Politics & Stuff

[Fulham Broadway 16,504]

I helped out in an old peoples home many with dementia. They had entertainment days when they would do karaoke etc with their relatives encouraging.

I saw less patronising applause from their relatives than Jill Bidens of her husband after that car crash head to head, and actually better performances -4 more years ?

[Vesper 27,732]

Haaretz: Three Israeli Army Reservists Explain Why They Refuse to Continue Serving in Gaza

Yuval was required to torch two residential buildings; Michael realized how many civilians were likely to be killed during every bombing he observed; and Tal broke down when Israel entered Rafah. They are willing to suffer the price for their refusal to serve in Gaza

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2024-06-27/ty-article-magazine/.premium/three-israeli-army-reservists-explain-why-they-refuse-to-continue-serving-in-gaza/00000190-5014-d3c0-a5d4-737644c90000

https://archive.ph/0WTS1

When Tal Vardi, a civics teacher from Jerusalem, was absent for a prolonged period from the high school where he teaches because he was called up for reserve duty, his students were surprised. He was one of the only members of the school faculty who disappeared for a long time, from the start of the war until the end of December, although he was considered the most left-wing of them all. "Indeed, I'm a very political teacher," admits Vardi, 28, in a conversation with Haaretz. "My students know my political stances on most issues. I believe that I share them in a thought-provoking way which gives rise to a healthy discussion in class." At the end of last month, Vardi, along with 41 other reservists who have served in the military since October 7, signed the first letter of refusal published by reservists since the beginning of the war in the Gaza Strip.

'A friend told me: 'I was in Shifa with my tank ... and four months later they sent me another emergency call-up to return to the same place, to occupy places that I'd already occupied.' "The six months during which we participated in the war effort proved to us that military activity alone won't bring the hostages home," wrote the signatories to the letter, 10 of whom signed with their full name and the others with initials. The writers then referred to the invasion of Rafah: "This invasion, aside from endangering our lives and the lives of innocents in Rafah, won't bring back the hostages alive… It's either Rafah or the hostages, and we choose the hostages. Therefore, after the decision to enter Rafah rather than to bring about a hostage deal, we, male and female reservists, are declaring that our conscience doesn't allow us to lend a hand to forfeiting the lives of the hostages and torpedoing another deal."

The signatories include 16 in Military Intelligence and seven in the Home Front Command. The others serve in infantry, engineering and tank units. Two of them serve in elite units, the Commando and Lotar units. One of the seven from the Home Front Command noted that many reservists serving in his command were assigned after October 7 combat missions such as serving on the line in the West Bank, to replace the many conscripts redeployed to Gaza. Most of the signatories told Haaretz that they're aware that their views are an exception among reservists. Vardi, a Tank Corps commander, is one of three signatories who agreed to be identified in this article. His reserve brigade was first sent to the war in the north to replace the battalions of conscripts who were sent to the south. He was engaged there mainly in teaching younger reservists, who were trained to fight in state-of-the-art tanks, but now had to learn how to operate older tanks.

"I grew up in the north and I spent the summer vacation between fifth and sixth grade, during the Second Lebanon War, running to the safe room," he explains. "I didn't have any doubts about doing so. I felt that I was doing my small part in the effort to protect the country's citizens." Even now, he says, if called up again for reserve duty in the north, he'll report, but if he's summoned to a job related to the fighting in Gaza, he'll refuse. "When I returned from reserve duty I started to question where this thing was going," he recalls. He says that after October 7 he had no doubt that Israel would begin a ground operation in Gaza, that it would last for a few months, and that in the end they would bring back the hostages. But the more time passed, the stronger were his doubts, in part after conversations with friends serving in the career army and the reserves.

snip

[KEVINAA 65]

 

Kanye West has arrived in Moscow, Russia

[Fulham Broadway 16,504]

The populist right continues to grow in Europe and the US...LBGQT and Immigration the main targets, whipped up by mainstream media billionaires

Marine Le Pen’s far-right, anti-immigration party is in reach of becoming the biggest political force in the French parliament after a historically high showing in the first round of snap parliament elections.

National Rally (RN) has won about 34% of the national vote share, according to exit polls from Ipsos, Ifop, OpinionWay and Elabe. Comprising about 12 million votes, this was a significant increase on its vote share of 18% in the last parliamentary elections in 2022.

