Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

When I decide to be condescending, you won’t have to dream up a fantasy about it.

My years-long effort to drive family and friends away has really paid off this year.

We can agree to disagree, but i’m right.

They traffic in fear. it is their only currency. if we are fearful, they are winning.

They fucked up the fucking up of the fuckup!

Teach a man to fish, and he’ll sit in a boat all day drinking beer.

Everybody saw this coming.

Damn right I heard that as a threat.

Since when do we limit our critiques to things we could do better ourselves?

It’s been a really long fucking year.

Nancy smash is sick of your bullshit.

Let there be snark.

We’ve had enough carrots to last a lifetime. break out the sticks.

Let me eat cake. The rest of you could stand to lose some weight, frankly.

Our job is not to persuade republicans but to defeat them.

JFC, are there no editors left at that goddamn rag?

Wow, you are pre-disappointed. How surprising.

Is it irresponsible to speculate? It is irresponsible not to.

The poor and middle-class pay taxes, the rich pay accountants, the wealthy pay politicians.

Infrastructure week. at last.

fuckem (in honor of the late great efgoldman)

Republican obstruction dressed up as bipartisanship. Again.

Make the republican party small enough to drown in a bathtub.

Accountability, motherfuckers.

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Activist Judges!

SCOTUS Rulings (Open Thread)

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I’m not a lawyer, but I think it’s safe to say the first ruling is disastrous for democracy, and it appears the second will remove a check on the flow of dark money that is corrupting our politics to the core. Here’s how Democracy Docket characterized the stakes in Brnovich v. DNC, the case concerning ballot collection in Arizona:

At a time when minority voting rights are under attack by Republican legislatures around the country, the outcome of this case will either expand or limit the tools available to those fighting voter suppression in court. It could also impact the scope of Section 2’s protections as we enter a crucial redistricting cycle. In short, the stakes could not be higher. A strong Voting Rights Act is necessary to protect minority voters’ right to cast their ballots and have them counted.

Emphasis mine. The Republicans on the court (let’s call them what they are) went with “limit.” Kagan wrote a blistering dissent. The ruling is here in PDF form.

The second ruling struck down a California law requiring disclosure of top donors, handing a win to the Americans for Prosperity Foundation and the Thomas More Law Center. [WaPo] Oh well. At least David Koch is still dead.

Open thread.

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SCOTUS Rulings (Open Thread)

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I am not a lawyer, and I am not even related to any lawyers by blood more closely than first cousins, once and twice removed. And even those relatives have given up the practice of law to pursue other interests. So I won’t attempt to offer analysis, but here are short summaries of two of today’s rulings via TPM:

SCOTUS Rejects Red States’ Bid To Throw Out Obamacare

The Supreme Court rejected on Thursday Texas’ challenge to the Affordable Care Act, in a 7-2 decision. The majority opinion, written by Justice Stephen Breyer, said that the challengers had not met the procedural threshold to bring the case.

The Supreme Court’s refusal to dismantle the 2010 law marks the third time that the Affordable Care Act has survived a major Supreme Court challenge.

Only Justices Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch dissented in the case decided Thursday. Justice Clarence Thomas wrote a concurring opinion.

It was red state yahoos who brought the case forward, IIRC, and it sounds like it got kicked out because zeroing out the mandate (Republicans did this!) meant they couldn’t claim harm? Something like that. Is this a significant ruling that is likely to shut down future efforts to trash the ACA, or will we be playing whack-a-mole forever? I have no idea, but maybe someone who understands it can tell us.

Here’s another ruling summary via TPM:

Unanimous SCOTUS Favors Religious Freedom Over LGBTQ Rights In Foster Care Case

The Supreme Court decided Thursday that the city of Philadelphia’s decision to stop contracting with a Catholic foster care agency unless it placed children with same-sex couples violates the First Amendment.

The case was seen as a clue for how the conservative Court will treat LGBTQ rights in the future, though the justices unanimously agreed on the final judgment that the particulars of the Philadelphia case implicated religious freedom. The justices were splintered in their rationales, though, with multiple concurring opinions.

Okay, this one pisses me off because it’s unanimous. (I expect stuff like this from the court’s Bony Carrot wing but not from Justice Sotomayor, et al.) This must be more nuanced than “everyone agrees it’s permissible for churches to discriminate against LGBTQ people,” right? Please explain if you’re so inclined; decisions are embedded at linked articles.

Otherwise, open thread.

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Late Night Trump Crime Cartel Open Thread: All the Ex-President’s Lawyer

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A man of many moods is Mr. Giuliani, every one of them incriminating…

Rudolph W. Giuliani, the onetime personal attorney to former president Donald Trump, cannot claim his profession should have shielded him from the search warrant for electronics executed at his home and office last month, federal prosecutors argued in a filing unsealed Thursday evening.

The former New York mayor, through his attorneys, has argued that because of the extensive business-related communications authorities are likely to find on his phones and computers, it is impossible for the Justice Department to sort through his data without infringing on the rights of his clients.

In late April, FBI agents acting on a warrant obtained by the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan seized 18 electronic devices from Giuliani’s New York home and office, including some belonging to employees of Giuliani Partners. A phone belonging to D.C.-area attorney Victoria Toensing also was recovered…

Prosecutors argued in the letter motion that “the mere fact that Giuliani and Toensing are lawyers does not mean that they are above the law or immune to criminal investigation.”

