Hacker News Reader

Comment by jihadjihad | Hacker News Reader

We’re only ~1/7 of the way through this administration. There is so much more time left on the clock for shenanigans.

It’s hard to imagine three summers from now being anything other than a hellscape. I hope to God I’m wrong.

Meanwhile SCOTUS has opted out of doing their job allowing the executive branch to do what it likes (as long as it’s their guy…)

It’s really the administration of whatever SCOTUS lets him get away with. Trump - by pressure testing the law - lets SCOTUS reimagine the constitutional order.

The administration has said they will not feel compelled to follow federal court orders. Who is to say they won't ignore orders from SCOTUS either, and go the Andrew Jackson route?

Forget who said they will do this or that; federal judges have been actually defying SCOTUS[0] because they disagree politically with the administration. Sometimes the call comes from inside the house...

[0]: https://archive.is/PkRaM

They have been defying SCOTUS because they disagree with the administration. 'Politically' doesn't enter into it, when the administration starts to do blatantly illegal stuff some people will just not accept that, no matter what the politics of the ruling party nominally are.

> when the administration starts to do blatantly illegal stuff some people will just not accept that

What is this "blatantly illegal stuff" ?

I hate comments like this, so I hate making them myself as well, but are you trolling?

If so, forgive me for not responding.

If you are not trolling, and well intentioned: why don't you go and read some of that main-stream-news that everybody loves to piss on these days and use that to get to at least a moderately up-to-date state of mind before engaging in threads like these. It would save a lot of time.

If you are of the mindset that you are in fact informed and that Trump's administration has not yet performed any acts that are blatantly illegal then you're entirely on your own, or at least, I would hope you are (unfortunately, you probably would not be).

Cults need isolation from former environments and values, thats a key element in any cult initialization. Resulting in internalized ignorance so strong, not even a speaking burning bush could convince them otherwise, let alone main stream media.

No, I am not trolling. Mainstream news hyper-exaggerates and when one studies the matter, one realizes that few laws if any are broken. Several court battles are waged until the Supreme Court makes judgements on the scope and applicability of the law. Once that is done, the administration follows the ruling or chooses a workaround law.

AFAIK, the Trump Administration - as controversial as it may be - has not broken any Supreme Court rulings. Legal workarounds are not unique to this administration - such were done by the previous Biden administration as well. Please note the Supreme Court struck down President Biden’s broad student loan forgiveness plan, ruling it exceeded the administration’s authority. Nevertheless, a workaround was found by using the Higher Education Act instead.

Like illegally using the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport people when the act literally states it's a wartime authority (no new wars). like illegally deporting Abrego Garcia to the one country that he wasn't allowed to be deported to.

Thanks - the Supreme Court clarified this in their ruling. But, the Supreme Court has also ruled that the US administration can deport individuals to third countries, while legal challenges to the practice are pending.

I see this as a perfect example of the US Supreme Court clarifying the scope and applicability of law - just like they rejected Biden's student loan forgiveness under the HEROES act and Biden found a workaround instead.

The whole point of SCOTUS is that they are the final arbiter of what is legal and what is illegal in this country[0]. Are you saying that federal judges in lower courts are given leeway to act against the law, provided they disagree with the administration?

[0]: Not what is right or wrong, and obviously like any other human enterprise, they are capable of making mistakes.

It is - to me, at least - abundantly clear that SCOTUS is now a political instrument and no longer in any way impartial. Between that, a congress and a senate that seem to be incapable of standing up for the rule of law you can no longer claim that SCOTUS is the final arbiter of what is legal and what is not, besides that, they only are supposed to rule on whether or not something violates the constitution or not.

> Are you saying that federal judges in lower courts are given leeway to act against the law, provided they disagree with the administration?

This is a weird and convoluted strawman, I'm not even sure what kind of question you want me to answer here, given your apparent stance on all this, did you maybe omit a negative in there?

> they only are supposed to rule on whether or not something violates the constitution or not.

The constitution is the supreme law of the land, so yes, by definition, they are the final arbiter of what is legal and what is not. Note that I explicitly pointed out that decisions on what is legal and what is not doesn't always line up with what is right and what is not. I'm not saying that the Supreme Court is some divine moral arbiter, just that under the laws that organize this country, there is no higher court that can tell it that it is wrong.

