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odinsblog · 2 days

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Elie Mystal covered the ridiculous, “Presidential Immunity” (aka, “Why Can’t Trump Be Treated Like A Dictator?”) case before SCOTUS

Dreeben: "BECAUSE THERE WEREN'T CRIMES!" (he didn't yell, I did, but he said "because there weren't crimes." )

Oh God, now Roberts wondering if they should send it back to the DC circuit because he's worried about presidents getting prosecuted in bad faith.

Roberts: "The court of appeals did not get into a focused consideration of what facts we're talking about or what documents we're talking about... they did not look at what courts usually look at when... taking away immunity."

Is this motherfucker serious? His argument is "Every president coups, why is mine getting charged?"

Thomas: Are you saying there's no immunity even for official acts?

And... that could be the ballgame

Roberts, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh are more worried about a prosecutor going after a president for *political* reasons than A PRESIDENT TRYING TO OVERTHROW THE GOVERNMENT.

This is just about over.

And by "this" I mean the rule of law and by "over" I mean delayed indefinitely to help Trump.

Gorsuch suggesting that under the government's standard a president could be prosecuted for leading a "civil rights protest" in front of Congress and sought to "influence an official proceeding."

Yes, because Jan 6 and a fucking sit in are the same thing, Neil.

This is goddamn disgusting.

I'm going to keep listening because it is my literal job, but this is pretty much in the bag for Trump at this point. Remand to DC Circuit for decision on "official acts" and whether organizing a coup is one.

After November, if Trump loses, SCOTUS will return to the issue.

Alito: Are you really saying the president is subject to criminal laws like everybody else?

YES YOU DICK. THE PRESIDENT SHOULD BE SUBJECT TO THE LAWS LIKE EVERYBODY ELSE!

Alito: "I'm not talking about the particular facts of this case."

WHY? WHY THE HELL ARE NOT TALKING ABOUT THIS FUCKING CASE RIGHT IN FRONT OF YOU?

The question I'd have for the SCOTUS now is: If you do this, why would a Republican president every peacefully transfer power again?

Democratic presidents will because Democrats follow rules that don't apply to the other side. But why would Republicans just leave *ever again*?

Alito: Couldn't FDR's decision to inter Japanese Americans during WWII be charged [as a crime]?

He says that LIKE THAT'S A BAD THING?

And Dreeben is trying to say that he couldn't.

This country, and specifically this court, is a fucking joke.

Now onto self-pardons. Alito is just playing all the Fox News hits now.

I'm going to smoke. Biden should send Seal Team 6 to Mar-a-Lago because according to Alito there's no downside.

Alito just suggested that the last election was "questionably decided"

I have left my body and am texting things I can't say aloud to my friends.

Kagan is like the first person to be asking about the actual criminal acts Trump is charged with.

I assume Alito is not listening because Kagan is a woman while Gorsuch is probably sitting there emailing the New York Times because they got something wrong on the Spelling Bee.

I see the internet is unimpressed with Dreeben but that's being a little unfair. The Republican justices want to do this, there's nothing that Dreeben could say to stop them.

What he *could* be doing was making their hypocrisy more clear for the non-legal media following along.

But... SCOTUS advocates have to preserve their ability to argue another day, and blowing up the justices in one case

A: Doesn't help them actually win the case.

B: Actively hurts them in the next one.

Kavanaugh: "Like Justice Gorsuch, I'm not concerned with the here and now of this case, I'm concerned about the future."

I don't know why this is acceptable. I do know that the justices are sure they are right about ignoring the facts of THIS ACTUAL CASE.

Kavanaugh... who WORKED FOR KEN STARR... is basically saying that Jack Smith is politically motivated and his appoint in unconstitutional.

It's... maddening. And most of the media reports will not even point out this hypocrisy.

The "independent counsel" law was rewritten into our current "special counsel" law BECAUSE of the shit Kavanaugh helped Starr do! Everybody was like "that crap can't happen again."

Somebody get @neal_katyal and @MonicaLewinsky on the phone to blow up this asshole.

@neal_katyal @MonicaLewinsky Every time I try to no have a stroke listening to this bullshit, they say something even more risible and stupid.

@neal_katyal @MonicaLewinsky Kavanaugh: "President Ford's pardon. Hugely unpopular when he did it... now probably looked on as one of his better decisions."

