This "the courts are slow-walking Trump's immunity claim" narrative (for the most part coming from non-lawyers who don't understand anything about the system) is truly pissing me off. So here's the real story. 1/
President Trump was indicted last August. Notably that's the biggest slow walk of all- an August 2023 indictment for a January 2021 alleged crime, and 10 months after Jack Smith was appointed. But Smith is a saint among men and "on our team", so he cannot be criticized. 2/
President Trump's motion to dismiss was filed on September 29, less than TWO MONTHS after the case commenced. Judge Chutkan, who, again, gets no criticism because she's on the right "team", decided it on December 1, a two month delay. 3/
Nonetheless, to be clear, Judge Chutkan deserves no criticism for this. Two months from filing to decision on a motion to dismiss in federal court is VERY FAST. Usually you are looking at six months or more. This case was expedited. 4/
Donald Trump had a right, under law, to appeal this ruling to the Court of Appeals and to stay the trial court proceedings while he did it. You may not like this rule, but it applies to ANYONE raising an immunity defense, not just Donald Trump. 5/
President Trump took his appeal and the court concluded briefing in JUST ONE MONTH, and then held oral argument on January 9 and decided the case February 6. This is LIGHTNING FAST. Most CoA cases take about a year to a year and half between commencement and conclusion. 6/
Further, the DC Circuit itself broke a norm to speed up the case further, and NOBODY criticized it for breaking this norm. It's a technical issue, but the "mandate" is the date on which a court of appeals judgment goes into effect. 7/
In a normal case, you get 15 days to petition the court to rehear the case (in case some error was made) or to suggest that the full court, rather than a 3 judge panel, hear the case, and then the decision takes effect 7 days after that. 8/
The DC Circuit panel took those 22 days away from President Trump. It did so even though we have no idea if the full DC Circuit actually might have wanted to hear the case. Doesn't matter, the panel said, we won't let you. The decision takes effect immediately. 9/
So President Trump was forced to file immediately for US Supreme Court review. Even here, his time was cut. Normally you get 3 months to file a petition to the Supreme Court. The DC Circuit gave President Trump A WEEK. Again, enormous speed. 10/
President Trump filed his application for SCOTUS to take the case on February 12. SCOTUS decided within just SIXTEEN DAYS to grant the application.
And then SCOTUS set a HIGHLY expedited briefing schedule. 11/
Normally, a case that is taken by the Supreme Court on February 28 will be briefed through the spring and summer, heard in October when the new term starts, and decided the following January or so. 12/
But SCOTUS held all briefing will be done by APRIL and it will be orally argued the week of 4/22. That sets this up for decision in early May. A motion that was filed in September goes through all three levels of the federal court system and gets decided by May. That's FAST! 13/
Want to know what regular order looks like? Well, Judge Chutkan takes 6 months to rule on the motion to dismiss, and rules on it the last week of March 2024. The DC Circuit appeal takes a year and is decided in March 2025. Throw on another month for the en banc denial. 14/
Trump petitions for certiorari in Spring 2025 and his petition is granted and the case is briefed in the summer and early fall and is argued in November 2025. It is decided in March 2026. That's what regular order is. This case has been expedited by ALMOST 2 YEARS TOTAL. 15/
And if you want to argue that a 5/24 decision is still too late, well, SCOTUS only controls the last 3 months of that delay. The rest of it? Blame the liberal Judge Chutkan and DC Circuit and ESPECIALLY the DOJ, who DIDN'T BRING THIS CASE FOR 2 1/2 YEARS! 16/
Seriously the court system took almost 2 years off a case that DOJ took 2 1/2 years to bring. The Supreme Court itself took 8 months off of the case. And we're blaming the Supreme Court? This is utterly wrong. 17/
The reality is once the DOJ decided it would take 2 1/2 years to bring January 6 charges, this goose was cooked. And that is the case even though the federal courts, including SCOTUS, tried to pull it out of the oven quicker at the end. End/
@MarkGattozzi @ARozenshtein 2. SCOTUS taking the case in December would have been extraordinary. SCOTUS rarely jumps in before a Court of Appeals has acted, and Jack Smith's argument that they should have was actually a lot weaker than Trump's immunity argument. It was never happening.
@MarkGattozzi @ARozenshtein 3. Sat for weeks? They decided the cert petition 16 days after receiving it, which again is lightning fast by SCOTUS standards.
@MarkGattozzi @ARozenshtein (It allowed Justice Jackson to sit on the affirmative action case.)
Also at least 6 cert before judgment cases were grant vacate and remand cases where court corrected some procedural error, not merits cases.
@MarkGattozzi @ARozenshtein As far as I know this would have been only the 5th case of its kind to jump the Court of Appeals in the last 20 years or so had they granted cert before judgment.
