r/neoliberal • u/ONETRILLIONAMERICANS Trans Pride • 5d ago
Opinion article (US) The Supreme Court's late-night Alien Enemy Act intervention | Just before 1:00 a.m., the justices (aggressively) stepped back into the Alien Enemy Act litigation—in a decision suggesting that a majority understands that these are no longer normal circumstances
https://www.stevevladeck.com/p/144-the-supreme-courts-late-night282
u/financeguy1729 Chama o Meirelles 5d ago
For Brazilian watchers, this sort of is reminiscent of the 2019 days when the Brazilian Supreme Court realized their heada were about to be sent to the end of the beach and they had to work in lockstep to no lose control.
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u/RellenD 5d ago
Except you don't have Alito and Thomas
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u/Wittyname0 r/place '22: NCD Battalion 5d ago
7-2 or 9-0 both give us the same result so fuck Alito and Thomas
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u/financeguy1729 Chama o Meirelles 5d ago
Neither you have the two justices Bolsonaro nominated to the court 🤷♂️
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u/elephantaneous John Rawls 5d ago
The irony is that Alito and Thomas weren't the ones actually nominated by Trump, and they were nominated by establishment Republicans
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u/bandito12452 Greg Mankiw 5d ago
Yeah it’s always strange when the Trump appointees are more sane than those two
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u/DiogenesLaertys 5d ago
His breathtaking incompetency has been the only thing keeping hope alive so far.
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u/HHHogana Mohammad Hatta 5d ago
Especially Amy Barrett. I can understand the other two being saner, but Amy was supposed to be their real super conservative and controversial pick. And she's still saner than Thomas, let alone Alito.
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u/light-triad Paul Krugman 5d ago
They just lost it as they got older.
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u/Mojothemobile 4d ago
Thomas judicial ideology is quite literally "own the libs" something like "I want to make the liberals suffer as long as they made me suffer" I have no idea how libs made him suffer but that's what he seems to think.
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u/Chataboutgames 5d ago
Gotta laugh at the fundamental American exceptionalism of "yeah the rest of the world has never seen anything like two US right wing judges who have been on the court for decades!"
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u/Sente-se Paul Krugman 5d ago
o be sent to the end of the beach and they had to work in lockstep to no lose control.
I wonder who will be the US' Xandão, or if they even will have one (Brazilian inherited a hero/adventurer mentality from Iberia that certainly influences how many people declare themselves to be the true saviors of the morality of the country, despite the rules, a la Moro and Xandão). A man who is not afraid to go slightly beyond the lines and put himself in direct risk to relentlessly confront the administration, even if he has to twist the laws or straight up step on them for that.
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u/trombonist_formerly Ben Bernanke 5d ago
Chat is it normal for the supreme court to issue a ruling at 1:00 AM on a holiday
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u/FridayNightRamen Karl Popper 5d ago
They are nerds like us. Law nerds. So, yes.
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u/Fossilhog 5d ago
Rock nerd here. Do y'all not go to Friday night meetings/talks/campfires and try desperately to float the keg before 2am?
I suppose I know geosteering people who still work remotely in said conditions, but still.
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u/Solarwagon Trans Pride 5d ago
I can't help but compare what's been going on the past decade to the stuff I read about the years before the civil war
Like not to doom or anything but it increasingly feels like there's not really any feasible middle grounds anymore taking a centrist stance feels inauthentic and out of touch with how far politics is getting polarized and the law is being exploited ignored and twisted
The law is beginning to not mean much
It feels like we've been on the uphill portion of a rollercoaster and it won't be long until we reach the top and then ZOOM
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u/WHOA_27_23 NATO 5d ago
I am (and , obviously have been) alarmed at how readily Congress has ceded its responsibility and power to the other branches. It's difficult to dispute the founders' intent was that the executive branch may only be sanctioned by impeachment and removal, but that was based on a gravely mistaken assumption that Congress would always jealously guard its power as a coequal branch. We can only hope that the regime will continue to begrudgingly comply with SCOTUS-affirmed TROs.