[cosmicway 1,278]

Marine's party came first with 34%.
But it's not over yet re. absolute majority for her.
Two things I don't understand:
First Lepen score 43% in the last presidential election in 2022. Why is the 34% an improvement ?
Second why the Frenchies hate Macron so much, having previously voted for him ?
I understand the Macron camp in 2022 was a broad coalition so the 20% hh got now does n't compare with the 57% of the presidential election, but what was his previous score ?

[Vesper 27,732]

[Fulham Broadway 16,504]

Trump given immunity from prosecution

• The justices ruled 6-3 that Trump has immunity from prosecution for official acts that are part of his core consitutional duties as president, and that he has zero immunity for unofficial acts
• They have sent the special counsel's case back to lower courts to decide what is official and unofficial, but they have also given guidance on the case

• The three liberal justices dissented, with Justice Sonia Sotomayor writing that under this decision "the President is now a king above the law"
• Trump sees this as a major victory. So do most court-watchers
• What a lucky cunt

[Fernando 6,397]

Yup he is going to win the election. 

Biden don't stand a chance. He has lost a lot of support with the Israel thing. 

[Fulham Broadway 16,504]

3 hours ago, Fernando said:

Yup he is going to win the election. 

Biden don't stand a chance. He has lost a lot of support with the Israel thing. 

Wonder who the first lady will be, Stormy ? Melania seems to have fucked off

[NikkiCFC 7,744]

What are the chances they drop Biden and who would replace him?

[Sir Mikel OBE 4,795]

3 minutes ago, NikkiCFC said:

What are the chances they drop Biden and who would replace him?

~0% barring him becoming incapacitated. 

[NikkiCFC 7,744]

17 minutes ago, Sir Mikel OBE said:

~0% barring him becoming incapacitated. 

That already happened.

[robsblubot 3,334]

Considering the Supreme Court ruling, perhaps Biden is also not fully using the power of the office?

I mean, the immunity ruling also affects Biden as current president. I mean he put do-nothing Garland in charge, so not holding my breath.

[Vesper 27,732]

4 hours ago, NikkiCFC said:

What are the chances they drop Biden and who would replace him?

very low, but here is an article from a pro-drop-out source

 

The Democrats Must Dump Biden. Here’s How.

After the debacle of the debate, it’s up to party leaders to come up with a substitute to keep Trump out of power.

https://prospect.org/politics/2024-06-28-democrats-must-dump-biden-heres-how-debate/

In one particular way, for me, the first Trump-Biden debate had a distinctly positive outcome: It enabled me to hear from many old friends, including some old girlfriends I hadn’t heard from in years. Within 15 minutes of the debate’s beginning, I began receiving text messages from them. The first read, “Now I agree with you: Biden needs to go. This is so so painful.”

The second, just five minutes later, read: “He needs to step down. Immediately.”

The third—from a girlfriend of 25 years ago—read: “I made the mistake of thinking that if it was said by Fox News, it had to be wrong. So I wasn’t prepared to see Biden like this. I had to turn the TV off.”

There were many more, but you get the picture. Donald Trump had a preposterous debate, never answering the questions put to him about the climate crisis, child care, and other such trivialities, and coming up with such day-for-night absurdities as historians rating his presidency as the most successful in American history. And yet, he emerged the undisputed winner, because Biden was simply too old and infirm to counter even Trump’s most blatant fabrications or to persuasively defend his demonstrably superior record and positions.

The reason the first texter wrote, “I agree with you: Biden must go,” is that for months I have argued that while I thought his actual presidency was largely stellar, Biden no longer possessed the campaigning chops required to win the election. Recent polls showing Democratic senators and representatives in close races outpolling Biden by between 5 and 15 points bolstered my case: The public hasn’t turned against the Democrats; it’s turned against Biden. I’m writing before even the quickest post-debate polls have been tabulated, but I’m certain that they’ll show Biden’s already low levels of support cascading downward.

In my view, there is now no plausible way that Biden can defeat Trump. But there are plausible ways to defeat Trump with a different presidential nominee.

Losing the White House to Donald Trump isn’t like losing it to Mitt Romney or John McCain or George W. Bush. It means losing a crucial share of American democracy. The party must nominate somebody else for president, or else it has no raison d’être.

