Supreme Court Declares Constitution Unconstitutional

“Stupid is as stupid does.” –Forest Gump

In coming up with a title for this article, I have tossed around different “candidates,” if you will. Some of them were:

• “Supreme Court Declares Donald Trump King.”
• “Supreme Court Gives Trump Power to Dissolve Itself.”
• “Supreme Court Makes It Official—Donald Trump Has The Right to Lie About Everything.”

I even played with the more esoteric,

• “God Screams From Heaven Through Symbolism of Court Case Title,” but I knew no one would get that one. I do promise though, to get to it by the end.

For now, the point is in this upside-down Age of Trump, perennial fantasist and bratty two-year old, each day seemingly is a through-the-looking-glass moment, hardly worth more than a mention before you turn to the sports page.

Thus it is that, in service to the logic of the Cult of Trump, the United States’ Supreme Court not only just surrendered its own legitimacy to this man, but urged him to act boldly in his zeal to dismantle the American experiment! It is sea changes like this that are so common now as we hurl headlong towards apocalyptic chaos, that sometimes we just have to stop and pause and take in their significance.

The Court implied, among a number of things, that Trump’s activities in organizing the January 6 attack upon Congress could be construed as falling within his Presidential duties! Furthermore, they granted even more than he had asked, ruling that any evidence gathered against him could not even be used to prove malicious intent![1]

Trumpian Audacity

Donald Trump is nothing if not utterly shameless and a hater of America, that is, the very idea of America, a rule of law and not of men (I Sam 8:6-9), the one thing in a fairly-sordid history that actually made us great. No matter how much he hugs that flag or claims how much he wants pristine air and water (while destroying all regulations to get us there), he’s just too ignorant to even appreciate the best of what the US even stands for. But Vladimir Putin and mafia oligarchs looting Russia? That he can understand, and he’s all in for doing the same here.

Trying to take seriously the desperate rationalizations bouncing around in this man’s quixotic mind may endanger your mental health. Donald Trump has obviously had a huge case of ADD all his life, and his endless pattern of clogging up courts, throwing ridiculous things up on the wall to see if they will stick, can leave you adrift in a sea of torturous legal hairsplitting. It reminds me of what Michael Hoffman in his monumental Judaism Discovered said about an early rabbinic era, that it produced an avalanche of Bible-nullifying “enactments” and an expanded bureaucracy of functionaries, “sufficient to fill a Kafkaesque courtroom or a Freudian insane asylum.”[2]

Le Pauvre!

“When the President does it, it’s not a crime.”

-Richard Nixon in the famous 1977 David Frost interview

As everyone knows, Donald Trump not only went through an impeachment due to his attempt to shake down Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to get him to muddy up the name of Joe Biden, he then went on a crime spree after he lost that very election.

His attempt in late 2020 to gaslight the country with the Big Lie, that somehow the Democrats had stolen the election from him, is what set in motion a whole series of actions that has gotten him in all this legal trouble he is now seeking to escape from. Inciting the January 6 Insurrection wherein he put his own Vice-President’s life in danger is one trial. Another is the documents case wherein he walked off with boxes and boxes of insecurely-stored top-secret papers, freely accessible to any foreign enemy visiting his supper club. Yet another is the Georgia case wherein on a recorded phone call no less, and against all federal election law, he brazenly sought to pressure a fellow Republican Secretary of State to “do him a favor,” to “only find 11,780 votes,” just one enough to win.[3]

Only in Donald Trump’s lawless, entitled mind could any of this crime spree be construed as “official responsibilities,” the argument the Supreme Court at least partially ratified on July 1. As I pointed out in a foundational article on this site, breaking, skirting and stretching the law to its limits is just a part of Donald Trump’s “brand,” his modus operandi, his birthright, his legend as the eternal “rebel without a cause,” born to be “the leader of the pack.” Donald Trump never intended to actually win the Republican nomination in 2016 you see, just come in “a respectable second” so he could “burnish his brand” to start a media company to rival Fox or CNN. But in doing so, in playing games with America’s “sacred election tradition,” he subjected himself to a public proctology exam he wasn’t used to in the highly-privatized world of the Trump Organization.

Obviously, the two most serious of those trials were the insurrection case and the stealing of national secrets to either sell to our enemies or use as blackmail bargaining chips in negotiating a deal with the US government. As in, you know, “What would it take to make a headache like me go away and retire in Russia? Or Saudi Arabia?”

