gattsuru
1yr ago
Copy of the decision and press release here.
To be fair, the relevant law requires the Secretary of State to do this adjudication within a specific (tight) timeline after receiving challenges in certain formats, which were filed by other people. Trump argued that Bellows should have recused herself given the long-standing objections she's publicized, but he's Trump (or Trump lawyers), so that doesn't mean it was possible.
To be... less charitable, the opinion does not read like a surfeit of either procedural ("As discussed on the record, due to a technical difficult suffered by the Rosen Challengers, a Dropbox link provided to the parties before the hearing and containing many of the Rosen Exhibits was inoperative.... This delay does not amount to a Due Process violation. There is no requirement under the APA that evidence be shared prior to an administrative hearing.") or legal caution.
Am I not allowed to use an example that you personally have not used?
No, I'm just being extremely clear because I don't want to fuck around and guess at what level of precision you want to use today.
No, you didn't, but Soros-like social manipulation seems to be the sort of thing you are alleging.
And that's why I separately discussed the figurative meaning (complete with SSC link!) first. Which you didn't engage with.
That is, capable of doing what nybbler claims (no Republican President will ever be elected again) or of always getting their way regardless of who is in the White House and Congress. A level of power that is, figuratively speaking, going to stomp on your face forever.
And then, on the other hand : "No, I do not think the standard has to be literally apocalypticaly high." (Is that literally-literally? Because I'm highlighting merely "Obviously if I'm wrong, you'll never be able to collect," which doesn't require an apocalypse in either the Promethea sense nor the nuclear war one.)
And fair, there's a sliver between this figurative face-stomping and the apocalypse, or even sufficiently aggressive online censorship that you or I'd never show up under these nyms again. Not the same sliver as that which merely excludes “laws I don’t like get passed”, for some reason. Yet if I point to the Tale of Defense Distributed, again, would the current situation be a further update to you? Or would it merely be one in a "list of (actual legal cases)".
Look dude, this is the new "You are not oppressed," something you feel like you have to bring up every time you argue with me?
If you're not going to engage with it, while trying to draw lines around what level of injustice is sufficient? Yes! But less flippantly, I'm using it as an example because it's your own words, and I don't want to be accused of weakmanning you, and I want to contrast the positions you've stated in the past with the ones we're trying to discuss now, to see if this is a change or a difference in focus or a misinterpretation on my end.
You tend to take me very literally when I'm using a flippant turn of phrase, while on the other hand when I am being very precise, you ignore it.
... I would very much appreciate an example of me ignoring a precise claim from you, or for that matter a precise claim from you in this context.
Maybe the fault is mine for being poor at expressing myself, though somehow I don't think you literally thought I meant all your examples are just crazy college kids on campus. (That, by the way, was another flippant turn of phrase, not literal.)
No, I think the bigger problem is that you're ducking to flippancy when I keep requesting specific examples, either of your position or your disagreement with mine. There's a good many interpretations of "Wokes Gone Wild" that includes the EEOC and federal courts -- but in turn they make it increasingly hard to come up with examples you'd care about that could exist before such time that they wouldn't matter.
Broadly speaking, I see your point. In the fine details, I would nitpick each of those statements (to take one example, saying you think transwomen are men or homosexuality is a sin is certainly a cancellable/fireable offense in a troubling number of cases, but how true is "as matters of law and regulation" really? As opposed to almost every university and corporation being quislings cowed by HR Karens? Which I think is very bad! But not quite the same as "a matter of law")
Wheeeeeeeeeeeee, good thing I've not talked at length about this matter in the past, including in this thread.
To take another, courts and executive branches have been "routinely defying the clear text and obvious intent of the law" (at least according to their opponents) since before the ink on the Constitution was dry.
Do I really need to point to and litigate the Alabama Association of Realtor case history, and if I did would that mean anything more than a point on a list of actual legal cases? Gustafson? Would it say anything, or would we just need to talk about how some political opponent described something poorly in the last two hundred years and fifty years (uh, I'd hope that's figurative? Or are we back to literal-Civil-War fitting that sliver between figurative face-stomping and literal apocalypse?)
Any specific examples you give, I might or might not agree with, but it would take more than a list of (actual legal cases...) to convince me that this is categorically different today than 10, 50, 100, or 250 years ago.
