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October 24, 2023 05:39 AM UTC

Tuesday Open Thread

  • 38 Comments
  • by: Colorado Pols

“I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion.”

–Jack Kerouac

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38 thoughts on “Tuesday Open Thread”

      1. Washington state senator Jeff Wilson was arrested on Saturday at Hong Kong International Airport and charged with possession of a firearm without a license, the charge sheet states, an offense punishable by up to 14 years in prison and a fine of more than $12,000.

      2. Media report I've seen says a maximum of 14 years imprisonment, just under $13,000 fine.

        The immediate impact — Hong Kong was supposed to be the initial stop on a 5 week vacation with his wife.  He's had to turn over travel documents, post a bond, and agree to NOT leave the city before the matter is resolved.

  2. Here is how they should do it ….

    Gather all 221 House Republicans together.

    Start with the letter “A” and put each member’s name and face on a big screen.

    When a name/face appear on the screen, ask a simple question to be answered by secret ballot:  “Is this someone you would be willing to publicly vote for on the House floor?”

    The first rep to hit 217 is the speaker nominee. Assuming he or she does not decline the nomination.

      1. Exactly. That's how they should do it!

        Although when they get to Matt Gaetz, My Kevin could lead the 200 or so who were loyal to him in flinging feces at the picture of Gaetz on the screen.

    2. Others have suggested having everyone "drawing straws" and the loser has to be Speaker. 

      I saw one amusing reference to The Lottery by Shirley Jackson, wondering if laws would be grown better with such a ritual.

      One "former legislator" opined that he wasn't certain if Jesus would be able to get 217 votes from members of the conference.

  4. OK, who's got the real dirt on whether Putin had a massive heart attack or not? I've seen dueling posts saying he did, while on the other hand the Kremlin is denying it.

    1. I wonder as well 2 Jung. I've seen conflicting reports that Putin is terminally ill with cancer, that he indeed had a massive heart attack, that he's using body doubles, that he's fine, that he's completely isolated, etc. etc. Truth is the first casualty of war. 

    2. I'm reminded of that moment in November 1982 when Leonid Brezhnev was reportedly sick with a "cold" while the Politburo was organizing his funeral committee the chair of whom traditionally became the new general secretary. (Forty-one years ago, next month. How time flies…)

      That was Andropov who within sixteen months also contracted a "cold" and was pronounced dead days later when his funeral committee was organized and led by Chernenko who in turn suffered a severe "cold" and was dead after eleven months in office.

      Perhaps Vlad simply has a bad "cold."

  5. WOTD: "[Buck's] a bizarre canary in the fascist coal mine. VIA TPM. 

     

    "Noah Berlatsky tackles the question of what has made Rep. Ken Buck (R-CO) suddenly sound like a more reasonable man:"

    Buck isn’t exactly an honorable man or a good legislator. That’s not surprising; it’s been some time since the GOP has been a party in which honorable people, or good legislators, are at all welcome. That means that opposition to Trump, within the GOP, has to come from people who are compromised, unserious, downright evil, or some combination of all of those things.

    Republicans have spent a lot of time constructing a party that encourages members to be their absolutely worst selves. Perhaps Ken Buck is a sign that that’s changing, if only slightly. He’s a bizarre canary in the fascist coal mine — but at this point that’s the only type of canary the GOP has.

    1. That means that opposition to Trump, within the GOP, has to come from people who are compromised, unserious, downright evil, or some combination of all of those things.

      Republicans have spent a lot of time constructing a party that encourages members to be their absolutely worst selves.

      Jenna Ellis just realized (much too late to help her) that Trump might not be exactly the best choice as well:

      Ellis, who hosts a podcast for the American Family Network, also publicly declared in September that she was unlikely to support Trump’s bid for the 2024 nomination. “I simply can’t support him for elected office again,” Ellis said on her podcast in September. “I have chosen to distance is because of that frankly malignant narcissistic tendency to simply say that he’s never done anything wrong.”

  6. Watching right wing Twitter loons Joey Mannarino and Laura “Looney melt down this morning over the Ellis deal, and Emmers as probable nominee,  is simply delicious.  Add to that Trump’s attempt to cancel the hearing today due to a “COVID epidemic”.  You couldn’t make this stuff up. 

    2. Emmer may become the nominee, but as we've seen by McCarthy, Scalise and Jordan being the nominee, many are called but few are chosen.

  7. Stable Genius Alert. H/T TPM

    Trump: I'm for us. You know how you spell us, right? U.S. I just picked that up. Has anyone ever thought of that before? I'm reading and said us. You know, when you think about it, us, equals U.S. If we think of something genius, they will never say it.

  8. Vegas Heist: Woman Allegedly Steals $50,000 from ‘Sugar Daddy’ During U2 Concert

    Right now I bet Ted Cruz is thinking, would she be willing to run?

  10. You might wanna steer clear of 1437 Bannock Street next week, as the trial of the state court lawsuit to keep PAB off the ballot in Colorado is set start in Denver District Court (Judge Wallace, a relative n00b who started in January) on 10/30.

