Liberals Bet They Could Beat Trump With the Law. They Lost.

Nov. 22, 2024 By Samuel Moyn: Mr.Moyn is a professor of law at Yale. (Read this if you have time, this is how sick and really out of touch & insane liberals are, while thinking they are superior. I don’t even know his justification or strategy how liberals can win again,it’s a meandering cry in the wildness of Liberalism.)1/2The BEST KEK I’ve read from the NYT’s, HA

The yearslong effort to vanquish Donald Trump in court was a dismal failure.

For liberals like me, it may be tempting to attribute the collapse of the various cases against him to convenient explanations of process or personnel.The more uncomfortable truth is that our search for political salvation primarily through the law has backfired. To oppose Mr. Trump in his second term,liberals must learn the lesson of this defeat, which is that there is no alternative to persuading our fellow citizens of our beliefs. (Starting out this article with the most inane idea, is the reason why liberals lose. Everyone knows your beliefs and they are and will ever be rejected. Its you arrogance that is your downfall.)

For decades, liberals have made the mistake of prioritizing legal victories over popular ones. It was a method of prolonging the civil rights movement even after its opponents assembled a majority to halt it. Fifty years ago, Richard Nixon’s four Supreme Court appointments — Mr. Trump got only three — shoved the court right and consigned liberals to damage control. While liberals saw breakthroughs afterward for women and L.G.B.T.Q. people, delivering progress more quickly than elections could, they failed to stop the conservative drift of American law.

A few victories made it easy for liberals to forget that the law is just another domain of politics where their enemies enjoy power too. They talked of law as a matter of principle, ignoring that their movement had mainly treated it as a weapon for legalistic political change. Legalism’s greatest theorist, Judith Shklar, defined it as the adoption of an ethics of rule-following and defended it as a useful strategy. Along the way, you claim that the rules are on your side and impose them on your political enemies, and sometimes yourself, because the results are good ones.

The trouble is that they regularly aren’t. In this election, legalistic tactics contributed to Mr. Trump’s victory, helping to produce the popular majority he had never boasted before. For all of Mr. Trump’s misdeeds, prosecuting them was not worth the cost of restoring him to power.

Liberals have rooted their opposition to Mr. Trump in the lawsince his first month in office, when lawyers descended on airports to challenge his racist travel ban. The results were mixed: The ban was blocked, but then replaced with a version designed to earn the Supreme Court’s sign-off.

The legalistic resistance was supercharged in May 2017 when Robert Mueller was appointed as special counsel to investigate Russian election interference and Mr. Trump’s “collusion” with it.But when Mr. Mueller’s inconclusive report was released in April 2019, it was an embarrassment to liberals. The politics of law had misdirected their focus for years, and in the process convinced millions of Americans that Mr. Trump’s foes were as prone to conspiratorial thinking as his allies.Cries that Mr. Trump’s opponents were engaged in “lawfare” suddenly gained credibility.

That would prove fateful when, after Mr. Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election, culminating in the Jan. 6 attack,criminal cases began to accumulate against him. The special counsel Jack Smith opened his investigation in November 2022; he had help from the House, which, after the Senate acquitted Mr. Trump in his second impeachment, conducted its own Jan. 6 investigation and referred the findings to the Justice Department for another chance at accountability. Mr. Smith also led the investigation and indictment of the former president for keeping classified documents. Finally, prosecutors in Georgia and New York began inquiries, one into the pressure Mr. Trump had placed on state officials to reverse his 2020 loss, and the other into the hush money he paid a porn star during his campaign.

The Georgia case had the most solid grounding in the law and might have been worth pursuing in isolation, but it stalled out thanks to its feckless lead prosecutor.It was the lurid New York case, widely seen as the most legally flimsy and nakedly political, that succeeded. In their totality, the trials became all-consuming, part of a larger pattern of seeking some law— like the Constitution’s rediscovered Civil War-era ban on insurrectionists in office — that might pre-empt the need to beat Mr. Trump in the court of public opinion.(WTF???)

https://archive.fo/dfIXV#selection-4529.0-5795.4

>>22061161

2/2

But agonizingly, Mr. Trump revealed how unprepared the law was for his acts. The law is open to interpretation and, even when clear, allows for discretion and selectivity in its enforcement.

Yet many liberals, convinced that their causes were righteous, didn’t register the risks of this legalistic strategy, which included being seen by voters as treating the law as politics by other means.The criminal investigations fueled their target’s dominanceof the Republican primary race andbreathed new lifeinto his campaign fund-raising. The election became somethinglike national jury nullification— after the fact for the New York case, and pre-emptively for the others.

