Mighty white of them to acquiesce by accepting the results of an American election, I say.

Note the legalistic cunning of the masterful paragraph below.   Reminds me of the elegant arguments the Defenders of the Faith constructed during the Spanish Inquisition, to explain, irrefutably, why Jesus Christ, His Father and the Holy Spirit are all deliriously happy to hear the screams of heretics and infidels tortured and burned alive. 

I do not myself believe that there was fraud in the counting of ballots or voting machine malfunctions. I do believe, however, that the unprecedented use of mail in voting over a period of many weeks, with the loss of the secret ballot, and drop boxes, produced a fundamentally illegitimate Biden victory in 2020 in Pennsylvania and elsewhere. I simply do not believe that in an honestly held traditionally run presidential election that Joe Biden would get 181,866 more votes for President in 2020 in Pennsylvania than Barack Obama got in 2008.

source

This belief-based argument citing the unproven massive fraud of mail-in voting (a wingnut conspiracy theory denied even by corrupt partisan Bill Barr, who tirelessly promoted it prior to the 2020 election) was penned by the esteemed co-founder of the far right judicial fraternity and judicial appointment pipeline The Federalist Society. Thanks to a 2016 deal with candidate Trump, brokered by housewife Ginni Thomas, KellyAnne Conway, Sloppy Steve Bannon and other members of the secretive, by invitation only nonprofit Council for National Policy, that as president Trump would only appoint Supreme Court and other federal judges from the “Fed Soc” list, the Federalist Society controls a neat, doctrinaire 6-3 lock on the current Supreme Court.

The radical right’s goal of absolute, permanent power is so close they can taste it. They are throwing caution to the wind with one radical 6-3 decision after another, angry, self-righteous, arbitrary, vindictive, punitive, as their type is. They are currently in a mad dash to ultimate, permanent holy victory over a nation of irredeemable sinners and nonbelievers, as Jesus Christ Himself has ordained for the USA. Sadly for them, no dignified figurehead is available, they have to march behind an unhinged Hitler wanna-be, but so be it. An American Hitler is a small price to pay to fulfill the will of the One True God.

Notice the elegant construction of Professor Calabresi’s “argument”. In the opening he nonchalantly acknowledges there’s no proof for any of the fraud claims repeatedly made in courts by Trump and the RNC, claims made without producing evidence of any kind. He doesn’t mention that these false claims, that led to the riot at the Capitol, are still insisted on, are a litmus test for remaining in the Republican party. Then he does a nice sleight of hand, continuing to frame his argument, supporting the completely toothless fraud claim — now directed at another unproven form of claimed fraud — not weighed down by the legal burden of proof, or using anything as base as ordinary evidence, but with unsupported insinuations and beliefs about mail fraud and the hated drop boxes — both of which he claims also violate the constitution’s requirement of a secret ballot.

The argument, thus teed up, is no longer one of rigid legal proof tied to a reasonableness standard, but, is transmogrified into a more mystical matter of absolute belief.  He does this operatic move in the manner of Alito and the rest of the disciples of Scalia (Antonin Scalia was the original beloved faculty advisor of this brotherhood of originalists co-founded by the supremely ambitious Calabresi, an apparent Alito wannabe).  Persuasion is then based on an absolute moral claim, an appeal to deeply held personal belief, faith, if you will, which, in the proper case, trumps fallible, soulless, human-made law every time.  This is always true if you have a one vote majority that always votes as a block. 

A non-negotiable higher moral purpose is the infernal thing these politically radical Christian devils always righteously claim when stealing from the poor, forcing the powerless to remain so, gutting regulations that protect Americans, decreeing that girls raped will bear their rapist’s child, as God wills it. In a pinch, this judicial fraternity points to their admirably unyielding fealty to a particular ancient holy book they are all inspired and united by. Then, righteous and freed from the tawdry burdens of producing evidence and making an actual legal argument, in any sense, the distinguished law professor, like the rest of his accursed tribe, boldly makes his case.

This Kavanaugh-like bitch is auditioning as hard as fellow Yale Law alum and frat brother for life Boof Kavanaugh himself did for that coveted and hard-earned spot (and Boof sweated blood producing writings and radical rulings like a devil as he was left off one Fed Soc list of 25 Supreme Court candidates after another, until finally jumping the whole line to become an aggrieved martyr whose very life Soros, Streisand and the Clintons were intent on destroying).  The 66 year-old Calabresi, with age and time against him, is putting his prayers on the realization of his network’s Project 2025, and seating himself on the bench where Alito or Thomas previously set their sweaty butts, keeping the seat warm and aromatic for their boy, Mr. Calabresi.  Calabresi apparently personally adored Antonin Scalia, the patron saint of the brazenly corrupt assholes who were his protégés, the transactionally uxorious Alito and the morally limber Black Klansman, among many others.