So: What should the Democrats do?

Yes, I know, the primaries, such as they were, are over and done with. There are party rules, which can be suspended, and some state laws, which are not so easily dismissed, that require delegates to the party’s national convention to cast their votes for Biden. If, after they cast those votes, the delegates pass a resolution asking Biden to refuse to accept the nomination, and he heeds their wishes, then the procedural problem, at least, will have been eliminated. If Biden is determined to stay in the race, my expectation is that all hell will break loose. If the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention was marked by rioting (mainly by the cops) outside the hall, the 2024 Chicago Democratic Convention will be marked by riots inside the hall.

My suggestion is that Democrats should heed the lessons imparted by leading Republicans in 1974, when they persuaded then-President Nixon to resign because there was virtually no one in the party who would oppose impeaching and convicting him after the most clearly incriminating batch of Watergate tapes had been released. Sen. Hugh Scott (the Republican leader in the Senate), Rep. John Rhodes (the leader of the House Republicans), and Sen. Barry Goldwater (the leader of the party’s conservative wing, which had been the wing that had stuck with Nixon until then) converged on the White House to convince Nixon that he’d lost all support and it was time for him to quit. Which Nixon promptly did.

Now, it’s up to the Democrats. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, House Leader Hakeem Jeffries (or better yet, Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi), former Presidents Obama and Clinton, all need to converge on the White House to tell Biden that his time is up, too, unless he wants to go down in history not as a president who enacted landmark legislation with the slimmest of congressional majorities, but as the man who handed America over to its first genuinely autocratic (not to mention vindictive and deranged) president. They probably need to be assisted in this task by the quiet urgings of Dr. Jill Biden; we must hope she understands that her husband’s reputation depends on his dropping his candidacy.

And then? My hope is the party opens up a new race, to be decided by the delegates to its upcoming convention, rather than just give the nomination to Vice President Harris. After all, if the case for Biden dropping his candidacy is that he cannot win, the same case can very plausibly be made against Harris. What makes more sense would be having a slew of governors throw their hats into the ring. I think Gavin Newsom would be hard-pressed to connect with working-class voters; I think that Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer or Kentucky’s Andy Beshear or Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro would have better prospects of winning.

But there’s a problem with this scenario, too. Passing over Harris—the first Black woman to hold the vice presidency—would be a blow to a key segment of the party’s base: Blacks, and Black women in particular. But the entire rationale for replacing Biden is that he stands no real chance of keeping Trump out of the White House, and unless Harris can somehow demonstrate that she’s up to that task, the same rationale applies. A contest among the plausible replacements for the support of the party’s delegates affords her that chance, and it’s the only way to square denying her the a priori right to claim the nomination with the necessity of denying Trump state power.

For now, though, the message from Democratic Party leaders (and not from those Democrats who are considering becoming the last-minute replacement) has to be: Biden must step down. If that’s not what they’re working on even now, they have no business being party leaders.

 

[Vesper 27,732]

The New Democratic Rift: Biden Stay-ers vs. Biden Go-ers

And what it will take for the goers to prevail.

https://prospect.org/politics/2024-07-01-new-democratic-rift-biden-stayers-goers-election-debate/

Thursday’s night debate has plunged the Democrats into two unhappy camps: the Biden-Must-Go-ers and the Biden-Must-Stay-ers. The Stay-ers’ case against going envisions a Bidenless scenario much like the plot of Shakespeare’s Lear: an aged king abdicates his throne and bestows his kingdom on his daughters, two of whom proceed to turn it into a bloody hell. The abrupt resignation of the sovereign opens a box of conflict, disorder and chaos best left closed.

Then again, speaking as a Go-er, Shakespeare could just as well have written a tragedy in which Lear continued to rule. As early as Act I, Scene 1, the old king is clearly addled and his judgment impaired. Otherwise, he wouldn’t be signing over portions of his kingdom to his daughters based on their protestations of love for him, however feigned they might be. One can easily imagine that by Act III in this version of Lear, the king would still be howling on the moors, only this time with state power.

