The Tremendous Trump Thread - Etterspill (Les førstepost)

[JK22]

nebrewfoz skrev (9 timer siden):

Finnegan var passasjer på dette flyet, så det kan vel godt hende han vanligvis fløy enmotors rekognoseringsfly ...

For taktisk rekognosering i fiendtlig luftrom var North American P-51 Mustang foretrukket, disse hadde definisjonen "F-6" og var vanligvis sendt ut for skadekartlegging etter fly- og artilleriangrep på fiendtlige baser med kamerautstyr slik at analytikere kunne vurdere om angrepene hadde de ønskede effekter. Det var for å si det mildt; en meget farlig jobb for piloter som ofte var velkjent for sin dristighet. 

‘Lost for words’: Joe Biden’s tale about cannibals bemuses Papua New Guinea residents | Joe Biden | The Guardian

Da Finnegan var i A-20 flyet, var det i nordkysten av New Guinea som er befolket av melanesierne, og i denne Guardian-artikkelen virker det som at selv de innfødte i dag er dårlig kjent med de kannibalistiske skikkene man hadde.

Melanesierne var meget beryktet i 1800-tallet for deres "foreigner poaching" som betyr regelmessig jakt på isolerte og enslige mennesker som ikke tilhørte egne eller andre samfunn. De hadde ord for det; "idaidaga" som betyr gjeldfri ervervelse - dvs. at man kan erverve seg noe uten å risikere konsekvenser. Tyveri, med andre ord. De "stjele" mennesker og annet som de visste var etterlatt til seg selv. Mange var tatt som slaver, men også som mat, og melanesierne er et av et dusin folkeslag i historien som hadde kommersiell kannibalisme. Alt som trenges var mistro, og ved å være i en kultur der det ikke fantes voldskontroll mellom familier, klaner og stammer betyr det at enhver utenfor egne samfunn var "fremmed". Det var kaotisk og sadistisk vold hvor ordet "menneskeverd" var ikke-eksisterende.

Så da kolonisatorene grepet inn, fikk de et stans på det ukontrollerte voldsfokuset som fulgt til menneskeofring, sanseløs dreping, systematisk voldtekt og sist kannibalisme som var et krigsfenomen. Mistroen var så stor, at forræderi, bedrag og motbydelige skikker var allment - som eksplodert meget voldsomt i møte med fremmede fra Europa hvor kannibalisme er et sosialt tabu i mer enn tre tusen år. De hvite var raskt med å sette seg i respekt, spesielt for når skipbrudne fra europeiske og amerikanske skip kom i hender på de melanesiske krigerne, som ofte var sporet ned og massakrert uten nåde som respons - sammen med landsbyfolk. Hele landregioner var brent ned. Da en høvding myrdet et barn som var holdt som slave for å servere kjøttet til gjester, var koloniguvernøren tross personlige relasjoner med ham nådeløst; høvdingen ble hengt og landsbyen kollektivt straffet. Gjestene ble sporet ned og fikk samme skjebne som høvdingen. 

Så da året 1944 kom, var uskikken for lengst opphørt langs kystene av New Guinea. De hvite hadde banket det ut av de innfødte som lærte seg hvordan å leve sammen.

[shockorshot]

En schizo tente på seg utenfor rettsaken:

 

Endret 19. april av shockorshot

[Entern]

JK22 skrev (1 time siden):

For taktisk rekognosering i fiendtlig luftrom var North American P-51 Mustang foretrukket, disse hadde definisjonen "F-6" og var vanligvis sendt ut for skadekartlegging etter fly- og artilleriangrep på fiendtlige baser med kamerautstyr slik at analytikere kunne vurdere om angrepene hadde de ønskede effekter. Det var for å si det mildt; en meget farlig jobb for piloter som ofte var velkjent for sin dristighet. 

‘Lost for words’: Joe Biden’s tale about cannibals bemuses Papua New Guinea residents | Joe Biden | The Guardian

Da Finnegan var i A-20 flyet, var det i nordkysten av New Guinea som er befolket av melanesierne, og i denne Guardian-artikkelen virker det som at selv de innfødte i dag er dårlig kjent med de kannibalistiske skikkene man hadde.

Melanesierne var meget beryktet i 1800-tallet for deres "foreigner poaching" som betyr regelmessig jakt på isolerte og enslige mennesker som ikke tilhørte egne eller andre samfunn. De hadde ord for det; "idaidaga" som betyr gjeldfri ervervelse - dvs. at man kan erverve seg noe uten å risikere konsekvenser. Tyveri, med andre ord. De "stjele" mennesker og annet som de visste var etterlatt til seg selv. Mange var tatt som slaver, men også som mat, og melanesierne er et av et dusin folkeslag i historien som hadde kommersiell kannibalisme. Alt som trenges var mistro, og ved å være i en kultur der det ikke fantes voldskontroll mellom familier, klaner og stammer betyr det at enhver utenfor egne samfunn var "fremmed". Det var kaotisk og sadistisk vold hvor ordet "menneskeverd" var ikke-eksisterende.

Så da kolonisatorene grepet inn, fikk de et stans på det ukontrollerte voldsfokuset som fulgt til menneskeofring, sanseløs dreping, systematisk voldtekt og sist kannibalisme som var et krigsfenomen. Mistroen var så stor, at forræderi, bedrag og motbydelige skikker var allment - som eksplodert meget voldsomt i møte med fremmede fra Europa hvor kannibalisme er et sosialt tabu i mer enn tre tusen år. De hvite var raskt med å sette seg i respekt, spesielt for når skipbrudne fra europeiske og amerikanske skip kom i hender på de melanesiske krigerne, som ofte var sporet ned og massakrert uten nåde som respons - sammen med landsbyfolk. Hele landregioner var brent ned. Da en høvding myrdet et barn som var holdt som slave for å servere kjøttet til gjester, var koloniguvernøren tross personlige relasjoner med ham nådeløst; høvdingen ble hengt og landsbyen kollektivt straffet. Gjestene ble sporet ned og fikk samme skjebne som høvdingen. 

Så da året 1944 kom, var uskikken for lengst opphørt langs kystene av New Guinea. De hvite hadde banket det ut av de innfødte som lærte seg hvordan å leve sammen.

Jepp.

Alle snakker om hvor grusom kolonitiden var men europeerne gjorde mange steder verden bedre.

Et annet eksempel er når de tvang inderne til å slutte å brenne hustruene sine levende.

Eller når de gjorde slutt på slavehandelen i Sudan.

[JK22]

Entern skrev (41 minutter siden):

Jepp.

Alle snakker om hvor grusom kolonitiden var men europeerne gjorde mange steder verden bedre.

Et annet eksempel er når de tvang inderne til å slutte å brenne hustruene sine levende.

Eller når de gjorde slutt på slavehandelen i Sudan.

Det er hva det vestlige hegemoniet hadde gjort i flere århundrer; verdenen formes om i "humanitarismens navn" - det er merkelig at det ikke er et norsk ord for det globalengelske begrepet "humanitarism" - spesielt i kolonitidens ære i 1850-1950, ved år 1800 var to tredjedeler av verden ikke underlagt humanitære siviliserte regimer - knapt et århundre senere hadde man fått slutt på menneskeofring, kannibalistisk skikk, barbariske henrettelsesmetoder og lovløse som totalitære maktutøvelse.

Helt siden 1500-tallet hadde europeerne spredt sin sivilisasjonsmodell over hele verden med vold og kløkt, og tross alt må det sies at den vesteuropeiske sivilisasjonen tross sittt meget krigerske atferd var mer humant enn resten av verden med en sterk intoleranse for menneskeofring, kannibalisme, sanseløs dreping uten lov og dom og en mentalitet som åpner for omsorg med andre - spesielt gjennom det kristne budskapet. Vi var i 1800-tallet monstre som i det minst ønsket å gjøre det bedre - og dermed overvinner de andre monstre som ofte simpelt ikke gidd. 

Det vestlige hegemoniet som er så viktig for menneskeheten, har blitt satt under angrep, og på innsiden finnes det krefter som ikke maktet å fatte at man risikere å bli satt meget sterkt tilbake. 

For menneskehetens skyld må Vesten overleve. 

[AveMORphine]

[AveMORphine]

[Subara]

Mange deler verdier i et polarisert USA

Sitat

Til tross for den dype politiske splittelsen i USA, deler de fleste amerikanere kjerneverdier om hva det betyr å være amerikaner, ifølge en ny meningsmåling.

Sitat

Politikerne mer polariserte enn velgerne

– Noe skyldes at politiske ledere ikke gjenspeiler velgerne og oppfører seg mye mer polarisert enn de som stemte på dem.

-

58 prosent av republikanerne mener kristen to og verdier er en kjerneverdi. Bare 18 prosent av demokratene mener det samme.

Sitat

Skarpt skille mellom unge og eldre

– Mange unge husker ikke tilbake til da folk med ulike partipreferanser kunne samles i hverandres hjem. Deres referanseramme er den store splittelsen som kom med Donald Trumps presidentskap, sier han.

[Entern]

JK22 skrev (13 timer siden):

Det er hva det vestlige hegemoniet hadde gjort i flere århundrer; verdenen formes om i "humanitarismens navn" - det er merkelig at det ikke er et norsk ord for det globalengelske begrepet "humanitarism" - spesielt i kolonitidens ære i 1850-1950, ved år 1800 var to tredjedeler av verden ikke underlagt humanitære siviliserte regimer - knapt et århundre senere hadde man fått slutt på menneskeofring, kannibalistisk skikk, barbariske henrettelsesmetoder og lovløse som totalitære maktutøvelse.

Helt siden 1500-tallet hadde europeerne spredt sin sivilisasjonsmodell over hele verden med vold og kløkt, og tross alt må det sies at den vesteuropeiske sivilisasjonen tross sittt meget krigerske atferd var mer humant enn resten av verden med en sterk intoleranse for menneskeofring, kannibalisme, sanseløs dreping uten lov og dom og en mentalitet som åpner for omsorg med andre - spesielt gjennom det kristne budskapet. Vi var i 1800-tallet monstre som i det minst ønsket å gjøre det bedre - og dermed overvinner de andre monstre som ofte simpelt ikke gidd. 

Det vestlige hegemoniet som er så viktig for menneskeheten, har blitt satt under angrep, og på innsiden finnes det krefter som ikke maktet å fatte at man risikere å bli satt meget sterkt tilbake. 

For menneskehetens skyld må Vesten overleve. 

Som jeg og min beste kompis en gang kom frem til: Vesten er det eneste lyspunktet i et hav av ondskapsfullt mørke.

Derfor må, som du sier, Vesten overleve.

[JK22]

'To His Core, In His Bones': John Legend Gets Blunt In Message For 'Racist' Trump (msn.com)

'To His Core, In His Bones': John Legend Gets Blunt In Message For 'Racist' Trump

Musician John Legend put Donald Trump on blast on Sunday, calling out the former president as a racist and then offering some specific examples. 