@MarkGattozzi @ARozenshtein (But perhaps you know more about appellate practice than I do. :) )
@SirCanuckles TBC I don't think that. I think 2 months is fine.
@InquisitiveUrsa See also the immigration judges issue which slows up asylum processing. We just don't have enough judicial officers at multiple points in the system.
@mo_sabet @MarkGattozzi @ARozenshtein It's at the point where I've answered most of the talking points. :)
@mo_sabet @MarkGattozzi @ARozenshtein And I'm not saying you do this but there's a "they do this all the time" sort of talking point being thrown around and no, even now, they really don't do it all the time. It's very rare.
@reedtcampbell Whereas here, this is not a discovery issue or grinding ongoing investigations to a halt. It's just a legal issue about whether there can be a trial.
@Trillest110 @Perl_of_Wisdom @ChiCyph80 @MarkGattozzi @ARozenshtein There's a reason Finley Peter Dunne's joke about SCOTUS following the election returns has so much bite. You don't want courts thinking about this shit, let alone trying to influence the results of elections (which of course is the real goal here).
@Trillest110 @Perl_of_Wisdom @ChiCyph80 @MarkGattozzi @ARozenshtein I definitely want the official rule to be "the election is legally irrelevant".
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I am going to try and add some value here, in light of the pushback I got for saying Obergefell v. Hodges is safe.
I am going to talk about "how to predict what SCOTUS will do in the future in politically salient cases".
Obviously, like all predictions, nothing will be 100%.
But the basic idea is "how do you actually gain some notion of what the Supreme Court is likely to do?".
Or another way of putting it is "how do we know which cases are safe and which ones are on the chopping block?".
And that latter way is a nice way of stating the question.
Because the basic type of discourse I am setting this up AGAINST is the sort of thing that says the Supreme Court is simply going to overturn every liberal precedent and enact the fever dreams of the far right. That has not happened and is not going to happen.
Folks, the reason i think Lia Thomas is a bad actor goes back to 2022. The first reporting about this had nothing to do with Riley Gaines, who swam for Kentucky and didn't meet Thomas until the nationals.
That original January 2022 story was based on extensive reporting about what Thomas' teammates were saying. And it paints a very stark picture of a person, Thomas, who doesn't give a hoot about the fears or concerns of c i s women and only cares about herself.
First of all the Post reported that Thomas was exposing her penis to other swimmers. Again, this is long before Gaines. This reporting has also now been confirmed by on the record statements. The Post got this 100% right and nobody can discourse lawyer their way out of this.
The real, nonpartisan lesson of Trump v. DVD, the South Sudan deportation case, is that the Convention Against Torture system is really based on the assumption that people are going to be deported back to their homes. And it doesn't work well on third country deportations.
With respect to being deported back to your home, the system works well. You get a notice of deportation because you are illegally here, and you bring in witnesses and testimony and documents and show that you will be targeted for official torture if you are sent back home.
So, for instance, the paradigm type of CAT claim is let's say you have an undocumented migrant from China, and he shows that he left China because he was a political dissident and that if he is sent back to his home, he is likely to be arrested and tortured by the authorities.
I will say one other thing on my mind about this Mamdani stuff, which is despite the Left's pose of being very class conscious, they really do not understand (or maybe do not care) about the connection between gaming affirmative action and similar systems, and class privilege.
I have said this before, that I knew some people who gamed affirmative action back in the day. People who had always called themselves white but had distant relatives who were HIspanic or Black and when college or job applications came around discovered the One Drop Rule.
The thing is, the people who did this all grew up rich and white in Burbank.
And this is not an accident. Pre-Trump, when vaccine skeptics were mostly on the Left? The zip codes with the highest vaccine skepticism were in West Los Angeles. Parents figured they could free ride.
Remember this? Justice Thomas getting mad at the rest of the Court for applying rules that he, in complete vanity opinions, performatively states he is too pure to believe in?
In MacRae v. Mattos, he is outraged about what he contends are massive, ongoing violations of free speech of public employees going on. They are losing their jobs because they speak on controversial topics. Sounds bad.
But now go to footnote 2. It turns out that in one of his onanistic dissents that he writes for no legitimate reason and which will never become law, he took the position that-- public employees have no First Amendment rights at all!
OK, here's my comprehensive Mahmoud thread. It's a terrible decision.
First, it creates massive privileges for religious objectors to sexual content, while leaving secular parents with the same objections out in the cold.
It flouts the rules of evidence and treats completely hypothetical classroom discussions as sufficient to trigger a free exercise violation and a court injunction.
It extends far beyond sex and gender and creates a constitutional right to object to any classroom instruction on conceivably any subject, and interferes with schools' ability to educate on important subject matters.