I am getting worried that the courts are not going to save us (actually, I have long thought that they weren't up to the task, and since the Executive and DoJ hold all the enforcement powers, that the Judiciary was not really the savior.)
How long until they disappear one of the never Trump gadflies to El Salvador without due process?
A variation on Pastor Niemöller's famous words has been ringing in my ears for weeks: "First they came for the undocumented. Then they came for the green card holders . . ."
First they came for the "violent rapist immigrants", then the "student terrorists", and "the visitors," and unfortunately some of the citizens got taken away too, ooops! is what they said. Trump is a madman and anyone who can get out should. In Germany it was the communists, then the socialist, the "disabled" and then the Jews, the Romani, the Blacks, the radicals, the ... Every fascist regime has to continually find new scape goats.
SCOTUS is a kangaroo court, with only 3 serious members. Ironically the three that are not Republican appointed. Bush was like Trump but a tepid version, not bold enough.
El Salvador is like a Nazi death camp. So, this is what Americans are supporting. I am outraged that there is no movement against this. I am afraid to return to the US and get my things and leave for a period of time, until it is safe.
Trump is like an abusive spouse or bad drunk parent. You need to leave until they are gone. Everyone with the gumption to do that should get out. Most countries cost less than the US, but with no savings hard to enter other countries.
We know the oligarchs are not only making money off the stock market, but also have their homes in other countries to escape to after they tank the US. They have homes in countries that won't allow them to destroy them as easily as the Americans have done. Greed catches up.
John — balls and strikes — Roberts and the Federalist Society. Not a surprise.
Headline on the Federalist Society home page: On Day One, President Trump Took Meaningful Steps to Rein In Administrative Abuse, Protect Due Process, and Improve Government Transparency.
Right? The legal reasoning in the dissents makes a mockery of the wishy washy half baked legalese and wish casting of the actual decisions. Just a simple "this opinion is a legal joke and the 5 justices supporting it know that, thanks for wasting my time" would suffice.
He’s in a bind. His right wing single minded pursuit of a unitary executive didn’t leave room for ambiguity or nuance. Having no experience with it, he doesn’t do it well.
At this point one has to wonder why we even bother with the entire judicial process. Nearly every single judge or panel, when presented with the administration's actions, has ruled against them. Then we follow the inevitable process, whereby, appeal after appeal, the case reaches the Supreme court, at which point a wishy washy decision is released that, more often than not, passes the buck, makes a legally weak specious argument, or, very occasionally, gives the administration exactly what it wants. Why bother with the cost, the effort, the breathless media coverage - just send everything directly to the court so they can dispense with it and save us all the headache, heartache and false hopes.
Next Trump has to test the military. If they are complicit with illegal actions then the US will have fully gone over to a fascist regime. I left that country, but not completely. I did not want to be living under a second Trump administration. I did not want my daughter to live under it, and of course she still wants to visit her friends, back home. I understand that but do not consider it a safe country to live in at the moment, especially not for anyone who is an immigrant, a visitor, a woman, a trans person, a person with black or brown skin, a person in the media, a lawyer, an academic, a non-Christian, a person who went against Trump in any way, etc... The list will grow longer.
Prof. Ruth Ben-Ghiat and Political Consultant Anat Shenker-Ocasio were discussing that a fascist regime needs to point to a dark and dangerous enemy that they alone can save everyone from. At the same time they need to show that they are effectively taking on and squelching that enemy. Then, they have to create a new enemy, and this goes on and on until most people are included.
The notion that John Roberts "rebuked" or "scolded" Donald Trump is, in my view, utterly ludicrous. First, Trump has already said that because he wasn't mentioned by name, it didn't happen! Second, when I went to law school, the one subject we never broached was whether the Supreme Court of the United States was corrupt. But that is plainly the case today.
Sure, the Supremes have made a lot of truly abysmal decisions over the years, like Dred Scott, Plessy v. Ferguson, Lockner, Korematsu, etc., but they have been largely fixed by a civil war, constitutional amendments, or outright overruled by the court.
The worst decisions now (by far!) have been written in the last 45 years since I graduated from law school, with the population of the court including Scalia, Thomas, Roberts, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett. They don't give a tinker's dam about the rule of law and never have. And they have the thinnest skins of any public officials I have ever seen.
They have, over the past few terms, utterly decimated the very foundation of everything I learned in civil procedure, criminal law, and constitutional law, and that's just for starters. They are all corrupt (yes, even the liberals), because they have no enforceable ethics code, refuse to police themselves, and thumb their noses at their own rulings in an often whimsical, always hypocritical, obtuse and intellectually dishonest way whenever it serves their purpose.
