(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5543615&forum_id=2...id#47766488)

If not, Trump will just say "fuck it" and appoint someone with just the consent of the Senate Minority and get his AG to sign off on it.

Constitution just requires the "Advice & Consent" of the Senate. What can the DEMS do if Trump just accepts the "advice & consent" of half of Senate and appoints anyways?

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5543615&forum_id=2...id#47766973)

(2) Recess appointments are obviously temporary (they expire if they aren't confirmed by the end of the congress, so two years max), but what I don't know is whether the Senate can boot you pre-sine die by affirmatively no-voting you. (I don't know if this has been decided at all.) Either way, would be 180^180 to have Interim Justice Kacsmaryk write the Court's 5-4 decision overturning gay marriage ("But we agree with the Obergefell majority, and disagree with its dissenters, on the most important point: the Constitution does speak directly to same-sex 'marriage.' Looking to the history and text of the document, we find that the Founders would have been repelled by the idea of the matrimonial union of Man and Man, and their cherished document must be understood as implicitly prohibiting legal recognition of such arrangements....")

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5543615&forum_id=2...id#47767118)

But accepting the hypo, I think (a) TRUMP appoints either a standard hardliner or, at worst/best (depending on your perspective), a righty with a little bit of moderate street cred (the R version of obama's merrick garland pick); (b) Dems rightly refuse to confirm; (c) TRUMP waits out the midterm; (d) if Rs flip the senate in 2026, obviously they confirm who they want (most interesting question here is, if they went with conservative merrick garland initially, do they swap him out for a Kacsmaryk type); but (e) if they don't flip the senate, they probably try to work out a real compromise -- to me, an OLD AS FUCK con makes more sense than a moderate R (it's what I'd want from Ds if they were in this position) -- and probably fail to do so, because, bear in mind, the Dem senate leadership will feel like their behavior in obstructing through 2 years was rewarded by keeping the senate in '26, so why change course?

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5543615&forum_id=2...id#47767058)

He develops this point over 17 pages of his concurrence. See ibid. at 18-35. We remind lower courts that the dicta of a single concurring justice is of limited value, particularly where, as here, the dicta relates to constitutional-interpretation questions wholly unrelated to this case, which concerns the dischargeability of certain debts in a Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5543615&forum_id=2...id#47767174)