The Exorcist got me pretty good
Pagliacci
joined 2 years ago
They claimed that his statements made while President served an interest to the government. It's wildly stupid, and really just a flimsy excuse to protect him, but that's what they said.
I think this may just be another excuse, but part of why they're reversing course is that he's now made statements long after losing office, so how could you argue that his actions were driven by his service to the office?
Justice Department lawyers said they took into consideration Trump’s deposition that was played in the battery and defamation trial, as well as statements Trump made last October repeating the denials long after he left office, as an indication that he was not motivated to protect and serve the US when he first made the comments.
I don't think he "face planted", he's telling us exactly who he is. The good Senator from Alabama, one of the lucky 100 to make major policy decisions for all of us, is a defender of white supremacists.
But don't worry, racism is dead and gone. SCOTUS told us so.
I feel like there's a concerted effort to delegitimize the entire concept of whistleblowing. They're getting more common, more partisan, and less backed by physical evidence.
Agreed, if a bear can eat a person why can't I eat a person?!
I don't think you solve one problem by introducing another problem. The solution to over-criminalization is to decriminalize things. If a person is a danger to society, charge them with a crime and let a jury of their peers decide their guilt. Hacking into someone's property so that you can spy on them is absolutely not an alternative worth entertaining.
He endorsed Elon for saving Twitter too, so maybe he's not the best judge of character?
The major question doctrine acts as a “get-out-of-text-free card” that conservative justices make “magically appear” whenever they see an executive branch policy that goes against their ideological “goals,” Justice Elena Kagan wrote in a dissent in the 2022 case of West Virginia v. EPA.
Apparently legislating from the bench is fine for Conservatives as long as you make up your own judicial doctrine as justification.
I don't know how we fix the problems we face. The court is seated by politicians, Congress is seated by grifters and ideologues,, and the people are too defeated/controlled to make meaningful changes.
Do we know why they dissented? In another article it referenced that they didn't think a ruling was appropriate because the NC courts overturning the ruling in question rendered the case moot. Neither article I've read gave more of an explanation than that.
Or did they flat out endorse the independent legislature theory?
Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch would have dismissed the case because of the intervening North Carolina court action.
Was this the crux of their dissent, or did they disagree with the actual ruling in regards to the independent legislature theory? Having 3 justices endorse that theory would be alarming.
Happy this is settled for at least this iteration of the court. The idea that state legislatures can ignore their own state Constitution, that they themselves wrote, is absurd and paradoxical. Being bound by the state constitution isn't giving or sharing power with the state courts, it's a limitation placed on themselves by the state legislature.
I'm not sure what could be done. It's an executive order, not a bill, and it's scope is fairly limited. It doesn't create any new powers, just uses what's outlined in the HEROES Act to reduce the burden of student loans. Since it's an executive order the next President could revoke it, but the cancelled amounts can't be brought back so that would just wipe away the changes to how interest is handled.
This line from Schindler's List always stuck with me:
The context is that at the end of the movie Schindler is distraught thinking of how many more he could have saved if he just did certain things differently, like selling a ring and using that money to hire another Jewish worker. One of the people he saved tells him the above line.
It's stuck with me for two reasons, I think.
First, it's an interesting perspective on individuality. Each person has their own unique perspective of the world. When that person dies, that perspective is gone forever. An entire universe dies with them, never to be seen again. I think that's a powerful way to view the individual.
Second, it's a reminder that we do what we can, and while it may be imperfect, it's enough. You can't save everyone, just live well and help those you can in the capacity that you can. If you save one of those people, you've saved the world.