So let’s unpack this “chaos” so feared by those who say Biden must stay. Until the 1950s, conventions frequently required more than one ballot to decide upon the party’s nominee. Both Lincoln and FDR won their nominations on the third ballot. Conventional wisdom has it that the great audience watching on television wouldn’t abide the prolongation of the process. Then again, conventional wisdom also has it that the convention-watching audience has shrunk precipitously, because the conventions’ outcomes are now entirely predetermined by the preceding primaries and caucuses. Conventional wisdom has further led the television networks to run innumerable contest shows in which the best singer or dancer or athlete isn’t determined until the final episode.

So much for conventional wisdom.

In the BT (Before Television) days, conventions were frequently dramatic affairs, riveting the nation’s attention. Today, of course, Republicans and right-wing media would gloatingly show scenes of Democrats disagreeing or perhaps even fighting with one another over who should succeed Biden. But at a time when the clear majority of Americans would happily welcome an alternative to Trump or Biden, I’m not sure that the public’s reaction to a contest producing a different nominee would be negative. On the contrary, I suspect it would likely be positive, particularly if those seeking the presidency audition in speeches before the delegates and an unusually attentive public.

Getting Biden to agree to decline the nomination, however, will require three types of pressure. The first is the public opinion of the Democratic rank-and-file, on which pollsters will now surely take soundings. (A Morning Consult poll from the morning after the debate showed that a plurality of Democrats and a majority of independents thought Biden should abandon his bid, though the same poll also gave Biden a 1 percentage point lead over Trump.) There are precious few organizations of rank-and-file Democrats in this post-party (though not post-partisan) age, but if they’re out there, they’d have to start making noise, much as chapters of the Young Democrats and the California Democratic club movement did when they started opposing Lyndon Johnson’s renomination as early as 1966.

Longtime Obama consigliere David Axelrod argued in the debate’s aftermath that 2024 isn’t the1960s, and there certainly isn’t a presidential policy like the Vietnam War, so repulsive to so many Democrats that the prospect of Johnson’s renomination split the party. Narrowly speaking, Axelrod is right. But as of Thursday night, there actually is a presidential policy so terrifying that it’s split the party: Biden’s determination to stay on the ticket, which clearly runs the risk of handing the nation over to Donald Trump.

At a time when the clear majority of Americans would happily welcome an alternative to Trump or Biden, I’m not sure that the public’s reaction to a contest producing a different nominee would be negative.

But it’s not just the Democratic base that has to be heard from; it’s also Democratic politicians. Virtually every pre-debate poll showed swing-state Democratic senators and House members running ahead of Biden by anywhere from five to ten percentage points. But if Biden’s polling goes further south in the wake of the debate, those pols will have reason to think their own margins may not be enough to save them. That should put their leaders—Chuck Schumer in the Senate, Hakeem Jeffries and Nancy Pelosi in the House—in an awkward position if and when their members come to them fretting that they can’t win with Biden atop the ticket.

So far, the Stay-ers are holding firm. A decent speech in North Carolina on Friday was passed around by Biden’s handlers as the stirrings of a comeback. The party’s eminences grises—Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Jim Clyburn, Steny Hoyer, and Pelosi herself—told reporters and the public on Friday that Biden should remain in place. If they don’t move, younger rank-and-file Dems will have less confidence to call for a change atop the ticket. A movement for change will have to come from those in danger of losing their seats and political careers; from the bottom up, in other words.

There are also the leaders of non-party organizations that actually do much of the work, like getting out the vote, that parties used to do: unions, Planned Parenthood and the like. My guess is those leaders won’t make any pro-replacement statements unless a host of leading Democratic officeholders ask them to, and even then, that would be an iffy proposition. But if their own members believe that Biden should step down—and surely, there are local unions and pro-choice chapters where that’s now a widely-held belief—they should certainly make themselves heard.

Finally, there’s Biden’s own circle; at its narrowest, Ted Kauffman, Mike Donilon, Steve Ricchetti, and above all, his wife Jill. The first three, at least, will doubtless hear plenty from party leaders. But the crucial factor for them all will be their assessment of Biden’s legacy. The only blot on Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s stellar reputation is that she stayed so long on the Supreme Court that she was succeeded by a Trump nominee. That blot would pale, of course, alongside that of staying so long that you’re succeeded by Trump himself, and this time, a Trump determined to pull down Lord knows how many pillars of American democracy. Polls of the Democrats and interventions by party and major organizational leaders matter, but it’s hard to imagine Biden will even consider stepping down unless those closest to him make the case that staying will be such a negative that it will eclipse his remarkable successes as president.

