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Trump

Supreme Court Might Let Trump Tell Congress, America To Get Bent

Only little people pay taxes.

Yesterday, the Supreme Court decided to once again halt the release of Donald Trump's tax returns.

The brief order in Trump v. Mazars temporarily blocks a lower court order requiring the accounting firm to turn Trump's tax returns over to the House Oversight and Reform Committee, which first issued subpoenas for the returns back in April.

What does this mean?

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Immigrants

Donald Trump Libelslandering The DACA Kids, So That's A Surprise

You know who's really a 'hardened criminal'? Half his administration!

With the Trump administration's attempt to shut down the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program being argued before the Supreme Court today, the Great Man took the opportunity to tweet about it. Remember how he used to say his "heart just breaks" for the plight of folks who were brought to the US as little kids and through no fault of their own don't have legal status because of their illegally border-crossing parents (who are of course scum)? He even briefly said this about DACA kids, shortly after he decided to end DACA and then found out that wasn't popular.

Trump's opinion of those fine young men and women is as variable as anything else rattling around in his head, so of course this morning he decided the best strategy would be to simply lie through his teeth about DACA recipients:

You know how it is: Sure, they may be cute and innocent-looking when they're young, but whatever country in Mexico they're from Donald Trump knows they're murderers and rapists, they sell drugs, and some, he supposes, are good people, although that last bit is open to revision for the 2020 campaign.

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SCOTUS

Should SCOTUS Judges Pal Around With Professional Bigots Whose Cases They Are Trying?

Seems like a bad idea, too bad it's not an ethics violation.

Some Supreme Court justices just can't stop being bigots.

Last week not one, but two justices with lifetime appointments to the highest court in the United States decided it would be fun to hang out with the leader of an anti-LGBTQ hate group at the Supreme Court. In the same term as SCOTUS is set to decide three important cases that will likely set the tone for decades to come.

So that's all just great.

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State/Local Politics

Why Won't Democrats Work Across The Aisle????

Wisconsin GOP with some more ACTUALLY SHOCKING bullshit!!!

With Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin refusing to concede he lost yesterday's election to Democrat Andy Beshear, who received 5,000 more votes, and Donald Trump proclaiming the Kentucky election a huge success for the GOP, we're beginning to wonder whether this marks a new tool for Republicans to add to their bag of tricks: In addition to using gerrymandering and voter suppression to impose minority rule, why not just start ignoring the outcomes of elections altogether?

For a case in point, let's look at Wisconsin, where yesterday the state Senate ousted the Democratic agriculture secretary, months after all five Republicans on the Agriculture committee had voted to support his nomination. Why? Because the Republican leader of the state Senate wanted to teach Democratic Gov. Tony Evers that despite beating Scott Walker in 2018, Evers isn't really in charge. Republicans may have gotten only 46 percent of the statewide vote that year, but thanks to gerrymandering, they kept 64 percent of the seats in the state Assembly, and actually added a seat in the Senate. It's just one more example of Republicans' contempt for the state's voters, which started when they used their lame-duck session to limit the governor's power before he took office. And Evers better not forget it.

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2020 democratic primary

Justice Kennedy Was Not Good, Mayor Pete. He Was Not Good.

We do not need another one.

Say it ain't so, Pete.

In an interview with Cosmo this week, Mayor Pete Buttigieg decided to talk about his plans for the Supreme Court by ... praising former Supreme Court Justice and lifelong Republican Anthony Kennedy, who stepped down so Donald Trump could put Brett Kavanaugh on the Court.

So I've floated several ideas and deliberately kept some level of open-mindedness about which ones are going to work best. One of them would be to have 15 members, but 5 of them can only be seated if the other 10 unanimously agree. The idea here is you get more justices who think for themselves. Justices like Justice Kennedy or Justice Souter, and there are many legal scholars who think this could be done without a constitutional amendment under current law.

Sigh.

Where to start?

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lawsplainer

Supreme Court Ready To Rock You, We Mean Really, Throw Rocks At You

2020 gonna be lit. We mean set on fire.

It is October and the 2020 Supreme Court term is officially upon us. And boy oh boy, is there a shitstorm brewing.

2020 is going to be another blockbuster year for our country's highest court. From gays to guns to God, SCOTUS is set to make a number of rulings that could fuck over the country for decades to come.

And with the current makeup of the Court, that seems likely. Let's get to it.

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lawsplainer

Breaking The Law Breaking The Law!

Normally, we'd write about these individually. Have a speed round instead!

Damn, this week has been a long month.

