Supremes vote 7-2 to pause deportations of Venezuelans

The Trump administration has been bragging that the Supremes let them deport Venezuelans under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, which of course is a half-truth. The April 7 decision 5-4 stipulates that due process be followed, which is why they ordered 9-0 the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia who didn't get it, and the Supremes this morning aren't sure that's the case either with the latest group set to be deported.

 

 U.S. Supreme Court temporarily halts deportations of Venezuelan migrants under wartime law

The U.S. Supreme Court early on Saturday paused President Donald Trump’s administration from deporting Venezuelan men in immigration custody after their lawyers said they were at imminent risk of removal without the judicial review previously mandated by the justices. ...

At issue is whether the Trump administration has met the Supreme Court’s standard for providing the detainees due process before sending them to another country - possibly to the notorious prison in El Salvador where others are jailed. ...

Their deportation would be the first since the Supreme Court’s 5-4 ruling that allowed removals under the 1798 law while specifying that “the notice must be afforded within a reasonable time and in such a manner as will allow them to actually seek habeas relief in the proper venue before such removal occurs.” ...

On March 15, the Trump administration deported more than 130 alleged Tren de Aragua members to El Salvador. Many of the migrants’ lawyers and family members say they were not gang members and had no chance to dispute the government’s assertion that they were. 

 

 

As presidential mandates go, Trump's is very small, smaller than Bush 43's second term and smaller than Carter's

 The top mandates go to Nixon II at 1.61, Johnson at 1.58, Reagan II at 1.44, IKE II at 1.36, and IKE I at 1.24.

The top combined term mandates go to Reagan at 1.34, Nixon at 1.31, IKE at 1.30, Clinton at 1.17, and Obama at 1.12.

Bush 43 I and Trump I have the dubious distinction of sub-one mandates, meaning they failed to win the popular vote. JFK and Nixon I barely squeaked above 1.000.

 

click to enlarge

 

Internal polling must be really bad: Trump tries to reign in Elon Musk, or at least appear to be doing so

 Trump puts new limits on Elon Musk: The president convened his secretaries, with Musk, to clarify power

... The president’s message represents the first significant move to narrow Musk’s mandate. According to Trump’s new guidance, DOGE and its staff should play an advisory role — but Cabinet secretaries should make final decisions on personnel, policy and the pacing of implementation. ...

The president with the largest popular vote mandate over his opponent in the post-war was Richard M. Nixon in 1972 over George McGovern

 1.61 votes for Nixon for every vote for McGovern, the real reason Democrats hated him so much.

The smallest popular mandate belonged to JFK over Nixon in 1960 at 1.0033. Democrats stole that election but Nixon let it pass for the good of the country.

There were smaller mandates, if you count Bush 2000 at 0.98 (Gore 1.01), or Trump 2016 at 0.95 (Hillary 1.04), lol, but those aren't really popular vote mandates now are they?

LBJ was second in 1964 with 1.58, because JFK had been assassinated in 1963. I don't think Jesus himself could have won it for the GOP in 1964.

Third overall was Reagan in 1984 with 1.44, followed by IKE at fourth and fifth with 1.36 and 1.24 respectively in 1956 and 1952.

If back-to-back terms is your yardstick, Reagan was tops with a combined mandate of 1.335, followed by Nixon at 1.31, IKE at 1.30, Bill Clinton at 1.17, and Obama at 1.115. Bush 43 brings up the rear at a distant 1.015.

People who think Trump is a repudiation of Bush 43 Republicanism should consider that Trump's not-back-to-back combined score is now 0.99.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: Trump is a transitional figure for the GOP, and certainly not a nationally transformational one like Reagan who destroyed the bipolar world, IKE who re-moralized a victorious but demoralized nation, and Nixon who fatefully opened the door to China.

Unfortunately for the GOP, Trump is mostly just a wrecking ball who is wrecking his own HDQ, and the Democrat threat remains just decimal points away.

 

 

 

 

For every Kamala Harris voter there were just 1.03 Donald Trump voters lol

Even Hillary's mandate was bigger than that in 2016 lol: 1.04.

American whiners generally rate their own healthcare positively but not the country's

 Gallup, here.

People are in a bad mood about it since 2020 because of what happened during the pandemic with lock-downs, quarantines, and mask and vaccine mandates, and because the expanded emergency coverage from that year has expired with the expiration of the emergency in 2023.

But 71% still think their own healthcare quality is pretty good, compared with 44% saying the same thing about the quality for the country as a whole.

There's always been that disconnect.

And generally speaking, it is difficult to draw any conclusions from this about pre-Obamacare and post-Obamacare experiences because of it. But 62% rated the quality of healthcare in the country highly in both 2012 and 2010, the year Obamacare was passed. That's now down 18 points to 44%. 71% now rate the quality of their own healthcare highly, down 11 points since 2012 from 82%.

I suspect we'll be living with the after effects of the pandemic debacle for a while longer.

