|
Heck Yes! Loam! posted:Lol trump responds The full 12-page statement is surprisingly boring. Only a few paragraphs bring that classic Trump energy, the rest is obviously written by a staffer.
|
#
¿
Jun 14, 2022 01:26
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 21, 2024 06:17 |
|
|
Charliegrs posted:I think it was really dumb to have only the first hearing at prime time and then the rest at 130pm EST. If they are trying to get the American people to pay attention to this then putting it on while 99% of people are at work was a bad idea. At best some folks will get the 5 minute sound bites of the hearings long after they have ended but that's just not going to have the same impact. They did such a good job with the opening hearing not only in airing it prime time but also with how they decided to present it. It was a much more digestable hearing for normal folks. They should have just kept doing it that way. The hearing is almost certainly planned with the intention of having the sound bites dripped out through the media. Only the most deeply politically-addicted people are going to directly watch more than an hour or two worth of Congressional hearings.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 15, 2022 05:48
|
|
|
Dr. Faustus posted:I called it. It was I can't believe this is loving real https://twitter.com/judgeluttig/status/1538266501530234881 https://twitter.com/judgeluttig/status/1538266513433673729 https://twitter.com/judgeluttig/status/1538266523520880640 I thought for sure it was a parody, but if that Twitter account is fake, then someone's been pretending to be Luttig for a very long time
|
|
#
¿
Jun 20, 2022 17:41
|
|
|
Herstory Begins Now posted:You got trump's # off, he had ~85% of conservatives in 2020 I think it was 93% of Republicans, not 93% of conservatives. This conversation keeps switching between "Republicans" and "conservatives" and it makes it tough to follow.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 21, 2022 22:10
|
|
|
Automata 10 Pack posted:If it’s to preserve democracy then yeah, the party should be dissolved. There's not really any point in that in a two-party country. If you dissolve the GOP, all the GOP supporters will just flock to another party and turn that one into the next GOP. If you ban all right-wing parties and make the US a one-party state, well, better hope you've cultivated extremely close ties with the military, because you'll have a hard time maintaining a one-party dictatorship against the will of 40+% of the voters without plenty of troops to do the legwork for you!
|
|
#
¿
Jul 3, 2022 18:17
|
|
|
TulliusCicero posted:...John Brown was convicted of treason and executed, as were the Rosenbergs (extremely unfairly). John Brown was convicted of treason against Virginia, under Virginia state law. John Brown never faced any federal charges, only state charges. Virginia state law's definition of treason is different from the federal definition. And if you have to precede your statement with "you could argue", then you do not actually have a solid basis for prosecuting someone for Treason, the number one big-deal crime in federal law with its own special treatment in the Constitution. The Treason Clause is specifically written to make it very difficult to use, and later Supreme Court jurisprudence has narrowed it even further. There's just no way that any reasonable prosecutor would take on the extra-hard-mode challenge of using the Treason Clause against an big fish like Trump who actually poses an ongoing danger. Especially when there's plenty of similar laws that don't carry the same Constitutional baggage.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 7, 2022 19:23
|
|
|
Uglycat posted:. Why do you think that? I don't really see how that would be the case. He'll become a martyr, and his supporters will endlessly decry the injustices imposed on him by biased Democrats and the evil deep state. It'd make him a hero and forever immortalize him in fascist thought. quote:He may appeal. It may go to the Supreme Court (would it tho? I don't know). Hey may be granted a stay or commutation or whatever (I'm against). But like, the chud qanon Maga movement has to be kicked in the balls, and creating legal precedence for regarding trumps actions as treasonous is all you can do to discourage the next flynn, or whatever. It would most definitely go to the Supreme Court. Treason Clause cases often do, thanks to the extremely specific requirements placed on that charge by the actual text of the US Constitution. I don't think you're really getting just how much harder it is to convict for treason compared to any other crime, let alone how much harder it is to get the death penalty for it.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 8, 2022 06:21
|
|
|
