On the one hand, America’s Supreme Court is so concerned about the alleged ‘right to life’ of non-conscious early-stage human fetuses as to dictate to any woman in whose body such an object is being formed, “That is state property and you have no right to terminate it.” But, on the other hand, America’s public are so little concerned about their own and actual “right to [conscious] life” as to allow (and to accept their Government’s allowing) — at a time of one of the deadliest and most intensely communicable pandemics in global history — unmasked people to mass together in crowds of strangers to entertain themselves and so to catch the sometimes deadly disease and pass it on to others (after the event), and they thereby produce vast numbers of entirely preventable deaths throughout the entire U.S. population, despite America’s claimed ‘right to life’. Americans, obviously, care more about protecting the lives of pre-conscious fetuses than about protecting the lives of themselves and all of the strangers whom they meet — conscious beings. Is that sane?

On September 3rd, NPR’s Nina Totenberg headlined “The Supreme Court Heads Toward Reversing Abortion Rights”, and reported:

The Supreme Court’s conservative majority tossed a legal bomb into the abortion debate late Wednesday night.

By a vote of 5-to-4, the court’s most conservative members upheld, for now, a Texas law that, in effect, bans abortions after about six weeks. But almost as important as the result was how the court reached its decision — without full briefing and arguments before any court.

The court majority, including its three Trump appointees, emphasized that it was not ruling on the issues presented in the case. Still, it refused to block the law from going into effect for procedural reasons. The unsigned court order was just one long paragraph in length. And within a day, state legislators in Florida and elsewhere announced plans to introduce copycat legislation in their states.

Chief Justice John Roberts, who has dissented from almost every decision upholding expansive abortion rights, disagreed this time. He called the Texas law unprecedented because it not only bans abortions after roughly six weeks, but delegates enforcement powers not to state officials but to the general “populace at large.” Roberts noted that the law appears to be deliberately structured to prevent courts from being able to promptly consider the constitutionality of the law. …

Specifically, the law confers on any individual the right to file suit for money damages against a clinic, or any person who aids or abets an abortion after a fetal heartbeat is detected.

This is now the Trump Court; and, whereas, previously, signed 5-to-4 conservative U.S. Supreme Court rulings were common, this was an unsigned 5-to-4 theocratic ruling by all 5 of the U.S. Supreme Court’s fundamentalist Christians: four Roman Catholic fundamentalists (Alito, Thomas, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh), and the only Protestant fundamentalist) (Barrett), ruling that the new Texas law, which places $10,000 bounties on the heads of anyone who participates or assists, or “intends” to, an abortion in Texas, should maybe be allowed to be enforced by this bounty-system, and should temporarily be allowed to be enforced, though “this order is not based on any conclusion about the constitutionality of Texas’s law,” but the ruling instead invites all states to consider passing similar laws so that the U.S. Supreme Court itself maybe won’t need to act in order to outlaw abortions, and thus this matter might simply go back to being a state instead of federal matter. Interestingly, the billionaires-controlled U.S. ’news’-media report, and generally praise, details of each of the two (signed) dissenting opinions, but not of the one (and far more important but unsigned) five theocrats’ majority decision, so that the public won’t understand what’s happening (which that majority decision is preparing to impose).

Among the very few public commentaries on that majority (5-to-4) decision was one by the lawyer Luppe Luppen, who headlined “The Supreme Court Guts Roe and Opens a New Era of Nullification”, and he summed up by saying “If state legislatures can effectively turn off constitutionally protected rights by inventing or copying procedures that flummox these five Justices, they may well try to do it.” He pointed out the legislative chaos which that will cause. However, his assumption, there, that the five theocrats were simply “flummoxed,” instead of carrying out a very systematic and carefully thought-out pro-theocracy restoration of the coathanger-abortion era in America, wasn’t backed by him citing any evidence, because it is simply false. These theocratic ‘Justices’ are respected by the public, though they are carrying out the commands in the Bible, instead of in the U.S. Constitution, and it’s achieved by their own, and by the ’news’-media’s, deceits, and, especially, by ’news’-media refusing to call lies “lies.” Though, during Trump’s Presidency, Democratic Party ’news’-media were starting to call his lies “lies,” none of the American media call lies “lies” generally. For example, Obama’s hefty serial-lying is still generally ignored, instead of noted.

