Re: Northeast corridor. We’ve sworn off 95, Turnpike, etc. Take the extra 90 minutes and go through Pennsylvania, it’s good for maintaining low stress levels…
Thanks for your great analysis. As a British lawyer I am not au fait with all the procedure and precedents you refer to but general principles have usually been the same or similar. That is until the Federalist majority of the present SCOTUS chose to use the lord Chancellor’s Foot* as its main term of reference rather than the basic principles of statutory construction and stari decisis. Now the certainly that lawyers and their clients need is replaced by a judicial lottery.
*a medieval joke that the law varied depending on who sat on the Woolsack.
Thanks for rounding out the stuff that I missed. Although the issue wasn't discussed much in this newsletter, I made a donation to the Biden campaign yesterday just as a vote of confidence. Democrats shouldn't have doubts like this, and it is only feeding the overwhelming headlines. It's wag the dog, with the headlines telling us who to support, and its tiresome.
I fully expect this corrupt court to kick the immunity decision can by sending it back down for a completely unwarranted analysis of "official" versus "unofficial" acts, as their primary goal is clearly to delay proceedings in the hopes of a Donald Trump victory. That cake is baked.
Almost as worrisome as all the political hackery is the utter abandonment of stare decisis and what that portends. I'm not an attorney. But I have been responsible for FDA compliance in a medical device manufacturer, and I have spent more than half of my adult career managing product development and global marketing of multi-nationals. So I must applaud former corporate attorney Chief Justice John Roberts for engineering the biggest windfall corporate attorneys will see in this lifetime or any other by throwing out Chevron, which is certain to generate 100s of years of billable hours for the endless litigation that will result. His former colleagues in appellate practice at Hogan-Lovell's are probably still hungover from all the champagne.
I recommend that every company that doesn't have their attorneys on retainer do so now and negotiate the highest amount of included hours you can possibly negotiate. Everyone else had best pray you never need medication or a medical device and that you grow your own food and have a safe water supply as we are headed back to the days adulterated dairy and contaminated drugs.
I can tell you from first-hand experience that faced with the cost of compliance with FDA safety regulations for medical devices and pharmaceuticals the manufacturer associations and their members will carefully cost out going to court, rather than complying, knowing if they can move a case to one of Leonard Leo's handpicked judges they will prevail. And you can expect the same from every firm contaminating our atmosphere and drinking water, every firm seeking to clear cut our forests to the ground and drill for oil offshore and on federal lands, every arms manufacturer wanting to sell armor-piercing ammunition to civilians, every automobile manufacturer that wants to drag its feet on emissions control, all of whom can enjoy millions, if not billions in profits by fighting every effort to restrict and regulate their activity, even if all they achieve is years of delay only to lose their cases.
The experts are no longer in charge, and if you're a bad corporate citizen, with luck, your judge will be an anti-government buffoon like former Judge and member of Congress Louis Gohmert who apparently can now decide a case for corporate polluter and call it a "gratuity" instead of a bribe.
I have been asking various legal analysis Substacks whether jettisoning Chevron means that a court is prohibited from simply ruling that it finds the agency position more credible. I don't think it does. This means that there is going to be a RUSH to the jurisdictions with idiot and hubristic judges who think their law clerks can figure out whether some drug is more dangerous than the FDA says it is. Even if, unlike the 5th Circuit, the jurisdiction does use the random selection, some have more idiots than others, and the chances of landing an idiot go up. And a large business is quite likely to have local ties to allow the suits to be brought anywhere they want.
The result is going to be MASSIVE disagreements between the courts at both District and Appellate levels about certain regulations. And that brings up the danger of "nationwide injunctions" which the court really needs to clarify and bring back to the emergency use only imposition of them.
If a purveyor of canned salmon brings suit in Texas claiming that a regulation of the limits on fishing in spawning rivers is ambiguous and costing it money, is that going to mean that some Texas clerk/judge can issue a nationwide order stopping enforcement of those limits in WA?
We've long known that litigation favors frequent litigants with the financial wherewithal and experience to work the court system. Add the fact that courts only act when a case comes before them means that delay always works to the advantage of bad actors, particularly the big, rich and powerful industry associations that already spend millions on lobbying Congress directly, and will frequently resort to the courts to undo what little public good Congress actually does through litigation.
I’m still struck by Nick Catoggio’s take on the debate that he felt it was time for him to look into a Canadian work visa. That debate was horrible.
We’ve got a long few months ahead and I’m going to be burying myself in teaching as much as I can. I have to choose to do good while facing uncertainty like this. Fortunately I get to talk about misinformation & disinformation as well as generative AI during my digital literacy class at the community college so I get to equip students to face this uncertainty.
