Quote of the Day

In Alabama, women can now be forced to have babies they don't want and can’t have babies that they do.

Joyce Vance

Joyce Vance at Civil Discourse Substack:

The newsletter starts tonight with enormous gratitude to folks in the courtroom, reporters and lawyers, who are live-blogging and tweeting the first criminal trial of Donald Trump. It’s ridiculous that the former president is on trial and Americans can’t watch, or at least listen to, the trial in real time. I have strong views about the damage done by excluding all but a very few people from access to the courtroom during this most important of trials, so I’m grateful to the people who are sitting in and recording their impressions and the proceedings so we can follow along. If you’re looking for some good follows: Adam Klasfeld, Norm Eisen, Hugo Lowell, the WAPO and NYT updates, and Politico all caught my eye today. Most of my analysis tonight is based on their work, as well as information friends in the courtroom have shared. Many defendants seem to be incapable of focusing on the reality of their situation until they face jury selection and see the people who will sit in judgment on them. That reality began to sink in for Trump today. He showed up looking haggard and with bags under his eyes, appropriate for a man who seemed to spend much of the night and early morning hours tweeting nonsense on Truth Social. He will doubtless continue to lie and bluster, but this is a solemn and serious moment for a defendant, and no matter how much he thinks he is, Trump is not an exception.

The morning started with Judge Merchan denying Trump’s renewed motion to recuse. No surprises here. We discussed the law previously—judges have an obligation to stay on a case when there is no legal obligation to recuse. Judge Merchan previously received an ethics panel opinion that approved his participation in the case, and Trump offered no new reasons for him to recuse. "To say that these claims are attenuated is an understatement," Merchan said. So why are Trump’s lawyers engaging in these sort of tactics? They won’t delay the case, and his lawyers know they’re extremely likely to lose. It’s all about preserving possible issues for appeal. A surprising amount of what goes on at trial on Trump’s side of the courtroom will be about appeal. That started with pre-trial motions and will continue with jury selection and throughout the trial. It’s precisely what you would expect to see in a significant white collar prosecution, and it’s a reminder that much of what Trump’s lawyers do will be the type of legitimate defense work you would expect to see. As a defense lawyer your job is to identify possible reversible error, object to it, and hope you can live to fight another day if your client is convicted.

Judge Merchan took up a number of pre-trial motions, many about admissibility of evidence, before jury selection began late in the day. (This, by the way, isn’t unusual ahead of jury selection in many jurisdictions. Although it’s common in state systems, there are federal courts, like those in Alabama, where this goes on too. It’s important to understand that the practices vary from place to place, and sometimes even from judge to judge in the same courthouse.) There is a general rule that prosecutors can introduce evidence that is sui generis, part of the story of the crime and necessary to explain context to the jury. So the Judge ruled, for instance, that the prosecution can introduce evidence of the National Enquirer’s involvement in “catch and kill.” The prosecution wants to show the jury positive headlines from the National Enquirer in 2016 that were run past Trump for approval before publication, calling them the “concrete manifestation” of the scheme to suppress bad stories about candidate Trump and push negative stories about his opponents. The Judge decided the evidence was “inextricably intertwined” with the facts of the case.

[...]

Calendar notes: The trial will take place every day except Wednesdays, which the Judge has reserved for other matters, including the veterans and mental health courts he oversees. He also announced he would not hold trial on days that conflict with any jurors’ religious observances.

