The Story of Therapy Dog Tails 422
Where Everyone Gets a Dose of Puppy Love
PRESENT DAY 54: The Un-Recused
In Chapter 366 I suggested that integrity, honesty and common sense demanded that Supreme Court justices recuse themselves in cases where there is a clear conflict of interest. The current “Roberts” (actually McConnell / Trump / Federalist Society) court is having a lot of trouble with that idea. Maybe they’re just having trouble coming up with a definition for “conflict of interest.” It’s simple enough but given that they’re ignoring integrity, honesty and common sense, maybe that’s the problem. Maybe they’re just too dense to figure it out. If that’s the case, let’s offer a little help. Here’s a good, simple, working definition that actually applies to the case in point yesterday as these nine people were trying to figure out whether or not attempting to overthrow the government could be an “official” act of a president:
Conflict of Interest: taking part in any case involving the person who nominated you for the lifetime sinecure that you now enjoy.
I’m not kidding. These so called “jurists” are pretending that there is no conflict of interest in having Trump’s life in their hands when they are beholden to Trump for being in that position in the first place. This obvious conflict of interest alone is enough to make this “supreme” court a supreme joke. Here are the people in question:
Image: The Un-recused: Thomas, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Coney Barrett
Clarence Thomas’ wife was an active participant in Trump’s attempted coup. Why she isn’t under indictment herself is another question that America had better answer and fast. Only so many fascists can be allowed to go scot-free before real damage is done to the foundations of a democracy. Thomas would have us believe that he had no idea that his wife was involved in sedition but this is the same Thomas who has been on the take for decades from ultra-right wing billionaires. He says he “forgot” to report the hundreds of thousands of dollars he's illicitly received. One of nine justices thumbing their nose at American institutions is bad enough, though Thomas has had various comrades in arms against the United States in the persons of people like Scalia, Alito and Kennedy over the years. Even two or three anti-Americans on the court we can survive. But now there are four. Gorsuch was installed by Mitch McConnell in violation of the Constitution. Gorsuch, nevertheless, was more than happy to take the illicit offering from Trump, the only kind of offering Trump makes. Kavanaugh was shown to be entirely unfit for the position but was installed anyway with the bare minimum of 50 votes. Coney Barrett was obviously unqualified for a seat on the highest court, having no judicial experience at all, but she was installed because of her rabid Christian nationalist leanings, leanings which make her entirely unfit for the seat as well.
But of course these people understand what a conflict of interest is. They’re simply pretending not to understand or that they don’t see it or that it doesn’t exist. So maybe it shouldn’t be surprising that these so called “justices” yesterday were actually debating whether or not a president is immune to prosecution for attempting to overthrow the government over which he/she presides - he, in the case at hand, Trump, though they also tried to pretend that they weren’t talking about Trump but about some hypothetical White House criminal, as if such a criminal didn’t already exist and hadn’t already turned flag waving into an act of treason and tried to assassinate his own Vice President and Speaker of the House. So let’s help them with another easy definition. It wasn’t just the nature of a conflict of interest that seemed to elude them. They were also having trouble with or pretending to have trouble with figuring out what constitutes an “official act” of a president. So here’s another good, simple working definition for that one:
An “act” is not “official” if it is indictable as a criminal act, given that the person committing the act has sworn an oath to uphold the law and the Constitution.
