People only think executive overreach is cool as long as they can ignore the downsides.

> The president knows this. He told the press that his administration had surveyed the opinions of constitutional scholars, and that most thought an extension would be unlawful. Yet under political pressure from the left, Biden nevertheless ultimately decided to issue the extension.

In other words: SCOTUS wrote words clearly indicating a ban would be illegal. By a technicality (expiration date), they didn't issue an explicit ruling. Biden did it anyway, while admitting he knew it was illegal.

I could certainly see the argument that it's ill-advised, and indeed, it was struck down a few weeks later. However, I don't think concurring opinions are binding and you could imagine certain fact patterns that might have changed Kavanaugh's mind: Congress agrees on a similar extension, but there's a short gap before it comes into effect, the situation worsens dramatically, the extension is much more narrowly tailored, etc.

It's not illegal at all. Making it illegal would never work in practice.

It is however supposed to be politically embarrassing and should in theory hurt your party.

However right now, in practice, due to the polarized two-party shit show that is US politics at the top level, it doesn't matter. The constituents haven proven to lack both will and tools to hold their elected representatives accountable, who in turn have learned they can get away with pretty much anything.

What could they have done to avoid a president who would behave that way? Elect Trump? Hah.

If I were placing blame here, I'd put at least part of it on the SC for not giving a real ruling on it in the first place. There was speculation about an extension in the air already at the time, and they could have cut that short.

SCOTUS said the moratorium exceeded the CDC's legal authority, but declined to strike it down given it was soon expiring [1]. (They also strongly suggested that if POTUS tried renewing, they would strike it down.) POTUS tried renewing. SCOTUS struck it down.

None of this is properly construed as POTUS ignoring SCOTUS. When SCOTUS struck down the law, POTUS obliged.

[1] https://www.scotusblog.com/2021/06/divided-court-leaves-evic...

At least other administrations justify their attempts to break the law and mount some defense.

There isn't a mechanism to stop unconstitutional laws from being passed or left on the books.

for example, if the Court ruled that the Controlled Substances Act were unconstitutional, the government would be forced to free prisoners convicted of violating it, since the law was illegitimate the whole time. but if Congress repealed the act, they'd have no such obligation, since it was still a crime when the felony was committed.

The court doesn’t get to make law by threatening to make law. They have to actually do it.

You can't really avoid this either without throwing out judicial precedent because "knowing how the court will rule on subsequent cases" is basically the same as law.

But that's not law. That's consistent interpretation of law. Very different.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/the-supreme-court-st...

> The president knows this. He told the press that his administration had surveyed the opinions of constitutional scholars, and that most thought an extension would be unlawful. Yet under political pressure from the left, Biden nevertheless ultimately decided to issue the extension.

In other words: SCOTUS wrote words clearly indicating a ban would be illegal. By a technicality (expiration date), they didn't issue an explicit ruling. Biden did it anyway, while admitting he knew it was illegal.

And the administration gets to say they did all they could and it’s up to congress now.

Nobody alleged anything was unconstitutional. The question was whether the CDC exceeded the authority Congress gave it. The Court declined to answer that question when it was first raised. It answered it, definitively, the second time, striking down the moratorium extension.

Seems like they are kind of picking and choosing what rules they'll follow, and which rights they think people deserve

The Court originally declined to vacate the stay in a 5-4 decision. The fifth vote was from Kavanaugh, who wrote that he thought the stay should be vacated, but wasn't voting to do so because the moratorium was about to expire anyway. That concurrence is certainly informative, but doesn't override his actual vote to maintain the stay.

The second moratorium was quickly overturned, with Kavanaugh voting this time in accordance with his opinion. In any case, the administration did actually follow that ruling.

This is taken directly from the actual decision (the first round is discussed on page 4): https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/20pdf/21a23_ap6c.pdf

And what was his plan if they did violently take over DC? The largest army in the world would just take it back. Don't tell me they would follow his orders, they didn't like him before he started killing US civilians, politicians, and cops.

I guess we'll see what the committee discovers. Apparently, it's your belief that they'll discover nothing of significance in the next three years, but maybe we'll see after.

All Caesar had to do was harness this growing discontent of the masses through his fake populism and having undying loyalty in much of the army helped as well.

It took just one generation after Ceasars assassination for the establishment of the Imperium and the dissolution of the Republic.

Trump might or might not be reinstated but the beginning of the end of the American experiment has already been set in motion.

The only way to save it is through a radical reorganisation of power to counter the one to come but the establishment want to keep returning to the supposed Utopia that was in place before Trump - missing the obvious fact that it was their "utopia" that lead to Trump in the first place.

Sure, it's probably pointless to try to argue that there was some specific point where it changed from "is a democracy" to "isn't a democracy," or to try to argue that it's "55% a democracy now." The actual point is whether there are important institutions that have weakened or failed, whether there is indication that this will continue, and what the consequences will be.

I could be wrong, since it's been some years.

This is the key that people often miss in this regard. The staggering ROman Republic was hardly a great country.

Also, common to Rome is the notion that they are a special people who deserve dominion over the rest of the world. It might be shrouded in more egalatarian language (cue the exporting "freedom" talk) but barely so.

We need a new American experiment that is actually government by the people. One that doesn’t take ownership of other people as a founding principle (but you know, it’s cool because we took it back).

This is the reason votes in rural areas count so much more than urban votes. Because rural areas in the south were heavily populated by enslaved people and the slavers (meaning not just the title holding slave owners; many people who did not own slaves were still fundamental players in the system of slavery) held a lot of influence.

Also, in 1790 the US was much less urbanized. 5% of people lived in cities (vs 80+% today), and the economy was primarily agricultural. It was not a world in which the rural-urban divide was particularly significant. All states were rural states.

If every political decision in the US before the Civil War was made with the aim of preserving slave state power, why is it the South that left the Union? Couldn't they have just used their power?

I'd like to correct my previous comment. I said that the three-fifths compromise was the only consitutional component of slavery; in fact there were two others. The fugitive slave clause, and a clause forbidding the federal government from restricting the slave trade. I apologize for these errors.

They left because they were worried about losing their power — the northern population grew much faster than the south, and as the country expanded west most of the settlers were from free states, bringing attitudes about slavery with them. Things had reached a point where even deep compromises couldn’t tip the scales in the slavers’ favor, so the slavers decided to withdraw to attempt to preserve their power.

There were a significant number of northerners who were active abolitionists and not involved in politics. John Brown is an American hero in my mind. Slavery was doomed regardless of the political order, but the political order tried to protect it nonetheless.