 

Kevin Dowd: close the border, eliminate regulations, end the war on fossil fuels, cancel electric vehicle mandates, do a little dance

 

 

 Kevin Dowd takes over for Maureen Dowd on Thanksgiving, here:

 

Trump promises a return to common sense and has been given the tools to accomplish it with an electoral mandate and all three branches of government on his side. He cannot squander it. He must not get bogged down in petty disputes and perceived slights. ...

There are things he can do right away to make a difference: close the border, eliminate regulations, end the war on fossil fuels and cancel EV mandates. ...

He should move forward without rancour or grievance, fuelled by the joy of the Trump Shuffle, his robot-like dance that has broken out at UFC fights and across the NFL. I’m going to have the younger members of the family teach it to Maureen on Thanksgiving.

Kamala Harris' confused messaging on fossil fuels, reported by Politico and given publicity by CNN's KFILE, continues to melt down lol

Camila Thorndike, a top Harris-Walz campaign climate adviser, abruptly walked back her recent comments stating that Vice President Kamala Harris would be hostile to future oil and gas drilling as president—effectively reversing her reversal of the candidate's position.

In a statement Monday, Thorndike lamented that she wasn't clear enough when she told Politico last week that Harris is not "promoting expansion" of oil drilling and suggested Harris was not fond of a provision in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act mandating fossil fuel leases. Thorndike serves as Harris's "climate engagement director."

"I didn't explain myself clearly here," Thorndike said Monday. "Contrary to Trump's claims, the VP has not banned fracking, doesn't support banning fracking, and in fact cast the tie-breaking vote on the biggest pro-climate law ever, which, yes, opened new fracking leases. People know that's her position." ...

It remains unclear how Thorndike's new statement clarifies her comments from last week. 

More. 

It's hard to run away from a former position which had no nuance.

Harris was, and remains, an extreme opponent of fossil fuels, a Kool-Aid drinker like Hillary Clinton who thought you could mandate solar panels on every home in the United States.

More importantly, her political support comes from the extreme opponents of fossil fuels, and they have to be assuaged as Harris runs away from them in order to win in pro-fracking Pennsylvania, at whom the Monday statement was aimed.

Harris' climate adviser is being forced by the campaign to say words she doesn't want to say.

 

 

By 2032 no more than 29% of new cars can be gas-powered, and Kamala Harris doesn't have to do anything to make it happen except get elected to protect the Biden EPA rule

 

That's one big reason why Kamala says she can't think of one thing she'd do differently than Joe Biden.

 The Environmental Protection Agency’s new greenhouse gas emissions rules require that battery-powered and plug-in hybrid vehicles make up 32% of auto maker sales in 2027. By 2032 no more than 29% of new cars can be gas-powered. Ergo, there will be only one gas-powered model for every two electric cars on dealer lots. ...

Auto makers must spend tens of billions of dollars to ramp up EV production to meet government mandates. The financial pain is growing for companies as sales of gas-powered cars decline, reducing profits available to invest in the EV “transition.” ...

A UAW study in 2019 projected that EVs would kill 35,000 jobs at its plants. “The workers who are making engines and transmissions today, their jobs will be eliminated when we make a transition to electric vehicles,” said UAW research director Jennifer Kelly.

More.

 

The New Way Forward is just another lie.

 

 

 

Trump has been moving left on abortion, adding insult to injury with a commitment to another federal mandate

 In August, Trump reiterated his opposition to Florida’s ban on abortions after six weeks. Asked if he supported an amendment to the state’s constitution expanding the right to abortion, Trump said, “I am going to be voting that we need more than six weeks.” Faced with a firestorm of criticism from anti-abortion groups, Trump campaign officials maintained he “has not yet said how he will vote on the ballot initiative.” ...

At the end of August, with polls showing a slight lead for Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump announced that “because we want more babies,” his administration would require either the federal government or insurance companies to pay the entire cost (which typically runs in the tens of thousands of dollars per individual) of IVF treatments for all Americans. He did not specify whether his proposal would be implemented through the Affordable Care Act, which he has promised to repeal, or whether he has become an advocate of socialized medicine. Nor did Trump reconcile the plan with the 2024 GOP platform, which has language that seems to support rights of citizenship, under the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, to fertilized eggs, embryos and fetuses.

More.

Trump has learned nothing.

 

Stephen L. Miller doesn't have the faintest idea about how Republicanism lost its way

 

Guy who says Mitt Romney was decent man says get fucked you fuckers

Decent man says Paris Olympics opening ceremony mocking Christianity was great!

Decent man says government mandates, fines, and taxes are not worth getting angry about

Decent man says let autoworkers eat rust

Decent man was NeverTrump because he is NeverFight

Decent man inflames rioters and looters who go on to cause $2 billion in damage

Decent man says Antifa "No USA at all" is morally superior to Robert E. Lee admirers

Decent man says sodomy must be mainstreamed in America

Decent man can't define "assault weapons" but says they have to go

Biden-Harris administration forges ahead with electric vehicle mandate through EPA final rule, Harris-Walz campaign disavows it to get elected

 

Trump says he's still against the electric car mandate, Musk says he's giving money to promote Trump, just not $45 million a month

“I have a good relationship with him, I think he’s a nice guy,” Trump said of Musk during a call-in interview on Fox News.

