Ok, everybody had their fun saying Biden should just disappear his political enemies because it’s allowed now. It’s a new day, and those jokes are all old now, and also they’re cynical and stupid and counterproductive.
Democracy is on the ballot. Stop fucking acting like it’s already gone.
Because if you and enough people decide it’s already gone, it is. It’s like watching Peter Pan where you, the audience, have to clap and say you believe in fairies for them to exist, except it’s real.
My concern is this: if Roberts is willing to do this, we have to consider that he's willing to invalidate election results that support Biden.
Maybe he is and maybe he isn't. But the risk is enough that I think we have to find any way to reform the court before the election.
Well, SCOTUS just gave Biden the tools.
EO that says: 4 new seats. Recess appointment 4 justices in. Hope that Congress is too broken to stop when they reconvene.
But of course, that means not clapping for the fairy. At least for a little while.
It’s important to note that this would both backfire electorally and also not work practically. There’s more to seating some more justices than just Biden not getting prosecuted for doing it illegally after he leaves office.
Right! Biden is like “there’s four new justices now” and the court is like “lol no there’s not” and every paper is like “senile Biden believes he’s a king” and the house impeaches him and probably honestly the 25th amendment is invoked.
What Roberts and his court have done is made it very clear that there is no institution we can trust to keep our Democracy for us. All of them can fail if we vote badly. The only thing that will protect us is electing good people to office. All the offices. That's the only actual safeguard.
Well if you control the legislature you can always pass laws that do more to constrain the system and the executive.
So if you want "more" then the next step is still the same. Pass better laws.
You need control of government, and the ability to govern. Winning elections is the biggest chunk of this. Not everything on its own, but the big piece.
Step 1, win elections. Step 2, keep winning them until the GOP is forced to change their behavior. Step 3, fix the laws so they actually work to constrain the executive.
I am definitely not on board with "abuse executive power for as long as we have the executive." That's a bad plan.
How about
Step 1: abuse the executive power, and if that would lose you elections,
Step 2: suspend elections, and if people have a problem with that,
Step 3: military force
Its foolproof.
It’s a fair warning. Especially to the Good Guys. Though perhaps not inevitable.
The question posed (eg Drezner’s substack) is what about if the Bad Guys did it and it didn’t lose them elections.
That. But also. If a democracy elects an authoritarian leader, but doesn’t react strongly and reject this leader; and allows them to begin the process of authoritarianism; and voters / civil society decide (majoritarian?) not to stop him …
If we re-elect Donald Trump then we are a nation that wants Donald Trump and we have to come to grips with that. It's a feeling someone who spent their first 40 years living in KY is all too familiar with.
We voted against Trump’s reelection.
If this new SCOTUS power; if a forced deportation order; other crazy Trump 2 schemes; if one of these upset a fraction of a Republicans; or encouraged more non-voters to come out, a political backlash could build capable of rejecting an authoritarian.
It depends where you are in the authoritarian spiral. At some point it could have to be civil society and disobedience. Not just voting to get you there.
The scarier premise we were contemplating initially (again see Drezner) is what if people learn to accept it.
Like, DACA was a novel use of executive power, I'm not saying that it's per se a bad idea. It's just a bad idea to declare that there are four new SCOTUS justices now.
Yeah. I get the slippery slope argument.
(And I’m not disagreeing with Fig or others in this thread just trying to feel around for what we’re saying and testing arguments).
But I don’t think all actions are equal and I don’t think one always falls down the slope.
My argument is if we’re saying democracy is on the ballot, which it is, we can’t argue the way to save it is to abandon it to claim dictatorial powers before the bad guy can. That’s not a slippery slope argument, that’s starting already at the bottom.
Yeah. I do think the hypothetical yields to more nuanced and complicated decisions once context / severity / extent is applied.
Like. Using the military to force universal voting which (let’s assume) would generate the ‘right’ outcome.
Using Seal Team 6 to force the scotus to reconsider
Their last opinion and do a new one.
Those things are not the way to restore our democracy.
But are their norms or other reaches within this new authority that might be a tactic to ensure Trump didn’t return to power (not sure what those are) and would this fail similar tests?
I do think that some of the proposals for exercises of the new powers granted by the court are going way long on what’s practically allowed to this president now in the short term. The president having after the fact criminal immunity for official acts is bad but it’s not “Biden can do anything now”
I also don't really have an easy, generalizable principle here that applies to everything. Don't do evil things; greater risk is probably necessary in an emergency, etc.
Like, that means that the DOJ can't be fully independent of political considerations (not that it ever has been), because the immediate criminal conspiracy is political.
Which is different still than just the president sending over a list of guys to jail.
Yes, acting maximally within the law is different than declaring that the law does not bind you. The first is good and necessary, and they should do it as much as they can. The second is an admission that we are lost.
Are you saying the new scotus decision is a false set of laws; or that it is properly the new boundary until we change it back and rectify it.
We still need norms and sane moral and ethical use of power irrespective of what new power has been conferred in POTUS.
Ie Seal Team Six should not be used to “solve” this problem, even if that power has now been granted.
Or more relevantly. Our independent DOJ is based largely on norms. We shall want to keep that.
But Trump will (already tried to) break these norms.
Are the norms good and desirable in a good government sense? If yes, are they things which wind up holding us back when the other side has abandoned them? If yes, does abandoning them ourselves lead us to a better place or does it enable more racing to the bottom?
Michelle Obama: When they go low, we go high.
For example: We liberals would never hold up confirmation of a Supreme Court justice for a year.
Look where that got us.
We need to return to the rule of law. Before we can do that, we need to get through the current crisis. Trump cannot be the next president, or all is lost, including the independent DOJ. Seal Team Six is starting to sound pretty good.
