Because the previous thread commenting on Trump's invasion of Venezuela has gotten so long, while hot-off-the-press commentary continues, I'm starting a new thread. My goal with these threads is to allow anyone interested to see pieces of commentary that seem valuable to me, and to link to the commentary itself.
"This is what happens when over 77 million Americans vote for such a lawless, reckless man, some 89 million choose to stay home, and John Roberts’ Supreme Court supermajority hands him near-total immunity."
In general, I appreciate the many inspiring interactions we have here om Mastodon. But recently I have received at least 10 replies, that are all variations of the sentence "Trump should be killed".
I fully understand the resentment against a criminal person who is tearing a country apart, but I am a firm believer that the answer to his crimes is not more crimes, but instead more justice.
Trump must be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.
Win the midterms decisively. Then impeach him.
@randahl Trump is 79 years old and won't live to see legal justice. But he is and has been literally cancerous to everything and everyone he encounters except for those who bow before him and do his despicably-cruel and ill-informed bidding. His actions are cancer. As president with the power that #JohnRoberts bestowed, #Trump is #cancer and I will never apologize for wanting full and total eradication of such malignancy.
A screenshot of a Politico article titled "Trump targets states that voted for Harris in shutdown fight." The article states that the Office of Management and Budget is withholding billions in energy and infrastructure money in more than a dozen states that voted against Trump. The image shows a man in a blue suit and red tie gesturing with both hands, standing on a grassy area with a helicopter in the background.
"The polite norms around the Supreme Court have been obliterated. This should be apparent to everyone; every one of these shadow docket rulings where the majority semi-anonymously grants a would-be dictator more power to overthrow the Constitution only reinforces the fact that the high court’s age of respectability is over."
"In an interview at Catholic University last week, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas said what he’s clearly been thinking for the past 30 years: Supreme Court precedents don’t matter, and he’s making things up as he goes along to fulfill his own political agenda.:
"President Trump notched a startling legal win Friday evening, as the Supreme Court gave an early stamp of approval to a legal theory so outlandish that experts at one point predicted to TPM it wouldn’t 'get a single vote.'
The Court blessed, at the preliminary stage, Trump’s gambit to zero out money Congress already appropriated."
The U.S. Supreme Court will consider the legality of Trump's tariffs, hearing oral arguments in November. Read more about this from NBC News. In other Supreme Court news, Chief Justice John Roberts has allowed the Trump administration to continue its freeze on billions in foreign aid while the court reviews the case. Read about this at the second link, which is from @TheHill.
An image featuring Chief Justice Roberts in a judicial robe, with a serious expression, seated in what appears to be a courtroom. The text overlay reads: "Chief Justice Roberts says the rule of law is eroding like we've rarely seen. Maybe he should've thought of that before ruling the president is above the law. You don't get to burn the house down and act shocked it's on fire."
@georgetakei#SCOTUS was supposed to prevent fascists like trump from ever subverting the US government.
This psychopath was instrumental in enabling trump and the MAGA cum techbro perversion of the state.
This psycho is not the "deranged but'brilliant" architect of fascist USA (there isn't one, they're all hateful morons); he's merely a hateful fucking rubberstamper.
The original 'legal architect' of the Nazis — the unrepentent Carl Schmitt — got off nearly scot-free after the WWI.
roberts is more akin to an auschwitz clerk. And those were belatedly hunted down and prosecuted.
@dangillmor That they continue to refer to the raping felonious piece of shit as *president is despicable. I hate the #NYT and sorry I ever subscribed to them. Our fascist-enabling #media and #JohnRoberts are 100% responsible for this shit show. #FuckEveryRepublican
America's partisan gerrymandering mess dates back to a 2019 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court. In Rucho v. Common Cause, "the five Republican judges held that court challenges to partisan gerrymanders could not go forward in federal courts because such cases present a 'political question,'" Jay Willis writes for Balls and Strikes. "What is happening in Texas and California and elsewhere right now demonstrates just how vapid and hollow the reasoning in 'Rucho' always was. You do not have to have a law degree to understand that a Texas map that transforms a 56-42 advantage into a 79-21 blowout is not, in any meaningful sense, fair. You do not need to be a Supreme Court justice to understand that a California map that would turn Kamala Harris’s 58 percent vote share in 2024 into 94 percent of power in the House does not allow for equal participation in the political process.
But this is the price that 'Rucho' is forcing millions of voters to pay."
Advertisement discusses purchasing rings from your college education. A young man in a suit and tie carries his books with a playboy slipped in between. A young woman gently touches his books while looking long at him. Over his shoulders another woman looks over her shoulders at him yearningly.
Mark Mansour notes that the overt, unabashed gerrymandering proposed by Texas Republicans is designed, by their own admission, to "enhance the political efficacy” of GOP votes.
