DL Open Thread: Friday, April 26, 2024

No DC Trump Trial Before Election.  The Supreme Court has guaranteed it in a multitude of ways.  Josh Marshall says it best:

I was watching cable news this afternoon at the gym. And I saw one of those examples of what has now become a Trump/Roberts Court-era set piece, where principled and very smart lawyers and/or legal academics have to say, I guess I was a chump.

My guiding heuristic has been that the Roberts Court, especially in its post-2017 iteration is thoroughly corrupt and will generally do whatever is in the interests of the GOP so long as it doesn’t put too big a dent in the Court’s own perceived legitimacy and elite social standing. Based on this standard I assumed the Court would settle for delaying Trump’s trial until the Fall. It seems now that they’re likely to kick it back to the trial Court for further fact-finding and thus the case itself well into 2025.

We are where we should know we are. The Roberts Court is a corrupt institution which operates in concert with and on behalf of the Republican Party and to an ambiguous degree right-wing anti-regulatory ideology. If we believe in a different set of policies or even democratic self-governance we will have to succeed at that with the Supreme Court acting as a consistent adversary.

Call the Rethug justices what they are: Unindicted co-conspirators.  Here’s another good take.

Arizona FINALLY Repeals Civil War-era Abortion Ban.  Well, almost:

After days of national outcry over an Arizona supreme court ruling that upheld the 1864 ban, passed before Arizona became a state, three Republicans in the state house broke ranks to vote with Democrats to support a repeal. Last week, two Republicans in the state senate also voted with Democrats to advance a similar repeal. As long as those Republican votes hold firm, Democrats will likely send the repeal to Arizona’s Democratic governor in May.

Before the fall of Roe, anti-abortion activists were becoming increasingly hardline, often pressuring the GOP to drop candidates who lacked anti-abortion bona fides. But after Wednesday, rather than directing their ire at the Republicans who are making the repeal possible, they have largely blamed the usual suspects: abortion rights advocates. “The most protective pro-life law in the country is poised to fall to the appetites of pro-abortion activists,” Cathi Herrod, president of the powerful Center for Arizona Policy, said in a statement, adding that she supports efforts to “defend the state’s 15-week law if the pre-Roe law was repealed”.

Hey, at least the hard-liners still have the Supreme Court, which appears poised to…

…overturn ‘federal law (that) require(s) hospitals to provide emergency abortion care in states with strict bans on the procedure’.

Why Democrats Suck–Part Of An Endless Series:

Barring a last-minute breakthrough, more than 7,000 workers are set to walk off their truck and bus assembly lines on Friday night in the swing state of North Carolina, injecting the United Automobile Workers’ new activism in the South directly into the 2024 election.

North Carolina has never been hospitable to organized labor, and the midnight strike at the North American subsidiary of the German industrial giant Daimler Truck has been greeted with trepidation by the state’s Democratic establishment, which has long tried to project a moderate, pro-business bent.

In other words, they’re not Democrats.

Hospital Cost Review Board Bill Passes.  After a marathon session that would have gone on even longer were it not for a legislative gimmick.  BTW, there’s a comment in the trash concerning this that we didn’t put there.  If you (you know who you are) wish us to post it, just ask.

What do you want to talk about?