Ocelot II
Ocelot II's JournalThe rich have access to the best *available* health care, but if research is defunded,
that available health care might not be good enough any more. Some illnesses and conditions aren't curable yet, even with the best treatment, but scientists have been working on cures for Alzheimer's, some presently incurable cancers and other diseases that even rich people get. Right now Alzheimer's is incurable, and so is glioblastoma, the cancer that killed Ted Kennedy, John McCain and Beau Biden, people with access to the best available health care. Pancreatic cancer is incurable. So are Parkinson's disease and muscular dystrophy. Rich people get those diseases. Cures or at least better treatments could be found if research was supported, but it no longer will be. Maybe scientists in other countries, which are already luring our scientists to their universities and laboratories, will be able to do it, but not the US, not any more.
And the rich will not be safe from the consequences of climate change and extreme weather events, either. Their homes, factories and offices can be submerged, blown away, or burned up. And they have to breathe the same air and drink the same water. The wealthy might not suffer as much as the rest of us, but they will suffer.
I am beginning to think RFKJR's brain worm is actually an alien parasite
that has also infected the brains of everyone in the Trump administration, and obviously Trump himself, along with most MAGA. It's an Invasion of the Body Snatchers scenario in which an alien race has taken over the brains of the people in power and some percentage of the population for the sole purpose of destroying the world's most powerful country. Once that's done the aliens can conquer the rest of the world and take the natural resources they need, leaving the remaining humans to die off due to climate change.
I can't think of any other reason why everything they do is so contrary to rational thought, common sense and self-preservation. Even the greed of the oligarchs doesn't explain it, because the wealthy aren't immune from the consequences of this destruction either. Wealth goes only so far when your property is destroyed by once-predictable weather events, or you become ill with a disease or condition that could have been cured by the scientists who left the country because their research was terminated, or treated by the immigrant doctors whose visas were revoked, in hospitals that closed because they were no longer funded or staffed; or when even the ordinary services you once relied on are no longer available because the immigrants who used to provide them have been deported. It's so senseless that it can't be explained by anything other than mass insanity caused by alien brain parasites.
That's not even word salad. In a salad there are chunks of recognizable things.
This is more like word puree. There are words and phrases but the sense behind them is pureed and all you get after the brain-blender stops whirring is a word Slurpee.
Vance, as a simulacrum of a human being, would be no better, but
he won't have Trump's cult following. He has the charisma of cold oatmeal; he's just as mean as Trump but without his show biz flair and talent for getting other people to punch down with him. He won't be the iron-fisted leader of the GOP who can control votes with a phone call. Instead, there will be a power struggle; without Trump the GOP has no leader, and a whole bunch of sorry little pissants like Mike Johnson and Ted Cruz will be fighting for that title like scorpions in a jar. I expect a GOP schism - the Christofascist culture warriors vs. the libertarian techbro greedheads. Vance will try for both factions but neither will want him.
Why doesn't he just set up a carnival side show on the WH lawn?
He's a carnival barker at heart anyhow; he'd be right at home. There could be the usual freak shows - maybe Marge Sporkfoot could show off her bleach-blonde bad-built butch-body, there could an exhibit of moral midgets, there being so many of them; Matt Gaetz' giant forehead; alligators straight out of Gator Gulag (you can an undocumented immigrant to feed them!); conjoined twins Clarence Thomas and Sam Alito, a man wearing eye makeup having carnal knowledge of a Louis XIV fauteuil à la reine, the geek Stephen Miller, biting off the heads of anybody who gets too close, a greasy orange fortune teller predicting how America will be Great Again when nobody has food or health care. Step right up!
The only problem with that word is that an asshole has a purpose.
Everyone needs an asshole; you couldn't survive without one. But nobody needs Trump. The best word for him would be one describing something both odious and completely useless. Even "shit" doesn't work because manure is useful. All creatures, even icky, creepy ones - and even parasites - have a purpose within an ecosystem. Maybe the perfect word is just trump. A trump is a being that has no purpose, no use, no reason to exist, and creates only chaos and destruction.
We, as a collection of human beings, are no better than any other collection
of human beings that comprise a country. We are just as capable of cruelty as any other. We've done it before - the taking of land and the genocide of Native people, the abduction and enslavement of African people, Jim Crow laws, all manner of terrible behavior throughout our relatively short history. Our big mistake was gaslighting ourselves into thinking we were above and better than all the other countries who had committed such atrocities. Behold the Manifest Destiny doctrine by which we persuaded ourselves that we had the God-given right to take all that land that belonged to other people and inhabit and develop and farm it and profit from it. During our early years wealth was also derived from the stolen labor of others - not just the wealth of the Southern states, but that of the North, which bought the slave-harvested cotton and turned it into textiles and sold it in Northern cities. Our railroads were built by Asian laborers, not slaves but almost, until we decided we weren't going to allow those people to immigrate any more. We welcomed some immigrants but exploited and discriminated against others. Former slaves were just barely "liberated," but remained oppressed and poor.
All the while, we told ourselves that we were the exceptional country, the good guys, the country that won wars against evil empires. We patted ourselves on the back for defeating the Nazis, but we were so convinced of our superiority and indestructibility that we got sucked into fruitless, pointless, protracted wars in southeast Asia and the Middle East, from which we eventually slunk away while trying to pretend we hadn't been defeated. Have we become a cruel country? Trump made it socially acceptable to be cruel in public, but people will be cruel unless reminded that cruelty is ultimately destructive. Trump just let us take the mask off so we, collectively, could stop pretending to be better than the rest of the world.
