IT COULDN'T BE more obvious that the reason the most criminal president in American history pardoned the hundreds of criminals who tried to keep him in power in 2021 is to encourage those criminals in their insurrection against America's electoral democracy to benefit Republicans and their sponsors. This is part of a long, concerted effort to normalize the idea of armed violence used by neo-fascists, even neo-Nazis politically. It's what the ever more permissive court and, especially Supreme Court gun legislation* has resulted in, the Roberts Court's criminally insane presidential immunity and overt corruption on the layaway plan of last year were issued even as they knew that the likely Trump II regime would pardon his criminal army of thugs and they enabled him, anyway. I'll forego detailing my suspicion that the drug-addled, demented and impotent Trump gets off on the violence and the prospect of violence, though I'm sure that figured into it for him, too.
Democrats, both those who aren't members of the Democratic Party and those who are, have to face the fact that the Republican party is a fascist party who have no use for the rule of law and certainly have no use for honest elections and that lauded peaceful transfer of power. That's as true of those on the Supreme Court as it is for the thugs in the Congress and the criminals in state houses and governorships and in the Trump II regime. Much as I respect and admire Nancy Pelosi, her statement that the country needs a normal Republican Party and those others who long to go back to the normal of some past are deluded. You can't reconstruct any past, never mind the one that once saw Republicans vote with Democrats to pass clean-election legislation after witnessing the crimes of the Nixon regime. That past is as dead as the likes of Jacob Javits and Edward Brooke. Every time a Supreme Court ruling pushes the boundaries away from the old ones, those have fallen fully and forever. The only way to change that is by changing the words of the Constitution that the "justices" used to push those boundaries or to break them down and unless the legislative branch removes the Marbury style power grab they use to do that, that resetting of the boundaries is for naught.
The courtly respect shown for "Constitutional scholars" is absurd, considering the ease with which such scholars, especially those at legal knocking shops like Harvard, Yale, Georgetown, etc., knock down the previous erudition of their guild generally for those who can pay the best or for the most ignominious of reasons. An enormous amount of such erudition is expended in holding the line against racial equality by genteel white supremacists such as John Roberts, enhancing electoral inequality in favor of Republicans, coming up with wealth enhancing legal theories for the wealthiest - lawyers being far more accomplished and compensated gold-diggers than those reduced to prostituting their bodies. Only the top ranks of "journalism" being more well compensated whores to wealth. The few, the very, very few such scholars of Constitutional lore who maintain the pose of it being better than it has ever proven to be as a potential, are rather whimsical mythicists than students of reality.
If you are hoping that the consequences of the Trump pardoning of his army of violent thugs will move the judiciary in consequential numbers for the better, I can only say that I doubt you are right. I think we're in for worse than we've seen and in a big way.
If we ever do manage to recreate a democracy it had better make that level of change that I've been talking about because any attempt to go back to some imaginary better past will only make it certain that all of those corruptions will come back, probably faster and with even worse consequences than before. This reminds me of a discussion I had with one of my college teachers about the idiotic book In Defense of Anarchism by Robert Wolff. I'd been somewhat impressed with some of his arguments, it was the period of police violence used against civil-rights and anti-war protesters and other excesses of state and police power. She cut through them in one sentence to the effect that having to recreate civil authority would probably include all of the worst aspects of it happening all over again. We can't go back to any previous time in that evolution, not the 1850s, not the 1950s or the sixties or 1970 - it's impossible to recreate any past and it's stupid to want to. We have no alternative but to change what the enemies of equality and democracy have used, including the First and Second Amendments, the liberalization of the first got us Trump, the liberalization of the second one got us his armed thugs.
The choice is between that and the descent into fascism that we are on right now. It's as clear a choice as that.
* It's time to call what the Court does by what it is, the usurpation of the legislative function in direct violation of the Constitution as it's written. The Marbury v. Madison power grab has repeatedly and now more boldly than any time since Dred Scott been used by corrupt "justices" to further political ends and in the Roberts Court its blatant Republican-partisan character couldn't be more obvious. It is well past time that Democrats in the Congress and Executive stripped them of that self-created power, it's time that Democratic voters insist that they do that at the first possible opportunity, the dangers of the descent into Republican fascism is a direct consequence of Supreme Court power grabs, the Warren Court, stupidly and unintentionally and the Rehnquist and Roberts Courts with calculation and deliberate damage to American democracy.
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