IT ISN'T ONLY the Trump regime declaring it will not obey the court order on its illegal abduction and rendition to a notorious torture prison of a man who had the courts' protection against that, it is the courts' and, especially the Supreme Court setting us up for this to have been an inevitable denouement. And I believe, at least in the case of the Supreme Court* it was done primarily for baldly partisan purposes by the Republican-fascist appointees to the court. Though that purpose is to serve the patrons of that party, the billionaires and millionaires, those who the legal profession serve above and all others because they can pay the best. It really starts in nothing more complex than that. That practice, which becomes a habit during the course of a professional life in the law, has thoroughly saturated not only the practice of lawyers but through rulings of courts and Supreme Courts and in the consequent legal thinking of the lawyers who so overwhelmingly have dominated the legislatures and executives of our country.
The fatal flaws of America's 18th century liberal democratic Constitution were baked into it at the start. It is a Constitution which was explicitly, from the start, radically anti-egalitarian in its service to the original corrupt deal between the blackmailing slave-holders and the northern financiers and speculators and because the aristocrats who framed it didn't really want the common People to directly determine the country's government. They had bamboozled the poor, the landless, the recently freed from slavery into fighting their revolutionary war and when, under the Articles of Confederation, the common People realized they had been bamboozled revolted over the reneged promises that were broken by the Congress. That is what is behind the Electoral College which the Rehnquist Court used to install the Republican loser of the 2000 election and which installed the loser of he 2016 election, Trump. It is what is behind the Republican dominated Senate to install the most corrupt Courts in our history, the Rehnquist and Roberts Courts. The power given to small population states has always, since the founding of the country, given more power to first the slave-states and then even more so the de-facto slave states and those which have had policies of preventing Black People, other People of Color and those who are more likely to vote for Democrats than Republicans all on the basis of "equal representation" of states in both the Senate and, so Electoral College which further enhances the power of those who trend to favor white supremacy and other forms of injustice.
The notorious 3/5ths provision of the original Constitution becomes WORSE BY TWO-FIFTHS when Republican-fascists prevent People from casting a vote and prevent those votes from being counted and so determining the government. Under America apartheid many of the defects of the original Constitution became worse than it was under slavery. Under the laws made laws by the Rehnquist and Roberts Courts - another very dangerous and serious defect in the U.S. Constitution - the Court made laws overturning the Voting Rights Act - we are rapidly returning to the status quo of American apartheid, only this time they are extending it well past People of Color to apply it to anyone who isn't in the minority who support Republican-fascism. They are trying to pass a law that will disenfranchise huge numbers of Americans who have voted for their entire adult lives, I am hoping that they may shoot themselves in the foot by disenfranchising many Repubican-fascist rural voters who will find it hard or impossible to get the documents they insist Americans present to register to vote or re-register to vote or to, in fact, vote. Making such People appear at an office to obtain such documents and to document their lives may, in fact, give an advantage to those who live in cities where such offices are. But I wouldn't count on that. Such laws are never applied on an equal basis.
I was glad to hear that finally a prominent lawyer, Adam Senator Adam Schiff, has finally admitted that we are in that Constitutional Crisis that has, in fact, been going on for a year and, I would argue, has been going on since Bush v. Gore. Finally, one prominent lawyer was forced by Trump's presser with the dictator of El Salvador to admit that. I hope it is the opening of the flood gate to the admission that we are well past being on the cusp of dictatorship. Though I will believe that when I see it. We have to admit the truth even as we understand how hard it will be to change it.**
Those who are hoping the Roberts Court is going do anything but facilitate the fall into Republican-fascism are living in a fantasy, they are all-in on it. Even a Court which was not all-in on it would be impotent to reign in a criminal president, as Trump certainly is, due to our dangerous presidential system. The fact is that the Republican-fascists in the Congress will block his impeachment and, even when the House voted articles of impeachment, the Republican-fascists in the Senate, either in the majority or the minority will block his conviction under our idiotic Constitution. Impeachment of a president or a Supreme court "justice" is a dangerous myth that has kept us from doing that one thing that is most essential to establishing and protecting egalitarian democracy - the only legitimate form of government - changing our Constitution from the dangerous presidential system to a dangerous but far less dangerous parliamentary system. ONE WHICH, UNLIKE THE BRITISH SYSTEM, IS BASED IN REAL, NUMERICALLY DETERMINED EQUALITY, ONE PERSON ONE VOTE AND EQUAL REPRESENTATION IN THE GOVERNMENT.
* Other courts such as the ones under Trump's and McConnell's scumbags , Ailene Cannon Matthew Kacsmaryk, are even more overtly Republican-fascist
** Hearing Lawrence O'Donnell talking last night about how the Trump lawyer-liars use terms which carry positive, even virtuous connotative meaning to name the exact opposite of them may lead to a post on that. The failure of even the college-credentialed Americans to notice that is another specialty of lawyers, judges and "justices." That practice may have started there but it has become widespread, especially among those with a little learning and lots of media exposure.
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