Anyone care to bet on the outcome when Donald Trump dispatches Seal Team Six
to "persuade" the Supreme Court Nine that his novel interpretation of the
Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, or the 22nd Amendment, or
prima nocta, or
whatever is the correct one?
Of course, all the usual scum and quislings on the court will need no
persuading, but a unanimous decision would look so much better -- so much more
"bipartisan" and "centrist" -- for the history books, don't you think?
And Trump's heavily-armed praetorian guard wouldn't even need to be in the
room with the "justices". They could be stationed outside, providing
"security", because you know how dangerous those Liberal thugs
are.
Just a phalanx of Murrican patriots protecting the important work of the high
court from the commie, baby-killing Left.
Making sure no one enters or leaves until the court has come to a decision.
First, Sam the Sham Alito leads his ragtag band of Federalist Society myrmidons up to
the ippy-tippy top of the jurisprudential mountain to announce to the world
that, yes! yes! the United States Supreme Court really is the black-robed Conservative abattoir of democracy that those America-hating, terrorist-loving,
baby-killing Liberals have been warning us about for decades.
Then Nepo-great-great-grandbaby A.G. Sulzberger rode his high horse all the
way to the uppermost balcony of his New York Times to announce to
the world that, yes! yes! America's Newspaper of Record really is the bastion
of petty, vindictive, cosseted monarchists that those dirty hippie
ingate Liberals have been warning us about for decades.
Been a heck of a week, vindication-wise. I'm exhausted. Think I'll just kick back,
open a cold one and wait for the very sincere apologies to come rolling it from all
those Very Serious Persons who have been so very righteously wrong all along.
He didn't quite get around to whining about interposition and nullification, but as Rachel Maddow pointed out, Little Jeff made quite the cottage industry of trying to figure out how many syllables he could add to the word "Socialist" to make it sound extra scary.
Also -- with a straight face -- the Party of "Bush v. Gore" and "Citizens United" thought it would be a genius move to spend most of the day tarring the late justice Thurgood Marshall with the evil "activism" brush: the man who won Brown v. Board of Education, went on to serve with great distinction as this nation's first African American Supreme Court justice, and for whom Elena Kagan once clerked and spoke admiringly.
Because when your Base has the IQ of Boo Radley, the temperament of Veruca Salt and the memory of Leonard from "Memento"
("Bush who?") it really doesn't matter what kind of gibberish you spout or how incoherent it is. As long as you conjure up an imaginary hippie or uppity Negro to explain every problem and punch him in the face to solve that problem, you're fucking golden with the Pig People.
I'm not an attorney (although I was married to a very nice one for a time, which is why I still have dreams of being chased through a deep forest by the excited utterance exception to the hearsay rule) but I do understand how human institutions operate reasonably well, which I why I find most of the arguments around the nomination of Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court to be so tragically funny.
For example, while I wholly agree with all of the objections Glenn articulates here (and would love to see more of our "Serious" teevee pudding-pushing pundit class thrown into the streets in favor of clear, intelligent debaters) --
-- I also cannot help but think that he is praying to the wrong God. Everything that is wrong about our current political institutions is the result of the decisions made by the men and women who run those institutions.
In other words, the D.C. Supreme Court sausage machine has been carefully built and calibrated to produce one-and-only-one kind of sausage; if the raw material fed into the hopper is off by so much as two or three cultural or political micrometers, the machine will destroy the nominee. Everyone fucking well knows the rules, and both sides play the game very differently (from Digby):
Could this phenomenon possibly be related to the fact that the Republicans nominate radical wingnut freaks and Democrats nominate middle-of-the-road centrists with no discernible judicial philosophy? That one Party relishes a fight and the other runs from one?
Whatever it is, I think we can rule out that it's because the Republicans are more cooperative.
