The Bitterest Vindication

ANYONE WHO BELIEVES that the six "justices" who, yesterday, turned the presidency into a kingship of a particularly dictatorial kind would have put out the same decision if it had been an ex-Democratic president in question, they are the kind of fools who regularly get on TV and whose scribblage regularly gets featured on editorial pages of some of the most, um, "august" of ink on paper rags.  The Roberts six made their ruling confident that a Democratic President would not rule as a dictator, they know that Joe Biden won't use it to break the law.   They know full well that a Republican one would, they had four years of one who would and have heard him planning to do more of that for the past three years,  and that is why they issued that ruling giving one the tools to.  We now have a king who has fewer legal restrictions on him than George III had on him at the time of the Revolutionary War, under a Court regime which has destroyed the basis of our revolution.  A law unto himself by Supreme Court fiat.

It wasn't just any ex-president they ruled on behalf of, it was a Republican-fascist president who, himself, justifies the -fascist part of that by announcing that, as in his first chance, the second chance he's going for he intends to rule as a dictator and to get back at those who opposed him.   Roberts, Alito, Thomas (the RAT in that rats nest) Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Coney-Barrett knew who they were handing impunity from prosecution, they know full well what they are risking for the rest of us in the knowledge that they would actively service such a Republican-fascist dictator in the end, as, indeed, Trump himself has repeatedly said they would.  The previous lack of action in previous election cases since Trump mounted an insurrection against the election of Joe Biden for which the talking heads on TV praised them, assuring us that we could rely on the good-ol' Supreme Court in the end are now moot because they gave him everything he needs to impose an even more violent, vicious, version of what his previous four years. a practice run for what may well come next year but will come as long as this atrocity stands.   Because if not him another Republican-fascist who will be elected even without a majority vote, that is if the Republican-fascists will risk there being another American style vote and not a Putinesque one.  The way this court has legalized the most blatant voting fraud and gerrymandering, they're all in on that.   I am absolutely certain that it has been one of the top items in their agenda, making sure that there is never an effective majority vote in every place they and Republican-fascist legislatures and governors can arrange to prevent one.  That has been one of the major items in John Roberts' agenda since before he got on the court, to make sure that Black disenfranchisement is as much of a thing as it was in the 1930s if not the 1830s because he knows that Black People voting in line with their presence in the country is one of the biggest dangers to a Republican-fascist, millionaire-billionaire ruling class there is and that is what he and his colleagues want to make sure happens from now on.

Four of the "justices" voting to give a potential second Trump regime dictatorial powers with no legal redress were all in on the previously most outrageous anti-democratic action of the Republican dominated Supreme Court in recent decades, the Bush v Gore decision that stopped the counting of the ballot in the state that Jeb Bush and Republican-fascists ruled, Florida, handing by Supreme Court decision the 2000 election to George W. Bush. Thomas,  Roberts, Kavanaugh and Coney-Barrett.  Thomas one of the Bush v Gore five who decided that election by Supreme Court fiat, something I knew at the time was proof of the extent to which Republican-fascists would go to thwart the will of the majority on whose behalf Republicans had no intention to govern.  Two of them, Thomas and Alito have direct implication in support for the Trump insurrection that sought to do the same thing in 2020, Alito having not one but two flags of the insurrection flying over houses he owns and Thomas's wife actively participating in that insurrection attempt.  We now know that Alito was not opposed to his wife's signaling of support for Trumps insurrection, he's all in on it.  

The Supreme Court, most remote from democracy, is the most corrupt of the three branches of government, they have been for most of our history.  Given that remoteness, that should not be a surprise to anyone who believes in democracy as the only legitimate kind of government.  

