While we were all watching coverage of the Coronavirus and preparing for the onslaught, Trump’s justice department was moving to drop charges against Russian backed companies indicted by Mueller for financing Russian interference in the 2016 election.  Yes, that is really happening.

A good weekend read, Slate has published the resignation letter to John Roberts from James Dannenberg, retired Hawaii state judge, law professor, and member of the elite Supreme Court Bar.  His reasons are the radical partisanship that now pervades the majority of the court has made it impossible for him to remain on the bar.  Here’s his letter in full:

The Chief Justice of the United States

One First Street, N.E.

Washington, D.C. 20543

March 11, 2020

Dear Chief Justice Roberts:

I hereby resign my membership in the Supreme Court Bar.

This was not an easy decision. I have been a member of the Supreme Court Bar since 1972, far longer than you have, and appeared before the Court, both in person and on briefs, on several occasions as Deputy and First Deputy Attorney General of Hawaii before being appointed as a Hawaii District Court judge in 1986. I have a high regard for the work of the Federal Judiciary and taught the Federal Courts course at the University of Hawaii Richardson School of Law for a decade in the 1980s and 1990s. This due regard spanned the tenures of Chief Justices Warren, Burger, and Rehnquist before your appointment and confirmation in 2005. I have not always agreed with the Court’s decisions, but until recently I have generally seen them as products of mainstream legal reasoning, whether liberal or conservative. The legal conservatism I have respected– that of, for example, Justice Lewis Powell, Alexander Bickel or Paul Bator– at a minimum enshrined the idea of stare decisis and eschewed the idea of radical change in legal doctrine for political ends.

I can no longer say that with any confidence. You are doing far more— and far worse– than “calling balls and strikes.” You are allowing the Court to become an “errand boy” for an administration that has little respect for the rule of law.

The Court, under your leadership and with your votes, has wantonly flouted established precedent. Your “conservative” majority has cynically undermined basic freedoms by hypocritically weaponizing others. The ideas of free speech and religious liberty have been transmogrified to allow officially sanctioned bigotry and discrimination, as well as to elevate the grossest forms of political bribery beyond the ability of the federal government or states to rationally regulate it. More than a score of decisions during your tenure have overturned established precedents—some more than forty years old– and you voted with the majority in most. There is nothing “conservative” about this trend. This is radical “legal activism” at its worst.

Without trying to write a law review article, I believe that the Court majority, under your leadership, has become little more than a result-oriented extension of the right wing of the Republican Party, as vetted by the Federalist Society. Yes, politics has always been a factor in the Court’s history, but not to today’s extent. Even routine rules of statutory construction get subverted or ignored to achieve transparently political goals. The rationales of “textualism” and “originalism” are mere fig leaves masking right wing political goals; sheer casuistry.

Your public pronouncements suggest that you seem concerned about the legitimacy of the Court in today’s polarized environment. We all should be. Yet your actions, despite a few bromides about objectivity, say otherwise.

It is clear to me that your Court is willfully hurtling back to the cruel days of Lochner and even Plessy. The only constitutional freedoms ultimately recognized may soon be limited to those useful to wealthy, Republican, White, straight, Christian, and armed males— and the corporations they control. This is wrong. Period. This is not America.

I predict that your legacy will ultimately be as diminished as that of Chief Justice Melville Fuller, who presided over both Plessy and Lochner. It still could become that of his revered fellow Justice John Harlan the elder, an honest conservative, but I doubt that it will. Feel free to prove me wrong.

The Supreme Court of the United States is respected when it wields authority and not mere power. As has often been said, you are infallible because you are final, but not the other way around.

I no longer have respect for you or your majority, and I have little hope for change. I can’t vote you out of office because you have life tenure, but I can withdraw whatever insignificant support my Bar membership might seem to provide.

Please remove my name from the rolls.

With deepest regret,

James Dannenberg

Trump FINALLY declares national emergency over CV.

Great read from the Atlantic, The Trump Presidency is Over.

Italians sing together from their windows during the CV lockdown.

CDC estimates that Americans who could die from CV is 200,000 to 1.7 million.

No one will win the Saudi-Russian oil price war.

Coronavirus effects based on government response.  An interactive chart.

Trump lied today (and other times) that Obama bungled the H1N1 flu contagion in 2009.  He forgot that Republicans mocked Obama’s warnings and called THAT outbreak “a hoax”.  Sound familiar?

And finally, Katie Porter (D-CA) beat Dr. Redfield, Director of the CDC, about the face and neck with questions until he finally committed to guaranteeing free testing to all Americans.  It’s sweet…

Federal judge Reggie Walton (appointed to the bench by GWB) issued a scathing opinion today about Bill Barr’s summary of the Mueller report, calling into question his “candor” and “credibility”.  He has ordered that the DOJ release the unreacted report so he he can judge for himself if Barr essentially lied to the public to protect Trump and bury the report.  A few meaty tidbits:

“The Court has grave concerns about the objectivity of the process that preceded the public release of the redacted version of the Mueller Report and its impacts on the Department’s subsequent justifications that its redactions of the Mueller Report are authorized by the FOIA.”

“…a review of the redacted version of the Mueller Report by the Court results in the Court’s concurrence with Special Counsel Mueller’s assessment that Attorney General Barr distorted the findings in the Mueller Report.”

And the crowning blow:

“The speed by which Attorney General Barr released to the public the summary of Special Counsel Mueller’s principal conclusions, coupled with the fact that Attorney General Barr failed to provide a thorough representation of the findings set forth in the Mueller Report, causes the Court to question whether Attorney General Barr’s intent was to create a one-sided narrative about the Mueller Report—a narrative that is clearly in some respects substantively at odds with the redacted version of the Mueller Report.”

Like all stories about corrupt officials, the truth of this particular corruption will come out.  This opinion by this Republican appointed judge is just the first step in dismantling the veil of lies constructed by Trump, his minions, and his corrupt attorney general.

It’s just a matter of time.

In an interview with ABC News today, Bill Barr said Trump’s tweets are making it “impossible to do my job,” and that he won’t be bullied into doing anything.  He also said, “I think it’s time to stop the tweeting about Department of Justice criminal cases,” and that he’s prepared for any consequences of crossing Trump.  He continued saying he can’t do his job with a continuous background of commentary from Trump on criminal cases.

It’s a rare split from His Orangeness; Barr’s sudden reversal is just one sign of the chaos at DOJ and the FBI that Trump has created.  A mutiny is certainly underway and Barr had to step in.

A little ray of sunshine in the dark abyss of Trump corruption.

Oh, and a message to Ted Cruz and John Cornyn…This is all on you.

Yes, you read that correctly.  Last year, Barr’s DOJ granted over $1 million to Hookers for Jesus and the Lincoln Tubman Foundation while denying established organizations Catholic Charities of Miami and Chicanos Por La Causa in Phoenix. Why?  Hookers for Jesus was founded by a conservative christian and anti-gay activist, Annie Lobert.  She is a former prostitute who supposedly ministers to sex workers in Las Vegas.  Oh, and she’s anti-gay.  The Lincoln Tubman Foundation was started in 2018 by the daughter of a Trumpist who was actually a Trump delegate at the 2016 Republican convention.

Why were the more established charities denied?  Both organizations are active with Democrats and oppose cruel Trump immigration policy.  So Trump has even corrupted US charitable grants, damaging those who oppose him and helping friends.  He doesn’t care what it looks like.

As if that meant anything.