This afternoon, the SCOTUS issued a one sentence rebuke of TFG in his efforts to hamstring the DOJ investigating his theft of thousands of government documents.  The order, one sentence long, said:

TRUMP, DONALD J. V. UNITED STATES

The application to vacate the stay entered by the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit on September 21, 2022, presented to Justice Thomas and by him referred to the Court is denied.

Even the SCOTUS can occasionally surprise by doing its goddam job.

Last night in Kansas the voters spoke up about the right for women to make their own healthcare decisions without interference from politicians.  Turning out like never before, voters struck down Republican efforts to strike abortion rights from the state constitution and impose a strict ban that would cost lives.  This election was the bell cow for other states that were trying to do the same thing.  Had pro-choice efforts failed here, it would have cast a dark cloud over vast areas of the entire country as ideologues imposed their religion and dogma over tens of millions of women and their families.

More significant, Republican legislators cheated their asses off to get the result they wanted, making their loss even more sweet. Kansas Republicans had already put this measure onto the ballot for the PRIMARY election where no Democrats were running, hoping that they could ban abortion under the radar in a low turnout election.  After the SCOTUS stupidly and wrongly struck down Roe, that strategy went out the window, and Kansas became the focus of national attention.  That attention drew a turnout estimated at 54%, almost 20% higher than typical primaries, and more important, the measure was struck down in red areas of the state by almost 20% higher than Trump received in 2020.  What this tells us is that not only are abortion rights strongly supported by those who vote Democratic, it’s also supported by Republicans.

What happened last night is the logical result of gross overreach which always happens when politics are dominated by one party.  The Republicans should learn a lesson from this (but they won’t) that overplaying your hand can be costly.  With issues as important as Constitutional rights under threat, Americans who are normally asleep at the wheel wake up and actually vote.  We saw that during the Viet Nam war, after Watergate, after Bush’s foray into Iraq, with veteran’s healthcare just this week, and now women’s right to choose.

Hopefully this motivation to the polls sticks for the November mid-terms and beyond.  The only way our government works is for elected representatives to be held accountable to the voters for corruption and power grabs.  The GOP has proven itself to be irresponsible and callous to the needs of its voters.  It’s long past time for local, state, and federal governments to be brought back to actually representing the people.  ALL the people.

You’ll recall that in the last session, Texas passed another stupid law, trying to make it illegal to take down inflammatory and false rhetoric from social media platforms.  They were targeting Facebook and Twitter, which, after years of comatose moderation FINALLY started taking down posts from white supremacists, insurrectionists, QAnon enthusiasts, and other weirdos pumping manure to the public.  The court blocked the law in a mixed opinion with the liberal justices, except for Kagen, plus Roberts making the ruling with the conservatives (and Kagen) voting no.  It was a relief, but it’s not over as the court sent the case back to the courts.

But that’s not the interesting part.  What’s interesting was Alito’s dissent.  He took the same side that he did in the Texas Bounty law on abortion, wanting to have a clearly unconstitutional law stand while it wound its way through the courts; but this time he said that the court will have to visit this case at some point. In his opinion he said:

“This application concerns issues of great importance that will plainly merit this court’s review,” he wrote. “Social media platforms have transformed the way people communicate with each other and obtain news. At issue is a groundbreaking Texas law that addresses the power of dominant social media corporations to shape public discussion of the important issues of the day.”

I agree that laws like this that threaten what little is left of civility in public debate are important, but I find it interesting that Alito is most concerned about social media moderation but is OK with taking away the right to vote and women’s rights to choose their own healthcare, while at the same time taking a completely hands off approach to gerrymandering, the greatest clear and present danger to the survival of our democracy.

The court’s problem is much larger than this particular opinion, and adds fuel to the fire that millions of Americans see the court now as illegitimate; I most certainly do, especially after the latest Trump/McConnell court packing that’s happened over the last decade.  The conservative super majority is cemented in now for future decades and that was accomplished by McConnell’s blatant cheating seeking retribution for Bork’s rejection by Democrats decades ago.  The court has transformed our country from a teetering and weak democracy to an oligarchy that protects the rich at the cost of everyone else.  The court now rules almost 90% in favor of corporations and has completely failed at its main responsibility, protecting the rule of law.

I don’t see that changing anytime soon.

It’s now been a week since the communications office of the Supreme Court announced that Clarence Thomas had been hospitalized “for an infection” and that he would go home in a few days.  That few days has now expanded to a full week, and repeated attempts by the press to get more information on him have been met with silence.  This is one of the most odd set of circumstances about the health of a SCOTUS justice that I can recall, especially after the detailed blow by blow reporting from the court about Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s health in the few years before she passed away in 2020.

