I’m for the changes, but I’m skeptical about whether anything can be accomplished. If the SC changes aren’t done as an amendment, they’ll be subject to SC review. Getting anything past either of those bars seems nigh impossible.
Similarly, if the SC rules that presidential immunity is implied in the constitution, they could also block that without an amendment.
Maybe the plan isn’t to succeed but just to establish a record that Republican lawmakers are good with a supreme executive and corrupt courts, but I sort of feel like they’ve all but said that aloud anyway.
ETA:
But while we’re on the subject of changing things, I wonder about after an 18 year term is up, if there would be any use for a sort of Justice Emeritus who doesn’t get a vote, but can write concurring/dissenting opinions and maybe serve in either an advisory or ethics review capacity. So keep the lifetime appointment with all the advantages of that, but allow for the actual sitting court to change more over time. I don’t know; I haven’t really fleshed out the idea because it’s a pipe dream at this point.
So in other words, there was every reason to realize that this guy shouldn’t have access to a gun and a badge, but neither his coworkers nor his supervisors did anything about it.
AND THAT is why people say ACAB, because the other police who allowed this man to remain an officer are 100% complicit in this outcome.
Why do we have to wait until they fucking execute someone to do something about it?
Well, you better remove as much funding as possible from every police agency, and make sure that being a cop is as unpopular a career as possible, while still saying that having a police force is a vital part of our societal structure and so they have to find someone to hire.
Surely those efforts will help to solve this very genuine problem.
Sounds like a great idea on both counts. And actually I would add to that, create a nationwide registry of complaints against officers. There was an initial start at that in some of Biden’s police reforms, although it’s still sort of partial. Aviation dealt with this a while back, and it caused some fatal accidents until they fixed it; the system is flawed if you’re depending on the job candidate to volunteer to you the information that they were fired from some other location for incompetence. You need to have an external system in place that tracks it nationwide.
For some reason, the solution to this (again, very genuine) problem “bad cops tend to get fired and travel to some other agency” is not “let’s fix the holes that make that pattern possible” but “See? Police agencies always protect bad cops! Let’s starve them for money and make them desperate for more people!”
For some reason, the solution to this (again, very genuine) problem “bad cops tend to get fired and travel to some other agency” is not “let’s fix the holes that make that pattern possible” but “See? Police agencies always protect bad cops! Let’s starve them for money and make them desperate for more people!
We had decades of uncritical support of police from most of the population until cameras started showing up everywhere to let us see what we were supporting. It turns out those decades of mostly uncritical support does not seem to have resulted in the sorts of police we want. So maybe try being upset about the shitty police instead of being upset about people being upset about the shitty police.
It’s also important to recognize the relevance of class warfare here. Many many many organizations responsible for human safety often cut back on staff and hours so much that you’ll take a piece of shit watching your back because if they get fired your boss is gonna take those savings as a win and not hire anyone else and then no one will be watching your back so you just tolerate the piece of shit until they finally do something you can’t conscience anymore (which is waaay too late) or until they also become a danger to you, and the fact that they’re making individuals make that call on reporting the person responsible for their safety is a huge problem that needs to be addressed if we’re going to make any headway.
I don’t wanna talk about it in detail but I was put in a similar situation at the age of like 19 when I didn’t know any better and was constantly dragging another technician away from patients or even having to put my physical body between them but if I had reported them I would’ve been completely alone with the literally criminally insane men on my unit. I thank my stars every day they got fired on a regulatory technicality instead of actual patient harm because at the age of 19 with a highschool diploma and two weeks technician training I had no idea where to even start (and its also hard to get your head on straight when you’ve got that much adrenaline and cortisol in you for months on end). Oh and yeah, no, they didn’t hire anyone else and thank God I felt shit heating up and left because the day I did they had to put down a literal riot because of the conditions they were leaving these people in. If it weren’t for the working conditions I probably never would have left that patient population, those criminally insane men were some of the realest people I ever met and I learned so much from them and they’re almost entirely responsible for my WASP fundie deprogramming but I digress.
There’s also an element of if you report and nothing happens, or even if something does happen, you can get “frozen out” and no one will watch your back or some people will even push you into dangerous situations to get rid of you. So you’d have to have it be a tolerable and high paid enough position even with high standards that you can afford to just replace entire departments quickly. Defunding won’t do that, so the real answer is just making sure the funds they do have go more to regulatory oversight, but especially the most to the lowest rung people who do the most hands-on work.
