News: Republican liars in congress; The Union splinters before our eyes; Bad hearing leads the Christian Taliban astray

The Republican Party no longer bothers to try to hide the corrupt, authoritarian moral rot that has consumed it. The New Republic reports about a new example related to rotted Republicans desperately wanting Hunter Biden tossed in the slammer:

New Transcript Blows Up James Comer’s Entire Hunter Biden Argument

A new transcript from a key Hunter Biden witness undercuts many of the claims Republicans are making about “Biden corruption”

The House Oversight Committee on Tuesday released the transcript of the testimony of Kevin Morris, a friend of and attorney for Hunter Biden, and his statements undercut everything Republicans have said about the embattled first son.

Morris is a high-powered entertainment lawyer in Los Angeles who met Hunter at a 2019 presidential fundraiser for his father, Joe Biden. Morris has loaned Hunter nearly $5 million in the years since. He testified about his relationship with Hunter in a closed-door committee hearing last week.

Initially, Oversight Chair James Comer just released a list of paraphrased highlights from Morris’s testimony. Comer claimed that Morris informally loaned Hunter the money and does not expect to be repaid until after the 2024 election—or possibly ever. But the transcript shows this couldn’t be further from the truth.

In reality, Morris never once mentioned the possibility of forgiving the loans. Instead, he said he has a “100 percent” expectation that Hunter will repay him, and repeatedly states that he and Hunter have a series of promissory notes agreeing the younger Biden will pay back the money.

What’s more, Morris testified that there is a “balloon” on the loans set for after the election. This means that Hunter is currently making low or even no payments but will start making lump repayments in 2025.  

Morris also repeatedly stated that Hunter never asked him for the money. Morris would voluntarily send money through his lawyers to Hunter’s, but the younger Biden did not ask him to do so. Morris only gave Hunter cash directly once, when he bought two paintings on their second meeting in 2019. And again, he wants the rest of the money he loaned paid back with interest.  

Morris’s lawyer accused Comer last week of grossly misrepresenting what Morris actually said during his deposition. [Morris attorney] Bryan Sullivan slammed Comer’s “cherry‐picked, out of context and totally misleading” press release and demanded the representative release the full transcript.

Even before Morris testified, his lawyer asked the Oversight Committee to be fair about the testimony and not distort what he says by cherry picking comments or mischaracterizing what he says. As TNR makes clear, the Oversight Committee ignored that and mischaracterized the Morris testimony by cherry picking comments and flat out lying. This is the same reason that Hunter Biden keeps asking for a public hearing and no Republican distortions or lies about what he says. Morally rotted House Republican authoritarians wanted Morris’ and Hunter’s testimony behind closed doors so they could lie about what was said and not get called on it.

Last week before the transcript was made public, a House Republican spokesman said “the transcript will affirm Chairman Comer’s readout of the interview with Kevin Morris .... the Committee intends to release the transcript soon but we do not have it from the court reporter at this time.”

What is baffling is why the Oversight Committee didn’t just get rid of any Morris transcript and destroy recording of the testimony. House Republican liars could simply claim it was a clerical error or something. Apparently the Republicans still have not got around to smothering this little bit of transparency in government. That’s probably now on Republican the list of things in government to break (or “fix” as they would call it).

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Texas radical right authoritarian governor Gregg Abbott released a 1 page statement that edges toward a declaration of succession from the Union. He says that he intends to ignore a recent USSC ruling that says federal border agents have the power to control border areas the Texas military (National Guard) has invaded and now controls. Abbott’s declaration is blunt and clear:

The failure of the Biden Administration to fulfill the duties imposed by Article IV, § 4 has triggered Article I, § 10, Clause 3, which reserves to this State the right of self-defense. For these reasons, I have already declared an invasion under Article I, § 10, Clause 3 to invoke Texas’s constitutional authority to defend and protect itself. That authority is the supreme law of the land and supersedes any federal statutes to the contrary. The Texas National Guard, the Texas Department of Public Safety, and other Texas personnel are acting on that authority, as well as state law, to secure the Texas border.

