Jakub Jakoubek & Emeline Rochefeuille

5280 Westival TikTok Challenge 2024. Emeline is always great, but this clip for me highlights Jakub's dance skills. So many WCS leaders can lead well but can't dance for shit.

Proof beyond reasonable doubt

Unless you're not reasonable...

 

 

Weissman: Remand backfire

Per previous posts it was noted that SCOTUS might remand this back to the District Court to determine which acts were official and which were private. Granted that would delay the trial beyond the election as intended. But Weissman sees a silver lining in that Chutkan, while holding a hearing on the issue, can call witnesses and bring in other evidence that would be presented at trial. All of which would then be reported, giving the public access to information that would otherwise only be available at trial.   

Lincoln Project: Banning reproductive freedom

What Repugnantcons really want. Do you want them? 

Brown Jackson pinpoints the immunity issue

Trumpler asserts that a President is absolutely immune for his official acts. So she asks why doesn't SCOTUS just answer that question instead of engaging in distracting, abstract hypotheticals? 

"If a president’s official acts are not entitled to absolute immunity, she suggested, the problem is eliminated. Why, she asked, would the president not be required to follow the law when performing his official acts?" She added: "Even if we reject the absolute immunity theory, it’s not as though the president doesn’t have the opportunity to make [other immunity] arguments that arise. We shouldn’t be trying to, in the abstract, set up those boundaries ahead of time as a function of sort of blanket immunity."

Roberts got at this issue by asking if bribery is committed in the execution of an official act, like appointing an ambassador, the crime cannot be separated from the official act, as the former depends on the latter. Hence there is no absolute or blanket immunity for official acts.

But the answer to Brown Jackson's question is that apparently at least four of the conservative justices are obviously avoiding the issue because they are partisan hacks whose only duty is this case is to protect Trumpler by muddying up the issues and delaying trial. 

SCOTUS reveals intent in immunity arguments

Recall when they took the case the issue they chose to address was the following:

"The petition is granted limited to the following question: whether and if so to what extent does a former President enjoy presidential immunity from criminal prosecution for conduct alleged to involve official acts during his tenure in office." 

So the conservatives asked questions about the above with all sorts of hypothetical abstractions while never addressing the facts or law in the specific indictment. In fact they went out of their way to avoid it. Whereas the indictment is about private, criminal acts that can in no way be considered official. Even Trumpler's lawyer, when Coney-Barrett asked specifically about those crimes, agreed they were not official.

But the other conservatives were obsessed with the more hypothetical question as to which acts were official. Which seems to indicate that they would agree with Trumpler's lawyer's suggestion that perhaps the issue should be remanded back to the District Court to determine. Which of course completely ignores the indictment altogether and further delays the ultimate trial beyond the election, which seems their real intention.  

Sotomayor sums it up