Uglycat posted:I get that it's harder, in principle. And what I'm pointing out is that it's never easy, and that you're vastly underestimating just how specific and constrained the requirements of the Treason Clause are. For example, there is actual Supreme Court precedent (Ex Parte Bollman and US v Aaron Burr) saying that actively recruiting an army to overthrow the US government is not sufficient to sustain a treason conviction: it wasn't overt enough an act, and didn't constitute an actual "levying of war". When I say that no prosecutor will risk using the Treason Act against an actual current threat, poo poo like that is why. As far as I can tell, no one has ever been executed under the Treason Clause of the US Constitution. Though several US citizens who defected to the Germans or Japanese during WWII were convicted of Constitutional treason after WWII, none were executed. And while several people were executed for treasonous behavior during and immediately after the Civil War, they were convicted and executed by military tribunals under military law. Other famed treason executions, like John Brown, were done under state treason laws rather than federal. And of course there's people like the Rosenbergs who, despite being executed, were never charged with treason at all - other laws not subject to the same Constitutional restrictions were more than sufficient to put them to death. Uglycat posted:Certainly the standard should be very high; but if there is no standard that can be met, why make it a crime at all? In any case, while you might advocate for treason not being a crime punishable by death - it is on the books. If they joined a foreign military that was actively at war with the US, and then helped that military force in their war against the US, they could be charged with treason no problem. If they raised an actual military force and sent it to engage in an actual shooting war against the US military, as Jefferson Davis did then they could probably be reliably charged with treason. That's about it. Trump's actions may qualify, but it's not guaranteed that it would - there's some ambiguity, and when it comes to Treason Clause jurisprudence, ambiguity generally means "assume it doesn't qualify". Besides, charging a current politician with a tightly-defined Constitutional crime is basically inviting the Supreme Court to get involved, and no sane prosecutor should want that given that Trump personally appointed one-third of the Court's current members. As for why treason requirements are so hard to meet, it's a consequence of the English common law tradition, where creative prosecutors and compliant judges had been quite successful in expanding the definition of "treason" to something quite broad. At the time the Constitution was written, actions that could get an Englishman executed for high treason included counterfeiting money, killing a judge, or having sex with the king's wife. And that doesn't even include things like petty treason, which was essentially an enhanced murder charge for those who killed people immediately above them in the social structures of the day (for example, a wife killing a husband, or a servant killing a master). Moreover, to allow for new and novel types of treason that didn't exist when the Treason Act was put to paper in 1351 (!), if a judge thought something should be treason even though it wasn't, they had the ability to put the trial on pause and refer the matter to the King and Parliament to have them decide whether to pass a new treason law for it. That generally expansive view of treason was not popular among the general populace, and the American colonists inherited that distaste for English treason law. As such, the writers of the Constitution wanted to make absolutely sure the expansion of treason's definition didn't happen here, by firmly establishing tight and well-defined limits without even a hint of flexibility. There was an active effort to prevent prosecutors and political factions from having even the slightest flexibility that might allow them to create what Madison derisively called "new-fangled and artificial treasons". As such, the Treason Clause is pretty much entirely restrained to the worst and most blatant cases possible. And when I say "worst and most blatant", think Jefferson Davis and Robert E Lee, not Donald Trump. PhantomOfTheCopier posted:That seems rather circular to me. "If he's held accountable for crimes committed (I don't claim here what those might be), his supporters will claim with hunts and conspiracy and immortalize him as neoHitler". On the other hand, "If he's not held accountable for crimes committed, his supporters will claim See this was all a witch hunt and conspiracy! then immortalize him as neoHitler". Nah, I'm saying that execution specifically will martyr him and empower his followers. The movement doesn't need him anymore, there's plenty of people who'll happily take his place as leader of the new fascist movement if the opportunity arises. It's honestly inconvenient for them to have him still farting around, throwing endorsements wherever he likes and screaming into the void on Truth Social. Putting him in prison where he can't go out and personally rally the crowds, but is still able to muddle conservative politics through middlemen, is far better than letting DeSantis frame himself as the inheritor of Trump's will and the avenger who will wreak vengeance on liberals for the unjust judicial murder of Donald J Trump.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 8, 2022 17:26
