#right-wing scotus corruption

[contemplatingoutlander]

But the justice added that to Americans, the independent judiciary “means that when you’re unpopular, you can get a fair hearing under the law and under the Constitution. If you’re in the majority, you don’t need judges and juries to hear you and protect your rights. You’re popular.” The judicial system is “there for the moments when, when the spotlight’s on you, when the government’s coming after you, and don’t you want a ferociously independent judge and a jury of your peers to make those decisions?” Gorsuch added. “And so I just say, be careful,” he concluded.

First of all, Gorsuch showed his lack of ethics that he couldn't even acknowledge that like every other judge in the country, the Supreme Court justices should be subject to a standard judicial code of ethics that has a way to be enforced.

Gorsuch also ignores the fact that he and the other far-right justices are NOT "independent" of the Federalist Society, the right-wing billionaires who give some of them gifts, and the GOP who abused the system to put Gorsuch in an appointment that should have gone to Garland, and who later rammed Amy Coney Barrett's appointment through in the last 6 weeks of the Trump administration.

Finally, the "unpopular" people who aren't in the "majority" (which I suspect Gorsuch defines in a peculiar way) that Gorsuch and the other far-right justices want to "ferociously" defend are not the poor, or members of minority racial/ethnic groups, or the lgbtq+ community, or women/people of childbearing age, or other marginalized groups. No Gorsuch wants to "ferociously defend":

Corporations and right-wing oligarchs who want to exploit labor and the environment for profit.

White, heterosexual men who don't want to share power with women, Blacks and other POC.

Far-right "Christians," who want to impose their beliefs about reproductive rights, gender, and sexuality on the rest of the nation.

A corrupt ex-president who wants to get away with the crimes he has committed, including an attempted coup to stay in power.

That in fact Gorsuch identifies the "government" as the enemy (i.e., "when the government’s coming after you") suggests he is so immersed in far-right ideology, that he is certainly NOT "independent" of GOP policy positions.

Gorsuch clearly doesn't care that government agencies were designed to PROTECT the "little guy" from being exploited by the rich and corporations, from the discrimination and bigotry of other citizens, corporations, and some politicians, and from a for-profit healthcare system that often makes it hard for the "little guy" to get affordable healthcare and needed medicines.

Gorsuch is so embedded in far-right, "Christian" MAGA GOP political beliefs that he does not seem to realize he is NOT independent of the Federalist Society that shaped him to do the MAGA GOP's bidding. And THAT is truly alarming.

In an interview with Fox News, Justice Neil Gorsuch highlighted the need for a fair justice system.

Aug. 4, 2024, 2:14 PM MST

By Alexandra Marquez

Justice Neil Gorsuch responded to President Joe Biden’s proposal for sweeping reforms to the Supreme Court in an interview that aired Sunday, telling Biden to “be careful.”

Asked by Fox News’ Shannon Bream to respond to Biden’s proposal, Gorsuch told her, “You’re not going to be surprised that I’m not going to get into what is now a political issue during a presidential election year. I don’t think that would be helpful.”

[wilwheaton]

We focus a lot on the pipeline the Federalist Society created to place ideologically true justices first on the appellate courts and then finally on the Supreme Court. What gets much less focus and what these stories highlight is the way the justices are essentially kept by the Federalist Society and the sponsor families once they ascend to the Court. It makes you wonder: which families got assigned to Neil, Brett and Amy? In any case, it’s probably wrong to see this too much in transactional terms. Certainly, all of these lavish gifts should be reported and the justices should recuse themselves when cases arise dealing with their “close friends.” But the larger issue is the way the justices remain “kept” in perpetuity by the right-wing activist donor network that placed them on the Court in the first place. Sugar Justices, if you will.

Leonard Leo’s SCOTUS-FedSoc Sponsor Family Program

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Mike Luckovich, Atlanta Journal Constitution

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

July 30, 2024

Heather Cox Richardson

Jul 31, 2024

On Friday, speaking to Christians at the Turning Point Action Believers’ Summit in West Palm Beach, Florida, Trump begged the members of the audience to “vote. Just this time. You won’t have to do it anymore. Four more years, you know what: it’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine…. In four years, you don’t have to vote again, we’ll have it fixed so good you’re not going to have to vote.”

The comment drew a lot of attention, and on Monday, Fox News Channel personality Laura Ingraham gave him a chance to walk the statement back. Instead, he said: “I said, vote for me, you’re not going to have to do it ever again. It’s true.” “Don’t worry about the future. You have to vote on November 5. After that, you don’t have to worry about voting anymore. I don’t care, because we’re going to fix it. The country will be fixed and we won’t even need your vote anymore, because frankly we will have such love, if you don’t want to vote anymore, that’s OK.”

Trump’s refusal to disavow the idea that putting him back into power will mean the end of a need for elections is chilling and must be viewed against the backdrop of the Supreme Court’s July 1, 2024, decision in Donald J. Trump v. United States. In that decision, written by Chief Justice John Roberts, the court’s right-wing majority said that presidents cannot be prosecuted for crimes committed as part of a president’s “official duties” and that presidents should have a presumption of immunity for other presidential actions. 

John Roberts defends the idea of a strong executive and has fought against the expansion of voting rights made possible by the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The idea that it is dangerous to permit minorities and women to vote suggests that there are certain people who should run the country. That tracks with a recently unearthed video in which Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance calls childless people “psychotic” and “deranged,” and refers unselfconsciously to “America’s leadership class.” 

The idea that democracy must be overturned in order to enable a small group of leaders to restore virtue to a nation is at the center of the “illiberal democracy” or “Christian democracy” championed by Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán. Orbán’s imposition of an authoritarian Christian nationalism on a former democracy, in turn, has inspired the far-right figures that are currently in charge of the Republican Party. As Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts put it: “Modern Hungary is not just a model for conservative statecraft but the model.”

