Sure- but then you have to be careful defining labels.
Trying to peg a generic one dimensional (left-right) or even two dimensional (social/fiscal) political position on justices is difficult, even with loosely defined labels/ categories.
It's much easier to look at justices relative position/ rank on a per-topic basis.
Alternatively, and less useful to the general public, but very useful to SCOTUS junkies, is looking at cross tabs of how often a particular justice votes with others. Especially when they break from the publically perceived left/right voting block, which is more often than most think.
Scotusblog is full of this type of analysis for those interested:
And this is, in fact, precisely how the court is theoretically supposed to work. The two-dimensional partisan framing—which, unfortunately, is very real in other domains—is what's causing the court to break down.
Kind of, yeah. Supreme court justices aren't elected, are appointed for life, and collectively have veto power over basically any law, should they choose to break (or gradually discard) historical norms.
I think it's telling that neither Biden nor Harris was willing to rule out court-packing at the presidential debates, and at this point I think they're right to leave it on the table! But, it really would mark the beginning of the end of the Supreme Court. It's easy to predict what would probably happen the next time power changed...
I think it's telling that neither Biden nor Harris was willing to rule out court-packing at the presidential debates, and at this point I think they're right to leave it on the table!
The correct answer to that question was obviously, "Congress makes the laws, including ones about the number of SC justices, not the President."
Idk about Google... But they're biased for more reasons than that.
But they are still an excellent source, and are about as good as it gets compared to most (supposed) non-partisan media these days.
Fwiw, I also believe their bias to be almost entirely unintentional, which is way more than can be said for most sites. For topical seminars, where authors might actually argue for a side, they do a decent job of getting various opinions from multiple sources, even if it's not always exactly balanced 50/50.
And they disclose all cases in which someone might be involved.
Like anything else, you still need to consider the source when reading it.
This is really an important distinction. Social issues like gay marriage and things like this are completely orthogonal. The Democratic Party as a whole is very much neoliberal or liberal as opposed to left. Liberal judges are much the same.
The DNC would be center right in Saudi Arabia? By what metric?
What is with the ridiculous hyperbole that's so common when talking about America on the internet, especially by non-Americans? Talk about "American exceptionalism" - just in a different way.
Indeed it's quite ridiculous. What they mean to say is that the DNC would be center-right in Europe, which is an incredibly Euro-centric way to look at the world. In reality, if you consider the actual bulk of the planet, which would include mainly China and India, the DNC and RNC dichotomy is rather unclassifiable.
Well, what's going on in America is being pushed down the throats of everyone in the world. You can hardly read an article without someone mentioning Trump and US politics in general. We may as well join in too!
> The Democratic Party would be considered center-right in any other country of the world, but the USA.
Any other Western democracy (including some Western-model democracies outside of the West proper), sure. But then the left-right axis is not really readily transferrable to outside of that domain, anyway.
It depends on how you define things. For example, do you measure by where Democrats end up in practice, or where they want to go? For example, the United States is to the right of Germany in terms of universal healthcare. But Medicare 4 All, where many Democrats appear to want to go in the long term--though they disagree about how quickly they want to get there--would be quite to the left compared to the multi-payor mandatory insurance system currently in place in Germany.
It also varies quite a bit by subject-area. In Germany, the constitutional court held (around the same time as Roe) that legalized abortion was unconstitutional, violating the fetus's right to life. Today, it is technically still illegal, but decriminalized up to 12 weeks. (Shorter than in almost every state in the U.S.) The abortion rate in Germany is much lower. The Democratic party's views on abortion would not be considered center-right in Germany. On gay rights, Germany got legalized same-sex marriage a couple of years after the U.S. And things like surrogacy, which gay male couples often rely on to have kids, is illegal.
Or, consider that Merkel, a member of the center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) has called for a ban on burqa. To my knowledge, even Trump has not said anything like that. Similarly, on immigration, while Merkel allowed Muslim refugees, her successor declared that a "mistake" which the country had "learned from." Democratic favorability to refugees would not be a center-right position in Germany.
In the area of religion, the U.S. is extremely left wing compared to every country but France. In the U.S., teaching religion (as such) is banned in public schools. In the U.K., Germany, Italy, and Spain (four of the five largest EU countries) it's actually required, either by statute or by the constitution. Children have a right to receive a religious education at the public expense in these countries.
In the area of taxes, the Democratic Party is center-right in some ways but quite left win in others. Merkel has championed Germany following along with Trump's corporate tax cuts. The Democrats' proposal to repeal that would not be a center-right position in Germany. The Democrats' proposal to tax capital gains as ordinary income is quite left wing. Most Western European countries, including Germany, have preferential treatment for capital gains taxes. In general, the U.S. has the most progressive tax code in the OECD: https://opportunitywa.org/u-s-federal-income-tax-structure-m...
But Democrats' tepid support for labor unions, for example, would be considered center-right or even right-wing in Germany.
On the whole, on social, religious, and immigration issues, the current Democratic Party is solidly to the left compared to western Europe. On labor issues, it's to the right. On corporate and investment taxation, it's solidly on the left. On healthcare, its to the right, but mainly for reasons that have to do with minimizing disruption to peoples' current private insurance. Where they want to end up, single payer public insurance, is solidly on the left.
