ALL HAIL PRESIDENT TRUMP

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rojimboo wrote:

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Aim_Deep wrote:

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rojimboo wrote:

Can some Trump supporter spend some time defending his/her faith in Trump?

I wanted to ask, what has Trump done for you that you benefitted somehow? I'm assuming you would be an average American.

I am asking because apparently people have a tough time answering that question

https://trofire.com/2019/04/20/trump-hasnt-done-a-single-thing-to-help-average-americans/

Thats easy - low taxes, low regs, more originalist SC justices who will follow US constitution. The greatest document in the history of man - to the degree it's followed!

I dont really care for his flamboyant style or racist tendencies and woulda preferred Cruz but he's a million times better on policy I care about than any Dem is IMO

How much less taxes are you paying % wise due to Trump?

How has low regulation affected you positively?

How have the appointees to the Supreme Court affected you personally positively?

Does anyone else find it hilarious Trump has done nothing to help average AMericans?

I do.

Two years man, what the hell has he been doing??

Personally, I'm curious how originalist judges help "the average American". Those originalists sure are big fans of union-busting, and aren't huge fans of universal health care. In fact, the Roberts court has been a years-long history of decisions that are notably horrendous for "the average American" - Slate has a nice overview here. My personal favorites: Citizens United, which means that if you're rich enough to buy up TV channels nationwide, there's absolutely nothing wrong with your free speech being a million times louder and more present than mine; Shelby County, which means that if your state has a history of voter suppression it is likely to continue that history; and the truly bizarre NIFLA v. Beccera, which means that health care providers that aren't actually health care providers have no requirement to admit that up front - always great for the "average American" when crisis pregnancy centers are able to defraud them.

This is a bit like saying that the Trump tax cuts help "the average American", when in reality almost all of the gains went to the top 1%, and the people who passed it immediately used the huge deficits they gained as a result as an excuse to go after things that really do benefit the average American, like Medicare and Social Security. And "deregulation"? Sure, okay, let's hear how deregulation helps the average American. And if you want to say "it's good for the economy", please bring actual receipts on which regulations were cut and what effect they are estimated to have on the economy.

It's kind of telling that all Aim_Deep can come up with is this vague boilerplate and a tax cut that really doesn't amount to much. And even he's not stupid enough to support Trump's border wall. Hey guys, newsflash - the points on our border where it would be useful or valuable to have a wall? We already have a wall!

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Budget_player_cadet wrote:

Personally, I'm curious how originalist judges help "the average American". Those originalists sure are big fans of union-busting, and aren't huge fans of universal health care. In fact, the Roberts court has been a years-long history of decisions that are notably horrendous for "the average American" - Slate has a nice overview here. My personal favorites: Citizens United, which means that if you're rich enough to buy up TV channels nationwide, there's absolutely nothing wrong with your free speech being a million times louder and more present than mine; Shelby County, which means that if your state has a history of voter suppression it is likely to continue that history; and the truly bizarre NIFLA v. Beccera, which means that health care providers that aren't actually health care providers have no requirement to admit that up front - always great for the "average American" when crisis pregnancy centers are able to defraud them.

This is a bit like saying that the Trump tax cuts help "the average American", when in reality almost all of the gains went to the top 1%, and the people who passed it immediately used the huge deficits they gained as a result as an excuse to go after things that really do benefit the average American, like Medicare and Social Security. And "deregulation"? Sure, okay, let's hear how deregulation helps the average American. And if you want to say "it's good for the economy", please bring actual receipts on which regulations were cut and what effect they are estimated to have on the economy.

It's kind of telling that all Aim_Deep can come up with is this vague boilerplate and a tax cut that really doesn't amount to much. And even he's not stupid enough to support Trump's border wall. Hey guys, newsflash - the points on our border where it would be useful or valuable to have a wall? We already have a wall!

God this was awesome!

