by Dan Burns

Sep 9, 2022, 2:30 PM

Another, and more dangerous, right-wing coup plot, in the works

I get that, thanks to the role of negativity bias in human cognition, doom-and-gloom scaremongering works best for online clicks and donations. But I personally find something like this to be more righteous.

Until and unless those of us who are shocked and horrified at lawless rulings by lawless Trump judges are prepared to propose structural solutions, the aggregated effect of criticizing their rulings won’t be to restore the rule of law or even to restore public confidence in the rule of law. The aggregated effect will be just to confirm that we will all be living under the thumb of Donald Trump’s lifetime-appointed hacks for many decades.

There are solutions out there for the problem of Trump’s runaway judges. Expanding the courts—even just the lower courts—is the most bulletproof. Congress has periodically added seats to the federal judiciary from its inception to help judges keep up with ever-ballooning caseloads. Today’s litigants (who are not named Donald Trump) often face yearslong court delays. The Judicial Conference, a nonpartisan government institution that develops administrative policies, has begged Congress to add seats to the lower courts. Some Republicans have supported the idea in recognition of the crisis facing our understaffed judiciary. Letting Joe Biden balance out far-right courts like the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals—which will weigh Cannon’s ruling if the government appeals—would go a long way to tame the jurisprudence of Trumpism. When district court judges know their radical decisions will be overturned on appeal, they may be less likely to swing for the fences in the first place.
(Slate)

The plutocracy is well aware that their favored candidates are set to be competitive in fewer and fewer elections, over time. That’s because less and less of the electorate is, however well-meaning by their own (dim) lights, messed-up enough to continue to buy into the failed, imbecilic ideology that is contemporary right-wing conservatism. So said plutocrats are desperate to essentially do away with democracy. The U.S. Supreme Court has taken a case called Moore vs. Harper, which they may well use in order to try to give gerrymandered right-wing state legislatures full control over federal elections.

This would be an attempted right-wing coup. Not of the same sort as happened on Jan. 6, 2021, but the end goals are the same. And it should ultimately be dealt with accordingly.

(Incidentally, I regularly hear people who just don’t seem to take Jan. 6 very seriously. I’ve even caught myself being that way. That’s because the cop-killing Trumper mob, while dangerous and horrifying, was also composed of as sorry a gaggle of gullible simpletons as you’ll ever find on the entire face of the earth. It was also very obvious, and what SCOTUS has in mind is less so and therefore more dangerous.)

If SCOTUS really does do this, President Biden needs to, at the very least, suspend the decision – it doesn’t matter whether doing that is precisely “legal” or not, because we’d be talking about a national emergency here – and launch immediate investigations into both particular members of SCOTUS, and into the Federalist Society that plotted it all. He will absolutely have a substantial majority of the populace on his side. It will help if we all do what we can to increase that majority, by imparting information and laying on persuasion, in the meantime.

Trump is in the process of being proven, not just beyond a reasonable doubt but beyond any and all doubt, to be a god-damned seditionist and traitor to the United States of America. It’s unthinkable that he be permitted any lasting presidential “legacy,” judicial or otherwise. At least it should be unthinkable.