After the 2020 presidential election, as some Trump supporters falsely claimed that President Biden had stolen the office, many of them displayed a startling symbol outside their homes, on their cars and in online posts: an upside-down American flag.
One of the homes flying an inverted flag during that time was the residence of Supreme Court Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., in Alexandria, Va., according to photographs and interviews with neighbors.
The upside-down flag was aloft on Jan. 17, 2021, the images showed. President Donald J. Trump’s supporters, including some brandishing the same symbol, had rioted at the Capitol a little over a week before. Mr. Biden’s inauguration was three days away. Alarmed neighbors snapped photographs, some of which were recently obtained by The New York Times. Word of the flag filtered back to the court, people who worked there said in interviews.
From a policy perspective I think this is one of the only truly smart things the administration has done.
We're in an era of populism and people are voting with their checkbooks. You can cite any number of "good" things the administration has done, but if those things don't make a detectable, sensible, positive impact on peoples lives between now and November, they are basically irrelevant (the vast majority of bbb).
You can hate it, and you should, but the smartest thing Trump did electorally in his 4 years was to insist that his name be written on the checks mailed out to millions of Americans. For those that recall, we all know it was house progressives that made those checks appear; however, Trump was able to get people to identify them with him with his insistence that his signature be on them. He and his party were basically opponents to the checks happening, but still today, people associate those payments with Trump, not house progressives.
In the same manner, Biden needs to make sure that people are mentally associating his name, his presidency with things that are making a material difference in their lives. Getting rid of student loan debt is one way to do that.
Its wag the dog all the way down, and we can't afford to lose this election to christian nationalism. The Biden administration has been working against themselves in this regard with policies that are deeply unpopular with the Democratic base on foreign policy. They can probably make up some ground with student loan debt forgiveness. Its a policy that can directly improve the material conditions of peoples lives in a way that is immediate, detectable, and sensible.
While the flag was up, the court was still contending with whether to hear a 2020 election case, with Justice Alito on the losing end of that decision. In coming weeks, the justices will rule on two climactic cases involving the storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6, including whether Mr. Trump has immunity for his actions. Their decisions will shape how accountable he can be held for trying to overturn the last presidential election and his chancesfor re-election in the upcoming one.
“I had no involvement whatsoever in the flying of the flag,” Justice Alito said in an emailed statement to The Times. “It was briefly placed by Mrs. Alito in response to a neighbor’s use of objectionable and personally insulting language on yard signs.”
The US only has one non-lethal way to remove a federal judge: impeachment. And that requires a 2/3 vote in the Senate, which won't happen any time soon because the Republicans there favor his support of treason.
There really is nothing anybody in power can do. He’s a Supreme Court justice. Appointment for life. The only ways for him to vacate his position is to die or to be impeached. This means that not only would the House have to impeach him, but more importantly, the Senate would have to convict and remove him; by a two-thirds majority, no less.
With the current spread in both the house and senate, you’d be better off becoming an expat.
They can stack the court if they get a majority in both (which would increase election chances since you'd be giving people hope they won't live in a theocracy ruled an unelected supreme council. Fuck we're even less democratic than Iran on paper.), they can marginalize the court by very publicly refusing to enforce their rulings, they can have them assassinated.
The alternative is expecting to win every single election for the next 40 years or so until they die of natural causes. And then being willing to ban the filibuster to actually get a dem pick in.
There’s the rub: the republicans stacked the courts, which is how we got to where we are now. They did it even when the democrats had majority rule. The dems, on the other hand, are pretty much too scatterbrained to organize on the level necessary to pull that shit off. I’m really surprised (and impressed) that they got 278 democrats to pass that discharge petition. That was monumental, especially for the democrats.
A tactic FDR used was threatening to add justices to the court. That's what's meant by stacking the court.
The threat was enough to get them to do what he wanted, since they realized they could either go along with him, or go against it and be marginalized since they have no actual power to enforce their rulings.
I'm sure a Trump administration will really help the people of Gaza, the LGBTQ+ community, women's body autonomy, etc. I guess they want 2000 all over again.
A lot of younger voters don't really remember 2000, where we had a protest vote going for Nader, which had the effect of throwing the election into the courts, enabling Bush to get them to install him in office.
There was an article somewhere showing that if trump had taken all the money he inherited and put it into an index fund, he would have vastly more money than he has now. He maybe “rich” but its from a dwindling inheritance and not savvy business.
If we now also take into account all the additional money he should have paid in taxes and hadn’t, how much did he really “make through this business”.
That's what a (probably intentional) lack of education does to people.
Republican politicians can openly use traditional antisemitic narratives that a majority of people doesn't recognize anymore as a dogwhistle again.
Trump as well as -idiotic as it is- Israel's government can openly steal from Hitler's rhetoric.
People wanting to peacefully protest for Palestine miss the very obvious antisemitc clues of some people standing right beside them and supporting their message for the completely wrong reason, this way delegitimizing their actual cause.
And in the end any nuanced and informed discussion (that is important for a working democracy) gets derailed and replaced by polarisation and brain-dead tribalism.
Mission accomplished... And the people behind that mission definitely aren't part of some global conspiracy (of Jews or others) but mostly just right populists and authoritarians operating independently or loosely allied at best with the same well-tested anti-democracy playbook.
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