I don't think we've met. I'm rojimboo, your new fan ;)

I had something similar saved up for when they inevitably doubled down on the Trump 'benefits' for average Americans, but you stole the show. In a good way.

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Turtledove wrote:

Trump didn't push for a wall when Republicans controlled the House and Senate. For him to get approval for his wall now would require him to deal with Democrats in a way that he's never seemed inclined or able to do. The way Trump seems to try to make a deal is to usually just demand that everyone gives him what he wants then every once in a while he switches instead to saying I'll agree to what you want but then backs out of the deal a few days later.

It appears to me that he's much more interested in making the wall a political issue rather than actually building a wall.

This might be beyond the capability of most people to process because it involves having a memory that goes back more than a year, but Trump faced significant resistance from Congresspeople within his own party, in both houses, up to about the Kavanaugh Show; the media circus that was the confirmation hearings finally consolidated support under a single banner.

But that was just the Senate.

Although the time Trump truly had trustworthy support in from GOP Senators was just a few months, I still fundamentally agree with you: Trump squandered an opportunity. I understand why — he was betting on a more favorable House thanks to primary challenges against NeverTrump Republicans — but his (and my) prediction of the midterms was proven overly optimistic. Donald Trump should know better than most to buy low and sell high, and even after mid-2018 gains he held on until after the November crash.

I wouldn't be surprised if he curses his own stupidity weekly over that mistake. But I know he'll never admit it. At least you not while he's in office. And a lot of people don't give him even that much benefit of the doubt. Ann Coulter, like you, believes Trump's 2018 inaction proves he doesn't really want a wall; the difference between you and her, is that she does.

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Budget_player_cadet wrote:

Personally, I'm curious how originalist judges help "the average American". Those originalists sure are big fans of union-busting, and aren't huge fans of universal health care. In fact, the Roberts court has been a years-long history of decisions that are notably horrendous for "the average American" - Slate has a nice overview here. My personal favorites: Citizens United, which means that if you're rich enough to buy up TV channels nationwide, there's absolutely nothing wrong with your free speech being a million times louder and more present than mine; Shelby County, which means that if your state has a history of voter suppression it is likely to continue that history; and the truly bizarre NIFLA v. Beccera, which means that health care providers that aren't actually health care providers have no requirement to admit that up front - always great for the "average American" when crisis pregnancy centers are able to defraud them.

I've actually read the Citizens United decision. I will give you credit for one thing — it really is a good case for contrasting originalist jurisprudence vs activist jurisprudence.

See, I also don't like the effect of Citizens United. I am not a socialist, and I oppose socialism, but I'm not so biased against them as to believe they never have a good idea. In particular, I've always thought an article entitled "Why Socialism?" by physics genius and anti-capitalist Albert Einstein was particularly accurate in terms of describing the disease that plagues advanced capitalism (but not particularly useful in describing the cure). Einstein foresaw a market progressing towards fewer but bigger economic actors, megacorporations running out of competitors they could realistically defeat in a cost-effective manner and turning towards the conversion of economic power to political power, the importance of a free press to democracy and the inevitable rise of fake corporatist news*, and a world where people believe in narratives fed to them by business elites instead of learning the truth — and vote accordingly, with the illusion of choice.

So in other words, the Citizens United decision was an endgame victory for the assholes who seek to turn my beloved capitalism into Orwellian tyranny.

That said, law is supposed to be law, and in law the only things that matter more than Constitution and statute is precedent. That's the way it's supposed to be. The Roberts court didn't decide corporations were people; that was an earlier case. The Roberts court didn't decide corporations being people meant they had Constitutional rights; that was an earlier case. The Roberts court didn't decide the First Amendment included the right to spend your own money on political advertising; that was an earlier case.

All the Roberts court did was add together previous decisions in a way that, from an originalist standpoint, was inevitable. The only way they could possibly have come to any different conclusion was to disregard precedent, to declare a previous case invalid, to functionally legislate from the bench. In other words, the only way out was activist jurisprudence.

