President Biden Must Put The Court On Trial

THERE ARE NO "JUDICIAL NORMS" now that the Roberts' Republican-fascists have abolished rule by law and not their preferred man, though those trained in that lore will be the last to understand that.   FROM HERE ON IN, SAVING DEMOCRACY WILL DEPEND ON THE ULTIMATE AUTHORITY, THE LEGITIMATE VOTE OF THE PEOPLE OF THE UNITED STATES.

The Department of Justice should open an investigation into contacts between members of the Supreme Court, those involved in Project 25, the Heritage Foundation and other seditious groups planning the coup against democracy that the Supreme Court set in motion with their ruling giving Donald Trump and all future Republican-fascist presidents retroactive immunity from criminal prosecution.  They should include any legal scholars who promote the anti-democratic unitary executive theory of the presidency.   If Merrick Garland is too squeamish to do it, with the new powers granted to him by the Supreme Court, President Biden should order them to do it and oversee that it is done with rapidity and diligence, subpoenaing the "justices" and the fascist seditionists to comply on pain of imprisonment.  He is obliged as part of his official duties to protect and defend the Constitution and they are clearly bent on destroying it, they could hardly try to remove that power from President Biden which they just gave to Trump.  He should not rely on an Ivy League trained lawyer to oversee any such investigation, I think an honest and diligent historian with a record of supporting egalitarian democracy would be an entirely better bet.  

The epic election to rescue us from dictatorship will have to be fought not only against King Trump I but also against the Trump Court under Roberts and the rest of the king-making majority of that Court.  The Court should be put on trial by The People, the only possible means of defeating them under our dangerously structured government which has put the Court above any real restraint, impeachment of those on that level being, for every practical and so real purpose, a fiction.  Questioning his motives for doing that, definitively put outside of any legal consideration by the Roberts Court fascists.  Everything they have done, starting with nationalizing the bodies of Women in the overturn of Roe should be used to defeat Republican-fascists at every level.  As a life-long Mainer, I'd love to see Susan Collins harried into resignation over her role in this, both in the overturn of Roe and in the killing of the American republic in favor of Trumpian dictatorship.  I'd love to see the complicit Jared Golden forced away from it, though I have little to no faith in the Second District in my state.  He will cross the isle after November if he's not succeeded by a Republican-fascist.  I wouldn't be surprised if some others of those who tried to foment a challenge to Nancy Pelosi do as well.  American democracy is hanging by a thread.

The investigation of Supreme Court sedition would certainly fall within the powers of the president they gave Donald Trump.  The Biden administration could certainly collect any evidence they want and they could release that to the public without having to worry about it being illegal, that is if President Biden authorized it.  He is sworn to uphold and defend the law of the land and the Constitution and he should do it before the Roberts Courts seditionists make a ruling saying they, as well, are exempt from criminal prosecution, that is before they formally do what they have done on a de facto basis in refusing to do anything about Thomas and Alito's blatant corruption and breaking of laws requiring them to recuse from just such cases on the basis of their known connections to and blatant support of the Trump putsch of January 2021.  

We need to have the evidence that they have done what they did as part of the clear plan of the Project 25 fascists to destroy American democracy and they need to be exposed before the election.  

It was and still is widely believed that the Taney Court, in writing the Dred Scott decision which removed legal personhood from all Black People and attempted to extend slavery into all of the states and territories, even those which had abolished slaveryl  They colluded with the incoming Bucanan administration and, I'd suspect that of that other slimy presidency of Pierce.  Bucanan mentioned its substance in a speech before it was issued, clearly leaked to him as Alito leaked the draft opinion in the overturning of Roe v Wade.  There was, likely direct contacts between Buchanan and his fellow Pennsylvanian on the court who was a concurring "justice" agreeing to do that.  It's as clear that the Roberts Court is coordinating with Trump and with the afforenamed and unnamed fascist seditionists in what they did this term to lay the groundwork for not only anti-democratic but clearly and plainly unconstitutional dictatorship.  They effectively nullified several sections of the Constitution that clearly, plainly and with the record of the very Federalist Paper that Kavanaugh and others cited during their confirmation hearings refutes their claim that a president is immune from criminal prosecution for law breaking EVEN WHEN THAT FALLS WITHIN THE AREAS OF ENNUMERATED PRESIDENTIAL POWER.  

What the Roberts Court did in its granting of the privilege to Donald Trump to commit the gravest of felonies imaginable, to make his style of financial corruption legal in another case and numerous other ways puts those six Republican-fascists on the Court in the same category as the Taney Court.  In doing that they also grab for themselves unprecedented powers to act legislatively without the processes of a legitimate legislative branch and without the protections of having to face the voters and to be easily overturned by subsequent Congresses.  It is clear from the Thomas, Alito and Roberts family scandals which were revealed and for which there is no process for ending that they may well have had themselves in mind when they legalized bribes in their ruling on that.  Even the Taney Court was not so boldy and baldly corrupt as the Roberts Court is. That is unless you take the fact that so many of the "justices" ruling on matters regarding slaverly were slave-holders, themselves, going back to Marshall who was among the most corrupt of all of them in that regard.  NOT that that does anything to his reputation among the weird, amoral secular-theologians of legal scholarship.  The amorality of the legal profession is and always should have been a warning of those tendencies among the lawyers who would, inevitably, comprise  almost everyone elevated to the Supreme Court.  The legal profession and its pay scale and its means of determining merit being based on service to oligarchs and the filthy rich is another thing that should always put those who value equality and democracy above Mammon on their guard in regard to it.  Even the best and brightest of them, such as "justice" Brown Jackson are vulnerable to the norms of legal lore when they do things like nullify provisions of the 14th Amendment which would have saved us from King Trump in clear contradiction to the letter of the law AND THE LEGISLATIVE RECORD OF ITS ADOPTION.   

They also have to be exposed fully as what I said Roberts and Alito were in 2006, guilty of perjury during their confirmation hearings.  All six of them are rightly suspected of lying during their confirmations, they certainly did when they took the oaths of office required of Supreme Court "justices" because they have attacked and overturned provisions of the Constitution and the law they are required to administer.  And all of the evidence of that must be released to the public because if we are to protect a nation of laws and not of black robed, soft-handed insurrectionists, mob lawyers, those reluctant to believe that's what they are have to be shown that evidence.  Any formal trial of them will happen in the Congress where the rules allegedly in place in the courts don't apply, and that's not where the actual trial of them will have to take place, first, in the court of the judgment of The People.

We really should strip the members of that court of that cynically dishonest title, "justice" because that court is notable for its long history of providing injustice.  It is more sordid than the Congress and always has been.  Relying on those lawyers who specialize in Court history to write the lore of that court is a mistake because, other  than a few determinedly honest ones who research the primary documentary evidence, like Paul Finkleman, they have little honesty and willingness to tell the truth about them.  The lore of John Marshall and others such as Joseph Storey are generally passed on as if the evil they did doesn't matter, and as so much of the evil they do are to Black People, Native Americas, members of other minority groups, the working poor and destitute, in short, People unlike the affluent scribblers of such lore written for others of their class to read and hear, it is a crazy quilt of lies and half-truths which are, in fact, lies.  Like so much of the "history" that is promoted in the popular press and media, it serves oligarchy and affluence and, now, blatant despotism.  From the first House hearings into Donald Trump's attempt to blackmail the President of Ukraine to slander Joe Biden as part of his campaign in 2020, seeing how it was so unexpectedly the diplomats and military officers who stepped up and testified fully and honestly, at cost to themselves, on Trump's crimes and how it was the lawyers who almost uniformly testified so as to cover their asses, seeing the subsequent antics of the judges, the masterful use by Trump and his lawyers of "the law's delay" to get away with it, I have had an ever lowering opinion of the legal profession and the judicial branches at the federal level and the several states in which that has played out by not playing out.  

