Tuesday, November 26, 2019

Supreme Court Or King Maker?

If the Supreme Court overturns the monumental order written by Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson ordering Don McGahn to honor the subpoenas to testify, it should be obvious that the "justices" enabling the Trump crime gang are as in on it as Giuliani and Manafort.   If they do that it must force a total rehauling of the Supreme Court, the most totally undemocratic of the branches of the United States, one that mixes a pantomime of sanctity with some of the most corrupt actions taken by the federal government.  

Supreme Court members (let's drop the "Justice" title, they don't deserve that assumption of delivering that) should be confirmed by both houses of Congress.   Since the Supreme Court has given themselves the power, or rather five out of the nine, of overturning the judgement of the majority of elected members of Congress, both houses, and, in most cases, the elected president, the present system of relying on the least democratic of the elected parts of the government alone, is inadequate. 

Though it seems to me, given that self-created power,  they should only be able to overturn a duly adopted law by a unanimous decision.  If you object that the Congress has the possibility and, on rare occasion, has adopted bad laws, well, the Supreme Court is certainly no less likely to make bad law from the bench and to obliterate good laws and given the ideological and personal interests of many members of the Supreme Court, dating back to the beginning when rich, slave-owning members of it made decision after decision that enriched them - the kind of thing that still goes on unchecked - that is no real argument.   It's a lot harder, in most Congresses to make the kind of terrible decisions that Supreme Courts do by 5-4 and, unlike the unelected members of the court, the Congress has to stand for elections in which the only source of legitimacy for any of them doing anything,  THE PEOPLE, can weigh in on the issue.   

That power was given by the Supreme Court, to itself by itself.  It was not adopted by a Congress and ratified by the States.   If the Congress and the President chose to ignore it, what would happen? 

Supreme Court members should have a 10 year term limit.  It is disgusting that we are totally dependent on the health of people well past their life expectancy to outlive a criminal administration of which - thanks in no small part to Supreme Court decisions overturning campaign finance laws - we have more of than not, these days.   If your objection is this or that great justice living longer on the bench than ten years, I'll name you more criminals and fascists in a black robe who have, as well. 

The Court should be expanded and panels of judges should hear a particular case.  Maybe there should be some mechanism for members with particular expertise on some matters to weigh in on them if they aren't part of a panel but the Court being limited to nine members is not in the Constitution and there is no reason the Court must be that size.  At times in its history it has been fewer and, briefly, as I recall, it was more than nine.  

Since so many of its cases depend on math and science expertise which few if any of the judges have any of, there should be a requirement that a considerable number of the members of the court have such competence.   If you can put boobs like Kavenaugh and Thomas and hacks like Alito and Goresuch on the court, you can certainly make it a requirement that some of them know the hell what the issues before them actually are.  Making a brave attempt to understand complex statistical mathematics for men and women well up in years is absurd.  Try learning a new area of math in your 60s to test your acuity and see how fast you learn it.  I did, it gets harder to learn new things.  And the particular thing I chose was a lot easier than some of the statistical issues that are important to the cases the Court takes.  

The Supreme Court is as veiled in repulsively false, sentimentally presented sanctimony as American football is.  Its history, truthfully told does not sustain that.  If the Supreme Court does enable Trump in his quest to be king, it will have definitively disconfirmed that civic religiosity as a load of stinking crap.  And the fact that we are left in any doubt as to whether or not the Roberts Court, padded with thugs anointed by the Federalist-fascist-Society will or will not make the most criminal head of the Executive into a fascist king is enough reason for us to take away their ability to do that.   They should not have that power, they've used such power over the past fifty years to seriously damage our democracy, to enable billionaire oligarchs and massive corporate criminal syndicates, and to thwart the Congress in its past attempts to rescue American democracy from the domination of billionaires.   

If they overturn Judge Jackson's ruling, they have effectively crowned the mentally defective criminal Donald Trump as the king of the United States. That should kill off the cult of the Supreme Court.   I suspect even Nina Totenberg might notice that that part of her act needs work.   Even if they sustain her order in full - they might try to weaken it or nullify it the way Roberts did the ACA which he didn't politically dare to destroy at that time - that we have to wonder if they might stick the last knife into American democracy is reason enough to make these changes in it. 

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