High Fash Court Grants the Orange Hitler Fan Big Win
Like I've Been Saying...
I hate to say I told you so, but, well, I told you so. Please see these two recent The Paul Street Reports (TPSRs):
“The US Bourgeois Democracy Farewell Tour,” The Paul Street Report, February 1, 2024, https://paulstreet.substack.com/p/the-us-bourgeois-democracy-farewell;
“Courts and Constitution Won’t Save Us From an Orange Menace 47 Presidency,” The Paul Street Report, February 9, 2024, https://paulstreet.substack.com/p/courts-and-constitution-wont-save.
Consistent with the warnings in both (and other TPSR) reports, the already too-late Georgia case against Trump’s fascist election interference in that state is further hung up by an alleged sex and payment scandal inside the Fulton County prosecutor’s office and the federal classified documents case against Trump is being fatally delayed by a hack Trumpist federal judge in Florida. And yesterday, Trump was given a major victory by the Christian Fascist US Supreme Court he did so much to create. Here is some of the establishment New York Times’ reporting on the monumentally corrupt and illegitimate high court’s ruling yesterday:
“The Supreme Court that former President Donald J. Trump helped to shape tossed him a legal lifeline on Wednesday night, making a choice that substantially aided his efforts to delay his federal trial on charges of plotting to overturn the 2020 election. By deciding to take up Mr. Trump’s claim that presidents enjoy almost total immunity from prosecution for any official action while in office — a legal theory rejected by two lower courts and one that few experts think has any basis in the Constitution — the justices bought the former president at least several months before a trial on the election interference charges can start. It is not out of the question that Mr. Trump could still face a jury in the case, in Federal District Court in Washington, before Election Day. At this point, the legal calendar suggests that if the justices issue a ruling by the end of the Supreme Court’s term in June and find that Mr. Trump is not immune from prosecution, the trial could still start by late September or October…But with each delay, the odds increase that voters will not get a chance to hear the evidence that Mr. Trump sought to subvert the last election before they decide whether to back him in the current one. If Mr. Trump is successful in delaying the trial until after Election Day and he wins, he could use the powers of his office to seek to dismiss the election interference indictment altogether. Moreover, Justice Department policy precludes prosecuting a sitting president, meaning that, once sworn in, he could likely have any federal trial he is facing postponed until after he left office.”
How polite. Here’s my translation:
‘The monumentally corrupt and illegitimate, racist, sexist, and Christian Fascist high court that Donald “Poisoning Our Blood” Trump and his fellow Republi-fascist Malevolent Mitch McConnell brought to life just gave a supreme judicial green light to a second fascist Trump administration. Liberal, progressive, moderate, and centrist hopes that the US judicial and broader criminal justice system (and/or other establishment bourgeois democratic/capitalist institutions, forces, and actors) will save us from the Amerikaner fascist reconquest of the world’s most dangerous office by the man Noam Chomsky once rightly called (in January 2020, before anyone could guess that Trump was going to help spread a deadly pandemic across the United States), “the most dangerous criminal in human history” are in this and other ways being exposed as naïve “hopey-changey” dreaming.’
The Court’s decision to hear Trump’s absurd and dangerous appeal means that it is assisting Trump’s effort to run out the clock and dodge trial for Jan.6. As Mark Joseph Stern writes on Slate:
“In a stunning move…the Supreme Court has all but guaranteed that Donald Trump will not face trial for his efforts to subvert the 2020 election before this November’s presidential election. On Wednesday, after more than two weeks’ delay, the court issued an order refusing to lift the stay that’s preventing the Jan. 6 trial, prosecuted by special counsel Jack Smith, from moving forward. Instead, the court took up the case, scheduling oral arguments for the week of April 22—nearly two months from now. On this timeline, the justices will probably issue a decision near the end of June. That punt gives Trump exactly what he wanted: an extended pause that will make it impossible for Judge Tanya Chutkan to hold a trial in time for the upcoming election…If Trump wins that election, of course, he will ensure that his Justice Department halts the prosecution and dissolves the charges against him. Which means that SCOTUS has awarded him a powerful incentive to beat Joe Biden by any means necessary, and a good reason to hope that he can evade accountability for Jan. 6.”
The crassness and idiocy of Trump’s “legal argument in this case” is difficult to exaggerate. The aspiring fascist strongman’s lawyers pretend to believe that he enjoys absolute constitutional immunity from prosecution for any crimes committed while in the White House. Those crimes include a conspiracy to cancel the 2020 election’s outcome in numerous contested states and participation in an election-nullifying campaign against the US Congress and the US Vice President — an ugly pressure campaign that led to a mass putschist assault on US Capitol (the infamous January 6 Capitol Riot). As Stern elaborates:
“A cross-ideological panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit rejected this theory of total immunity because it is nowhere to be found in the Constitution, or the nation’s historical traditions. You can search the Constitution high and low for Trump’s theory of immunity without finding even a hint that it exists, because it does not exist. It has never existed. The former president’s lawyers know that. They made it up out of whole cloth for one purpose: They realized that, by raising a claim of immunity, Trump could halt all proceedings at the trial court until he exhausted his appeals, at which point he would be far closer to winning back the presidency.”
It seems unlikely that even the present Supreme Court will accept Trump’s bullshit argument but the court gives that argument undeserved legitimacy simply by agreeing to hear it in the first place and they don’t have to accept the argument in order to grant him the great win of delay.
Much prefer your take on the Supreme Court justices over The NY Times.
The US has always been at best a hybrid democracy, more for some and certainly less for many others, probably most when it comes to powerlessness and economic/finance policies and system. But regarding what is happening with Trump's court actions, we will look back and say, the US was/is in decline and nothing makes that more clear than the story of Donald Trump and how US's institutions have mostly treated him--executive, legislative, and judicial along with corporate and media.. And we have all been witnesses to it, not so unlike the devastation of US war-making, continuous war-making that has been the most destructive force in recorded history.