A Rogue Supreme Court Turns America into a Dictatorship
The Illiberal, Authoritarian Supreme Court is Destroying America
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To aid and abet 34 count felon Donald Trump, a lopsided, ideologically-driven conservative majority Supreme Court has granted partial absolute immunity to any president of the United States, with a laser focus on probable president-for-life Trump, in a dire, consequential, and chilling ruling issued on Monday, July 1st.
Even though he is not currently president, Trump is enjoying the benefits of presidential immunity for his prior crimes.
Trump's sentencing for the hush money trial was previously set for July 11th and now is delayed until September 18th how-about-never, thanks to this objectionable immunity ruling. It has been determined as of Tuesday, July 2nd, that the New York Court is now willing to “delay” in light of retroactive presidential immunity. In a one-two punch, Judge Merchan has agreed to forestall squander America's one opportunity to lock him up.
Justice delayed is justice denied, and as such, special counsel Jack Smith's 2020 election interference case is also “delayed” indefinitely in the wake of this immunity ruling, making a federal trial before the November 2024 election nearly impossible. Trump was indicted on four counts, including conspiracy to defraud the United States; conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding; obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding; and conspiracy against rights.
To highlight the insanity and regressive barbarity of this immunity ruling, Biden could now legally order Trump assassinated or imprisoned as a national security threat. But Biden respects America's norms, exhibits forbearance, and has the character and temperament not to do so.
With King-like maneuvering, the Supreme Court has done Trump's bidding with an immunity ruling not so much for theoretical presidents going forward that they should be unrestrained in carrying out duties “boldly and fearlessly,” which no president but Trump has felt the need to employ, but to retroactively get Trump off the hook for his innumerable crimes while in concert effectively cutting their nose off to spite their face, undermining their own agency and power.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor accused the majority of being so fixated on a president’s need for boldness and dispatch that they ignored “the countervailing need for accountability and restraint.” Never before in U.S. history, she added, have presidents had reason to believe that they would be immune from prosecution if they used their office to commit crimes.
Justice Sotomayor wrote in an outraged dissent joined by the court’s other two liberals. “In every use of official power, the president is now a king above the law.”
The Supreme Court of the United States has decided to convert the United States into a dictatorship by granting the president of the United States immunity from all his official acts while in power — a great definition of an authoritarian regime. —Prof. Sam Vaknin
With a wide-sweeping claim of presidential immunity, a president such as Trump could and would act with unrestrained dictatorial, i.e., absolute powers such that the Supreme Court would be reduced to being a shill for the president's agenda to rubber stamp whatever he has in mind as “democratically” legitimate, their mere presence being the legitimizer. The Supreme Court then effectively acts as a pencil-pushing, mentally masturbatory, feckless, and without teeth instrument of the state, who would be the all-encompassing Trump. And all their cynical dreams of the state and government being bloated bureaucracy come to pass in a self-realized, self-fulfilled prophecy of nihilism.
The psychopathological resonances here with political narcissistic abuse are strong in the giving away of one’s power to the narcissistic leader. By appeasing their master, Trump, the Supreme Court undermines their own credibility and judicial power. It's not as simple as to think that their underhanded motivations include that the Supreme Court is now enjoying corrupt pay-for-play bribes, which are now, after the fact, “gratuities”; there is a psychological undercurrent here of entrainment (brainwashing) with Trump that is amplified by MAGA contagion and dovetails with antipathy and cynicism towards and Democratic Party and liberal democracy in general. In the spirit of “deconstructing the administrative state,” the Supreme Court is acting suicidally by rendering itself empty robes of “Justice” — a spectacle, a ruse, all to subvert our democracy by demoralizing and destabilizing American society to a crisis point (could this be it? America's Reichstag fire?) that will then become a normalization of a chain of events from autocracy to authoritarianism and then fascism.
In a ridiculous hair-splitting move, the Court ruled that immunity is ostensibly limited to acts committed in the “official” duty of the presidency, with “unofficial” acts as the exception. What constitutes “unofficial” acts is ambiguous and likely to tie up the courts in a myriad of cases in the years to come if America continues to have legitimate courts of law under Biden, and not devolve into a banana republic of kangaroo courts under Trump. By the looks of it, “unofficial” acts are a cover for the legitimacy of this decree such that the court is providing smoke and mirrors that there could be a possibility to prosecute a president to the full extent of the law, knowing full well that these “unofficial” acts could be facilely argued as “official” acts while maintaining the pretense that no person is above the law.
As previously stated in my piece from April, Trump's Immunity or Immunity from Trump? Containing Trump Contagion:
A standard play in the playbook of authoritarianism world over is the strongman's call for prosecutorial immunity.
In her book Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, professor of history at NYU, captures this sentiment, “From Mussolini onward, making sure you have immunity while those who have done your dirty work go to jail has been an essential strongman skill.”
Just this week, Steve Bannon, 70, has been sentenced to 4 months in prison for contempt of Congress for defying a subpoena from the House select committee investigating the January 6th attack on the Capitol, and Rudy Giuliani, 80, has been disbarred in the state of New York for his failed attempt to overturn the 2020 election by citing mass voter fraud— two tales of woe in a long line of Trump’s collateral damage.
If the Supreme Court were to live up to its ideal, it would be neutral and non-partisan regardless of which president nominated each judge. More or less, the court has held to this standard with little fanfare or grave consequence (minus the non-trivial Citizens United case, which dented democracy by greenlighting big money interests) until Trump appointed three partisan judges, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett during his administration, taking a wrecking ball to an established good faith precedent of neutrality.
These three partisan hack judges perjured themselves when they lied during their confirmation hearings that they had no intention to overrule stare decisis (Latin for “to stand by things decided”), the legal foundation for Roe vs. Wade. Their presence on the court is scandalous in that it is built upon a foundation of mendacious, fallacious, and fantastical quicksand, which threatens the standing of the entire republic and what makes America America: liberal values.
