US Politics December 2018: ~very legal and very cool~

Did I phrase it wrong? lol

idk I guess it was ambiguous to me, nm

that's... a pleasant surprise?

In the most positive sense of the utterance, I must ask...WTF?

Thomas wrote a dissent for the three conservatives, saying the court isn't doing its job.

"What explains the Court's refusal to do its job here?" Thomas wrote.

"I suspect it has something to do with the fact that some respondents in these cases are named Planned Parenthood," he wrote.

I suspect it does.

I suspect Roberts and Kavanaugh either didn't think this case merited the controversy it would engender, or thought there was some more important legal principle at stake (standing, I would guess?)

my theory is that Kavanaugh is a clueless entitled dudebro pig but still has some sort of moral pulse (maybe cuz he got shook so bad in the hearings, just theory), whereas Thomas is genuinely evil. but as per Outic, Roberts & Kavanaugh may have had some other nefarious agenda here.

maybe Kavanaugh got advice from his frat buddies

idk if its nefarious necessarily it's just that the law and legal reasoning is often different from political reasoning, because if you, say, blatantly override precedent or established principles all the time, then the entire legal system completely falls apart, and if there's anything the three branches of federal government have in common it's that they all tend to jealously guard their perogatives/power.

i haven't been following anti-abortion legal strategy too much, but i assume there are many, various ways they are trying to attack?

my first thought when reading that kavanaugh sided with the liberals (and roberts) is that he's waiting for a more powerful attack to come before the SC. that way he can vote to make it harder to get an abortion while having a "pro-choice" vote in his past, giving him a veneer of ...what is it...oh yeah, a judicial temperament

In February, the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a lower court ruling that Kansas was wrong to to end Planned Parenthood’s Medicaid funding, writing that states can’t cut off funding for reasons “unrelated to the provider’s competence and the quality of the healthcare it provides.” Four other appeals courts have ruled that Medicaid patients have the right to access the provider of their choice.

But the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals has held that states do have the right to terminate a provider’s Medicaid contract and that residents have no right to challenge that decision.

The Supreme Court's action Monday allows the split decisions to stand in different federal circuits. Thomas, in his dissent, wrote that the Supreme Court should have taken the cases to resolve conflicting findings from lower courts.

is it wrong that I am kinda hoping for an economic crash in terms of how that will affect Trump's political fortunes and global GHG emissions

― Οὖτις, Monday, December 10, 2018 8:52 AM

I'm going with yes. the pain from an economic crash falls on the just and the unjust alike, and disproportionately harms the powerless.

so not exactly win-win

xp

hate to quote myself online but

I have organized & supported & attended a lot of direct actions over the years, and not once have I seen a target come out to an assembled crowd and happily acquiesce to a clear demand like this. Something remarkable is happening. https://t.co/dFuynhlVUL #GreenNewDeal

— justin jacoby smith (@hoosteen) December 10, 2018

the pain from an economic crash falls on the just and the unjust alike

'08 taught us this is simply not the case.

he pain from an economic crash falls on the just and the unjust alike, and disproportionately harms the powerless.

Yeah, I'm leery of burn-it-all-down rhetoric from any side because it's pretty much always the most vulnerable people who get hurt the worst in any upheaval.

'08 taught us this is simply not the case.

― resident hack (Simon H.), Monday, December 10, 2018

love you boo but i'm not even going to pretend to hear this, esp given your revision of the quoted sentence

hoos that is AWESOME

^OTM

that is awesome hoos

HOOS streets

awesome!

from his roots driving cab on staten island to the corridors of power...the american dream

lol

For that we have to go back to the late 2017 federal disclosure filings that showed Ayers, a 36 year old man with no apparent inherited wealth, was worth between $12.2 and $54.8 million.

Most or all of that money appears to come out of Ayers’ work as a campaign operative in the increasingly lucrative world of dark money politics. There are lots of ways a guy like Ayers gets that money. But the central one is TV advertising. If you control the ad budgets, you get a large slice of the cash for yourself, usually by owning or having a stake in the company that the campaign has place the ads. Reporting from Axios and other outlets last night says that Ayers is planning to run the main pro-Trump outside group America First, which he helped found last year. It seems like it was that gig that made Ayers refuse to give Trump more than a three month commitment.