“He’s done very little for us and he is at his core, truly, truly a racist,” Legend told MSNBC’s Jen Psaki.

Trump has claimed that he’s done more for Black Americans than “any other president since Abraham Lincoln and maybe including Abraham Lincoln,” and his supporters point to bipartisan criminal justice reform that Trump signed into law in 2018.

But Legend said Trump’s track record tells another story. 

“He’s not been an ally,” Legend said. “At the same time he’s claiming credit for those small things, he’s also saying if people are stealing something they should get shot in the middle of the store. When we protested the killing of George Floyd he advocated for the military to shoot us in the streets.” 

During the unrest of 2020, Trump called protesters “thugs,” advocated that police shoot looters on sight, and suggested putting the military in charge of the response.

“He’s made it clear throughout his life that he believes Black people are inferior, like he believes that to his core, in his bones,” he said. “He wouldn’t let us live in his buildings back in the day.” 

Legend also referred to Trump’s belief in “superior” genes and bloodlines

“He clearly believes in a genetic hierarchy of humanity and it’s racially determined,” he said.

Legend ― who has achieved the rare feat of Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony awards ― continued: 

“So he is a tried-and-true, dyed-in-the-wool racist. Like, in the core of his being, he’s a racist, so I don’t wanna hear what he has to say about what he’s done for Black people. He’s done for little for us. And he is, at his core, truly, truly a racist. You even hear what he says about immigration and what countries he wants people to come in from. They’re all very white.” 

Enhver som har lest seg opp i biografi om Trump, er klart over hans rasistiske holdninger mot de fargede fra gammelt av - og ingenting har vist at dette har endret seg i dag. Ennå er mange fargede villig til å stemme på ham, og det skyldes to motiv fordi disse fornekte ikke hans rasismeholdninger, for det første; det er en voksende kristenkonservativ bevegelse blant de fargede som har opplevd sosiale normoppløsning i flere generasjoner - for det andre, man har sterk mistro mot det politiske systemet og håper dermed på at Trump vil ødelegge det. 

Supreme Court Deals Blow to Effort to Kick Donald Trump Off Ballot (msn.com)

Og i mellomtiden fortsetter Roberts med å beskytte Trump, en saksøker som i lang tid prøvd å få Trump diskvalifisert med basis i 14. grunnlovstillegget har fått hans sak avvist og dermed må avslutte virksomheten - nesten samtidig som den føderale høyesteretten tillatt rettsforfølgelse av offisielle ansatte for presise det samme lovbruddet som Trump anklages for. Dette er forskjellbehandling som er i klar strid med amerikansk rettspraksis. For "alle" er det klart at Roberts beskytter Trump, til tross for voksende dissens - spesielt etter hvert som kaoset omkring delstatlige immigrasjonslover forverrer seg - har sendt ham og institusjonen ut i hardt uvær.

Det er bare dager til den første høringen om Trump har absolutt immunitet eller ikke, og da kommer alle juridiske eksperter, toneangivende jurister med mye makt og politiske eksperter til å overvære dette. Om Roberts og de konservative dommerne skulle gli i Trumps retning, kan det gi dissensen politisk og juridisk vekt. Etter det som hadde hendt i de siste måneder har kjennerne følt seg dypt usikret på om de kan forutsi høyesterettens handlinger. 

The Supreme Court doesn’t seem eager to get involved with homelessness policy, in Grants Pass v. Johnson - Vox

U.S. Supreme Court appears to lean toward Oregon city in complex homelessness case (yahoo.com)

Dessuten er det en viktig sak på gang; saken om de hjemløse. Grants Pass v. Johnson. 

The Supreme Court’s ultimate decision in Grants Pass v. Johnson probably isn’t going to end well for homeless people. The case, which asks whether a city in Oregon may enact so many restrictions on sleeping in public and similar behavior that it amounts to an effective ban on being unhoused, drew many questions from justices skeptical that the federal judiciary should play much of a role at all in addressing homelessness.

That said, there is an off chance that Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett might join with the Court’s three Democratic appointees to permit a very narrow injunction blocking the web of anti-homelessness ordinances at issue in this case. Barrett, in particular, seemed concerned by the fact that the city of Grants Pass, Oregon, “criminalizes sleeping with a blanket” while outside.

The bulk of the Court’s questions, however, and especially the questions from the Court’s Republican appointees, focused on the difficult “line-drawing” questions that arise once the Supreme Court says that there are constitutional limits on what the government can do to criminalize behaviors that are associated with homelessness.

If a city cannot criminalize sleeping in a public park with a blanket, for example, can it criminalize public urination or defecation by someone who does not have access to a toilet? Can it criminalize lighting a fire in public to stay warm? And does the answer change if the person who lights the fire needs to do so in order to cook?

Given these difficult questions, many of the justices — and especially Chief Justice John Roberts, Justice Samuel Alito, and Justice Neil Gorsuch — suggested that maybe the courts should stay away from homelessness policy altogether and let local governments sort out how they want to deal with this issue.

Meanwhile, at least three justices — Justices Clarence Thomas, Sonia Sotomayor, and Ketanji Brown Jackson — floated the possibility that the federal judiciary may lack jurisdiction to hear this case to begin with. Such a decision would allow the Court to punt on the broader question of whether the Constitution permits the government to effectively criminalize homelessness.

Høringene om saken var en blåkopi av høringen som mer eller mindre avgjort diskvalifiseringssaken, hvor de konservative dommerne nektet å ta saken på alvor, betvile om det er deres sak og deretter regelrett avvist eventuelle følger som vil oppstå av egne avgjørelse. Som sett den gang, vil de ikke tillate aktivitet av konstitusjonelle bestemmelser for å hindre uønskede konsekvenser.  

- permits the government to effectively criminalize homelessness - 

Et stort problem med hjemløshet i USA er fravær på et statlig velferdssystem som kunne forsørge de hjemløse som trenger huslys og offentlige tjenester, det er over 650,000 registrerte hjemløse - aldri før i USAs historie har det blitt registrert så mange. Gang på gang hadde man prøvd å få myndighetene til å gjøre noe, men i republikanske som demokratiske byer og delstater var det observert en sterk motvilje omkring de hjemløse. Så meget, at det ofte bare er en føderal villighet der by og delstat nektet. Til tross for at det er meget høy dødelighet blant de hjemløse, det meldes at det er estimater for mellom 18,000 og 40,000 døde per år - de fleste som skyldes kriminalitet og vold. I flere delstater kunne de hjemløse okkupere andres eiendommer om disse ikke benyttes året rundt, men i 2023-24 var det sett en skrekkelig bevegelse som kalles "castle doctrine" - som innbar at bruk av dødelig makt mot inntrengere legitimeres. Det var tidlig forbudt fordi selvforsvarsretten knyttes til eiendeler og bosted, ikke eiendommer uten ly eller forlatte bygninger. I Florida er det vedtatt, i andre delstater kan folk snart fritt skyte ned enhver som befinner seg i disses eiendommer uten konsekvenser. Dermed kan ikke hjemløse og andre fritt bevege seg for å finne ly. 

Og i byen Grant Pass, delstaten Oregon har de hjemløse blitt forbudt. Rett og slett forbudt, uten at det settes av ressurser for å hjelpe ut de hjemløse.

“Why do you think these nine people are the best people to judge and weigh those policy judgments?” Chief Justice John Roberts asked, referring to the Supreme Court.

Hva slags argument er det?!! 

“You don’t arrest babies who have blankets over them, you don’t arrest people who are sleeping on the beach, as I tend to do if I’ve been there a while. You only arrest people who don’t have a second home, is that correct?” Sotomayor said.

Hun er på det rette sporet her. Det finnes konstitusjonelle bestemmelser som kan gjøre diskriminering mot de hjemløse ulovlig om det ikke settes inn tiltak for å hjelpe dem ut, men Roberts meget frekt nektet å vurdere dette og lyttet ikke på Sotomayor, som sliter med svekkede helse. (Biden hadde ønsket å erstatte henne, men sabotøren McConnell nekte og vil heller erstatte henne med en erkekonservativ dommer - han er farligere enn Trump på dette stedet)

‘Cruel and unusual punishment’

The justices are being asked to decide whether the enforcement of that local ordinance on regulating camping on public property violated the “cruel and unusual punishment” clause of the Eighth Amendment.

Theane Evangelis, the attorney representing the city, argued that the city is going after the conduct of unhoused people, rather than the status of homelessness.

“We can look at the law and it has a conduct element — the conduct is establishing a campsite,” she said.

The attorney representing the plaintiffs, Kelsi B. Corkran, argued that the ordinance is a violation of the Eighth Amendment by inflicting punishment for the status of being homeless.

“Although the city describes its ordinances as punishing camping on public property, it defines campsite as any place a homeless person is while covered with a blanket,” she said. “The city interprets and applies the ordinances to permit non-homeless people to rest on blankets and public parks, while a homeless person who does the same thing breaks the law.”

Problemet her er at Grant Pass har blitt overlatt til seg selv; delstatsmyndigheter som regionmyndigheter gjør ingenting, andre kommuner holdt seg unna, selv om det er 600 hjemløse i en by med 40,000 innbyggere, hvor man ikke engangs er villig til å gi dem husly i en delstat som kan bli meget kaldt om vinteren. Bare frivillige ønsket å hjelpe dem. Forbudet vil dermed få meget drastiske virkninger, for i eldre tid var det ikke uvanlig at politi bortførte hjemløse og kaste dem ut til en ukjent skjebne. 

Og FN er på banen; de har gjort det klart at amerikanernes politikk mot de hjemløse kan betegnes som massive menneskerettighetsbrudd. Her fra wikipedia; 

Criminalization

Various laws have both directly and indirectly criminalized people that are homeless and people attempting to feed homeless people outdoors. At least 31 cities have criminalized feeding people that are homeless.

In 2014, the United Nations Human Rights Committee criticized the United States for the criminalization of homelessness, noting that such "cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment" is in violation of international human rights treaty obligations.

A 2018 report by Philip Alston, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, found that homeless persons have effectively been criminalized in many cities around the United States, and noted that "punishing and imprisoning the poor is the distinctively American response to poverty in the twenty-first century." As of 2023, both Missouri, Tennessee, and Texas have passed laws to ban homeless public camping by homeless people, often punishing such behavior with felony charges; with other states considering similar legislation.

Vagrancy

Many municipalities in the US make it a crime to provide food or shelter to homeless people, with many more making it illegal for homeless people themselves to use blankets or soap.

In August 2012, a federal district judge in Philadelphia ruled that laws prohibiting serving food to homeless people outdoors were unconstitutional.

On June 19, 2014, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit struck down a 1983 ordinance in the city of Los Angeles which "bans people from living in cars or recreational vehicles on city streets or in parking lots" as being unconstitutionally vague, saying "This broad and cryptic statute criminalizes innocent behavior, making it impossible for citizens to know how to keep their conduct within the pale. ... Unlike other cities, which ban overnight parking or sleeping in vehicles, Los Angeles' law prohibits using cars as 'living quarters' both overnight and 'day-by-day, or otherwise'."

