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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
I'll start having some faith in the constitution as a document when so-called originalists aren't happily ignoring parts of it to suit their needs. I'm not showing more respect for it than the people who're supposed to be making sure that legislation is constitutionally valid.
And if there's a hostile court with a strong Conservative majority, I have no faith in them to not find a way to strike down the entire law under whatever pretences they can come up with; there's nobody that can overrule them or appeal, so it doesn't matter how stupid it is if the fear of retaliation makes not simply adding more judges taboo. Hell, even if they don't go that far, the idea "well, we'll just rewrite the legislation!" is bound to end with either: A) diluting it to the point of uselessness (assuming that they don't strike down one of the fundamental principles), or B) getting struck down on some other legal point that just dilutes it more.
Trump got his Muslim ban passed without diluting it to the point of uselessness.
I have to believe that we're more competent than the Trump Administration.
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.Because Democrats aren't stupid, talking about court packing when they aren't in power would be a terrible idea that would only embolden our enemies.
Court packing is something they'd consider once they have power and the Supreme Court blocks legislation, furthermore just because FDR failed (considering that the Supreme Court stopped blocking the New Deal I wouldn't even say that he failed) doesn't mean that we must.
"Einstein would turn over in his grave. Not only does God play dice, the dice are loaded." -Chairman Sheng-Ji YangGlaring omission as George W. Bush raises money for vulnerable Texas Republicans: Ted Cruz
Politico first reported that Bush held a closed-door event Wednesday morning in Fort Worth for Rep. Will Hurd, R-San Antonio, and will host a similar gathering next week in Dallas for Rep. Pete Sessions, the Republican who serves as Bush's congressman.
The former president will also headline fundraisers in the coming days and weeks for Florida Gov. Rick Scott, who is running for Senate in that state; North Dakota Senate candidate Kevin Cramer; Missouri Senate candidate Josh Hawley; and Indiana Senate candidate Mike Braun.
"While he prefers to consider himself retired from politics, President Bush recognizes how important it is to keep the Senate and decided to help a few key candidates," Bush spokesman Freddy Ford told Politico.
Noticeably absent from the list is Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, a Republican who is facing a surprisingly robust challenge from Rep. Beto O'Rourke, D-El Paso.
California professor, writer of confidential Brett Kavanaugh letter, speaks out about her allegation of sexual assault
Now, Ford has decided that if her story is going to be told, she wants to be the one to tell it.
Speaking publicly for the first time, Ford said that one summer in the early 1980s, Kavanaugh and a friend — both “stumbling drunk,” Ford alleges — corralled her into a bedroom during a gathering of teenagers at a house in Montgomery County.
While his friend watched, she said, Kavanaugh pinned her to a bed on her back and groped her over her clothes, grinding his body against hers and clumsily attempting to pull off her one-piece bathing suit and the clothing she wore over it. When she tried to scream, she said, he put his hand over her mouth.
“I thought he might inadvertently kill me,” said Ford, now a 51-year-old research psychologist in northern California. “He was trying to attack me and remove my clothing.”
Ford said she was able to escape when Kavanaugh’s friend and classmate at Georgetown Preparatory School, Mark Judge, jumped on top of them, sending all three tumbling. She said she ran from the room, briefly locked herself in a bathroom and then fled the house.
Ford said she told no one of the incident in any detail until 2012, when she was in couples therapy with her husband. The therapist’s notes, portions of which were provided by Ford and reviewed by The Washington Post, do not mention Kavanaugh’s name but say she reported that she was attacked by students “from an elitist boys’ school” who went on to become “highly respected and high-ranking members of society in Washington.” The notes say four boys were involved, a discrepancy Ford says was an error on the therapist’s part. Ford said there were four boys at the party but only two in the room.
Notes from an individual therapy session the following year, when she was being treated for what she says have been long-term effects of the incident, show Ford described a “rape attempt” in her late teens.
In an interview, her husband, Russell Ford, said that in the 2012 sessions, she recounted being trapped in a room with two drunken boys, one of whom pinned her to a bed, molested her and prevented her from screaming. He said he recalled that his wife used Kavanaugh’s last name and voiced concern that Kavanaugh — then a federal judge — might one day be nominated to the Supreme Court.
Edited by sgamer82 on Sep 16th 2018 at 12:30:20 PM
Kellyanne Conway's husband, George, rips Trump over tweet about Obama's "57 states" gaffe.
House Intel Chairman Nunes plans to release interviews from committee's Russia probe
The California Republican said in an interview on Fox News' "Sunday Morning Futures" that he would release the materials "in the next few weeks" so that the public could review them before the midterm elections.