Didn't happen.

I still consider myself a supporter of originalist judges, even though I consider Citizens United to have been a complete disaster. Why? Because even when I hate the rules with a fiery passion, I don't believe it's a judge's job to change it. I believe it's a judge's job to interpret legislation as written, excepting when it disagrees with the Constitution as written. I don't think "unconstitutional" is synonymous with "legislation I don't like;" I think plenty of existing law is both constitutional and stupid as fuck. I expect judges to enforce those stupid as fuck laws, in the stupid as fuck way they're written.

So sorry bro, but I'm not feeling bad about Kavanaugh, or Thomas, or any of the other originalist jurists who aren't activist enough to let special interests shove policy agendas through the judiciary that they could never hope to get through the duly elected Congress. I don't blame them. I blame the people whose job it is to write the laws. They are the source of the stupid.

Above all, I blame Congress for not passing a bill that makes it crystal clear that a corporation is not a legal person.

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Budget_player_cadet wrote:

This is a bit like saying that the Trump tax cuts help "the average American", when in reality almost all of the gains went to the top 1%,

The average middle-class American saw his standard deduction double. When you say this kind of shit, I honestly wonder for a second if you even live in the same reality I do. Not that I'm saying you're necessarily wrong about the top 1% getting most of the cuts — who knows, maybe they did. But the tax cuts represent a significant boon to typical Americans that pretty much everyone with a W-2 is feeling right about… now. It's refund season, and you're acting as if it's not different this year.

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Budget_player_cadet wrote:

and the people who passed it immediately used the huge deficits they gained as a result as an excuse to go after things that really do benefit the average American, like Medicare and Social Security.

Which group do you think is larger?
A. Americans who use the Standard Deduction on their income taxes (e.g. earn a paycheck)
B. Americans on either Medicare or Social Security

You probably don't realize it, but you've taken the minority position. Perhaps you do live in the same reality I do, but you don't work.

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Budget_player_cadet wrote:

And "deregulation"? Sure, okay, let's hear how deregulation helps the average American. And if you want to say "it's good for the economy", please bring actual receipts on which regulations were cut and what effect they are estimated to have on the economy.

Meh. Deregulation is kind of like pruning a garden. If you prune excessively, you've ruined things by removing the plants; if you don't prune at all, then you don't really have a garden, all you have is uncontrolled growth.

A good government should regulate things. That's quite literally its job. But it doesn't need to regulate everything, and perhaps most importantly it should routinely clean up old regulations that should be either removed or updated. The natural trend, if not actively fought against, is an ever-growing, increasingly Kafkaesque bureaucracy that keeps making new rules and never disposes of old ones. In that sense, I tend to advocate deregulation. ESPECIALLY the "two rules cut for each new rule made" kind.

I'm not an anarchist. Some government is good. And of course we should be wary of what regulations are cut and who benefits from the cutting. But if you hear "deregulation" and the only thing you hear is a dogwhistle for corporatist meddling, you've lost the plot. Just because the corporatists will try to meddle doesn't mean we shouldn't do it.

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Budget_player_cadet wrote:

We already have a wall!

I don't think it's too much to ask them to actually finish building it. Right now it's got holes.

* I can only imagine TFW you're so fucking smart that you can see 60 years into the future better than today's partisans can see what's right in front of their noses — and then further, to predict they won't see it — when your primary expertise lies in another field.

Were the Trump tax cuts really worth it, for a temporary small boost to economy, whilst exploding the deficit?

The tax cuts certainly did not pay for themselves...

The rich got richer, and the poor got poorer. Same old story.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

So in other words, the Citizens United decision was an endgame victory for the assholes who seek to turn my beloved capitalism into Orwellian tyranny.

