About the debate tonight — I’ll be here and have an open thread for comments, so if you want to hang out with me you are very welcome. Part of me is dreading it, though. Chris Hayes was playing highlights of the first 2020 debate the other night and I had to turn it off. Too much. This time with mics turned off Trump shouldn’t be able to talk over everybody through the whole. bleeping. debate, but he may start shouting, knowing him. Trump is being advised to not be a “raging asshole” this time, but whether he can discipline himself is another matter.
I just reviewed what I wrote about the first 2020 debate. I couldn’t watch it then, either. I turned it off and followed a live blog of it instead. Here’s my longer post from a day later. And I had forgotten about the cows. From a transcript:
1:18:31 TRUMP
You wanna rip down buildings and rebuild the buildings — where airplanes are out of business. Where there are two car systems or where they want to take out the cows.
Well, we still have cows, at least in Missouri. I haven’t seen any since I’ve been in New York, but I have to assume the cows are still there.
Anyway … about the Supreme Court. Bleep. The Supreme Court rules that state officials can engage in a little corruption, as a treat. Some of those fellas do like their treats. See also It Sure Looks Like KBJ Is Throwing Yacht Shade at Sam Alito and Clarence Thomas by Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern at Slate. I understand Justice Jackson’s dissent is worth reading all the way through. So here’s the decision; the dissent starts on page 23.
There’s a lot more to complain about. I’m betting they are holding on to the fleetingly revealed Idaho abortion decision and possibly the Trump immunity decision until tomorrow, to take attention away from whatever mess Trump makes of the debates. It appears with Idaho they’re planning to kick the can down the road so that they don’t have to decide anything before the election. Another anti-abortion ruling before the election might hurt Trump’s chances, you know. Priorities.
Update: It appears we did get the Idaho abortion decision today after all but managed to not resolve anything. The issue at hand was whether federal law that requires hospitals to at least stabilize emergency patients (rather than denying them care if they don’t have insurance) could be used to force Idaho hospitals to perform abortions to save the lives of women. The Court dismissed Idaho’s appeal of a lower court ruling that allows doctors to perform emergency abortions, meaning the lower court ruling is back in effect, for now. But the litigation will continue, and this law may end up back in the Supreme Court in a future time. NBC:
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who objected to the court failing to decide the case, read her dissenting opinion from the bench, a step justices generally only take when they are particularly disgruntled with the outcome.
“There is simply no good reason not to resolve this conflict now,” she wrote.
Conservative Justice Samuel Alito agreed on that point in a dissenting opinion joined by Justice Clarence Thomas and, mostly, Justice Neil Gorsuch.
Alito indicated he would rule against the Biden administration, which argues that federal law requires abortions when a woman is suffering from various health complications that are not necessarily immediately life-threatening, notwithstanding Idaho’s strict ban.
“Here, no one who has any respect for statutory language can plausibly say that the government’s interpretation is unambiguously correct,” he wrote.
Yeah, let’s worry about the statutory language while women are going into sepsis. Priorities. See also Why Idaho’s hospitals are having pregnant patients airlifted out of state.
In another genius move, the Court blocked an EPA plan for reducing smokestack emissions
Sharks and boats with big batteries, I hope Trump has a solution for that world problem. Thanks for the cow quote, I expect we will hear a more advanced version of that style of nonsense.
Originalism and textualism seem to be a couple of judicial theories that sounded good to some but fall to pieces when tried in practice. In the great Kansas experiment Grover Norquist and Laffer of the Laffer curve had similar outlier theories that went down to our great expense. This time we get a national level debacle. Why do republicans latch on to these idiot ideologies? I'm going with perverted elitism for now. I am waiting for a display of that tonight.
Funny point of Jewish law, which curls back to the Mandatory Ten Commandments forcing display of 11 commandments, and all that.
Jewish law is unambiguous on one point: any law can be broken in order to save a life. It doesn't require that the danger be imminent; for example, no Jew would say you can't clear an ectopic pregnancy from the moment of discovery. They'd rely on ancient principles like "you putz, if God didn't want us to clear an ectopic pregnancy, he'd have shown us dozens self-resolving already!" or somesuch.
The idea that God would want to keep women in danger from pointless pregnancies is ludicrous on its face, given that Christians claim that Jesus came and brought the *real* meaning of the law, which, remember, always allows exceptions to save a life.
That's something to keep in mind, for folks who think that these are dedicated religious people with sincere beliefs and a desire to serve the desires of their God… when their God told them some four thousand years ago not to be such knuckleheads.
Would somone please call this court a death panel? Since that is what it is.
Would some lawyer please argue to scotus: what to do when as the texas woman who was carrying twins and one was dying non viable, too early to deliver viable one, texas refused her the right to get the abortion so the viable one could live. She had to go to colorado to save her life and the viable twin. Now what would the court have her do when she lived in a state where the legal system was sentencing all 3 to die? Will we start letting certain people die like dialysis or hiv or cancer or addicts? If you can legally kill pregnant women who else can you kill?
Will American men grow up when their wife is made to die by law and the husband is left raising the other children alone? Just wondering…..