Longtime readers of what I post here will know I've been warning about the corruption of the Supreme Court all along.   Cleaning up that nearly two-hundred fifty year accumulation of filth will take radical action, and given the professional habits and lore of that profession, it will likely take lifetimes and rigorous academic training to clean up the lawyers trade.   There are lawyers who I do respect and even some judges, though, as mentioned above, even some of the best of them are too thoroughly indoctrinated in the habits of mendacity that are embedded into that profession.  When I hear even some conservative federal judges shocked and stunned at the vileness of the Roberts Court, it's clear that they have just started to realize the consequences of the embedded corruption of the legal profession.  All of what was done to destroy the republic, replacing it with a dictator was done by lawyers with a few Senators outside the profession concurring with that.  They should wear that as much as the Catholic Church should (and does) the Crusades and Inquisition and Marxism its record of evil.  Only, unlike either of those, here and now, what the Court did is the biggest body blow that the American Republic has taken since the Confederate sedition and insurrection.  The Court was all in on that, too,  Taney tried to thwart President Lincolns conduct of the Civil War through the emanations of the Marbury usurpation of Court power.  President Biden or any other President who seeks to protect us from the Court should study what he said and did in that regard and cite him as to why they ignore the Court now.  They should ignore the niceties of legal lore because with what the Court did this term, that's a dead hand on democracy.  

Angry Elegy For The American Republic On July 4th

THE LATE, CONDITIONALLY great United States, a nation of laws and not of men didn't quite last two hundred-fifty years, being ended, ironically, by the judicial branch of that rickety experiment of John Adams, three balanced branches of the federal government.  The "law" branch.   The Roberts Republican-fascist six ended it with their ruling on July 1, 2024, turning the American presidency into a monarchy with powers that George III didn't have by making the least worthy of those who have become President immune from criminal acts committed while in office.  A man whose blatant and vulgar corruption and criminality, a fountain of lies and viciousness proves that there were always terrible flaws in the Constitutional system inserted for the protection of an elite against majority rule.  That it was destroyed on behalf of Donald Trump by six Ivy League trained lawyers elevated by some of our worst presidents, only one of whom actually won the majority of the popular vote to be made president though the stinking, anti-democratic Electoral college, destroyed by a corrupted Supreme Court, bought with billionaire and millionaire funding of the Federalist fascist society and the Alcibiades of America, Leonard Leo and with plans laid by the fascist and seditious Heritage Society and other such stink tank sewage proves how those long ago embedded dangers have all matured the poison fruit that was always ripening in full view.

That it is the revered, secretive, shrouded in mystique Supreme Court which did it and the Constitution has no means of overriding them which is rapid enough or practical enough and which, in fact, not real at all, proves that at least some of the critics of the Constitution c. 1787 were right to be skeptical of it.  That some of what they used to lay the ground work for this, lies and phony images and fictitious characters, such as the Trumpizis view of their god-king, shows that the proposed remedy of the Bill of Rights had dangerous flaws in it, though I am prepared to believe that those of the First Amendment were unintentional, those of the Second being an item in the agenda of the slave-power, that amendment has no right to being considered as possibly innocent on that ground.  

Now that the Roberts Court 6 member Republican-fascist majority have made us a country of men and not of laws, the country is only as good as the one who gets installed as President at any given time.  The man they did it on behalf of as bad a man as has ever held the office of president.   And it should never be forgotten that five of them depended on that happening through the Electoral College installing the loser of the election, Thomas being a product of Bush I who I hope is being punished for his cynical elevation of the incompetent, indolent and criminal Clarence Thomas in the afterlife.   

I don't expect the sources of these evils to be corrected through Amendment, removing the usurped powers of the Supreme Court, which are not anywhere in the Constitution and, so, are not the fault of the framers.  It should never be forgotten that the provisions of the Court organization laws that John Marshall overturned to create that power in Marbury v. Madison were written by actual framers of the Constitution and voted for and signed into law by framers of the Constitution, including Madison and Washington while Marshall was not one of the framers of the Constitution.  The framers who voted for that law were numerous in Congress while those on the court who overturned it to create that usurped power were both few and unlike Washington and the members of Congress, were not elected by The People.  While the election of "justices" on a supreme court carries real dangers, we now know that the dangers of the members of tat court not having to worry about the rest of their professional lives by sitting on that court is at least as dangerous.  Having them being products of elite, private law schools would seem to be as much of a danger, those law schools being full of those who create such atrocities as Unitary Executive theory.  

I don't expect that the Republican-fascist majority states will allow the ratification of any amendment to overturn the Roberts Court's coronation of king Donald I to happen, not until the consequences of what should be considered a high crime, treason against democracy and even, ironically, republican government. The absurdly narrow definition of "treason" in the Constitution is as ill-considered as the absurdly expansive presidential pardon power, something that presidents from Bush I to Trump used to shield their criminal acts in office.  Trump has already stated his intention to use the pardon power to pardon the homicidal thugs he unleashed on the Congress and Mike Pence - not that that seems to have stiffened the moral resolve of that moral fraud.  I have no trouble imagining the Court that made-up presidential immunity in the dictatorial style will have no trouble saying such pardons in furtherance of Republican-fascist power will cover everything up to and including murder.  The Roberts Court has marked itself as one which is capable of anything except honesty and morality.

I think that if there were any justice to be had as a consequence of their treason, the murderers of democracy should be tried and sentenced to serve out life in prison what they could spend on the Court if they didn't choose to cash in as Thomas, Alito and the Roberts are known have been while on the Court.  I don't expect that even if we are lucky enough to have Joe Biden or Kamala Harris as a president who refuses to be king that that could possibly last even a decade.  The media, owned by the same billionaires and millionaires that stacked the Supreme Court will make sure this is normalized, as Trump or another Republican-fascist thug and his goons normalize the violence and terror that will be needed by them to maintain fascist rule.  If you don't think that's possible in the United States, it is what held slavery and Jim Crow in place for most of our history against a very large percentage of the population, it has been used against other groups and Women for almost as long.   Facing that white and male supremacy has been the fascism-not-honestly labeled in the United States, the tool that put the Bushes and Trump in the presidency, won't come any time soon, either.  

The great gray whore, the New York Times is not going to save America's democracy, the WaPo won't, the networks and cabloids won't.   Nothing but the American People fighting against Republican-fascist and media ratfucking is going to save us, now. 

