On July 1, 2024, Chief Justice John Roberts led the MAGA faction of the U.S. Supreme Court into the worst judicial decision in Supreme Court history at the behest of the first convicted felon to run for the presidency, former president Donald John Trump.
I wrote then in “Betrayed by the Weak,” “Today, there is no lower court in the United States of America than its highest court. The U.S. Supreme Court of Donald J. Trump has upended the rule of law, negated the separation of powers, ended the constitution and opened the door to a fascist dictatorship.”
It took Trump mere days since his inauguration to play his get-of-jail-free card, attorneys at his brand new, highly weaponized Department of Justice gently reminding the high court in response to several lawsuits arising from the many laws he’s broken so far in his second term.
“Congress cannot act on, and courts cannot examine, the President’s actions on subjects within his conclusive and preclusive constitutional authority,” the Roberts court ruled.
In law, preclusive means preventing something from happening, or making it impossible for it to happen. Conclusive means something is final, decisive, and cannot be argued against.
A conclusive presumption is an assumption that cannot be challenged or proven otherwise.
I’m no lawyer, but the way I read the line above from the July 1 ruling, it says, “the president cannot be constrained.”
To the contrary, our nation’s founders, deliberately and with clear purpose, established the separation of powers, establishing an executive, a judicial and a legislative branch, each one with responsibilities designed to provide checks and balances to keep any one branch from usurping power, particularly an executive with aspirations of being king.
But they didn’t foresee a Donald Trump and the cult of MAGA.
If the US Supreme Court violates the Constitution, their ruling can be considered legally invalid and it can be challenged through further litigation, potentially leading to a reversal of the decision by the Court itself in a future case, or through a constitutional amendment to change the interpretation of the Constitution itself.
But there is no direct legal mechanism to punish the justices for violating the Constitution. The only real recourse is public pressure and potential impeachment proceedings in extreme cases.
This is an extreme case, and it’s the clear fault, not of politicians, not of any “deep state” or any conspiracist’s theory. Not of a corrupted supreme court or compromised legislature.
The fault lies with the fourth pillar of U.S. government not named as one but nonetheless a pillar put into nine simple words by this nation’s most harshly tested U.S. President on a Pennsylvania battlefield.
T hey weren’t his words, Lincoln just made them poetic, immortal.
In 1850, 13 years before Lincoln’s brief but deeply profound speech, Unitarian Minister and abolitionist Theodore Parker penned the words, “a government of all the people, by all the people, for all the people.”
We the people are the electorate, as qualified by the constitution, who choose which of our citizens will leave home and hearth to assemble and on our behalf do the essential work of government, not to rule, but to serve, to provide common services, to maintain order and to defend her citizens.
To serve. A responsibility, not a privilege.
As voters, we, the fourth pillar of our constitutional republic, have abrogated our responsibility to our own governance, sufficient that less than half this nation’s eligible voters went to the polls, and just over half of them, fearful of being replaced, oppressed … wallowing not in truth in any form but on the well practiced lies of a victimized megalomaniac, voted as president a criminal given carte blanche to assume, that his way is our way and so he serves himself.
Donald John Trump, proclaiming landslide victories and a clear mandate, is a clear and consummate liar who has a few followers all sharing one thing, and all of them wrong — devotion to the idea that they are somehow superior. A portion of the electorate they claim to have defeated were in fact kept from the polls, others dissuaded with, “sorry folks, that’s just the way it is.”
On behalf of Donald, the U.S. Supreme Court blatantly violated the U.S. Constitution each justice swore to uphold and defend — why?
Intimidated by a bully and his noisy band of brats.
The majority party of the United States House and Senate tossed their constitutional oversight responsibility to Donald Trump’s feet … why?
Intimidated by a bully and his noisy band of brats. Happens in classrooms, happens in towns. Now it’s happened to a nation.
Why? Easy … no one not intimidated has seen fit as yet to stand up to say, “no sir, enough,” and stand fast. The bullies of the world won’t understand. The bullied will.