Make no mistake this time, this has been a long standing attempt to destroy equality in order to destroy majority representation on behalf of a political party that services a minority.  The billionaires and millionaires first, then the white, straight, affluent, especially those who are male, at the expense of the majority of the country.  They have used every slave-power enhancing, rich-white-male enhancing corruption inserted into the Constitution by slave holders and wealthy aristocrats at the time of the writing of the Constitution to do it.   Those and such things as the dangerously vague First Amendment and the extremely dangerously worded Second Amendment were always lying there as potential tools for such a group of corrupt lawyers and "justices" to use to thwart egalitarian democracy.  In the past the incremental efforts to do that, most blatantly of all previous past efforts, the Dred Scott and Plessy v Ferguson decisions were aimed at Black People and a dangerously large number of the majority were OK with that.  The plans of the lawerly servants of oligarchy have always used our worst character flaws in their plans as they have our worst weaknesses.  Con men do that and they are and have been con men and, now con women with Barrett joining her predecessor, Sandra Day O'Connor in that effort.  When Rehnquist was up for the nomination as Chief Justice, old Joe Rauh testified about his being directly involved with voter intimidation of Black and Latin voters in Arizona, to have many a Court reporter pooh-pooh his warning, the media has been more than merely implicated in this effort as well, review what the great gray drab, the New York Times was publishing in the run up to the election that put Trump in power and the current Roberts Court on the bench if you need reminding of that.  And you can throw in the sanctimonious James Comey into that for good measure. Barack Obama keeping him in the leadership of the FBI was one of the stupidest things he ever did.  

Where do we go from here?  We had better win this election big for Joe Biden and give him a really Democratic Congress or this years election is likely the last one we ever see in our lifetimes.  And those lifetimes for many of us may be shorter than we had planned on.  The media will try to do what CNN did in that "debate" last week and hand it to the Republican-fascists because the billionaires and millionaires who own the media want those Trump tax-giveaways extended next year - I am entirely convinced that is why Sulzberger has been trying to sandbag Joe Biden, in the end.  Though I'm sure his refusal to kow-tow to the might of the NYT figures into it, just as I'm sure some personal pique of that family was behind their sandbagging of Hillary Clinton.  

We wake up today in an ex-constitutional democracy, one which now has a king by Supreme Court fiat.  Remember that on July 4th.  Not content, anymore, with being able to amend and nullify parts of the Constitution at will, they now are in the business of overthrowing rule by law on behalf of the most lawless Republican-fascist "president" in our countries history.  They have overthrown the entire framing of that.  

There have been many who have thought my calling the Supreme Court the most corrupt of the three branches was hyperbolic, especially as I have been saying that online.  I remember being scolded on Eschaton and other blogs for pointing that out,  I remember one other geezer of my age cohort invoking the Impeach Warren signs that went up after some of the rulings of that very brief lapse in that Court's generally oligarchy, white-supremacy record.  Pearl clutching or a fainting couch may have been involved, I couldn't see, such was the transgression against the norms of decent talk under our norms of "free speech."  I wonder how Nina Totenberg will cover this.  Warren's good intentions, especially the "First Amendment" rulings made things worse, the Sullivan Decision, privileging the media to lie about Democratic politicians, though I'm sure they didn't realize that would be the effective effect of it.  Sullivan was built on in the terrible Buckley v Valeo ruling, which was then extended all the way to Citizens United and worse, things that all contributed to yesterday's Supreme Court nullification of government of laws and not of a dictator. On the way overturning the good-government intentions of a bi-partisan Congress in the wake of the Nixon crime spree, not five years after his crimes were exposed, in all of their remote from reality, judicial judgement.  The Supreme Court, especially as opposed to the Congressional record they so often misread or ignore, entirely, is often the stupidest branch of government, as well.   

All along the way, from before the internet, I've gotten push back from would-be liberals and even lefties when I warned how dangerous this was, starting in 1976 when I came to that conclusion drawn from Buckley v Valeo and my study of the real history of that most nauseatingly august of courts.  The claimed powers that the Warren Court explicitly asserted was that Court's in that most beloved of cases, Brown v Board, emboldened those who afterwards built on that extension of unenumerated self-claimed Court powers for the opposite of what the Brown decision intended.  Though I'm certain if they hadn't, the Rehnquist Court would have for far less moral ends, they overturned an election, doing what the Trump insurrection did from the Supreme Court bench.  I admit to feeling vindicated by yesterdays ruling but I certainly don't feel good about that. Only the most amoral of fools would feel good about suspecting the worst was coming. I feel absolutely nothing good about that, I'd rather have been wrong.  But I'm not.  Believe me now, worse is to come unless the Democrats gain control and exercise it to nullify the Roberts Court.