Kevin Roberts has called for “institutionalizing Trumpism” and pulled together dozens of right-wing institutions behind the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 to create a blueprint for a second Trump term. Those who created Project 2025 are closely connected to the Trump team, and Trump praised its creators and its ideas. 

Today, The New Republic published the foreword Vance wrote for Kevin Roberts’s forthcoming book. Vance makes it clear he sees Kevin Roberts and himself as working together to create “a fundamentally Christian view of culture and economics.” Like others on the Christian right, Vance argues that “the Left” has captured the country’s institutions and that those institutions must be uprooted and those in them replaced with right-wing Christians in order to restore what they see—inaccurately—as traditional America.  

That determination to disrupt American institutions fits neatly with the technology entrepreneurs who seem to believe that they are the ones who should control the nation’s future. Vance is backed by Silicon Valley libertarian Peter Thiel, who put more than $10 million behind Vance’s election to the Senate. In 2009, Thiel wrote “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” 

“The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics,” he wrote. “Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women—two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians—have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.” 

Thiel set Vance up to invest in companies that made him wealthy and touted Vance for the vice presidential slot, and in turn, the Silicon Valley set are expecting Vance to help get rid of the regulation imposed by the Biden administration and to push cryptocurrency. Trump appears to be getting on board with comments about how the tech donors are “geniuses,” praising investor Elon Musk and saying, “We have to make life good for our smart people.” In a piece that came out Sunday, Washington Post reporters Elizabeth Dwoskin, Cat Zakrzewski, Nitasha Tiku, and Josh Dawsey credited the influence of Thiel and other tech leaders for turning Vance from a Never-Trumper to a MAGA Republican. 

Judd Legum of Popular Information reported today that the cryptocurrency industry is investing heavily in the 2024 election, with its main super PAC raising $202 million in this cycle. Three large cryptocurrency companies are investing about $150 million in pro-crypto congressional candidates. 

On Saturday, Trump said he would make the U.S. “the crypto capital of the planet and the Bitcoin superpower of the world.” He promised to end regulations on cryptocurrency, which, because it is not overseen by governments, is prone to use by criminals and rogue states. That regulation is “a part of a much larger pattern that’s being carried out by the same left-wing fascists to weaponize government against any threat to their power,” Trump said. “They’ve done it to me.”

But the problem that those trying to get rid of the modern administrative state continue to run up against is that voters actually like a government that regulates business, provides a basic social safety net, promotes infrastructure, and protects civil rights. In recent days, Minnesota governor Tim Walz has been articulating how popular that government is as he makes the television rounds.

On Sunday, CNN’s Jake Tapper listed some of Walz’s policies—he passed background checks for guns, expanded LGBTQ protections, instituted free breakfast and lunch for school kids—and asked if they made Walz vulnerable to Trump calling him a “big government liberal.” Walz joked that he was, indeed, a “monster.” 

“Kids are eating and having full bellies so they can go learn, and women are making their own health care decisions, and we’re a top five business state, and we also rank in the top three of happiness…. The fact of the matter is,” where Democratic policies are implemented, “quality of life is higher, the economies are better…educational attainment is better. So yeah, my kids are going to eat here, and you’re going to have a chance to go to college, and you’re going to have an opportunity to live where we're working on reducing carbon emissions. Oh, and by the way, you’re going to have personal incomes that are higher, and you’re going to have health insurance. So if that’s where they want to label me, I’m more than happy to take the label.” 

The extremes of Project 2025 have made it clear that the Republicans intend to destroy the kind of government Walz is defending and replace it with an authoritarian president imposing Christian nationalism. And when Americans hear what’s in Project 2025, they overwhelmingly oppose it. Trump has tried without success to distance himself from the document. 

He and his team have also hammered on the Heritage Foundation for their public revelations of their plans, and today the director of Project 2025, Paul Dans, stepped down. The Trump campaign issued a statement reiterating—in the face of a mountain of evidence to the contrary—that Trump had nothing to do with Project 2025 and adding: “Reports of Project 2025’s demise would be greatly welcomed and should service as notice to anyone or any group trying to misrepresent their influence with President Trump and his campaign—it will not end well for you.” 

The Harris campaign responded to the news by saying that “Project 2025 is on the ballot because Donald Trump is on the ballot. This is his agenda, written by his allies, for Donald Trump to inflict on our country. Hiding the 920-page blueprint from the American people doesn’t make it less real—in fact, it should make voters more concerned about what else Trump and his allies are hiding.” 

The reasoning behind the idea of a strong executive, or a “leadership class” that does not have to answer to voters, is that an extremist minority needs to take control of the American government away from the American people because the majority doesn’t like the policies the extremists want. 

When Trump begs right-wing Christians to turn out for just one more election, he is promising that if only we will put him into the White House once and for all, we will never again have to worry about having a say in our government. As Trump put it: “The country will be fixed and we won’t even need your vote anymore.”

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[lenbryant]

Right-wing logic…

[arewelemmings]

Shifty conservatives have been working hard for decades to corrupt the courts. The justices on the US Supreme Court are not elected by the people, and don't represent us. Something needs to change to bring power back into the hands of We the People.

[qqueenofhades]

I love your essays; they are fascinating. Thank you for sharing your perspective! I have a follow up question, if you have the time or energy: in your last, you said, “It's a blueprint for a tiny group of extreme right-wing theocrats and fascists to get their way regardless of what the broader public says about it…”. Who ARE the tiny group of extreme right wing theocrats and fascists? Is it the politicians whom we see all over the news, like Vance and Boebert ands Haley and DeSantis? Or are they puppets whose strings are being pulled by donors behind the scenes, like…I don’t know, the Koch brothers and the Uleins (sp?)? I feel like whoever it is must have mind boggling amounts of money, to overcome the sheer number of people who don’t think like that, even people nominally republican who believe in traditional low taxes and small government, but are not completely bananapants. Or maybe that’s why they tagged trump, bc no one before him was willing to act like enough of an outright gangster to seriously move the needle…? How much more rich than disgustingly rich do they need to be?