 

Once red states ignore USSC decisions, the rule of law has collapsed. That opens a path to civil war or a peaceful disintegration of the Union. Things are getting real interesting. In a scary sort of way. 

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The Atlanta Black Star reports:

Colorado Pastor Says He May Have ‘Misheard’ God’s Instructions 

After Being Accused In $3.2M Cryptocurrency Scheme

An online pastor in Colorado who claims he was following God’s guidance faces charges of civil fraud in the alleged sale of $3.2 million in bogus cryptocurrency that state regulators say is “practically worthless” to those who fell for the scheme.

A legal complaint filed last week by Colorado’s securities commissioner accuses Eligio Regalado and his wife, Kaitlyn Regalado, of scamming Denver’s Christian community with counterfeit digital currency that had been promoted under the trendy moniker INDXcoin.

Confronted with the charges, Eligio Regalado released a video statement saying that he might have “misheard” the divine instructions, leading to violations of Colorado’s anti-fraud, licensing and registration laws.  

“The Lord said: I want you to build this,” Regalado claimed. “We took God at his word and sold a cryptocurrency with no clear exit.”

In a statement, state regulators claim the digital currency was marketed as a “low-risk, high-profit investment” when, in reality, the assets were undeclared and thus ineligible to be converted to cash through the typical means of a digital platform or trading exchange, rendering the coin “practically useless.”

One peanut gallery expert insightfully commented, I guess it was god’s accent. He just misunderstood. In response to that, another peanut responded, God sounds like my tech guy from Mumbai?

Other concerned peanuts commented, (i) This is why you always get it in writing!, (ii) God was using Google voice and it was mistranslation! and (iii) Everyone knows God is a notorious mumbler. He misheard “rot in jail” as “buy a jet.”

Various bits: MOAB discovered; Germain’s thoughts on the election; Building neuron pathways

The regular news sucks today. It’s repetitive to the point of nausea. The MSM is awash in clickbait headlines leading to mostly clueless blowhard opinionators spewing empty blither about not much of anything, while the authoritarian radical right media remains as crappy and vicious as it has been for many years now. So, other things seem worth a bit of time.

Techspot reports about the finding of a gigantic data breach dubbed MOAB, the Mother Of All Breaches:

Researchers have discovered a database composed of stolen user credentials and personally identifiable information so large that it's been dubbed the mother of all breaches (MOAB). The dataset contains no fewer than 26 billion records, making up 12TB of data from sites including Twitter/X, LinkedIn, Weibo, Tencent, and more.

As is the case with similar databases, most of the data in MOAB has been gathered together from previous leaks over the years. But the sheer number of records it contains suggests there will be new information that has never before appeared online. 

"Threat actors could leverage the aggregated data for a wide range of attacks, including identity theft, sophisticated phishing schemes, targeted cyberattacks, and unauthorized access to personal and sensitive accounts," the researchers write.

Most of the top leakers

Corporate motto: We take your information privacy 

very seriously! 

(Who is AdultFriendFinder??

What is MyFitnessPal??)

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After the unsurprising, completely expected NH primary result, it remains as clear as it has been for months and months, that the election will be Biden vs. DJT. OK, maybe a bit clearer. 

Exit polls indicate that most Repub DJT voters in NH think he would be just fine even if convicted of felonies. So much for anyone ever complaining about an unqualified presidential candidate, despite dementia, felonies, confusing Haley for Pelosi, corruption, or fornication with an illegal hush money payoff. For about half the country, qualification for Republican president is a non-issue as long as the candidate passes two tests, (1) foggy mirror (still breathing*) and (2) whatever the Constitution says (not much).

* I'm not dead yet! 

