God and Man at the Supreme Court

 

If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.

--Voltaire 

One reason we need our Supreme Court justices to wear black robes and to have a ritual at the Court on 1st Street in Washington, D.C. is we need to have an unimpeachable power, like God, to give a final judgement. So the sessions begin with "Oyez! Oyez! All persons having business before the Supreme Court of the United States, are admonished to draw near and give their attention, for the Court is now sitting. God save the United States and this Honorable Court!"

The trouble with a republic, with a government of the people, by the people, for the people is that the people are fractious and argue all the time, and often simply will never accept they are wrong about anything, so you have to have somebody who will settle things and end all the contention. So we really like the finality, the omniscience of a court.

 Unless, of course, you are Donald Trump, in which case you rage against those who judge you, unless they adore you.

But the rest of us submit, and we like it, as the parishioners in a Catholic Church enjoy submitting. 

It makes us feel there is a power in the universe which controls fates according to impartial laws, and a place where the good guys win and the bad guys punished.

Until you discover one justice who has been given a home for his mother and a mobile vacation home for himself, and another who believes he is anointed to bring godliness to the nation and four others who will vote to allow bump stocks to convert rifles into machine guns so you can shoot 58 people in a few seconds, if you decide God has told you to do so.

And your justices can declare that separation of church and state is unconstitutional now, and that no precedent in law matters any more, that thing called stare decisis is a dead letter, so that every prior decision is no longer safe--same sex marriage, inter racial marriage, abortion, contraception are now on the docket, as Justice Thomas said in his Dobbs opinion, where he invited cases about these issues to be brought before the Court because he intended to reverse those erroneous decisions of the past.

Thomas might entertain revisiting Brown v Board of Education, because, you know, to say that separate but equal is inherently unequal, is just so 20th century.

The thing about Mr. Trump and judges is that he is such a bomb thrower the whole bowing and scraping thing to judges just gets exploded along with all the rituals of respect for authority figures--that's called "draining the swamp," you see--and if Mr. Trump dropped his trousers and mooned the judge, his fans would squeal with delight. 

There is about as much chance we will ever fix our judges and judicial system as we will ever kill the Electoral College. 

The arguments against "packing the Court" or using some other mechanism to replace the justices who are currently ensconced come down to two:

1. A Court of fixed, lifetime justices provides stability, to anchor the country in a stormy sea, where political passions shift in four year cycles. It provides predictability so businesses and individuals can plan ahead years and decades, a rock, a North Star, in a tempestuous sea of ever changing political passions. 

The trouble with this Court as an anchor idea is that the Court clearly has, at least since it became a Trump Court, and even before, not been an anchor immune to the shifting tides and passions of political opinion. The Dobbs decision was a political decision: Trump said he'd pack the Court to overturn Roe and he did and they did the job they were appointed to do. And in doing so, Justice Thomas, in his opinion, clearly said it would not end with Dobbs, as he looked at the cases legalizing gay marriage and even contraception, based on an implied finding of a right to privacy, and he invited new cases so he could rule against these things. That is not an anchor, not continuity, but revolution. 

This current Court, with Thomas leading the way, calls for undoing generations of decisions which the Federalist Society and the National Rifle Association and the John Birch Society and the Ku Klux Klan have hated: decisions regarding laws attempting to regulate gun ownership and use, carrying and firepower, decisions about whether consenting adults can have sex with whomever they wish, decisions about whether separation of church and state is a guaranteed principle, a First amendment right, or an anathema and unconstitutional. This Court is not an institution of stability but an instrument of political will coming from the far right. 

And so that makes the Court ultimately not just political, but the most political of all our branches of government. It tells us what we cannot vote on, what the rule will be. So when Roy Cohn provided Donald Trump with his fundamental concept: "Don't tell me about the Law; tell me about the Judge," that was a fundamental insight.

2. Packing the Court would mean that the Court could grow to an unwieldy number, unless some justices were ejected, and Court packing certainly would acknowledge that the Court is a institution driven not by "the law" but by partisan politics.

There are two answers to this: 

a/ Some supreme courts in Europe have 150 justices and they function quite well, thank you. So size is not in and of itself, a problem. But if you like the Court to stay at 9 justices, then you can rotate out some of them and rotate in new justices, at least according to Bernie Sanders. The Constitution only says the justices shall serve for life, but it does not say they have to serve on the Supreme Court; they can be rotated back to the lower courts in the federal judiciary, and apparently that was once the practice.

b/ The Court has already, for all practical purposes already been packed.

Mitch McConnell did that, when President Obama nominated Merrick Garland for SCOTUS, McConnell simply said, "No," and when Trump assumed office, McConnell was able to pack the court with a 6-3 super majority. 

Did that not say as baldly as any act that the Court is a political animal?

But we like wearing blinders; we like our dark glasses through which the world is only shadows and we construct images of reality in our mind, not from the evidence we can actually see.

