Trump's Fainthearted SCOTUS Picks Could Doom Him in DC Election Case

posted by Josh Hammer at Townhall 

One of the more underappreciated recent trends in American law and politics, obscured by a few high-profile conservative victories at the Supreme Court and thus noticed by few other than dyed-in-the-wool legal conservatives, is that former President Donald Trump's three picks for the high court are soft and undependable.

The truth is that none of the Trump-era triumvirate of Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett can hold a candle to their two reliably conservative senior colleagues Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito. Kavanaugh and Barrett are pragmatic center-right judges, eager to avoid wading into hot-button "cultural" topics such as religious liberty and often disappointing regarding issues as wide-ranging as COVID restrictions, immigration and congressional redistricting. Gorsuch has the strongest libertarian streak on the court; he adamantly rejected COVID tyranny, but he has proven a disaster on many other issues, such as gender ideology, Indian rights and criminal law.

If Trump secures a second presidential term, conservatives must ensure he makes better high court selections. It is nothing short of a Hollywood script-worthy twist of fate, then, that Trump's own Supreme Court picks will now play an outsize role in determining whether such a second term materializes.

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court agreed to expedite a hearing in the case of Donald J. Trump v. United States, in which the justices will decide "whether and if so to what extent does a former president enjoy presidential immunity from criminal prosecution for conduct alleged to involve official acts during his tenure in office." The resolution of this threshold question is necessary before determining whether special counsel Jack Smith's prosecution of the 45th president for his conduct pertaining to the 2020 election can proceed. If the court holds that a former president is fully immune from such future criminal prosecutions, then Smith's case in Washington, D.C. dies.

For the Biden Regime and the broader Democrat-lawfare complex, shaken by the incumbent's horrific swing-state polling and motivated to derail Trump by any means necessary, the stakes couldn't be any higher. With the Georgia prosecution on similar election-related grounds collapsing in real time due to Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis' extramarital scandal and public corruption, the Regime has put all its eggs in Jack Smith's D.C. basket. And Smith will leave no stone unturned in his quest to secure a guilty verdict in Judge Tanya Chutkan's trial court before the November election.

It's going to be a race against the clock for both sides.

It is well-established Department of Justice policy that a sitting president cannot be criminally indicted, but whether a former president can be criminally indicted for actions he took while serving as president is a novel legal question. It should be obvious that at least some presidential actions -- those implicating "core" Article II functions and presidential powers -- must be immunized from future criminal prosecution. After all, do Democrats really think former President Barack Obama should be subject to prosecution, now that he is no longer the active president, for the 2011 drone assassination in Yemen that killed al-Qaeda operative and U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaki? It would set a horrible precedent if the court permits post-presidency criminal prosecution for such "core" Article II functions -- for tense, split-second decisions made in the White House Situation Room, for instance.

But where to draw the line? And if there is no possible line between "core" and ancillary presidential functions that can be drawn, then is it best to do as Trump requests -- immunize the entirety of a president's conduct while actively serving from future criminal prosecution?

Justices Thomas and Alito, who tend to be more supportive of broad presidential power claims, might accept Trump's argument in its entirety. But after them, it is not clear where Trump's argument might attract more votes. Justice Kavanaugh's separation-of-powers jurisprudence is also more pro-Article II, but his "don't rock the boat" disposition will make him wary of seeming too "Trumpy." Chief Justice John Roberts has at times also shown sympathy for broad presidential power claims, but his seething personal animus for Trump is well known. And it is very difficult to see either Justice Gorsuch or Justice Barrett going along for the "full immunity" ride.

The best Trump can reasonably hope for is a mixed opinion wherein the justices accept the premise that only "core" Article II functions are immunized from future prosecution and remand to a lower court to ascertain whether the specific conduct alleged in Smith's indictment fits the bill. Such a mixed result is certainly plausible.

But if Trump loses outright on the immunity issue, he will have himself to blame. He had the opportunity to nominate three Thomas/Alito-esque stalwarts. He whiffed.

