not mentioned by pretty much anyone yet, is how the supreme court back loaded all of its decisions.
normally they finish the major cases towards the start of the month, and a lot of people were speculating they might actually extend into july this year.
instead, they waited till the day after the debate to drop a whole lot of extreme decisions?
can’t help but think the majority saw an opportunity to fly a bit under the radar, and took it. happily.
/conspiracy theory
It’s not a conspiracy theory. It was definitely timed.
little did they know, biden wouldn’t have been able to leverage news of those decisions anyway 
( i still think biden’s more than capable for the job. just dear god, no more debates. )
June 30, 2024 (Sunday)
In addition to his comments about Russia in Ukraine, Trump said something else in Thursday’s CNN presentation that should be called out for its embrace of one of the darkest moments in U.S. history.
In response to a question about what the presidential candidates would say to a Black voter disappointed with racial progress in the United States, President Joe Biden pointed out that, while there was still far to go, more Black businesses were started under his administration than at any other time in U.S. history, that Black unemployment is at a historic low, and that the administration has relieved student debt, invested in historically Black colleges and universities, and is working to provide for childcare costs, all issues that affect Black Americans.
In contrast, Trump said: “As sure as you’re sitting there, the fact is that his big kill on the Black people is the millions of people that he’s allowed to come in through the border. They’re taking Black jobs now and it could be 18. It could be 19 and even 20 million people. They’re taking Black jobs and they’re taking Hispanic jobs and you haven’t seen it yet, but you’re going to see something that’s going to be the worst in our history.”
Trump was obviously falling back on the point he had prepared to rely on in this election: that immigration is destroying our country. He exaggerated the numbers of incoming migrants and warned that there is worse to come.
But what jumped out is his phrase: “They’re taking Black jobs and they’re taking Hispanic jobs.”
In U.S. history it has been commonplace for political leaders to try to garner power by warning their voters that some minority group is coming for their jobs. In the 1840s, Know-Nothings in Boston warned native-born voters about Irish immigrants; in 1862 and 1864, Democrats tried to whip up support by warning Irish immigrants that after Republicans fought to end enslavement, Black Americans would move north and take their jobs. In the 1870s, Californian Denis Kearney of the Workingman’s Party drew voters to his standard by warning that Chinese immigrants were taking their jobs and insisted: “The Chinese Must Go!”
And those were just the early days.
But while they are related, there is a key difference between these racist appeals and the racism that Trump exhibited on Thursday. Politicians have often tried to get votes by warning that outsiders would draw from a pool of jobs that potential voters wanted themselves. Trump’s comments the other night drew on that racism but reached back much further to the idea that there are certain jobs that are “Black” or “Hispanic.”
This is not a new idea in the United States.
“In all social systems there must be a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life,” South Carolina senator James Henry Hammond told his colleagues in 1858. “That is, a class requiring but a low order of intellect and but little skill. Its requisites are vigor, docility, fidelity. Such a class you must have, or you would not have that other class which leads progress, civilization, and refinement. It constitutes the very mud-sill of society and of political government; and you might as well attempt to build a house in the air, as to build either the one or the other, except on this mud-sill.”
Capital produced by the labor of mudsills would concentrate in the hands of the upper class, who would use it efficiently and intelligently to develop society. Their guidance elevated those weak-minded but strong-muscled people in the mudsill class, who were “happy, content, unaspiring, and utterly incapable, from intellectual weakness, ever to give us any trouble by their aspirations.”
Southern leaders were smart enough to have designated a different race as their society’s mudsills, Hammond said, but in the North the “whole hireling class of manual laborers and ‘operatives,’ as you call them, are essentially slaves.” This created a political problem for northerners, for the majority of the population made up that lower class. “If they knew the tremendous secret, that the ballot-box is stronger than ‘an army with banners,’ and could combine, where would you be?” Hammond asked his colleagues who insisted that all people were created equal. “Your society would be reconstructed, your government overthrown, your property divided.”