Despite (i) the corruption and lunatic authoritarianism that has engulfed most of America's political right, and (ii) Biden’s crappy public opinion polling and even worse messaging, I’m starting to sense a shift in general sentiment in favor of Biden. It’s apparently not all the GOP lies and moral rot that seems to bug people the most. It’s something else. Several news items over the last couple of weeks hinted to me that there is a significant ongoing turn by the American public against GOP authoritarianism and maybe another thing(s) I cannot see in the data. 

Right now, and subject to changing events, it feels like Biden is probably going to win this thing (~55% chance) despite himself. Maybe this feeling will pass, but something feels different at the moment. There’s still a lot of time left for either candidate to really self-destruct or be destructed by an October surprise! 

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Researchers have found that neurons are likely to self-organize into neural pathways instead of forming pathways dictated by genes. I posted here before about non-genetic phenomena that hints at self-organization of neurons. In a completely non-biological example, a post discussed how piles of tiny silver wires covered by a very thin layer of polymer could form electrical pathways that mimicked learning in a process called neuromorphic learning, a purely non-biological phenomenon. Now, a similar self-organizing behavior was found to occur in animal models of neural pathway formation. The authors postulate that the same process could be happening in humans. 

The authors write in Nature Physics:

Heavy-tailed neuronal connectivity arises from Hebbian self-organization

The connections in networks of neurons are heavy-tailed, with a small number of neurons connected much more strongly than the vast majority of pairs. However, it remains unclear whether this heavy-tailed connectivity emerges from simple underlying mechanisms. Here we propose a minimal model of synaptic self-organization: connections are pruned at random, and the synaptic strength rearranges under a mixture of preferential and random dynamics. .... Extending our model to include neuronal activity and Hebbian plasticity, we find that clustering in the network also emerges naturally. We confirm these predictions in the connectomes of several animals, suggesting that heavy-tailed and clustered connectivity may arise from general principles of network self-organization rather than mechanisms specific to individual species or systems.

Science Daily discusses this in layman terms:

To understand how neurons form connections to one another, they developed a model based on Hebbian dynamics, a term coined by Canadian psychologist Donald Hebb in 1949 that essentially says, “neurons that fire together, wire together.” This means the more two neurons activate together, the stronger their connection becomes. [just like what happens in non-biological neuromorphic learning]

Across the board, the researchers found these Hebbian dynamics produce “heavy-tailed” connection strengths just like they saw in the different organisms. The results indicate that this kind of organization arises from general principles of networking, rather than something specific to the biology of fruit flies, mice, or worms.

The model also provided an unexpected explanation for another networking phenomenon called clustering, which describes the tendency of cells to link with other cells via connections they share. A good example of clustering occurs in social situations. If one person introduces a friend to a third person, those two people are more likely to become friends with them than if they met separately.

“These are mechanisms that everybody agrees are fundamentally going to happen in neuroscience,” Holmes said. “But we see here that if you treat the data carefully and quantitatively, it can give rise to all of these different effects in clustering and distributions, and then you see those things across all of these different organisms.”

As Palmer pointed out, though, biology doesn't always fit a neat and tidy explanation, and there is still plenty of randomness and noise involved in brain circuits. Neurons sometimes disconnect and rewire with each other -- weak connections are pruned, and stronger connections can be formed elsewhere. 

[unlike what happens non-biological neuromorphic learning] This randomness provides a check on the kind of Hebbian organization the researchers found in this data, without which strong connections would grow to dominate the network.

The researchers tweaked their model to account for randomness, which improved its accuracy.

“Without that noise aspect, the model would fail,” Lynn said. “It wouldn't produce anything that worked, which was surprising to us. It turns out you actually need to balance the Hebbian snowball effect with the randomness to get everything to look like real brains.” 

In this data, one can start to glimpse the workings behind the stunning complexity and diversity of brain wiring, thinking and behavior. Our neurons are self-associating (Hebbian behavior) and self-disassociating (connection pruning or “anti-Hebbian” behavior) all the time. That phenomenology winds up being reflecting in thinking and behavior. 

