“in Texas, you can commit murder without suffering the legal consequences of that crime, so long as your victim’s politics are loathed by the right and your case is championed by conservative media. Or at least, this is the message sent by Gov. Greg Abbott’s pardoning of Daniel Perry.
“In the weeks after George Floyd’s murder in 2020, the proliferation of Black Lives Matter protests had filled Perry with apparent bloodlust. Then an active-duty Army officer, Perry texted and messaged friends, among other things:
“I might go to Dallas to shoot looters.”
“I might have to kill a few people on my way to work they are rioting outside my apartment complex … No protesters go near me or my car.”
“I wonder if they will let [me] cut the ears off of people who’s decided to commit suicide by me.”
When a friend of Perry asked him if he could “catch me a negro daddy,” Perry replied, “That is what I am hoping.”
Weeks later, Perry was driving an Uber in Austin, Texas, when he came upon a Black Lives Matter march. According to prosecutors, Perry ran a red light and drove his vehicle into the crowd, almost hitting several protesters. Activists gathered angrily around Perry’s car. Garrett Foster, a 28-year-old Air Force veteran who was openly carrying an AK-47 rifle, approached Perry’s window.
Perry then shot Foster dead.
At trial, Perry’s defense team alleged that Foster had pointed his rifle at the defendant. But witnesses testified that Foster never brandished his weapon, only carried it, which is legal in Texas. And Perry corroborated that account in his initial statement to the police, saying, “I believe he was going to aim at me. I didn’t want to give him a chance to aim at me.” A jury convicted Perry of murder last year.
But..the governor of Texas used his pardoning power to release Perry from prison.
In a statement, Abbott said, “Texas has one of the strongest ‘stand your ground’ laws of self-defense that cannot be nullified by a jury or a progressive district attorney.” He noted that in the Lone Star State, a person is justified in using deadly force against another if they “reasonably believe the deadly force is immediately necessary” for averting one’s own violent death. The Texas governor argued that it was reasonable for Perry to believe his life was at stake since Foster had held his gun in the “low-ready firing position.”
Yet this claim is inconsistent with Perry’s own remarks to the police, which indicated that Foster did not aim a rifle at his killer, but merely carried it. Needless to say, seeing a person lawfully carrying a firearm cannot give one a legal right to kill them.
But pesky realities like this carry less weight than conservative media’s delusional grievances. Shortly after Perry’s conviction in April 2023, then-Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson aired a segment portraying Perry as a helpless victim of “a mob of rioters” and a “Soros-funded” district attorney. Carlson decried the jury’s verdict as a “legal atrocity” and lambasted Abbott for standing idly by while his state invalidated conservatives’ right to defend themselves. “So that is Greg Abbott’s position,” he said. “There is no right of self-defense in Texas.”
The next day, Abbott pledged to work “as swiftly as Texas law allows regarding the pardon of Sgt. Perry.””
“The Supreme Court delivered a firm and unambiguous rebuke to some of America’s most reckless judges on Thursday, ruling those judges were wrong to declare an entire federal agency unconstitutional in a decision that threatened to trigger a second Great Depression.
In a sensible world, no judge would have taken the plaintiffs arguments in CFPB v. Community Financial Services Association seriously. Briefly, they claimed that the Constitution limits Congress’s ability to enact “perpetual funding,” meaning that the legislation funding a particular federal program does not sunset after a certain period of time.
The implications of this entirely made-up theory of the Constitution are breathtaking. As Justice Elena Kagan points out in a concurring opinion in the CFPB case, “spending that does not require periodic appropriations (whether annual or longer) accounted for nearly two-thirds of the federal budget” — and that includes popular programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.
Nevertheless, a panel of three Trump judges on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit — a court dominated by reactionaries who often hand down decisions that offend even the current, very conservative Supreme Court — bought the CFPB plaintiffs’ novel theory and used it to declare the entire Consumer Financial Protection Bureau unconstitutional.
