Jul 12, 2024
Remember
Keep in mind who this Trump asshole really is, as the Press Poodles try to force us to watch their favorite blood sport (ie: manufacturing "controversy" - putting red ants and black ants in a great big pickle jar, and charging an admission fee to see them fight).
The stuttering old man who knows his shit, and tries to tell me as much of the truth as he can without fucking up national security? He's my guy all day every day.
Versus that other old man who can't express a coherent thought without taking a giant dump on everybody's head? No fucking thanks. Leave it and walk away.
I'll take a crippled up FDR over assholes like Mussolini and Stalin and Putin and Trump every time.
Some scholars have argued that the political style of Donald Trump resembles the political style of fascist leaders. Such assessments were first made during Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign, continuing over the course of the Trump presidency as he appeared to court far-right extremists, including his attempts to overturn the 2020 United States presidential election after losing to Joe Biden, and culminating in the 2021 United States Capitol attack.[44] As these events have unfolded, some commentators who had initially resisted applying the label to Trump came out in favor of it, including conservative legal scholar Steven G. Calabresi and conservative commentator Michael Gerson. After the attack on the Capitol, one historian of fascism, Robert O. Paxton, went so far as to state that Trump is a fascist, despite his earlier objection to using the term in this way. In "Trump and the Legacy of a Menacing Past", Henry Giroux wrote: "The inability to learn from the past takes on a new meaning as a growing number of authoritarian regimes emerge across the globe. This essay argues that central to understanding the rise of a fascist politics in the United States is the necessity to address the power of language and the intersection of the social media and the public spectacle as central elements in the rise of a formative culture that produces the ideologies and agents necessary for an American-style fascism." Other historians of fascism such as Richard J. Evans, Roger Griffin, and Stanley Payne continue to disagree that fascism is an appropriate term to describe Trump's politics. Jason Stanley argued (2018) Trump uses "fascist techniques to excite his base and erode liberal democratic institutions."
In 2017, the Hamburg, Germany-based magazine Stern depicted Trump giving a Nazi salute and it also compared Trump to neo-Nazis and members of the Ku Klux Klan. In the book Frankly, We Did Win This Election, authored by Michael C. Bender of The Wall Street Journal, recounts that White House Chief of Staff, John F. Kelly, was reportedly shocked by an alleged statement made by Trump that "Hitler did a lot of good things." Liz Harrington, Trump’s spokesperson, denied the claim, saying: "This is totally false. President Trump never said this. It is made-up fake news, probably by a general who was incompetent and was fired."[53] Kelly further stated in his book that Trump had asked him why his generals could not be loyal like Hitler's generals. According to the Ohio Capital Journal, quoting his roommate, politician Josh McLaurin, then-Republican candidate and senator-elect from Ohio, J. D. Vance, was said to have wondered whether Trump was "America's Hitler". Harvard University professor of government Daniel Ziblatt also drew similarities between Hitler's rise and Trump's. Trump has also been compared to Narendra Modi,[58] and former aide Anthony Scaramucci also compared Trump to Benito Mussolini and Augusto Pinochet.
In a July 2021 piece for The Atlantic, George W. Bush's former speechwriter David Frum wrote that "Trump's no Hitler, obviously. But they share some ways of thinking. The past never repeats itself. But it offers warnings. It's time to start using the F-word again, not to defame—but to diagnose." For The Guardian, Nicholas Cohen wrote: "If Trump looks like a fascist and acts like a fascist, then maybe he is one. The F-word is one we are rightly wary of using, but how else to describe the disgraced president?" New York Magazine asked, "Is It Finally Time to Begin Calling Trumpism Fascist?" Dana Milbank also believed the insurrection qualified as fascist, writing in The Washington Post, "To call a person who endorses violence against the duly elected government a 'Republican' is itself Orwellian. More accurate words exist for such a person. One of them is 'fascist.'" Dylan Matthews writing in Vox quoted Sheri Berman as saying, "I saw Paxton's essay and of course respect him as an eminent scholar of fascism. But I can't agree with him on the fascism label."
The Guardian further reported on Trump's "stand back and stand by" directive during the 2020 United States presidential debates to the Proud Boys and it also made a note of the fact that he had made "positive remarks about far-right and white supremacist groups." During the 2020 debate, Biden asked Trump to condemn white supremacist groups, specifically the Proud Boys. Trump's response was interpreted by some as a call to arms. The United States House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack public hearings explored the relationships which existed between the Oath Keepers, the Proud Boys, and Trump's allies, with evidence of coordination in the run-up to the Capitol attack.
