gAlienLifeform @ gAlienLifeform @lemmy.world

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Because Republicans hold a 53-47 advantage in the Senate, it will be difficult for Democrats to regularly defeat judicial nominations. But a clip of, for example, Missouri district court nominee Josh Divine trying to explain why he endorsed literacy tests for voting and analogized homosexuality to bestiality is the sort of thing that, if done correctly, would have a chance to go viral enough to get Susan Collins to have second thoughts.

The bad news is that no such clips exist, because when Senate Democrats had the chance to question the nominees in person, they decided they had other things to do or other places to be. Illinois’s Dick Durbin, California’s Adam Schiff, and Rhode Island’s Sheldon Whitehouse spent more of their allotted time lauding Federalist Society judges for sometimes ruling against Trump than they did asking questions of Whitney Hermandorfer, the pending nominee to the Sixth Circuit. Incredibly, their performances were still more impactful than those of Connecticut’s Richard Blumenthal, New Jersey’s Cory Booker, Hawaii’s Mazie Hirono, and California’s Alex Padilla, who did not say anything to Hermandorfer at all.

Democratic politicians are fond of casting Trump as a threat to democracy and the rule of law, and are very aware of the power of political theater when they have new books to promote or campaign donations to solicit via lengthy, meme-laden, green-blubble text. But it is difficult for Senate Democrats to persuade voters to care about judicial confirmation battles when they, the Democrats, are so uninterested in fighting them.

That's the whole point of the article

Phoenix officials have offered assurances that police reforms will continue, despite President Donald Trump’s order ending federal scrutiny of alleged misconduct by local law enforcement.

Seeing as how this guy and Mike Johnson are both connected to the same weird little new apostolic sect it's amazing he hasn't been getting more grilling about this. Like, whenever a Muslim in this country just looks at somebody funny Ilhan Omar always gets screamed at for days.

Roberts first asserts that the law does not discriminate on the basis of sex, allowing it to evade heightened scrutiny. Then, having settled upon a deferential standard of review, he dismisses the law’s overt discrimination on the basis of sex as constitutionally unconcerning. These two lines of logic cannot be reconciled. Surely a regulation that instructs girls to be girls (and boys to be boys) by compelling both genders to “appreciate” their sex classifies children based on their sex. The law is impossible to enforce without taking sex into account. And that classification should trigger heightened scrutiny at the outset. Yet Roberts ignores this sex-based classification at the outset, pretends the law is sex-neutral, then writes off its most overtly discriminatory provision by applying relaxed scrutiny. That’s simply not how the law of equal protection operates.

...

SCOTUS has also rejected “separate but equal” in the context of sex discrimination. Yet Roberts brought it back in Skrmetti, giving states leeway to discriminate on the basis of sex as long as they pretend they are discriminating “equally” against both genders. Is this actually the new law of sex discrimination? Is it a bespoke exception from the rule, one the chief justice used to cobble together a majority that, behind the scenes, disagreed about major aspects of the case? Or is it the majority’s way of hobbling constitutional challenges to anti-trans laws without admitting that it must kneecap bedrock principles of equal protection?

We will not know for sure until SCOTUS revisits the issue and tries to make some sense out of Wednesday’s hash. For now, one thing is certain: To carry Skrmetti over the finish line, Roberts abandoned coherence and candor in favor of a crude exercise in outcome-oriented reasoning.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/06/skrmetti-john-roberts-anti-trans-supreme-court.html (arc)

Here's a driver's license. Good luck. Now get to work you lazy bum!

Conversely, I should not be required to show my face to anyone if I'm not trying to assert authority over them. Being a public servant means having a public identity, being a private citizen means you have the freedom to make choices about what you share.

Yep, border patrol and the whole US government knows this is exactly what happens when you lock down all the safe routes - desperate people don't stop trying to enter just a bunch more of them die.

Still every president since Clinton has worked to lock down more and more routes (arc). Depraved scum would rather let people die out of sight and out of mind in the desert than have to deal with them in a civilized way.

The owner of some hotel chain complained to Trump so he chickened out, then Stephen Miller got back from a long weekend and threw a fascist temper tantrum so Trump chickened out again

Honestly, tho, this all seems less like chickening out to me and more like Diane Feinstein in 2023. He's mentally gone so his aides are trying to prop him up and ride it out, except those aides are all terrible petty jackasses who hate each other, so Trump is constantly "changing his mind"

*just sort of hardline effort

Immigration is an unfathomably evil invasion that threatens our nations security and our sovereignty and [blah blah fascist claptrap blah...]

... unless The Economy says no, then nevermind.

-administration that demands to be taken seriously

There are definitely more people responsible for this than the one person who pulled a trigger, but he certainly is responsible for that. Being manipulated is not the same as being forced to do something.

A source familiar with the matter tells ABC News that two of those shot are state Sen. John Hoffman of Champlin and state Rep. Melissa Hortman of Brooklyn Park

Why these two? I did a search for recent news articles about them and nothing notable jumped out at me, but hitting two Democratic state lawmakers feels too coincidental to just be dumb spree killing.

I'll bet, but feeling bad about it doesn't change what they're doing

What's the weather looking like in DC today? Because I know these stubborn idiot fascists won't let something like a little lightning stop their stupid little celebration of themselves, so this all could end up a really fucking stupid mass casualty event pretty easily.

Yep, in October 2024 Israel wanted to bomb nuclear and oil resources in Iran but Biden said no to that and that they needed to pick another target, so Israel blew up a military base and killed some Iranian soldiers instead

Hopefully they feel like they're under a ton of pressure from all angles between everyone calling them out for being the fascist thugs they are and Trump constantly screaming at them for more deportations and it's making them sloppy

Fair enough, but, like, 100 archers against 1000 people ends poorly for the archers if the people are willing to take some casualties, and a keep wall is only good so long as nobody inside decides to unlock a door or people outside can't get a ladder set up somewhere for a few minutes

Yes, there have been successful revolutions since the 1850s, but they're definitely a lot harder than they used to be, and I think they now really do require some sort of defection from the ruling classes or military over to the opposition in a way that you didn't really need for, say, the French revolution, where an angry mob of peasant women could just force their way into the kings castle and tell him how things were gonna be going forward

I'm not saying it's impossible, and I'm definitely not saying people should give up protesting all the bullshit going on right now, but I do think meta social contract between the rulers and the ruled has changed a lot since the 18th century because of technological progress

Good question

why people aren't gathering in mobs

Well, it happened about a hundred years after your time, but there's this thing called the Gatling gun that got invented that really became a hard counter to angry mobs trying to storm things, and once that stopped being an option they just kinda stopped listening to us