I understand that the main topic right now has to do with presidential immunity and how let down liberals are that we seem to be moving towards and executive branch dictatorship. I understand also that the crushing loss suffered by Hillary Clinton to Donald Trump in the 2016 election led us to the point of a Supreme Court dominated now by conservatives after three successful nominations to the highest court in the land by then President Trump.
But I think there is more to consider during a period in history where our democracy has frayed to the point that top level politicians and other personages appear to be completely subject to the criminal courts instead of less punitive measures.
I understand also that we have begun to chant slogans like, “No one is above the law” – and now that the president may be, many have begun to denounce this because we may have granted the president a “kingdom.”
What has been going on, even if we temporarily forget, is that Donald Trump has been convicted of multiple felonies in New York. And for each count, he could face the maximum, technically including incarceration. However, I see a true national security threat here, even though no one on CNN has explained it as such.
President Trump – like it or hate it – had the highest security clearance in the land while serving in office. Whether we like it or not, his mind was not erased of all classified information when he left office. If President Trump is placed behind bars in a New York State prison, has anyone else considered with whom he will be residing?! Many members of gangs and other criminal organizations!
Gangs are savvy. They will know instantly that if they can successfully corner Trump, then they might be able to extract classified information by way of extortion. Since ongoing classified operations affect national security – and don’t just cease when someone new is elected – these criminal operators might very well be able to access information from the highest levels of government simply by figuring out how to threaten to take President Trump’s life, and to let President Trump know that his life might be taken if he does not comply with the code of the inmate. And it would not necessarily stop at facts alone. If, say, the Aryan Brotherhood to date remained unclear about how covert investigations lead to law enforcement sweeps -- by surprise -- of their organization, and President Trump feels forced, under threat of death, to divulge top secret operating strategies to save his own life, then we have a whole new can of worms open in the War on Crime.
Furthermore, what if lower-level prison officials corner President Trump and threaten to submit reports that would stand in the way of his parole? What if they, also, seek classified information by way of extortion, looking to make a mint by selling secrets outside of the prison walls?!
And it’s not just Donald Trump, now is it?! The right has been labelling President Biden the head of the “Biden Crime Family,” and many a zealot has been digging up information and half-truth intended to incarcerate Joe Biden. But the same holds true for him: he has the highest-level security clearance in the land.
So how can we hold our highest-ranking officials accountable to standards created for people without security clearance, simply because we are all equal under law? What courtroom law truly is is not just about which laws have been broken. Rather, it consists of an assessment of the facts about any and all forms of exigent circumstance or other potentially exonerating factors to who a defendant is and what that defendant’s circumstances truly are.
So why should we potentially commit suicide by exposing people with the most national security merit to the criminal underworld and in doing so potentially allow our nemeses to rape us of our national security? Since it’s become known that the Supreme Court has taken to use of “shadow docketing,” wherein the true rationales for decisions are kept classified and alternative decisions are presented to the public, what if these easy to guess ideas have played a role in permitting immunity for official actions?
All progressives must remember at all times: This new immunity decision does not only hold true for Republicans in the Oval Office. Whether the new Supreme Court truly likes this or not, the decision has rendered President Joseph Biden immune, too.
Looking forward to Monday morning and your take on if the S.Court grants criminial immunity for a president's official acts, will Biden immediately order trump (and a few SC justices) thrown in jail, and claiim immunity since it' for national security. I mean, who can stop him, right?
Many thanks for these great explanations. Sadly, though, I really do think you should watch the entire debate, including Biden's facial expressions and how he looked when approaching his podium. It is jaw-dropping. I never could have imagined something this bad. Biden is a fine human being, and Trump is unworthy of being a dog-catcher, but, wow.
I am with the court on Fischer, primarily due to Jackson's reasoning, because no one seems to be thinking about what a Trump administration could do by expanding the unlimited statute to ANY PEACEFUL PROTESTER whose aim is to influence a decision by a law maker, senate committee, or anyone else. That's what protest is intended to do. Sure, such prosecutions would violate the constitution, but when would that ever stop President Retribution? 20 years for simply trying to influence a government body to take your point of view. Lobbyists would be at risk too, I guess, but the danger for protests would be much greater.
It is the fact that those charged with this statute were NOT peaceful and engaged in all sorts of other indictable acts for which they were indicted and convicted (insofar as there has been a trial for the individual) that made this particular violation superfluous for most J6rs. Some sentences might be reduced if the judge considered this statute to be an exacerbating factor--but hordes of the rioters are NOT going to be released.
