Senate The US Politics 2.0 Discussion Thread

I would like to live in this world where climate change hits blue states less, because that's definitely not the world I'm living in right now.

 

Vegas needs to survive, too.

 

Children had to be rescued by boat from an elementary school in Maryland yesterday due to flooding. Climate Change doesn't care who you vote for, it's coming for all of us .

 

@Runjedirun I agree, but overall, it will hit the red states harder first. As the great Tom Skilling said to our students several years ago, we (the Midwest) are fortunate that we have fresh drinking water (Lake Michigan, where I live) nearby and are far enough north that our yearly temperature increases won't be as extreme compared to some other places like Florida. Again, the irony in all of this is that climate change overall will hit the red states much harder and quicker than the blue states, even though it's the red states/areas that refuse to think it's happening, even though it is. In the end, Bugs Bunny will be proven to be a prophet:



FEMA btw, is already admitting it's not ready for hurricane season:

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/fema-ready-hurricane-season-internal-review-finds/story?id=121837637

And considering the new FEMA Director, David Richardson, looks like Vigo the Carpathian from Ghostbusters 2 (and is perhaps more cruel), I don't think we will see them getting ready anytime soon.

 

I saw a post today from a MAGA supporter gloating over Trump's genius negotiating skills and how the tariff taxes aren't going to be bad now. They admired how respected he is in the Middle East and how no other president has ever been given a plane before. They capped the post off with "He knows the Constitution better than anyone!"

Red States states could literally boil and it wouldn't make a dent in their reality.

 

Yeah, maybe one of those places will see over 4000 family homes destroyed in like 48 hours or something crazy like that. Boy, a catastrophe like that sure couldn't hit a 40,000 person blue-voting community in a blue state.

There's an expectation of targeted karma and there's lack of awareness and compassion. And I'm very much seeing the latter here.

 

I'm under no such delusions that climate change is going to target Red States first.

But they will also not have their minds changed, by climate change.

 

@DarkGingerJedi He went from threatening to shoot us in the head to shooting us in the foot with the option to put the gun back to our head at any moment. Remember it's just high tariffs for the moment with the comical tariffs on "pause" until he decides he wants to have more chaos since he is not being talked about enough. Greatest negiotator ever in their mind. In my mind? I continue to stock us up on non pershiable items, have everything from the roof (which was replaced two years ago) and major appliances, cars, etc all checked and looking to make sure there are no major issues (even car repairs are going to get smack hard), etc.

I do find it hilarious though that besides all they had to do was bribe him with a plane and McDonald's as the Saudis served him McDonald's and I know people are going to say "Who cares" but that is how little they think of him and us. Just give him two Big Macs, two Filet-o-Fishes (again that proof alone the man is utter psychopath because nobody in their right mind eats a Filet-o-Fish sandwich unless it's Lent and even many Catholics are like "Can't do it, that thing is just nasty so I will just go to confession again next week") and a large chocolate shake and the dude can be played like the harp from hell.

 

Yeah yeah. And when they are finally asleep, you're going to go out to join the party.

 

Sobering assessment:
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/this...rica-as-we-know-it_n_68264d0de4b0a8ff0de70449

Chaos. Chaos is what could reign for untold thousands of children and their parents if the U.S. Supreme Court allows the Trump administration’s executive order on birthright citizenship to go into effect, even on a limited basis, by limiting how lower courts issue nationwide injunctions.

On Thursday, conservative justices seemed largely swayed by Solicitor General John Sauer’s arguments that courts should only be allowed to provide relief to specific plaintiffs who bring legal challenges, and that nationwide injunctions from the courts ultimately act as an unchecked power on the executive branch’s authority.

But this very premise, when accompanying Trump’s executive order — which seeks to rewrite over a century of precedent around birthright citizenship — threatens to unleash “destabilization across the country,” according to some legal experts.

Without lower courts’ injunctions on orders that potentially affect huge swaths of people — including those who have never signed on to a lawsuit or can’t afford a lawyer or are simply unable to access a courtroom — the legal system could be turned into a “catch-me-if-you-can regime” led by the executive branch, Justice Kentanji Brown Jackson noted during oral arguments Thursday.

That would mean “everyone has to file a lawsuit in order for the government to stop violating everyone’s rights,” she said.

If there was ever a time the Supreme Court should rule in favor of upholding nationwide injunctions, this is it, Anna Baldwin, senior legal counsel on voting rights for the Campaign Legal Center, told HuffPost.

The Trump administration is trying to use a “procedural gimmick,” Baldwin said, so it can continue to “game the system.”

At one point during arguments, Sauer, she noted, seemed to give the game away when he told justices that while the administration would obey an order from the Supreme Court, it wouldn’t necessarily obey an opinion from an appellate court.

“That’s, frankly, a shockingly lawless position to say only the Supreme Court of the United States has the ability to say what the law is, and the government is admitting it’s willing to push right up to that line,” she said.