When I say this Calabresi fuck is going full Nazi, I don’t mean that as a gratuitous insult, it’s descriptive of the type of rabid partisan that this well-educated, well-indoctrinated, impeccably credentialed true believing asshole is. Think I’m exaggerating? Here you go:

Biden said as a candidate in 2020 that he was a moderate liberal, but he proceeded to govern like Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren except for the refusal of two brave Democrats, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, to go along with that nonsense. Manchin and Sinema will both be booted out of the Senate come January 3, 2025, as a result. Biden said as a candidate that he would depoliticize the criminal justice process. Instead, his Department of Justice has used an unconstitutionally appointed Special Prosecutor to indict former President Donald Trump—the first time in history that a former President has been indicted. Hillary Clinton was given a pass on the misuse of classified documents, but not so Donald Trump. Biden’s Democrats even got Trump unconstitutionally convicted for altering business records to conceal the Trump Organization’s involvement in First Amendment protected speech in a New York State trial that was truly a charade.

We are now about to choose again between Donald Trump and Joe Biden in a presidential election year—2024—which is totally free of the fears of infection in public places caused by Covid. Here are three things we should insist on: 1) a return to truly secret ballots cast in polling booths with the curtain shut behind the voter; 2) no use of drop boxes, and 3) that everyone votes on the same day, with the same headlines in mind, and not over the period of a month.

The loss of the secret ballot, the use of drop boxes, and of same day voting is a huge change in our democracy, which ought to be abandoned now that Covid is gone. You cannot fill out a ballot at home in most cases without your family members knowing how you voted and that means the sudden loss of the secret ballot. Partisan canvassers may also observe how people vote, intimidating them and undermining their independence.

The secret ballot is of central importance in elections, especially when candidates generate the passionate feelings of hatred that are generated by Donald Trump and Joe Biden. This is a hatred that pits family members and even long-time friends against one another sometimes ruining long-cherished relationships. If ever, there was to be a presidential election for which the secret ballot was essential, it is this year’s rematch between President Trump and Joe Biden.

(from Calabresi’s learned blog post/audition for Alito’s seat)

What’s the point of having unappealable power if you don’t use it on behalf of your generous benefactors to do things that can’t be otherwise done legally in a democracy?

A 98-0 vote in the Senate, a margin of more than 350 votes in the House, the proud signature of the sitting Republican president to reauthorize the Voting Rights Act is no true expression of the voice of the People. It is the five (now six) unelected, ideologically pure justices who always defeat the four (now three) less partisan justices by one (now two) vote(s), and a willingness to be a shamelessly political actor, that decides what the voice of the fucking people is. If that’s not your idea of democracy, say these God-fearing white Christian radicals, then we’ll detain you without charges for as long as we like, how about that, wiseass?

The GOP has gone full Nazi (check out the latest seig heiling somersaults from Federalist Society co-founder Steven Calabresi — post coming soon).   All of America’s wealthiest reactionaries (many of our current 813 American billionaires — up from the pre-pandemic 640) have gone all in with the clearly insane, iron-willed criminal candidate that many of them were, until recently, still hoping to replace with someone more stable, capable and reliable.  

The big talking point on the right, since Trump’s recent conviction in NYS criminal court, is LAWFARE, the selective weaponization of the “justice” system against innocent members of their party, including vicious leftist attacks on the ethics of perfectly fair Supreme Court justices guilty of simply loving their wives and having generous billionaire personal friends.

Here’s a little partial scorecard:

The criminal trial of seemingly criminal Senator Bob Menendez (D-NJ), indicted September 22, 2023, is underway as you read these words (assuming it’s some time around June 10, 2024)

The criminal trial of a crack addict named Hunter Biden (you’ve seen photos of his genitals, displayed in the House of Representatives, now watch the trial itself) who lied on an application for a gun permit, a charge brought after a six year investigation by a Trump appointee made Special Counsel by the current AG, that was being disposed of in a plea deal (rejected by a Trump appointed judge on July 27, 2023) is currently about ready to go to a jury.

