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.

  • sugarfree@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Is it really such a problem to allow American voters to decide the election in 2024, by voting for whichever candidate they so choose?

    • CodeName@infosec.pub
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      1 year ago

      The problem is that one of these candidates lost the last time there was an election, and then broke the law and tried to illegally maintain power, thus making himself ineligible to run again. Is it really such a problem to uphold the Constitution of the US?

      • jballs@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        I think the biggest problem is that conservatives are used to using the Constitution to mean they can do whatever they want. “You can’t take away my fully automatic assault rifle with a 30 round magazine of armor piercing rounds, the 2nd Amendment says so!” “You can’t force my business to serve gay people, the 1st Amendment says so!”

        As soon as the 14th Amendment says, in clear and easy to understand language, that Trump can’t run for president - all of a sudden they act like they’ve never heard of the Constitution before.

      • rhacer@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I’m sorry, I must have missed the conviction for the crime of insurrection, much less then indictment for it.

        Wishful thinking does not get us there, and until there is even an indictment for insurrection, the Democrats should not be fucking around with anti-democratic and clearly un-Constitutional manouvres, because that plays directly into Trump’s sob-story politics, “boo hoo they’re all out to get me.” Well guess what he can now point to conclusive evidence that “they are out to get him.”

        Democrats need to stop being fucking stupid and playing directly into Trump’s strengths.

        • merc@sh.itjust.works
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          1 year ago

          I’m sorry, I must have missed the conviction for the crime of insurrection, much less then indictment for it.

          Nobody is ever prosecuted for the crime of insurrection. If an insurrection is successful a party takes over the government, and won’t prosecute themselves. All you could do is attempt to prosecute someone for an attempted insurrection. The problem is that if an insurrection is unsuccessful, it’s a matter of judgement as to how close it came to being successful.