News bits: Property rights over human life; Never-Trumpers losing hope; Democracy unravelling

Vice reports about legislation pending in the Kentucky legislature:

In Kentucky, politicians are preparing to vote on a law that would authorize the use of force against unhoused people who are found to be camping on private property.

The bill, known as the “Safer Kentucky Act,” or HB5, would target homelessness, drug possession and mental illness by drastically increasing criminal penalties for a range of offenses.

In addition, it says that “deadly physical force” is justifiable if a defendant believes that someone is trying to “dispossess” them of their property or is attempting a robbery or committing arson, language that could also have ramifications for tenants overstaying their lease.

The bill contains many hallmarks of a template produced by the Cicero Institute, a libertarian think tank founded by Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, which has been drafting and lobbying for anti-homeless bills across the country. Cicero’s model legislation criminalizes public camping and restricts funding for evidence-based permanent supportive housing.  

Yet no other bill modeled after Cicero’s template sanctions the use of force against homeless people, as the Kentucky bill does, a provision advocates have called alarming.

Two points are important:

• Here, property rights are elevated over human life. The ambiguity of someone trying to “dispossess” someone else of property allows a property owner to shoot someone dead, claiming he was being dispossessed of property. It’s a lot like a stand your ground law that allows someone to murder someone else and justify it by claiming they were standing their ground against a threat from the dead person. I was under the impression that lethal force was justified only in defense of one’s own life or the life of another(s). Apparently that was a mistaken belief. 

• This is another example of (1) the power a hateful authoritarian billionaire and radical right politicians have to chip away at a key aspect of democracy, namely civil liberties, and (2) authoritarianism being cloaked in morally rotted, radical political ideology, libertarianism in this case. Note the antipathy of authoritarianism to evidence-based policy. That trait is common or dominant among radical right authoritarians who hate government. 

Q: Is this pro-democracy compassionate conservatism, pro-democracy pull yourself up by your bootstraps conservatism, old fashioned anti-democratic authoritarianism, or something else?

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The Hill reports about pessimism among Republican Trump opponents as he is on the verge of being the Republican nominee for a 3rd time:

The Memo: ‘Never Trumpers’ are close to giving up hope

“It’s his party, plain and simple. I’m not a fan of his, but it’s a MAGA party now, and he’s the leader of that,” said former Rep. Joe Walsh (R-Ill.), who mounted a long-shot primary challenge to Trump in 2020 and left the GOP soon afterward.

“This party cannot be reformed, cannot be fixed. It’s on the track it’s on,” Walsh acknowledged. “I don’t see, in my lifetime, it getting off this track.”

Susan Del Percio, a strategist who has remained a Republican despite her fervent opposition to Trump, struck a broadly similar note — though she believes the party could move back onto a more traditional footing once Trump eventually leaves the political stage.

“The party needs to burn to the ground and rebuild itself,” Del Percio said. “It’s not going to happen in two years.”

Q: Who is morel likely to be right, Walsh who says the GOP is broken and not fixable any time soon, or Del Percio, who says the GOP can come back after demolition and reconstruction after Trump leaves the stage?

I think Walsh is probably closer to the mark than Del Percio because the monster has outgrown Trump and now has a life of its own.

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The AP reports on a USSC decision in a border dispute between Texas and the United States:

Supreme Court allows federal agents to cut razor wire 

Texas installed on US-Mexico border

A divided Supreme Court on Monday allowed Border Patrol agents to resume cutting for now razor wire that Texas installed along a stretch of the U.S.-Mexico border that is at the center of an escalating standoff between the Biden administration and the state over immigration enforcement.

