Ketanji showing them how it's done. 
Trump's lawyer is arguing Biden has the right to assassinate Trump, and that the President has a right to do a military coup before the Supreme Court
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DetroitEWarren
Superstar
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."
DetroitEWarren
Superstar
Their not gonna rule. This shyt is over until after the election. It will be remanded and this shyt will stretch until after the election, if Trump wins they DEFINITELY grant him full immunity and we DEFINITELY live under a 100% dictatorship after that. Biden wins they kill all forms of the arguments recently made upon the court.If the Supreme Court ends up ruling that a President can't be criminally charged for acts committed during a Presidency, Biden should have Seal Team 6 take out that orange b*stard the following day...
However, the Military has right wing garbage, but the dudes on top will DEFINITELY put the work in to take them out (lawmakers included) and the US will come out better on the other side.
I literally think a Trump win will last a month max before the military gets his bytch ass out of there.
An unspeakable MAGA concession
MAGA begins to panic: Trump may not make it to the ballot
www.salon.com
MAGA begins to panic: Trump may not make it to the ballot
“It’s a real s**t show to consider”
By
ColumnistPUBLISHED APRIL 25, 2024 9:00AM (EDT)
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Donald Trump.
Those two words spoken out loud can elicit an emotional response on par with the worst invectives, curses or insults you can conjure.
The man himself is capable of the same emotional outbursts under the proper stimuli. This week he finds himself cornered in a Manhattan courtroom, facing 10 counts of violating a gag order because he simply cannot control himself.
His emails to his faithful include statements like “They can’t keep me off stage,” and “Trump Tower is mine,” along with cryptic threats such as “The bloodbath is 24 hours away,” along with even more outlandish claims that he’s just hours from being thrown in jail.
I still do not think Trump will be on the ballot this November and this week in court shows why.
It’s all calculated to drive his followers mad, and by firing scattershot insults he hopes to convince his faithful followers who aren’t showing up in Manhattan to protest in the numbers that Trump wants. It’s also a projection of growing fear that he’s finally being held accountable for his actions.
While this was going on, President Joe Biden announced the U.S. had given missiles to Ukraine he’d previously denied sending and signed into law the latest Ukrainian arms package he helped negotiate past Republican extremists in Congress. Along with forcing China to divest itself of TikTok, the foreign aid package is a huge policy win for Biden that comes on the heels of a major union endorsement this week.
Related
Donald Trump has neutered Republicans' power to sabotage Joe Biden
Biden has largely steered clear of talking about Trump, trying to actually get his job done as proof that he deserves another term, but reminded everyone this week that “Trump is a toxic threat to planet earth.”
Trump’s only response is to claim Biden is losing it. Biden seems to be rising to the challenge even as Trump falters. This week found the president playfully sparring with reporters. When asked what his legacy would be on abortion, Biden showed his cheek and replied, “What will your legacy be to be reporting?”
Yeah. Sleepy Joe, the cocaine-addicted mastermind – at least according to Trump – can still hold his own with a reporting pool that honestly looks like Middle School students at a pep rally.
Today the Supreme Court takes up Trump’s claim of absolute immunity – apparently ready to consider whether or not they will give Trump the power of a King and adjudicate themselves out of a job. No one believes the Supreme MAGAs on the court are intent on doing anything more than delaying the inevitable decision against Trump, while at the same time buying time so Trump can ride back into town and inflict upon the country his brand of dystopia and dyspepsia. Make no mistake; Trump has no coherent policy. The people who control him have an agenda, and maintain control over Trump by telling him what he wants to hear. Those who worship him love what he has to say. None of it makes sense. It’s all chaos in a blender designed to benefit those who control Trump to the detriment of the rest of us.
But a funny thing happened on the way to Trump’s coronation. In Manhattan, facing nearly three dozen felonies, Donald Trump’s thin veneer of competence is being stripped away by a guy named Pecker and Trump’s increasingly apparent mental decline. He is on a downward spiral caused by dementia, depression and derision.