Re: Northeast corridor. We’ve sworn off 95, Turnpike, etc. Take the extra 90 minutes and go through Pennsylvania, it’s good for maintaining low stress levels…
I usually know it's Saturday because the Friday Roundup comes out. You're screwing up my internal clock this week 😂😂😂
Thanks for your great analysis. As a British lawyer I am not au fait with all the procedure and precedents you refer to but general principles have usually been the same or similar. That is until the Federalist majority of the present SCOTUS chose to use the lord Chancellor’s Foot* as its main term of reference rather than the basic principles of statutory construction and stari decisis. Now the certainly that lawyers and their clients need is replaced by a judicial lottery.
*a medieval joke that the law varied depending on who sat on the Woolsack.
Thanks for rounding out the stuff that I missed. Although the issue wasn't discussed much in this newsletter, I made a donation to the Biden campaign yesterday just as a vote of confidence. Democrats shouldn't have doubts like this, and it is only feeding the overwhelming headlines. It's wag the dog, with the headlines telling us who to support, and its tiresome.
I fully expect this corrupt court to kick the immunity decision can by sending it back down for a completely unwarranted analysis of "official" versus "unofficial" acts, as their primary goal is clearly to delay proceedings in the hopes of a Donald Trump victory. That cake is baked.
Almost as worrisome as all the political hackery is the utter abandonment of stare decisis and what that portends. I'm not an attorney. But I have been responsible for FDA compliance in a medical device manufacturer, and I have spent more than half of my adult career managing product development and global marketing of multi-nationals. So I must applaud former corporate attorney Chief Justice John Roberts for engineering the biggest windfall corporate attorneys will see in this lifetime or any other by throwing out Chevron, which is certain to generate 100s of years of billable hours for the endless litigation that will result. His former colleagues in appellate practice at Hogan-Lovell's are probably still hungover from all the champagne.
I recommend that every company that doesn't have their attorneys on retainer do so now and negotiate the highest amount of included hours you can possibly negotiate. Everyone else had best pray you never need medication or a medical device and that you grow your own food and have a safe water supply as we are headed back to the days adulterated dairy and contaminated drugs.
I can tell you from first-hand experience that faced with the cost of compliance with FDA safety regulations for medical devices and pharmaceuticals the manufacturer associations and their members will carefully cost out going to court, rather than complying, knowing if they can move a case to one of Leonard Leo's handpicked judges they will prevail. And you can expect the same from every firm contaminating our atmosphere and drinking water, every firm seeking to clear cut our forests to the ground and drill for oil offshore and on federal lands, every arms manufacturer wanting to sell armor-piercing ammunition to civilians, every automobile manufacturer that wants to drag its feet on emissions control, all of whom can enjoy millions, if not billions in profits by fighting every effort to restrict and regulate their activity, even if all they achieve is years of delay only to lose their cases.
The experts are no longer in charge, and if you're a bad corporate citizen, with luck, your judge will be an anti-government buffoon like former Judge and member of Congress Louis Gohmert who apparently can now decide a case for corporate polluter and call it a "gratuity" instead of a bribe.
I have been asking various legal analysis Substacks whether jettisoning Chevron means that a court is prohibited from simply ruling that it finds the agency position more credible. I don't think it does. This means that there is going to be a RUSH to the jurisdictions with idiot and hubristic judges who think their law clerks can figure out whether some drug is more dangerous than the FDA says it is. Even if, unlike the 5th Circuit, the jurisdiction does use the random selection, some have more idiots than others, and the chances of landing an idiot go up. And a large business is quite likely to have local ties to allow the suits to be brought anywhere they want.
The result is going to be MASSIVE disagreements between the courts at both District and Appellate levels about certain regulations. And that brings up the danger of "nationwide injunctions" which the court really needs to clarify and bring back to the emergency use only imposition of them.
If a purveyor of canned salmon brings suit in Texas claiming that a regulation of the limits on fishing in spawning rivers is ambiguous and costing it money, is that going to mean that some Texas clerk/judge can issue a nationwide order stopping enforcement of those limits in WA?
We've long known that litigation favors frequent litigants with the financial wherewithal and experience to work the court system. Add the fact that courts only act when a case comes before them means that delay always works to the advantage of bad actors, particularly the big, rich and powerful industry associations that already spend millions on lobbying Congress directly, and will frequently resort to the courts to undo what little public good Congress actually does through litigation.
I’m still struck by Nick Catoggio’s take on the debate that he felt it was time for him to look into a Canadian work visa. That debate was horrible.
We’ve got a long few months ahead and I’m going to be burying myself in teaching as much as I can. I have to choose to do good while facing uncertainty like this. Fortunately I get to talk about misinformation & disinformation as well as generative AI during my digital literacy class at the community college so I get to equip students to face this uncertainty.
