SCOTUS

First, I'd just like to say a simple "fuck you" to all those purity-minded dickheads who shit-talked Hillary to the point of making people whose votes we'd normally get to count on, either stay home or vote Jill Stein or write in Bernie, or whatever other hip, fart-breathing bullshit they used to rationalize their way through their oh-so-smart and strategic decisions in the 2016 election.

Susan Sarandon, Michael Moore, Rosario Dawson, et al - seriously -

 fuck you 

So anyway - WaPo has a look at the obvious political venality of another possible Cult45 nominee for SCOTUS:

A broad cross-section of Florida Republicans, from acolytes of President Trump to former top aides to Jeb Bush, lined up over the weekend behind Barbara Lagoa, propelling the federal judge and Miami-born daughter of Cuban exiles to the top of the shortlist of potential replacements for Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

The swift ascension of the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals judge to serious consideration by members of Trump’s team, along with Amy Coney Barrett of the 7th Circuit and several others, reflects the blunt political calculations informing the White House’s decision-making 45 days from an election that could turn on the outcome in Florida, which has never sent a justice to the nation’s highest court. The president, facing a tight race in the state, whose electoral college votes are seen as critical for his path to reelection, is intensifying his courtship of Hispanics, especially the heavily Republican Cuban American community in South Florida.

Within 48 hours of Ginsburg’s death, a push for Lagoa, 52, has taken shape in the battleground state, drawing on years of goodwill she and her husband have built in Florida’s legal and political circles and their extensive ties with the Federalist Society, the influential conservative legal group.

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“She is a Cuban woman from Miami, and Florida is the most important state in the election,” said Jesse Panuccio, former acting associate attorney general in Trump’s Justice Department and a member of the Florida Supreme Court Judicial Nominating Commission, which vetted her before Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) named her to the state’s top court in January 2019.

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Lagoa concurred this month in a federal appeals court ruling that is expected to keep many of the 85,000 felons who have registered to vote in Florida from casting ballots. Lagoa’s role in the case has prompted backlash from Senate Democrats, who sent her a letter this summer alleging that her failure to recuse herself “appears to violate the Code of Conduct for United States Judges” given her role last year in an advisory opinion handed down on the issue by the Florida Supreme Court.

On Florida’s high court, and before that, on a state appeals court, she repeatedly sided with businesses, helping to turn back a higher minimum wage in Miami, limiting recourse for homeowners facing foreclosure, and reversing or rejecting cases of employees who sued Caterpillar and Uber. Lagoa also wrote a controversial decision finding that DeSantis had broad executive authority to suspend a county sheriff over his handling of the 2018 shooting in Parkland, Fla.

And while the judge has not expounded at length on abortion and its legal limits — saying in written answers submitted to the Senate last year that she would “faithfully apply . . . precedents” when it came to Roe v. Wade — one of her main advocates, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), said she is “very pro-life, reliably pro-life.”

“The hardcore Catholics usually stick with us,” the congressman added. “Her faith guides her perspective on life.”

Daniel Goldberg, legal director of the liberal Alliance for Justice, was critical of Lagoa’s record, saying she is a judge “who has showed contempt for our democracy.” Goldberg said he has “no doubt that she will meet Donald Trump’s litmus test” for a Supreme Court nominee and support his pledge to overturn Roe and the Affordable Care Act.