Thomas, Alito and Gorsuch would be hard to go farther right without actually joining the Nazi party.
When you are counting on pretty right of center Justices in Umpire, Beerbro and Handmaiden to be the central voices of reason, you are going to be disappointed more often than not.
Clarence Thomas takes bribes. Iām not going to get into much detail since itās been discussed so much here. His momās house provided for her and upgraded, his non-familial wardās expensive school paid for, trips, private flights, his RV.
Kavanaugh had as much as $200,000 in credit card debt in 2016 and a fraction of that in savings, but alleges that this was due to buying baseball tickets for friends and that they paid him back, such that shortly after all his debts were paid off. He also reports having significantly fewer assets than any other justice - something in the range of $500,000 including retirement accounts, not including his residence. Iām sure that some kind of āfriendsā paid him back.
I havenāt tried to verify, but Iāve seen people say that Thomas authored a decision affirming Chevron in ~2005, prior to his influx of money from people that wanted Chevron over turned.
As Iāve said before, we have the best Supreme Court money can buy.
Interesting video by LegalEagle, explaining why the immunity decision is way worse than we think. The tl;dr is that the āofficial conduct vs unofficial conductā limitation isnāt really a limitation given the details of the decision. And, of course, the checks and balances that the founders of the constitution were so big on, are effectively gone.
One of the comments on the LegalEagle posting, and something that is now quite literally true, is that this argument would now work in the US:
āYour Honour, although my client, Mr Hitler has committed genocide, he did so as Official Acts.ā
Impeachment still exists where the question if something is even a crime (once Mitch STFUs) is irrelevant though, right?
Sure Jan
Yes, the President could, in theory, still get kicked out of office. But Iām sure any President could think of a way to use their immunity to get around that. Killing Congressional opposition is just the obvious example.
Quoting Article I, Section 3 of the US Constitution:
Although the majority opinion in the immunity case doesnāt come right out and say it, the only way you can reliably count on a President being held criminally liable for egregious misbehavior would be for that President to be impeached, convicted of impeachment, and then subsequently indicted, criminally tried, and convicted.
Itād have to be some incredibly monstrous misbehavior, or weād need to have moved away from our current extreme polarization, for there to be any realistic shot of getting a President convicted after impeachment.
Seems like our current result even before the ruling is that if no one cared about the president crimes, nothing was really going to happen anyway. Abusing power, obstruction, etc, look at all the things he just does out in the open, and no one cares. Calling him a convicted felon didnāt seem to matter much for as long as it lasted. The system was already broken, but maybe we just didnāt want to admit it, or Mitch being lazy, wanted to pass off his responsibilities. A trump conviction in the documents case would have just been another politically motivated thing, people would have yawned and moved on.
We lost when the media lost the ability to hold him accountable. You can argue what led to that, but that is the real problem. If the media and system functioned properly, none of this would be an issue, and none of us would care. Presidential immunity is not really a concern with Biden, but it is a big deal with Trump. Is that polarization, or something else failing?
Its the end result of failing capitalism that results in large parts of the electorate being poorly educated as well.
You have plutocrats on one hand corrupting the levers of power (executive, legislative, judicial), with a kakistocracy running things on a day to day basis.
The sane people in the middle are basically in the minority.
The alignment in the US currently is that the middle class are generally moderately educated and Trump voters with the extremes on education being more Biden voters.
Thatās making an assumption that poor inner city educations are failing much more than poor rural educations.
I had to look up kakistocracyā¦ TIL. The term also describes the United States at present.
(Maybe we are a penkakistocracyā¦ second to worst least suitable person in charge? I made that upā¦ probably not a real word. But penultimate means second-to-last, soā¦ maybe?)
These days, party loyalty and the lack of supermajority will result in President doing whatever the hell he wants, including dissolving the other two branches of government.
I am pro verbalfacturing.
I believe I want to be president. I have any number of untested theories that Iād like to give whirl.
If itās you against trump you have my vote
Starting to think thereās a chance that Clarence Thomas is really corruptā¦
There is a handy table in Appendix B of the letter here: