So you don't believe we're on the eve of destruction?
Following the Oklahoma City bombing, Congress passed and Bill Clinton signed the Anti-terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 (AEDPA) which modified 28 U.S.C. §§ 2244, 2254, and 2255 (habeas corpus) to strip curtail the federal court's ability to protect the constitutional rights of death row inmates.
This OP, however, is not about the death penalty.
Contained in the AEDPA were the provisions of 28 U.S.C. § 2264 which gave state death row inmates basically no access to the federal courts if the states were to enact a set of state law protections that would meet criteria that the United States Department of Justice would set out in a series of administrative regulation (you know, administrative regulations just like the ENTIRETY of our environmental regulations).
The final regulations were adopted this year . . . TWENTY YEARS after they were first proposed.
For that entire 20 years they have been tied up in administrative hearings, comments, etc. and litigation. Think about that for a second, regulations that hurt only people that the overwhelming majority of judges (and even a large number of DUers) could care less about were held up for 20 years.
I keep hearing people talk about how "in four years" (and, quite frankly, not even having a decent plan for then) we are going to get rid of Trump, or how it might be a generation before we are back in power. I hear people talking about how we don't want to be acting crazy because we can't lose those middle of the road voters that put Bill in office . . . how we can't have a repeat of Chicago, or Ferguson, or OWS . . . how we have to be patient and work through the system.
Fuck that.
The day after Trump takes office, the director of the EPA (you know, the former AG of Oklahoma who has spent his career suing the EPA) can, WITHOUT ANY CONGRESSIONAL ACTION WHATSOEVER, withdraw every single environmental regulation and merely START the process to enact new regulations (which he has to do unless Congress repeals the enabling legislation). However, even if he does (and even if the new regulations aren't just oil/ chemical/power industry wet dreams), this country will have no environmental protections for a quarter of a century.
Now tell me again how we have to be "reasonable"
How we can't use parliamentary maneuvering to put Garland on the USSC
How Obama can't use the Trump/Putin conspiracy as an excuse to declare martial law
How we can't do anything to stop this
How we can't even try.
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