The mistake everyone is making is the assumption that the Roberts court is attempting to set precedent. They aren't. They're attempting to return the Republicans to power at any cost. What was noteworthy about Bush V. Gore was the amount of dancing the Rehnquist Court did around the precedent they were setting - they made great pains to write out any possible future outcomes because really, all they wanted was for Bush to win. Logic-based political parties suffer from the requirement that their moves make sense and are a part of historical continuity. Allegiance-based political parties suffer from the fact that their only cohesion comes from affinity and opportunism. The Democratic Party is and has been a logic-based political party. The Republican Party started transitioning to allegiance-based after Eisenhower but really nose-dived into pure fealty with Trump. The move for the Democrats is to do Democrat things in order to maintain their Democratic base; the move for Republicans is to amp up the passion for their base. The problem, of course, is that their base has peeled away from the middle. They end up in a doom spiral that has a very real chance of sucking us all down with them. I'm making my way through Second Hand Time. It's fucking rough. The through-lines, though, are crystal clear: 1) There is no Russia only Moscow 2) Every republic except Russia hated the USSR 3) Muscovites prefer to dominate others - even if they suffer - over actually knowing their place in the world pecking order I see a lot of Republicanism in it. The Republicans have cooked up this imaginary past when everything was great and the Blacks and Mexicans knew their place and if we just own the libs hard enough we can return to 1952. When a Trump administration with both wings of government fails to get any traction? It's because the libs aren't being owned hard enough. If they just believe harder they'll be able to return to a utopia that never existed, when they didn't have to deal with the fact that other people have feelings and that there is no "away" in "throw stuff away." "Trump is king" is the logical end result. There is not a speculative fiction writer out there whose basis of government was anything other than "we'll have a one-world government run dispassionately by people we agree with." The complications of actually running a country aren't interesting to that line of thinking. (1) Make Trump King (2) Whatever Trump wants is good for the country (3) If you don't like it learn to suck up better. The USSR was corrupt. The people who ran it were the ones who most benefited from the corruption. Then Gorbachev tried to root out the corruption and the USSR collapsed. The people who came out on top were the opportunists, the people who lost were the idealists, the people who were crushed was everyone else. The Roberts court is at "theocracies are simpler." Your soldier? Needs to carry out his illegal orders in hopes he does it well enough to get a pardon so he'd best please the King. That's simple strongman logic, which is exactly what the Republicans want.
I'm not as sure as you are about that for two reasons. Firstly, they could have decided the case narrowly to simply say that Trump is immune. They didn't. They said The President is immune for any official act, then went on to define "official" so broadly as to make almost anything official in some conceivable way. And secondly, this dumb fucking "unitary executive" hypothesis has been kicking around for decades. Nixon himself wasn't the one who first opined that when the president does it, it's not illegal. Largely, however, I agree with you that Roberts has gone out of his way to try to twist himself in knots to sound intellectual while basically holding the party line to the greatest extent possible. I think he'll go down as a great villain of 21 c. America. You expect that out of the other lackeys, but he tries to position himself as above the fray, and he's not fooling many people.The mistake everyone is making is the assumption that the Roberts court is attempting to set precedent.
To clarify, this is the scenario I think they envision: 1) president crimes 2) Congress whines about said crime 3) Complications ensue; case goes before the Supreme Court 4) Supreme Court decides whether the President is Republican When I say they "aren't setting precedent" I mean that they do not intend to create any case law that stands on its own. They absolutely want to cement their powers as the ultimate arbiters of all law and jurisprudence. Which means your ability to slow walk, obfuscate and delay will absolutely be dependent on the political makeup of congress and the courts. Populist regimes around the world are doing a banner job of demonstrating why that "appointed for life" bullshit associated with the courts is a terrible fucking idea. I suspect it will go away a piece at a time. Fundamentally, the more parliamentarian our courts become the less sense it makes for them to be political appointees. Fuckin' run for election like every other choad.
Agree with an amendment in favor of parliamentary systems. Or even re-writing much of the constitution, but I'm not gonna pretend like we're in any position to hold a constitutional convention in the current political climate, even if the will was there. Same for an amendment, I guess. The other thing I haven't seen discussed here yet is that Alito and Thomas want to retire, but won't step down unless the president is GOP/Trump. How much that motivates the decisions of Roberts and the rest of the Trump-appointed SCOTUS is a fair question, but it probably explains at least a bit.
Oooof, dark. Had to look that one up. Maybe I'll just stick with my "MAKE SCOTUS SCARED AGAIN" pink hat (w/ inverted Alito face on the back). It's no wonder all of the MAGA celebs and pols demonize cities so much, they're too scared to show their face in public inside a metroplex. I'm all for reinforcing that. Did you see the evening shots yesterday of the crowd barricades put up outside of SCOTUS, with zero people around? Unfortunate. Maybe folks saw what happened to the kids on university lawns.
Here's how it will go. JD Vance really gets it. Biden would do best to realize that they'll try to jail him regardless of what he does or doesn't do. And speaking of the latter, I'm looking very much forward to the SCOTUS ruling, in a veneer of intellectual prose, explaining why Biden's inaction on immigration law is not considered an official act. Like "inactions, in fact, are non-official". That'd be perfect, especially after Trump had his House puppets scuttle the immigration reform talks earlier this year. Honestly I can't think of anything a future Trump admin would try to prosecute Biden for that's based in fact, and since anti-immigration xenophobia is the #1 motivating animus of MAGA, that'll probably be what they go for.
Disregard what I just said in chat. You get it. I just want to be so, so wrong when I worry that our transition to post-democracy could all come in one fell swoop before January 20th via the judiciary. But I can assure everyone that the transition from election subversion and denialism into actual rigged elections will be more seamless than anyone imagined, should Trump get back in office. If he even decides to uphold a facade of "elections". They're attempting to return the Republicans to power at any cost.