And if I point to things that have been categorically different like the growth of social media or the administration state, would they mean anything?
I suspect we'll be stuck going back and forth on those. Until I fatigue and then you'll cite Dangerous-Salt again for my "failure to engage."
Fine, if you're sick of it, I'm not exactly having a good time, either. Have a nice rest of your holidays, and enjoy your new year.
gattsuru
1yr ago
I'd be more equivocal about agreeing with this. There are certainly a lot of liberal institutions dedicated to deplatforming conservatives, but I don't think they have as much power as you seem to, nor do I think it's a grand Soros-like conspiracy aided and abetted by President Biden and whoever else you think is part of this "enemy action."
First, I'll point to Too Many People Dare Call It Conspiracy: it's not a particularly strong claim to start with, and it's even weaker when I'm saying a lot of this is publicly coordinated or recognizing that it may well have been independently developed in parallel across the country.
((Also, I've literally mentioned Soros once in the entire existence of this site, and only in a quote of another poster here, and only to say it's not a great joke.))
What level of power do you think I'm claiming this broader movement has, that isn't present or supported by evidence? I gave a list of concrete facts; if you want me to show the links demonstrating them, I can.
What was Scott's post about seeing evidence of ancient Atlantean highways at the bottom of the ocean, and how if you are dedicated to finding a pattern, you will find it?
Don't remember that one. Contra fideism was about pyramids, and so were Pyramid and Garden. Building Intuitions on non-Empirical Arguments was about the Sphinx. And none of them seem particularly on-point.
But I've asked, repeatedly, for people to try to find counterexamples. Ymeskhout especially for gun-related enforcement specifically, but ChrisPrattAlphaRptr and others on the broader problem. I've repeatedly asked you. I've looked myself! I've even noted, in this thread, some times I've genuinely been wrong!
And yet the model remains the best prediction I've gotten. The closest I've gotten in terms of serious engagement has been Ymeskhout, and that was to find out that the more serious statistical analysis may not exist or even be possible to gather data for.
I realize that this is not an entirely satisfactory answer ("I could rebut you if I cared enough to spend the time on it") but I hope it explains why I can nod along to almost all of your examples and still not be convinced by your core argument. What would convince me of your core argument? I am not sure, but probably some sort of tipping point, some sort of event (or series of events) beyond the pale of normal politics and culture war.
... at the risk of echoing what Dangerous-Salt-7543, this seems like the sort of description where either you'll have gotten used to the new "beyond the pale" (December 2020! Did you have 'riots invading Congress' or 'movement to pull a major party candidate from the ballot wins at a state supreme court' on your card back then?).
Or, well... setting the standard you won't declare so high that "Obviously if I'm wrong, you'll never be able to collect, but anyway."
Maybe if you lay out why you think we have already reached a tipping point, why you think there is no possibility of the pendulum swinging the other way, or even moderating, I'll be persuaded, but not by examples 1 through 50 of Wokes Gone Wild.
Bluntly, "Wokes Gone Wild" is neither a fair nor complete description of the claims I've made: the point of my posts are always more than just some rando on the outgroup trying something.
We're in this thread because Trace thinks that "Republicans are rapidly losing the capacity to run public institutions at all levels other than electoral, and this trend cannot realistically reverse within a generation." I disagree with him on the cause(s) (and that 2rafa actually engaged with that matter), and there are even some hypothetical ways I can see this trend reversing.
I think there's quite a possibility of the pendulum swinging the other way! But I didn't join the ratsphere because '10% chance of avoiding a horrifying result (possibly for a /different/ Red Tribe-flavoured horrifying result), I sure love my high-stakes gambling!' What I'm worried about is that I'm not seeing any evidence of or cause of de-escalation for either side.
Positions held by large portions of the Republican electorate (and even a not-trivial number of progressives!) are, as matters of law and regulation, potential sources of serious liability for employers, even if discussed off-campus and after-hours. Courts and executive branches have routinely defied the clear text and obvious intent of the law to get their way and/or fuck over their political enemies; lower courts and state-wide politicians and the sitting President of the United States have taken to simply thumbing their nose at the Supreme Court. Federal investigators simply ignore due process protections for serious actions and happily bring down the hammer on even sympathetic cases for the Red Tribe, while lobbing softballs at life-threatening violations from the Blue and simply ignoring 'lesser' ones. Major Red Tribe political organizations have state attorney generals who campaign on destroying them and then tried it in court.