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Speaking on Chip Franklin’s podcast, “ Really Political,” Dr. John Gartner, an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University Medical School, reminded us this week that we are currently seeing “The best Donald Trump – today.” In other words, he’s never going to be as good as he was the day before — no matter how bad that is. Dr. Gartner believes it is Trump who is suffering from a precipitous decline in mental health, and he’s never going to get better. With each day the former president’s mental acumen slips further and soon the rate of acceleration of mental decline will take Trump to a “mental cliff.” Once he falls off, watch out. Should Trump see a second term, Dr. Gartner compared it, potentially, to a “Weekend at Bernie’s.”
As a comparison for how bad a second Trump administration could be, actor Tom Arnold asked me on that show what it was like during Trump’s first term. I came to the realization there are still many Americans who do not understand how truly dysfunctional Trump was and is. The fact is Trump’s first administration was extremely dangerous — and it had nothing to do with his politics.
The Trump White House was unlike anything I have ever seen — nor will likely see again. It was unprofessional, intolerable, idiotic, chaotic and filled with innuendo. It was a grade-B Hollywood production led by a self-loathing narcissist with delusions of adequacy.
No one in that administration seemed to even understand U.S. law. A quick example: Trump told us he was going to send U.S. troops to the Southern border. He was unaware of the fact that the Posse Comitatus Act precludes him from doing so — unless a congressional waiver is secured. This has been done in the past.
I remember speaking with one of Trump's assistants about this in the lower press offices with another reporter. "Is this like a rule, or a policy?" he asked. I explained it was a law — one heavily supported by Republicans historically. He was unaware. "That's a law?" he questioned. Then we asked a few other questions and at the end of the conversation the man turned to me and said, "I'll get back to you about that Hakuna Matata thing."
A Trump administration official compared the Posse Comitatus Act to the “Lion King,” didn't know what the law was and never got back to me. The next day he seemingly forgot it, so I had to ask another Trump official about it. When I said it seemed like there was some really poor planning at the White House, he just laughed and said, "You give us too much credit. We don't have any plans."
It isn’t politics. It’s reality. Trump is incapable of serving another term as president.
Want a daily wrap-up of all the news and commentary Salon has to offer? Subscribe to our morning newsletter, Crash Course.
The good news is I still do not think Trump will be on the ballot this November and this week in court shows why. It’s not his sleeping. It’s not his reported flatulence (which I care little about). It is that Trump is showing undeniable signs of dementia. He seems to be melting into a puddle of his own makeup and sweat. The stress can be seen in the photos and the videotape from New York. If Donald Trump is this stressed out a week into his first trial, how could he possibly be expected to last through three more trials, or lead our country for four more years in what is probably the most stressful job on the planet?
His decline combined with his narcissism are slowly consuming him. The trial in New York is also exposing the depravity of those in his inner circle. David Pecker is the colorectal cancer of journalism. The guy wanted to be the editor of Time Magazine. Thank God that never happened. His willingness to run a supermarket rag like the National Enquirer as a PR firm for Trump underscores not only his vacuousness, but how cheap Donald really is – not just monetarily, but spiritually. He's an empty suit of plastic emotions bound in hubris and anger. He’s screaming for thousands to show up at court and show their support, and even his rabble are growing weary of his constant whining.
Trump says we can’t keep him from the stage – but the trial is doing just that. For eight hours a day, four days a week, he has to sit in a courtroom while a jury of his peers scrutinizes his every move, his sleeping patterns, his doddering dementia, his flatulence, his grunts – everything.
Trump made his grifting possible, in part, by a carefully staged persona seen in glimpses at private and public events. It’s why he didn’t do many press conferences and didn’t show up in the White House briefing room until the COVID crisis made his appearances a requirement. Those appearances were well known for his inane claims regarding the virus, ranging from there would be no deaths to suggesting the introduction of light into the body or injecting bleach could cure COVID.
Being on a jury confined in close quarters with such a frightened, angry narcissist does not bode well for Drowsy Donny. The longer the trial takes in Manhattan, the more it becomes clear to the world, including his faithful minions, that Donald Trump has no more gas in his tank.
This opens up speculation as to what will go on in Milwaukee when the MAGA faithful descend like a horde of cicadas to choose their candidate for president. It is presupposed that Trump, no matter what, will become the nominee. But there are whispers, and growing speculation among the faithful and the faithless in MAGA land that Donald Trump may not be up for the job.
