Midnight Thoughts

Image from New York Times. Their full report with more details here Welcome to the start of the American election season! Here’s a brief breakdown of what happened on the cold night of January 15th, 2024 in Iowa. Trump is calm and in control. Still dominant in the race by far, Trump won with 51% of the vote. He gave a gracious victory speech, which if your only news source is MSNBC, you probably wouldn’t have expected. He spent the first 9 minutes calling out and thanking various people, with a heavy reference to his family. Conventional stuff, as if this is from 2012, not 2024. He referred to his primary opponents in a friendly manner and didn’t really attack them, which indicates he sees this primary fight as effectively over. The rest of his speech pivoted to policy and what he vows to do in a second term. He repeated the phrase “drill baby drill”, vowing to drastically increase fossil fuel production, and likely an all-out war of climate change denial. Besides that and the usual ...

  Brett M. Kavanaugh, Associate Justice                Justice Brett Kavanaugh received a B.A. from Yale College in 1987 and a J.D. from Yale Law School in 1990. He clerked for two judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals circuits and for Justice Anthony M. Kennedy of the U.S. Supreme Court. He was an attorney in the Office of the Solicitor General of the United States and an Associate Counsel in the Office of Independent Counsel. He had brief stints in a DC private law firm. From 2001 to 2003, he was Associate Counsel and then Senior Associate Counsel to President George W. Bush before being the Assistant to the President and Staff Secretary. He was appointed a Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in 2006. President Donald J. Trump nominated him to replace the retiring Justice Kennedy.                Kavanaugh’s hearing was combative from the start, faci...

Sonia Sotomayor, Associate Justice Justice Sonia Sotomayor earned a B.A. in 1976 from Princeton University, graduating summa cum laude and receiving the Pyne Prize, the highest academic honor Princeton awards to an undergraduate. She earned her J.D. from Yale Law School in 1979 where she was an editor of the Yale Law Journal. She served as Assistant District Attorney in the New York County District Attorney’s Office from 1979–1984. She was an associate and then partner litigating international commercial matters in NYC at Pavia & Harcourt from 1984–1992. She served in the U.S. District Court of the Southern District of New York after being nominated by President George H. W. Bush from 1992–1998. From there President Bill Clinton nominated her to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit where she served from until 2009, when President Barack Obama nominated her as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court to replace retiring Justice David Souter and she assumed this role th...

While Supreme Court justices ought to be nonpartisan, the fact that they have to be nominated by the President and approved by Congress meant that they’re often chosen to serve partisan agendas. Thus it’s important to understand who they are in order to understand American politics. I took their education, career background, and pictures from the Supreme Court’s website before adding my own commentary: https://www.supremecourt.gov/about/biographies.aspx John G. Roberts, Jr., Chief Justice of the United States Chief Justice Roberts graduated with Bachelor of Arts summa cum laude from Harvard College in 1976 and a J.D. from Harvard in 1979. He served as a law clerk for Judge Henry J. Friendly of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, as well as then-Associate Justice William H. Rehnquist of the Supreme Court. He served as a Special Assistant to the Attorney General, Associate Counsel to President Reagan, White House Counsel’s Office, and as Principal Deputy Solicitor ...

               Let’s start with the facts that nobody is seriously disputing. On December 19, 2020, one of @realDonaldTrump’s posts on his twitter said “ Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild! ” He continued to post numerous times about a rally to oppose the certification of the results of the 2020 presidential election on January 6th . Such a rally did occur on January 6th, and the mob from that rally went on to the Capitol Building to stop Congress from certifying the results of the 2020 election, breaching the premises and entering the building. Numerous deaths resulted, more than a hundred were injured. The crowd were not cleared until mid-evening. In a since deleted tweet, Trump said “ a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away ” (which is claiming that Biden’s victory is not legitimate) and in the same tweet addressed his supporters, saying “ [g]o home with love & i...