As regards Americans being “so little concerned about their own and actual right-to-life as to allow (and to accept their Government’s allowing) — at a time of one of the deadliest and most intensely communicable pandemics in global history — unmasked people to mass together in crowds,” RT headlined on September 5th, “‘Not a mask in sight’: Fans return to U.S. college football in a BIG way – to the delight of many, but the horror of others (VIDEO)”, and posted numerous photos of huge crowd-scenes of Americans at sporting events and other entertainments, in which no one was wearing a mask. Covid isn’t just a matter of private health, but it is especially a raging matter of public health; but, if Americans don’t care about the health of anyone but themselves, and if they are stupid enough to believe that by attending such events they are not endangering both themselves and others, then what else can this be but an insane country, where such dangerous behavior is legal? It might be common for many countries — France, for example — but still it is, quite simply, insane.

Is insanity normal? Is it good? Or is it bad? Is there any doubt about that?

That table starts in 1989, so doesn’t show the prior figures, but other studies place the start of the post-WWII increase in America’s wealth-concentration at around the year 1981. Prior to that, it had been pretty unchanged, for decades. Maybe Ronald Reagan was largely responsible for the change, but none of the subsequent U.S. Presidents did anything to reverse his “Greed is good!” policies.

Here is from Reagan’s interview, in the libertarian Reason magazine, on 1 July 1975, headlining “Inside Ronald Reagan”:

REASON: Are there any particular books or authors or economists that have been influential in terms of your intellectual development?

REAGAN: Oh, it would be hard for me to pinpoint anything in that category. I’m an inveterate reader. Bastiat and von Mises, and Hayek and Hazlitt – I’m one for the classical economists.

They had been the formulators of the “Greed is good!” philosophy, now called libertarianism (which in continental Europe is instead called “neoliberalism”). Prior to President Reagan, no U.S. President had been a libertarian. But the losing Presidential candidate in 1964, Republican Barry Goldwater, had been a libertarian. So, the “Greed is good!” philosophy had been respectable in the Republican Party for at least 16 years before a libertarian became elected President in 1980. Then, after Reagan, America has been in the Reagan Era, ever since. The Democratic Party merely adds hypocrisy to it, by condemning libertarianism. That stance (libertarianism while condemning libertarianism) is nowadays called “liberalism.” Such ideological hypocrisy has become a secular religion, which is believed especially by many religious people in America — “Let God do it!” (Otherwise called: adherence to natural law.) Among some, it is called “Prosperity Theology”. Since it effectively inducts the super-rich into a new type of sainthood, America’s billionaires — especially Republican ones — would never object to it. After all: it’s just another form of libertarianism, which already deifies the rich and despises the poor.

As-of 2014, the top 0.1% of Americans owned almost as much wealth as the bottom 90% did. The top 0.1% owned more than the entire bottom 80% did. Furthermore, America’s billionaires now have an absolute veto-power against any candidate in both Parties’ Presidential primaries, such as Bernie Sanders, whom no billionaire wants to become President. Only candidates who are backed by at least a few billionaires has any realistic chance at all. A candidate whom no billionaire backs is not possible to win the nomination of either of the major Parties. Unfortunately, enough Americans are manipulable enough to be deceived by the ceaseless propaganda that’s funded by the super-rich. Any candidate who opposes the super-rich has virtually no chance to win any election to the federal Government. Many federal officials — and almost every Republican one — even overtly champion the super-rich and at least implicitly denigrate labor and deify capital “the entrepreneur”), but such a situation would be impossible in any nation which has an informed and sane electorate, because it entails the vast majority of voters voting against themselves. People don’t do that unless they are deceived (such as to think “I am an entrepreneur” because they own, maybe, a hamburger stand, or receive some rental income). (Anybody who isn’t backed by at least venture capitalists is no “entrepreneur” that federal politicians are likely to care about.)

This is the reason why, today, 36% of America’s private wealth is owned by top-one-percenters, whereas in 1990 only 5% was. “Greed is good!” makes that okay.