The 5-4 vote clears the way for Border Patrol agents to cut or clear out concertina wire that Texas has put along the banks of the Rio Grande to deter migrants from entering the U.S. illegally. Some migrants have been injured by the sharp wire and the Justice Department has argued the barrier impedes the U.S. government’s ability to patrol the border, including coming to the aid of migrants in need of help.

None of the justices provided any explanation for their vote. The one-page order is a victory for the Biden administration while the lawsuit over the wire continues.

The vote was 5-4, meaning four USSC judges wanted to let Texas establish and enforce it’s own international border law. That is an example of American democracy falling apart. The fact that a lawsuit about this is still to be decided indicates that the USSC could still let Texas do whatever it wants on its border with Mexico. 

Two points merit a mention:

• The border situation with illegal immigrants and asylum seekers needs to be fixed or it could be one of the factors that cost the Dems the 2024 presidential election and maybe congress too. Then all of us could lose our democracy. 

• Fixing the border situation seems to be unlikely, with opposition coming from both the radical right and progressives. House Speaker Johnson has problems with a proposed Senate fix. So does Trump. By keeping the border situation unresolved by a bipartisan compromise, the issue appears to significantly favor the radical right authoritarian political movement.

News bits: A democracy threat analysis; Georgia court case update

A NYT opinion by two legal scholars points to the most likely path that radical right authoritarian state legislatures can subvert the 2024 election. They write (not paywalled off):

After the assault on the nation’s Capitol three years ago, we worked through every strategy we could imagine for subverting the popular will by manipulating the law. What we found surprised us. We determined that the most commonly discussed strategies — such as a state legislature picking a new slate of electors to the Electoral College — wouldn’t work because of impediments built into the Constitution. We also concluded that the most blatantly extreme strategies, such as a state canceling its election and selecting its electors directly, are politically unlikely.

The scenario we see as the most alarming was made possible by the Supreme Court itself. In a 2020 decision, the court held, in our reading, that state legislatures have the power to direct electors on how to cast their electoral votes. And this opens the door to what we think is the most dangerous strategy: that a legislature would pass a law that directs electors to vote for the candidate the legislature picks.

Imagine the election results in a state are close. Charges of fraud cloud a recount. Leaders in the state legislature challenge the presumptive result. In response to those challenges, the legislature votes to direct their electors to cast their ballots for the candidate who presumptively lost but whom the legislature prefers. Any elector voting contrary to the legislature’s rule would be removed and replaced with an elector who complied.

The question now is whether there is any way to close that loophole before a stolen election slides through.

In my very humble opinion, for the foreseeable future there is no way to close that loophole before a stolen election slides through. The 2024 election would very well be stolen by Trump and his corrupt authoritarian enablers.

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Some news sources are reporting that the criminal lawsuit against DJT is in serious trouble due to misconduct by chief prosecutor Fani Willis. Willis added prosecutor Nathan Wade to her team, but dirt diggers somehow found out that Willis and Wade were having an affair. As you an imagine, Michael Roman, the Trump co-defendant who discovered the affair, immediately filed a motion to remove Willis and Wade from the case due to alleged prosecutor misconduct. The authoritarian radical right dark free speech machine fired up in self-righteous moral outrage claiming witch hunt and etc. Legal experts at a group called Just Security published an analysis of the situation based on the limited public information available so far. JS writes:

Why Fani Willis Is Not Disqualified Under Georgia Law

 

Based on what is known so far, it represents poor judgment—especially in a case of this magnitude, even if a prosecutor’s private life is generally none of the public’s business. Willis has already said publicly that she is “flawed” and “imperfect” in her public remarks at Bethel AME Church following the allegations. But whether there were personal failings is not the operative legal test for whether Willis or Wade should be disqualified from the case, and accordingly that question is not the focus of this essay.

The key point is that regardless of whether the factual circumstances involving Willis and Wade give rise to separate ethical concerns with respect to his hiring, such questions do not affect the propriety of the prosecution against [Trump co-defendant Michael] Roman and his co-defendants.

