Thanks so much to those who were able to join the great discussion that I had on Wednesday night with my fellow Substack author
, who writes the must-read .If you’re a free subscriber, here’s a brief clip from that conversation:
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Thanks, as always, for your support.
Steve
It can be argued that the conservatives on the Supreme Court are more dangerous to the life and well being of our country than ex-president Trump. Indeed, it is likely that Trump owes his success in no small measure to the wrecking ball “decisions” of the Court, chief among them those that gut our election laws and the refusal to deal with gerrymandering. What galls me is they have achieved their results using slippery language and tricks of rhetoric almost as crude as those used by carnival barkers and Mr. Trump himself. We were treated yesterday with examples in defense of the notion that our president needs immunity. Why is it needed? Some future president will create turmoil by ruthlessly using his office to squash his opponent.
Why do I object to this ruse? Well, it is simple to the point of being simple minded. It is a fake fear manufactured to frighten weak minds. The justices label it as a “hypothetical”. They used this same trick in arriving at the need to abolish the right to abortion. In that argument, you will find the Trumps of the world threaten the hypothetical of mothers strangling healthy babies fresh out of the womb. I’m sure Alito refers to this fear at times. What makes it a ruse is, first, the situations depicted are unrealistic and unlikely. But mostly because they willfully ignore real fears of the policies created by their rulings.
Here’s a list of my favorites:
• No fear has been expressed of the results of allowing Ak-15’s to be sold everywhere to anyone. How can that be? One might as well argue that bazookas, carrying only one charge, come much closer to the revolutionary war musket. Or the recently marketed flame thrower.
• No fear was expressed by the court about opening our elections to secret money and the warped world it has created where billions – BILLIONS!! – are now being spent in endless campaigns.
• Gerrymandering did not cause our Justices to quiver in fear of the drastically unfair elections that have been foisted on the populace by their unwillingness to with them. No hypotheticals were raised in that decision.
• We all know the chaos in our medical systems has been unleashed by overthrowing Roe v. Wade. Where were the hypotheticals?
No, frightening hypotheticals are only useful when near-lunatic justices want to carve out new laws from the bench. Similar objections could be raised against the phony claim that their lunatic laws can be justified by reference to some manufactured “original meaning”. How have we come to accept the loose, foggy reasoning that goes into their stupid and costly decisions? We have allowed a group of nasty, dishonest, corrupt people lead our country into a wilderness of folly. Guns, money, restrictive laws on abortion that maim and kill mothers, fake elections that define results based on dishonestly drawn districts. When will it end?
Maybe they have gone too far. They are attempting now to block the most corrupt politician in our nation’s history from being held to account by fake hypotheticals and twisted logic. Imagine the tar and feathers such behavior would have been greeted with in olden times. We are frogs and the water is getting hotter.
Where is that interpreter that was in the room with Trump and putin in that meeting no one else was allowed to attend?