A bigger and bigger percentage of U.S. private wealth is going into the stock markets, because more and more of it is sheer excess that’s beyond the ability of its owners to spend for their own consumption. Furthermore, because the Covid-19 crisis hits workers the hardest, and the stock markets have been booming in 2020, the percentage of America’s private wealth that’s owned by the richest 1% is getting a special boost this year. David Sirota’s investigative news blog The Daily Poster headlined on December 30th “10 Stats That Will Blow Your Mind” and the top four were:

1. The total cost of $2,000 checks ($465 billion) is less than half the amount that American billionaires have made during the pandemic ($1 trillion). The total cost of the checks is less than the amount that just 16 American billionaires increased their net worth by during the pandemic ($471 billion).
2. Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk gained more wealth during the pandemic ($158 billion) than Congress just authorized for additional unemployment benefits for millions of Americans ($120 billion).
3. Jeff Bezos’s personal wealth increased more every second of 2020 ($2,800) than Congress is considering giving Americans who are facing eviction, starvation and bankruptcy ($2,000).
4. Congressional lawmakers are being paid $3,300 of government money every week to come up with ways to block $2,000 checks to millions of Americans.

During this period of more and more of the country being owned by the richest 1%, more and more of the Government is also being controlled by the richest 1%, because money brings power (such as the ability to hire and fire employees and other agents), and especially it brings the power to hire lobbyists, and to do favors for the members of Congress, and to hire everyone who retires from government-service, including not only former elected officials, but also former career civil servants. The revolving door between service to the Government, and service to the people who fund election-campaigns (the richest 1%), spins ever-faster, as the richest 1% own more and more of the country. If they will own 100% of the private wealth, they will also control the Government 100%, and therefore effectively own 100% of the government wealth, too. What would the U.S. Constitution say about that? It would be an absolute dictatorship by the richest 1%. But what would the U.S. Constitution say about that?

The turning-point was actually in 1976, the U.S. Supreme Court’s unanimous Buckley v. Valeo decision (but with Justice Byron White dissenting in part), which said that there can be no limits placed on an individual’s total political donations, because that money is “speech” and the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment prohibits any laws against “speech” — such as against lying, or against any other form of expression, no matter how harmful (and what could possibly be more harmful that allowing the government itself to be bought?) — the Court ruled that if more money means more control over the Government, then that’s okay, but Justice Byron White, in his lone and grandstanding objection said that “Congress and this Court’s cases have recognized this as a mortal danger against which effective preventive and curative steps must be taken.” (He basically wanted to punt the entire issue back to the legislators, who were now legally hamstrung against dealing with it, because of the unanimous decision, which ‘Justice’ White himself was joining in to sign onto.) That unanimous equation of “money” with “speech” was the beginning of the end of America’s till-then-limited democracy, and it marked the beginning of today’s American aristocracy — America’s aristocracy of wealth. But were America’s Founders in favor of creating an aristocracy? Wasn’t their overriding objective to prevent any such thing from taking over here? Who hired these ‘Justices’? Were they actually traitors?

If it started on any date, that’s the date: 30 January 1976.

What do the three sovereigns see when they examine the dystopia that took over Exceptionalistan?

They see, once again, three – discombobulated – nodes in conflict: the post-historic Pacific and Atlantic coasts; the South – a sort of expanded Dixieland; and the Midwest – what would be the American heartland.

The hyper-modern Pacific-Atlantic nodes congregate high-tech and finance, profit from Pentagon techno-breakthroughs and benefit from the “America rules the waves” ethos that guarantees the global primacy of the U.S. dollar.

The rest of America is largely considered by the Pacific-Atlantic as just a collection of flyover states: the South – which regards itself as the real, authentic America; and the Midwest, largely disciplined and quite practical-minded, squeezed ideologically between the littoral powerhouses and the South.

Superstructure, tough, is key: no matter what happens, whatever the fractures, this remains an Empire, where only a tiny elite, a de facto plutocratic oligarchy, rules.

It would be too schematic, even though essentially correct, to assert that in the presidential election, invisible campaigner Joe Biden represented the Pacific-Atlantic nodes, and Trump represented the whole South. Assuming the election was not fraudulent – and that remains a big “if” – the Midwest eventually swung based on three issues.

1. Trump, as much as he relied on a sanctions juggernaut, could not bring back manufacturing jobs home. 2. He could not reduce the military footprint across the Greater Middle East. 3. And, before Covid-19, he could not bring down immigration.

Everything that lies ahead points to the irreconcilable – pitting the absolute majority that voted Dem in the Atlantic-Pacific nodes versus the South and a deeply divided Midwest. As much as Biden-Harris is bound to isolate the South even more, their prospects of “pacifying” the Midwest are less than zero.

