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Pickering: Justice Breyer’s timely retirement bad news for GOP in Senate

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After 27 years of praiseworthy public service on the U.S. Supreme Court, Justice Stephen Breyer has announced his retirement from the court, which will reportedly take effect this summer after the court’s current term ends.

California-born Breyer’s surprise retirement has sent conservative politicians in Washington, D.C., into a terrified tailspin in their knowledge that the possibility of the Republican Party winning a majority in the U.S. Senate in November has now just come to an end. Too bad for them.

Due to the historical pattern of the incumbent U.S. President’s party losing congressional seats in the first mid-term election after that president takes office, combined with the numerous announced retirements of incumbent Democratic U.S. House members, recent redistricting, and extreme congressional gerrymandering by Republican state politicians, it’s probably unlikely at this point that the Democratic Party will be able to maintain their narrow majority in the U.S. House of Representatives after November’s general election.

However, all of the time and public tax dollars wasted by GOP politicians in Republican-controlled red states (whose blatantly discriminatory and illegally gerrymandered congressional political maps are being torn up by one court after another) will not have any appreciable impact whatsoever on the outcome of U.S. Senate races in 2022, because statewide U.S. Senate elections can’t be gerrymandered since all voters in any state get to vote for or against their state’s U.S. Senate candidates.

What will impact the 2022 U.S. Senate elections is the fact that the current 6-3 partisan Republican majority on the U.S. Supreme Court is likely to overturn Roe v. Wade prior to this November, which will spell certain political doom for anti-Choice Republican U.S. Senate candidates across the country, not just in swing states or in Democratic-controlled blue states.

Even red state Republican candidates have much to fear this year from what is sure to become a historically large voter turnout in November by women furiously focused on protecting their right to choose from misogynistic male GOP jurists and from right-wing religious extremist Republican politicians who are personally obsessed with controlling, regulating and restricting female sexuality at the point of a gun.

The Republican Party is going to have some explaining to do, due to its corporate donors and to its fascist foreign sugar daddies (like Russian kleptocrat Vladimir Putin and Saudi Arabian despot Mohammed bin Salman) when 2023 dawns on at least several red states inaugurating Democrats as their new governors, etc.

In fact, Justice Breyer’s retirement along with the likely overturning of Roe v. Wade by the current U.S. Supreme Court prior to November will probably result in multiple red states becoming swing states just in time for this year’s general election, not to mention those flipping to blue states in time for the 2024 presidential election (like Texas and Ohio for instance), which will hand a second four-year term in the White House to President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris.

Maintaining their current slim majority in the U.S. House of Representatives is likely to be a heavy lift for the Democratic Party this year. However, don’t be shocked if the redirection of American voters’ attention towards the U.S. Supreme Court come election time will make fools out of those in the corporate media who have already mindlessly handed victory to the GOP in 2022, without a single vote having been cast yet!

“Conventional wisdom” isn’t wisdom after all, y’all. It’s simply groupthink.