Homeless rights advocates are pushing for "Right to Rest" bills in several states in 2015, which would overturn laws that target homeless people for sitting, eating, and sleeping in public places.

In 2018, in Martin v. Boise the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled that city ordinances banning sleeping outside cannot be enforced if there are not enough shelter beds available in the city.

I dette århundret var de føderale domstolene i ferd med å fjerne kriminaliseringen av de hjemløse, og det var dette som skulle avgjøres av den føderale høyesteretten som under normale omstendigheter vil nikke til den progressive utviklingen for å tvinge myndighetene - og spesielt folk flest - til å gi velferdstjenester til de hjemløse. For det var observert at mange bofaste sitter med ekstreme voldsomme fordommer mot de hjemløse, selv når disse opprinnelige kom fra samme krets som dem selv.

Nå tyder alt på at Roberts vil fjerne den føderale tilstedeværelsen. For det er observert en arroganse som synes å ha kommet utenfor kontroll slik at han ikke lenge er etisk egnet for hans rolle;

Roberts, meanwhile, tossed out various competing theories for why he might rule in favor of the city in this case. At one point, he warned that a too-broad definition of what constitutes a status crime could prevent the government from criminalizing the “status” of being a bank robber.

At another point, he suggested that the status of being homeless is too transient to qualify for protection under Robinson, pointing out that someone may gain or lose access to shelter on any particular day.

The Chief’s overarching concern, however, appeared to be that courts are just not well-suited to address homelessness policy. Why would someone think that “these nine people,” meaning himself and his colleagues, are better suited to decide whether a city should focus its limited resources on addressing homelessness and not, say, replacing lead pipes or some other important problem?

Han og andre dommere ser ut til å ønske å kvitte seg med Robinson v. California (1962)-avgjørelsen som mener " - so a state cannot arrest someone simply for being a person with a drug addiction - " Her hadde den føderale høyesteretten regelrett revet bort hundrevis av lokale og delstatlige lover ment for sosial kontroll gjennom statsinngrep fordi det ikke lenge er tillatt å arrestere " simply for being a person with " som betyr at en lovbryter bare kan anholdes/sanksjoneres ved brudd på "statuslover". Det var den legendariske Earl Warren som gjort det klart at grunnlovstillegget nr. 8 fra 1791 sier - " - prohibit criminalization of particular acts or conduct, as contrasted with prohibiting the use of a particular form of punishment for a crime - "

Det er en kjepphest for erkekonservative dommerne i USA. Roberts vil ikke ha en "Robinson-effekt" omkring de hjemløse man vil kaste ut. Bokstavelig. 

“Homelessness is a result of systemic issues such as a lack of affordable housing, exorbitant rents, and a shortage of well-paying jobs,” Sarae Lewis, a spokesperson for Community Solutions, said in a statement. “Arresting and fining people for sleeping on the streets is ineffective, keeps people homeless for longer, and distracts from real solutions like those we see working in communities across the country.”

Dette er morgendagens USA, et hjerteløst stendersamfunn som i 1700-tallet. Meget mange ønsker det. Og Trump vinner på denne hjerteløsheten. Biden gjør ingenting. Simpelt fordi han vet at det er altfor mange som ikke vil hjelpe andre som er i nød. 

ALTFOR MANGE. 

[JK22]

PS.

I kommentarfelter er det lett å se at amerikanske holdninger er egoistisk, fiendtligstemt og sterkt fordomsfullt i et samfunn hvor man er opptatt av penger fremfor sosial velvære. Dette er utenkelig i store deler av Europa hvor staten tar sitt ansvar på alvor, hvor man aktivt motarbeider sosial nød. For disse amerikanerne forstår ikke at hjemløshet er sosial nød og fattigdom. 

* “What’s so complicated about letting someone somewhere sleep outside with a blanket if they have nowhere to sleep?”

1) It drives away business

2) the sidewalks fill up with human excrement

3) it causes illegal drug sales

4) it puts a strain on police, fire, ambulance services

5) when these sleeping people are attacked while on someone elses property, they can sue for not having a safe place

6) drives up insurance rates

7) when one person is allowed to sleep there, they tell others, and a bazillion others show up

8) where these sleepies show up, crime follows

9) people are afraid in their own homes

10) people are afraid to walk the streets of their own town

11) where sleepies show up, so do filthy hypodermic needles.

11) it is no longer safe to walk your dog down the sidewalk in front of your own home

12) trash just keeps accumulating

13) etc. etc. etc.

* They need jobs, not hand-outs. And if they are not willing to work, neither should they eat. Stop rewarding them for doing nothing.

* If someone doesn't want to agree to the terms to be allowed to stay in a shelter then they shouldn't be allowed to set up camp anywhere they want. The argument "the city is required to give everyone a bed" is a joke. It's not the city's job to be your mother. By the liberal logic here I should be able to park my truck in the middle of city park if I can't find a parking space close to where I need to go.

Homelessness in the United States – Wikipedia

Hjemløshet er ikke nytt i USA. Men dessverre hadde den sterke motviljen mot sosialpolitikk og velstand i meget lang tid sammen med bevisste ignoranse for sosial nød fulgt til at dette problemet var meget sterk; og det som er skremmende er at meget mange hvite mennesker har en tendens med å ignorere at deres foreldre og slektninger, spesielt som immigranter, hadde vært hjemløse i lengre perioder. I 1870-tallet var immigrantene den største gruppen blant de hjemløse, før disse flytte seg ut - ofte i meget sterk nød. Mange, inkludert skandinaviske immigranter, overlevd ikke. 

I 1930-tallet var hele to millioner hjemløse i "hoovervilles", det var først da "New Deal" kom på plassen det bli slutt med trakassering og overgrep på de hjemløse, det var endog massedrap på hjemløse veteransoldater i selveste Washington. Roosevelt fikk en slutt på dette, da han innførte offentlige velferdsordninger ment for å avverge sosial nød og dette var en så stor suksess, at hjemløsheten nesten forsvant i etterkrigstiden, slik at det var noteverdige eksempler som da mentale syke tvinges ut på gatene hvor disse må klare seg selv.

Dette var president Kennedys største mørke hemmelighet; han banket gjennom "Community Mental Health Act" i 1963 uten å innføre tvang på lokalstyre om å hjelpe en reintegrering av psykiske lidende i hverdagslivet. Loven var en suksess der man hadde sosialbevisste og ansvarlig lokalstyre, men en horribel fiasko der lokalstyret ikke brydd seg og bare kaste dem ut med minimal hjelp, da man enten var utilstrekkelig forberedt eller gjort lite av det som var forskrevet. Da Reagan overtok i 1981, valgt han like godt å ødelegge virkningene av loven - slik at meget mange hjemløse siden den gang har psykiske lidelser. 

The number of homeless people grew in the 1980s, nearly doubling from 1984 to 1987. According to Don Mitchell, this was in part due to the neoliberal reforms of the Reagan presidency, as housing and social service cuts increased and also the economy suffered a recession early in the decade.

The United States government determined that somewhere between 200,000 and 500,000 Americans were then homeless. There were some U.S. federal initiatives that aimed to help, end and prevent homelessness; however, there were no designated homeless-related programs in the Office of Management and Budget.Tent cities, which had largely vanished during the post-war period, began to re-emerge during this time.

The history of the United States illustrates that this was a time when there was economic distress, and high unemployment at points, and was also the period when chronic homelessness became a societal problem.

Dagens hjemløse er et resultat av Finankrisens ettervirkninger som forsterkes med energikrisen og inflasjonen i dag. Det vist seg nemlig at opptil 60 % av de registrerte hjemløse har fast arbeid eller arbeid i store deler av året, dette er spesielt ille i California hvor det ikke er uvanlig at de hjemløse kunne ha kjøretøyer, fast arbeid og eiendeler som offentlige tjenester, men ikke kunne bo i verken leiebolig eller egenbolig fordi boligutgiftene er for høy; det vist seg at på flere steder er det hele 30 % over det gjennomsnittlige inntektsnivået! 

Og som et resultat av "den falske konservatismen" ved å ekskludere offentlige fellestjenester som skole, bad og så mye annet har det fulgt til at mange hjemløse ikke kunne bade eller få dekke sine hygieniske behovene. Det var en gang offentlige bad som var åpnet for alle uten betaling, selv under kriseårene i 1930-tallet. Mange lokalstyrer vil ikke ha fasiliteter for folk i sosial nød selv når disse bare trengt bad og vask. 

Da er det ikke rart at FN reagert sterkt på situasjonen omkring de hjemløse i USA, som kan ansees som et symbol over den selvopptatte, egosentriske og ignorant amerikaneren, som republikanerne spesielt appellere til, og som dessverre oppstå av seg selv i krisetid, når man blir for opptatt av egne nød eller problemer fremfor å søke solidaritet og felleskap.

Endret 23. april av JK22

[JK22]

Jeg kan ikke tro det. Jeg bare kan ikke fatte det! Under høringen kom det fram at de konservative dommerne med Roberts i spissen bevisste bryter med sedvane fordi de er på gli mot ideen om absolutt immunitet for en president. 

Trump Had a Good Day in One Court (msn.com)

Even now, “President Donald Trump,” is still a phrase that requires conceptual gymnastics — a leap from the tabloid depths to the heights of power. Consider a pair of scenes, in a pair of courtrooms, Thursday morning. Promptly at 10 a.m., in Washington, to the ritual incantation of “Oyez! Oyez! Oyez!” nine black robed justices of the Supreme Court filed in to hear arguments in a case that could determine whether a president can be prosecuted for committing crimes while in office. Meanwhile, Trump was mired in Manhattan criminal court, listening as David Pecker, the former chief executive of the National Enquirer, testified about hushing up Trump’s alleged affair with a Playboy model, and once discussing the arrangement in the presence of the FBI director.

High, low. Low, high. They say justice is blind, but with Trump, it’s dizzy.

Let’s start at the top. In the marbled Supreme Court chamber, the mood was grave as the justices considered whether presidential immunity exists to protect Trump from prosecution for crimes related to his efforts to overturn the 2020 election. “There are some things that are so fundamentally evil that they have to be protected against,” said Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who posed a hypothetical about a president who ordered assassinations of political rivals. Her colleague Elena Kagan broached the scenario of mounting a military coup. Brett Kavanaugh warned of steamrolling prosecutors. Ketanji Brown Jackson theorized that White House might one day become a “seat of criminal activity.” Samuel Alito raised the possibility that the United States might be devolving into a cycle in which each president prosecutes his predecessor, as sometimes happens in the developing world. Neil Gorsuch, never one shrink from grandiosity, said the court needed to write “a rule for the ages.”