What? WHAT? WHO THE FUCK THINKS FORD'S PARDON OF NIXON WAS A GOOD IDEA? WHEN DID I DIE AND GO TO HELL????

@neal_katyal @MonicaLewinsky This could be a men v. women 5-4 ruling.

Men: Let's kick this back to DC to further delay Trump's trial.

Soto, Kagan, Jackson: Why? That's fucking dumb.

Barrett: Ladies, I agree with you, but we shouldn't call the men fucking dumb. We should politely disagree.

@neal_katyal @MonicaLewinsky We're past the two and half hour mark for an argument where the Republican justices made their decision when they were appointed, some of them decades ago.

@neal_katyal @MonicaLewinsky KBJ is closing by trying to answer all of Gorsuch's questions, which would be effective if Gorsuch operated in good faith. But... he doesn't. So...

@neal_katyal @MonicaLewinsky I had hoped that *one* of the liberal justices would have made the point from the Common Cause brief, highlighting that the whole point of what Republican justices are doing is to give Trump delay.

Not a persuasive argument for the justices, but good for the media to hear.

@neal_katyal @MonicaLewinsky The case is submitted. Court doesn't come back till May 9th which will be a decision day.

But I think they won't decide *this* case until July 3rd for max delay. And that decision will be 5-4 to remand the case back to DC, for additional delay.

@neal_katyal @MonicaLewinsky I wish I had better news for you. Thanks anyway for following along with our national descent into madness.

#politics #republicans #donald trump #scotus #elie mystal #presidential immunity

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dontmean2bepoliticalbut · 7 months

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#us politics #news #elie mystal #washington dc #Democrats #us house of representatives #rep. kevin McCarthy #republicans #conservatives #mainstream media #twitter #tweet #x #rep. hakeem jeffries #speaker of the house #house speaker

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profeminist · 2 years

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Elie Mystal: "There are things we can do NOW. There are things we should have been doing since last SEPTEMBER when Texas went rogue and cancelled constitutional rights before SCOTUS did. Fight to make people DO THESE THINGS. Stop throwing up hands as if there's nothing that can be done.

* Make abortions available on federal property leased to providers who pay for it out their own pockets and charity.

* Guarantee the right to travel, AND TRAVEL VOUCHERS for people in need of a "vacation"

* Make abortion meds available through the federal post and on fed land

We can do these things RIGHT NOW, before the midterms.

Then:

* Win in November

* Eliminate the filibuster

* Pass federal abortion protections

* Expand the Supreme Court so they don't overturn the new legislation."

Thread: https://twitter.com/ElieNYC/status/1541085479117922306

Please note: when Mystal refers to leveraging federal land he is NOT talking about reservations.

#abortion #roe vs. wade #feminism #feminist #stop forced childbirth #elie mystal #scotus #supreme court #pro-choice #pro choice

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toshootforthestars · 4 months

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I predicted, in June of [2020], mere weeks after the murder, that all of the alleged “solidarity” from corporate or political “allies” was white bullshit. I explained that white folks understand (either consciously or not) that the police are there to protect them, their privilege, and their power. I said that white folks are fundamentally willing to sacrifice innocent Black people to the murderous clutches of the police if it ensures their continued supremacy. I wrote: The system of white supremacy enforced and protected by the American police was not built in a day, and it will not be dismantled in a day. What will people be prepared to do two weeks from now to make the world safer for black people than it was two weeks ago? What will they be prepared to do in two months? In two years?… Already, the infrastructure is in place for this country to ignore police brutality the moment everybody stops shouting about it. It was an easy prediction to make if you understand the way the white world works. The white public support for the protests dissipated before the summer was even over. The inclusion and diversity programs erected in response to the protests are being torn down with glee by the defenders of white supremacy. Meaningful police reform died in statehouses around the country, in Congress, and on Senator Joe Manchin’s desk. And the news media and Hollywood resumed its regularly scheduled programing of copaganda. And so, three-and-a-half years after the summer of “no justice, no peace,” we are back to the quiet acceptance of systemic injustice. A new report from the nonprofit organization Mapping Police Violence shows that 2023 was the police’s most homicidal year on record. The police killed at least 1,232 people last year, the most since the organization began tracking police murders in 2013. In 98 percent of those cases, the officers faced no charges. It should come as little surprise that Black people faced the greatest danger from these murderous officers. Black people accounted for 26 percent of the deaths, despite the fact that we are only 14 percent of the population. Indeed, the statistics showed that Black people were 2.6 times more likely to be killed by the police than white people. But, hey, former Harvard University president Claudine Gay improperly cited some of her sources, so really her appointment was the biggest racial injustice story of the year. Not Tyre Nichols, who was lynched by a group of Memphis cops. Not Niani Finlayson, who was fatally shot by a Los Angeles police officer mere seconds after he arrived on the scene to respond to a domestic violence call she made. Not Leonard Allan Cure, who spent 16 years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit, was exonerated, and was shot to death by police during a traffic stop.