“Under their approach, the subjects of a criminal investigation would have the authority to make unilateral determinations not only of what is privileged, but also of what is responsive to a warrant,” the prosecutors wrote…

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Moot Court (Open Thread)

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Kate Riga at TPM has a piece up that addresses anti-choice people’s puzzlement at the wingnut SCOTUS supermajority’s failure so far to mount a full-scale attack on reproductive rights. They’re particular confused and disconcerted by Bony Carrot’s failure to strike down Rowe vs. Wade:

When Justice Amy Coney Barrett was confirmed to the Supreme Court in October 2020, the anti-abortion community celebrated the beginning of a new era. The Court would now be heavily skewed to the right, and its newest member had been open about her own beliefs.

“It’s go time! Get ready for a post Roe v Wade America! #ProLifeGen Assemble! This is what we were made for and have been preparing for,” tweeted the president of the anti-abortion group Students for Life.

That was six months ago. The hammer still hasn’t dropped.

Riga notes that the lack of action so far doesn’t necessarily mean a damn thing; the Court could take up the listed case on Mississippi’s ban on abortions after 15 weeks “this week.”

But there’s all kinds of speculation swirling about the delay. Folks interviewed for Riga’s piece gave possible reasons, including that the Court is planning to deny review of the Mississippi petition and is delaying that announcement until a dissent is prepared, to the possibility that Justice Breyer plans to retire at the end of the term (and a subsequent confirmation circus), to the Court wanting to kick the can down the road until the end of the term, to the Court being generally reluctant to fuck with the status quo right now.

My cynical side wonders if the Republican Justices (because that is what they are) are leery of giving Democrats any ammunition for the midterms, trusting that their voters will swallow their disappointment and turn out in greater numbers than ours will. That’s usually a safe bet, but who knows?

Senator Markey and Congressman Nadler introduced a bill to raise the number of justices from 9 to 13, which would be great, but it has no chance in hell of passing the in the current U.S. Congress. Maybe their gambit is about 2022 congressional races too. Again, who knows?

Open thread!

 

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Procedural Open Thread: Merrick Garland Gets A Hearing

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Poltico, today:

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell will support Merrick Garland’s nomination for attorney general, five years after blocking the judge’s path to the Supreme Court…

The Senate Judiciary Committee held a two-day confirmation hearing this week for Garland.Some Senate Republicans criticized Garland for not answering enough questions, but several have already announced their support for him to lead the Justice Department, including Sens. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) and John Cornyn (R-Texas), a McConnell confidant. Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley, the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, also spoke positively of Garland on Monday…

The Senate Judiciary Committee will hold a committee vote on Garland’s nomination March 1 and Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin said he is hoping for final confirmation next week…

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Monday Morning Open Thread: Sweet, Refreshing “Boredom”

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Monday Morning Open Thread

(Mike Luckovich via GoComics.com)
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Not really the right word — more like ‘decency’:

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Late Night Cranky Open Thread: Chief Justice Roberts Is A Coward & A Cad

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Nice Polite Republican that he is (give me no guff about ‘judicial independence’), Roberts took the slim excuse that there’s no written instructions about impeaching an ex-president to scuffle sideways out of an unpleasant duty… and let the Democratic senators take the full load of a Republican Administration’s misconduct. May he regret this Jesuitical misdeed to the end of days, and may his children grow up telling people ‘it’s a very common surname, Roberts’.

There’s nothing about this situation spelled out in the Originalist Constitution of Roberts’ dreams because its writers never expected a world where the small group of educated, propertied White men who made up the national government would need to prevent a criminal ex-President from taking further advantage of his ill-gotten gains. Roberts doesn’t need an imagination to understand why keeping Trump from running again might be to the benefit of our American commonwealth… but he also doesn’t need much imagination to see how presiding over such a trial would hurt him personally, so fekk a bunch of historical precedent, John Glover Roberts washes his soft, lily-white hands and turns away.

From Bloomberg, “Trump Trial Without Chief Justice Lets GOP Talk Optics, Not Riot”:

U.S. Chief Justice John Roberts’s refusal to preside over Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial is giving Republicans an opportunity to focus on the Senate’s process rather than the specifics of the insurrection charge against the former president…

Roberts’s decision to skip the current trial without any public explanation leaves a Democrat already on the record as favoring conviction, Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont, overseeing the trial when it gets underway the week of Feb. 8. That opens it up to accusations of being a more partisan — and less judicial — process than in Trump’s 2020 impeachment.

Republicans are seizing on Roberts’s absence to question the trial’s legitimacy and deflect attention from the substantive charge that Trump incited the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. The increasingly partisan nature of the debate was on display Tuesday, when 45 of the Senate’s 50 Republicans supported an unsuccessful bid to declare the case unconstitutional because Trump is no longer in office.

“If a Democratic senator is presiding over the impeachment of a Republican president rather than a Republican-appointed Supreme Court justice, it makes the entire proceeding look much more partisan,” said Republican pollster Whit Ayres. “We’re not talking about what’s legal here. We’re talking about political perception.”

Roberts has refused to comment on the impeachment trial, even leaving it to lawmakers to convey that he had declined to take part. His silence has left others to speculate on his reasons and debate the significance of his decision…

Without Roberts, “the optics are going to be manipulated,” said Melissa Murray, a New York University law professor. His absence will give cover to “those who may be concerned about condoning the conduct that gave rise to the impeachment article but don’t necessarily want to be on record to convict the president because of the way it might inflame the base.”

And also to those (now in the majority of the Republican party) who don’t give a damn about the law, except as it can be used as a figleaf for their crimes.

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