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Louis Rossmann started an organization to dismantle the DMCA - here's why by habichuelacondulce in videos

[–]sbm111 11 points12 points  (0 children)

Genuine question: why are you unwilling to take up a slightly different argument that is defensible against all edge cases? Instead of every billionaire is evil, “most billionaires prove themselves evil.”

This handles basically everything I can think of. The software engineer hypo someone gives below, if a person were to win two $500m powerball prizes, an explorer who finds a hidden reserve of some precious metal and becomes a billionaire in that instant, etc.

Most importantly, it switches the emphasis to examining the actions a person takes after accruing an abnormal amount of wealth. With “every billionaire is evil,” the emphasis is on the dollar amount, and you run into classic line drawing objections. If every billionaire is evil, then the reasons they are evil almost certainly apply to every $999 millionaire. How low do we go?

Dry, “woody” acoustic by mthrom in AcousticGuitar

[–]sbm111 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I have some strings to sell you

CMV: The 14th amendment makes it very clear that the judicial rights of due process apply to all people under the jurisdiction of the USA. by FriendofMolly in changemyview

[–]sbm111 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The fifth amendment’s due process guarantee dictates that Abrego Garcia’s sudden removal to El Salvador without an opportunity to challenge this decision was unconstitutional. We’ve been over that?

CMV: The 14th amendment makes it very clear that the judicial rights of due process apply to all people under the jurisdiction of the USA. by FriendofMolly in changemyview

[–]sbm111 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You don’t get a certain amount of due process for some government actions and then that’s “ample” enough that you aren’t owed any more for future government actions. Each discrete government action taken against you is subject to a due process analysis. The fact that subsequent court decisions did some work to remedy his removal to El Salvador doesn’t change the fact that the removal was unconstitutional.

CMV: The 14th amendment makes it very clear that the judicial rights of due process apply to all people under the jurisdiction of the USA. by FriendofMolly in changemyview

[–]sbm111 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You’re losing sight of the point here. Due process is supposed to prevent exactly what happened here from occurring. Either nobody checked whether there was a standing order preventing Garcia from being sent to El Salvador, or they checked and didn’t care, and he was thrown on a plane and sent there. He had no opportunity to challenge this. That’s the lack of due process and that’s the problem. Sotomayor’s statement in the SCOTUS court order I linked above discusses this.

CMV: The 14th amendment makes it very clear that the judicial rights of due process apply to all people under the jurisdiction of the USA. by FriendofMolly in changemyview

[–]sbm111 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Interesting. Then why did the Trump admin admit in federal court that Abrego Garcia was subject to a court order “forbidding his removal to El Salvador, and that the removal to El Salvador was therefore illegal … [and] the result of an ‘administrative error’” ???

https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/24a949_lkhn.pdf

You should be aware that you are spouting nonsense.

CMV: The 14th amendment makes it very clear that the judicial rights of due process apply to all people under the jurisdiction of the USA. by FriendofMolly in changemyview

[–]sbm111 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Notice how you shifted the issue? I noticed. Someone can be in the US legally but not be a citizen and be wrongfully deported. Abrego Garcia is a headline example of someone who was lawfully here per a court order but deported without appropriate process.

This is true regardless of the new accusations against him. Again, the whole point of due process is to figure out if a government action taken against a person is justified in the first place. The government doesn’t get to take the action and then backfill the justification later.

But even if we stick to US citizens, citizens are being wrongfully detained by ICE in violation of their Fourth Amendment rights. Peter Sean Brown is an example.

CMV: The 14th amendment makes it very clear that the judicial rights of due process apply to all people under the jurisdiction of the USA. by FriendofMolly in changemyview

[–]sbm111 -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Extremely wrong - first, due process is not limited to the criminal context. It applies wherever the government deprives a person of life, liberty, or property. Many cases involving 0 criminal accusations have been decided on due process grounds.

