My reaction to this a few years ago would've been something like, "Pish-posh and nonsense; the rules are clear, and only a fool would claim otherwise."
Then Trump v. US kicked the rule of law square in the nuts, and now anything is possible.
Stay frosty, America.
I wouldn’t have been that dismissive but I did think institutions and norms would hold up better than they have. They have been utterly inadequate to the occasion.
Institutions are only as resilient as the people working within them are resolute. I know many judges and lawyers who I knew would never hold the line. They were in orgs for their own reasons. Love of how law benefited society wasn’t the calculus. Judgeship was just the career “natural next step”.
We've been on this trajectory since Bush V. Gore.
All it takes is a few quislings selling out to collapse the rule of law...
Trump v. US was breathtaking in its dishonesty. I expected some modest rollout of unitary executive principles, not a coronation.
They perhaps thought "Hell, they can't just ignore us! We're the law!" Legal theory won't get you thru a power struggle.
I stagger to think what the historical lions of congress, regardless of their party, would say about this quisling congress.
Rayburn? Cannon? Johnson? O’Neil? I doubt even Boehner would have ceded this much authority to the executive.
been terrifying to watch. selling up as a Brit snowbird, 23yrs AZ, was the 1st step, but daughter (only child) still in USA so its still extremely terrifying every day
as someone else pointed out, things got properly kicked square-in-the-bollox the day the SC basically gave full immunity to a dick
This is why I’m so concerned with candidates who are fixated on restoring norms and institutions instead of creating new safeguards. The old ones manifestly did not work to preserve our system! We can’t just try ‘em again and hope they do better next time!
I thought the same. But I underestimated people’s desire for money and power. Expecting people with large quantities of both to put up a fight for equality for the rest of us was a huge mistake. When the SCOTUS is only concerned about rights for the ruling class, we are lost.