I for one would welcome a fight. Or detente. Or a level playing field. But what Liberals are no longer willing to do is unilaterally disarm in an attempt to play nice with demonstrably despicable and insane people. This, I would argue, is the single political and cultural factor that has well and truly changed in the last 25 years: the reluctant realization on the part of the great majority of Liberals that the Right really is just plain mad-dog-crazy, that they are no longer capable of being moved away from the abyss by any means short of a crude, continuous form of kick-them-in-the-balls-until-they-say-"Uncle" Skinnerian conditioning, and that the only way to mete that out is with the kind of smashmouth politics with which Liberals have traditionally been very uncomfortable.
That being said, let’s consider the Mystery of the Shifting Metrics!
Our story so far…
Renowned Reasonable Conservatives, David Brooks and Andrew Sullivan, both claim to have deep, principled reservations regarding the nomination of Ms. Kagan, which has so far manifested itself like this...
David Brooks' column today really helped crystallize for me my qualms about Elena Kagan. Her life, so far as one can tell, is her career, and her career has been built by avoiding any tough or difficult political or moral positions, eschewing any rigorous intellectual debate in which she takes a clear stand one way or the other, pleasing every single authority figure she has encountered, and reveling in the approval of the First Class Acela Corridor elite. The NYT profile - which is superb apart from its editorial decision to excise any account of any non-trivial private life (she smokes cigars!) since high school - is chilling in its assessment of a human soul in steady, determined pursuit of approval and power. ...
...In Kagan, it seems to me we have reached a new level of utter blankness. Her entire career has been about never taking a stand on anything of any substance - free coffee for students! - while networking in a way to neutralize any conceivable opposition. ...
But I'm guessing. We're all guessing. None of us has a clue - including those who say they are close to her. There are so many things we don't know about this person about to get enormous power over us for life. Which is why I have so far found this nomination so disturbing.
About a decade ago, one began to notice a profusion of Organization Kids at elite college campuses. These were bright students who had been formed by the meritocratic system placed in front of them. They had great grades, perfect teacher recommendations, broad extracurricular interests, admirable self-confidence and winning personalities.
If they had any flaw, it was that they often had a professional and strategic attitude toward life. They were not intellectual risk-takers. They regarded professors as bosses to be pleased rather than authorities to be challenged. As one admissions director told me at the time, they were prudential rather than poetic.
If you listen to people talk about Elena Kagan, it is striking how closely their descriptions hew to this personality type. ...
I have to confess my first impression of Kagan is a lot like my first impression of many Organization Kids. She seems to be smart, impressive and honest — and in her willingness to suppress so much of her mind for the sake of her career, kind of disturbing.
"The result is you get a set of incentives that impairs the careers of brilliant but flawed or prolific people. It rewards the careers of bland mediocrities."
Got all that? A person who understands the game and calculatedly barbers their career in pursuit of winning it is, in Bobo's and Sullivan's collective estimation, "disturbing", "depressing", "chilling", an "utter blankness" and a bland mediocrity.
Now, bearing that in mind, let us consider the brief Supreme Court career of one John G. Roberts: the ultra Conservative Chief Justice who, during his confirmation hearings, famously swore an oath to humility and to use the bench to do nothing more than "call balls and strikes"...and who has since issued one radical decision after another, including overturning 70 years of precedent by pulling a Constitutional right to Corporate Personhood right out of his ass.
In other words, Roberts -- the Wingnut Candidate from central casting -- pretty clearly lied outrageously and repeatedly during his hearings to get his gig as Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. Of course, if Roberts were a Liberal or even a Moderate I have no doubt that Republicans would be trying to attach impeachment amendments to every piece of legislation in Congress, but since he is a Conservative who lied in furtherance of the radical Conservative agenda, that appears to be perfectly OK with the Right.
But let us get back to the Mystery of the Shifting Metrics!
