They could have heard this vile, essentially vapid case months ago, if they’re so goddamned determined to hear it. Way back in December 2023, Jack Smith brought a motion asking SCOTUS to leapfrog the lower courts and take up Trump’s constitutionally ludicrous and flagrantly un-American immunity claims straight away, since as sure as water’s wet, it was going to land in their laps anyhow, after interminable months of useless process and delay. Nope, ruled the mighty black-robed trolls, let justice run its course in the usual way, which was to say, screw it, let the weeks roll by as November draws near. So the lower courts did what they do, as the case ground its way through the appeals process, Smith champing at the bit, the judges dawdling as if there was no particular urgency, until at last, too damned slowly but at last, the D.C. Circuit rendered an opinion for the ages, the sort of written decision you teach in constitutional law class, an absolutely bulletproof demolition of Donald’s frivolous and vexatious claims of absolute Presidential immunity. Hooray, and this was the Supreme Court’s cue to simply decline to hear any further appeal – they get to do that, and are usually delighted to turn applicants away when the case involves the denial of fundamental rights, or the imposition of the death penalty, matters of that sort – but no, this one they wanted to hear. This one merited sober second thought.
So, just as Jack Smith (and for that matter everybody else) had predicted, there it was, months later, on the SCOTUS docket, and again came the delays. Always with this feckless system of supposed justice, it’s delay, delay, delay, process, more process, then delay. It was nearing the end of February when the Supremes decided to grant Trump his hearing, and, since apparently there still wasn’t any particular rush, they set a timetable on the premise that everybody needed a few more weeks to prepare, and scheduled oral arguments for the end of April, weeks down the road at the time, but happening right now as I type this. The hearing resumes Monday the 29th, should wrap up in a couple of more days, and then God only knows when they get around to delivering their decision. It could be as late as the end of June. God only knows, too, what they’ll say when they finally get around to it.
All along, the legal analysts I follow and watch on MSNBC, brilliant, accomplished lawyers, professors, and jurists like Laurence Tribe, Joyce Vance, Barbara McQuade, Andrew Weissmann, and Michael Luttig, have been falling back through successive layers of intellectual retrenchment, struggling with disbelief as each new phase of the ongoing idiocy plays out. Early on, they were all of course, they’ll grant Smith’s request for expedited review – because, just as Smith says, they’re going to have to weigh in anyway, so why delay? Then it was look, given the strength of the D.C. Circuit opinion, which really says it all, SCOTUS doesn’t even need to hear the case at all, they can let the appeal court ruling stand as an eloquent and indeed definitive statement of the law, so that’s what we could expect. Oh, but they have resolved to hear it? OK, then of course, they’ll move to get this over quickly, they can really hustle when they want, remember Bush v. Gore, or for that matter Trump’s 14th amendment ballot disqualification case? Lickety-split, you betcha. What’s that then? Not until April? Well, all right, but they’re going to laugh Trump’s lawyers out of court, and there’s still a chance of getting the trial going before November…wait, say what now? The tenor of the Justices’ questioning indicates they’re actually warming up to this immunity nonsense, in the abstract, while refusing to address the specifics of the case at bar, that is, that at this moment we’re talking about immunity for riot, insurrection, and the attempted thwarting of the peaceful transfer of power? Well, shit, OK, not great, but OK, maybe instead of ruling against Trump outright, they’ll send it back down to the lower courts to settle a few key questions…
Which is where it sits as I write this, taking in the rather dismal view from atop the very last line of palisades. We’re now forced to admit that after this last possible scenario, the only thing left to contemplate is that they don’t send it back down to the lower courts with questions, a move which itself would all but guarantee that no trial can be held prior to the election (since, again, any answers to such questions arrived at lower down will simply be appealed all the way back up to SCOTUS, in another excruciatingly protracted process lasting months). Maybe, instead, they just up and rule for Trump. Maybe the crazed SCOTUS majority decides simply that yup, he’s a King, you can’t touch him, Absolute Presidential Immunity is actually a thing within the Founders’ constitutional framework, no matter what Madison and Hamilton made the underlying philosophy of their new governmental system sound like in the Federalist Papers, and thanks for coming out.
