THE ABSURD, NOW, DISGUSTING DEFERENCE and pseudo-religious reverence that the Supreme Court has traditionally been given in the United States is belied by the history of that court. From the period when it was upholding and expanding slavery, through the period up to and including the Taney Court and when it was upholding American apartheid, white supremacy after the abolition of de jure slavery, "justices" who had a direct or family interest in slavery and the Jim Crow system and who certainly had a social caste interest in them continuing ruled in support of their own, financial interest. It is ironic that one of the cynical Bush I appointees was a rare Black man who was prepared to promote its revival as he racked up a record of overt corruption graft and grift to match the financial corruption of even the most highly regarded of the slave-owners on the court before the Civil War. Only the cynicism that put Clarence Thomas on the court has marked appointments to that court throughout its history. Their support of wage slavery, corporate abuse and even murder (Gorsuch on truckers being forced to choose their job or freezing to death, for example), financial corruption and overturning any effort to reform government to make it do the will of most Americans is the actual majority history of that court.
The Roberts Court taking that corruption to new depths in its recent rulings such as the one that legalized bribe taking by government officials (such as Thomas and Alito and certainly others are guilty of), taking the right of the destitute to have a place to lay their heads, destroying the voting rights act and on behalf of Republican-fascist states to suppress votes and rig congressional districts, and turning the most corrupt, vulgar and stupid man to have ever gotten the presidency into a monarch worse than George III was permitted to be under British law are merely part of the worst of that Court's history, perhaps its current lowest point. I doubt even Roger Taney and his corrupt colleagues would have legalized corruption and made the likes of Buchanan immune from prosecution for crimes related to the core functions of the presidency. John Roberts' name along with those who concurred with those rulings should go down as the most corrupt "justices" in our history for the old fashioned reason that they earned it. They should be treated with the same regard that Matt Gaetz, Lauren Bobbert, and Marjorie Taylor Green are treated because, despite their Ivy League credentials and their absurd black robes and the putrid legal temple they work in, they are trash. There is no more obvious instance of sworn public officials violating their oaths of office than those who overturned, not only legitimately adopted and enacted laws but parts of the Constitution, the structure of the government set up under it and even the rejection of a despot with royal powers that was the absolute substance of the Declaration of Independence. And they did it while lying through their teeth in legaleese.
In the aftermath I've been curious to hear lawyers on different sides and how many of them can't face the reality of what was done. Those who like Sonia Sotomayor in her dissent have grimly faced the real meaning of the immunity decision in its full potential to allow presidents to commit even murder and get away with it, a power argued for by Trump's lawyer that the Court majority certainly didn't reject in their decision. They would certainly have rejected that as too far on that basis unless they intended for a president of their liking having that power. A power which it is impossible to believe any of those who wrote and ratified the Constitution would have approved, even tacitly. The royal power they had rejected stopped somewhat short of that. But not the well-manicured, affluent, Ivy League lawyers on the Roberts Court. Roberts' public routine of judicial aloofness is as phony as Alito's "christianity."
I've read things like what is described here from law professors at elite universities, one of Coney Barrett's colleagues at that shameful institution, Notre Dame's law school,
University of Notre Dame law professor Derek Muller said the decision makes it harder to prosecute presidents but does not give them a pass.
“It definitely gives more protection to the president, but I think there are pitfalls for future administrations if they were to rely too heavily upon it,” Muller said.
The lines between official and unofficial acts can be blurry, as they are in Trump’s case, Muller said. The decision leaves open the possibility that Smith’s charges against Trump over the election can continue, and it provides some protections to President Biden if he loses to Trump this fall, Muller said.
“It prevents President Trump from prosecuting former president Biden, if that’s the case, on a great many things,” he said. “So there is a way in which it will de-escalate rhetoric about a president or a candidate threatening to prosecute a former president for official acts.”
He called the hypothetical example of an assassination plot absurd. To start, others would likely be loath to carry it out because they would fear they could be prosecuted, he said.
Much more has to play out in the Trump case in the lower courts, and the case could easily return to the Supreme Court, he said. In short, the precise details of when presidents enjoy immunity remain unclear.
Keeping it from playing out in the lower courts is exactly what the decision does, you'd have to be a pretty stupid law professor to not see that, though apparently many are so stupid as to think we'd believe they are that stupid.
