Can’t. Trump is POTUS until 2029. Can’t enact SKKKOTUS reform until there’s a Dem POTUS. Can’t pass anything that will stop the KKKristofascist End Game until the SKKKOTUS is reformed. And even then, I suspect the 6 KKKristofascists on SKKKOTUS will try to rule that the reform legislation is unconstitutional.
Soft secession needed to begin months ago.
What’s it to ya? I’ll say what I damn well please about SCOTUS.
Fair enough.
I’m just pissed at everything right now. Sorry. I gotta vent.
Totally.
We will need an unprecedented number of new registrations of Democratic voters as well as a huge turnout of black voters.
"Still I sent up my prayer
Wondering where it had to go
With heaven full of astronauts
And the Lord on death row"
— Joni Mitchell “The Same Situation”
Hard to imagine a universe where this Court bails them out, but they’re trying
Yes, of course. But it is more “inside baseball” evidence to the one-sided character of this court. A tsunami of an election is the one real hope, and it needs to be more than just one. The challenge will be after the mid-terms, when the plutocrats will, running scared, increase their spending and algorithms that much more.
Meanwhile, unleashed by Callais and urged onward by President Trump, southern states are racing to eliminate their majority-Black, majority-Democratic districts before the midterms. Tennessee was first out of the gate, though its new 9-0 Republican map has already drawn a legal challenge from the NAACP.
Can we stop calling these radical reactionaries “conservative” now?
“This is a declaration of war … on American voters.”
Now?
I thought that was on Jan. 6 2020.
That people didn’t get it then is part of the problem.
While many are hoping to see Putin finally go away, there is a real risk that the mafioso state that comes after may be worse. I fear the US faces a similar downgrade problem, but hopefully not as brutal. The oligarch class has always pooh-poohed political and judicial aspirations to an optimum “best” equilibrium. Indeed, the Fed’s mandate includes creating the monetary conditions for optimum employment. The 5th and 14th amendments guarantee “due process” without which the government may not deprive individuals of life, liberty or property. In a “second-best” equilibrium, the government flatly concedes that some of the conditions needed for achieving the best economy or best society just aren’t there, so this is what you can get without meeting that condition (say a generally healthy, literate population with most material needs met). Instead you get a situation with public violence and fear that may last several decades until the poor results of a second-best or third-best world ultimately become tiresome, even for the oligarchs.
I feel that the gravity of what is happening now is underappreciated. If Republicans retain control of the House with a non-trivial minority of the national or statewide vote with the aid of a corrupt Supreme Court ruling, we will cross the legitimacy line–you know, that whole sovereignty of the people governments derive their just power from the consent of the governed business that’s the ideological first principle of democracy? That line. And they’re choosing to try to cross it in a time of economic turmoil and dislocation.
What do you think Americans do if that happens? Because y’all, repudiation of the social contract in times of economic distress is how revolutions start. We’ve seen it more times than I can count in the last forty years.
And possibly worse, they have shown us that there is no limit on what they’re willing to do to stay in power other than those applied externally, such as by military resistance to illegal orders or lower federal courts. Or crowds of citizens who resist Sturmabteilung-grade thuggery with mass displays of sheer Americanism. But the only limits are created by the resistance of those they don’t control. There are no self-applied legal, ethical or, above all, financial limits on what they will do to cling to power and avoid accountability.
Because the “they” in question isn’t Republicans. It’s the oligarchists. The GOP is just a front for them now and entirely dependent on them for election. And as oligarchists are wont do to, they will gleefully, recklessly escalate their way into wars they cannot possibly win because their whole lived experience is that they always win and a popular threat to their power trip-as-lifestyle is existential to them.
Like the slave-owning class in the 1850’s, really.
Unlikely, I know. “Oooh, that’s court-packing. Can’t do thaaat.”
It is important to remember that the GOP has spent decades gerrymandering already, and have long relied on this as a method.
What it means in real life is that the margins are already thin, and a wave election can only hurt them even more.
Right now they are adrift in hubris. It is the Right’s Achilles’ heel, and they are heel-first into an election.
Senate Majority Leader Scott Surovell (D) said that forcing the court into early retirement would be “extreme” and that there isn’t enough time to make changes to the maps, per local reporter Brandon Jarvis.
Of course it would be extreme! Because that’s what’s required to beat back extremism on the Right. They do extreme things multiple times every day. Meanwhile our putative leaders still fret over how it will look if they take any action to counter authoritarianism.
That does not make it OK to tilt the field at a 45 degree angle for the Republican Party. And not every election is a blowout. Should Dems be in the minority except in those years, once every decade or so, when there is a wave election?
I’m trying to train myself to avoid all derogatory sexist epithets; it’s really hard to avoid them all. So far not a good emotional release when I call someone a “taint”.
Suggestions welcome.
I think we’ve already crossed the line. Certainly the oathbreaking traitor thinks so, with crap like this, he’s clearly angling to be President for Life (from some garbage posting as reported by ABC News a few hours ago):
Trump sounds off SCOTUS justices he appointed over tariff ruling
Story by Lalee Ibssa
“Well, maybe Neil, and Amy, just had a really bad day, but our Country can only handle so many decisions of that magnitude before it breaks down, and cracks!!!” he added. “Sometimes decisions have to be allowed to use Good, Strong, Common Sense as a guide. A negative ruling on Birthright Citizenship, on top of the recent Supreme Court Tariff catastrophe, is not Economically sustainable for the United States of America?”
And what happens when the Country breaks down and cracks, exactly? Captain America Jesus Trump saves us from China?
This tariffs deal is quite the scam. We the People paid out of OUR pockets the tariffs, not China, of course, and now the US Treasury is refunding those tariffs to the businesses that collected them from the American People, but guess what?
We ain’t getting it back into our pockets. Big Business, they can do the legwork, they’re getting it, so it’s like a tax on consumers getting funneled to Big Business kinda directly.
“Like the slave-owning class in the 1850’s, really.”
Yep.
Ditto. That kind of language lessens us all and it bothers me when I use it.
The only tactic that has ever worked even a little for me is to give a heartfelt definition
spelled out in detail but then leave out the word I am defining. Of course, that is the very opposite of
shorthand, so there is little satisfaction to it.
I guess I need to say this one more time. Republicans might be shooting themselves in the foot by engaging in more intensive gerrymandering during a wave election year. Nobody is taking the vote away from anyone, the Republicans are just trying to win by rearranging the deck chairs. If you gerrymander too much you take the chance that you are going to weaken your own safe districts. That is not a smart thing to do in a wave election year. Lets say you rearrange three districts, one safe Democrat and two safe Republican districts. If you try to move enough Republicans into the Democratic district you might just weaken your chances in all three districts especially during a wave election year. It is time for Democrats to start working like hell to maximize their turnoout.
