So much for Trump’s con d’etat. Time to pack him off to exile at Mar-a-Elba.
Those of us who still embrace basic American values – little things like democratic elections and the will of the people – are naturally happy that the U.S. Supremes, with zero dissent from the tinpot Napoleon’s three appointees, has seen fit to summarily scrape his neo-fascist feces off their footwear.
I am of course referring – albeit scatalogically, because the moment demands that depth of disdain – to MAGA’s treasonous attempt to overthrow the election by arguing without a shred of substance that red states like Texas have the right to erase President-elect Biden’s free and fair ascent. Late yesterday, the high court flushed that away with two terse sentences, basically decreeing that Texas has no say “in the manner in which another state conducts its elections,” and that the whole thing is “moot.”
This was the fake lawsuit that Trump had ballyhooed as “the big one” that “everyone has been waiting for,” so unless he can find a higher appeals court in a galaxy far, far away, or unless he can dragoon the U.S. military into installing him for life (which ain’t happening), he’ll soon face exposure as a private citizen to potential prosecution.
But all the havoc he has predictably wrought on his way out the door – abetted by his posse of cynical cowards and sincere traitors – will not soon be repaired. Much has already been written, here and elsewhere, about his demagogic efforts to delegitimize the President-elect and sabotage the foundation of democracy, for the sole purpose for salving his eggshell ego. But his final act – seeking to delegitimize the highest court in the land – was truly the capstone atop his wall of shame.
Think about it. Trump in recent weeks repeatedly said that he wanted to throw the election to the Supreme Court (where 6 of the 9 members are Republican appointees), and that he was banking on a stolen victory with extra help from his three purported proteges. It was straight from his mentor’s playbook; mobbed-up lawyer Roy Cohn always said that the way to win a case was to find a compliant judge. Or if you want to get your new building project approved, you ensure that your local zoning board has compliant people.
The Supreme Court isn’t august and pristine, as we all know, but it doesn’t deserve to be treated as if it were a zoning board. And clearly its members didn’t appreciate the craven invitation to trash the rule of law – to commit, in the withering words of Pennsylvania attorney general Josh Shapiro, a “seditious abuse of the judicial process.”
What an insult it was to expect the court to endorse, without a shred of legal or factual basis, the MAGA delusion that an opponent’s victory is by definition unconstitutional. Or something. Or as Woody Allen railed in a courtroom in Bananas, “a travesty of a mockery of a sham.”
Trump apparently told himself that the fix was in. But what he and his fellow nitwits know about the law could fit in a thimble. The bedrock principle of federalism – long embraced by conservative judges – is that states have the right to govern themselves; and that, to be more precise, states have the right to decide for themselves how to run their elections. And that if states want to make mail-balloting easier during an unprecedented pandemic when it’s deemed unsafe to vote in person, they’re well within their rights to do so.
Strip away all the fancy language, and the loser is still a loser. All he has left are the paws he pounds on Twitter – most notably today’s agitprop, assailing the high court’s “disgraceful miscarriage of justice. The people of the United States were cheated, and our Country disgraced.” Because he knows more about the law than the justices do.
It was once said of Napolean that, in his arrogance, he “never doubted that (he) was wise enough to teach law to lawyers, science to scientists, and religion to Popes.” He got sick of being exiled to the island of Elba, and sought to reclaim his kingdom – only to be dealt an even more devastating defeat at Waterloo. But thanks to the terse dismissal of Texas v. Pennsylvania, our own little man has already suffered his Waterloo. The big question, going forward, is whether the Biden administration can repair the American fabric that Trump and his Republican enablers have so viciously ripped.