Donald Trump Sack Watch

elitedam wrote:Did you read The Atlantic's version?

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/11/what-if-trump-refuses-concede/616424/

Kushner, seated at the head of the conference table, in a chair taller than all the others, was quick to strike a confrontational tone. “The federal government is not going to lead this response,” he announced. “It’s up to the states to figure out what they want to do.”

One attendee explained to Kushner that due to the finite supply of PPE, Americans were bidding against each other and driving prices up. To solve that, businesses eager to help were looking to the federal government for leadership and direction.

“Free markets will solve this,” Kushner said dismissively. “That is not the role of government.”

The same attendee explained that although he believed in open markets, he feared that the system was breaking. As evidence, he pointed to a CNN report about New York governor Andrew Cuomo and his desperate call for supplies.

“That’s the CNN bullshit,” Kushner snapped. “They lie.”

According to another attendee, Kushner then began to rail against the governor: “Cuomo didn’t pound the phones hard enough to get PPE for his state…. His people are going to suffer and that’s their problem.”

“That’s when I was like, We’re screwed,” the shocked attendee told Vanity Fair.

The group argued for invoking the Defense Production Act. “We were all saying, ‘Mr. Kushner, if you want to fix this problem for PPE and ventilators, there’s a path to do it, but you have to make a policy change,’” one person who attended the meeting recounted.

In response Kushner got “very aggressive,” the attendee recalled. “He kept invoking the markets” and told the group they “only understood how entrepreneurship works, but didn’t understand how government worked.”

CBarca wrote:Scenario #2 is very, very unlikely. For as many people as think that the US is sliding down the democracy scale (which isn't necessarily wrong), we're a long way away from having the first step of a dictatorship occur. Even Congressional Republicans are walking back the Presidents statements, as well as the press secretary.

As horrifying as his statements are, and as little respect as they show to democracy, the rule of law, and the office of the POTUS, there isn't any way that Trump manages to somehow corral the US Military and US Congress into strongarming his way into a third term.

I think he'll leave kicking and screaming (I'm assuming he will lose as that is the probable result at this point according to polling), but he'll leave.

Scenario #1 is more likely, but a pretty doomsday way of looking at a Trump win. In any case, no we are not sliding into a civil war. We are in a pretty historic time of civil unrest though, obviously. With the worst person to be in charge of it.

Let’s begin with an immigration case, one that shows very well how Barrett will undermine basic constitutional rights. Mohsin Yafai is a United States citizen whose wife, Zahoor Ahmed, is a citizen of Yemen. Yafai and Ahmed wanted to live together in the United States, so Ahmed and her children applied (using the correct legal process) for visas. The consular office denied Ahmed’s application on the grounds that she had “attempted to smuggle two children into the United States using the identities Yaqub Mohsin Yafai and Khaled Mohsin Yafai.” It’s not clear why the consular officer believed Ahmed was attempting to “smuggle” children (no evidence was provided to the family), but apparently the consular officer thought the children Ahmed had applied for visas for were not actually her children. In any case, the children, Yaqub and Khaled, had tragically drowned while the applications were pending. Yafai and Ahmed then submitted a large amount of evidence to the consulate, including “vaccination records for the deceased children, school records for the older deceased child, prenatal care and ultrasound records, publications concerning the drowning, a passport for the older deceased child, and complete family photos prior to the children’s deaths.” But the U.S. simply affirmed its existing visa denial, meaning that Mohsin (again, a citizen of this country) could not live here with his wife, Zahoor. The two took the matter to the courts.

Here is where Amy Coney Barrett comes in: she threw out the couple’s case. Writing for two judges on a three-judge panel, she said that it didn’t matter whether the accusation was based on no evidence. It didn’t matter whether Zahood Ahmed provided giant piles of counterevidence showing that the visa denial had been a mistake, and that she had fulfilled the legal requirements to come to the U.S. to live with her husband. It didn’t matter if the officer had just made the smuggling stuff up out of whole cloth. Barrett wrote that because the consular officer had cited a statute (the anti-smuggling one) in denying the visa, the decision was “facially legitimate and bona fide,” and therefore would not be reviewed by the court.

The third judge on the panel, Kenneth Ripple (a Reagan appointee), strongly dissented from Barrett’s judgment. The decision, Ripple said, showed “no respect for the Constitution or Congress” because it meant that the government could simply arbitrarily deny visas to people fully legally qualified for them, who had gone through the correct process and done everything right. And the government could do this based on vague accusations for which it provided no support, and without even pretending to review the applicant’s own evidence disproving the accusation. Under such a standard the law would become (even more of) an utterly meaningless fiction, because one’s rights could simply be trampled upon without it being possible to do anything about it. Ripple wrote:

Here, in a case where the Government asserts no national security interest and where the important familial rights of an American citizen are at stake, the Government asks us to rubber stamp the consular decision on the basis of a conclusory [a legal term meaning “stated as a fact without being proven”] assertion. Although Congress has tasked us, by statute, with the responsibility to prevent arbitrary and capricious government action, we look the other way despite the significant record evidence to refute the Government’s assertion and no suggestion that the consular officer even considered it. Congress did not, and would not, sanction consular officers’ making visa decisions in a purely arbitrary way that affects the basic rights of American citizens. We have the responsibility to ensure that such decisions, when born of laziness, prejudice or bureaucratic inertia, do not stand.

Barrett did not have to do this. Even the anti-immigration Center for Immigration Studies acknowledges that this area of law is “nowhere near settled.” Barrett made a choice to empower the government and disempower immigrants (and, remember, immigrants who follow the law to the letter). Ripple wasn’t the only one of Barrett’s fellow appellate judges to take her to task. In a dissent to an opinion denying Yafai and Ahmed a rehearing, judge Diane Wood (joined by Ilana Rovner and David Hamilton) called the ruling “a dangerous abdication of judicial responsibility” and “a deeply troubling extension of current law” because it “insulat[es the officer] from any shred of accountability.” Wood wrote:

At its root, due process requires that the person subject to a governmental action be given enough information to be able to know what the accusation against her is. A regime in which the consular official can just say“no,” and the US citizen spouse must guess both about the accusation that supposedly supported that decision and—critically—what facts lay behind the “no,” is not worthy of this country.

Judges are usually collegial types, so for one of them to call a decision “unworthy of this country” is a strong statement indeed. But it was necessary, because the implications of Barrett’s majority opinion so seriously threaten people’s basic legal protections.

sportsczy wrote:My problem with Barrett is that she's a bible pusher...  that's the big no-no for me.  She seems a bit extreme about religion.

I think the separation of Church and State is fundamental in the US. We need leaders that respect that.

Blue wrote:Nathan Robinson is supposed to be one of the intellect on the left, he embodies what is wrong with the left. They simply do not understand power and the motivation of their rivals.

Point blank the reason Barrett is being nominated is because her record of favoring corporation and the powerful. It is the reason why many of the elites are lobbying to get her on the court, even those who have objected to Trump.

Everything else is smoke and mirrors, it is to con the ordinary man and women from what is really going on. Feeding the culture war it is the reason why Trump and billionaires can pay $750 in taxes, which by the way was tax policies was set under Obama. It is also the reason why thr rich have gotten richer during a global pandemic; while unemployment rose to double digits, and destroyed many small businesses.

Myesyats wrote:doesnt have to kill him, just weaken him enough so that he can't continue

Art Morte wrote:I'm hearing that Biden used a Huawei-manufactured 5G device to give Trump covid at the debate.