So much has now been written about the SCOTUS decision on Presidential immunity that I don’t see any point in trying myself to explain it further. You’ll do just as well to read this, by Ian Millhiser of Vox:
https://www.vox.com/scotus/358292/supreme-court-trump-immunity-dictatorship
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Here’s how this would go if Americans weren’t living in a Bizzaroland populated by a critical mass of ignorant morons ready to re-elect a criminal who’s already tried to put an end to their democracy: an enraged and terrified public would vote en masse in November to ensure that not a single Republican occupies any office in the federal government. Everyone would show up for the emergency. The 100+million eligible voters who’ve repeatedly chosen to sit out prior elections would run to the polls, and vote as if their lives depended on it. In the aftermath, the Senate would consist of 100 Democrats. The House would be filled with 435 Democrats. A Democrat would be in the White House. Those elected officials would then go about the impeachment of the Supreme Court’s conservative majority for its corruption and deliberate subversion of the Constitution. An expanded and reformed Supreme Court would overturn all of the egregiously toxic decisions of the Roberts Court, starting with Citizens United and ending with yesterday’s anti-constitutional abomination. The judicially repealed sections of the Voting Rights Act would be restored. Roe would be reaffirmed as the law of the land. The overturn of Chevron would be reversed. Then the campaign to restore sanity would move on to the impeachment of Trumpist hacks in the District and Circuit Courts, campaign finance reform, electoral reform (passing, at last, the For the People Act) and the lancing of various other festering boils cultivated over decades of malfeasance by the GOP. A hard core of bigots, white nationalists, christo-fascists and neo-Nazis would squeal like stuck pigs, but their shrieks would be drowned out by the roaring approval of the vast majority. A sane political alternative would eventually rise from the ashes of the obliterated GOP.
Of course, that’s not going to occur. Not any of it. The American people are incapable of rising to this occasion, they simply don’t have the wit or the moral fibre to save themselves, and at this point nobody else is coming to the rescue.
I don’t know what’s going to happen now, and I don’t know which of the remaining possibilities is the least deplorable. All I can assert is that there is no immediately obvious lawful, democratic, constitutional way to undo what SCOTUS just did. Even should Biden, or some other Democrat running in his stead, keep Donald out of the White House this November – and that’s looking increasingly unlikely – the systemic anti-democratic elements of the Constitution will ensure that there can be no decisive change in the Congressional balance of power, and therefore no meaningful reform. Meanwhile, the Electoral College will continue to weight electoral results in favour of a Republican President. Forty million Californians will continue to get the same number of Senators as 500 thousand clodhoppers in Wyoming. Gerrymandered districts will stay that way. Sooner or later, the GOP will retake Congress and a Republican will win the White House. Every election from now on will be a referendum on whether America should remain a constitutional republic, in practice, if no longer by law; we can’t win every time into the indefinite future, and once the Presidency is handed to J.D. Vance, Tommy Tuberville, Matt Gaetz, or whichever MAGA stooge takes the baton from Donald, Project 2025, or 2030, or 2035, will be implemented, Congress will do nothing to stop it, the Courts will approve, and that’ll be all she wrote.
I don’t even know whether my imagined miraculous shift in the voting preferences of the general public would be enough to swing the pendulum all the way back. Suppose that a Democratic Congress does move to reform the Supreme Court and impeach the present Justices; what’s to stop the Court from ruling the attempt is unconstitutional? Do you suppose they won’t? Why wouldn’t they? When the unelected, lifetime-tenured, answerable-to-nobody highest court in the land decides to undo the Constitution, and then has final say over any lawful attempt to correct the damage, we’re confronted with the purest possible variety of constitutional crisis, with almost no legal or institutional mechanisms remaining to put the nation back on an even keel. I suppose there may be ways that a sufficiently Democrat-dominated Congress could attack the problem such that SCOTUS couldn’t overrule it, I’d have to think about that, but look, enough dreaming, we’re never getting that Congress. So I can’t see any but two ways forward. It can all simply be allowed to happen, or there can be chaos, mayhem, and the pursuit of extra-legal solutions that could wind up in civil unrest, and even civil war.
As near as I can tell, that’s where we are. By this time next year I wouldn’t be surprised to see Nicole Wallace and Rachel Maddow hauled away in chains to serve out life sentences in Gitmo, and no, I’m not joking.
It’s not like we couldn’t have seen this coming. I did. I wrote this back in 2018:
Here’s what I believe… America has now taken the first steps down an old and well-travelled road that wends its way toward coups, assassinations, the imposition of authoritarian rule, and civil war. They may yet reverse course, but it’s hard to quell the horror that they could actually have started down this path, as if stumbling drunk towards a buzz saw.
Well, there haven’t been any assassinations – yet – but there’s been a coup, authoritarian rule is just around the corner, and the drunken stumble towards the buzz saw is just about to end in the inevitable gory mess, and it’s all their own damned fault. The failing, ultimately, is not with the judges, or the oligarchs, or their corrupt Republican enablers, it’s with the people themselves, who never had the wherewithal to understand what was happening, and kept voting for the lying politicians who pushed all their manufactured culture war buttons. Even now, Trump leads in the polls. It’s unfathomable.
It really does feel as if it’s too late now to turn this thing around. Decades of Republican efforts to stack the courts, gerrymander the electoral districts, suppress the minority vote, brainwash the general public with an endless stream of lies, and stoke the primal fears of the shrinking White majority, are now reaching fruition, just as planned all the way back from before Project REDMAP.
You have to hand it to them. They sure knew how to stick to the program and maintain the pressure until the system finally cracked. They’ve been nothing if not disciplined, every step of the way, and the people just stood there, uncomprehending, watching them pull off the heist in broad daylight, and cheering wildly for the folks who promised to preserve their White privelage. What could ever have been done to save the Founders’ dream when its fate was handed to such an electorate?
I’m assuming that President Biden, decent Patriot that he is, won’t run with the power SCOTUS now says is his and do something drastic. Maybe he really should, I don’t know. But he won’t. Anybody got any other bright ideas? I’m going to have to put some more thought into all this. Maybe something cheerful will occur to me. Stay tuned.
the needlefish 