The Imperial Presidency

[Labster]

Trump is going to run out of minions, and the problems they are having with recruiting strongly suggest that the people as a whole aren't evil, just regrettably gullible.  

As my dear departed mother once said "You can fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time, and sometimes that's enough".

This is something that sounds a lot like a good argument, but it's only true to an extent.  A good portion of voters apply their own dreams and values on to a candidate for highest office, as if he can somehow defy physics and/or politics. This is a multipartisan problem -- just look at how many people thought Obama would end racism, when at the end we somehow got a country that was more racist than before.  Trump is exceptionally talented at saying things that sound good emotionally until you think about them, and also at targeting his message.

But... like, we had four years of Trump before, lots of us died in the pandemic because he thought masks made him look weak, and he basically said that he was going to do the same stuff as before but not listen to people trying to hold him back. I don't think someone gets to absolve moral responsibility just because they're gullible.  The fact that he was re-elected after his policies of tearing apart families and keeping children in cages and trying to overthrow the republic -- the fact of re-election itself -- means that a majority of the whole are evil.  Or were evil on at least one day last year.  I think trying to assign moral culpability to a sociopath like Trump is pretty questionable, but to those people who decided that election day, they carry the full weight of Trump's actions.

And moreover, it doesn't really matter if Trump has minions, if people are so divided that he gets what he wants anyway.  I want to share this article: Deeply divided Supreme Court lets NIH grant terminations continue. The setup: Trump/Kennedy terminates all health grants that do DEI things, like mention that race or gender exist.  The suit goes to federal district court to stop that.  This particular challenge that made it to the Supreme Court was that the district court wasn't the proper venue to bring the case, and it would have to be brought in Federal Claims Court instead, so the previous injunction requiring grants to be paid was invalid.

The court was so divided between whether it was the proper venue and if the injunction held that basically one person got to decide the whole case on her own opinion, and Barrett chose to split the baby.  Not like the biblical story about splitting the baby, but actually going through with the damn thing.  The end ruling is that federal district court is the correct venue to determine if the action was constitutional, but to actually get the government to disburse money, it would need to be filed at the claims court.  So in this case, to restore the grant money, the injunction won't work, because they will need to first win a case in district court, exhaust all appeals, and then once this is done, file a brand new lawsuit in a different court to actually get the money... and then 6 years later, you finally get the grant funding to continue researching on that cancer patient ... oops, she's dead already.

The point is, the court was divided enough that the end result is effectively zero accountability for grant terminations.  And no one was willing to back off from the dumbest possible way of doing it.  The Supreme Court now seems — how do I say it? — collectively but differently seditious?  There's a line beyond which partisanship crosses into sedition and it kinda feels like everyone crossed that line.  Except maybe Roberts, the Chief Justice, but he's been marginalized for a while.

Meanwhile in California: man delivering strawberries in Little Tokyo was detained for being foreign, right across the street from the museum where they have all of the exhibits on the Japanese internment during WWII. No ichigo keiki for you, that guy is getting deported.