On June 9, 2023, Trump was indicted for violations of the Espionage Act, and criminal charges related to false statements by defendant Trump and his lawyers and multiple efforts to obstruct an FBI investigation, one year ago yesterday.  The case has been postponed indefinitely based on a grab bag of defendant’s fringe legal theories the sitting judge, appointed by Trump after “losing” the 2020 election, has not yet had a chance to rule on (rendering her so far impervious to appeal, yo).

Trump was indicted for Election Interference, disrupting an official proceeding and other crimes in the federal court in D.C. on August 1, 2023.  That case has been delayed indefinitely by the 6-3 Federalist Society Supreme Court, since December 2023 when they refused to expedite DOJ’s request to immediately hear Trump’s frivolous appeal, and rule on the absurd non-issue under consideration by the Federalist Six (the thorny, novel legal question:  can a former president ever be indicted for anything done while president, including murder of his political opponents?) is unlikely to be ruled on in time for the full evidence against Trump to be heard by the public before the 2024 election.

Trump and eighteen co-conspirators were charged by Fulton County DA Fani Willis for a criminal conspiracy to overturn the results of the 2020 election in Georgia.  They were indicted on August 15, 2023, a few pleading to lesser charges to avoid possible felony convictions.  The case is now on hold because the appeals court in Georgia is planning to hold more hearings regarding the consentual relationship between the Fulton County DA and a prosecutor she hired for the criminal prosecution.  Although the appeal appears to be as frivolous as the Trump defendants’ original stinking, racist dumpster of a motion to dismiss the prosecutor, bear in mind that the totally colorblind justice system of the state of Georgia continues to take any kind of colorable sexual improprieties between Black government officials as VERY serious matters of public concern.

In the one case the cognitively diminished 78 year-old former president (as of Flag Day, June 14) was indicted for and stood trial for (or rather, slept trial for), the unanimous jury convicted him on all counts.   The jury found that Trump’s falsification of business records to cover up pay offs to silence two women whose stories would have hurt him in the upcoming 2016 election, payoffs made right after the “grab ’em by the pussy” recording was released by the Clinton campaign shortly before the election, had been established beyond a reasonable doubt.

That is the standard of proof in a criminal trial, a fairly high bar. Beyond a reasonable doubt. Just as the standard for recusal by a Supreme Court justice is set out with perfect clarity in federal statute for every right wing “textualist” with eyes to read it:

Of course, to the members of the orthodox, highly partisan “conservative-libertarian” federal judicial fraternity/ federal judgeship pipeline, the Federalist Society, citing this law out of context this way, and focusing unfairly on the word “shall”, making recusal mandatory if the judge’s impartiality might reasonably be questioned, is just another example of an armchair liberal cuck loser cripple, deranged on steroids and worse, pathetically trying to weaponize “justice”, waging more feckless Leftist partisan lawfare, ranting impotently while a good Christian conservative has loud, righteous sex with the cuck’s wife in the other room.

Fascists must destroy the citizens’ ability to obtain information, analyze it and make critical decisions. They do this through violence, after flooding them with propaganda that mobilizes their grievances to instill an overpowering sense of fear and rage in the population. Once enough disaffected people become terrified and enraged, they will all goosestep just fine, thanks, and the most violence prone among them will happily commit any idealistic violence the leader might require to seize and keep power.

So much of what these American Nazis are currently doing is literally translated from the original German. Stay tuned for the co-founder of the Federalist Society’s recent full embrace of the vaunted Federalist Society credo: Führerwortes haben Gesetzeskraft!  He didn’t want death camps, if there was any choice in the matter, but since there is no choice?   Death camps it shall be, sir!

There is no hole in Raskin’s legal reasoning, as he presented it in today’s New York Times. The law is very clear, whatever a whining Alito might have to say about his wife’s indomitable flag flying habits and his own complete and obvious objectivity. We can only hope the remainder of the MAGA caucus on our highest court heed binding federal law, the Constitution, and their own precedent and force their two openly pro-insurrection colleagues to obey the law and take themselves off of pending cases that will decide the fate of insurrectionists, and quite possibly our Republic.

The only weakness in Raskin’s impeccable, beautifully written argument is that the action irrefutably required by the Constitution, explicit federal statute and Supreme Court precedent, depends on the transactional ethics of “justices” from an extremist judicial fraternity actually following the law to enforce required ethics. Several of them (Kavanaugh, Roberts — rewarded by Dubya Bush for his excellent work on the case that made him president — and Coney Barrett) were partisan actors, sent to Florida in the days leading up to Bush v. Gore, a highly dubious legal ruling decided by at least two judges (The Black Klansman being one of them) who had an ethical obligation to recuse themselves from that nakedly partisan case. The Federalist Six are lifetime political appointees who have many times over revealed their lack of integrity and their fraternity’s united contempt for precedent, norms and the rule of law.

