His replacement will have no chance. This whole campaign and all the controversy around it have been so poorly managed. The dems have shot themselves in the foot again. So now we get six more years of rapist-enabler Susan Collins. This is not an improvement.
Not quite. The court’s position is that there cannot exist an independent agency. They don’t see any provision for such a thing in the constitution. And if you take a purely literal originalist interpretation of the constitution, they’re right. Nothing in there says anything about “independent agencies”. Such independence was established ~140 years ago by precedent. So they’re not rewriting the dictionary, but they’re certainly rewriting a core legal doctrine that has been in place for >50% of the nations existence.
In my opinion, assuming there’s ever actually an opportunity to fix this mess, a key change we’ll need to make is that there needs to be a higher standard for the supreme court to overturn its own precedent. Like, maybe the vote needs to be unanimous or something. This activist court has been decades in the making, and is radically rewriting much of the foundational doctrine under which the country has operated for generations.
I don’t know. Recent polls showed the Platner/Collins race as a statistical dead-heat (tied within the margin of error). Collins has massive amounts of money to spend, and significant support from outside of Maine. Platner was generating a lot of enthusiasm; there were many houses with Platner signs in their lawns that had never publicly displayed such support for a candidate before. I think a lot of those people are going to be pretty disillusioned by this entire experience, and it won’t take many former Platner supporters staying home to tip the scales for Collins.
We’ll see what happens…
(edit: some coverage of the poll I mentioned, obviously from before the latest Platner issues were published. centralmaine.com)