I'm going to point out here that this idiot Muller seems to not have watched TV on January 6, 2021 when Trumps insurrectionists were hunting down Nancy Pelosi, TRUMP'S OWN VICE PRESIDENT!, and other members of Congress to murder them on his order. They forget Trump's demand that metal detectors be inactivated because his insurrectionists weren't going to use any guns they brought with them on him. AND THAT WAS AT A TIME BEFORE THE ROBERTS COURT HAD GIVEN TRUMP IMPERIAL POWERS OF IMPUNITY. Anyone who thinks a Trump couldn't get members of the military who were AOK with murdering officials of civilians is too stupid to bus tables at a fast food joint. Especially given that he has already promised pardons to those who do his bidding. Many of those involved in the insurrection had held jobs in the military and on police forces, they'd sworn to uphold and defend the country against just such as Donald Trump wanted to be.
I've listened to even some anti-Trumpists take that belief that there are limits as foolish comfort, forgetting, as apparently law professor Muller does, that presidents are stupidly given the absolute power of pardon in the Constitution. Trump, himself has said he'd pardon anyone who committed violence on his behalf, and he has pardoned many of his henchmen, as, in fact, Bush I did with the collusion of such of them as Bill Barr. And they forget that it's the Roberts Court and its like in, no doubt, future Republican-fascist packed courts that will be deciding any challenge to any criminality on the part of a Republican-fascist president and the legitimacy of any pardons granted. I heard Harry Litmann point out that even the hoped-for evidentiary hearing the Court ordered the trial court judge to conduct will be ratfucked by its ban on the use of evidence of intent. I can imagine they included that as an excuse for them to quash any attempt to introduce TO THE PUBLIC evidence that might hurt Trump's chance that his worst criminality will be hidden from voters. The depths of vileness in that decision are only, now becoming evident. I have no doubt that future Republican-fascist courts enjoying the same ability to do so, will drive things even lower.
I would bet that three years ago no one would have believed a Supreme Court, even the worst in our history would have done things that the Roberts Court has done for the past several years and certainly plans on doing in the next term. Anyone who would bet on them not going farther than they have is an idiot.
The Supreme Court will, as I'm already hearing some predict it will, extend similar emanations of immunity to themselves, I can't believe them legalizing bribery and financial corruption for government officials was done without regard to the financial scandals the Court has been confronted with this year. If there is one thing we know from the history of that court, from "justices" like the legendary John Marshall, they are fully capable of rendering decisions that benefit their worst financial motivations. He repeatedly ruled to support slave-holders and even slave-importing pirates after the importation of slaves was made a capital crime by the Congress. The depths of corruption tied to the financial interests of the "justices" cannot be excluded from the actual history of that court as it is understood by those indoctrinated into the often corrupt secular theology of legal scholarship.
The Supreme Court has so abused, not only its legitimate powers but such powers as it gave itself in Marbury v. Madison too badly and too dangerously to allow that to continue. If, by a miracle, we get a strongly Democratic Congress and president, they must legally overturn the usurped power-grab of the Court, put binding, effective and removing ethics requirements on the Court - Clarence Thomas and likely Alito should be investigated criminally for what we already know and imprisoned if they are convicted. Unless there is a Democratic super-majority in the Senate to impeach them - which I doubt we'll see in our or any ones' lifetimes - we should face the fact that impeachment and conviction of Supreme Court members and presidents is a constitutional mythological entity which will never happen. The stupidity of an anti-democratic Senate guarantees that. Impeachment and removal from office as a guarantee of safety from an imperial president or an imperial court is a dangerous myth. If it were not, it would have worked by now.
But there is nothing saying that a member of the Court who is convicted of a crime could not be given a twenty-year term without possibility of parole, their office not being any impediment to their imprisonment. And that should include their colluding spouses, such as Ginny Thomas and any others who made common cause with Trump's insurrection. I would include in the corruption that would be banned the extremely lucrative career of Roberts' wife in head hunting for law firms that either do or potentially could do business before the Court.
Those taking such an appointment to such powerful positions should be held to a far higher ethical standard than those for those without such power. They and their families should understand that is one of the conditions of them accepting such an office. The talk about that, about a spouse being able to have a career despite its high potential of creating a conflict of interest is wrong. When it comes to a spouse having a position of great power such as an official in the federal government, the potential for corruption should always outweigh the seeming fairness of their spouse being able to take whatever job they want to. There is no right for someone to hold a public office, there is no right to be married to someone who holds such a position. Their private decisions cannot be considered to be more important than the Peoples' need for honest government and an honest legal system. If their spouse doesn't like that restriction on them making money or indulging in a hobby of extreme anti-democratic agitation, that's the nominees problem and they should probably keep the job they already had. Frankly, I don't think there has ever been an irreplaceable member of the Supreme Court, one whose seat might not have been better filled by someone else. We've had less than a handful of presidents who may have been irreplaceable,*
From what I understand the model of that would be Vice President Harris's husband whose legal career in corporate law was put on hiatus for her term in office even though it was extremely unlikely that her duties in office would ever be in conflict with it. There isn't any right for a Supreme Court "justice" to be a multi-millionaire, thinking of such a thing as a "right" proves how stupid our "rights" language is, now. We'd be better off if they had to all get by on a working-class salary, them and their spouses. If she wanted a job she could have found one that had no conflict with his job but they're allowed to do that even when the conflict is so obvious. I'd like to see them overturn the Constitutional ban on reducing Supreme Court salaries but I doubt we'll see that till after a restoration of intended democratic rule after a catastrophe. I think the majority on the court would be overpaid at minimum wage.
There's a point past which a mere appearance of corruption turns into a pattern in which it is entirely more than a mere appearance and the set way of doing business. The Supreme Court passed that stage of mere appearance during the Marshall Court. As an appointed, not elected branch of the government, giving them the kind of deference they have enjoyed was always stupid and a violation of the spirit of representative democracy. They have proven what should always have been suspected, that, unless prevented from outside, an appointed judiciary was bound to become corrupt. The low regard that the "political" branches are held in even though they had to pass the test of voter approval at regular intervals is misplaced, though through such corruption as Supreme Courts have enabled and supported, elections in the United States are often the duped stupidly putting their exploiters in office. But such fallible men - and it's all been men so far - are the ones who choose who to put on the Court. There is now a long standing pattern of Republicans elevating some of the worst for some time now. Certainly in this century only two of those, Stevens and Souter have demonstrated an unwillingness to be corrupt on a partisan basis, the rest of Republican appointees, in cases such as Bush v Gore and those legalizing political corruption, vote suppression and rigging, and making Donald Trump immune from criminal prosecution are among the worst in the history of that court. The Roberts Court should be the last straw in the continuation of that disgusting history. The ordure in that Court has made drastic changes in it a necessity if equality before the law and democracy, itself, is going to survive. Nothing can be allowed to stay the same, from their self-imposed impunity from ethics laws to the amber-tinted, awed piety style of Court reporting, all of that is part of their criminality and treason against democratic government. The history of corruption on that court should be opened up and fully exposed, even going back to Marshall who was about as evil as a slave-holder could be expected to be.
* Washington who made himself so by relinquishing power to his successor, Lincoln who fought the Civil War and ended legal slavery, FDR who saved the country from the Republican depression and foreign fascists, the very same forces we are facing now. LBJ who forced the adoption of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts using his enormous knowledge as a member of the Senate to do that. I think if President Biden has a second term with a Democratic Congress, he may join that short list because we are in danger in ways that the others never faced. The Roberts Court can be counted on to prevent that if they can get away with it. They would welcome a Republican-fascist despot because they would serve the same purposes with pleasure and to their own profit.
** Souter warned twelve years ago about someone like Trump getting power in the United States due to the profound ignorance of civic processes among Americans. Given that warning you'd have hoped he would have done more to prevent that than he apparently has. I haven't noticed him doing much of anything to counter Trump or the Roberts Court making what kept him awake at night the horrific reality we live with 24 hours a day.
I would agree with what he said though I would say that at least as important, probably more so than mere ignorance is something he touched on as a "feeling of responsibility" is the deficit of any sense of morality which is an even more important foundation for democracy. I think the fact is we have to start positively instill in all Americans of all ages in the moral bases of equality and, so democracy. And I mean in school children no less than those who are already supposedly adults. And, far from Souter's charmingly naive concept of instilling that through high school civics classes, the only effective means of doing that is a requirement based in the mass media, the entertainment media being entirely more effective in doing that OR INSTILLING ITS OPPOSITE TENDENCY TOWARDS FASCIST STRONG-MAN RULE than the pseudo-journalistic parts of it.
No comments:
Post a Comment