The Vile Suppurating Boil That is SCOTUS

So, Trump’s racist travel ban withstands scrutiny in the highest court in the land. Hands up everybody who’s surprised.

First, the obligatory fairness and balance. Blah blah blah, court rulings must be sacrosanct, blah blah respect rulings whether or not you agree, blah blah impartial jurists are the cornerstone of the rule of law, blah sour liberal grapes blah blah I didn’t complain when the courts were liberal blah.

OK? OK. Let’s just cut through the embroidery here. The US Supreme Court will never deliver justice. Not for as long as the likes of Mitch McConnell are around to make sure it’s stacked with people like him. In fact, the wealthy, the cruel, and the supposed Christians don’t even need Mitch any more. The damage is done. These bastards serve until they die, and even when they’re finally planted – or does a profoundly evil idiot-savant like Antonin Scalia just melt, like the Wicked Witch of the West? –  the odds are excellent that some Republican stooge will be in the White House to appoint a successor, and that even if Democrats control the Senate in years to come, they won’t take the nation-shattering risk that Mitch did when he refused to let Obama fill a vacancy.

As to that last thought, we may never get to see. Soon Trump himself may get the chance to stack the court permanently, as far as anyone already born is concerned – just in time for a Republican Senate to wave his choices on through the confirmation process (oh boy, there’s a lot riding on the upcoming midterms). Maybe if Kennedy resigns he’ll appoint Bannon, or better yet Stephen Miller, who’s young enough, and mean enough, to live 55 more years.

Forget about it. It’s over with SCOTUS, and therefore it’s over with the court system. No part of it will ever deliver justice that sticks. No defence of the Constitution will ever prevail. No public policy meant to protect the powerless will ever make it past the bench. Not for as long as you live.

Lots of Supreme Courts over the years have rendered decisions that should have made anyone with a thimbleful of humane morality woof his cookies – just ask the Japanese Americans who were interned during WWII. The Roberts court, though, is something special. It, not the Trump Presidency, is the greatest engine of harm in modern America, both on its record and because it alone remains to stop Orange Mussolini when a Republican Congress won’t do its constitutional job, and will always choose not to. Instead, it acts as if Trump presents no special danger, and goes along as usual, undermining the common good and making corporations and right-wing idealogues giddy with joy, as it has now for several years running.

I’m enough of a lawyer and academic that I could lay out all the cases in detail, citing each recent decision and analyzing its most egregious aspects, starting with Bush v Gore, but I’m too weary. It would feel about as useful and rewarding as marshalling the evidence that every tide that goes out eventually comes back in again (besides, I’m on a roll here, and digging out all the supporting material would break my stride). Tell you what, I’ll meet you halfway and set out some highlights in bullet points, and skip the citations; you can trust me, or look it up I guess, but you can trust me. Here’s what those trolls in robes have done over the past few years:

• doomed all gun control that does more than nibble around the edges of the problem by deliberately misinterpreting the 2nd Amendment as a personal right, having nothing to do with raising a regulated militia, no matter what it says
• granted corporate artificial persons the human right to free speech, while equating free expression with the expenditure of overwhelming sums of filthy lucre in quantities sufficient to swing elections, thus obliterating campaign finance laws
• narrowly failed to repeal Obamacare entirely, but re-defined the law on Medicaid expansion, making it possible for states to opt out
• shafted unions by empowering employers to deny employees the right to launch class actions as a condition of employment
• effectively allowed discrimination in the delivery of services to the public on the basis of sexual orientation
• devastated anti-trust legislation by allowing companies to dictate whether middle men can tell consumers there are other options to their own services
• gutted the voting rights act on the basis that it wasn’t needed any more because it already worked (like a pre-schooler asking why you need a roof when it hasn’t rained in the living room once in his whole life)
• ratified voter suppression via purging of voting lists
• ratified voter suppression via gerrymandering
• ratified Trump’s anti-Muslim travel ban
• screwed unions by prohibiting them from imposing “fair share fees” on workers who refuse to join but reap the benefit of union negotiations

That’s some hi-lite reel, eh? Most of it happened in just the last couple of years or so. Brace yourself, because it will get worse.

You may as well get comfortable with it. When they get a chance they’ll overturn Roe v. Wade. I wouldn’t even count on Miranda to survive. Or habeas corpus. And if a constitutional crisis lands in their chamber, they’ll overturn US v Nixon and make Trump immune to subpoenas. They’ll rule his pardon power is as unfettered as he says it is, and that dangling pardons at his henchmen can’t constitute obstruction of justice. If it comes to it, they’ll confirm the deeply flawed opinion of the Department of Justice, enshrined in nothing more than a memo with little law to support it, that you can’t indict a sitting President, no matter what he’s done.

Now Donald knows it, too. Mitch did his job. The court is stacked and everything from here on out is a foregone conclusion. Just watch how bold Trump becomes in the wake of this travesty. Maybe a Hispanic ban will be next.

Say, when was the last time you felt like putting out your own eyes with a red-hot poker? Want to? Here, then, this is a photo sent around today by Mitch McConnell’s office to troll liberals everywhere, with Mitch giving the ol’ attaboy to Neil Gorsuch, the conservative robot he installed on the Court after stopping Obama from filling the seat left by Scalia, may he rot in Hell.

Two pigs in a pod.