He also was absolutely convinced the 'Le Presidency, c'est moi" He literally acted like Don McGahn the White house attorney, was his attorney,; he thinks the Presidency is a prize he won, rather than an office he served in.
This is the crooked flaw at the entire heart of his term. And looks to be one that the Suprem(ly corrupted) Court appears ready to make a reality.
I’d forgotten about the tweeted spy satellite image. There is a 22-year old kid—Jack Teixeira, an Air Force reservist—serving 16 years in a federal prison for the crime of posting classified documents to a video game group chat. He did it to look cool. He has a bright future in Republican politics.
And I'd forgotten about Teixeira, but I'll try not to do it again. He was kind of an asshole, but if Trump gets away with doing the same thing (and he has gotten away with it, nobody's charged him) you want to ask what is the law even worth.
"The evidence is completely clear on this". Yes it is. Now prove it in court.
That's the part that's driving everyone insane, because they have never been more focused on our criminal justice system in their lives, and they find it arcane, hidebound, and largely incomprehensible, with Latin mutterings and Calvinball rulings. But it's always been this way.
He is, as usual, correct. My pathetic attempt to define this is Fudd's 1st Law: if there is a system, someone will try to game it. Is there a more succinct description of what the Federalist Society has been doing for decades now? Trump has merely been an accellerent on a deliberately smouldering pile of rags. Many, like the Prickly Pear of Arizona jurisprudence, bmaz at Emptywheel, still insist that The Law is an impartial self-correcting system that will deal with this madness in good time, and none of this is anything new to those who work in the system. But the system has been corrupted, from the top down. I think Frank's point about fetishization is about believing the system will protect itself, and us as a byproduct, despite the evidence that the system is collapsing before our eyes, again from the top down.
No, "fetishization" has a pretty specific meaning, in anthropology and in Marx. It's really a kind of religious stand, even if bmaz is one of the believers. If constitutionalism is to work we *have* to believe it works. Like the fairies in Peter Pan, constitutionalism can only exist if we all clap our hands. It's that that is failing, not particular individuals' attempts to game it, which have always existed.
It's like when the Hawaiian king Kamehameha I died in 1819 and everybody suddenly stopped obeying the traditional taboo system, and women and men started eating together: "The usually strict rules of the Hawaiian religion and social system, known as kapu [taboo], were in abeyance during the usual mourning period. Women ate pork and bananas, people had sexual intercourse with whomever they pleased, routine life was completely overthrown." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CA%BBAi_Noa
The old system was far from perfect, but Trump's infringements have exposed that it was never really *real*--there's no way of forcing the king to obey the abstract law--and there may be no way of going back to the belief system that kept sustaining us for the first 240 years.
So the issue isn't just whether we can recover some of that lost ground, but whether there's any future for democracy at all. Whether we can make it real and not just a pious hope. I hope it's not that bad, but I certainly don't know.
This is a slightly cleaner, brighter version of what my attorney friend says about the game. Or, more literarily, “When they use a word… it means just what they choose it to mean – neither more nor less.”
It is why she eventually left the practice, and strenuously remonstrated her children when they considered law school...
He also was absolutely convinced the 'Le Presidency, c'est moi" He literally acted like Don McGahn the White house attorney, was his attorney,; he thinks the Presidency is a prize he won, rather than an office he served in.
This is the crooked flaw at the entire heart of his term. And looks to be one that the Suprem(ly corrupted) Court appears ready to make a reality.
I’d forgotten about the tweeted spy satellite image. There is a 22-year old kid—Jack Teixeira, an Air Force reservist—serving 16 years in a federal prison for the crime of posting classified documents to a video game group chat. He did it to look cool. He has a bright future in Republican politics.
And I'd forgotten about Teixeira, but I'll try not to do it again. He was kind of an asshole, but if Trump gets away with doing the same thing (and he has gotten away with it, nobody's charged him) you want to ask what is the law even worth.
"The evidence is completely clear on this". Yes it is. Now prove it in court.
That's the part that's driving everyone insane, because they have never been more focused on our criminal justice system in their lives, and they find it arcane, hidebound, and largely incomprehensible, with Latin mutterings and Calvinball rulings. But it's always been this way.
Frank Wilhoit posted something relevant and really deep at NMMB https://nomoremister.blogspot.com/2024/04/a-few-thoughts-on-supreme-court.html#comment-6445143621
He is, as usual, correct. My pathetic attempt to define this is Fudd's 1st Law: if there is a system, someone will try to game it. Is there a more succinct description of what the Federalist Society has been doing for decades now? Trump has merely been an accellerent on a deliberately smouldering pile of rags. Many, like the Prickly Pear of Arizona jurisprudence, bmaz at Emptywheel, still insist that The Law is an impartial self-correcting system that will deal with this madness in good time, and none of this is anything new to those who work in the system. But the system has been corrupted, from the top down. I think Frank's point about fetishization is about believing the system will protect itself, and us as a byproduct, despite the evidence that the system is collapsing before our eyes, again from the top down.
No, "fetishization" has a pretty specific meaning, in anthropology and in Marx. It's really a kind of religious stand, even if bmaz is one of the believers. If constitutionalism is to work we *have* to believe it works. Like the fairies in Peter Pan, constitutionalism can only exist if we all clap our hands. It's that that is failing, not particular individuals' attempts to game it, which have always existed.
It's like when the Hawaiian king Kamehameha I died in 1819 and everybody suddenly stopped obeying the traditional taboo system, and women and men started eating together: "The usually strict rules of the Hawaiian religion and social system, known as kapu [taboo], were in abeyance during the usual mourning period. Women ate pork and bananas, people had sexual intercourse with whomever they pleased, routine life was completely overthrown." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CA%BBAi_Noa
The old system was far from perfect, but Trump's infringements have exposed that it was never really *real*--there's no way of forcing the king to obey the abstract law--and there may be no way of going back to the belief system that kept sustaining us for the first 240 years.
So the issue isn't just whether we can recover some of that lost ground, but whether there's any future for democracy at all. Whether we can make it real and not just a pious hope. I hope it's not that bad, but I certainly don't know.
Ah, thanks. I'm beginning to better understand your "deep" comment.
This is a slightly cleaner, brighter version of what my attorney friend says about the game. Or, more literarily, “When they use a word… it means just what they choose it to mean – neither more nor less.”
It is why she eventually left the practice, and strenuously remonstrated her children when they considered law school...