I understand that the main topic right now has to do with presidential immunity and how let down liberals are that we seem to be moving towards and executive branch dictatorship. I understand also that the crushing loss suffered by Hillary Clinton to Donald Trump in the 2016 election led us to the point of a Supreme Court dominated now by conservatives after three successful nominations to the highest court in the land by then President Trump.
But I think there is more to consider during a period in history where our democracy has frayed to the point that top level politicians and other personages appear to be completely subject to the criminal courts instead of less punitive measures.
I understand also that we have begun to chant slogans like, “No one is above the law” – and now that the president may be, many have begun to denounce this because we may have granted the president a “kingdom.”
What has been going on, even if we temporarily forget, is that Donald Trump has been convicted of multiple felonies in New York. And for each count, he could face the maximum, technically including incarceration. However, I see a true national security threat here, even though no one on CNN has explained it as such.
President Trump – like it or hate it – had the highest security clearance in the land while serving in office. Whether we like it or not, his mind was not erased of all classified information when he left office. If President Trump is placed behind bars in a New York State prison, has anyone else considered with whom he will be residing?! Many members of gangs and other criminal organizations!
Gangs are savvy. They will know instantly that if they can successfully corner Trump, then they might be able to extract classified information by way of extortion. Since ongoing classified operations affect national security – and don’t just cease when someone new is elected – these criminal operators might very well be able to access information from the highest levels of government simply by figuring out how to threaten to take President Trump’s life, and to let President Trump know that his life might be taken if he does not comply with the code of the inmate. And it would not necessarily stop at facts alone. If, say, the Aryan Brotherhood to date remained unclear about how covert investigations lead to law enforcement sweeps -- by surprise -- of their organization, and President Trump feels forced, under threat of death, to divulge top secret operating strategies to save his own life, then we have a whole new can of worms open in the War on Crime.
Furthermore, what if lower-level prison officials corner President Trump and threaten to submit reports that would stand in the way of his parole? What if they, also, seek classified information by way of extortion, looking to make a mint by selling secrets outside of the prison walls?!
And it’s not just Donald Trump, now is it?! The right has been labelling President Biden the head of the “Biden Crime Family,” and many a zealot has been digging up information and half-truth intended to incarcerate Joe Biden. But the same holds true for him: he has the highest-level security clearance in the land.
So how can we hold our highest-ranking officials accountable to standards created for people without security clearance, simply because we are all equal under law? What courtroom law truly is is not just about which laws have been broken. Rather, it consists of an assessment of the facts about any and all forms of exigent circumstance or other potentially exonerating factors to who a defendant is and what that defendant’s circumstances truly are.
So why should we potentially commit suicide by exposing people with the most national security merit to the criminal underworld and in doing so potentially allow our nemeses to rape us of our national security? Since it’s become known that the Supreme Court has taken to use of “shadow docketing,” wherein the true rationales for decisions are kept classified and alternative decisions are presented to the public, what if these easy to guess ideas have played a role in permitting immunity for official actions?
All progressives must remember at all times: This new immunity decision does not only hold true for Republicans in the Oval Office. Whether the new Supreme Court truly likes this or not, the decision has rendered President Joseph Biden immune, too.
Looking forward to Monday morning and your take on if the S.Court grants criminial immunity for a president's official acts, will Biden immediately order trump (and a few SC justices) thrown in jail, and claiim immunity since it' for national security. I mean, who can stop him, right?
Many thanks for these great explanations. Sadly, though, I really do think you should watch the entire debate, including Biden's facial expressions and how he looked when approaching his podium. It is jaw-dropping. I never could have imagined something this bad. Biden is a fine human being, and Trump is unworthy of being a dog-catcher, but, wow.
I am with the court on Fischer, primarily due to Jackson's reasoning, because no one seems to be thinking about what a Trump administration could do by expanding the unlimited statute to ANY PEACEFUL PROTESTER whose aim is to influence a decision by a law maker, senate committee, or anyone else. That's what protest is intended to do. Sure, such prosecutions would violate the constitution, but when would that ever stop President Retribution? 20 years for simply trying to influence a government body to take your point of view. Lobbyists would be at risk too, I guess, but the danger for protests would be much greater.
It is the fact that those charged with this statute were NOT peaceful and engaged in all sorts of other indictable acts for which they were indicted and convicted (insofar as there has been a trial for the individual) that made this particular violation superfluous for most J6rs. Some sentences might be reduced if the judge considered this statute to be an exacerbating factor--but hordes of the rioters are NOT going to be released.