Perhaps surprisingly, it's fairly easy to identify the Hall of Shame who are busily trying to end American democracy, not least because they have become increasingly open about it. Their motives are diverse but all terrible. The quick rundown is as follows:

First, the alt-right billionaires club such as Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Harlan Crow, and Leonard Leo (the last two are some of the chief funnelers of dark money to SCOTUS; Crow is Clarence Thomas's sugar daddy). They have reasons ranging from grandiose delusions about "remaking" the world in their preferred image (not at all terrifying) to attaching themselves to fascist politics in order to defeat workers' rights and labor unions, who they view as a threat to their mega-wealth. Thiel is the primary sponsor of JD Vance and the alt-right cryptobros clubs that draw the young right-wing white men who also primarily form the membership of neo-Nazi and white nationalist groups. They want to end democracy in order to punish women, minorities, LGBTQ+ people, and anyone else who Nazis always hate. Crow and Leo have lavishly funded the corrupt SCOTUS in order to influence their preferred right-wing rulings, and there are undoubtedly more who we don't even know about. This is just the tip of the iceberg and I have no doubt that it's far, far worse than anything that has been publicly reported.

Next are the extremist right-wing interest groups that have cohered around and advocated for Project 2025, which is basically just the conservative-extremist wet dream put in one place and written down. They include the Heritage Foundation (the primary Project 2025 author) the Federalist Society and the John Birch Society of right-wing judges and policymakers, and Opus Dei, the secretive Catholic right-wing influence group who are straight out of a Dan Brown novel but are in fact some of the most consequential and powerful players in MAGA World. Their name means "work of God" in Latin, which is very much what they see themselves as doing, and their reach in DC is vast, particularly in the far-right evangelical and fundamentalist Christian groups that have attached themselves to Trump as a vehicle to push through their regressive-reactionary social and cultural politics, especially on abortion, women's rights, LGBTQ+ rights, and other things that they view as "unholy." These are the diehard true believers who really, truly think that it's better for the US to be a fascist theocracy espousing "Right and Moral" religious views than a flawed, pluralist, and secular democracy. Hard Yikes.

Thirdly we have the useful idiots, such as Vance, Ron DeSantis, Boebert, Greene, basically pick-a-Republican-politician-here, who are pursuing fascist politics out of careerism, opportunism, some amount of genuine belief, and exploiting the age-old fissures of American racism, nativism, xenophobia, and other original sins that have dogged the country since its founding. Of course, Trump himself is chief among these useful idiots, because he's completely willing to end American democracy and install himself as Dictator-for-Life if it exempts him from having to face the consequences for all the crimes he did last time (and frankly, his entire life, which is now catching up with him). I don't think Trump has an actual consistent or coherent policy bone in his body; witness how quickly he was willing to flip-flop on the Florida abortion issue depending on what he thought was useful (and then after the backlash he received from his base). He's a malignant narcissistic sociopath who is incapable of complex reasoning and long-term planning. His only and overriding interest is himself, he will do absolutely whatever he has to in order to save himself, and as long as he has his death grip on the GOP, everyone who wants to succeed in the party or even have a future in it has to slavishly kiss Don Corleone Trump's ring. That is why many lifelong Republicans have been breaking ranks to say they will vote for Harris, because "being a Republican's" one and only qualification is now "being utterly loyal to Trump." That's it.

These are all actors based more or less in the US, but we also can't forget the fact that basically the entire Republican Party is in deep, deep hock to Vladimir Putin and other foreign autocrats (but most especially and dangerously Putin). We just had the DOJ indictment of MAGA influencers who were taking Russian black cash by the bucketload in order to spread damaging lies about Biden/Harris and pump for Trump, and this is consistent with Russia's pattern of extensive interference in American elections going back to at least 2016. It is hard to overstate how much Putin hankers to end American democracy for many reasons. He is a former KGB agent trained in the black-and-white us-and-them logic of the Cold War where the US was the USSR's archenemy, his constant mourning for the USSR's collapse has been well documented, and it would be the absolute defining and singular achievement of all of post-imperial Russian history for Putin to effectively end American democracy with a second Trump term.

This is for the simple reason that Trump is utterly in thrall to Putin and will do whatever he asks, whether it's cutting off aid to Ukraine and forcing them to accept annexation by Russia, pulling America out of NATO and letting Putin set his invasion sights on Poland and the Baltic states, and anything else. That is genuinely terrifying but very likely if Trump was re-elected, aside from the end of American democracy and the worldwide ramifications it would have to empower fascist authoritarians everywhere. Putin is trying to achieve this through a combination of good old-fashioned Soviet-style dezinformatsiya, paying off MAGA influencers, putting the entire resources of the Russian state into defaming Harris-Walz, and recruiting useful idiots like his asset Jill Stein, who has extensive Russian ties and only pops up every four years for idiot leftists to spoil their vote and ruin Democratic electoral prospects. So. Again. Hard yikes.

So that's the quick rundown of the people who are vested in Trump and Project 2025's success and why, and as you can see, while they're all different, they're all terrible. But yes: that really is a very, very small group of people, relatively speaking. And a vote for anyone except Kamala Harris and Tim Walz is a vote to empower them and also to ensure that you will never have the chance to vote again, due to living in an authoritarian fascist regime. Choose wisely.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Rebecca Shabad, Sahil Kapur, and Megan Lebowitz at NBC News:

WASHINGTON — Senate Republicans on Wednesday blocked a Democratic-sponsored bill that would require Supreme Court justices to adopt a binding code of conduct. “The highest court in the land cannot and should not have the lowest ethical standards,” Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin, D-Ill., said in a floor speech before the motion. Durbin took to the Senate floor Wednesday and sought to pass the Supreme Court Ethics, Recusal, and Transparency (SCERT) Act by “unanimous consent,” which immediately faced Republican opposition. As he promised to do Tuesday, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., led a group of GOP senators in blocking the Democratic request, effectively stalling the legislation.

