No surprise there. They don’t give a shit about solving the problem. They certainly weren’t going to put any effort into it. This was all about being able to announce that they brought down prescription drug prices. Well, that and to slap Trump’s name on yet another useless waste of time and money.
Even if they were following the law and had no agenda or ulterior motives they wouldn’t be about crime. And that’s part of the problem. They avoid constitutional limitations associated with all other forms of law enforcement by having only administrative authority and dealing with civil law.
It’s like giving postal workers body armor and assault rifles and letting them abduct anyone that they suspect might have used improper postage or that had thrown away junk mail addressed to someone else while claiming everyone they attack had been terrorists sending letter bombs.
Greenland is Iceland.
Bleach is medicine.
E. Jean Carroll is Marla Maples.
I get 3 in 1 but only use it as face and bodywash. I have long hair that doesn’t play nice if I don’t use decent shampoo and conditioner. But the 3 in 1 stuff isn’t any more expensive than other bodywashes and there’s enough fuzz everywhere else that I like a little conditioner in my soap.
[Happy Chewbacca Noises]
Trump isn’t personally running the entire federal government and showing up to court to file his own motions and answer questions from judges. Trump and his inner circle may act like they’re above the law, but the people who have to carry out their instructions aren’t immune to consequences.
This is especially true in court. Lawyers aren’t eager to throw their careers away by lying to judges, filing false statements, or openly defying court orders. That’s why the administration has lost so many lawyers and says things in court that are wildly different than what they say everywhere else.
Suing this administration has been a much more effective strategy than most people seem to realize. It’s often a long, drawn out process that wastes time and money, and they drag things out as much as possible. And yes the Supreme Court has been blatantly corrupt in the ways they’ve bailed out the Trump administration. But still, they only take on a small fraction of the total number of cases (and even then, they mostly help them stall cases with temporary orders rather than deciding actual cases).
When the Supreme Court doesn’t intervene, the Trump administration loses or backs down the vast majority of the time.
The 25th amendment is invoked by the cabinet and the vice president. Those are the people supporting this shit, they aren’t going to get rid of him. He’s doing what they want and giving them cover.
I would say that the only thing that could convince them to remove him is if he became such a liability that they felt the need to get rid of him out of self-preservation. But honestly, I don’t think they have the necessary level of awareness. If anything, I suspect most of them would be more likely to double down on being cartoonishly evil and try to do whatever it takes to cling to power.
Real people don’t have scripts to read from.
But seriously, listen to the way people talk. It’s chaotic, messy, often unclear and very inefficient. Conversations meander wildly, with dangling threads that are never concluded and often times with people talking past each other as much as to each other. If you wrote dialogue that way it would just be harder for audiences to follow and waste precious screentime.
Realistic sounding dialogue is about writing what a real person would say if they stopped to think for a minute between each statement.
In some states you have to be registered as a member of a party to vote in their primaries. In states with open primaries you can vote in primaries without registering as a party member, but they still typically have party affiliation as an option on the form.
And let’s not forget the student loans that are being forced onto worse repayment plans, and brutal collections for anyone who can’t keep up. Because the only thing the department of education does that they actually support is keep people weighed down by crippling debts.
Honestly, if I was some admiral trying to protect a bunch of R&D projects in development from Trump, I’d probably wrap as many of them as I could into a pitch for a big battleship with his name on it then spend the entire budget on the technologies that are supposedly going into the ship. Put basically no effort into the ship itself, just show him concept art and maybe send him a model or something to make him think progress is being made.
Even his handpicked board didn’t all go along with it. One of them is suing over this, and said their mic was muted so that there couldn’t be any objections.
The only thing that should be named after Trump is a maximum security prison that houses every scumbag in this administration along with their accomplices.
If only I’d posted more than one sentence, maybe I could have addressed the issue of impeachment… even though the comment I was responding to specifically mentioned the legal system, and the point I was making was about how no legal safety mechanism can function when the people in charge of it are corrupt, which is a problem when the people at the top in all the branches of government are corrupt.
So it is the system’s fault for allowing this. Why not make the system so that the president or the ruling party alone cannot appoint the supreme court justices.
The president can nominate anyone, but they have to be approved by the senate. Every justice we had made it through that process, most before they scrapped the filibuster.
I mean I only spent 5 minutes thinking about this, but why not make the appointments work the same way they vote for laws? I.e. both parties, not individuals, have to vote and get a majority to appoint, and only in emergency situations could anyone appoint a justice without a vote.