* * * * *

This is the police force white America wants: violent and unaccountable. We cannot even muster enough sustained attention to the problem of police brutality, much less the sustained political pressure to try to fix it. Whatever else happens in 2024, one thing is certain: The police will kill more people, those people will be disproportionately Black, and nobody will stop them.

Elie Mystal, "The Cops Killed More People in 2023 Than They Had in Years"

The Nation | 11 Jan 2024

#elie mystal #the nation #news #2020's america #us law enforcement is out of control #law enforcement corruption #police violence #black lives matter #if black lives don't matter then no lives matter

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dontmeantobepoliticalbut · 1 year

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Conservatives want to make the massacre about trans people or religion—anything but the blood-soaked murder factory they’ve forced us all to live in.

By Elie Mystal

The mass shooting at Covenant School in Nashville, Tenn., on Monday, which left six people dead, including three 9-year-olds, was the 13th school shooting this year that led to injury or death. Education Week, which has been tracking these massacres since 2018, reports that there were 51 such shootings last year and 157 since they began tabulating the body counts.

Guns are now the leading cause of death for children in the United States. Over 6,000 American children were either killed or injured by guns in 2022. One 2022 study examined the data for youth mortality in 12 rich countries, including the United States. American children accounted for 97% of the total gun deaths from all 12 countries.

In a normal country, stopping this would be all we talked about. Elections to every major local, state, and federal office would turn on the single issue of which candidates have the best plan to prevent our children from being murdered. Parents of school-age children would band together in broad, multiethnic, cross-class coalitions demanding action and results. A normal country would not suffer 13 school shootings per quarter without massive social and political upheaval.

But we don’t live in a normal country. We live in a blood-soaked murder factory. We live in a country where there are more legal restrictions on where a person can bare their breasts than brandish their guns. We live in a society where people are more interested in banning books than guns. We live with state governments that will force people to give birth against their will, but shrug when actual children are killed at school.

We live like this because of the Republican Party. These school shootings are not tragedies. They are choices made by our government. Every other country on Earth has violent people with a motive to do harm to others. Every other country has people with mental health issues. Every other country has access to media and art that glorifies or trivializes violence. But these school shootings don’t happen in every other country, because every other country doesn’t have easy, nearly unfettered access to weapons of mass murder.

What’s exceptional about America is that we have sacrificed the safety of our children because letting them die helps gun sales. Republicans have reinterpreted our Constitution to make it fit an NRA marketing gimmick from the 1970s. The Republican lust for blood, as expressed through their ahistorical interpretation of the Second Amendment, is why we are here. Restricting gun ownership would save lives; removing gun regulations leads to death. Republicans have chosen the latter. Guns are the Republican Moloch, their god to which they are willing to sacrifice children.

Everyone already knew that the Nashville shooting wouldn’t change this reality. We knew that after the last mass shooting, and the one before that, and all the ones before that one. This time, though, some Republicans appear to feel even less obliged than usual to pretend that they care. In the wake of the shooting, Tennessee Representative Tim Burchett was caught on camera telling the gross truth about himself and his despicable political party.

When asked about the shooting, Burchett said, “We’re not going to fix it.” When asked what Congress could do, he said, “I don’t see any real role that we could do other than mess things up.” (This congressman, by the way, went on Newsmax to fervently defend Tennessee’s ban on drag shows, in case you needed a sense of what he thinks the government should be doing.) Finally, when asked how we are supposed to protect children like his own daughter, Burchett said, “Well, we homeschool her.”

That is the entire Republican Party in a nutshell. They won’t do anything; they will stop other people from doing something, and their grand plan is to protect their own people while leaving the rest of the country to suffer and die.

Of course, the message “we are impotent nihilists who retreat to our gated communities instead of serving the public” is not a politically viable response to mass murder. Enter the white-wing media.