X22, And we Know, and more- March 1st

 

U.S. prescription drug market in disarray as ransomware gang attacks Millions of Americans have been affected by delays in obtaining medicine or having to foot the bill without insurance

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/03/01/prescription-drug-hack-alphv/?utm_campaign=wp_post_most&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&wpisrc=nl_most&carta-url=https%3A%2F%2Fs2.washingtonpost.com%2Fcar-ln-tr%2F3cecba3%2F65e208213daa071b49b6974d%2F65db5c9172d27e0cb5029ff9%2F5%2F53%2F

A ransomware gang once thought to have been crippled by law enforcement has snarled prescription processing for millions of Americans over the past week, forcing some to choose between paying prices hundreds or thousands of dollars above their usual insurance-adjusted rates or going without lifesaving medicine.

Insurance giant UnitedHealthcare Group said the hackers struck its Change Health business unit, which routes prescription claims from pharmacies to companies that determine whether patients are covered by insurance and what they should pay. The hackers stole data about patients, encrypted company files and demanded money to unlock them, prompting the company to shut down most of its network as it worked to recover.

Change Health and a rival, CoverMyMeds, are the two biggest players in the so-called switch business, charging pharmacies a small fee for funneling claims to insurers.

“When one of them goes down, obviously it’s a major problem,” said Patrick Berryman, a senior vice president at the National Community Pharmacists Association.

A notorious Russian-speaking ransomware ring known as ALPHV claimed responsibility for the Feb. 21 breach, capping a string of attacks that included several hospitals.

The lasting issues underscore the continued fragility of critical infrastructure nearly three years after a ransomware attack on Colonial Pipeline prompted a shutdown of the biggest network of fuel pipelines in the United States. Service stations, particularly in the eastern half of the country, ran short of fuel as consumers rushed to gas up.

Since then, U.S. officials and their international partners have announced a series of operations that have included hacking the gangs, taking over their chats with business associates and, in some cases, making arrests.

ALPHV was targeted in a December takedown that proved short-lived.

FBI Deputy Assistant Director Brett Leatherman, who heads the agency’s cyber division, said Friday that it weighs multiple factors in deciding when to disrupt a group, including whether it will provide technical material that will aid victims, such as decryption keys.

“With ALPHV, part of why that was such a success is because of the way we helped the victims,” Leatherman said in an interview.

U.S. pharmacies reported a wide range of impacts, with independent stores experiencing some of the worst problems.

UnitedHealth estimated that more than 90 percent of the nation’s 70,000-plus pharmacies have had to alter how they process electronic claims as a result of the Change Health outage. But it said only a small number of patients have been unable to get their prescriptions at some price.

At CVS, which operates one of the largest pharmacy networks in the nation, a spokesperson said there are “a small number of cases in which our pharmacies are not able to process insurance claims” as a result of the outage. It said workarounds were allowing it to fill prescriptions, however.

Many pharmacies have started routing claims through CoverMyMeds, which posted a notice online Feb. 22, “No outages here.” The company, owned by McKesson, did not respond to a request for comment Thursday.

For pharmacies that were not able to quickly route claims to a different company, the Change Health outage left pharmacists to try to manually calculate a patient’s co-pay or offer them the cash price.

Compounding the impact, thousands of organizations cut off Change Health from their systems to ensure the hackers did not infect their networks as well.

UnitedHealth’s own pharmacy services company, Optum Rx, said it, too, disconnected but that it would not penalize pharmacies that made their best efforts to tell whether a given drug was covered for a patient. Optum said in a letter to those pharmacies that it was “committed to reimbursing all claims that are appropriate and filled with the good faith understanding that a medication should be covered.”

The attack on Change Health has left many pharmacies in a cash-flow bind, as they face bills from the companies that deliver the medication without knowing when they will be reimbursed by insurers.

Some pharmacies are requiring customers to pay full price for their prescriptions when they cannot tell if they are covered by insurance. In some cases, that means people are paying more than $1,000 out of pocket, according to social media posts.

The outage has also created havoc for patients who use drugmaker coupons to get their prescriptions at a discount. Some reported being told that the coupon system also relies on Change Health.

Amy Ginsburg, a Bethesda resident, said her local CVS wasn’t able to process a coupon she uses for her diabetes medication.

“Normally, it would be a $25 co-pay, but it will actually be a $250 co-pay,” she said. Ginsburg, 62, still has some medication left and plans to wait for the refill until next week, hoping the situation will be resolved by then.

