28th June 2023, 4:31 AM
(This post was last modified: 28th June 2023, 12:03 PM by Dark Jaguar.)
(27th June 2023, 6:33 PM)A Black Falcon Wrote: What a wonderful day! Okay, it's not wonderful out, we're still in that permanent cloudbank that seems to have been overhead for most of the past few months. For a while Maine was protected from the worst of the Canadian wildfire smoke by a storm off to our east, but it's not anymore.
But politically, it sure is wonderful, because the Supreme Court explicitly rejected Moore v. Harper's incredibly dangerous independent state legislature theory. In a 6 to 3 ruling the Supreme Court solidly opposed ISL as a theory. Considering how incredibly dangerous ISL is as a theory, particularly with how it could allow a state legislature to overturn the results of an election they don't like with zero oversight, this is fantastic, fantastic news. Roberts got two of Trump's appointees to support keeping the status quo on elections, again going against a past opinion of his in the name of opposing this highly destructive theory that would totally upend our election system.
This decision pretty much stops this avenue for the destruction of our democracy. Republicans may try some new avenue for their goal of continuing their extreme anti-democratic (small d, not big d) and pro-authoritarian agenda, but this is a big win against that. Of course, Roberts also did it out of self-interest, since this would be surrendering his own branchs' power to the legislative branch, and likely also to keep the people from hating the supreme court even more after their abortion decision, but regardless of the reason the effect is to keep the system as it is: imperfect, but democratic.
Somewhat democratic, at least, which is better than "none democratic". It was the obvious right decision, and these days we're not getting those as often as we'd like from the Supreme Court. There's speculation going around that McConnel may have made a mistake selecting supreme court candidates based solely on a single issue and hadn't vetted them for their positions on other issues. This decision is another notch for that proposition, but I'm still a bit skeptical on that count.
Meanwhile...
The supreme court made a bad decision today, ruling that there must be proof that someone sending a death threat knows it's a death threat. That's a pretty much impossible burden of proof. The better burden is the "reasonable person" standard, which does require a jury but it's better than this. Now, death threats are basically legal nationwide, so long as the person making the death threat, when asked, coyly puts a finger to their lips saying "Oh who me? Oh no that was just me sharing poetry!".
"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." ~ Charles Babbage (1791-1871)