You can thank one liberal pipe dream and one overly cautious Justice Department.
“It’s up to the Supreme Court.” These days the phrase is as much a statement of fact when it comes to a major legal issue that the justices will resolve as it is a cause for concern. After all, in the past two years alone, the conservative supermajority of justices installed by Donald Trump has upended the law on abortion, gun control, voting rights, affirmative action, executive power, and discrimination in public life.
The same group of justices is now poised to consider two major legal questions that will significantly shape — and perhaps even indirectly determine — the outcome of the 2024 presidential election. The Court’s handling of these issues will constitute a roiling, monthslong subplot of the 2024 presidential contest, one that remains, according to recent polling, a statistical dead heat between Trump and President Joe Biden and couldplausibly turn on the progress of Trump’s criminal cases before Election Day.
It is an unsettling, if not outright maddening, situation that should concern anyone who has watched the politicization and deterioration of the Court in recent years or who recalls its intervention in the 2000 election in favor of George W. Bush. The uncertainty before us is the result of two ostensibly different problems that are converging before our eyes: the emergence of a solidly conservative majority on the Supreme Court, whose decisions often align with the partisan political priorities of the Republican Party, and the Justice Department’s needless delay in moving to investigate and prosecute Trump over his effort to steal the 2020 election.
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Welcome to 2000…
I turn 39 this year. Growing up in the 90s it seemed like post cold war things might be looking up. Lofuckingl.
It did. Then SCOTUS threw the presidency to Bush and commercial airliners flew into tall buildings in NY.
Imagine the Gore timeline. I know we can agree this is the culmination of Nixon and the Southern Strategy for 60+ years. Or maybe that we let things persist by not cleaning house after the Civil War.
But imagine the restoration of all the good will toward America deteriorated by decades of imperialism btwn WW2 and 9/11… and Gore was at the helm instead of the Neocons.
The climate alone… peace in the middle east instead of oil wars… banking regulations… so many other timelines we’ll never know… Too much power in that court.
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Oh, Al Gore DEFINITELY won in Florida, that was figured out in January of '01, but by then the Supreme Court had already installed Bush.
Had they allowed the count to continue, Gore would have been President.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/jan/29/uselections2000.usa
"In each case, if the newly examined votes had been allowed to count in the November election, Mr Gore would have won Florida’s 21 electoral college votes by a narrow majority and he, not Mr Bush, would be the president. Instead, Mr Bush officially carried Florida by 537 votes after recounts were stopped.
In spite of the findings, no legal challenge to the Florida result is possible in the light of the US supreme court’s 5-4 ruling in December to hand the state to Mr Bush."
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Our elected Democrats keep trusting their Republican colleagues to do the right thing, and they keep getting fucked over. When will they learn?
Democrats have been Charlie Brown to the Republican’s Lucy for as long as I can remember. Every time they run to kick the ball, every time the Republicans pull it out of the way, and every time the Democrats fall on their ass.
A perfect analogy. Good grief!
This is fantastic.
The delays in the justice department are because they’ve never prosecuted a previously sitting president to this degree before. If they make a misstep, he wins on appeal. This is being taken very slowly, very deliberately as to not pervert the course of justice. Unfortunately for us, the very rich and very influential can essentially delay this almost indefinitely.
Trump will die before he ever ends up in prison. Honestly, I think that’s the best we can hope for.
So sorry, I’m confused, your start off by saying that the justice department is responsible for the delays because they’re working hard to get it right. That’s an excellent point.
But then you say that unfortunately the rich and influential can delay this indefinitely. Also a good point, but flies in the face of the first.
Can you clarify?
It doesn’t fly in the face of the first at all. That’s how the law ends up working (or not working) for people. If you can hire a team of educated lawyers, they can postpone, argue merits of, wording of, conditions of, etc – written law.
If you can’t hire that same team of lawyers, you just get told “that’s how it is” and you don’t get the same protections.
Like Trump saying he never vowed to “uphold” the constitution. That teeny tiny argument ended up costing like 2 weeks worth of court…
It’s these little things, that lawyers then argue in appeals court – to justify overturning a previous ruling. Things like the previous judge misapplying a ruling, etc. These “small” injustices are done every day to normal people who can’t afford a team of lawyers to scrutinize every single little thing that a judge does.
In some cases, if a lower court gets it wrong – then the decision gets overturned. However…if the lower court is slow, methodical, and steps very carefully - appeals will look at the person filing the appeal and laugh. But every single I has to be dotted. Every T has to be crossed. Everything has to be performed perfectly. It reduces the amount of scrutiny that the lawyers can use to their advantage.
Sorry still confused. Are things moving slowly because Prosecutors want to get it right? Or are things moving slowly because the former President’s legal team is dragging things out? They literally can’t both be true.
They literally both can be true, and literally are both the case. They drag things out by scrutinizing the proceedings. THUS, they are moving methodically in order to get it right so that it doesn’t ALSO make it to appeals court.
Those two things are not mutually exclusive.
