I’m not entirely sold that when it returns it will have all of the things it once had. Only time will tell I guess.

If you have any belief that any of this stuff will be returning, I have beachfront property on Mars that you may be interested in.

Isn’t this just going to impact the US credit rating, leading to higher borrowing costs and enormous inflation spikes?

Those specific ones may be trolls, but the election results clearly show that there were a number of people in this country that genuinely felt that way.

Right. But then you vote for the least bad option. You don’t let the exponentially worse option come back to power and then complain when they start doing even worse things.

Oh, trust me, I know. Check my post history and the responses. I was repeatedly insulted and downvoted to oblivion for simply pointing that out. Never once did I get an answer to the question of “How is allowing Trump to return to power in any way better?” that wasn’t simply a barrage of nonsense and insults essentially telling me to go fuck myself.

“How dare Harris accept an endorsement and campaign with Liz Cheney? I am so mad that she allied herself with a former Trump supporter that I’m going to sit home and let Trump return to power! That’ll show 'em!”

“I am so mad about the state of the economy and the price of groceries that I’m going to vote for the guy who promised to make me pay even more!”

These people were so adamant that the leopard wouldn’t eat their face that they stuck their head shoulder-deep into the leopard’s mouth, and are now suddenly shocked and surprised when the leopard bit down.

Given the amount of whining about “Genocide Joe” and how bad a candidate Harris was, I wouldn’t be so sure of that.

There were plenty of people on here saying how they had to “send a message to Democrats” or some variant of that, and saying “at least Trump promised change”.

I don’t think Russia does enough business with the US for this to have any meaningful impact one way or the other. And I admit that I know little about the subject, but if I recall correctly, Russia got hit with all sorts of sanctions when they invaded Ukraine to begin with, just to see many of those sanctions either “worked around” or outright ignored because many European countries weren’t in a position to actually enforce such sanctions without doing even more harm to their own people than to Russia (mostly because of European reliance on Russian gas). And in the end, what sanctions were enforced did absolutely nothing to stop Russia anyway.

Russia will not be stopped by diplomatic means. They have allies in China, Iran, North Korea, etc. that can help Russia achieve their goals, work around sanctions, and replenish their soldiers and arms. Just like they’ve been doing. Continuing to supply Ukraine with supplies without actually putting boots on the ground has only ensured that Ukraine will slowly die a death of a thousand paper cuts instead of Russia just steamrolling in and taking the whole country all at once. The only way this is ever going to end in Ukraine’s favor is boots on the ground, but no country is willing to give them that.

Ukraine can’t hold out forever, even with supplies from NATO allies. Russia has historically been willing to shove soldiers into the meat grinder en masse until they win by attrition, and then simply move Russian citizens into the territory they take over in the process. And Ukraine is fighting Russia’s war by Russia’s rules, where Russia gets to replenish their troops with soldiers from allied nations, but Ukraine isn’t allowed to do the same.

Ukraine and its allies really do have to make a tough decision if they want the war to end. Either allies can actually start supplying boots on the ground in order to help Ukraine drive back Russia and get soldiers out of Ukranian territory, or Ukraine is going to have to enter peace talks with Russia where they will have absolutely no negotiating power, which at best means they’d be giving up a good chunk of their territory and promising Russia that they’ll essentially become a puppet state. The current barely-a-stalemate where Russia slowly takes over more and more territory over the course of time just delays the inevitable and causes a shitload of deaths in the process.

It’s time we did something about it.

We had that chance, just over two months ago.

We elected one of them to office.

This is leverage, nothing more. He has every intention of saving it. He’s just going to make sure that he gets his cut and assurances that any anti-Trump videos be scrubbed and any searches return no results. And he wants to make sure they continue to do what he wants, when he wants, and the way he wants by literally hanging a potential ban over their heads that he can sign into effect by EO at the stroke of his favorite sharpie.

It is literally a Mafia protection racket on steroids.

So instead of staying home because Harris didn’t promise you a pony, you’re saying you stayed home because the DNC didn’t promise you a pony. End result is the same: You didn’t get the god-perfect candidate, so you pulled a temper tantrum and let Trump return to power.

Doesn’t matter. They’ll just come up with a whole new list of charges to hit them with.

Johnson could order “hearings” in order to prove Fauci himself concocted and released COVID-19 out of his own basement, and subpoena Fauci to testify, then hit him with obstruction charges when he refuses to participate in their kangaroo court. Or they won’t go after Cheney for her role in the j6 hearings, but they’ll suddenly have hearings about the 2020 election being stolen and what her role in that was.

