Leo’s appointees — Justices Roberts, Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, Thomas, Alito, and Barrett — just accommodated Leo by holding that the Constitution and the Voting Rights Act (the “VRA”) allowed Louisiana to use race in creating a district map, satisfying Leo’s hopes of denying blacks an equal opportunity to elect representatives. The holding was quickly exploited by six southern Republican state legislatures who redrew their maps to discriminate against black voters and convert minority-heavy districts into GOP seats.

In addition to rolling back anti-discrimination protections in voting, Leo’s priorities were: keeping Trump in office, deregulation of corporations, and restricting access to abortion.

His appointees complied on all fronts, even when it meant perverting the Constitution and defying the Supreme Court’s own precedent. The justices not chosen by Leo always filed strong and admonishing dissents.

Keeping Trump in office

• In Trump v. United States, Leo’s Majority gave Trump broad immunity and delayed his D.C. criminal trial until after the 2024 election so voters wouldn’t know that Trump was a convicted felon. By contrast, it took the Roberts Court just 16 days to decide Nixon wasn’t immune from prosecution and one day to make Republican George W. Bush president instead of Al Gore.
• Leo’s Majority worried that presidents would be chilled from taking bold action — a fabricated concern that other presidents’ conduct will be as egregious as Trump’s. As Justice Frankfurter held, “the process of Constitutional adjudication does not thrive on conjuring up horrible possibilities that … won’t happen again in the real world.”
• Leo’s Majority, bizarrely, remanded the case to the District Court to decide whether the January 6 attack on the Capitol was an official or unofficial act.
• That Trump, if inaugurated, could pardon himself.

States’ legislatures can racially discriminate to win elections.

• The Majority’s recent holding that state legislators can use race to gerrymander against minorities was preceded by other Constitutional violations.
• In Alexander v. South Carolina NAACP, Leo’s Majority upheld South Carolina’s Republican legislature’s right to move 60% of Black voters from their districts into a White-dominated district to ensure the election of the Republican candidate. Duh; isn’t the purpose of racial gerrymandering always to win elections?
• In Brnovich v. DNC, Leo’s Majority held that Arizona’s voting restrictions didn’t violate the VRA, which prohibits racial discrimination in elections. The law discarded votes cast in non-designated locations and prohibited third parties from collecting ballots for delivery to polling places other than family members, caregivers, or people who share the same household. But only 18% of Native Americans in rural counties receive mail at home, and most would have to travel two hours to reach a mailbox. Half don’t own cars and must rely on friends and neighbors, who are not allowed to help with transportation, which the law prohibits. Roberts admitted that Arizona’s restrictions fall more heavily on Native Americans, but that the consequences are small even though voters from the district were twice as likely as whites to have their ballots discarded. Nonetheless, Leo’s Majority decided that those disadvantages didn’t exceed “the usual burdens of voting.” To the contrary, the tossed votes exceeded the margins of victory in the 2018 and 2020 elections.
• In Shelby v. Holder, Leo’s Majority struck down Section 4(b) of the VRA, which required states with histories of suppressing minority voting to clear voting law changes with federal authorities. They relied on the 10th Amendment, which doesn’t mention elections. The 15th Amendment, which they didn’t cite, expressly prohibits racial gerrymandering and gives Congress the power to enforce that prohibition. Requiring federal pre-clearance for states with a history of racial voter suppression would seem to fall directly within that power. Shelby desperately invoked the antiquated theory of equal sovereignty (ES), which requires the federal government to treat states equally. But ES is nowhere in the Constitution; it’s not even a law. It was originally invented to prohibit different criteria in admitting states into the Union.

Deregulation of Corporations

• In Loper v. Raimondo, Leo’s Majority overturned Chevron v. NRDC, which held that courts should defer to an executive agency’s interpretation of ambiguous legislation — no longer. There, Leo’s Majority held that the Administrative Procedure Act requires courts to decide whether an agency’s interpretation of ambiguous language is correct. The holding transferred an enormous amount of policymaking from federal agencies, which require tens of thousands of workers, to the judiciary, the only unelected branch of government, which lacks the personnel to do the job. It was an indirect form of deregulation. Loper also unleashed a slew of corporate lawsuits challenging agency interpretations. The courts will now be loaded down with second-guessing agencies’ interpretations of ambiguous statutes.

Overturning Roe v. Wade

Leo found easy fodder in Thomas, Gorsuch, and Alito. The rest is history.

Leo’s appointees were conflicted since they repeatedly ruled in favor of Leo rather than what the Constitution required. In Caperton v. Massey, the Supreme Court had held that “every case … [and] every procedure which would offer a temptation to the average man … to not be impartial … denies … the due process of law.” Would Leo’s appointees feel beholden to the patron who got them on the bench and be tempted to favor their patron’s agenda? Of course they would.

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The post THE GOP PLOT THAT STACKED THE SUPREME COURT WITH JUSTICES WHO TURNED THEIR PRIORITIES INTO THE LAW  first appeared on Inside The Political Chaos.

