American Democracy – immigrationcourtside.com

🏴‍☠️CRISTIAN FARIAS @ VANITY FAIR: WHAT HAPPENS WHEN A MAJORITY OF A DEMOCRACY’S TOP JUDGES NO LONGER BELIEVE IN DEMOCRACY & ARE UNWILLING TO DEFEND IT?☠️

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/08/post-roe-scotus-is-on-a-collision-course-with-democracy

After destabilizing the nation over abortion, and moving further right on guns, climate, and religion, the conservative justices’ sights are on affirmative action, voting rights, and a fringe legal theory that could empower Trump-friendly state legislatures for future elections.

BY CRISTIAN FARIAS

AUGUST 25, 2022

On the eve of his retirement, the nation’s first Black justice and constitutional giant, Thurgood Marshall, took a moment to denounce the Supreme Court of the United States over its “radical” path of abandoning past decisions for no other reason than the court’s membership had changed. Owing to these shifts in personnel, Marshall charged, now “scores of established constitutional liberties” hung in the balance, the powerless were left defenseless, and the court’s own authority and legitimacy were diminished. “Power, not reason, is the new currency of this Court’s decisionmaking,” Marshall warned in 1991, in what turned out to be his final dissenting opinion.

The dissenting justices in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the watershed case that discarded nearly 50 years of American jurisprudence protecting a woman’s right to terminate a pregnancy, felt the need to quote from Marshall’s decades-old warning because power, indeed, is the only sensible explanation for the Supreme Court’s present course. The seismic end of Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, two pillars of a much larger structure of unenumerated constitutional rights the high court has erected over almost a century, was neither legally necessary nor a product of profound changes in American society. Instead, five justices tore these precedents off the law books, ushering in a new era of abortion criminalization and second-class citizenship for half the nation, simply because they could—and had the numbers to do so. “Neither law nor facts nor attitudes have provided any new reasons to reach a different result than Roe and Casey did,” wrote Justices Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan in their anguished Dobbs dissent. “All that has changed is this Court.”

As radical and destabilizing as the fall of Roe is for our most intimate personal decisions, beyond just abortion rights, its ripples will extend to other areas where the conservative justices are already smelling blood. Not satisfied with the erasure of just one constitutional right, Clarence Thomas, writing separately in Dobbs, indicated that contraception and same-sex marriage could be next. That future begins now. These actions and other signals make abundantly clear what Marshall foresaw: The Supreme Court is on a collision course with democracy itself. Dobbs merely sets the stage.

Every new justice creates a new court, the maxim goes. Yet for much of their time on the bench, Justice Samuel Alito, long a soldier in the Republican holy war to curtail abortion rights, and Thomas, an avowed Roe antagonist, had the will but not the votes to impose their antiabortion vision on the majority of the Supreme Court, much less on the rest of the country. Their fortunes, and power, changed with the election of Donald Trump, whose own marriage of convenience with white evangelicals and social conservatives paved the way for his presidency and the installation of three new justices of a different mold, all of them more extreme and lacking the moderation of Republican appointees of the past, including those who made Roe and Casey possible.

Next to this “restless and newly constituted Court,” as Sotomayor branded this new majority in June, Chief Justice John Roberts looks as weakened as ever. The Supreme Court may bear his name, and the chief may have come of age during the abortion wars of the 1980s and ’90s, but neither his title nor institutionalist bent could convince the reactionaries to his right that their power grab in Dobbs represented “a serious jolt to the legal system” that he simply could not join in full. Too much, too soon. To the Trump justices, plus Thomas and Alito, this shock to the nation could not come soon enough.

Nominated by a president who lost the popular vote and narrowly confirmed by a Senate plagued by minority rule, these justices—Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett—were all groomed for this moment. All of them were grown in the test tube of the Federalist Society, the conservative legal brain trust that for decades has been a judicial pipeline for Republican administrations and state governments, which since the time of Ronald Reagan have made the fall of Roe a white whale of their politics.

. . . .

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Read the rest of the article at the link.