Every one of these six in the majority has made no secret of their disdain for "activist judges," all the while being the very embodiment of what it is they publicly condemn. There is no more activist court than the Roberts court. There never has been, and there never will be. The worst decisions in the history of the court have been rendered with John Roberts as chief justice.
Just last term, for instance, they redacted and rewrote the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution, legalized machine guns, took control of all regulatory authority, and granted this president of the United States monarchical powers. They pulled that last one, criminal immunity, directly out of their corrupt asses. No one on the court, not even Sotomayor, recognized that advancing that argument in the first place was unethical.
Then they all magically showed up at Trump's batshit crazy Castro-esque pseudo SOTU last month so that they could kiss his ass in public and receive his bullshit thanks for pulling his ass out of the fire on 91 criminal charges.
If they could've stopped his conviction on 34 felony counts in the state of New York, they would've. Instead, they'll just settle for Trump literally getting away with those crimes by insisting that there be no penalty imposed for those felonies. Oh, and insuring that none of the other crimes he committed will ever be prosecuted against him.
Finally, let's stop bullshitting about these five Ivy Leaguers (and one Opus Dei Notre Dame) in the majority. The only lessons that they took from Robert Bork's hearing was that if they wanted to get on the bench, all they needed to do was lie. They learned that lesson well. They all perjured themselves when they said, under oath, that "no man is above the law," and "I haven't made up my mind" on a pantheon of issues like Voting Rights, Abortion, executive power, separation of powers, ethics, or the independence of the judiciary.
The end of our democracy began when those perjurers darkened the doorway of the US Supreme Court building. It will not be fixed in my lifetime. And that is truly depressing.
I am getting worried that the courts are not going to save us (actually, I have long thought that they weren't up to the task, and since the Executive and DoJ hold all the enforcement powers, that the Judiciary was not really the savior.)
How long until they disappear one of the never Trump gadflies to El Salvador without due process?
I am shocked but not surprised.
A variation on Pastor Niemöller's famous words has been ringing in my ears for weeks: "First they came for the undocumented. Then they came for the green card holders . . ."
First they came for the "violent rapist immigrants", then the "student terrorists", and "the visitors," and unfortunately some of the citizens got taken away too, ooops! is what they said. Trump is a madman and anyone who can get out should. In Germany it was the communists, then the socialist, the "disabled" and then the Jews, the Romani, the Blacks, the radicals, the ... Every fascist regime has to continually find new scape goats.
SCOTUS may actually help the administration to bring an end to the Democracy! 🤦♀️ Really scary! 🫣
They've been working on it since before Trump was elected the first time, e.g., the Citizens United decision (2010).
They sure seem to be taking that path.
I have to say that the light is, indeed, fading.
SCOTUS is a kangaroo court, with only 3 serious members. Ironically the three that are not Republican appointed. Bush was like Trump but a tepid version, not bold enough.
El Salvador is like a Nazi death camp. So, this is what Americans are supporting. I am outraged that there is no movement against this. I am afraid to return to the US and get my things and leave for a period of time, until it is safe.
Trump is like an abusive spouse or bad drunk parent. You need to leave until they are gone. Everyone with the gumption to do that should get out. Most countries cost less than the US, but with no savings hard to enter other countries.
We know the oligarchs are not only making money off the stock market, but also have their homes in other countries to escape to after they tank the US. They have homes in countries that won't allow them to destroy them as easily as the Americans have done. Greed catches up.
John — balls and strikes — Roberts and the Federalist Society. Not a surprise.
Headline on the Federalist Society home page: On Day One, President Trump Took Meaningful Steps to Rein In Administrative Abuse, Protect Due Process, and Improve Government Transparency.
Chief Justice John Roberts the perfect example of a turkey voting for Christmas
I hope , when the time comes, he's not too big for the oven.
As always the dissents make more sense than the foolish and evil Trump-loving majority opinions.
Just once I'd like to see a dissent saying: This decision is obviously wrong. I want no part of it, including explaining why it's so obviously wrong.
Right? The legal reasoning in the dissents makes a mockery of the wishy washy half baked legalese and wish casting of the actual decisions. Just a simple "this opinion is a legal joke and the 5 justices supporting it know that, thanks for wasting my time" would suffice.
He’s in a bind. His right wing single minded pursuit of a unitary executive didn’t leave room for ambiguity or nuance. Having no experience with it, he doesn’t do it well.
This is a critical piece and spot on. Roberts would rather surrender power for the sake of the court’s relevance than stand up to it.