It should not take any debate at all to determine that overturning an election through violence and/or fraud is not an official act of any kinds because it is an attempt to do away with the very idea of “official” acts by doing away with the rule of law and the Constitution altogether. Obviously these people know what a conflict of interest is and are simply ignoring it. Obviously they know that overthrowing the government cannot be an “official” act. Therefore, obviously they were doing everything they can to obfuscate the obvious because they are right now colluding with the Trump fascist Republican Party that put the majority of them into the positions that they now hold and it could not be more obvious than that this very situation was the reason this majority was installed - to undermine the rule of law and the Constitution when the opportunity arose. It arose with Trump’s illegal ascension to the White House in 2017. It arose when Mitch McConnell used that fascist installation of Trump to install Gorsuch. It arose again when Republican fascists cut a deal with Anthony Kennedy to open up a spot for the installation or the creepy fascist lapdog Brett Kavanaugh. It arose again when RBG died with just a few weeks left in Trump’s term and McConnell this time, admitting that he’d violated the Constitution in the Merrick Garland / Obama case, rushed through the installation of Coney Barrett. Now with these people in place alongside Thomas and Alito, installed by previous not-quite-so openly fascist Republican administrations, it’s payback time. These people owe their right wing Republican benefactors and they are paying them back with this end run around the Constitution. They are doing what they can to ensure Trump gets another shot this year and there is no doubt that they will go further in order to ensure Trump’s triumphant return to the White House. If this sounds extreme, just consider the bogus arguments we saw them legitimize during yesterday’s hearing on presidential immunity. If the president doesn’t have the right to break the law, won't this just encourage him/her to break it in order to stay in power.? Yes, Alito floated this bogus idea yesterday. Or from Gorsuch, if we allow a president to be prosecuted, what’s to stop a “creative” prosecutor from indicting another president on trumped up charges for something they don’t like? This is the same bogus argument this same bogus supreme court used to rule that Colorado cannot kick Trump off their ballot though the state of Colorado has found that Trump engaged in insurrection and is therefore in violation of the 14th amendment and this “court” is supposed to all for states’ rights. Anyone watching live t.v. on Jan. 6, 2021 knows that Trump engaged in insurrection and that was just the tip of the iceberg. As proven by the J6 House Committee and testified to by all the members of that committee including Liz Chaney, Trump engaged in a far reaching plot to overturn the 2020 election using various fraudulent schemes in at least half a dozen states. No doubt, as House Republicans have already demonstrated with their bogus impeachment of Alejandro Mayorkas, “creative” Republicans will trump up charges against innocent Democrats but the solution to that is to throw bogus cases out of court, not to disallow legitimate cases as we have in Colorado. I’d suggest that this issue would have been determined long ago if those who ought to be recused were recused. If the four pictured above had even the slightest grain of integrity, they’d be recused, leaving five justices to determine this case - the three honest women, Alito and Roberts. If that were the case, Trump would be declared not to be immune from prosecution for attempting a coup and his D.C. trial, which has been on hold for weeks because of this court’s deliberate collusion with the Trump team, would continue. The vote would be either 3 - 2, if Roberts did the wrong thing, or 4 - 1, if Roberts did the right thing. Alito, of course, can be counted on to do the corrupt thing. This Trump “Supreme” Court does not deserve the respect that we have granted our top court since 1965 when the Civil Rights Act was passed and upheld and since the early 70s when Roe v. Wade finally ended the un-America Christian stranglehold on abortion rights. If knowing how corrupt Thomas and Alito are isn’t enough; if knowing how the three Trump installations have corrupted the court isn’t enough; I’ll just point to one aspect of yesterday’s hearings that makes more than evident that this court is in collusion with the fascist MAGA movement that has packed it. Trump’s lawyer repeatedly stated that there is some sort of Constitutional immunity for “official” acts where the president has not been impeached and convicted by Congress. Forget for the moment that there is no way to impeach, let alone convict, a former president. This is an entirely fabricated argument, a lie, in other words, and yet this court allowed it to be made and even acted as though it were a thing, a real thing. Just as Trump’s lawyers in his ongoing New York hush money case have been lying to the court every time they claim that Trump is innocent, never knew the women in question and wasn’t really attacking the witnesses when he attacked the witnesses over and over again on his social media platform and at rallies, the Trump lawyers have lied to this “Supreme” Court and those lies have been accepted as if they were legitimate arguments. Maybe it’s time for the three honest women, Kagan, Sotomayor and Brown Jackson, to go to the media and denounce this court as the corrupt institution that it now is. I don’t know if sitting Supreme Court justices have ever before denounced the very court on which they sit but then the corrupt Trump members have no respect for precedent, as they proved in overturning Roe v. Wade, the 1965 Civil Rights Act and now possibly the very Constitution itself. Given that this court is so far down the Trump hole that it might already be too late to save ourselves, maybe these three ought to take the drastic step of exposing the behind-the-doors corruption that is clearly going on. I, for one, would welcome it and if it sets a precedent for future bad actors, I’d just say again, bad actors don’t need a precedent to act badly. Witness everything Trump and his many minions including Thomas, Gorsuch, Alito and Kavanaugh, have done. It remains to be seen if America can survive this “Supreme” Court. Time will tell if America will be done in by the unabashedly, unashamedly un-recused.