Will calls for Biden to step down, and a scramble to anoint his successor, be fraught with electoral dangers? Of course they will. Will Biden staying at the top of the ticket be fraught with electoral dangers? Of course it will. My sense is that his staying is more dangerous than his going.

 

Edited yesterday at 02:24 by Vesper

[Vesper 27,732]

A Tarnished Silver Lining

Biden was so inept that the case for replacing him is now overwhelming.

https://prospect.org/politics/2024-06-28-tarnished-silver-lining-trump-biden-debate/

“We’re able to make every single solitary person … eligible for what I’ve been able to do with the, uh, with—with the COVID, or excuse me, with, dealing with, everything we have to do with, uh … Look … If … We finally beat Medicare.” —Joe Biden

There were two good things about last night’s debate debacle. First, it happened early. Second, it wasn’t close; Biden’s collapse was total.

If this had happened in September, the usual month of the first debate, or if Biden had been a little less pathetic and had landed a few punches, we truly would have been screwed. Now, there is still time for Biden to step aside, and little doubt that he must.

Even though no major elected Democrat has yet gone to Biden to tell him he has to step down, that will surely come. Over the next several days, the most senior Democrats in the country will be conferring, and they can only come to one conclusion.

Quite apart from the existential threat of Trump becoming the next president and ending American democracy, there is pure self-interest. The futures of every other Democrat up for re-election are on the line.

With Biden heading the ticket, Democrats will likely lose the House, Senate, state legislatures and governorships, and down-ballot races all the way to school board, as well as the presidency. Chuck Schumer cares more about losing his post as majority leader than he cares about the awkwardness of having to tell his president he needs to go. And to quote Shakespeare, “If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well it were done quickly.”

Ironies abound. This early debate was the Biden camp’s idea. It’s evidence of the cluelessness of Biden’s inner circle about the president’s weakness as a candidate that they thought Biden would triumph. They gloated that they prevailed on the terms—no audience, no on-mic cross talk—and still their man got clobbered.

Biden should have won overwhelmingly—on the issues, on Trump’s lying, and on his own coherence compared to Trump’s. Biden’s policies have been superb and consistent. Trump’s policies, both as president and as future president, are a contradictory medley of disasters.

But from the moment he shuffled onto the set, Biden obviously wasn’t up to it. A second irony: Trump, who is widely thought to be demented, came across as stronger, more coherent, and far better able to compose a sentence. Biden, who is probably mentally sounder than Trump, seemed the more impaired, staring blankly and struggling to complete a thought.

Trump’s inventions mostly got a free pass. Trump did cross over into sheer meanness at some points, but he managed to keep his ranting in check. Instead, he turned his tendency to wander into a debating asset. I counted eight times when a moderator asked Trump a hard question—about who he would deport, or what he would do about child care—and each time Trump deftly turned the subject back to Biden. When Trump said repeatedly that other world leaders did not respect Biden, the frail old man on the split screen gave that absurd contention credibility.

Trump looked powerful last night, but he could have been bested by a more competent Democratic candidate and still can.

While a few Biden surrogates have tried to spin the outcome as Biden winning on the issues, or Biden having a bad start but getting stronger as the debate went on, if anything Biden became less articulate over the 90 minutes and even bungled easy winners like the issue of reproductive rights. His attempts to compete on policy successes were laundry lists of obscure details that lost his audience.

If Biden were to stay in, there is simply no way to recoup. Democrats can run TV spot after TV spot, or maximize their efforts to get out the vote, but the problem is not the message; it’s the messenger. The picture that viewers got last night is indelible. You felt embarrassed for him, but pity does not win elections.

Until now, the conventional wisdom has been that only one person might persuade Biden to step aside, his wife Jill. But last night’s debate changes that assumption.

In coming days, the media echo chamber, which for once has it right, will keep reinforcing the depth of Biden’s defeat and the story of utter panic among Democratic officials, strategists, and donors. That will be self-reinforcing.

I’ve been writing for months that Biden’s duty was to be remembered as history’s greatest one-term president and to step aside in favor of a younger and more vigorous nominee. He might have done that in a way that made him look classy and elegant. Now his departure will be messier and less dignified, forced on him by a panicking party.