|
|
|
Jaxyon posted:"He's already being platformed by sympathetic media so really it's NBD if we platform him in a congressional hearing" is certainly a big brain take Eh, I can certainly see why "I'll incriminate myself, but only on live TV" is an offer that gives mixed feelings. But there's no reason to demand that if you're planning to be useful and not disruptive.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 8, 2022 21:10
|
|
|
President Kucinich posted:How did democrats kill the criminal investigations into Bush's war crimes and systemic mortgage fraud and is there anything preventing democrats from using those mechanisms again? I don't recall there ever being any criminal investigations into Bush or his associates for war crimes in the first place. And if Congressional Democrats had any intention to protect Donald Trump from prosecution, they wouldn't be holding this whole big investigation in the first place.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 13, 2022 01:05
|
|
|
Dapper_Swindler posted:Having tried to read poo poo on the hunter tapes. Wtf are they even talking about. Like most of it is sex tapes or him high as gently caress and blowing dad’s money used to help him get rehab or trying to get cushy board jobs because of daddy’s name and then being a dick when he gets someone pregnant and texts of his dad saying he still loves him. Like tragic/funny failson dipshit poo poo. Meanwhile my uncle thinks it’s a loving goldmine and proves hunter is some mastermind. You've probably read more about the Hunter tapes than your uncle has. Your uncle doesn't really give a poo poo - he wants to hear bad things about Biden, so when Fox or r/maga or whatever tells him that Biden did bad things, he's happy to hear it and doesn't bother to look at the details. And "politician did corrupt favors for their relatives" is one of those stereotypical politician things that people are generally primed to assume is true in the first place.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 17, 2022 22:58
|
|
|
LegendaryFrog posted:The USSS explanation is already in the article linked. I doubt it'll be as simple as that. It's pretty well-known that asking people to voluntarily upload their stuff to something is a piss-poor way to implement a mandatory requirement. If you're required by law to retain records, then either you set up a system to do it automatically without human intervention, or you send the managers to go breathing down everyone's necks and looking over people's shoulders as they personally verify the uploads.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 20, 2022 16:44
|
|
|
Regarde Aduck posted:Doesn't really matter that the one solution is going to cause issues. It's still the only solution. The rot is deep. Historically, the big problem with dealing with elite military groups dedicated to the government's defense, like the Praetorian Guard or the Janissaries, wasn't that they were disloyal and meddled with politics. It's that they were wary of any moves that might diminish their power and influence in any way, and would happily coup any emperor that showed even the slightest intention of reining them in. Proposing sweeping measures like disbanding the group or creating a more trustworthy alternative force were a quick route to getting assassinated. So if we really think the Secret Service is so far gone as to be compared to the Praetorians, then carelessly engaging in hasty action isn't good. And if the Secret Service isn't that far gone and this is just a small group, then firing absolutely everyone will radicalize them and increase the disloyal faction's power.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 22, 2022 00:45
|
|
|
toterunner posted:So the source considers the raid a spectacular backfire and Garland is trying to distance himself from it. That doesn't seem to be what the source is saying at all. Rather, they're saying that the FBI went out of their way to minimize the media profile of the raid, in hopes that it would be more likely to be seen as non-political, but this backfired by making it easier for the GOP to set the narrative.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 10, 2022 23:22
|
|
|
