Holy shit! She’s fucking wasted.

pic.twitter.com/rN0bYa2Pf9

— Bad Hombre (@joma_gc) February 10, 2024

I recently witnessed a significant "family meeting" type discussion in /r/law after the Fanni Willis debacle. Experienced trial attorneys making politically agnostic observations about potential impacts to the case were being down voted into oblivion for the mere act of being politically agnostic and acknowledging even the possibility that Willis could have acted in a way that could negatively impact the case. The adults in the room circled the wagons. The consensus was that any thread that achieves a minimum critical mass of participants will attract partisan non-experts whose interest in facts and reality is secondary to their interest in every situation conforming to their preconceived notions.

r/law used to have high quality legal discussions like three years ago. Now it's r/politics with a thin veneer of “objectivity”

This post is one of the bad legal takes on this sub that it purports to call out.

“You can think that the stakes are so high here that the justices should depart from textualism and original public meaning to read the phrase more broadly. You can upmarsey all the people who say Trump should lose”

Just read Baude's extensive paper. Disqualifying trump likely follows the text original intent and original meaning of the 14th amendment. Pretending disqualifying Trump is “progressive” constitutional interpretation is disingenuous and misleading

This article combined with the Federalist society argument is not a novel “progressive” constitutional theory.

There is ample historical evidence that the president was considered an officer at the time of drafting and ratification.

Yeah, it's hard to take posts like this seriously.

We are posting in a midwit thread on God

WORDSWORDSWORDS MY SO WORDSWORDSWORDS

!Neolibs, do you think you know more than the supreme court?

Because of his age and his determination to run for a second term, President Biden is taking the American public into uncharted waters. He is the oldest person ever to serve as president, is the oldest ever to run for re-election and, if he is successful, would be 86 at the end of his tenure. Ronald Reagan, by comparison, was an unprecedented 77 when he ended his second term in 1989.

A remarkably broad swath of the American public --- both Mr. Biden's supporters and his detractors --- have expressed increasing doubts about his ability to serve for another five years because of his age. As Nate Cohn, The Times's chief political analyst, noted, "In Times/Siena polling last fall, more than 70 percent of battleground state voters agreed with the statement that Mr. Biden's 'just too old to be an effective president.'" But the release of the special counsel Robert K. Hur's report on Thursday --- and Mr. Hur's assessment that the president presents himself as a "well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory" --- will invariably test the trust that the American people have in their president.

Mr. Biden's performance at his news conference on Thursday night was intended to assure the public that his memory is fine and argue that Mr. Hur was out of line; instead, the president raised more questions about his cognitive sharpness and temperament, as he delivered emotional and snappish retorts in a moment when people were looking for steady, even and capable responses to fair questions about his fitness.

His assurances, in other words, didn't work. He must do better --- the stakes in this presidential election are too high for Mr. Biden to hope that he can skate through a campaign with the help of teleprompters and aides and somehow defeat as manifestly unfit an opponent as Donald Trump, who has a very real chance of retaking the White House.

Mr. Biden's allies are already going to the usual Washington playbook of dismissing the special counsel's report as partisan. Regardless of Mr. Hur's motivation, the details that he presented spoke to worries voters already had. The president has to reassure and build confidence with the public by doing things that he has so far been unwilling to do convincingly. He needs to be out campaigning with voters far more in unrehearsed interactions. He could undertake more town hall meetings in communities and on national television. He should hold regular news conferences to demonstrate his command of and direction for leading the country.

As it stands, he has had less substantive, unscripted interaction with the public and the press than any other president in recent memory. As Michael Shear of The Times reported last year, "In the 100 years since Calvin Coolidge took office, only Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan held as few news conferences each year as the current occupant of the Oval Office." As of late January, he had also given fewer interviews than the last six presidents: only 86. Mr. Trump gave 300, and Barack Obama gave 422. For the second year in a row, Mr. Biden has even refused to do an interview before the Super Bowl, a practice that allowed presidents to speak to Americans informally before the country's largest sporting event of the year, unpersuasively citing a desire to give the public a break from politics.