There is also the awkward matter of Vice President Kamala Harris, the one Democrat who would be even weaker as a candidate than Biden. The way to finesse that is to throw open the convention. Any resentment that a Black woman next in line for the presidency is being passed over can be solved by creating a ticket composed of a stronger woman and a stronger African American.

My own preferred ticket is Whitmer-Warnock. My colleague Harold Meyerson addresses how we might get from here to a stronger ticket. That challenge is tricky but not insurmountable.

Trump looked powerful last night, but he could have been bested by a more competent Democratic candidate and still can. With a younger, more vigorous Democratic nominee, Trump becomes yesterday’s old man, Biden’s baggage is no longer relevant, and Trump’s liabilities become the issue.

In tribute to the great actor Donald Sutherland, who died last week, my wife and I have been watching our own festival of Sutherland movies. One of the greatest is Eye of the Needle, in which Sutherland plays a patriotic Nazi who is deeply embedded in Britain as a fake Englishman during World War II, where his job is to send top secret information back to Berlin. Along the way, he has to unsentimentally kill several innocent people who happen to get in his way.

The movie is also a character study, and the question is whether Sutherland is a sociopath or merely a patriotic Nazi. The answer is that he is both. One of the terrifying things about fascism is that it places sociopaths in power, at every level of government. Hitler murdered millions of Jews both as a racial ideologue and as a sociopath. He invited hysterically loyal sociopaths to run his government and carry out his orders.

From Trump to MAGA acolytes in Congress and MAGA state officials, sociopaths are adept at telling Big Lies, believing those lies, and making those lies sound convincing. Though Biden is a truth-teller, he is a badly impaired one. He needs to step aside so that we are spared being led by a government of sociopaths.

Edited yesterday at 02:24 by Vesper

[Vesper 27,732]

A Captive and Corrupted Court

Today on TAP: Roberts’ ruling gives Trump license to pursue dictatorship.

https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2024-07-01-captive-and-corrupted-court-trump-immunity/

 

Any hope that Chief Justice John Roberts would be a breakwater against a wholly partisan Supreme Court or an incipient despotism ended today with the 6-3 decision in the well-named case of Trump v. United States, giving a president near-total immunity from prosecution if an otherwise illegal activity can be deemed an official act of the chief executive. The cynicism of the Court’s decision was compounded by its tactic of slow-walking the final ruling, remanding the case to the trial court to delay it until well after the November election. Had it chosen to do so, the Court could have issued its own final decision today.

The most important and flagrant of the Trump indictments involved special counsel Jack Smith’s case against Trump for plotting to overturn the 2020 election in the events at the U.S. Capitol of January 6, 2021. Trump’s effort to strong-arm Vice President Pence into delaying or reversing the vote count was prima facie evidence of Trump’s intent, even if Trump’s relationship to the violent insurrection inside the Capitol was murkier.

In her District Court ruling in Washington last December, Judge Tanya S. Chutkan denied Trump’s immunity claims, writing: “Whatever immunities a sitting president may enjoy, the United States has only one chief executive at a time, and that position does not confer a lifelong ‘get-out-of-jail-free’ pass,” she wrote. A unanimous three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit agreed in February.

Smith went to the Supreme Court right after Judge Chutkan’s December decision, asking for an expedited ruling on Trump’s claims. Instead the high court waited six months, in sharp contrast to its quick ruling in the Colorado case on whether Trump’s indictments disqualified him from being on the ballot—in that case, an expedited ruling served Trump’s interests.

In his 43-page ruling, Roberts gave the lower courts a precise road map to exonnerate Trump from wrongdoing, using tortured logic. For instance, the majority decision held that Trump cannot be prosecuted for attempts to “leverage the Justice Department’s power and authority to convince certain States to replace their legitimate electors with Trump’s fraudulent slates of electors.” This is presumably an official action, however illegitimate.

The court also held that Trump is “presumptively immune” from prosecution for his heavy-handed pressure on Pence, because the president and vice president were discussing their official responsibilities. However, since the vice president’s post as president of the senate is not an executive branch role, Trump could conceivably be prosecuted for attempting to undercut that role. Roberts asked the trial court to review that the facts of that question.