In August 2022, President Biden referred to the "extreme MAGA agenda" as "semi-fascism". In the Battle for the Soul of the Nation speech September 1, Biden criticized the "extremism" and "blind loyalty" of Trump supporters, calling them a threat to democracy. He added that he did not consider a majority of Republicans to be MAGA Republicans.
On March 13, 2023, journalist James Risen reported that it was discovered that 2021 United States Capitol Attack attendee, Hatchet Speed, was planning to kidnap Jewish leaders, including the leaders of the ADL, and the philanthropist George Soros. Speed was working as a Pentagon Analyst at the time of Risen's investigation of him and his planned attack. Reportedly, he has praised Hitler as "one of the best people there has ever been on the earth".
And then there's this from 2017, hours after Charlottesville:
These are the three reasons fascism spread in 1930s America — and might spread again today
The violent white nationalist rally in Virginia has reawakened simmering fears of American fascism. But the roots of these feelings — and the militant organizations that promoted them — did not begin with the election of President Trump. The last time fascism was brazenly embraced was in the 1930s. The lessons of that crucial decade bear increasing relevance for modern American life. The three big factors that drove the spread of American fascism at that time are still relevant for America today.
Fascist ideas were quite popular in 1930s America
In the 1930s, fascist ideas were increasingly accepted. This was reflected in the energetic growth of Nazi organizations. Ku Klux Klan rallies were common and numerous; Trump’s own father was arrested at one such rally, reportedly while wearing a Klan outfit. A 1941 book found that more than 100 such organizations had formed since 1933.
The appeal of fascist ideas extended far beyond the fringe, reaching prominent citizens such as Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh. Lindbergh went so far as to praise Adolf Hitler as “undoubtedly a great man.” In 1940, Lindbergh’s wife published a bestseller that called totalitarianism “The Wave of the Future” and an “ultimately good conception of humanity.”
At the time, Jews served the same role for U.S. fascists that immigrants, Muslims and other minorities serve today: a vague but malicious threat they believed to be undermining America’s greatness. Surveys of U.S. public opinion from the 1930s are a startling reminder of just how widespread these attitudes became. As late as July 1942, a Gallup poll showed that 1 in 6 Americans thought Hitler was “doing the right thing” to the Jews. A 1940 poll found that nearly a fifth of Americans saw Jews as a national “menace” — more than any other group, including Germans. Almost a third anticipated “a widespread campaign against the Jews” — a campaign that 12 percent of Americans were willing to support.
The careers of anti-Semitic celebrities such as Catholic Rev. Charles Coughlin reflected the popular appeal of fascist ideas. Father Coughlin, as he was known, enjoyed the second-largest radio audience in the country (after President Roosevelt’s fireside chats), frequently quoted Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, and praised the Nazi quest for full employment and racial purity. He broke with Roosevelt in 1934, forming his own party, whose 1936 candidate received nearly 1 million votes. Coughlin was finally silenced by the Catholic Church in early 1942.
These voices welcoming fascism were not marginal radicals but mainstream writers, presidents of major associations and editors of popular journals. In his 1934 presidential address, the president of the American Political Science Association — the nation’s oldest and largest organization of political scientists — railed against “the dogma of universal suffrage” and argued for abolishing a democracy that allowed “the ignorant, the uninformed and the antisocial elements” to vote. If these reforms smacked of fascism, he concluded, then “we have already recognized that there is a large element of fascist doctrine and practice that we must appropriate.”
Three factors helped U.S. fascism spread
So what does the history of American fascism tell us about its resurgence? The good news is that the three major factors that drove its expansion are absent today.
The first was a major economic depression and social dislocation that undermined people’s confidence in democracy and led them to look for alternatives. As a U.S. economist complained in 1933, “democracy is neither very expert nor very quick to action” and cannot resolve “group and class conflicts easily.”
"Americans feeling an economic anxiety voted for a strong leader..."
The second factor was fear of communism, which led many leading intellectuals to embrace fascism as a bulwark against Bolshevism and as the lesser of two evils. As in Europe, worries about communism intensified fascism’s appeal in the U.S. “I thank heaven for a man like Adolf Hitler,” argued popular Christian activist Frank Buchman in 1936, “who built a front line of defense against the anti-Christ of communism.”