Every mass shooting inspires conservative media to find literally any culprit other than the murder weapons to blame for the murders. We’ve all heard them before: mental health, violent video games, doors. They’re all stupid reasons, but the conservative base does not require good reasons to believe what they believe. But this mass shooting has given the party of literal death a ready-made scapegoat that already fits in with the conservatives’ bigoted priors: The shooter in Nashville appears to have been trans.

The conservative media firestorm has been as predictable as the reality that there will be another mass shooting soon. But if you’re looking for the worst white-wing coverage, the New York Post is always a good place to start. Its front-page headline the day after the shooting read: “TRANSGENDER KILLER TARGETS CHRISTIAN SCHOOL: ‘Manifesto’ leads to 6 dead, including three young kids.”

Everything about that headline, from its implications to its basic grammar, is wrong. For those playing along at home, let’s do a close read.

• A “transgender killer” would be a serial killer who targets trans people. This was a killer who is trans. (The Post also misgendered the shooter, for good measure.)

• It is believed that the suspect was a former student at the school, which would make the still-undetermined motive far different than a school shooter who “targets Christian school[s].” They targeted their school. Dylan Roof, by contrast, targeted a Black church. It would be a different motive if he targeted his church.

• The “manifesto” did not “lead” to six dead people. The two assault rifles and handgun the shooter brought with them led to six dead people. If the shooter had shown up to school armed with a manifesto, everybody would still be alive.

The people writing headlines for the Post are probably evil, but they’re not stupid. They know exactly what they’re doing. The Post knows what Burchett knows: that Republicans are not going to fix it. To deflect from that should-be-unacceptable reality, the Post offers up these distractions of a trans menace and threats on religious institutions.

As is usual for places where conservatives get their media, the Post takes real problems and inverts them to fit the white grievance narrative. There are, indeed, “transgender killers,” as in “people who kill trans folks.” The murder of trans people has doubled over the past four years, and 73% of those trans victims were killed by a gun. Meanwhile, mass shootings at houses of worship have been steadily on the rise all this century. People of all faiths are increasingly under threat where they pray. But again, these mass murderers are not showing up to houses of worship with hammers eager to nail their manifestos to a door. They’re showing up with guns, most “legally” obtained, and that’s why worshipers are dying.

Everybody knows what the problem is, but Republicans won’t let us fix it. And so the white-wing media has to obfuscate and try to distract people from the solution Republicans are unwilling to let the rest of us implement.

So more people will die from preventable gun violence. More children will die. Republicans have stared at the bodies of dead children and decided that their deaths are acceptable. There is no bottom. There is no tragedy so horrific that it will shock Republicans out of their death cult.

Republicans are complicit in these murders. And so is everybody who votes for them.

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synonym-pie · 2 years

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#scotus #roe vs. wade #roe v wade #rights #elie mystal #black lives matter

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gwydionmisha · 2 years

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#Herschel Walker #Elie Mystal #Raphael Warnock #Georgia #News

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plitnick · 10 months

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Thought for the Fourth of July

Thanks to the news show Democracy NOW! I’ve developed an annual July 4th tradition of listening to James Earl Jones read Frederick Douglass’ brilliant speech “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” Douglass’ speech was an important early example of white people trying to pat themselves on the back for their magnanimity toward Black people. The speech was delivered in 1852, long before the…

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#Civil War #Declaration of Independence #Elie Mystal #Fourth of July #Frederick Douglass #Jim Crow #SCOTUS #Supreme Court #US Constitution

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makingdonalddrumpfagain · 2 years

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#elie mystal #msnbc

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odinsblog · 10 months

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When most people talk about expanding the Supreme Court, they're talking about adding a few Justices, two or four to the bench. But I am not most people. I do not think we should add a few Justices to get into an endless tit for tat with Mitch McConnell and his Federalist Society forces. I think we should blow the lid clear off this incrementally institutionalized motherfucker, and add 20 Justices.

I'd like to tell you about my Court expansion plan and explain why adding many Justices instead of fewer Justices is actually a better reform, fixes more underlying problems with the Court, and works out to be less partisan or political than some of the more incremental plans out there.

Let's start with the basics.

Expanding the number of Justices on the Supreme Court can be done with a simple act of Congress, passed by the Senate and signed by the President. Court expansion does not become easier or harder based on the number of Justices you seek to add to the Court. From a civics perspective, the process to add two Justices to the Court is just the same as the process to add 20.

Arguably, the rationale is the same too.

