watching competent adults confront the untrammeled lunacy of Trumpworld is almost as good as the Thanksgiving leftovers I'm enjoying while reading today's 3rd Circuit smackdown
"godspeed & good luck with that cert petition, kids"
tens of millions of Americans may spend the rest of their lives believing that Trump was cheated out of a second term simply bc Trump's legal team has been publicly saying that everywhere--well, everywhere but in any actual court, anyway
I'm not saying this appeal would have gotten much further with a competent attorney who had actually seen the inside of an appeals court in the past 30 years, but I am saying that it would not have ever been this funny
anyway, this has largely been lost in the reporting but as the 3rd Circuit decision repeatedly reminds us here this never about any of the merits of #StoptheSteal so much as Rudy & Trump's "elite strike force" trying to scale a legal Everest of their own horseshit & buffoonery
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
I chose an extremely unprofitable field of law in which I knew that I might not be able to fully repay my student loans for decades (if at all). I now drive a $900 car, got lucky on a great mortgage, buy 1 pair of shoes/yr... and am still only paying down interest on my loans.
AFAIK I don't have many lawyers who make more than $100K in my immediate circles, & frankly those who do typically aren't working with the ppl who most need counsel. Canceling a chunk of our debt would be one of the best things this country could do for free/low-cost legal aid
all I'm really trying to say here is that I am happy to provide @michaelbd with fifteen years of my student loan statements on the entirely reasonable condition that he agrees to shove every one of them all the way up his ass
SOTOMAYOR: may I interest you in another copy of the opinion I already wrote on this 2 yrs ago
GORSUCH: what she said
KAGAN: can I maybe draw you a diagram, or
BREYER: how about following the law as written, have you tried that
KAVANAUGH: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Kavanugh's position in non-legal terms:
It's totally fine for a restaurant to give you 1/2 your bill at the table and send the other 1/2 along to your last known address at some point in the indeterminate future while also taking you to small claims court for the whole amount
Vital reading from @DLind on Biden's most immediate immigration quandary. IMO ending #MPP & associated policies is already what Gitmo was for Obama: an easy promise to do the right thing @ enormous political cost w/no real political benefit
Restoring and fully supporting #asylum at the southern border for the victims of our empire *is* the right thing, and we should accept nothing less. We just need to be real, as @DLind is here, re: just how politically and practically fraught this is. It's a whole lot of fraught.
To be absolutely clear, this is me committing to doing whatever I can to hold him to it and encouraging you to do the same. The war on asylum via #MPP/#safethirdcountry agmts is literally murderous, as bad as Trump policy got. It all has to go on Day 1--no delays, no excuses.
Every election for more than a decade now I have slipped into #Boston's Ward 1 Precinct 1 (my #EastBoston polling station) as they're closing up just to watch the numbers come in.
This is something any citizen can do. In some states, you could go do it tonight!
A lot to unpack here, but what I've mostly learned from reading these so far is that I still have the capacity to be astonished. Not that they knew that the single worst Trump immigration initiative (#MPP) was bad--we all knew that--but that they would put any of this in writing
I mean a "full and fair" asylum system is literally the definition of a "safe third country." That's it! That's all it requires. We all knew none of the countries they were forcing into these agreements had one, but...
Here's the clearest example of "the cruelty is the point" I've seen from this boundlessly cruel govt.
They knew that conditions were so dangerous that these refugees would leave under any circumstances--all while insisting that most of their asylum claims were fraudulent.
Proud to say that I spent my Election Day winning an #asylum claim for exactly the kind of applicant the Trump administration has spent the past four years trying to keep from winning asylum, based on legal grounds they have spent the past 4 yrs years trying to eliminate.
For immigration advocates--and, far more importantly, the ppl we serve--the past four yrs have been an endless, exhausting, all-consuming nightmare of arbitrary administrative cruelty and violence. Much better lawyers than I have defended every inch, winning far more than not.
4 yrs ago, thousands of young ppl watched this country vote in the worst of us for the explicit purpose of doing violence to the most vulnerable. Many of them have just passed the bar, fresh reinforcements in a generational battle against institutional racism & xenophobia.