I have thoughts about how they should have to be licensed and have oversight boards and a couple other things, but there’s a lot of problems in all sectors that just aren’t going to get solved until we address the fact that no one wants to pay for direct human services labor of any kind anymore. Hands-on blue collar work has been just so fundamentally devalued at the actual monetary level that even people who WANT to do it and do a good, honest job that serves other humans can’t even afford to sometimes, both monetarily and in costs to their physical wellbeing. So there’s nothing left that’s desirable about these positions except having power over others, and no shit that’s going to attract the worst of humanity.
Gun control is also critical and the lack of it is the #1 reason I don’t work in community mental health services despite specifically specializing in violent and malignantly manipulative behavior. I’d 100% be an amazing violent conflict deescalator (I’ve only been doing it almost a decade now) but the risk of getting shot is just not worth it. And I can tell you that’s also on the cops minds because I’ve chatted with them while sorting out emergency psych hold paperwork. I think even without that shitty “warrior cop” training they’re exposing them to, the question “what if they have a gun” is going to be at the forefront of their minds. Until that’s a lot less likely and / or they’re much more likely to know ahead of time, they’re going to want to shoot first before the other guy has even a hypothetical chance.
“Defund the police” is a great catchy tagline that just sounds like nonsense to the people actually doing this work or who are adjacent to it, so no wonder it’s not going anywhere. Fuck I keep adding shit this is a topic I’m really passionate about. There’s a saying in L&D that baby isn’t safe if mom (/ the primary caregiver) isn’t safe but it really applies to pretty much any person responsible for another human beings’ safety. No human can ever fully devote themselves to another’s safety if they aren’t already reasonably sure of their own.
I hope the redistributed federal money finds its way quickly to the communities that can’t afford to fix their water infrastructure themselves, so collectively we can improve society together.
You want it to be long enough to retain some of the advantages of lifetime appointments. It wasn’t originally framed that way just for fun or convenience, it does have importance.
We also need to make sure they don’t need to go job hunting after their term limit is up, as that would incentivize corruption. They should retain their salary for life.
edit: Reading another comment in here, perhaps its important to note that the main advantage of the lifetime appointment is it allows Justices to be fearless. They can challenge the most powerful people in the entire country, because for their whole lifetime they need nothing more than their current job, which is guaranteed.
Yeah, so the lifetime appointment thing is true right now and it turns out enables corruption. Perhaps the original justifications behind lifetime appointments were just, in fact, bad?
More that something like corruption is impossible to completely prevent. So you just try to make it harder by reducing incentives. We can’t get to “perfect” in a world with humans in it, but “better” is a realistically attainable achievement.
Okay, but it’s not being prevented at all. The current system incentivizes corruption because, clearly, it is practically impossible to do anything about justices who have succumbed to that corruption. So within the context of an environment where billionaires can dump limitless money on a justice and the constituents of that justice can do nothing at all to recall them or even really reprimand them in any way, how is that not asking for corruption to happen?
There actually is a method provided for justice removal, it just takes Congress, which also features corruption unfortunately. Also, just because there is some corruption evident does not mean it is not being prevented at all. Are all 9 corrupt? That would eventually happen if it was not prevented at all.
Importantly though, short term limits would also not prevent corruption, and would probably increase it, as Justices would become much more interested in joining businesses and lobbying organizations after their tenures are up. Hence, a middle ground is probably smarter.
Well said. There’s a strong tendency for people to revere tradition and the constitution a little too much. They forget that our democracy is old (as far as modern democracies go). The constitution was set up by a bunch of wealthy landowners (and some of them were slaveholders). It’s a collection of pretty bad compromises that had to be amended 27 times…and now is practically impossible to amend.
Supreme Court Justice is a very important and respectable position, but there’s nine of them (for now) because one person can’t be trusted with too much power. I think it should be limited even further. We give them too much veneration and power under the current system. Treating these people as infallible demigods is what got us into this mess to begin with.
Biden’s proposals also includes an enforceable code of ethics to address corruption on the bench. And as Carrolade mentions, Congress can impeach and remove judges.
Card draining is a scheme in which thieves remove gift cards from stores, capture their numeric codes or swap them out for counterfeit cards, and place the products back on display. When an unsuspecting customer loads money onto a tampered or counterfeit card, criminals access it online and steal the balance.
From the article it sounds like what they’re doing is replacing the activation keys on the cards and then putting them back on the shelf, then when the card is activated what really happens is the money is loaded on the card they have.
The problem is that doing any of these things in a matter which will stick will require amendments, because that is the only process that this compromised Supreme Court might respect. (And even that is not a given: I wouldn’t put it past them to say that any amendment not passed by a Founding Father is invalid, or something).