As a matter of both common sense and Georgia law, a prosecutor is disqualified from a case due to a “conflict of interest” only when the prosecutor’s conflicting loyalties could prejudice the defendant leading, for example, to an improper conviction. None of the factual allegations made in the Roman motion have a basis in law for the idea that such prejudice could exist here – as it might where a law enforcement agent is involved with a witness, or a defense lawyer with a judge.

When this story first broke, it seemed as if this revelation could derail the entire criminal lawsuit against DJT and his co-defendants. The Just Security analysis suggests it would be best if Wade removed himself from the prosecution, but it does not yet look like this will get Trump off the hook for his crimes. Nonetheless, we can count on DJT howling in faux sanctimonious moral outrage about the horrors of prosecutorial misconduct. 

Just Security is right to say that Willis showed poor judgment on a case this important. She had to know that her private life would be looked at by professional dirt diggers and the affair found and exposed. Unbelievable stupidity by Willis. Time will tell if this turns out to be a way that Trump once again gets to weasel out of accountability for his crimes. If it turns out that Willis is hiding more than just an affair, the entire lawsuit could crash and burn.

Make your best guess........

 Since it is apparent that Donald Trump will be the next President, speculation has begun as to who will be his VP.

Among the names most commonly floated among pundits and press right now are: Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio), South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, former Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), former South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster, Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson, North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy and Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.).

https://www.forbes.com/sites/saradorn/2024/01/21/here-are-trumps-most-likely-running-mate-picks/?sh=26bb036b6501

OR maybe.......

Trump Jr. says Tucker Carlson ‘certainly’ a VP contender

https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4416145-trump-jr-tucker-carlson-vp-contender/

OR could it be?

Donald Trump Jr and Ivanka Trump are among Republican voters’ top picks for the GOP presidential nomination in 2024, according to a new poll.

(The poll is four years old, but would anyone be surprised if the numbers are close to the same?)

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jan/04/donald-trump-jr-ivanka-trump-2024-presidential-election-poll

So.............

AND give us your best suggestion of who Trump should pick for VP, or who you think he will pick.

About a possible USSC power grab: Autocracy vs. plutocracy-theocracy?

The Nation reports its analysis of the likely flow of power if the USSC decide to gut the power of federal agencies. Like I’ve commented before, the situation at present seems to be one where the USSC takes power to build and defend a corrupt authoritarian single-party state vs the autocrat Trump who is out for power for himself. The two seem to me to be on a collision course. TN writes:

We Are Witnessing the Biggest Judicial Power Grab Since 1803

During a major hearing this week, the conservative justices made clear they’re about to gut the federal government’s power to regulate—and take that power for themselves

The Supreme Court heard two consolidated cases yesterday that could reshape the legal landscape and, with them, the country. The cases take on Chevron deference—the idea that courts should defer to executive agencies when applying regulations passed by Congress. They’re the most important cases about democracy on the court’s docket this year, and I say that knowing full well that the court is also set to decide whether a raving, orange criminal can run again for president, and whether former presidents are immune from prosecution for their crimes in the first place.

That’s because what conservatives [sigh, they are not conservatives, they are authoritarians] on the court are quietly trying to do is pull off the biggest judicial power grab since 1803, when it elevated itself to be the final arbiter of the Constitution in Marbury v. Madison. They’re trying to place their unelected, unaccountable policy preferences ahead of the laws made by the elected members of Congress or rules instituted by the president. If conservatives get their way, elections won’t really matter, because courts will be able to limit the scope of congressional regulation and the ability of presidents to enforce those regulations effectively. And the dumbest justice of all, alleged attempted rapist Brett Kavanaugh, basically said so during oral arguments.

I’m contractually obligated to tell you that the cases were technically about fees that fisheries are required to pay to federal observers. But all the justices talked about was Chevron deference. Only Justice Sonia Sotomayor even bothered to mention the fish, three hours and 20 minutes into a three-and-a-half-hour hearing. 