This is an angry elegy to America's imperfect but better than the alternatives liberal democracy, the American Republic, because the Republican-fascists on the Supreme Court have ended it and the Republican-fascist party is all in on it.  If Democrats don't sweep the federal election and remain an anti-monarchist, democratic party, it is already dead, the body is just waiting to cool and go into rigor mortis then to rot.  There's nothing to celebrate today, what we celebrated on previous July 4ths, what John Adams gleefully predicted would be the cause of celebration and fireworks when the Declaration of Independence was signed, a republic of laws and not of men, that's gone.  Killed by Supreme Court fiat.  That process started with Marbury v Madison, it just took time for the poison to work.  

Post Script:  Anyone who believes that the scheme the Roberts Court criminals put into effect on July 1st will not come with violence against Americans is as stupid as, no doubt, the law scholars who dreamed up such dainty fascism as the unitary executive theory are. 

No one gets to take and hold office above the law without violence being part of that, whether it be a monarch with actual power or a king that gets called a "Mr. President."  Trump has always eagerly looked forward to being able to use police and military power against his opponents, there was no secret about that and the fact that he has used violence against entirely innocent People, including young children and babies during his time in the presidency.  The Roberts six for fascism knew that as they issued their ruling as they certainly knew he announced his intention to do it again if he gets that power, AND THAT WAS BEFORE THEIR RULING GIVING HIM THE POWER TO DO THAT.   I wasn't exaggerating when I said that what they did from the bench deserves life in prison and I'll add without possibility of parole.  When Trump or the next Republican-fascist uses that power you might change your mind about that because if we know one thing, we know that Roberts, Alito, Thomas, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Coney-Barrett KNEW HIS INTENTIONS BECAUSE HS LAWYER, JOHN SAUER INFORMED THEM THAT IMPUNITY TO COMMIT MURDER WAS WITHIN WHAT TRUMP WAS ASKING FOR AND WHICH WAS, IN FACT, GRANTED BY THE STINKING SUPREME COURT.   I am convinced one of their motives in trying to put Trump back in the presidency is to shield the most corrupt Supreme Court in living memory from court reform, protecting not only their usurped powers, creating an imperial court even as they created an imperial presidency but also the lavish booty they have been taking as they sit on that Court.  They deserve to be imprisoned if not given the legal penalty for treason against the United States.   Though, unlike them, I don't believe in state-murder for even their kinds of crimes.  That violence is already on them, some of them obviously relishing that power, none of them rejecting it.

Play Lefties Falling For Republican-fascist Election Year Bait Every Time

Michael Sean Winters asks, Why are we fighting over the 10 Commandments?  to which there are a number of answers, the most informative one is a. because it's an election year and Republican-fascists can be counted on to get those ol' liberal-lefty knees jerking over some unconstitutional matter of little real importance, so as to marshal the right-wing knees to jerk themselves to the polls and put them in power.   They do it every election cycle and if they don't do it some liberal-libertarian asshole like Bill Maher can be counted on to do it to get publicity.  If I could be bothered I'd go back and look for my post on his pre-election stupidity, "Religulous" which he put out with similar timing in 2008 and given who he is, probably for the same reason. 

Don't get me wrong, I am absolutely, 100% in on the separation of church and state as a great idea, but like many great ideas it isn't the only great idea.   

Democrats winning elections and governing AND APPOINTING FEDERAL JUDGES AND "JUSTICES" IS A FAR GREATER IDEA. 

I am old enough and come from a small New England yankee dominated town at the very end of the traditional English-Scottish hatred of Catholics and Catholicism around here,  I remember knowing that my first grade teacher didn't like Catholics.  I had thought it was just the French Canadian kids she hated, then I realized she hated Irish Catholics as much.   It did have a real impact on my early life going far past the daily recitation of the Lords Prayer with the customary appendage of the Doxology and being exposed to the KJV.   I was still in school when the Warren Court banned such religious content from public schools and remember it coming of something of a relief.   So I am all in favor of keeping it out of schools.  Though, as I've grown up noticing of those townspeople I grew up with and who had such religious content presented to them at school,  it doesn't seem to have much taken in their lives.  Even the Protestant churches in town are largely empty and I notice no great effect on their moral lives, whether personal and no one's business nor in their public, financial behavior.   If there is some vestige of moral inclination such as "forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors" or, in the Catholic version replacing "debts" with "trespasses" and "teresspass against us"  I haven't noticed it in many of them.  The ones who went into real estate development are as amoral as Trump.  

So I think it's an important issue but its far from the most important issue, and that's only in so far as children in schools go.    Things like posting the Big 10 in courtrooms?   In Louisiana?  You may as well get worked up over what color they paint the walls.   It is entirely unimportant and no matter what the dolts at the ACLU say, it's not worth getting into a religious brawl over this in any year, least of all a decisive election year.   I don't agree with everything Winters says but it's at least worth considering.  Here's a sample.

At The Hill, Southern Methodist University professor of religious studies Mark Chancey denounced the decision as "alarming." He recalled the incident in 1859 when 11-year-old Thomas Wall, a young Catholic student, refused to recite the Protestant version of the Ten Commandments and had his hands beaten. Surely, such an incident can and should be included in whatever curriculum is devised to explain the historical significance of the Commandments.

"Permanently posting the Ten Commandments in every Louisiana public-school classroom — rendering them unavoidable — unconstitutionally pressures students into religious observance, veneration, and adoption of the state's favored religious scripture," fretted the American Civil Liberties Union in a complaint filed to block the new law.

At Religion News Service, Mark Silk is right to chuckle at these religiously motivated politicians bending over backward to make the case that the Ten Commandments is of secular significance: The new law also requires posting of the Mayflower Compact, the Declaration of Independence and the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, but the Ten Commandments are difficult to disentangle from their religious significance.

But while it is not true to call America a "Christian nation," for most of its history it was a nation of Christians, and they certainly were motivated in their understanding of law in part by the tablets Moses brought down from Sinai.

Everybody needs to take a deep breath and relax.

I am entirely in favor of every child, in school or not being taught the substance of "give us this day our daily bread," "forgive us our wrongs as we forgive those who wrong us,"  and especially "lead us not into temptation and deliver us from evil." as well as things like not lying, not stealing, not breaking your promises in marriage and outside of it, etc.   I am entirely in favor of making those truths of morality more effective in effecting the lives and behaviors of everyone, from childhood on.  I am in favor of every child being thoroughly indoctrinated in the moral requirements of equality, of fairness, of kindness in school and out.  I am even in favor of those and similar messages being taught by the media, movies, TV, internet and their opposite vices and immorality presented as unattractive and evil.   I am entirely opposed to the regime of amorality that the idiot civil libertarians thought was better than the whiff of religion that they feared would infect the minds of children.  Though I would be in favor of those being presented from a non-denominational and even non-religious framing, though I don't think there is any way to present them as enduring and effectively durable truths without God being the source of that.   There is no other ultimate explanation of their truth and why someone should do good when they don't want to or want to do wrong, instead. 