In the midst of the Ukrainium One shitstorm, it can be easy to lose track of all of the other things going on. A bunch of states are suing Trump. Trump is suing a bunch of states. A whole bunch of other people are suing over a whole bunch of other terrible things. So totally normal politics and very stable geniuses with a dash of late-stage syphilis and a heaping teaspoon of PCP. #2019.

So anyway, here are all of the other places where Trump is fighting with states, civil rights organizations, and other assorted people trying to bring some goodness and light into the world.

Trump Tax Returns: Trump v. Vance

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Congress

Ayanna Pressley Wants to Impeach Brett Kavanaugh & We're Bringing The Torches & Pitchforks

We're done playing nice with Republicans.

Rep. Ayanna Pressley filed a resolution Tuesday to open an impeachment inquiry into Justice Brett Kavanaugh. A survivor of sexual assault herself, Pressley doesn't believe an alleged attempted rapist belongs on the Supreme Court. There are only nine justices. It's not too much to ask that none of them have any credible rape accusations against them.

PRESSLEY: Sexual predators do not deserve a seat on the nation's highest court and Brett Kavanaugh's confirmation process set a dangerous precedent. We must demand justice for survivors and hold Kavanaugh accountable for his actions.

Elizabeth Warren approves of this plan, but not every Democrat is on board. Jerry Nadler, who chairs the House Judiciary Committee, claims they're too busy never actually impeaching Donald Trump to waste time never actually impeaching Kavanaugh. Republicans would've made this a big talking point with a President Clinton: "OMG, there's just so much crime and corruption! But we'll rack up the overtime ... for America."

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Saudi Arabia

Rand Paul Vs. Liz Cheney: LET THEM FIGHT.

It's your Sunday show rundown!

We begin this Sunday with the feud between Rand Paul and Liz Cheney. The feud seems to have begun when Paul rightfully called out neocons like the newly fired John Bolton, for their desire for "endless wars." This, of course, pissed off the scion of Dick Cheney enough that she responded via Twitter:

So began a volley of insults from the nepotistic children of rightwing scumbags, while somehow still remembering to kiss Donald Trump's ass while doing it.

So we pick up with this on CNN's State of The Union, where Jake Tapper asked Paul about this and whether it was more than the petty squabbling of spoiled assclowns:

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News

Supreme Court Did Thing Again. It Was Not A Good Thing

'Go back to Mexico' would make more sense if the people were from Mexico.

We're treating immigrants like shit again.

This week, the Supreme Court allowed the Trump regime to bar immigrants who arrive at the US border from seeking asylum, unless they have sought asylum in another country first. The decision in Barr v. East Bay Sanctuary Covenant means the Trump regime can, in essence, bar all people from Central America arriving on foot from seeking asylum in the US, no matter how terrible the conditions they are fleeing. The rule does not allow for any consideration of whether the immigrants would be safe in that third country.

Giphy

Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissented, joined by RBG, reminding us that there is some good left in the world.

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Culture Wars

Rudy Giuliani Took 'Blue' Anniversary of 9/11 A Little Too Literally

Here's a video that is bullshit!

September 11th, 2001 was a day that forever changed the course of history. It started a war we are still waging (Afghanistan), created new government departments (DHS, ICE), gave the government wide authorizations to violate privacy (Patriot Act), and created the security theater we all perform every time we want to go on a flight. (Because somehow a 16 ounce bottle of shampoo is bad, but two eight ounce bottles next to each other is cool. It's just science!) And as each year has passed, we've seen the anniversary of 9/11 cravenly used as a political tool, mostly by Republicans.

There is no better example of this than Trump's personal lawyer, former mayor of New York City and Nosferatu-looking fuckmouth: Rudy Giuliani.

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News

Moscow Mitch Writes Love Song To All The Senate Norms He's F*cked Before

McConnell writes NYT op-ed begging Democrats not to nuke filibuster. Sounds like he's scared.

The New York Times published a work of fiction today from Mitch McConnell. The tortoise who wrecked the Senate passionately defended the legislative filibuster, which he argues plays a "crucial role in our Constitutional order." McConnell isn't just a singularly graceless liar. He also thinks you're stupid.

This is how his fairy tale begins:

" You'll regret this, and you may regret this a lot sooner than you think."

That was my warning to Senate Democrats in November 2013.

Don't you just love a story that kicks off with someone's straight-up gangster declaration? The Godfather at least opened with a wedding. McConnell likes to cast former Democratic leader Harry Reid as the villain who blew up Senate norms so Barack Obama could pack the courts with Castro clones. This isn't what happened. The Republican Senate minority blocked countless Obama executive branch appointments. They were not "controversial," as McConnell claims -- they just weren't right wing hacks. Republicans also used the filibuster to "negotiate" legislative concessions. They were close to demanding protection money from Obama, so Reid went nuclear. McConnell, naturally, takes no responsibility for this. He repeatedly broke his word to Reid and refused to honor previous commitments.

