The Righteous

“Nominating Gabbard for director of national intelligence is the way to Putin’s heart, and it tells the world that America under Trump will be the Kremlin’s ally rather than an adversary,” Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a professor of history at New York University and the author of “Strongmen,” a 2020 book about authoritarian leaders, wrote on Friday. “And so we would have a national security official who would potentially compromise our national security.”
So foreign nations do get a vote.

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Ukraine has fired US-made ATACMS missiles into Russia’s Bryansk region, Russia’s Defense Ministry said, in a major escalation on the 1,000th day of war.
The attack comes just two days after the Biden administration gave Kyiv the green light to use the longer-range American weapons against targets inside Russia.

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German Defence Minister Boris Pistorius has said damage to two undersea cables in the Baltic Sea looks like an act of sabotage and a "hybrid action", without knowing who is to blame.

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The Righteous

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled that faulty mail-in ballots can’t be counted during this year's Senate vote. This after the Democratic majority on the Bucks County election commission had decided to ignore a binding state Supreme Court ruling in an attempt to engineer the election of Democratic incumbent Sen. Bob Casey (D-Pa.).

The Bucks County Boards of Elections counted them anyway.

"People violate laws any time they want," Democratic Bucks County commissioner Diane Ellis-Marseglia said last week, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer. "So, for me, if I violate this law it’s because I want a court to pay attention. There’s nothing more important than counting votes."

But the court had already paid attention. It had already ruled against her. So they ruled against her again.

Laws are challenged in the courts all the time, but not by breaking them and seeing what happens. And while demonstrators will sometimes break a law--like assembly or trespassing restraints--it is to call attention to another, unrelated legal issue. 

But violating the law because you think your vision of the legal situation is better has one foot in tyranny, one in chaos. This is especially true in a nation whose very foundation rests on the confines built around the appropriate actions of its government.

This is not an outlier. Recall Biden and his response to the Supreme Court's ruling against his college loan forgiveness/transfer. “That didn’t stop me,” President Biden proudly declared after the Supreme Court blocked his $430 billion student loan write-off in 2023. It sure didn’t. After striking out in court with three debt forgiveness schemes, the Administration unveiled another.

This arrogant assumption of personal superiority over foundational law is the hallmark of the autocrat.