Born a Citizen... For Now

If there's any good news at the moment, it's that the Far Right Supreme Court didn't go completely evil and nuke birthright citizenship from orbit (via Lawrence Hurley at NBC News):

The Supreme Court on Tuesday blocked President Donald Trump’s contentious attempt to limit citizenship at birth for those born on U.S. soil, delivering a major blow to his agenda.

The court, divided 6-3, ruled that the executive order Trump issued Jan. 20, 2025, the first day of his second term, was unlawful. Five justices said the order fell afoul of the Constitution’s 14th Amendment, which has long been interpreted to bestow birthright citizenship on almost anyone born in the U.S.

One justice, conservative Brett Kavanaugh, said the order violated federal law but not the Constitution.

It's like, Brett, what the hell you thinking about when the other five Justices are pointing to the obvious 14th Amendment answer but you're out there waving a different flag no one asked you to wave? If you're trying to impress that one law professor you gave you a C in Legal Arguments 101, it won't work...

Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts said there was “scant evidence” for the Trump administration’s radical reimagining of how the law has been understood for decades.

“Citizenship, then and now, was the right to have rights — to freely participate in our political community,” he wrote.

The 14th Amendment was enacted after the Civil War to ensure that everyone, including former slaves, would have those rights, he added. “We keep that promise today,” he said.

Three assholes Justices in Alito, Thomas, and Gorsuch argued that 14th Amendment allowed trump to dismantle birthright citizenship: Thomas arguing the 14th Amendment only applied to freed Black slaves - which is wrong - and Alito arguing this would encourage more illegals sneaking across our borders - way to be a hater, Sam.

Thing is, on an obvious and direct matter such as birthright citizenship - literally written into a constitutional amendment as clear as possible - we shouldn't even be seeing a split Court like this. A 6-3 ruling isn't anything to sneeze at, but if you consider Kavanaugh's concurrence is an attempt to negate the 14th outright (making it at heart a 5-4 narrow ruling) then we're looking at only five Justices who think the amendment's language should be enough.

So this isn't going to be the end of this fight. The racists on the Far Right - desperate to end unwanted immigration from non-Whites from Central/South America, Asia, and Africa (trump is only letting in Whites from SOUTH AFRICA for God's sake) - are going to keep pushing at the 14th Amendment - where a lot of our civil rights as we know them reside - until the courts pretend it doesn't even exist.

The only way to stop that America, the only way to make sure our rights as citizens never go away, is to STOP VOTING FOR THESE RACIST REPUBLICANS. 

Goddamn this. Citizenship should be easy, not broken.

The Arc of Justice, Pretzeled by the Far Right Undoing the VRA

Goddammit. Just as I was writing a long spiel about gerrymandering, this extremist Roberts Court decides to come out with a ruling against redistricting for minority representation that basically made things worse for democracy (via Lawrence Hurley at NBC News):

The Supreme Court on Wednesday further weakened the Voting Rights Act, ruling that a congressional map in Louisiana was a racial gerrymander even though it was drawn to comply with the landmark law aimed at protecting minority voters.

The justices, split 6-3 with the court's (note: Republican) conservatives in the majority, told states they can almost never consider race when drawing maps to comply with Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which was enacted to protect minority voters who long faced discrimination in elections.

Conservative Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the majority, said that while there may be extreme situations where the use of race can be justified to draw a map, no such conditions existed in the Louisiana case. As a result, the new map was an "unconstitutional racial gerrymander," he added.

This ruling ignores the long, horrifying history of segregation when post-Civil War southern states slid back to control under ex-Confederate racists who rigged elections, took away voting rights for Blacks, and drew maps in such a way that pretty much guaranteed racist one-party rule well up into the Second World War. But that's the point: Alito and his fellow Far Right conservatives wanted to return to that segregationist era ever since the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s ended their racist regimes. Labeling the Louisiana district as a "racial gerrymander" is irony of the sickest kind.

The implications could be immediate: as much as we're weeks away from midterm primaries kicking off, a number of Republican-controlled states were already in the process of last-minute gerrymandering efforts that can get a boost from this ruling to erase every Black majority district off their maps. Not only the congressional districts, but the state legislative districts are at risk of seeing every Black/Latino representative getting mapped out of office.

If there's any ray of hope, it's the one David A. Graham shared in that dummymander article I quoted in my previous blog entry:

The math is simple: In order to draw more districts favoring Republicans, GOP legislators had to spread their own voters a little thinner. But if they spread them too thin and Democrats have a good year, Republican candidates will become vulnerable.

The state-level Republicans may be eager to redraw Black majority districts out of existence, but they run into the risk that those voting blocs with blend in with the surrounding districts that the conservatives made sure were racist White enough to lean conservative/Republican. A lot of those "racial gerrymandered" Black districts were intentionally over-packed with Democratic voters to where that district could be +20 Dem while the surrounding four or five districts leaned +2 or +5 GOP. Without that overpack, that +20 Blue can flow into those GOP Red districts and shift them enough to where the Republicans lose their advantages in spite of their map rigging.

This is why the Republicans are also working overtime to take away voting rights from everyone they fear/hate. Don't be surprised if there's a lot of last-minute legislation under the guise of fighting "voter fraud" to take away the constitutionally guaranteed rights of Blacks, women, and college students to solidify whatever "win" the Far Right inflicted on this nation today.

Keep fighting. This was how things were in the 1960s and here we are again, but these rights are worth fighting for, there is an America still out there worth fighting for. Don't let these bastards win: Vote every fucking conservative Republican out of office while we still can.

Update: Adam Serwer at the Atlantic explains it better than I can.

As the historian Nancy MacLean wrote in Freedom Is Not Enough, by the 1970s, (segregationist James Jackson Kilpatrick) had refashioned himself as an opponent of racial discrimination, a champion of color-blindness. Liberal egalitarians supporting race-conscious remedies, he argued, were “worse racists—much worse racists—than the old Southern bigots.” His transformation was so complete, he joked, that he was like the convert who “became more Catholic than the Pope.”

In fact, Kilpatrick’s conversion was no conversion at all. To understand it is to understand the Roberts Court’s decision today in Louisiana v. Callais. The decision purports to uphold Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits racial discrimination in voting, but effectively nullifies it, ruling that a Louisiana redistricting map that created two majority-Black districts out of six, in a state whose population is one-third Black, was an “unconstitutional racial gerrymander.” The majority opinion uses procedural language to obscure what its rewriting of the VRA will allow lawmakers to do: engage in racial discrimination in drawing political districts as long as they say they are doing so for a partisan purpose rather than a racist one—as if the results would not be identical.

In states with large Black populations that remain under Republican control—half of the Black American population resides in the South—lawmakers will now be able to draw districts that dilute Black residents’ voting power. In his opinion for the right-wing majority, Justice Samuel Alito wrote that “in considering the constitutionality of a districting scheme, courts must treat partisan advantage like any other race-neutral aim: a constitutionally permissible criterion that States may rely on as desired.” The Court’s decision is consonant with the philosophy, articulated by Kilpatrick in his earlier days, that the state is oppressive when it interferes with the right to discriminate, and respects liberty when it allows discrimination. And the decision fits just as well with Kilpatrick’s later spin on that philosophy: Attempts to ban racial discrimination are themselves discriminatory—against white people.

What Kilpatrick wanted, and what the Roberts Court is making possible, is a country where white people can maintain their political dominance at the expense of Americans who are not white. The anticaste provisions of the Reconstruction amendments, intended by their authors to reverse the “horrid blasphemy” that America was a white man’s country, are being inverted to defend that dominance. This is not the color-blindness of Martin Luther King Jr., but what the scholar Ian Haney López has called “reactionary colorblindness,” the purpose of which is to maintain racial hierarchy through superficially neutral means. It takes the view that the Constitution’s “color-blindness” renders any attempt to remedy anti-Black racism unconstitutional, because by definition that would involve making racial distinctions. Similarly, the ruling in this case does not explicitly overturn the VRA’s ban on racial discrimination in voting so much as rewrite it to allow such discrimination.

The best way to stop racists is to stop fucking voting for them. Get every Republican out of office now.

In trumpworld, the Tariffs Will Increase Until Morale Improves

Update: thanks again to Steve in Manhattan for sharing this article at Crooks & Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up. Just a reminder, save your sanity by avoiding tonight's SOTU and rely on the poor souls who will annotate it on Bluesky for us.

