I want everyone to think about what Trump will do with explicit absolute immunity from prosecution and the full power of the presidency of the United States of America
those are the stakes in November, full stop
look i'll be clear, I will be voting, and encouraging everyone I know to do the same, against donald trump and the end of democracy in this country in november. I do not care if that means i'm voting for a man who is literally dead.
the decision lays out - explicitly in the case of the DOJ and implicitly in case of the military - that a president can order the prosecution of or a military strike on anyone he doesn’t like and fire anyone who doesn’t comply until he finds someone who will
he may not be prosecuted for this
“democrats have to win every election forever” is not a sustainable solution and it is quite literally the one we are facing unless we break the power of this court
The electoral problem has become, as the IRA gloated to Thatcher, that the GOP only needs to get lucky once and the Democrats need to be lucky forever.
Either they’re going to do something about the court - now, not eventually - or we will simply play iterations of this game until the GOP wins.
Yes, ‘you can’t duly elect an administration to then use experts and science to combat climate change, insure airline safety, or regulate drugs’ was a BFD. ‘Grifty McShitweasel is a king’ just drove it from the front page.
The part I disagree with is that today's our only chance. Fixing the courts is likely going to require a new crop of reps even if it should be expanded today, yesterday really and the day before that and the day befo
But like - we have a corrupted court, academic establishment, top to bottom media, religious community, etc. not to mention business. The fuckers got their ducks in a row
But they are the minority. And is THIS close to all falling apart for them. And I think they know it, which is why they are all-in on TFG. Win in Nov. is Step 1. Then start worry about Step 2
No one alive in 1850 thought they'd live to see the end of slavery. We've overcome worst but the future isnt set in stone and it's up to all of us to carve the future we want
you could believe, in 1854, that the night was dark. the moderates were smashed, the pro-slavery faction in control of the Dems - slavery was going into Kansas, was going to go into Cuba, was going to go deeper into Mexico, the bad people controlled all branches of government and would never let go.
and then within a decade the slave power was burning and armies of Black men were the ones holding the torch - within a decade and a half, the formerly enslaved were in Congress and voting in elections.
One reason why I like the depiction of the quotes better in the book is this quote happens in the shire before frodo agreed to the quest, right after gandalf explains how the forces of darkness are mustering and how little hope there is but ultimately we still have our duty to better this world
Consider: this isn't good for business/money, either. The fascist minority in the United States does not have the money and the spending power to keep turning the engine business currently has. Most of that money is in the Evil Liberal places, that's why Republicans hate the DEI boogeyman so much.
You have some rich fucks who prioritize not disrupting themselves, true. And other rich fucks who are willing to hurt themselves financially for insane beliefs. But most money is somewhere between inactive and generally-center-left
It's tough for the "why are you all just telling me to vote harder, ugh" crowd, but that's the bottom line of this opinion:
Unless Dems hold the Whitehouse indefinitely, the next R president will declare any election that goes against them fraudulent and use the DoJ + DoD to cancel it.
We must focus. There is not enough time to reform the court before the election. If trump wins we will never have the chance. Like it or not we are beaten if Biden is not re-elected and if Congress doesn’t have a Democrat majority
Luckily, the Court has just declared that it's entirely legal for the sitting president to have them all removed from office without justification.
It would be part of their official duties, after all.
The funny part is it's even worse than this. Even if democrats *do* win every election for the next 40 years, the court is already lost for a generation. The fix isn't electing dems, it's electing dems (or some other party) *willing to actually take power from the court*
According to the Supreme Court, Biden could order the REP justices all drowned in the Washington Monument reflecting pool without fear of prosecution. Just as an example.
Not only do Democrats have to win every election ever.
They need to do this while overcoming the electoral college, gerrymandering, small-state Senate bias, voter disenfranchisement, media bias ...
As long as the other major party is a fascist one, it's the only solution, because even if we pack the court with 8 new liberal justices, nothing prevents the problem from recurring a few decades down the line. The GOP is a cancer that must be excised and replaced with a party that values democracy.
I've been using the Athens debacle at the end of the Peloponnesian War as illustration:
Athens had to win EVERY battle. Sparta only needed to win one.
It's unsustainable.
(Yes, this is flippant. I’m at the “I’m going to laugh helplessly and nihilistically for a little bit so I don’t start destroying things,” stage right now.)
Agreed. If Democrats can ever win the Executive & Legislative Branches again, they can codify laws that will protect our rights & make it harder for the fascists to destroy the country.
It's not just the court but also the demographics that allow dozens of underpopulated states to wield outsize power due to a Constitution finalized in 1787. Wyoming with less than 600,000 souls has two Senators just as California does. And what if this happens: www.commoncause.org/our-work/con...
Short of a trifecta in November (not impossible, but odds are against it), IDK how we accomplish that.
The good news is, if Democrats *DO* have a trifecta in January, it will be one that doesn't depend on the useless bastards Joe Manchin or Kyrsten Sinema, and so court expansion is a possibility.
Funny thing is (not really funny) this is what Republicans realized a while ago, and the strategy of taking every quasi-legal advantage to the extreme when they managed to get their foot in the door is how we ended up with 1/3 of the Supreme Court appointed by a guy who has 34 felony convictions.
One party winning forever isn’t particularly small-d democratic either. What makes a polity a democracy is that everybody loses an election sometimes & no one is in power forever.