 

“Somebody told me he was going to give me 45 million [dollars] a month. I said, ‘That sounds like a lot, even for Elon, that’s a lot,’” the Republican presidential nominee said.

 

But Musk “never told me he was giving [$45 million],” he said.

 

“But he did say, ‘I strongly endorse you,’ despite the fact that I’m against the electric car mandate,” Trump said, referring to the Biden administration’s policies aimed at prioritizing electric vehicles over gas-powered vehicles. ...

But Musk, in an interview with conservative public figure Jordan Peterson, said the figure reported by the Journal was “simply not true.”

 

“I’m not donating $45 million a month to Trump,” Musk said in that interview, which was posted Monday on X, the social media site he owns. ...

In an X post Tuesday night, Musk wrote, “I am making some donations to America PAC, but at a much lower level.” He asserted that most Republicans align with the PAC’s key values of “supporting a meritocracy & individual freedom.”

 

More.

 

EMTALA from 1986 became an illegal immigration magnet, 5-4 Supreme Court decision now may make it an abortion magnet

 Supreme Court allows emergency abortions in Idaho for now :

The federal government sued, leading a federal judge in August 2022 to block the state from enforcing provisions concerning medical care that is required under the federal Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, or EMTALA.

That 1986 law mandates that patients receive appropriate emergency room care. The Biden administration argued that care should include abortions in certain situations when a woman’s health is imperiled even if death is not imminent.
 

THANK GOD immigration wackadoodle Saul Anuzis no longer runs the Michigan Republican Party

It is an insult to ... millions ... when some embrace dark rhetoric about immigrants poisoning the nation’s blood. ... Americans deserve better than politicians who would choose to use the issue as a political wedge rather than as a mandate to govern. The people who for centuries have risked their lives and everything they owned to flee British kings and dictators like Stalin and Castro will not let Trump’s tyranny extinguish the flame of the American dream.

Here, at libertarian, open-borders Real Clear Politics.

 

The orchestrated lawfare against Donald Trump is designed to make you forget Biden's five tyrannical anti-democratic COVID-19 vaccination orders

Not to mention to make you forget all Biden's other failures, starting with the fall of Kabul in August 2021.

This is the same political strategy used by Hillary and the Democrats after Trump's election, with their phony baloney plastic banana Trump-Russia hoax to hamstring Trump's tenure in office.

 

The five mandates were discussed here in April 2022:

Federal contractor mandate September 9, 2021 on all employees with no opt-out for testing or masking

Federal employee mandate September 9, 2021 on all employees with no opt-out for testing or masking

OSHA mandate November 4, 2021 on all employers of 100 or more COUNTRYWIDE to be vaccinated or tested weekly

Medicare/Medicaid provider mandate November 4, 2021 on all provider employees with no opt-out for testing or masking

Head Start mandate November 30, 2021 requiring vaccination of 300,000 employees at child care facilities AND masking of the children.

And let's not forget the vaccination mandates shoved down the throats of the US military and National Guard in August and November 2021. More than 8,000 service members who refused the jabs were forced out.

This is the real Joe Biden.

Biden tailpipe rule will turn America into a Cuba of old cars

New York Post here:

Biden’s goals will push internal-combustion-vehicle prices into the stratosphere, and likely still not get consumers to play along; the 2032 mandate is beyond impossible to meet. 

Instead, Americans will keep older cars on the road far longer; even paying through the nose for clunkers and repairs will be the better bet.

 

May 2023: Average age of a car on the road in the US hit a record 12.5 years, up 3 months from 2022.

I have two cars for my family. One is 27 years old, the other 17. 

Remember Cash For Clunkers under Obama?

Yeah, I skipped that.

Biden deals bloodbath blow to auto industry, EPA finalizes rule requiring 67% of new cars and trucks sold to be electric by 2032

 The administration forged ahead with its plan despite pleas from thousands of car dealerships across the country, warnings from industry leaders and major manufacturers slashing production. Demand in recent years has failed to meet growth expectations. ...

“This rule is delusional,” the senators said. “This is the Biden administration’s attempt to get rid of the internal combustion engine without congressional authority.” Sen. Joe Manchin III, a moderate Democrat from West Virginia, was ready to side with Republicans. He called the rule “reckless and ill-informed.” “The federal government has no authority and no right to mandate what type of car or truck Americans can purchase for their everyday lives,” said Mr. Manchin, who chairs the Senate Energy Committee.

At the current pace of sales growth of all-electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles, the U.S. would take decades to meet the administration’s 2032 goal. ...

The EPA wants 67% of all new light-duty vehicles and up to 32% of medium-duty vehicles to be electric by 2032. That includes a mixture of all-electric, plug-in electric hybrids and battery electric hybrids.

More.

HHS: Two percent of Americans have taken the latest COVID booster

 Reported here.

5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans votes 10-6 to block Biden's 2021 executive order mandating Covid-19 vaccine for U.S. government workers

Heh heh.

Story.