Whose ground control?

Beyond the raucous altercations on whether the presidential election was fraudulent, these are the key factual points.

1. A series of rules in mostly swing states were changed, through courts, bypassing state legislatures, without transparence, before the election, paving the way to facilitate fraud schemes.
2. Biden was de facto coronated by AP, Google and Twitter even before the final, official result, and weeks before the electoral college vote this past Monday.
3. Every serious, professional audit to determine whether all received and tabulated votes were valid was de facto squashed.

In any Global South latitude where the empire did “interfere” in local elections, color revolution-style, this set of facts would be regarded by scores of imperial officials, in a relentless propaganda blitz, as evidence of a coup.

On the recent Supreme Court ruling, a Deep State intel source told me, “the Supreme Court did not like to see half the country rioting against them, and preferred the decision be made by each state in the House of Representatives. That is the only way to handle this without jeopardizing the union. Even prominent Democrats I know realize that the fix took place. The error was to steal too many votes. This grand theft indicts the whole system, that has always been corrupt.”

Dangers abound. On the propaganda front, for instance, far right nationalists are absolutely convinced that U.S. media can be brought to heel only by occupying the six main offices of the top conglomerates, plus Facebook, Google and Twitter: then you’d have full control of the U.S. propaganda mill.

Another Deep State source, now retired, adds that, “the U.S. Army does not want to intervene as their soldiers may not obey orders.

Many of these far right nationalists were officers in the armed forces. They know where the nuclear missiles and bombers are. There are many in sympathy with them as the U.S. falls apart in lockdowns.”

Meanwhile, Hunter Biden’s dodgy dealings simply will not be made to vanish from public scrutiny. He’s under four different federal investigations. The recent subpoena amounts to a very serious case pointing to a putative crime family. It’s been conveniently forgotten that Joe Biden bragged to the Council on Foreign Relations

that he forced Ukraine’s chief prosecutor Viktor Shokin to be fired exactly when he was investigating corruption by Burisma’s founder.

Of course, a massive army of shills will always invoke another army of omniscient and oh so impartial “fact checkers” to hammer the same message: “This is Trump’s version. Courts have said clearly all the evidence is baseless.”

District Attorney William Barr is now out of the picture (see his letter of resignation). Barr is a notorious Daddy Bush asset since the old days – and that means classic Deep State. Barr knew about all federal investigations on Hunter Biden dating back to 2018, covering potential money laundering and bribery.

And still, as the Wall Street Journal delightfully put it, he “worked to avoid their public disclosure during the heated election campaign”.

A devastating report (Dems: a Republican attack report) has shown how the Biden family was connected to a vast financial network with multiple foreign ramifications.

Then there’s Barr not even daring to say there was enough reason for the Department of Justice to engage in a far-reaching investigation into voting fraud, finally putting to rest all “baseless” conspiracy theories.

Move on. Nothing to see here. Even if an evidence pile-up featured, among other instances, ballot stuffing, backdated ballots, statistical improbabilities, electronic machine tampering, software back doors, affidavits from poll workers, not to mention the by now legendary stopping the vote in the dead of night, with subsequent, huge batches of votes miraculously switching from Trump to Biden.

Once again an omniscient army of oh so impartial “fact checkers” will say everything is baseless.

A perverse blowback

A perverse form of blowback is already in effect as informed global citizens may now see, crystal clear, the astonishing depth and reach of Deep State power – the ultimate decider of what happens next in Dystopia Central.

Both options are dire.

1. The election stands, even if considered fraudulent by nearly half of U.S. public opinion. To quote that peerless existentialist, The Dude, there’s no rug tying the room together anymore.
2. Was the election to be somehow overturned before January 20, the Deep State would go Shock and Awe to finish the job.

In either case, The Deplorables will become The Ungovernables.

It gets worse. A possible implosion of the union – with internal convulsions leading to a paroxysm of violence – may even be coupled with an external explosion, as in a miscalculated imperial adventure.

For the Three Sovereigns – Russia, China and Iran – as well as the overwhelming majority of the Global South, the conclusion is inescapable: if the current, sorry spectacle is the best Western liberal “democracy” has to offer, it definitely does not need any enemies or “threats”.

