breaking: SCOTUS rules Donald Trump has ‘absolute immunity’ for ‘official acts’

ugh

BREAKING:

"Under our constitutional structure of separated powers, the nature of Presidential power entitles a former President to absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for actions within his conclusive and preclusive constitutional authority. And he is entitled to at least presumptive immunity from prosecution for all his official acts. There is no immunity for unofficial acts."

immunity for official acts, no immunity for unofficial acts. okay, so what does that mean for Donny’s Big Election Interference Fuckery trial?

“The Court accordingly remands to the District Court to determine in the first instance whether Trump’s conduct in this area qualifies as official or unofficial.”

fucking SCOTUS. after delaying making a ruling until the very last second, they kicked the can down the road. they dropped everything back into Judge Chutkan’s lap and said here, you figure it out.

this is why we can’t have nice things.

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sigh. now back to the post I had just finished writing when the news came down.

all eyes have been on Joe Biden lately, but let’s not forget that Republicans are evil, and they never stop working overtime to make life worse for everybody but their plutocrat overlords.

North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum played a vigorous round of Are You Willing To Abase Yourself Enough To Be Trump’s Veep Pick on Meet The Press this weekend.

Kristin Welker: “Donald Trump challenged the election results. he had a right to do that. and yet, Hillary Clinton and Al Gore conceded. Donald Trump has yet to concede. is that not undemocratic, particularly for someone who is running to be the leader of this country and the free world again?”

Doug Burgum: “Donald Trump, at the end of his term on January 20th, left the White House. we had a smooth transition, and I think it’s fair—”

Welker: “January 6th wasn’t exactly a smooth transition, Governor.”

Burgum: “well I think we have to say there was a smooth transition, and everybody in both parties will challenge elections if they don’t think they’re fair. we don’t have on election in America. there’s over thirty-one hundred counties and each of those counties have different rules. in 2020, of course, with covid, there was a myriad set of rules and regulations that we had never seen before, and so of course going in 2024 I think both parties are going to be very focused on it, and I think this is a— the idea that this is a threat to democracy, as a governor in North Dakota, I’ve been living under what I call the Biden dictatorship, because of all the rules and regulations now. thank goodness for the Supreme Court that came out on Friday with the Chevron ruling, because now maybe we can put a stop to agencies creating laws that don’t come from Congress.”

good fucking lord, Burgum is all over the map here with the nonsensical word salad.

let’s start with Words, What Do They Even Mean? “I’ve been living under what I call the Biden dictatorship.” does Doug cite any example of this alleged dictatorial behavior? no, he does not. what Doug does do is blather on about SCOTUS shitcanning the Chevron doctrine — which is actually super fucking disastrous from a We The People standpoint, because it takes regulatory power out of the hands of government agencies and gives it instead to far-right ideologue judges like Matthew Kacsmaryk.

here’s Joyce Vance to break this shit down.

So now, it’s up to the courts. Want to know if you can use the abortion drug mifepristone? Despite studies confirming the drug is safer than Viagra and Tylenol, that decision is up to Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk in Amarillo, Texas. If he decides the FDA was wrong to approve it, well then, he can deny women access to medication abortion. What happens if a company that builds airplanes objects to an agency decision that requires them to use, say, six bolts to attach an engine to a plane? They can go to court and make their case to a federal judge. And then, that judge—a lawyer, not an engineer—gets to decide how it will work. The arbitrary action the court expresses concern agencies might take is replaced by arbitrary action from far less qualified federal judges—possibly shopped for in the infamous one-judge-divisions like the one that gave us the mifepristone case. Do you feel less safe suddenly?

now let’s turn to this “smooth transition” horse shit, because the gaslighting here is off the fucking charts. let’s set aside the obvious part where Donald Trump sent an armed mob to the Capitol to hang his vice president.

here a thing that got completely lost in the shuffle: Trump didn’t allow his staff to participate in the process where the new incoming administration is brought up to speed.

here’s how that shit went down back in November 2020.

