Do we really need judicial review? See Nikolas Bowie https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Bowie-SCOTUS-Testimony.pdf
// I feel like the upsides of judicial review are given shirt shrift. Miranda rights, gay marriage, until recently abortion rights all derive from judicial review. Reading this piece, you’d think the only minority rights the Court ever protected were rights of the wealthy. But in a post-Roe world with a weaponized Supreme Court legalizing corruption and authoritarianism, judicial review is becoming hard to defend.
Should Democrats strategically poll?
If a pollster calls, and you are one of the weirdoes who takes pollster calls, and of course you would vote for Biden rather than Trump, but you think Biden should pass the baton, should you lie and say you'd vote for Trump to put greater pressure on the Biden campaign?
@data_from_space fucking with you, then making you take a breath and think about what is being communicated.
"Right now each of these scenarios are equally possible but that does not mean they are equally likely." #CassidySteeleDale https://cassidysteeledale.substack.com/p/possible-futures-for-the-2024-democratic
// an interesting framing for when probabilities over a set of scenarios are not knowable, but none are overwhelmingly likely or vanishingly unlikely
it is better to prevent than to punish.
The pain was impossible. He thrust the blade again and again and again. Into belly. Leg. Chest. My only consolation was this would end. It had to end, very soon. This will end!
I hadn't realized I had spoken aloud, but he laughed. Pausing only for a moment he asked, "Don't you believe in knife after death?"
Text: The Supreme Court has, for example, (1) taken away the right to choose whether to have an abortion, (2) decided that the Courts (packed with Trump appointees) not scientists or experts will get to decide whether our air and water is clean, (3) legalized taking bribery after its own members were caught taking bribes, (4) declared that the violent attempts to stop Congress in an insurrection is not a crime of interfering with Congress, with two members of the majority refusing to recuse even when evidence came out that they supported the insurrection, (5) created out of thin air a new rule that Presidents are immune from the crimes committed in office even though the Constitution specifically says that former presidents are subject to prosecution and the founders wrote that a president can be held criminally liable.
Judge Jackson: "While the President may have the authority to decide to remove the Attorney General, for example, the question here is whether the President has the option to remove the Attorney General by, say, poisoning him to death. Put another way, the issue here is not whether the President has exclusive removal power, but whether a generally applicable criminal law prohibiting murder can restrict how the President exercises that authority."
The Constitution is not a homicide pact!
Text: Make no mistake about it — this is the most radical, destructive, arrogant Supreme Court in the entire history of the United States of America. John Roberts promised us it wasn’t his job to pick up a bat, and yet he’s spent his time as Chief Justice using a baseball bat to bludgeon the Constitution and the institutions of our government he promised to protect. It’s long past time for us to stop him and his fellow bagmen from the Federalist Society before they finish the hit job they’ve been contracted for. Make no mistake: the Supreme Court will the most important issue of this election, and long beyond that. Democrats need to treat it like the fundamental crisis it is, both on the campaign trail and in congressional committees which must hold in-depth hearings and advance legislative solutions immediately. The Court’s conservative majority has revealed itself to be the most direct threat to American democracy, and any Democrat who is not ready to shelve old fears about “court packing” and get serious about expanding and reforming the Court isn’t made for this moment, period. This is serious. Act like it.
when we practice expropriation
we'll call it innovation.
"As Thomas Jefferson once wrote, under judicial review, the Constitution 'is a mere thing of wax in the hands of the judiciary, which they may twist and shape into any form they please'…the Court has…deleted both of the Constitution’s anti-bribery clauses for the president…The Roberts Court recently deleted Section 3 [of the 14th Amendment], which forbids traitors and rebels from serving in the govt, once again to protect Donald Trump from accountability." @ryanlcooper https://prospect.org/justice/2024-07-04-supreme-court-roberts-murdered-constitution/
“For the first time since the dawn of the Renaissance, innovation is now feared by the vast majority of people. And the tech leaders, once admired and emulated, now rank among the least trustworthy people in the world.” #TedGioia https://www.honest-broker.com/p/how-did-silicon-valley-turn-into
“technocracy tends to provoke a backlash, because it creates an opportunity for populists to argue – reasonably – that there are no uniquely rational solutions to complex problems, and that democracy is supposed to be about choice and popular participation, not elites decreeing that there is no alternative.” #JanWernerMueller https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/why-macronism-failed-by-jan-werner-mueller-2024-07
Text: And make no mistake about it: When a court that has been battered by near-weekly reports of undisclosed oligarch-funded vacations (and gifts and super yachts and tricked out RVs and secret conferences with high-paying Koch supporters getting access to justices) decides to make it easier to bribe public officials—as it did in Snyder v. U.S.—that’s a very public signal that the conservative supermajority does not care what you think. When a court that has been caught with not one but two justices who have spouses who were excited by insurrectionist activity and symbols stands up those same justices as dispassionate and objective deciders of three separate Jan. 6 cases, that’s a very public signal that the conservative supermajority doesn’t care what you think. And when that self same court makes it illegal for homeless people to sleep in parks because not one of these members of the conservative supermajority will lose sleep over homelessness, climate change, housing policy, or any of the other root causes of being forced to sleep in a park, it’s a very, very public signal that the justices don’t care what you think. Whatever braking mechanism once existed at the court is now broken. We wake up this summer in a new government order.
Text: Nowhere in the Constitution is there mention of executive immunity, which was a topic of peculiar interest to the Founders and Framers. Alexander Hamilton wrote in Federalist 69 that unlike the “king of Great Britain,” the chief executive of the United States would “be liable to prosecution and punishment in the ordinary course of law,” and in Federalist 77 named “subsequent prosecution in the common course of law,” in addition to impeachment, as checks on “abuse of the executive authority.”
