This is shaping up as a week of reckoning in the Senate. Either Mitch McConnell and Senate Republicans relent and allow the president to exercise his power to appoint people to positions at the NLRB and CFPB so that they can function as Congress intended, or Harry Reid and Senate Democrats finally push the nuclear button on filibuster reform.
Important to keep in mind that filibuster reform would be a result of this reckoning, but not precisely the point of it. Filibuster reform is the tool Democrats are waving about — the threat of it, to be exact — but the narrow objective is to get the NLRB and CFPB up and running. If Democrats can achieve that short of changing Senate filibuster rules, they would leap at the chance. For that reason, I suspect we’ll see some kind of deal struck between Reid and McConnell, but it’s hard to conceive of a deal in which both sides are truly happy with the result. Someone is bound to lose here.
Glenn Greenwald says the documents Edward Snowden has not released contain the ‘blueprints’ for the entirety of the NSA’s signals intelligence and data collection operations – information that “would allow somebody who read them to know exactly how the NSA does what it does, which would in turn allow them to evade that surveillance or replicate it.”
Quite telling that in the immediate aftermath of the Zimmerman verdict, Zimmerman’s lawyer is going off about reverse racism and his brother is suggesting that Martin was a drug dealer and gun runner.
[We’re discussing the verdict here at TPMPrime.]
TPM Reader DD writes in from Wisconsin. Going on the below, I’d be curious to hear from lawyers in other jurisdictions how distinct Florida law seems from how a case with a similar set of facts would have been adjudicated in their jurisdictions …
I’m a criminal defense lawyer in Wisconsin, but I’ll tell you my reaction to the Zimmerman verdict today. I’ve had friends in Florida asking for my take. I haven’t watched the trial very closely (it seems like an ordinary criminal case to me in many respects). But I was astounded that the defense would put on a “self-defense” argument without the defendant testifying. In most civilized jurisdictions, the burden is on the defense to prove, at least more likely than not, that the law breaking was done for reasons of self-defense. I couldn’t figure out how they could do this without the defendant’s testimony.
I’m not surprised the jury didn’t convict Zimmerman of 2nd Degree Murder. I am surprised it doesn’t qualify as manslaughter. The law in Florida has some peculiarities which heavily favored Zimmerman. But this was a situation he created through actions that I don’t think anyone can credibly argue weren’t reckless and showing extremely poor judgment. If a kid who was literally minding his own business ends up dead as the result, it’s hard for me to see it as a just outcome if there’s no criminal culpability whatsoever.
Yesterday afternoon an African-American couple was eating at the outside tables at Benny’s Burrito in Greenwich Village when a drunken man, complaining about his wife leaving him and his job at Goldman Sachs, crashed their table. Douglass Reddish, 25, the man with his girlfriend, tried to help the man steady himself but got a different response than he likely expected. Read More
Iowa’s all male Supreme Court decides that it was legal for a man to fire a woman for being so attractive that he was afraid he would try to have an affair with her.