If you are a Liberal, you probably remember that, at the time of his nomination, there was some considerable bitching from the Right that Roberts was a blank slate, whose opinions on important matters had been kept carefully opaque. (if you're a Conservative, I take it for granted that you can't remember anything that happened before January 20, 2009). One typical example of that concern is found here:
President Bush announced his nomination of John Roberts for the Supreme Court of the United States this evening. Roberts worked for William French Smith in the Reagan administration, clerked for Justice William Rehnquist, and argued 39 cases before the Supreme Court. Roberts is 50, and has an impressive resume. ... Republicans have tried the blank slate route before. That's the Supreme Court pick whose opinions are unknown--perhaps even to himself. What did it get the GOP? David Souter, for one. President Bush has twice been elected president, and his party controls 55 Senate seats. If he really is a social conservative--let's face it, this is all about Roe v. Wade--why should he operate from a position of weakness and nominate a consensus candidate? While Roberts is neither the consensus candidate nor 2005's David Souter, his views on Roe v. Wade, at least, are unknown.
In fact, from his choice of schools, to his age, to his stint as Solicitor General, to his scant public record, to the nature of his personal and collegial relationships, Roberts' stage managing of his own career in the direction of the high court with the precision of a topiary gardener is eerily similar in almost every particular to that the Elena Kagan. And had her nomination to the federal bench by Bill Clinton not been killed by Republicans
On June 17, 1999, President Clinton nominated Kagan to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, to replace James L. Buckley, who had taken senior status in 1996. The Senate Judiciary Committee's Republican Chairman Orrin Hatch scheduled no hearing, effectively ending her nomination. When Clinton's term ended, her nomination to the D.C. Circuit Court lapsed, as did the nomination of fellow Clinton nominee Allen Snyder.[17]
Kagan would have by now logged a few years on the federal bench, making her resume almost perfectly identical to that of court's current Chief Justice at the time of his nomination.
So given the startlingly close parallels between Roberts and Kagan -- and the unambiguously clear objections to Blank Slatism that both David Fucking Brooks and Andrew Sullivan have articulated -- you might very well assume that, unless they are both just shamelessly HUGE fucking hypocrites, these Stalwarts of Reasonable Conservatism would of course have been be on the record in 2005 with virtually the same objections to Roberts that they have to Kagan
...Roberts helped out on a fascinating Supreme Court case for his firm. It doesn't tell us how he'd rule on, say, Lawrence vs Texas. My guess is that as an educated man of his generation, he's well aware of gay people, doesn't approve of discrimination, but has a very limited idea of what the constitution can do to protect minorities. I learned more from the reaction of people like James Dobson. For Dobson, any hint of sympathy for homosexuals is anathema. Roberts is a better man than that. And from everything I've read, is a superb choice for SCOTUS.
Right now, Roberts seems to me to be an extremely shrewd and defensible pick: federalist in instinct, prosaic in judgment, factually-astute, a conservative defender of judicial restraint. If a re-elected Republican president cannot get such a man confirmed, something has gone terribly wrong with the system. Obviously, we all have to wait for the hearings and any new revelations before making up our minds definitively. But I'd say it's inspired for being so uninspired, which is a pretty good definition of political conservatism at its best.
But compared to Bobo's nauseatingly ooey-gooey July 21, 2005 paean to John Roberts
Sullivan's assessment looks positively stoic.
Seriously, if you don't remember it, Bobo's sonnet was truly such a completely off-the-charts public mancrush blowjob of a column, that I can't stomach reprinting the entire thing.
So grab your sick bag and wade in up to your ankles.
Roberts nomination, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee with the depth and breadth and height my soul can reach. I love thee freely, as men strive for right. I love thee because this is the way government is supposed to work. President Bush consulted widely, moved beyond the tokenism of identity politics and selected a nominee based on substance, brains, careful judgment and good character.
I love thee because John G. Roberts is the face of today's governing conservatism. ...