"The depositions that we took, I believe about seventy people, those need to be published and I think they need to be published before the election," Nunes said. "I expect to make those available from our committee to the American public in the next few weeks."
The committee's top Democrat, Rep. Adam Schiff, called for Nunes to release all such interview materials in June, NBC reported.
Adam Schiff has tweeted the following in response to Manu Raju tweeting a summary of the news story:
Edited by Wyldchyld on Sep 16th 2018 at 8:19:34 PM
If my post doesn't mention a giant flying sperm whale with oversized teeth and lionfish fins for flippers, it just isn't worth reading.Wait, when did the actual details of the Kavanaugh thing start coming out? I haven’t heard about it at all.
Oh God! Natural light!Two days ago. For a week, rumours were circulating on the Hill that the letter existed and that Feinstein was refusing to let anyone know its contents. Then The Intercept wrote about the story, trying to spin this in a bad way for the Democrats, but Buzzfeed found out the identity of the letter's author and tried to interview her. She refused, so they ran the story, too, but with a different spin on it than The Intercept (and they didn't reveal the identity of the woman).
As a result, Feinstein was forced to make a statement. She confirmed the existence of the letter and that it had been passed to the FBI, but refused to state what the letter was about. So, most of the news picked it up yesterday, along with reports of Kavanaugh denying it — his denials essentially confirmed the rumour that it was about an alleged sexual assault (although I'm not sure his intention was to confirm but, sometimes when you deny something happened, you essentially confirm what the complaint is about).
I guess the letter's author has decided to come forward to give her side of things, which is what's being reported today.
Edited by Wyldchyld on Sep 16th 2018 at 8:27:39 PM
If my post doesn't mention a giant flying sperm whale with oversized teeth and lionfish fins for flippers, it just isn't worth reading.This feels like an attempt at blackmail gone wrong...for the victim.
"Step down and this won't go public."
"Fuck you, you got nothing."
- releases it
"Well shit."
Edited by CharlesPhipps on Sep 16th 2018 at 12:32:50 PM
Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.FEMA Administrator Brock Long says Puerto Rico hurricane death toll numbers are ‘all over the place’
“It’s hard to tell what’s accurate and what’s not,” Long said in an appearance on “Fox News Sunday.” He made similar remarks in appearances on NBC News’s “Meet the Press” and CBS News’s “Face the Nation.”
Puerto Rican authorities have accepted the results of the GWU study.
Long also did not dispute Trump’s incorrect claim that Democrats raised the death toll to make the president “look as bad as possible,” telling NBC’s Chuck Todd, “I don’t know why the studies were done.”
He cast doubt on the GWU study, suggesting that researchers took into account deaths due to a range of causes with tenuous links to Hurricane Maria, such as automobile crashes and domestic violence.
“You might see more deaths indirectly occur as time goes on, because people have heart attacks due to stress, they fall off their house trying to fix their roof, they die in car crashes because they went through an intersection where the stoplights weren’t working. . . . Spousal abuse goes through the roof. You can’t blame spousal abuse after a disaster on anybody,” Long said on “Meet the Press.”
He contended that the crucial figure is “direct deaths — which is the wind, the water and the waves, buildings collapsing.”
Long’s remarks came after Trump on Thursday denied large-scale casualties from Hurricane Maria. “3000 people did not die in the two hurricanes that hit Puerto Rico,” Trump tweeted. “When I left the Island, AFTER the storm had hit, they had anywhere from 6 to 18 deaths.”
Trump also claimed that “if a person died for any reason, like old age,” the researchers would “just add them onto the list.”
The GWU researchers did not, however, attribute any specific individual’s death to Maria. The study examined the number of deaths from September 2017 to February 2018 and compared that total with what would have been expected based on historical patterns, making adjustments for a range of variables, including the mass departure of residents from the island in the aftermath of the storm.
If researchers had attributed every death on the island to the storm, the six-month death toll from the hurricane would have been more than five times as high.
Remember how Manafort Flipped a few days ago? In a ironically hilarious twist of fate, the asset forfeited as part of the plea deal, may have just made the investigation turn a profit.
We don’t know exact numbers, but there’s a pretty good chance that net profit gained from the asset forfited, could cover the cost of the Mueller Investigation, therefore invalidating one of Trump’s favorite Complaints about the cost.
Edited by megaeliz on Sep 16th 2018 at 6:43:23 AM
And she’s furious.
Pease, who earns $3.53 an hour as a server at the Coney Island diner in a suburb of Detroit, helped successfully gather hundreds of thousands of signatures to put a minimum- and tipped-wage hike to the voters via a ballot referendum this fall. Michigan organizers also had gathered enough signatures to force a vote on paid sick leave for workers.