The second hand on the large antique clock hanging over the bench kept sweeping forward. Each tick brought Trump that much closer to his goal: getting to November. His immunity appeal makes a number of arguments, some mildly plausible and some risible, but for now they hardly matter. The appeal has already created the best thing Trump could have hoped for: a long delay. If the justices take a reasonable amount of time to make a decision, a trial in Washington — where even Trump’s lawyers admit he faces a high likelihood of conviction — is certain to be pushed past the election. And so just being in the Supreme Court in April represented an enormous victory for Trump, who wasn’t, in the literal sense, actually there. He had been hoping to attend oral arguments in person, but Juan Merchan, the judge overseeing his other case, had told him his presence was required in Manhattan, telling him that “having a trial” was “also a big deal.”

So Trump was forced to sit through another undignified day of testimony by Pecker, the silver-haired sleaze merchant who said he considered Trump a “friend” and “my mentor.” As he spoke, Trump would lean back in his chair, sometimes with his eyes closed, listening to a laborious account of the work it took to keep damaging stories about Trump out of the public domain before the 2016 election. “I wanted to protect my company, I wanted to protect myself and I also wanted to protect Donald Trump,” Pecker said. Prosecutors from the district attorney’s office sought to show that the two men had engaged in a conspiracy that continued after the 2016 election. Pecker testified that Jared Kushner had pulled him up to see President-elect Trump at Trump Tower during the transition, where he joined a meeting that included then FBI Director James Comey, and Trump asked him about his alleged former mistress, Karen McDougal.

Because Trump allegedly made the payoffs to McDougal and Stormy Daniels before he was elected, his immunity claim before the Supreme Court would not have helped him in the New York case, but if the Court does find he has some protection, it would likely end or severely hinder the other three cases against him. (Under questioning from Justice Amy Coney Barrett, the attorney representing the Justice Department, Michael Dreeben, conceded that an immunity doctrine that applied to the January 6 case would likely also cover the substantially similar state case in Georgia.) John Sauer, a raspy-voiced appellate attorney for Trump, told the justices that the Framers intended to protect presidents from this sort of criminal liability. As proof, Sauer cited the fact that for “234 years of American history, no president was ever prosecuted for his official acts.” He suggested that without such immunity there could be no presidency as we know it,” and raised that the possibility of future prosecution would make presidents vulnerable to “blackmail and extortion” by opponents.

“I understood it to be the status quo,” said Justice Jackson, who pointed out that it had long been presumed that presidents could be prosecuted after leaving office. Sauer responded by quoting something that Benjamin Franklin said at the Constitutional Convention.

“So what was up with the pardon of President Nixon?” Jackson retorted.

It is conservatives who usually accuse liberals of reading previously invisible meaning into the Constitution, and the Democratic appointees on the Court seemed to relish the opportunity to play up the irony. “The Framers did not put an immunity clause into the Constitution,” said Justice Kagan. “They knew how to. There were immunity clauses in some state constitutions.” But, she said, “They were reacting against a monarch who claimed to be above the law.” Kagan focused on the most un-originalist element of Trump’s appeal: its interpretation of the impeachment clause of the Constitution. By any normal reading, it’s an accountability mechanism, but Trump seeks to turn it into a nearly impenetrable liability shield. Under Trump’s theory, a president could not be prosecuted for anything he did officially — no matter how illegal or immoral — unless he was first impeached and convicted by Congress.

Kagan brought up a series of doomsday scenarios. Would it be an “official act” for a president to sell nuclear secrets? What if a president ordered a coup? DId he have to be impeached in order to be held responsible? Each time, Sauer was forced to dissemble, saying the answers to each hypothetical were “fact-specific” and “context-specific.”

“That answer sounds to me,” Kagan said, sardonically, “as though it’s like, ‘Yeah, under my test, it’s an official act, but that sure sounds bad, doesn’t it?’”

After about 90 minutes, Dreeben, a veteran Justice Department attorney on the staff of Special Counsel Jack Smith, rose to speak, saying Trump’s “novel theory” would allow presidents to get away with “bribery, treason, sedition, murder, and, here, conspiring to use fraud to overturn the results of an election and perpetuate himself in power.” There seems to be little chance that any of the justices will go along with that. Trump’s own appointees seemed to be at pains to distance themselves from any defense of his actions. Barrett seemed particularly skeptical in her questioning. Both Gorsuch and Kavanaugh said they were less concerned with the “here and now of this case,” as Kavanaugh put it, than with creating a durable standard for the future.

Kavanaugh grew impassioned as he criticized what he called “one of the court’s biggest mistakes,” a 1980s Supreme Court decision that upheld the law creating the independent counsel, a prosecutorial office meant to investigate high officeholders. He seemed to be speaking from experience: He once played a key role in Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr’s investigation of Bill Clinton — which led to Clinton’s impeachment over the Monica Lewinsky affair — and he may have been alluding to Starr when he questioned Dreeben about the “risk” that the president could be victimized by “a creative prosecutor who wants to go after a president.” (Then again, maybe Kavanaugh was subtly needling Dreeben himself, who previously worked on a variety public corruption investigations, including Robert Mueller’s investigation of Trump.) At any rate, the justice sounded determined to make sure that any decision on Trump’s immunity would be tailored narrowly, to prevent presidents from being prosecuted frequently.

By the end of the hearing, it sounded as if the Court was trending in the direction of a ruling that would potentially offer Trump immunity for some of his actions and not others. Barrett, in her questioning of Sauer, went through a long list of offenses alleged in the indictment, and compelled him to answer that some of them — like sending private attorneys off to put together fraudulent slates of electors — were in no way official actions. When Sauer proposed the Court strip the indictment of official acts, Chief Justice John Roberts said that would be like a “one-legged stool.” With Dreeben, she explored the idea that the January 6 case might still be able to proceed, with only those indisputably private actions being presented to the jury as crimes. It seemed as if she were trying to offer a way out.

Unfortunately for Dreeben and his boss, Smith, it was hard to count five votes for a resolution that would allow them to take their case to trial before November. Roberts sounded particularly dubious of an appellate court ruling that resoundingly resolved the immunity issue in Smith’s favor, calling its reasoning “tautological.” Of the justices, Roberts, a proceduralist to his core, sounded the most inclined to punt the issue back to the district court, asking for it to come up with a test that would draw a distinction between the president’s official and private actions. If that happens, the Washington trial will be delayed many months. If Trump wins the election in the meantime, that will put the question to rest—unless Trump starts prosecuting his predecessors.

Justice Jackson suggested that her colleagues’ concerns about unintended consequences were misplaced. If anything, she said, a ruling that affirmed absolute presidential immunity would have the opposite of a “chilling” effect on the presidency. “If the potential for criminal liability is taken off the table,” she asked Sauer, “wouldn’t there be a significant risk that future presidents would be emboldened to commit crimes with abandon while they’re in office?” At roughly the same time, in New York, prosecutors displayed a photo of David Pecker with Trump at the White House, showing him as he discussed how he and the president had discussed the McDougal payoff during a walk in the portico. Justice Jackson’s concern wasn’t just a hypothetical. The White House, according to the Manhattan prosecutors, had already been a “seat of criminal activity.”

“Today was breathtaking,” Trump said Thursday afternoon after he emerged from the courtroom, where his defense attorney Emil Bove had begun his cross examination of Pecker. “I was forced to be here, and I’m glad I was, because it was a very interesting day in a certain way. But the U.S. Supreme Court had a monumental hearing on immunity.” He claimed that, if deprived of immunity as he conceived it, the presidency would become merely a “ceremonial” office.

“We want presidents that can get things done and bring people together,” Trump said. “The justices were on their game. So let’s see how that all pans out. But again, I say presidential immunity: very powerful. Presidential immunity is imperative, or you practically won’t have a country anymore.” With that, the ex-president left the courthouse. The screen split again and he returned to his campaign.

JEG BARE KAN IKKE TRO DET! 

Enhver som lese dette vil straks innse hva Roberts er i ferd med å gjøre! Han er villig til å gi president immunitet som overgikk alle formelle grenser og ser ut til å ønske et "kompromiss" uten å fatte ALVORET hvor en president må på prinsippet ikke ha absolutt immunitet! Han bruker helt presist samme taktikk som under diskvalifiseringssaken ved å si fra at hvis man følge lovens tekst kan det åpne for politiske inngrep for å diskvalifisere uten legal begrunning! Dette fulgt til forskjellbehandling og ødeleggelsen av diskvalifiseringsregelen! Det er som hvis Roberts er kommet i troen om at "alle" er skurker som kan fritt misbruke lover uten hindring - som det amerikanske rettsvesenet vil stoppe.

Hvis Earl Warren var der under høringen, er det mulig at han ville ha eksplodert og marsjert rett til Roberts for å rive dommerkappen av ham! Nå er det utvilsomt; Roberts og hans gjeng må kastes ut. Warren var meget klart at det ikke finnes snarvei, kompromiss eller rom for tolkning i en prinsipielle sak. Her prøver Roberts seg på å treffe en mellomvei uten å fatte at dette er i strid med allmenn fornuft! Tre ganger har han forbrutt seg mot etablerte sedvaner; først diskvalifiseringssaken, deretter saken om delstatlige immigrasjonslover, og nå ser vi at han vil gi president mye større immunitet enn det er tradisjon for, kun i offisiell tjeneste. 

Dette er meget alvorlig. Roberts er blitt Trumps alliert. Han er blitt en fiende mot det amerikanske demokratiet. 

WASHINGTON—The Supreme Court, hearing a last-ditch appeal from Donald Trump, appeared open Thursday to granting some level of immunity to protect former presidents from being prosecuted for alleged crimes committed while in office.

Over nearly three hours of oral argument, the court’s conservative majority expressed greater concern that a future president might flinch from bold action for fear of prosecution than the possibility that Trump could avoid accountability on charges he attempted to steal the 2020 presidential election from Joe Biden.

The risk, said Justice Brett Kavanaugh, was that a Trump trial could open the door to a new era of American politics where prosecution of ex-presidents became routine, much as the use of special counsels accelerated after the Watergate scandal.

“It’s going to cycle back and be used against the current president or the next president and the next president and the next president after that,” Kavanaugh said.

Trump himself amplified that concern before arguments began Thursday. “Crooked Joe deserves life in prison!” Trump said in an email to supporters. “Put Biden on trial.”

The court seemed unlikely to accept all of Trump’s arguments, which seek “absolute immunity” for alleged crimes committed while in office. But most justices agreed that former presidents deserve strong protection from prosecution.

Any high court decision embracing that position could further delay Trump’s trial, if not end the prosecution entirely. And it likely would cloud other prosecutions Trump is facing, including charges before a Georgia state court that he pressured officials there to fraudulently deliver to him electoral votes Biden won.

“If a president can be charged, put on trial, and imprisoned for his most controversial decisions as soon as he leaves office, that looming threat will distort the president’s decision-making precisely when bold and fearless action is most needed,” Trump’s lawyer, D. John Sauer, told the court.

Liberal justices, however, suggested the greater threat to democracy was a decision that effectively placed the president above the law, not one holding him to the same rules that apply to other high officials as well as ordinary Americans.