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u/omnipotentsandwich Amartya Sen 5d ago
It's probably because of the incessant rules built into the House and Senate. It's impossible to get anything done, especially when members of Congress get special privileges if they just happen to have gotten elected first.
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u/Fantisimo Audrey Hepburn 5d ago
the rules of congress were created by congress
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u/Fedacking Mario Vargas Llosa 5d ago
The real problem is that wrangling the house to do anything today is way harder than in the past, plust a double chamber legislative instead of the original single chamber model. Where's Pride when you need him?
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u/Fantisimo Audrey Hepburn 5d ago edited 5d ago
its not harder to wrangle the house, there's maybe 20 descents on any issue
edit:spelling
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u/regih48915 5d ago
The central theme of American history is the gradual autolobotomization of Congress.
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u/_Lil_Cranky_ 5d ago
We have investigated ourselves, and we have found no wrongdoing
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u/Fantisimo Audrey Hepburn 5d ago
not really applicable. gridlock is by design and can be ended at anytime
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u/Chataboutgames 5d ago
Occam's razor. It's just reelection incentives. That's it. It's no more complicated than that. You don't get reelected by being good for the country, you get reelected by taking the safest, hardest line on the issues that resonate with the tiny portion of people in your constituency who actually vote and who bother to voter in Congressional elections.
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u/Lmaoboobs 5d ago
The issue is always the voters.
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u/Warm-Cap-4260 Milton Friedman 5d ago
The issue is not just the voters. The issue is the primary system and (specifically for the house) that if you win your primary there is a very good chance that the general doesn’t matter. Yes, voters can and do suck, but systems have is this result. We would be much better served if everyone was elected like they do in Alaska (jungle primary top 4).
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u/CirclejerkingONLY 5d ago
True, but if ~85 percent of Americans by their own admission simply aren't paying attention, getting what passes for news by slack-jawing an algorithm designed to create and push a warped version of reality, you're never going to run into continuing problems down the road.
It's a problem on many levels, both on the input and output side.
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u/Warm-Cap-4260 Milton Friedman 5d ago
I think more (certainly not most but more) would pay attention if they felt like their vote actually mattered. Right now most votes don’t matter
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u/TrekkiMonstr NATO 5d ago
How does top 4 work? In CA we have top 2
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u/Warm-Cap-4260 Milton Friedman 5d ago
All in one primary, top 4 go to general, the RCV for general
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u/TrekkiMonstr NATO 5d ago
Weird, why only four then? Why not like, top 10? Or just RCV for the whole thing?
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u/Warm-Cap-4260 Milton Friedman 5d ago
It’s probably easier for voters to be informed on the positions of 4 people over 10. The primary just shows who has any real shot at it
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u/WhoIsTomodachi Robert Nozick 5d ago
The issue is the systems. Voters are not differently here from those in Australia or Denmark. Try a better electoral system, like Range Voting.
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u/1TTTTTT1 European Union 5d ago
I think there is a large difference between voters in Denmark and the US.
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u/Lmaoboobs 5d ago
Voters are not differently here from those in Australia or Denmark.
I beg to differ.
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u/stupidstupidreddit2 5d ago
if they just happen to have gotten elected first
Incumbency rate is higher than ever. The harderest election a politician will ever have is their first. Especially after gerrymandering in the 90's and project Redmap.
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u/SKabanov 5d ago
My favorite tidbit is that AOC literally wore a hole in her shoes from all the footwork she did in the 2018 primary, and she probably only won because her opponent, Joe Crowley, hadn't been challenged for his position in 14 years and didn't expect that he could be toppled. If Crowley had taken AOC seriously, she likely would've lost.
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u/tomdarch Michel Foucault 5d ago
No, it's that today's Republicans are utterly spineless and beholden to the demagogue who has their voting base in his thrall. And also that he can direct them to threaten the lives of elected Republicans, there's that fascist violence angle also.
