Laminar_flo

I say this because I deeply love my wife - people spend all this time trying to be perfect to attract a mate. But when you really love some one, like really love them - you always end up falling in love with the imperfections....

I love how everyone has turned into a Constitutional Law scholar overnight to be able to say “Yes, DACA is unconstitutional.”

Its funny you say that, b/c my first take was "I love how every immigration lawyer has turned into a Constitutional Law scholar overnight to be able to say “Yes, DACA is constitutional.”" I mean your answer is a copy/paste of this, without exploring any relevant case law, particularly TX v US, which is incredibly relevant and was upheld/punted by SCOTUS. I practiced for a while years ago, but I follow it more as a hobby today.

Deferred action in this case is directly opposed to the Take Care clause. There isn't a ton of direct precedent around this area of the law, except in cases where there is direct harm (and scale matters A LOT here - letting in a few hundred people per year on humanitarian grounds does not create direct harm of the scale necessary for amelioration and/or redress). A really important case here is Heckler v. Chaney where SCOTUS expressly put the power 'of decision to enforce' in the hands of Congress, not the executive branch (this case involved the FDA acting as agent of the executive branch, interestingly). So the scale tips slightly to start in favor of the states that are suing, as SCOTUS finds that agency action must be with the bounds established by Congress, not the executive branch (eg, Congress makes the call on DHS's immigration powers, not the President). This is the root of the overreach argument, and you can't handwave it.

Speaking expressly on direct harm, in TX v US DACA expansion was halted, and although the judge did not expressly address the question of executive overreach, he built the entire framework around direct harm related to the (potential) overreach within the context of failing to 'take care' (eg states are facing direct harm from deferred action which implies that the executive branch is failing to take care). This matters a lot and people who defend DACA by quoting the constitution are missing 95% of the meat of the case.

The constitutionality of expanded DACA and DAPA was never decided by the Supreme Court because it died at the preliminary injunction phase

This was b/c of a standing issue, not because there was little/no legal merit to the argument. That's exactly the type of argument/theory SCOTUS picks up at cert regardless. We will never know now, but if the US atty had walked in front SCOTUS and said "Article II Section Three of the Constitution has been interpreted....chooses not to remove based on humanitarian grounds", Roberts would have said, "thanks, we have all read the Constitution before. What's your legal theory?" SCOTUS punted this 4-4 once and there is roughly 0% chance Gorsuch was going find in favor of the US govt. It would have been a 5-4 with Gorsuch being the decider, in my opinion of course.

I’ve spent about 20 years on Walk St. The TLDR is that the ‘stock indices’ represent about 0.05% of the companies out there, and those 0.05% are best positioned to ‘win’ going forward.

In the US there are about 12M ‘operating companies’ out there (an operating company is a ‘company’ as you think of them). Only about 6,000 of the 12M are publicly traded on stock markets and have ‘stock’ as you know it. The rest are ‘privately held’ and are held by a small group of people. The S&P500 represent the biggest (appx) 500 public companies in the US (eg of the 12M companies in the US, only the 500 biggest are in the S&P500). The NASDAQ (or NASDAQ100) are the 100 biggest tech companies in the US.

Here’s the kicker: those 500 companies are the biggest and best positioned to, not just survive, but thrive in the post-COVID world. They have the biggest balance sheets, the best management teams, most sophisticated finance teams, best IT, best infrastructure....I can keep going. The remaining 11.9M companies are suffering and will continue to suffer - those are the companies that are feeling the pain right now.

If you think about it that way, the stock indices should be up. It crack me up that r/wallstreetbets is obsessed with betting the SP500 is going down....but then can’t understand why they keep losing money.

And to another Reddit point: People have a tendency to moralize this, like “Well our country is being taken over by huge companies” - but this is incredibly naive and silly. The economy ends with the consumer - full stop. In other words, people will vocalize on Reddit about how big companies are terrible....from an iPhone, while wearing Levi’s jeans and a shirt from Macy’s (that was delivered via UPS), while sitting on a pottery barn couch, and eating a papa Johns pizza.

This isn’t a bad thing, and no rain drop feels responsible for the hurricane, but the effect is the same. It’s not ‘the economy’s fault’ or a ‘failure of capitalism’ or at ‘failure of the government’ - it’s the inevitable conclusion of YOU acting in your own best interests, multiplied 330M times over.

I'll take a stab at this. Just for reference: 1) I'm going to take the Barr summary at face value (I know this is a big assumption), 2) I (used) to practice law (eg, I went to school, joined the bar, and actually practiced; I'm not a 'reddit lawyer'), and 3) this is a very politically fraught topic, and I'm going to be as impartial as possible.

The ELI5 is this: What we are really talking about is a 'conspiracy' from a legal perspective (collusion is generally reserved for corporate law, but the media seized on the phrase and ran with it). For 'conspiracy' to occur you need an agreement between a Trump insider and a Russian to commit a crime. Additionally, you also need to show that Russia (or whoever) changed their actions as a result of the agreement; in other words, a very effective defense against conspiracy charges is to argue that the parties would have committed to the actions even if there wasn't an agreement in place. I cannot stress this enough: you need solid evidence that there was an explicit agreement in place and that agreement dictated the parties actions. A Trump associate meeting with a Russian isn't illegal at all (this happens with some frequency), and sharing polling data isn't illegal (it certainly looks bad, but its not conspiracy).

The two 'biggest' potential crimes that came up during this were the WikiLeaks dumps, and the Trump Jr's interest in the Clinton emails. With respect to WikiLeaks, it would appear that Russia acted unilaterally in dumping the files, and did not have an agreement in place with a Trump insider. This will be something to pay attention to in the full report, but its not impossible to believe that Russia acted on its own. Trump Jr looks shadier, but it would appear that he stopped just short of entering into an agreement (probably at the advice of a lawyer). Again, something to look at in the full report; however, 'interest' does not equal criminality. Put differently, Trump Jr, could very effectively argue something like, "I thought they were bluffing so I played along. When I saw they were serious and real, I backed off quickly." We can debate if that's true (and this might be in the full report), but something like that would absolutely be his defense.

Without a collusion charge (or a charge for something criminal), its really close to impossible from a practical perspective to get the obstruction charge to stick. At the most basic level, if there was no collusion, there was no obstruction. One of the key elements needed to prove obstruction is called 'mens rea'; its latin for 'guilty mind' and its the idea that you know what you're doing is wrong. With no underlying criminal charge, its really close to impossible to say 'you knew what you were doing is wrong.' Now obviously we can come up with 'comic-book hypotheticals' (eg, a defendant could burn reams and reams of files and successfully derail an investigation); however, if that were the case here, the Mueller/Barr report would look very different. Within the bounds of the summary report, there isn't a good argument for obstruction. At the end of the day, if there is no underlying charge, an innocent person - with no guilt of mind - declining to aide an investigation more than the absolute minimum required, is exactly what an innocent person would do.

There are tons of sources that have been reporting this for ~18mo (POLITICO's coverage has been excellent and basically predicted this outcome); however, that's not what people want to see.

Do you genuinely believe that DACA would have withstood the inevitable SCOTUS challenge? If yes, can you briefly share with us your legal theory as to how it would have stood?

Looking at this purely from a legal/constitutional perspective (absent the politicking and the strong emotions that permeate this issue), DACA was almost certainly going to be reversed by SCOTUS 5-4, in my opinion. I'm no Trump fan, but he's absolutely being placed with the blame in a situation that was created by some fairly egregious executive overreach from the prior administration. At least now the pressure is on Congress to act or choose very publicly not to act. But irrespective of the outcome, there's no more hiding.