PhantomOfTheCopier posted:Trump objects to everything so it seems the most likely outcome, but forgive my stupidity: Well, in this case, the far right has been claiming that this was a frame-up by the FBI making up reasons to politically persecute Trump. They've been pointing to the secrecy shrouding the raid as evidence that it's not all on the up-and-up, and some of them have insisted that the DoJ must make the warrant public if they don't have anything to hide. Of course, Trump has a copy of the warrant and could have made it public at any time. But he's refused, saying that it's up to the DoJ to decide to be transparent. Which isn't surprising, because the ambiguity is good for Trump, who most likely doesn't really want the media getting their hands on a detailed report laying out exactly why the FBI thought they had to raid him. So the DoJ is calling his bluff here. Either Trump lets the documents go public and they make very clear the FBI has a case against him, or he opposes it and can no longer accuse the DoJ of being the ones hiding info and covering things up. At least in theory.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 12, 2022 00:03
|
|
|
Madkal posted:Do higher up Repubs hate true believers as much as everyone else? Some probably do, some probably don't. But at this point, the true believers have been around for so long that they have had a fair bit of say over who gets to be the higher-ups. Aside from Trump himself, a pretty good example is how Boehner spent much of 2015 feuding with the Freedom Caucus and was eventually driven out of the Speaker of the House position by them. And McCarthy, who was thought to be the favorite to replace him, ended up having to drop his candidacy because the Freedom Caucus refused to support him. In the end, the Freedom Caucus played kingmaker and gave the Speakership to Paul Ryan, who was more palatable to them. Things like that obviously cheese off many of the people who had a good shot at the top leadership. But at the same time, they attract plenty of sycophants who think they can pay Trump some lip service and ride his wave right to the top. And there's no doubt that there's some people who fall into both camps - resenting the way their careers have been derailed by the rise of the insurgent right, but ambitious enough to hitch themselves to that wagon in hopes that they'll be able to control it and benefit from it. By many accounts, both McCarthy and Trump have slammed each other in private - but they still acted friendly even after Jan 6, as long as they thought there was any potential advantage in using each other.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 13, 2022 01:12
|
|
|
GreyjoyBastard posted:bloodlust aside, this is literally what hanging charts are for This does not, however, mean that these principles were necessarily followed. For example, the top US military executioner in Europe during WWII was notorious for botched hangings, because he didn't really know how to hang people properly. He lied when he claimed to have prior experience with executions, presumably in hopes of getting out of combat duty, and the Army didn't really care even after he developed a reputation for messy executions. It especially stood out compared to the British executioners, who were career hangmen and extremely professional about it. If there's a silver lining in this story, it's that he was still hangman when the Nuremberg Trials happened, and the American executioners were the ones chosen to carry out the death sentences.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 13, 2022 07:07
|
|
|
mobby_6kl posted:Is there really anything to suggest he was trying to sell this stuff? I wouldn't be surprised at all, of course, but seems most likely that he just took it all home because he's an idiot and thought he could just keep government documents. There's not really any reason to keep this stuff just for the sake of hoarding it. And Trump's certainly not the type to go down there and read through the documents for fun. If he kept these documents, then it was most likely for the purpose of being able to show other people in some way. Whether it's bragging about his stash of important secrets to make himself seem important, letting guests tour the room to impress them, selling them to foreign countries, or holding onto a stash just in case he needs to use it to bribe a foreign leader, or something else entirely. We don't know which, but he certainly wasn't keeping those documents just because he loved documents so much.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 13, 2022 17:00
|
|
|
Uglycat posted:e: about the passports, there's this one little inconsistency that I keep coming back to. If there is an inconsistency between what Donald Trump says and what the DoJ says, the simplest example is that Donald Trump is a habitual liar who is currently spinning stories for the express purpose of falsely portraying the DoJ as being involved in unjust persecution against him. It's unlikely that there was any real significance to the passports at all.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 16, 2022 13:00
|
|
|