"Obama is an evil genius bent on destroying capitalism so he can give your house, and your car, and your gun to undeserving brown people."
The third factor was the rise of Nazi Germany as an economic and military powerhouse. Hitler’s ascent began a long period of German recovery, economic expansion and the swift end of unemployment in that country. By 1939, Germany had a labor shortage of 2 million people, while industrial production had more than doubled. Generations of historians have debated whether the recovery was real, but the widespread perception of German success attracted admirers regardless of its reality.
"Just look at the strength of Putin and Xi and Kim..."
There could be a resurgence of fascism in the U.S.
Even though these three factors no longer exist, similar problems lurk under the surface of modern political life, problems that could conceivably drive a resurgence of fascist movements. The overall U.S. economy has been performing well, but levels of inequality continue to rise. Wide areas of America are increasingly mired in permanent unemployment and a massive drug epidemic. These are the sorts of economic conditions that drove fascist support in the 1930s; another major crisis like the Great Recession is likely to bolster nationalist appeals even more.
Few people worry about the communist threat today. Yet fear of communism has been replaced by fear of globalists and elite technocrats (still often tinged with anti-Semitism) who supposedly seek to undermine and control the lives of ordinary Americans. The recently uncovered National Security Council memo reflected these sentiments clearly, arguing that Trump’s opposition is made up of a cabal of Islamists, cultural Marxists and global bankers. The extreme right-wing blogger Mike Cernovich, who has been praised by Donald Trump Jr., recently published a cartoon showing national security adviser H.R. McMaster as a puppet manipulated by George Soros, who in turn was being manipulated by a monstrous green hand labeled “Rothschilds,” a historically wealthy Jewish family.
The third factor — the appearance of an ideological rival that seemed to outperform America’s corrupt democracy — is today reflected most clearly in fears over the rise of China. Over the past decade, numerous observers have argued that liberal democracy is being supplanted by the kind of state capitalism exemplified by China, in which a capitalist system of production is undergirded by state ownership and guidance, with little room for democracy.
Americans cannot be complacent about democracy
Over the 20th century, democracy spread from a few isolated outposts to most corners of the world. Today its superiority seems self-evident to people who have been steeped in its moral virtues and material successes. But over the past century, mere moral appeal has rarely been sufficient for its survival. It would be a convenient mistake to accept the victory of democracy as a historical morality play, the predestined triumph of good over evil.
For much of the 20th century, democracy’s success depended on the existence of powerful countries such as the United States, examples to be imitated. More than any appeal to freedom, democracy spread because it promised economic prosperity and political stability. But when democracies failed to deliver, as during the Great Depression, the tide of popular and elite opinion shifted just as readily and just as quickly against democratic institutions. The key lesson of the 20th century is that democracy is more fragile than we might like.
Jul 11, 2024
Driving Up The Probability Number
Variation on a theme: How often do you have to pose the "rhetorical" question: "Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?" before you get to a sufficient level of certainty?
Unrestrained Demons
People have been falling for this kinda shit for a long time.
My mom used to tell the story of going to visit some older rural-folk relatives in North Dakota (late 1940s maybe?), and how her dad's aunt would run from the room when a light bulb needed changing, because she feared the 'lectrical might leak out of the light socket and kill her.
Disruption can be legitimately very frightening, but ultimately very good. Or it can be very bad, while cynically manipulative people try to convince us it's all just peachy dandy.
We get legitimately confused, and I'm not going to pretend I know how to sort it all out.
But I know we don't arrive at factual conclusions if we rely solely on our favorite bias-confirming news sources, or on our pontificating friends, or your favorite blogger, or if we just shrug it off and ignore it.
I'm trying to keep some of this in mind next time somebody starts in on Solar Panels or Climate Change denial - or any of the numerous things we need to be making good decisions about.
And it's not likely to get any easier as we dive deeper into the land of AI.
Stay on your toes.
Go Small To Play Big
But every time you shit-talk Biden, or politics in general - every time you complain about not having the choices you want - you're giving somebody else permission to stay home, or to write in Harold Stassen, or reason to believe the Both Sides bullshit, or whatever. So stop it.
When we can't count on 40-60% of Americans to show up and vote - the absolute least you can do to serve this country - over time, our little experiment in democratic self-governance ends with barely a whimper.