The current plan, supported by some Democrats, is to add four Justices to the Supreme Court. Their arguments are that the Court has gotten woefully out of step with the American people and the elected branches of government, which is true.

They argue that the country is a lot bigger now than it was in 1869, when Congress set the number of Supreme Court Justices at nine, which is also true. Basically, all of these arguments flow together into the catchphrase, “we have 13 Circuit Courts of Appeal, and so we should have 13 Justices.”

See, back in the day, each Supreme Court Justice was responsible for one lower Circuit Court of Appeal. Procedurally, appeals from the lower circuits are heard first by the Justice responsible for that circuit. But now we have 13 lower Circuit Courts of Appeal, meaning some Justices have to oversee more than one. If we expanded the Court to 13 Justices, we'd get back to a one to one ratio for Supreme Court Justice per Circuit Court of Appeal.

But it doesn't actually matter how many circuits each Justice presides over, because all the Justices do is move an appeal from the lower court to the Supreme Court for the full Court to consider whether to hear the appeal.

Their function is purely clerical.

It doesn't matter.

One justice could oversee all 13 circuits while the other eight went fishing, kind of like hazing a rookie on a team. And it wouldn't make a damn bit of difference in terms of the number of cases the Supreme Court hears. It's just a question of who has to work on Saturdays.

Indeed, I'm not even sure that I want the Court to hear more cases. These people are unelected, and these people already have too much power. More cases just gives them more opportunities to screw things up. I don't need the Court to make more decisions. I need the Court to make fewer shitty decisions. And for that, I need to reform how the Court makes those decisions. And for that, I need more people. And I need those people to make their decisions in panels.

Those lower courts, those 13 Circuit Courts of Appeal, almost all of them operate with more than nine judges. The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has — wait for it — 29 judges!

All the lower courts use what's called a panel system. When they catch a case, three judges are chosen at random from all the judges on the circuit to hear the case. Those three judges then issue a ruling. If the majority of the circuit disagrees, they can vote to rehear the case as a full circuit.

The legal jargon here is called “en banc” when the full circuit hears the case.

But most of the time, that three judge panel ruling is the final ruling on the issue, with the circuit going en banc only when they believe the three judge panel got it clearly wrong.

Think about how different it would be if our Supreme Court operated on a panel system instead of showing up to Court knowing that six conservative Justices were against you, or the one or two conservative Justices that you invited onto your super yacht are guaranteed to hear your case.

You literally wouldn't know which Justices you'd get on your panel.

Even on a six-three conservative court, you might draw a panel that was two-to-one liberals, or you might draw Roberts, Kavanaugh, and Barrett instead of Thomas, Alito and Gorsuch, which could make a huge difference. Either way, you wouldn't know which Justices you'd get.

Not only does that make a big difference in terms of the appearance of fairness, especially in this time when some Justices are openly corrupt, it also makes a big difference in terms of what kinds of cases and arguments people would bring to the Court. Without knowing which Justices they'd get, litigants and red state attorney generals would have to tailor their arguments to a more center mass, mainstream temperament, instead of merely shooting their shot and hoping their arch conservatives can bully a moderate or two to vote with them.

Now, you can do panels with nine or 13 Justices, but you pretty much have to do panels with 29 Justices. Overloading the Court with Justices would essentially force them to adopt the random assignment process used by every other Court.

That would be good.

Sure, litigants could always hope for en banc review, where the full partisan makeup of the Court could be brought to bear. BUT, getting a majority of 29 Justices to overrule a panel decision requires 15 votes. Consider that right now you only need four votes, a minority of the nine member Court, to get the full Court to hear a case.

I'm no mathlete, but I'm pretty sure that 15 is just a higher bar.

That brings me to my next big point about expanding the Court to 29: Moderation.

Most people say that they do not want the Court to be too extreme to either side. Generally, I think that argument is bollocks. I, in fact, do want the Court to be extreme in its defense of voting rights, women's rights, and human rights. But maybe I'm weird.

If you want the Supreme Court to be a more moderate institution, then you should want as many Justices on the Supreme Court as possible. Why? Because cobbling together a 15-14 majority on a 29 member Court will often yield a more moderate decision than a five-four majority on a nine member Court.

Not going to lie. The law is complicated, and judges are quirky. If you invited five judges off the street over for a barbecue, they wouldn't be able to agree on whether hot dogs and hamburgers count as sandwiches.