Here’s a taste of Jamie Raskin’s op ed in today’s NY Times:

In one key 5-to-3 Supreme Court case from 2016, Williams v. Pennsylvania, Justice Anthony Kennedy explained why judicial bias is a defect of constitutional magnitude and offered specific objective standards for identifying it. Significantly, Justices Alito and Thomas dissented from the majority’s ruling.

The case concerned the bias of the chief justice of Pennsylvania, who had been involved as a prosecutor on the state’s side in an appellate death penalty case that was before him. Justice Kennedy found that the judge’s refusal to recuse himself when asked to do so violated due process. Justice Kennedy’s authoritative opinion on recusal illuminates three critical aspects of the current controversy.

First, Justice Kennedy found that the standard for recusal must be objective because it is impossible to rely on the affected judge’s introspection and subjective interpretations. The court’s objective standard requires recusal when the likelihood of bias on the part of the judge “is too high to be constitutionally tolerable,” citing an earlier case. “This objective risk of bias,” according to Justice Kennedy, “is reflected in the due process maxim that ‘no man can be a judge in his own case.’” A judge or justice can be convinced of his or her own impartiality but also completely missing what other people are seeing.

Second, the Williams majority endorsed the American Bar Association’s Model Code of Judicial Conduct as an appropriate articulation of the Madisonian standard that “no man can be a judge in his own cause.” Model Code Rule 2.11 on judicial disqualification says that a judge “shall disqualify himself or herself in any proceeding in which the judge’s impartiality might reasonably be questioned.” This includes, illustratively, cases in which the judge “has a personal bias or prejudice concerning a party,” a married judge knows that “the judge’s spouse” is “a person who has more than a de minimis interest that could be substantially affected by the proceeding” or the judge “has made a public statement, other than in a court proceeding, judicial decision or opinion, that commits or appears to commit the judge to reach a particular result.” These model code illustrations ring a lot of bells at this moment.

Third and most important, Justice Kennedy found for the court that the failure of an objectively biased judge to recuse him- or herself is not “harmless error” just because the biased judge’s vote is not apparently determinative in the vote of a panel of judges. A biased judge contaminates the proceeding not just by the casting and tabulation of his or her own vote but by participating in the body’s collective deliberations and affecting, even subtly, other judges’ perceptions of the case.

On the day when we remember our valiant dead, killed in wars, it is worth recalling what the now old men (my father, drafted when he turned 18, would be 100 next week) who fought and died in great numbers to defeat Nazism died for.   The freedom to have a voice in government, no matter how small, and to sometimes see justice done in a democracy, rather than the terrifying absence of all fairness in a totalitarian state ruled by obedience to the will of one enraged psychopath bent on revenge.

Below is a clip of Sam Alito, one of our nine unappealable lifetime rulers on what is lawful in the US, whining about a made up theoretical scenario in which a president, after committing crimes while in office, will be compelled, after losing a “close and hotly contested” election, (say by a razor thin 7,000,000 vote margin as the ex-president now making the immunity claim did) to pardon himself, or foment violence to stay in office, if absolute lifetime presidential immunity for criminality while in office is not preemptively granted.  You know, since history shows that every president before Trump was immediately indicted for crimes, by his political enemies, after leaving office… while somehow all forgetting to invoke their absolute constitutional right not to be indicted.

This kind of floridly assholic line of reasoning/questioning can only be posed by a judicial genius who is also a fucking Nazi.

And when I say Nazi, recall that this was a party of ambitious power-hungry climbers willing to do anything to advance the Nazi cause.  They were not all-in on mass murder, until it was required of them by their unquestioning obedience to the will of their Führer, which was their only principle, outside of seeking their own power.  The 2020 GOP platform had one plank, whatever the Big Guy wants, we support it.  Remember also, it took the Nazis several years in power, after years of violence, rhetorical and physical, to come to power, before they started committing the serious crimes and wholesale murder they are now known for. 

A guy like Alito is a Nazi because he openly demonstrates his partisan willingness to further the merciless party line, whatever it might be, and enhance the power of his sponsors and fellow extremists, no matter what.  He does this over and over again, in his judicial opinions and angry public statements, as when brazenly lying on FOX about why his Stop the Steal flags were flying outside two of his homes. Some commie called his wife the c word!   She had every right to fly the flag of insurrection over their house!