For all the storm and fury over donald trump's obsession for raising tariffs, there was eventually a reckoning this week when the Supreme Court finally realized they needed to tell trump "No, you CAN'T raise tariffs without congressional approval." (via Scott Horsley at NPR):

The Supreme Court ruled Friday that President Trump overstepped his authority when he ordered tariffs on imports from nearly every country in the world, using a 1970s emergency statute...

The federal government has been collecting about $30 billion in tariffs every month — or about four times as much as it took in before Trump returned to the White House.

Trump has raised tariff rates to their highest level in nearly a century, but import taxes are still a small share of overall government revenue — just over 5% in January...

A working paper from Harvard University professor and former International Monetary Fund economist Gita Gopinath and Brent Neiman of the University of Chicago estimates that nearly all the cost of Trump's tariffs are being paid by U.S. importers, not foreign suppliers as Trump has claimed.

In some cases, importers have absorbed that cost, settling for lower profits. In others, they've passed the additional cost on to customers in the form of higher prices...

Trump promised that imposing the highest tariffs since the Great Depression would spark a renaissance in U.S. manufacturing. But factories have been in a slump for most of the last year, shedding 108,000 jobs in 2025.

No doubt Trump's taxes on foreign imports have allowed some U.S. factories to raise their prices. But the vast majority of factory managers, many of whom rely on foreign components, say tariffs have been a drag on their business.

"Morale is very low across manufacturing in general," one unnamed factory manager told the Institute for Supply Management in December...

So of course, trump being trump he decided to double down on his tariffs obsession (via Kristen Wright, also NPR): 

President Trump on Saturday said he plans to raise global tariffs from 10% to 15%.

"...I, as President of the United States of America, will be, effective immediately, raising the 10% Worldwide Tariff on Countries, many of which have been "ripping" the U.S. off for decades, without retribution (until I came along!), to the fully allowed, and legally tested, 15% level," the president posted on Truth Social.

The announcement was made a day after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the president's sweeping use of emergency powers to impose tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA). The 6-3 ruling is a major blow to Trump's economic policy agenda.

Trump said his decision to raise taxes on imports to 15% is based on "a thorough, detailed, and complete review of the ridiculous, poorly written, and extraordinarily anti-American decision on Tariffs issued yesterday."

trump is, of course, lying out of his ass about "thorough, detailed, and complete review" of a ruling within 24 hours of getting it dumped on his head. Given the ineptitude of trump's entire administration, there's rarely been ANYthing other than messy, disorganized, poorly reasoned responses.

trump is pushing ahead on his tariffs for - again - various reasons, mostly tied to his raging narcissism. Above all is how trump can never admit he is wrong, or losing in any way. he will double down on his mistakes and his flawed logic whenever possible, and blame the people who stopped him for being "crooked" or wrong (when they're not).

he's still convinced - and not through egotistical stubbornness, but genuine belief - that trade wars work, that tariffs are effective sources of revenue (when it's only five percent of total revenue, that can't be anywhere near correct), and that tariffs give him more control over everyone else. trump wants the power to wield tariffs and the threat of such over foreign nations and local businesses alike, as extortions and shakedowns. 

trump believes he doesn't need to work with Congress in any way - look at how he refused to coordinate with even his fellow Republicans during the first time - and his abuse of the laws regarding trade and tariffs is a big sign of that disregard.

The tariff trump is looking to impose now can well face more legal actions from businesses and groups threatened by how rash and destructive these decisions are. But that more dragging out in courts, meaning the costs of trump's tariffs are going to prolong the economic malaise building under his misrule.

trump doesn't care. he's going to keep lying and keep bullying about how great everything is, until he's convinced we adore him the way he wants.

Which is never going to happen. So the beatings tariffs will continue on...

The Far Right's One True Plan

There's a simple reason why trump's lawyers couldn't answer this question about their fight over birthright citizenship before the Supreme Court (via Amanda Frost at the Atlantic (paywalled)):

Forty-six minutes into the Supreme Court’s oral argument in the birthright-citizenship litigation, Solicitor General D. John Sauer got a question he couldn’t answer. Arguing on behalf of the government, Sauer wants the Court to prohibit nationwide injunctions, allowing President Donald Trump’s executive order ending birthright citizenship—along with many of his other policies—to go into effect. Justice Brett Kavanaugh, a Trump appointee, wanted to know how, exactly, the government would administer a rule denying citizenship to potentially hundreds of thousands of babies every year.

“On the day after it goes into effect,” Kavanaugh asked, “how’s it going to work—what do hospitals do with a newborn? What do states do with a newborn?”

“We don’t know,” Sauer candidly told the Court, saying that “federal officials will have to figure that out.” Later, he added, “Hopefully, they will do so.”

Really? With this one exchange, Sauer inadvertently revealed why nationwide injunctions are at times the only way to protect the public. The administration has no workable plan for its unconstitutional order, yet it wants to take away the best legal pathway for those affected to challenge the government’s action.

The Trump administration has had plenty of time to prepare for this moment. During his first administration, Trump claimed authority to end birthright citizenship by executive order. Last year, he repeated that threat at rallies across the nation. His campaign website prominently featured a video in which he personally pledged to end birthright citizenship on “day one” of his presidency.

On January 20, 2025, Trump delivered on that promise, signing an executive order denying citizenship to all children of undocumented immigrants, as well as all children of immigrants with temporary legal status, who are born after February 19, 2025.

That order is at odds with the clear text of the Fourteenth Amendment, the original understanding, long-standing judicial interpretation, and multiple federal statutes. And it would destabilize the citizenship of many of the 3.6 million babies born, on average, in the United States every year—including those born to U.S. citizens. According to the executive order, a birth certificate alone would no longer demonstrate citizenship. All of those parents would have to somehow prove their own citizenship or immigration status before their child could be recognized as a citizen. Additionally, even babies born to lawful temporary immigrants—including temporary workers and students who have been living in the United States for years—would be denied citizenship, losing access to Medicaid, SNAP, and other federal and state benefits. Those children would be born undocumented, some stateless, all at risk of being deported on the first day of their life.

Yet Sauer conceded that the Trump administration does not have a plan—does not even have a concept of a plan—to implement this radical change in U.S. law and policy...

For one thing - as an aside - trump and his anti-immigrant allies especially Stephen Miller likely do a have in place. They just didn't want to admit it in open court, knowing full well that on-the-fence Justices like Roberts, Gorsuch, Barrett, and maybe even Kavanaugh would recoil from it.

Because the real answer - not even part of what Kavanaugh asked - is that the Republicans led by trump and by a score of Far Right sycophants who've spent decades railing against their culture war enemies want to go farther than just denying citizenship rights to newborns.

This has always been about the hardcore Conservatives of the Far Right wanting the power to take away citizenship rights of everybody else.

Remember what Frank Wilhoit spelled out: 

Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

By taking away a person's citizenship here in the United States, you're taking away any legal protections they may have to things like Due Process, property rights, voting rights, employment rights, the right to their own bodies for God's sake. We're seeing part of that now as trump and his ICE brigands are rounding up every documented migrant - even the ones who have legal rights to be here in the US - and loading them into planes to ship them to overseas prisons, ignoring every judicial order to uphold Due Process and maintaining their rights as human beings.

Unspoken in all of this right now is how these acts can lead to American citizens - even those who can trace their lineages back well before the turn of the 20th Century - losing their rights as well. Because if birthright citizenship can be taken away by the Executive branch on the President's orders for any contrived excuse, that birth certificate you think protects you becomes a worthless piece of paper.

This has been an issue among the Far Right well before trump showed up on the political stage: I noticed this back in 2010, and it was worrisome then: 

See, one of the ongoing issues with the crazed Far Right Wingnut crowd is how... emphatic they are about going after those they oppose.  Anyone who makes the Republican Party looks bad gets personally demolished by the next FOX Not-News cycle.  Anyone questioning the efforts of Republicans to lower taxes for the super-rich and deregulate every industry to the point that nothing will be safe or reliable will get demonized as SOCIALIST ZOMG.  And above all, the best way they can dismiss, ignore or invalidate anyone that wants to debate them?  All they have to do is point a finger and accuse their opponents of being "Un-American."

