There's only two routes to getting this undone. One is a constitutional amendment, the other is for the Court to get several justices who are eager to overturn this decision, and then bring a case to trial specifically to address this issue.

I can't think of an amendment that would likely have a broader appeal than one that says presidents aren't kings and aren't above the law. But even so, I can't see it getting passed any time soon, given the overwhelming bipartisan support it would need. Personally, I'd like to see this done anyway, if only so that we could also include a provision stating that a president can't pardon himself, and can't pardon crimes that he ordered.

By comparison, it seems a lot easier to change the balance on the court, since one way or another it will be changed over time. And assuming we reach a point where we can be confident that the majority is ready to completely erase this ruling, then you just need to bring a case against a former president.

One could wait for such a case to arise organically, but that's leaving a lot to chance. You need a former president to have allegedly committed a crime, you need a evidence enough to bring a case, you need to go through the appeals process, they need to try to use presidential immunity, and then it needs to be taken up by the Supreme Court. Any number of things could go wrong, and there could be political fallout. If there's a serious enough situation that requires this, by all means, go after them and make this an issue in the case so that it has to get appealed. Worst case scenario, they get away with something they would have gotten away with anyway.

Personally, if I were president and had shifted the balance of the court back to one that respects the rule of law, I'd probably tell the justice department to bring a case against me, appeal to the Supreme Court, ask that they expedite the appeal, and then they can completely reverse this insane precedent. It would all be contrived, but that's hardly anything new. I would make sure that anyone I appointed to the Court was down with a plan like this, If they won't do that much to safeguard the country, the constitution, and rule of law, they can't be trusted with the responsibility of being on the Supreme Court.

No one's trying to put terraforming Venus into next year's budget. This is all theoretical talk about what would be possible to do some day.

The cost of terraforming Venus would be large, but the benefits of having a second habitable planet are also quite large. Even ignoring the benefits of having more land and resources, there's also the just the fact that being on two planets means we can potentially survive as a species if something happens to one of them.

It would also have to be heavily automated, and only really becomes realistic once you have machines that are essentially self-sufficient at which point the concept of "cost" becomes a lot fuzzier. It would mean dedicating resources, but you aren't paying an army of self-replicating robots.

However, the sheer scale of the task means that the benefits would only be seen many generations later. It would require extreme efficiency and long term planning with little tolerance for error. The kind of people who would make such an investment are unlikely to just hand the money over to the shadiest billionaire they can find. And it would be difficult to keep a scam going if they need to show continual progress decade after decade.

Maybe we'll never see enough progress to overcome the kind of greed and short term thinking that would doom a huge, world-altering endeavor like this. But if that's the case, it's more likely that we'd just never try. All the more reason to keep pointing out what could be instead of just accepting the shittiness that we see today.

I'm on a keto diet right now, and while keto bread is an amazing innovation that's made it much easier than the last time I did this, I have to keep that shit in the freezer because it seems to get moldy a lot faster than normal bread, often well before the expiration date.

Why not both?

Although Mars is still a terrible candidate for terraforming. It's at the outer edge of the goldilocks zone, and even if you can solve the temperature, radiation, and atmosphere issues to create a viable ecosystem, it's still going to cause problems for humans thanks to the low gravity.

Venus on the other hand could realistically function as a second earth if we clean up the atmosphere.

Farscape is a very soft sci-fi, but it has a mostly consistent world that mostly follows its internal logic. It has muppet aliens and the supernatural along side more traditional TV space tropes, but the narrative makes sense as presented, and it doesn't do much to hurt your suspension of disbelief.

Doctor Who is the opposite of consistent. It makes shit up as it goes along and isn't even consistent in the kind of bullshit it's throwing at you. It can be tropey nonsense, comedy overriding reality, fairy tale reasoning that breaks down when you try to think about it to much, or whatever other idiocy it feels like being today. Instead of building a world that you can understand, it basically just says "don't worry about it, assume we already did the boring set up stuff, and just run with the fact that plastic can be alive and chasing after people because that's what we're doing this week."

Absolutely. We can't tolerate that kind shitty behavior and inappropriate language. Thanks for keeping it classy [email protected]

I hope he gets on a private jet with 5 other justices and some of his billionaire buddies for a trip to some tropical resort only for the plane to get shot down through a president's official act suddenly go down, totally unexpectedly.

The ruling wasn't just that you can't charge the president with crimes related official acts. It also said that you can't use official acts as evidence. Since the case included evidence from the time when Trump was president, they want it thrown out because apparently that shouldn't be admissible because fuck you.

Crazy that we didn't have this already.

Also, how long before a Texas Judge overrules it thanks to Chevron being overturned?

There are also some Republicans that will state they don’t like the ruling but are also too afraid of the loss of their seat to actually do anything for the country the swore to protect.

Any Republican that supports impeaching a right wing Supreme Court justice (let alone 6 of them) is going to be committing career suicide. It would be handing vacancies to the Democrats to fill, and potentially locking in a left leaning court for decades.