That said, law is supposed to be law, and in law the only things that matter more than Constitution and statute is precedent. That's the way it's supposed to be. The Roberts court didn't decide corporations were people; that was an earlier case. The Roberts court didn't decide corporations being people meant they had Constitutional rights; that was an earlier case. The Roberts court didn't decide the First Amendment included the right to spend your own money on political advertising; that was an earlier case.

All the Roberts court did was add together previous decisions in a way that, from an originalist standpoint, was inevitable. The only way they could possibly have come to any different conclusion was to disregard precedent, to declare a previous case invalid, to functionally legislate from the bench. In other words, the only way out was activist jurisprudence.

Didn't happen.

See, you say this as though the hands of the justices on the bench were tied, and there were no competing legal theory that wouldn't lead to absurd and society-destroying results.

This would seemingly imply that Citizens United was a 9-0 decision.

But... It wasn't. It passed by a 5-4 margin. A straight-up partisan split.

Now, I'll be honest - I haven't read the dissent in Citizens United. However, I tend to assume that in such cases, the dissent has at least some legal merit, and cannot simply be dismissed out of hand as "activist judges". Especially when the author of the dissent takes the thoroughly unusual step of reading a large part of his dissent from the bench. Especially when it's a 5-4 partisan split in a court that has seen a disturbing number of 5-4 partisan splits which explicitly favor republican and conservative causes.

Y'know, you'd think that if existing jurisprudence leads to an absurd or obscene result, one possible response would be to go back and re-examing existing jurisprudence to ensure that it makes sense individually or in aggregate. Maybe go back and re-examine that whole "corporations are people" bit. But I'm not a legal expert, so maybe that's not an option. And in the meanwhile, capitalism continues to eat itself.

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I still consider myself a supporter of originalist judges, even though I consider Citizens United to have been a complete disaster. Why? Because even when I hate the rules with a fiery passion, I don't believe it's a judge's job to change it. I believe it's a judge's job to interpret legislation as written, excepting when it disagrees with the Constitution as written. I don't think "unconstitutional" is synonymous with "legislation I don't like;" I think plenty of existing law is both constitutional and stupid as fuck. I expect judges to enforce those stupid as fuck laws, in the stupid as fuck way they're written.

I know for a fact I'm not the first person to point out that "originalism" is kind of iffy. The Supreme Court doesn't tend to get a whole lot of open-and-shut constitutional cases. In many cases, it's weighing one constitutional value against another. For example, in Beccera v. NIFLA, it's not a straightforward free speech case; we have to weigh your right to free speech vs. the commonsense right to not be the victim of false advertising. The conservative branch of the court found that it was unconstitutional to compel crisis pregnancy centers to tell people that they are, in fact, crisis pregnancy centers. Somehow, this is unreasonable "compelled speech", despite the fact that Casey v. Planned Parenthood made it legal for states to compel abortion providers to literally lie to their patients. As Nathan J. Robinson put it:

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Robinson wrote:

“Compulsion is a basic infringement on the liberty of speech! Doctors must have the right to use their judgment rather than having the state tell them what to say!”

“But what about this very prominent instance in which the state literally hands doctors a pamphlet about abortion and tells them what to say?”

“Oh, well, that’s just informed consent. Informed consent is part of tort law. It doesn’t regulate ‘speech as speech.’”

A distinction? Yes. A distinction made for sound legal reasons rather than political ones? No.

Now, again, I am no legal expert. But it doesn't take a legal expert to notice that the through-line between Casey and NIFLA is not "free speech is important and compelled speech is bad", but rather "abortion is bad, and we'll find a way to make this work anyways". This kind of distinction without a difference is not unique to this case, either. You can claim that the originalists are simply "playing by the book"... But it's just not true. They aren't. NIFLA/Casey is just the most obvious case of this, where Thomas argues that this is somehow "different", but brings forward a distinction without an actual difference.

Like any other justice, they're often forced to weigh various rights within the constitution in any given case, and they weigh them in accordance with their own values. And those values are overwhelmingly good for big business and bad for workers, unions, and people who can't afford to buy up local TV stations.