In the latter, his hand-picked, Federalist Society and Supreme Court-ambitious judge Aileen Cannon has been obviously running interference for him.[4] This is what Merrick Garland gets when he tries to “play fair” with this man and his neo-Jacobin, subversive Republican fan boys (and girls).[5] A man clearly fit for the Supreme Court but certainly not the junk yard dog the Attorney General needs to be to deal with the worst criminal elements, Garland is simply too fair and civilized a guy to take on a skunk like Donald Trump. Trump should have been immediately arrested as a public menace and foreign agent after Biden’s Inauguration, told “we’ll come up with some charges eventually,” and never allowed to go back to Mar-a-Lago to re-group.

Busy Little Legal Beagles

After he outright lost the 2020 election, Donald Trump invented and endlessly repeated “The Big Lie” psy op that somehow the Democrats had stolen the whole thing, even though Republicans took over the House. After losing over 60 cases in appeals to various courts, including “his court” (the Supremes), he then plotted the January 6, 2021 insurrection. The astounding testimonies by former Trump officials in the J6 Committee hearings (that his cult followers were told to dutifully ignore), were the evidentiary foundation for the much-anticipated Insurrection trial.

Because of the serious nature of this never-before attempt at a coup and stealing national secrets wholesale, Garland assigned former Hague prosecutor Jack Smith as special counsel in November, 2022 to develop these two highly-sensitive cases.[6] In August of 2023, after presenting his findings to a grand jury, they indicted Trump on four felony counts in regard to the Insurrection.

Trump’s legal enablers of course filed an appeal,[7] audaciously claiming basically what Nixon shocked the world with in 1977 (though it didn’t surprise his long-suspicious detractors), that “When the President does it, it’s not a crime.” For example, organizing what the J6 hearings determined to be a coup attempt, could be claimed to be part of his “official Presidential duties.” Of course it does. After all, it’s his duty to protect the country from the danger of someone else winning an election. Ipso facto, it must have been “Rigged, Rigged, Rigged!”

On Feb. 6, 2024, a three-judge US Appeals Court unanimously ruled Smith could proceed with the trial. In that hearing, Jack Smith “was blunt”:

 “That position [of unlimited Presidential immunity] finds no support in constitutional text, separation-of-powers principles, history, or logic. And if that radical claim were accepted, it would upend understandings about Presidential accountability that have prevailed throughout history while undermining democracy and the rule of law.”

A week later, Trump’s lawyers took it to the Supreme Court of course. Back in December, the Supremes had rejected Smith’s request for them to hear this case directly, forcing him to go through the longer appeals process. They did this to buy Team Trump more delay time. But now in February they magically changed their minds, taking up this frivolous suit in spite of a long history of preceding cases parcing Presidential powers. It was a move that was largely interpreted as the Court’s willingness to play along with Trump’s delay game. Postponing the hearing until April only reinforced everyone’s suspicions.

High Friends In High Places

In that April hearing, “Justice Brett Kavanaugh appeared sympathetic to the former president’s argument that criminal statutes do not apply to the president unless they say so specifically.” Yes, that’s what it’s like in the Pharisaical Age of Trump. Unless you nail down in writing every possible criminal, devious, underhanded and unethical thing a reprobate like Trump can can come up with, then he’s allowed to do it.

This is what substitutes for character in a President. This is what we’ve never had to deal with before, simply because every other President has had something of a working conscience or a moral compass.

“[Kavanaugh] told [Special Counsel] Dreeben that it’s a ‘serious constitutional question whether a criminal statute can apply to the president’s criminal acts.’”

Sheesh, has this guy been smoking crack? Uh, NO! First, if a President is committing criminal acts, then criminal statutes can and must apply obviously. Secondly, this is not a serious constitutional question. In fact, it’s a very unserious one. The entire basis of Constitutional government, at least this Constitution and the repeated statements of its Framers, is that no man is above the law, least of all the most powerful one. 

So why then are they even taking up a question that has a long track record of adjudication and precedent? Gorsuch and Kavanaugh kept claiming that what they were concerned about was the “huge implications for the future” of the Presidency. in spite of the fact that no recent Presidents have been shy about using their executive powers. And yes it’s true. If Republicans keep breaking the law, they will keep getting investigated! Screaming that the Democrats or Justice Department are politically motivated doesn’t change the fact that the DOJ has been firewalled from the Whitehouse since Watergate, that that was a move toward better government, and that there are such things as actual crimes in this world.