“If you count the legal votes, I easily win. If you count the illegal votes, they can try to steal the election from us.” That statement by US President Donald J. Trump is actually posted on the official White House website. The “most powerful man on earth” had been repeating this spectre for months even while the mainstream propaganda machinery, rigged polls and manufactured “experts” were predicting landslide victories for his challenger Joseph R. Biden Jr.

Before the 46th President of the United States is officially confirmed by the Electoral College on Dec 14, several legal issues and possible recounts must be resolved. Rather incredulously, late mail-in ballots are still being counted in the self-proclaimed “greatest nation on earth” – a task that would have taken a day or two in a relatively dysfunctional Third World nation. The US electoral process is a choreographed circus with a long history of fraud. The ongoing Dominion Voting Systems fiasco is a natural extension of the Diebold controversy 20 years ago.

Democracy 2020 – as Fox News pompously themed the recent presidential elections – was anything but democratic. Representatives from one party were systematically barred from observing the ballot counts. The dead were resurrected for a day to vote for a particular party. The seemingly unbridgeable chasm between the Trump and Biden rallies did not translate into proportionate votes. Even the laws of statistics, particularly Benford’s Law, were mangled in this farce.

Just how could the incumbent lose Arizona when one juxtaposes the staggering 96 mile-long Trump train rally in the state with the minuscule crowds drawn by his opponent? Even online, Trump supporters easily outnumbered their counterparts by several magnitudes. The illusion of Biden’s popularity had to be propped by paid trolls from India!

The US electoral imbroglio is indeed the result of the “most extensive and inclusive voter fraud organization in the history of American politics.” That damning quote is taken verbatim from none other than Joe Biden himself.

The Manchurian Fruitcake

The most puzzling aspect of this travesty was the nomination of Biden as the Democrat Presidential nominee in August this year. Insiders would have been aware of his son’s incriminating laptops, including alleged evidences of child pornography and dubious dealings with Ukraine and China which stretch back to Biden’s stint as Vice President. The FBI was reportedly in possession of such material since December 2019 but predictably did nothing.

So why nominate a highly-compromised and senescent gaffe machine to win a rigged election when any other cardboard cut-out would do? Perhaps, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s recent invocation of the 25th Amendment offers the best clue: A full month before the elections, the Speaker called for the establishment of a (presumably permanent) commission to determine a president’s fitness for office. Pelosi insisted that it was “not about Trump” who incidentally appears sharper with every quotidian brickbat thrown at him.

The logical conclusion is inescapable: A Joe Biden presidency will be stillborn. The following scenario therefore is predicated on the surmise that Trump will not be sworn in as president on Jan 20 2021.

Pandemonium Unleashed

Why did the mainstream media throw every hook, line, sinker and septic tank to ensure a Biden presidency with its attendant uncertainties?

Over the next four years, what the United States needs foremost is social stability and unity in the face of unprecedented meltdowns in every sector of its society. The incoming Biden administration intends to meet these critical challenges by severely curtailing fundamental rights even as Washington exports “freedom and democracy” for the benefit of its oligarchic assets worldwide. Contagions, breakdowns in law and order, cyberattacks, etc. will be used to justify the march towards authoritarian rule. Expect endless, hypocritical allegations of “rigged elections” in nations not aligned to US foreign policy.

The promise of a comeback by Trump in 2024 would be an ideal psychological sop to avert civil war for as long as possible. There is a possibility that Trump may neither concede the presidency nor accept the outcome of the Electoral College meeting on Dec 14. He may however heed any decision made by the Supreme Court in order to “uphold the Constitution.” It would be a logical way out as the social pandemonium juggernaut unleashed during the presidency of Barrack Obama cannot be recoiled.

There will be several tipping points in this unmanageable cauldron. Sooner or later, Biden may have to step down in favour of Vice President Kamala Harris who, in turn, may be coerced to elect someone in the mould of Hillary Clinton as her No 2. Rapidly increasing lawlessness may, in turn, force a feckless Harris out of office.

In the meantime, a de facto politburo representing the interests of Big Tech, Big Pharma and the Military-Industrial Complex would effectively govern the nation. Let’s call it the “Liberty Commission”. Its real purpose would be to enrich a select few at the expense of disempowered citizens. US policies will also be aligned to the World Economic Forum’s Great Reset. Coincidentally, Biden’s first series of pledges as “President-Elect” were to prioritize immigrants and an assortment of globalist agendas over the lives of impoverished Americans.