It's simply easier to get five people to do something extreme than it is to get 15 people to do something extreme.

Think about your own life.

If you wanted to hike up a damn mountain, that is an activity for you and a couple of your closest friends. You're not taking 15 people to climb a mountain. That's not even a hike. That's an expedition, and you're expecting one or two of them to be eaten by bears on the way to the top. But if you're organizing an outdoor activity for 15 people, you're going to go to the park, and your friends will be expected to bring their own beer.

Most likely, adding 20 Justices would moderate the conservative majority just by putting enough people and personalities in the mix that it would be harder for them to do their most destructive work.

Just think about how the five worst senators you know, or the five worst congresspeople you can think of, often don't get their way because they can't even convince other members of their party to go along with their nihilist conservative ride.

Note, I said Conservative majority.

The astute reader will notice that I have not said that I want to add 20 fire-breathing liberal comrades who will stick it to Das Kapital for the rest of their lives. No, I believe the benefits of this kind of court expansion are so great — panels and the moderation from having more justices trying to cobble together en banc majority opinions — that I'd be willing to split the new justices ten and ten with conservative choices.

A 16-13 conservative leaning court would just be better than a six-three conservative court, even if my guys are still in the minority. The only litmus test I'd have for this plan is that all 20 have to be objectively pro-Democratic, self-government. All 20 have to think the Supreme Court has too much power. You give me 20 people who think the court should not be rulers in robes, and I'll take my chances.

However, there's no objective reason for elected Democrats to be as nice and friendly as I am when adding 20 Justices. Off the top, seats should be split eleven to nine, because Mitch McConnell and the Republicans must be made to pay for their shenanigans with the Merrick Garland nomination under Barack Obama. Republicans stole a seat. Democrats should take it back, full stop. I will take no further questions about this.

From there, this is where Democrats could, I don't know, engage in political hardball instead of being SAPS like always.

You see, right now, Republicans are dead set against court expansion because they are winning with the Court as it is. I can make all of the pro-reform, good government arguments under the sun, and the Republicans will ignore them because, again, they're winning right now.

But if you put forward a bill to add 20 seats, the Republican incentives possibly change: obstruct, and the Democrats push through court expansion on their own, and add 20 Justices of their own choosing, and you end up with people like, well, like me on the court. Or Mitch McConnell could release Senators to vote for the plan, and Republicans can share in the bounty.

It puts a different kind of question to McConnell: Join, get nine conservative Justices and keep a 15-14 conservative majority on the court, or Obstruct, and create a 23 to six liberal majority on the court, and trust that Republicans will take over the House, Senate, and White House so they can add 20 of their own Justices in the future.

Note that McConnell will have to run that whole table while overcoming a super liberal Supreme Court that restores the Voting Rights Act and strikes down Republican gerrymanders. Good luck, Mitch.

My plan wins either way.

Either we get a 29 person court that is more moderate, we get a 29 person court that is uber liberal, or McConnell does run the table and we end up with a 49 person court or a 69 person court. And while Republicans are in control of that bloated body, everybody understands that the Court is just a political branch there to rubber-stamp the acts of the President who appointed them.

Perhaps then, voters would start voting based on who they want to be in control of that court, instead of who they want to have a beer with.

The court is either fixed, or neutered.

It's a win-win.

I know 20 is a big number. I know we've all been institutionalized to believe that incremental change is the only change possible. And I know it sounds fanciful to ask for 20 when the starting offer from the establishment of the Democratic Party, the Republican Party, and President Joe Biden, is zero.

But like a doctor with poor bedside manner, I'm less interested in people's feelings and more interested in fixing the problem.

If you give me two Justices or four Justices, I can reverse a number of conservative policies that they've shoved through a Supreme Court that has already been illegitimately packed with Republican appointees. If you give me a few Justices, I can reestablish a center-left, pro-democracy majority… at least until those new Justices die at the wrong time, under the wrong president.

But if you give me 20 Justices, I can fix the whole fucking thing.

—ELIE MYSTAL, In Contempt of Court

#politics #elie mystal #scotus #court packing #packing the court #roberts court #john roberts #federalist society #the federalist society #republicans

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dontmean2bepoliticalbut · 1 year

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#us politics #news #twitter #tweet #conservatives #republicans #fox news #Rupert Murdoch #kyle griffin #elie mystal #fox corporation #lachlan murdoch #faux news #fake news #election denialism #free market #free market capitalism #eat the rich #2023

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profeminist · 2 years

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Note: this was written before the Dobbs decision, but Mystal knew it was coming.