Uglycat posted:Hypothetically, at this point in the investigation, if Donald Trump announces publicly that he remains president and that Biden is a usurper with no legal authority... Depends on what he's in court for, what he's being charged with, and so on.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 16, 2022 21:12
|
|
|
Uglycat posted:Y'know, the extra-legal campaign of stochastic terrorism. If he pursues that course (and everything indicates it, and the passport discrepancy confirms) - it's to be treason, yeah? Whereas if he backs off and pleads the 5th from here, it's 'just' espionage. No. As we've discussed with you before, the Constitutional definition of "treason" has purposely been drawn to be unreasonably tight and restrictive, and courts have consistently followed the clearly expressed will of the writers by interpreting the Treason Clause extremely strictly. If you're asking if something could be treason, the answer is almost definitely no. When it comes to treason, there is no "could", there is no "maybe", there is no "well if you look at it this way". It was deliberately designed to make it as difficult as possible to stretch or expand it, which is most of the reason it was written into the Constitution to begin with. I know you desperately want to see Trump convicted of treason and executed, but give up on that dream.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 16, 2022 22:23
|
|
|
Jaxyon posted:What does it matter? He's not in jail and likely won't ever be. We're talking about an ex-president stealing classified documents from the government and keeping a cache of nuclear secrets in his basement. It's a fairly unique situation, and really not comparable to whatever you're trying to compare it to here.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 24, 2022 05:08
|
|
|
SubG posted:Zuckerberg was apparently just on Joe Rogan's podcast lamenting that Facebook implemented too many rules about disinformation, specifically in re the laptop. He also talked about how VR will unlock "economic opportunity" by allowing people to virtually commute to "cities that didn't have their values". Between that and the stuff about claiming it's the FBI's fault that he had to CENSOR Hunter Biden's laptop story, it seems like Zuck too is making a play for the far right. https://twitter.com/aleksiaaltonen/status/1562995792775852038 quote:For someone who invented social media, Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg did not appear a big fan of the monster he helped create during an excruciating interview with Joe Rogan.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 26, 2022 18:05
|
|
|
BiggerBoat posted:Just worth pointing out I think that Laura Loomer is claiming voter fraud in her won loving primary. Is every Republican that loses any election going to automatically claim this bullshit moving forward? No matter who they're running against? Not every Republican. But a lot of them, especially the fringe folks who came up through the Trump movement or right-wing media grift rather than the typical GOP pipelines, are absolutely gonna point that playbook even against their fellow Republicans.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 27, 2022 00:16
|
|
|
Ynglaur posted:The story may be from 2021 but it's relevant today because recent revelations explain why that was (is) happening. There's no actual indication that this is due to Trump. At the very least, no one important or in a position to actually know has officially drawn that connection or made that accusation yet, at least as far as I can tell. The article proposes plenty of entirely plausible reasons for this to be happening. (short version: the CIA is being careless and incompetent with the lives of foreign informants, too arrogant to take enemy counterintelligence seriously and too focused on covert ops bullshit to take the basic spy work seriously)
|
|
#
¿
Aug 27, 2022 16:20
|
|
|
Charlz Guybon posted:Maybe bad, maybe not? It doesn't make much sense for the judge to appoint a special master here, but she's not appointing a special master yet: she's informing them of her preliminary intent to do so, and asking the parties to file with their thoughts. Which pretty much means "eh, I'm kinda leaning this way, tell me why I'm wrong". If she's still leaning this way in a few days, that'll be a different story, but right now she's practically inviting the DoJ to talk her out of it. So it's not a Big Deal just yet.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 28, 2022 01:26
|
|
|
Heck Yes! Loam! posted:this seems even dumber than usual It seems like a pretty basic and straightforward effort to portray the DoJ as untrustworthy, and insist on the court appointing outside parties to do everything. Unlikely to work, but sometimes defense lawyers take long shots just in case they get lucky or can build on the argument later. Especially when it makes the client happy.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 29, 2022 20:03