You get the idea. It doesn’t take much to make an end-run around these pardons if Trump really wants to, and even if that fails, there’s the very real possibility that SCOTUS will magically say they have the right to “judicial review” of these pardons and just invalidate them. Would be far from the first time that SCOTUS just created powers for itself out of thin air.

Or does it magically get legal power and existence because 2 citizens (musk and trump) say so?

Ding Ding Ding.

And it gets the rest of its power from the Department of “What the fuck are you going to do about it?”

Be very careful. Remember, ABC and George Stephonopalous (or however you spell his name) just had to cough up $15 million and apologize to Trump for repeating this.

I wish I was joking.

They can’t remove it without corrupting the courts, who would read the 14th amendment in a way that violates its meaning.

You haven’t been paying much attention lately, have you…

Do you think the Constitution is a magical, sentient, self-enforcing document that has the ability to enforce its own rules?

It’s a really old piece of paper. It relies on our three branches of government being willing to uphold the laws and principles written on it. If the three branches of government are no longer willing to uphold those principles, then the Constitution is effectively about as binding as a child’s bedtime story. And right now, our three branches of government are largely unwilling to uphold the Constitution and have already hand-waved away many important protections already.

If Trump says “We’re going to ignore the 14th amendment”, and Congress passes a law that says “We’re going to ignore the 14th amendment”, and SCOTUS says “We’re going to ignore the 14th amendment”, then the 14th amendment may as well not exist. They don’t have to repeal it. They can just ignore it.

If you don’t believe that our government can and will just wave away Constitutional amendments when they become inconvenient, then remember that we just re-elected a former President who should have been disqualified until SCOTUS chimed in and said another part of the 14th amendment was already unenforceable. What do you think is stopping them from just chiming in and striking down the rest of it?

You can say that the 14th amendment is a thing all you’d like. But unless you have some method of actually enforcing it, it doesn’t matter.

Here’s the thing. All things considered, I believe it was the right thing to do and probably the best option available given the circumstances, but a part of me still thinks that this just might end up making things worse.

I’m not even convinced that these things will hold. We have already learned that just because it says so in the Constitution doesn’t mean this Supreme Court will abide by it, as they’ve already hand-waived away several Constitutional protections already and have essentially turned the Constitution into a very old piece of paper with guidelines that can be ignored when inconvenient.

Given this President and this Supreme Court, I could easily see the Supreme Court either spinning all new powers of “judicial review” when it comes to pardons all for itself out of thin air, or just saying that pre-emptive pardons aren’t a thing and are therefore invalid. And when the precedent of Nixon’s pardon is brought up, they could just say that it would have been struck down too had it been challenged. Or at least, they would have struck it down. Easy to say because Nixon’s dead and it’s moot one way or the other, so it’s easy to twist it to their advantage.

And since accepting a pardon comes with the implication of guilt, the right wing conspiracy theorists are going to have a field day showing how this “proves” that Fauci, Milley, etc. are all guilty and should be prosecuted anyway. (“Even though the Biden pardons were all ruled invalid, the fact that these defendants had accepted them comes with the implication of guilt. That implication is not Constitutionally protected and therefore can be used against them in future prosecutions.” – This Supreme Court, probably, in the near future.) This will also lead to a groundswell of support from the rubes who will continue the march to dictatorship with thunderous applause as they start demanding that these people be prosecuted anyway, using their acceptance of the pardons in the first place as “proof” that they were right all along, these people were committing crimes, and they knew it.

Of course, if and when Trump writes his own pardon, the courts will gladly carve out an exception that applies only to Trump. His cronies may go to jail, but we all know what Trump thinks of his cronies once they stop being of use to him.

Watch him try and do it anyway, challenging the pardons in court saying pe-emptive pardons shouldn’t count, only to backtrack when he realizes it means it will make the blanket pardon he wrote for himself invalid too.

That’s not how this works if you’ve been paying attention to our legal system.

Don’t get me wrong…Trump absolutely will try to have these pardons challenged. But it’s not like the courts are just going to remind him that it won’t work for him either when he tries it. They’ll just wait until he does, then carve out a special exemption that applies only to Trump. That’s how the law works.

Scary thing is that there is a very real chance Comcast will bend the knee, cough up some dough, and make Seth Meyers apologize.

The crimes occured in 2015. It was national news. They had five years.

No, they set the stage when they took a zillion years to bring up charges in the first place. They could have brought these charges up in 2020 when he left office but they decided to sit on the case forever.