FIFY 
Wish I could believe I was merely snarking.
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I was so looking forward to being the one to say it. None of us three want to be the lawyer for the DOJ when the judge asks us, "Did you explain to your client that my order was to not do something, my order was NOT to not do it pursuant to one theory or rationale. You are obligated to put before the court all bases on which you think you are legally entitled to prevail; if you donāt you have presumably waived that legal argument, and therefore cannot later say āHey, I was hiding these cards behind my back so I win!!ā That is what a sociopath does.
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The switch to claiming a partisan motivation might have worked earlier. With the new evidence which has come to light it is clear that the motivation included raw racial discrimination in favor of whites. This is blatantly unConstitutional. Attempting to portray any other motivation is going to look remarkably pretextual.
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Yeah. Legally the case is toast. And IMO, the signal the SCOTUS was sending Trump was not that he had a way to fix this particular caseā¦it was more like āDude, come to us in the future with something even vaguely believableā
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I hope youāre right. Thereās not much I put past Roberts. Iāve seen quotes from the SCOTUS ruling but havenāt read the whole thing (and donāt have time right now). My understanding based on those quotes and on other analyses Iāve read is that the Gang of Five wants very, very, very much to defer to the Executive Branch on this one, so long as its rationale doesnāt conflict so much with the available evidence as not to be able to pass the laugh test, even for them. Yeah, I agree ā blatant racial discrimination could well be held unconstitutional. But if they can frame it in partisan terms ā D vs. R ā that seems A-OK with the current Gang of 5. I hope youāre right that the record will show blatant racial discrimination, but Iām looking for Roberts & Co. to find a way to wiggle out of it. Iāll be overjoyed if Iām wrong.
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And therein lies the dilemma facing Roberts, where he has to choose between ruling for his side and maintaining the courtās independence and co-equal status. By deferring to the executive branch and granting it increasingly arbitrary power, he diminishes the court.
Marshall faced the same dilemma, but in an era where the powers and boundaries of each branch were mostly fuzzy and still being defined as they went along. 200 years later, thatās no longer the case and Roberts would be opening a Pandoraās Box if he messed too much with the established order of things, which would go against both conservative thinking and the courtsā power.
My bet is he doesnāt go as far as some here fear. Not necessarily because heās a closeted liberal as because heās looking out for the judicial branch and its co-equal status. He doesnāt want to render himself moot.
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Well, nothingās truly toast until it pops out, but yeah, not looking good for Donnie Drumpkopf. If he doesnāt end up killing us all, Trump might well end up pushing the country leftward for years if not decades.
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Really, really hope you (and @ajm) are right. Maybe Iām just extra-cynical today, but as someone wrote in these here threads sometime in the last few days, if you aināt cynical, you aināt paying attention. Wonder if I should take the other side of a bet that Iām really hoping Iāll loseā¦
So, I happened to be attending a funeral at my synagogue in March 2017, almost exactly 3 weeks after Linda Sarsour and Tarek El-Messidi first organized a fundraising campaign in the Muslim community to repair and rehabilitate the desecrated/vandalized St. Louis Jewish cemetery. That campaign blew through its initial $20,000 goal in three hours, eventually raising over $162,000. They raised $80K in the first 24 hours ($1,000 every 20 minutes). Eventually they helped repair and rehabilitate vandalized synagogues and cemeteries in St. Louis, Chicago, Rochester (NY), Denver, Pittsburgh (the Tree of Life synagogue), and Fall River (MA) among others I believe.
At this funeral I spoke with a rabbi/activist friend of mine, and this fundraising campaign came up. I remember exactly what he said: āIf [Individual-1] doesnāt destroy us first, he might just make America great again.ā
GMTA. May it be so.
I donāt know about actually great, but Iād settle for saner and better and on the right overall path. There will always be problems, some intractable. Like, racism, sexism, xenophobia, greed, megalomania, etc., and their inevitable consequences. But more like Canada than Mexico, Iād settle for that.
Context. I agree w/you about the whole āgreatā thing, but in the context of my discussion with my friend, using the MAGA meme made perfect sense.
I get that. I was just clarifying that we need to be realistic and set goals and expectations accordingly, especially when it comes to human nature. We are not trying to build a utopia. We are merely trying to make the best of things in the context of what is doable. E.g. universal health care, sure, absolutely, but there will still be lots of problems. Dealing with climate change and replacing fossil fuel consumption with renewables, definitely, but weāre going to be burning that oil well past midnight for years if not decades to come. Itās just that folks on the left have this tendency to believe that the alternative to the present terrible reality is some utopian dreamland, which ultimately causes us to fail in our attempt to replace one with the other. Baby steps, especially these days.
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Agree, except regarding that oil burning thing. Physics is apolitical. Global cooking has progressed at a rate far outstripping the projections of the IPCC, which were, in retrospect, almost hilariously optimistic, despite being branded as āalarmismā. San Francisco is looking at flooding. New Orleans is about to be under water again. Thereās talk of āsunny day floodsā now. US cities are already getting feet of water dumped on them in a matter of a few hours.
So we can talk about whatās politically possible, and baby steps, all we want. Physics wonāt even bother to laugh at us. Itāll just keeping on doing what itās doing, and following its own laws, just like it always has. We learn to follow those laws, or die.