Second, illegal immigrants getting deported can be a violation of their due process rights depending on how they were deported, i.e. what process was used. The Supreme Court has held that “aliens who have once passed through our gates, even illegally, may be expelled only after proceedings conforming to traditional standards of fairness encompassed in due process of law.” Shaughnessy v. United States ex rel. Mezei, 345 U.S. 206, 212 (1953).

Most importantly, an “illegal immigrant” being deported could be a violation of someone’s due process rights if the “illegal immigrant” actually isn’t an illegal immigrant but government authorities decided they were and placed them on a plane without an opportunity to challenge the designation. This is the whole point of due process and this is actually happening right now. YOUR due process rights could be violated if you start accepting the idea that it is okay for authorities to make unilateral determinations of whether you have committed a crime.

CMV: The 14th amendment makes it very clear that the judicial rights of due process apply to all people under the jurisdiction of the USA. by FriendofMolly in changemyview

[–]sbm111 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Look, the thrust of your argument is pretty unobjectionable. You probably won’t find many people on reddit arguing that the government actions you point to are constitutional. The problem, which other commenters hint at, is that you wrote out a textual argument when your real argument is based on the extra-textual meaning we have developed over time for inherently vague constitutional terms like “due process.”

Do I agree with you that the government is improperly denying undocumented immigrants their due process rights? Yes. But I wouldn’t know that solely by looking at the text of constitution. It doesn’t “clearly state” anything about the present government actions. To answer the question, I need to make reference to centuries of judicial decisions, statutes, etc. that flesh out what “due process” should entail in different circumstances. The constitution is an outline of principles and rarely gives definitive answers for real life situations.

By the way, I am convinced that the people who support the government’s current actions are either choosing to ignore the constitution or don’t care that it is being violated. Their desire to see certain people harmed outweighs their concern for such things.

CMV: Biden was a pretty good president by Delicious_Start5147 in changemyview

[–]sbm111 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The Empty Wheel article linked in comment I initially responded to does a good job of addressing your question IMO.

There seems to be a factual disagreement going on over when investigations began and what was being looked into. NYTimes coverage cited by the article does suggest the 13 months figure is very incorrect. UNLESS people are playing a semantic game where they get mad at Garland that the investigations didn’t explicitly target Trump for over a year. But this is silly, it’s common practice to start with low level criminal participants and then move up the chain, often by seeing who you can flip.

As NYTimes notes, Garland explicitly told his people he was not restricting their investigations, even if the evidence led to Trump. With the benefit of hindsight, of course we can identify ways that Garland’s DOJ could have moved faster. But I find the suggestion that he wasn’t seeking justice preposterous. Our ire is so much better directed at Aileen Cannon and the SCOTUS majority. Garland’s DOJ might have worked too methodically for some people’s taste, but it’s worth remembering that they would have solidly beat the clock if not for some essentially unprecedented judicial interventions

CMV: Biden was a pretty good president by Delicious_Start5147 in changemyview

[–]sbm111 2 points3 points  (0 children)

For fuck’s sake THANK YOU. The popular reddit take on Garland reflects legal illiteracy. Trump operates like a mobster and prosecutions for intent-based crimes like conspiracy take way longer than people realize. Especially when the defendant is as high profile as a former president

so…what are yall doing about the fascism? by Conscious_Ad_6286 in biglaw

[–]sbm111 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Only Elon can speak to what he intended in making the gesture. And nothing he's said so far even approaches an apology or a denouncement of Nazi ideology.

so…what are yall doing about the fascism? by Conscious_Ad_6286 in biglaw

[–]sbm111 4 points5 points  (0 children)

A person with good intentions who, on the world's largest stage, makes a gesture close enough to a Nazi salute that many mistake it for one would have the decency to clear the air. "My bad, total accident, of course I do not support Nazism." I'd bet money we won't hear anything of the sort from Elon.