The only true way to look at the world was to understand that some people were better than others and had the right and maybe the duty, to rule. “I repudiate, as ridiculously absurd, that much-lauded but nowhere accredited dogma of Mr. Jefferson, that ‘all men are born equal’” Hammond wrote, and it was on this theory that some people are better than others that southern enslavers based their proposed new nation.
“Our new government is founded…upon the great truth that the [Black man] is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical and moral truth,” Alexander Stephens, vice president of the Confederacy, told supporters.
Not everyone agreed. For his part, rising politician Abraham Lincoln stood on the Declaration of Independence. Months after Hammond’s speech, Lincoln addressed German immigrants in Chicago. Arguments that some races are “inferior,” he said, would “rub out the sentiment of liberty in the country, and…transform this Government into a government of some other form.” The idea that it is beneficial for some people to be dominated by others, he said, is the argument “that kings have made for enslaving the people in all ages of the world…. Turn in whatever way you will—whether it come from the mouth of a King, an excuse for enslaving the people of his country, or from the mouth of men of one race as a reason for enslaving the men of another race, it is all the same old serpent.”
According to the mudsill theory, he said the following year, “a blind horse upon a tread-mill, is a perfect illustration of what a laborer should be—all the better for being blind, that he could not tread out of place, or kick understandingly. According to that theory, the education of laborers, is not only useless, but pernicious, and dangerous.” He disagreed. “[T]here is not, of necessity, any such thing as the free hired laborer being fixed to that condition for life.”
He went on to tie the mudsill theory to the larger principles of the United States. “I should like to know if taking this old Declaration of Independence, which declares that all men are equal upon principle and making exceptions to it, where will it stop,” he said. “If that declaration is not the truth, let us get the Statute book, in which we find it and tear it out!” To cries of “No, no,” he concluded to cheers: “Let us stick to it then. Let us stand firmly by it.”
One hundred and sixty-six years later, Black and Hispanic social media users have answered Trump’s statement about “Black jobs” and “Hispanic jobs” with photos of themselves in highly skilled professional positions. But while they did so with good humor, they were illustrating for the modern world the principle Lincoln articulated: in the United States there should be no such thing as “Black jobs” or “Hispanic jobs.”
Such a construction directly contradicts the principles of the Declaration of Independence and ignores the victory of the United States in the Civil War. Anyone who sees the world through such a lens is on the wrong side of history.
So many members of the GOP are making it clear they want to take this idea even further than in the past. They know that most people given a choice between menial jobs that don’t pay enough to survive and any other job will take the latter. Part of the trick they are playing on voters who aren’t paying attention is that work will be another area where they intend to take away any remaining ability to choose.
In their dream world, where they have ended birthright citizenship and created all kinds of tests people must pass in order to remain in the country, there won’t be many BIPOC left. After they have detained or deported all the Black or Hispanic people, guess who they will expect to do all those menial jobs?
GOP pols don’t really care about pale people either, especially if they are poor. However, they’ll tolerate the ones who they believe will be useful to them. When I point this out to folks who are hesitant to vote Blue, I remind them that in the GOP, “poor people” means anyone who has to work for a living or relies on any form of government assistance*. Let’s hope more non-wealthy, likely GOP voters get the memo about their true place in the country 45 and his minions are trying to create, and join the rest of us in fighting like hell to stop them.
*Not the assistance given to corporations or wealthy, business-owning Makers, of course. 
July 1, 2024 (Monday)
Today the United States Supreme Court overthrew the central premise of American democracy: that no one is above the law.
It decided that the president of the United States, possibly the most powerful person on earth, has “absolute immunity” from criminal prosecution for crimes committed as part of the official acts at the core of presidential powers. The court also said it should be presumed that the president also has immunity for other official acts as well, unless that prosecution would not intrude on the authority of the executive branch.
This is a profound change to our fundamental law—an amendment to the Constitution, as historian David Blight noted. Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts said that a president needs such immunity to make sure the president is willing to take “bold and unhesitating action” and make unpopular decisions, although no previous president has ever asserted that he is above the law or that he needed such immunity to fulfill his role. Roberts’s decision didn’t focus at all on the interest of the American people in guaranteeing that presidents carry out their duties within the guardrails of the law.
