As Boof Kavanaugh’s mother taught her snarling, partisan son, when judging a controversy use common sense to decide what makes sense, what smells funny and who has the most to gain by claiming what smells funny. Now consider the stench her boy and his judicial fraternity frat bros (with apologies to Amy, a woman’s woman and also a Federalist Society member) have been busy creating since he became an unappealable lifetime ruler on what is justice and what sucks ass.

When it was time for the Supreme Court to rule on a state’s right to kick an insurrectionist off the ballot, for, at minimum giving aid and comfort to Capitol-sacking rioters who stopped the certification of an election Trump lost, the rightwing frat boys quickly rewrote the 14th Amendment (writing section three out of the law) and hurried to release their ruling in time for the big primary day called Super Tuesday. No quid pro quo by the three Trump appointees, no conflict of interest for Clarence and Ginni, they’re all on the same side, with our greatest secretive billionaires!

Trump one, Constitution and the rule of law zero.

When it came to Trump’s absurd Nixonian/Dershowitzian claim that if a president, or even a former president, does it — no matter what it is — it can’t be prosecuted as a crime, the same six extremist fraternity members decided to delay the hearing from December, when Jack Smith asked for it and they kicked it to the DC circuit court of appeals (who took their time writing an unappealable decision), to the end of April for a ruling by the end of June when they break for the summer. Criminal trials for the big orange turd? Not if the Federalist Six can help it! Only a bit of a lie was needed to make their delay holding Trump has no such right fly. Trump two, Constitution and the rule of law zero.

The Fourteenth Amendment was put into place to ensure rights for newly freed Black citizens. It was written to guarantee federally enforceable rights against state governments seeking to re-enslave or otherwise abuse certain citizens under color of law. Its purpose was to ensure that no state could give a citizen rights less than the federal ones protected by the Constitution, specifically the Bill of Rights. The fourteenth enforces the Bill of Rights against encroachment by the states. It guarantees equal protection under the law and a right to all the privileges and immunities of US citizenship. It was soon put into a 90 year judicial coma by a series of sickening Supreme Court decisions, relying on dirty tricks (like limiting the privileges and immunity to an irrelevant three or four and leaving the rest up to the states) but that is another story for another day. Section three, disqualifying insurrectionists and those who give aid and comfort to insurrectionists, like the rest of the fourteenth amendment is self-executing (as the Supreme Court conceded in relation to candidates for state office only.)

When I read Shelby County v. Holder, the case where John Roberts and the boys did away with enforcement of the Voting Rights Act, I saw easily, once I read RGB’s brilliant dissent, that Roberts had lied. His strongest argument, that the Act had worked to correct historical racist voter suppression and that Congress reauthorized the Act based on forty year-old data, was pulled completely out of his impeccable corporate/Federalist Society ass. There had been many hearings in Congress, reams of current data studied, including documentation that the ‘plaintiff’, Shelby County, Alabama itself had recently engaged in racist voter suppression highjinx, not to mention that 98-0 reauthorization vote in the Senate. Days after the decision dozen of new racist voter suppression laws were enacted, or resurrected, in various states.

In Anderson, the recent case from Colorado that wrote the disqualification section out of the 14th Amendment for candidates for federal office, the Roberts court engaged in the same outright lying and judicial deception. Section five, held the court — without any support in law, history of the text of the Fourteenth Amendment — means that if Congress does not make a specific law to enforce a specific provision of the 14th Amendment, courts may not enforce it. This is a plain and easily demonstrable lie.

Cases are brought by the dozens every day in federal courts all over the country based on violations of clauses of the 14th amendment, equal protection, privileges and immunities, and so on, with no federal enabling statute in existence. Section five was included to make sure that if a specific law was ever deemed necessary to enforce the rights under the amendment, in some unforeseeable way (like the Ku Klux Klan Act, for example), Congress was specifically authorized to address it. Balls and strikes umpire Roberts turned the Constitution on his head, no doubt in the spirit of Originalism, or perhaps in the name of the supremely flexible, Federalist Society tweaked Political Questions Doctrine.

Don’t take my word for it. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse does a great presentation on this very issue, the Supreme Court’s ability to rely on false statements in unappealable decisions, which I saw yesterday. He refers to these ongoing decisions based on false premises, decisions that are not later overturned or corrected to address their failure of truthful analysis, as zombie decisions. His talk is easily digestible, super informative and highly recommended.

If your ideas are unpopular, because they represent only one percent of the population’s interests, you cannot count on democracy to implement these ideas. You have to think outside of the democratic box. You propagandize through supposedly non-partisan “think tanks” that you fund, support extremist candidates,  create an extremist judicial fraternity and stack the courts with well-trained judges steeped in your unpopular worldview. Then it is simply a matter of having these courts impose your values on everybody, as long as these courts have the final word on what is law and what is justice.

Heather Cox Richardson, as usual, nails it:

Two days ago, in Slate, legal analyst Mark Joseph Stern noted that when Mitch McConnell (R-KY) was Senate majority leader, he “realized you don’t need to win elections to enact Republican policy. You don’t need to change hearts and minds. You don’t need to push ballot initiatives or win over the views of the people. All you have to do is stack the courts. You only need 51 votes in the Senate to stack the courts with far-right partisan activists…[a]nd they will enact Republican policies under the guise of judicial review, policies that could never pass through the democratic process. And those policies will be bulletproof, because they will be called ‘law.’”

Heather