This is part of a concerted, modern White House strategy to reach Americans through online influencers or tightly produced videos, rather than public encounters that might challenge him. But the combination of Mr. Biden's age and his absence from the public stage has eroded the public's confidence. He looks as if he is hiding, or worse, being hidden. The details in Mr. Hur's report will only heighten those concerns, which Mr. Trump's campaign is already exploiting.

This is a dark moment for Mr. Biden's presidency, when many voters are relying on him to provide the country with a compelling alternative to the unique danger of Mr. Trump. On the most important questions --- of integrity, record of accomplishment and the character required to be fit for the presidency --- there is no comparison between them. In the most challenging moments of his presidency, in supporting our allies when they are threatened and in steering the U.S. economy away from recession, Mr. Biden has been a wise and steady presence. He needs to do more to show the public that he is fully capable of holding office until age 86.

!chuds !nooticers what did the NYT mean by this

!Neolibs God do I hate redditors

🚨 SPECIAL COUNSEL REPORT: “We have also considered that, at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning,elderly man with a poor memory” pic.twitter.com/YSSPQkIW4y

— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) February 8, 2024

sympathetic well meaning elderly man with poor memory

Yikes

The Supreme Court on Thursday seemed poised to allow former president Donald Trump to remain on the Colorado ballot, expressing deep concerns about permitting a single state to disqualify the leading Republican candidate from seeking national office.

Justices from across the ideological spectrum warned of troubling political ramifications if they do not reverse a ruling from Colorado's top court that ordered Trump off the ballot after finding that he engaged in insurrection around the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol.

The court was considering the unprecedented and consequential question of whether a state court can enforce a rarely invoked, post-Civil War provision of the Constitution to disqualify Trump from returning to the White House.

During more than two hours of argument, the justices asked questions that suggested that t he often deeply divided court could reach a unanimous or near-unanimous decision to reject the challenge to Trump's eligibility brought by six Colorado voters. Not since the court's 2000 ruling in Bush v. Gore has the Supreme Court been thrust into such a pivotal role in a presidential election.

Liberal Justice Elena Kagan repeatedly questioned whether one state should be allowed to decide whether a presidential candidate is disqualified. “Why should a single state have the ability to make this determination not only for their own citizens but for the rest of the nation?” she asked, adding, “That seems quite extraordinary, doesn't it?”

Conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett agreed, adding that “it just doesn't seem like a state call.”

Trump is quickly closing in on the GOP nomination, and several justices suggested that a state court ruling initiated by voters in one state to bar him from federal office would throw the presidential race into extreme disarray.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. predicted that a number of other states would quickly try to disqualify the leading Democratic candidate if the justices allowed the Colorado decision to stand. He called the prospect of a handful of states deciding the presidential election a “pretty daunting consequence.”

Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh worried about disenfranchising voters if the court removed the leading Republican presidential candidate from the ballot. “What about the idea that we should think about democracy, think about the right of the people to elect candidates of their choice, of letting the people decide?” he asked.

In response, attorney Jason Murray, representing the Colorado voters, said, “The reason we're here is that President Trump tried to disenfranchise 80 million Americans who voted against him, and the Constitution doesn't require that he be given another chance.”

The high court could announce a decision at any time. Its opinion is expected to resolve the issue in other states with similar challenges to Trump's eligibility.

Colorado's top court put its December ruling on hold while the litigation continues. Trump's name will appear on the state's already printed March 5 primary ballot.

At issue is Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which prohibits anyone who previously pledged to support the Constitution as “an officer of the United States” from returning to office if they betrayed their oath by engaging in insurrection.

