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Chrysicat  Nov 11, 2016 • 5:21:46am

They’re being waaay too reassuring on the parts that talk about SCOTUS. Never before has one party appointed at least 7 Justices at once–which the Rs, between Bush and Trump, will likely have done by 2019.

And even if they had, the idea of all candidates being vetted by the Federalist and Heritage Societies is a new thing that ensures we’ll see nothing but Clarence Thomas clones. Now remember that there’s no filibuster and that Trump is actually probably near the left edge of serving Repug politicians, which means no one he nominates will be held up unless he—and that’s not a ‘unisex he’; that’s ‘the Republicans are devoted to putting women back in the home now more than any time since 1950’–is too liberal to get a one-week-or-less confirmation.

Also, add that one of Fed Society’s big things is that stare decisis receives too much respect and the letter of the Constitution too little. And that said letter of the Constitution makes virtually everything ever done by the federal government, and certainly anything done since the election of FDR, unconstitutional. Clarence Thomas, though he’s likely only where he is because of federal law, believes that Plessy was good law and that even Brown v Board was overreaching–one of the most vile cases of pulling up the ladder that’s ever been seen. All that a court needs after the death (she won’t resign to let her spot be filled by Trump!) of Ruth Bader Ginsburg is to grant cert to some bigot who volunteered to let himself get arrested for not serving a Black person, and there goes the Civil Rights Act, let alone Roe and the entire Right to Privacy. And to get either back will require a constitutional amendment, which it’s now becoming clear we’d never have had the numbers to get ratified even in 1982, which was probably the high point of apparent race relations.

Gay marriage is likely to be turned back to the states; the only question is whether SCOTUS will keep DOMA from being rehabilitated, since it seems the only place where full faith and credit applies to Fed Soc members is regarding the Second Amendment.. Despite the paper telling us there’s no type of case where cert might be granted, all we need is another county clerk or even just a normal court clerk, like that one in Kentucky last year, to be approached by a sympathetic-minded attorney who tells them that all they need to do is refuse a single f**-marriage license, let the state fire them over that, and sue the state for wrongful termination. Our Thomas clones will happily grant cert, though IANAL and don’t know what happens if the state-district, or state supreme, or even fed-district, court dismisses the suit as frivolous. But if it gets to the Court, the ruling will be that obviously there’s no federal interest to compel states to make laws regarding homosexual marriage.

Though the bigger dangers to LGBT come well before that, and for whatever reason the article didn’t address it. The UCMJ is going to include homosexuality and transsexuality as dischargeable offences again, that’s a given. A lot of our best soldiers, sailors, pilots and airmen are going to be receiving general discharges at best (this portion is probably less due to Trump in power and more due to simply-not-a-Dem there; I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the only reason such actions hadn’t already been taken via congressional bill is that the House knew the Senate would lack the votes to work an override. Since Trump is likely quite willing to sign anything passed by a Repub congress, that’s obviously no longer an issue of wasting time, and it’ll happen). Further, there is a not-impossible risk that Congress, either on its own or prompted by a request from the exec branch that would probably originate from Pence, issues a form of the final sumptuary laws that existed in the English-speaking world: the ones, once so common at the state level, that made it illegal for a person to be in public while wearing an insufficient number of articles of clothing conforming to the gender their birth sex is linked to (the only question is whether post-operatives would be required to wear their birth-sex’s clothing, or their surgically-corrected one’s). I know, it would seem that there’s no excuse under the Commerce Clause, even read as it is by a sane SCOTUS, to do that or to outlaw being perceived to be practicing a sexuality other than hetero, but when have Rs ever been accused of being consistent?

Of course, that’s not likely to be the full extent of sumptuary laws related to this regime, but it’s what they’ll be able to get away with until the voter suppression starts being enforced. The odds that Muslims are allowed to go around without wearing a green crescent, decrease with every year he’s in office.

As for the non-SCOTUS issues aside from reviving the various Nazi identifying symbols, the paper is delusional about Congress waiting on a replacement plan before repeal. They’ll be confident enough that the portion of voters who lose their coverage and are Republican is small enough to be considered acceptable collateral damage, and that the Democratic-leaning voters who lose their insurance will thus see a sufficiently-greater percentage die off who would have been ready to vote them out in their next electoral cycle, as to be a net win. (They also fully know what they’d replace it with, anyway: the only difference from the market as it looked on October 29, 2010, would be a federal law mandating that no state may forbid the issuance of any policy from any insurance provider in any state, so long as it complies with the standards of the issuing state. Insurers will then move all their headquarters to states with the lowest minimum-coverage requirements, thus screwing even the residents of more liberal states like California and New York who had tried requiring that plans provide more than just one 5000-dollar payment, for one procedure, in a year, with the policy subject to cancellation should a payout actually occur. And yes, that’s basically what the notorious junk policies of 1990-2010 tended to be structured as in places like the Dakotas and South Carolina, none of which would be inclined to increase the statutory requirements this time around. Then, if you had to actually make a claim and lost your non-group coverage, just like the Bad Old Days, you’d be ‘eligible’ to join your state’s High-Risk Pool. Coverage would be better than under the junk plans, but on the other hand, still worse than even an ACA Bronze-compliant plan (though at least they’d cover pre-existing conditions; see below), and premiums for a single 40-year-old man-born-male would be around 1.3k a month. Women-born-female would, of course, be looking at substantially higher premiums during their childbearing years, and trans-people would be further screwed, as another part of the ACA was gender-independent policies and pricing. The best values would be back to being the group-of-fellow-employees plans, and just like the old days, those plans would include preexisting-conditions riders for at least 9 months and usually a full 12. COBRA might or might not be revived; if it’s not, then developing a chronic condition becomes even more of an impetus to do anything to maintain one’s employment than it was before 2010, and I’m sure all of us remember a few people who would let their employers run roughshod over them in order to keep their health insurance. No better way to force a wage-slave to stay on!)

Something else the article fails to touch on is that he wants to appoint an AG who will enforce Schedule One status regarding pot again, by using the FBI or the DEA to raid every ‘legal’ dispensary in the country. That this will severely damage the economies of several blue states is likely more a feature than a bug. And while it’s true that Stop-and-Frisk would have to be performed by local officers, it’s also true that I can see these clowns witholding all federal tax money from any state that doesn’t immediately mandate it at a state level.

And there may be no federal libel law now, but I can see the Rs willing to make one for him if he’ll just agree to rubber-stamp whatever else they want.

Basically, I’m disappointed in them for focusing so much on what he’s legally permitted, because he’s not going to consider those limitations to be valid and we all know it. And I’m not sure that the low possibility that they’re right and I’m just spreading FUD justfies being quite so dismissive as the paper appears to be.


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