Anyone who is depending on the Roberts Court to not support Trumpian fascist rule is deluding themselves. The five dependably fascist votes on the court upheld his discrimination against Muslims in his travel ban despite Trump's own words that that was what he intended as a gift to his racist and bigoted supporters.
Liberals have had a deluded concept of the Supreme Court for more than half a century, depending on two things, the long, long dead court of Earl Warren, which was a mixed-blessing at best, and the equally mixed blessing of pious invocation of the First Amendment in both rulings and dissents in previous and subsequent courts.
The Warren Court is responsible for some very great advances, Brown v Board, other civil rights rulings, some of its less unwise rulings on civil liberties but it also set up the environment in which fascists have lied their way to power through the mass media. The idiocy of pretending that fascists and Nazis deserved a "fair-chance" to air their murderous ideologies so that those poor, put-upon communists could do the same was always bound to end badly. By the time they started doing that communism had so discredited itself through the examples of its rule in the Soviet Union, its occupied states in Europe and elsewhere, China, various smaller Communist countries, that the idea Americans would go for it was totally and obviously delusional. As was the idea that if that had been a possibility that it was something an egalitarian-democratic country should risk happening. The list of American Communists who elected to live in the "workers paradise" of their choosing is minuscule and that tiny little set of people was a subset of the set of the ideologically insane and stupid.
The rulings of the Warren Court that liberals wax so romantically about were a big part of what set us up for the ensuing years of Republican-fascist ascendancy, the very media that the Warren Court relived from any danger from any political lie and libel they chose to peddle is what has led us to this state. They and subsequent courts who ruled in favor of Nazis being free to spread their propaganda, to march in Skokie and Charlottesville and permitted corporate-fascists and billiionaire would-be oligarchs to lie are chiefly responsible for this. The free-speech rulings of the Warren and earlier courts, the vocabulary provided to them by the lawyers in the hire of the mass media and the civil liberties industry were also used to ensure the corruption of our elections by shooting down virtually every means that the legislative branch came up with in the wake of the Nixonian corruption of our elections with slush funds and massive funding of corruption.
As radical a lawyer as Louis Boudin long ago warned the left and everyone else of the danger of depending on the Supreme Court and other courts to protect us. He understood that the Supreme Court - the least democratic of all of the branches of government - was far more likely to support the wealthy who high-price lawyers most often represent, who were often their patrons or the patrons of the politicians who appointed them than they were The People. The culture of elite law-schools that formed them in their understanding of the law are cesspools of privilege and the training grounds for the servants of privilege. The fascist federalism that is the ruling orthodoxy of the Supreme Court was formed at such institutions by prominent faculty, some have held judicial appointments, some to state supreme courts. None of them have dirty hands and nails, none of them froth at the mouth, I'm sure many of them think the Trump regime is staffed by vulgarians, they have made such use of the crude and vulgar, that was part of the strategy to impose fascism. Theirs is a violence once or twice removed.
The Supreme Court has become a tool of fascism, it will remain so for the foreseeable future. That is something we will have to fight and the first place to fight it is at the ballot box and the Supreme Court has been doing everything the fascists that rule it can to prevent fair elections and the equal representation of all people. Liberals who have supported the lunatic ideas that empowered them, who stupidly believed that the Warren Court was typical are an encumbrance for the real left that will have to fight this. Trump will almost certainly get to put more fascists on the Court, unless Democrats, by some miracle, gain control of the Senate and do to him what the Republican-fascists, Grassley, McConnell, Hatch, and other Republicans did to prevent Obama from filling a seat and seats on lower courts. Without holding the majority in the Senate, nothing can stop them. Democrats have no blame in it to the extent that they oppose the placement of fascists on courts. Democrats have to play the hardest of hard ball with these people if they get the chance, we may have to hold their feet to the fire if that miracle happens.
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