So the first thing that needs to be done is to “pack” the court. (I prefer the term “unfuck”, but that is less PC). This can only be done if Democrats take the Presidency and both houses of Congres, and nuke the filibuster. But it’s that important. Dial the fucker up to 13, then go to Republicans and say “OK, now we need to work to fix the courts together. You can decline, but if you do you will watch Momala appoint 4 additional justices under the old rules, to lifetime terms, and bank on getting your own trifecta to re-fuck the Court”.
While we have the amendment process open, we also need to set a limit to how long Congress can deliberate on any appointment, not just SC. Once a President makes an appointment, the Senate shouldn’t be able to sit on it indefinitely. It should be guaranteed to get a vote in the full Senate within X legislative days. The Senate can vote it down, of course, but then the President can nominate someone else. Republican Senators challenged Obama to make a centrist pick for the SC, and he did. Mitch and Lindsey sat on it for months because they knew that it would pass if it went to the full Senate. This process basically gives the Senate Leader a veto over both the President and the will of the overall Senate, and cannot be what the Founders intended.
Technically speaking the filibuster is only acceptable because the rules of congress allow them, but the rules are changed and Agreed on by all members every year. So “nuke the filibuster” would mean to disallow it in the procedural rules of congress.
The US Senate only has 100 members (2 per state), and since the body is so small they pride themselves on not limiting debates there. But at some point they do need to decide to progress to a vote, and to do that someone makes a “cloture” motion to close debate on that issue and proceed to a vote. In the US Senate, a cloture motion needs 60 votes to pass.
What this means is that if a minority wants to kill a bill, all they need to do is maintain 41 votes against ending debate. It can never proceed to a vote, then, even if more than 50 Senators are in favor. This is what we call a fillibuster: when enough Senators prevent a measure from being voted on.
This filibuster is just a Senate rule, though, and can be removed by a simple majority vote of the Senate. In the current Democratic majority, though, there were just enough Senators who didn’t want to nuke the rule to keep it in place. They are leaving, though, so if Democrats retain the Senate they will probably have the votes to change the rule.
The drawback is that someday, Republicans will take back the Senate, and if there is no filibuster Democrats in the Minority will have lost a key tool to gum up a Republican majority. But the SC is more important than all that. We need to reform the court ASAP, no matter the political cost.
Right now, any one senator can stop a vote on any bill by announcing they filibuster it.
That used to (decades ago) require them to stand and talk as long as they were able, to delay voting on the bill.
Now without the “talking filibuster” requirement, it becomes trivially easy for any senator to stop anything they don’t like.
A filibuster can be broken, and a vote can be forced to happen, if 60 of the 100 senators agree to it.
That almost never happens, as no one party ever gets a 60 seat “super-majority”.
Removing the filibuster will allow most any bill to pass with a standard 51% majority.
Stopping the minority party from blocking everything they don’t like.
The rules of the Senate itself can be changed with with a simple 51% majority, since they aren’t Laws that govern the land.
So it is possible to eliminate the filibuster without requiring a filibuster breaking super-majority.
Exactly. The path to an amendment is super difficult, and Conservative states have no incentive to do so while they have so thoroughly captured the Supreme Court. That’s why you pack the Court first. Appoint 4 liberal justices in their early 40s to lifetime appointments, and you will see much more of a push from those Conservative states for reforms.
Harris’s stepkids call her “Momala”. I think she needs to lean into the nickname, particularly since the couchfucker is implying she is somehow unqualified because she doesn’t have kids of her own.
A federal Mandate should be put in place where questionable laws which possibly violate the Constitution are not enforced until they are found legitimate.
He’s like a monkey throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks.
His supporters already hate immigrants. Right wing media has spent more than 40 years programing them to hate immigrants. Trump is just striking up a tune that he knows they’ll dance to.
The following was initially part of a reply to another person:
Maybe the simple, gentle, “everyday” language here is truly the point? There are so many things to attack about Trump, so many legitimate concerns for his fascist, racist, sexist, ad nauseum behaviors. We’ve heard it all before. But simply calling him weird could spark a little reflection in his supporters and would-be voters while obviously delivering a shock to Trump’s vanity.
It’s not something you can easily deny as a conspiracy theory or fake news or any other excuse about his words and behavior. The man is weird. And psychologically, I think it’s harder to defend a person described that way, or at least makes a defender get a little self-conscious. Trump being deemed weird is really indefensible, and I think it could work in deflating the cult of personality around him.
Not everyone can identify maniacal dictator rhetoric for what it is, and the power dynamic is clearly alluring to Trump supporters. However, knowing a weird person or even being called weird at some point is something almost everyone has experience with.
It’s uncomfortable. It makes you ask yourself what it is about a person that makes them weird and how you should deal with it. It prickles something very basic in the human psyche. So I think they’re on to something here. It might give supporters pause and will most definitely give Trump a complex.
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