But this extraordinary power grab does not mean President Joe Biden can do as he wishes. As legal commentator Asha Rangappa pointed out, the court gave itself the power to determine which actions can be prosecuted and which cannot by making itself the final arbiter of what is “official” and what is not. Thus any action a president takes is subject to review by the Supreme Court, and it is reasonable to assume that this particular court would not give a Democrat the same leeway it would give Trump.
There is no historical or legal precedent for this decision. The Declaration of Independence was a litany of complaints against King George III designed to explain why the colonists were declaring themselves free of kings; the Constitution did not provide immunity for the president, although it did for members of Congress in certain conditions, and it provided for the removal of the president for “high crimes and misdemeanors”—what would those be if a president is immune from prosecution for his official acts? The framers worried about politicians’ overreach and carefully provided for oversight of leaders; the Supreme Court today smashed through that key guardrail.
Presidential immunity is a brand new doctrine. In February 2021, explaining away his vote to acquit Trump for inciting an insurrection, Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), who had also protected Trump in his first impeachment trial in 2019, said: “Trump is still liable for everything he did while he was in office…. We have a criminal justice system in this country. We have civil litigation, and former presidents are not immune from being held accountable by either one.”
But it was not just McConnell who thought that way. At his confirmation hearing in 2005, now–Chief Justice John Roberts said: “I believe that no one is above the law under our system and that includes the president. The president is fully bound by the law, the Constitution, and statutes.”
In his 2006 confirmation hearings, Samuel Alito said: “There is nothing that is more important for our republic than the rule of law. No person in this country, no matter how high or powerful, is above the law.”
And in 2018, Brett Kavanaugh told the Senate: “No one’s above the law in the United States, that’s a foundational principle…. We’re all equal before the law…. The foundation of our Constitution was that…the presidency would not be a monarchy…. [T]he president is not above the law, no one is above the law.”
Now they have changed that foundational principle for a man who, according to White House officials during his term, called for the execution of people who upset him and who has vowed to exact vengeance on those he now thinks have wronged him. Over the past weekend, Trump shared an image on social media saying that former Representative Liz Cheney (R-WY), who sat on the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, was guilty of treason and calling for “televised military tribunals” to try her.
Today, observers illustrated what Trump’s newly declared immunity could mean. Political scientist Norm Ornstein pointed out that Trump could “order his handpicked FBI Director to arrest and jail his political opponents. He can order the IRS to put liens on the property of media companies who criticize him and jail reporters and editors.” Legal analyst Joyce White Vance noted that a president with such broad immunity could order the assassination of Supreme Court justices, and retired military leader Mark Hertling wrote that he was “trying to figure out how a commander can refuse an illegal order from someone who is issuing it as an official act.”
Asha Rangappa wrote: “According to the Court, a President could literally provide the leader of a hostile adversary with intelligence needed to win a conflict in which we are involved, or even attack or invade the U.S., and not be prosecuted for treason, because negotiating with heads of state is an exclusive Art. II function. In case you were wondering.” Trump is currently under indictment for retaining classified documents. “The Court has handed Trump, if he wins this November, carte blanche to be a ‘dictator on day one,’ and the ability to use every lever of official power at his disposal for his personal ends without any recourse,” Rangappa wrote. “This election is now a clear-cut decision between democracy and autocracy. Vote accordingly.”
Trump’s lawyers are already challenging Trump’s conviction in the election interference case in which a jury found him guilty on 34 counts. Over Trump’s name on social media, a post said the decision was “BRILLIANTLY WRITTEN AND WISE, AND CLEARS THE STENCH FROM THE BIDEN TRIALS AND HOAXES, ALL OF THEM, THAT HAVE BEEN USED AS AN UNFAIR ATTACK ON CROOKED JOE BIDEN’S POLITICAL OPPONENT, ME. MANY OF THESE FAKE CASES WILL NOW DISAPPEAR, OR WITHER INTO OBSCURITY. GOD BLESS AMERICA!”
