The reasonable solution would have been to include a mechanism for quickly and efficiently overruling these decisions when needed. They have to report to congress about anything that is withheld, but as far as I know they didn’t include a provision that would allow them to reject the given justification and order the release.
They may not have felt that this was a good case for their purposes. Or enough of them may have felt that this was a bad time for it. Hell, maybe a couple of the conservative justices just don’t care enough to want to revisit the issue.
But respect for the law, the constitution, and the rights and wellbeing of the people hasn’t been evident in many of their recent opinions. Letting half the states pretend a fraction of marriages never happened wouldn’t even be the most disruptive thing they’ve done. They endorsed racial profiling, made racial gerrymandering presumptively legal, made prosecuting bribery essentially impossible, overturned abortion rights, and crowned Trump as king and gave him a license to kill. And that’s ignoring all the shenanigans happening on the shadow docket where they don’t even bother justifying their decisions. That they’ve at least drawn something of a line against the Trump administration trying to eliminate due process altogether makes sense only because letting go of due process would mean giving up some of their own influence.
I never said they would actually do it, only that they wouldn’t find it difficult to write that opinion. Seeing as they’ve had multiple cases in recent years where the opinion was completely untethered from law, precedent, and fact, there’s basically no position so extreme that I would assume they can’t rationalize it.
If they can invent presidential immunity despite there being absolutely nothing in the constitution to justify it, I’m sure they have no problem writing an opinion that allows bans on gay marriage.
My best guess would be that they would frame it as being about the right of the states to regulate marriage. If the state can decide how many people can be in a marriage, how old you have to be to marry, how closely related you can be and still marry, the requirements for starting or ending a marriage, and so on, then what’s one more criteria? Add some tangents about the history of marriage in the US, some comments about how government is involved in marriage specifically because of how it connects to issues relating to reproduction, cite some cases from the 19th century, and twist some more recent precedent to reverse its meaning so that you can pretend to be following existing case law and you have a pretty standard ruling for this court.
As I understand it, the fine print allows the board to wave a lot of the requirements and award a large part of the pay package anyway. And since the board is entirely under Musk’s control, that’s pretty much guaranteed to happen.
I’m a little disappointed that I haven’t see an article point out this one:
Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Epstein
Musk’s name appears 11 times.
Grokipedia: https://grokipedia.com/page/Jeffrey_Epstein
Musk’s name doesn’t appear at all.
I would be curious to know how those polled would define capitalism and socialism. Even ignoring the ones that would boil down to cartoonishly good and evil, I would assume that there is a huge disconnect in what each side thinks those terms mean.
I suspect that if you had asked the same people how they felt about policies and priorities without explaining which are capitalist and which are socialist, and included a broad spectrum of ideas ranging from one extreme to the other, you’d see a very different picture emerge.
The Trump administration claims that the children of immigrants who are born here only inherit their parent’s legal status rather than becoming citizens. And they claim they can revoke legal status at any time, even for those who become citizens. Since everyone in the country has ancestors who weren’t citizens, the combination of these two ideas would mean that anyone could be deported.
Well, that and anything is possible when you can deny do process. The next administration could round up everyone from the previous administration and deport them to Atlantis. Hope they’re good swimmers.
Off the streets and into the Whitehouse.
At this point, there is no position so indefensible and abhorrent that I would bet against the Supreme Court ruling in favor of it.
Not to mention that the bullshit in AI videos made by the left would absolutely get called out in every propaganda outfit on the right. It would just give them more ammo (without the usual lies).
But even more important, it will grant legitimacy to everyone who responds to damning video evidence by claiming it was AI. We don’t need to make shit up, the reality is already horrifying. All AI will do is make it harder for people to believe their own eyes.
We need to have criminal charges for this shit and throw the assholes responsible in prison. And not the minimum security bullshit either, they need to get the same punishment that the rest of us would get if we stole that much from them.
Do that, and seize the money, and hit them with fines, and make them pay for the cost of their prosecution if they are convicted. Then we might start taking the legal risks a bit more seriously.
IIRC, a contempt charge has to be voted on (not happening) and if it passes it is then referred to the US attorney’s office for them to pursue. And since that office is currently held by a Fox News host whose only qualifications are loyalty to Trump and a total lack of ethics, that case wouldn’t go anywhere.
Assuming the 23% and the 28% aren’t overlapping, that makes 51% that think a shut down is woth it if it gets their side what they want.
That actually involves being slightly helpful. This is just security guard stuff. Paul Blart would be overqualified for this.
The only reason it hasn’t happened yet is because the people who would have to support it would prefer to hide behind an erratic Trump who is prone to manipulation. His cabinet can get what they want and let Trump take any heat from the consequences. And congress sure as fuck doesn’t want to be seen as betraying Trump, nor do I expect many of them want to see a president Vance, especially in the lead up to the 28 primaries.
Technically, that was in a concurring opinion, so it’s not actually a precedent and lower courts are free to ignore it. But it’s also clear that the Supreme Court will kill this case if it gets to them, they’ll just do it on the shadow docket with virtually no explanation beyond a single paragraph citing a (dubious) procedural issue.
It would be disastrous for the country both economically and strategically. Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem to be much of a deterrent for this administration. If anything, that would seem to align with their existing policies.
I didn’t say they were equally stupid. I said one explanation was most likely correct, but thr other wasn’t completely implausible.
Yes, faking an attempted drugging for attention/politics/whatever is less likely to get someone killed. But it’s so a really fucking stupid plan that had to actually be completely premeditated. Just look how well it worked out for him.
The potential child abuse plan is monstrous and risks killing them, but pedophiles do risky and horrible things all the time. And at least the part of the plan that involves showing the cops the drugs can be seen as a bad decision made in the moment by someone panicking and not thinking clearly.
Unless they had probable cause to believe there was a bomb, that’s absolutely no excuse for a search. Might as well just get rid of the fourth amendment altogether if police can just imagine the possibility of a dangerous object and excuse searching anything at any time.
If she really thought there was a bomb, she is recklessly handling this herself instead of calling in a properly trained and equipped bomb squad. But far worse, she claims she needed to check it so as not bring a bomb to the station, but apparently has no problem potentially handling a bomb around a bunch of innocent bystanders.
That she is lying in order to justify what she knew to be an illegal search is actually the least damning interpretation. Either way though, the evidence should be thrown out along with her career.