bigtree
bigtree's JournalEveryone 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?
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?
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.
DOJ Attorney Dressen: It's not involved in this case. The DOJ has not had to take a position as to how these core powers would be resolved... none are involved in this case.
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.
As with the three-hour argument in Trump v. Anderson, a disconcertingly precious little of the two-hour argument today was even devoted to the specific and only question presented for decision.
Ari Melber @AriMelber 16m
Kavanaugh echoes Gorsuch saying they care only about a rule they make for posterity-not how it impacts this defendant (Trump)
Does the public believe these proclamations, that there's more concern about some hypothetical future defendant, than the actual, real one before them?
https://twitter.com/AriMelber/status/1783528568053510296
Supreme Court Justice now trashing the grand jury process
Laura Rozen @lrozen 37sDoes Alito have a single redeeming feature? raises “the old saw about indicting a ham sandwich” presumably to further Trump lawyer batshit argument it is a slippery slope if a former president ever held accountable for criminal conduct.
Barb McQuade @BarbMcQuade · 2m
Alito: Skeptical of layers of protection in criminal justice system. Projecting bad faith? SC: Advice of AG, grand jury finding of probable cause. Alito, a former prosecutor of all people, says a grand jury can indict a Jan sandwich. Cynical, hypocritical, and wrong.
...Alito questions the legitimacy of every other level of justice's authority except his branches's own.
NYT reporter says their nonstop coverage of Biden's age is retribution
Eric Schultz @EricSchultz 10mwow - NYT reporter says their nonstop coverage of Biden’s age is retribution for not giving their boss an interview:
“It’s A.G. He’s the one who is pissed [that] Biden hasn’t done any interviews and quietly encourages all the tough reporting on his age.”
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/04/25/new-york-times-biden-white-house-00154219
emptywheel @emptywheel
Anon NYT journo says that A.G. will demand the NYT relentlessly focus on Biden's age unless and until the nepotistic brat and presumed transphobe activist gets an interview with Biden personally.
__According to interviews with two dozen people on both sides who were granted anonymity to discuss a sensitive subject, the relationship between the Democratic president and the country’s newspaper of record — for years the epitome of a liberal press in the eyes of conservatives — remains remarkably tense, beset by misunderstandings, grudges and a general lack of trust. Complaints that were long kept private are even spilling into public view, with campaign aides in Wilmington going further than their colleagues in the White House and routinely blasting the paper’s coverage in emails, posts on social media and memos.
Although the president’s communications teams bristle at coverage from dozens of outlets, the frustration, and obsession, with the Times is unique, reflecting the resentment of a president with a working-class sense of himself and his team toward a news organization catering to an elite audience — and a deep desire for its affirmation of their work. On the other side, the newspaper carries its own singular obsession with the president, aggrieved over his refusal to give the paper a sit-down interview that Publisher AG Sulzberger and other top editors believe to be its birthright.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/04/25/new-york-times-biden-white-house-00154219
https://twitter.com/MeidasTouch/status/1783469406581920212
He's all alone.
MeidasTouch @MeidasTouchIt is driving Trump absolutely insane that he has almost no supporters heeding his calls to protest at the court. He is just there by himself. No fans. No family. All alone.
Vaughn Hillyard @VaughnHillyard
Trump just claimed that the police have shut down the streets around the courthouse for blocks & that his protesters can’t be here.
Just…not true. There is one pro-Trump person here & the main street along the courthouse is open to traffic.
https://twitter.com/Democracy1stE/status/1782810920861007950
George Washington's cherries
Frank Mitman @frankdpi
Centuries-old bottles of cherries unearthed at George Washington’s home - The Washington Post
Archaeologist Nick Beard was gently pushing aside the hardened dirt in the basement of George Washington’s home at Mount Vernon, Va., last fall when he spotted the mouth of a glass bottle.
He stuck his finger in the mouth to see if he might wiggle the piece loose. “And my finger came back wet,” he said. “I thought about it for a half-second longer and said, ‘Oh my God, my finger is wet,’” he recalled.
Experts at Mount Vernon said last week that Beard and other archaeologists have now discovered two intact bottles that still had, along with liquid, some of the cherries they contained when they were buried about 250 years ago. The area of the discovery was believed to have once been a storeroom, Beard said.
Much of the liquid could be ground water that seeped in after the cork seals deteriorated, but pits, stems, sodden cherries, and gooey residue were also present, the experts said.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2024/04/22/cherries-george-washington-mount-vernon-1770/
"Father, I Can Not Tell a Lie: I Cut the Tree,"
It's all about Pecker today
...MSNBC pundit just said (misquoting), 'this trial starts with Pecker and ends with Pecker.'
Is this going to all descend into an endless stream of Pecker jokes?
I'm seeing many this morning determined to be adults about this, recognizing that many of these grownups haven't said 'pecker' since they were snickering about it in grade school, in any context.
Best of luck today, folks, 
What Jane Mayer is really on about
Salome Strangelove @salstrange 5hJFC — is this what she’s on about? Reliving her glory days?
Just pissed that Biden’s competency and press discipline won’t let them have the fake dementia narrative they’re salivating for?
...yep, she just wants to elicit a gaffe for another round of 'Biden old' articles.
2023:
Should age disqualify Joe Biden or Donald Trump from another term in the White House? The staff writers Jane Mayer and Jill Lepore, plus the gerontologist Jack Rowe, discuss.
https://twitter.com/salstrange/status/1782092462539886982
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.
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