The 'Supreme' Court Won't Save Us, Plus

We're all homeless now, plus Whisky Pete, whatever, plus music

Not his country (credit Weldon Berger)

The 'Supreme' Court Won't Save Us

Those headlines represent a small sampling of recent predictions that the new regime’s power grab won’t survive their ongoing collision with the federal courts. The New York Times piece from retired federal judge Michael Luttig, a frequent and respected commentator on judicial affairs, closes with this prediction:

If the president oversteps his authority in his dispute with Judge Boasberg, the Supreme Court will step in and assert its undisputed constitutional power “to say what the law is.” A rebuke from the nation’s highest court in his wished-for war with the nation’s federal courts could well cripple Mr. Trump’s presidency and tarnish his legacy.

And Chief Justice Marshall’s assertion that it is the duty of the courts to say what the law is will be the last word.

Boasberg is the federal judge who attempted to block the regime’s transfer of (mostly) Venezuelan migrants who the regime claims are members of a Venezuelan gang which has effectively invaded the U.S. and thus fall within the authority of a wartime emergency law, from the U.S. to a deadly El Salvadoran prison where they have effectively been disappeared. The judge wants the regime to explain what if any due process the migrants were afforded and why the U.S. defied his order to halt the deportations.

Regime lawyers have to this point treated Boasberg’s rulings and demands for responses as a joke, variously arguing, if one can call it that, that the judge’s order to halt the deportations came too late to safely turn around the aircraft on which the migrants were transferred, and additionally that the planes were outside U.S. airspace at the time of the order and so it wasn’t applicable to them, as if he was ordering the inanimate planes to turn around as opposed to ordering the regime, who are not outside U.S. airspace, to turn them around.

And of course there’s the oft-tried and oft-accepted state secrets/national security component, sometimes called the “we could tell you why we did what we did but then we’d have to kill you” defense, behind which every admininstration worth its salt hides whenever they’ve done something illegal or embarrassing.

Now imagine if you will the court which immunized Trump and his successors from consequences for their crimes in office attempting to halt the commission of those crimes. If the crimes are assumed to be so central to carrying out the head of state’s duties that they cannot be punished afterward, how can the same judges rule that they’re not central now?

But for the sake of argument, let’s say that two among the supreme court majority who made a king of the president regret their decision and move to mitigate it. What expectation can there be that the crime of disobeying them would scare the regime out of doing so? Thanks to the power of the pardon, there can be no criminals in government other than ones who offend the kings or their factotums.

We cannot count on any court to stop the regime. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t support the courts in trying to do so—leaving a record is important—or the people and organizations bringing cases against the regime; only that it’s something to be done in parallel with other, perhaps less formal efforts.

We're all homeless now

Back in 2022 The Financial Times ran a story titled “Britain and the US are poor societies with some very rich people,” which we’ve mentioned several times, including in the post below. You should read what we wrote on that occasion (peripherally for an introduction to the anti-communist folk singer Janet Greene, who scored a hit among the Goldwater crowd with songs including “Comrade’s Lament” and “Commie Lies”).

Whatever They're Doing Is Not For You

The gist of the FT piece is that the U.S. can’t be said to have been our country, for the value of “our” which doesn’t include wealthy individuals and corporations, for some while now. What can be said is that the people who have loosely owned the country during that long while are now aggressively consolidating their control with malicious intent. Quoting ourselves,

The obvious point, which we’ve made before because it’s obvious, is that all of the ills afflicting the bottom 90% of our economic heap, and most especially the bottom 20%, getting worse as you burrow down, are the result of policy choices, either to do something that makes matters worse or to refrain from doing something to make them better.

You may think you’re insulated by virtue of social standing or skin color or economic status or political preference, but unless you’re on the board of directors of USA Inc, you’re not. You may not be at immediate risk of losing the roof over your head, although literally millions of us, including me, are—been there, done that more than once—but this is nevertheless not your country anymore if ever it was.

And you may despise the voters who helped bring about the current state of affairs or the citizens who only celebrate it, but if at some point they’re out in the streets throwing concrete . . . accusations at the king and his court, consider meeting them there.

Whisky Pete, whatever

You’re no doubt aware that the drunk in charge at the Pentagon along with some other juvenile Lords of Undiscipline conducted a chortling group-chat preview of secret plans for an assault on Yemen that they shared, presumably by accident, with Atlantic editor Jeff Goldberg, who to be fair is so far up the national security state’s ass in any administration—hence even the possibility that he’d be included by virtue of very senior officials having him on autodial—that he’s no threat to do more than embarrass a particular one, which he has done by posting some non-secret aspects of the chat.

Outraged people are calling for Hegseth and other participants in the chat to resign or be fired, which won’t happen. Nobody was under any illusion that the participants were remotely qualified to be hired for their jobs, in the traditional understanding of “qualified,” so nobody has any reason to think they’ll be fired for graphically proving it.

It’s more likely that Goldberg will get in some sort of hot water for not keeping even quieter than he has done. Ken Klippenstein has words for the Atlantic honcho’s flaccid brand of journalism.

Goldberg took the scoop of a lifetime and chose to act as gatekeeper, publishing only the most innocuous tidbits like what emojis different officials used and their goofy backslapping instead of the actual news. It is one of the worst cases of media paternalism, what I call highchair journalism — open up for your infotainment, here comes the airplane: Trump officials used emojis, LOL! — but also a disturbing reminder of how much the mainstream media have been co-opted by the national security state.

“I will not quote from this … or from certain other subsequent texts,” the Atlantic’s editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg wrote of the Trump administration messages to which he was privy. “The information contained in them, if they had been read by an adversary of the United States, could conceivably have been used to harm American military and intelligence personnel, particularly in the broader Middle East, Central Command’s area of responsibility.”

He sounds more like a Pentagon spokesman than a journalist dedicated to informing the public.

A number of people have mentioned that perhaps more significant than the stupidity and carelessness is the likelihood that the use of a commercial messaging service for the exposed hijinks, Signal, signals an attempt to evade U.S. Presidential Records Act requirements. One can assume that’s a widespread practice among regime insiders. If you don’t know, now you know.

Fight or flight

My comfort zone on the mental disturbance front is depression, but during the past month or so a sense of constant, low-level panic is moving up the charts. It’s debilitating.

Subscriptions and such

If you like what I do, please let me know and share it around, and if you’ve not already, consider a free or paid subscription. Free subscriptions get what paid ones do other than the enduring pleasure of treating me to an occasional round of sashimi.

Music

The Reivers, Saturday, “Once in a While;”

Squalls, Live From The 40 Watt, “Bride of Frankenstein;”

McCoy Tyner, Asante, “Goin’ Home.”

Be well; take care.