that the whole project is at serious and maybe fatal risk if trump is imprisoned or loses in the fall and that conservatives on the court have a duty to try to prevent that any way they can, through the most motivated reasoning they can conjure.
there just *isn't* another republican waiting in the wings who can take up the mantle here with the same kind of public support, it's trump now or never, and panic does not encourage careful, disciplined, strategic decisions.
Lot of factors like this make me wonder how much longer the GOP can be nationally competitive, not even including bird flu likely jumping to humans soon and killing off even more of their voters
They've got the courts - and now everything has to go through the courts.
The popularly-elected branches are now officially a would-be-nice, not a must have.
There are even, lurking in the details of today's decision, places where the court can modulate the extent to which a President is a king.
The thing is, you only have control of the courts until someone goes “hey, why are we listening to these bozos?” Judicial power is even more of an illusion than most governmental power.
When SCOTUS stopped the recount in a state governed by Bush's brother, whose Secretary of State overseeing elections was Bush's campaign chair, I predicted civil war in 20-25 years.
Now 3 of the lawyers who helped Bush steal that election sit on SCOTUS, yet that fact rarely gets remarked upon.
I caught on later, but I currently predict Civil War 2.0 in 5 or less years. And the funny thing about predictions is that the closer to "now" the predicted thing is, the less things that can happen to change the result.
However, I have another prediction, this time about the result:
The "rematch" of North vs South will end the same way the 1st one did. Bloodiest war of it's time period, and the more equality-and-justice oriented side the victor.
Well, I say "Victor", but this time it's more likely to be "Survivor" We've hopefully learned that the south will not just lie down and be ruled, seeing how many Amendments it took for them to even (legally only) recognize PoC as "humans with rights just like them", that'll happen again probably.
It's a nation-sized cult & cults have this tendency to decline or fall apart when their Heavenly Father dies. He's 78. It really is now or never for them.
i'm not really being snarky; i don't know if roberts thinks about it in terms quite as stark as that, but that's because everyone's the hero of their own story and most people try to find any way they can to rationalize and justify the choices they make, i assume this goes 100x for judges
SCOTUS may embody the highest degree of sophistication and erudition in self deception, if any of those six are still denying to themselves that they are in the tank.
I think this is true *and yet* this is not the most careful decision of its type he could have crafted to look reasonable! I’d guess it’s the most careful one he could craft without the other five ditching him and going way further.
She concurred with the idea that there's a difference been official and unofficial acts and that presidents have immunity from the former, but she agreed with Sotomayor about how absurd it is to say that all *official communications* are similarly protected, even when they further a conspiracy to 1/
So, then the question becomes, if the other 4 conservatives had lost Roberts, would she be the fifth vote with him and the liberals? Or would such a coalition not even have a possible consensus?
I mean it really feels like they have gotten even sloppier- the nonsense of the students loans case ignoring the plain text of the law, Bruen being so badly reasoned they had to revisit it less than six months later, and now this which seems like it goes nowhere anyone wants it to go except the 6.
the whole term has been, even to a layidiot like me, one sloppy, eye-rolling clusterfuck after another, which isn't sustainable. though, unsustainability doesn't mean "good"
The whole invention of “history and tradition” to justify their bullshit decisions has been *exceedingly* sloppy and shown more than ever that they only care about results and the rest is barely even a fig leaf.
I mean I am not kidding when I say that there are a lot of lawyers out there who likely have having a bit of an identity crisis right now because the activist liberal viewpoint of “the law is brute power built off of counting votes weakly constrained by norms” has been proven unambiguously true
One summer I stayed with a handful of friends in our frat house at college. We had a system where we would rotate who made dinner for everyone, and we all went ~once a week. We got one skip day over the course of the summer where we could just order pizza instead. Anyway…
…the next summer we did the same, but at some point we realized the rules were arbitrary and we could just order pizza every night, and that’s what we did for the rest of the summer. The Supreme Court feels like that, to me.
yes.
i believe the majority of the electorate already basically gets this dynamic, generally, as well (and yes i know the polling numbers)
trump/theocracy will lose in nov, more than biden will win
One of the things I’ve been thinking about is how incredibly homophobic mainstream conservatives are, and how that dynamic is playing out in the FedSoc monoculture that dominates the judiciary.