Cristian creates an interesting vignette. The Justices take a few minutes to gather to welcome Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Court. Then, the Right Wing Majority goes to work ignoring her views, insuring her marginalization, and pushing a minority agenda drawing into question her very existence as a person under law.

The conclusion of the article is perhaps most illustrative of the uncertain future of democracy, human rights, equal justice, and indeed basic human decency:

“Women are not without electoral or political power,” wrote without irony the five justices who ended their right to be full and equal citizens before the law in Dobbs. In asserting power rather than reason over what remains of our less than perfect union, the Supreme Court may well unravel democracy with it, taking us down a path from which there is no return.

Quite an achievement for a Court now dominated by those appointed by Presidents whose election (initial or sole) contravened the will of the majority of voters.

“Better Judges for a Better America!” Why not start with your “wholly owned and operated” Immigration Courts, Merrick Garland?

🇺🇸Due Process Forever!

PWS

08-29-22

More from today’s WashPost on the threat to our democracy posed by the anti-democracy, scofflaw GOP and their right wing judges:

William Webster and William Cohen on how today’s MAGA-infested GOP has become a cult of the lawless: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/26/mar-a-lago-fbi-attacks-lawless-gop/

E.J. Dionne on how the “off the rails, far right” GOP Supremes’ majority threatens humanity’s future with their anti-scientific, anti-government, anti-truth far right agenda: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/28/west-virginia-epa-inflation-reduction-act/

Jennifer Rubin on how one distinguished Senior U.S. District Judge, a Clinton appointee, stood up to the GOP’s anti-abortion overreach: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/28/federal-judge-pushback-idaho-abortion-ban/

⚖️ABOVE THE LAW: Trump Treated Ethics, Legal Norms, & Human Values Like A Joke — The GOP Supremes Laughed With Him, As They Insured His Lack Of Accountability & Actively Undermined Those With The Courage To Stand Up To Tyranny!🤮

Jacqueline Thomsen reports for the National Law Journal:

. . . .

Even with an emoluments lawsuit filed against Trump on his first day in office, four years later nothing came of it. After he left office, the lawsuits were declared moot by the U.S. Supreme Court and dismissed.

The struggle to legally hold Trump to account over the alleged emoluments violations were emblematic of the rest of the lawsuits he faced during his presidency, whether they targeted him individually or his administration.

When lower courts ruled against Trump officials—as they did in suits over border wall construction—his administration would go to the U.S. Supreme Court to get an emergency order that allowed them to continue the challenged action. More often than not, Trump got a ruling in his favor.

“Trump could count on them for anything,” Norm Ornstein, a conservative resident scholar with the American Enterprise Institute, said of Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito.

“And certainly that’s the case with Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett,” he added, referring to the three justices Trump appointed to the court.

And the novel legal questions surrounding lawsuits against a sitting president were enough to significantly delay several other challenges against him. House cases dragged out as courts determined whether lawmakers had the ability to sue to enforce subpoenas against the administration, a legal issue that forced similar suits to halt for months.

Despite two impeachments, hundreds of lawsuits against his administration and other litigation targeting him and his businesses, Trump left office relatively legally unscathed. Armed with a litigious past and a grip on his political party, he successfully managed to use the country’s institutions to minimize the blowback and get his way.

. . . .

************************

Those with NLJ access (everyone used to get 3 free articles/mo; now it’s down to one) can read the rest of Jacqueline’s article at the link. She’s a great writer. Too bad so much of her work is “hidden behind the wall.”

Lack of accountability for scofflaw behavior, abuse of power, and corruption are hallmarks of third-world dictatorships and authoritarian regimes throughout history.

The Supremes’ enabling started with the Travel Ban cases and continued to the Capitol insurrection, which “the complicit ones” were able to watch unfold from their marble palace across the street.