I can even provide Blue Tribe versions of (some of) these claims. People have, for you. But in addition to a lot of them being weaker, they don't really solve the 'we're no longer trying to persuade each other, or even prevent the other side from winning, but prevent the opposing side from playing the game' problem.
Do you need more categorical claims, or do I need explain why these feed back into themselves?
gattsuru
1yr ago
Maine on Thursday disqualified Donald Trump from the state ballot in next year’s U.S. presidential primary election, becoming the second state to bar the former president for his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, a Democrat, concluded that Trump, the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, incited an insurrection when he spread false claims about voter fraud in the 2020 election and then urged his supporters to march on the Capitol to stop lawmakers from certifying the vote. "The U.S. Constitution does not tolerate an assault on the foundations of our government," Bellows wrote in a 34-page ruling.
The decision can be appealed to a state Superior Court, and Bellows suspended her ruling until the court rules on the matter.
gattsuru
1yr ago
Lawyers for Colorado’s Republican Party came to the Supreme Court on Wednesday, asking the justices to overturn a ruling by that state’s highest court that would leave former President Donald Trump off Colorado’s primary ballot in 2024 because of his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attacks on the U.S. Capitol. Lawyer Jay Sekulow told the justices that the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision “presents a constitutional crisis, national in scope.”...
In a motion filed simultaneously with his petition for review, Sekulow asked the court to decide the case by March 5, 2024 – Super Tuesday, when 16 states and one territory will hold their primary elections – or, at the latest, by the end of the court’s current term.
On Thursday the voters who filed the Colorado lawsuit urged the justices to act on the party’s appeal even more quickly. Telling the justices that “voting in Colorado happens mostly by mail and will begin for in-state residents once the ballots are mailed out on February 12,” the voters asked the justices to decide the case by Feb. 11, “so that voters in Colorado and elsewhere will know whether Trump is disqualified before they cast their ballots.” To ensure that the dispute is resolved quickly, the voters also encouraged the justices to set a deadline for Trump himself to seek review of the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision.
gattsuru
1yr ago
What, exactly, are you trying to persuade me of?
For this specific thread, and speaking in the specific context of higher education:
A conservative -- or even anything people want to call conservative, with all that implies -- working within the system is inviting a cheesegrater to their tender bits, hopefully figuratively. Any conservative organization trying to work within the system at minimum is subject to being shut down at a moment's notice, if not subject to being hollowed out and worn like a skin suit; any effective capability itself becoming justification for such an attack.
I can provide the various examples and practices and links if you want, but you haven't actually asked, and I'm not in the mood to do a big effortpost if it's not even a point of meaningful disagreement or if you're just going to shrug and say some variant of 'sucks to be them' or 'well, not literally every one got instantly shut down, so progressive groups must not have the capacity everywhere even if it happens repeatedly'.
More generally, I think -- to be charitable! -- you are either underestimating the effort or effect of progressive efforts to remove as much administrative power and all four of the boxes of liberty from conservative hands, or to remove the real-world impact of any use of these systems when not possible, and to the extent that these efforts have used government power or threat of government power to apply themselves merely because they don't have direct civil or criminal statutes.
Not every part of this has a direct impact today (although that's not always the case: the pronounced effort to shut down public speech does hit a lot of randos and normies, two-in-five workers deal with DEI, colleges are increasingly requiring pledges to as part of certificates or degrees most jobs now require, HR yadayah; again, I'm not doing a deep dive if this isn't the point of disagreement). Whether intentionally or not, whether the goal or not, these efforts are bad not because "laws I don't like sometimes get passed" -- in no few cases, I personally like the policy goals -- but because they drastically reduce if not outright crush disagreements in a wide variety of spaces. Worse, numerous people in the progressive movement have been quite willing to throw under the bus very people they claim to be acting for, in order to push these efforts.
I mean, I'm open to being persuaded in turn. I'd like the alternate position to be correct, where I'm just being paranoid and this stuff is all the totally-normal everyday behavior every political alignment just has to deal with, absolutely normal and absolutely possible to handle with normal persuasion. I would like an answer to increasing efforts by progressives to censor their opponents to have some possible response rather than merely to ask them not to do it, and :surprised pikachu: when that just results in it happening harder.