That said,  this years version of that worrying about some actual harm in fucking Louisiana courtrooms is as absurd a swivet to get into as could be imagined.  AS IF LOUISIANA OR ANY OTHER JUDICIARY AND THE LAWYER-LIARS WHO PRACTICE LAW ARE GOING TO BE IMPACTED TO ACT MORE MORALLY!   I doubt posting them in ten-inch high letters where no one could miss them would lead to a single one of them giving up adultery or, more to the point, stealing and coveting.   It wouldn't stop them from taking God's name in vain every time someone takes an oath or administers it (Jesus telling us not to swear but let our yes mean yes and no, no, has certainly not been a Commandment that the courts follow).  

This is an election year stunt by Republican-fascists and it would be best ignored, entirely.   It will have no meaning, whether it stands and it will under the Roberts-Republican-fascist court, or it falls in some unlikely future.  It is more of a religious affront to do its blasphemous use of religion and reference to God in an amoral scheme than it is an affront against secularism.   Though, as I've indicated recently,  I don't give a damn about affronts against secularism anymore.  If such secularists took Democrats winning elections and preventing fascism more,  I might be inclined to take them a bit more seriously.   I don't take the ACLU seriously anymore at any time.

Three Books

AS READERS HERE may have guessed, I've been studying the New Testament scholarship of Luke Timothy Johnson for the past several months, following studying the First Testament depending heavily on the scholarship of Walter Brueggemann for a while, now.  I could go into the differences and different conclusions as well as the many connections found between the Mosaic Law, the Prophets and the Gospel and Epistles but I'm not ready to do that.  I'm not, by the way, anything like done with Walter Brueggemann or those whose scholarship he cites nor the Scriptures.  That subject is as oceanic as the music of Bach, Beethoven or Schoenberg, you don't get to the bottom of it.

This is a recommendation of three books by Luke Timothy Johnson. His extremely extensive and impressive book often used as a university level textbook, The Writings of the New Testament: An Introduction is one of those books which I can say has changed my life, supplanting understandings of Jesus and those who wrote the Scriptures which have formed my thinking on that for decades.  That I didn't read it when it was first published is one of the strongest personal regrets I have.  It is the kind of book you'll have to read repeatedly and study, looking up the enormous number of Scriptural and other citations to really get how powerful Johnson's interpretation and understanding of Scripture is.  If I disagreed with something he concluded about that I'd have to really look hard at it but that would be because I would suspect that I was the one who was wrong about that.  I expect to be working on this book for years, maybe the rest of my life, reading Scripture more deeply than I ever have, as a result.  I would have no hope of going through all of his sources and citations, the massive bibliographies at the end of each chapter reveal the scope and depth of Johnson's scholarship as the questions for discussion are useful to the re-reading of the book.  

If you aren't ready to take that deep dive, as I didn't feel I was before, you can get a very good abbreviation of many of his points from his much shorter The New Testament: A Very Short Introduction, part of a large series of such Very Short Introductions published by Oxford University Press.  It isn't a replacement for the longer work but it serves as a very effective means of deepening your knowledge of the New Testament.  Its brevity, however, is a virtue in itself.  You will find many of the major points of the longer book easier to grasp for the relative lack of supporting detail.  

I may look at some of the other "Very Short Introduction" books to see if they are as good as this one, if I get around to that in the fall and winter.  This one is wonderful. Though the copy I have has very small print which means I've been reading it with a large Fresnel lens that I find I need more and more as my eyesight fails.

More than either, though, I would recommend his book Living Jesus which, dealing with the experience of the Living Jesus by living People, gets you to the practice in real life of what the Gospels and Epistles, and so The Law and the Prophets as well exhort us to live.  The letter of the Law kills, it's the spirit that gives life, I had never really grasped that The Spirit is an expression of the Living Jesus as we experience Jesus in our lives, know that or not.  Just as I had never really understood the difference between facts to be learned and mysteries to be experienced and to ponder but which will never, in this life, give us a final answer.  If I were going to read only one of these, that would be the one I'd choose.

How Bad Is It? Worse Than You'll Hear On MSNBC Or Stephanie Miller's Show

HE WISDOM OF THE WISE is often pretty stupid in the end.  That Scripture tells us something like that in a comparison of human wisdom to that of God proves that sometimes Scripture makes sense.  Scripture also tells us that knowing the truth is what will free us and that is certainly far wiser than the First Amendment which doesn't specify the right to tell the truth doesn't mean there is a right to lie.  Since lies spread in the mass media and, now, online are responsible for the peril democracy is in here and around the world, that is certainly wiser than the wisdom of liberal democratic theory, free speech absolutism which privileges lies and the media to lie despite the obvious danger of that.  We will need to get over our fetish for the First Amendment as it is written AND AS IT HAS BEEN DISTORTED EVEN FARTHER BY LAWYERS AND JUDGES AND "JUSTICES" or democracy is going to die by the force of the privilege those give to those who lie.

That most august of newspapers, the New York Times boasted a while back that it was the first beneficary of the most unwise privilege given by the U.S. Supreme Court to lie with impunity, the Sullivan decision that had the practical effect of making lying about Democratic politicians immune so that Republicans would win elections the law of the land.  Of course, as I pointed out yesterday, that was not what the Warren Court thought they were doing when they made the ruling though anyone who understood who owned the media, the rich, and the eventual decision of the rich to do what is in their own best financial interest, to put dishonest politicians who will enrich them even more into power to do that could have predicted the outcome of a permission to lie about politicians and other public figures would have.  We ran that test, it produced Nixon in 1968, Reagan in 1980, Bush I in 1986, Bush II in 2000 and 2004 and Trump in 2016.  AND THOSE "JUSTICES" THEY PUT ON THE COURT.  As I will point out more, I suspect, Nixon lost in 1960, before the Sullivan Decision was issued, he won in 1968 and brought the American presidency to a level of criminality that had not previously been known.  I could dwell on his many administrations domestic crimes (including those of Gorsuch's mother, who was convicted), though his and, through his crimes in Southeast Asia, Latin America, Ford's in East Timor, etc.  Bush I and II in Iraq and the region, with literally millions dead are the most serious of those crimes.  I will never forget that Congressman Fr. Robert Drinan proposed articles of impeachment against Nixon for his crimes extending from the Vietnam War only to have the congressional committee refuse to adopt them, but that topic is for another post.  I don't, by the way, in any way withhold that same condemnation of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, the point some commentators have made that the immunity the Roberts thugs gave for official acts of the president are probably far more dangerous than the crimes they will commit outside of their official acts, though the Roberts thugs have erased any real line that would have separated the two in judicial make-believe.  