Despite the disingenuous pretense of sending the case back to the lower courts, the Supreme Court left little doubt about the direction of its final ruling. The Court’s action today is an invitation to dictatorship, and one more cost of Trump’s having been allowed to name three justices. Had the Supreme Court ruled similarly on Richard Nixon’s claims of being above the law, Nixon never would have been forced from office.

The Court is now a corrupted institution and a shameless enabler of a corrupt president.

In dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote, “The court effectively creates a law-free zone around the president, upsetting the status quo that has existed since the founding.” She added: “When he uses his official powers in any way, under the majority’s reasoning, he now will be insulated from criminal prosecution.” For example: “Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune.”

She concluded: “Never in the history of our Republic has a President had reason to believe that he would be immune from criminal prosecution if he used the trappings of his office to violate the criminal law.... With fear for our democracy, I dissent.”

And in a separate dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson called attention to the Court’s own power grab. She wrote: “Effectively, the Court elbows out of the way both Congress and prosecutorial authorities within the Executive Branch, making itself the indispensable player in all future attempts to hold former Presidents accountable to generally applicable criminal laws.”

While we still have some semblance of a democracy, there is only one way to rein in both Trump’s dictatorial ambitions and this captive court. Trump must be defeated in November.

[Vesper 27,732]

Who’s Gonna Check the Supreme Court?

This term illustrates that the Court often exercises unjustified power.

https://prospect.org/justice/2024-06-29-whos-gonna-check-supreme-court-chevron-separation-powers/

 

The unmistakable theme of this Supreme Court term has been raw power, and just how much of it the high court has in our particular system of democracy, compared with the other branches. 

Today, the Court dropped yet another handful of bombshell decisions that change and impact national policy and everyday American life in deeply significant ways, including curtailing the prosecutions of the insurrectionists who attacked the U.S. Capitol in 2021, and legitimizing all-encompassing “camping bans” that allow cities to deploy police to “clear out” unhoused people from public spaces.

Most significantly, the Court also overturned decades-old precedent that gave federal agencies primary authority to regulate various aspects of American life, from food safety to workplace policy to transportation, climate change and the health-care system—much like any modern government. That power has now been effectively transferred from federal agencies under the executive branch to the judiciary. 

The idea behind the overturned doctrine is that Congress writes broad rules covering certain areas, and then delegates responsibility for the details and broader enforcement to agencies with specialized expertise. The idea, though it may have to change after this ruling, is that Congress can’t write detailed laws that cover every potential human activity that affects people’s health, natural resources and other matters of public concern, nor can members be expected to develop deep scientific or technical knowledge over all those fields. This also allows space for executive power, since the agencies are staffed at the very top levels by political appointees of the President. 

That balancing of power between Congress, the President and the courts, has been explicit for at least 80 years, since the Administrative Procedure Act was enacted, and the current scheme has been in place for four decades, established in a case called Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council. Chevron held that courts should defer to agency actions and interpretations of the laws and regulations they administer, so long as Congress hasn’t passed a law that directly addresses the legal question at hand, and so long as the agency’s action or answer isn’t patently unreasonable.

Congress has kept Chevron as is for all of those 40 years, as the liberal justices pointed out in a dissenting opinion. 

But the Court’s right wing overruled that precedent today, saying the principle of judicial review—the courts’ power to interpret the Constitution and strike down laws that violate it—means judges do not have to defer to agency interpretation. 

“Chevron’s presumption is misguided because agencies have no special competence in resolving statutory ambiguities,” the Court wrote in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Secretary of Commerce. 

As it happens, the Court on the very same day, and without a hint of irony, decided that a “handful of federal judges” can’t match “the collective wisdom” that average American people possess in deciding how best to handle homelessness. That point came in the ruling allowing cities to take a draconian law enforcement approach to their homelessness and affordable housing crises, as I mentioned above. 

Not only are the justices empowered to define the shape and scope of executive branch power, they are in fact able to accrue that power to themselves, simply by declaring it so.

The Loper Bright ruling furthers a decades-old goal of the conservative movement to gut the so-called “administrative state,” to kneecap federal regulation on businesses, in plain terms.  

And it’s a neat example of the Court’s power: not only are the justices empowered to define the shape and scope of executive branch power, they are in fact able to accrue that power to themselves, simply by declaring it so.