Justice Katenji Brown Jackson also brought up what I think should be the dispositive point: She said that getting rid of Chevron deference was “impractical and chaotic.” It’s hard to emphasize this point enough. Without Chevron deference, every single agency rule is likely to be challenged in court by some disaffected party. And with no standard other than what judges think the policy should be, we’re going to end up with wildly different rulings about the same regulation, depending on which lower court (and especially which Trump judge) hears the case.  

Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar and Justice Elena Kagan brought up the thousands and thousands of cases (over 17,000, according to briefs submitted to the court) that have been decided on Chevron grounds over the past 40 years. Potentially all of them could be up for re-argument should the court overrule Chevron. The conservative super lawyer Paul Clement, who was arguing against Chevron deference, promised this wouldn’t happen, but his reasoning was hypocritically thin. He said courts would still respect the precedents that happened under Chevron, even as he was arguing out of the other side of his mouth that the court should ignore the very precedent set by Chevron. His argument reduces to: “The leopards we unleash will only eat the right faces.”

TN explains that the term “Chevron deference” comes from a 1984 case, Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Counsel. There, a provision of the Clean Air Act required manufacturing plants to get permits before increasing toxic emissions. The Environmental Protection Agency made a rule, pursuant to the Clean Air Act, that allowed some of these industrial plants to increase emissions in certain cases without a permit, and environmental groups sued. The USSC held that the EPA had the authority to make the rule and that the courts should “defer” to the judgment of executive agencies when acts of Congress are ambiguous or plausibly allow the agencies to make additional regulations.

As we all know by now, thanks to DP (me) harping on it so often, most of what Congress writes and passes is incoherent, ambiguous blither. With sloppy laws being common, Chevron deference amounted to a massive shift in power to federal agencies with professional and expert bureaucrats trying to figure out what Congress actually wanted and how to implement whatever it was based on their expertise. Congress does not have such expertise. And now that Congress is gridlocked and incapable of functioning, one can expect matters to worsen.** It is dominated by idiot, self-serving politicians concerned mostly with elections and re-elections.

** TN summarized it nicely like this: 

What [justice Neil Gorsuch] understands is that Chevron deference is the key to running a modern administrative state. Congress is going to pass only so many laws (even fewer in times of government gridlock). Those laws are going to have ambiguity and gaps, because of both the political deals that are made to get the laws passed and Congress’s general incompetence. Chevron deference allows the executive agencies to fill in those gaps. Without it, only the courts can do that—and in many cases, those gaps won’t get filled at all. Without executive agencies with robust powers, it will be easier for companies to pollute the air and water, billionaires to cheat on their taxes, tech bros to monopolize markets, and mass shooters to buy restricted guns and ammunition.

That’s the world, and the power, Neil Gorsuch wants. .... That’s not a democracy, that’s a juristocracy, where our votes are suggestions until the judicial machine tells us what laws we’re allowed to have.

Kleptocratic autocracy vs kleptocratic plutocracy-theocracy

As best I can tell, if the USSC guts Chevron deference, the court will have to shoot down Trump’s run at dictatorship. In that case, kleptocratic plutocracy-theocracy will be ascendant and power will probably consolidate itself in that political framework. If Chevron is left intact, I suspect the USSC will probably let Trump off the hook and allow him to form a kleptocratic dictatorship. I think the former is more likely than the latter, but I just don’t have a feel of the odds for either outcome. 

Obviously that is just my speculation. This could play out lots of different ways. Specifically all the elites could come to a power-sharing agreement in an outcome that is partly autocratic, partly plutocratic, partly Christian theocratic and fully kleptocratic. All parties involved will vehemently deny my speculations and say they are just humble, honest servants only doing what is constitutional and good for America, the American people and the whole world. So, don’t look to the elites to be even a little bit honest about any of this.