What could happen then in a world where Citizenship is not an automatic given based on birth but instead vulnerable to the whims and interests of whichever political party is in charge of Congress, the White House, and the Courts?  Nowadays the Republicans can call you "Un-American" and that would be just another insult.  If the 14th Amendment were gone... A Republican With Authority can call you "Un-American" and mean it... which would also mean no rights under the law, no protection from immediate arrest, no Habeas, no home, no life...  This is the true danger of what the Republicans are proposing to do by getting rid of the 14th Amendment.  They claim it'll be to get rid of unwanted Illegals... but also consider that the Republicans have no love of Muslims right now, and not much love for Blacks, and very little love for Liberals... and so on, and more, and also...  Repeal the 14th Amendment and NO ONE would be safe from the charge of being "Un-American."

When we're talking about a Republican Party controlled by Far Right extremists obsessed with denying rights to Blacks, Women, Gays/Lesbians/Trans, college students, anybody they deem a "Pinko-Commie Agitator" and how the Far Right would LOVE to take away their rights to vote, work, even live in their own homes... We're talking about purges of entire populations from every legal protection we're supposed to have.

We went through this kind of nightmare before, during the McCarthyist era of "Commie" witch hunts going after anyone the Republicans deemed "Un-American." Back then, there was still a 14th Amendment in place that protected their victims' Due Process rights and overall status as citizens. People still lost jobs and livelihoods and spent decades under hostile surveillance, alas.

But if trump and his cohort can ignore the 14th Amendment when it comes to defining WHO is a citizen, they will happily take away those rights for every one of trump's perceived enemies as well as everyone on the GOP Shit List since 1972. We'll be getting McCarthyism on steroids, where not only will people lose jobs, lose homes, lose families, they'll lose any chance to fight back in the courts.

The reason we HAVE birthright citizenship in the 14th Amendment comes from the fallout from the odious Dred Scott decision, where the conservative (slave-owning or slavery-friendly) Justices like Chief Justice Taney ruled that not only did Black slaves have no rights under the law, neither did the freeborn Blacks in Free Soil states. It took a Civil War and that amendment to undo the damage of Dred Scott, but the goddamned Far Right want to bring that power to deny citizenship to any group they deem a lesser class. 

Only this time, they're looking to take away citizenship from everyone not in their own ranks, not genuflecting to trump, or not offering up their worship and their fear to the Far Right Gods of Hate and Violence.

I am praying to the better Gods of Sanity and Hope that our current Supreme Court sees the dangers of what will happen in a trumpworld devoid of the Rule Of Law for all citizens and residents of the United States.

Because if trump gets his way, if the wingnut Republicans get their way... Every Black, every Woman, every Latino, every Gay/Lesbian/Trans, every Democrat, every anti-trumper will suffer. And we'll be deep into another bloody civil war cleaning up the mess of racism and hate we didn't resolve the first time.

The Nightmare of 2024

As befits the day of All Hallows Eve, I need to describe the recurring nightmare that keeps haunting me as we get closer to Election Day.

The absolute utter dread that somehow donald motherfucking trump might sneak his way back into the White House.

It's been a nightmare being stuck in the Darkest Timeline since November 2016, not just coping with the reality that a solid plurality of my fellow Americans are happily siding with a known racist sexist idiotic shitgibbon like him. It's watching time and again trump committing public faux pas and mental meltdowns, and getting exposed as a financial fraud and adjudicated rapist; all the while violating every known rule of political gravity that should have ended this madness ages ago.

It's unnerving to even contemplate trump could win. Not through any honest means, obviously, but through deceit, rigging, and overt bullying.

I know it can't happen through the popular vote. trump never won the popular vote in 2016 or 2020 in spite of all his gaslighting lies, and there is no sign that trump can win the people over this 2024. 

It could happen through the Electoral College's broken system. For all the hope of a Blue Wave - for all the signs of higher voter turnout leaning towards Kamala Harris and the Democrats - there is still the nagging reality that nobody's really going to know until voters actually vote how the battleground states will play out. All it can take is three or four of the key states - Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, North Carolina - to go in favor of trump to have the Electoral College negate the popular vote. Much like how Hillary in 2016 clearly won the popular vote by 3 million nationwide but lost the Electoral by 30,000 votes in Wisconsin and Michigan: Kamala could be up by 7 million over trump but if she loses Pennsylvania AND Georgia AND Wisconsin by 7,000... The absolute EVIL of the Electoral College will tear this nation apart.

If there's any good news about the likelihood of the Electoral College failing (AGAIN) is that most of the battleground states have polls and early turnout trending away from trump. trump is already complaining about "stolen votes" in Pennsylvania so there may be internal polling suggesting he's about to lose that state (it is considered the key battleground state: Winning it points towards winning states with similar populations like Michigan and Wisconsin).

If trump is hoping to stage another chaotic mess of fake electors or getting his allies in certain states to refuse to certify the results - anything to force chaos and make the system convert to the fallback option of having the US House choose a winner - that is unlikely to happen: The current election laws and mechanisms point towards having it all resolved in the Electoral College anyway.

None of that is the real nightmare.

The nightmare scenario is that Kamala Harris wins both the popular and Electoral votes in a decisive manner - it could be by 500,000 votes and a slim EV count, it could be by 20 million and an Electoral blowout - and yet still "loses" because trump gets his allies in the court system - especially the Supreme Court - to buy his false claims of stolen votes and throw the results to him.

Considering how this Roberts Court already bent over backwards to undo previous court rulings - and run roughshod over established norms - all to give trump a Get Out of Jail Free card - LITERALLY - we can't ignore the possibility that the six Conservative Justices on the high court will ignore the basic facts of 1) trump never having evidence that the elections are rigged, and 2) the clear majority of voting Americans sided with Harris and the Democrats on who should lead this nation.

What will happen if Harris gets over 90 million voters - as I'm hoping - while trump gets barely over 50 million, with a majority of states flipping Democratic Blue in the process, only to have six Justices whom no one directly elected tell that American majority their votes and their voices and their power don't count?

That's what terrifies me heading into next Tuesday: The response by angry American voters - not just Democrats but the Indy and anti-trump Republicans - betrayed by a corrupt Supreme Court. What the hell do we do if Harris and the Democrats honestly win and yet trump and the Republicans steal it away?

No Punishment to Which trump Can Be Subjected By a Wingnut SCOTUS

The President of the United States would be liable to be impeached, tried, and, upon conviction of treason, bribery, or other high crimes or misdemeanors, removed from office; and would afterwards be liable to prosecution and punishment in the ordinary course of law. The person of the King of Great Britain is sacred and inviolable; there is no constitutional tribunal to which he is amenable; no punishment to which he can be subjected without involving the crisis of a National revolution...
-- The Federalist 68, by Alexander Hamilton 

I really hate being in this darkest timeline. 

As I dreaded earlier, this Far Right controlled Supreme Court ruled on donald trump's plea for legal immunity to save him from the federal charges he is - maybe was now - facing over the stolen classified documents at Mar-A-Lago and his role in the January 6th Insurrection. They basically gave him everything trump asked for and destroyed any pretense at accountability in the process (via Amy Howe at SCOTUSBlog):

In a historic decision, a divided Supreme Court on Monday ruled that former presidents can never be prosecuted for actions relating to the core powers of their office, and that there is at least a presumption that they have immunity for their official acts more broadly.

The decision left open the possibility that the charges brought against former President Donald Trump by Special Counsel Jack Smith – alleging that Trump conspired to overturn the results of the 2020 election – can still go forward to the extent that the charges are based on his private conduct, rather than his official acts.

The case now returns to the lower courts for them to determine whether the conduct at the center of the charges against Trump was official or unofficial – an inquiry that, even if it leads to the conclusion that the charges can proceed, will almost certainly further delay any trial in the case, which had originally been scheduled to begin on March 4, 2024 but is currently on hold.

Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts emphasized that the president “is not above the law.” But Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in a dissent joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, countered that if a future president “misuses official power for personal gain, the criminal law that the rest of us must abide will not provide a backstop...”

Sotomayor is rightly pointing out that a corrupt President will ignore the meaningless assurances Roberts is offering, because that corrupt SOB will figure out how to drag everything under that "official acts" umbrella and nobody - not even future Courts - will be able to argue otherwise.

This ruling goes against what was considered settled law with Nixon v United States, which stated clearly "no one is above the law." This Roberts Court is now saying that a sitting President is above the law, and can inflict acts of retribution and cruelty on everyone else.

This is the power of kings: To rule with impunity and injustice. This is something our nation's Founders fought against. We're due to celebrate the holiday honoring their Declaration against the tyranny of a British king, and these wingnut Justices just undid everything the Founders stood for.