With that in mind, those of us who don't think it's cool to be cruel should stop pretending the US was ever all that morally superior in the first place. Our job now is to shove the cruelty back into the closet, and expose the error of people who think being horrible to their fellow citizens and even more horrible to our immigrants will somehow prove the myth of American exceptionalism. We certainly can become better than we are now; Germany recovered from the Nazi regime that caused its near-destruction and became a prosperous democracy. I don't think I'll ever understand what motivates some people to take such pleasure in punching down, but we have to acknowledge the existence of that tendency in others (and maybe sometimes in ourselves) and resist it and keep resisting it. And call out the cruelty, every time.
By definition, the Constitution *can't* be unconstitutional but its provisions are subject to interpretation.
The citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment simply says: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside." The Trump's EO purports to add conditions to the birthright citizenship clause by stating two different situations where a person is not a U.S. citizen at birth: When the mother was unlawfully present in the U.S. and the father was neither a U.S. citizen nor a lawful permanent resident when the person was born; or when the mother was in the U.S. lawfully but on temporary status, such as a student visa, work visa, tourist visa or under the Visa Waiver Program, and the father was neither a U.S. citizen nor a lawful permanent resident when the person was born. These exceptions apply to anyone born after February 20, 2025. Several courts have held the EO to be blatantly unconstitutional and enjoined its application, but SCOTUS said those courts' injunctions don't apply nationwide but only within their jurisdictions, meaning the EO is still blocked in Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington and Wisconsin - that is, states which have Democratic attorneys general. In the remaining states, Trump's order can go into effect 30 days after Friday's ruling, pending any further legal action. SCOTUS will have to decide the question, and to uphold the EO they will have to interpret the plain language of the 14th Amendment as meaning something other than what its words seem to say. The issue seems to have been pretty well resolved back in 1898 in the case of United States v. Wong Kim Ark, https://perma.cc/C5PG-SQSP where the court held that a person born in the US to Chinese parents was a citizen despite the current law limiting the immigration of Chinese people. The language of that case cites so much history and English common law supporting the doctrine that a person born within the boundaries of a country by operation of law and custom becomes a citizen of that country, that even the troglodytes on the current SCOTUS should be satisfied (but you never know with that bunch).
In the meantime, though, babies born after February 20 are US citizens in half of the states but might not be in the other half, at least pending further proceedings.
Thank you. I generally try to keep the fire from other people's hair
from setting mine alight, so before I get too close to the flames I'll read the actual opinion as objectively as I can. News reports, and especially headlines, often get things wrong, sort of like preliminary bomb damage assessments - and then the inaccurate/oversimplified headlines set those coiffures ablaze. I think an important point is that there won't be the wholesale deportation of everyone born in the US to an undocumented immigrant. Even by the terms of Trump's clearly unconstitutional EO, that won't happen because it refers to only two situations: " (1) when [a] person’s mother was unlawfully present in the United States and the person’s father was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of said person’s birth, or (2) when [a] person’s mother’s presence in the United States was lawful but temporary, and the person’s father was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of said person’s birth." It also provides for a 30-day ramp up; since the EO was dated January 20, 2025 (he could hardly wait!), so it didn't go into effect until February 20. In other words, the only people it purports to deny citizenship to are those born after February 20 to certain (not all) non-citizen parents. So there's one hair-conflagration that can be put out. The obvious problem with the case is that it requires potential plaintiffs to sue individually, although as of today there seems to be a class action in the works, which might solve that dilemma.
What I consider to be the case's weakness isn't that the court found nationwide injunctions to be historically unfounded; it's the rigid originalism that didn't allow it to find an exception for a situation Congress could not have anticipated when enacting the Judiciary Act 200+ years ago - which is the modern use of broad executive orders, and in this case to circumvent the Constitution. In fact, executive orders weren't even a thing in those days (the Emancipation Proclamation was an EO of a sort, but they were otherwise almost unheard-of until the 20th century). Barrett also interpreted the equitable principle relating to the inadequacy of a remedy at law, which is needed for injunctive relief, narrowly, apparently concluding that the availability of litigation in other courts would provide that remedy, where as a practical matter requiring separate litigation in each case where constitutional rights are at stake is a pretty flimsy remedy. She did toss the bone of a class action, though, and we'll see where that goes. And as I said before, the positive result of this case is the effective sidelining of that asshole in Texas.
This is worth reading - a sensible perspective.
No paywall link: https://archive.is/kbIhX
When I was in law school some 40 years ago, I took a course in federal civil procedure (we called the class "Mystery Courts" because the rules and jurisdiction issues can be pretty arcane). At the time I had no idea there could be any such thing as a nationwide injunction; the issue was never discussed at all, and I just understood that a court's decision was limited to the parties to the case. But I've been out of the law business for awhile, so when a few years ago that crackpot Kacsmaryk in Texas tried to outlaw mifepristone for abortions on a nationwide basis I wondered, Can he even do that? I'd assumed that his power was limited to the parties to the case and was surprised to learn otherwise. I just read Barrett's decision, and I can't say that it's wrong, at least historically. This was a typically originalist decision. The modern problem, though, is that nationwide injunctions seem to be the only immediate remedy against nationwide executive orders that are arguably unconstitutional and that previous presidents weren't doing. While the decision is solid as a matter of precedent, it leaves plaintiffs in the position of having to challenge Trump's shitty EOs in multiple courts, with the possibility of inconsistent decisions to be sorted only at some later date, or file class actions, which are cumbersome. On the other hand, Kacsmaryk and similar judicial troglodytes are also sidelined, which is definitely a good thing.
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