In fairness, the Fifth Circuit’s decision would not have invalidated Social Security or Medicare, but that’s because the Fifth Circuit made up some novel limits to contain its unprecedented interpretation of the Constitution. And the Fifth Circuit’s attack on the CFPB still would have had catastrophic consequences for the global economy had it actually been affirmed by the justices.
That’s because the CFPB doesn’t just regulate the banking industry. It also instructs banks on how they can comply with federal lending laws without risking legal sanction — establishing “safe harbor” practices that allow banks to avoid liability so long as they comply with them.
As a brief filed by the banking industry explains, without these safe harbors, the industry would not know how to lawfully issue loans — and if banks don’t know how to issue loans, the mortgage market could dry up overnight. Moreover, because home building, home sales, and other industries that depend on the mortgage market make up about 17 percent of the US economy, a decision invalidating the CFPB could trigger economic devastation unheard of since the Great Depression.
Thankfully, that won’t happen. Seven justices joined a majority opinion in CFPB which rejects the Fifth Circuit’s attack on the United States economy, and restates the longstanding rule governing congressional appropriations. Congress may enact any law funding a federal institution or program, so long as that law “authorizes expenditures from a specified source of public money for designated purposes.””
“When Trump lawyer Michael Cohen paid porn star Stormy Daniels $130,000 shortly before the 2016 presidential election to stop her from talking about her purported 2006 sexual encounter with Trump, that transaction was “not illegal,” Trump’s lead defense attorney, Todd Blanche, said during his opening statement last week. “Entering into a nondisclosure agreement is perfectly legal. Companies do that all the time….Executives, people who are wealthy, people who are famous enter into nondisclosure agreements regularly, and there’s nothing illegal about it.”
…
“Trump is not charged with “conspiracy” or “election fraud.” He is charged with violating a New York law against “falsifying business records” with “intent to defraud.” Trump allegedly did that 34 times by disguising his 2017 reimbursement of Cohen’s payment to Daniels as compensation for legal services. The counts include 11 invoices from Cohen, 11 corresponding checks, and 12 ledger entries.
Ordinarily, falsifying business records is a misdemeanor. But it becomes a felony when the defendant’s “intent to defraud includes an intent to commit another crime or to aid or conceal the commission thereof.” Bragg says Trump had such an intent, which is why the 34 counts are charged as felonies.
Bragg had long been cagey about exactly what crime Trump allegedly tried to conceal. But during a sidebar discussion last week, Colangelo said “the primary crime that we have alleged is New York State Election Law Section 17-152.” That provision says “any two or more persons who conspire to promote or prevent the election of any person to a public office by unlawful means and which conspiracy is acted upon by one or more of the parties thereto, shall be guilty of a misdemeanor.”
In other words, Bragg is relying on this misdemeanor to transform another misdemeanor (falsifying business records) into a felony. But the only “unlawful means” that he has identified is Cohen’s payment to Daniels. And while Cohen pleaded guilty in 2018 to making an excessive campaign contribution by fronting the hush money, Trump was never prosecuted for soliciting that contribution.
There are good reasons for that. The question of whether this arrangement violated federal election law hinges on whether the hush money is properly viewed as a campaign expense or a personal expense. That distinction, in turn, depends on whether Trump was motivated by a desire to promote his election or by a desire to avoid embarrassment and spare his wife’s feelings.
The former hypothesis is plausible, especially given the timing of the payment to Daniels. But proving that allegation beyond a reasonable doubt would have been hard”
…
“Convicting Trump of soliciting an illegal campaign contribution would have required proving that he “knowingly and willfully” violated the Federal Election Campaign Act. Federal prosecutors evidently concluded that they could not meet that requirement. But to violate Section 17-152 of the New York Election Law, the provision on which Bragg is relying for “another crime,” Trump would have had to “conspire” with Cohen to influence an election through “unlawful means,” which suggests he knew the payment to Daniels was illegal.”