When they created the Executive branch, when they settled on a President of the United States, the Founders insisted on establishing checks and balances to ensure political power never rested with a tyrant. By creating the idea of even limited immunity related to the "duties of the office", this Court just upended those balances, ended those checks.

A crooked man in the White House - someone like trump - can now do anything he wants.

Consider what trump wants to do in a second term in office should he lie, bully, and steal his way back into the Presidency. he's openly planning revenge against the New York officers and judges who held him accountable for his acts of fraud and sexual assault. trump and his anti-immigrant handlers are drawing up plans to seize up to 20 million people they'll claim are illegal immigrants and hold them in "camps" (note: there aren't that many illegals in America. They'll likely be seizing real citizens - mostly kids unable to produce ID - and making them suffer) in clear violation of civil rights. And he's planning to gut the Executive branch of civil service employees in violation of workers rights and the needs of the public. 

We are now facing the serious threat of an uncontrolled donald trump sitting in the Oval Office with a literal license to kill.

The entire nation needs to recognize the threat donald trump and his Far Right Republican allies represent. No one is going to be safe if he gets back in the White House.

To the 81 million Americans who voted for Joe Biden in 2020, you need to come back to the ballot box and support him - as Biden respects the rule of law and denounced today's ruling - again. To every Independent voter out there, you need to pick a side now and vote for the Democrats who won't subvert the Constitution and its protections we've lived with our whole lives. To any Republican voters who still respect the rule of law and understand how dangerous trump is, you need to get over any hesitancy to vote Democrat and for the LOVE OF GOD AND COUNTRY vote Biden.

The entire nation as we know it is now at the edge of the cliff. trump and his cronies are eager to drive us over that edge.

Time to stand up. Time to vote. Time to deny these corrupt trumpian powers any dominion over us.

The Death of Expertise

One of the things dreaded about this ultraconservative Supreme Court was how - at some point - the Far Right Republican justices were going to nuke federal regulations from orbit in order to appease their uber-rich corporate buddies. Well, this weekend that finally happened, and apparently nuked the checks and balances of the Constitution with it (via Amy Howe at SCOTUSBlog): 

In a major ruling, the Supreme Court on Friday cut back sharply on the power of federal agencies to interpret the laws they administer and ruled that courts should rely on their own interpretion of ambiguous laws. The decision will likely have far-reaching effects across the country, from environmental regulation to healthcare costs.

By a vote of 6-3, the justices overruled their landmark 1984 decision in Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council, which gave rise to the doctrine known as the Chevron doctrine. Under that doctrine, if Congress has not directly addressed the question at the center of a dispute, a court was required to uphold the agency’s interpretation of the statute as long as it was reasonable. But in a 35-page ruling by Chief Justice John Roberts, the justices rejected that doctrine, calling it “fundamentally misguided.”

Justice Elena Kagan dissented, in an opinion joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson. Kagan predicted that Friday’s ruling “will cause a massive shock to the legal system...”

The justices took up their appeals, agreeing to address only the Chevron question in Relentless v. Department of Commerce and Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo. (Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented in the Relentless case but was recused from the Loper-Bright case, presumably because she had heard oral argument in the case while she was still a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.)

Chevron deference, Roberts explained in his opinion for the court on Friday, is inconsistent with the Administrative Procedure Act, a federal law that sets out the procedures that federal agencies must follow as well as instructions for courts to review actions by those agencies. The APA, Roberts noted, directs courts to “decide legal questions by applying their own judgment” and therefore “makes clear that agency interpretations of statutes — like agency interpretations of the Constitution — are not entitled to deference. Under the APA,” Roberts concluded, “it thus remains the responsibility of the court to decide whether the law means what the agency says.”

Instead of the Executive Branch making these decisions, Roberts is saying, it should be the Judiciary. And by the sound of it, the Legislative Branch passing the regulatory laws can't say anything about it either. 

Roberts rejected any suggestion that agencies, rather than courts, are better suited to determine what ambiguities in a federal law might mean. Even when those ambiguities involve technical or scientific questions that fall within an agency’s area of expertise, Roberts emphasized, “Congress expects courts to handle technical statutory questions” – and courts also have the benefit of briefing from the parties and “friends of the court.”

The problem with this position is that judges really aren't the experts they think they are. On matters of law, yes. On matters of what construes as toxic waste, or the effectiveness of safety gear in hazardous work areas, or the type of materials that Boeing should use to build planes that are falling apart as I blog this, no they are not.

This Court is effectively kneecapping every civil servant in every regulatory office at the federal - and likely state - level, forcing them to cope with filing requests to judges for every safety / health regulation challenge that the major corporations handling dangerous or costly products - the energy companies, the chemical manufacturers, pharmaceuticals, car makers, building constructors, anything listed in the Thomas Register - are now likely to file.

Everything regarding clean water and clean air are now out the window, which you'll need to keep closed if you suffer from allergies and asthma and anything else pollution can affect. Remember what happened to Flint, Michigan? Start multiplying that by 100 as poor communities find themselves dumping grounds for toxic waste that companies no longer have to regulate.

Anyone arguing "self-regulation" will take place because corporations won't profit from hazardous business practices should remember all the times corporations STILL failed to hold themselves to standards while spilling pollution everywhere. If a company can cut corners and save spending even a small sum of money on something in order to report bigger profits, they will.

Government regulation was the only thing keeping the massive corporations in line when it came to cleaning up the pollution that threatened our nation back in the 1970s. People today can't remember how bad it got during the post World War II era of mass industrialization and failures to keep things clean. Lead poisoning was a serious problem with the breathable air, something that the clean air laws reduced to a point where scientists made legitimate claims that it's lessened the crime rate and extended lifespans.

But we're not going to have that scientific expertise making the decisions that can affect regional health or workplace safety anymore. Now we're going to rely on judges who are going to act on their partisan agendas instead of the facts. We're going to have justices deciding on the difference between "nitrous" and "nitrogen", something they are clearly not prepared for.

And that's just the environment we're talking about. In terms of financial safety, Roberts' Court kneecapped the Securities and Exchange Commission in a separate ruling that makes it harder to stop the fraudsters and grifters looking to inflict their greed on the rest of us.

This is where the Club For Greed's deregulatory crusade has led us: A conservative court rigging the system to answer to THEIR authority and no one else's. Not the Congress, not the Presidency.

Gods help us.

Dreading a Decision

With the Supreme Court winding down for the summer, there are still a number of key legal decisions they have to issue. The big one being the decision on donald trump's claims of Absolute Immunity from facing criminal prosecution for acts he committed while President Loser of the Popular Vote (Twice).

The Far Right on the Court have already done trump a solid favor by taking up this matter, forcing delays on two of the federal cases trump is facing: One for his mishandling/theft of classified documents at Mar-A-Lago; the other related to his actions - and inactions - during the January 6th Insurrection. Even if the Court comes out with a ruling that says trump still has to stand trial on those charges, the likelihood is that both won't finish - or even start - before the general election this November. While the 34 guilty verdicts trump received in New York court already paints trump as a felon, these federal cases directly focused on trump's unfitness as President, and could have convinced a larger majority of American voters to deny him a second - more corrupt - term.

For all of how this affects the electoral matters, there is still a serious danger regarding the Supreme Court's pending decision on this.

One of the worst possible outcomes would be if a simple majority - five of the Republican-appointed conservatives - approved trump's stance of having Absolute Immunity. It would immediately destroy any check and balance within the Constitution: the Executive branch will become untouchable to the Judicial and Legislative branch. It would give Presidents full power to be tyrants. And it would be insane even for Justices like Alito and Thomas - who've openly supported such Unitary Executive arguments for years - to approve that.

The only thing stopping such a ruling is that it would immediately grant the current President - Democratic Joe Biden - the same immunity, which he could then abuse to his own devices. Considering real-world issues - such as Russian interference supporting a corrupt felon like trump this election cycle, Far Right obstructionism in Congress, and a Supreme Court dominated by unethical Republican-nominated Justices (hello again, Clarence Thomas) - Biden could well argue the need for his administration to cross legal boundaries to perform his duties, and arrest every single one of them without regard to legal niceties. Granted, it would trigger secession from the Red states and open civil war, but an Absolutely Immune President like Biden could ignore things like Posse Comitatus and send a mostly-loyal federal military to overwhelm them all. I doubt the Far Right judges will risk that.