Roberts is a conservative practitioner, not a conservative theoretician. He is skilled in the technical aspects of the law, knowledgeable about business complexities (that's why he was hired to take on Microsoft) and rich in practical knowledge. He is principled and shares the conservative preference for judicial restraint, but doesn't think at the level of generality of, say, a Scalia. This is the sort of person who rises when a movement is mature and running things.
I love thee also, Roberts nomination, because now we probably won't have to endure another bitter and vulgarized chapter of the culture war. ...
This is going to be the first Supreme Court confirmation battle of the age of the blogger. Already the liberal interest groups, amplified by the blogs, are rolling out the old warhorse rhetoric. Already they've begun distorting Roberts's record, selectively quoting from his opinions and insisting the Senate maintain the balance of the court (which never matters when a Democrat is president).
I suspect the Democratic elites would rather skip this fight because it has all the makings of a political loser. ...
But the Democratic elites no longer run the party. The outside interest groups and the donors do, and they need this fight. It's why they exist. ...
In short, I love thee, Roberts nomination. President Bush has put his opponents on the defensive. He's sidestepped the culture war circus. And most important, he's shown that character and substance matter most.
Yes, he really did rub out this giddy 800-word load of high-school-hots-for partisan jizz into the Op Ed pages of the New York Times because they pay him to do that.
And yes, as usual, it turned out that he got just about everything wrong.
And, yes, he still has his sweet-sweet gig as the Reasonable Conservative at the Times. And at NPR. And on the "Chris Matthews Show". And on "Meet the Press". And on PBS.
Also too, Sullivan kept his suite at "The Atlantic", as well as his guest privileged on all the usual teevee shows.
Because there is a Club.
And if you're in it, there are apparently no series of public failures and fuck-ups large enough to get you kicked out.
Ah...but if you are not in it, then even the tiniest and most innocuous error can get your career suddenly and terminally kneecapped.
Which is one of those brutal facts of life that has clearly not been lost on either John Roberts or Elena Kagan.
I must say, it is absolutely hilarious to watch David Brooks and Andrew Sullivan both go all thrombo over the nomination of Elena Kagan for the same reason:
David Brooks' column today really helped crystallize for me my qualms about Elena Kagan. Her life, so far as one can tell, is her career, and her career has been built by avoiding any tough or difficult political or moral positions, eschewing any rigorous intellectual debate in which she takes a clear stand one way or the other, pleasing every single authority figure she has encountered, and reveling in the approval of the First Class Acela Corridor elite. The NYT profile - which is superb apart from its editorial decision to excise any account of any non-trivial private life (she smokes cigars!) since high school - is chilling in its assessment of a human soul in steady, determined pursuit of approval and power. ...
About a decade ago, one began to notice a profusion of Organization Kids at elite college campuses. These were bright students who had been formed by the meritocratic system placed in front of them. They had great grades, perfect teacher recommendations, broad extracurricular interests, admirable self-confidence and winning personalities.
If they had any flaw, it was that they often had a professional and strategic attitude toward life. They were not intellectual risk-takers. They regarded professors as bosses to be pleased rather than authorities to be challenged. As one admissions director told me at the time, they were prudential rather than poetic.
If you listen to people talk about Elena Kagan, it is striking how closely their descriptions hew to this personality type. ...
I have to confess my first impression of Kagan is a lot like my first impression of many Organization Kids. She seems to be smart, impressive and honest — and in her willingness to suppress so much of her mind for the sake of her career, kind of disturbing.
"The result is you get a set of incentives that impairs the careers of brilliant but flawed or prolific people. It rewards the careers of bland mediocrities."
I know why these characteristics bother me, but I fail to understand why two such stalwarts of Conservatism and Capitalism as Sullivan and Brooks would find them disturbing or depressing. After all, if they are correct (and I have no way of knowing if they are or not), all they are witnessing is one more landmark among the hundreds of moraines and valleys that the glacier of Modern Capitalism is in the process of gouging out and leaving in its pulverizing wake as it grinds across the face of the old world, obliterating everything in its path.