|
|
|
Class3KillStorm posted:Doesn't at least one of the Federal laws that Trump is being accused of breaking include a penalty of "may be prevented from holding public office" (or something to that effect)? I remember there being someone online discussion videos around that being a potential consequence a few weeks ago. If that's the case, and if this goes to trial and if he gets found guilty (both of those being big "ifs" right now, I'll grant), couldn't the judge slap him with a writ or whatever that says "The plaintiff may never again hold any public office in the United States" as part of the sentencing or whatever? The presidency is not included in that prohibition, because Congress does not have the authority to pass an ordinary law restricting people from being president. The list of things that make someone ineligible to be president is written directly into the Constitution, so modifying that list requires a Constitutional amendment too. slurm posted:DOJ won't touch him once he declares an intent to run, right? That's the end of investigations etc. No? There's not really any reason to think that at this point. If the DOJ was going to consider a presidential candidate untouchable, they wouldn't have bothered with this in the first place, because Trump was obviously going to run again in 2024.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 31, 2022 17:53
|
|
|
Charliegrs posted:Have any actual lawyers weighed in on whether it was really an admission of guilt that Trump said the documents were in boxes? The only thing that's unquestionably an admission of guilt is a guilty plea. Anything else can be explained away by a sufficiently savvy defense lawyer with a client who's sufficiently charismatic and sufficiently cooperative. It's extremely unlikely that Trump is going to totally destroy his case in a single tweet. If tweets end up mattering at all, it'll be through the lawyers sorting through hundreds of tweets over a series of weeks or months to create evidence of trends and inconsistencies. But in the end, I don't think anything he posts on Truth Social is going to hurt him as much as the clear video evidence that he tried to deceive the government. The government already knows that Trump still had the documents, and they wouldn't be moving forward unless they had sufficient leads on evidence that Trump personally knew about still having the documents. Trump saying it is funny because it contradicts his own attempts to claim it's a witchhunt on social media, but that's just embarrassing, it doesn't have a real impact on the court cases.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 1, 2022 02:38
|
|
|
Arsenic Lupin posted:Like kajillions of goons, I know nothing about this but will nonetheless share my uninformed views. He could argue that he had no idea they were in there, and that someone else did it without his knowledge. It's certainly unlikely that lone staffers and secretaries were all snatching documents on their own without his knowledge and hiding them in his desk without him having any idea they were there, but it's not impossible for a good defense lawyer and a sympathetic client to convince a jury that it's possible, and that makes "beyond reasonable doubt" a tough standard to meet unless they've got something more solid that personally implicates him in the decision. Of course, "I had these highly classified documents so poorly secured that random workers were snatching them and hiding them around Mar-A-Lago and I had no idea" has some obvious limitations as a defense. Failing to properly secure classified documents is less bad than deliberately seeking to hide them from the government, but it's not exactly gonna get him off scot-free either. I doubt Trump will be satisfied with that, which means his poor lawyers will be forced to try a wilder and more novel line of argument.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 1, 2022 21:05
|
|
|
BiggerBoat posted:Trump is never going to put in jail. Not saying he shouldn't. Just that he won't Do you have any proof that backs up this assertion? I find it hard to see how you could, given that it concerns the future of a very unprecedented event, but you seem pretty confident.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 3, 2022 00:43
|
|
|
Judge Schnoopy posted:It occurs to me that in an insane world, Trump could have loaned out those documents for 'donations'. And that at the time of the raid they may not have been given back in time. Meaning that, in this insane world, somebody is out there holding classified documents they're absolutely not supposed to have with no way to give them back without admitting what happened. I guarantee you that Trump was not "loaning" out the actual paper copies of the documents For one thing, if the "borrower" refuses to return the copy, what the heck is he gonna do about it - call the cops and tell them they won't return the documents he stole?