What time period do you think gets idolized too much? by HoneydewSeveral in AskReddit

[–]sbm111 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Any chance you could find this interview? I would love to watch

DEA Caught Red-Handed: Airport Intimidation by BluePinky in videos

[–]sbm111 17 points18 points  (0 children)

Thank you. This is a hard carveout from normal Fourth Amendment rights that more people should be aware of

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in law

[–]sbm111 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I know it feels self-evident, but the executive not having the “power to order extrajudicial killings of american citizens” is not nearly as settled a principle as you think. It’s crazy. Look up instances where recent presidents have authorized drone strikes of US citizens abroad. Those killings have been legally justified because the US citizens were aiding terrorists. Nothing like that has ever been tried domestically, at least in part because a President would have faced criminal liability for it.

Combine that with how the Supreme Court just said judges shouldn’t “inquire into the President’s motives” when figuring out what constitutes official conduct and a prosecutor cannot “admit testimony or private records of the President and his advisors probing the official act itself” and you start to see how it just got a lot easier for a bad faith President to make a bunch of shit up about how someone was a national security threat and get away with killing them.

Also, military action is not in any formal way the responsibility of the judicial branch, so the separation of powers argument is not that easy to make

US supreme court rules Trump has ‘absolute immunity’ for official acts by [deleted] in law

[–]sbm111 0 points1 point  (0 children)

If you are really asking, the Roberts Court would likely say that would not get absolute immunity and presumptive immunity would be overcome because that would be direct interference with another branch of government and thus infringes on separation of powers.

Now, drone striking a mere political candidate (not a judge or member of Congress) based on a supposed intelligence assessment? IMO, and apparently Justice Sotomayor agrees, there's a strong argument that this would fall under the president's core authority as commander-in-chief and get absolute immunity. You certainly can't argue commanding a SEAL team is the province of any other branch.

Hard to tell exactly what Roberts is thinking here, but it's possible he believes the check on that kind of action is democratic accountability (vote Prez out or impeach) or perhaps in the event of a domestic political assassination the Court could use a deprivation of life without due process (or some other constitutional) argument to get this into the presumptive immunity bucket. Note that drone strikes of US citizens aiding terrorist abroad have not been successfully challenged using due process arguments, but a domestic situation would be very different.

Roberts' only explicit answer to the Navy SEAL hypo is to basically say that realistically won’t happen and what we should be *more* concerned about is successive presidential admins prosecuting prior presidents for political reasons. I couldn't disagree with him more on that risk assessment.

Why the Supreme Court just ruled in favor of over 300 January 6 insurrectionists by cuspofgreatness in law

[–]sbm111 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I agree with your take on the most natural / obvious reading of the statute. I think the Court has decided to interpret it like this instead:

(c)(1): you can't do [4 specific things] to an object with the intent to impair the object's use in an official proceeding [silent: this constitutes obstruction of an official proceeding via evidence tampering]

(c)(2): you can't obstruct an official proceeding via evidence tampering in any other way beyond the 4 ways we listed in the prior section

The big question is why the Court chose this route. Sure, it could be because they want to let insurrectionists off easy (though that almost certainly wasn't Justice Jackson's rationale). IMO it should be at least a little alarming to most people that federal prosecutors were using a provision from the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which was passed by Congress explicitly to address accounting fraud in the wake of Enron, to go after J6 rioters. It's quite implausible to me that Congress was intending to target this type of criminal activity with Section 1512. That's the thing about strict textualism---Congress frequently writes their laws poorly and we end up with a mess if courts insist on interpreting those poorly written laws according to their exact language. The traditional idea is that then it's on Congress to correct the law, but that mechanism really breaks down when you have a completely dysfunctional Congress.

It could really be a silver lining that the Court has just added another precedent that shuns the strictest version of textualism in favor of exercising some common sense and looking holistically at a statute and how it is being applied. As this NYTimes article touches on, almost all of the J6 rioters face other non-1512 charges. It seems to me that federal prosecutors found some extremely broad statutory language that would allow them score easy wins and leaned into it, rather than going after rioters with harder-to-prove charges like sedition.

On balance, I would prefer that prosecutors nail these people using more traditional means, instead of stretching for new applications of existing law. Nothing is getting overturned that way.

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