Make-believe

Ronald Reagan was a product of Hollywood pretense, deception and con artistry.  His, um, acting career was what led to his elevation to politics, used by and using all of the phony methods of the movie industry and the PR racket to get to the presidency and the lying media to keep him there.   Trump was far more a creation of the alleged news media, the press and TV and radio in New York, before he went on to have a career in the most repulsively and dishonestly named effect of a culture saturated in feuilleton ephemera, "reality TV" which is all TV and has nothing to do with reality.  Everything about Trump's TV show, from presenting the vulgar con man as a brilliant businessman as dictator in TV sets that I'd bet most of its audience believed were the Trump company offices.  The truth that Trump was never more than a con man who hired corrupt lawyers to rig his con games using every weakness and stupidity in the courts to cover up his criminality was certainly not told on TV in that show.  We have the producers and directors and writers of Hollywood as much as the tabloid, cabloid press and hate talk radio for the Trump presidency, as with Reagan, the Trump presidency was a total product of the media, the free press to lie with impunity and present "reality" that was really nothing but lies.  Yet, because of the stupidity of the First Congress who drafted the Bill of Rights to not specify that there is no right to lie with impunity as they both set up a vague "free speech" and an even more ill considered privilege they misnamed a "right" to the artificial entity, "the press" and the Warren Court going with that so that dirty books could be sold without being arrested (what a price we've paid for that devolution in culture)  little will be done to prevent worse as the enemies of equality and democracy hone their skills in deception and conning, gulling and wowing an ever stupider media-trained public.  And the "news" media, is all in on that instead of rigorous fact-checking before they publish.  What a price we've paid for the scribblers, publishers, producers and babblers' convenience.  

As we should be mourning the Supreme Court's destruction of democracy in favor of a dictatorial presidency on Monday, the Declaration of Independence, casting off the British monarchy will be touted as if what just happened didn't happen and that it wasn't decisively the end of that effort to have the rule of laws and not of men.   If there is a sober analysis of what happened, it should certainly include the place that lies and show-biz has played in it.  What brought the six "justices" who crowned Trump as thug-king to power were the power of lies spread in the mass media, the "free press" that's a hell of a lot wider spread, faster and more effective in manipulating Peoples' minds than the ink on paper, one page printed at a time "press" that Jemney Madison and his colleagues imagined they were enabling.  If there's one thing that those of us old enough to have experienced the invention of the internet and its rapid adoption should have learned it is that a change in conditions, what may have seemed a relatively safe permission to lie in 1800 has proved ever since to be extremely dangerous, first mostly to Native Americas, Black People, Women, especially those without money and so power, but now to everyone.  Modern mass media changed everything as it ate up the conscious attention of most of us most of the time.  The dictators of the first half of the 20th century, the fascist movement of the revived KKK, etc. early realized the power of even silent movies to spread lies and hate and racism and, certainly, the subjugation of Women.  The willfully blind members of the upper escallon  of the legal profession, the kinds who teach Constitutional Law at universities and publish academic abstractions in influential journals have their heads in the sand and their eyes and ears shut against the reality of how dangerous allowing them to lie is.  But, then, considering that Monday's demolition job on democracy was a product of such lawyerly-lying as could invent and promote the unitary executive theory and keep jobs at places like Harvard Law and the other Ivies and their equivalents, no doubt what even the prissiest of the Roberts Court's six Republican-fascists rests her mind upon to do such evil, why would anyone expect members of the legal profession to be against lying when it gets them what they and their sponsors want?  

As much as anything the death blow the Roberts Court gave to democracy was a product of the professional slipperiness of the legal profession in regard to the truth AND MODERN ACADEMIA'S EQUALLY SLIPPERY RELATIONSHIP WITH REAL LIFE AND THE TRUTH.  

The hard truth is that if we want democracy, if we want responsible freedom to govern our lives and societies, we are going to have to make and force the choice for truth and the insistence on good will as a ground level requirement for us all.  Libertarian liberty, free from responsibility freedom won't make you free, it will just unequally distribute the misery and the privilege.  That's what our legal system does, for pay, with hourly billing.   We're going to have to change that or we will never get out from under the dictatorship of the Supreme Court.  More than a hundred ten years ago the radical lawyer and legal scholar Louis Boudin warned that the Marbury v Madison ruling and its extension from Dred Scott till then and on till now meant that the United States was such a country ruled by black-robed, establishment-conservative men (now some women), that the Constitution meant only what they said it did by anything from a simple majority to a nine-man consensus - that's hardly rule of law with the just consent of The People.  There is no other Supreme Court in any modern democracy that has that power which the Supreme Court gave itself in 1803, he noted how dangerous it already was at the time of its first major use in the Dred Scott decision, he gave many ample examples of its corrupting and irrational consequences in rulings up to his day, it has become steadily worse.  We now know that the Supreme Court is willing to up-end the very framers' intention to turn the presidency from an executive of a Congressional, representative democracy into a lawless despot.  They have literally over-ruled the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution from the bench.

I hope that someday they'll take that atrocious building that houses that court and either tear it down or turn it into a museum of legal injustice because that's what it houses and symbolizes.  I want a reformed Supreme Court housed in a modest office building with a mandate to protect and defend equality and democracy as well as a reformed Constitution.   One that will reign in the corruptions of the legal racket, from the sleaziest of gangster lawyers up to the gangsters on law school faculties and in the judiciary.   The Supreme Court is a lawless institution, by its own choices and the refusal of the Executive and Legislative branches to impinge on them even as the Court usurps the functions of both.  Why would the Roberts Court not mind a despot, that's what the Supreme Court has been willing to be, especially during the Rehnquist and Roberts Courts, with the backing of legal scholars and theoreticians who are financed by billionaires and millionaires.  The whole thing has to be purged of that nonsense, right now or far, far worse is coming.

This is one of those rants that I can't try to edit without adding to so I'll leave it to this.

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.  

Government By Judiciary Suporting Republican-Fascist Criminals

All those TV lawyers who assured us the Supreme Court wouldn't make a president a dictator have been proved wrong. 

I encourage President Biden to have Alito, Thomas and Roberts removed from the court and imprisoned for corruption and crimes against democracy.    Then the three others for lying under oath to the Senate Judiciary Committee. 

The Roberts Court is the court that ended American democracy today.  

The Mere Shadow of Jesus And The Darker Side of America's Secular Order

OFFICIAL SECULARISM may well be a moral as well as a practical necessity in a religiously diverse country, including believers of many different religious traditions, from the many indigenous ones to the ones imported from everywhere else in the world to the religious traditions that deny they are religious, be those the many religious traditions of atheism and agnosticism and the largest of all those, unthinking indifference.   The necessary coercion, if not violence, necessary to enforce the privileges of an established church is an immoral thing, especially true of the moral teachings of Jesus and his followers who wrote the New Testament. So, from that you can conclude that official secularism in secular government would probably be a good thing in the most religiously uniform of polities, as well.  

Official secularism, part of what the putrid Sandra Day O'Connor may have included in her putrid formulation of "civic religion," may be merely a practical necessity in practice, excluding any moral content because secularism has no especial basis for morality within it, it being merely agnostic and not a positive statement of morality.  It is compatible with a mere non-consideration of such things that cannot do without moral consideration and practice.  I have come to believe that the official secularism of many so-called "liberals" is of that kind, any vestiges of morality contained within them what Nietzsche ridiculed as the "shadow of the Buddha," a mere habit of moral thought or, at least words, growing ever fainter with each passing generation as that habit is replaced by an absence of any deep or effective moral consideration or, even more so, moral practice.  I've lived long enough to see that happen in three generations of families I've known, the grandchildren devoid of any of even the civic virtues of their grandparents, as the Trumps and other established crime families of the rich demonstrate, amorality is a far more reliably vital aspect of such family traditions than the much harder to follow morality of revealed religion.  