Graham called the bill an “unconstitutional overreach” that would “undermine the court’s ability to operate effectively.” He was joined by Sens. John Kennedy, R-La., Mike Lee, R-Utah, and others in objecting. “I do not think this bill is about ethics. This bill is about abortion,” Kennedy said on the floor Wednesday, accusing Democrats of pushing it because they’re angry that the court overruled Roe v. Wade. That sparked a debate on the floor, with numerous Democrats chiming in to make the case for the bill as an instrument of transparency and a way to protect the legitimacy of the court. The bill would require the justices to adopt a binding code of conduct, create a mechanism to investigate allegations of violations of the code and other laws, require them to explain decisions to recuse themselves from cases and improve disclosure rules when a justice is connected to a party or amicus in a case.

“The Supreme Court has squandered its almost mystical authority, its unique power in the federal government,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., said in a floor speech.

Republicans in the Senate voted against the SCERT Act, thereby making themselves enablers to the corruption of the right-wing SCOTUS majority.

[scottguy]

Article: John Roberts’ Secret Trump Memo Revealed in Huge SCOTUS Leak

John Roberts’ Secret Trump Memo Revealed in Huge SCOTUS Leak

There you have it, the CHIEF JUSTICE of the Supreme Court was *eager* to run legal interference for Donald Trump.

He also manipulated the other nine justices in the Colorado 14th amendment disqualification-from-the -ballot case into an unsigned opinion for the appearance of unanimity.

Roberts had previously chosen Alito to write the "Trump cannot do anything wrong as president if it is an 'official act' "ruling. But Alito's brazen unapologetic right-wing upside down flag flying at his home made for bad optics.

It's actually surprising because since when does our now fully corrupt Supreme Court even bother to pretend to care about seeming neutral?

Their decisions are now incompetently reasoned, arbitrary, flouting longstanding precedent (stare decisus) and which are far too overly broad.

Broad rulings are bad and are the opposite of the court's longstanding precedent & protocol for issuing limited scope rulings so as to affect the fewest amount of other important laws inadvertently.

The conservative justices get all huffy and upset when their decisions are questioned in light of all the trips & "gifts" (bribes), the open partisanship, and the above noted flaws in written decisions. They scream that they are legitimate as if they can just will themselves to be so.

It's as if the very FACT of them being appointed to the Supreme Court AUTOMATICALLY washes them forever clean of any suspicion of political bias. They were placed there BECAUSE OF their demonstrated right-wing bias and they know it. They meekly do exactly what they were hand selected to do, which is to thwart regulations and to destroy the wall between church and state.

I can imagine the right-wing six all snickering and smirking in private thinking, "What are you *poor* powerless average Americans going to do about us? Nothing! Money & raw political power anoint us as winners and thus the deciders of all laws no matter how much you want those protections. Power always protects power. So just suck it."

If a law cuts into corporate profit SCOTUS will now find SOME way to say that law is "unconstitutional."

Our entire constitution is designed to prevent too much power in any one branch of government. But the SC is abusing its ideally limited power to hand nearly infinite power to the office of another branch, the presidency.

This is why Republicans block Congress all the time now. They don't want new laws. They're happy to stand back while US Supreme Court nullifies decades of hard-won laws to protect Americans. The corrupt SC does so in favor of capitalist oligarchs and the Catholic religious zealotry they want push on all of us for their own selfish reasons.

The corrupt Supreme Court members need to be impeached, found guilty, and ejected.

Vote blue to make this much more likely.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

May 16, 2024

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

MAY 17, 2024

Seventy years ago, on May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court decided Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. That landmark decision declared racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional. 

Brown v. Board was a turning point in American history.

It established that the U.S. government would, once and for all, use the Fourteenth Amendment to protect American citizens from discriminatory legislation written by state legislatures. 

Added to the Constitution in 1868, in the wake of the Civil War, as southern state legislatures were writing laws that made Black Americans subservient to white Americans, the Fourteenth Amendment asserted that the federal government could, and must, stop such discrimination. It established that “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” It gave Congress the power to enforce the amendment.

In the late nineteenth century, the Supreme Court nodded to racial segregation in the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision, getting around the Fourteenth Amendment by asserting that separate accommodations were fine, so long as they were “equal.” But in 1954 a unanimous court under Chief Justice Earl Warren, who had previously been the Republican governor of California, ruled that racial segregation established by state law in public schools denied to Black children the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment. 

“Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal,” it wrote. 

Just two weeks before it decided Brown v. Board, the Supreme Court had decided Hernandez v. Texas, which established that not only Black Americans, but also Mexican Americans and all other nationality groups, were entitled to equal protection under the Fourteenth Amendment. 

Over the following decades, the Supreme Court used the Fourteenth Amendment to strike down state laws against interracial marriage and gay marriage, and to establish equal rights for women, including the right to abortion. It also ruled the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibited discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin, constitutional.

That new legal framework, embodied in Brown v. Board, both established the equal rights that were central to the modern era and sparked a backlash against them. 

The federal requirement that states desegregate their public schools spurred southern state legislatures to pass laws and resolutions to block or postpone desegregation. In 1956, ninety-nine congressmen, led by South Carolina Democrat Strom Thurmond, wrote the “Declaration of Constitutional Principles,” quickly dubbed the Southern Manifesto, denouncing desegregation as unconstitutional. 

Lawmakers also found ways to transfer tax dollars to private schools, which were not covered by the Supreme Court’s decision. Attendance at so-called segregation academies exploded. By 1958, more than 250,000 students had migrated to segregation academies, a number that jumped to a million by 1965.

Those opposed to racial equality made common cause with those businessmen determined to get rid of federal regulation of business. In 1955, William F. Buckley Jr., the son of an oilman, started National Review, a periodical that promised to stand against an active government that protected labor and regulated business. Buckley said he would tell the “violated businessman’s side of the story.” 