Which could lead to an even worse possibility: The conservative Justices decide to carve out Absolute Immunity but in such a way it covers trump and no one else. Trying to make sure Biden or any future President - unless it's trump again (shudder) - won't use such powers to disrupt or upend any Far Right hold on American politics, those Justices could twist the entire legal system into knots granting an individual certain powers they would deny to others in the same position. Such a ruling would make a mockery of centuries of legal history; ignoring the practice of following and creating precedence, or the idea that persons are equal before the law.

That result would undermine the already crumbling reputation of a partisan Supreme Court. Legal experts who aren't already pandering to trump would cry foul. There would be the likelihood that Biden's Attorney General would argue that ruling "unenforceable" and ignore it, creating a massive crisis dragging in a divided Congress that would have House Republicans impeaching AG Garland and President Biden while the Senate Democrats refuse to vote on the matter. It could still lead to Biden claiming such powers of immunity anyway, since any constitutional norms are clearly out the window.

A more likely scenario is that the Far Right Justices would carve out Selective - not Absolute - immunity, granting that trump while in office was able to perform certain criminal acts "if it fell within the scope of his duties." They would try to align such "criminal acts" to the ones trump is facing charges - a tidy little coincidence - so that Biden and future Presidents can't unleash themselves. But it staggers the mind that the Justices would grant immunity over such high-priority matters as refusing to send in help to subdue a violent riot incited by a President - like in January 6th - or trying to take all those classified documents - like in the Mar-A-Lago matter - that are clear violations of that President's duties.

The best possible decision would be for a majority of the Justices - the Democratic-appointed ones alongside at least two Republican ones - to agree a President doesn't have Absolute Immunity. They could stick to the precedence set by US v Nixon that "no one is above the law" and that Presidents should consider their criminal liability for acts they commit even while in office. It would mean trump is exposed to whatever fate he faces with the federal criminal trials... depending on if the South Florida judge Aileen Cannon will stop her own screw-ups in the Mar-A-Lago case.

In this timeline, Special Prosecutor Jack Smith could arguably speed up the DC trial regarding trump's involvement in January 6th and get that trial going as soon as possible (maybe late July). The classified documents one will clearly not be ready this year, and the Fulton County matter has been delayed until October, so the DC case would be in the clear. Thing is, most legal experts argue that the amount of evidence and witness testimony could take months, making it unlikely the trial would end before November.

That all said, the Far Right Supreme Court could make a ruling not to decide. They could delay the whole argument by sending the matter back down and demanding "clarification" from the lower courts which Presidential acts could be protected by immunity and which shouldn't. That would definitely freeze up the DC trial for now, and put everything on hold until the Court reopens for business in October.

Waiting for justice from this broken Supreme Court has turned into a joke.

It's been clear for some time that the legal system is not going to save us from a corrupt trump or a sadistic self-serving Republican Party. We're going to have to do it at the ballot box.

In spite of all the threats from the Republicans that they're going to suppress the votes, they can't stop or deny us all. If we can get the 81 million who voted for Biden in 2020 - and if we can get the Independent voters and Rational Republicans who refuse to vote for a convicted felon like trump - we can overcome the GOP's plan to steal this election.

Get the vote out, America. Only WE can stop trump from committing more crimes.

The Bullets Count the Cost

Don't you shoot him down/
He's about to leave here/
Don't you shoot him down/
He's got to stay here/
He ain't going nowhere/
He's been shot down to the ground/
Oh where he can't survive no no...
-- "Machine Gun," Jimi Hendrix

The latest ruling out of this extremist, archconservative Supreme Court pretty much guarantees an increase in the national body count when it comes to gun violence. Via Amy Howe at SCOTUSblog:

The Supreme Court on Friday struck down a rule that banned bump stocks, issued by the Trump administration after a 2017 mass shooting at a concert in Las Vegas. By a vote of 6-3, the justices rejected the federal government’s argument that rifles equipped with bump stocks are machine guns, which are generally prohibited under federal law. In an opinion by Justice Clarence Thomas, the court’s conservative justices emphasized that Congress could have enacted a law that banned all weapons capable of high rates of fire, but it did not – and so the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives was wrong to interpret the federal ban on machine guns to extend to bump stocks.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissented, in an opinion joined by the court’s other more liberal justices, Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. She warned that the majority’s decision “will have deadly consequences.”

The bump stock is an attachment that transforms a semiautomatic rifle into a weapon that can discharge at a rate of hundreds of rounds per minute. The Trump administration issued the rule at the center of the case in 2018. It followed a mass shooting at a music festival in Las Vegas in which the gunman used semi-automatic rifles equipped with a bump-stock device to kill 60 people and injure over 500 more. The rule, which concluded that bump stocks are machine guns, was an about-face from the ATF’s previous position, which until 2018 had indicated that only some kinds of bump stocks are machine guns. Under the 2018 rule, anyone who owned a bump stock was required to destroy it or drop it at a nearby ATF office to avoid criminal penalties...

Rather than leave it up to the federal agency to determine that bump stocks turned semi-auto guns into full-auto, Thomas and the other Republican Justices decided "fuck public safety, let the gun nuts have their firepower."

Because that's what was at stake here. Not a Second Amendment matter, but a public safety matter. And the goddamn Far Right don't give a rat's ass as long as they're not the targets (you will notice that a lot of the Far Right public gatherings are "Gun Free Zones").

If you want an idea of what a bump stock can do for an assault rifle, there's a YouTube clip going around that demonstrates (try to get to the 4:42 mark):

With a bump stock, you're shooting enough bullets to wipe out an entire room of people within seconds, not minutes. The Las Vegas concert mass shooting that convinced the ATF (and even a gun-happy trump administration) to ban bump stocks? The gunman was able to get off 1,000 rounds, killing 60 and wounding over 400 people (more people were also injured during the panicked fleeing).

Goddamn this. A solid majority of Americans want assault rifles banned, and yet our legal system - and far too many politicians bought out by the goddamned NRA - refuses to consider that need.

Gun violence is already a serious epidemic in our nation. Mass shootings are now so common that we don't even notice them unless the body count goes into double digits. By giving these gunmen the ability to do that, we are guaranteeing that the blood in our streets will not stop flowing. Not until every gun-loving politicians (mostly Republicans) are voted out of office, not until every gun-loving judges are forced to retire, not until we can do something about the twisted side of the American debate on guns that turned the Second Amendment from granting states the power to well-regulate their militias into a mindless license for gun nuts to shoot anybody they want.

The violence is going to get worse. Especially when the Far Right gun nuts get convinced the upcoming election isn't going their way...

The Threat of trump's Atrocities

Update 5/1/24 - Thanks again as always to Batocchio for including this article in Crooks & Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up! Please take the time to visit the rest of the blog, and get the vote out for Biden this 2024!

Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.
-- Voltaire

Well, the Supreme Court finally heard donald trump's legal arguments for getting ABSOLUTE IMMUNITY for all the criming he did as President; including taking classified documents in violation of the Presidential Records Act, and his involvement in the January 6th Insurrection. 

It didn't go well (via Adam Serwer at the Atlantic (paywalled)):

The notion that Donald Trump’s supporters believe that he should be able to overthrow the government and get away with it sounds like hyperbole, an absurd and uncharitable caricature of conservative thought. Except that is exactly what Trump’s attorney D. John Sauer argued before the Supreme Court yesterday, taking the position that former presidents have “absolute immunity” for so-called official acts they take in office.

“How about if a president orders the military to stage a coup?” Justice Elena Kagan asked Sauer. “I think it would depend on the circumstances whether it was an official act,” Sauer said after a brief exchange. “If it were an official act … he would have to be impeached and convicted...”

The Democratic appointees on the bench sought to illustrate the inherent absurdity of this argument with other scenarios as well—Kagan got Sauer to admit that the president could share nuclear secrets, while Justice Sonia Sotomayor presented a scenario in which a president orders the military to assassinate a political rival. Sauer said that might qualify as an official act too. It was the only way to maintain the logic of his argument, which is that Trump is above the law...

Trump’s legal argument is a path to dictatorship. That is not an exaggeration: His legal theory is that presidents are entitled to absolute immunity for official acts. Under this theory, a sitting president could violate the law with impunity, whether that is serving unlimited terms or assassinating any potential political opponents, unless the Senate impeaches and convicts the president. Yet a legislature would be strongly disinclined to impeach, much less convict, a president who could murder all of them with total immunity because he did so as an official act. The same scenario applies to the Supreme Court, which would probably not rule against a chief executive who could assassinate them and get away with it.