All these machinations will fail because complex problems cannot be resolved by a horde of duplicitous cretins who can no longer distinguish their own lies from stark reality. Expect a raft of incoherent policies that will “choose truth over facts” – to use Biden’s words once again!

Echoes from History

There are important historical parallels at play here. The lawless “social justice” movements unleashed by the Obama administration are eerily redolent of National Socialist (Nazi) agitations which led to the ascendancy of Adolph Hitler as the chancellor and later Fuhrer of Germany – despite lacking the majority vote in the last pre-WWII elections. Once in power, Hitler promptly purged his Brownshirt thugs in the Night of the Long Knives.

Will the assortment of Antifa, Black Lives Matter and other “woke” movements suffer the same fate? This is a mob that does not spare children. They were promised pies in the sky but what awaits them might be the sword of martial law. Mobocracy, once unleashed, always ends in the decimation of a society.

Another historical parallel is the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 which devoured its main protagonists in a series of purges that lasted till 1923. A similar fate awaits the United States 100 years later. Expect a series of massive shakedowns, violent purges and constitutional changes to bring “order out of chaos” by 2024.

The only meaningful intervention at this juncture lies with the US Supreme Court. Among various legal options at its disposal, the Supreme Court can order an unusual “contingent election” based on cumulative evidences of electoral fraud. This remains a tall order when one considers the gangrenous levels of corruption and blackmail along Washington’s corridors of power.

In the final analysis, this may be the last US elections conducted under the pretence of democracy!

activistpost.com

“Well, senator, if that question ever came before me, I would need to hear arguments from the litigants and read briefs and consult with my law clerks and talk to my colleagues and go through the opinion-writing process. So, you know, if I give off-the-cuff answers, then I would be basically a legal pundit, and I don’t think we want judges to be legal pundits. I think we want judges to approach cases thoughtfully and with an open mind.”

Somehow, keeping an open mind means pretending to be a tabula rasa before ascending to the bench. If someone had asked Barrett about the weather, she presumably would have replied that the question was designed to elicit “an opinion from me that is on a very contentious matter of public debate, and I will not do that” – which just happens to be what she told Kamala Harris when she asked about global warming.

All of which speaks volumes about America’s tattered 233-year-old constitutional tradition. Barrett is 48 years old. If she lives as long as Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who died last month of pancreatic cancer, this means that she could be handing down opinions until the year 2058. Thanks to medical progress, she might hand them down even longer – into the 2070s, perhaps. Yet even though her rulings will affect Americans in the most profound ways, she refuses to provide the slightest hint about what she believes, how she’ll vote, or where she stands politically.

This is not what government of, by, and for the people is supposed to be about. The first rule of democracy is accountability, the idea that people not only choose their representatives but expect them to report back periodically for inspection and review. If they fulfill their promises, then the people may reward them with another term. If they don’t, then they have the option to toss them out. But the point is that the people rule because it’s their society and no one else’s. They run a tight ship in which officials are expected to snap to, utter a crisp “yes, sir” (or ma’am), and then trot off to do what they’re told.

But Barrett’s stonewalling suggests the opposite, which is that not only will she refuse to take instruction in even the broadest sense, but that she’ll refuse to report back. Assuming she deigned to answer, Barret would no doubt reply that, as a judge, she’s above politics and therefore a special case. Rather than part of democracy, she’d argue that she’s part of the constitutional bulwark holding democracy up. Hence, she must be independent so that the elected branches can be held t account.

But this is mere word play. The founders may have conceived of the Supreme Court as a more or less neutral umpire, but those days are long past. Since World War II, Congress has steadily expanded its powers by saddling it with issues that members were afraid to touch. No one on Capitol Hill, for instance, wanted to talk about racial segregation in the early 1950s. It was too difficult and explosive and would do nothing but cost them votes. So they said nothing until the court tackled the issue f or them via its historic Brown v. Board of Education ruling in 1954. Rather than standing up for what they believed in, congressmen were able to avoid responsibility by deferring to the court instead. It was a cloud with a less-than-silver lining because it marked a defeat for democracy and self-reliance.

“If we are wrong, the Supreme Court of this nation is wrong,” Martin Luther King declared a year later during the Montgomery bus boycott in Alabama. “If we are wrong, the Constitution of the United States is wrong. If we are wrong, God Almighty is wrong.”