I'm not saying everybody needs to be a rah-rah for government. There's plenty about government in general - and this government in particular - that sucks.
So how do we change that?
In a democracy, we get to change that.
Get with a local campaign and write some postcards for somebody running for city council, or county commissioner, or state representative, or whatever.
Good things - and bad ones too - grow from the ground up.
Refusing to participate in democracy
is the same as voting against democracy.
And if you vote against democracy,
don't be surprised when you
never get to vote for it again.
Jul 10, 2024
Kamala Rising
If you're worried about Biden's longevity, or his capacity to serve - just remember Harris is on that ticket too.
If you don't like Biden, or you think it's time to hand things off to a younger warrior, then vote for Kamala Harris.
Can you think of a better way to extend the winning streak?
BTW, MAGA - if government shouldn't be deciding which toilet you can install in your bathroom, then government shouldn't be deciding when or if you can have kids.
The law cuts both ways. Handing government the power to prohibit abortion is handing it the power to require abortion.
I realize that doesn't fit with your Daddy State mindset, but you'll eventually have to let that go. Authoritarianism carries the seeds of its own destruction just like all the other ideologies - but nowadays, destruction comes quicker for fascism than it does for democracy.
Jul 9, 2024
Today's TweeXt
It's a tough one until you stop to realize that the god-knobbers will just say something like, "It's god's will. If god allowed the pregnancy, people don't get to interfere."
And then you have to go with, "So why does a loving god release a malevolent supernatural monster into the world, and leave us to fend for ourselves?"
"Your faith in the almighty's power of salvation will protect you, and blah blah blah."
Maybe it's better if I just shut up and enjoy the video.
What a conundrum pic.twitter.com/NZcvHQ4kkj
— Brent Terhune in Kansas City MO 7.11-13 (@BrentTerhune) July 9, 2024
Contradiction Much?
It seems MAGA is having a difficult time deciding whether they want to strip authority out of the Executive, or imbue it with absolute unaccountable power.
Opinion A conservative Warren court
The Roberts Supreme Court faces the same critiques from its critics as Warren’s.
After a term in which the conservative Roberts court swept aside the Chevron doctrine, a decision that will clip federal agencies’ authority to enact policy, and granted a broad new immunity to former president Donald Trump, liberals are critical not only of the ideology behind the decisions but also the integrity of the court itself.
As Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) put it: “This activist, extremist MAGA court faces a legitimacy crisis,” which has in turn created “a crisis for our democratic republic.”
Many of the criticisms that this court is enduring — particularly being too political — have been leveled before at earlier courts. What we are seeing is a replay of sorts.
In the 1960s, conservatives were the critics of the bold, liberal decisions of the Warren court. “Impeach Earl Warren” became a popular slogan, and the likes of Barry Goldwater intoned that, “of all three branches of Government, today’s Supreme Court is the least faithful” to “the principle of legitimacy in the exercise of power.”
Today, it is the opposite. The fact of a 6-3 supermajority changes both legal conservatism and liberalism. These shifts reflect a natural process of legal change, as court majorities tend to enhance their own power, while dissenters advocate for legal constraint. That was true during the Warren court of the 1960s, when liberals led the judiciary. It is true today.
While the Warren court was accused of endangering the judiciary and the nation at the time — just think of that era’s explosive decisions on school prayer, the Miranda warnings, legislative districting and desegregation — history has deemed otherwise.
Today, the decisions of the Roberts court are likely to have profound implications as well, including majority opinions before this year, like Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which eliminated constitutional abortion rights, or Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which struck at affirmative action in higher education.
They sue the EPA to take the teeth out of regulations aimed at reining in the polluters, while they're fully behind Project 2025.
But it's a paradox, not a contradiction.
They want the Executive to have the power to kill whatever agencies they see as restricting business, keeping them from doing whatever they want to do in order to boost their market value.
The Plutocracy Project is aimed at "reforming" the federal government so that it fulfills only 3 directives.
- Defend commercial assets world-wide
- Keep the rabble in line
- Settle contract disputes
And the Roberts Court is working hard to pave the way to Gilead.
But instead of explaining how monumentally stoopid it is to compare the Warren Court (which affirmed people's rights under the law), this fuckin' idiot, Richard Re, tries to tell us the Roberts Court is doing basically the same thing by stripping those same rights away from people. And hey - it'll all come out in the wash. Right? It's just two sides of the same coin.
