Brett Kavanaugh Caught Lying in SCOTUS Opinion Against Voting Access

 What an asshole.

Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh on Monday voted that 2020 elections ballots in Wisconsin can only be counted if received by Election Day.

Kavanaugh issued his own concurring opinion, where he suggested that state courts should be barred from protecting voting rights.

Kavanaugh also made a mistake of fact.

Sam Levine, a voting rights reporter for the Guardian, noted Kavanaugh was inaccurate in his concurring opinion.

“Other states, such as Vermont, by contrast, have decided not to make changes to their ordinary election rules,” Kavanaugh claimed.

That is not correct, on July 2nd the legislative bill S.348became law in Vermont. The bill was titled, “An act relating to temporary elections procedures in the year 2020.”

The good-government group VPIRG explained the importance of the bill.

“On Friday, Governor Phil Scott allowed S.348 to become law without his signature. This law grants full authority to the Secretary of State to mail all registered voters a ballot for this year’s General Election in November. This law finally makes it possible for Vermont to move forward with a vote-by-mail system, which is the safest way for citizens to cast their ballot during the pandemic,” VPIRG explained.

Amy Coney Barrett's First Decision As a Justice Was a Wrong One

 

Barrett didn't have to participate in a prime-time political spectacle at the White House, just eight days before Election Day. But she did.
Oct. 27, 2020, 8:00 AM EDT
By Steve Benen

snip//

Last night, the former reality-show personality turned the dial to 11, hosting a prime-time spectacle at the White House. It was, for all intents and purposes, a campaign celebration, held for the cameras, just eight days before Election Day.

The merriment had all the subtlety of a sledgehammer: Barrett stood in the spotlight, on a White House balcony in front of the presidential seal, alongside Trump who beamed with pride before an applauding audience, which included Republican senators who spent last week pretending they have no idea how the far-right ideologue will rule on cases of lasting import.

Barrett was then ceremonially sworn in by Justice Clarence Thomas -- arguably the high court's most reactionary conservative -- as if to drive home the point that the right had taken over the judiciary.

Barrett had a choice. She does not serve at the pleasure of the president. The Supreme Court's newest member could've told the White House, "No, I'm not comfortable with this. I'm not a trophy to be shown off during a re-election campaign." On the show last night, Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) described the event as "the latest episode of the Trump reality-TV show, 'Re-Election Theater.'"

And therein lies the point: Barrett's first decision as a confirmed Supreme Court justice was to agree to participate in this political spectacle. She knew about the electoral context; she knew this prime-time program would give the appearance of a political victory party; and she chose to do this anyway.

CNN's Jake Tapper heard from a Republican consultant last night who said in reference to the White House show, "If I'm [Amy Coney Barrett], I don't go to this." The consultant added that it "looks bad."

Her apparent indifference to the damage all of this does to her credibility and the legitimacy of her institution speaks volumes about Barrett and the indefensible process that concluded with such a brazenly political coda.

Trump's campaign is not returning donations from white supremacist donors

 but he's the least racist person ever!!!

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/white-supremacist-donors-trump-campaign-2020_n_5f9336c7c5b6494ba13be8d8?ncid=engmodushpmg00000004

President Donald Trump’s 2020 campaign has repeatedly accepted donations from well-known white supremacists, extremists and bigots, Federal Election Commission records show. 

Among the far-right figures who have given money to Trump’s reelection bid are a neo-Nazi pastor in Louisiana, a wealthy Florida businessman who called former President Barack Obama the N-word, and a neo-fascist activist recently arrested for opening fire on Black Lives Matter demonstrators in Portland, Oregon. 

The Trump campaign, which did not respond to HuffPost’s request for comment on this story, has been aware of at least some of the white supremacists’ donations, past media reports show. But it has declined to reject or return their money ― even though it is common practice for political campaigns to voluntarily forfeit donations from extremists. In 2015, for example, the Republican presidential campaigns of Sens. Rand Paul and Ted Cruz returned thousands of dollars in contributions from the leader of a white supremacist group.

The extremists’ donations to Trump’s campaign can be seen in official FEC filings. The contributions were spotted and compiled into a dossier by American Bridge 21st Century, a Democratic super PAC that conducts opposition research to boost the campaign of Trump’s opponent, Joe Biden. HuffPost independently verified the records of the contributions.

RIP GOP

 They need to go, because they are deranged assholes. Editorial from the NYTimes.

Trump Is Running the Sleaziest Presidential Campaign Ever

Max Boot dissects it. Trump is such an evil piece of shit. 

Trump Is Purposefully Spreading a Deadly Virus

What an evil asshole:

Trump’s campaign made stops nationwide. Coronavirus cases surged in his wake in at least five places. 