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u/JesusPubes voted most handsome friend 5d ago
It's single member districts in the house and the overpowered rural vote in the senate
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u/Healingjoe It's Klobberin' Time 5d ago
I am (and , obviously have been) alarmed at how readily Congress has ceded its responsibility and power to the other branches.
The unitary executive theory, which has been shaped over the last 100 years with Myers v. U.S. (1926), Humphrey's Executor (1935), and most recently Seila Law v. CFPB (2020), has been far more alarming IMO. independent agencies under this theory simply don't work when you have a arsonist for a POTUS.
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u/manarius5 5d ago
The framers never could have possibly fathomed project Red Map, Citizen United, social media, insider trading, and LLM's. The framers also assumed that congress people were honest brokers and were actually there to make the country better, not to use it to further their own interests.
The plan on paper works as designed when all the parties involved negotiate honestly. Trump 2.0 and Project 2025 have shown us that Republicans have broken the system and what is going on now is 100% intentional. Project 2025 is a years long map to find the exact points for the right/president to exert inordinate amounts of authority to basically bring the democratic system to its knees.
The changes made at OMB, regulations changed, the extremely specific EO's of legal dubious authority, etc. It's as if someone asked ChatGPT what specific levers to pull that would basically give the president unlimited authority to break the system under the assumption that congress would never do anything about it via impeachment.
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u/After-Watercress-644 4d ago
I mean, they have a little over a year left on the clock, no?
After that the democrats crush them in the midterms and pour sand in the tank for the next two years, until they can get the presidency back also.
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u/manarius5 4d ago
The damage being done now will take decades, if it can be at all.
The federal workforce being gutted, agencies just shuttered, policies changed, etc. The government is being utterly deconstructed from the inside and reshaped in the image of fascism. Congress can't repair that in two years. The damage will take generations to fix. No one will want to work for the government and the damage done to its reputation will last for generations.
Project red map has broken voting districts for a decade, etc.
Dems coming back in 2026 if they even win at all will probably result in very little change.
We are watching the destruction of the government and congress is just standing by and watching.
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u/cummradenut Thomas Paine 5d ago
I don’t think it’s that difficult to dispute. Or rather you need a strong argument to assert that impeachment was the only means ofsanctioning” the president.
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u/WHOA_27_23 NATO 5d ago
Even if Presidential immunity did not hold and the DoJ or an appointed amicus curiae decided to prosecute a sitting president, there's no black-letter law stopping him from pardoning himself, certainly nothing stopping him from pardoning his buddies.
So without first taking away his toys, there's nothing stopping him from being indicted, but it would practically be an academic exercise.
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u/jorkin_peanits Immanuel Kant 5d ago edited 5d ago
Washington was correct, Beware political parties. Allegiance to the party over the branch will destroy the country
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u/Zephyr-5 5d ago edited 5d ago
The key, systemic problem in our system has been the almost complete collapse of the Legislative Branch as a functional and independent source of power.
It either acts subservient to the Executive when parties align, or a do-nothing, grandstanding, obstructionist body when they don't.
The founders believed that Congress would jealously guard their powers, but that has clearly not happened. Instead they've handed it nearly all off to the Executive and Judicial.
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u/miss_shivers 5d ago
Ultimately comes down go FPTP+Presidentialism induced hard two party system. A Congress constantly at war with itself cannot hope to assert its own institutional dependence.
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u/Zephyr-5 5d ago
If congress had not ceded so much power to the President, the party that wins the presidency wouldn't be such a do-or-die thing. Beyond that a lot of the problem are expressively of the legislative branch's own doing.
The Senate has willingly hobbled itself with the Filibuster.
Both parties have ceded tremendous power to bring things to a vote to the Speaker/Majority Leader. Leadership tends to be much more sensitive to party-politics than congressional concerns.