“If I didn’t have sufficient quantity to tide me over, it could lead to serious consequences,” she said. “Not everyone has an extra $250 they weren’t expecting to spend.”

The situation has been “extremely disruptive,” said Erin Fox, associate chief pharmacy officer at University of Utah Health.

“At our system, our retail pharmacies were providing three-day gratis emergency supplies for patients who could not afford to pay the cash price,” Fox said by email. “In some cases, like for inhalers, we had to send product out at risk, not knowing if we will ever get paid, but we need to take care of the patients.”

Axis Pharmacy Northwest near Seattle is “going out on a limb and dispensing product with absolutely no inkling if we’ll get paid or not,” said Richard Molitor, the pharmacist in charge. “Probably the biggest impact has been with our hospice clientele, whose claims aren’t going through at all.”

The Change Health outage has been particularly tough on independent pharmacies, because they can only see prescriptions that a patient filled at their pharmacy — and not ones that the patient filled at others. The “switch” connects independent pharmacies to insurers or pharmacy-benefit managers, who have a more expansive view.

This means small pharmacies wouldn’t know if a drug they dispense interacts with another drug a patient received at a different pharmacy or whether a patient is trying to fill a controlled substance from multiple pharmacies.

“They’re flying blind when it relates to prescriptions filled at other pharmacies,” said Berryman, the National Community Pharmacists Association official.

ALPHV is one of the largest groups performing “ransomware as a service,” splitting extortion money with affiliates that do the actual hacking and then install ALPHV’s BlackCat ransomware encryption program. ALPHV then handles the threats and negotiations.

The group has collected more than $300 million this way, hitting such high-profile targets as Caesars Palace in Las Vegas.

In December, the Justice Department said it and partner nations had hacked ALPHV, recovering hundreds of decryption keys so that victims could get their data back without paying, and some analysts predicted the group would not recover from the internal penetration.

But as the past week has shown, ALPHV was hardly disabled. ALPHV reappeared on another site within days and announced it would exact revenge. It invited its affiliates to break into more sensitive American targets.

“These law enforcement-led disruptions are most effective when they are paired with an arrest or identifying information about individuals,” said Adam Meyers, senior vice president of intelligence at security company CrowdStrike.

Groups open to affiliates are especially resilient unless the trust among the criminals is broken, said Chris Krebs, former head of the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.

“If you want permanent, long-lasting impacts, it is going to require taking some of these guys off the playing field,” Krebs said. “But there’s more guys waiting in the wings.”

ANALYSIS: Youth Exposure to Online Hate Is Rampant, Says StatCan, But a Closer Look Shows ‘Hate’ Is in Eye of Beholder

 

About 70 percent of Canadian youth have been exposed to online hate, says a Statistics Canada report released the day after the Liberal government tabled its Online Harms Act aimed at the problem. The alarmingly high number suggests Bill C-63 has arrived just in time to address a widespread problem, but a closer look at the StatCan survey questions tells another story.

“Hate” is in the eye of the beholder. Survey participants were given no guidance on what “hate” means, and sociologist David Haskell says young people are increasingly taught to perceive hate in comments previously considered offensive, but not truly harmful or “hateful.”

“There is lots of evidence coming from current psychological research showing that educational environments are ’training' students to experience a phenomenon that does not exist in objective reality,” Mr. Haskell, an associate professor in the faculty of Liberal Arts at Wilfrid Laurier University, told The Epoch Times via email.

“Those who take part in classes or workshops related to ‘anti-racism’ education or diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) are significantly more likely to claim they can see ‘evidence’ of hate in what others see as innocuous words or deeds,” Mr. Haskell said.

This is a key point of contention regarding the Online Harms bill as well. The bill gives the average Canadian various avenues to lodge complaints against someone based on the perception of “hate.”

Perception of Harm

The bill would allow people to bring complaints of online “hate speech” to the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal. While not every complaint to the tribunal will necessarily result in a fine—up to $50,000—the process of being brought before a tribunal can in itself be onerous.

