Funereal Friday Reads: Life as a Dank Meme

The Supreme Court hears arguments on Trump’s immunity claim, John Buss, @repeat1968.

Good Day, Sky Dancers!

I got the cutest picture of the granddaughters today. The girls were smiling and looking at each other with adoration. Both were pretty in pink. All I can think of is what kind of country they may inherit.

I watched and listened to trials and hearings that were so surreal that I was pretty sure we’d entered the Evil Spock Timeline. I remember when the Supreme Court protected everyone’s rights. Now, rights are confined to those who brought the men there and paid for their holidays. It was like watching a Skeleton Dance. Not one TV Lawyer could find anything constitutional about the show they put on yesterday. We all laughed at him when he said,‘ I Could … Shoot Somebody, And I Wouldn’t Lose Any Voters’ Evidently, he can do worse than that, and the Supreme Court would make up something to cover his farty, diapered ass.

This is a must-read from Slate: “The Last Thing This Supreme Court Could Do to Shock Us  There will be no more self-soothing after this.” This is written by Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern. 

For three long years, Supreme Court watchers mollified themselves (and others) with vague promises that when the rubber hit the road, even the ultraconservative Federalist Society justices of the Roberts court would put democracy before party whenever they were finally confronted with the legal effort to hold Donald Trump accountable for Jan. 6. There were promising signs: They had, after all, refused to wade into the Trumpian efforts to set aside the election results in 2020. They had, after all, hewed to a kind of sanity in batting away Trumpist claims about presidential records (with the lone exception of Clarence Thomas, too long marinated in the Ginni-scented Kool-Aid to be capable of surprising us, but he was just one vote). We promised ourselves that there would be cool heads and grand bargains and that even though the court might sometimes help Trump in small ways, it would privilege the country in the end. We kept thinking that at least for Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch and Chief Justice John Roberts, the voice of reasoned never-Trumpers might still penetrate the Fox News fog. We told ourselves that at least six justices, and maybe even seven, of the most MAGA-friendly court in history would still want to ensure that this November’s elections would not be the last in history. Political hacks they may be, but they were not lawless ones.

For three long years, Supreme Court watchers mollified themselves (and others) with vague promises that when the rubber hit the road, even the ultraconservative Federalist Society justices of the Roberts court would put democracy before party whenever they were finally confronted with the legal effort to hold Donald Trump accountable for Jan. 6. There were promising signs: They had, after all, refused to wade into the Trumpian efforts to set aside the election results in 2020. They had, after all, hewed to a kind of sanity in batting away Trumpist claims about presidential records (with the lone exception of Clarence Thomas, too long marinated in the Ginni-scented Kool-Aid to be capable of surprising us, but he was just one vote). We promised ourselves that there would be cool heads and grand bargains and that even though the court might sometimes help Trump in small ways, it would privilege the country in the end. We kept thinking that at least for Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch and Chief Justice John Roberts, the voice of reasoned never-Trumpers might still penetrate the Fox News fog. We told ourselves that at least six justices, and maybe even seven, of the most MAGA-friendly court in history would still want to ensure that this November’s elections would not be the last in history. Political hacks they may be, but they were not lawless ones.

 On Thursday, during oral arguments in Trump v. United States, the Republican-appointed justices shattered those illusions. This was the case we had been waiting for, and all was made clear—brutally so. These justices donned the attitude of cynical partisans, repeatedly lending legitimacy to the former president’s outrageous claims of immunity from criminal prosecution. To at least five of the conservatives, the real threat to democracy wasn’t Trump’s attempt to overturn the election—but the Justice Department’s efforts to prosecute him for the act. These justices fear that it is Trump’s prosecution for election subversion that will “destabilize” democracy, requiring them to read a brand-new principle of presidential immunity into a Constitution that guarantees nothing of the sort. They evinced virtually no concern for our ability to continue holding free and fair elections that culminate in a peaceful transfer of power. They instead offered endless solicitude for the former president who fought that transfer of power.

However the court disposes of Trump v. U.S., the result will almost certainly be precisely what the former president craves: more delays, more hearings, more appeals—more of everything but justice. This was not a legitimate claim from the start, but a wild attempt by Trump’s attorneys to use his former role as chief executive of the United States to shield himself from the consequences of trying to turn the presidency into a dictatorship. After so much speculation that these reasonable, rational jurists would surely dispose of this ridiculous case quickly and easily, Thursday delivered a morass of bad-faith hand-wringing on the right about the apparently unbearable possibility that a president might no longer be allowed to wield his powers of office in pursuit of illegal ends. Just as bad, we heard a constant minimization of Jan. 6, for the second week in a row, as if the insurrection were ancient history, and history that has since been dramatically overblown, presumably for Democrats’ partisan aims.

All this with the husband of an insurrectionist sitting on the bench.   I heard Nicole Wallace give the best explanation of anything I’ve heard on why these men act out their grievances in court decisions last night.  Two of the guys that sit on the bench are sex pests and were publicly shown to be so.  Alito is just perpetually mad at everything but mostly at being branded a bigot because he has issues with women and gay people.  His hateful take on religion basically focuses on controlling the objects of his hatred.  Protecting his religious practice means he should get away with whatever. Nicole Wallace argued that they love Trump because they are all angry and aggrieved.  They identify with Trump because they feel they’re in a similar situation.  Civil rights are all about not letting white boys be white boys.  They all want absolute immunity. We have to rely on Amy and John to be reasonable.  Amy’s line of questions actually gave me a bit of hope.

It’s a weird timeline for me to quote Bill Kristol and Andrew Egger. This is from the Bulwark. “ Trump Melts Institutions, SCOTUS Edition. The Supreme Court’s no-win situation and the healthy liberalism we need.”