Check him out in the absurd presidential absolute blanket immunity from criminal prosecution hearing (that, but for several appointees by a criminal defendant, should have been held, and decided, if the ridiculous claim needed to be heard at all, in December 2023, as DOJ requested).

Icon of the far right Justice Antonin Scalia, started this “fuck you, ethics” trend when he refused to recuse himself from a case involving his friend and hunting companion, the aptly named Dick Cheney. When asked about the appearance of impropriety in traveling with Vice President Cheney on Air Force Two for some kind of holiday playtime while he sat on a pending case involving Cheney’s secret Energy Task Force meeting with Enron execs and others to deregulate energy on the West Coast, he told the reporter “I think it’s a sad day in America when people question the integrity of Supreme Court justices.”

The reporter was young, and flustered, and worked for a large corporation, an inherently conservative artificial person. She was apparently unable to follow with “I agree with you that it is a sad day when Americans don’t trust the integrity of a Supreme Court justice. However, that was not responsive to my question. So again, how does this clear appearance of impropriety not require you to recuse yourself from a case involving a powerful friend you vacation with?” If it had been me, I like to think I’d have added “bitch” at the end of that rephrasing of my clear question.

However, the point was made by the arrogant Scalia. A justice can simply say “fuck you for fucking questioning my integrity you fucking commie fuck” and that is the end of any discussion of the appearance of impropriety. Enraged extremist Sam Alito can wear a swastika under his robes, next to his Appeal to Heaven t-shirt, while fingering his authoritative compendium of witch burning anti-abortion jurists, compromised Clarence “Black Klansman” Thomas can seethe publicly about how viciously unfair it is that he’s questioned about undisclosed generous gifts from close billionaire friends who sidled up to him once he was on the Supreme Court, not to mention his rabid, powerful activist wife’s full-throated support of the Stolen Election lie. John Roberts’s wife can make millions referring rightwing lawyers to organizations who bring cases before her husband. Kavanuagh’s huge credit card debt can magically disappear overnight, Gorsuch can suddenly easily sell a property he’d had on the market for years, etc.

These clearly partisan, ideologically pure, anti-democratic, fanatical products of a doctrinaire rightwing legal fraternity are completely out of control, and John Roberts is respectfully silent as he and his five activist colleagues brazen out this crisis of public confidence, using the Scalia method, as he votes with them to rule that partisan gerrymandering is completely legal, unless those drawing the maps are wearing Ku Klux Klan hoods and publicly calling for the mass lynching of Blacks as they remove Black voters from a partisan district to protect the election prospects of one of their own.

This, of course, is 11 years after these anti-democratic creeps neutered the unanimously reauthorized (98-0 in the Senate) Voting Rights Act and later ruled that partisan gerrymandering is a political question that the court can’t comment on, unless, of course, as they clarified recently, it’s a bunch of n-words trying to bring a case previously covered by the Voting Rights Act that henceforth will be impossible to win, under new Supreme Court precedent that shifts the burden to them to prove the merely partisan map was also drawn with unmistakable racist intent.

In overturning two federal courts in South Carolina, Alito, writing for the six, created a new presumption of legislative non-racism that must be overcome by Black plaintiffs, no matter what the lower courts’ fact finding showed, no matter that 62% of Blacks were moved out of Nancy Mace’s district and into Representative Jim Clyburn’s (D-SC) district. Alito needs at least a one vote MAGA majority in the House to avoid a bill of impeachment against him getting to the floor, obviously. Every partisan drawn gerrymandered district counts! Fuck these fucking Nazi putos.

Biden in term two must have Congress expand the court and add four or five moderate, non-Federalist Society “ideological” diehards, to the Supreme Court which must also adopt a binding code of ethics. I think Merrick Garland should be one of the added justices, he will make an excellent, highly principled justice, even if he has not been bold in fighting fascism as our nation’s top law enforcement official. Hopefully it’s not too late for democracy in our country teetering on the brink of Klan/Nazi/White Christian Nationalist rule as a powerful minority uses despair, hatred and fear to permanently cement its hold on absolute power.

In the meantime, no more strongly worded letters to bland, smug corporatist John Roberts, Senator Durbin. Subpoena a few of these openly contemptuous fascists, starting with Samuel “My wife doesn’t like being called a cunt” Alito. Do it Tuesday.