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ACCORDING TO LIZ - What would you call a country where its supreme ruler could:
- have members of his executive team murdered
- arrest and incarcerate rivals without due process or a trial
- assassinate political adversaries
- use its justice system to further his personal and political aspirations
- use the military and intelligence organizations to maintain absolute power
- disburse and withhold funds based solely on loyalty to his personal agenda
- use the tax system to beggar opponents
- accept bribes
- sell pardons
- punish whistleblowers
- ignore subpoenas
- interfere in elections
- violate conflict-of-interest protocols for personal profit
- crush peaceful protests by deploying the army
Sounds like a dictatorship – yes? Maybe a clone of President Putin’s Russia? Or of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s Saudi Arabia?
Unfortunately, it’s the United States of America in the wake of the Supreme Court’s majority decision in Trump v. United States on July 1st of this year. In the name of “originalism,” the court that was originally established by the Constitution to balance the powers of Congress and the President, has rolled back justice to a time well prior to the American Revolution.
And has rolled back rights of inhabitants of this fair land to what they originally had (or didn’t have) under the auspices of Mad King George, to before the imperialism of Good Queen Bess, all the way back to the feudal times that emerged after the fall of the worst of Roman emperors.
And worse, far worse.
Today we have Trump and his oil barons fiddling as the world burns.
The list above comes from contrary opinions spelled out by the dissenting Justices; a few are actions actually taken over past decades by previous presidents without significant blowback.
That list is just the tip of the iceberg, one where the funds of American oligarchs have worn down our rights just as surely as climate change is eroding the Arctic and Antarctic ice masses.
In Trump v. United States, the addle-pated Supreme Court in-Justices have radically expanded the powers of the American presidency, leap-frogging the officeholder to above the Senate and Congress, from Commander-in-Chief to Emperor-of-All-He-Can-Imagine, granting “official” status to all his actions before, during, and after, and shielding him forever from prosecution no matter how criminal.
Presaging the demise of democracy and the rise of authoritarianism.
The groundwork for all this was laid by successive right-wing administrations egged on by the uber-conservative Federalist Society which created a Supreme Court in its own image, dominated by corporatists larded onto the Supreme Court, their votes secure because their personal peccadillos – rape, accepting bribes and worse – make them vulnerable to puppetry by those who foisted them on the people of the United States.
Teddy Roosevelt took on the exploitative robber barons of the late 19th century Gilded Age and, supported by the nascent labor movement, curtailed the monopolistic practices driving the growth of his era’s wealth gap which would have been an anathema to the original founders of this Republic.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt pulled the country out of the Great Depression by taking on the Wall Street plutocrats who had crashed and burned America’s economy.
And now a new and far more treacherous hydra-headed aristocracy has reared its ugly head.
Not content to solely build their own fortunes by means fair or foul, this new wave of capital cronyism having stacked the Courts has now made the Presidency a tool in their quest for shortsighted personal profiteering and, in the process, destroy the world for the rest of us.
In addition to granting all presidents absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts that are “core” to the presidency, Trump v. United States also ruled that the president is entitled to presumptive immunity for other official acts.
And that a prosecutor could only overcome that presumption by demonstrating that the “criminal prohibition of the act would pose no dangers of intrusion on the authority and function of the executive branch.”
Huh?! In this day and age of scurrilously manipulative corporate lawyerdom, that’s an impossibly high bar for any prosecutor to clear.
And if Biden can’t abrogate the powers of the current Court, and if Harris can’t hold the center in the battle for November 5th, the potential for authoritarianism will become America’s grim reality.
All hail, Herr Dictator Trump!
(Liz Amsden is a contributor to CityWatch and an activist from Northeast Los Angeles with opinions on much of what goes on in our lives. She has written extensively on the City's budget and services as well as her many other interests and passions. In her real life she works on budgets for film and television where fiction can rarely be as strange as the truth of living in today's world.)
