Scott Bradford: Off on a Tangent

Biden to Nominate Ketanji Brown Jackson to Supreme Court

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Ketanji Brown Jackson

President Joe Biden (D) will nominate Ketanji Brown Jackson to the United States Supreme Court. Jackson is a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

If confirmed by the U.S. Senate, Jackson would replace Justice Stephen Breyer, who announced last month that he intends to retire at the end of the court’s current term. Breyer is part of the court’s “liberal” wing and an advocate of the living constitution school of jurisprudence. Jackson is also generally considered to be a “liberal” judge, so her nomination is unlikely to shift the ideological balance of the court.

Jackson worked as a law clerk for Judge Patti B. Saris of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, for Judge Bruce M. Selya of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, and for Breyer on the U.S. Supreme Court. She has also worked in private practice.

In 2009, Jackson was nominated by President Barack Obama (D) to serve as vice chair of the U.S. Sentencing Commission and she was confirmed by unanimous consent in the Senate. In 2012, Obama nominated her to the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia and she was later confirmed by voice vote. Biden nominated Jackson to the U.S. Court of Appeals in 2021 and she was confirmed in a 53-44 vote.

The U.S. Senate is likely to hold hold hearings and a vote on confirmation some time in the coming weeks and months. The U.S. Constitution charges the Senate with providing “advice and consent” on presidential nominations to the Supreme Court.

Endorsement Statistics, 2004-2021

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Do you like pie graphs? I hope so. This post is going to have pie graphs.

I started making formal political endorsements on this website in 2004, a little more than four years after I turned eighteen and gained the right to vote. Since then I have evaluated in-writing every candidate and every issue that has appeared on my ballot. That’s 227 candidates for 95 offices and 61 yes/no ballot issues. So there’s plenty of stuff that you can go back and read and get me “canceled” for.

Every so often, I look back at my statistics to see if I can discern any trends or interesting tidbits. That’s what this post is about. So if you have no interest in a bunch of statistical data about my personal politics, you should probably just click away now. I’ll have something else for you to read soon.

Read more . . .

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The Washington Football Team (WFT) plans to announce its new name on February 2, 2022. The team, which plays American football, was founded in 1932 as the Boston Braves. It changed its name to the Boston Redskins the next year and played under that name until 1937. It then moved to Washington, D.C., and became the Washington Redskins.

In 2020, the team announced that it would retire the Redskins name and would be called the Washington Football Team until a permanent name could be chosen. Redskins is a term that refers to American Indians (Native Americans) and is now generally considered offensive.

Following are ten suggestions for new names for the WFT:

  1. Washington Wombats
  2. DMV Lines
  3. Washington Cronies
  4. District Dumbasses
  5. Capitol Insurrectionists
  6. Columbian Filibusteros
  7. D.C. Swamp Rats
  8. National Embarrassments
  9. Montreal Expos
  10. The Manifest Destinies

Justice Breyer to Retire

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Justice Stephen Breyer

United States Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer has announced that he plans to retire at the end of the court’s current term.

Breyer was appointed by President Bill Clinton (D) in 1994 after Justice Harry Blackmun’s retirement. He was confirmed by a 87-9 vote in the United States Senate. Breyer is regarded as part of the “liberal” wing of the court and has tended to follow the “living constitution” school of jurisprudence.

President Joe Biden (D) has the constitutional authority to nominate a replacement for Breyer, and that nomination must be confirmed by the Senate. Biden is likely to appoint another “liberal,” so Breyer’s retirement is unlikely to result in significant changes to the ideological balance of the court.

Biden has promised to nominate a black woman to the court. In the public and private sectors it is usually illegal to hire on the basis of race or sex, but antidiscrimination laws do not apply to presidential appointments.

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The government of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) bears primary responsibility for the COVID-19 pandemic. Even if the virus itself developed naturally, the PRC’s actions in the early days of the outbreak guaranteed that the world would never have any real chance of stopping it.

First they denied that anything was happening. Then, when they couldn’t deny it anymore, they lied about how serious it was and refused to let outside experts join the investigation or have access to critical data. They used their corrupting influence to undermine the World Health Organization, which became little more than a public relations mouthpiece for the Chinese regime’s lies. Even now, the PRC refuses to cooperate in any meaningful way with investigators trying to analyze how this all happened—how a bat virus conquered the world—and how we can stop it from happening again.

There’s no way to know if the SARS-CoV-2 virus could have been contained in Wuhan. Perhaps, if China had done everything right and the world had been able to impose travel restrictions months earlier than they did, we might have been able to prevent all of this. And if containment was truly impossible, we would at least have bought some more time . . . time to prepare, time to develop the vaccines, and time to learn how to protect the most vulnerable populations without shutting everything down.

The world needs to hold China responsible. But it won’t. As the pandemic comes to its ignominious, whimpering end, that much is clear. So let’s do the next best thing. Let’s send our individual bills to China. Here’s a fillable PDF form you can use:

Read more . . .

Scott Bradford is a writer and technologist who has been putting his opinions online since 1995. He believes in three inviolable human rights: life, liberty, and property. He is a Catholic Christian who worships the trinitarian God described in the Nicene Creed. Scott is a husband, nerd, pet lover, and AMC/Jeep enthusiast with a B.S. degree in public administration from George Mason University.