So I guess one answer is that I'm trying to persuade you to try and persuade me.
My confusion, in our exchanges, stems from the fact that you seem to be accusing me of... something.
I am accusing you of calling my posts a "gish-gallop", and then never engaging with a single claim that you think was not a reasonable example. I'm accusing you of requesting "specific examples" and not having much to say when multiple overt examples are demonstrated. I'm accusing you of strawmanning aggressively, even and especially when responding to people who bring moderate takes.
But I can deal with all of these problems, if there's something to have as a conversation, here. Is there?
A little over a week ago, a tpot-popular poster was allegedly linked to a criminal history sheet that's about as bad as it gets (cw: child sexual abuse), and has since deleted their twitter account after what looks to be confirmation. Along with Brent Dril showing up under a new handle (context), this has gotten a number of people who've long been critical of the most sexually-weird parts of Bay Arean culture doing 'I told you so' laps, and a number of people who were just generally critical talking up how it shows faults in the entire tpot culture, and some kinda with a foot in each. And some of it's gotten people... well, I'm hoping paranoid.
AFAICT, the vibecamp organizers are doing the ISO standard response of 'this guy was already banned' (which seems to be genuinely true!) and 'we're revising our safety procedures', but this still leaves a whole lot of people who didn't even think about those safety procedures as things that existed, for good or ill, or who believed that they were tied into relevant ones and found out they hard way they weren't.
gattsuru
1yr ago
The flip side to 'a hit dog will hollar' is that 'beaten dogs will bark at brooms'. There's very few conservatives (or libertarians!) who even attempted serious political discourse during the 2008 or 2012 campaign eras that were not intimately familiar with broad-scale and direct claims that the only possible source of disagreement with any given Obama policy was Racism.
And this game where you note there are some racists here, and some of them share your opponent's positions, and no you'll never name a name or exclude individuals by name, is just as old.
gattsuru
1yr ago
Rather, the lesson is that if you want to fight tyranny, the correct time to fight is when you see the tyranny coming, not when it has already arrived. This generalizes to all sorts of tyranny and oppression, not merely camps.
Yeah, I've been trying to avoid highlighting Joe Huffman's Jews in the Attic Test, since it's a little Godwinny in its name, and I have to keep emphasizing I don't think concentration camps are a near-term concern, but there's a reason he was highlighting it for LGBT causes in the late-90s and early-00s, and it wasn't because he believed that they'd be thrown into ovens anytime soon. Some of the (unfortunately, no-longer online) debates related to some of those matters were pretty persuasive to me even as someone who was skeptical of his redline around biometrics back then.
On the other hand, society does have some forces pushing for reconciliation and togetherness. As I understand it, Amadan's position is that the former forces are outweighed by the latter, where mine is that the latter are outweighed by the former. My question to you would be, why expect this to be a disagreement that can be resolved by evidence? Predictions seem more useful, and this seems to be a good time for them.
Part of my goal is to narrow down whether that is the point of disagreement. The one you hypothesize is not an unreasonable guess as a higher-level hinge, but it's hard to match with continued emphasis on disagreement about what's happening now.
Someone could also just reject this philosophy of preemptive resistance entirely, either out of moral disagreement, or by believing that any tactical benefits would be overwhelmed by the negative publicity. Those possibilities are part of why I keep highlighting the "Obviously if I'm wrong, you'll never be able to collect, but anyway" post. One of the solutions for your dilemma of distinguishing between acceptable levels of oppression is simply to set a threshold at so high a bar you never expect to see it in real life: it's possible to completely agree on the ground facts and expected social forces, and still fall here. That's why I tried and failed the Wittgenstein knockoff.
But even movement of forces is the disagreement, these estimations on these forces and their effects are observations of the world. There's nothing magical about predictions, and I dunno how useful they'll be, without an agreement on what we'd need to expect. Someone should be -- if not as persuaded -- still reconsider their positions when they find something unexpected in history or present-day news.
More deeply, I've highlighted some predictions I've made in the past, including where I thought I was wrong. And there's not been much engagement with that, or with either when they were first posted, either; I can't tell whether that's because those specific claims wouldn't matter even if true, or because no small-scale examples could be, or because anything without statistics is Chinese Cardiology.