Those at the top of that New World Order see the conventions and rituals of our world and its cultures as their personal Etch-A-Sketch, to be shaken up as many times as suits them. Under the banners of "Risk" and "Creative Destruction", they disorder the world so that they might better rule it, and use their superior social and fiscal positions to insure that the dice are always shaved in their favor. And because they and theirs are safe behind cofferdams of wealth and power and a dense social network of likewise insulated elites, those at the top need never worry too much about the downsides of living in a world that runs on risk, chaos and winner-take-all Davos capitalism (h/t Richard Sennett.)
Of course, for the rest of us, life under an economic regime whose mission is to relentlessly abolish any sense of personal security and which straps us all -- willing or not -- to the same rigged, roulette wheel is a fucking misery. And getting worse.
Since capitalism was let off its leash under Reagan and through all the subsequent years of massive dislocation, radical deregulation, whiplash corporate layoffs, the gaps between the Rich and Everyone Else widening into unbridgeable chasms, the rise of the New Moguls and the annihilation of the Middle Class...no cultural message has been clearer than this:
"He who succeeds best in this Brave, New Abattoir is he who best harnesses every impulse and domesticates every talent in the services of the System. Rack up as many degrees as humanly possible, and never twitch a muscle that isn't calculated to achieve a pre-conceived effect."
As both Sullivan and Brooks damn well know, while the New Capitalism claims to celebrate the rebel and the risk-taker, it actually destroys them, and anyone else who can't come to the table armed with enough wealth, position, "private knowledge and web of social networks" to keep their shirt past the first or second spin of the wheel.
(I would also add that the hilarity really peaked for me in the moments of pure, sublime, comic absurdity when Andrew Sullivan bemoaned the "private knowledge and web of social networks" that made the Kagan nomination possible...from safely beneath the sheltering, career-sustaining bower of his own "private knowledge and web of social networks"...
And so, to deal with the remaining points of contact between them and the grubby institutions of the rest of us "left behind" humans, our new Capitalist Gods require a new Priesthood -- a set of perfect, bright, subservient technocratic roller bearings on which their New World Order can glide.
Which is why I do not understand Sullivan and Brooks discomfort with the calculating, passionless face of Centrism Perfected.
A year from now, I'm sure I'll have jangled up the events of this week sufficiently that I'll remember it as the week that the Supreme Court finally ruled on the Blogroll Amnesty Day case, which was then used by a Massachusetts teabagger to club Air America to death.
Thank goodness I'll have this awesome podcast to refer to if I ever want to remember what really happened.
...The Republicans can do the corporations' bidding without constraints. Why should they bother with Democrats if they can just buy themselves a seat for a true believer? Much easier --- transaction-wise.
And of course, as imaginary non-human malefactors of great wealth everywhere celebrate this quantum leap in special rights for imaginary non-human malefactors of great wealth, their well-paid lackeys:
Fox News' opinion shows strangely mum on the Citizens United ruling
Nine years years ago, state's-rights-lovin', activist-judge-hatin' Conservatives from coast to coast applauded as the Conservative Supreme court publicly and spectacularly eviscerated what was allegedly one of its most inviolate judicial principles in order to install George W. Bush as the 43rd President of the United States on a 5-4 vote.
... This is a two-part coup. In 2000, in the judicially unconscionable Bush v. Gore ruling, the Supreme Court handed the Presidency to George W. Bush. Bush, in turn, appointed John Roberts and Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court, who, in their confirmation hearings, disingenuously promised the Senate and American people to be judicial moderates and avoid judicial activism. Now, in 2010, in perhaps the greatest act of judicial activism in American history, they overthrew 103 years of precedent to turn the US government over to the largest corporations. ...
Citizens United: The Problem Isn't the Law, It's the Court
Progressives may have thought the victory of Scott Brown in Massachusetts earlier this week was bad news, but today's Supreme Court 5-4 ruling in Citizens United v. FEC may ultimately prove far more devastating.