“Rather than focusing solely on the legal issues,the Trump defense adopted a high-stakes legal gambitthat transformed these criminal charges into political opportunities andessentially bet the farmon the outcome of the election,” Robert Mintz, a former federal prosecutor, noted.The bet paid off.

“I have no interest in recriminations,” Benjamin Wittes (he won't take responsibility for such a failure) wrote after the election on Lawfare, the website he helped found to resisthow law was being used to hem in the presidentduring the war on terrorism.

In 2016, he transformed it to call for using law to hem in Mr. Trump. But Mr. Wittes conceded, too, that thecriminal trials “so spectacularly failed to convince the publicof Mr. Trump’s unfitness thatthe mannow commandsmajority supportamong those who vote.”

That, as Mr. Wittes registered,is a flabbergasting outcome. And it should drive, far more than recriminations, a departure from our old strategies in the Trump era.If his victory does not lead liberals to reorient their opposition away from the courts, there will be no way past thenumb feelingsof inevitability with which many have greeted his 2024 breakthrough.

Unsurprisingly, legalistic moves produce a struggle for more power over the law. Mr. Trump’s choices for attorney general — first Matt Gaetz, now Pam Bondi — were predictable responses to the protracted attempt to hold him accountable.His rationale for both, as he put it, was ending the weaponization of the Justice Department— the honest response to which is that law has always been a weapon, and what matters is whether it advances just or unjust outcomes on balance.

Whoever ends up appointed, there can be no federal criminal investigations or prosecutions of Mr. Trump while he is in office. The Supreme Court may furnish liberals occasional wins in litigating his excesses, controlling some damage. But because of the Supreme Court’s position at the apex of the system, the federal courts will remain enduringly hostile territory for liberal interpretations of the law.

State courts may prove friendlier. But those committed to litigating Mr. Trump’s policies aggressivelyshould keep in mind the risk of producing illiberal and noxious precedents that could last for decades. Such was the risk incurred in the travel ban case as well as the Smith investigation, which has nothing to show for itself except the Supreme Court’s decision granting the president broad immunity from prosecution.

Doing nothing is not an option when Mr. Trump’s rule begins again. But there are the midterm elections in two years, andin the meantime a Democratic Party in dire need of reimagining and a public to win over. (They really don’t get it, no one like them,their arrogance oozes likes a pussy sore on their lips, and their minds are filled with revenge, never justice, they will just alienate more and more with articles like these)

“Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women,” Learned Hand, the liberal judge, remarked in 1944. “When it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it.” Without convincing our fellow citizens of the highest ideals to hold in their hearts,the law cannot make as much difference as many liberals have hoped. Instead, it has helped the enemies of liberalism win.

https://archive.fo/dfIXV#selection-4529.0-5795.4

TheBEST KEKI’ve read from the NYT’s, hahahaha

>>22061321

KEK

>>22061337

He looked scared as shit, not a good actor.

George

@BehizyTweets

BREAKING: Several major corporations have begun dismantling their DEI policies after President Trump's reelection. The list includes Boeing, Ford, Lowe's, Starbucks, etc.

Big players in the Racism Industrial Complex are already panicking because this means losing billions yearly from pushing racism. Many DEI consultants will be jobless.

DEI practices patently violate the Civil Rights Act. I hope the incoming Justice Department topples the demonic empire once and for all.

2:46 PM · Nov 25, 2024

·585.5K Views

https://x.com/BehizyTweets/status/1861134376320324081

>>22061585

where did you get that bullshit, I'm on the Guardian

Canda already being nasty

11/26/2024

14.43 EST

Justin Trudeau under pressure to stand up to Trump on tariffs

Other members of Canada’sparliament are calling on prime minister Justin Trudeau to ready a “war room” for the coming battle over tariffs with the United States.

“The only thing a bully responds to is strength. So where is our plan to fight back?” Jagmeet Singh, leader of the New Democratic Party, asked Trudeau. “Where is the war room?”

“I don’t think the idea of going to war with the United States is what anyone wants. What we will do is stand up for Canadian jobs,” Trudeau said. “Stand up for the prosperity we create when we work together.”

Meanwhile, members of Canada’s liberal and conservative parties are debating ways Trudeau could promote a “Canada First” policy or work collaboratively with “our US partner.”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/live/2024/nov/26/donald-trump-president-us-trade-tariffs-china-mexico-canada-latest-politics-news