In light of the news about Ruth Bader Ginsburg's newest reoccurrence of cancer, I fully expect the lefty avalanche of "she's an idiot because she didn't retire during Obama's administration" takes to go wild, and it's always been a pretty dumb take

Obama's administration made the political calculation that conservative Democrats - and remember, at the time this number included the likes of Joe Lieberman, Evan Bayh and Ben Nelson - weren't going to be agreeable to replacing more than one Supreme Court justice per year.

Their first priority was replacing John Paul Stevens, who was A) in terrible health and B) was friggin' 90. They replaced him with Sotomayor in the first eight months, which was pretty fast work. (Also Sotomayor is a great justice.)

After Stevens, they knew all of the other left-leaning justices either actively wanted to retire or were willing to. Ginsburg (and Breyer) were in the "willing" camp. David Souter, on the other hand, desperately wanted to retire, so Ginsburg and Breyer let him be replaced first.

They replaced Souter with Elena Kagan in August of 2010, and then they lost the Senate, and that was that.

Basically the inability to completely recycle the left flank of the Supreme Court with younger justices boils down to "conservative Democrats wouldn't support it."

That isn't on Ginsburg or Obama. It's on Lieberman and Bayh and Nelson and Mary Landrieu and all the other limpdicks who actively impeded progressive legislation themselves during the first two years of Obama's administration when he could have gotten more done.

Like, these are the people who prevented a public option in the ACA, and who demanded slashing of the sitmulus, and who stalled cap-and-trade until the Senate was lost. They're the actual Republicans-in-Dem-clothing.

This is what I meant, and yes it's silly that losing a supermajority effectively meant losing the Senate, but there ya go. This is part of the reason I thought any Democratic candidate who didn't advocate for filibuster reform, including Sanders, was profoundly unserious. https://twitter.com/tomscud/status/1284188761224630277

This strikes me as a "Green Lantern willpower" critique; the idea that the Obama administration didn't want it enough to be able to convince Joe Lieberman, one of the worst Senators in modern memory and with no actual loyalty to the Democrats, to not be a terrible person. https://twitter.com/ddrenle/status/1284189518120140801

The ability to coerce/blackmail party members in the USA exists, to a certain extent, but only really via an authoritarian route (which is why Trump has been so effective at it). I don't think Obama would have been comfortable going that route even if it was available to him.