Supreme Court Is In the Bag For Trump

As much as I loathe quoting the Christian Bible, there is a scripture from 1 Corinthians, 13:11: “When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things.” It’s often paraphrased, “It’s time to put aside childish things.”

It was used by MSNBC host Ari Melber during a February 28 discussion about the U.S. Supreme Court’s de facto assist to ex-President Trump’s claim that as a former president he has “absolute immunity” from criminal prosecution for crimes he commits while in office. In other words, as Trump’s attorney, John Sauer, put it (hypothetically), a president could order SEAL Team 6 to assassinate a political rival and get away with it. Sauer’s answer was, “If he were impeached and convicted first … my answer is [a] qualified yes, there is a political process that would have to occur first.”

Because the foundation of this (once) great nation has as one of its pillars, the bedrock conviction that no one is above the law, regardless of their station in life, the simple — and correct — answer to the appellate court judge’s (Florence Y. Pan) question should be an unqualified “no.” Our entire legal system rests on that pillar. No one is above the rule of law.

In December 2023 special prosecutor Jack Smith asked the U.S. Supreme Court to take up the Trump team’s request for an appeal and the court rejected it. But then on February 28 the U.S. Supreme Court reversed its first decision and chose to hear the appeal — the week of April 22 — in effect slow walking the process so it would, conveniently enough for the defendant, delay the Washington, D.C. case charging the ex-president with:

• one count of conspiracy to defraud the United States due to Trump’s repeated and widespread attempts to spread false claims concerning the November 2020 election even though he knew they were false, plus he tried to illegally discount legitimate votes all with the goal of overturning the 2020 election.
• one count of conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding organized a mob, with several conspirators, on January 6, 2021 and instructed them to storm the capitol building and stop the certification of the 2020 presidential election.
• one count of obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding see the above count.
• one count of conspiracy against rights because Trump and his co-conspirators attempted to “oppress, threaten and intimidate” people in their right to vote in an election.

If the court’s decision in that case is stalled until late June or July it could effectively keep the case from proceeding until September at the earliest. Which would mean voters would not know if the ex-president is guilty of all or some of those charges before the November 5, 2024 general election.

This change in the high court’s decision means at least four of the Supremes believes Trump’s claim of absolute immunity has at least enough merit for the Supreme Court to hear the appeal.

If there are some U.S. Supreme Court justices that at least entertain the notion that presidents are like despotic kings and other dictators in that they have absolute immunity from prosecution … wow.

The United States fought a war against King George III and Great Britain to get out from under that sort of tyranny — and then fought the Brits a second time to keep it that way. The French threw off the rule of King Louis XVI and beheaded him and his wife, Marie Antoinette in 1793.

I have always wondered why her family, the royalty of Austria, didn’t step in and take their daughter back to Vienna.  In today’s legal system she would not likely receive a death sentence, or even go on trial for treason. And being a frivolous person is not a crime — then of course we do not employ the Guillotine, although it wouldn’t be hard to imagine members of the MAGA Cult — and maybe a few fire-breathing super-progressives — wishing they could use the Guillotine, or at least the executioner’s axe, on some of the lefties and anti-Trump Republicans.

One true thing in America: We love to kill. Whether it be in wars or by state sanctioned murder … err … the death penalty.

How many barbaric methods of execution have we used in these United States? They are all barbaric. State-sanctioned killing is cruel and unusual punishment, which is expressly forbidden by the Bill of Rights, the Eighth Amendment, to be exact: “Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.”

There is such a catalogue of tangents I could go into, but this death penalty issue, as well as the killing of Marie Antoinette are tangents that are flung far afield of the original raison d’être of this post.

It is no surprise to anyone that enough members of the U.S. Supreme Court are in the bag for the ex-President Donald J. Trump that the entire court can be used to put its enormous thumb on the scales of justice.

As the saying goes, “Justice delayed is justice denied.” The 60-70% of American voters will be denied the full breadth of knowledge about one of the major candidates for president. While at the same time they are getting bombarded with baseless reports that Joe Biden’s age (81 years; November 20, 1942) has somehow diminished the president’s mental capacities. At the same time we see countless examples of Trump’s diminished mental capacities. Say what you will about former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, but she put it right out there about her former boss’s creeping senility.

To quote Bill Press of The Hill, “Speaking to a rally in Concord, N.H., Trump claimed: “You know, by the way, they never report the crowd on Jan. 6. You know, Nikki Haley, Nikki Haley, Nikki Haley. Nikki Haley, you know they, do you know they destroyed all of the information, all of the evidence, everything, deleted and destroyed all of it? All of it because of lots of things like Nikki Haley in charge of security. We offered her 10,000 people, soldiers, National Guard, whatever they want. They turned it down.”

All bald faced lies of course. But Trump has also claimed, quoting Bill Press once again, “Trump bragged about running against and beating Barack Obama (he never ran against Obama), warned that Joe Biden could lead the United States into World War II (World War II ended in 1945) and blamed former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush for starting the Iraq War (it was Jeb’s brother George).”

When Trump confused Haley with former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, Haley brought up Trump’s mental acuity. Donald J. Trump is a gaffe machine and the mainstream press is under-reporting it, if they report it at all.

Now that we know the Trump Cult acolytes on the Supreme Court are most definitely carrying Trump’s water, we need, and I include the mainstream media, need to cut the bullshit about Biden’s age and start talking about Trump’s declining mental health. The U.S. Supreme Court has shown us they will not do the right thing so we must get Biden and enough Democrats elected in November so liberals and progressives control both houses of Congress and the Oval Office. The future of American democracy and the rule of law depends on it.