While you may find genuine morality in some agnostic or atheist, such morality is borrowed from elsewhere,  there being nothing in their ideology which provided that to them, it being supported by nothing except habit inherited from their parents or from somewhere when it isn't merely a product of them conforming to the vestiges of that in others habits of thoughts or its vestiges in the law which may impinge negatively on them if they violate what is allowed by the civil law.  As I have often pointed out, materialism, whether you call it the vulgar "lives of the rich and famous sort" or the intellectual face of that in academic babble, has no such morality as a logical or even volitional necessity.  And in the American legal system under the influence of such ever broadening amorality, especially in regard to money and its acquisition by those with the ability to hire the most amoral lawyers and the kind of amoral lawyers who are versed in how to interpret the often morally lax civil law to the benefit of those who will benefit them (the kind of lawyers who are promoted by the Federalist-fascist society and which the American Bar Association don't filter out by their standards of assessment) those are who are most likely to be named to the various state and federal benches and elected in our money-corrupted politics.   That money corruption being kept in place by Supreme Court "First Amendment" interpretation, standing as emblematic of the tendency of corruption under our official, civic secularism.  Our official non-establishment of religion would keep any such financial amorality from being restrained by what the Law the Prophets and the Gospel out of any consideration.  I can get into how sexual morality has traditionally not been handled in such a hands-off way by the legal system and its relation to facilitating the far more dangerous amorality of wealth some other time.

Of course, the history of established churches, established under the secular powers of the past and present prove that the same corruptions possible under official civic secularism under disestablishment are possible in the name of religion.  That is true whether or not that is polytheistic or monotheistic.  That possibility, perhaps inevitability, under an established church in the Hebrew monotheistic tradition which consists largely of countering moral commandments against that in every one of the three branches of it, the Jewish and Christian and Islamic traditions, should lead to the logical conclusion that it is even far more dangerous when those commandments are removed from government under amoral secularism.  The example of Saudi Arabia and Iran are good examples of how that can be rigged under the most elaborate and extensive of the trappings of monotheistic morality to make the super rich ever more filthy rich as they use sexual morality of the poor and unprivileged as a weapon against the many.   As have been Western monarchies or, in fact, monarchies anywhere in the world.  Egalitarian democracy is about the only form of government which has a chance of preventing that, "liberal democracy" as we can see in everywhere it is in effect, as in the United States, is fully capable of that kind of rigging for the super-rich.  

The official legal system of the United States was born just such an officially morally neutral secular system, explicitly in the founding text of the Constitution.  And after a vague and pious preface to that document any such morality is largely absent, replaced by the slavery-perpetuating content, the scheme of those framing aristocrats, largely consisting of lawyers brought up in the 18th century English law,  Moral neutrality naturally favors slave-holding and aristocratic wealth accumulation.  Not wanting to pay for the support of an established church not their own, not willing to take the chance on being dominated by a church hierarchy not their own, they inserted a practical official secularism in their document.  No doubt if they hadn't they could never have arranged its adoption in the religiously diverse states.   Many of the dominant figures in the original Constitutional Convention were under the influence of the fashionable 18th century "enlightenment," already denying and destructive of Christianity, something which was already well established in even the nominally Christian churches, the resulting system can hardly be blamed on the words of Jesus, Paul, James, etc.  

To be a lawyer under the secular system of the United States, even as a self-defined Christian, is to make professional peace with the frequently anti-Christian content of the law of the United States.  Those today in nominal Christian "christian nationalism," be they "evangelical" or "traditional Catholic" or Mormon or whatever, being some of the most attached to the anti-christain content of the civil law, which, under both amendment by the regular actions of adoption of law or by court fiat, is a code enabling gangsters, the wealthy who the legal system service as a regular part of their business.  

When I heard last year that the average corporate lawyers make an average salary that figures in the millions a year, that they were the best paid class of lawyers, that they dominate the profession, be it practicing lawyers or those odd secular, civic theologians, the "legal scholars," in law schools financed by millionaires and billionaires to produce that class of servants of wealth, I have come to believe my understanding of that profession, including the judges, is far more complete as I once had.  

The double-counterpoint of American lawyering, which enables the likes of such Catholic religious fanatics as Amy Coney-Barrett to claim allegiance to Catholic morality, which includes the truly radical official Catholic social teaching since Pope Leo in the late 19th century as well as the far more radical Gospel of Jesus, the teachings of Paul, James, etc.  to service the wealth that Jesus identified as a serious moral impediment and Paul declared to be the root of all evil, as she does exactly what she should know as evil, is a consequence of her indoctrination in the secular law of the United States.  I'm sure it is what she and her fellow legal professors at Notre Dame teach as well as those at Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Georgetown.  It is certainly not the social teaching of even those arch conservative popes,  John Paul II and Benedict XVI which informs her activities on the Supreme Court.  It certainly doesn't enter into the thinking or inclinations of the rest of such professors of Christianity as comprise the six Republican-fascist, Trump enabling "justices" on the Court, all of whom pretend to be Christians, as well.  Such as who have done everything they so-far dare to do to help the nominee of their Republican-fascist party to get away with obvious violations of the civil law, even the most blatantly stated intentions of the Constitution, to form a government that promotes the common-good, the protections of all of us from just such as Trump promises to deliver if he gets power a second time.  They have already done more to that end than even the corrupt lower court under Aileen Cannon has gotten away with doing in taking the case they're due to decide today on whether or not Trump had dictatorial powers from 2017 to 2020 and, really, well after he left office.  That they didn't refuse to take the case and consider that he did, in fact, enjoy such exemption from the civil law of the United States means that they are entirely comfortable with the possibility that they will claim that he did.  As a number of commentators have put it, they have already given Trump a win on that in the most important consequence, this years presidential election, by their vile and amoral delay in judging those questions, questions that the lower appeals court had already and ruled on with faultless logic and moral discernment.  Whichever of the "justices" chose to take that case, no matter what they might put their names to in their decisions, they are already all-in on letting him get away with the range of crimes up to and including mounting a putsch against the validly elected winner of the 2020 election, including the attempted murder of members of Congress and his own Vice-President.  

If anything the bulk of the behavior of that florid and public poseur of nominal "christianity" Mike Pence, in which he acted in regard to the letter of the law for one day, January 6th 2020, but who has been, otherwise, all in with Trumpian fascism for his own chance of benefiting from it, pretending to be a figure of morality all the time is as perfect an example of how dim the shadow of Jesus is in that kind of Christianity, in that case it was the mere letter of the secular, civic law that he went along with, no doubt, because he figured he might not get away with doing what Trump and his goons wanted him to do.  I doubt anything higher than that came into it.  It is too dangerous for us to depend on that in the future because his good intentions lasted exactly as long as he didn't figure he could profit from acting against those ever since.  That is a product of secular ethics, which is certainly morally inferior to Christian morality.  Trump stealing children from their destitute, desperate parents and putting them in concentration camps with plastic sheets to sleep on concrete floors should have been only one of any decisive breaks of the "christian" Mike Pence from Trump and it would have come far earlier than his one day of ethical behavior on January 6th.  But, then, he was far from alone with that, many a member of the U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops never parted company from Trump, nor many a leader in "evangelical christianity" or others who make religion into their business.  Though many a Christian, many Jews, many Muslims, many members of other religious traditions never took up with him on the basis of his fascist, oligarchic immorality.  You can't say that the secular law has broken with him because, other than about four courts in New York and Washington, DC, they're still indulging him and his delaying lawyers at every turn.  

