Thursday, April 25, 2019

Pearl clutching and stupidity at its finest!

Will Trump and the Supreme Court tear our democracy apart?
Our nation faces a constitutional conflagration, and President Trump is not the only actor willing to put personal and partisan interests above the preservation of our system of self-rule. Five conservative justices on the Supreme Court signaled clearly on Tuesday that they are willing to allow the administration to act lawlessly in distorting the 2020 Census and thus representation in Congress to benefit the party that placed them on the court.
So E.J. Dionne loves to pretend he is smarter than everyone, while apparently writing articles that specifically make him look dumber than everyone else. I have no issues with non-legal people providing legal opinions. In fact, I often times do it myself, and all I have is Computer Science and Business degrees with a minor in Math. Because of that, I will generally wallow through the opinions of those legal experts who have proven themselves to be "accurate" in their analysis, just to make sure I am not making a boob of myself with my own personal opinions.

But the two things the Dionne does here are staples in the liberal pundit community (legal or otherwise). The first is not understanding that the members of the USSC are actually superior judicial actors than those at the district and appeals court level. The second (and most alarming) is seeing everything "legal" within the scope of politics, rather than the law.

The first is simple and stupid. Dionne (like many others) love to cite how many lower court Justices have ruled in a particular way as if that somehow makes an opposite USSC ruling suspect or invalid. The reality is that it is actually the opposite. When you have the USSC overruling the lower courts as much as they have in regards to the President, we should be more suspicious of the lower court rulings, not the USSC.  Many of the legal experts I read can pretty much tell early on if the lower court decisions are going to be overturned. Generally they can tell, because the arguments are fairly obvious.

Take the Travel Ban situation. While there were a handful of early rulings in favor of the President, the bulk of them went against him, and those were quite obviously the ones we read and heard about (partially because these Judges offered full national injunctions).

But the arguments being used "against" the President and his ban were both flawed and unprecedented. The travel ban law had been used by every President since Carter, and never challenged. But as soon as it was used by Trump, suddenly the law itself was legally flawed  (according to several Judges). The President's campaign statements were ruled relevant (against USSC precedent) by many lower court Justices. It didn't seem to matter to these lower court Judges that the list of Countries came from the DHS, and had existed prior to Trump taking office. They desperately wanted that list to prove discrimination and wanted it to be a "Muslim ban" even when it was clear that it wasn't.

All of this made the overruling of these decisions fairly obvious. It didn't matter how many district or appeals court Judges used the same flawed legal reasoning, the reasoning was still flawed. The USSC got it right based on the law, precedent, and common sense. More to the point, pretty much everyone knew that was going to be the final outcome. The rest was hack judges engaging in obvious political theater.

The second is more of a mindset that I am not sure liberals will ever fully be able to get out of. Liberals see everything through the viewpoint of their politics (while caring very little about the rule of law) and they project this to others, and judge them accordingly. In the mind of a liberal, the real reason any Judge makes a decision is because of politics, and the "law" only matters as a means to justify a political decision. While this is quite obviously true of many Judges, it's not true of most conservatives Justices.

For instance, Dionne suggests that the potential ruling on the Census question takes a position that is the opposite of how they ruled on the Voting Rights act. Dionne sees both issues as primarily the same thing, when in fact the two "legal" subject matters have literally nothing to do with each other. To the degree that the two issues have political ramifications that exist in the general vicinity, the Justice of the USSC have no obligation to make rulings that appear to be "politically" consistent in the same manner that a Politician might have to remain "politically" consistent.

The voting rights act was a simple issue of state sovereignty, and whether our Federal Congress could continue to punish individual States for behavior that had taken place over forty years ago. The USSC ruled that such punishment was unconstitutional unless Congress was willing to reevaluate these judgements and create new lists based on current data. If these same states were still showing that they were legally discriminating or suppressing voters, then they could keep them on the list. But the legal logic was that there has to be a statute of limitations on behavior that took place decades ago by people who are no longer in charge.

The Census (on the other hand) involves none of these same legal issue. It quite literally is an issue of whether or not the Commerce Secretary has authority to make the decision, whether the decision has any justification (not arbitrary), and whether the decision either violates a known law or is otherwise unconstitutional. In the case, the facts are not even in dispute. Wilbur Ross has the authority. Ross provided a justification (the question wasn't pulled out of a hat, or added based on a roll of the dice). There are no laws against it, and the fact that it had been used prior pretty much makes it objectively constitutional.

