As the supreme court upends precedent again and again, the liberal justices reveal the divisions within the legal body
On Friday, Justice Sonia Sotomayor delivered an acidic sermon against the court’s 6-3 decision to end lower courts’ practice of issuing nationwide injunctions to block federal executive orders, reading her dissent directly from the bench in a move meant to highlight its importance.
“No right is safe in the new legal regime the Court creates,” states Sotomayor’s dissent, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown-Jackson. “Today, the threat is to birthright citizenship. Tomorrow, a different administration may try to seize firearms from law abiding citizens or prevent people of certain faiths from gathering to worship.”
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One thing I have observed about my fellow Usonians is that we all seem to have this strange, misplaced trust that eventually, ONE of our previous institutions will save us.
People crow about how the 2nd amendment will be what helps us prevent tyranny, but also seem to completely gloss over the fact that our police and military operate on an entirely different power level than citizens do. I have watched the US military terrorize people in Afghanistan and Pakistan for 20 years. Why do we think we would do any better against it?
Its the dying gasp of American Exceptionalism, at this point.
Ultra right wing types? My guns will save me!
No they fucking won’t, not if big daddy government decides to fuck you specifically, they have more people, more ammo, more guns, armored personel carriers and astonishingly better intel than you do.
Liberals? The law will function and stop this! The system will hold!
Ahem, obviously false.
Both of these are ultimately aspects of American society that are drilled into our heads as being exceptional, unique, and basically better than anywhere else on Earth.
Again, obviously false, in its totality, as basically every aspect of that system is now totally unravelling.
We are not facing a crisis, as if its in the future tense.
We have been in the crisis since Jan 6th…
Our entire legal system is now utterly arbitrary.
This ruling means that Trump can issue an EO to break any law, and no judge can immediately order it stop… it all has to be drawn out in court for years, by which time, the Executive Branch will just have done whatever the fuck it wanted to.
Even if a case is won after some time… and concludes that agents of the Executive Branch did actually break laws, Trump can pardon all of them instantly.
Trump has just effectively done a line item veto on the 14th Amendment.
He can now do that with any other Amendment or law as well.
The law is dead.
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Who is “they”? What you wrote doesn’t describe anyone I know. The people I know are deeply afraid, angry, and at times despondent. They try not to think too much about what’s happening and just live their lives hoping that this will pass in 2027 or 2029 because they can’t come to terms emotionally or mentally with what will happen otherwise.
Oh right like the US military hasn’t lost a bunch of wars against barely-trained insurgents over the last idk better part of a century
Fuck outta here with this soldier worship rhetoric
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They won’t even be dragged out of a house in the middle of the night.
The house will be obliterated by a reaper drone from miles away.
I’ve never met a single American gun owner that didn’t know how to operate their firearm with ease unless it was their first day handling one. It’s not some scary or complex thing to use. I’ve been shooting guns since I was six years old.
I also don’t know anyone that thinks much if any of this kind of stuff. Though I do have SOME faith in the military behaving themselves, maybe not the national guard… but the other branches.
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Rural living in the USA is an interesting thing, I wouldn’t say my family was extremely gun friendly. My mother hates them but my father wanted to start hunting again and it was a good way for him and I to bond as there wasn’t many other mutual interests. The vast majority of boys (and some girls) in my grade school through high school all hunted and “owned” several firearms before they were able to drive a car. I knew how to maintain my weapons, hunt, prep, and butcher all kinds of wild game before I was out of high school. It’s just a culture thing. These days I’m a city slicker so it seems like a different world in my past now but it’s certainly where I came from.
And you are right, it is a different thing in a gunfight. But life and death situations make people do extreme things.
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The US military lost against the resistance in Vietnam, in Iraq, in Afghanistan…
There is no way they would win against a properly organized resistance in the US either.
Problem is people thinking that the guns themselves would safe them from Tyranny, when it is using the guns against the tyrants that is protecting them.
You are glossing over how many casualties that the US endured compared to Iraqis or Afghans. Sure, the Taliban still exists nominally, but Afghanistan endured at least 46,000 civilian deaths, with Iraq enduring at least 100,000 — the US tallied less than 8,000 deaths total.
What happened is that we basically used their countries as a sandbox to maintain our war readiness and funnel money into the pockets of the personal friends of Dick Cheney and his various warhawk confidantes. It was, at its most generous, a massacre, which is what civilian resistance will be, too.
All of this mental Rambo work is paralyzing people from taking any action at all as they retreat inwards and wait for doomsday. It is making us give up on diplomacy sooner.
Things cannot go without casualties. But the more people stand up to fight, the less casualties there will be as the prospect of “crushing” the resistance dwindles from the start.
And people who larp 2A should get a grip that if they claim the armed resistance, they have to take what comes with it.
On the other hand you see a lot of people still in their liberal fairytale land, where they think that if shit starts delivering the suspected instigator and cozying up with the police would help them defeat fascism. See various posts in the 50501 community.
Lets be real about it. Fighting as an armed resistance means people will be killed. Not fighting will lead to being killed at much larger scale, as the killers reign freely.
Partly because hopefully not all of the military will fall in line to fight their own countrymen. But then we are seeing what is happening in LA…
There is one question every single Democratic lawmaker needs to be asked:
“What should Democrats do with the newly expanded powers of the presidency?”
If they cannot answer that question, they need to be primaried, as they are not fit for this moment.
The dissent doesn’t “reveal concerns.” Justices Kagan, Jackson, and Sotomayor have been very vocal about these issues for months, since last summer at least. I wish the news would stop with this limpdick rhetoric. We are in a fucking crisis, act like it
I genuinely feel bad for Justice Jackson. She is competent and thoughtful, and appears to appreciate how consequential the Supreme Court can be. She was an actual successful lawyer. I think she went into this expecting to make a difference, and, instead, we have the Roberts Court.
Feels a lot like being assigned to your bully for a class project. They’re not only gonna make you do all the work, they’re gonna make you feel like shit while doing it.
Feels a lot like being assigned to your bully for a class project.
This is exactly what democracy feels like every time.
I can’t tell if the majority expects there to never be another democrat president or if they just haven’t thought that far ahead. It probably varies from one to the next.
They know the Democrats are on the same side as them. This isn’t a party war. It’s a class war.
There will be another lawsuit and they will change the precedent.
just like the last one, the next D president will likely be in large part toothless
Oh silly, these expanded rules are only for Repugnican presidents.
The U.S. is disintegrating in real time. Decisions are pushing the states even further apart. Hard to see how the union survives another 10 years.
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Could be. Florida just arbitrary delayed an election.
reveal concerns that the US faces a crisis
I’m so tired of these half baked headlines.
The US has been in a crisis for A FUCKING DECADE at this point.Can we just skip all of this? We know what the republicans want. There’s no compromise anymore. The feckless Democrats have done nothing but capitulate. It’s never enough. It will never be enough. So why the fuck are we still pretending? What are we doing here?
“Today, the threat is to birthright citizenship. Tomorrow, a different administration may try to seize firearms from law abiding citizens or prevent people of certain faiths from gathering to worship.”
Sure feels like that’s the point, lady
Glad they could get caught up with the rest of us
Dear left SCOTUS Justices,
As 3/9ths of 1/3 of the federal government of The United States of America, please stop fucking around.
Sincerely,
Everybody