“For the first time,” I was told this week by a Trump organizer in Wisconsin, “I’ve started to think about what we would do if Trump isn’t our candidate. It’s a real s**t show to consider.”
If Trump is somehow rejected from the ballot or is incapable of serving, the Milwaukee convention could end up looking like the House of Representatives searching for a speaker after it expelled Kevin McCarthy. It could take several ballots, lots of smoke and drinks in backrooms combined with banshee-like wailing and gnashing of teeth. The whole Republican convention, always a circus show of pretense and populism, will more accurately resemble a hallucinogenic Barnum and Bailey event under the big top – or even more precisely Mad Max under the Thunderdome.
Each day in court brings that reality closer. Trump can’t run. Trump can’t hide. Trump can’t do all the things that have enabled him to thrive as a despotic grifter his entire life. His mind is slipping, his grip on the world is weakening and at the end of the day Donald Trump recognizes it. You can see it in his eyes. His last cogent thought may well be the recognition that he’s the world’s largest loser and everything he’s done his entire life has led to utter failure.
Then again, his last cogent thought might be “I love hamberders."
Trump immunity fight turns Supreme Court textualists topsy-turvy
“It sure ain’t originalism,” one critic said.
Diana Neary of Minneapolis, joins other protesters demonstrating outside the Supreme Court as the justices hear arguments over whether former President Donald Trump is immune from prosecution in a case charging him with plotting to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, in Washington on April 25, 2024. | J. Scott Applewhite/AP
By JOSH GERSTEIN
04/27/2024 07:00 AM EDT
The Supreme Court’s conservatives often accuse liberals of inventing provisions nowhere to be found in the Constitution. Now, the fingers are pointed in the other direction.
At the attention-grabbing arguments this week over Donald Trump’s claim of sweeping presidential immunity from criminal prosecution, the six-member conservative bloc seemed largely unconcerned by a key flaw in Trump’s theory: Nothing in the Constitution explicitly mentions the concept of presidential immunity.
Trump’s lawyer told the justices that the founders had “in a sense” written immunity into the Constitution because it’s a logical outgrowth of a broadly worded clause about presidential power. But that’s the sort of argument conservative justices have often scoffed at — most notably in the context of abortion rights.
Two years ago, conservatives relied on a strict interpretation of the Constitution’s text and original meaning to overturn the federal right to abortion. But on Thursday, as they debated whether Trump can be prosecuted for his bid to subvert the 2020 election, they seemed content to engage in a free-form balancing exercise where they weighed competing interests and practical consequences.
Some critics said the conservative justices — all of whom purport to adhere to an original understanding of the Constitution — appeared to be on the verge of fashioning a legal protection for former presidents based on the justices’ subjective assessment of what’s best for the country and not derived from the nation’s founding document.
From left to right: Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett, Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch, Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor, Associate Justice Clarence Thomas and Chief Justice of the United States John Roberts hear arguments. | Dana Verkouteren/AP
“The legal approach they seemed to be gravitating toward has no basis in the Constitution, in precedent, or logic,” said Michael Waldman, president and CEO of New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice. “It sure ain’t originalism.”
The two-hour, 40-minute argument session featured a boatload of scary hypotheticals about coups and assassinations, along with predictions about serial, tit-for-tat prosecutions of future presidents, but there was little discussion of the Constitution’s text.
That could come as a surprise to some. Justice Elena Kagan, one of the three liberals now on the court, famously declared in 2015 that conservatives had essentially won the decadeslong battle between those who favored a close fealty to text and original meaning and those who emphasized pragmatism or saw the Constitution as an evolving document.
“I think we are all textualists now,” Kagan told an audience at Harvard Law School then, as she delivered a lecture named for her then-colleague Justice Anontin Scalia, arguably the lead crusader for the text-based approach.
Kagan was perhaps the most insistent Thursday in highlighting the absence of any explicit immunity for presidents in the Constitution.