The same should be done for appointing the highest attorneys in the country.
Legislation doesn’t have to have support from both parties either. The filibuster rule makes it possible for a minority party to hold up certain things, but there is no requirement that anything be supported by both parties.
And even if we did have a system where a majority of both parties was required to approve a judicial appointment or attorney, that would just break the system even more. It would give a veto to the Republicans for every appointment regardless of which party is in the majority and they would gladly leave half the government vacant when they don’t hold the white house, or make such extreme demands that it wouldn’t matter which party the president belongs to. This would just give the most extreme group more power to grind the government to a halt and hold the whole system hostage.
How fucking stupid is it to allow the ruling party to control the justice system. It’s just asking to be abused by fascists.
Law should be politically impartial.
Yes, they should be. Unfortunately, those laws can only be written, enacted, interpreted, administered and enforced by people. Laws have no power on their own. And we have to have a process for determining who is in a position to oversee those laws. Some of those people are elected. Some are appointed. Some are hired or promoted independently within organizations that answer to elected and/or appointed officials. And there is necessarily a trade off when balancing power between elected officials (who are going to be the most politicized but also the ones who are answerable to the people directly) and those who are more independent (who can be less vulnerable to momentary political currents but also never have to answer to the general public).
As I said, there are many flaws in the American system, some of which are very big. But we also have numerous mechanisms that should prevent situations like this. The problem is they all require someone to do their fucking job and push back. Many of those furthest removed from electoral politics have been doing a lot to uphold legal and ethical standards. But when the elected officials and their appointees at the highest levels are either actively undermining the law or simply failing to do their duty to defend the law, it isn’t the law that’s at fault.
The problem is that you have a majority on the Supreme Court that are blatantly abusing their power and ignoring the law when it advances their side’s agenda, including just declaring the president to be above the law.
This would be the kind of thing that should lead to impeachment, but that requires a supermajority in the senate (because you don’t want whichever party has a majority to be able to easily abuse the impeachment process) but that won’t happen because every single republican with even a hint of integrity has been pushed out by Trump over the past decade. And even if there were Republicans that weren’t entirely corrupt, dismantling your own Supreme Court majority would be a tough sell politically. And even if they did remove the existing justices, it would just mean that Trump would get to appoint new ones that would be much worse and with many more years ahead of them.
And with Trump filling the executive branch with the worst scumbags he can find, chosen specifically for their willingness to be loyal sycophants who won’t let ethics or laws get in the way of doing his bidding, you aren’t going to get any help there. Again, this is exactly why the senate has to approve appointments but they are also scumbags right now. And for the same reason, the impeachment that should be happening for basically every member of this administration are not coming.
All that being said, there is resistance coming from both the executive and judicial branches. This administration has been firing people illegally in part because it can’t get them to do the illegal shit they want them to do. And those illegal actions and the related illegal firings have been taken to court and the administration has lost nearly 95% off the time. Sometimes the Supreme Court has stepped in to bail them out, but in most cases the ruling stands and the administration has eventually complied.
All of which is to say that, while there are many flaws both big and small in the American system, it isn’t the system itself that is at fault here, it’s the elected officials and the corrupt assholes they appointed. There is no system that will work when every branch of government is in the hands of people who ignore their ethical and legal obligations.
They already demolished it, so a temporary restraining order wouldn’t fix that. Anything they start to build can be destroyed later, so that wouldn’t be irreparable.
I really want him to think he’s going to run again so that he’ll undermine anyone else that tries to run. And then he can croak or something after ruining the primaries and getting his followers to hate any would be successor.
It’s an open and shut case. There is no rational legal argument for ending birthright citizenship.
Unfortunately, this court doesn’t seem to feel bound by little things like laws, precedents, the constitution or reality. If I had to bet on the outcome, I’d assume they will give Trump what he wants yet again. I want to be wrong about that, but at this point I think it’s a safer bet to assume this court will always do the worst thing possible.
According to Grok, the threshold is 50% of humanity. Apparently Elon Musk dying is as bad as or worse for humanity than a Thanos snap.
Just waiting for them to come up with a version of this bill that keeps all these same restrictions but which adds an alternative of using digital identity verification processes administered by third parties. Then they can just approve Xitter and the like as verification partners, making the easy route available through platforms their side controls, all with no transparency or accountability.