In National Review, Buckley gave Virginia newspaper editor James Kilpatrick a platform to assure readers that desegregation challenged American values. Black Americans had no right to the equality declared unanimously by the Supreme Court, Kilpatrick wrote. Rather, the white community had an established right “to peace and tranquillity [sic]; the right to freedom from tumult and lawlessness.” Desegregation would lead to bloody violence, he promised, implying that Black Americans would rage and riot, although, in fact, it was the white community that was attacking Black Americans.

In 1964, Arizona senator Barry Goldwater brought these two themes to his presidential campaign. He stood firm on the idea that the federal government had no business either regulating business or protecting equality. In The Conscience of a Conservative, published under his name in 1960, Goldwater asserted that the federal government had no power over schools at all and certainly could not order them to desegregate. 

Goldwater accepted the Republican presidential nomination in July 1964, less than a month after three civil rights workers registering Black Americans to vote had disappeared in Mississippi. Goldwater told his cheering supporters:  “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice, and…moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.” Strom Thurmond publicly announced that he would vote for Goldwater. 

Goldwater lost in a landslide, but his loss fed the backlash against federal protection of equality, especially after Congress passed the 1965 Voting Rights Act to expand Black and Brown voting, moving many of those voters into the Democrats’ camp. In 1968, Republican Richard Nixon courted Thurmond and white southerners with a promise to slow down desegregation and a defense of state’s rights. The so-called Southern Strategy moved the former Dixiecrats to the Republican Party. 

Religious traditionalists, particularly those among the Southern Baptist Convention, also opposed the federal government’s support for equality, although they got less press in the early years of that expansion. In their view, the Bible laid out hierarchical social arrangements, especially patriarchy. Government defense of women’s equality was a direct assault on their worldview. 

When he ran for the presidency in 1980, former California governor Ronald Reagan courted those religious traditionalists, and in 1985 his people made them a key part of the Republican coalition. Americans for Tax Reform brought together big business, evangelicals, and social conservatives under the leadership of Grover Norquist, who had been an economist for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. “Traditional Republican business groups can provide the resources,” Norquist explained, “but these groups can provide the votes.” 

In the following decades, Republican leaders used racist and traditionalist dislike of equal rights to turn out voters who would let them put their economic policies—cuts to taxes and deregulation of business—into place. But those opposed to equal rights found themselves out of step with a majority of voters and unable to get their policies enshrined into law as courts continued to uphold equal rights for racial and ethnic minorities, LGBTQ+ individuals, and women. 

The backlash against the federal protection of equal rights based on the Fourteenth Amendment entered a new era with the election of Donald Trump. In contrast to his predecessors, Trump let the racist and sexist voter base of the party drive policy. White evangelicals, especially, found in Trump an answer to their frustration at being sidelined by the courts and a majority of American voters. 

Despite his own lack of personal virtue, Trump was willing to smash through the laws and court decisions that had supported equality since the 1950s, offering to center the country on traditional religion and racial hierarchies in exchange for power. Under him, traditionalists saw the courts stacked with extremists who would prioritize their evangelical faith across society, including by ending the federal protection of abortion rights. 

Their fight to return Trump to power is part of their fight to establish traditional religion, rather than the equality promised in the Fourteenth Amendment, as the nation’s fundamental law. As Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows wrote to Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, as they plotted to overturn the decision of voters in 2020 to reject Trump: “This is a fight of good versus evil. Evil always looks like the victor until the King of Kings triumphs. Do not grow weary in well doing. The fight continues. I have staked my career on it.”  

Today, almost exactly seventy years to the day after Brown v. Board ushered in a new era of equality and democracy in the United States, MAGA Republican lawmakers Andy Biggs (R-AZ), Lauren Boebert (R-CO), Michael Cloud (R-TX), Eli Crane (R-AZ), Matt Gaetz (R-FL), Bob Good (R-VA), Diana Harshbarger (R-TN), Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL), Ralph Norman (R-SC), and Andy Ogles (R-TN) traveled to Manhattan to stand with Trump at his criminal trial for falsifying business records to interfere in an election. The lawmakers made it clear that their determination to control the country has made them give up not only on the equality promised in the Declaration of Independence and defended by the Fourteenth Amendment, but also on democracy. 

Echoing the promise of the right-wing Proud Boys to Trump before they stormed the U.S. Capitol to install Trump into office despite the will of the voters, Gaetz tweeted: “Standing back and standing by, Mr. President.”

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[marykk1990]

Well, President Biden is stepping down from the nomination for president. I'm sad about that as I still supported him over that traitor drumpf, even though his administration's policies on Ukraine's use of Western weapons infuriate me, and I've been wishing that he would fire that absolutely incompetent Jake Sullivan for over two years now. But Biden is still and will always be a billion times better than that orange mango traitor. So, I guess it's time to get behind our Vice President Kamala Harris and throw all of our support her way. The only thing that matters in the upcoming election is making sure that traitor drumpf and the maga repuglicans lose every race they are in, period. We need a massive blue wave tsunami, keep the White House, keep the Senate, and flip the House blue. Then, get new laws passed that make it illegal for a convicted felon to run for presidential office. Expand the Sureme Court. It was expanded to 9 in 1869, so there is precedent for that. Get laws passed that protect women from the Christian right-wing nutcases trying to control women's bodies and lives. Get laws passed that protect members of the LGBTQ community from the hate spread by intolerant right-wing nutcases. Get laws passed that protect POC from violence perpetrated by right-wing police departments around the country. Overturn the rulings made by a corrupt SCOTUS made up of members who lied in their confirmation hearings and who should be fired. Let's do this, Americans.

#VoteBlueToSaveDemocracy

#VoteBlueToSaveAmerica

[foreverlogical]

Well-known political expert, author, journalist, and CEO David Rothkopf is blasting conservatives on the U.S. Supreme Court after their disastrous rulings last week, warning the Court is now a “threat to democracy” and suggesting some justices should be “considered” for impeachment.

Rothkopf, also a national security and foreign policy commentator, is a columnist for The Daily Beast and the author at least seven books, including American Resistance.