But by signing both proposals into law last week, Michigan’s GOP-controlled state legislature has prevented them from being put to the voters — while also giving lawmakers a straightforward path to derailing them.
In Michigan, overturning a ballot referendum once it is approved by the voters requires a three-fourths majority of the legislature. By passing the measures now and scrapping the ballot referendum, Michigan lawmakers can instead undo them through a simple majority vote. Lawmakers have vowed to take up the proposals in the lame-duck session this fall, before they are scheduled to take effect.
“I’m angry. I’m really angry,” said Pease, 47. “It’s not just that I had a vested interest in this. But the point was to go to the people, and now they have circumvented our vote. They have taken away our vote.”
The fight over Michigan’s paid family leave and minimum-wage policy reflects broader battles occurring in several states and cities across the country, as progressive groups have tried turning to public ballot initiatives to get around deadlocked or GOP-controlled legislatures.
Those efforts have often run aground. In Arizona, teachers’ organizations had hoped to win higher pay through a ballot measure that would have raised their salaries by taxing the rich. But Arizona’s highest court blocked the ballot initiative in a ruling in late August.
Massachusetts organizers similarly pushed a ballot initiative for a surtax on any income above $1 million, hoping to use that money to fund education and transportation need. (The state has a Republican governor who has a mixed record on new taxes.) But the state's Supreme Court also struck it from the ballot this summer. And in Washington, city officials are moving to overturn the results from a public referendum that approved a higher wage for tipped workers.
“Paid sick leave, minimum-wage hikes, higher taxes on the rich for teachers — these are all overwhelmingly popular among both Democratic and Republican voters,” Saru Jayaraman, an academic at the University of California at Berkeley and co-founder of Restaurant Opportunities Centers United, which has pushed raising the wage for tipped workers. “Ballot measures are the greatest path to allow working people to move the issues they believe in, but they’re being subverted.”
The Michigan minimum-wage hike would have gradually increased it to $12 an hour by 2022 and upped the tipped wage from its current rate of about $3.50. The paid-sick-leave plan would require employers to pay for their employees' time off.
Business groups opposed to both measures cheered the vote, saying they had pushed lawmakers in both parties to approve the measure they ultimately hoped to defeat. Charlie Owens, of the National Federation of Independent Business, said approving the plans were necessary to avoid “an impossible hurdle that would have left us stuck” with the proposals.
“It’s confusing, because we’re opposed to the proposals, so we asked the legislature to vote for them,” Owens said. Owens pointed to research he said showed servers make less money when the tipped wage is increased, a claim contested by liberal groups.
Michigan state lawmakers are not saying exactly how they plan to change either plan but acknowledge the purpose of their vote Wednesday was to stop the public from ratifying the proposed ballot initiatives. Attempts to change the laws before the end of the legislative session may throw the battle to the courts, as one group has already vowed to sue if the legislation heads to the courts.
“The Senate adopted the policy to preserve the ability for this legislature and future legislatures to amend the statute to better fit our state and our economy,” Arlan B. Meekhof, the state senate's Republican majority leader, said in a statement. “The Senators heard from restaurant employees who fear they will earn less under the proposal and business owners who are concerned that they may have to reduce payroll in order to meet these new mandates. The Senate will be looking at options to improve the policies in the coming months.”
Twenty-one Democrats in the state’s lower chamber voted for the measure, according to the Detroit News, while six state Republicans voted against it. State Sen. Patrick Colbeck (R), one of the no votes, said conservative policymakers should have had the courage to take their fight to the voters and win in November.
“What it boils down to is we have Republicans who are afraid to make the case against the policy,” Colbeck said. “We're playing procedural gimmicks."
We should all hold our breath, but this might be good for us if Flake holds onto his word (which, again, we should hold our breath on).

If the Constitution invalidates the entire premise of single-payer healthcare then that would be a pretty significant issue that needs to be addressed before we can even think about passing a bill. Figuring out whether or not a law or ruling is Constitutionally valid is literally the Supreme Court's job.
It doesn't, mind you. But supposing that it did, then this defense of packing the court would be reliant on the idea that we should be ignoring the Constitution rather than working within it and amending it when necessary. When you start denigrating the founding basis of our government as "a 200 year old piece of paper", you've thrown out any claim of good faith towards our system.
The more likely scenario is that a hostile Supreme Court will hone in on specific details of the bill that seem Constitutionally questionable, just as they did with Trump's EO, as a basis to reject it. In which case, we refine it to address those specific details and pass it again.
Edited by TobiasDrake on Sep 16th 2018 at 6:33:43 AM
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.