All right. I’m not even kidding anymore. In light of today’s decision, Joe Biden, now insulated, apparently, from criminal liability for just about any use of the power of his office, has been granted a few unorthodox options he should definitely explore. No joke. No, no joking at all. This is an emergency, and we’re beyond the realm of democratic and constitutional corrective mechanisms. They don’t work, not now, not when confronting this level of subversive sabotage by the branch of government that’s supposed to protect the Republic, not destroy it. The ultimate catastrophe looms. Something needs to be done. I wish to God Joe would do it. The malign, unprincipled hypocrites on the Supreme Court are using the rules to destroy the entire system, smirking and smugly slapping each other on the back as they undermine the foundations of democracy, while those who still believe in the dream of government by the people, for the people, are expected to comply because rules, after all, are rules, for which read whatever we now say are the rules are for ever after the rules, so obey the rules, ye peasants, and when we arbitrarily change them, you just keep right on obeying, because we said so, and because for your purposes we’re God, and neither you nor anybody else can do anything about it.
Nope. We’re past that. What SCOTUS just pulled off is a coup d’état. Nothing less. They’ve declared that the President is a king, and, as if eager to see how far they can push their absurdist logic without provoking mass hysteria and backlash, they claim to base their ridiculous ruling on an originalist interpretation of the will of the Founders. Look, they claim, this is all based on the Constitution. We’re thus now to believe, so they tell us, that Madison, Hamilton et al were throwing off the yoke of the British monarchy merely to create a functionally equivalent home-grown alternative, under which the rude, unwashed, virtually ungovernable masses could be kept in line by supreme leaders unfettered by accountability to anyone save God. Up is down, backwards is forwards, ignorance is strength, freedom is slavery, war is peace, and Jeffersonian democracy embraces tyranny. And all y’all can just make yourselves comfortable with how it is.
Honestly, I’m too out of sorts to write a Harvard Law Review exegesis of this hideous, inevitably 6-3 SCOTUS abomination, in which they’ve outdone themselves in their ongoing campaign to put an end to responsible democratic government in the United States. I’ve read the decision. There’s much to discuss. Maybe I will, in a subsequent post. All you really need to know for now, however, is that Justice Roberts and his merry band of constitutional arsonists have pretended to leave open the possibility of prosecuting a criminal President, while erecting so many barriers to any such effort that it’s hard to imagine how Jack Smith, or anyone dealing with any future mob boss who seizes the White House, could use the law to constrain any sort of crime syndicate operated out of the Oval Office. My God, Roberts even decreed that in evaluating the possible malfeasance of Presidents, evidence of motive was categorically excluded. That’s what criminal law is all about: mens rea. A guilty mind. Intent. Not when it comes to the President, though, not any longer. No, anything within the scope of a President’s official duties is the stuff of absolute, unassailable immunity, regardless of the underlying scheme, and for good measure anything done peripheral to the office is protected by presumptive immunity, which presumption can only be rebutted by demonstrating that holding the President to account wouldn’t infringe upon the Chief Executive’s latitude to act boldly and decisively. They’ve even ruled that it’s not enough if the President’s actions were illegal. I’m not making this up. This is what this rancid cabal of fascist jurists have agreed is the law.
I’ll have to take a little time to produce something analytical and coherent on this cruel joke of a ruling, supposing I wake up tomorrow and think it’s worth the effort. For now, believe me, it’s bad. It’s very, very bad, almost as awful as the worst-case scenarios of our darkest imaginings. It all but ensures that Donald will never face justice for his traitorous crimes, and empowers him, and all his successors to come, to do almost anything using the vast powers of the Office of the Presidency, however unconstitutional, illegal, or vile. There will remain, of course, quibbling around the margins over what does or does not amount to an “official act”, and I hope to be able to speak sensibly about that in the coming days, but essentially, the decision today means Trump was a King and can’t be prosecuted. Not technically, maybe, but essentially.
Jack Smith may as well pack up his things and go back to The Hague.
Goddammit, I knew it. I knew in my guts that these miserable dipshits were going to do this, yet I still hoped they wouldn’t, thinking, while trying to maintain my sanity, that they couldn’t possibly take their cynical, sordid demolition of what used to be the American system of government to such an unthinkable length. That’s always our fatal weakness, isn’t it? They win because we cling to our illusions, believing the worst isn’t possible, simply because only monsters would revel in such destructive, immoral vandalism, and surely such monsters don’t exist. Well, they do, actually, and they just directed liberal democracy, found standing at a fateful fork in the road, to march straight down the long, rocky route to autocracy. They’ve done it consciously, deliberately, and maliciously. Make no mistake. White minority rule by an oligarchy of billionaires is what these bastards want, and what they were put there to achieve.
What, now, remains to be done? That’s not a rhetorical question. It’s simply unanswerable, at least to anyone determined to gather up and preserve the last pathetic shards of a shattered democratic civil society. Absent the self-imposed constraints based on a morality that obviously no longer has any influence over the behaviour of our would-be oppressors, there are answers that present themselves, but I guess even now I can’t bear to go there. I guess. I’m enraged, though. I’m thinking intemperate thoughts. I don’t know what’s right or wrong anymore, when confronting this level of evil.
Truly, my heart is breaking. I don’t want to live in these times. I don’t want to be here. The whole world changed today, and if you imagine that somehow we’re safe up here in our little northern enclave, thinking we’re for some reason inoculated against the contagion of corrupt authoritarianism and racist right wing populist rage, just because this is Canada, give your witless head a shake. We’re next. Don’t you see that? The toxic plume will keep spreading in our direction. We’re next.
the needlefish 