Trump must be in court every day of trial. The Judge advised him—and this is the rule for all criminal defendants—“If you do not show up there will be an arrest.” No wiggle room there. But there is still some wiggle room, or at least a week’s grace period, before the Judge will hold a hearing and decide whether Trump violated the gag order by posting about witnesses on social media. Judge Merchan set a show-cause hearing at prosecutors’ request, but didn’t schedule it until Wednesday, April 24. At a show-cause hearing, the burden is on Trump to convince the Judge he shouldn’t be held in contempt. As we discussed last night, the Judge has the difficult job of holding Trump accountable without making a martyr of him. It’s a tough balance to strike. But this decision feels lenient, although there are some possible explanations. Perhaps the Judge is giving Trump enough rope to hang himself with—but he’s already had plenty. There is a legitimate concern that doing this on the eve of trial, when it would be sure to receive widespread publicity, could result in prejudice to the jury, perhaps to the point of reversible error. It might make sense to hold off until the jury is selected and sworn in, and the Judge instructs them to avoid reading or discussing any news from external sources. We’ll see if the timing on that plays out and if this is just a measure of care from the Judge. But we are at the point where, whether it’s the gag order or misconduct in the courtroom, Judge Merchan is going to have to figure out how to hold Trump accountable for his behavior if he doesn’t want to play ringmaster to a circus instead of judge for a trial. I don’t say this critically of the Judge in any way. He has a difficult job here, and so far, he’s shown that he’s up to managing Trump.

[...] When jury selection finally got underway, more than half of the prospective jurors in the first panel of 96 people were excused after they told the Judge they could not be fair and impartial. That suggests 45 or so were willing to at least consider it, which seems like a pretty good start. Seriously. We’re talking about the trial of Donald Trump, so it’s unsurprising lots of jurors might have strong feelings they can’t overcome. The whole idea of this proceeding is to weed them out.

The Judge got underway with 18 potential jurors in the box. One was excused, presumably for cause, before the end of the day. The Judge will pick up there tomorrow morning. After a full day of voir dire, we will have a better sense of how much time it’s going to take to get a jury. New York Times correspondent Maggie Haberman and others reported from inside of the courtroom that Trump was nodding off during the proceedings this morning. If he can’t keep his eyes open when his own liberty is at stake, why would Americans have confidence he’s capable of paying attention when our country’s interests require sound presidential leadership? Trump was also observed with his eyes closed this afternoon as jury selection was just getting underway. That’s hardly the way to make a good impression on jurors. And yet, in such an important matter, Trump lacks simple good judgment. If Joe Biden fell asleep in a courtroom or anywhere else, it would be a front page story for the rest of the week. This should be too.

Joyce Vance writes in her Civil Discourse Substack about the opening day of the first criminal trial for Donald Trump in New York v. Trump.

Trump must be in the courtroom every day the case is in session in court, and yesterday, he was spotted nodding off with his eyes closed.

Judge Aileen Cannon on Thursday overruled the special master she appointed to review thousands of documents seized from Mar-a-Lago, shielding former President Donald Trump from addressing his claims that documents may have been "planted" or "declassified" in court.

Cannon, a Trump appointee in southern Florida, issued an order extending the timeline of the review after Trump's lawyers objected to the expedited schedule laid out by special master Raymond Dearie, who was chosen from a list proposed by Trump's lawyers. Under the new order, the review and any surrounding issues around Dearie's rulings "will almost certainly" stretch into next year, according to Politico.

Cannon, who has served on the bench for less than two years, also overruled Dearie, a Reagan appointee who has served for 36 years, on his requirement that Trump assert whether the FBI's inventory of seized items is accurate, effectively challenging his public claim that agents may have "planted" evidence.

"There shall be no separate requirement on Plaintiff at this stage, prior to the review of any of the Seized Materials, to lodge ex ante final objections to the accuracy of Defendant's Inventory, its descriptions, or its contents. The Court's Appointment Order did not contemplate that obligation," Cannon wrote.

She wrote that if any issues rise during the review "that require reconsideration of the Inventory or the need to object to its contents, the parties shall make those matters known to the Special Master for appropriate resolution and recommendation to this Court."

Cannon also rejected other parts of Dearie's plan for the review, giving Trump's lawyers additional weeks to assert whether they believe any documents are covered by attorney-client privilege or executive privilege.

"If Judge Cannon was going to continue calling every ball in Trump's favor, I'm not at all sure why she felt the need to appoint a special master to review the documents the government seized from Mar-a-Lago," tweeted Joyce Vance, a former U.S. attorney. "No real surprises here. The name of the game is delay. Judge Cannon countermanded Judge Dearie's streamlined schedule & helped Trump advance his usual delay game in litigation. That means it could be late December before DOJ can use documents it recovered from Mar-a-Lago."