“The framers did not put an immunity clause into the Constitution. They knew how to. There were immunity clauses in some state constitutions. They knew how to give legislative immunity. They didn’t provide immunity to the president,” said Kagan, an appointee of President Barack Obama. “And, you know, not so surprising. They were reacting against a monarch who claimed to be above the law.”
Arguing for the Justice Department and special counsel Jack Smith, attorney Michael Dreeben emphasized that the court would effectively be announcing judge-made law if it says presidents are entitled to criminal immunity.
“There is no immunity that is in the Constitution, unless this Court creates it,” Dreeben declared. “There certainly is no textual immunity. … I think it would be a sea change to announce a sweeping rule of immunity that no president has had or has needed.”
Of course, the court isn’t writing on a blank slate. The current justices aren’t the ones who essentially made up executive privilege in a 1974 ruling related to the Watergate probe or the president’s immunity from civil suits in a 1983 case brought by an Air Force analyst pushed out of his job. Those cases were mentioned numerous times in Thursday’s arguments.
“Whoever is a textualist is a textualist leavened by precedent,” University of Virginia law professor Saikrishna Prakash said. “To say that everybody’s a textualist … I think suggests to some people the false hope that we all agree about what something means. I mean, we’re all speaking English, but we all disagree on the margins about what to make of someone’s communications.”
Dreeben told the court that the Justice Department supports those earlier rulings on presidential privilege and immunity, even though the Constitution contains no explicit provision addressing either topic.
A prominent Supreme Court critic, Georgia State University law professor Eric Segall, said there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with the justices reaching a legal conclusion that lacks direct support in the Constitution. But he said the members of the nation’s highest court should not pretend that, in doing so, they are simply engaged in a mechanistic application of legal text.
“Do I think there should be some kind of constitutional privilege for the President? Yes, I do. But we have to recognize how atextual that is,” Segall said.
Calling someone a “purposivist” or a “consequentialist” might set off a brawl at a Federalist Society gathering, but the raft of hypotheticals offered by both liberal and conservative justices suggested they were intensely focused on both the founders’ purposes in laying out three separate branches of government and the possible consequences of giving or denying Trump his requested immunity.
The conservative justices did not completely ignore textualism in the Trump arguments Thursday. Indeed, the first question asked — from Justice Clarence Thomas — urged Trump lawyer D. John Sauer to “be more precise as to the source of this immunity.”
In response, Sauer pointed to the extraordinarily broad words of the first sentence of Article II of the Constitution. “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America,” it reads. Sauer didn’t read it aloud, perhaps because one can’t find any discussion of immunity there.
Sometimes, the court has found the absence of such language to be of great import.
Writing for five conservative justices in the earth-shaking abortion case two years ago, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Justice Samuel Alito referred to the notion of guaranteed access to abortion as “an asserted right that is nowhere mentioned in the Constitution.”
On Thursday, Sauer did offer one argument for presidential immunity drawn relatively directly from the text of the Constitution: The assertion that the language allowing for criminal conviction of a federal officer after impeachment by the House and conviction by the Senate implies that a current or former president can’t be criminally charged until and unless he or she is convicted by the Senate.
No justice of any stripe seemed particularly interested in that contention, although a couple did poke holes in it.
“What if the criminal conduct isn’t discovered until after the president is out of office, so there was no opportunity for impeachment?” Justice Amy Coney Barrett asked.
Sauer appeared to concede that adopting Trump’s approach would mean some presidential misconduct could never be punished.
“We say the framers assumed the risk of under-enforcement by adopting these very structural checks,” the Trump lawyer said.
Jamie Raskin Goes Scorched Earth on SCOTUS Trump Immunity Case
The Supreme Court seems prepared to give Donald Trump immunity.
newrepublic.com
Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling/
April 26, 2024/12:02 p.m. ET
Jamie Raskin Goes Scorched Earth on SCOTUS Trump Immunity Case
The Supreme Court seems prepared to give Donald Trump immunity.
ANNA MONEYMAKER/GETTY IMAGES
Maryland Representative Jamie Raskin took aim at a peculiar line of questioning brought by Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito in Donald Trump’s presidential immunity arguments on Thursday, during which one of the high court’s most conservative members seemed to claim that actually punishing Trump for any alleged crimes might only encourage him to break more laws.