The conservative justices have, over the years, seen harbingers of tyranny in union organizing, environmental regulations, civil-rights laws, and universal-health-care plans. When confronted with a legal theory that establishes actual tyranny, they were simply intrigued. As long as Donald Trump is the standard-bearer for the Republicans, every institution they control will contort itself in his image in an effort to protect him...

It would be madness for the SCOTUS Justices to consider their own destruction if they allowed Absolute Immunity for Presidents to move forward. A single man with the power to do what he will and never held to account will easily sweep aside every law and every norm until even the courts are no more. And yet, because it's trump begging for that immunity - because it will save him from the justice he's earned over 40-plus years of fraud and other misdeeds - we could well have five conservative Justices taking the absurd move to free trump from his legal fate... and create a situation where trump can become dictator on Day One of a second term and never let go. Serwer adds:

Trump has the conservative justices arguing that you cannot prosecute a former president for trying to overthrow the country, because then they might try to overthrow the country, something Trump already attempted and is demanding immunity for doing. The incentive for an incumbent to execute a coup is simply much greater if the Supreme Court decides that the incumbent cannot be held accountable if he fails. And not just a coup, but any kind of brazen criminal behavior. “The Framers did not put an immunity clause into the Constitution. They knew how to,” Kagan pointed out during oral arguments. “And, you know, not so surprising, they were reacting against a monarch who claimed to be above the law. Wasn’t the whole point that the president was not a monarch and the president was not supposed to be above the law?”

Never mind how such a legal decision could unleash absolute power from the current Presidency of Joe Biden. The Far Right Justices may try to carve out narrow definitions of "immunity" in order to save trump from both the classified documents trial and the January 6th trial, but even then they will grant that same immunity to Biden, since even under their twisted view of the Constitution they can't grant exemptions to one (trump) specific person here. And if Biden's people are smart enough, they can figure out how to expand that "immunity" to let Biden go directly after donald trump - and his Russian-backed GOP buddies - as a clear and direct threat to the national security of the United States.

Those conservative Justices - and their Republican party allies - may think that Biden is too "institutional" in respecting the norms of political office, but they themselves are creating a partisan environment - and are openly causing disruptions in foreign policy and national security - to where Biden may have no choice but to impose the expanded Executive powers the Supreme Court is about to unleash. Like Lincoln during the crisis of secession and civil war, Biden's own congenial world-view will have to move aside for the practical reality of bending the spirit of the law to prevent trump and his lackeys from breaking the entirety of the law itself.

Because on this point, Serwer has it right:

No previous president has sought to overthrow the Constitution by staying in power after losing an election. Trump is the only one, which is why these questions are being raised now. Pretending that these matters concern the powers of the presidency more broadly is merely the path the justices sympathetic to Trump have chosen to take in order to rationalize protecting the man they would prefer to be the next president. What the justices—and other Republican loyalists—are loath to acknowledge is that Trump is not being uniquely persecuted; he is uniquely criminal.

The Republicans have tied their fate to a man who is more con artist than conservative, who is more destructive to the nation than to the Democrats.

For the love of God and for the love of the Constitution and everything America ought to stand for, these Justices need to let trump go, let him face the legal system he's mocked for too long.

And for the nation, for the LOVE OF GOD, MOM, AND APPLE PIE, stop voting Republican until all their crooks are gone from power. 

The Limits of the 14th Amendment, and the Need to Get The Damn Vote Out America

Knew this was coming but it still hurts. The Supreme Court ruled today that Colorado - or any other state - doesn't have the standing to disqualify donald trump from the 2024 election ballots over his act of insurrection (via Amy Howe at SCOTUSBlog): 

The Supreme Court on Monday ruled that states cannot disqualify former President Donald Trump from the ballot for his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attacks on the U.S. Capitol. In an unsigned opinion, a majority of the justices held that only Congress – and not the states – can enforce Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which was enacted in the wake of the Civil War to disqualify individuals from holding office who had previously served in the federal or state government before the war but then supported the Confederacy, against candidates for federal offices.  

All nine justices agreed that Colorado cannot remove Trump from the ballot. But four justices – Justice Amy Coney Barrett in a separate opinion and Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson in a joint opinion – argued that their colleagues should have stopped there and not decided anything more...

In a 13-page unsigned opinion released shortly after 10 a.m., the justices reversed the state supreme court’s decision. The justices explained that the 14th Amendment was intended to expand the federal government’s power at the states’ expense. And in particular, they noted, Section 3 was designed to “help ensure an enduring Union by preventing former Confederates from returning to power in the aftermath of the Civil War.”

But before disqualifying someone under Section 3, the justices observed, there must be a determination that the provision actually applies to that person. And Section 5 of the 14th Amendment gives the power to make that determination to Congress, by authorizing it to pass “appropriate legislation” to “enforce” the 14th Amendment. Nothing in the 14th Amendment, the court stressed, gives states the power to enforce Section 3 against candidates for federal office, nor was there any history of states doing so in the years after the amendment was ratified...

In their six-page joint opinion, Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson agreed with the result that the per curiam opinion reached – that Colorado cannot disqualify Trump – but not its reasoning. The three justices acknowledged that permitting Colorado to remove Trump from the ballot “would … create a chaotic state-by-state patchwork.”

But the majority should not, in their view, have gone on to decide who can enforce Section 3 and how. Nothing in Section 3 indicates that it must be enforced through legislation enacted by Congress pursuant to Section 5, they contended. And by resolving “many unsettled questions about Section 3,” the three justices complained, “the majority goes beyond the necessities of this case to limit how Section 3 can bar an oathbreaking insurrectionist from becoming President...”

To a layman, it seems confusing how the Supreme Court is arguing that Congress has to set the law and enforcement of Section 3 through Section 5 of the 14th Amendment, but then arguing over how that has to work in the first place. To someone like me, it's as though the conservative majority was simply trying to keep it safe for trump to stay on the ballot now and then argue over semantics later.

We need to recognize several points. The Court did not even address the underlying finding of the Colorado courts that trump engaged in insurrection over the January 6th riots and its planning, with the implication that those courts' findings proved trump did. The Court may have ruled in favor of saying Congress has to oversee enforcement of Section 3 of the 14th, but they are divided on how that could get implemented. SCOTUS may have declared Congress has to handle this mess, but they're doing so knowing full well our modern Congress is a hyper-partisan dysfunctional mess, meaning this will not get resolved anytime soon anyway.

There was a hope that disqualifying trump through the 14th Amendment would end the high risk of trump - facing criminal charges at the state and federal level (depending on how fast this Supreme Court hears trump's Absolute Immunity claim), and threatening to unleash plans to behave worse on immigration and foreign policy than he did between 2017 to 2020 - getting anywhere NEAR the White House again. Now that hope is clearly gone.

We Americans now have to hope that the 81.2 million voters who showed up in November 2020 for Biden/Harris will return to vote Biden back to a second term as President; and that trump - whose support is not as strong in the primaries as an 'incumbent' candidate should have - loses a significant chunk of the 74.2 million who showed up for him so there's no fudging or denying Biden's Electoral wins.

For all the potential schemes that trump and his Republican allies have for this election cycle - the disinformation, the gerrymandering, the voter suppression - all of that can be defeated by honest-to-God voter turnout on a scale they can't suppress.

Democrats, Independent voters who oppose the Far Right's Culture War, even disgruntled Republicans tired of trump's rampages: ALL of us need to show up at the ballot box across all 50 states (and DC) and give all support to Biden and the Democratic ticket down the line (Senate, House, state level elections, state referenda, all of that).

GET THE DAMN VOTE OUT, AMERICA.

And for the LOVE OF GOD AND COUNTRY, do NOT vote trump at all.

Justice Delayed Becomes Injustice, What the HELL

When I heard this (I saw it on Twitter but I'll provide an official report from NPR via Carrie Johnson and Nina Totenberg) my first thought was 

The U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments the week of April 22 in a high-stakes dispute over whether former President Donald Trump enjoys immunity from federal criminal prosecution.

The order from the court on Wednesday keeps Trump's prosecution in the Jan. 6 case on hold for at least a few more months.

The justices said, in an unsigned order, that their review would be limited to a single question: "Whether and if so to what extent does a former President enjoy presidential immunity from criminal prosecution for conduct alleged to involve official acts during his tenure in office."