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So sorry bro, but I'm not feeling bad about Kavanaugh, or Thomas, or any of the other originalist jurists who aren't activist enough to let special interests shove policy agendas through the judiciary that they could never hope to get through the duly elected Congress.

...Which is funny, because as the Slate article I linked upthread points out:

"In 5–4 decisions in which the Roberts Five constituted the court’s majority, they voted in favor of the position advocated in conservative amicus briefs 93 percent of the time. The Chamber of Commerce, in addition to funding the Federalist Society and supporting Republican candidates, also writes amicus briefs. It took positions in 25 of the Roberts Five cases and won every single time."

Weird, right?

Meanwhile, republicans are trying to get their biggest 2016 campaign promise done in the courts after they failed to get it through the legislature. Funny how that works. Funny how many significant recent republican victories have come from the supreme court, and not the legislature (in fact, most of those victories come specifically from laws passed by the legislature being overturned!). My favorite here remains Shelby, where the majority case was fucking paper-thin and had nothing to do with "respecting the wishes of the legislature", or indeed any decent constitutional backing. With the benefit of hindsight, there is absolutely no denying that RBG's dissent, where she speaks about throwing away an umbrella because you're not getting wet in the rain thanks to said umbrella, was absolutely 100% right on the money. Methinks there is some projection going on here.

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Above all, I blame Congress for not passing a bill that makes it crystal clear that a corporation is not a legal person.

What do you reckon the odds are that such a bill would see immediate constitutional challenge based on current jurisprudence and be struck down in a 5/4 split by the SCOTUS? Being "passed by congress" did nothing to stop the supreme court taking huge chunks out of the Voting Rights Act. Why would this be any different? Or should we blame congress for not amending the constitution?

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The average middle-class American saw his standard deduction double. When you say this kind of shit, I honestly wonder for a second if you even live in the same reality I do. Not that I'm saying you're necessarily wrong about the top 1% getting most of the cuts — who knows, maybe they did. But the tax cuts represent a significant boon to typical Americans that pretty much everyone with a W-2 is feeling right about… now. It's refund season, and you're acting as if it's not different this year.

Because, well, it isn't. "Double the standard deduction"? That's nice, how much money does it actually amount to? It looks like a few hundred bucks.

Now don't get me wrong, getting a few hundred bucks back is nice! It's not nothing. It's just that these gains scale regressively in the worst way, with the richest getting the most out of it, and it utterly blows a hole in the budget. (Man, remember when deficits mattered to republicans? Me neither; it's always been transparent bullshit aimed at dismantling the social safety net.) And the giveaways to corporate America aren't set to expire, while the tax cuts for the middle class are.

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Which group do you think is larger?
A. Americans who use the Standard Deduction on their income taxes (e.g. earn a paycheck)
B. Americans on either Medicare or Social Security

You probably don't realize it, but you've taken the minority position.

This is a bit of a silly argument, because "middle-class families get to keep a few hundred dollars extra" is nice, while "the elderly have a guaranteed social safety net to keep them out of extreme poverty" is an important part of ensuring a society that isn't completely dysfunctional. Why yes, more people will get that tax cut. This doesn't make it meaningful. I think if you ask most people, "Would you rather get a few hundred bucks more each year or have social security and medicare when you're too old to work", you're not going to get a whole lot of people who will take the few hundred bucks.

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A good government should regulate things. That's quite literally its job. But it doesn't need to regulate everything, and perhaps most importantly it should routinely clean up old regulations that should be either removed or updated. The natural trend, if not actively fought against, is an ever-growing, increasingly Kafkaesque bureaucracy that keeps making new rules and never disposes of old ones. In that sense, I tend to advocate deregulation. ESPECIALLY the "two rules cut for each new rule made" kind.

Okay, but how, exactly, has the deregulation pushed by the Trump administration helped people? You seem to be admitting that the argument is kind of silly, am I wrong?