But even so, this was not the time to take that up. There has never been in our history an indicted President, let alone such a lawless one like Donald Trump, with four grand jury indictments on him and 91 felony counts. And yet here he was running for President again that fall! Trump’s Insurrection trial was originally scheduled for March 4 but had been postponed by this appeal. It dealt with one of the two most serious charges against him, the other being his theft of top-secret US documents. Justice demanded that the public know before the election whether the J6 Committee’s treasure trove of evidentiary findings were found to be true in a formal court of law, and the clock was ticking.

In the April hearing, Kavanaugh even questioned the Constitutionality of the Office of Special Counsel, which was formed by four different pieces of legislation, ignoring the urgency of the case before them. Yet the Supreme Court, in an obvious step of bias towards the Trump campaign to make sure this trial would never happen this year, waited until April for this hearing, then took their sweet, sweet time to render a ruling on July 1, the very last day before their three-month summer vacation.

A Court More Shameless Than Trump?

Never before has the hypocrisy, insincerity and pretentiousness of this radical, activist, right-wing court been more on display. This is the ignominious objective now hanging around the necks of the Christian Right after decades of slavish devotion to voting Republican—corrupt, corporate and regressive Supreme Court justices, the bottom line of their agenda.

As much as they try to hide behind flowery legalese, the truth is obvious now. They ruled the way they did because they buy into Trump’s false claim that his attempted Insurrection was legitimate, that the election somehow was stolen, that even if the evidence proved he conspired to do all that, that it would still fall under the category of “official acts.” Spare me.

Worse yet, they’re ratifying his equally false claims that these trials are all politically motivated and orchestrated by Joe Biden et. al., a claim they know to be untrue. They know that ever since Watergate, the DOJ has been firewalled by law from collusion with the White House; that it was Nixon colluding with his Attorney General John Mitchell to weaponize the DOJ to go after people on his enemies list that led to those reforms. Yet now Project 2025 is expressly calling for that wall to be torn down so that the DOJ can be used to destroy Trump’s opposition! And they can rule that way knowing that Joe Biden would never abuse his new Presidential powers to do such things himself. They know all these things, yet still they pretend that a non-independent DOJ is good government.

The hypocrisy and double standards are just breath-taking, the cynicism palpable. Just consider how in the tank they are for Insurrection, for fascist revolution from within, for doing this all by “legislating from the bench on steroids,” and that after years of whining about “judicial activism,” about swearing they’ll “only call balls and strikes,” lying in their Senate confirmation hearings, undermining the Constitution that they swore to uphold. It’s no wonder that Justice Sotomayor in her dissent said she “feared for our democracy.”

Consider now how deeply Clarence Thomas’ wife Ginny was involved in the Insurrection, all the trouble Justice Alito and his wife got into flying the American flag upside down, and how John Roberts, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett were all involved with the infamous Supreme Court decision of 2000, handing the election over to George W. Bush. Maybe we shouldn’t be surprised then at how corruptly they are now acting. As I’ve said before, today’s Republican Party functions like little more than an organized crime ring, attracting the most unsavory characters.

This is how the ACLU summed up the import of that ruling:

“The Supreme Court’s 2023-24 term will be remembered for one case above all…in which the court granted former President Donald Trump immunity from criminal liability for attempts to use his office to obstruct the peaceful transition of power after he lost the 2020 election…

The justices’ ostensible justification for providing such immunity is baseless. They surmised that without knowing that they can commit crimes with impunity, presidents will be deterred from energetically doing their job. Yet, until this decision, every president faced the risk of prosecution if they committed crimes and there is no evidence that American presidents have been shy about exercising their authority.”[8]

God Almighty Weighs In

The title of this case was appropriately named, “Donald J. Trump vs the United States.” That’s why I mentioned at the top that I contemplated using, “God Screams From Heaven Through Symbolism of Court Case” for the name of this article.

Why? Well, according to a much under-reported detail of that April hearing, at one point a thunderbolt appeared in the courtroom and a “booming voice” was heard. According to multiple witnesses, it yelled, “Change it to Donald J. Trump vs Your Brain, Fools!” True story.

This is not the first time the Lord God has made a personal appearance like that. Back in 2019, I reported on a presser the Lord held in an article called, “God Apologizes To Rabbis.”  Yes, even He has precedents.

And Now, A Word From Our Sponsor

Speaking of fools, how about some words of wisdom from His all-time best-seller:

In this little couplet, we see the perennial dilemma people have in dealing with fools. If you answer them according to their folly (their stupid thinking, their self-righteous rage, etc.), you may become like them. You can react just as extremely in the other direction, or you can sink down to their level of crazy, endlessly chasing after hypotheticals. But if you don’t, they will think in their vanity that they really have the right answers and you can’t think of a response.

