Clarence Thomas has spent the weekend in the hospital

I’m not going to engage in fake sympathy: Thomas is a hardcore reactionary whose wife played an active role in January 6 attempted autogolpe. Replacing him on the SCOTUS would be an enormous step toward reforming an institution which is currently an immensely malign influence on American politics and culture.

I’m going to take this opportunity to mention two especially absurd arguments that supporters of Ginsburg and Breyer put forward over the past several years. The first, much beloved of a certain LGM commenter, is that Harry Reid wouldn’t have gotten rid of the filibuster to fill Ginsburg’s seat in 2014, even though he got rid of it for all federal judgeships other than the SCOTUS the year before.

This is like arguing that Tony Soprano would nail your head to a coffee table if you didn’t pay back a $5,000 loan, but would only resort to sending you a copy of A Theory of Justice if you owed him a million bucks.

The other is that it doesn’t matter whether the right wing margin on the Court is 6-3 or 7-2. This is like arguing that it doesn’t matter if you give up another TD when you’re down by 14 in the third quarter because you’re already losing.