Trump is letting Vladimir Putin  send Iran intelligence on American military movements and  give Iran technology that makes Iran’s drones more accurate and deadly. Our President is helping Iran fight until it exhausts America’s military. It’s already draining the Pentagon’s supply of precision-guided munitions designed to hit specific targets.

 Putin denied it, but Trump took his word over his administration’s own security experts, and he continues to waive oil sanctions against Russia – another pitiful accommodations to his idol. 

Ironically, Trump’s many treacheries are more the fault of sitting Republicans who, among their many oath violations, confirmed the least qualified and most dangerous cabinet in American history. Unlike sitting Republicans however, Trump can’t help himself. He checks all the boxes mental professionals use to diagnose sociopaths and narcissists. Among them:

• Narcissists focus exclusively on are their own needs and nothing else. The ugly truth is that Trump’s bombing was self-serving – to distract voters from the Epstein scandal and his punishing economy, and for leverage to declare an emergency as an excuse to deploy American troops on U.S. soil, delay the midterm elections, and prove he can do anything he wants. The attack had nothing to do with Trump’s stated goals of regime change or denuclearization. Both were lies. Preventing the latter was already accomplished by his last attack on Iran, and achieving regime change doesn’t work for the U.S. It certainly didn’t in Vietnam, Iraq or Afghanistan. 
• Both narcissists and sociopaths are delusional. Trump insisted regime change had already occurred in Iran when it’s people and  military, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, have consolidated around the Ayatollah. He also said the Strait will “open up naturally,” reminiscent of his promise that Covid would “disappear like a miracle.” But by the end of his first administration the U.S. accounted for just 4.2% of the world’s population but 30% of COVID  cases and 19% of COVID deaths. Whether he believes what he says or is lying, he shouldn’t be America’s President.

I blame the sitting Republican cowards for putting our country, our allies and most of the Gulf nations in this near-irreversible disaster. There are no good outcomes. Trump might take a politically motivated escape that leaves Iran in control of the Strait of Hormuz and subjects the U.S. and the rest of the world in a devastating oil shock. 

Unlike every other U.S. President, Trump never consulted with our allies before bombing Iran. So we won’t be able to rely on their cooperation for decades to come, even, perhaps, if a more reliable government replaces the current one. That’s because American voters elected a rouge president and a complicit Republican majority to Congress, and our allies worry that it could happen again. 

Another unspeakable outcome is that Trump continues the war and deploys American troops in Iran which would extend the war indefinitely and ensure a more obvious U.S. loss given Iran’s rugged mountains and uninhabitable deserts.

There have been many courageous Republicans  that have done great things for our country, even saved us from several crises. We need them now more than ever to save us from this Iran train wreck  and to restore the Republican party to its respected standing at home and internationally. 

Perhaps the most difficult challenge to a new Congress will be to recapture the honor, trust and respect that sitting Republicans allowed Trump to reduce a respected global leader to a nation widely mocked, distrusted, and shunned.

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The post REPUBLICANS CAN  KEEP THEIR MAJORITIES BY VOTING IN THE PRIMARIES FOR REPUBLICANS NOT ON TRUMP’S LEASH.  first appeared on Inside The Political Chaos.

The eight Democratic Senators settled for a promise that the Senate will vote on a bill to extend the subsidies by the end of the second week of December. The eight Senators are either stupid or must have been corrupted by our Chief Corrupter, President Trump. 

Republicans have had a 3 decades-long sinister plan , referred to as “Starve the Beast” to cut Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. It includes Trump’s obscene tax cuts to knowingly increase our deficits and national debt and create shortfalls so the Republicans can throw up their hands and lament that they have no option but to cut America’s safety nets. 

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that Trump’s tax cuts will cut federal spending on Medicaid and CHIP by $1.02 trillion. Moreover, the Obamacare subsidies are set to expire at the end of the year  and are unlikely to be extended, especially given Trump’s mission to undo everything Obama accomplished. 

Democratic voters expected their party to fight for their healthcare with a zero-sum approach — to win-at-all-costs and rule out compromise. But the eight Senators who caved came up with a hollow reason to betray their constituents – a provision that federal employees would get back their jobs and their pay, which would have happened anyway. So, the eight defectors got nothing for risking Americans’ healthcare and lives. 

An NBC poll taken this March found that two-thirds of Democrats expected and wanted their party to “stick to their positions even if it means not getting things done  in Washington.” Their surrender drew anger and outrage from many of their Democratic colleagues who said the party should have held firm. And for base Democrats, this wasn’t simply a compromise, it was a complete and total misread of the political situation. Many thought that Most Voters believed that Democrats gave up their leverage to insist on the Obamacare subsidies. Voters largely blamed the shutdown on Trump and the GOP and scoring huge wins in states like New Jersey, Virginia and Georgia in off-year elections signaled the beginning of a trend. Does the phrase “snatching defeat from the jaws of victory” come to mind?

The post DEMOCRATIC VOTERS EXPECTED THEIR PARTY TO FIGHT FOR THEIR HEALTHCARE. THEY WERE DISAPPOINTED  first appeared on Inside The Political Chaos.