So, the Supremes, the institution whose most important job is to protect American democracy, democratic institutions, due process, and individual rights when the other two branches fail, wasn’t up to the job! Despite the Supremes’ best efforts to undermine democratic governance, and their active furthering of the GOP’s race-driven voter suppression agenda, 81 million voters bailed us out this time around. But, it’s highly unlikely that American democracy could survive another “Trump-type” authoritarian regime. Don’t expect any help from the Supremes as currently comprised.

⚖️🧑🏽‍⚖️Better judges for a better America!🇺🇸🗽

🇺🇸⚖️🗽Due Process Forever!

PWS

03-04-21

CATHERINE RAMPELL @ WASHPOST: We’re ALL Complicit In Trump’s Destruction Of American Democracy!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/whos-to-blame-for-the-death-of-american-democracy-all-of-us/2019/09/23/a03ce862-de40-11e9-b199-f638bf2c340f_story.html

R.I.P. American democracy. You still had so much left to give! Whom should we blame for your untimely demise?

Understandably, many believe the coldhearted killer was President Trump. He has after all solicited foreign help to aid him in taking out a political rival — twice. He continues to accept payments from other foreign leaders and well-heeled business executives, who patronize his properties in clear hopes of influencing U.S. policy. He has refused to disclose his tax returns, necessary to determine whether the executive branch is working in his interest or the country’s. He has sought to punish perceived political enemies, minorities and other groups that dare cross him.

And so on. But is Trump truly the guilty party?

In my view, he’s the wrong, or at least an incomplete, answer to this particular whodunit.

Had the perpetrator been Individual 1 — and only Individual 1 — our dearly departed victim might still be alive, if perhaps wounded. The real answer is more of a Murder-on-the-Orient-Express-type conclusion: We all did it.

Unindicted co-conspirators in this heartless murder include Republican lawmakers. They have been led by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.), House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (Calif.) and former House speaker Paul D. Ryan (Wis.), who tolerated massacres of civil rights, of rule of law and of other democratic values and institutions, so long as the party got its federal judges or tax cuts.

They got lots of help from their colleagues. Even when those colleagues were on record as disapproving of the exact kinds of anti-democratic actions Trump acknowledges taking.

Recall that in June, Trump told ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos that he’d gladly accept dirt from a foreign power on a political rival, and asserted that all politicians do so. Republican lawmakers flatly condemned Trump’s approach to such foreign-offered “oppo research” and said that they’d go straight to the FBI if anyone ever made such an offer. Senators on the record expressing some version of this view include Majority Whip John Thune (S.D.), Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.), Joni Ernst (Iowa), Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), Cory Gardner (Colo.), Thom Tillis (N.C.), Marco Rubio (Fla.), John Cornyn (Tex.) and Mitt Romney (Utah).

Fast-forward to today. Now that the hypothetical appears to have come true, they’ve mostly fallen silent. Or worse: They’ve urged the Justice Department to investigate the political rival whom Trump sought a foreign power’s help in sullying, former vice president Joe Biden.

At best, you have Romney tweeting that “If the President asked or pressured Ukraine’s president to investigate his political rival, either directly or through his personal attorney, it would be troubling in the extreme.” Except that “if” is superfluous, given that Trump’s personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani acknowledged this way back in May.

Trump’s lickspittle Cabinet officials are also implicated in the Trump-coordinated assault on democracy.

On Sunday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo gave multiple interviews in which he suggested that Biden is the real party responsible for interfering in U.S. elections. (Umm, what?) Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin — who has elsewhere praised Trump’s “perfect genes” — likewise dismissed as “speculation” reporting that Trump directed Ukrainian leaders to investigate Biden. Even though Trump then appeared to confirm that “speculation” (and then reversed himself again on Monday).

Even former defense secretary Jim Mattis, out with a new book on leadership, ducked a question about whether it would be wrong for a president, any president, to ask foreign leaders to investigate political opponents.

Meanwhile, the media has also dropped the ball.

I don’t just mean Trump’s preferred propaganda outlet, Fox News. The rest of us have allowed the president to serve as our assignment editor. We spread his smears for him, and too often shy from coverage of any threat to democracy more technical than a tweet. At best, we ask Democrats what would, at last, count as an impeachable offense — but rarely direct such inquiries at Republicans, who, you know, actually stand in the way of a fair impeachment trial.