Telling “the most powerful person in the world” that there was no possibility of punishment for breaking the law, could turn “the Oval Office into the seat of criminal activity in this country,” said Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.

Sauer did little to assuage such concerns. Posed various hypotheticals, he suggested that a president might face no penalty for such acts as selling nuclear secrets to a foreign adversary, ordering the assassination of a political opponent or directing the military to stage a coup.

“The framers did not put an immunity clause into the Constitution,” said Justice Elena Kagan. “Not so surprising—they were reacting against a monarch who claimed to be above the law.”

Sauer said that the president remained obligated to follow the law, but that accountability came from forces outside the judicial system, such as Congress and public opinion.

But if the high court rejected wholesale immunity, Sauer said that the district judge should be required to sift Trump’s official acts which couldn’t be subject to prosecution from private ones that could before trial began. Under such an approach, the judge’s decisions could be appealed to the circuit court and then the Supreme Court, likely putting any trial date far into the future, if ever.

Michael Dreeben, a Justice Department lawyer representing special counsel Jack Smith, sought to focus attention on the antidemocratic crimes alleged against Trump, actions he said had no relation to a president’s legitimate powers.

Siding with Trump “would immunize former presidents from criminal liability for bribery, treason, sedition, murder, and, here, conspiring to use fraud to overturn the results of an election and perpetuate himself in power,” Dreeben said.

He told the court that the justice system had adequate safeguards to protect ex-presidents from politically motivated prosecutions.

Following a grand jury investigation, Smith brought a four-count indictment against Trump last year, accusing him of a criminal scheme to subvert the presidential election. The charges included conspiring to submit fake slates of Trump electors for states Biden won, pressuring Vice President Mike Pence to fraudulently alter the electoral count at the Jan. 6, 2021, congressional session to certify the election, and directing his followers to obstruct that proceeding, culminating in a riot at the U.S. Capitol.

Chief Justice John Roberts said the grand jury process wasn’t enough to protect the presidency.

“You know how easy it is in many cases for a prosecutor to get a grand jury to bring an indictment,” he said, adding that he wasn’t speaking of the Trump case in particular. “Reliance on the good faith of the prosecutor may not be enough in some cases.”

Dreeben allowed that the unique role of the president meant that some laws applied differently to holders of the office, something a former chief executive could raise in defense if put on trial.

Justice Samuel Alito suggested that still exposed ex-presidents to unwarranted retribution.

Under Dreeben’s approach, “there has to be a trial, and that may involve great expense and it may take up a lot of time, and during the trial, the former president may be unable to engage in other activities that the former president would want to engage in,” Alito said.

“We are trying to design a system that preserves the effective functioning of the presidency and the accountability of a former president under the rule of law,” Dreeben said. “And the perfect system that calibrates all of those values probably has not been devised.”

That didn’t stop justices from trying. Justice Amy Coney Barrett suggested a middle ground between Dreeben and Sauer’s positions, in which the trial would proceed, the district judge would rule on objections, but Trump would be allowed to seek immediate review from an appeals court rather than wait until he is convicted.

The Supreme Court’s decision is expected by the end of June.

Trump appointed three members of the Supreme Court, and they have at times sided with him. In March, for instance, they joined all other justices in deciding that Colorado overstepped its authority when it ruled Trump ineligible for future office after engaging in an insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021. States "lacked authority" to enforce the 14th Amendment provision disqualifying former officials who engaged in insurrection from future office, the court then found.

To date, however, the court, including Trump’s own appointees, more frequently has ruled against him. In 2020, the court rejected Trump’s bid to stop a New York prosecutor investigating potential crimes from obtaining financial records from Trump’s accountants. In January 2022, the court denied without comment Trump’s request to prevent the House Jan. 6 committee from obtaining White House records related to the Capitol riot.

Most consequentially, the court in December 2020 rejected a Trump-backed suit to throw out the electoral votes of four states that supported Biden. Trump complained at the Jan. 6 rally preceding the Capitol riot that the three justices he appointed, Neil Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett, hadn’t stepped up to help him.

Trump wasn’t present to watch the high court in action. In New York, where he is on trial over state charges of falsifying business records, the judge declined to pause proceedings so the defendant could attend oral arguments in Washington.

Disse IDIOTENE evnet ikke å realisere at hvis de skulle gi fremtidige presidenter absolutt immunitet eller immunitet mot alvorlige lovbrudd i embetets tjeneste for egeninteresse - når de kunne kontrollere kongressen gjennom partilojalitet - en dyrkjøpt erfaring i Europa - risikere de at presidentembetet vil i praksis bli det samme som det er for Putin i Kreml; en sivildiktator på valg. De er så opptatt med å angripe kontrollmekanismene som de omtalte spesialanklagere som er en del av den amerikanske tradisjonen siden 1870, at de ikke fattet alvoret. De valgt å ignorere Trumps forbrytelsene. 

Det var en spesialanklager som brakt Nixon til kapitulasjonens rand under Watergatesaken, og den første historiske spesialanklageren var i forbindelse med en korrupsjonsskandale som involvert det hvite huset i 1875. Dette formaliseres i 1983 med "Ethics in Government Act"-loven, som helt siden den gang var dypt upopulært hos erkekonservative dommere som Scalia og republikanerne mens demokratene som regel ment det ikke er sterk nok. Da det var vedtatt, hadde ingen den gang forestilt seg at et parti skulle misbruke ordningen som sett under Clinton–Lewinsky skandalen i 1998.

Ikke bare ønsker de konservative dommere å gi presidenten større immunitet enn normalt - uten å presisere hvor mye - for det er ikke nedskrevet i 1789-konstitusjonen - de vil ta vekk et viktig kontrollverktøy som er en naturlig del av ethvert demokratisk styresett! 

Dette kan ikke aksepteres, nå er det meget åpenbart at Roberts og de konservative dommere vil beskytte Trump og vil dessuten også fremme nye ordninger som muliggjør uthuling av det amerikanske demokratiet. 

Nå MÅ alle juridiske, politiske og intellektuelle eksperter kommer på banen.

Snakk om meget dårlige nyheter! 

[AveMORphine]

Ja flere omtaler hva Trump sine advokater la frem i oral arguments som en direkte diktaturisk plan. Og de stiller seg og oss spørsmålet om hvorfor Amerika i det hele tatt brøt med kongedømmet England. Og mener Trump virkelig at the founders i sin tid la opp til at Presidenten i praksis skulle være en konge med absolutt immunitet for alt han gjorde. Det er helt sprøtt at Høyesteretten i USA i det hele tatt er villig til å høre på denne legale anti amerikanske fortolkningen av loven. Den er i praksis i strid med kjernen av hva som danner USA og deres constitution.

Men men, vi får håpe at Amerika overlever det som nå skjer. I Manhattan går det dårlig for Trump. Bevisene og vitnemålene (som nå blir underbygget med skriftlige bevis inkl. SMS`er og telefonlogger etc) er mildt sagt overveldende. Og det som kom frem i vitnemålet til Pecker er underbygget med dette og vil bli bekreftet av Cohen (også med tilhørende sms`r ol).

Det er markant at forsvarerene til Trump ikke prøver å bestride fakta i saken men nå heller prøver å vri dette om til at Trump brukte denne "tjenesten" som Pecker drev buisness med (for mange flere enn Trump). Og at Trump ikke så forskjell på tjenesten som ble tilbudt andre og det at han brukte det under sin valgkamp (for å holde det skjult for velgerene).

Det blir dog vanskelig for Trump sine advokater å overbevise Jury om at Trump ikke bevisst brøt loven (var klar over at dette var ulovlig og måtte gis pardons i ettertid når han var president).

Uansett som med alt annet med denne mannen så er det ett eneste stort rot og løgnene triller ut hver gang han åpner kjeften.

[JK22]

Her er en Vox-artikkel som forklarer hvorfor det amerikanske demokratiet er under meget stor fare. I Europa og Latin-Amerika var det sett hvordan uthuling og underminering av et demokratisk system fant sted - det hendt i domstolrommet med Venezuela som det beste eksemplet. Artikkelforfatteren er en anerkjent høyesterettsekspert, som ikke lagt skjul på sitt sjokk over det han hadde bevitnet.

Thursday’s argument in Trump v. United States was a disaster for Special Counsel Jack Smith, and for anyone who believes that the president of the United States should be subject to prosecution if they commit a crime.

At least five of the Court’s Republicans seemed eager to, at the very least, permit Trump to delay his federal criminal trial for attempting to steal the 2020 election until after this November’s election. And the one GOP appointee who seemed to hedge the most, Chief Justice John Roberts, also seemed to think that Trump enjoys at least some immunity from criminal prosecution.

Much of the Court’s Republican majority, moreover, seemed eager not simply to delay Trump’s trial until after the election, but to give him extraordinarily broad immunity from criminal prosecution should he be elected once again. Justice Brett Kavanaugh, for example, argued that when a president exercises his official powers, he cannot be charged under any federal criminal statute at all, unless that statute contains explicit language saying that it applies to the president.

As Michael Dreeben, the lawyer arguing on behalf of Smith’s prosecution team, told the Court, only two federal laws meet this standard. So Kavanaugh’s rule would amount to near complete immunity for anything a president did while exercising their executive authority.

Justice Samuel Alito, meanwhile, played his traditional role as the Court’s most dyspeptic advocate for whatever position the Republican Party prefers. At one point, Alito even argued that permitting Trump to be prosecuted for attempting to overthrow the 2020 presidential election would “lead us into a cycle that destabilizes ... our democracy,” because future presidents who lose elections would mimic Trump’s criminal behavior in order to remain in office and avoid being prosecuted by their successor.

In fairness, not all of the justices, or even all of the Republican justices, engaged in such dizzying feats of reverse logic. Roberts did express some concern that Trump lawyer John Sauer’s arguments could prevent the president from being prosecuted if he took a bribe.

Justice Amy Coney Barrett, meanwhile, pointed to the fact that Sauer drew a distinction between prosecuting a president for “official” behavior (which Sauer said is not allowed), and prosecuting a president for his “private” conduct (which Sauer conceded is permitted). Barrett also argued that many of the charges against Trump, such as his work with private lawyers and political consultants to overthrow the 2020 election, qualify as private conduct and thus could still be prosecuted.

Still, many of the Republican justices, including Barrett, indicated that the case would have to be returned to the trial court to determine which of the allegations against Trump qualify as “official” and which qualify as “private.” Barrett also indicated that Trump could then appeal the trial court’s ruling, meaning that his actual criminal trial would be delayed for many more months as that issue makes its way through the appeals courts.

In that world, the likelihood that Trump will be tried, and a verdict reached, before the November election is approximately zero percent.

The Court’s decision in the Trump case, in other words, is likely to raise the stakes of this already impossibly high-stakes election considerably. As Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson warned, the risk inherent in giving presidents immunity from the criminal law is that someone like Trump “would be emboldened to commit crimes with abandon.”