The Judges are not supposed to care if these legal facts line up politically with the legal facts of other cases. They don't need to considered if they think something is "right" or "wrong". They are only supposed to care about getting the legal facts correct in each and every case (politics be damned).

But these facts matter very little to people like Dionne. In fact, I suspect that most facts matter very little to people like Dionne. Better to use emotion and political rhetoric to argue the law, just as they use emotion and rhetoric to argue everything.

13 comments:

Myballs said...

Liberals really do make up their own reality. For example, my out of town in law stayed at our house for a few days. She showed up wearing a Rachel maddow hat, lived Hillary and made sure we all knew that she loves Elizabeth Warren. Like I give a fuck.

So anyway, just some of the 'facts' she asserted and I shot down (which threw her into an angry fit):

Trump has added more to the national debt than any president.

Isis is not diminished at all.

Trump is not creating jobs.

Buttigeig is more qualified to be president than trump was in 2016.

Last year's tax cuts did not lower taxes for anyone.

I could go on. But this is the shit they believe and cling to. It doesn't matter that none of it is true.

So finally she proclaimed that she can't talk about it any more. I said good. I didn't want to in the first place. You kept bringing it up.

Lol

Thomas Sowell said...

@ThomasSowell

“I cannot understand people who say that minorities should be represented everywhere and yet are upset when there are blacks represented in the conservative movement.”

anonymous said...

, while apparently writing articles that specifically make him look dumber than everyone else


You really should stop talking about yourself Lil Scotty....we all know your bias does not allow you to think clearly anymore!!!! BWAAAAAAAAA!!!!

Commonsense said...

I take it from all the rendering of garments SCOTUS will likely rule in favor of the census citizenship question.

The question is whether you can count non-citizens and illegal aliens.

The Constitution is silent regarding citizenship status. The text of the 14th amendment says "counting the whole number of persons except Indians not taxed."

That refers to Indians on reservations which were considered a dependent foreign entity until the Indian Citizenship act of 1924.

Now all Indians are considered citizens, and counted toward apportionment as are legal aliens since they are definitely "taxed".

Illegal aliens are an open question. You can make the case since they are not taxed they shouldn't be counted.

anonymous said...

my out of town in law stayed

If your wife's family is sooooo stupid.....time for a divorce,,,,!!!

Coldheartedtruth Teller said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Coldheartedtruth Teller said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Coldheartedtruth Teller said...

You make a boob of yourself with your own personal opinions every day. You don't have to Pulitzer Prize for your personal partisan opinions. And you never win a Pulitzer prize for quality journalism.

That's been what you have been doing since Trump won the minority popular vote victory.

Myballs said...

Landslide electoral college win. Winning California by 6 million votes doesn't make any difference.

Coldheartedtruth Teller said...


George Conway
@gtconway3d
Deranged Donald is at back at it again. Deranged Donald can do things like this and it’s not even the top of the news, because it gets lost beneath all of the other deranged things Deranged Donald does. #DerangedDonald

The Washington Post

@washingtonpost
Trump promotes baseless accusation of British spying a day after accepting an invitation for a state visit from the queen https://wapo.st/2XGvPjK

37.7K
3:52 AM - Apr 25, 2019 · Alpine, NJ
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13.9K people are talking about this

Coldheartedtruth Teller said...

Trump said that the British government assisted Obama to spy on Trump.

Powerline??

When did they win a Pulitzer prize?

C.H. Truth said...

In 2004, Power Line was named Time magazine's first-ever "Blog of the Year."[1] When AOL added blogs to their news website in 2007, Power Line was one of the five blogs included.[2] A 2007 memo from the National Republican Senatorial Committee described Power Line as one of the five best-read national conservative blogs.[3]


They just do this in their spare time. But they were the ones that broke Rathergate, as well as exposing Kerry's X-mas in Cambodia lie.

Oh... and when they (all attorneys) blog about rulings and cases... they are generally (as in 95% of the time) CORRECT about what they predict.


Again... rather go with people who are right... than people who get "awards" likely for being wrong.

Anonymous said...



Again... rather go with people who are right... than people who get "awards" likely for being wrong.


a special lifetime achievement award was created specifically for dan rather just for the purpose of rehabilitating his shitpile of a reputation after the bush NG story debacle.

these are the assholes that the alky worships, and sniffs their thrones.