… reading the tea leaves of oral arguments is always an exercise in guesswork. Hopefully SCOTUS won’t be long in unveiling their opinion on the matter.

But one other thing is worth saying: It’s completely understandable that so many people’s first instinct was to roll their eyes at the Court’s apparent interest in using this case to trace out the complex contours of any newly explicit presidential right to official-act immunity—given the remarkable hubris of Trump’s bringing those arguments in the first place.

After all, here’s a guy who, during his second impeachment, explicitly arguedthat prosecuting an ex-president was the role of the criminal courts: “a president who left office is not in any way above the law,” his lawyers argued, “as the Constitution states he or she is like any other citizen and can be tried in a court of law.”

Now Trump articulates just the opposite position: No act that is “official” in form—which, his lawyers have had to admit during arguments, would include such acts as ordering the military to carry out a coup—can be criminally prosecuted after he leaves office unless he was first convicted in an impeachment trial for that conduct. How any president enjoying such expansive power could ever be impeached by a Congress he could apparently order murdered without consequence remains unclear.

It’s a ridiculous exercise, a transparent stalling tactic. For Team Trump, just getting the argument in front of SCOTUS was a victory in and of itself, further diminishing the odds of a jury getting to rule on Trump’s stolen-election charges before the November election. “Literally popping champagne right now,” one lawyer close to Trump told Rolling Stonewhen the court announced it would consider the immunity claim in February. This week, RS quoted another Trump source that it hardly matters what the court does now: “We already pulled off the heist.”

At the same time, no matter how transparent Trump’s run-out-the-clock motivations in bringing the petition to the Court, it’s true that the claims of presidential immunity at hand have never been litigated. The justices are highly unlikely to endorse Trump’s theory that every presidential act that is official “in form” is exempt from prosecution—but are some presidential acts immune? What is the line between a president acting in his capacity as president and acting in his capacity as a candidate or private citizen? And could it be true—as Trump’s lawyers have argued—that opening up too broad a swath of presidential actions to post-presidency prosecution could hamper a president’s ability to run the country effectively?

Evidently, Kavanaugh’s love of beer causes him to be delusional and totally out of it.

One last SCOTUS send-up and I’m changing the topic.   This is from Adam Sewer, who is writing for The New Republic. ” The Trumpification of the Supreme Court. The conservative justices have shown they are ready to sacrifice any law or principle to save the former president.”

The notion that Donald Trump’s supporters believe that he should be able to overthrow the government and get away with it sounds like hyperbole, an absurd and uncharitable caricature of conservative thought. Except that is exactly what Trump’s attorney D. John Sauer argued before the Supreme Court yesterday, taking the position that former presidents have “absolute immunity” for so-called official acts they take in office.

“How about if a president orders the military to stage a coup?” Justice Elena Kagan asked Sauer. “I think it would depend on the circumstances whether it was an official act,” Sauer said after a brief exchange. “If it were an official act … he would have to be impeached and convicted.”

“That sure sounds bad, doesn’t it?” Kagan replied later.

The Democratic appointees on the bench sought to illustrate the inherent absurdity of this argument with other scenarios as well—Kagan got Sauer to admit that the president could share nuclear secrets, while Justice Sonia Sotomayor presented a scenario in which a president orders the military to assassinate a political rival. Sauer said that might qualify as an official act too. It was the only way to maintain the logic of his argument, which is that Trump is above the law

This Mike Luchovich cartoon is brutal and true.   I am shifting to the other SCOTUS shit show this week.  CNN has “Takeaways from the Supreme Court’s oral arguments over emergency abortions.” Again, thank goodness my youngest daughter is in Denver. Who knows what her outcome may have been? Dr. Daughter is getting more colleagues in Washington State because of Idaho.  Pregnant women are gestational containers there. This analysis was provided by Tierney Sneed and John Fritze.

In a Supreme Court hearing on the Biden administration’s challenge to aspects of Idaho’s strict abortion ban, US Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar sought to appeal to conservative justices who just two years ago ruled that states should have the ability to prohibit the procedure.

The dispute, stemming from the Justice Department’s marquee response to the high court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade in 2022, turns on whether federal mandates for hospital emergency room care override abortion bans that do not exempt situations where a woman’s health is in danger but her life is not yet threatened.

To prevail, the Biden administration will need the votes of two members of the court’s conservative bloc, and with Justice Brett Kavanaugh signaling sympathies toward Idaho, the case will likely come down to the votes of Chief Justice John Roberts and Amy Coney Barrett. The two justices had tough questions for both sides of the case.

The court’s far-right wing, perhaps in an attempt to keep those two justices on their side, framed the case as a federal overreach into state power. The court’s liberals, meanwhile, focused on the grisly details of medical emergencies faced by pregnant woman that were not covered by the limited life-of-the-woman exemption in Idaho’s ban.

So, back to Pecker and the man who has to pay for sex coming and going. There’s been a whole of objecting accompanied by “sustained.”

More will be coming once the print journalists get their stories in.  I wish I could be Pollyanna and play the glad game, but I can only come up with the bad news. We get to see this continually, which is also the thing I’m glad about.  I m  feel like a total masochist every time I turn the TV on or read a magazine article, but just think how awful it would be if we didn’t know about this. I’m not sure what will become of Donald, but I’m certain that we still have time to make certain he doesn’t get back into the White House.  We have time to stop the MAGAdons that want to clone that agenda into every state and the U.S. Congress. We’ll see and read nothing else but propaganda if we don’t stop them now.

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?

Guess who John Prine wrote this about?