Our next Vice President will very likely be a Democrat who, in 2019, supported single-payer public healthcare, treating capital gains as ordinary income, a 35% corporate income tax rate, a financial transactions tax, publicly funded abortion with no compromises such as waiting periods, Green New Deal, free healthcare for people who immigrate illegally, etc. If she actually believed those things, she would be a solidly mainstream left politician in most European countries.
Thanks for typing this all out. The idea that American liberals would be “right wing” in Europe is just plain wrong for reasons you’ve mentioned. There’s a lot of nuance lost and you can’t really compare the two. For instance Europe is full of Christian socialist parties: something unthinkable here in the states.
> But Medicare 4 All, where many Democrats appear to want to go in the long term--though they disagree about how quickly they want to get there
Democrats generally agree that there should be universal access to health care, and a mostly agree that that should involve a public plan (not just a private subsidy) available to at least some section of the population beyond the current Medicaid population.
There is not general agreement within the Democratic Party on universal single-payer as even a long-term goal. The currently dominant neoliberal faction of the Democratic Party supports a public option as a long-term component of healthcare policy to acheive universal access, but does not generally support single-payer as a goal, in either the near or long term.
> In general, the U.S. has the most progressive tax code in the OECD
As your own source notes, net of transfers and taxes, the US has one of the least progressive systems in the OECD.
> In the area of taxes, the Democratic Party is center-right in some ways but quite left win in others. Merkel has championed Germany following along with Trump's corporate tax cuts.
You seem to be really obsessed with the CDU as your measure of center-right parties, but AFAICT the CDU is to the right of most parties labelled center-right, not just in Europe, but even in Germany specifically (which has a fairly wide range of center-right parties.)
But, yes, its really only the dominant faction of the Democratic Party that is center-right, the "progressive" faction is center to center-left by European terms, and the whole (today, with the gains the progressive wing has made over the recent years considered) is probably more center than center-right; the "Democrats are a center-right" party was most true at the height of the Clintonian neoliberalism of the Democratic Party which as faded over the last decade or so and particularly since Bernie Sanders 2016 campaign reenergized the progressive wing, though it has still not become dominant.
> There is not general agreement within the Democratic Party on universal single-payer as even a long-term goal. The currently dominant neoliberal faction of the Democratic Party supports a public option as a long-term component of healthcare policy to acheive universal access, but does not generally support single-payer as a goal, in either the near or long term.
A big majority of Democrats support Medicare 4 All: https://www.kff.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/9394-Figure-3.... They support a public option somewhat more, but to me it seems more like they do so to soften the transition to a single-payer system. A “public option” wouldn’t be like the multi-payer systems of Germany, Switzerland, or the Netherlands. Since it would kill private competitors in the long run, it’s just a slower road to single payer.
Regarding taxes: netting transfers mixes up the tax system from the welfare system. As the article points out, our taxation is progressive but our spending is regressive. It’s a system designed to redistribute money from the rich to the middle class, not the middle class to the poor.
As to social or religious issues, Italy or Spain would be more conservative in some respects. (Islam isn’t a recognized religion in Italy.)
The recent rise of progressives has moved Democrats sharply left in part because Europe has been moving to the right economically for decades. Low corporate and investment taxes and deregulation is gospel across the European center, but it’s disappeared among progressive Democrats. That wasn’t remarkable in 1975 but it’s remarkable today. Macron, for example, is campaigning on deregulation and a government takeover of Islam, and his major competition is to his right. Center left parties in France aren’t questioning the country’s fairly low corporate and investment taxes. Neither are those in Spain. Democrats (in particular Warren’s utterly cockamamie proposal) really stand out in that area as a throwback.
Green New Deal is a great example of this. It’s an FDR era jobs program. It stands in stark contrast to Europe, which is doing carbon pricing. Progressives seem to have developed an allergy to markets, and while the center isn’t there yet it’s not pushing back either.
I mean that’s before you get started on Sweden’s center-left party continuing to cut corporate taxes and partially privatizing social security.
Oh, I forgot about school choice. Democrats are far to the left compared to Europe in that.
> A big majority of Democrats support Medicare 4 All
Sure, a big majority of Democrats in the electorate do.
The description of the center or center-right nature of the Democratic Party is not a description of the party-in-the-electorate but the institutional party. In fact, it's frequently expressly contrasted with the views of the party-in-the-electorate to argue that the institutional party is a poor agent of its membership.
Turning to polls of the party-in-the-electorate to argue against the characterization is, at best, not understanding what the discussion is about and, at worst, the fallacy of equivocation.
> netting transfers mixes up the tax system from the welfare system.
In every state, taxes and the welfare system are already mixed up, and the division of function between them isn’t consistent fromm state to state. Viewing them separately miscasts differences in preferred vehicle with differences in preferred function. Or vice versa.
Both parties are liberal. Republicans deviate from liberalism when pandering to their religious base, and Democrats deviate from liberalism when adding to the social safety net and labor rights, pandering to their left base. Neither party takes their deviations from liberalism seriously, and both parties have an interest in not resolving those (wedge) issues to keep voters from drifting to the other party.
