From Heather Cox Richardson yesterday, on the long judicial coup run by the cunning, privileged owners of the activist extremist party that is now calling itself MAGA (see, also John Birch Society):

In 1986, when it was clear that most Americans did not support the policies put in place by the Reagan Republicans, the Reagan appointees at the Justice Department broke tradition to ensure that candidates for judgeships shared their partisanship. Their goal, said the president’s attorney general, Ed Meese, was to “institutionalize the Reagan revolution so it can’t be set aside no matter what happens in future presidential elections.” 

That principle held going forward. Federal judgeships depend on Senate confirmation, and when McConnell became Senate minority leader in 2007, he worked to make sure Democrats could not put their own appointees onto the bench. He held up so many of President Barack Obama’s nominees for federal judgeships that in 2013 Senate majority leader Harry Reid (D-NV) prohibited filibusters on certain judicial nominees.

McConnell also made it clear that he would do everything he could to make sure that Democrats could not pass laws, weaponizing the filibuster so that nothing could become law without 60 votes in the Senate. . .

She then details McConnell’s right-wing judiciary appointment mission, and how he removed the filibuster for Supreme Court justices, when the time was right, to get a couple of 50% supported nominees on to the court, after denying Obama his constitutional right to nominate a replacement for Antonin Scalia eight months before the 2016 election.

. . . Throughout his tenure as Senate majority leader, McConnell made judicial confirmations a top priority, churning through nominations even when the coronavirus pandemic shut everything else down. Right-wing plaintiffs are now seeking out those judges, like Matthew Kacsmaryk of Texas, to decide in their favor. Kacsmaryk challenged the FDA’s approval of the drug mifepristone, which can be used in abortions, thus threatening to ban it nationwide.

Meanwhile, at the Supreme Court, Trump appointees are joining with right-wing justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito to overturn precedents established long ago, including the right to abortion. 

source

Don’t forget America’s most partisan balls and strikes umpire John “Corporations get to say ‘go fuck yourself'” Roberts. How does this smiling corporate shill, who schemes behind the scenes, votes in every key case with the right-wing fraternal order of the Federalist Society block, and has authored some of its most infamous decisions, get a pass from even someone as brilliant as Heather? How is he, the man who, although he didn’t vote with the other four to kill Roe v. Wade, gleefully signed on to nullify the power of federal regulators, keep an insurrectionist on the ballot in Colorado and immunize criminal acts committed by a criminal president, among other MAGA endorsed rulings, still seen as somehow “moderate” or an “institutionalist”?

Look no further than his infamous decision in Shelby County v. Holder when he ruled that enforcement of the Voting Rights Act, which he acknowledged righted a historical injustice, was no longer necessary. His argument is bland and pristine: Congress relied on forty year old data when they reauthorized it, so me and four Federalist Society diehards are undoing their uninformed, undemocratic activism. True, except that he was lying about the forty year old data, as it turns out. As I wrote when I read the decision:

Only when you read Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s dissent (another magnificent piece of clear, precise legal and moral logic) do you realize the audacity of the Roberts majority’s legal sleight of hand. You learn that the reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act was passed, after 21 hearings and 15,000 pages of evidence of ongoing discrimination in the states under preclearance, by a vote of 390-33 in the House and, after further debate, 98 to 0 in the Senate. Reading the John Roberts decision you’d have no reason to suspect that President George W. Bush signed the reauthorization into law a week later, as Ginsburg writes:

recognizing the need for “further work . . . in the fight against injustice,” and calling the reauthorization “an example of our continued commitment to a united America where every person is valued and treated with dignity and respect.” 

Nah, says John Roberts, we’re going back to that golden time when the wealthy land owners, the ancestors of our greatest billionaire donors and close friends, made all the decisions for the USA.  Dignity and respect, after all, are just words, and ridiculous ones when applied to those who deserve neither. Strike three, bitches.

I began writing this yesterday, and today the Gray Lady herself chimes in on Roberts. Here’s how he teed up the question posed by the Roberts court in Trump v. US:

The justices instructed lawyers from both sides to address a broad question: “whether and if so to what extent does a former president enjoy presidential immunity from criminal prosecution for conduct alleged to involve official acts during his tenure.”. . .

. . . On April 25, the justices and the lawyers in the case gathered for oral arguments in the courtroom, across the street from where the Jan. 6 rioting had taken place three years earlier. The clamor from the Capitol attack had been audible from inside the court building, former employees recalled in interviews, and afterward, security sharply increased and fences shielded the building.

During the arguments, however, several conservative justices said that they wanted to focus not on what had happened that day, but on broader legal questions.

“I’m not discussing the particular facts of this case,” Justice Alito told the courtroom.

“I’m not focused on the here and now of this case,” Justice Kavanaugh said. “I’m very concerned about the future.”

“We’re writing a rule for the ages,” Justice Gorsuch said.

For the Thousand Year Reich, no doubt.

Here’s a bit about Roberts’s fundamental dishonesty:

One footnote left scholars wondering whether former presidents could ever be prosecuted for taking bribes. An N.Y.U. professor was startled to discover that the opinion, which leaned heavily on Nixon v. Fitzgerald, a 1982 case on presidential immunity, truncated a quote from that decision, changing its meaning.

Verdict: Federalist Society stalwart and Nazi fuck.