|
|
#
¿
Sep 3, 2022 21:12
|
|
|
Professor Beetus posted:If we ever want to have a functional government again the judiciary needs a house cleaning and rules/laws put in place to prevent presidents from stacking it in their favor, particularly presidents that like to pack it with heritage foundation dumb fucks. I would also like a unicorn please. Isn't it the other way around? If we ever want to have a functional judiciary again, Congress needs a housecleaning and a change of rules/laws. It's largely the fault of Congress that the judicial branch is in the state it's in now.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 5, 2022 19:30
|
|
|
Jaxyon posted:Gee, trumps clownshoes lawyers sure don't seem to matter he's still getting what he wants. Jaxyon posted:Yeah that's exactly what I've said. People keep talking about how bad his lawyers are. It does not matter. The trial hasn't even started yet, this is pre-trial jockeying over the precise manner in which evidence should be handled. Might be a tad bit premature to be forecasting Trump's total acquittal. Having a bad lawyer doesn't mean that you lose everything all the time forever! Judges actually can sometimes be fairly patient with people who have bad lawyers, because they can always slap the lawyer down later. Even when somebody wastes the court's time with dumb antics, the judge may tolerate it for a little while, but in the long run it's a pretty poor idea to wear down a judge's patience without a real good reason.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 6, 2022 04:37
|
|
|
V-Men posted:It's not a rock solid case (yet) and Garland is risk-averse enough that he won't indict unless it is rock solid. There's enough wriggle room that Trump can claim (in court) it was just overzealous aides who packed classified materials or anyone else but him and he never knew where they were because aides and assistants and lawyers handled all that for him. There's enough wiggle room based on what has been publicly revealed so far, but there's still a lot to it that hasn't gone public. And the administration wouldn't have gone as far as it already has unless they either had something more solid, or had good reason to believe that they will find something more solid. VitalSigns posted:That vote certainly would have failed if Dems had actually opposed her enough to show up and not, ya know, voted for her because there weren't enough Republicans there. That is just arithmetic. Even in this ultra-partisan landscape filled with Congressional obstructionism, even the GOP isn't whipping against federal judge nominations. As far as I can tell, not a single Biden federal judge confirmation has faced an all-out "all 50 GOP senators show up and vote No" opposition. For that matter, almost all of them actually got GOP crossover votes. In many cases, this happened even when one or two Dem senators didn't show up, granting the GOP the ability to block or delay the nomination just as you're describing here. But instead of playing games with the nominations to slow the proceedings or force the Dems to get everyone back to DC, the GOP appears to have simply waved them through without seriously whipping up opposition, apparently judging that it was not worth it to waste everyone's time with pointless obstruction. And if even the McConnell GOP doesn't think it's worth obstructing, it probably really isn't worth it. For example, the nomination of Alison J. Nathan, where 3 Dems didn't show up to the vote - but 3 GOP senators voted Yea to make sure that it passed anyway. Or Mary Dimke, where 7 Dems didn't vote, but 23 GOP senators didn't bother to show up and vote either, and 4 GOP senators crossed the aisle to vote Yea. Or Patricia Giles, where 3 Dems didn't vote, but 22 Republicans crossed the aisle to vote for her. Thanks to that, Biden has confirmed exactly as many federal judges as Trump had at this point in his term, even though Trump had a larger Senate majority than Biden did. I'm not going to speculate about why, but even the GOP is still being bipartisan about federal judge nominations. It doesn't really seem to be a point that's been contentious thus far.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 7, 2022 14:01
|
|
|
VitalSigns posted:Well except at the Supreme Court level right. And the DC Circuit which they filibustered under Obama The Supreme Court is quite a different thing, politically. But even then, Ketanji Brown Jackson's nomination didn't face party-line obstructionism (she got 3 GOP votes). The rest, I don't really get. It seems to be based on the idea that Cannon is a new style of judge, different from what came before, and that the GOP will only nominate those types of judges from now on. But I don't really see that being true. The GOP has been drawing from the Federalist Society rolls for decades. Yeah, Trump's Supreme Court nominees were Federalist Society members...but so were GWB's. Thomas, Alito, and Roberts* were all Federalist Society members. Many of the Bushes' lawyers and legal aides were Federalist Society members. Even Reagan had a fair few Federalist Society members in the ranks of his administration. The Federalist Society, the spearhead of the GOP's partisan project to take over the judicial branch, has been around for forty years. And the conservative legal movement that put it together is even older than that. *Roberts would object strongly to this sentence, and has sought to make clear to reporters that he never actually paid membership dues during his time participating in Federalist Society activities and leadership GlyphGryph posted:Is there any reason for the executive branch to not simply... ignore this judges orders? This is a pretty excessive reaction to a single pre-trial ruling on the handling of evidence. Judges make dumb rulings all the time, that's what the appeals process is for.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 7, 2022 16:42