Right?
Opinion A conservative Warren court
The Roberts Supreme Court faces the same critiques from its critics as Warren’s.
By Richard M. Re, professor of law at UVa School of Law.
After a term in which the conservative Roberts court swept aside the Chevron doctrine, a decision that will clip federal agencies’ authority to enact policy, and granted a broad new immunity to former president Donald Trump, liberals are critical not only of the ideology behind the decisions but also the integrity of the court itself.
As Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) put it: “This activist, extremist MAGA court faces a legitimacy crisis,” which has in turn created “a crisis for our democratic republic.”
Many of the criticisms that this court is enduring — particularly being too political — have been leveled before at earlier courts. What we are seeing is a replay of sorts.
In the 1960s, conservatives were the critics of the bold, liberal decisions of the Warren court. “Impeach Earl Warren” became a popular slogan, and the likes of Barry Goldwater intoned that, “of all three branches of Government, today’s Supreme Court is the least faithful” to “the principle of legitimacy in the exercise of power.”
Today, it is the opposite. The fact of a 6-3 supermajority changes both legal conservatism and liberalism. These shifts reflect a natural process of legal change, as court majorities tend to enhance their own power, while dissenters advocate for legal constraint. That was true during the Warren court of the 1960s, when liberals led the judiciary. It is true today.
While the Warren court was accused of endangering the judiciary and the nation at the time — just think of that era’s explosive decisions on school prayer, the Miranda warnings, legislative districting and desegregation — history has deemed otherwise.
Today, the decisions of the Roberts court are likely to have profound implications as well, including majority opinions before this year, like Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which eliminated constitutional abortion rights, or Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which struck at affirmative action in higher education.
The legacies of these and other transformative rulings are yet to be decided.
It’s understandable for liberals to see this new era as beyond the scope of their understanding of democracy. But change doesn’t mean the court is broken. It means that the Roberts court is a conservative Warren court.
This role reversal is uncomfortable for liberals and conservatives alike, but it is also logical. The flexibility that conservative dissenters have long disdained is often essential to responsible judging. At the same time, the liberal justices, who are absorbing what were once strict, conservative principles, are performing a service by reminding the majority of its erstwhile views and curbing the court’s excesses.
Several cases this term illustrate these patterns. Start with judicial deference to administrative agencies. In the 1960s and 70s, liberal courts often looked skeptically on the work of administrative agencies. But with President Ronald Reagan in office and former president Jimmy Carter’s appointees staffing many courts of appeals, conservatives championed so-called Chevron deference, which required courts to accept reasonable agency interpretations of law.
Now the politics of agency deference have reversed. This year, in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, the conservatives abandoned Chevron, over the liberal justices’ protest. The majority acknowledged that Justice Antonin Scalia, a leading conservative jurist, was “an early champion” of Chevron. But only the court’s three liberals defended ideas once espoused by the conservative icon.
“For its entire existence,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. asserted, “Chevron has been a ‘rule in search of a justification,’ if it was ever coherent enough to be called a rule at all.”
A similar story has played out with stare decisis, or the principle that the court generally adheres to its past rulings. Many of the Warren court’s most famous rulings overruled long-standing precedents, despite cries from conservatives.
Likewise this year: When the court overruled the Chevron doctrine, the liberals argued that “a rule of judicial humility gives way to a rule of judicial hubris.”
But if the left and right are trading places, this repositioning will happen only gradually — as it should. Despite issuing many dramatic rulings, the Warren court also chose its moments. For example, it took several years for the liberal justices to identify a right to use contraception.
Because the justices, like most of us, do not like to be caught in a blatant contradiction, they do not seize on whatever views are most convenient in the moment.
Yet the conservatives’ gradual repositioning is often desirable. The justices now in the majority have to grapple with real problems in a workable, nuanced way, rather than relying on the stark logic that often appears in angry dissents.
Take United States v. Rahimi, which involved a federal law prohibiting people subject to domestic violence restraining orders from possessing firearms. By an 8-to-1 vote, the Roberts court upheld the law. And that majority — composed of conservatives and liberals alike — relied more on “common sense” than the strict originalism long associated with conservative justices.
Some Roberts court critics object that the justices are cynically helping Trump or the Republican Party. Yet the court’s bold conservative vision, like the Warren court’s liberal one, cuts across party lines.