Admittedly, nationwide injunctions are a “complicated issue,” Philip Bobbitt, a professor of federal jurisprudence at Columbia Law School, told HuffPost Thursday.

Nationwide injunctions can be a vehicle for a politician to sue the government over disfavored policies or law, and they open the door to forum-shopping for plaintiffs who want a specific district to weigh in. But they can also be a protective shield for the public against state or federal actors attempting to run roughshod over their constitutional rights.

“This is about fundamentally redefining who has equal rights to citizenship and participation in the American polity. This is about saying you are locked out of participating in our representative government, making people a permanent underclass.”
- Anna Baldwin, senior legal counsel on voting rights for the Campaign Legal Center

Bobbitt said the high court may choose to try to split the difference, giving lower courts guidance for tailoring nationwide injunctions so that they avoid the potential pitfalls.

“The Supreme Court wouldn’t have even taken on this case if they had not thought there should be some guidance issued on nationwide injunctions,” Bobbitt said. But in this instance, the administration’s overall position on birthright citizenship is so “frivolous” that it should be enough to convince the court to leave the injunctions in place, Bobbitt argued.

“The prospect of having some states where some children are given citizenship rights versus others, or were expelled, or left in limbo in a checkerboard across the country until a final resolution is reached through an appellate process [is] almost so extreme of a scenario, that this may be the time the court could say they wish to uphold nationwide injunctions and it would be appropriate because the merits are so exaggerated and extreme,” Bobbitt said.

At various points during oral arguments Thursday, justices floated the idea of asking the parties to file a supplemental briefing on the merits of Trump’s birthright order. Sauer bristled at the idea.

Claiming that 125 years of legal precedent around birthright citizenship only applied to the children of slaves and not the children of noncitizens or “aliens,” Sauer said the administration didn’t need to raise the merits because further consideration by the lower courts on birthright citizenship was especially important.

Nationwide injunctions “prevent percolation of novel, difficult legal questions, encourage rampant forum shopping, [and] encourage judges to make low information decisions,” Sauer said.

Baldwin says the administration’s push to have courts “percolate” on the idea of redefining U.S. citizenship against foundational precedent appears to be in pursuit of a greater goal: limiting who can access it.

“This is about fundamentally redefining who has equal rights to citizenship and participation in the American polity. This is about saying you are locked out of participating in our representative government, making people a permanent underclass, and then they are locked out of most fundamental democratic protections including the right to vote, rendering them to the margins of society,” she said.

Bobbitt said he believes one of the more profound impacts of Trump’s executive order is to create a “climate of fear.”

It’s not technically or financially feasible to round up millions of people and ship them abroad, he said, but the administration’s legally dubious argument on birthright citizenship may instill enough fear that people “self-deport” or decide not to have children “for fear of becoming stateless,” Bobbitt said.

Elora Mukherjee, the director of Columbia Law School’s Immigrants’ Rights Clinic, told HuffPost that if the executive order is allowed to stand, the “reality on the ground” will be a fast-moving nightmare, and a Trump administration victory in this case could mean “destabilization across the country,” she said.

Two babies could be born on the same day in different states, but one might be considered a U.S. citizen while the other is born stateless.

“This could overwhelm local governments and their ability to assess and offer benefits to families that qualify for them. It would invite a flood of costly legal battles and it would gut the 14th Amendment to equal citizenship and tear at the core of America’s national identity,” she said.

Mukherjee noted that some justices raised concerns about how the children of immigrants would be treated by ICE if they were considered citizens in one state but not in another.

“The consequences raise the worst echoes of the Dred Scott decision,” Mukherjee said.

In that decision, the Supreme Court upheld slavery and refused to give Black people of African descent citizenship rights.

The 14th Amendment sought to rectify that and make clear: If you are born on U.S. soil, or inside its territories, you are entitled to citizenship by birthright.

“The suggestion that individual babies — that’s what we’re talking about — will need to enforce their right to U.S. citizenship in federal district courts across the country when many of them are from families that will not be able to access lawyers, may not be fluent in English and do not have law degrees — that somehow they will be able enforce their right to citizenship, that ‘catch-me-if-you-can’ regime is antithetical to the rule of law,” Mukherjee said.
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And the Trump administration hasn't even obeyed a Supreme Court order.

 

... what?

I mean, actually, WHAT?

Like literally the cases that established birthright citizenship throughout the (more than) 125 years of legal precedent had absolutely nothing to do with children of slaves and EXACTLY children of non-citizens...

 

All right, this is some warped hell:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/may/15/pregnant-georgia-woman-brain-dead-abortion-law

Brain dead pregnant woman kept alive so kid gets born. Who'd want to be a doctor in Georgia now? Or anywhere else with similar abortion law.

 

I never had the McDonald's version, but I enjoy Burger King's.

There's that, but given that we're a red state and turnout was low all around, it was more about the trolley and other behaviors that dud her in. Either way, she's out.