May 7, 2024

Sun is out, and yet, according to AP, a storm is coming

Lisa Rubin @lawofruby
Morning, all, from 100 Centre Street for day 13 of the Trump trial. On this spring day, the trees are blooming, the sun is out, and yet, according to @AP, a storm is coming.



https://twitter.com/AnnaBower/status/1787825361167761750

May 6, 2024

I see his family finally showed up at court

Robert Costa @costareports
Strange, slightly unsettling scene today outside Manhattan criminal court



https://twitter.com/MrGlenCarroll/status/1787470953607311669

April 30, 2024

MSNBC: Trump legal team trying to use multiple devices and methods to keep Trump awake in court.

Biden’s Wins @BidensWins
BREAKING: New reporting from MSNBC exposes the Trump legal team trying to use multiple devices and methods to keep Trump awake in court. Evidently they all are failing.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/live-blog/trump-trial-hush-money-case-live-updates-rcna149906/rcrd40353?canonicalCard=true



https://twitter.com/BidensWins/status/1785384013802111197

April 30, 2024

When threatened, the ochre-faced blubbermonkey inflates its cheeks

Conspiratorial Templates @mynamehear
When threatened, the ochre-faced blubberdonkey inflates its cheeks and prepares to spew foul-smelling, barely coherent rants at anyone unlucky enough to be nearby

https://twitter.com/jbendery/status/1785357228171551168

April 30, 2024

Smart move by House Dems

CNN @CNN
Democrats say they would save Mike Johnson if GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene moves ahead with effort to oust him

https://twitter.com/CNN/status/1785319408312684887


...what I said a week ago:

Something worth exploring for House Dems

...the threatened motion by MTG to vacate Mike Johnson's speakership will probably go the way of this bipartisan Ukraine vote 'if' Johnson agrees to help move important legislation blocked by the Trump caucus, with enough Dems voting to help keep him in his seat for that effort.

It would be a political wedge against Marge and her MAGA-obsessed ilk that's worth exploring, imo, that wouldn't be unlike our party working across the aisle with past republican Speakers on bipartisan legislation.

Normally we'd be better off letting them just hang themselves up again, but this is as much of a battle for regular order in Congress at this point as anything, and no other choice on their side is going to be any better.

Republican legislation out of the House is DOA, unless it's in line with what Senate Dems and the WH agree to. Johnson's no real threat to our agenda unless he's an obstacle - and that's the game here.

April 29, 2024

Still true.

April 28, 2024

Joe: 'Not a joke"

April 26, 2024

Everyone looking to the court today to address the Trump charges behind his appeal

...but the Supreme Court couldn't be bothered to discuss the actual case before them.

The right wing dominated Roberts court held up the Trump election interference trial just to gaslight Americans today about hypotheticals having nothing at all to do with the actual indictments, and spent three hours arguing about those without expressing one objection to any of the charges, or any claim that those crimes alleged had anything to do with their concerns.

They not only refused to talk about the nature of the charges in the Trump indictment, several laughed openly as they rebuffed repeated entreaties from the DOJ attorney to relate their concerns to something, anything in the appeal before them.

The charitable explanation for that behavior is that they have an inflated sense of their own importance; glaringly evident today as they cast aspersions and even scorn on lower court judges and even citizen grand juries.

This Court behaves as if their own opinion and legal efforts are sacrosanct and superior to not only precedent, but to the People, represented by judges and juries adhering to the established law this Supreme Court treats as inferior and perpetually subservient to their own dominant role in overseeing it all.

The most offensive, though, is the way this Court takes no responsibility for anything other than formulating opinions. They signal or express zero concern about the violent insurrection, even downplaying it by positing about the president leading a peaceful protest; or characterizing the mob chasing legislators from the House floor with an aide barely scooping up the election certificates as a temporary delay- instead of the clear subversion of democracy which horrified and stunned the vast majority of Americans.

The worst explanation for their interference is the evident one; that they're in this for interference sake; that the republican appointed SC justices are running a cynical and deliberate defense against Trump prosecutions they disagree with.

It might be understandable if there had been a trial on which to base those objections on, instead of this naked, compromising bias from at least three justices toward the man who appointed them to the bench.

Considering an appeal AFTER a verdict is the normal course for a court which is supposed to respect the normal process of prosecutions - not looking for ways to take down charges in manner which completely ignores the facts in the case, and threatening to completely obscure and bury those facts in an arbitrary dismissal of charges.

This is just a delay for delay sake, with the Supreme Court assuming the role of the lower courts without ANY of the obligations of evidence; and without even the means to determine the validity or value of the evidence in this case; the case before them that they're deliberately ignoring.

When will this Court take responsibility for more than just protecting Donald Trump (and, by extension, his co-conspirators) from prosecution?

April 25, 2024

We're waiting for the SC to decide whether there are 'official acts' in the indictment which deserve immunity

...but they won't talk about evidence in the case in front of them, or allow the DOJ attorney or Jack Smith to argue the specifics of the prosecution at hand.

How do the justices determine what's an official act without looking at the evidence, or at least allowing some part of the facts in this case to be presented to them before making these decisions?

It's a farce for the Court to present themselves as the ultimate arbiter of what was an official action by Trump without essentially serving as a substitute for the People, who are represented by a judge and jury who would hear and adjudicate ALL of the evidence and testimony.

It may be that the Court will decide to send it back to trial with jury instructions and other guidance for the presiding judge making the distinctions they seem to think are so important, especially after agreement on both sides that there are several clearly private acts being charged.

But in the Robert's court's view, they are the ultimate word on the law, certainly not the lowly federal judges and juries who do the work of actually facing the facts in prosecutions and deciding matters of law everyday with an alacrity this Supreme Court hasn't yet demonstrated in any action they've undertaken which doesn't benefit Trump.

They are in a quandary of their own making by taking this appeal, and the reason these issues of immunity are so hard for them - outside of the efforts of more than a couple of the justices to downplay the insurrection and conjure up innocuous scenarios where Donald Trump was leading a peaceful protest - is that they are institutionally ill-equipped to decide these issues outside of the squirrelly sense of self-preservation rattling around in their own heads.

What's even more disturbing is that any evidence that they're wrong about the issues in this case that they arbitrarily decide will be obscured for as long as they refuse to allow the trial to continue. It's not as if they can't look at the end of the prosecution for whatever they believe is immune and act on that complete record of charges and courtroom generated evidence.

Is it weird to anyone else that these wasn't one charge in the indictment before them mentioned or discussed by any justice?

April 25, 2024

Gorsuch: "I'm not concerned with this case so much as future ones"

...so much of the objections and skepticism from Roberts, Alito, and Gorsuch has to do with issues that have little to nothing to do with the case they're considering.

Moreover, the justices are cutting off the DOJ lawyer everytime he tries to lead them back to the issue at hand.

Gorsuch proclaims at one point that "...we're writing a rule for the ages."

But that leads to the question of why the court thought it was necessary to interject itself at all in this, if it isn't about the underlying case at hand, but about some concern of theirs for some other aspect of presidential powers and immunities?

Everyone is waiting for Trump to be tried before the election in which a victory by him would enable the defendant to make the prosecutions disappear. These right wing justices are delaying the case they're deliberately ignoring, when they could easily narrow their effort to the case at hand and leave the fiddling with the law out of it.

Put plainly, they could let this trial go forward, since they appear to have no credible argument against this particular prosecution at all, and restrict their worrying over the Exective branch to internal deliberations.