The boycotters were not right because what they did themselves, in other words, but because of what the court, the law, and other higher authorities did for them. The result was a curious blend of liberalism, sanctimony, and reverence for the past that has long defined American political culture. The same happened when the court went on to mandate one person-one vote (if only at the state and local level), legalize birth control, require cops to read prisoners their rights before subjecting them to interrogation, and, finally, guarantee a right to abortion. Liberals cheered. But what they cheered was their own inability to forge such breakthroughs on their own.

By celebrating the court, they celebrated their own impotence. The upshot now that conservatives are gaining control of the same sacred institution is a trap of their own making. After years of preaching deference, they can’t turn vow defiance merely because justices are no longer voting their way. They’ve worked for years to shut the people out of the decision-making process because that was somehow the progressive thing to do. But the effect is to render them more helpless than ever now that people like Barrett want to shut them out even more completely by refusing to answer the simplest question.

As for the latest pipedream known as packing the court, it will never happen because Democrats don’t have the guts and a know-nothing machine politician like Joe Biden will never go along. So liberals have no choice but to submit to a judicial dictatorship that they largely created.

The outlook is not good. The more the constitutional apparatus towers over the people, the more self-government will turn into a meaningless formula. Instead of a modern democracy, America will return to its roots as a rickety old eighteenth-century republic that is increasingly unresponsive and corrupt. U.S. politicians likes nothing more than lecturing other countries about democracy. But before they open their big yap again, they should put their own house in order before the walls collapse and the roof caves in.

Since this would spell doom for a Biden-Harris administration, Democrats have come up with what they think is a perfect solution. It’s called packing the court, and it entails expanding “the Supremes” from nine to fifteen members in order to fill the ranks with liberals guaranteed to toe the party line.

It’s neat, clean, and constitutional since nowhere do the framers specify how many justices the court must have. So there’s nothing standing in the Democrats’ way once they wrack up enough House and Senate seats. But if it’s so simple, why are Joe and Kamala continuing to stonewall whenever reporters ask what they’re going to do? Instead of dodging the court-packing issue, why don’t they embrace it as the obvious answer to all that ails them?

The reason is clear. They won’t commit because they’re afraid of two things. One is that voters won’t like it while the other is that court-packing will take whatever is left of America’s tattered 233-year-old constitutional tradition and reduce it to zero.

This might not be such a bad thing given that America’s museum piece of a constitution should have been replaced generations ago with something more democratic and up to date. But it’s not what Biden and Harris want since, as federal office-holders, they’re sworn to defend and uphold it as it currently exists. And it’s probably not what “we the people” want either, at least not at the moment, since no one has given a thought to how to replace it or what to replace it with.

The last president who tried packing the court was Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1937. It did not go well. After watching the Republican majority gut one New Deal economic initiative after another, FDR figured that the moment for a showdown had finally arrived with his landslide victory in the 1936 election. Early the following year, therefore, he unveiled a plan that would allow him to appoint half a dozen justices up front and then keep on adding pro-New Dealers in the years ahead. Since Democrats had a solid lock on Congress, everyone expected the scheme to sail through effortlessly.

Everyone was wrong. The public was appalled at Roosevelt anti-judicial assault, and the Senate ended up voting it down by a margin of 70-20. More than a setback for the Roosevelt administration, it proved to be “a humiliating defeat from which it never fully recovered,” according to the historian Alan Brinkley. FDR set out to save the New Deal, but ended up sinking it beneath the waves.

Even a cipher like Biden knows not to make the same mistake twice. But what makes the move even more unlikely is the aura of sanctity that has grown up around the court in the decades since.

This was most unexpected. Roosevelt’s famous quip about “nine old men” perfectly captured the idea of the court as a representative of the stuffy old order that the New Deal was determined to overthrow. The public didn’t disagree either even if it was taken aback by FDR’s methods. But then a funny thing happened on the way to the dethronement. In response to pressure from both the White House and the march of world events, a former Tory stronghold began moving leftward to the point where, by the 1950s, it all but defined the liberal vanguard.