Or see: "(hypothetical, hypothetical, vaguely related anecdote)".
((And then there's the problem of who and how you evaluate predictions. This would have been really prescient in January 2021, but it wasn't like we had a spat of politically-motivated homicides between Sept 2020 and Jan 2021; in mid-2022 one could claim it was just the racial nationalists modulo things like that cop city snafu; in a year I'm... not optimistic that it will be so easily debatable. Do the church arsons count? Do they have to be in the United States?))
gattsuru
1yr ago
This is what mystifies me about how large the supposedly beyond the pale attacks on Romney during the 2012 campaign are such a huge theme on this forum, popping up time after time after time.
Some of it's literally just me, and just used as an example over other cases like Palin or Dubya because Romney's more recent.
That said, just because it looks like harsh weapons sometimes get used doesn't mean that there are no rules, or motions about rules that people 'should' follow. LBJ's famous (alleged) pigfucker politics weren't exactly shared as aspirational goals -- note this summary is from a clearly progressive partisan Dem! And we do not see many serious attempts to call random politicians literal pig-fuckers today, and indeed that progressive partisan Dem mostly does not highlight statements from either serious politicians or their cutouts.
Part of that's because 'no one would believe it' (uh...), but the bigger part is that after a certain point this is the sort of thing that gets the Wohl's convicted or Project Veritas driven to bankruptcy. There are rules, as arbitrary and ill-enforced as they might be.
More critically, there's a point where the published violations of those rules would be more costs than the benefits might hold. It's like the people who wonder why Peter Thiel doesn't just hire private detectives to ruin the lives of everyone who pisses him off: the very act of trying to hire them would be a far bigger story than anything they could come up with would be, in ways that would undermine anything they could come up with. Scott Alexander might call this a specific form of bounded distrust, and while I don't particularly agree with his analysis, it's not completely wrong, either.
The flip side to 'Bounded Distrust' is that, even assuming it to be true, those bounds are not set in stone or engraved into golden plates, and the 2012 election was either a major shift or the revelation of a major shift, here. People point to the 2008 Swiftboating of Kerry, and maybe th at was another shift, but it was one where a rando PAC made allegations. We did not have a handful of plausibly connected cutouts claiming Romney would put "Black people back in chains"; we had the sitting vice president of the United States do it. We did not have some sketchy tabloid mag claiming Romney did not pay taxes; Harry Reid stood on the Senate floor and made his case.
But probably the more damning bit is that Romney made no small part of his public persona his decency. There's a (fair!) argument that this was always skin-deep: 47%, and all, and I've got a draft post I've been working on pointing out how much he was just as prone to snickering about his opponents as Trump was, just behind their backs rather than to their faces. Yet he made a large number of costly commitments to that skin-deep 'decency', while no small number of partisans on both sides were talking up how vital it would be both for the Republican project and for the American democratic project as a whole to elevate discourse.
gattsuru
1yr ago
... do you have an example person you're highlighting, here? Because that's a pretty serious charge to just be throwing out for The Implication, especially given the previous poster was specifically talking about people on this forum.
I understand (and hope!) that everyone's got better things to do with their holiday season.
(I am pretty sure I have never accused you of lying.)
Do you know why I've been linking to the wikipedia page for gish gallop? Or why I keep using variations on the phrase "mostly isn't happening"?
I'm not sure you have accused me of lying! I'm trying to dig at whether you're accusing me of "specious arguments, half-truths, misrepresentations, and outright lies", or what subcombination thereof. Maybe we're both just really confused about what 'metaphorically' going against the wall in the context of firings and speech restrictions might be!
But it's kinda hard to tell, since we never seem to get to the actual claims.
I don't think everyone on "your side" is plotting defection and civil war. I think very few are, actually. I never claimed everyone who feels they are being oppressed is an accelerationist or a would-be secessionist.
And I've not accused of that, nor particularly care whether you do or not.
I think there are many degrees between "complaining" and "being sent to gulags" and I don't know why you are accusing me of presenting only such stark choices.