Coincidently, news is breaking daily about the deep involvement of Thomas’ wife, Ginni, in the effort to overturn the US presidential election in order to illegally keep Trump in office after he lost.  It turns out that not only did she attend the “Stop the Steal” rally on January 6th, she communicated extensively with Mark Meadows and others in the conspiracy to overturn the election by amplifying lies about non-existent voter fraud.  Apparently there were 29 texts between them from the election to January 10, 2021.  She also communicated with other like minded folks in Trumpland including Jared Kushner.

Not coincidently, Justice Thomas voted against the other 8 justices when the court refused to intervene in the order to release Trump’s WH records.  He also wrote a dissent when the Court declined to hear the Pennsylvania case that was seeking to disqualify mail-in ballots in that state.  Ginni Thomas also publicly supported expelling Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger from the RNC when they voted to impeach Trump in the second impeachment and then joined the January 6th Committee.  In her texts to others in Trumpland, she also repeated QAnon bullshit conspiracy theories, loudly proclaiming the election was stolen and supporting the lawyers spreading the lies.  Worse, she has Justice Thomas’ ear 24/7/365 and even mentioned to Meadows in one text that she was talking to her “best friend” about how the election was stolen.  Not coincidently, her “best friend” has ruled 100% in Trump’s favor in cases brought before him.

The stink of the Thomases’ corruption just adds to the existing stench of the cheating and partisanship that has finally overtaken the Court since McConnell successfully stole Merrick Garland’s seat and then rammed through the nominations of Kavanaugh and Barrett, clearly unqualified nominees.  The Court has been rapidly undoing decades of precedent in many areas with particular focus on taking away a woman’s right to seek her own healthcare and making it harder for non-Republicans to vote.  John Roberts has been concerned about the eroding public confidence in the Court, and with good reason.  In a recent Gallup survey, confidence in the Court has declined to a low point of 40%.  Twenty years ago, confidence was as high as 62%.

Is it merely coincidence that Justice Thomas has suddenly dropped off the face of the earth as the scandal of his wife’s deep involvement in the insurrection comes to light?  I think not.  I wouldn’t be surprised to see a sudden retirement from the bench to avoid what looks to be the first impeachment case built against a SCOTUS justice.  Nothing else explains the deafening silence about Thomas’s supposed health problem and hospitalization.  We’ll be watching this one closely.

Late this afternoon, SCOTUS surprisingly ruled that the National Archives can release TFG’s  January 6th records to Congress.  TFG lawyers have been throwing everything, including the kitchen sink, in an effort to stop the disclosure.  Characteristically, Clarence Thomas dissented.  Jesus.

TFG at Mara Lago is probably a real shitshow right now.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor couldn’t have said it better.  Trump’s and McConnell’s packing of the SCOTUS has now successfully destroyed all hope of the judicial branch protecting our Constitution and the rights it enshrines for all Americans.  Yesterday, the court inexplicably allowed Texas’ game playing with legislation to, as Sotomayor accurately described it,

“…the Court’s dangerous departure from its precedents, which establish that federal courts can and should issue relief when a State enacts a law that chills the exercise of a constitutional right and aims to evade judicial review.” and “…the Court effectively invites other States to refine S.B. 8’s model for nullifying federal rights.”

The court left the law in effect, denying a Constitutionally protected personal right for all women in Texas to control what happens to their own bodies.  Gorsuch’s ruling was so badly constructed by his concocted rationalizations that states have now been provided a roadmap for nullifying any Constitutional right they don’t like.

With the court’s ruling, it’s time to now to test this rewriting of US law by turning the tables by legislating private enforcement against other constitutional rights.  How about a law against individual gun ownership?  Example: anyone caught carrying a firearm, whether licensed or not, can be sued by any individual with a minimum $10,000 award to the plaintiff.  How about a law that bans wearing of MAGA hats?  How about personal enforcement by lawsuits against those who discriminate against minorities like LGBTQ individuals, African Americans, and other racial minorities?  The list is endless where states can simply nullify any federally protected individual right by delegating enforcement of laws against those rights to individuals.  Vigilantism can now displace our entire constitutional judicial system and over 200 years of case law that protects it.

The US is inexorably sliding into a post-democracy era where governments are ineffective at protecting personal rights, allowing one class of Americans to force their belief system onto everyone else.  With compromise no longer possible in our political system, aided by the complete disassembly of our court system, the exclusive right to make policy will fall to the party in control.  Texas is the perfect example of this warping of our political system where the governor, aided by the courts and a single party controlled legislature, is now simply a dictator, nullifying local government’s efforts to protect its own citizens through his arbitrary orders while hiding in the governor’s mansion.  He’s now protected not only by non-existence of corruption laws, but by the SCOTUS itself.

Our only hope of blunting this nullification of individual rights is for states like California, New York, Delaware, and others to take advantage of this activist court’s new legislation from the bench by hitting the very people trying to take away our rights by taking away theirs.  How about a law that allows individuals to sue Fox News every time Tucker Carlson tells a lie?  Yeah, that’s the ticket.  Let’s hit ’em where it hurts.