As President Donald Trump jetted across the country holding campaign rallies during the past two months, he didn’t just defy state orders and federal health guidelines. He left a trail of coronavirus outbreaks in his wake. The president has participated in nearly three dozen rallies since mid-August, all but two at airport hangars. A USA TODAY analysis shows COVID-19 cases grew at a faster rate than before after at least five of those rallies in the following counties: Blue Earth, Minnesota; Lackawanna, Pennsylvania; Marathon, Wisconsin; Dauphin, Pennsylvania; and Beltrami, Minnesota.

The Barrett Nomination Shows the GOP Are Pushing for a Christian Theocracy

 Fucking assholes.

Let me assure you. As a survivor and scholarof authoritarianism, the Amy Coney Barrett confirmation is much, much worse than you probably think, and that’s alreadyif you think it’s pretty bad. Why do I say that? The big picture is this: America has a choice before it. Either it begins to become a modern society, like Europe and Canada — it’s half a centurybehind them. Or it plunges into hardcore implosion, like Russia and Iran — becoming a true failed state.

All this at the most crucial juncture, by the way, in human history, when the fate of civilisation will be decided— but I digress.

The Republicans, who are ramming her through the confirmation process, breaking every norm and precedent, have effectively two arguments. Each is more absurd than the last.

The first is that she is a “brilliant legal mind.” The second is that she’s not the fanatic she appears to be. Think about that — it’s literally asking you not to believe what’s in front of your face.

Is she a brilliant legal mind? It’s easy enough to observe that America doesn’t really have brilliant minds at that level anymore, which is why it’s a collapsing society. It has minds ranging from mediocre — Ezra, Jake, Chris — to thoughtless, like all those alt-right “intellectuals” like Bannon, who was once hailed as Nietzsche in cargo pants. ACB is on the poorer half of that spectrum. Maybe you think that’s unkind, so let me prove it.

A truly brilliant legal mind would observe something like the following. America is a society in the latter stages of collapse. The average American has become a poor person, dying in $60,000 of debt, unable to raise a small amountfor emergencies, struggling to pay the bills. As a result, happiness, trust, meaning, and social bonds have all come undone. That despair, in turn, fuelled a vicious circleof authoritarianism.

Where didn’t all this happen? Europe and Canada.Why not? Precisely because their jurisprudence has created a vastly different set of societies — truly modern ones, where living standards are vastly higher. So why did America collapse, while Europe and Canada prospered?

It’s a little known fact that American jurisprudence is effectively failed American economics in disguise. No, not Mom and Pop shops. The law of the artificial lowest price. The thinking goes that the lowest price is always the best — it “maximizes consumer welfare.” Who can provide the lowest price? The biggest corporations. That is why every industry in America is now what economists call “highly concentrated,” meaning dominated by a tiny number of monopolies, from banking to finance to real estate to healthcare.

Now, a good legal mind — not even a brilliant one — would ask: was that theory true?Did the law of the lowest price by way of gigantic monopolies really lead to higher living standards? The answer is: obviously not. Americans have the lowest living standardsin the rich world, approaching those of much poorer countries. They live vastly shorter, poorer, dumber, meaner, and more desperate lives than Canadians and Europeans.

A good legal mind would conclude that something went badly, badly wrong with the grand American theories of the lowest price.

ACB seems to be a staunch supporter of all the above. She’s never asked the question once: why did America collapse, while Europe and Canada prospered? Why not?

The answer to that question reveals what she really is. A fundamentalist. ACB subscribes to a theory that’s called in America “originalism.”It means something like: no deviation from America’s founding documents should ever be possible. The constitution should be interpreted as it is, in the way it would have been intended when it was written.

In simpler language, we’d call all that fundamentalism.Because it prevents a mind like ACB’s from asking the question above, and answering it properly. If you assume the answer to every social question is always: go back to America’s founding documents!! What kind of progress can you really make? The answer is none. And in that literal and real sense, “originalism” is a euphemism for fundamentalism.

A better mind would observe that Canada and Europe prospered because they have cutting-edgeconstitutions.In them, things like healthcare, retirement, education, income, and so on, are all guaranteed as basic rights. Therefore, there have to be social-scale institutions to provide them. America’s constitution, by contrast, is two and a half centuries old. It is not fit for the 21st century, because it recognises none of the things we now consider basics as rights. Hence, Americans have to battle one another for them, in a never-ending, bitter, bruising contest for the basics, whether income or healthcare. That is what it means to be a collapsed society.

But if all you assumeis “originalism,” that America’s founding ideas are flawless, the answer to every possible question, then you can never understand any of the above. You cannot engage with the modern world at all.

America’s founding documents are deeply inadequate to build a modern society upon precisely because they were meant for a slave state.Americans may not want to hear that, but it’s true. And that brings me to the second half of ACB’s fundamentalism, the second argument Republicans make for her. “She’s not the fanatic she appears to be!” now that we’ve dismantled the foolish notion that she’s some kind of American Aristotle.