“Watching debates about Supreme Court here and elsewhere is the latest study in GOP efforts to normalize the unconscionable, the corrupt, and the contra-constitutional. This is a court in which a majority of those on the right took their seats under questionable circumstances,” Rothkopf said at the start of a lengthy thread on Twitter.

“Of them, a cloud of corruption hangs over Thomas & Alito. Kavanaugh took [his] seat despite allegations against him that were not properly investigated. Questions surround his payoff of personal debts. Gorsuch’s ascension is also clouded by questions surrounding Kennedy’s departure,” he says.

READ MORE: ‘Treacherous March of Normalization’: ABC News Slammed for ‘Puff Piece’ Profile on Moms for Liberty

Justice Clarence Thomas has been under fire for months over his relationship with billionaire GOP donor and businessman Harlan Crow, who reportedly has had business before the high court. The far-right wing justice and his wife, Ginni Thomas, (who has been accused of working to undermine the 2020 presidential election results,) may have received gifts totaling over $1 million in luxury vacations, travel, food, lodging, and clothing. Experts say Thomas was required to disclose portions of those gifts and that he did not.

Justice Samuel Alito is also the beneficiary of luxury travel, including a fishing trip to Alaska courtesy of another billionaire, and a trip to Rome during which he delivered a highly-criticized speech just days after delivering his opinion striking down Roe v. Wade. That trip was reportedly paid for by a religious liberty organization whose leader reportedly bought Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s Indiana home.

Indeed, Rothkopf also skewers Justice Barrett, or at least her confirmation.

“Barrett received her seat in a rush to judgment that was unlike any we have ever seen and completely contrary to the way the GOP Senate treated prior Dem nominees (Garland). In the time since the majority took over, they have cast aside one core principle after another,” he observes.

READ MORE: ‘Tyranny’: Legal Expert Says Ruling in Favor of Anti-LGBTQ Discrimination Makes It ‘Impossible’ to Respect Supreme Court

“Stare decisis went out the window. (Precedents were ignored without any sound justification.) Promises to honor past decisions as established law (like Roe) proved worthless. Past claims that the right valued originalism and condemned judicial activism were wholly ignored,” Rothkopf charges.

“When precedent went against them, absurd arguments drawing on ancient and irrelevant legal decisions were used to supersede the clear intent of the framers and decades, sometimes centuries of legal precedent.”

Last week, he says, we saw “a decision on affirmative action that ignored precedent, reality, and justice and contained, in its carve-out for military academies, a sub-decision that refuted the logic of the main opinion. In the case of reversing the Biden student loan decision,” Rothkopf writes, “a brand new doctrine was presented out of whole cloth. The decision regarding the ‘right’ of a website designer to refuse to do work for a ‘gay’ couple was based on both a lie and a hypothetical, should never have been taken on as a case and was grossly wrong on the law,” he adds.

Rothkopf appears to believe the conservative justices will not stop.

“These judges are acting with impunity because they believe a GOP controlled Senate will never challenge them and that a fundamental flaw in the way the Constitution grants power to underpopulated states assures that the document that was created to evolve never will,” he writes.

And he suggests some of the Supreme Court’s justices might need to be impeached.

“They also know that Senate rules essentially mean they can act with impunity despite their wholesale corruption and the fact that several of them should, in all likelihood, be seriously considered for impeachment.”

READ MORE: Sotomayor Slams ‘Embarrassing’ SCOTUS Anti-LGBTQ Decision That Marks ‘Gays and Lesbians for Second-Class Status’

Pointing to Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin, he adds: “This is, as [she] has said a constitutional crisis. This is an illegitimate, rogue institution that is seeking to reverse decades of progress and impose the will of a white, wealthy, Christian, male, straight minority on the majority of Americans.”

“This is a moment that calls for action on the part of Democrats in power to use their ability to call Senate hearings and to challenge this extremist cluster of judicial terrorists wherever possible. But more than that, it demands absolutely clarity from the voting public,” he says.

Rothkopf warns conservatives in the Court are poised to do even more damage to democracy and the American people.

“Unless Democrats win the presidency, hold and increase their majority in the Senate and retake the House, this tiny band of malevolent and dangerous actors will gut many of the most important provisions of the past century and a half of American law.”

“They will destroy lives and put millions of others at risk. Next year’s election must be in part, about this threat to democracy even as it is also about the threat posed by GOP presidential candidates. Stop. Consider the consequences.”

He warns minority Americans will continue to see their civil rights “stripped” away.

“Consider the basic rights that will be stripped away from women, people of color, our LGBTQ brothers and sisters, voters, and all who believe in the ideals that have guided American leaders as we have struggled to perfect our nation,” he says. “The only people who can save us are you and your fellow voters. The only way to do so is to mobilize, be active, donate to candidates and remain committed to defending our country against the threat posed by the MAGA GOP in our legislature and our judiciary. Starting right now.”

[wilwheaton]

How did the court get so much power that it can overrule both Congress and the president, ignore efforts to hold justices accountable when they are nakedly corrupt, and overturn laws like our bribery statutes? Who put them in charge of America? The simple answer, as I lay out in detail in The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America, is that the justices gave that power to themselves. Not only is such power for the court not found anywhere in the Constitution, but Article 3, Section 2 explicitly puts the Supreme Court under the thumb of Congress, not the other way around: In all Cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, and those in which a State shall be Party, the supreme Court shall have original Jurisdiction. In all the other Cases before mentioned, the supreme Court shall have appellate Jurisdiction, both as to Law and Fact, with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make. [emphasis added] The Founders and Framers were very clear about this, even though that notorious liar Sam Alito wasn’t when he recently wrote in The Wall Street Journal: “No provision in the Constitution gives [Congress] the authority to regulate the Supreme Court—period.”

The Supreme Court Was Never Meant to Be Kings and Queens

This stolen, illegitimate, corrupt, right wing SCOTUS majority has no legal or moral right to impose its tyrannical, christian nationalist agenda on an entire nation. 