A Trump administration appointee is refusing to sign a letter allowing President-elect Joe Biden’s transition team to formally begin its work this week, in another sign the incumbent president has not acknowledged Biden’s victory and could disrupt the transfer of power.

The administrator of the General Services Administration, the low-profile agency in charge of federal buildings, has a little-known role when a new president is elected: to sign paperwork officially turning over millions of dollars, as well as give access to government officials, office space in agencies and equipment authorized for the taxpayer-funded transition teams of the winner.

so no, Doug, there was no “smooth transition” — not in any sense of the phrase. the incoming Biden administration was kept in the dark about everything, and had to hit the ground running when they walked into the White House on January 20th — all because Donald Trump was a big fucking baby who is too broken inside to accept his humiliating defeat.

speaking of that big fucking baby, here’s Donny from a couple of days ago.

“these guys, you’ll never get ’em done. you’ll never get ’em done. they don’t have any clue. all they know is electric. they want electric army tanks, they want electric planes. what happens if the sun isn’t shining and you’re up in the air? ‘well sir, you know, I told you there’d be problems, sir.’ no, they want electric everything. they want electric boats. the problem, the boats, they don’t float — because the battery is so heavy, it sinks the boat. they say ‘we don’t care, we want ’em anyway.”

where in the ever loving world do you even start with this batcrap lunacy? Donny has no fucking idea what he’s talking about, and every time he starts blithering about electric this and that, he wanders further into the murky fever-swamps.

electric planes? they don’t exist. but in Donny worm-infested cortex, not only are they real but they fall out of the sky when it’s cloudy. hey dummy, that’s solar power, not battery power. nobody is talking about building solar-powered airplanes (which by the way, would have storage batteries in them in case, y’know, it got cloudy).

but don’t bother trying to tell that to Donny. he’s too busy telling some “sir” story about a big strong pilot — biceps rippling, blinded by the tears of gratitude running down his cheeks — explaining that I told you there’d be problems.

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UPDATE: it turns out someone did make a solar-powered plane, and no, it doesn’t fall out of the sky when it’s cloudy. thank you, commenters, for cluing me in.

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and come the fuck on, boats don’t sink because you put something heavy in them. if this were true, there would be no cargo ship industry. fucking duh.

but the MAGA cultists gobble this shit right up, because Donny’s uncle was the Isaac Newton of MIT or some such twaddle.

I’m voting for the guy who understands how science works.

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sorry to spike your blood pressure so early in the day, but you have to see The New York Times’ latest atrocity to believe it.

here we go again. the Times now wants us to wring our hands over how could the Democrats have just let Joe Biden be the candidate?

news flash for the Times: incumbent presidents don’t get primaried. it isn’t done. nobody primaried Obama in 2012. nobody primaried Bush in 2004. ditto Bill Clinton. ditto Ronald Reagan — and he had Alzheimer’s.

in fact, the last president to get a serious primary was Jimmy Carter in 1980, when Teddy Kennedy stepped in to fuck shit up. remind me, how did that work out for the country?

now shut the fuck up, Grey Lady, and find some other shiny object to fixate upon.

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let’s go out on a high note. putrefying meat sack Steve Bannon reports to prison today. ha ha. fuck that guy.

folks, a word on a different subject before I let you go: we’re doing some quarterly fundraising at my other venture, The Smirking Chimp. I’m leery of even mentioning it because if you’re one of the people paying to support my own writing here, you’re already doing god’s work and you’re already doing more than enough to help out. but if you’ve got five dollars that you absolutely wouldn’t miss and you do feel like supporting the Chimp, well, that just makes you twice the hero. the donation link is here, or you can go straight to paypal if you need no further convincing. and if you don’t care to donate, that’s totally cool, too, and we will not speak of this again. in fact, we never had this conversation. thanks for listening and that’s it from me for now.