You're free to disagree with SCOTUS decisions. I disagree with quite a few myself. The justices don't even agree with each other a lot of the times[0]! But it would be good for the republic for people to not reach for the "SCOTUS is now clearly political!" jar every time they disagree with a decision or the makeup of the court, because your political opponents will feel the same way, as well.

> I'm not even sure what kind of question you want me to answer here

Let me clarify: you seemed quite worried that the Trump administration would defy SCOTUS rulings. My rebuttal was that lower court judges are already doing that, because of their opposition to some of what the administration is doing; that is, they are issuing rulings that clearly contravene prior SCOTUS rulings, in defiance of the law.

Prima facie, the administration isn't engaging in any behavior that their political opponents aren't engaging in, and I find the apocalyptic talk about authoritarianism, fascism, or the end of democracy in the US very unpersuasive, not to mention unhelpful and unhealthy.

[0]: But perhaps not as often as you think: https://www.newsweek.com/supreme-courts-ideologically-split-...

> the administration isn't engaging in any behavior that their political opponents aren't engaging

So ignoring court orders to quickly deport people happened before?

Could you show me an example where Biden ignored a court ruling, because i dont know any. Ill insta-upvote you, if you can show the occurrence numbers are roughly equal.

If you cant provide any example, i strongly suggest you reconsider your above statement about the end of democracy, or whether you would be willing to storm the capitol to defend it against trump.

Hope for the best, plan for the worst.

Too much of the focus is on Trump and not nearly enough on the people who are willing to vote for such an obviously corrupt conman. Trump will be dead within a decade, but these voters who actually want a dictator as long as he hurts the people they think should be hurt will be voting for generations.

Trump is a symptom of the cancer of conservatism. He’s the inevitable result of conservative politics and positioning over the last 40+ years. The GOP wanted to make an environment where their guy could never be punished for watergate levels of blatant criminal offense and they fucking succeeded.

https://www.project2025.observer/en

I remember when people here on HN were telling us Trump had no relation to Project 2025.

This was the same doomsday message in the last Trump term. Nothing happened.

The old guard of nonfascist Republicans wasn't purged until late in the last Trump term and into the period between Trump terms, and was particularly strong in the first half of the last term, the second half of last term, the Democrats controlled the House, limiting. There was not a trifecta under a fully Trump-aligned Republican Party until the current term. That makes a difference in outcomes, and has already made obvious differences in outcomes in exactly the direction discussed.

Apart from January 6th. Which was dissipated once a Capitol guard decided he finally had enough cause to shoot someone.

My comment still stands relevant in response to the country turning into a “hellscape” because of the current administration.

Well, you can round down everything short of outright civil war to 'zero' but then you might miss important signals that you could act on. That doomsday message so far seems to be largely on the money, and in some ways has already been exceeded. That doesn't mean it can't get much worse.

... except for all the stuff that happened. You know, an attempted coup, Covid and the half a million Americans it left dead.

> Covid and the half a million Americans it left dead.

1,168,021 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistics_of_the_COVID-19_pan...

But — unlike the attempted coup which was totally his fault — I'm not sure you can blame even half of that death toll on Trump, given all the other countries that also did badly.

I can blame Trump for his policy and also his and the larger Republicans parties ideological brigade against medicine and science. Which still continues to this day, and will continue to take lives.

I'm not above blaming extremely powerful people for harmful abstract ideology. I'll do it.

Sure, and I do too, but the relative difference between "ideological brigade against medicine and science" and "what the various Europen countries did" suggests that the difference between Trump as he was and a plausible competent alternative still didn't add up to 5e5 lives per 342 million population.

China, I think, managed to get their response right (eventually, having failed hard right at the start). Either that or they managed to hide the death toll in several different dependent outputs that all roughly agree with these numbers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_by_country_a...

(That said, this map also says that the USA should be ruled over by Canada, with King Charles as head of state etc., I absolutely do not disagree that a lot of dumb things were done and should've played out differently, this is just a relative statement about how incredibly mediocre a lot of our other leaders besides Trump are in the supposedly developed nations…)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com