@entsocamerica
When I first successfully cultivated the common milkweeds in my flowerbed several years ago, there was a bad orange aphid infestation. Then one day, a bunch of lady beetles came and the balance was restored within days. 💪🐞🐞✨💚
I don’t understand why people oft for pesticides, especially if they’re trying to help an insect species.
"The Supreme Court cut the heart and soul out of America with this abominable decision… The defining maxim of America has been that no one is above the law. That can never be said about America again after this decision from the Supreme Court."
"if a Democratic president did commit crimes, the Supreme Court would handle it. This Calvinball Court would find an exception, a loophole, a heretofore hidden penumbra that allows them to clothe in the language of legal authority the real rule: Our side gets to do what it wants, and your side doesn’t."
"So yes, Donald Trump is a profound threat to democracy. But he can’t destroy it without the cooperation of the six conservative justices on the Supreme Court. And they’re already on the case."
"Reactions to the [Supremes' immunity] ruling across the ideological spectrum have been largely negative. Only the far right seems to relish the prospects of an imperial presidency fully untethered from the inconvenient shackles of democratic accountability."
"Faced with the most potent threat to democracy in more than a century, our most revered institution didn't just fail to hold, it aligned itself with the threat."
"Some members of the hushed tones crowd are scolding the court’s critics for using terms like 'dictator' or 'fascism' in response to this ruling, assuring us that of course Trump would never order the assassination of a rival, the arrest of a journalist, or the suppression of dissent."
"If after attempting to overturn the results of a free fair election through fraud, deceit, and force, a majority of voters are willing put the same people back in charge, it’s unreasonable to expect our institutions to continue to hold.
A majority of the Supreme Court has now made clear that if an autocratic regime ever does take power, they have no intention of standing in its way."
"In its extraordinarily disturbing decision earlier this week granting presidents wide-ranging immunity from criminal prosecution, the US supreme court dramatically mis-weighed a competing set of risks to our constitutional democracy."
"On the one side of the scale, the court placed the possibility that a future rogue prosecutor will seek to settle political scores by indicting a former president for 'insufficiently enforcing … environmental laws.'"
"On the other side of the scale, we can place the possibility that a former president, having previously been charged with subverting the peaceful succession of power, returns to the White House, where he demands the prosecution of all those who tried to hold him to account."
"America’s first revolution was against a king. Republicans want a second revolution to install one. They are threatening violence if they don’t get their way."
The Guardian's assessment (from London) of the current US Supremes:
"This is a court for the rich and powerful, and it is making them more so. The founders intended the supreme court to be part of the solution to the tyranny of European kings. Mr Trump, and the court’s conservative justices, have made it part of the problem."
"The Roberts supermajority has taken a radical course where the judiciary is increasingly the final arbiter not just on the law but on the facts, the interpretation of those facts, the application of those facts in given situations, and the technical, scientific, and professional implications of those facts in the real world.
"By issuing this decision regarding presidential immunity, the conservative majority of the Supreme Court virtually guarantees that an unscrupulous politician who ascends to the presidency can take nearly any outlandish and illegal action and not face any consequences."
If the political history of this nation has any lesson to teach us right now it is this: The lack of accountability for high crimes and misdemeanors only compounds the original harm and ensures injustices in the future.
"No one should be above the law, especially the President of the United States."
"The Court’s opinion presents an absurd paradox that defeats the purpose of a constitutional democracy governed by the rule of law. It has little basis in the Constitution or in the words of the Founders. It is the outcome that most benefits the Court’s preferred presidential candidate, while allowing the justices to live with themselves for defacing beyond recognition the Constitution and the concept of democratic self-determination."
"Tellingly, Chief Justice John Roberts’ majority opinion spends not a moment condemning the violence in the Capitol on Jan. 6 or saying how awful the allegations against Trump are if true, or even celebrating peaceful transitions of power and reaffirming American democracy."
Nick Anderson's commentary on the "Supreme" Court ruling giving Convicted Felon Donald Trump now King Donald I absolute immunity from the law as long as he does his dirt while claiming it's "official."
"This decision is the most reckless and dangerous decision ever issued by the U.S. Supreme Court, because it utterly transforms our country and the rule of law into one that’s optional for whoever is the president of the United States. This decision is not a legitimate decision, in my view."
"If the president under criminal indictment had not been a criminal, then the Court would not have invented Constitutional law to protect him.
Instead, it is only because Trump is an actual criminal that SCOTUS felt the need to create such an expansive regime of legal immunity for the chief executive."
"Yesterday’s immunity decision by the Supreme Court took a sledgehammer to the constitutional foundation of American democracy and eviscerated the rule of law. It will, in my view, go down in the annals of wretched Supreme Court decisions alongside Dred Scott, Plessy v. Ferguson, and Korematsu. It makes Bush v. Gore look like a piker."
"The door is now wide open to the kinds of fascism and authoritarianism we spent much of the 20th century and hundreds of thousands of American lives combatting overseas. Many of you will be skeptical of this. I will take no joy in being right about this. You can wait and see, but don’t wait too long. It may already be too late."
"I can tell you, I've never seen language like this in a Supreme Court opinion or dissent. There is something really dangerous going on here, and something that is really threatening the entire basis of our constitution and separation of powers."
"Deciding with what new tools of abuse and impunity to arm the presidency just as such a man [as Trump] is on the verge of its accession is a decision, not an ineluctable deduction from history and text and case law.
It is a decision of surpassing recklessness in dangerous times."