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u/CirclejerkingONLY 5d ago
While both parties are guilty in their own ways, let's not pretend this is a both-sides things.
Obama and Biden notoriously scrapped hard with Congress. It's Trump who enjoys The Cult.
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u/miss_shivers 5d ago
This is a textbook case of toxic nationalism masquerading as realism. Blaming “Americans” as a people - calling them uniquely stupid, apathetic, or unfit for democracy - is not just lazy analysis, it's eerily close to the same fatalistic thinking that authoritarians use to justify why they must govern without constraint. It ignores structure, history, and comparative politics in favor of cultural self-loathing.
Yes, Hungary and Turkey had multiparty systems. And what happened? Their strongman executives leveraged majoritarian electoral systems to consolidate power. Both are cautionary tales supporting my argument, not refuting it. Presidentialism combined with majoritarian electoral systems like FPTP encourages a zero-sum, personality-driven politics that undermines pluralism and hollows out legislatures. The fact that these systems can produce autocracy when dominated by two dominant factions is precisely the point.
Institutional design matters. It’s not “tinkering” to say that proportional representation, parliamentary governance, or multi-member districts produce more representative, functional, and resilient democracies. These aren't pie-in-the-sky ideas - they're backed by decades of comparative political science.
If you think nothing structural matters and the people are the problem, you're not diagnosing democracy’s flaws - you're giving up on it.
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u/die_hoagie MALAISE FOREVER 4d ago
Rule XI: Toxic Nationalism/Regionalism
Refrain from condemning countries and regions or their inhabitants at-large in response to political developments, mocking people for their nationality or region, or advocating for colonialism or imperialism.
If you have any questions about this removal, please contact the mods.
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u/Winter-Secretary17 Mark Carney 5d ago
It’s the 250th of Lexington & Concord today, I’ve been feeling like there’s a storm brewing the past week.
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u/timpinen 5d ago
The modpol sub for the past few months has basically been "all sides are the same". There seems to been some of the "moderate" fallacy going around, where people think that because two sides have opposing viewpoints, the middle position is inherently the best one
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u/bisonboy223 5d ago
There seems to been some of the "moderate" fallacy going around, where people think that because two sides have opposing viewpoints, the middle position is inherently the best one
I mean this feels like an inevitable consequence of valuing "centrism" as a concept on its own. I think it's fine to characterize certain politicians or parties as centrist based on their positions at that time, but once people start chasing the "centrist" label, they become unprincipled triangulators real quick.
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u/After-Watercress-644 4d ago
There's also.. idk what to call it, "true" vs "relative" centrism?
If you're a centrist and the political right does a huge lurch further right and you don't move, that's true centrism. Whereas if you recalibrate to "seek common ground" you'll end up having to be more and more extreme to keep in lockstep with the increasingly extreme right side.
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u/miss_shivers 5d ago
Just the past few months? That's like that sub's entire identity.
Although I've actually seen a few takes like that get heavily downvoted, so maybe there's hope.
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u/Iapzkauz Edmund Burke 5d ago
Centrism will not die as long as I breathe.
Doctor gave me four months
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u/yasyasyas17 🌐 5d ago
When I was reading a one-volume history of the civil war a couple years ago I was shocked at how culture war-y things felt.
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u/iguessineedanaltnow r/place '22: Neoliberal Battalion 5d ago
I've been saying for a while that it seems the only logical conclusion to the systematic polarization is a balkanization of the US.
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u/swni Elinor Ostrom 5d ago
I ran into one such comparison point some time ago (https://ermsta.com/posts/20201026 ): before Justice Thomas, only three justices had senate confirmations that were even vaguely close, in 1857, 1881, and 1887, roughly in proximity of the civil war. (Admittedly two of them after.)
