Court crisis

The Supreme Court has been issuing incredibly bad rulings for two-plus years, but today's was the worst of the worst and has sent me into a fit of anger/frustration/(non-clinical) depression/outrage/terror/anxiety.

I was going to write a big screed about the indefensible and clearly unconstitutional "immunity" ruling but I find I can't focus my outrage into a coherent narrative in the time I have before I have to leave for umpiring. So instead I am going to quote Mary Trump, niece of the criminal ex-POTUS, who rightly is focused on preventing things from getting even worse.

The justices who are trying to make my uncle a king are traitors, equal to the traitors who attempted a coup against our nation and who have been spreading the Big Lie in order to undermine the American people’s faith in free and fair elections. With this immunity decision, they have launched an attack on our most important ideals. It’s a continuation of the 2021 coup attempt, and it’s the start of the next one, not just a rubber stamp for my uncle’s worst impulses and abuses but an open invitation for more .... This was an unjust and anti-democratic decision from a Court that no longer has any credibility and, apparently, no longer believes in its mission to uphold the Constitution. 

Six unelected people have stripped basic human rights from millions of women, destroyed the federal government, and made it almost impossible to hold Donald accountable while coming very close to granting him the powers of a king. It’s time for tens of millions of us to rise up and vote in unprecedented numbers. That’s how we tell the New York Times editorial board to fuck off. It’s how we increase the likelihood that Donald goes to prison or, at the very least, never gets near the levers of power again. And it’s how we start to take back our country from the corrupt traitors on the Supreme Court. 

This [SCOTUS] decision is the end of something and we have a choice: we can be demoralized and stop fighting, or we can use these horrific decisions as a rallying cry—because if we do nothing, the consequences will be swift and unthinkable. If we do nothing, Donald will win and that will be the end of the American experiment.  

So let’s get it together. If we want to save our country and our future and our children’s futures, we have to elect Democrats no matter what. 

This has all been worse than we thought it would be, but we now know it will absolutely get so much worse than we can imagine unless we own the fact that making sure American democracy survives is down to us and no one else.

This is DEFCON 1. SCOTUS is already doing what they can to implement Project 2025, just making shit up so violations of law and the very US Constitution—but only by the "right" people—is permissible.

The Roberts Court has stripped away reproductive rights from American women, stripped away regulatory authority from governing experts in any field, and declared Presidents are above the law so long as they can call their crimes "official." Not mentioned in Mary's great post is that the Court recently also legalized bribery of government officials, so long as the bribe comes after the favor as a "gratuity"; made it easier for frauds to be perpetrated on the Securities and Exchange Commission; stripped away portions of the Clean Air Act, thus allowing even greater pollution from corporate entities; allowed municipalities to criminalize homelessness; eliminated a ban on so-called "bump stocks" that convert guns into machine guns; and said states can gerrymander their Congressional districts as much as they like.

And that's just what I have off the top of my head.

The six justices appointed by Trump and by the Bushes are completely out of control, not even pretending anymore that they are not a subsidiary of the Republican Party, a Republican Party that has thrown its lot in with autocratic anti-American criminals. If we had a Congress without so many Republican enablers of this traitorous behavior, two of those justices—Alito and Thomas—would be impeached on monetary corruption grounds and a third—Chief Justice Roberts—for negligence as well as aiding and abetting criminality in several instances, not the least of which was the impeachment trials of Donald Trump which he presided over and completely abdicated his duties in. The other three are illegitimate based on (a) perjury in their confirmation hearings, and (b) their appointment by a criminal president.

The sooner any and all of these six people are removed from the Court the better. The sooner Congress and President Biden can expand the Court to match the number of circuit courts again the better.

Until then we're in big trouble.