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

[Project 2025 :: blueprint for a second Trump term of office]

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

July 4, 2024

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

JUL 05, 2024

Monday, July 1, was a busy day. That morning the Supreme Court handed down a decision in Donald J. Trump v. United States that gives the president absolute immunity for committing crimes while engaging in official acts. On the same day, Trump White House strategist Steve Bannon began a four-month sentence for contempt of Congress at a low-security federal prison in Danbury, Connecticut. Before he began serving his sentence, he swore he would “be more powerful in prison than I am now.” 

“On July 2, Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, went onto Bannon’s webcast War Room to hearten Bannon’s right-wing followers after Bannon’s incarceration. Former representative Dave Brat (R-VA) was sitting in for Bannon and conducted the interview.  

“[W]e are going to win,” Roberts told them. “We're in the process of taking this country back…. We ought to be really encouraged by what happened yesterday. And in spite of all of the injustice, which, of course, friends and audience of this show, of our friend Steve know, we are going to prevail.”

“That Supreme Court ruling yesterday on immunity is vital, and it's vital for a lot of reasons,” Roberts said, adding that the nation needs a strong leader because “the radical left…has taken over our institutions.” “[W]e are in the process of the second American Revolution,” he said, “which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”

Roberts took over the presidency of the Heritage Foundation in 2021, and he shifted it from a conservative think tank to an organization devoted to “institutionalizing Trumpism.” Central to that project for Roberts has been working to bring the policies of Hungary’s president Viktor Orbán, a close ally of Russia’s president Vladimir Putin, to the United States. 

In 2023, Roberts brought the Heritage Foundation into a formal partnership with Hungary’s Danube Institute, a think tank overseen by a foundation that is directly funded by the Hungarian government; as journalist Casey Michel reported, it is, “for all intents and purposes, a state-funded front for pushing pro-Orbán rhetoric.” The Danube Institute has given grants to far-right figures in the U.S., and, Michel noted in March, “we have no idea how much funding may be flowing directly from Orbán’s regime to the Heritage Foundation.” Roberts has called modern Hungary “not just a model for conservative statecraft but the model.”

Orbán has been open about his determination to overthrow the concept of western democracy and replace it with what he has, on different occasions, called “illiberal democracy” or “Christian democracy.” He wants to replace the multiculturalism at the heart of democracy with Christian culture, stop the immigration that he believes undermines Hungarian culture, and reject “adaptable family models” in favor of “the Christian family model.” He is moving Hungary away from the stabilizing international systems supported by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

No matter what he calls it, Orbán’s model is not democracy at all. As soon as he retook office in 2010, he began to establish control over the media, cracking down on those critical of his far-right political party, Fidesz, and rewarding those who toed the party line. In 2012 his supporters rewrote the country’s constitution to strengthen his hand, and extreme gerrymandering gave his party more power while changes to election rules benefited his campaigns. Increasingly, he used the power of the state to concentrate wealth among his cronies, and he reworked the country’s judicial system and civil service system to stack it with his loyalists, who attacked immigrants, women, and the rights of LGBTQ+ individuals. While Hungary still holds elections, state control of the media and the apparatus of voting means that it is impossible for the people of Hungary to remove him from power.

Trump supporters have long admired Orbán’s nationalism and centering of Christianity, while the fact that Hungary continues to have elections enables them to pretend that the country remains a democracy.

The tight cooperation between Heritage and Orbán illuminates Project 2025, the blueprint for a new kind of government dictated by Trump or a Trump-like figure. In January 2024, Roberts told Lulu Garcia-Navarro of the New York Times that Project 2025 was designed to jump-start a right-wing takeover of the government. “[T]he Trump administration, with the best of intentions, simply got a slow start,” Roberts said. “And Heritage and our allies in Project 2025 believe that must never be repeated.”

Project 2025 stands on four principles that it says the country must embrace: the U.S. must “[r]estore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children”; “[d]ismantle the administrative state and return self-governance to the American people”; “[d]efend our nation’s sovereignty, borders, and bounty against global threats”; and “[s]ecure our God-given individual rights to live freely—what our Constitution calls ‘the Blessings of Liberty.’”

In almost 1,000 pages, the document explains what these policies mean for ordinary Americans. Restoring the family and protecting children means using “government power…to restore the American family.” That, the document says, means eliminating any words associated with sexual orientation or gender identity, gender, abortion, reproductive health, or reproductive rights from any government rule, regulation, or law. Any reference to transgenderism is “pornography” and must be banned. 

The overturning of the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that recognized the right to abortion must be gratefully celebrated, the document says, but the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision accomplishing that end “is just the beginning.” 

Dismantling the administrative state starts from the premise that “people are policy.” Frustrated because nonpartisan civil employees thwarted much of Trump’s agenda in his first term, the authors of Project 2025 call for firing much of the current government workforce—about 2 million people work for the U.S. government—and replacing it with loyalists who will carry out a right-wing president’s demands. 

The plan asserts “the existential need” for an authoritarian leader to dismantle the current government that regulates business, provides a social safety net, and protects civil rights. Instead of the government Americans have built since 1933, the plan says the national government must “decentralize and privatize as much as possible” and leave “the great majority of domestic activities to state, local, and private governance.”

It attacks “America’s largest corporations, its public institutions, and its popular culture,” for their embrace of international organizations like the United Nations and the European Union and for their willingness to work with other countries. It calls for abandoning all of those partnerships and alliances. 

Also on July 1, Orbán took over the rotating presidency of the European Union. He will be operating for six months in that position under a slogan taken from Trump and adapted to Europe: “Make Europe Great Again.” The day before taking that office, Orbán announced that his political party was forming a new alliance with far-right parties in Austria and the Czech Republic in order to launch a “new era of European politics.”

