Did the courts issue an order that was neither stayed nor recalled which the executive hasn’t conformed to?

Filing a lawsuit is exactly how laws are applied. And the system runs on temporary and final court orders that constrain or command executive action, that are often appealed and formally stayed pending appeal. Blanche or trump or god himself conceding to anything doesn’t matter unless and until a court issues an order.

Laws are not self executing, and while their plodding reaction to contemptuous behavior is infuriating it is how the system has always worked.

I’m way more worried about ICE than I am the Epstein files. Not to say that lining those child-raping pedophiles against a firing squad isnt an important goal, but we can’t jump to the neremberg trials when the Nazis still occupy France.

That’s not what happened. There was a release of Epstein files, just not as much as was intended by Congress

The next step would be for someone with standing to file a suit with the courts, who would then rule if the law passed by congress requires more than is done already given the external rules of the constitution and all the other laws congress has passed.

The executive branch applying laws in a way that Congress did not necessarily intend is not enough for a “constitutional crisis”, wherin the federal system has broken down in a way that cannot be corrected without discarding the system.

There are other crisis, like SCOTUS presuming to interfere in the administration of elections or dictate whether or not Congress really meant it when they passed a law, but those have unexhausted and nonforclosed plausible remedies if Congress decides to actually try and fix them.

From a purely federalist standpoint the Epstein files are as irrelevant as any murder or rape. Child trafficking and sexual abuse are already illegal, and if the full unredacted Epstein files included conclusive proof that Trump raped a kindergartner to death it wouldn’t change enough votes to matter.

Trump is exposing the very real flaws in the US system and the bundle of precedents whose existence dissuaded actual change during the imperial-esque exoansion of executive power during the cold war, but he hasn’t broken the constitutional system. Congress still passes laws, those laws still go into effect, and the executive branch still largely obeys the adjudicated application of those laws by the courts.

We have very real problems and Trump is definitely trying to break the system so he doesn’t end his life in prison, but it’s not fucking broken yet. Although it is a system that’s historically led to a bunch of terrible things, from Jim Crow and the Trail of Tears to the 80s AIDS epidemic and Anne Frank being sent back to Germany to die.

~I may have misremembered if Anne was one of the German Jews turned away while fleeing Germany, but it definitely happened to some of her peers.~

If we had a unicameral sovereign parliament we’d have devolved into a dictatorship almost a decade ago.

Our checks and balances aren’t meant to keep the US from doing shitty things. They’re meant to preserve the responsiveness of the government to the people. If enough of the people in enough of the country keep electing people who promise to do shitty things, shitty things will get done. That’s democracy.

Exactly none of the US system of checks and balances includes expecting an employee of the executive branch to defy the head of the executive branch.

It works by the courts invalidating executive orders as illegal or unconstitutional, and the Congress refusing to fund or legislate at the executive’s whims.

Our checks and balances are working fairly well, especially considering that the GOP hold majorities in every part of the federal government. The problem is just that Congress let the other two branches assume too much of its own authority.

I won’t accuse the late senator of either sexually abusing children or being erotically attracted to them.

But he was a consistent Republican vote for shitty Republican ideas. So, yeah, he definitely fucked America’s kids.

Does the video do more than note the thing about asking for a massage?

Because that’s not a relevant fact whose omission is any sin of journalism, and if that’s all they have then releasing a YouTube video with that headline is absolutely victim blaming, even if indirectly.

The only appropriate rebuttal to a claim of sexual assault is a refutation of the facts claimed, ideally with a horrified “people who cross this line suck” commentary.

No set of external facts matters if you touch someone in a sexual fashion without their contemporaneous consent. Assertions of external facts existing even being noteworthy is vicirm blaming and helps rapists get away with it.

I didn’t intend to accuse you of victim blaming.

I’m accusing the video of doing that, and you of failing to identify it as such in either your summary or a top-level comment.

The summary paragraph attributed to you does not include any skepticism about this obvious attempt at victim blaming.

Spreading this sort of bullshit is what I’ll blame if Platner stays in and loses. He needs to drop out, now, and find a way to make amends and help the cause. Such as throwing his weight behind the most progressive candidate to replace him on the ballot.

(Unless he really is the shallow pseudo-leftist misandrist lefties clocked him as at first recollection of that damn tattoo.)

New Mexico, Colorado, Maryland, and New Jersy are not about to join the neo-confederacy. Maybe Indiana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania if the new POTUS is a black gay trans woman from Michigan who promises to ban chikd marriage.

Texas is so obsessed with slavery that they:

• Rebelled from (the US of) Mexico because they wanted to own slaves.
• Rebelled from the USA because they feared their slaves being taken away
• Gave Oklahoma its pan-handle because they wanted to join the US as a slave state.

We mark a federal holiday celebrating the end of slavery in June because Texas didn’t lose its slaves until the union occupation took them away, five and a half months after the 13th amendment was ratified.

The most eloquent proof that the US Civil War was fought over slavery may well be just that Texas joined the confederacy.