Justice Elena Kagan penned a fiery dissent, joined by the other two liberals. 

“A rule of judicial humility gives way to a rule of judicial hubris,” Kagan wrote. “All that backs today’s decision is the majority’s belief that Chevron was wrong–that it gave agencies too much power and courts not enough.”

The court’s ultra-conservative “majority disdains restraint, and grasps for power,” Kagan added. 

The word “power” appears roughly 90 times in the ruling (along with variations like “empower.”). And it’s worth considering, head on. 

As a basic matter, the Supreme Court has outsize power to knock down or reshape national policy established by Congress or by the President and executive branch. That’s often what happens when the Court “interprets law.” Sometimes, it can also effectively create national policy, like a robust personal right to firearms, for example. 

And, in recent years, the Court has had no compunction about flexing or stretching the bounds  of its immense practical powers in increasingly brazen ways. By now, that point is so glaringly clear that perhaps the most spot-on descriptions come from the conservative justices’ liberal colleagues. 

Last July, for example, the liberal justices took the extraordinary step of writing, in plain terms, that the Court had overreached and taken actions that exceed its powers and role in our democracy, which is not something you see very often. 

The court's decision overturning affirmative action in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard  was an "unjustified exercise of power," Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote for the court’s liberals. 

Yesterday, Sotomayor wrote in another decision about agency power that the Court had ushered in another massive sea change, explicitly connecting the right-leaning justices to the broader conservative movement, and suggesting that they don’t simply interpret law: “Litigants seeking further dismantling of the ‘administrative state’ have reason to rejoice in their win today, but those of us who cherish the rule of law have nothing to celebrate,” she wrote.

And Kagan noted in today’s ruling that overturned Chevron that “this very Term presents yet another example of the Court’s resolve to roll back agency authority, despite congressional direction to the contrary,” and without regard to stare decisis, the principle that courts shouldn’t shake up long-settled laws and practice. 

In recent years, the Court has had no compunction about flexing or stretching the bounds  of its immense practical powers in increasingly brazen ways.

“My own defenses of stare decisis—my own dissents to this Court’s reversals of settled law—by now fill a small volume,” Kagan wrote, citing the ruling that overturned the constitutional right to abortion, among other recent major policy changes. 

Besides how they’ve exercised their authority, at least some of the justices also apparently believe that the other two branches of government have little or perhaps no power over how they operate, or to tell them what they can and can’t do. 

John Roberts, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and head of the judicial branch, has refused to testify before Congress twice in the last two years, in regards to the most serious kind of apparent ethical violations by his fellow conservative justices. Roberts cited “separation of powers concerns” as his reasons both times, and in one letter, he pointed out that “Congressional testimony from the head of the Executive Branch”—the president—is “likewise infrequent.” 

Take that analogy to the elected head of state how you will; Justice Samuel Alito, though, has been much less circumspect.

“Congress did not create the Supreme Court,” Alito said last year, in an interview published in the Wall Street Journal’s opinion section. 

“I know this is a controversial view, but I’m willing to say it,” he went on.  “No provision in the Constitution gives them the authority to regulate the Supreme Court—period.”

To be frank, that notion is entirely unserious, both as a matter of constitutional interpretation,  basic principles of democratic governance, or just common sense about checks and balances. 

The Constitution says that the “judicial power of the United States, shall be vested in one Supreme Court” and lower federal courts that “Congress may from time to time ordain and establish.” In short, it calls for the establishment of a Supreme Court, but their power comes from Congress, as does their rules of operation, like how many justices sit on the Court.

Alito’s point likely prompted a sort of rebuke from one of the liberal justices, again: days after his comment, Kagan said during a judicial conference that “Of course Congress can regulate various aspects of what the Supreme Court does.” 

““It just can’t be that the court is the only institution that somehow is not subject to any checks and balances from anybody else,” she said, adding, “I mean, we are not imperial.”

That point is obviously correct. Still, whether or not her conservative colleagues agree seems to be an open question. And the way the court exercises its power certainly suggests that the six justices in the conservative majority might just be the supreme rulers of the United States, at least as a practical matter. 

As some have suggested, Congress and the President—you know, the other co-equal branches—might want to do something about that.