(deep inhale) "FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKK"

The good news: I was getting in my car at the workplace parking lot when I checked Twitter so I wasn't upsetting the kids at the library when I dropped that F-Bomb.

The bad news: JFC WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED

The ruling from the U.S. Court of Appeals was supposed to be airtight. That panel of jurists came back with a unanimous ruling that they "cannot accept that the office of the Presidency places its former occupants above the law for all time thereafter... Doing so would collapse our system of separated powers by placing the President beyond the reach of all three branches."

Apparently there were at least five Supreme Court Justices who decided "nah" and want to jump into this mudpit to make their own ruling.

I considered three possible reasons why this is now happening:

1) This is just the Far Right Conservatives on the Supreme Court - three of them appointed by trump himself, expecting favors in return - doing what they can to stretch out the calendar on trump's DC felony insurrection trial (and maybe the South Florida classified documents trial) to keep it from even starting before the November general election happens, with Early Voting starting in some states by mid-September. Even if the Supreme Court ultimately affirms the lower court's ruling, it won't be until mid-August when they're expected to make such a ruling and the trial itself is expected to last at least two months (the South Florida trial is expected to last four to six months, it was never expected to wrap up before November). 

This is the most likely reason, as it's the one defense trump truly has: DELAY EVERYTHING. Even then it's such an extreme partisan move that no honest American should ever trust a SCOTUS ruling under the Roberts regime ever again.

2) The Justices saw something in the Appellate ruling that required either clarification, or they believed that a decision on Presidential Absolute Immunity required a final say from the highest court in the land. This is the least likely reason, because most legal scholars agreed with the Court of Appeals and there was no reason for SCOTUS to rule on this other than ego.

3) There are at least five Supreme Court Justices - considering how many of them are members of a Federalist Society that supports the Unitary Executive Theory that Presidents can wield incredible powers not even allowed in the Constitution - who legitimately think donald trump can claim Absolute Immunity as President and even to keep claiming after leaving office.

This is the nightmare scenario. This possibility would do exactly what the Court of Appeals warned against: Immediately break the Checks and Balances of the Constitution and basically be a suicide note ending any judicial power of the Supreme Court itself.

You might think even the Far Right Justices would recoil from the reality that granting trump that Absolute Immunity would be the end of their own power of Judicial Review. But remember, those Justices believe it is not only possible under Unitary Executive rules, but necessary. They agree with the idea of a dictator in the Oval Office just as long as it's a conservative standard bearer seizing all that power. It may destroy the Constitutional order we've all lived with for 230-plus years, but it'll give them the excuse to rebuild their conservative utopia on those ashes.

We now are facing the real and serious reality that at least five Justices - Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett (with Roberts being the only conservative who might balk at the destruction of his own jurist legacy) - will try to find a way to give trump the "Get Out of Jail Free" card that Absolute Immunity could give him.

The logical argument that would deter such a ruling - that by agreeing Presidential Absolute Immunity exists, the Supreme Court may be giving current President Joe Biden a literal license to overthrow government himself - ignores the fact that the Republican-backed Justices have twisted rulings and precedent in previous decisions in order to carve out narrow rulings to benefit only a select few. Don't put it past the Far Right Justices to come up with a legal argument that grants that immunity to trump alone. Even though our entire legal system is supposed to be based on "equality before the law" as a rule.

The Far Right may also be gambling on the possibility that even granted this weapon, Biden's own personal nature would prevent him from wielding it as he sits in the White House right now. But don't count on that. Biden may have no choice but to use such absolute power if it comes to it. He's got solid evidence right now that trump and the Republicans are colluding with a hostile foreign power - Russia - to subvert the 2024 elections, and his own intelligence agencies could be telling him by October the only way to save the United States is to declare emergency powers and arrest everybody in the GOP from trump on down. Granted, that move will trigger an open and bloody civil war, but the alternative would be to risk the likelihood that trump and his wingnut allies will sabotage the Electoral College count one way or another. And then trump gets to be dictator on Day One, and the Constitution dies for good.

Sanity and common sense tells us no one person should hold such absolute power: Not in politics, not in religion, not in law, not in life. But we're not living in sane times, are we. Not since 2015 when trump upturned everything this nation was supposed to stand for.

I'd been trying to calm other people down over the last few years, people at work and people I know online, trying to get them to hope that the worst can't happen.

Tonight, I am panicking in a way I haven't felt since that terrible night back on November 9 2016.

I am honest-to-God worried now that the worst CAN happen. That trump will evade justice for his crimes altogether. And that he'll lie and cheat his way back into a White House he will NEVER give up again.

Even exhorting every American out there to get the vote out this election cycle - which we need to do, anything we can to make it clear the majority of us DO NOT WANT trump BACK IN POWER - doesn't feel like it'll be enough.

Fuck it. We're going to fight. 

Stop trump. That's the mission now. Just fucking STOP trump. 

That Could Have Gone Better

Update: Thank you Steve for including this article in Crooks & Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up! I would say GO BUCS but they're not in this year's Super Bowl alas. In the meantime do sing Happy Birthday to my cat Mal the Krazy Panfurr who was born on a Super Bowl night 10 years ago! ;-)

The U.S. Supreme Court heard the matter of Colorado Supreme Court's decision to ban donald trump from the 2024 ballots over his January 6th insurrection, and by most accounts the Justices came out swift and painful against anyone in favor of a 14th Amendment Solution. Mark Joseph Stern over at Slate pretty much noted the "goose is cooked" regarding SCOTUS' view on the matter:

The Supreme Court is not going to let Colorado, or any other state, remove Donald Trump from the ballot in 2024. That’s the upshot of Thursday’s arguments in Trump v. Anderson, the blockbuster case contesting the former president’s constitutional ability to run for office. A clear majority of justices expressed overwhelming skepticism toward the plaintiffs’ claim that Trump is disqualified under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment because he “engaged in insurrection.” The only real question is what rationale the court will use to reject that theory—though one emerged as a probable consensus: Justices across the ideological spectrum suggested that individual states cannot enforce Section 3 against federal candidates, at least not without congressional approval...

The notion that individual states can’t take unilateral action to strip federal candidates from the ballot has immense practical appeal, and arguably aligns with broader constitutional principles. But it is not what Section 3 says on its face, nor is it clearly borne out by the original meaning of the amendment. Many of the justices’ questions on Thursday amounted to policy arguments thinly cloaked in the language of textualism and originalism...

Amy Howe over at SCOTUSBlog covered how much of the conservative Justices looked at the matter, arguing over the history of the 14th Amendment's actual implementation:

A central issue at Thursday’s argument was whether the question of how Section 3’s ban on government service by individuals who have “engaged in insurrection” can be enforced – do states like Colorado have the power to enforce it themselves, as the voters contend, or (as Trump argues) can it only be enforced through laws passed by Congress?

Some justices looked to history, pressing Murray to provide examples of other scenarios in which states have relied on Section 3 to disqualify candidates for federal office. Murray pointed to an 1868 congressional election in Georgia, as well as to state elections and candidates disqualified by Congress, and he noted that the dearth of examples was “not surprising” because elections operated differently then, with ballots for political parties rather than individual candidates. Therefore, he reasoned, “there wouldn’t have been a process for determining before an election whether a candidate was qualified.”

But that answer did not mollify Justice Clarence Thomas, who observed that the “plethora of Confederates” still present in public life in the post-Civil War era would suggest that this issue would come up.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh echoed Thomas’ emphasis on the absence of any historical examples as evidence that states do not have the standalone power to disqualify candidates under Section 3. He cited Griffin’s Case, an 1869 decision by Chief Justice Salmon Chase, serving on a lower court. In that case, Chase ruled, Section 3 can only be enforced through laws passed by Congress.

Although the decision is not binding on the Supreme Court, Kavanaugh suggested that one year later Congress had Griffin’s Case in mind when it enacted the Enforcement Act of 1870, which gave the Department of Justice the power to bring lawsuits seeking to disqualify federal officials. For 155 years, Kavanaugh concluded, no state has attempted to disqualify a federal officer from the ballot under Section 3 because “there’s been a settled understanding” that states don’t have that power. Moreover, he added, “Congress can change that” but hasn’t done so.