It’s unclear if the Court is going to go so far as to definitively rule that the president of the United States is allowed to do crimes. But they appear likely to make it impossible for the criminal justice system to actually do anything about Trump’s attempt to overthrow the election — at least before Trump could be elected president again.

Even if Trump technically “loses” this case, he’s still won

Under current law, all government officials enjoy some immunity from civil lawsuits. The president, meanwhile, is on a short list of government officials, alongside judges and prosecutors, who enjoy particularly robust immunity from such suits. But the law has never been understood to immunize any government official from criminal prosecution.

Moreover, while no president has been prosecuted prior to Trump, judges and prosecutors (who enjoy the same level of immunity from civil suits as the president) are routinely prosecuted for taking bribes or for otherwise violating the criminal law during their official conduct in office.

For this reason, I’ve argued that his immunity case was primarily about delaying Trump’s trial until after the election. The arguments for presidential immunity from the criminal law are so weak and their implications are so shocking — Trump’s lawyer told a lower court that unless Trump had first been successfully impeached, he could not be prosecuted even if he ordered the military to assassinate one of his political rivals — that it seemed unimaginable that even this Supreme Court would buy Trump’s immunity arguments.

After Thursday morning, however, a decision that merely delays Trump’s criminal trial until after the election is probably the best possible outcome Smith could hope for. There appears to be a very real chance that five justices will rule that the president of the United States may use his official powers in order to commit very serious crimes.

Even the best case scenario for Smith, moreover, is still an enormous victory for Donald Trump. If Trump prevails in the 2024 election, he can order the Justice Department to drop the charges against him or even potentially pardon himself. And, regardless of what happens in November, the American people will go to the polls without the clarity of a criminal trial which determines whether or not Trump is guilty of attempting to drive a knife into US democracy.

The case is likely to turn on the difference between “official” and “private” behavior

Trump’s core argument is that the president is immune from prosecution for “official acts” taken while he was in office. All six of the Court’s Republicans showed at least some sympathy for this argument, though some displayed more sympathy than others.

It appears likely that at least four justices — Justices Clarence Thomas, Alito, Kavanaugh, and Neil Gorsuch — will give Trump the immunity he seeks (or apply a rule like Kavanaugh’s requirement that criminal statutes don’t apply to the president unless they explicitly say so, which would have virtually the same effect). At one point, Thomas even suggested that the Justice Department’s decision to appoint Smith to investigate Trump was unconstitutional.

Roberts and Barrett, meanwhile, were a little more enigmatic. But both, at the very least, floated sending this case back down to the lower court for more delay.

Chief Justice Roberts, for what it’s worth, did express some concern that the line between an “official” action and a “private” one is difficult to draw. Early in the oral argument, he asked Sauer about a president who appoints someone as an ambassador because that appointee gave the president a bribe.

While making the appointment is an official act, taking a bribe is not. Roberts worried that prosecutors would be unable to secure a bribery conviction if they were forbidden from telling the jury about the official act taken by the president in order to secure that bribe.

Barrett, meanwhile, spent a considerable amount of time walking Sauer through the actual allegations in the indictment against Trump. And she even got him to admit that some of the charges, such as consulting with private lawyers and a private political consultant on how to certify fake electors, amount to private conduct that could be prosecuted.

Later in the argument, however, Barrett seemed to lay out how the process of determining which parts of the indictment can survive should play out. Under her suggested framework, the trial court would have to go through the indictment and sort the “official” from the “private.” The trial would then be put on hold while Trump appeals whatever the trial court says to higher courts — in a process that is likely to take months or even longer to sort out.

By the time that was all done, the November election would be long past, and Trump could very well be back in office — and emboldened to commit more crimes in the very way that Justice Jackson warned about.

Indeed, the striking thing about Thursday’s argument is that most of the Republican justices appeared so overwhelmed by concern that a future president might be hampered by fears of being prosecuted once they leave office, that they completely ignored the risk that an un-prosecutable president might behave like a tyrant. Gorsuch even warned that presidents might “try to pardon themselves” on the way out the door to avoid such prosecutions.

Under the legal rule that Gorsuch and many of his colleagues are considering, however, such a pardon would be unnecessary because the president would be almost entirely above the law — including, potentially, a president like Trump, who has already shown his eagerness to destroy constitutional governance for his own personal gain.

Høringen den 25. april 2024 må betraktes som en av de meste skandaløse dagene i det amerikanske rettsvesenets historie og et av de største faretegnene i hele det amerikanske systemet siden Uavhengighetserklæringen den 4. juli 1776 for 248 år siden - man kan høre grunnlovsfedrene av 1789-konstitusjonen snur seg i disses kistene. 

There appears to be a very real chance that five justices will rule that the president of the United States may use his official powers in order to commit very serious crimes.

Denne setningen er nok til å iverksette alle alarmklokkene i hele USA og hele verden. President Biden, senatorene, de folkevalgte, media og alle dommere som lekfolk og politiske som intellektuelle aktive KAN IKKE LENGE IGNORERER DET SOM SKJER med den føderale høyesteretten som er nå bare et skritt fra å bli en blåkopi av den venezuelanske domstolen som gav Chavez utvidede fullmakter, immunitet og deretter muligheter for å innføre et diktatorskap. Det er ikke lenge nok med dissens for å sette høyesteretten ut av funksjon som i 1858-1865, den må stanses. McConnell som gav altfor mye makt til høyesteretten ved å hindre balanserte utnevneringer av dommere, har kommet i en situasjon hvor han indirekte er ansvarlig for underminering av demokratiet. Og Roberts selv må definitivt konfronteres så sterkt som mulig og han må resignere. 

Det som hendt er galskap! 

 

[JK22]

AveMORphine skrev (28 minutter siden):

Ja flere omtaler hva Trump sine advokater la frem i oral arguments som en direkte diktaturisk plan. Og de stiller seg og oss spørsmålet om hvorfor Amerika i det hele tatt brøt med kongedømmet England. Og mener Trump virkelig at the founders i sin tid la opp til at Presidenten i praksis skulle være en konge med absolutt immunitet for alt han gjorde. Det er helt sprøtt at Høyesteretten i USA i det hele tatt er villig til å høre på denne legale anti amerikanske fortolkningen av loven. Den er i praksis i strid med kjernen av hva som danner USA og deres constitution.

Men men, vi får håpe at Amerika overlever det som nå skjer. I Manhattan går det dårlig for Trump. Bevisene og vitnemålene (som nå blir underbygget med skriftlige bevis inkl. SMS`er og telefonlogger etc) er mildt sagt overveldende. Og det som kom frem i vitnemålet til Pecker er underbygget med dette og vil bli bekreftet av Cohen (også med tilhørende sms`r ol).

Det er markant at forsvarerene til Trump ikke prøver å bestride fakta i saken men nå heller prøver å vri dette om til at Trump brukte denne "tjenesten" som Pecker drev buisness med (for mange flere enn Trump). Og at Trump ikke så forskjell på tjenesten som ble tilbudt andre og det at han brukte det under sin valgkamp (for å holde det skjult for velgerene).

Det blir dog vanskelig for Trump sine advokater å overbevise Jury om at Trump ikke bevisst brøt loven (var klar over at dette var ulovlig og måtte gis pardons i ettertid når han var president).

Uansett som med alt annet med denne mannen så er det ett eneste stort rot og løgnene triller ut hver gang han åpner kjeften.

Det vil ikke hjelpe fordi Roberts og hans republikanske kollegene ser ut til å like ideen om grenseløs immunitet for en president slik at Trump kunne i fremtiden bryte loven uten konsekvenser, og det er basert på ahistoriske betraktninger; da grunnlovfedrene utarbeidet konstitusjonen, skulle man ha en republikk, et legalt fåmannsvelde som er valgbart der samtidige er likemenn, hvor den utpekte lederen skulle velges med disses samtykke (de første presidenter var valgt i lukkede valg innenfor kongressen), det var kongressen som skulle inneha eneansvaret for opprettelsen av det politiske systemet, ikke presidentskapet eller domstolene. Den første presidenten, Washington, var ikke engangs så mektig som i de siste tretti år - og da han tre av, kom han med bitende kritikk om at embetet hadde for mye makt "som en konge på oppsigelse" - i praksis blir den amerikanske presidenten en enevoldskonge etter 1600-tallets mønster (det var funnet ut at grunnideene bak 1789-konstitusjonen var fra 1600-tallet, ikke fra opplysningstiden!) ved å fungere som enmannsregjering. Men han hadde ikke absolutt immunitet eller større immunitet enn alle andre folkevalgte/delegater som i tråd med det borgerlige dydsprinsippet er likemenn i beskikkelse av deres embeter. 

Så ved å gi presidenten absolutt immunitet eller større immunitet enn for resten av republikkdelegatene - det er de alle fra presidenten til det meste lavstatusbaserte kongressmedlemmet - er dette i realiteten ikke lenge en republikk, men et diktatursystem basert på Princeps-doktrinen, "den fremste, den første" fra Augustus` dager for to tusen år siden - det er lett glemt at det romerske republikksystemet faktisk eksistert samtidig med det nær totalitære keiserveldestyret i år 0 til 400-tallet e.kr. Dette er ikke hva grunnlovsfedrene eller uavhengighetstilhengerne i 1775-1789 ønsket. For dem var konsensusprinsippet essensielt i et "lovløst" land med selvstyre i nærmest hver eneste nivå fra landsby til land og meget mange forskjellige statsledelser i både form og funksjon - USA opprinnelig besto av 9 delstater. 

Men de gjort flere alvorlige feilgrep; de unnlot å bygge inn reguleringer omkring partipolitiske virksomhet, unnlot å gjøre noe med valgrett - konstitusjonen er aktuelt antidemokratisk etter vår standard i dag - og unnlot å regulere hvordan det skulle være mellom maktinstitusjonene utover balansemekanismer - inkludert immunitetsspørsmål. 

De har seg selv å takke for at den amerikanske republikken er satt i meget stor fare i dag. 

[qualbeen]

Poor Old Gil skrev (På 16.4.2024 den 10:03 PM):

Går ikke så bra med aksjen til Trump. Kommer han til å tjene noe på dette?

Festlig graf.  

Meeen trenden har snudd, og p.t. så vil alle andre utvalg enn 1 måned vise profitt: 

 

https://www.nordnet.no/market/stocks/17595439-trump-media-technology

Dersom det stemmer at alle Trump-tilhengere anbefales å kjøpe denne aksjen, så kan nok kursen drives kunstig høyt – og det over kunstig lang tid. Det er tross alt ganske mange millioner amerikanere (og også andre!) som støtter Trump. Dersom noen få prosent av de investerer noen kroner dann og vann, så vil det gi grei cashflow til denne aksjen. (Dessverre!)

Selv kommer jeg aldri til å kjøpe noen aksjer der, da jeg ikke ønsker å berike meg selv økonomisk på det viset. Jeg vet at idealisme aldri vil føre meg til millionær. Man blir ikke rik av å ha gode verdier og holdninger. Man kan bli rik når man driter i alle andre, og helt uten problemer tråkker andre ned i søla. Well ... 

