The Red Court and the Coming Horrors

The Supreme Court's Disastrous Decision

After the body blow of last week's debate, the ensuing chaos in the Democratic apparatus, the elite media freak out, and their subsequent attempt to demonstrate their power by shoving Joe Biden off the ballot, many of you are understandably seeking comfort and hope.

Although Steve Bannon reporting to jail is amusing, it is in the end only a distraction. 

This essay will not comfort you. 

It will not tell you that no matter what happens that the Republic will survive.

The stakes for our country in this election have reached their highest and most deadly pitch. If we fail this November, the Supreme Court has ensured we will fail as a nation. They will have placed inconceivable powers in the hands of a man adept at the abuse of those powers, and eager to show the world just how far he’ll go.

As I warned in April, the Red Court was there to delay Donald Trump’s trials. They were also there to complete Leonard Leo’s Long March, and to realign forever the structure of our government and institutions. 

Mission accomplished. 

As of yesterday and this cataclysmic decision on executive power, the democracy you thought you had, the Republic you thought would stand, and the country you thought you knew is on a ragged edge.

While the ruling itself states a President’s official actions protect him from prosecution, the Court most certainly knew those words are a flimsy, indeed diaphanous, veil over arriving horrors looming with Trump‘s return.

Nothing about this ruling would make it acceptable, even with an ordinary President in the mix, but the meaningful possibility Donald Trump could be reelected means the ruling is a constitutional barn fire.

Donald Trump is the world's greatest expert at finding and exploiting loopholes in our society, law, and politics to abuse power and engage in criminality at a scale never imagined in Richard Nixon‘s wildest, drunken ravings, all while avoiding accountability and consequence. This decision is a license for unlimited corruption, criminality, and the abuse of executive power not seen since the Enabling Act of 1933.

This decision didn’t emerge from the fear of executive power being too limited; it was designed to expand it beyond all reason.

The conservative position on executive power has always been that it must be constrained, controlled, limited, bounded, and managed carefully to avoid abuses, and to prevent the reemergence of monarchy and the depredations of the populist urge to power.

The power of the state, as reposed with the executive must never be without fundamental accountability beyond just political sanction. If no man is above the law, then no man is above the law. The risks of executive power are almost never worth the rewards of its expansion.

That ended yesterday. Gleeful “conservatives” practically danced in the streets after the announcement. This was the latest on the long descent into radical populism by my former party. 

The shallow conceit that this ruling merely addresses some imagined injustices committed against Trump by the deep state is absurd. 

What is really at play here is that hyper-populist nationalism on the right is frustrated with the limits and controls of a Constitutional government. They loathed the old reality that their Executive Branch couldn’t act on its urges and instincts, couldn’t race to their ideological finish line without the law over their shoulders. The party once believed so strongly in controlling the power of the state screamed like maniacs in an orgiastic political frenzy.

Yes, they’re delighted that Trump will no longer be held to account in a meaningful way for stealing classified documents, inciting an insurrection, conspiracy, and the rest of his vast portfolio of crimes and sins. It isn’t simply that any kind of accountability has been limited and delayed beyond the event horizon of consequence. 

No, their joy, their glee comes from the knowledge that the next Republican President, be it Donald Trump or anyone else in the parade of miserables to follow will have more executive power than any president in our history. They recognize the phrase “official act” is their  stay-out-of-jail-free card. 

They recognize a congressional majority is no longer particularly important. They will act with dispatch and intent in ways the hand-wringing Democrats beholden to that fussy old Constitution, and the tiresome rule of law never would. They giggled yesterday as Joe Biden said he would never accept the Court’s poisonous gift while he was President. 

This is the scenario I feared more than any other. It’s not just the return of Trump.

It is that the men around him understand the use of power. They’ve long dreamed of being the one who knocks at the door at 3 AM while their political opponents are sleeping quietly. They have a raw lust for the ability to act from their impulses, unbound from accountability. 

They have long believed the American system is flawed, weak, and decadent. Like so many autocrats before them, they crave purges, shocks to the system, shortcuts to control, and punishments for their political enemies beyond the ballot box. 

Not for them is the long tradition from the Enlightenment onward. They scorn that inheritance and the frustrating beauty of America’s system of checks and balances. 

No, they are exactly who you know them to be.

They are the autocrats who will declare the urgency of their causes and beliefs is so great that anything standing in their way must be swept aside. They are the ones who believe that the Constitution and the rule of law are impediments, not among America’s proudest achievements. 

If Donald Trump returns to power, they will have control. They will be unaccountable. They will be shielded from any sanction. 

And they will abuse that power in ways you can barely comprehend. They will never stop. They will never relinquish power. They will never cease their abuses of anyone who tries to oppose them. They will revel in the pain they cause to millions, wrapping themselves in the comfortable cloak of immunity.

Perhaps you think Trump is exaggerating when he calls for a military tribunal to prosecute and execute the January 6th Committee members.  Perhaps you think the idea of rounding up and punishing political opponents of Trump is some distant fantasy. 

You could not be more wrong.