Smash, bash, shred and corrupt institutional stability—the right wins, U.S. greatness staggers
The Liberty Bell, a symbol of a vital, law-abiding democracy, just incurred another terrifying crack, a body blow of historic proportions that enables presidential scorn for law and limits. Historians now compare the total immunity/no accountability disgrace on par with the worst modern Supreme Courts decisions, more than equal to the horrible Citizens United, dumping abortion protection and shredding voting rights. The awful irony: Past curbs didn’t handcuff Trump’s criminal rampage—and now chaos is “official”?
On the garbage heap now with one SC ruling, that nostalgic Yankee notion of a nation of laws, vs. an open mine field stripped of prosecutorial scrutiny. Beyond delivering a terrible moral message, the SC just made ill-prepared judges the first-round deciders to distinguish official from not-official acts, a nearly impossible division. Judges also must decide what testimony gets admitted, an equally daunting task, only to be second-guessed by the SC.
This horrendous default forces hard decisions on an inefficient, slow-moving, procedural bureaucracy, the wrong solution to genuinely check any presidency. Look how Trump has already manipulated the courts to escape accountability. Thus, the void of any Constitutional language speaks to Trump-like stupidity. What decently-ruled, democratic nation can tolerate no explicit restraints on its “official” power-center, the one with the greatest leverage to abuse?
While the electorate now endures fewer rights (on procreation, voting, homelessness, protest and free speech), the top dog can now growl and bite whoever and whenever—just call it “official” and reckless “freedom” reigns, This is both a symbolic and real-world sledgehammer that pommels the foundation of civility and justice, forcing a new, radical wedge between the American CEO and the now far less sovereign people. Any system that carves out “exceptions” voids “no one is above the law”—thus entering self-destruct mode.
Where are the Dems on this disaster?
What president can “represent” the sane majority if he or she runs roughshod over laws that rigorously apply to everyone else. Why can’t there be “official” billionaire acts that allow similar rule waivers? If laws don’t apply to the most powerful, why should they apply to all (and Jan. 6 is the prime example when insurgents made clear they don’t)? Whatever you term it, an unbridled, lawless president can wreak horrors of a dimension we have not yet imagined. Adding insult to injury, chief justice Roberts exposed tin-ear extremism by putting down dissent as “fear-mongering.” When dissent is demonized, whither life and pursuit of liberty, if not happiness? And where’s the heroic champion we can even look to for relief? Dems have other distracting re-election qualms.
Nothing “in the system” stops a committed law-breaker like Trump, gleefully bragging about his ability to escape his own outlaw behavior, indeed crime spree. Double impeachments were a farce, not even sufficient to make him un-electable (indeed, for his angry mob, the very opposite). Now all bets are off were the Felon-in-chief to take over what was once literally (by statute) the highest law enforcer in the land. Why not put criminals in charge of the DOJ, or appoint gang members as advisors and investigators? Why not seek out deviants more deranged than MTG, and greater scoff-offs than Matt Gaetz or George Santos, as “law-makers” since they know what bad-faith lawlessness is all about. Oh, that’s the case.
Worse still, having infected the House and many right-wing senators, Trumpism has finally established its mark by corrupting an outlaw Supreme Court (paradoxical as it may be) to be a despotic enabler. Two generations of right-wing connivance, conspiracy and corruption has finally nuked what made America great—checks and balances assuring us no one is above the law. Oh, add in gerrymandering, fundraising razzle-dazzle, and voting rights violations.
A body blow to checks and balances
Can any democracy thrive amidst this increasingly self-destructive contradiction? If fairness, if not realistic evidence, are not core drivers of justice, then America tumbles. If the basic handcuffs on any previous president, fearful of indictment when crossing the line, has no legal reality, then what impedes any Dictator-in-chief? That means a default, rather like an unstable banana republic, to the military or any militant force prone that can commandeer, even hijack the Capitol and key government buildings.
If a president does it, now that makes it legal, sings the top court’s perversion of justice and functional government. Worst of all, elections way after the illegality become the only meaningful “impeachment/conviction” mode, a sorry, ineffective process. The default to an electorate (too often suckered) obliges us to: 1) elect candidates with no chance to abuse law, stable traditions, his opponents or critics; and 2) then totally trust that choice to serve the country, not himself. What rational adult looks at history and concludes, “sure, we naturally elect heroic, honest people who never falter”? Right, there’s a bridge for sale between Manhattan and Brooklyn.
And there’s more. What if a president cherrypicks what in the Constitution he will honor—sidestepping the 25th Amendment even if he goes batty (or battier in DT’s case)? Or decides that the impeachment/conviction process is illegitimate, whatever its results—and then we endure months and months for the SC to act? What if, as in 2020, a losing president threatens to make White House his fortress? Or steals top secret docs galore? By what Supreme Court intervention, and in what time period, can that be overcome?
The one solution to right-wing takeover
Overall, the right’s ferocious war on the Constitution has now super-powered the executive, leaving Congress, the judiciary, regulators, and ordinary, law-abiding citizens in the lurch. Doesn’t the Supreme Court realize how it just shot itself in the head—making itself potentially obsolete—vulnerable to justices being “taken out” for being high “security risks”? The outcome leaves only one way to deflect chaos—only elect saintly, ego-free, Constitutionally-aware presidents. How else to confront dire forces, like billionaires, evangelicals, anti-abortionists and gun owners, elbowing beyond their minority leverage.
As Lord Action famously declared, “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely” Until human nature evolves to something less selfish and self-serving, the rarest commodity in the world is the super-ambitious politician who doesn’t worship power and control over all opposition. Name one.
The successful dictator, per expert historians, gains his absolutism not by popular decree but by woeful, legitimate checks on power and the ability to abuse and oppress fellow citizens. If the Supreme Court’s latest corrupt gift to Trump is not promptly reversed by federal legislation, clarifying the Constitution even for partisan hacks, we face the iconic slippery slope. If a president can escape accountability for secondary law-breaking, what stops a full-fledged dictator from becoming an insurgent against his own Constitution—and the idealistic sovereignty once awarded to “we, the people” to orchestrate our own government?
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