What this is really about is enhancing the political efficacy of WHITE RURAL voters. As Mansour says, it's "a chilling disenfranchisement of millions of voters—especially Black, Latino, and Asian Americans."
"Partisan gerrymandering is legal because the US Supreme Court declared in 2019 that it is too difficult for federal judges to ensure that congressional districts are fairly drawn. (A demonstrably false claim.)"
"Having washed its hands of voter suppression like a modern-day Pontius Pilate, the Supreme Court relinquished control of congressional districting to a patchwork of inconsistent, flawed, and (sometimes) corrupt state legislatures. Chaos ensued."
“Trump knows he can’t win the upcoming mid-term elections, so he is trying to rig them. And the way he is trying to do it is to dismantle the Voting Rights Act of 1965 as we know it. He is trying, for example to try and dismantle Hispanic and African-American opportunity districts."
"In clearing the way for President Trump’s efforts to transform American government, the Supreme Court has issued a series of orders that often lacked a fundamental characteristic of most judicial work: an explanation of the court’s rationale.
A collection of my Fediverse blog posts about fascism and current events, published from April 13th to 15th, 2025. Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, I wrote a lot about the Trump regime, ICE, and nazi billionaires.
"If they get away with this, or even if they can just successfully use it to justify applying government pressure against an extremely large, well-funded news organization, there’s no limit to how far these nazis will take this. This is how a fascist regime transforms the entire media environment into pro-Trump, state news outlets and it won’t just stop with the Fox-ification of media orgs either."
I wrote a little bit about the ongoing anti-trans pogrom in America, in light of a 6-3 fascist dominated Supreme Court ruling upholding a Tennessee ban on gender affirming care for trans youth. While everyone agrees that this is a horrible decision that will definitely result in more dead trans kids, a lot of folks are relieved that at least the Roberts Court didn't directly legalize anti-trans discrimination. I'm less sure; the vagueness and disingenuous logic of the fascist majority's ruling in theory can be replicated over and over to deny rights to trans people while pretending the laws you write have nothing to do with trans people at all. Furthermore, this pattern is likely replicable to target other marginalized or disadvantaged groups the fascists want to isolate and repress; particularly I fear, in the context of women's rights and patriarchal domination.
"This is all basically crass prejudice and transphobic fuckery, delivered by the Roberts 6-3 fascist dominated court with the thinnest veneer of legality and a poison smile towards trans people, and in particular trans youth, in America. The devil is however in the details as always, and it’s ultimately the disingenuous, circular logic employed by the court majority that represents perhaps the greatest danger to equal protection law in the modern history of this country. How exactly do you argue a ban on gender affirming care for trans kids whose drafters specifically state the purpose of the law is to “encourage minors to appreciate their sex,” neither targets transgender people specifically, nor qualifies for sex-based classification? Well if you’re John Roberts, you repurpose some of the worst obsolete rulings in legal history to argue that trans people are not the droids you’re looking for."
Well, I'm not going to lie. This took me eight days, and almost made me move to a cave on the edge of civilization, but I wrote an article about the Roberts Courts decisions in both the trafficking migrants to third country concentration camps case, as the birthright citizenship case. My analysis is pretty grim, but you folks don't read me for sunshine and rainbows.
"So let’s sum up what we’re looking at here, shall we? Over the course of a single week in June, the 6-3 fascist high Roberts Court openly signaled SCOTUS’s willingness to let the Trump regime ruthlessly violate the constitutional rights of immigrants, including children with a legal right to American citizenship, while simultaneously eliminating every other court in America’s ability to stop the government from violating anyone’s rights unless they can afford a lawyer and get a case to trial, twice. At the same time, the Trump administration publicly declared their intentions to immediately begin ignoring the law to traffic migrants to foreign concentration camps, strip citizenship from people born in the United States, defund Dem-controlled sanctuary cities who won’t help Trump illegally kidnap migrants, block access to gender affirming healthcare for trans people, end enforce unconstitutional funding cuts in the broader US government. And then the Court closed up shop for the term."
L - The official photo from the Kremlin of US Special Envoy @SteveWitkoff putting his hand over his heart as he greets his friend Vladimir Putin again this week.
R - Putin’s latest missile attack killing at least 21 people, including 7 children, on Palm Sunday.
Let's be sure to repeat the motherfucker's name at every opportunity. #JohnRoberts is a despicable #Cunt who knew that granting the raping felon would open the floodgates to fascism. The piece of shit and his #CorruptSCOTUS are to blame for every single act of criminality the felon and his gang of rancid #GOP cunts commit. #JohnRoberts#TrumpFellater#PutinPuppet
"Many top legal experts believe a full-blown constitutional showdown between President Trump and the courts is already here. Others are confident there's still room to avoid one.