You can thank one liberal pipe dream and one overly cautious Justice Department.

“It’s up to the Supreme Court.” These days the phrase is as much a statement of fact when it comes to a major legal issue that the justices will resolve as it is a cause for concern. After all, in the past two years alone, the conservative supermajority of justices installed by Donald Trump has upended the law on abortion, gun control, voting rights, affirmative action, executive power, and discrimination in public life.

The same group of justices is now poised to consider two major legal questions that will significantly shape — and perhaps even indirectly determine — the outcome of the 2024 presidential election. The Court’s handling of these issues will constitute a roiling, monthslong subplot of the 2024 presidential contest, one that remains, according to recent polling, a statistical dead heat between Trump and President Joe Biden and couldplausibly turn on the progress of Trump’s criminal cases before Election Day.

It is an unsettling, if not outright maddening, situation that should concern anyone who has watched the politicization and deterioration of the Court in recent years or who recalls its intervention in the 2000 election in favor of George W. Bush. The uncertainty before us is the result of two ostensibly different problems that are converging before our eyes: the emergence of a solidly conservative majority on the Supreme Court, whose decisions often align with the partisan political priorities of the Republican Party, and the Justice Department’s needless delay in moving to investigate and prosecute Trump over his effort to steal the 2020 election.

  • PugJesus@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    It’s astounding just how far Very Important People will go to bothsides blame at every opportunity and give sympathy to blatantly dishonest ‘interpretations’.

    • originalucifer@moist.catsweat.com
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      1 year ago

      i call the both sides people ‘conservatives’. they live in a different era, where 2 parties attempted to work together (or at least pretend).

      they are desperately trying to conserve that at all costs… while the system burns around them.

      • LastYearsPumpkin@feddit.ch
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        1 year ago

        Back in the before times, they two parties worked together quite fine in the backroom dealing, and only blustered when there were cameras, or the public, around.

        Now that garbage is leaking into the backroom dealings, and it shows.

      • MagicShel@programming.dev
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        1 year ago

        Out of curiosity, what is your vision of government where the players are simply at all-out war with one another instead of seeking compromise? Outside of an autocracy, I’m struggling to picture a stable government where people on different sides make no attempt at working together.

        And if what you’re seeking is a left-authoritarian government then I’m going to have to agree with the both-sidesers on this one. I don’t want any flavor of authoritarian rule. Fascism is probably the worst, but the Soviet Union was a real shit show, too.

      • RaincoatsGeorge@lemmy.zip
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        1 year ago

        These are the real problem group. They are hooked on partisan politics and would never support a Democrat, but this comes at the cost of the cancer growing among their ranks. I dont think these people are all classical racist fascists. These are Christian church going family men entering middle and elderly age. They are in fact generally good people and they are proud of that fact. These are the ‘nobody wants to work anymore’, 'I worked two jobs to make it through college ’ crowd. But they have done well and raised good families. They are in my mind good people, hard workers, and good leaders. But they can’t get past this us vs them mentality. They don’t like trump and the maga shit but only because it makes them look bad. They want to be taken seriously and maintain their honor but it’s real hard when your new maga friends keep wearing swastikas.

        They are conflicted and angry and have signaled that no matter what, the majority of them will place their pride above all and vote for Trump again and again. They just can’t accept that shit got away from them and their great monolith party of principles and honor is anything but. They have to find any way to both sides it and make the maga cancer seem like a common problem amongst their enemies ranks as well. To them it’s not a maga problem if they can create a boogeyman. BLM and trans people invading schools.

        It falls apart quickly under review, so that’s why they don’t review. If you get your news by reading headlines and you get your headlines from fox news, you’ll always have a safe space.

        These men and women are inadvertently killing America. They are blind to it because their victory would seemingly benefit them and cause no problems. They don’t realize the true ramifications because they dismiss all of that as liberal overreaction.

        This is the group that scares me, just because they yield so much influence.

        • HopeOfTheGunblade@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          Yeah, all of that adds up to not good people, sorry. You can’t keep your head down and ignore what’s going on and empower the worst among us because you don’t want to have to think, and still be a good person.