The challenge to Trump's candidacy was brought by six Colorado voters — four Republicans and two independents. After a five-day trial, a lower court judge in November concluded that Trump engaged in insurrection when he summoned his supporters to Washington and encouraged an angry crowd to disrupt Congress's certification of President Biden's 2020 victory. But the judge also found that Section 3 did not apply to the presidency.

A divided Colorado Supreme Court disagreed and barred Trump from the ballot, prompting his appeal to the Supreme Court. Maine's secretary of state reached the same conclusion, but her decision is also on hold.

Much of the discussion Thursday centered on differing interpretations of the text and history of the 14th Amendment provision, also known as the disqualification clause, which was initially intended to stop former Confederates from returning to power after the Civil War.

Conservative Justice Clarence Thomas and liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson — two justices who have not often agreed on the most divisive issues before the court — both expressed deep skepticism of the Colorado voters' view of the scope of the 14th Amendment, agreeing with Roberts's assessment that the post-Civil War amendment was aimed at limiting the power of the states.

And yet, Roberts said, the Colorado voters seeking to remove Trump from the ballot appear to be trying to use the same amendment to say states have the power to prevent candidates from running for nationwide office.

“That seems to be a position that is at war with the whole thrust of the 14th Amendment and very ahistorical,” Roberts said.

The text of Section 3 does not specify who is supposed to enforce the clause or when it should be invoked.

Trump's attorney, Jonathan Mitchell, told the justices that Congress, not state courts or officials, enforce the provision and that Trump's passionate political speech on Jan. 6 did not amount to insurrection. Section 3 does not apply to Trump, they emphasized, because the president is not an “officer of the United States,” which is the term the section uses to discuss potential insurrectionists.

Mitchell pointed to three other sections of the Constitution — the appointments clause, the commissions clause and the impeachment clause — that distinguish between the president and “officers” appointed by the president.

On the other side, leading historians and the Colorado voters working with Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington have cast doubt on the idea that the framers of Section 3 would have created a loophole for oath-breaking, insurrectionist former presidents.

Murray, the voters' lead attorney, urged the justices not to create a “special exemption” from the disqualification clause for Trump.

The former president's eligibility is not the only question before the court that could affect Trump's political future. He is expected to asked the Supreme Court to reverse a ruling this week from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit that said he is not protected by presidential immunity from being prosecuted for trying to block Biden's 2020 victory.

The justices separately have said they will review the validity of a law that was used to charge hundreds of people in connection with the Jan. 6 riot and is also a key element of Trump's four-count federal election obstruction case in Washington.

In a sign of the significance of the case before the Supreme Court on Thursday, the courtroom was filled with many guests of the justices, high-profile visitors and dozens of journ*lists. Among those in attendance was Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), who helped lead the impeachment proceedings against Trump after the attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Trump listened to the argument from Mar-a-Lago in Florida and called it “a beautiful thing to watch, in many respects.”

“I thought the presentation today was a very good one,” Trump said at a news conference after the arguments concluded. “I think it was well received. I hope it was well received.”

This is a developing story. It will be updated.

Cspan starts at 8 minutes

!latinx

Sure, the left has Taylor Swift, but we have Catturd https://t.co/jOQ3BFgJHM pic.twitter.com/xaiN3InS2J

— TheBlaze (@theblaze) February 6, 2024

apparently catturd is a twitter user who pwns libs and got an interview with tucker carlson

Greene: Democrats hid one of their members trying to throw us off on the numbers pic.twitter.com/8Da16eNJcj

— Acyn (@Acyn) February 7, 2024

Context: Republicans failed to impeach the Secretary of Homeland Security by vote

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/house-vote-gop-led-push-impeach-dhs-secretary/story?id=106967588

!nonchuds

Four republican reps have employed an obscure and abstract constitutional argument to rationalize how Mayorkas does not deserve to be impeached even though Congress's laws are contrary to his administrative actions.

https://x.com/BarackObama/status/1754969473684050257

!chuds !nooticers