You literally responded to:
I do not believe that I enjoy free expression, or free speech, or whatever we're calling it these days. I do not believe that having my words and opinions formally criminalized would actually be much worse than the current situation; certainly a few thousand dollars in fines, say, would be vastly preferable to the results of my words being attached to my real identity on Twitter.
with
What space are you trying to subdivide that's below a few thousand dollars in fines and the results of FCFromSSC's name being attached to his real identity on twitter, that anyone should care about? Leave alone the obnoxious questions like whether FCFromSSC ever said anything comparable to "imminent danger of being sent to a gulag" (even in his historical post on Russian terror!), he's the very central case of the sort of person you're disagreeing with. What are these many degrees that we're supposed to be shimming into place?
EDIT: and to be clear, that's not a "oh no, you've used hyperbole, the banned superweapon". What the hell is any serious response supposed to be? You clearly don't find anyone's examples persuasive, even when going down the list of things that you supply, so what are you asking for?
gattsuru
1yr ago
Hradzka has a good bit on what he expected Richard Spencer was trying to do with the term to start with, and what a lot of progressives were doing as well. Or see this New York Times piece (by Singal, of course) that separated the 'alt-right' from the 'alt-light' -- and contrast, even contemporaneously, other pieces.
There's a lot of if-by-whiskey, where sometimes the alt-right was just the nutty white nationalists when defining their ideology, others where it was people who hadn't denounced them heavily enough, and then other times the alt-right was pretty much everyone to the right of Mitt Romney. And to a lot of the progressive and leftist movements, the difference was kinda marginal : if you think Mitt Romney was a white supremacist, you're worried about all of them.
gattsuru
1yr ago
The character's definitely recognizable, and there's a certain faction that promotes him more than Santa (or does weirder stuff). But at least as far as I've seen (admittedly, away from the coasts), he's more a minor part of the season, rather than a full replacement for Santa -- you'll see a lot of Five Below or Hot Topic grinch-themed stuff, but you're not going to see a bunch of kids lining up to have photos taken in the Grinch's lap. Even among the anti-christmas set, you're more likely to run into Jack Skellington as a symbol.
The 2000 live action and 2018 3d-animated ones got mixed receptions: Jim Carrey in particular sometimes was memeable but too exaggerated (for a Seuss character!), while the 3d-animated one felt too bland. Making a full movie out of the story just requires too much padding. Most recognition today will still reflect the 1966 version, which was really well-executed for its time and played pretty often on television during the Christmas season. If that one was never common fare for your area, that would definitely explain the different awareness.
gattsuru
1yr ago
The most immediate controlling characteristic is temperature: you can have a temperature swing of twenty degrees farhenheit going thirty miles inland, in a country that's already pretty toasty throughout its spring, summer, and early fall. Which has never had a surfeit of fresh-water rivers. So a majority of the population lives almost exactly on the coastline, and more than a third live in Sydney or Melbourne. On the east, inland settlement was driven by tapping a single massive aquifier; on the west coast, it mostly wasn't.
This has lead to a massively urbanized population, spread across a handful of major cities.
Americans tend to think of Australia in the same way Europeans think of America. Where Brits think of the various states like taking a half-hour train ride to London, Americans think of the various territories as states like the American southeast. But driving from Adelaide to Perth is a longer trip than going across all of Texas, it's got the same scope of planning requirement, and if you're in Perth, it's your mode of comparison (going north is worse!).
Ok, economics. Work in the country is heavily bifurbicated, with resource extraction and agriculture providing a vast majority of economic exports along with a nature tourism industry, and then on the other side the finances/state agency/urban service sector. Manufacturing used to span the gap a bit, but it collapsed over the last couple decades, even more so than American manufacturing did. Construction kinda tries, but doesn't really.
((There's some policy stuff that augments this; the backpacker visa being one of the most obvious to outsiders by providing a massive labor force of mobile non-voters who get changed out every few years; among other things, they're why the rural/far-suburban service sector is a non-actor in politics.))
As a result, rural areas have basically no political (the National party has been a joke for a long time) or cultural (except as villains) importance, while urbanized voters face strong economic and environmental pressures toward communitized interests.
gattsuru
1yr ago
SOP, you say? I'll admit I wasn't quite as plugged into the social justice fandom at the time, what with tumblr upsie-wupsie a fucky-wusky, and I couldn't (and can't) stand dealing with the non-transcript version of a Trump speech. Still, would have expected to hear about Trump getting to enforce a Muslim ban for a couple weeks after a SCOTUS order made clear he was going to flunk the likelihood-of-success, giving a long series of public pronouncements about how he couldn't do it, telling SCOTUS he would expire and not renew the ban, and then just doing it again.