Conservatives critique liberals for judicial activism; however, these conservative judges are corrupt activists. Justice Samuel Alito's flag-flying scandal and Justice Clarence Thomas's bribes from billionaire Harlan Crow are enough to make one think twice about the legitimacy of this court.
Justice Thomas accepted 38 vacations, 26 private jet flights, a dozen VIP passes to sporting events, rooms at luxury resorts, and his nephew’s tuition payments. Crow also bought Thomas's mother's property at an above-market price. Justice Thomas reported none of these perks/bribes.
A Rogue Supreme Court’s Recent Supreme Court Rulings
In addition to the presidential immunity case, Trump v. U.S., these narcissistically shoehorned rulings do not reflect the will of the people.
A sampling:
Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, Relentless v. Department of Commerce, re: Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council: (Chevron Deference Doctrine) Lest anyone be in denial about the seriousness and gravity of Project 2025 with its promise to end regulations on pollution and food safety, this Supreme Court makes it clear that they mean business in terms of lining big business’ pockets with cash at the expense of the health and dignity of American citizenry.
“The decision was the culmination of a decades-long, billionaire-funded campaign to capture and weaponize the unelected power of the Supreme Court to deliver huge windfalls for corporate interests at the expense of everyday Americans,” said Alex Aronson, a former Democratic staffer in Congress who is executive director of Court Accountability, a judicial oversight group.
Fischer v. U.S: Supreme Court sides with January 6th defendant.
Garland v. Cargill: Bump stocks turn a semi-automatic rifle effectively into a machine gun. This Supreme Court is so extreme that they struck down Trump's ban on bump stocks in the wake of the 2017 Las Vegas shooting, which injured 500 people and killed 60 people in the deadliest mass shooting in American history.
The Biden-Harris Communications Director Michael Tyler responded, “Weapons of war have no place on the streets of America, but Trump's Supreme Court justices have decided the gun lobby is more important than the safety of our kids and our communities.”
Johnson v. Grants Pass: SCOTUS criminalizes homelessness.
Snyder v. United States: Corruption law allows gifts to state and local officials, distinguishing after-the-fact rewards from before-the-fact bribes.
Implications in a Narcissistic Age
In narcissism expert Prof. Sam Vaknin's video interview How Leader’s Pathologies Resonate with Ours New Age of Delusions (with Adriana Ferreiro), he asserts:
“Our pathologies resonate because evolution is experimenting with psychological mutations. It is a form of progress via diversity.
Pathology is the engine of growth and evolution. A normal state is stagnation and death. It is pathology that is the mutation of civilization.
The new pathology nowadays is psychopathic narcissism.
What are the clinical features of psychopathic narcissism? It's divorced from reality and living in fantasy. It actively prefers fantasy. It's Machiavellian (manipulative). It's conspiracy-minded with a psychological trait known as conspiracism. It's dysempathic, etc.
The leader is the mirror, and I call it psychopathological resonance.
The leader legitimizes the pathology of the people. The leader tells the people, “You're not crazy. You are normal. Everyone else is crazy. You are healthy. Everyone else is sick. Why? Because I think like you. The fact that I think like you proves to you that what you're thinking is right. I am the source of legitimacy.”
A leader comes who says, “Yes, blacks are inferior biologically, and you feel legitimized and justified, and your anxiety is reduced. Now, there's a trade-off. The leader tells you, “If you want me to reduce your anxieties, you need to give me control over your life, over your thoughts, over your opinions.”
That's what leaders do; he can do what you can't, but he also legitimizes your dark side. He tells you your dark side is perfectly acceptable, perfectly okay. Actually, you should be proud of your dark side. You should promote it and make it your only side, etc.
This is the psychopathological resonance.
It creates conflict between the healthy part and the increasingly larger sick part, the sick part that is influenced by the environment. This conflict creates anxiety. And then the leader comes to you and says, “You shouldn't feel this conflict. Your healthy side is sick. Your sick side is healthy, so you should pay attention to your sick side. You should cultivate it. You should nurture it. You should listen to it. You should follow it. You should believe in it. The dark side is the only source of light. Your healthy side was mistaken, evidently mistaken, because it's non-conformist.”
Society is sick, so if you are healthy in a sick society, you are sick. There is no such thing as objective psychopathology. It is all context-dependent.
If you live in a narcissistic society, and you are not a narcissist, something is wrong with you.
The leader is the channel; the leader channels the pathologies of the age.
The leader communicates to you the pathologies of the age.
For example, you were a lawyer, an accountant, or a teacher, and then Hitler communicated to you that you should kill Jews in Auschwitz.
So Hitler communicated to you the pathology of the age, and you adapted yourself. And once you adapted yourself, once you started to kill Jews in Auschwitz, in Nazi Germany, you felt good, it felt good, conforming to society feels good, conforming to pathology feels good, it reduces anxiety, it restores inner peace.
To not be a psychopathic narcissist in today's United States is to be a freak. It is the leader who defines who is a freak and who should sleep well at night and feel happy when they get up in the morning. This is the leader's power because he is the reification of pathology.
Leaders are seismographs. They pick up the earthquakes in the zeitgeist. They are attuned, and this is why they become leaders. We don't; they do. They're much more attuned.
We have transitioned from shared fantasies to delusions.
We are entering the delusional age.” —Prof. Sam Vaknin
It may be delusional to think that Americans are still living in the land of liberty, given that Republicans think that America is already living in a dictatorship, and with these courts, the Democrats are quickly beginning to agree. As Americans head into July 4th, Independence Day, I suppose we can thank our lucky stars that at least America has enjoyed 247 years of freedom.