Under current law, a Canadian could only be formally accused of “hate speech” under very limited circumstances. One may be criminally charged with hate speech, but that charge must be reviewed by the attorney general and can’t be laid by police. As it stands now, “hate motivation” for other crimes like assault or murder is only considered an aggravating factor by judges in sentencing. The bill would amend the Criminal Code to now make hate crimes a standalone offence.

People may also report others to the courts on the basis of a “fear” they may commit hate crimes, including an online “hate propaganda” offence. If the judge finds the fear reasonable, the defendant must adhere to restrictions (such as a curfew and wearing an electronic bracelet) for a year on pain of imprisonment.

“Far more draconian than being arrested for something you say, is being imprisoned for something someone else is afraid you’ll say,” lawyer Marty Moore, litigation director with the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (JCCF), told The Epoch Times.

Social media companies will also be required to gauge what is “hateful.” They must flag content they believe “foments hatred” and deal with content they have “reasonable grounds to believe posed a risk of significant psychological or physical harm,” according to the bill.

The Online Harms Act would have broad impacts on how hate speech is defined and policed, though its scope goes beyond that. It also targets child exploitation, intimate pictures shared without consent, content related to terrorism, and more.

The bill is touted by the Liberal government as primarily aimed at protecting youth from online harm. The report on youth online harms released by Statistics Canada, a federal agency, may be seen as intertwined with the rationale and thinking behind the bill.

The StatCan Report

Statistics Canada peppers some definitions of hateful online content throughout the report. It says disinformation, malinformation, and misinformation can all “contain elements or undertones of aggression and can promote or propagate hate.” It says “misinformation,” however, is not intentionally harmful.

In 2022, 84 percent of Canadians aged 15 to 24 saw information online that they suspected to be false, the report says.

Seventy-one percent of this age group reported also seeing content that could “incite hate or violence,” compared to the national average of 49 percent. “This type of content can consist of, but is not limited to, terrorist content or violence toward ethnic groups,” the report says.

The survey question used to garner this data does not define or give examples of hate or violence or the type of content in question. It is thus up to the respondent to decide based on perception.

“During the past 12 months, how often did you see the following harmful content online?” starts the section related to online harms in the Canadian Internet Use Survey 2022 (CIUS 2022). Then it asks simply about “content that may incite hate or violence,” with no further information.

A Statistics Canada spokesperson told The Epoch Times via email that the question posed in the CIUS 2022 included “e.g., terrorist content, violence toward ethnic groups.” But the spokesperson did not reply as of publication to a follow-up question as to why that does not appear in the CIUS 2022 published on the Statistics Canada website.

Mr. Haskell said “activist” teachers and professors are influencing young people to see “a banal statement or action as hateful.” He cited Cato Institute research that queried Americans on microaggressions. It found the “microaggressions” related to race that college professors are telling students to avoid actually aren’t considered offensive by most black and Latino people.

Statistics Canada did note briefly in the report “the same content can have a different impact on different viewers.”

It said the majority of cyber-related hate crimes reported to police are allegedly committed by youth. Boys aged 12 to 17 were charged or accused in 30 percent of the crimes from 2018 to 2022. In an additional quarter of the crimes, the accused was aged 18 to 34.

So it seems a substantial number of people behind the kind of online content targeted by the Online Harms legislation are themselves children, or young adults.

The last line of the Statistics Canada report says polarization in society is causing online hate to spread.

“The rapid and constant sharing of misinformation and violent and hateful media can polarize individuals and communities and foster a space for hate to spread both online and offline.”

This echoes comments Prime Minister Justin Trudeau made during an interview with Ryan Jesperson of Real Talk on Feb. 21.

Mr. Trudeau said “social media drivers” and the alternative news sources increasingly available online “prevent people from actually agreeing on a common set of facts.” It undermines legacy media, which “used to project across the country at least a common understanding of things.”

Opposition Leader Pierre Poilievre released a statement on Feb. 27 regarding the Online Harms Act, saying, “We do not believe that the government should be banning opinions that contradict the Prime Minister’s radical ideology.”

He said that “serious acts should be criminalized, investigated by police, tried in court and punished with jail, not pushed off to new bureaucracy.”