At this point one has to wonder why we even bother with the entire judicial process. Nearly every single judge or panel, when presented with the administration's actions, has ruled against them. Then we follow the inevitable process, whereby, appeal after appeal, the case reaches the Supreme court, at which point a wishy washy decision is released that, more often than not, passes the buck, makes a legally weak specious argument, or, very occasionally, gives the administration exactly what it wants. Why bother with the cost, the effort, the breathless media coverage - just send everything directly to the court so they can dispense with it and save us all the headache, heartache and false hopes.
Methinks that Roberts’s capitulation to Trump is part personal racism and part desperation to keep his job.
A side product of the SCOTUS habeas decision is to make Texas the ideal locale for immigrant pre-deportation holding camps.
Next Trump has to test the military. If they are complicit with illegal actions then the US will have fully gone over to a fascist regime. I left that country, but not completely. I did not want to be living under a second Trump administration. I did not want my daughter to live under it, and of course she still wants to visit her friends, back home. I understand that but do not consider it a safe country to live in at the moment, especially not for anyone who is an immigrant, a visitor, a woman, a trans person, a person with black or brown skin, a person in the media, a lawyer, an academic, a non-Christian, a person who went against Trump in any way, etc... The list will grow longer.
https://lindaweide.substack.com/p/foreign-students-at-a-us-university?r=f0qfn
Prof. Ruth Ben-Ghiat and Political Consultant Anat Shenker-Ocasio were discussing that a fascist regime needs to point to a dark and dangerous enemy that they alone can save everyone from. At the same time they need to show that they are effectively taking on and squelching that enemy. Then, they have to create a new enemy, and this goes on and on until most people are included.
The Injustices are setting us up for a MAGAmafia execution. They’ll replace Thomas and Alito with younger even more malleable Righties ….
There are some miracles. Just in: The SC by 9-0 rules that Trump must "facilitate" return of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia from El Salvador.
The notion that John Roberts "rebuked" or "scolded" Donald Trump is, in my view, utterly ludicrous. First, Trump has already said that because he wasn't mentioned by name, it didn't happen! Second, when I went to law school, the one subject we never broached was whether the Supreme Court of the United States was corrupt. But that is plainly the case today.
Sure, the Supremes have made a lot of truly abysmal decisions over the years, like Dred Scott, Plessy v. Ferguson, Lockner, Korematsu, etc., but they have been largely fixed by a civil war, constitutional amendments, or outright overruled by the court.
The worst decisions now (by far!) have been written in the last 45 years since I graduated from law school, with the population of the court including Scalia, Thomas, Roberts, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett. They don't give a tinker's dam about the rule of law and never have. And they have the thinnest skins of any public officials I have ever seen.
They have, over the past few terms, utterly decimated the very foundation of everything I learned in civil procedure, criminal law, and constitutional law, and that's just for starters. They are all corrupt (yes, even the liberals), because they have no enforceable ethics code, refuse to police themselves, and thumb their noses at their own rulings in an often whimsical, always hypocritical, obtuse and intellectually dishonest way whenever it serves their purpose.
Every one of these six in the majority has made no secret of their disdain for "activist judges," all the while being the very embodiment of what it is they publicly condemn. There is no more activist court than the Roberts court. There never has been, and there never will be. The worst decisions in the history of the court have been rendered with John Roberts as chief justice.
Just last term, for instance, they redacted and rewrote the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution, legalized machine guns, took control of all regulatory authority, and granted this president of the United States monarchical powers. They pulled that last one, criminal immunity, directly out of their corrupt asses. No one on the court, not even Sotomayor, recognized that advancing that argument in the first place was unethical.
Then they all magically showed up at Trump's batshit crazy Castro-esque pseudo SOTU last month so that they could kiss his ass in public and receive his bullshit thanks for pulling his ass out of the fire on 91 criminal charges.
If they could've stopped his conviction on 34 felony counts in the state of New York, they would've. Instead, they'll just settle for Trump literally getting away with those crimes by insisting that there be no penalty imposed for those felonies. Oh, and insuring that none of the other crimes he committed will ever be prosecuted against him.
Finally, let's stop bullshitting about these five Ivy Leaguers (and one Opus Dei Notre Dame) in the majority. The only lessons that they took from Robert Bork's hearing was that if they wanted to get on the bench, all they needed to do was lie. They learned that lesson well. They all perjured themselves when they said, under oath, that "no man is above the law," and "I haven't made up my mind" on a pantheon of issues like Voting Rights, Abortion, executive power, separation of powers, ethics, or the independence of the judiciary.
The end of our democracy began when those perjurers darkened the doorway of the US Supreme Court building. It will not be fixed in my lifetime. And that is truly depressing.