i think her correct title is “popular vote winner, hillary”
in truth, it wasn’t just the votes themselves. it was the electoral college and outsized influence of the ex confederacy, plus a long running campaign of voter disenfranchisement and gerrymandering against people of color. ( eta: oh. and misogyny of course )
and - preaching to the choir - none of it by accident
I don’t understand why every single Democratic member of Congress doesn’t simply utter the following sentence at all speaking opportunities: “A vote for Trump is a vote for fascism.”
This Supreme Court decision is just more support for that assertion…
Just like “Carthago delenda est”
Never use it and pack the court in 2025 to kill it with fire.
And Comey violating DoJ policy…
But how do you kill it? Let’s say a set of actual adults gets control of the SC. They have to have a case presented to them to provide a judgement and change, correct? They cannot simply go “you know that decision? Yeah, it’s bad news” or RvW would have been gone long long ago.
Option 1: Someone does something to create a test case, and someone files suit.
Option 2: Someone just makes up a case and files suit.
The second one seems to be fine these days.
Yeah, there is a reason that this never came up before. Flagrantly felonious fuckheads usually do not get elected president. And (IANAL, so take with huge grain of salt) we would have to have such a situation to get this into court again, yes? I am not certain that is how this would work, but how else does it get reviewed/overturned?
I must say, the US hard copy constitution once seemed a model of brevity, clarity and good sense, but now it looks like a kind of legalistic trap.
Ah, I see your problem, here.
exception to the rule… He just hid it better…
My family was harmed financially by T**** being in power during COVID. It turns out, he violated laws to cover up the fact that he violated campaign finance laws, and I am harmed if he gets immunity for those illegal actions. There, I ( and hundreds of millions of other Americans) now have more standing than every plaintiff this court has used for their religious illiberty decisions over the past six years. Done.
IMO, the problem is that it’s been distorted over time in the interest of making it unapproachable to regular people. Laws are written by (mostly) lawyers for interpretation by lawyers (and judges, who are also lawyers). That’s why law is pretty opaque to lay people. But the Constitution was written by (mostly) non-lawyers for regular people. It was meant to be approachable and in plain language. Treating it like some mystical document that can only be interpreted by an anointed few just opens it up for abuse by bad actors (cough, SCOTUS cough). The average person should be able to look at a SCOTUS decision and, whether they disagree with it or not, understand how it relates back to the plain language of the Constitution.
And not issuing a correction when Senate Republicans lied and said he had reopened the investigation.
Americans approach their constiution as if it were a religious text that cannot be rewritten, so they rewrite it by reinterpreting it to mean what they want it to say.
The other messed-up thing about the US Constiution is that the amendments do not amend the original text. You can read, study and revere the Constiution and at the same time ignore the amendments you don’t like. You can pontificate endlessly about respect for the Constitution without having to admit that you do not recognise the Constitution that is in force now.
I think that this crazy evidentiary rule is going to be more of a problem with the classified documents case. Yes, Trump is only charged with his actions after he left office. But establishing that he did not, indeed declassify the documents while he was still in office, (which would indeed be an official act) might require evidence that is now barred. This decision is a horrible mess eight ways to Sunday.
I mean I understand the reasoning behind the idea that his conversations with Justice Department officials are official acts, even if I don’t think that he should be immune from being charged with any crimes he may have committed during those conversations. They’re part of the executive branch and he’s their boss. But really, how is talking to the vice president an official act? The president is NOT the boss of the Vice President. Indeed the only constitutional powers for the vice president, presiding over the Senate and casting tie-breaking votes there would seem to indicate that until the president dies or is removed from office and the vice-president becomes president, he is part of the legislative branch. The president can’t fire the vice president. He doesn’t serve “at the will” of the president. POTUS is free to inform VPOTUS on what the VPOTUS should do but he can’t really give orders. But threatening the VPOTUS should be construed as interfering with VPOTUS’s constitutionally enumerated duty. Tough to prove, but there should be no immunity for it.
There would be documentation with the existing administration for such declassification. And I have a feeling that the Biden administration would be happy to cooperate with investigators.
Declassification is a process that has a paper trail. No documentation, no declassification.
That is certainly the argument that I would make. The president does have authority to declassify anything since the whole process of classification is authorized by by an executive order. That is WHY he isn’t charged with mishandling the documents when he was in office. And like the pardon power the authority to do something does not imply that he can do it “in his mind,” not tell anyone, and then say after he is out of office, “:Oh, by the way, I actually pardoned him when I was president.” But the current Supreme Court seems willing to make some strange logical leaps to get themselves the result hat they want, so I wouldn’t be too surprised if they decided that the classification of these documents was essentially “unknowable.”
