It’s been a hell of a fortnight—one that deserves to live in infamy.
Thursday, June 28th, presented a great opportunity: all that was needed was a clear, calm, explanation of the actual Republican agenda. That alone should have been enough to bury forever the threat of a second Trump term.
Yes, there is a sector of the electorate that is eager to deep-six democracy and replace it with a fascist dictatorship—though they would, of course, obscure that unseemly truth with yards of obfuscatory patriotic blather. That group of voters will earnestly swear allegiance to a gibberish-spouting goon, though his allegiance is only to himself. For this group, such a recitation from Biden would amount to a campaign ad for Trump. But they’re beyond reach anyway, and probably beyond hope.
They are also a minority. In a democracy, in theory, that means they should not get to rule. Most Americans, we like to presume, are sane and decent people. That’s why Biden needed to take that opportunity, while the would-be Caesar’s mic was muted, to translate his cacophonous symphony of dog-whistles into plain, coherent English. A clear description of how the nation would be changed under Trump 2.0 would give us just what we need—a true picture of American Carnage.
For that matter, if Biden could have transcended, in the nation’s time of need, his instinct to be an honorable and decent human being, and gotten personal, he could have just hammered his opponent into the stage floor with a 45-minute litany of his sins, perversities, and depravities.
But noo… instead the Democratic standard bearer pulled a classic Democratic maneuver. By giving a weak performance at a pivotal moment, he snatched defeat from the jaws of a potential victory.
Our national media stayed true to form. While ignoring the GOP candidate’s incoherent promises to vigorously do all the wrong things, they concluded that the Democrat lacked the focus and energy to do the right things.
Since that night it’s just been bam, bam, bam: one damn thing after another, each one ratcheting up the stakes. Taking the lead in this relentless drive towards general enfrazzlement was, of course, the Roberts Court.
Unelected, largely appointed by presidents who lost the popular vote, affirmed by senators representing more cattle than people, the court is today’s equivalent of an old Hollywood trope: a bunch of gun-totin’ desperadoes terrorizing defenseless communities on behalf of shadowy, moneyed, off-stage interests.
That Friday morning, as the nation was still absorbing the implications of the debate, the Court announced that prosecutors had treated 300 January 6th defendants unfairly. Sure, they beat up Capitol cops, stormed the barricades, broke through the doors, and delayed the certification of election results for hours—but that hardly rises to the level of “obstruction of an official proceeding.”
Please, dear readers: do not ask us to explain that last paragraph. We cannot.
That same day, the court threw out the Chevron doctrine. For forty years, federal agencies which are answerable to the Executive branch have had the authority to establish rules and regulations, in order to carry out laws passed by Congress. Well, to hell with that, sayeth the court. From now until Doomsday—which will likely be hastened by this ruling—obscure judges in lower courts may decide for themselves what exactly Congress meant, guided by whatever spiritual beliefs they may hold—or what personal demons may possess them.
Fleshing out a truly terrible trifecta, the court also ruled that, in effect, it’s against the law not to have a home. Or, to put it another way, if you should choose to perversely persist in not having a home, that’s fine—just as long as you never sleep again. It’s your choice. After all, it is a free country.
Having thus labored on behalf of the people, we presume that over the weekend, these godlike creatures rested. In some cases this may have meant taking a private jet to an exotic locale, there to smoke expensive cigars in the company of billionaires, but hey—to each his own, right?
On Monday, though, it was back to business—which is to say, giving the people the business—which they did big time: SCOTUS gave POTUS a license to kill.*
As one outraged critic put it, “the President is now a king above the law…insulated from criminal prosecution…[and empowered to order] Seal Team Six to assassinate a political rival.”
Those are alarming words, to be sure. Are they alarmist? That is, does the statement exaggerate the risk, to cause needless alarm?
Would that they were, but sadly, they’re not. They’re part of a dissenting opinion written by Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor.
The only good news this fortnight came from a far horizon: the land of the cheese-eating surrender monkeys, where a leftist coalition upset an expected right wing takeover.
* Now, in many ways, this is not exactly new. Presidents have certainly been killing people with relative impunity since the very beginning. The one possible exception would be William Henry Harrison, whose lone month in office hardly offered him much lethal latitude.