Tomorrow, Orbán will travel to Moscow to meet with Russian president Vladimir Putin. On July 2, Orbán met with Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky in Kyiv, where he urged Zelensky to accept a “ceasefire.” In the U.S., Trump’s team has suggested that, if reelected, Trump will call for an immediate ceasefire and will negotiate with Putin over how much of Ukraine Putin can keep while also rejecting Ukraine for NATO membership and scaling back U.S. commitment to NATO. 

“I would expect a very quick end to the conflict,” Kevin Roberts said. Putin says he supports Trump’s plan. 

Roberts’s “second American revolution,” which would destroy American democracy in an echo of a small-time dictator like Orbán and align our country with authoritarian leaders, seems a lot less patriotic than the first American Revolution. 

For my part, I will stand with the words written 248 years ago today, saying that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” 

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[lenbryant]

Mainstream media fails us again with their tepid failure to communicate the important points.

[worldofwardcraft]

Worst SCOTUS decision ever.

February 15, 2024

Over the years our Supreme Court has delivered up many an egregiously poor decision — from Dred Scott v. Sanford (1857) to Bush v. Gore (2000) to the Dobbs v. Jackson ruling two years ago. And these are only a sampling. But the one SCOTUS decision that has arguably had the most ruinous effect on our nation was in the 2010 case of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission.

Without delving into the facts of the case, it involved the ability of wealthy donors, corporations and special interest groups (in this instance a conservative nonprofit called Citizens United) to spend money in elections. Reversing more than a century of campaign finance restrictions, a 5-4 majority ruled that such groups could legally shell out as much as they want.

In the Court’s opinion, Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote that limiting “independent political spending” from corporations and other groups violates their First Amendment right to free speech (since corporations are supposedly people). He also naively added that "independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption."

Not only did that turn out to be emphatically wrong, but so also was the assumption that such unlimited campaign spending would be conducted independently. Almost immediately following the decision, super PACs sprang up to facilitate the funneling of dark money through shadowy nonprofits that don’t disclose their donors. And while it's illegal for these committees to coordinate election spending with candidates or political parties, many routinely do so because a toothless FEC can't stop them.

Unsurprisingly, we've seen record-breaking amounts of expenditure every election cycle. As the Campaign Legal Center reports:

Campaign spending by corporations and other outside groups increased by nearly 900% between 2008 and 2016. In 2020, total election spending was $14.4 billion, up from $5.7 billion in 2018, and more than $1 billion in dark money was spent.

To take just one example, in the election cycle following the Citizens United decision, ultra-rich real estate developer Harlan Crow's political contributions went from a little over $500,000 to nearly $4.5 million! Americans for Tax Fairness found that a small group of 465 (mostly right-wing) billionaires had pumped an eye-popping $881 million into the 2022 midterm elections by October. And by the time the cycle was over, it was around a billion dollars.

Nowadays, oligarchs like the Soroses, Kochs, Uihleins, Griffins and Thiels are able to manipulate elections, Congress, state governments, the courts, indeed, our entire political system. All because of one terrible, no good, very bad Supreme Court verdict.

[zigdirty]

We already knew there was election interference from Russia in 2016.

We also had evidence of Russian interference before Election Day in 2024.

We know that right-wing influencers were bankrolled by Russia. We also know that right-wing pundits and media clips were used in Russia as pro-Russia propaganda.

We know that specific states that are overwhelmingly conservative routinely suppress votes and interfere with results (Florida, Georgia, etc.). SCOTUS simply also joined in for the 2000 election and decided that Al Gore lost, which has been shown to be false repeatedly since that election was decided.

We know that Reagan was elected due to collusion with a foreign enemy by conservatives in order to ruin the incumbent’s chances.

It is highly likely Nixon had similar circumstances to Reagan.

We know that economic recessions and government shutdowns happen almost entirely under conservative leadership.

We know that (prior to the 2024 “results”) every non-incumbent conservative presidential candidate victory did NOT win the popular vote, but some of said candidates still managed to “win” the election (the Electoral College is fucked and should have never existed in the first place, wholly undemocratic).

Seems pretty likely there was significant election interference and subterfuge.

Conservatives only claim corruption when they do it. And they’ve been noticeably silent since 11/5.

Stolen from an internet comment:

I mean think about it. Republicans got the endorsement of almost nobody. Kid Rock and Hulk Hogan were their front runners. Vance’s approval rating was like 30%. They had so many people vocally against them from media to celebrities to public figures.

Then in swoops the richest guy in the world who goes full bananas MAGA and puts his entire reputation on the line for Trump’s promise of a seat in the White House. Why risk it all unless you knew that promise was going to happen?

Why did Trump routinely say to not bother voting because they had all the votes? Why did Trump insist the only way Dems would win is if they cheated, is it because he knew he rigged it already so literally the only way Harris could win is if she somehow cheated and undid/redid the rigging? What was the “little secret”? Why did it seem like nobody on Trump’s team was excited to win and they took the stage like nothing happened, is it because they knew it was going to happen? How did states like Florida get called almost instantaneously? Why were there numerous bomb threats from Russia at only heavily Democratic polling stations? Why was there numerous reports of tabulators malfunctioning at only heavily Democratic polling stations? Why was every single person who has accurately predicted elections over the last 5-10-15-20+ years wrong? Not one or two, all of them were wrong, how?

How is it that none of the heinous stuff Trump did matter? Jan 6, felonies, racism, misogyny, questioning when Harris turned black in front of a room of black people, threatening to jail or kill people that didn’t support him, calling Puerto Ricans garbage, calling the military losers and suckers, saying Haitian immigrants are eating dogs, I mean you name it. How can he do all of the stuff over the last 4 years that would have sunk any politician’s career dead in the water and yet he gained supporters from literally everywhere?

How does sentiment analysis show Democrats with the highest voter enthusiasm and engagement since Obama and yet deliver an absolute abysmal showing in the election? How does Harris/Walz sellout enormous stadiums multiple times a day all over the country while Trump can barely fill a 2,000 seat auditorium, yet that translates into not even winning the popular vote?

Maybe they didn’t cheat. But you ask yourself the above questions and you really start to wonder if they did…