HOW DEGENERATE is American conservatism that so many of the "principled conservatives" could still be members of the party that brought us, first Bush II and now Trump II?
I know there were some for whom Trump I was too much at the start and I will acknowledge them getting out of the filthy, criminal racket that the Republican Party had already become in 2015, the year that Jeb Bush began to discover that the party his father and brother had controlled and formed had developed to such a state of decadence that it was too far along in fascist degeneracy to choose his style of aristocratic oligarch. The year it came under the complete control of the tech billionaire promoted, "reality" TV imitation master of business, Trump.
Or maybe, getting those tax breaks, themselves, they're more OK with it than you might think. By the way, I think that explains the actions of the New York Times since about 2000, so they're not alone in that.
I don't believe any of the Bush family left the burning hazardous waste site that their party had become, largely under the stewardship of their own family and those allied to them. Maybe the Bushes have come of age and figure they don't need to be the ones with the titles of government, having joined the oligarchs that are kingmakers, the kind who come out of elite preps that put out those who don't need to pretend to work for a living. They are just the kind to be that delusional. They are not the only ones living in dangerous delusion.
I listened to this discussion by John Harwood with Norm Ornstein, only because it was put out under the Zeteo brand. I listened to the reasoning of Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute a "principled conservative" and it's clear that even after seeing the catastrophic decay that his folks on the Supreme Court and in Congress have brought us to, he's got all kinds of ideas for patch jobs that he imagines will bring us back to the status quo conditions of the Reagan era.
That is delusional, there is no going back to any of that, the Gingrich-Hastert House and subsequent ones, Republican courts, the McConnell-Thune Senate, the Rehnquist-Roberts Courts, the Bush II and Trump presidencies . . . HOW CAN ANY AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE OF ANY SENSIBILITY NOT SEE THAT THOSE ARE WHAT GOT US HERE. And those are the product of trends that go back a lot farther IN THE REPUBLICAN PARTY than the 1990s.
I would not be dishonest enough to claim that I'm anything like that species of coward or idiot held up as if they were avitars of virtue, the "non-partistan" though, as you can read whenever I write about these things, I have admitted that there were a number of the ever dwindling number of Democratic appointments to the Supreme Court whose foolish decisions based in libertarian notions of freedom, especially in the privilege given to the corporate media to lie and to carry lies, and also Democrats in elected office who, as well, carry the idea that such proven poisons of equality and democracy are some kind of civic virtue due to the idiotic wording of the First Amendment. But the Democratic Party has not been the problem in this, the Republican Party has been in paving our road to degeneracy, much of it in the name of such civic virtue based in asinine and proven disasters like "classical liberalism" "libertarianism" Constitutional "originalism" "textualism". . .
Looking more into Ornstein and his ilk in an admittedly slap dash way, looking at that risky "source" which I only use as a source when I lack the time to look in depth, Wikipedia, I see that Ornstein has been a consultant in drafting a piece of model legislation to fix the corruptions that the Republican Supreme Court has baked into the real constitution of the United States, the one the Court creates anew whenever a majority on it decides to. That legislation is named rather hopefully The American Anti-Corruption Act the wiki article on it, no doubt written by those who wrote it and advocate it says
Its provisions cover three areas:
Stop political bribery by overhauling lobbying and ethics laws
End secret money by dramatically increasing transparency
Fix our broken elections by ending gerrymandering and modernizing voting and election funding laws.
The AACA's authors state that its provisions are based on existing laws that have withstood court challenges, and are therefore constitutional.
Oh, yeah, just like the Voting Rights Act, various acts establishing independent regulatory agencies, Roe v Wade, upheld by the Court repeatedly over decades. It is hopelessly naive, STUPIDLY NAIVE AND DENYING OF HOW DANGEROUS THE COURT AND MANY LOWER COURTS ARE . It's exactly the kind of thing that the kinds of well-connected, credentialed, "vetted" hacks of the kind that staff groups that come up with such stuff will come up with.
