Slate writes about a possible signal that the USSC is going to drop some heavy artillery shells on America by the end of this court term on June 30. In recent decades, the USSC has issued major decisions during the last few days of June so that the justices can get out of town and avoid criticism for the garbage the court often degrades the US with these days. Gutless radical authoritarian Republicans in particular are keen to avoid criticism. The like to think they their keep dignity unruffled by avoiding public protests from unwashed scum.
How Republican justices see
us rabble
In a Q&A interview, Slate speculates that we might be in for some very unpleasant decisions in coming days:
The Supreme Court Is Going Off the Rails.It’s About to Get So Much Worse.Q: What makes this term different?A: It’s different in two ways that are going to sound like they’re inconsistent, although I think they’re coming from the same place. The first way is: The court’s actually doing less. We’re on track for maybe 58 or 59 merits decisions by the time we go home for the summer and go start crying again. Which will be the fifth term in a row that the court doesn’t get to 60 cases. And it hadn’t been below 60, before that, since 1864. And so there’s a whole universe of cases that has completely disappeared from the Supreme Court’s docket.
Yet a remarkably high percentage of what’s left are major cases. You’ve got these major administrative law cases, abortion cases, and social media cases. You’ve got two major gun cases. Oh, by the way, there are those two small Jan. 6 cases, including one about whether former President Trump can be criminally prosecuted. So depending on how you count, that’s about 20 major decisions that the court has to get through between now and the end of June. And they’re doing three or four a week right now.
Q: What in the world of conceivable interventions could John Roberts, the institutionalist, take?
A: Roberts the institutionalist is missing in action and has been for some time. The chief’s questions from the bench in some of these high-profile cases have been really trollish and hacky. In the Fisher case about the Jan. 6 prosecutions, he sounded like Thomas and Alito. In the homelessness case, he sounded so horribly cruel and insensitive.
I worry that the “moderate” John Roberts who appeared intermittently from 2012 through maybe 2023 is gone. I feel like he’s just done trying to police his colleagues and he’s doing this YOLO court thing that we had previously assumed he was embarrassed by.
Strap on your seat belts folks. The ride ahead might get a bit bumpy.
__________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
The jurors in DJT’s criminal fraudulent business records prosecution are getting instructions from the judge. Presumably the jury will start to deliberate today. Two points. One relates to the complexity of the law in this particular case. Trump is charged with falsifying records to cover up a second crime — the violation of a state election law that forbids a conspiracy to aid any election by “unlawful means.” This will probably be the hardest part for judge Merchan to explain to the jury. The outcome of this lawsuit turns on this point.
Second, despite endless pundit and partisan blowhard predictions there is no way to predict how or if the jury will decide. A single MAGA pro-Trumper can hang the jury and cause a mistrial, regardless of how solid the evidence is. In that case, the jury could not decide. Then if there is no MAGA juror, there is the matter of getting all 12 non-MAGA jurors to accept the legal basis for at least one of the alleged 34 felonies in this case for a conviction. I have no idea how this will turn out.
__________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
The NYT is reporting that a senior Israeli official national security adviser, Tzachi Hanegbi, said he expected Israel’s military operations in Gaza to continue through at least the end of the year. That ought to be long enough to pulverize most infrastructure there into dust. The people? That is an ugly question.
An Israeli pulverizer on the Gaza border
The NYT also reports:The bombs used in the Israeli strike that killed dozens of Palestinians in a camp for displaced people near Rafah on Sunday were made in the United States, according to weapons experts and visual evidence reviewed by The New York Times.
Munition debris filmed at the strike location the next day was remnants from a GBU-39, a bomb designed and manufactured in the United States.
1:32 minute video: This little thing is feisty
No comments:
Post a Comment