"Roe will be taken away, and states will pass laws banning or functionally banning abortions, and Democrats will do nothing other than telling their voters (who have already handed Democrats control of the White House and both Houses of Congress) to “vote harder,” because apparently Democrats need a supermajority to combat what Republicans can do with a minority.

But while we wait for the people elected to defend women’s rights to wield power like the people elected to take them away always do, there is another Republican strategy progressives should use to fight the new anti-abortion laws: We should sue. Every state that passes a forced-birth mandate should face a deluge of lawsuits.

Oh, we’re going to lose those lawsuits. I don’t want to give anybody false hope. [....] But still, we should sue, and lose, and sue, and lose, and keep suing and keep losing.

What follows are three types of lawsuits I’d like to see in every state that mandates birth by unwilling people. I don’t want progressives and Democrats and people of sense to “take an L”—I want us to throw so much at the system that it chokes on itself.

Read the full piece here: https://www.thenation.com/article/society/after-roe-lawsuit

#scotus #elie mystal #stop forced childbirth #feminism #feminist #pro choice #pro-choice #supreme court

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aunti-christ-ine · 2 years

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#sunday sermon #quotes #Elie Mystal #The Nation #freedom of religion #freedom FROM religion #hypocrisy #think for yourself #question everything

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afragmentcastadrift · 1 year

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Current reads

#elie mystal #kate beaton #random cocktail post #alcohol cw #rye + amaro

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dontmeantobepoliticalbut · 11 months

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THE TEXAS ATTORNEY GENERAL WAS IMPEACHED BECAUSE HIS STAFF HAD THE COURAGE TO SOUND THE ALARM ABOUT THEIR BOSS. WHEN WILL THE SENATOR’S STAFF BE BRAVE ENOUGH TO DO THE SAME?

BY ELIE MYSTAL

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has been in office since 2015, and since 2015 he has been one of the most destructive forces in American law. He’s used his office as a Republican wish-fulfillment machine, trying to win through conservative courts the policies that Republicans cannot win at the ballot box. It was Paxton who organized a red-state challenge to the Affordable Care Act in 2018, trying to get Obamacare declared unconstitutional (he lost). Paxton also led the 2018 challenge to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, and brought it all the way to the Supreme Court (he lost). And he challenged Obama’s Clean Power Plan in 2017 (he won). During the Trump administration, he turned his attention toward reproductive rights, and he’s been at the forefront of trying to implement Texas’s bounty-hunter law, which punishes anyone who tries to help pregnant people in Texas receive an abortion. So far, during the Biden administration, he’s sued the administration more than 50 times, mainly over Biden’s immigration policies and student debt-relief programs. For Paxton, there is simply no difference between the law and his conservative political agenda.

Paxton has also been one of the most corrupt public officials in America in recent years. He has been under indictment since 2015 for securities fraud. But he has managed to use his status as attorney general, and a number of procedural tricks, to evade facing trial on those charges. We’re talking about a man who once hopped into a getaway truck, driven by his wife, to avoid a subpoena compelling him to testify in an abortion case. His wife, by the way, is a state senator.

All of this is apparently fine with a majority of Texas voters (the same people who have infected this country with Ted Cruz). They elected Paxton to a third term as AG back in 2022, just two years after he came out as an election denier and, in one of the dumbest lawsuits I’ve ever seen, tried to get the Supreme Court to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

Given Paxton’s apparent popularity with Texas voters, I was surprised to see that the Republican-controlled Texas House of Representatives overwhelmingly voted to impeach him last week and put him on leave from his duties pending trial in the Texas Senate. The vote was 121-23. You don’t often see Republicans turn on one of their own like this.

The credit for this shocking turn of law before party has to go to Paxton’s staff. His own employees sounded the alarm on the misdeeds that led to his impeachment.