How silly can a bunch of guys in white shirts and ties get?
Theirs is a program which is hopeless and hopelessly naive, middle-of-the-road, acceptable to the sensibilities of a dutiful and scrupulous PBS or NPR or C-Span audience member, the kind of thing I imagine an Aaron Sorkin or a Ripon Society member (are there any left?) to take seriously.
That wiki article contrasts that effort with what I think is only a somewhat less naive though far more reality based attempt that calls for something far more seemingly realistic but ultimately as futile, Move to Amend, which calls for Constitutional Amendments getting rid of two of the greatest Supreme Court created corruptions of the United States, law and politics, "corporate personhood" and "money is speech." I acknowledge the wisdom of Move to Amend for identifying those two central Court created corruptions, there are others. I think they believe this is only a start.
But as I have been noting here for the past month, there have been Acts of Congress, acts passed into state law by state legislatures, THERE HAVE BEEN MONUMENTAL CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENTS to correct the corruptions baked into our Constitution (even hacks like Ornstein admit that the Electoral College is one of those) and those imposed by the Court, the Civil War Amendments, and when corrupt "justices" on the Court want to they mow them down or "interpret" even the most plainly readable parts of the Constitution to achieve their own law-making and breaking from the bench. I will note that even the author of the Wiki article on the Ornstein side admits that such provisions as they propose to correct our corruption is already under attack from the judiciary and is subject to overturning by Republican-fascist governors.
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We aren't going to fix it by "regular means."
The United States is such a myth enthralled country that we don't even admit what's obvious from the lives we lead such as THE FACT THAT WE ARE NOT RULED BY A WRITTEN CONSTITUTION ANYMORE THAN BRITAIN IS, we are governed by the one the Supreme Court makes up and changes at the whim of a majority and the Courts that have sat for the past half a century have become ever more extreme in that practice. I have put the tipping point in various places though milestones are a better physcal analogy. Bush v Gore is certainly one of the more dramatic ones, maybe the last one that could have still passed as being the most extreme of regular Court actions, though I'd say it had already passed the line before the Roberts Court destruction in Trump v USA. Bush's opponent was the winner of the Presidential vote, Trump's is the entire country and the Roberts Court sided with Trump.
In many ways we are at a lot more danger because we don't admit that with the power the Court invented for itself to be the ultimate and unappealable definer of the Constitution, of the constitutionality of the actions of the ELECTED branches of the Government, that our written Constitution is the malleable thing of wax that Jefferson said Marshall et al had made it. British Constitutionality with its constant court remaking of the thing is prepared to deal with a Court that goes too far, just as it could theoretically and probably effectively deal with a monarch that goes too far. I have no doubt that Elizabeth and Charles know full well if they acted unconstitutionally, it would put their position in peril in a way that the Roberts Court has made out of the question in the United States - we dangerously put the head of state and the head of government in the same head, just one of the other defects in our Constitutional system of allegedly "balanced powers." John Adams, often credited as the author of that notion of the three branches bragged late in his life that his greatest contribution to the American People was his installation of John Marshall as Chief Justice, in an act which, as I noted last week, was designed by him and Marshall and others as a means of him insuring the rule of his party after the Voters had ended their period in power. By the time Adams said that it was clear that overturning by the Voters was permanent.
The evils that best us really do trace back to the earliest years under the Constitution and the drafting of that document, itself. Nothing short of a democratic AN EGALIATARIAN DEMOCRATIC Congress and president ending the Supreme Court's self-created power to nullify duly adopted laws and parts of the Constitution as it chooses is going to fix it. Many of those evils sprang from the mind of Adams and the other framers. Others were imposed through Adams' and Washington's Court appointments. You're not going to fix it by means we have been sold as "regular". The Court has to be made safe for a country of laws and not of five or more black robed Ivy-League law schooled gangsters.
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