It is rumored that John Robert’s most cherished possession is a letter he received on the day he graduated from law school. It features a letterhead that bears the Federalist Society’s logo and the opening salutation reads “Dear Wormwood.”
Actually I just made that up. But I did it to underscore the fact that the Chief Justice’s treatment of the Dissenting Opinions in the case Trump versus United States is like a Master Class in the art of deception. It selectively amplifies, filters, and contextualizes the objections raised to create a false impression. And, were I to probe his motives, I would likely conclude that Roberts wanted to include that treatment and effectively preclude or simply dissuade undisciplined readers from doing a proper examination of either the thirty page Sotomayor Dissent or the twenty two page Jackson Dissent.
Unlike William Barr, with his willingness to provide a misleading “summary” of the Mueller Report, or Donald Trump, with his plan to have the Justice Department send letters to the States falsely alleging election fraud, sentinels like then acting Attorney General Jeffery Rosen, did not just go along to get along. Roberts, with his Opinion and by avoiding the Second Impeachment Trial demonstrated that, in matters of character and the tenets of true statesmanship, he is seriously deficient.
The corrosive influence of dark money on the democracy underpinnings of our constitutional republic is the political equivalent of tar and nicotine. That sound you hear is the wheezing of Lady Liberty and Uncle Sam. For the plan devised long ago by Lewis Powell, to influence every judicial decision by the installation of integrity challenged Justices, has since been deemed a success by almost every measure. As the minority on the Supreme Court struggles to catch a breath of fresh air and reclaim at least some legitimacy, the smoke the majority has leveraged, against a plane of unreality, continues to distract the governed. And now any informed consent has effectively been nullified by the Court’s own unrelenting artifice infusion.
Roberts, with reckless abandon, has turned the Separation of Powers Doctrine into a shield for criminality. Rather than use it to protect the public interest, he has advanced the idiotic notion that Justice “may not inquire into the President’s motives.” And the Roberts spin on the earlier decision concerning the Nixon tapes now bars investigators from using “Testimony or private records of the President or his advisers” and prohibits “probing such conduct” insuring that it “may not be admitted as evidence at trial.”
The theft of democracy by those practicing criminality at the highest level is well neigh complete. To add insult to the nation’s severe injuries, John Roberts in his Opinion on Trump versus The United States drove a stake into the heart of the country even while he referenced a quote from George Washington’s Farewell Address. The Roberts Opinion twisted the stake as he included the following:
A government “too feeble to withstand the enterprises of faction,” he warned, could lead to the “frightful despotism” of “alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge.” — And the way to avoid that cycle, he explained, was to ensure that government powers remained “properly distributed and adjusted.”
The adjustment layer that Roberts excised and excavated under was, at least in part, previously vested in the independence of the Justice Department.
When the Supreme Court can be packed and hyper-politicized, over the course of one presidential term, it sends danger signals to the entire nation.
It was never just about packing the Court, Trump packed it with malign actors that would be whoring for the businesses that backed him as he and McConnell were installing them in their cushy jobs. The prevailing public perception is entirely correct. We have had judges forced upon us that have no fidelity to their oaths, no affinity for the truth, and no reverence for those constitutional imperatives that The Supreme Court itself has now put asunder.
The hero of today’s hard right, Joseph Goebbels, defined the true aim of such moral inversion influencers with the statement:
“We shall reach our goal, when we have the power to laugh as we destroy, as we smash, whatever was sacred to us as tradition, as education, and as human affection.”
It is in this way, the so-called conservative majority on the Supreme Court has demonstrated, they are actually the conservators of nothing. And, the Chief Justice has become a junior tempter trying to corrupt the soul of his “Patient.” Unfortunately, Wormwood’s Patient in the immediate case is the United States of America. And, now that the majority on the Supreme Court has, at least for now, abandoned its highly selective historical analogues schtick in favor of their natural inclination towards judicial activism, the country is stunned.
The backwards people making up the Majority have clearly demonstrated they are, first and foremost, creatures of partisan politics; posturing, prevaricating, and prostituting themselves in ways that are offensive to the public interest. Somewhere between the covert and the overt bribery it has become apparent the Court’s undeniable value proposition is to insure that the rich will get richer and the poor will die.
No court has done more to systematically corrode the democracy underpinnings of our constitutional republic than the Roberts Court. And, while the moneyed interests that control the media try to frame the ongoing tension as one of autocracy versus democracy, the real contest is, and has been since the time of this country’s founding, one of kleptocracy versus democracy.
The Roberts Court has nothing to offer that qualifies as either a Spiritual ideal or a positive nature. Only a new court of sentience, with integrity at its center, can move us away from the present orgy of darkness and death onward and upward into a new era of light and life.