The Texas House impeached Paxton on 20 charges of bribery, obstruction of justice, and abuse of public trust. Many of those charges involve favors Paxton is accused of performing on behalf of one of his wealthy donors, a man named Nate Paul. Paul is being investigated by the FBI for real estate fraud, so Paxton decided to green-light a state investigation of the FBI’s actions, going so far as to hire his own outside attorney, over the objections of his staff. The most egregious allegation, to me, involves a COVID-related opinion Paxton allegedly forced his staff to write to benefit Paul. Paxton’s staff claim that he asked them to determine if any of the various COVID-19 legal moratoriums could be invoked to delay foreclosure proceedings. He was told that this would not work. So Paxton allegedly ordered them to rewrite the opinion and argue that foreclosure sales were prevented by COVID-19 restrictions. His staff couldn’t make sense of Paxton’s directive—until they realized that Paul had a number of properties facing foreclosure proceedings.

Members of Paxton’s team brought up these concerns with regulators, and were subsequently fired by Paxton. Those staffers then brought a whistleblower lawsuit and won a $3.3 million settlement from Paxton. Paxton (in an act that must be in the running for the Guinness Book of World Records for hubris) then asked the Texas Legislature to pay the $3.3 million he owed these people. That triggered the House investigation into the charges, which is what directly led to his impeachment last week.

We members of the public tend to treat political staffers as nameless, faceless functionaries who exist only to serve their famous bosses. We don’t expect them to exercise their own moral judgment, and we often give them a pass when they silently and dutifully serve even the most evil and corrupt public officials. Sure, the President’s staffers often become famous, but most people cannot name a single person who works for Clarence Thomas or Josh Hawley or Ron DeSantis, and when those staffers pop up later in some other government role or run for office in their own right, most people don’t hold their prior service against them. We act like political staff cannot be held responsible for the decisions of their bosses.

In reality, the staff is complicit in the policies and decisions of the officeholder they serve, and they know what’s really going on long before the public or ProPublica do. And political staffers, collectively, have a whole lot of power. They are the people who have the option to speak truth to power—or to become mere cheerleaders for the worst instincts of their bosses.

Instead of being complicit in Paxton’s apparent corruption and abuse of power or silent witnesses to it, Paxton’s staff chose to speak out. That’s crucial. A person like Paxton cannot exist without the tacit consent and professional aid of many other people. And, too often, those people justify looking the other way either because of their personal careerist goals, or their supposed dedication to the larger political agenda of the people they work for.

To put it another way: We’re lucky that the people who worked for Paxton are not like the people who work for California Senator Dianne Feinstein. Her failing health prevents Feinstein from doing her job as a leader in a representative democracy. She is being propped up, literally, by her staff. Seeing her wheeled around like this, appearing barely cognizant of where she is or what she’s being asked to do, is tragic in a way that borders on farce.

For wildly different reasons, both Paxton and Feinstein are unfit for their elected offices. Paxton is unfit because he’s a corrupt-o-fascist who couldn’t even find a benefactor wealthy enough to own a superyacht. Feinstein is unfit because she’s not compos mentis—which I believe is Latin for “let’s just make sure she’s comfortable”—and has been unable to participate in basic Senate business for several months. To be clear, there’s no moral equivalency here: Feinstein is a dedicated public servant who got very old and very incapacitated; Paxton is a power-hungry repeat bad actor who got caught. But operationally, neither person should have the jobs that they do. Paxton’s staff knew it, and I promise you Feinstein’s staff knows it too.

By propping Feinstein up like this, her staff is putting their own agenda ahead of the best interests of California voters who deserve to have a Senator who can vote and advocate and make crucial decisions on their behalf. We can assume that Feinstein’s staff agrees with her votes (since they appear to be the ones functionally doing the voting), just as we can assume that Paxton’s staff agreed with his horrible policies and habit of manipulating the law for conservative ends. But at least some people on Paxton’s staff drew the line at self-dealing. Some of them determined that the people of Texas deserved an attorney general who wasn’t in it for himself alone. Some of them were willing to risk their precious jobs, and in fact lost those jobs, for telling the truth about what was happening in their office.

Does anybody working for Feinstein have that same commitment to truth? Who will be the “whistleblower” who goes public and says that Feinstein cannot do the job anymore and needs to be replaced—or is that the kind of thing they’re all saving for the books they will write after the fact? Who among them is willing to put the people of California first, and their own careers on Capitol Hill second? It hurts my soul to write this, but the group of people who showed up to work for the sniveling, corrupt Republican attorney general of Texas showed more respect for the norms of democratic self-government than the people who show up to work for the senior Democratic Senator from California.

The bottom line is that Ken Paxton would not have been impeached but for the willingness of people who worked for him to go public with the truth. Dianne Feinstein will not be replaced until the people who work for her are willing to do the same thing.

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