As long as most people can lead their day to day lives, can fill up their pick up trucks with gas, afford their vacation homes and holidays, we are stuck with the system we've got, with judges in black robes who are not just above the law, but who are the law, and a Trump, who like Silvio Berluscone of Italy, will never be punished for breaking any law, and we will have the government and the country we deserve, of the people, by the people, for the people--God save us. 

Felonious Trump: Whose Crooked Now? What is Justice?

 

Occasionally, I have imagined arriving in Heaven and being welcomed at a sort of cocktail party for new arrivals in an event which looked a little like some of the parties thrown by New York publishers I got invited to, decades ago. Scattered about those Manhattan event rooms were people I recognized all brought together in one place:  George Plimpton, Nelson DeMille, Kurt Vonnegut--people you'd expect to see hanging about at a party of literati, but also Carly Simon, the singer, who wound up there because she had written a children's book and was a grand daughter of the Simon of Simon and Shuster, but also the occasional mayor, or ballet dancer. 

But in my imagined welcome party at Heaven, I saw Adolph Hitler, standing there with his Swastika armband, among the other guests, and I thought, "Oh, my, perhaps I did not qualify for Heaven after all, but am in the other place."

The Model Victim

Wannabe

But no, I was assured, I was in Heaven, but so was Adolph. He was just standing there chatting, among the other celebs, all having a pleasant time.

And how would I reconcile those two things?

But then I remembered that passage from that wonderful book I read, as a freshman in college, "The Stranger" in which Meursault, the narrator, who has told you the story of how he, inexplicably,  shot to death an Arab youth on a beach, and who now tells you, immaculately detached, about his trial and the witnesses who come forth to describe how utterly unfeeling he seemed at the funeral of his mother, and Meursault says, likely accurately, that he got the impression he was being judged not for having fatally shot the Arab youth, but for not having cried at the funeral of his mother.  

Listening to Accusations

He was being judge for being alienated from human affection.

And he marvels at the parade of witness who describe him from different parts of his humdrum life, each from his own perspective, relating a scene with Meursault they remember in some detail, as the prosecution systematically builds its case against him as an inhuman, remorseless killer, and Meursault observes the experience engenders even more detachment, as the person they are describing is completely unrecognizable to him, as the picture which emerges is not of him, but a picture of someone he does not know at all, who is on trial, not for a murder on a beach but for being a monster.

Of course, we know Meursault as readers, and we know the scenes described are accurate in one sense, but we know Meursault is not so much unfeeling, as scrupulously honest; he simply refuses to profess feelings he does not really embrace. He would never say, as most of us do, "Oh, I'm so sorry for your loss," when, in fact, we are not really saddened, but we know we have to act out our parts as the sympathetic human beings we are not.

In Meursault's case, his mother has died at an inconvenient time.  The fact is, she had lived apart from him in a nursing home and it is likely she had never much missed him nor him her. They had "grown apart" we might say in polite society. And now she had died and his employer had to give him the Friday off so he could get to the funeral some distance away, and the employer felt he had to say yes, although clearly he was unsympathetic, but in the end he had to say, "Well, there is no one like a mother." He had to play the role of sympathy society demands, but which Meursault sees as phony.

When Donald Trump went on trial, I have not one iota of doubt he heard testimony against him and he did not think any of it fairly described him. He sees himself as a good man, a champion in fact. He had no idea who that man was who was being described by Michael Cohen and Stormy Daniels.

Rauter on Trial

So did Hans Albin Rauter, the SS commandant of the Netherlands, who ruthlessly executed anyone who resisted the German control of that nation, who oversaw the round up and execution of Dutch Jews--the Netherlands, by percentage, purged more Jews than any other European nation falling under Nazi control. (Of 150,000 Dutch Jews only 40,000 survived.)  When Rauter survived an assassination attempt, 500 Dutch were summarily executed in reprisal under his direction. This was standard Third Reich method: Reinhard Heydrich was assassinated in Czechoslovakia and whole villages with villagers int them were burned alive.

 And in both cases the SS men felt wholly justified.

Heydrich

Listening to Rauter testify in his trial for war crimes after the war, you learn he considered himself an innocent victim, who was only concerned with maintaining order in the new, exalted society the Reich was creating.

Obadiah Youngblood

In "Looking for Mr. Goodbar," Judith Rossner provides the confession of the man who murdered a woman he had picked up in a bar, who had taken him home to her apartment, had sex with him but then tried to get him to leave her apartment when he had nowhere else to go, being homeless, and so her stabbed her to death, which, as Rossner observes, seems to him a perfectly reasonable thing to do, and in fact anyone in the same position would have done the same, because, after all, he was the victim.

And so it is with that 40% of the American public who loves Trump. Trump is a completely innocent man. He can never be guilty. His trial was a witch hunt and a travesty of justice, a political charade. 