American Paralysis and Decline ~ VDH

Societies do not always collapse from a lack of wealth, invasion, or natural catastrophes. But they are so paralyzed by their fear that the road to salvation becomes too painful to even contemplate.

by Victor Davis Hanson for American Greatness

“We can bear neither our diseases nor their remedies.”

So shrugged the ancient historian Livy (59 B.C.- A.D. 17) of the long decline of Roman national character that, in his age, finally ended the Roman Republic.

Like a patient whose medicine proves worse than the disease, Livy lamented that the Romans knew that they had become corrupt and lawless.

But the very contemplation of the hard medicine needed for restoration—and the furious reaction that would meet the remedy—made it impossible to save the patient.

America is nearing such an impasse.

We know that no state can long exist after opening its borders to over 7 million illegal aliens, requiring neither background checks nor legality.

The recent murder of a Georgia female jogger by an illegal alien and the savage beating of New York policemen by similar others hardly merit media attention.

Everyone knows that neither new appropriations nor new laws are needed to secure the border as it was in 2020.

Instead, we could just stop suicidal catch-and-release, deport lawbreakers, privilege the legal over the illegal immigrant, demand would-be refugees apply for asylum first in their native countries, finish the border wall, and pressure Mexico to stop undermining the territorial integrity of its northern neighbor.

But then we shrug, “We can’t do that”—paralyzed in fear of being smeared as “xenophobic,” “nativist,” or “racist.”

So this generation apparently feels that it can endure the collateral damage of daily assaults on American citizens, the near bankruptcy of our cities, and 100,000 fentanyl deaths per year—but certainly not the idea that it is somehow not politically correct or compassionate.

The same is true of the $35 trillion debt, now costing more than $1 trillion a year in interest payments—and growing. We all know it is unsustainable. Americans understand it will eventually lead either to destructive hyperinflation, suicidal renunciation of federal debt, or confiscation of private savings.

Yet we ignore the reckless spending and keep borrowing well over $1 trillion a year. Apparently, our generation prefers being praised as “virtuous” and “caring.” So it leaves the next generation to be smeared as “cruel” and “unfair” when it is forced to cut federal entitlements and bloated government or face civilizational collapse.

The crime epidemic is also similar. Everyone accepts that no society can long endure quasi-legalized shoplifting or green-lighting smash-and-grabbers and carjackers to be released without bail.

But we assume that such a civilizational implosion will never reach our own sanctuary neighborhoods or safe places of work—at least not yet.

We also know that restoring deterrence by arresting, convicting, and jailing repeat felons will return safety to our streets.

But again, we fear even more that advocating “law and order” will earn slanders like “racist” or “reactionary.”

Ditto the homeless. In an age of self-congratulation and hyper-environmentalism, we know that a million homeless defecating, urinating, injecting, and assaulting on our downtown sidewalks and storefronts is medieval.

We know that it is illegal to camp out on the street and publicly harass citizens or relieve oneself in public.

And we know the cure lies in building and staffing more mental institutions and providing areas far from public spaces where the homeless can find shelter, sanitation, and medical care.

But the very idea of removing anyone from his accustomed sidewalk spot, or the notion of the use of force to transport the mentally ill to proper and humane facilities, terrifies us.

So we walk around, step over, and ignore those on the street.

Is the assumption that the odds of being assaulted or sickened acceptable? Or do we just not wish to learn where the flotsam, jetsam, and human offal of the street end up?

Most accept that had Donald Trump just not run for president in 2024 or was a man of the left, he would not now be facing four different felony court cases.

Most accept that three of the four prosecutors have either in advance promised to get Trump or have proved grossly unethical.

Most know it is wrong to try to remove a leading presidential candidate from state ballots.

Yet many shrug that this new weaponization of America’s legal system is the flamboyant Trump’s own problem, not their own. So they ignore the third worldization of our political system, which they quietly acknowledge is otherwise leading us to a Venezuela-like mess.

The paralysis of American society extends to our foreign policy as well. We deplore the terrorism of Iran and its thuggish surrogates. But we fear more the nasty, costly business of stopping its aggression.

Societies do not always collapse from a lack of wealth, invasion, or natural catastrophes.

Most often, they know what is destroying them. But they are so paralyzed by their fear that the road to salvation becomes too painful to even contemplate.

So they implode gradually, then suddenly.