Cannon previously came under criticism for repeatedly siding with Trump in the case. Cannon's initial order barred the Justice Department from continuing its criminal investigation into the documents and ordered documents marked classified to be included in the special master review and shared with Trump's lawyers. A federal appeals court overturned those rulings, arguing that she had abused her discretion and that Trump "not even attempted to show that he has a need to know the information contained in the classified documents."

Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe said that Cannon's order on Thursday was "clearly wrong."

"But she's a sideshow now that the Court of Appeals has lifted her injunction with respect to the classified documents," he tweeted. "On the eve of her stupidly extended deadline, DOJ should indict Trump and render her delays and game playing moot."

Former federal prosecutor Renato Mariotti said the order was a "minor win" for Trump.

"But this doesn't change the difficult position Trump is in," he added. "He still has to take a position regarding every seized document."

Some legal experts criticized Cannon for repeatedly intervening on Trump's behalf.

"She's an embarrassment to the federal judiciary," wrote conservative attorney George Conway.

"Cannon's latest order has neither law nor reason on its side," tweeted former U.S. Attorney Harry Litman. "Judges never micromanage special masters this way," he said.

Former federal prosecutor Andrew Weissmann, who served on special counsel Bob Mueller's team, said that the order was "one more piece of evidence that she is completely unfit to serve on the bench."

"What does Donald Trump have on Judge Cannon or her husband?" Weissmann wrote. "Something is SO off in her decisions (and the court of appeals said as much) that it is impossible not to ask this question in all seriousness."

Read Cannon's full order below:

Cannon overrules Dearie by Igor Derysh on Scribd

Mike Luckovich, Atlanta Journal Constitution

* * * * *

No More Mifepristone

Joyce Vance

On the Friday before Easter, just after the end of the workweek in Texas, a federal judge in Amarillo decided that Mifepristone, one of two key drugs used for medicated abortion, should be banned. This despite 20 years of data showing it’s safe and effective. Mifepristone has a lower rate of complications than Tylenol.

The judge also entered a stay, which means his order won’t go into effect for seven days. He did it to give the government an opportunity to appeal. But if neither the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, deeply conservative after a tranche of Trump appointments, nor the Supreme Court orders a lengthier extension, legal access to Mifepristone will come to an end. Not just in Texas, but nationwide.

The government didn’t need seven days. It filed its appeal to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals a few hours after the decision.

DOJ was prepared to file immediately because they understood the inevitable ruling in this case. Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, who the plaintiffs judge-shopped for by filing this case in the Amarillo division where virtually all cases are assigned to him, has a background of deep antagonism to letting pregnant people make their own decisions. Kacsmaryk’s legal ruling affects the entire country, not just Texas. A federal district judge in Washington State entered a ruling ordering the FDA to keep Mifepristone on the market, just moments after the Texas ruling. But Kacsmaryk entered a nationwide injunction that rescinds the FDA’s approval of Mifepristone nationwide—even in states where abortion is still legal and without exception for the mother’s health.

That’s not the legal landscape the Supreme Court said it was creating when it ended 50 years of abortion rights under Roe v. Wade in the Dobbs case. When the Court decided Dobbs, it said decisions about whether and under what circumstances abortion should be legal would be left up to each state. But now, Judge Kacsmaryk has made that decision for all of us—you and me, for our mothers, daughters, sisters, aunts, and friends, regardless of medical necessity or our personal religious and moral beliefs. Judge Kacsmaryk knows best.