Put it all together and you see that Ayers is a guy who has already accumulated a staggering personal fortune on political work. Given the inherently lucrative nature of that kind of work and the nose-bleed high tolerance for corruption in the Trump world, running the big unregulated money stream for the President’s reelection campaign is an opportunity to rake in an almost unimaginable amount of money. In perfectly Trumpian fashion, Ayers appears to have stiffed his boss in a richly humiliating way so that he could cash in big time on his name and political movement.

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/fast-times-in-user-land

campaign finance reform NOW

. . . why does that post never use his first name lol

so Judge Ayers looks like young Justice Kavanaugh

how nice would it be if free-market campaign ads were BANNED and instead there was just a website where each candidate would be allowed to post TWO (2) one-minute long videos + a 3-page PDF laying out their case? that's it. no racist robo-calls, no multi-million ad buys by outsider groups, no targeted glossy mailers, no letters that look like parking ticket violations that are actually from ted cruz. just one fucking website

Why do u hate free speech

because i only have $134 worth of it

*checks bank account*

$92

Alternately, for every person in politics above a certain wealth threshold, perhaps we could publicly distribute the directions to and floorplans of their homes, along with instructions for overriding security systems and information which kinds of sausages Dobermans find the most delicious.

Republican campaigns are a huge grift, eating their own, overcharging their own donors for services. Grand USA tradition of the venal rich.

The second problem beyond the lack of regulations is the lack of enforcement for the regs that exist. So much of this stuff is on an honor system anyway, it's not like there are legions of auditors out there digging into campaign finances.

I for one would have supported Supreme Court Justice Bill Ayers

it's just such obvious bullshit.

is overturning citizens united a requirement for real campaign finance reform? by which i mean, if by some miracle real reform passed congress and was signed into law, would it immediately face a challenge in the supreme court hinging on their interpretation of citizens united?

just to define my terms, by "real campaign finance reform" i mean "something that doesn't blow chunks all the time"

Any new regulations will be challenged, for sure. I guess the key would be writing them in a way calculated to withstand scrutiny from the current court. Which could be hard, but I'm sure there are models out there.

This is a good Vox explainer: https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2018/5/7/17325486/citizens-united-money-politics-dark-money-vouchers-primaries. Basically says forget it about overturning Citizens, but there are other avenues. Citizens doesn't restrict disclosure rules, so a first step would be congressional action taking the "dark" out of dark money (even if you can't take out the money).

thanks! i'll give that a read today.

i should also finally get a copy of Jane Mayers' universally praised Dark Money

If you've been paying attention, then Dark Money may inform you of some details you did not know, but the take-home message will be all-too-depressingly familiar.

jesus is going to come back soon and punish the wicked? that's what gets me through the night. come on jesus, dip your sword of vengeful return in the flames of righteousness and reign torment upon us all

That will be his intention until someone offers him a sweet position in a thinktank and he starts pulling down seven figs with bennies.

(It's all over once you hear him start to unnecessarily abbreviate words, bruh.)

karl malone: statehouse numbers https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1z1ydQBJrlnIYqrBiS4M3GQWy_gPeLAPS6Ffd32wmrSQ/edit#gid=1265475948

you can't make seven figs with bennies unless you make a priority of breving words. it's a self-selecting pool. using fewer sybs makes space for more sybs, and you can take that straight to your bottom line

xp

xp thanks caek! @Taniel is on fire imo

wrapping up in CA, here's how much the vote shifted (7m vote on election, 5m vote before)

https://www.latimes.com/projects/la-pol-ca-late-vote-shift/

takeways:

- every single congressional race moved towards the democrat with early voting added
- the average move was 2.6%.
- nunes is a legit target in 2020 (won 53/47, can't imagine he's going to cover himself in glory over the next couple of years on intelligence)

is anyone legit surprised by the massive increase in voting by mail, when it is *so much fucking easier* than locating your poll, going there before or after work, standing in line for god knows how long, and figuring out your vote in a tiny booth? like duh. make voting easier and more people will do it.

word. this is why making election day a holiday would be a time-consuming distraction. i'm sure it would help a bit, but it would be politically difficult (federal legislation). meanwhile: postal voting is right there as an option.