That is because today, the Court's conservative majority re-wrote the Constitution to give corporations -- never mentioned in the Constitution -- the same right to influence the electoral process as 'We the People.' As the NYT's Adam Liptak explains, "Sweeping aside a century-old understanding and overruling two important precedents, a bitterly divided Supreme Court ... ruled that the government may not ban political spending by corporations in candidate elections." The justices did what many progressives feared for months it would do: hold that long-standing restrictions on corporate campaign spending violate the First Amendment.
The Court's ruling could transform our electoral politics. During 2008 alone, Exxon Mobil Corporation generated profits of $45 billion. With a diversion of even two percent of those profits to the political process, this one company could have outspent both presidential candidates and fundamentally changed the dynamic of the 2008 election. ...
And, just like nine years ago, the Pig People are cheering.
FRC: Supreme Court Ruling a Win for Free Political Speech
WASHINGTON, Jan. 21 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Family Research Council (FRC) President Tony Perkins released the following statement regarding today's decision by the U.S Supreme Court in Citizens United vs FEC:
"Under the principles established by the First Amendment, nothing is more foundational than free speech. This is a win for free political speech and the right of corporate citizens to join the political process.
Today's Supreme Court decision: Good Riddance to Incumbent-Protection Censorship; Hello Insurgents
Written by Richard Viguerie on January 21, 2010, 12:29 PM
Today’s Supreme Court ruling in the Citizens United case means that the anti-incumbent furor that has been growing is partly released from the shackles created by ‘incumbent protection’ election and campaign finance laws.
The dirty little secret about all campaign finance laws passed by Congress since 1972 is that they were designed to protect incumbents by stifling competition.
This ruling is especially important for advocacy causes and organizations, which may now more freely express opinions about incumbents. ...
Over at FoxNews' Andy Breitbart's site, Chris Berg -- advisor to "conservative organizations including the Republican National Lawyers Association and the Young Republican National Federation" and Bush Administration Labor Department Objectivist Hero Second Class -- can't contain his joy at the freedom-flavored awesomeness of it all:
"Today the United States Supreme Court released its decision in the case of Citizens United vs. the Federal Election Commission. This long overdue decision is a victory not only for Citizens United but also for the First Amendment..."
Mr. Berg's fellow Brietbartian, Robert Frommer, (staff attorney with the League of Justice Institute for Justice) is also large in the pants with delight at giving limitless power to corporations, but warns that we must remain on guard against the remote possibility that some vestigial remnants of quaint, old-timey carbon-based-life-form-centric democracy which may be lurking around somewhere might still need to be put down like a sick dog and bulldozed onto the ash heap of history.
Because Eternal Vigilance is the price of Corporate Omnipotence.
Or something.
"But while Citizens United marks a major victory for First Amendment rights against expansive campaign finance regulation, the war rages on. Politicians worked to silence corporations because they have the resources to speak effectively..."
Assuming they break no other laws, what gives government the right to dictate when on the calendar they can exercise free political speech? Apparently, being “rich” is a Constitutional exception through which the government can infringe on rights.
Of course its a lot easier to avoid breaking the law when you write the law. And own the refs. And own the stadium. Also "rich" is not the problem. "Immortal, imaginary, non-carbon-based entities with unlimited funds and armies of lawyers" is the problem.
And as we know, wherever power has become concentrated into the hands of ever fewer, unaccountable, unelected oligarchs, that has ALWAYS turned out well for democracy.
At least that's what Glenn Beck said that Rush Limbaugh said that Ayn Rand whispered to him on her death bed.
Or something.
Of course, if the teabaggers were actually interested in saving this country from the actual enemies of democracy instead of blaming imaginary hippies for the sour taste that sucking George Bush's dick for eight catastrophic years has left in their mouths, this Supreme Court decision should put them in the street-- pitchforks and torches in-hand -- by the millions.