Challenged legal rulings are typically stayed to preserve the status quo while appeals work their way through the courts. But the post-Trump, uber-conservative Supreme Court has always had a different jurisprudence when it comes to abortion, permitting restrictive measures like Texas’s SB-8 vigilante-justice law to go into effect while the appeal was pending. Nothing says “result-oriented” like special rules for anti-abortion litigants (to say nothing of reversing the long-standing precedent of Roe that had worked well to balance rights and did not meet the Court’s test for when precedent should be reversed). It’s tempting to think the Court might decide the Mifepristone decision is a bridge too far, if not based on legal principles and the expectations it set when it decided Dobbs, then out of purely pragmatic political considerations some of Justice Clarence Thomas’s billionaire friends might want to see in order to avoid steep Republican losses at the polls following yet another anti-abortion decision. But it’s difficult to imagine this Court walking it back so close to its goal of extinguishing abortion rights. DOJ has strong arguments to make on appeal—compelling ones on threshold issues like whether the plaintiffs had standing to bring this case, as well as on the merits. Whether the Court will give them a fair hearing is an entirely different matter.

Soon we’ll find out if the Court meant it when it said abortion would be up to the states. Or if one judge in Texas can resurrect the long-disfavored Comstock Act and terminate people’s rights across America. The Act is an 1873 law that makes it illegal to advertise or mail anything, including information, related to preventing contraception or producing abortion (as well as outlawing sending “obscene, lewd or lascivious,” “immoral,” or “indecent” publications). The Comstock Act fell into disuse because of its effect on First Amendment rights—it involves prior restraint by the government on speech. The prohibition on materials and items related to contraception was removed after the Supreme Court’s 1965 decision in Griswold v. Connecticut, which held that Connecticut’s “mini-Comstock” law unconstitutionally invaded the privacy rights of married couples. Be concerned about where a resuscitation of this law could lead.

Restricting abortion today does not seem to be about good-faith conservative values and protecting the sanctity of life. It’s hard to believe that a party that denies access to basic medical care and education and that lets schoolkids die at the hands of mass shooters in the name of the Second Amendment is deeply committed to unborn children, unless it’s become somehow morally righteous to protect them only until they leave the womb. Ending abortion is a political rallying cry, used to bring voters to the polls and raise money, with a healthy side effect of owning uppity liberal women.

It’s really not that difficult: If you’re against abortion, don’t get one. We live in a pluralistic society and there are religions other than conservative Christianity, for instance Judaism, that command their followers to protect the life of a mother over that of an unborn fetus. Somehow their rights are now ignored, while a minority that has gained control of the Supreme Court dictates to the rest of us.

Interestingly, banning Mifepristone isn’t just part of the trend to make abortion less available; it’s also part of the trend to make it less safe and to endanger women’s lives. I spoke with Jesanna Cooper, a friend and a doctor in Birmingham, who is an experienced Ob-Gyn. She told me, “The take-home is that without mifepristone, more people will hemorrhage and/or get septic from incomplete expulsion of the products of conception.” Using Misoprostol, the other drug used in a medication abortion procedure, alone is “less effective,” she says. It involves the “same amount of pain but [is] more likely to be incomplete, which can be dangerous.” It doesn’t sound very pro-life.

More information about the two drugs, if you want to read some of the science, is here.

In 1996 then-Congresswoman Patricia Schroeder (D-CO) tried to convince the House to take the Comstock Act off the books. They didn’t. But her floor speech has resonance today. She explained that the Act was named for a man named Anthony Comstock, who “was one of these people who decided only he knew what was virtuous and right, and somehow he managed to convince all sorts of people that this was correct.” That sounds familiar.

She continued, “Anthony Comstock was a religious fanatic who spent his life in a personal crusade for moral purity—as defined, of course, by himself. This crusade resulted in the arrest and imprisonment of a multitude of Americans whose only crime was to exercise their constitutional right of free speech in ways that offended Anthony Comstock. Women seemed to particularly offend Anthony Comstock, most particularly women who believed in the right to plan their families through the use of contraceptives, or in the right of women to engage in discussions and debate about matters involving sexuality, including contraception and abortion.” We don’t need a new Anthony Comstock, and we don’t need Judge Kacsmaryk to dictate health care—or the absence of it—to people across the country.

You know what the solution is: go vote. Democrats will need sufficient majorities in both houses of Congress to restore protections for abortion. It’s not enough to win the House or the Senate; Democrats must take both to ensure access to abortion, and 2024 is not that far off.