…
“The fact that Bragg is relying on an obscure offense that apparently has never been prosecuted speaks volumes about his eagerness to convert the Daniels hush payment into 34 felonies. That strategy will prove “twisty,” Connor said, because “you’re having an underlying crime within an underlying crime to get to that felony.”
If Trump did not recognize the hush payment as “unlawful,” it is hard to see how his “intent” in falsifying business records could have included an intent to conceal “another crime.” And that’s assuming a purported violation of federal campaign finance restrictions counts as “unlawful means” under Section 17-152.”
“Even this Supreme Court, with its 6-3 Republican-appointed supermajority, is unlikely to buy Trump’s argument that former presidents enjoy broad immunity from criminal prosecution. Trump’s lawyers have not even attempted to hide the implications of this argument. When the case was heard by a lower federal court, a judge asked Trump’s lawyer if the former president was immune from prosecution even if he’d ordered “SEAL Team 6 to assassinate a political rival.”
Trump’s lawyer responded that Trump was immune, unless he were first impeached and convicted by the Senate.”
…
“Trump’s goal is to delay his trial for as long as possible — ideally, from his perspective, until after this November’s election.
And in this respect, the Supreme Court has already given him what he wants. So long as this case is sitting before the justices, that trial cannot happen. And the justices have repeatedly refused special prosecutor Jack Smith’s requests to decide this immunity question on an expedited schedule that would ensure that Trump’s criminal trial can still happen before November.
This decision to put Trump’s appeal on the slow track is part of a much larger pattern in this Supreme Court:
The justices do not always need to rule in favor of a conservative party on the merits in order to achieve a conservative result. They can do so simply by manipulating their own calendar.”
“As far as consumer complaints go, of course, there’s nothing wrong with some of the DOJ’s concerns. We might wish that every product we owned was compatible with every other product we owned and that they worked in perfect tandem. We might wish we never had to consider tradeoffs between price, function, design, compatibility, etc.
Where this gets crazy is the federal government saying: Consumers being able to choose whether to use a product is not good enough. We’re going to step in and say that this business has to make a competitor’s products more accessible. It has a legal duty to undermine its own business interests to help outside—and many would argue inferior—products compete.
In the vein of other recent antitrust actions against tech companies, particularly under the Biden administration, the Apple suit relies on an absurd conception of how the law should work. And it’s a conception that could seriously harm innovation, weaken the position of U.S. tech companies, and mess with products many people like.
And many people really, really love Apple products, including iPhones.
The bottom line: Nobody has to use an iPhone, and no developer has to distribute its app through the App Store. There are other ways to communicate, other smartphone options, and other ways to distribute apps (including other ways to distribute apps to iPhone users). That many people still carry iPhones and distribute their apps through the App Store speaks to the fact that many people find the phone’s upsides and the App Store’s upsides stronger than any downsides.”
“If the court continues to deploy their methods of interpretation, Breyer told me, “We will have a Constitution that no one wants.” It’s a remarkable statement from a former Supreme Court justice.
The conflict between the left and right on the court is virtually impossible to bridge. Conservative justices broadly favor a theory of constitutional interpretation known as “originalism,” which purports to interpret the Constitution in accordance with the public meaning of the text when enacted, and a theory of statutory interpretation known as “textualism,” which prioritizes the text over considerations like congressional purpose and practical consequences when interpreting laws passed by Congress. Liberal justices like Breyer had long embraced theories that were flexible in nature — that allowed judges to account for a variety of inputs when answering hard legal questions.
For Breyer, the problem with conservatives’ approach goes beyond the desirability of specific outcomes in areas like abortion, affirmative action or executive power — areas in which the conservative majority has already significantly changed constitutional law. Breyer argues that the conservatives’ theories are inherently fraught, regressive and anti-democratic, and that they are just as prone to mischief and misuse as the more flexible and expansive theories that conservative judges reject.”