Can you explain why a trial can’t proceed slowly for more than one reason?
They already did it before, why not again?
It’s astounding just how far Very Important People will go to bothsides blame at every opportunity and give sympathy to blatantly dishonest ‘interpretations’.
i call the both sides people ‘conservatives’. they live in a different era, where 2 parties attempted to work together (or at least pretend).
they are desperately trying to conserve that at all costs… while the system burns around them.
Back in the before times, they two parties worked together quite fine in the backroom dealing, and only blustered when there were cameras, or the public, around.
Now that garbage is leaking into the backroom dealings, and it shows.
The “in the before times” also included segregation, Jim Crow, and chattel slavery.
So “worked together quite fine” seems disingenuous at least.
Out of curiosity, what is your vision of government where the players are simply at all-out war with one another instead of seeking compromise? Outside of an autocracy, I’m struggling to picture a stable government where people on different sides make no attempt at working together.
And if what you’re seeking is a left-authoritarian government then I’m going to have to agree with the both-sidesers on this one. I don’t want any flavor of authoritarian rule. Fascism is probably the worst, but the Soviet Union was a real shit show, too.
These are the real problem group. They are hooked on partisan politics and would never support a Democrat, but this comes at the cost of the cancer growing among their ranks. I dont think these people are all classical racist fascists. These are Christian church going family men entering middle and elderly age. They are in fact generally good people and they are proud of that fact. These are the ‘nobody wants to work anymore’, 'I worked two jobs to make it through college ’ crowd. But they have done well and raised good families. They are in my mind good people, hard workers, and good leaders. But they can’t get past this us vs them mentality. They don’t like trump and the maga shit but only because it makes them look bad. They want to be taken seriously and maintain their honor but it’s real hard when your new maga friends keep wearing swastikas.
They are conflicted and angry and have signaled that no matter what, the majority of them will place their pride above all and vote for Trump again and again. They just can’t accept that shit got away from them and their great monolith party of principles and honor is anything but. They have to find any way to both sides it and make the maga cancer seem like a common problem amongst their enemies ranks as well. To them it’s not a maga problem if they can create a boogeyman. BLM and trans people invading schools.
It falls apart quickly under review, so that’s why they don’t review. If you get your news by reading headlines and you get your headlines from fox news, you’ll always have a safe space.
These men and women are inadvertently killing America. They are blind to it because their victory would seemingly benefit them and cause no problems. They don’t realize the true ramifications because they dismiss all of that as liberal overreaction.
This is the group that scares me, just because they yield so much influence.
Yeah, all of that adds up to not good people, sorry. You can’t keep your head down and ignore what’s going on and empower the worst among us because you don’t want to have to think, and still be a good person.
Who are these so called vip? I don’t think there’s any legitimate both sides accusations.
Illegitimate government is illegitimate
What’s even more maddening is that there are tons of people now that are willing to throw away their vote because of their stance on foreign affairs- while simultaneous ignoring the fact that Biden’s opposition- a twice-impeached treasonous rapist, would do the exact same thing, if not worse over there.
Seriously… the Palestinian conflict is the best thing to have happened to Trump since Mexico agreed to pay for his wall.
What’s also insane is that the supreme court in the US is so partisan. I don’t think the people in virtually any other country could name their supreme court justices, and certainly not say what party they’re loyal to. The appointment process in the US is designed to result in partisan justices, which is yet another way that the US constitution is flawed and needs to be amended.
Could. Haha.
Is it really such a problem to allow American voters to decide the election in 2024, by voting for whichever candidate they so choose?
The problem is that one of these candidates lost the last time there was an election, and then broke the law and tried to illegally maintain power, thus making himself ineligible to run again. Is it really such a problem to uphold the Constitution of the US?
I think the biggest problem is that conservatives are used to using the Constitution to mean they can do whatever they want. “You can’t take away my fully automatic assault rifle with a 30 round magazine of armor piercing rounds, the 2nd Amendment says so!” “You can’t force my business to serve gay people, the 1st Amendment says so!”
As soon as the 14th Amendment says, in clear and easy to understand language, that Trump can’t run for president - all of a sudden they act like they’ve never heard of the Constitution before.
I’m sorry, I must have missed the conviction for the crime of insurrection, much less then indictment for it.
Wishful thinking does not get us there, and until there is even an indictment for insurrection, the Democrats should not be fucking around with anti-democratic and clearly un-Constitutional manouvres, because that plays directly into Trump’s sob-story politics, “boo hoo they’re all out to get me.” Well guess what he can now point to conclusive evidence that “they are out to get him.”
Democrats need to stop being fucking stupid and playing directly into Trump’s strengths.
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I’m sorry, I must have missed the conviction for the crime of insurrection, much less then indictment for it.
Nobody is ever prosecuted for the crime of insurrection. If an insurrection is successful a party takes over the government, and won’t prosecute themselves. All you could do is attempt to prosecute someone for an attempted insurrection. The problem is that if an insurrection is unsuccessful, it’s a matter of judgement as to how close it came to being successful.