  12. " The Party of Rule-Breaking Trundles Toward Its Inevitable End Point" Josh Marshall at TPM.

    Eight years ago Will Saletan said “The GOP is a failed state. Donald Trump is its warlord.” There’s probably no short summary, phrase or aphorism I’ve repeated more times on TPM.

    …

    Civic democracy operates through an organized competition between different stakeholders in society. It requires a consensus to litigate disagreements through a prescribed set of rules. The breakdown of those rules creates an opening for strongmen who traffic in raw power and sell their ability to impose order. It is both the cause and result of the species of civic and moral degeneracy we see as the mother’s milk of Trumpism.

  13. Originalist argument that domestic abusers have a right to own a gun Ian Milhiser at Vox.com

    Until 1871, when the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that a husband and wife “may be indicted for assault and battery upon each other,” it was legal in every state for married partners to beat their spouses. There is historical evidence that abused women, in at least some parts of the country, were able to obtain court orders requiring their abusers to temporarily turn over money, which would be forfeited if the abuse continued. But there is no founding-era analog to the federal law disarming domestic abusers.

    And so the question the Supreme Court must confront in Rahimi is whether a decision like Bruen, with its unworkable legal standard and catastrophic consequences, can be tolerated any longer.

    …

    Bruen relied on a blinkered view of history

    One fundamental problem with Bruen, as Judge Miller’s critique of the decision emphasizes, is that the six Republican-appointed justices who joined it appear to have no understanding of why changes in American society over the past 250 years make it difficult or impossible to draw meaningful analogies between modern gun laws and those that existed when the Constitution was written.

    Recall that Justice Clarence Thomas’s majority opinion in Bruen announced that gun laws that address a “general societal problem that has persisted since the 18th century” are presumptively unconstitutional unless there is a “distinctly similar historical regulation” from the 1700s. Applying this newly announced rule, Thomas argued that a citywide handgun ban is unconstitutional because “firearm violence in densely populated communities” was a problem that existed at the time of the founding, but 18th-century lawmakers did not address it with a handgun ban.

    1. Important article, but the important meat of it is well down the page:

      The specter of originalism is haunting the Supreme Court

      At this point, you might be wondering how six Supreme Court justices — all of them legally trained and well-credentialed — could have embraced a legal framework with such obvious flaws that has been so harshly criticized by judges across the political spectrum. The short answer to this question is one word: “originalism.”

      Originalism, in Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s words, is the belief that “constitutional text means what it did at the time it was ratified and that this original public meaning is authoritative.” All reasonable judges believe that it is sometimes useful to inquire into how the Constitution was originally understood in order to decide cases, but originalism, at least in its strongest form, claims that this is the only legitimate way to interpret the Constitution.

      Many Republican lawyers, including Thomas, Justice Neil Gorsuch, and Barrett, view originalism as an important part of their identity.

      Barrett, at least, also acknowledges two serious problems with the originalist methodology: It sometimes leads to terrible or ridiculous results, and it sometimes produces no result at all. As Barrett wrote in a 2016 article co-authored with scholar John Copeland Nagle, “adherence to originalism arguably requires, for example, the dismantling of the administrative state, the invalidation of paper money, and the reversal of Brown v. Board of Education” — results that, Barrett admits, would “wreak havoc.”

      Similarly, Barrett has also acknowledged that originalist methods don’t always produce a clear result, although her answer to how originalists should approach this problem is unsatisfying: “For an originalist, the meaning of the text is fixed so long as it is discoverable.”

      Justice Thomas’s biggest innovation in his Bruen opinion is that he figured out a way for originalists to resolve Second Amendment cases even when it is not clear how that amendment would have been understood at the time it was ratified — simply apply a presumption that all gun laws are unconstitutional, and strike down the law unless the government produces sufficient historical evidence to rebut this presumption.

      Thomas’s innovation makes a lot of sense if you are an originalist judge who wants to solve the problem of not knowing how to rule on a case if the historical record is indeterminate — provided, of course, that you don’t care one bit what happens to the people of the United States after countless gun laws are struck down. But Bruen does nothing to solve the other problem acknowledged by Barrett’s scholarship: What should an originalist do if their methodology leads to a truly awful and destabilizing result?

      A responsible Court would confess that it erred in Bruen and come up with a new framework that can be applied in a sensible and predictable way by lower court judges. 

    2. A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

      I just wish the “originalists” at the Supreme Court would be consistent.  If they are going to set gun regulations according to the laws of 1800, they ought to apply to the “Arms” of 1800, too. So, no infringement on the right to single shot muskets and rifles, double-barreled shotguns, and primitive handguns.

      I can’t find anything that hints that the Founders would have tolerated giving an individual a broad power to kill as many as were killed in a top ten battle between armies of the colonies and Britain during the Revolutionary War.

      1. Musket loaders – crimes of passion.

        Part of the originalist conundrum is that no one in 1780s worried about domestic violence from guns because they can't be stored with powder. You get mad at your spouse, and need to load, tamp, prime and set fire. Hope that first shot does your dirty deed.

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