But you've used it as an SOP example. Got a link?
I'm sorry, "pursuing policy which will probably be held illegal and stopping when ordered to do so" isn't my complaint, nor anyone else's complaint, and you know it.
gattsuru
1yr ago
That's fair, but in turn it seems like an argument in favor of hydroacetylene's claims: while the 9-0 ruling did go against Obama, it was far less aggressive than conservatives argued in the concurrence, or that the lower court held.
gattsuru
1yr ago
At the risk of tl;dr'ing an old effortpost:
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With a very small number of exceptions not relevant here, it is unconstitutional for the federal government to act ultra vires.
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((There are also separate due process, takings clause, and procedural reasons it was also unconstitutional, raised by the AAR plaintiffs, which are fairly compelling; these are also unconstitutional, if not the central focus.))
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Biden should have known that the attempt would be rejected in the courts, and made clear that he was running this policy to exploit the time period for the justice system to react. There's some fun philosophical questions about whether he genuinely believed Lawrence Tribe in the same way that Trump might have 'genuinely' believed Dominion conspiracy theories, and both of them are politicians with brains made of playdoh. But by any meaningful definition of the word "knew", he knew both that it was unconstitutional and would be found unconstitutional.
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The balance of equities for a stay overwhelmingly favors a government actor over economic interests of private individuals. This is often hilariously misguided -- the refusal to recognize financial costs under the premise they'd be renumerated after a successful completion of a case a sick joke -- but the only one that seriously recognizes and favors the interests of AAR was the likelihood of success on the merits.
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Worse, Biden should have known that he only got the time he did from SCOTUS because, and I quote the justice giving the deciding vote: "the CDC plans to end the moratorium in only a few weeks, on July 31". The Biden administration stated this, explicitly! Nice letterhead, official paperwork, everything, June 24th.
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And then on August 4th, decided fuck it, we're doing it anyway. Pretty literally: when I said the final order had its serial numbers filed off, I wasn't exaggerating.
Yes, I get it, you had a conversation with someone at the time where you nitpicked into oblivion how the Supreme Court technically never issued an order to the federal government. If someone had said that Biden had defied an explicit order from the Supreme Court, you might even have a point. But instead, you're trying to nitpick:
Biden knew the renter moratorium was unconstitutional. His advisors told him as such. The SCOTUS said this is illegal but since you told us you are ending it we will let you end it in an orderly fashion. He then said “fuck it — I will extend it and hope it will take months or years to overturn what I knew was against the constitutional Order."
He knew, by any degree of knowledge that can resist a schizophrenic in a crappy suit. His advisors told him -- he lost Tushnet -- and that one advisor said the opposite is no defense when Guiliani was trying it. SCOTUS said it was illegal, if perhaps taking a slightest bit of effort to read the tea leaves. And Biden said fuck it.
gattsuru
1yr ago
... to be more explicit.
JUSTICE THOMAS, JUSTICE ALITO, JUSTICE GORSUCH, and JUSTICE BARRETT would grant the application.
gattsuru
1yr ago
There's a lot of detail about that June of 2021 concurrence that you're glossing over, here.
gattsuru
1yr ago
If you want to bring an example, you’d be better off talking about the Hatfield courthouse.
But these politicians don’t want a good example; this is the same ‘highlight the contradictions’ approach from a lot of other movements, without the sympathetic media or academic facade
gattsuru
1yr ago
It would also depend on their proposed law not getting invalidated or stayed near-instantly, while the Trump disqualification didn't apply. Which isn't a huge possibility band, but it's a lot wider than the chance of their law lasting once past.
... that depends a lot on the timeline and processes.
August 30th is the last day for a major party to fill a vacancy in Colorado, for one example. One of my frustrations with Unikowsky's analysis is that he's talking about things in the frictionless spherical plane sense. Forget the hard questions like whether Gorsuch goes hypertextual a la McGurt or not; the difference between an instant denial of cert, a GVR-with-direction, a reversal, and a request for briefings is a big deal, even assuming that they'd all result in the exact same conclusion eventually.
That seems about the same tack that Bellows took, if a bit better thought out. The analysis in the decision is just:
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