Great, now I get to go vote for the same dude in November. Clearly there’s no other system that would solve this.
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noze from 22
good to see you here
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So Sondland’s defense is gonna be “I knew it was probably (illegal) quid pro quo, but I did it anyway and tried to cover it up.” Seems bad, but all the criminals in this admin get away anyway so 
A little concerned also that the Post story is based on a single anonymous source. I trust them (they didn’t fall for Project Veritas) but I hope this isn’t a thing where somebody lied to them about what Sondland would say, so they can muddy the waters after his testimony is like “No quid pro quo. Total exoneration” and say look the Fake News was trying to get Trump again.
Trump already got himself
car insurance lol
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Wait, again? Is this an actual talking point they’re going with?
Yes, car insurance is insanely high here. Obviously nothing these morons offer up will do anything about it.
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his political strategy has to be like, stephen miller googling, “biggest yearly expenses working man ohio” and handing trump a list of things he’s going to say he’s going to make better. that’s how we end up with this and $20/year health insurance, if you’re young, and when you’re 70 they give it back to you in one lump sum.
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Was driving across Louisiana last week and at least half the billboards were for personal injury lawyers. Was pretty comical, had several law firms quoting Bible versuses about punishing the mighty (like big rigs!) on behalf of the weak.
I would guess that whoever is in charge of translating the gibberish into plausible policy is pushing tort reform.
Didn’t Edwards win because Jindal ruined the state? So the strategy is to point out whatever Edwards didn’t fix and hope enough voters have goldfish brains who will put a Republican back in office? Good plan tbh.
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Sounds like the standard Republican strategy
It would be funny if it wasn’t so damn damn fucking accurate
Lol unskewing the polls is going to be big again
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and he got owned by it. You were the most powerful person in the world for 8 years and then we got trump. What a great use of your overwhelming mandate.
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First, you need to understand that the Barr quote is exactly what Millhiser is talking about, though the quote was made after the podcast. You also need to understand that Lenord Leo of the Federalist Society is an extreme Catholic who believes God’s law (as interpreted by extreme catholics, not the current wishy-washy pope), like Scalia, and Barr, and Alito, and Gorsuch (who seems somewhat Episcopalian but graduated from Georgetown Prep Jesuit Academy two years after Kavanaugh), and in a slightly weirder way Thomas (who has bounced around different extreme versions of Christianity since he was a kid and who was also in religious schools before college and attended Catholic seminar for a time).
What all of these “smart” people have in common is that they are extremists who believe in Natural Law Natural law - Wikipedia, i.e., God’s law, is the True source of legal and natural order in the world. In fact, Gorsuch earned his “gentleman’s” PhD at Oxford under the guidance of John Finnis John Finnis - Wikipedia, one of the few big shot legal scholars with a strongly favorable orientation toward Natural Law. So, basically what you have on the jurisprudential Right is a bunch of religious extremists that basically form a cabal. They are good, like a doctrinaire Marxists, at rationalizing their agenda, but Truth and accuracy are secondary considerations to The Mission. They identify “worthy” students, get them good clerkships with conservative judges, which gets them significant legal jobs in conservative administrations, which gets them high-level government contacts for future judgeships and work for conservative organizations and firms like Jones Day. Gorsuch’s mom was a cabinet secretary for Reagan. These guys know more about getting federal judgeships before they entered law school than I knew when I graduated.
For example, Pat Cipollone, the current White House counsel who signed the disgraceful 8 page “you have no right to impeach” letter last week, attended Covington Catholic High School (where the bros who were harassing the Indian on the mall a few months ago), then attended Fordham University for undergrad (a middling Catholic college in NY, where the idle children of the rich mix with middle class strivers), and then somehow did his JD at the University of Chicago. He then clearked for a conservative appeals court judge and was then somehow assistant to Attorney General William P. Barr from 1992–1993, two years out of law school. Now, this is not what we in the law world regard as a typical career path–it looks like someone being carried along by particular forces. Kavanaugh’s career trajectory is similar, he worked as a conservative oppo lawyer in the 90s, worked on Bush v. Gore, and then had cushy Bush administration jobs until he was appointed to the DC Circuit.
Now, as far as these people being “smart”. Well, I went to a big public CA university, and then to an elite graduate philosophy program, and then to a semi-“elite” law school (Berkeley). I know smart people, close friends of mine are professors in tier 1 law and philosophy departments. I’ve studied under “big name” philosophers, scientists, and law professors. I’ve had seminars and dinners with “elite” judges and lawyers, conservative and not, and none of the Kavanaugh’s, Alito’s, Gorsuch’s, etc. would stand out as above average at the kind of places I’ve attended. They probably buckled down, did the reading, understood most of it, did their work, turned it in on time, and got a pass to the next level in the process, but they are not smart peoples’ idea of smart.
What they are is 1) well organized and 2) convinced they are correct. The “Talking Feds” podcast of last week asked some reporters (who, except for a select few, like Yglesias, are not capable of evaluating the “smartness” of most lawyers or judges or academics), noted that Barr (from his exit interview in the 90s when he thought he was done with government work) is utterly convinced of his own rightness and brilliance, while I would consider him a second rate thinker with an entrenched world view that guides his understanding and interpretation of legal doctrine, which most legal scholars and academics regard as incoherent. However, people like Barr rarely engage in the “real word” of academics. They get to chose their bubble and damn the secularists as heathens. That’s one reason I like it when genuine conservative big shots, like George Conway and Charles Fried, denounce people like Cipollone and Barr. They are conservative, but they come to their views more or less legitimately. People like me or most law professors may disagree with them, but we are more or less playing the same game and believe in certain rules of evidence and justification, rules that Barr and Cipollone refuse to be governed by.
So, I do not think they are smart in the way Millhiser claims they are. I believe they are organized and dedicated to particular ends (and they are certainly not dumb), which makes them much more effective than, say, the kind of people Obama hired (mainly intellectuals with a broad range of views and no particular agenda), but do not mistake their effectiveness for the quality of their views.
A brief note of optimism. In the legal and academic world these people are freaks. Elite law schools are now around 60% female. It’s very hard to find conservatives, particularly among the better students. Religious approaches to law and things like “natural law” are regarded as a joke. Extreme Chicago School economics has largely been discredited in the economics profession, etc. However, whatever deal with the devil Trump made (someday we will find out) to only appoint 100% federalist society approved judges has given this cabal unusual power at a time when they could have been made nearly extinct. That will still happen, but it may take 20 years more than it otherwise would have.
Also, the Federalist society is much more extreme than it was even 20-30 years ago, and has now basically discredited itself. See:
https://twitter.com/gtconway3d/status/1182725900892327937
By the way, here are Ian Millheiser’s credentials. If he were a staunch conservative, he’d probably already have a seat on a federal appellate court. There are a lot more Ian Millheiser’s than Brett Kavanaughs. “Ian Millhiser is a senior correspondent at Vox, where he focuses on the Supreme Court, the Constitution, and the decline of liberal democracy in the United States. Before joining Vox, Ian was a columnist at ThinkProgress. Among other things, he clerked for Judge Eric L. Clay of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit and served as a Teach For America corps member in the Mississippi Delta. He received a B.A. in philosophy from Kenyon College and a J.D., magna cum laude, from Duke University, where he served as senior note editor on the Duke Law Journal and was elected to the Order of the Coif. He is the author of Injustices: The Supreme Court’s History of Comforting the Comfortable and Afflicting the Afflicted.”
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