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News

DOJ <3 Discrimination Against Trans People

And let's also discriminate against all women while we're at it, because why not?

Trump's DOJ is at it again! In a brief filed Friday, the Department of Justice argues to the Supreme Court in Harris Funeral Homes vs. EEOC that trans people deserve to be discriminated against. It also throws in some arguments that would allow all kinds of discrimination against all women, because why not?

Somehow, the DOJ's brief managed to be even worse than I expected.

Their logic seems to rest on two main contentions. First is that a transgender woman is actually a man who can legally be forced to present as male in the workplace. Second is that transgender people, as a class, can legally be discriminated against. They also argue that the court ruling for the woman in this case, who was fired simply for being a transgender woman, "would transform Title VII into a blanket prohibition on all sex-specific workplace practices" -- and that, apparently, is a bad thing.

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Congress

Filibuster! Joe Biden Don't Even Know Her!

Get it? A joke!

The Senate filibuster is a source of great debate among Democrats. Our girl Elizabeth Warren is all "fuck the filibuster," because she has a brain in her head, plans on her website, and no interest in continuing a parliamentary procedure whose "noble" legacy includes attempts to block civil rights legislation.

Unfortunately, other Democrats running for president are protective of the filibuster because they're chumps. Sen. Cory Booker has said he would "personally resist efforts" to dump the filibuster. This past February, Booker proclaimed, "We should not be doing anything to mess with the strength of the filibuster. It's one of the distinguishing factors of this body." Ted Cruz is also a distinguishing feature of the Senate, but that's not a good excuse for keeping either around.

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand lamented how Republicans nuked the filibuster for judicial appointments and rammed through a series of right-wing hacks. She's right that the filibuster would've kept both Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh off the Supreme Court, but you know what else would've worked? Electing Hillary Clinton. But if Hillary had managed to beat Putin's puppet, she would've had the same troubles as Barack Obama. Senate Republicans were in the minority but relentlessly obstructed Obama for the first six years of his presidency. (Also the last two, but they weren't in the minority then. We guess.)

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News

A Lawsplainer On The Nihilist Supreme Court Declaring Trump King

This one's about his fucken wall.

Donald Trump wants to steal $6.7 billion from various government agencies for his racist wall on our southern border that he keeps saying Mexico is going to pay for. On Friday, the Supreme Court made it a lot easier for him.

Let's back up ...

One of Trump's most noxious 2016 campaign promises was that he was going to build a giant wall on our border with Mexico -- and that Mexico was going to pay for it.

Of course, we all knew that Mexico was never going to pay for Trump's vanity wall. We started off the new year in the midst of the longest federal government shutdown in history, thanks to the commander-in-chief having a temper tantrum over not getting funding for his racist border wall. So, although the only crisis on our southern border is a humanitarian crisis of our own making, Trump declared a national emergency.

As predicted by Yr Wonkette's own Five Dollar Feminist, Trump's bogus emergency declaration was immediately met with litigation. Sixteen states, the Sierra Club, the Southern Border Communities Coalition, the Center for Biological Diversity, Defenders of Wildlife, the Animal Legal Defense Fund, and the US House of Representatives, among others, have filed lawsuits to try to stop Trump from raiding various pots of money to build his stupid fucking wall.

Overall, Trump has earmarked several billion dollars for his border wall. The cases at issue here are about the $2.5 billion he wants to take from the military. Judge Gilliam, a federal judge based in Oakland, issued injunctions blocking Trump from stealing the $2.5 billion from the Pentagon to build his monument to racism. Earlier this month, the Ninth Circuit upheld the injunctions. So naturally, the Supreme Court stepped in on Friday to give Trump the go-ahead.

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Nice Time

Ruth Bader Ginsburg Will Dance On All Our Graves

'A senator said I was almost dead. I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice chianti.'

In an NPR interview with Ruth Bader Ginsburg that aired this morning, the 86-year-old Supreme Court justice said she takes care of herself, doesn't worry overly much about her health, and neither should you. In fact, says Nina Totenberg, Ginsburg "is not oblivious to health concerns, but she waves away worries about her future." Like this, for instance:

"There was a senator, I think it was after my pancreatic cancer, who announced with great glee that I was going to be dead within six months," she recalled. "That senator, whose name I have forgotten, is now himself dead, and I," she added with a smile, "am very much alive."
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