Murray pushed back, suggesting that no state had tried to disqualify candidates for federal office because there had not been a need to do so. Virtually all former Confederates had received amnesty by 1876, so that there would no longer be a need to disqualify them from the ballot, he observed. And since then, he contended, there had been no reason to invoke Section 3 because the country had not previously experienced anything like the Jan. 6 attacks...

But on the question of enforcement, the court focused even more specifically on the possible implications of upholding the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision. Justice Elena Kagan was among the most vocal in expressing her concerns. Why, she queried, should one state be able to disqualify a candidate from the ballot and, in so doing, effectively determine who becomes the president of the United States? Rather than sounding like an issue for an individual state to decide, she said, that “sounds awfully national to me.”

Justice Amy Coney Barrett appeared to agree. If the court upholds the Colorado ruling, she posited, it will as a practical matter decide the issue for all the other states. Like some of her colleagues, she envisioned possible logistical problems, observing that the court would have to make its decision using the facts developed in whatever state-court case made its way to them first. In a scenario in which the factual record isn’t well developed, she asked, how should the court review those findings? It “just doesn’t seem like a state call,” she concluded...

When the liberal-leaning Justices are questioning the validity of a matter alongside the conservative ones, it doesn't look good. That Kagan was looking at the question of jurisdiction - and that Jackson was looking at the historic element that the 14th Amendment focused on ex-Confederates reaching Congress instead of the presidency - suggests that applying Section 3 to trump running for the White House - for the moment - won't happen.

The way SCOTUS is framing the debate, they could well make it that the 14th Amendment could apply but that it's up to Congress at the federal level to enforce it. The issue of what "insurrection" actually is - Jackson did berate trump's lawyer over whether an insurrection can be "organized" or not - could also get applied to the final ruling here, although it may force a set of concurrent rulings that would muddle things further.

I had hoped earlier last month when Colorado Supreme Court made their ruling that this would be the way to prevent a violent, vulgar force like trump from regaining presidential power. I did fear that the conservative-controlled U.S. Supreme Court would try to find a way to excuse trump's behavior in some way: Thing is, the point of contention that today's arguments aimed for - the question of who has the power to enforce the 14th Amendment - did reach valid conclusions. I have to admit that banning trump from the ballot over his calls for insurrection on January 6th may not work after all.

There is still the matter of the federal court case charging trump on four counts over his misdeeds that day, with the question of trump's efforts to delay that trial set to get resolved soon - this Monday at least - and whether the Supreme Court will hear that and rewrite all of reality to grant trump his request for Absolute Immunity. THAT seems less likely to pass judicial scrutiny even for the conservative justices like Roberts.

But then again...

We voters have to take into consideration that the legal system is not going to let us off the hook anytime soon. It is up to us - to the 81 millions who voted for Biden in 2020, and any newer voters rising to join those ranks - to return to the ballot box this November and ensure trump and his Republican lackeys get denied any claim to power by our power to vote.

For the LOVE OF GOD AND COUNTRY, America. Do not vote trump, at all.

What If: The Colorado Ruling Applies to ALL of 2024 Primaries?

So, let's just say the Colorado Supreme Court ruling that said trump should be barred from the presidential ballot because he engaged in insurrection regarding the January 6th riots goes to the US Supreme Court, and even the majority conservative bench of six Republican jurists rule against trump in some fashion.

It's not a given that the six will rule for trump outright. Doing so would go against their own Originalist opinions the Far Right justices had been arguing over the years. They would have to flush down the toilet the Colorado court's detailed opinions, some of which used a SCOTUS Justice's - Gorsuch - own arguments to make the decision that the states are obligated to defend the electoral process. In some respects, trump is asking the Supreme Court to ignore a constitutional amendment - or interpret it into utter uselessness - which bodes ill for any future rulings that could ignore other amendments to the Far Right's detriment. The justices may feel territorial about holding onto their powers of judicial review, after all.

There could still be some kind of ruling where Chief Justice Roberts can retain some integrity for the high court all the while giving trump what he wants - to stay on the ballot to avoid his criminal fate as much as possible - but that would be threading the smallest eye of a needle in legal history. 

This is as much a YES or NO legal decision as we will see: Either trump committed acts in violation of the 14th Amendment and should be barred from future elected office, or the 14th Amendment section insisting on blocking insurrectionists is unenforceable and trump stays on ballot (they shouldn't be able to argue if trump engaged in seditious/insurrectionist acts to begin with, because the lower court and state supreme court both found trump did, and that it violated the 14th's requirements. The lower court ruled that it didn't find trump was an "officer" as defined by the amendment, which the state court overruled).

So, let's say the Supreme Court rules 5-4 at the least that trump did violate the 14th Amendment, and that Colorado and other states could remove trump's name from the ballots for the 2024 Republican primaries.

Okay, after all the MAGA rioting settles down, what would actually happen?

The most likely thing is that the heavily Democratic-controlled (Blue) states will take trump's name off the ballots. The Republican Party and the media may scream that it denies the voters a choice; but this isn't about the voters this is about the constitution, and the constitution restricts choices all the time (after all, the Natural Born requirement for Presidents is why we don't have a President Schwarzenegger - who was popular nationally - after his stint as California's governor in the 2000s).

It's likely the heavily Republican-controlled (Red) states will ignore the legal efforts to block trump's name, even if the state courts follow through on any lawsuits filed over the matter (it would then be a matter if the state courts will hold Republican elections officials in contempt over this). The question mark will then be the battleground states where governments split between parties for legislatures, courts, and executive branches decide to bar trump as an insurrectionist from the ballots.

How would any of this affect the 2024 elections cycle.

If we look at the primaries themselves, trump can't afford to be blocked from too many state ballots. Based on the information at the Green Papers website tracking the primaries, the Republican nominating process requires a winning candidate lock up 1215 delegates.

Why is New Jersey, a state in the top 20 for population,
stuck with so few delegates?

So let's say the states that we know are solidly Democratic - California, New York, Illinois, about 16 others - and several battleground states that may agree that trump can be barred - New Hampshire, maybe Virginia, maybe Georgia considering all the local opposition from the governor and other state officials going on - take trump out of the primaries? How many delegates will that be? 

Given that the delegate total of blocked states is around 1093 (out of 2429), it looks like trump could still eke out a delegate victory with the remaining Red/pro-trump states and get his name on the Republican general ballot.

This all depends on which states actually follow through on removing trump from the ballot. Some of these states I added may not, and who knows one or three of the Red states may see it happen if their courts rule on it and can enforce those rulings. If enough states bar trump to where he can't reach 1215, he's screwed.

This also depends on if the US Supreme Court rules against trump outright, finding his actions on January 6th are punishable by disqualifying him from every state (or at least encourage all 50 states to do so).

This also depends on if the Republican national leadership doesn't change their own primary rules in case trump does get thrown off ALL the ballots. They could try pulling a last-minute rule change to negate primaries and just go with a convention floor vote in spite of the 14th Amendment's enforcement.

While the state primary ballots are at play now, if trump survives that he still has to deal with a general election where the states that barred him on the primaries can do so again with the November ballot. The Electoral College math is slightly different from the delegate math, and if enough battleground states deny him a spot on the ballot - and refuse all write-ins - he could once again lose enough Electors to face defeat (that he could be barred in nearly half the states will definitely lower his popular vote total across the nation).

This is all speculation, of course. We still have to see how the Supreme Court rules: If they abide by the judicial review process, if they agree with Colorado's ruling, if they find trump accountable under constitutional law. If Roberts' Court gives trump carte blanche, then partisanship wins out and the legal system is truly dead under trump's inevitable misrule.

The one thing we know for certain is that elections matter, that voter turnout matters, and the majority of the nation that dares not let trump back in the White House better fucking show up in 2024 to stop him. Get the damn vote out, Americans. Stop trump, save the world.

Update 12/28/23: I may have misspoke too soon, in that Colorado has not fully removed trump's name from the ballot, as they're awaiting the Supreme Court decision and the Secretary of State won't be doing it for the primary vote.

Michigan's Supreme Court agreed with a lower court to allow trump to remain on their ballot, although I've read elsewhere - need to find that link - that the state would revisit the matter if trump is convicted in the federal case regarding his involvement in the January 6th riots.

In the meantime, Maine's Secretary of State held her own hearing on the matter and determined trump violated the 14th Amendment, so she IS removing his name from the ballot. This will clearly go to the courts as well.

Just a reminder kids that this isn't about the voters' choice, this is about the rules etched into the Constitution itself.