The Supreme Court’s pro-dictator ruling “provides license for any future president to lie, cheat, steal, suppress dissent, and — if they have the stomach for it — assassinate. It obliterates a guardrail for executive power that’s fundamental to a functioning democracy. So fundamental, in fact, that until the country elected an aspiring autocrat brazen enough to engage in open-air corruption, it was a guardrail few thought necessary to actually define. Of course the president can be prosecuted for actual crimes.” — Radley Balko
“If the justices did not wield such awesome power, and if lawyers who practice before them did not have to treat them with ritualized obsequiousness, most of the justices would be laughingstocks. Few people this famous are so ostentatiously bad at their jobs.” — Ian Millhiser pointing out that the Supreme Court keeps giving itself more say in every government matter when it can’t even manage its normal docket.
“Thomas, she wrote, “never explains why hunting for historical forebears on a restriction-by-restriction basis is the right way to analyze the constitutional question.” The majority “presents tradition itself as the constitutional argument,” as though it is “dispositive of the First Amendment issue,” without any “theoretical justification.” In a passage that must have made the liberal justices proud, Barrett continued: “Relying exclusively on history and tradition may seem like a way of avoiding judge-made tests. But a rule rendering tradition dispositive is itself a judge-made test.” — from an article finding that Clarence Thomas is getting so extreme even Amy Coney Barrett can’t stand it.
“Buried deep in a letter Democratic senators sent to Attorney General Merrick Garland requesting a special prosecutor to investigate Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s potential federal ethics and tax violations is something shocking: Democrats claim that the Supreme Court justice accepted a 2003 yacht trip to Russia and a helicopter flight to Yusupov Palace in St. Petersburg, Putin’s hometown—both paid for by Republican billionaire donor Harlan Crow.” We won the Cold War yet now Putin’s outplaying us?
“If Trump is re-elected, Raiklin wants to enlist so-called “constitutional” sheriffs in rural, conservative counties across the country to lock up Trump’s political enemies. He lusts for “live-streamed swatting raids” against Trump’s political enemies on his “Deep State target list.”
“If only we had some means of testing the theory that Trump has so little real support that he would simply vanish from politics if he lost an election“
“Just like evangelists portray Satan as both all-powerful but ultimately falling to the godly forces of good, Trump makes Biden seem both capable of destroying America in a short time but also “an incompetent president who doesn’t know what the hell he is doing. He will not lead us to the promised land.” At one point, Trump “joked” (to laughter) that he wasn’t even sure that Biden knew he was alive.”
“Despite his support in the polls, what I’m amazed at is that he has nothing left but violence. Where violence was once the background noise, now it’s at the forefront. He can’t hide it anymore, and now he just totally owns it. It’s not stochastic terrorism anymore. It’s incitement. It’s not, “What did Trump mean when he said it’s going to be wild?” Now it’s a picture of Biden with a bullet in his head. There’s a difference. So I actually stopped using the term [stochastic terrorism]. To me it’s just pure incitement and we must prepare. We’re results-oriented in this election. What is about to happen and what is happening leading up to November, and then November to January, is like nothing we’ll ever see again.” — a look at Trump’s current rhetoric
