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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • Not to speak for the other person but I feel the same way. His win in 2016 was a fluke.

    It won’t be a fluke, this time. Republicans in Red states have spent the last couple years ramming through laws making it harder to vote. And they will certainly be claiming massive fraud again, sans evidence, and tying up certification in their states for as long as possible giving SCOTUS the chance to step in like they did in Florida 2000 when SCOTUS handed the states votes to Bush.

    Worse still, republicans in swing states have been trying to use the theory of the independent sate legislature to enact legislation granting themselves the power to overrule the will of the voters and award the state’s electoral votes to the candidate of their own choosing. Don’t shake your head too quickly at that idea. At least three members of SCOTUS support the idea.

    Even so, three justices—Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Clarence Thomas—have spent two years campaigning for the independent-state-legislature doctrine in judicial statements and dissents. None of those writings carried the force of law, but together they served as invitations for a plaintiff to bring them a case suitable to their purpose. A fourth justice, Brett Kavanaugh, wrote a concurrence in which he invited the North Carolina Republicans in the Moore case to return to the Supreme Court after losing an emergency motion. Where John Roberts and Amy Coney Barrett stand on the doctrine is unclear.

    You can be certain that there will be lawsuits filed within hours of the election claiming fraud and that the legislatures in those states can name their own electors. I wouldn’t even be surprised to see right wing terrorists attacking polling stations, disguised as AFTIFA of course, in order to give the legislatures ammo to support those efforts.

    This could be the ugliest election in the history of this nation. The forces of evil are doing all they can to hand Trump another term.



  • If she did it, the judgement would immediately be appealed and she would get her pee pee slapped hard and the judgement would be overturned. Maybe, if the gods are good, she’ll be removed from the case. It seems unlikely that she will take that chance though since she can cause more delay by staying where she it, but who knows, she doesn’t seem to be the sharpest crayon in the box so maybe she will do it.

    The whole point of this is just to delay until the election when Trump, should he be reelected, can undermine the whole thing. It’s clear that the attorney general can appoint a special council when an investigation by DoJ directly could present a conflict of interest. Making a bad ruling here might work for her though. Having the ruling appealed would certainly delay things at least a few weeks or a month and that could take us to the end of July before it was overturned and/or sent back down to her court.

    If the appeals court does finally decide to give her the boot, it would take quite a while to get a new judge appointed and a new trial underway. There would be no chance of a decision before the election and that is the whole goal. Plus, then she’d probably be free to go on the right wing talk circuit and make piles of money while still supporting Trump.




  • Chevron deference <------- Non-ELI5

    Not a law-talker type here, but essentially, when the legislature creates an agency like the FDA, it delegates powers to them to make rulings on certain matters but does not specifically legislate every decision that agency has to make. It says that the FDA can make rulings about drug safety, but it doesn’t say explicitly what drugs the FDA can make decisions about.

    In this particular case, the FDA has said that a drug, mifepristone, is safe and doctors can prescribe it to patients. The law suit claimed that the FDA overstepped it’s authority because the legislature never explicitly gave the FDA the power to do that. This is a flawed argument because SCOTUS already decided, in the linked case above, that it was inappropriate for the court to substitute its own interpretation of a rule on an issue like this where the legislature gave an agency an implicit power to make such a decision as long as the agency’s decision is reasonable.

    That is the Chevron Deference. It means that the courts should defer to agency rulings when those rulings are reasonable even if the power to make the ruling is only implicitly granted to the agency.

    I may not be dead on the mark here, but I think I’m fairly close. If not, I’m sure some real law-talker type will be along to correct me.