The unusual brief filed by Special Prosecutor Jack Smith with the SCOTUS today, to dispense with the Appellate circuit and, for the purpose of a well-informed public, asking it to decide expeditiously whether TFG’s legal defense has merit enough to forestall Judge Chutkan’s judicial calendar for the MAL indictment, on a claim of presidential immunity, is saying essentially that. Rucho v Common Cause (2019) showed the American people what this Court thinks of ‘the People’ and self-government, when it washed it’s hands of any responsibility for apportionment abuse by the states.
“I wish it weren’t that loudmouth Trump, but like it or not, here’s our moment”, Leonard Leo and Harlan Crow are probably thinking, “Our ‘unitary executive project’ is in good hands.” Or is it?
To agree with TFG’s nonsensical claim of presidential immunity under any and all circumstances, would be signing the death warrant of the Judicial branch itself. And by extension, the republic. Odds are, even this SCOTUS will deny Trump his triumph. He’ll be pissed, for sure. And then he’ll up the ante.
Can you blame this childish-gambino? He doesn’t know anything else. Mary Trump has had him pegged for years as the psychopath he is.
But can you imagine what that campaign is going to look like? Personally, I think it will be the beginning of the end of Donald J Trump. Finally.
Running against even this extremist Supreme Court will put his essential Lawlessness squarely in the balance for what voters will be deciding to endorse with their votes in 2024. It’s sure to be a toxic stew of 1A-protected hate, jingoism and intimidationist rhetoric.
Nevertheless, this is an extraordinary moment in American history. On the one hand, of the immense gravity of the consequences for the Republic in either direction the SCOTUS rules on Jack Smith’s brief; and yet the profound unseriousness of the issue at hand: The absurdity of a branch of Government being asked to endorse an interpretation of the American constitution by a defendant who coordinated a conspiracy to nullify that constitution.
Asking the American people to accept that it’s reasonable to interpret the Constitution as a suicide pact. That one man — one Person — can, by intimidation, cause those who lived the sweep of the second half of the 20th century, as the children of those who experienced the Holocaust, and sacrificed everything to preserve a semblance of law and order in the world; as the intellectual heirs to almost two and a half centuries of constitutional struggle and legacy, to be asked whether it was worth it? Whether being alive to ‘tell the tale’ was worth it. Trump, by not being treated like the psychopath that he is, is telling us “No.” We have allowed a psychopath to stand before history and argue this nihilistic absurdity to, supposedly, the preeminent legal authorities in the world.
That is a profoundly unserious legacy of ideation, that these #BillionairesShouldNotExist have left us with.
Don’t look up.
Stare at your navel.
Aspire to nothing.
I truly hope that when we get through this, it will spark a new — unexpected — epoch of constitutional reform*, having come this close to losing the Republic through the poison of Apportionment abuse, funded by a constituency that prizes it’s Wealth above law and order.
The American people need to disabuse themselves of the fiction that Democracy can coexist with Wealth without restrictions, particularly when that Wealth has the means to cause (a manufactured portion of) the People to challenge the legitimacy of their own Government.
* It’s my personal belief that the Electoral College will be gone within 20 years, at the end of major electoral reform in Congress, upheld by a different SCOTUS, and probably the first amendment to the Constitution passed in over half a century.
#BillionairesShouldNotExist