We’re in this together,

Joyce

[Civil Discourse With Joyce Vance]

Trump is totally, and uniquely among our former presidents, out of bounds. It's time to stop letting him break the rules. We’re entitled to more, not less, accountability from our presidents than from average citizens. No one is saying Trump can’t campaign or that he can’t criticize Biden. What he can’t do is suggest he should be kidnapped, knocked out, and bound in the back of a pickup truck. I can’t believe that I have to write that out—there is no universe in which that’s acceptable. Did you hear anyone in his own party calling him out for that? Of course you didn’t. We’re long past that point.

Why does Donald Trump get more leeway, especially with his past history? He only continues to get it because our institutions—the courts, the Republican party—let him take it. One of the problems with Trump is that he goes right up to the line and then hovers on top of it in a way that gives him plausible deniability he hasn’t quite crossed over. That’s what he’s doing when he targets the Judge’s daughter in Manhattan, just like he targeted Judge Engoron’s law clerk, and just like his buddy Roger Stone quite literally targeted the Judge in his criminal case, posting a picture of her on Instagram in what looked like crosshairs. That’s what Trump did today, posting an image of a kidnapped President Biden while letting his followers put on the story it didn’t mean anything. Actions have consequences. Judges have the ability to compel good behavior from defendants on bond pending trial in their court. They can go so far as taking away their guns once they’re indicted or prevent them from contacting and threatening witnesses and victims. They should tell him he can’t threaten the President of the United States. It’s time for the courts to stop bending over backward to protect Trump. He’s entitled to all the constitutional protections any other criminal defendant receives, but he’s not entitled to more.

A federal grand jury is apparently investigating how 15 boxes of classified material ended up at Mar-a-Lago after Trump left office.

Trump was probably waiting for a Russian submarine to slip into Palm Beach to pick them up.

Enough Already!!!

What I want to share with you today is a post by Joyce Vance from Saturday.  I’ve had a welcome break for a day or two from writing about Donald Trump, but we all knew it couldn’t last forever.  So what’s the latest?  Threats, thinly-veiled threats against a judge, the judge’s daughter, and against the President of the United States.  And what are the courts doing to harness the person behind the…

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"Elections matter. You’re not just picking a president—you’re electing state leaders who will determine what kind of taxes you pay and a mayor impacts issues like how local dollars are used. You’ll be electing school board members who decide what books your kids can read. You’re electing a sheriff who determines law enforcement priorities and how his deputies will be trained and what standards they’ll have to live up to. You may be voting for legislators who will decide if women in your state will have a right to an abortion—or an exception if there isn’t one for the mother’s health. There are dozens of reasons to get out and vote in every election. But they are all amplified in this next one. And topping them all is the need to do everything we can to prevent Trump from launching a dangerous narrative that leads to civil unrest."

Joyce Vance

Civil Discourse

Joyce Vance: Tennessee

I haven't been doing much here for a little while on account of some health stuff, but with respect to the Tennessee House expulsions, I think some history is in order, courtesy of Joyce Vance:

Several months after his election in June 1965, a civil rights organization that Mr. Bond belonged to issued an anti-war statement about Vietnam, which he subsequently endorsed in statements to the press. White members of the Georgia House challenged Bond’s right to be seated, charging that his statements aided our enemies, violated the Selective Service laws, discredited the House, and were inconsistent with the legislator’s mandatory oath to support the Constitution.

Bond filed a challenge in the House to the petitions against seating him, alleging they were violations of his First Amendment rights and they were racially motivated. The House committee hearing his challenge concluded that Bond should not be seated. He filed a lawsuit, and a three-judge panel in the federal district court in Georgia ruled against him 2-1. Bond filed an appeal under a provision that permitted him to go straight to the United States Supreme Court. While the appeal was pending, he was re-elected to the Georgia House in a special election, and, again, the House refused to seat him. He was elected again in the regular election in 1966, and the Supreme Court decided his case shortly afterwards.