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I don't think it's too much to ask them to actually finish building it. Right now it's got holes.

See, you're doing so well playing the stalwart intellectual and then you say something utterly mind-numbing like this, and it just blows my mind. The reason they didn't "finish building it" is because a border wall covering the entire southern border is both undesirable and unachievable. Again, the places where it makes sense to have a wall already have a wall. "Finish building it" means putting walls in places where they make no sense, either from a fiscal, environmental, or practical standpoint. Trump's idea of a wall from the Pacific to the Atlantic is a dumb joke of a policy proposal. It's utterly unserious.

While we're talking about jurisprudence, this segment from that CurrentAffairs article I linked above is really quite telling:

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Here’s another way in which values are smuggled in, which we might call “sophistry over time.” It goes something like this: First, a court decision (Abood) says that while forcing workers to subsidize political speech is coercive, they can indeed be forced to pay for nonpolitical speech. Then another decision (Janus) says that this distinction doesn’t make sense, that the supposedly nonpolitical speech is still pretty political, that Abood’s justifications for requiring it fail, and that coercion is coercion. If we get caught up in “law logic,” we can end up having a fight over whether the government’s interests in drawing the political/nonpolitical distinction are “compelling.” And we can forget how many premises we’ve already tacitly accepted, namely that having a buck deducted from your paycheck is the same as being forced to say words on penalty of imprisonment. Law often evolves through a series of syllogisms that occur gradually, and look insane when they’re put together, but because they come in separate cases, can seem reasonable one by one. Consider this (purely hypothetical) logic:

1. There should be no difference between the way laws are applied to individuals versus organizations of multiple individuals.
2. The government cannot prevent individuals from exercising their right to free speech.
3. Preventing people from spending money to speak is preventing them from exercising their right to free speech. If the government prohibited someone from buying flyers to speak, it would be the same as if it prohibited them from speaking.
4. Corporations are organizations of multiple individuals.
5. Any restriction on how corporations spend money to influence the political process is a freedom-destroying tyrannical violation of the First Amendment.
From voting rights to prosecutorial accountability to class actions, there are numerous examples of how premises that sound plausible in isolation can lead to disastrous and absurd results when taken as a whole.

In fact, bad Supreme Court decisions can actually look very compelling. You don’t notice the shell game being played. A persuasive argument will be mounted about precedent, then a persuasive argument will be mounted about principle, but what you don’t see is that the precedent was being emphasized when the principle was weak, and the principle was being argued when the precedent was weak. There’s a wonderful old saying about how to be a lawyer: “When the law is on your side, pound the law. When the facts are on your side, pound the facts. And when neither is on your side, pound the table.” It’s absolutely true, and once you’ve trained yourself to spot it, you can see it constantly. (Insisting that stare decisis should be honored even if the precedent makes no sense is generally the equivalent of “pounding the table.”) You can find a justification for everything somewhere, even if existing precedent goes completely against you. Abood explicitly allowed agency fees, so what did the conservatives do? They just overruled it, because it was “poorly reasoned.” On the other hand, when sodomy laws were overruled, it was Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas who were screaming in dissent about the critical importance of deferring to old decisions, and the liberals invoking the overriding importance of liberty.

The whole article is worth reading, because it takes aim squarely at this absurd belief, that SCOTUS judges are somehow impartial interpreters of the constitution. (A belief that anyone paying attention for 5 minutes should quite reasonably discard; you'd expect a lot fewer 5-4 splits on contentious cases along partisan lines were that the case.)

I like the contrast.

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Xavderion wrote:

I like the contrast.

Weren't the attacker's attribution still unknown at that time?

Beside, kind of hard to condemn ISIS (or cells of it) harder than declaring a war on them.

As for Easter, it's celebrated across most faiths with christians roots, which as you know, include many different faiths. So in that sense, I don't really see anything wrong with this. Better to envelop all of them in one go than forgetting one.