As I said to objections the other day, you can entirely exempt Christianity from the immorality of professing Christians by going back to the foundations of Christianity, the teachings of the New Testament and the relevant and consistent parts of the First Testament which support the teachings of Jesus, Paul, James, etc.  Those define Christianity, they are the authority which defines Christianity, ultimately.  No secular order which is dependent on ever fluctuating parts of the civil law has such a life-saver which can rescue it from moral blame.  Anything which Christianity is rightly to be faulted with must be found in the declared teachings of Jesus, ultimately, and Christianity must be answerable to that, anything claimed for Christianity which is not consistent with the teachings of Jesus is not legitimately Christian.  Jesus taught to do to others what you would have done to you, to give the destitute and poor economic justice, ample sustenance and love, to love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that if you want to be more perfect you must sell all you have and give the money to the poor, for those who would be preachers of his Gospel to be the least, the servants of all, to not have fancy clothes or even shoes (though as Hans Kung has pointed out, what might be possible in that regard in the geographic regions such as Palestine don't work much for places that get cold weather and snow).  The secular order has no such moral foundation, as the Roberts Court has entertained, it can't even reliably reject the idea that a president doesn't have the right to murder his opponents to retain power illegally.  That last point even being entertained by the Supreme Court impeaches their moral authority, it identifies that Court as one that is willing to entertain that as a possibility, no doubt coming up with some transparently false Constitutional blather to make that the lawless law of the land.  They have declared that there is a right to lie, after all, and a thousand other atrocities flowing out of transparent lies they told about things such as the meaning of the 14th Amendment to legalize conning, cheating and grinding oppression of workers and, very recently, the 8th Amendment to say the poor have no right to even sleep.  Such is the moral vacuity of secular "civic religion."    

For more you can read this article published today.    Apparently Gavin Newsome is a supporter of the ruling I slammed yesterday.   

California Gov. Gavin Newsom praised the Supreme Court's decision and said in a statement it provides state and local officials "the definitive authority to implement and enforce policies to clear unsafe encampments from our streets."

I've got a real problem with "liberalism" that could support such cruelty to the least among us, considering that ruling enables the likes who rule in the Republican-fascist dominated states as well as California and Massachusetts.  I would vote for him if I had to but I don't trust that kind of liberalism.    I'm old enough to remember when homelessness and destitution were considered national shames, not annoyances to those above them on the economic scale. 

The article notes: 

Gorsuch wrote the Eighth Amendment "focuses on the question what 'method or kind of punishment' a government may impose after a criminal conviction, not on the question whether a government may criminalize particular behavior in the first place." He also said the fines and jail sentences in the Grants Pass case do not do not "qualify as cruel and unusual."

There is, apparently nothing cruel or unusual in making a person sleeping, a biological necessity and, eventually involuntary act, something punishable by criminal law.   Easy for a pampered, rich, white, straight guy whose mother was an affluent Reagan administration criminal, the product of an elite education and who probably never had any prospect of being destitute himself to say.   I doubt he's ever known someone who had to live on the street.   Though I'd be surprised if his partner in Constitutional cruelty, Thomas had not, not that it makes any difference to that moral atrocity.   Make those amoral bastards on that Court give a full and competent legal representation to the least among us as a condition of them holding office or a law license.   Lawyers should all have that obligation imposed on them as a condition of their professional status.  Otherwise they give rise to all of the moral atrocities in the law.  

Jesus " is the embodiment of poverty with nowhere to lay his head"

19 And a scribe came up and said to him, “Teacher, I will follow you wherever you go.” 20 And Jesus said to him, “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man has nowhere to lay his head.”  Matthew 8:19-20

THE CATHOLIC PREP-SCHOOL  prep-to Ivy League law school Republican-fascist majority on the U.S. Supreme Court reminds me of one of the monsters of Revelation, multi-headed and at complete service to the Antichrist, devouring and destroying at will.  You can take many of the rulings, be they 5-4 or 6-3 that have issued from the Leonard Leo-Federalist-fascist Society, "Red Mass" going lawyer-liar dominated Roberts Court as examples of the Antichrist, those who daily propitiate Mammon and serve the billionaire-millionaire oligarchy and its extension into the petty affluent class who are the semi-suckered, semi-beneficiaries who provide Republican-fascism its electoral success but the one that says the U.S. Constitution legalizes the illegalization of homelessness is one of the most blatantly obvious.  Anyone who says that the United States is a Christian country should have that thrown in their face immediately.  

"Traditional Catholicism" like so much of "white-evangelical" "christianity" is a "christianity" without Jesus Christ, the very central figure of the real thing but who turns out to be disposable to those who will make do with merely notional and pseudo and "national Christianity."  The vindictive Martha Ann Alito wants to put "the sacred heart of Jesus" on a flag as giving the finger to LGBTQ+ as her husband makes rulings that destroy the least among us, the actual presence of the Living Jesus among us, according to his very word.  That's the kind of Catholicism that trad-catholics trade in.  While many others in the "trad Catholic" cult have more style than her, such as John Roberts, Amy Coney Barrett, the cruel Gorsuch,  the criminal Alito and Thomas, their "catholicism" is no more authentic.    

Under the law that the Republican-fascists on the Supreme Court declared constitutional, Jesus and his Apostles as they traveled around, those who followed him would regularly have been vulnerable to arrest for sleeping in public, as Jesus said having no place to lay his head, would have been fined with full knowledge of the police and judges that he had no money to pay and would have ended up in jail and come out harried out of town after town and, no doubt one of the desiderata of the 6 Republican fascists, have lost many rights, most important to them the right to vote.  Jesus would have been made an outlaw by the Catholic-prep to Ivy League fascists on the Court, from the merely less evil and best at pretending that's not what they're about, perhaps Barrett and Roberts, to the middle of that pack, Kavanaugh, down to the worst of them, Thomas, Alito and Gorsuch (I can never stop remembering that his mother was one of the many Reagan era felons) they are emblematic of exactly what's worst in our Constitutional system, the elite level of our so-called educational system and of what happens to Christianity under the overriding influence of affluence.  I'm sure that when they go to then next "Red Mass" on the feast day of Thomas More, they're unlikely to hear the bishop or cardinal who preaches the homily about them turning any second-coming of Jesus into vagrant vulnerable to being arrested and imprisoned and stripped of the very last right that he would have to sleep, nor any of the other Mamonist-Antichrist rulings that they have made.  I wonder if that numb nun who testified in favor of her former student, Clarence Thomas, would be proud of her student today, though she's probably long gone.  I wonder if the former president of Notre Dame has any qualms about his preening in the elevation of Coney-Barrett to the court in light of that ruling - I'll bet his being exposed to the most life threatening period of Covid at the Trumpian-fascist nomination celebration would probably have made more of an impression on him, not what his protegee just did to the least among us.