Now, obviously they should be able to put the good of the country and the rule of law above things like partisan politics and their prospects for re-election. But we've already had several rounds of purges on the right that have wiped out anyone with principles or conscience since those things get in the way of being blindly loyal to Trump.

The next steps would be ordering the justice department to prosecute him, going to court, and appealing all the way to the new Supreme Court so they can overturn the precedent. Which would require either moving very quickly or preventing the other side from taking power, one way or the other.

Of course, by then pandora's box is open. As long as someone is willing to follow those kinds of orders, nothing would prevent the next president from doing the same thing. It's a slippery slope not unlike the one that caused Rome to go from being a republic that viewed regicide as a fundamental virtue to an empire that would persecute groups for denying the divinity of the emperor.

This decision so blatantly ignores the constitution, history, tradition, case law, and all available evidence, that I have to question why they even bothered writing such a long decision. They might as well have just said "Fuck it, we say Trump is immune. Eat shit America, we can do whatever we want."

I had felt the same way, until they ruled that partisan gerrymandering is constitutionally protected, that racial gerrymandering can only be unconstitutional if it doesn't provide a partisan advantage to one side, and that the court must assume that legislators are acting in good faith because their need to not be embarrassed outweighs the constitutional rights of the people and the need for honest elections. I read that decision and said "shit, they're gonna rule that Trump's immune."

I never thought the Court would put out a decision that could rival Dred Scott for worst in history, but these asshole's have put out multiple contenders for that title in a single term.

Fucking insanity.

Civil immunity makes sense because anyone can sue anyone for anything at anytime, and allowing people to sue the president for official acts would leave him vulnerable to a nonstop barrage of lawsuits. Crime doesn't work that way. The only way the president should be facing criminal prosecution is if he's breaking the fucking law. That's kind of the opposite of what the president is supposed to be doing. You know, faithfully executing the laws and all that. If a presidential action violates the law, it can't really have the legitimacy that's being presumed for all official acts here, because by definition it violates his official duties under the constitution.

Now, I would never suggest that a sitting president order the unlawful detention or summary execution of political opponents and/or corrupt justices. But I might suggest that, in the interest of national security, that he order intelligence agencies to troll through communications records, financial records, etc. to search for signs of treason and corruption at the hands of foreign powers. And if that search should happen to find evidence of any kind of illegal activity among his political opponents or on the Court, well...

France on Sunday took a step closer to delivering what was once seen as an unthinkable nightmare: a far-right government taking power in Paris for the first time.

Well... the first time in a while. And just as the last time was exiting living memory.

I'd vote for ToS era Pike over Trump. I'd vote for a candidate who only communicates via ouija board over Trump. I'd vote to not have a president for 4 years before I'd vote for Trump.

It's crazy that Trump can get convicted of fraud, be found liable for sexual assault, promise to abuse presidential power to get revenge against those who cross him, actively undermine both national and global security, promise to round up millions and put them into camps, attempt to overthrow the election and refuse to not try it again, and so on, and his side is still so loyal they'll wear solidarity diapers for him.

They need a format that breaks the debate up into sections and actually includes fact checking, and a cross examination after each section. Have a team scrambling to find the records, studies, video clips and other evidence that they can bring up. Someone who is mostly honest gets lay ups and affirmation. Someone who lies constantly gets called out and put on the defensive.

Wouldn't happen of course. Even if the hosts were down to have someone take on a more adversarial role, Trump would never agree to something that actually holds him accountable for spewing nothing but bullshit. It's his entire strategy, if he can't sell snake oil he has nothing to sell at all.

This means that anyone who doesn't like a particular rule or regulation can pick a venue with a friendly judge, challenge it in court, and likely get the outcome they want. Even if judge shopping wasn't a major problem right now, this would still be a bad idea. The reason Chevron told judges to defer to agencies in matters where the interpretation is ambiguous is because those agencies have the experience and and expertise to understand the issues involved far better than a judge who has to try to master the subject from inside the courtroom.

This is all the more crazy in light of the recent racial gerrymandering decision, where Alito not only ignored the deference that appeals courts are supposed to show to trial courts (where the case is actually experienced and not just summed up in a brief) but then says that the judicial branch must defer to the legislators when they claim that they are being fair. So judges can just override the executive branch in subjects that they likely do not understand, but they can't actually contradict the legislature over something like whether a policy is violating someone's constitutional rights, despite that being one of their core functions for the past couple of centuries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilbert's_paradox_of_the_Grand_Hotel

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_theseus

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sisyphus

Well, for starters, it's over 50 grand for the base vehicle, and that's before adding the bed. And it's bigger than what I'm looking for.

What I want is something more like an electric version of the Ford Maverick, but one that adds to the bed length by switching to a regular or extended cab, and by moving the cab forward a bit since we no longer need to accommodate an engine. I want different proportions, but the same basic size and price (obviously making it electric likely comes with a price increase, but that shouldn't be enough to double it).