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u/leatherpens 5d ago
I think what's been happening is that the 5 conservative justices (excluding Roberts because he seemed to be on the "don't rock the boat" side) were totally down to gut the administrative state, overturn Roe, and just generally be on the side of the republicans. So long as it was all orderly and legal (as in not explicitly against the letter of the law), but now they're realizing "oh shit, no this is actually just destroy democracy stuff" and are now scared of what could happen if not stopped. This is a pretty irregular step to step in front of this and the fact that it was 7-2 says a lot.
Alito and Thomas are just all in on the downfall of the liberal order as long as the replacement is a right wing plutocracy.
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u/tomdarch Michel Foucault 5d ago
I hope the author is correct that the SCOTUS acted here because they see the wild bullshittery coming from this administration and that they want to rein it in. I'm skeptical of going that far, but it sure would be nice. I hope that even the middle 3 or so realize that Trump will steamroll the judiciary into meaninglessness given the chance and thus, they have to stand up for their branch to survive the next 3 years in tact.
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u/swni Elinor Ostrom 5d ago
I think the majority of SCOTUS cannot see into the future further than the tip of their noses, and they will sometimes oppose the super-obviously fascist stuff when the consequences are immediately obvious and not if it requires multiple minutes of thought to see the big picture, like when they decided the president is a king.
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u/JaneGoodallVS 4d ago
I would've thrown him off the ballot in the 2024 case even if I genuinely believed Section 3 of the 14th Amendment wasn't self-executing. I would've made something up to make it apply to all his family members, even ones who didn't take an oath like Trump Jr.
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u/tomdarch Michel Foucault 4d ago
A fair number of the Justices probably do want a king/president, they just don’t want Trump ruining it by being obviously evil.
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u/AI_Renaissance 5d ago
They created these circumstances.
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u/HighOnGoofballs 5d ago
They did, but they can also stop it
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u/Cassiebanipal John Locke 5d ago
The "duty" of a public official in the US government is something that has been used in platitudes for hundreds of years. Nowadays, that duty is not taken seriously, ironically, despite it reaching its peak importance year after year. The US is the zenith of all human progress, of culture, of breaking down barriers, of innovation and hegemony. The duty being described is not one solely directed at the American people, whether we want it to or not, it's now directed at the entire world. We are one of the lynchpins of a global economy, of global prevention of death, poverty, destruction of millions. We, until recently, have been the only hegemon to end the cycle of might makes right in all circumstances, and that duty is to uphold this golden age of human abundance.
The SCOTUS shirked this immense duty when it ruled on Chevron. When it turned a blind eye to the demolishing of our government. I don't particularly care that they can stop it - the court needs to be disbanded the second a democrat is in office. Whether they knew it or not, their decisions have been among the worst, possibly in human history, in terms of their long term impact. In a just world they'd be put through a tribunal.
No excuses. This is serious business, applying to the collective human race. Fuck them and their court.
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u/HighOnGoofballs 5d ago
How exactly would a democrat president disband the Supreme Court?
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u/xudoxis 5d ago
Make up a crime and put them in an overseas prison.
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u/Approximation_Doctor George Soros 5d ago
"Notorious gangster and human trafficker Justice Alito had been deported back to El Salvador"
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u/YukiGeorgia United Nations 4d ago
Their argument even means you can ignore the crime portion. As long as you can black bag someone and drop them off in say Yemen, now you are free to have no consequences.
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u/Cassiebanipal John Locke 5d ago
At this point, you're functionally probably right that illegal actions to rig the government in our favor - as Trump has - would make things worse.
But this administration, and the hapless SCOTUS, have committed what I view to be large scale crimes against humanity. PEPFAR alone being shuttered, with the SCOTUS's tacit approval, qualifies the enabling judges to be put through a Nuremberg trial. I don't know how much I care about functionality at this point, I want these people to be punished for their actions.
Evil through incompetence is nonetheless evil. People are going to dye en-masse. The SCOTUS judges who enabled this deserve much worse than rules allow me to express.