In a concurring opinion, Justice Clarence Thomas, whose wife was deeply involved in the effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election, also took a shot at the appointment of special counsels to investigate such events. Thomas was not the only Justice whose participation in this decision was likely covered by a requirement that he recuse himself: Alito has publicly expressed support for the attempt to keep Trump in office against the will of voters. Trump appointed three of the other justices granting him immunity—Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett—to the court.
In a dissent in which Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson concurred, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that because of the majority’s decision, “[t]he relationship between the President and the people he serves has shifted irrevocably. In every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law.”
“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. Moving forward, however, all former Presidents will be cloaked in such immunity. If the occupant of that office misuses official power for personal gain, the criminal law that the rest of us must abide will not provide a backstop. With fear for our democracy,” she wrote, “I dissent.”
Today’s decision destroyed the principle on which this nation was founded, that all people in the United States of America should be equal before the law.
The name of the case is “Donald J. Trump v. United States.”
So what do we do? Party for 6 mos and then jump off a bridge? What do you do when you have lost your government to a coup and are unsure who to bank with now?
Like ok it was a good run! The penultimate chapter is always more fun than the end. I’m not physically going to be able to survive to the epilogue without tremendous luck and I’m no of more a target than basically any other woman, less so than many/most. my country is dead to rights. my culture has degraded to the point of it being considered normal to regularly slaughter schoolchildren. there is nowhere in the world that I can go.
So here I am.
Useless, of course.
It’s not over yet. There is still an election in November, and Trump cannot use the power of the Presidency to influence this election because he is not President. What we do is vote for Biden. Vote for the Democratic candidate for Senate from your state, if there is a Senatorial election in your state this time. Vote for the Democratic candidate for the House from your district. Vote for the Democratic candidate for Governor. Vote for Democrats for your state’s House and Senate. Vote for Democrats for mayors and city councils and school boards and judges. We no longer live in a world where you should vote for the best candidate, regardless of their party affiliation. One party wants autocratic rule under a single party headed by one man who is above the law. The other party still respects representative democracy. Right now, we can still vote our way out of this problem. Vote.
I don’t know how else to say this. If I want my vote to count I have to move. I’m not saying I’m going to stop or change how I vote. I have not voted for anyone on the GOP ticket since I began voting.
It’s just that literally we have also already been largely disenfranchised by our state and would depend on the Supreme Court to resolve it.
You’re alive right now and that’s what counts. You don’t have to live forever; you just need to outlive the fascist death cult. Once they are gone and you’re still here, then you can see real change. They are growing more audacious and violent as they grow weaker, but they won’t be around for much longer. But you will.
They have gone full-on fascist specifically because they are dying off and this their last chance to keep the diverse, accepting culture that is rising from taking power. Don’t get me wrong, this is them at their very most dangerous, because they are fighting a demographic tide they cannot defeat short of fascist final solution shit. But they are dying off. “But Doc, there are young racists and fascists!” There are, but millenials and, even more so Gen Z and younger, are trending progressive by huge numbers. The cavalry is coming. We need to fight on to make sure they still have a country, and the fascists are trying their damnedest to make sure they do not. 2016 was the most important election in our country since Lincoln, and we failed. 2024 is the second most important. We cannot fail this one.
Yeah I didn’t mean to come across like I was trying to take the fight out of people.
it’s a lot.
That’s how I described the decision to family who hadn’t read it, yet. The majority set up this fictional idea of President-Man, a superhero figure who has to make unhesitating decisions and actions to prevent world annihilation.
Blargh. The absolute last person on earth who I want to make split second decisions without a thought for legality is the President of the United States.
It’s also such a blatant lie, such an obvious straining for justification.
Reminds me of the SCOTUS explanation for stopping the 2000 FL recount. Wasn’t it that not stopping it would cause harm, and that which would be harmed was Shrub’s chance of winning the election?