In Walter Brueggemann's great sermon-lecture on Jeremiah's presentation of real justice, Slow Wisdom as a Subversion of Reality, he quoted Terry Eagleton on the real character of Jesus in the Gospels, making it entirely relevant to the "christianity" of such "christians" and what they do to the least among us right now.

But what then?  Well. If we take the antithesis of [the Jerusalem establishment's values] might, wealth and wisdom, we might come up with a triad of weakness, foolishness and poverty. And, of course, that's what we get in Jesus of Nazareth. For God chose foolishness that is wiser than human wisdom and God's weakness is stronger than human strength.  First, you know the gracious act of our Lord, Jesus Christ who though he was though rich, yet for our sake became poor so that by his poverty he might make ready rich. unlike most responsible American citizens, Jesus appears to do no work, is accused of being a glutton and a drunkard.

It turns out that the life of the Crucified One exhibits the counterpoint to the great seduction of Jerusalem. He is the embodiment of weakness as he stood vulnerable before imperial authority.  He is the embodiment of foolishness.  Terry Eagleton describes him this way,   He is presented as homeless, property-less, celibate, peripatetic, socially marginal, disdainful of kinfolk, without a trade, a friend of outcasts and pariahs, averse to material possessions, without fear his vote for his own safety, careless about purity regulations, critical of traditional authority, a thorn in the side of the establishment, and a scourge of the rich and powerful, The morality Jesus preaches is reckless, extravagant, improvident, over the top, a scandal to actuaries and a stumbling block to real estate agents. Forgive your enemies, give away your cloak as well as your coat, turn the other cheek, love those who insult you, walk the extra mile, take no thought for tomorrow. So far Eagleton.

He is the embodiment of poverty with nowhere to lay his head or even healthcare.  The remembered Jesus sits amid our posturing, it reminds us that the great imperial triad of might, wisdom and wealth never delivers the security or the happiness that it promises.

That such a Supreme Court majority who would leave Jesus with nowhere to lay his head is certainly relevant to judging not only their Christianity but, perhaps even more so their schools, their associates, their families Christianity.  Anyone who didn't take the chance to influence them to do better.  I think it reflects especially badly on the hierarchy of the Catholic church who run the prep-schools and universities which produced such banally evil lawyers and judges.  That the elite universities which provided most of them with their law-school credentials were once Protestant and are now gaudy baubles on the crown of Mammonist monsters certainly has something to teach about the inadequacies of secularism as certainly as the ability of that tendency to dominate elite Catholicism.  I have come to distrust or at least hold in deepest suspicion religion with a lot of overhead holdings.  Coney-Barrett's membership in what I take to be a charismatic-"catholic" cult which has a host of bizarre club beliefs attached but which allowed her to vote for that ruling, and many others, has similar lessons to teach.   If I were Pope, one of the first things I'd do is abolish the "Red Mass" abomination, a mass held to be attended by professional liars in the legal profession, the worst of those sitting on the Supreme Court bench, I'd also get the religious orders out of the business of credentialing such affluent rich men and, now, women who wouldn't just leave Lazarus starving on the doorstep, they'd call the cops to remove them and throw them in prison.  They'd certainly never visit them there anymore than they'd provide them with healthcare or food or clothing or a place to lay their heads.  

If I were able to do it, I'd make the members of all of the federal judiciary directly provide the best of legal council to the least among us as a condition of them holding seats on those courts, the lazy Roberts Court certainly has lots of time on its hands, they take so many lavish, billionaire financed vacations.  I would like the least among us who are the victims of their "justice" in their faces, there's no place in the Constitution that would prevent the quartering of the destitute in their many homes and travel vans.  I wonder if Clarence Thomas ever parked his billionaire gifted trailer on public property, I'm guessing he has.   If he does in the future, I want him and his criminal wife arrested.  

I'd love to have Roberts and his wife have to wake up to face the destitute at their breakfast table face, to face, having to face the reality of their lives.  Not to mention the rest of them.  I'd like them to have the product of their work pushed into their view, into their hearing, into their feeling and smelling.   

It makes me think of when Mark Twain read about a rich woman being outraged at the idea that she should have to see some workman attending her church, being in close proximity to them.  He pointed out that she'd, no doubt, be offended by seeing the carpenter, Jesus, there, no doubt finding his working-man smell and appearance offensive. And that would be the working poor, not the destitute. Along with outlawing destitute PEOPLES' right to a place to lay their head, lots of towns and cities are making it illegal to feed them.  No doubt Jesus feeding the multitudes would get him jailed in many an American town with this Court's OK.

I'd like to have all of the elite Catholic schools, churches, cathedrals, monasteries, etc. required to house the homeless as a condition of their tax-exempt status, I'd include the secularized Ivy and Ivy equivalents in that.  I'd like the wall that shields the senses of the rich from the least among us torn down along with the legal fictions that produce that difference, to start with.  But I'd like to start that by sticking into the faces of these "justices" the product of their "justice."  They just legalized the harrying of the poorest of the poor out of town and out of mind for the petty affluent, that much should be the topic of the sermon of the next "Red Mass" that they dishonor by their "honors" presence.  Though I doubt the Catholic hierarchy is going to do that in any great numbers, it being dominated by the servants of Mammon, itself.  I doubt that the next generation who are going to Catholic-preps are likely to hear anything to that effect, either.  I loathe the Catholic preps and universities as they are in most places, more concentrated on football and basketball and how to plug their product into the elite than they are on what they would laughingly refer to as "Catholic moral values."   As Kavanaugh and Thomas and the rest of them prove, that means meddling in other peoples' sex lives, even as they do the same things, themselves.   

They make me the most ashamed I've ever been at being associated with Catholicism, and there was plenty to be ashamed of even before then.  They are, all of them, a product of elite Catholic institutions or were never taught better by the Church. I don't regard what they do as having anything to do with Jesus so I am certainly not ashamed of being associated with Christianity.  I take Jesus seriously, the Son of Man who had no place to lay his head.   He got hassled by the priests and the experts in the law back then, too.  

Post Script: Going over this in my generally hap-hazard attempt at editing on the run, it occurs to me how dependent the legal tradition that the judges follows relies on the English common law, which you'd have thought we'd left behind the second of July 1776 and that reminds me of how the great English radical William Cobbett pointed out how the Tudors and Stuarts destroyed the great English social safety net when they dissolved the monasteries and ransacked the churches turning what were once distributors of aid and comfort into manner houses and estates for the super rich among them.  For whatever faults you can name in the medieval Catholic Church, they were the ones who maintained what would be called in response to the Reagan pillaging of public assistance, the "social safety net."   The trad-catholics might hold a collection once in a while for what gets called "charity" now but the like of those who indulge in the base sacrilege of the "Red Mass" and who are the majority on the Supreme Court are fully in with the Tudor tradition, the Poor Law under Elizabeth illegalized being destitute, too as the remnant of far stingier aid to the poor in England had all kinds of rules to regulate their movements.  A pregnant woman who strayed outside of her own parish could have her tongue bored through with a hot iron, as I recall.  I don't think the Roberts Court would be above OKing a modern day equivalent of that.  Such is those "justices" notion of "justice."   I suspect that if you go over the use of the phrase English common law, it will very often be attached to something shafting the least among us.   We should have dumped that with so many other things by now.