Har forresten solgt siste rest av Tesla-aksje også, da jeg synes innblandelsen fra E.Musk er for problematisk. Selv om selskapet ikke lenger kan sies å være 100% styrt av ham, så klarer de ei heller å markere et hardt skille.  

Endret mandag kl 11:20 av qualbeen

[JK22]

JK22 skrev (På 26.4.2024 den 5:20 PM):

There appears to be a very real chance that five justices will rule that the president of the United States may use his official powers in order to commit very serious crimes.

Denne setningen er nok til å iverksette alle alarmklokkene i hele USA og hele verden. President Biden, senatorene, de folkevalgte, media og alle dommere som lekfolk og politiske som intellektuelle aktive KAN IKKE LENGE IGNORERER DET SOM SKJER med den føderale høyesteretten som er nå bare et skritt fra å bli en blåkopi av den venezuelanske domstolen som gav Chavez utvidede fullmakter, immunitet og deretter muligheter for å innføre et diktatorskap.

Det er voksende raseri i USA. Det er bare et spørsmål før det reises dissens så sterk, at den føderale høyesteretten kan bli enten satt på hold - eller regelrett fjernet. Meget mange hadde måpte i voksende sjokk, og nå sies det rett ut at de konservative dommerne ikke lenge kan være i skikk for deres embeter. Spesielt Roberts er under angrep. Det er mulig om at konstitusjonseksperter kan komme med erklæringer om høyesteretten skulle gi absolutt immunitet til presidenter i juni 2024, om at høyesterettsdommerne krenket 1789-konstitusjonens ånd basert på borgerlige dyd - spesielt likemannsidealet. Dette kan sende et massiv jordskjelv gjennom USA. Allerede i senatet er det mild bestyrelse fordi senatorene og presidenten skal være likemenn, spesielt i forbindelse med riksrett etter prinsippet om at bare likemenn kan dømme. 

Supreme Court justice said 'quiet part out loud' at Trump immunity hearing: analyst (msn.com)

Supreme Court justice said 'quiet part out loud' at Trump immunity hearing: analyst

Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch may have said the "quiet part out loud" at a hearing into Donald Trump's presidential immunity claims, an expert said Monday.

Legal analysts Allison Gill and Andy McCabe addressed the Supreme Court hearing in the most recent episode of their "Jack: A Special Counsel Podcast."

And they said a comment by Gorsuch summed up what other justices seemed to think — and which, they claimed, was incorrect.

Gill said one problem with the way the conservative justices viewed the case is that they wanted to apply it to a slew of hypothetical ideas, when the case is actually very specific to Trump. It doesn't try to set a standard for all presidents on a variety of immunity claims, she said. Instead, it follows the grand jury's ruling that Donald Trump attempted to overthrow the 2020 election, and in so doing, he broke the law and should be prosecuted.

"They should have said, 'We don't have to decide about official acts for future presidents because the appeals court only considered this case," Gill said.

“Chief Justice Roberts asked Michael Dreeben, the lawyer that was arguing for special counsel if he agreed with the statement” from the Washington, D.C. Appeals Court that judges needed to consider just Trump's immunity, not if it should apply to all presidents.

Gill suggested that means Roberts either thinks that point is up for question, or he misunderstood "what the appellate court ruled.

Roberts then falsely claimed before the court that the D.C. court ruled that there is never any immunity for presidents from criminal prosecution, Gill said.

"If he actually, wrongly, thinks that, then it's no wonder he granted" the case to be heard before the High Court, said Gill.

It puts Roberts in a situation in which he has participated in either "a gross misinterpretation of the appeals court ruling," or he is trying to find a justification for hearing the case, Gill said.

But, she said, several Supreme Court justices seemed confused about that.

To me, I mean, we're either here because of incompetence, arrogance, or a corrupt intentional delay tactic, and none of those options gives me a lot of confidence about how the court will rule," she said.

McCabe said that the moment that struck him the most was when the justices wanted to talk about anything but Trump's case. They were spinning hypotheticals at a time when the appeals court ruling specified it was taking only Trump's case into consideration.

"The facts of this case were basically far outside the bounds of any arguable acknowledgment of immunity," McCabe said. "And they were really trying to litigate on some different ground. And, I think [Neil] Gorsuch went so far as to say the quiet part out loud when he insisted, 'We are making a rule for the ages here.'"

Essentially, he said, Gorsuch was claiming that the Supreme Court wasn't there to consider just Trump's case, but the wider concept of presidential immunity.

Man burde tenker to tanker samtidig; her ser man en villighet til å hjelpe ut Trump og samtidig muliggjør en "fastsettelse" av spørsmålet om immunitet for fremtidige presidenter, uten å fatte at absolutt immunitet betyr at presidenten kan fritt ignorere det amerikanske lovverket. 

Legal experts: "Shameful" Supreme Court puts US one vote away from "the end of democracy" (msn.com)

Legal experts: "Shameful" Supreme Court puts US one vote away from "the end of democracy"

It’s not a hard question, or at least it hasn’t been before: Does the United States have a king – one empowered to do as they please without even the pretext of being governed by a law higher than their own word – or does it have a president? Since Donald Trump began claiming he enjoys absolute immunity from prosecution for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, two courts have issued rulings striking down this purported right, recognizing that one can have a democracy or a dictatorship, but not both.

“We cannot accept former President Trump’s claim that a President has unbounded authority to commit crimes that would neutralize the most fundamental check on executive power – the recognition and implementation of election results,” states the unanimous opinion of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, issued this past February, upholding a lower court’s take on the question. “Nor can we sanction his apparent contention that the Executive has carte blanche to violate the rights of individual citizens to vote and have their votes cast.”

You can’t well keep a republic if it’s effectively legal to overthrow it. But at oral arguments last week, conservative justices on the Supreme Court – which took up the case rather than cosign the February ruling – appeared desperate to make the simple appear complex. Justice Samuel Alito, an appointee of former President George W. Bush, argued that accountability was what would actually lead to lawlessness.

“If an incumbent who loses a very close, hotly contested election knows that a real possibility after leaving office is not that the president is going to be able to go off into a peaceful retirement but that the president may be criminally prosecuted by a bitter political opponent, will that not lead us into a cycle that destabilizes the functioning of our country as a democracy?” Alito asked Michael Dreeben, the lawyer representing special counsel Jack Smith and the Department of Justice.

As Dreeben reminded the court, no former president, before now, has ever faced criminal prosecution after leaving office. That’s because only one, Donald Trump, refused to accept the outcome of a democratic election and, when all legal avenues were exhausted, encouraged a mob to block the counting of the winner’s electoral votes.

Trump’s own legal counsel, D. John Sauer, argued the former president should even have enjoyed the right go further – to order the military to carry out a coup, or to kill his political rival, without fear that any American law could touch him. While there may be legitimate concerns of a hypothetical prosecution that is frivolous and partisan, that has not happened before and it is not happening now; the risk of an executive, unmoored, seems far greater.

Not all of the court’s right-wing members went as far as Alito, making legal accountability the mother of tyranny, with Justice Amy Coney Barrett, a Trump appointee, credited by observers for challenging Sauer’s claim that a president could only be held accountable if they are successfully impeached and removed from office. But when faced with the absurd – a legal rationale for political assassinations, couched in the language of the U.S. Constitution – none were willing to come out and ask: What are we even doing here?

Writing at Slate, legal commentators Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern said the court’s right-wing bloc acted like “cynical partisans” eager to spare one man, Donald Trump, from consequences for his actions.

“To at least five of the conservatives, the real threat to democracy wasn’t Trump’s attempt to overturn the election — but the Justice Department’s efforts to prosecute him for the act,” they wrote. “After so much speculation that these reasonable, rational jurists would surely dispose of this ridiculous case quickly and easily, [the oral arguments] delivered a morass of bad-faith hand-wringing on the right about the apparently unbearable possibility that a president might no longer be allowed to wield his powers of office in pursuit of illegal ends.”

Laurence Tribe, a law professor at Harvard University, said the oral arguments were “embarrassing.” Instead of a court hearing, it felt more like congressional showmanship, Tribe told MSNBC; even if it doesn’t end in a total victory for Trump, the hearing itself gave him most of what he wanted – a delay, with any ruling likely to prevent voters from hearing the case against him before they elect another president-king. “It was a shameful performance by the court,” Tribe said, “buying the very time that Donald Trump wanted.”

It says a lot about the state of the conservative legal movement that so many Federalist Society alum, ostensibly committed to limited and constitutional government, would even consider the argument that one person, in America, should stand above all others.

“I’m profoundly disturbed about the apparent direction of the court,” J. Michael Luttig told The New Republic’s Greg Sargent. “I now believe that it is unlikely Trump will ever be tried for the crimes he committed in attempting to overturn the 2020 election.”

Luttig is himself a conservative and former federal judge; Trump’s lawyer in the Supreme Court is one of his former law clerks. But he no longer recognizes conservatism as a philosophy of limited government; it is certainly no longer the movement for those who believe no one is above the law.

“The conservative justices’ argument for immunity assumes that Jack Smith’s prosecution of Trump is politically corrupt and seeks a rule that would prevent future presidents from corruptly prosecuting their predecessors,” Luttig said. “But such a rule would license all future presidents to commit crimes against the United States while in office with impunity. Which is exactly what Trump is arguing he’s entitled to do.”

Andrew Weissmann, a former federal prosecutor who worked on special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation, believes the very fact that the Supreme Court took up the case is alarming. Appearing on MSNBC, he said the very fact Trump’s legal arguments are being considered is a victory for the former president, likely delaying his election-interference trial until after November. But that the court is seriously considering his claim to immunity for all “official acts” taken as president signals that American democracy is in a terrible state.

Trump’s claims “could possibly be squared … with the text of the Constitution or the history of the presidency,” Weissmann said. And yet, “there were justices who actually were taking this seriously. And it just was, frankly, shocking.”

At least four of the court’s conservative justices appear likely to side with Trump, Weissmann argued, suggesting it could hinge on Chief Justice John Roberts, putting the country “one vote away from sort of the end of democracy as we know it, with checks and balances.” The U.S. would not just have an “imperial presidency,” he continued, but a criminally immune king. “What is so shocking is how close we are.”

Og alt tyder på at Roberts er villig til å gi fremtidige presidenter absolutt immunitet. Da er dette det meste eklatante bruddet på den amerikanske konstitusjonen fra 1787, som hadde trådd i kraft i 1789, for da grunnlovsfedrene utarbeidet konstitusjonsteksten hadde de vektlagt de borgerlige dydene ved å fremme borgeridealer der selveste likemannsprinsippet er essensielt, og det har derfor blitt sterkt vektlagt - gjentatte ganger - med ordet "likemann", på det veldige prinsippet hadde man gjort USAs eksistens realistisk, for en republikk i praksis og teori er snakk om fåmannsvelde eller folkedelegater valgt av folket/samfunnet der ingen skulle bli "likere enn den andre" eller "den første av alle" som med det romerske keiserveldestyret hvor det ikke fantes en keisertrone - kun et forledende politisk tittel. 