It’s bullshit on so many levels. It presumes the president is taking an action of governance, for the benefit of the country. Roberts never engages with the reality that Trump was charged with acts that would benefit nobody but himself. No president has ever been restrained from taking actions up to and including war crimes by the absence of immunity. Roberts is a supreme gaslighter. The lot of them should be disbarred like Eastman.
It’s not enough. Voting is bare minimum.
I’m somewhat disappointed that this was Biden’s response. As @TornPaperNapkin has written, that excludes all the good people who have had their votes nullified in states like Texas and Wisconsin.
I would ask my representatives to push Biden to at the very least implement federal protections with active teeth to protect every single American’s right to vote fairly. The fascists are going to take that away: as @anon29537550 says, they don’t care about the consequences of violating people’s rights. This is the thrashing of a drowning swimmer. They have every incentive to cheat harder, because the reward for success is a T**** presidency and positions in the new, shiny face-stomping theocratic dictatorship, while their consequences for failure are being treated fairly and with due process by an administration that will bend over backwards to act in good faith.
There are limits to what Biden can do. Elections are managed by the states, not the federal government. What’s he supposed to do? Send the National Guard to keep watch at polling locations? Talk about voter intimidation. Unlike Trump, Biden actually believes in the Constitution and in the rule of law. He’s not going to overstep his authority. So what, exactly, would you like Biden to do to protect people’s right to vote?
And as far as what we can do, we can vote. And we can volunteer for various candidates and campaigns. And we can protest and organize. And…run for office ourselves, I guess. Too late this year, but going forward. I never said voting was enough. But it is absolutely mandatory this year. And it’s mandatory that we vote Democrat. This is no time to “Well, this one Democrat in my district isn’t great, and there’s a Green Party candidate I like” right now. We have to prevent the Republicans from gaining control of all branches of government. And the primary way we do that is by voting. I wasn’t speaking to what Biden and the Democratic Party should do. I’m speaking to what we should do. We vote.
Reinstate the 1965 Voting Rights Act by Executive Order, but extending it to all states. Put together a rapid response team from DoJ, Homeland, etc. to actively monitor for fuckery from the usual suspects like Desantis, Abbott, Paxton, etc. and counter it. It’s not too late to have automated voter registration across the country and freeze voter roll purges. That’s all within his purview anyway, except for stepping on SCOTUS’s toes regarding their illegitimate overturning of the Voting Rights Act.
I’m just tired of treating external threats from relative nonentities like crises but existential threats from inside the country like it’s business as usual. It’s not. It’s not hyperbole to call the combinations of this decision and T**** an existential threat that needs to be countered as such. It’s Biden’s job to uphold the Constitution. This decision is unconstitutional. T**** as a candidate after organizing a failed insurrection is unconstitutional. Uphold, FFS!
It absolutely is not. The President does not have the authority to institute automatic voter registration nationally or to freeze voter rolls. Congress has some ability to influence the voter registration process for federal elections, like they did with the National Voter Registration Act (aka the Motor Voter Act). But if Biden tried to do something like nationwide automatic voter registration for federal elections by executive order, it would be challenged in court before the ink dried, and you and I both know how this Court would rule on that. I don’t want to waste time and resources on efforts that have no chance of success. There are limited resources, and right now, they need to go into electing Biden.
If you mean SCOTUS’s decision yesterday…well unfortunately that’s not how that works. SCOTUS is the body which declares what is and isn’t Constitutional. They are the final authority on such matters, unless you want to scrap the Constitution and start over. I disagree with their decision, but their decisions are, by definition, Constitutional. In the words of former Justice Robert Jackson, “We are not final because we are infallible, but we are infallible only because we are final.”
Under a reinstated Voting Rights Act, it absolutely is. Federal oversight of elections is what that act was all about.
There has to be a line. It goes completely against the plain language of the Constitution. It is a coup. As I wrote in the other thread, relatively speaking, the Constitution was written in plain language by non-lawyers for regular people. The idea that it’s some murky document that can only be interpreted by the Oracles of Georgetown is false and wrong, and this is what we get from treating it that way.
