August 27, 2021

A very good article about "court stripping"

Could the “Monarchs” on the Supreme Court Tank Democracy?
Get ready for the Supreme Court & a handful of GOPers to put Trump, DeSantis, Scott, Cotton or Hawley into the White House regardless of the 2024 election outcome - unless they are stopped now
https://hartmannreport.com/p/could-the-monarchs-on-the-supreme?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email&utm_source=copy

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"[T]he supreme Court shall have appellate Jurisdiction, both as to Law and Fact, with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make.”

Exceptions? Regulations? Congress can do that? Can Congress tell the Supreme Court what it can and can’t rule on? Really?

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This process of writing “the Supreme Court may not rule on this law” into controversial legislation had been done many times in American history, but never in such a big way that it was tested by the Court itself. It’s called “court stripping” or “jurisdiction stripping.” And it has never been tested.

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A number of Senators and members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus have recently been discussing limiting the Court, while the Biden Administration has empaneled a group to examine specific “regulations” that could or should be imposed on it, ranging from changing its number of justices to require its members to abide by the federal code of judicial ethics (something from which the Court has exempted itself).

This Court has gone way over the line, from blowing up a Voting Rights Act that passed the Senate unanimously, to endorsing multiple Republican voter suppression efforts, to opening the floodgates for billionaire- and corporate-money to flood elections and end up in the personal pockets of politicians

And if any more justices join Thomas, Roberts and Alito in arguing that the Court can throw the 2024 election to whomever they please with a little help from Republican-controlled state legislatures the issue becomes even more urgent.

Now is, therefore, an essential time to add to that discussion the power of Congress to not only pass legislation that limits money in politics, Supreme Court interventions in state-based elections, racialized voter suppression and partisan gerrymandering, but also unambiguously prevents the Supreme Court from blowing up congressional and presidential efforts by ruling against them.

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August 18, 2021

Chuck Todd pulls another Todd ...same old nonsense

Chuck Todd Channels Rudy Giuliani
Meet The Press host Chuck Todd used the most odious right-wing meme to attack President Biden's decision to withdraw from Afghanistan
https://crooksandliars.com/2021/08/chuck-todd-biden-competence

Meet The Press host Chuck Todd used the most odious right-wing meme to attack President Biden's decision to withdraw from Afghanistan.

Traitor Trump negotiated a deal with Taliban in 2020 that put the United States in the position that we're in, so President Biden chose to rip off the Afghanistan bandage, while owning the consequences

It was never going to be pretty, unfortunately. But the Beltway media has an obsessesion for US dominance and when the pictures ("optics" ) don't look good - they pounce.

“You’ve got to ask: the orderly part of this, what went wrong?” Todd mused.

Then he switched on his inner Giuliani and went right to Biden's mental capabilities.

"Joe Biden’s greatest strength against Donald Trump in the campaign was the idea that he has been around the block, he knows what he’s doing, we’re facing this crisis with COVID, we need some basic competency back in government, no more chaos. He’s lost the competency high-marks he was getting at one time, and that’s tough to get back." Todd said with a straight face.

The idea that Trump was not competent is not an idea but an actual fact.

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August 17, 2021

Jeffrey Toobin is a special kind of moron

I mean what possible reason or purpose could he use an excuse for writing such a piece of drivel? Unless he has completely gone over to the alternative reality world of right wing quackery after his zoom embarrassment. CNN shouldn't have even thought about publishing such nonsense.


Attorney General Merrick Garland, don't prosecute Donald Trump
By Jeffrey Toobin, CNN
https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/16/opinions/donald-trump-attorney-general-garland-toobin/index.html

(CNN)Did Donald Trump commit federal crimes in his final, desperate attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election?

The latest revelations about Trump's final days in office demonstrate that his behavior was, at a minimum, outrageous. He pressured his acting attorney general, Jeffrey Rosen, to open an investigation of purported fraud in the vote count in Georgia, even though there was no evidence of such wrongdoing. In one call, Trump apparently directed Rosen to "just say the election was corrupt, [and] leave the rest to me

Trump also allegedly engineered the departure of the United States attorney in Georgia when he refused to pursue Trump's false claims. In addition, Trump's statements at a rally in Washington, DC, on January 6 are said to have led his supporters to storm the Capitol later that day. For some distinguished lawyers, this evidence provides a roadmap for Merrick Garland, the attorney general, to direct a criminal investigation of the former president.

To which I'd respond: not so fast. It's one thing to describe the former president's behavior as disgraceful and wrong -- and I'd share that view -- but quite another to argue that Trump should be criminally prosecuted. Based on the available evidence, there is no basis to prosecute Trump and little reason even to open a criminal investigation.

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