I direct your attention to Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern, and also to Digby. It appears that six of the so-called Justices of the Supreme Court intend to end the American experiment in democratic governance. You should read both of them -- they say pretty much the same thing but with significant stylistic differences. I'm not going to elaborate much, but here are a couple of pull quotes just so you know what were talking about here. From L&S:
For three long years, Supreme Court watchers mollified themselves (and others) with vague promises that when the rubber hit the road, even the ultraconservative Federalist Society justices of the Roberts court would put democracy before party whenever they were finally confronted with the legal effort to hold Donald Trump accountable for Jan. 6. . . . We promised ourselves that there would be cool heads and grand bargains and that even though the court might sometimes help Trump in small ways, it would privilege the country in the end. We kept thinking that at least for Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch and Chief Justice John Roberts, the voice of reasoned never-Trumpers might still penetrate the Fox News fog. We told ourselves that at least six justices, and maybe even seven, of the most MAGA-friendly court in history would still want to ensure that this November’s elections would not be the last in history. Political hacks they may be, but they were not lawless ones. . . .On Thursday, during oral arguments in Trump v. United States, the Republican-appointed justices shattered those illusions.
And Digby:
I had no expectations that the right wing Supreme Court majority would act with restraint on this issue. Bush v. Gore cured me of faith that they have any integrity when a presidential election is on the line. But going into the Supreme Court arguments last week, I think most legal scholars expected the court to be at least somewhat disdainful of the idea that a president must be allowed to be a criminal or he can’t do the job. But it turns out that at least four of them and possibly even six are quite open to the idea. Justice Samuel Alito went so far as to turn the whole case inside out and upside down by stating:
“If an incumbent who loses a very close, hotly contested election knows that a real possibility after leaving office is not that the president is going to be able to go off into a peaceful retirement but that the president may be criminally prosecuted by a bitter political opponent, will that not lead us into a cycle that destabilizes the functioning of our country as a democracy?”
I’m pretty sure that ship sailed on January 6th. But what that comment, and others made by the right wingers on the court, shows is that they’ve bought into Trump’s Big Lie that the prosecutions of Donald Trump are partisan exercises brought by his “bitter political opponent.” And they are clearly prepared to use their own vast, unaccountable power to even out the score.
If they had any concern about their institution’s credibility they wouldn’t have even heard the case. Obviously, they don’t care about that . . .
No, they don't. And it will take decades to repair, if we're lucky.
2 comments:
I was under the impression that under our legal system a defendent is presumed innocent until judged guilty by unanimous consent of a jury of 12 of his or her peers. This ought to protect anyone from being shafted by a kangaroo court. The possibility that most of the Supremes no longer believe this scares the spit out of me.
I'm more worried that the court will use some torturous reasoning to deny the bedrock principle that no person is above the law. They tipped their hand by the way they phrased the question they would consider.
Trump's basic assertion is as ridiculous as claiming that 2 + 2 = 5. The Supreme court responded by saying "Well, maybe there are special circumstances where that actually may be true. For example, if we are working with 2.3 and 2.35, both numbers that are closer to '2' than any other number, then their sum will be 4.65, which is closer to '5' than any other number. Q.E.D!"
Of course, arithmetic is much simpler than real life, so the Court will hide its sophistries in Trump's case in a cloud of legal reasoning that will make it look almost reasonable even though it has no logical clothes.
The point, of course, is to throw the case into a briar patch that it can't extricate itself from until after the election. It's the legal equivalent of burying it in red tape.
The degree to which the anything-but-supreme conservatives are willing to bolster an insane traitor is ineffably disturbing. It's no longer, "What meat doth this, our Caesar, feed upon that he hath grown so great?" but rather, "How & why did we arrive at a moment where absolutely corrupt judges believe the indefensible bullshit around them, and in their own brains, to the point where they believe that destroying the United States is even a good thing for them?"
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