Hillary Clinton, on the other hand was "crooked." But Trump is a straight arrow who says what he thinks whether it is politically correct or not, like Meursault. He is fundamentally, an honest man who says the truth, offensive as it may be, like, for instance, our country is being poisoned by illegal immigrant rapists, insane asylum escapees, who are dark skinned, and who don't speak English.

You never see yourself as guilty. 

MTG and Dr. Anthony Fauci

 

One wonders why Anthony Fauci, MD, who is no longer a federal employee, would consent to testify at a Congressional hearing when he knows  Marjorie Taylor Greene, Jim Jordan and other Wah Wah Republicans will not actually ask him questions, but will simply use him as a stage prop.

MTG spewed forth a number of complaints:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTSG_xlJvFQ

1/ Science uses dogs in experiments. Beagles (Snoopy) in particular.  She may be unaware it was dogs who were sacrificed to discover insulin in 1922, saving a ward of three hundred Toronto children dying of type 1 diabetes, and very quickly saving thousands then millions of other patients with juvenile diabetes.

Banting and Best discover insulin

2/ MTG expresses withering disdain that Dr. Fauci first questioned the efficacy of masks but then endorsed masking for children and the general population. Fauci, has, of course, said he was skeptical that masks could be effective, but when scientific studies were complete, it was evident they could help reduce spread of infection, so he said then, "Well, I was wrong. They are a useful tool." But for Ms. Greene the mask is a sort of child abuse, comparable to ritual blood sacrifice.  

Obadiah Youngblood New Hampshire Howl

3/ Dr. Fauci is shown in a photo held by Ms. Green as he sits in an empty bleacher section with two people, his mask pulled down below his nose while the other two are masked and the stadium clearly nearly empty. This offense is less clear. Is Ms. Greene saying Fauci was hypocritical in pulling down his mask or in recommending avoiding crowds and then going to a crowdless game? Mad Dog did recognize the woman sitting next to him in the picture--it was Dr. Fauci's wife. That Fauci might unmask while sitting next to his wife, who he lives with, did not strike Mad Dog as a violation of mask protocol. Who the man is, is not clear, but this photo hardly looks like a smoking gun.  Ms. Greene's wah wah seems to be that stadiums were forced to be empty just to prevent spread of a virus which was projected to kill 3 million people but in the end killed only 1 million, because the intervention of Dr. Fauci and those who worked with him.

4/ Ms. Greene rails about NIH scientists collecting $750 million from patents on medicines and other products they developed while employed by the US taxpayer.

Dr. Fauci has said elsewhere he made $125 a year from a patent on a technology for a lab test he developed 25 years before COVID,  but that is not illegal and in fact, he might have added that scientists supported by government grant money not uncommonly set up companies outside their universities to develop and pursue ideas they got while being supported by government grants. 

Fauci is not one of those, but this is a murky part of intellectual property law and Ms. Greene appears to be saying scientists should not profit from their ideas if they are employed by the government. She has not, apparently, read "The Billion Dollar Molecule" which describes how miracle drugs which have changed the fates of millions of patients often start in drug companies or universities, but then are driven by the incentive for profit to be developed outside these places.

5/ MTG represents those resentful, seething folks in Rome, GA, who do not have MD degrees and she refuses to address Dr. Fauci as "doctor" because she knows her constituents love that. Any signifier of respect for a title, anything which confers and recognizes prestige as a result of academic achievement is a red flag waved in the face of her down home folks, who haven't a prayer of ever achieving that title. Oh, so you're a DOCTOR, well let me tell you, we don't respect doctors down round these parts, because we know the doctors torture beagles, make children wear masks in school, develop vaccines which save millions of lives, shake their heads when Donald Trump suggests he has a great idea for ending the COVID pandemic by injecting bleach intravenously, and people like MR Fauci should be thrown in jail for all those horrible things they did to save the nation.

In Georgia, They Love MTG 

Mad Dog remembers Dr. Fauci walking onto a dark ward at two A.M. to talk about a twenty year old woman who was lying in a bed gasping for air. He listened to her heart and then stepped into the hallway and asked the medical student, intern and resident who were standing there trying to figure out what to do for her what they thought her problem was. When they gave their answer, which was wrong, he smiled tolerantly and explained why they were wrong, but he gave them full points for trying, and for holding fast to their post at the bedside and then told them what to do to save her, and then walked off the ward to grab four  hours sleep before Morning Report. 

Dr. Fauci

To Mad Dog's knowledge, Marjorie Taylor Green has never set foot on a ward and saved a patient at 2 AM, or at any more civilized hour, in her entire, brief, ignominious life. Nor has Jim Jordan. Nor have any of the Wah Wah Banana Republicans who argued about "decorum" on that committee, who decided respect was owed not to any witness, but only to other members of Congress.

The New York Hospital Cornell Medical Center

As if any of these Republicans has ever done anything which could have earned them even one iota of the respect owed Dr. Fauci.