Democrats share some blame, too, feckless as they’ve been. They dragged their feet in demanding critical documents, including Trump’s tax returns. They failed to competently question petulant and obstructive witnesses such as former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski. And they frequently seem more interested in attacking one another than holding Trump to account.

Given all this, can you really blame voters, disillusioned and disappointed as they are, for tuning out the onslaught on American democracy — and thereby contributing to its demise? Add them to the list anyway.

Yes, Trump has repeatedly, egregiously abused his power. He fired an arrow at the heart of our most cherished norms and institutions. But it took the rest of us to ensure that he hit his target.

************************************************************

I certainly see Catherine’s point. But, I have a few additional thoughts:

She fails to mention the key failure of the Supremes and many of the U.S. Courts of Appeals.
- Starting with the whitewash of Trump’s invidiously discriminatory actions in the Travel Ban Case, and continuing with the disgraceful and cowardly 7-2 cop out in Barr v. East Side Sanctuary Covenant, the Supremes have a) showed a cowardly indifference to Constitutional rights of individuals, particularly refugees and migrants; and b) have failed to show necessary support for the U.S. District Judges who courageously have stood up against this Administration’s illegal actions;
- With some exceptions, the Courts of Appeals have also failed to get the job done (particularly by not holding that the Immigration Courts as they exist in the DOJ are unconstitutional);
- When all else fails, the Article III Courts are supposed to be our bulwark against tyranny – they have failed miserably to fulfill that critical constitutional duty.
It’s hard to see how those fighting tooth and nail against the Administration’s abuses, often with scant support from the courts, like the “New Due Process Army,” immigration advocates, pro bono lawyers, and anti-Trump religious organizations have been “complicit;”
Not all are equally complicit.
- While the Dems have been somewhat feckless, you can’t really equate that with the evil of “Moscow Mitch”, Paul Ryan, and the GOP who have eagerly embraced Trump’s anti-American, racist agendas and continuous stream of false narratives;
- Again, while “mainstream media” have undoubtedly made some mistakes, there is no equivalency with the maliciously false, racist, overtly corrupt White Nationalist agendas of Fox News, Breitbart, and other far right “news outlets” and vile right-wing racist operatives posing as “news commentators.”

PWS

09-24-19

THOMAS B. EDSALL IN THE NYT: DEMOCRACY SOWING THE SEEDS FOR ITS OWN (AND OUR) DESTRUCTION!

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/19/opinion/democracy-populism-trump.html?em_pos=small&emc=edit_up_20171023&nl=upshot&nl_art=5&nlid=79213886&ref=headline&te=1

Edsall writes:

“Will President Trump’s assault on the norms underpinning constitutional democracy permanently alter American political life?

On a daily basis, Trump tests the willingness of the public to accept a president who lies as a matter of routine. So far, Trump has persuaded a large swath of America to swallow what he feeds them.

. . . .

As Sasha Polakow-Suransky, the author of “Go Back to Where You Came From: The Backlash Against Immigration and the Fate of Western Democracy,” warns in The New York Review of Books:

Liberal democracies are better equipped than authoritarian states to grapple with the inevitable conflicts that arise in diverse societies, including the threat of terrorist violence. But they also contain the seeds of their own destruction: if they fail to deal with these challenges and allow xenophobic populists to hijack the public debate, then the votes of frustrated and disaffected citizens will increasingly go to the anti-immigrant right, societies will become less open, nativist parties will grow more powerful, and racist rhetoric that promotes a narrow and exclusionary sense of national identity will be legitimized.

The threat to democracy posed by the current outbreak of populist nationalism has become a matter of concern for both scholars and ordinary citizens. The central topic at a conference at Yale earlier this month was “How Do Democracies Fall Apart,” and the subject will be taken up again in November at a Stanford conference called “Global Populisms: A Threat to Democracy?”

