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.