“The most astonishing thing for me today was Justice Alito’s question. He actually asked whether holding the president criminally accountable for actual crimes committed, whether murder or coup or you name it, whether holding them accountable would actually encourage them to stage more violent coups to stay in office to avoid prosecution,” Raskin told MSNBC later Thursday.
“Which buys completely into Donald Trump’s narcissistic criminal worldview. I mean, for all of American history, we have said presidents are subject to criminal prosecution if they commit crimes. That’s why Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon. That’s why Bill Clinton agreed to give up his law license with the bar for five years so he wouldn’t face criminal prosecution.”
“Now they say, ‘If you’re really mean to Donald Trump and you hold him accountable the same way every other American citizen is held accountable, then he’ll really overthrow the government, he’ll really bring out the big guns, and we can’t afford that,’” Raskin continued. “And that’s a kind of masochistic capitulation-ism of Donald Trump’s authoritarianism.”
“Of course we’ve got to hold the president accountable to the law,” he said. “It’s the basic premise of our law, that nobody is above the law, including the president.”
Raskin also went on to argue that a popular mode of thinking about how to hold Trump accountable—which is that you can “impeach and convict and then you can prosecute him”—defies the language of the U.S. Constitution.
“That twists the language and turns it upside down in the Constitution. It says, even if you’re impeached and convicted, ‘nevertheless’ you can still be prosecuted and tried and convicted and punished, presupposing, of course, that the president is subject to criminal law,” Raskin said.
The Supreme Court’s decision to take up the case has already significantly waylaid Trump’s D.C. trial, which hinges on whether the former president can be tried for his alleged involvement in the MAGA-led January 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, disrupting Congress’s certification of the 2020 presidential election results.
Following a hearing on Thursday, the court appeared ready to reject Trump’s claims that he can’t be tried on alleged election interference, but their decision may still significantly delay a trial that was originally slated to be the GOP presidential nominee’s first criminal proceeding. The high court’s ruling is expected to be released sometime between late June and early July.
It’s not a wake up call to those that have been following their trajectory for the past 50 years or so.
Take Bill Barr for example. People are scratching their heads saying bu bu he admitted that he tried to overthrow the government. Trump has insulted him over and over yet he’s still going to vote for him!
The “mission” is what’s most important. That mission is protecting wealth and power for a small group of white males. When the law can assist with that so be it. When it can’t subvert it. If democracy was useful for it use it. If it’s not go fascist. This is bigger than his feelings about one man whom I assume he thinks is an idiot. However he is useful to the “mission”. It’s not cognitive dissonance. It’s the purposeful utilization of dishonesty and underhanded tactics to achieve the only goal that matters.
The corrupt Justices have the same mission. The law and constitution and all of that is secondary to it. Thus they will do whatever they can to protect a dangerous moronic traitor. Because they share the mission.
Born2BKing
Veteran
They do if they feel the dictator shares their beliefs, ala racism.
Born2BKing
Veteran
nikka you never voted in your life.Neither are better muthaficka!!! no tangibles no fukking vote there's my answer... Deal with it...
You gotta chill on political converations my boy.I mean, he's going lead this country to hell if he wins
Let him lose and let the special forces pop up out of the blue to shut shyt down if necessary
I mean, he's going lead this country to hell if he wins
Let him lose and let the special forces pop up out of the blue to shut shyt down if necessary
Biden is losing popular opinion, and no matter how many lawsuits Trump is hit with nothing comes of it
Jan 6 was basically an act of treason and they failed to even bring it up
Trump has a massive cult following and pretends to be the most patriotic president in history
I don't want he11 on Earth, I don't want Trump as prez again
the ironic thing is the white people that love Trump don't even realize he doesn't care about them either
Donald Trump cares about Donald Trump
he's thrown countless other white people under the bus and in the bushes too, dude just hates everybody, he shouldn't be the leader of any country
ORDER_66
The Fire Rises 2023
nikka you never voted in your life.
I voted for obama you clown why you think im against both parties now?!!?!?
why do you think alot of folks disillusioned???
Doj lawyer should've said if POTUS is immune he can kill SCOTUS judge or send them to gitmo and put in his own people in place
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