At which point, like I’ve been saying, if I’m Joe Biden I’ve got a couple of ideas about a new mission set for Delta Force.
God grant me strength.
This ridiculous sham of a Supreme Court, this self-satisfied, insular, smug little cabal of lifetime appointees – one of them occupying a stolen seat, who sits among a nasty troika first nominated by a President who lost the popular vote, and then cynically and rapidly confirmed by Senators representing less than half of the U.S. population – are notoriously corrupt, and so in the tank for Donald that they’re doing everything they can to make sure he evades accountability before he takes his shot at reassuming the Presidency and making it all go away. Hell, one of these Republican stooges, Thomas, isn’t just a whore for corporate money, he’s married to a January 6 coup plotter. Alito, the arch-opponent of Roe v. Wade, is, frankly, certifiable. Thomas and that smirking frat boy Kavanaugh are both sexual predators, while the whole conservative majority comprises a set of religious whack-jobs reckoned, in a recent study of the jurisprudence, to include the top five most pro-religion justices since at least World War II: Chief Justice John Roberts Jr., and Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito Jr., Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch.** So much for secular government.
Honestly, it’s now gone beyond disgusting – it’s downright bizarre. This sick institution, which has already done so much to strip away the legal underpinnings of a government that would do more than service the interests of the 0.001%, gutting several areas of regulatory supervision and protection, all but abolishing gun control, eroding the separation of church and state, pretty much banning affirmative action, not to mention depriving citizens of numerous basic freedoms, including voting and reproductive rights, needs to be reined in before it puts an end to American democracy once and for all. Enough. Enough dicking around with this crew. Screw the norms and traditions. If Biden wins this fall, and if the Dems keep the Senate and take the House – a whole lot of ifs, but we live in hope – they’ve got to make radical reforms, pronto, while they have the chance. If that means stacking the court, or passing new laws to create rotating panels to hear cases, selected at random from a large pool of justices, or some other work-around to the current abysmal dysfunction, fine, whatever, there are plenty of good ideas out there, all of them perfectly constitutional – there’s nothing, for example, in the Craptacular Parchment that mandates any fixed number of justices, or decrees that all those appointed to serve the Court must sit for every case, among a number of key questions relevant to the Article III Branch upon which, typically, the Founders’ purported masterpiece is simply silent – and if doing anything at all means first getting rid of the Senate filibuster, then good, get rid of it, and what took you so long.
Whatever it takes. This can’t go on. This little clique of misfit ideologues cannot be allowed to steer the whole course of American history, and, by necessary extension, World history, as if nothing matters beyond the narrow interests of the Orange Mussolini wannabe who put them there. If Biden wins, if the Dems have the power, they must act, decisively.
And if Trump wins? I don’t know. I got nothin’. And if, God help them, Donald does win, and these lunatics have in the meantime had the cajones to actually side with the sentient comb-over on absolute immunity, well, the Rule of Law will be dead, and after that, having decided to cry havoc and let slip the dogs of lawless anarchy, whatever next happens, to America, to us, to the Justices themselves, is entirely on SCOTUS. The august jurists may find that a MAGA dictatorship isn’t so keen on maintaining them in their comfy little judicial sinecures, and that a world in which the Constitution means nothing isn’t all that sympathetic to the bleating of increasingly irrelevant legal elites whose only power to dictate political outcomes flowed from the former belief that they should wield it, and the long-since squandered confidence that they’d wield it wisely. After all that’s gone on, all the stunts that have been pulled, nobody in his right frame of mind has any feeling for the present batch of Federalist Society hacks. These days, SCOTUS polls maybe a couple of points north of esophageal cancer, depending on the sample size. That’s awfully dangerous.
You’d think they’d grasp that.
190 days to go.
**https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/the-justices-faith-and-their-religion-clause-decisions
the needlefish 