The recent Trump immunity ruling, for instance, might prove an asset for presidencies of both parties. Just imagine how the case would look if criminal charges were pending against a former Democratic president.
Other critics object that the justices are corrupt or have conflicts of interest. These concerns, too, call to mind the 1960s, when liberal justice Abe Fortas was severely criticized for, among other things, accepting large payments from business interests for teaching a series of classes. (Another scandal later prompted Fortas’s resignation.)
So while judicial ethics may be a ripe topic for reform, transformational courts have attracted harsh ethical criticism before.
Of course, the Roberts court is conservative whereas the Warren court was liberal. That fact alone guarantees that many commentators will adore one and loathe the other. But pitched debates about judicial politics should not obscure what the left and right have in common.
Today, much as in the 1960s, the rule of law persists — even as it changes.
It’s understandable for liberals to see this new era as beyond the scope of their understanding of democracy. But change doesn’t mean the court is broken. It means that the Roberts court is a conservative Warren court.
This role reversal is uncomfortable for liberals and conservatives alike, but it is also logical. The flexibility that conservative dissenters have long disdained is often essential to responsible judging. At the same time, the liberal justices, who are absorbing what were once strict, conservative principles, are performing a service by reminding the majority of its erstwhile views and curbing the court’s excesses.
Several cases this term illustrate these patterns. Start with judicial deference to administrative agencies. In the 1960s and 70s, liberal courts often looked skeptically on the work of administrative agencies. But with President Ronald Reagan in office and former president Jimmy Carter’s appointees staffing many courts of appeals, conservatives championed so-called Chevron deference, which required courts to accept reasonable agency interpretations of law.
Now the politics of agency deference have reversed. This year, in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, the conservatives abandoned Chevron, over the liberal justices’ protest. The majority acknowledged that Justice Antonin Scalia, a leading conservative jurist, was “an early champion” of Chevron. But only the court’s three liberals defended ideas once espoused by the conservative icon.
“For its entire existence,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. asserted, “Chevron has been a ‘rule in search of a justification,’ if it was ever coherent enough to be called a rule at all.”
A similar story has played out with stare decisis, or the principle that the court generally adheres to its past rulings. Many of the Warren court’s most famous rulings overruled long-standing precedents, despite cries from conservatives.
Likewise this year: When the court overruled the Chevron doctrine, the liberals argued that “a rule of judicial humility gives way to a rule of judicial hubris.”
But if the left and right are trading places, this repositioning will happen only gradually — as it should. Despite issuing many dramatic rulings, the Warren court also chose its moments. For example, it took several years for the liberal justices to identify a right to use contraception.
Because the justices, like most of us, do not like to be caught in a blatant contradiction, they do not seize on whatever views are most convenient in the moment.
Yet the conservatives’ gradual repositioning is often desirable. The justices now in the majority have to grapple with real problems in a workable, nuanced way, rather than relying on the stark logic that often appears in angry dissents.
Take United States v. Rahimi, which involved a federal law prohibiting people subject to domestic violence restraining orders from possessing firearms. By an 8-to-1 vote, the Roberts court upheld the law. And that majority — composed of conservatives and liberals alike — relied more on “common sense” than the strict originalism long associated with conservative justices.
Some Roberts court critics object that the justices are cynically helping Trump or the Republican Party. Yet the court’s bold conservative vision, like the Warren court’s liberal one, cuts across party lines.
The recent Trump immunity ruling, for instance, might prove an asset for presidencies of both parties. Just imagine how the case would look if criminal charges were pending against a former Democratic president.
Other critics object that the justices are corrupt or have conflicts of interest. These concerns, too, call to mind the 1960s, when liberal justice Abe Fortas was severely criticized for, among other things, accepting large payments from business interests for teaching a series of classes. (Another scandal later prompted Fortas’s resignation.)
So while judicial ethics may be a ripe topic for reform, transformational courts have attracted harsh ethical criticism before.
Of course, the Roberts court is conservative whereas the Warren court was liberal. That fact alone guarantees that many commentators will adore one and loathe the other. But pitched debates about judicial politics should not obscure what the left and right have in common.
Today, much as in the 1960s, the rule of law persists — even as it changes.
Guns
Gun crime has something to do with gun proliferation.
Gun proliferation has everything to do with coin-operated Republicans.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)