"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."
@wdlindsy We never could say "no one is above the law" in the US with a straight face. Now it's just been made official.
Soon they'll make another disastrous decision that explicitly protects corporations so that what's on the books matches our lives experience even more closely.
@liquor_american We said it as a core principle knowing, if we had any self-awareness, that the law has always been applied very unequally, depending on race, economic status, gender, and so on.
"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."
@nicholas Yes, lots of choose to live in comas, don't we? Maybe the gotcha games a lot of us love to play on social media make us comatose as in intellectually starved.
"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."
@wdlindsy The far right= 1 way anti-American hypocrites. They only love it if they perceive political advantage and they don’t care it’s a double edge sword because in their myopic view, they’ll never be the ones getting cut.
"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."
"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."
I’ve not seen any #monarch#butterflies so far this spring but they’ve obviously been here. Spotted these two monarch #caterpillars yesterday on the one milkweed in my front #garden, a survivor that has regrown after dying back to the soil following our big winter freeze. Hope these make it to adulthood, the ones I saw last year disappeared before pupating.
@Trilobyter It's a (very) zoomed cell phone image, but there's a Monarch in the center. There were three of them bopping around this community garden when I was there on Sunday.