Dette kan ikke den legale USA akseptere. Men høyesterettsjustitiariene var smertelig klart gjennom århundrene som demonstrert av Earl Warren, at så lenge det ikke eksistere en reguleringsmekanisme omkring presidentskapet med hensyn til immunitet istedenfor luftige og vage formaninger var faren høyt reelt. I 1800-1970 kom de fleste høyesterettsdommere fra politikernes egne rekker, de fleste var delstatlig/føderale kongressmedlemmer, senatorer, guvernører og endog eks-presidenter som med Taft som var president OG høyesterettsjustitiarius for et århundre siden, slik at det var et selvjusterende konsensusvelde der man passer på at utglidninger ikke skulle skje. Siden 1970 har det vært sett en profesjonalisering etter hvert som flere og flere kom inn i høyesteretten fra utsiden som Scalia og Roberts, som dermed ikke lenge utspringer ut av "republikkdelegatenes midte". Det var sterk egeninteresse for å beholde likemannsprinsippet blant delegatene uansett embete og arbeidsområde. Warren hadde meget sterk støtte fra en samlet politisk front uansett partitilhørighet da han fra dødesengen avgjort Nixons skjebne under Watergate. 

Her ser vi at disse høyesterettsdommerne ikke forstå hva slags rolle den føderale høyesteretten inneha i forholdet til det hvite huset og kongressbygningen, da de havnet i en institusjon som hadde kommet altfor langt vekk i omløpet inntil punktet av manglende samholdighet. Hvis grunnlovsfedrene, alle presidenter og høyesterettsjustitiariene i 1800-1970 hadde blitt gjenopplivet, er det mulig at de ville ha stormet høyesterettsbygningen og river av dommerkappene på alle der inne for deretter å skamslå dem akkurat som med Jesus og kremmerne i templet. 

Endret mandag kl 21:41 av JK22

[JK22]

Sure Sounds Like the Supreme Court Is About to Give Trump a Big Win! (yahoo.com)

Last week, the Supreme Court considered the question of whether Donald Trump should be shielded from federal prosecution by presidential immunity, and a majority of the conservative justices seemed ready to side with the former president. Meanwhile, in New York, Trump’s hush money trial continued, with prosecutors for Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg introducing their first witness. And in Arizona, the state attorney general announced a new criminal indictment over the Trump team’s fake electors scheme.

Last week, the Department of Justice and Trump’s lawyers argued over presidential immunity at the Supreme Court in a case that could make or break special counsel Jack Smith’s federal election interference indictment. And after nearly three hours of oral arguments, a majority of justices seemed poised to give the former president a hugely consequential win.

John Sauer, Trump’s attorney, argued the “presidency as we know it” would be over if presidents were not granted immunity from criminal charges, claiming that vindictive prosecutors would target them for any controversial decisions made in office as soon as they leave it. He also reiterated an argument that Trump’s legal team has used to push back against all of his criminal indictments: Congress must impeach and convict Trump before he can be criminally prosecuted. Meanwhile, Michael Dreeben, a lawyer representing Smith’s office, emphasized that the Supreme Court has never recognized absolute presidential immunity and that the Constitution already has multiple checks  to prevent vindictive prosecution of a former chief executive.

The justices ultimately focused on whether a president’s “official acts” could be criminally prosecuted—and if so, what distinguishes “official” acts from “private” ones. Justice Brett Kavanaugh (a Trump appointee) suggested that prosecutors could only charge a former president under criminal statutes that explicitly state they can be applied to presidents, which justice Sonia Sotomayor quickly pushed back on. “If we say a president can’t be included in a criminal law unless explicitly named, then that would bar the Senate from convicting him for high crimes or misdemeanors,” she argued. “Because that means that [Trump] is not subject to the law at all.” (As Sotomayor also pointed out, there are only a tiny handful of criminal statutes today that explicitly name the president.)

In an analysis of the day’s oral arguments, Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern explained that the court’s conservative justices made it clear they disapproved of Smith’s indictment of the former president. “To at least five of the conservatives, the real threat to democracy wasn’t Trump’s attempt to overturn the election—but the Justice Department’s efforts to prosecute him for the act,” they wrote.

The Supreme Court is expected to issue a final decision in June and could end up kicking part of Trump’s appeal back to the U.S. Court of Appeals to reconsider. The procedural back-and-forth means Smith’s already slim chances of putting Trump on trial before the November election are looking even slimmer.

It’s been nearly one year since Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes launched a criminal investigation into the fake electors scheme—in which Trump supporters plotted to overthrow their state’s 2020 election results for Joe Biden—and it has finally produced a criminal indictment.

Mayes has indicted 18 people, including former Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, attorneys Rudy Giuliani, Jenna Ellis, and John Easton, adviser Boris Epshteyn, and aide Mike Roman. The former president himself is not named in the indictment, but is most likely “Unindicted Co-conspirator 1.”

Arizona is now the fourth state to announce a criminal indictment stemming from the fake electors scheme, joining Georgia, Michigan, and Nevada. Meadows, Giuliani, Ellis, and others allegedly pressured Arizona GOP officials to keep Trump in power, leading to 11 Trump supporters organizing in the days after the 2020 election to send a false certificate to Congress certifying Trump had won the state of Arizona. (He didn’t; Biden won by 10,457 votes.)

Arizona was an especially sensitive loss for Trump; Fox News was the first network to call the state for Biden, with about 73 percent of the vote counted. Trump then declared the election was a fraud and said states should just stop counting any votes and leave it up to the Supreme Court to decide.

David Pecker is the former CEO of American Media Inc. and was a key ally to former president Trump—until now. During last week’s hush money trial, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg introduced Pecker to the jury, and the former executive offered pretty damning testimony.

Pecker outlined a strategic effort by then-candidate Trump to influence the 2016 election by controlling what stories would get published in tabloids owned by Pecker, like the National Enquirer. The two men held meetings where Trump checked in on the status of hush money payments to Karen McDougal, a former Playboy model who claimed she had an affair with Trump. Once elected, Trump even held a “thank-you dinner” for Pecker at the White House. (Here’s a refresher on who is who in Trump’s hush money trial.)

Slate’s Jeremy Stahl, who is in court covering the trial, explained that Pecker’s testimony enabled prosecutors to “tie Trump directly to the conspiracy to influence the election—a crucial element of the case that elevated the record-keeping offense to a felony.”

The prosecution also brought in Rhona Graff, Trump’s personal assistant who worked for the Trump Organization for 34 years. She testified that she had a “vague recollection” of seeing Stormy Daniels at Trump Tower and confirmed Trump had both Daniels’ and McDougal’s contact information.

It has now been two weeks since Trump’s hush money trial began and Bragg’s strategy is becoming clear: He’s making the case that Trump and his allies deliberately organized a scheme to keep damaging stories about him out of the press in order to protect his political image leading up to the 2016 election. And it wouldn’t be a true Trump trial without a battle over a gag order, which started after Trump publicly criticized witnesses across 10 separate posts on his Truth Social account. Meanwhile, the former president is continuing to complain that the courthouse is “freezing.”

 Det er sterke følelser på gang. McConnell vil ikke ha absolutt immunitet for fremtidige presidenter, men karakterisk nok er han for feig til å signalisere åpen motstand mot monsteret han hadde skapt. Over hele verden er det debatt og atter debatt etter hvert som mange begynte å innse eventuelle konsekvenser - og det er en generell motstand mot ideen om absolutt immunitet i folkedybden. 

Dessuten ser det ut at det er noe meget seriøst galt med den yngre delen av befolkningen; "drop-outs" er ferd med å vende seg bort fra samfunnsidealene mens utdannede kastes inn i allmenn forvirring som synliggjort av palestinerstøttende demonstrasjoner og protestaksjoner som har fått mange til å spørre om det har rablet for dem. I motsatte retning sier man om disse som går til høyre. En observatør mener det skjer en "kultifiseringsprosess" i det amerikanske folket, spesielt i de yngre lag som har blitt for sterkt påvirket av polariseringen siden 2008, da en fargede mann ble valgt som president. Vi ser at de eldre lag av befolkningen vender seg vekk fra Trump som deretter finner støtte i de selvstendige (50 %, stort sett i 18-30 årsgruppen) - og faktumet om at meget mange yngre ikke gidd å avgi deres stemmer. Det er mulig etter min mening at fordummingen da man kuttet ned på skolegang, collegeutdanning og annet siden 1980-årene, er nå ved å gjøre seg gjeldende pga. nettets destruktive virkninger ved å skape informativ forvirring for mange millioner.

Da jeg besøkt Bing, blir jeg mektig irritert av "bedrevitende" aktiviteter som i virkeligheten vil slå ut evnen for selvstendig gransknings- og kritisk vurderingsevne. Dette vil ikke påvirker de eldre over 30 år, men så definitivt de yngre. 

De legale eksperter er dessuten dypt forvirret over detaljene omkring presidentstyret - som tyder på at man ikke har forstått hvordan de amerikanske presidentene hadde kunne utøve deres embete med all konsekvens det innbar, fordi disse må forholde seg til amerikansk lov, folkedelegatenes medvirkning/råd og søke klarering for sine handlinger. Dette er pluralistisk maktutøvelse i praksis, hvordan i all verden kunne amerikanerne ha glemt dette? Presidentene i fortiden levde ikke i et vakuum som bare en av likemenn i et republikansk maktsystem der man får fullmakter av de andre. Slik at kongressmedlemmer, senatorer, høyestedommere/føderale dommere, føderale ansatte og presidenter med rådgivere kunne fungere som et felles maskineri. 

Det kunne bare forklares med at presidentmakten hadde styrket seg i de siste førti årene samtidig som det oppsto en polarisering i midten av 1990-tallet som gjør at den utøvende makten hadde kunne styrke seg - det var presidenter som var stolt over at de utsendt så få presidentdekreter som mulig, men for hver president blir det flere og flere - inntil punktet at man var blitt for mektig. Kongressen sluttet med å fungere som navet for det politiske systemet etter hvert som den mer og mer kjøre seg fast, og da McConnell begynte med å overføre mye makt til den føderale høyesteretten hendt det på bekostning av den lovgivende makten, som i 2000-2024 fant seg maktløst mot den dømmende makten. Hvilken IKKE var meningen. Presidenten mer og mer dannet ansiktet på makten. 

I slutten hadde presidentstyret kommet dit at det overskygget alt annet, og hadde gjort det så lenge, at mange ikke klarte å huske de sterke pluralistiske tradisjonene helt siden uavhengighetserklæringen. De yngre sannsynlig vet ikke hva "kompromiss", "pluralisme" og "konsensus" betyr. De kan endog ønske velkomne åpen tyranni akkurat som med det russiske folket og Putin.