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Sotomayor Says Presidents Are Not Monarchs and Must Obey Rulings (www.nytimes.com)

submitted 4 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 4 weeks ago (2 children)

Sotomayor: "pretty please Mr. Trump, follow our guidance :( "

This doesn't mean jack shit. SCOTUS does not enforce policy - it interprets it.

So many stories of pundits saying "But but but... Trump cant do that 😡. That goes against established norms and precedent!"

News flash: he can, and he is, and he will. It's as out of touch as someone saying "I think Mueller is still going to bring Donny down!"

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago)

SCOTUS does not enforce policy - it interprets it.

So, in theory, a SCOTUS ruling allows bureaucrats in the various agencies to ignore a Presidential command. But in practice, we've got the Doggy Department stepping in behind the scenes and unhooking any individual disloyal to the President from their security badges and sign-in credentials. Power is being centralized via the mechanism of IT.

This is, incidentally, a strategy Balaji Srinivasan and his friends at Y-Combinator lay out explicitly in "The Network State" which is a favorite book of Peter Thiel and Elon Musk.

What they're building is a real technical means by which a new kind of technocratic institution can do physically what a judiciary simply orders and hopes is fulfilled. A verdict from Musk has material consequences - access suspended, accounts disabled, money transfers halted - that a judicial appointee cannot physically obstruct.

It’s as out of touch as someone saying “I think Mueller is still going to bring Donny down!”

Mueller laid out the terms by which incoming President Joe Biden could have prosecuted Donald Trump. And Biden's AG Merrick Garland just... didn't do it. This isn't a question of "can" but of "will". Do people in positions of power wish to utilize their authority to change the country?

Elon and Trump are 100% serious about changing the way the federal government functions this time around. President "Nothing will fundamentally change" Biden - the most institutional of the institutionalist Democrats still alive - was not.

I don't even think this is a Donald Trump thing anymore. He's just a vehicle for the Move Fast And Break Things Silicon Valley crowd to take control of the federal bureaucracy. But guys like Srinivasan and Thiel aren't fucking around. They are using the mechanisms of power that the administrations of Biden, Trump, and Obama just kinda sat on. Remove Trump and you'll just get JD Vance who is even more servile and pliant towards the Trillionaire Class.

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