Justice and Development Party, known by the acronym AKP, have faced raids and arrests.

Erdogan is rolling up anyone suspected of helping the coup attempt, and that includes pretty much everyone who isn't Erdogan. The press, opposition leaders, public intellectuals, lawyers, university professors, civil servants, all are under attack.

But nobody is suffering more than Turkey's Kurdish minority.

Elected mayors and local councils have been fired and replaced with unelected administrators in 27 municipalities in the largely Kurdish southeast, according to Human Rights Watch.

At least 30 elected Turkish mayors are being held in pretrial detention, Human Rights Watch reported. Even more are under criminal investigation on suspicion of supposed terrorism offenses.

On Sunday, the government detained the two elected co-mayors of the predominately Kurdish city of Diyarbakir. Human Rights Watch said they were jailed on “trumped up terrorism charges.”

Two days later, authorities appointed an unelected administrator to run the city. Police also separately detained 30 officials from the left-wing opposition Democratic Regions Party in the area.

In the month of October , the Turkish government jailed 98 officials from the leftist Democratic Regions’ Party, an allied organization of the Peoples’ Democratic Party, a leftist, feminist, pro-Kurdish party that has become the third largest faction in parliament.

The permanent "state of emergency" play is pretty standard in the MENA dictator book, and Erdogan is having a grand time of it. And please remember this is a full-fledged NATO ally here doing this while the EU and US are decidedly busy with larger issues like Syria, Brexit, the US presidential election and Yemen, and Erdogan knows he can pretty much get away with anything right now.

And he is, and he will continue to do so. 

StupidiNews!

• So the Chicago Cubs won Game 7 of the World Series in extra innings, after a rain delay, after blowing a three-run lead, after coming back from being down three games to one.
• A Colorado man has been indicted on federal weapon of mass destruction charges after allegedly leaving an improvised explosive device outside a small-town police station.
• England's High Court has ruled that the British government must win the approval of Parliament to exit the European Union, the May government is expected to appeal.
• President Obama took aim at Donald Trump and GOP lawmakers in North Carolina yesterday in a campaign stop for Hillary Clinton in Chapel Hill.
• Internet backbone provider Level 3 Communications is investigating another large-scale US internet outage on Wednesday morning, the second such outage in two weeks.