The Neofascist Five Supreme Court Justices: America's Downward Political Spiral Continues...
Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. & the rest of us are doomed to repeat it with them...
Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. & the rest of us are doomed to repeat it with them...
The asymmetry in politics rears its head: Democratic presidents do not want to commit crimes. Thus a Supreme Court-granted license to presidents to commit crimes enables no additional scope of action for a Democratic president. Republican presidents, by contrast, have—since Nixon—wanted to commit crimes. So a Supreme Court-granted license for them to do so would be of considerable value.
And if a Democratic president figures out a crime they would like to commit? Well, then, whatever precedents the Neofascist Five will create will be as much “settled law” as Roe v. Wade was.
And yet the only strategy of response to the Neofascist Five I can think of right now is to—vainly—try to get Mike Johnson and Mitch McConnell on board to impeach the f***er right now:
Dahlia Lithwick & Mark Joseph Stern: The Last Thing This Supreme Court Could Do to Shock Us: ‘There will be no more self-soothing after this…. For three long years, Supreme Court watchers mollified themselves (and others) with vague promises that when the rubber hit the road, even the ultraconservative Federalist Society justices of the Roberts court would put democracy before party whenever they were finally confronted with the legal effort to hold Donald Trump accountable for Jan. 6…. We promised ourselves that there would be cool heads and grand bargains and that even though the court might sometimes help Trump in small ways, it would privilege the country in the end…. Political hacks they may be, but they were not lawless ones….
On Thursday, during oral arguments in Trump v. United States, the Republican-appointed justices shattered those illusions. This was the case we had been waiting for, and all was made clear—brutally so…. To at least five of the conservatives, the real threat to democracy wasn’t Trump’s attempt to overturn the election—but the Justice Department’s efforts to prosecute him for the act. These justices fear that it is Trump’s prosecution for election subversion that will “destabilize” democracy, requiring them to read a brand-new principle of presidential immunity into a Constitution that guarantees nothing of the sort…. Justice Samuel Alito best captured the spirit of arguments when he asked gravely “what is required for the functioning of a stable democratic society” (good start!), then answered his own question: total immunity for criminal presidents (oh, dear). Indeed, anything but immunity would, he suggested, encourage presidents to commit more crimes to stay in office….
The conservative justices are so in love with their own voices and so convinced of their own rectitude that they monologued about how improper it was for Dreeben to keep talking about the facts of this case, as opposed to the “abstract” principles at play. “I’m talking about the future!” Kavanaugh declared at one point to Dreeben, pitching himself not as Trump’s human shield but as a principled defender of the treasured constitutional right of all presidents to do crime…. The court has now signaled that nothing [Trump] did was all that serious and that the danger he may pose is not worth reining in. The real threats they see are the ones Trump himself shouts from the rooftops: witch hunts and partisan Biden prosecutors. These men have picked their team. The rest hardly matters… <https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/04/supreme-court-immunity-arguments-which-way-now.html>
The root clearly set in with Bush v Gore. The court bowed to politics then and has continued down that anti-constitutional path.
Alito's argument is truly deranged. The whole point of a coup is to *overturn a democratic result*. It's impossible to "protect democracy" through immunity if the crime being committed is intended to destroy democracy. In consequence, if we can't preserve democracy via election the only alternative will be understood to be assassination.