"I was surprised that the dissenters never tried to defend the right to abortion and never try and offer an alternative ground. They relied entirely on stare decisis."

Said Larry Kramer, in "Liberals Need a Clearer Vision of the Constitution. Here’s What It Could Look Like. The legal scholar Larry Kramer on why the left’s embrace of judicial supremacy was a mistake" (NYT). 

"Once cooperation breaks down, the only play to restore it is tit-for-tat. It’s the only way both sides can learn that neither side wins unless they cooperate."

"President Trump and the Republicans are unapologetic about discarding longstanding cooperative rules for making judicial appointments. Should they lose the election after succeeding in putting Judge Barrett on the court, it becomes incumbent upon Democrats to respond in kind. Paradoxical as it sounds, tit-for-tat, hard ball for hard ball, would set the stage for, for constructing a judiciary we can once again respect. Adding two to four new justices is one way to do this, but there are others that are less disruptive and just as effective."

Writes Larry Kramer, former dean of Stanford Law School, in one of a collection of essays — "How to Fix the Supreme Court" — in the NYT. The word "fix" presumes the system is broken. Kramer expects us to assume that enlarging the Court to create new seats is equivalent to filling an empty seat whenever you can. It's "tit-for-tat." It's also simply asserted that the fate of the third branch of government is a game to be played by the partisan actors in the 2 political branches of government, and that the game must be played over time so that the "sides" "learn." 

Yes, there are studies that show that "tit-for-tat" is the best strategy for games played over time, but that has to do with 2 parties in an ongoing relationship, without regard to the damage done beyond the participants in the game. Here, the damage will be done to the third branch of government! But barge ahead, Kramer tells us, because the Democrats and Republicans need to learn that they can't win unless they stop their political aggression. Let the Supreme Court go to hell as these idiots play their game. 

Kramer does offer an alternative to simply adding seats to the Supreme Court. It's complicated, and I think there's no chance that people will like it. With each new Congress — that is, every 2 years — a new Justice is appointed, but the 9 longest-serving Justices continue to be the active Supreme Court. The new Justices just help out, substituting when there are temporary absences and working at the circuit or district level. Whenever one of the 9 dies or resigns, one of these standby Justices moves up to the active Supreme Court seat. This would drain a lot of the importance out of Supreme Court appointments. Kramer calls this "an easy fix."

"[T]he first 800-page instalment of a two-part history of America that tells of the secret gay life of figures from Alexander Hamilton, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln to Mark Twain, Herman Melville and Richard Nixon."

From activist/writer Larry Kramer.

ADDED: The link goes to an article in The Guardian which has the title "Were Lincoln and Nixon gay? The ‘history’ book that is dividing America" and, right under that, this set of pictures:



The caption under that is: "Abraham Lincoln, left and Richard Nixon. 'It may look like fiction, but to me, it’s not,' says author Larry Kramer of his book." One gets the sense that Kramer is playing an imaginative game of hypothesizing that this or that historical figure was gay. He says:

"Most histories have been written by straight people. There has never been any history book written where the gay people have been in the history from the beginning.It’s ridiculous to think we haven’t been here for ever."

Of course, he's right about that. There were gay people who hid it, so why not speculate about which ones were gay? What evidence is there? Lincoln and Nixon look so grim in those photographs. Maybe it was the stress and pain of denying and hiding their true sexuality.