Personally, I favor the second approach. They have to be answered no matter how bizarro the conversation gets. How else can you talk them down from the ledges? And I think I have the Apostle Paul on my side in this—“ Would to God ye could bear with me a little in my folly: and indeed bear with me…” He went on in II Corinthians 11, explaining that they had forced him to brag about his accomplishments in Christ in order to contrast himself with the false apostles.

Through these years of endless Trump-related court cases, I have learned a lot from listening to the analysis of legal experts, from the torturous rationalizations of the Sekulow crew, to the nuanced explanations of mainstream media lawyers who haven’t sold their brains to the Devil.

I can tell you that hairsplitting is not exactly my cup of tea. I like the good old-fashioned tradition of American bluntness and frankness, as in, “That’s a racket,” “calling a spade a spade,” etc. The right to get to the heart of the matter and speculate on people’s motives is fundamental to what a free society is all about. Bullies, thugs and dictators always try to intimidate you into silence, to keep themselves from getting exposed.

The Supreme Court promoting the idea that a President’s motives or actions should never be questioned is of a piece with Israel’s attempted anti-Semitism legislation, that if you criticize their policies and motives, you’re a bigot who should go to jail. Seriously, this is all these fascist circles got? Talk about emperors without clothes.

Notes:

[1] “The court’s decision delivers a real mess for the trial court to sort out, while preserving the court’s ability to second guess whatever they do,” Greg Germain, a law professor at Syracuse University in New York, told Newsweek.” https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-supreme-court-scotus-immunity-prosecution-jack-smith-1920009#:~:text=%22The%20court%27s%20decision%20delivers%20a%20real%20mess%20for%20the%20trial%20court%20to%20sort%20out%2C%20while%20preserving%20the%20court%27s%20ability%20to%20second%20guess%20whatever%20they%20do%2C%22%20Greg%20Germain%2C%20a%20law%20professor%20at%20Syracuse%20University%20in%20New%20York%2C%20told%20Newsweek.

[2] Judaism Discovered, (Coeur d’Alene, ID: Independent History and Research), 2008, p. 135.

[3] https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-us-canada-55524676 As I’ve pointed out before, “winning” an election by one vote is for this perpetual cheat, something of a perverse pleasure. Being able to demagogue such a narrow win with his usual bullying, presumption of entitlement style is one more way of humiliating his opposition, of “training” them to be doormats. Ritual humiliation is a key feature of Dear Leader dictatorships, of watching other people grovel before you. What kind of a normal human being would actually want such a thing?

[4] Garland and Smith could have easily moved to have a different judge handle this case than the inexperienced MAGA judge Cannon, way over her head in the best construction of her actions, and highly-biased in the worst. But Garland at least is an “institutionalist” who deeply believes in the system and the fiction of non-partisan cooperation with these deeply-treasonous Trump Republicans.

[5] The hypocritical Republican game of bullying and guilt-mongering Democrats to “play fair” while they do the exact opposite seems to work well for a party that has long ago lost any principles. Garland’s own history should tell him that. It was Mitch McConnell, Senate Majority Leader at the time who suggested Garland to Obama in 2016 for the Supreme Court because he was a moderate Democrat who would go through the nominating process more smoothly. Then when it came time for the Advise and Consent, McConnell wouldn’t even allow him a hearing, coming up with the novel argument that, since it was so close to an election (8 months), they should let the public decide. Of course when Ruth Bader Ginsberg died just six weeks before the 2020 election, this same skunk rammed Amy Coney Barrett onto the Supreme Court.

[6] Court cases involving these levels of national security require special judges, prosecutors and people with security clearances to even see this level of the nation’s top secrets. Aileen Cannon, an unqualified and inexperienced Trump appointee, and clearly in way over her head, is nonetheless milking this for all its worth, obviously playing suckup in order to get a Supreme Court nomination if she plays her cards right.

[7] Smith knew that Team Trump were just stalling for time, so he attempted to take it directly to the Supreme Court where he knew it would end up. The Supremes decined to hear it, in spite of the urgency of resolving this controversy for the American people. But after the lower court upheld Smith’s arguments, they magically had a change of heart. As the Church Lady would put it, “Isn’t that special?” https://www.cnn.com/2023/12/22/politics/supreme-court-trump-immunity-jack-smith/index.html

[8] https://www.aclu.org/news/civil-liberties/supreme-court-term-ends-with-win-for-trump-first-amendment-rights