|
|
|
VitalSigns posted:Okay? So what is your point then. That Cannon is fine? Or that she's bad but every Republican judge back through the Bush era would do the same (and therefore I suppose we can expect SCOTUS to back her?) Or that she's just a one-off mistake and not the exact kind of judge Republicans are trying to stack on the courts? Why should I agree with the bolded? I haven't seen any evidence on it one way or the other, and researching it myself seems like a huge pain in the rear end just to refute a point you haven't bothered to back up in the first place. You've just asserted that it's true, but you haven't provided any backing at all for that assertion, so I don't really have any reason to think that it's a reasonable assertion. And if Federalist Society judges haven't been getting worse (whether because they're not that bad or because they were always that bad), then your argument for the Dems to change their behavior and go full obstructionist in nominations kind of falls apart. After all, even the highly obstructionist GOP still routinely cross the aisle to help Dem court appointments along (though not nearly to the same level as during the Obama administration, when judges were getting confirmed almost-unanimously even as late as summer 2016), so it's difficult to make a case for the Dems pointlessly going full obstructionist even on votes that are guaranteed GOP wins anyway. In general, I think that the general "politics addict" mindset is very poorly suited to livewatching high-profile court cases, and therefore people (including the media) are catastrophizing over a decision that (by itself) is not particularly consequential. It could lead to more consequential decisions, and definitely shows that the judge is taking some latitude to be excessively favorable to Trump's team at this point, but the special master ruling itself is not a Big Deal. Now, it could become a bigger deal if the appeals court says something truly bizarre, or if she nominates Special Master Steve Bannon, or something like that, but at this point all this amounts to is slowing the DoJ's roll a bit.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 7, 2022 17:29
|
|
|
GlyphGryph posted:The Republican electoral strategy in Ohio was to ignore decrees by the courts, and they did. Yes, another higher court later expressly rewarded them for doing so, but it was only able to do so because they ignored court decrees until then. The Republicans in Ohio didn't ignore the courts. Every time the courts rejected a map, they complied with the rejection. None of the maps they drew met the court's requirements, but they didn't just ignore the court and put those maps into practice anyway. If a judge ruled that Trump is president now, the case would be immediately appealed to a higher court, which would immediately put a stay on the ruling, blocking it until the appeals court ruled. That's why your hypothetical doesn't make sense.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 7, 2022 19:42
|
|
|
-Blackadder- posted:What's interesting is that by far most of the Trump appointed judges that Trump himself has stood before have ruled against him based on the law, though most of those judges were relatively qualified for their appointments anyway. So the question becomes what makes this current Judge dumb enough to try and assuage Trump when so many others were smart enough to tell him to gently caress off? My (probably naive and overly charitable) guess is that she's spooked by having any part of such an important and sensitive case land on her desk, given her lack of qualifications and the significant possibility that we're on the brink of civil war, so she'd rather let some other judge be the one to decide once and for all whether Trump can claim executive privilege or not.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 9, 2022 16:31
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 21, 2024 06:17 |
|
|
Sitting judges' official actions on the bench in the scope of their role as a judge, including rulings, are protected by judicial immunity - even if those actions are outright malicious and obviously illegal. And by "obviously illegal", I mean poo poo like "the judge orders the police to rough up the defense lawyer", or other things that go well beyond just issuing a ruling we think doesn't line up with the law. Now, unofficial actions not taken from the bench and outside their role as a judge, such as taking bribes and kickbacks outside the courtroom, or engaging in an extensive media campaign to publicly defame and harass someone, those are things that aren't protected by judicial immunity. In order to charge a sitting federal judge with obstruction of justice based on one ordinary pre-trial order, you'd probably need evidence of the judge being involved in actual crimes, preferably ones committed outside the courtroom. Issuing a ruling you disagree with isn't illegal. Part of the underlying logic behind judicial immunity, by the way, is that we already have a working system for dealing with individual bad rulings: they can be appealed to another, higher judge, who is fully empowered to overturn them if they're not in line with the law and the shown facts.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 9, 2022 20:27
|
|