The unanimous Supreme Court decision in Bond’s favor relied upon a famous First Amendment case, New York Times v. Sullivan, holding that although a state may impose a requirement that legislators take an oath of allegiance, it cannot limit their capacity to express views on local or national policy. “[D]ebate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide-open,” the Court wrote, citing the decision in Sullivan.

The Court’s opinion in Bond concluded with these words: “Legislators have an obligation to take positions on controversial political questions so that their constituents can be fully informed by them, and be better able to assess their qualifications for office; also so they may be represented in governmental debates by the person they have elected to represent them. We therefore hold that the disqualification of Bond from membership in the Georgia House because of his statements violated Bond’s right of free expression under the First Amendment.”

Julian Bond died in 2015, so his own personal experience isn't even long past, and that time is still very much in living memory. You would hope that we would have learned by now, but it seems as though the challenge of the 60s is still with us, and it's up to us to meet it again.

Salt Lake Tribune

* * * * 

Putting More Guns in the Wrong Hands  ::  Joyce Vance

First the Supreme Court decided Heller, a case that extended the Second Amendment notion of well-armed militias to permit Americans to possess virtually any kind of firearm that wasn’t fully automatic or short-barreled in their home, under a self-defense rationale. Then came last term’s decision in Bruen, a New York case, that struck down what it decided were unreasonable limitations on public possession of firearms. So we knew it was only a matter of time until a court took it even further. After all, over the years the NRA has advocated for the right of blind people to carry firearms, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), the only federal agency tasked with oversight of the gun industry, is so notoriously underfunded by Congress that it cannot fully perform that role.

This week the 5th Circuit entered the fray, ruling that the domestic violence provision of 18 U.S.C. 922(g) contradicts the nation’s “historical tradition” of access to firearms even for people who aren’t “model citizens.” The three-judge panel (two Trump appointees and one Reagan appointee, for those who are counting) held that the statute is unconstitutional because it gives too much power to Congress to determine who qualifies as “law-abiding, responsible citizens” when it comes to gun ownership.

The court worried about who might lose their right to possess firearms if they permitted the prohibition against people with a demonstrated propensity towards violence against their partners to stay on the books: “Could speeders be stripped of their right to keep and bear arms? Political nonconformists? People who do not recycle or drive an electric vehicle?”

The court vacated the conviction of the Texan man Zackey Rahimi, who pleaded guilty to having a pistol in his home following the issuance of a civil domestic-violence restraining order for assaulting his former girlfriend. Texas, which we know denies women abortion access to protect the lives of unborn fetuses, apparently thinks it’s acceptable to risk that same woman’s life at the hands of a man with a firearm who has already shown a willingness to do violence to her. The court wrote that “Rahimi, while hardly a model citizen, is nonetheless part of the political community entitled to the Second Amendment’s guarantees, all other things equal.”

The 5th Circuit contorted itself to ignore the use of language like “law-abiding citizen” that prior cases have used to determine the reach of Second Amendment rights. And while the decision is limited to the 8th subsection of the statute, which we started out with above, there is little reason to believe litigants won’t proceed to challenge other parts of the statute.

And none of this is theoretical. Prosecutions for possession of firearms by disqualified persons have risen steadily over the years. The most recent numbers available from the U.S. Sentencing Commission show that in 2021, there were 7,454 offenders convicted under 18 U.S.C. 922(g). That was an increase from 6,032 offenders in fiscal year 2017. Illegal firearms possession cases are also significant as a percentage of DOJ’s total criminal docket. For instance, in fiscal year 2016, there were 5,391 offenders convicted under 18 U.S.C. 922(g), accounting for 8% of all offenders sentenced in federal court.

DOJ has already announced it will appeal the Rahimi decision in a statement from Attorney General Garland: “Nearly 30 years ago, Congress determined that a person who is subject to a court order that restrains him or her from threatening an intimate partner or child cannot lawfully possess a firearm. Whether analyzed through the lens of Supreme Court precedent, or of the text, history, and tradition of the Second Amendment, that statute is constitutional. Accordingly, the Department will seek further review of the Fifth Circuit’s contrary decision.”