I contacted several of the participants at the Yale gathering and was struck by their anxiety over the future prospects of democratic governance.

One of the most insightful was Adam Przeworski, a political scientist at N.Y.U., who has written, but not yet published, his own analysis of current events under the title “What’s Happening.”

First and foremost, Przeworski stresses,

there is nothing “undemocratic” about the electoral victory of Donald Trump or the rise of anti-establishment parties in Europe.

These parties and candidates, he points out:

Do not advocate replacing elections by some other way of selecting rulers. They are ugly — most people view racism and xenophobia as ugly — but these parties do campaign under the slogan of returning to ‘the people’ the power usurped by elites, which they see as strengthening democracy. In the words of a Trump advertisement, “Our movement is about replacing a failed and corrupt political establishment with a new government controlled by you, the American people.”

In support of Przeworski’s argument, it is clear that the success of the Trump campaign in winning the Republican nomination was the result of a classic democratic insurgency: the Republican electorate’s rejection of its party’s establishment.

The danger in the United States, in Przeworski’s view, is the possibility that the Trump administration will use the power of the presidency to undermine the procedures and institutions essential to the operation of democracy:

That the incumbent administration would intimidate hostile media and create a propaganda machine of its own, that it would politicize the security agencies, that it would harass political opponents, that it would use state power to reward sympathetic private firms, that it would selectively enforce laws, that it would provoke foreign conflicts to monger fear, that it would rig elections.

Przeworski believes that

such a scenario would not be unprecedented. The United States has a long history of waves of political repression: the “Red Scare” of 1917-20, the internment of Japanese citizens during World War II, the McCarthy period, the Nixon presidency.

Along similar lines, Anna Grzymala-Busse, a political scientist at Stanford, replied by email to my inquiry:

My big worry is not simply that formal institutions have been eroded, but that the informal norms that underpin them are even more important and even more fragile. Norms of transparency, conflict of interest, civil discourse, respect for the opposition and freedom of the press, and equal treatment of citizens are all consistently undermined, and without these the formal institutions become brittle.

Trump, in Grzymala-Busse’s assessment, “articulates a classic populist message that we see in Europe: the elite establishment is a collusive cartel uninterested in the problems of ‘the people,’” and, she continued, he has begun to follow the path of European populist leaders:

Much of Trump’s language and actions are also familiar: there is a standard authoritarian populist template, developed in Hungary and faithfully followed in Poland and in Turkey: first, go after the courts, then the media, then the civil society, churches, universities.

The attacks on the courts, media and universities

are not simply the ravings of a lunatic, but an established strategy for undermining democratic oversight and discrediting the opposition.

. . . .

Paul Waldman, writing in The Washington Post on Oct, 17, summed up Trump’s approach to veracity and to reality itself:

Trump takes his own particular combination of ignorance, bluster and malice, and sets it off like a nuclear bomb of misinformation. The fallout spreads throughout the country, and no volume of corrections and fact checks can stop it. It wasn’t even part of a thought-out strategy, just a loathsome impulse that found its way out of the president’s mouth to spread far and wide.

Trump’s recklessness is disturbing enough on its own. But what makes it especially threatening is that much of the public — well beyond the 40 percent of the electorate that has shown itself to be unshakable in its devotion to the president — seems to be slowly accommodating itself to its daily dose of the Trump reality show, accepting the rhetorical violence that Trump inflicts on basic standards of truth as the new normal.”

*********************************************

Read Edsall’s full, much longer, article at the link.

An immigration policy based on xenophobia, racism, and White Nationalism, rather than on any rational, generally accepted socio-economic analysis, is at the heart of the Trump–Bannon-Sessions-Miller attack on America’s democratic institutions. As I said earlier today, “The Trump Administration, and its ‘fellow travelers’ among GOP politicos and voters, is the biggest threat to our national security and the future of American Democracy.”

PWS

10-22-17

🇺🇸Due Process Forever!

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🇺🇸⚖️🗽Due Process Forever!

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