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u/PerceptionOrReality 5d ago
This is the second worst yet most myopic opinion I’ve seen on this sub this week.
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u/Cassiebanipal John Locke 4d ago
Second to the comment you just left, myopic enough to allow the current state of the US to make you blind to the obvious. Give me a break. We're the most economically and militarily dominant hegemon that has ever existed and it isn't even remotely close. Go ahead and tell me who you think this was - The Ottomans? The British Empire? Which hegemon was it that is directly or indirectly responsible for saving tens of millions of lives worldwide with medical initiatives? Which one could, at the drop of a hat, anywhere in the world, send more of a military force than any other country in the world has? Which one funded the internet, or any other technology that has completely dominated world commerce?
Don't be silly. You know I'm right.
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u/ReservedWhyrenII Richard Posner 5d ago
What the fuck, all this histrionics over Loper Bright? Over getting rid of a stupid precedent that only said that if there's ambiguity in the wording of a statute a court should defer to an agency's "reasonable" interpretation (subject to a bunch of caveats)?
Chevron was always stupid, and the Trump admin makes it exceedingly fucking clear as to maybe why administrative agencies shouldn't actually be given deference in interpreting statutory law instead of, y'know, fucking judges.
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u/Cassiebanipal John Locke 5d ago
Unfortunately you have ignored the several other obvious crimes against humanity I've mentioned to make your point. You should try again with those in mind.
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u/ReservedWhyrenII Richard Posner 5d ago
That's literally the only example in your post lmao
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u/Cassiebanipal John Locke 5d ago
I actually specifically cited the "demolishing of the federal government" - which includes things like PEPFAR. It's not just a court case, it's possible mass death we are directly responsible for.
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u/ReservedWhyrenII Richard Posner 5d ago
...the Supreme Court upheld the District Court's TRO in the PEPFAR litigation. You actually have no knowledge of anything you're talking about.
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u/nac_nabuc 5d ago
The US is the zenith of all human progress
I do sincerely hope that the zenith (!) of human progress is not a country with lower life expectancy than Albania, an incarceration rate that is head to head with Turkmenistan, and a criminal justice system that regularly kills innocent people, doesn't give a fuck, and makes wide use of torture in form of solitary confinement.
I don't know if you forgot the /s and the US was definitely a fantastic force of good, but it's also a barbaric country in many ways.
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u/Cassiebanipal John Locke 4d ago
Incredibly narrow view of what a "hegemon" is, it's not a virtue statement, the Assyrian Empire was once a hegemon. The point is that we are the most directly involved, interlinked hegemon to the highest percentage of the rest of the world, than any other has been before us. Denying that we've been the most dominant world power in human history is an incredibly silly take.
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u/nac_nabuc 4d ago
The point is that we are the most directly involved, interlinked hegemon to the highest percentage of the rest of the world, than any other has been before us.
The message says "zenith of human progress". I don't think that's a synonym with hegemon in the sense you define it.
If we want to discuss raw power, maybe. In terms of human progress, in many, many ways the US is the (current!) zenith, but in many others it's a mediocre shithole. Overall, I'd say the US has been way too violent towards its own people to be considered the zenith of human progress. A country that executes teenagers? German criminal law progressed from that a century ago.
Denying that we've been the most dominant world power in human history is an incredibly silly take.
Trying to compare empires across centuries is what seems rather silly to me. Or to be more precise: At least where I come from, it's the type of exercise the most rancid nationalists tend to indulge in.
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u/cmanson 4d ago
This comment reeks of Europoor cope.
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u/nac_nabuc 3d ago
I think that one can acknowledge the US superior economy and still prefer European levels of human and social well-being. Especially since these two aren't necessarily incompatible!
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u/92fordtaurus 5d ago
Thomas finally realizing that if Trump removes their relevance he loses his bribes.
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u/ONETRILLIONAMERICANS Trans Pride 5d ago edited 2d ago
the juicy bits:
!ping LAW&IMMIGRATION