What should we expect the Supreme Court to do? In a 2019 case, Rehaif, the Court considered whether the government had to prove a defendant was aware they had the status that made it a crime for them to possess a firearm (in that case, that they were not legally in the United States). The Court ruled that the government did, without in any way suggesting that the statute itself was unconstitutional. However, this Court has been less mindful of precedent than the Court has been at any other point in our lifetimes. Given its recent trajectory on firearms and Second Amendment issues, it’s hard to feel optimistic that all of the public-safety-based restrictions on firearms ownership in 922(g) will survive.

We’re in this together,

Joyce

CIVIL DISCOURSE

Joyce Vance

Dating Vance Hopper HCS (AU VER)

This is what it’s like dating Vance Hopper in my Ultim Hawkins AU (AKA an AU that’s just a whole bunch of AUs stuck together [plus OCs])

Warnings: None!<3

AN: Not proof read!! Was this an excuse to write about my AU? Oh yes absolutely. Will I regret it? NEVER. Don’t be afraid to send in a request! I don’t really have much to write so I can do more AU headcanons for like Robin or something

To start with, Vance has A-LOT of siblings.

Though he only grew up with his older sister and sadly had to watch as their younger sister passed, he now has two more sisters and three more brothers

If you decide to spend the day at his house expect ZERO privacy from Roxy barging in to ask for cash to Will gently knocking on the door asking to borrow some pencils for him and El

You two barely get a moment alone

I can also imagine one day Roxy invites you over for a family dinner and Vance is begging you not to go, but you go anyways cause you’re curious to see what’s it like when all his family is together

Btw his family consists of his father Jim Hopper and his step-mother Joyce Byers. His siblings are Leo, Valerie, Jonathan and Will Byers and Roxanne and Jane Hopper :) [Jane is adopted]

When you finally sit down it’s utter chaos

Will and El are gossiping about kids at their school and judging them

Roxy and Leo look like their about to get into a fist fight (Which Jim is betting 10 bucks Roxy’ll win)

And Joyce is talking to Valerie trying to figure out what Jonathan and Argyle’s relationship is

Needless to say you just end up eating and listening to the different conversations with your hand intertwined with Vance’s, hidden under the table

And if you’re lucky some other guests will be there! Like Murray and his daughter Noelle, Jonathan’s partners Argyle and Nancy, Will’s boyfriends Lucas and Mike, El’s girlfriend Max, Valerie’s friend Bonnie and Jim’s friend Dmitri

Luckily Joyce threatened to take Lonnie to court for mental and physical abuse towards the kids so she got enough cash to buy a big enough house for her seven children

I’d like to imagine that Jonathan brings you two places and will always remind Vance to stay safe and stay with you at all times due to the situation that happened when Vance was in Denver with his birth mom

Joyce is the best mom ever, she supports you two sm and absolutely adores you. Vance loves her more then his birth mother and it shows.

Roxy is also super cool and will dye your hair if you ask since she did her own

It’s 100% canon in this AU that Vance is a punk metal head. You can and will be forced to listen to that kind of music, but if he’s feeling nicer then usual then he’ll let you put on what you like.

Vance most likely struggles in some subjects so you’d offer to help him study, and when you get to his place and tell Joyce she just nods her head like “ya sure. Study.”

But she’s pleasantly surprised when she walks past Vance’s open door to see you and him sitting at his desk with you explaining different aspects that go into solving a two step equation for math

Before you and Vance started dating, Will and El would be with you in their living room watching some program and Vance leaves to go grab some drinks from the fridge when El turns to you and says

“You know Vance has been talking about you ALOT lately. I think he might like you.”

And as your face is turning red Will is interjecting “YOU MEAN THEY AREN’T DATING? Shit. I owe Max 10 bucks now.”

Once Vance gets back he’s confused as he sits down next to you who’s face us flushed scarlet and El who’s mouth is painted with a smug smile

Cat person. If you have a cat expect him to lay on your couch with the cat on his chest as he gently strokes its furr while talking to you