Democrats promptly changed their tune. Instead of excoriating the court, they showered it with praise as it outlawed school segregation, approved birth control, mandated one person-one vote (if only at the state and local level), and legalized abortion in 1973 with Roe v. Wade. Martin Luther King summed up the mood during the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott in 1955. “If we are wrong, the Supreme Court of this nation is wrong,” he intoned. “If we are wrong, the Constitution of the United States is wrong. And if we are wrong, God Almighty is wrong.” A new holy trinity was born, one consisting of God, the Constitution, and Earl Warren, chief justice from 1953 to 1969. The cult continued right up to Saint Ruth Bader Ginsburg, she of the lace colors, oversized glasses, and legions of fervent feminist followers.

Faith like this is not something you can switch on and off like an electric light. After decades of judicial worship, the Democrats can’t turn around and announce that their idol has feet of clay merely because a rightwing Catholic is about to ascend to the bench.

So they’re stuck. For the sake of argument, however, imagine that Democrats pass a court-packing bill next year regardless and promptly appoint six new members, all paid-up members of the ACLU. What happens next?

You guessed it. The next time Republicans are in office, they’ll do the same. So will the Dems once the pendulum shifts their way again. Then, as the court expands from fifteen members to twenty-five, forty, or even more, any and all pretense of constitutional analysis will fall by the wayside. Instead of interpreting the document, justices will give it a quick glance and announce that it says whatever the voters want it to say.

Arguably, this is what the court has been doing for years regardless of all that mumbo-jumbo about original intent and the like. But if that’s the case, why bother with the Constitution at all? Why not just chuck the document altogether and announce that, regardless of what the founders said in 1787, “we the people” have the sovereign right in the here-and-now to do whatever we think necessary to form a more perfect union, establish justice, and insure domestic tranquility? No true small-d democrat would disagree, so why not just do it?

But the political classes who whisper in Joe Biden’s ear won’t allow it. They want checks and balances, judicial review, and other outmoded expressions of eighteenth-century political mechanics. So they’ll inform the president that the Supreme Court is off-limits and that he has no choice but to submit to a rightwing judicial dictatorship. Blind obedience will become the highest virtue, and rather than government of, by, and for the people, we’ll have one that’s of, by, and for a constitution that is increasingly at odds with the needs of modern democratic society.

This is what Democratic constitution-worship has come to – a society that is switching into reverse and which no one knows how to stop.

The normal procedure, following long-standing practice, would be for the President to nominate a candidate to fill the Supreme Court vacancy and for the Senate to hold hearings following which it would vote to confirm or reject the nominee. But nothing is any longer simple or routine in this annus horribilis that has gripped America. The nine-member Supreme Court is as divided along partisan and ideological lines as the American body politic. If the outcome of the November Presidential and congressional election is disputed, as the powerful forces which are behind the current upheavals promise that it will be, the person installed to replace Ginsburg may tip the balance in the evenly split Supreme Court.

What happens next and at what pace the replacement process will be conducted, whose candidate will ultimately fill the vacancy in the Supreme Court and when, before or after the November election, are matters of vital political interest for both sides in America’s current internecine battles. There is already a precedent, fresh in everyone’s memory. In the closely contested 2000 Presidential election, it was the Supreme Court which by a tight 5-to-4 vote effectively selected the winner.

The Constitution of the United States is oddly reticent on the precise scope of the Supreme Court’s responsibilities. In fact, it was only in 1803, some time after the Constitution’s adoption that the cardinal principle of judicial review, defining the fundamental role of the Supreme Court in America’s system of government, was promulgated in the landmark Marbury v. Madison case. In the majority opinion, Chief Justice Marshall argued that the Constitution is the “supreme law of the land” and that the Supreme Court has the final say over the interpretation of the Constitution. From then on, all legal controversies of federal significance were to be resolved exclusively by the Supreme Court of the United States.

The laconic Constitution does not even prescribe how many Supreme Court justices there should be, a matter ultimately left for Congress to decide. That oddity implies that Congress is also empowered to change the number of justices. In the present politically impassioned atmosphere that means that depending on who controls it after November it can also expand the court’s composition and “pack” it in conformity with the majority’s ideological agenda. Something of the sort had already been done on President Roosevelt’s watch, though it was in an incomparably more civilized and normal America, hence far less destructive to the delicate equilibrium of the country’s constitutional system than a similar manoeuvre would assuredly be today.

The political stakes are therefore much higher than may meet the eye. Any disputes or legal controversies arising from the November elections will have to be settled by the Supreme Court. Since justices with professional integrity are a thing of the past, everybody knows that their political biases, including those of Ginsburg’s replacement, will decisively determine the outcome.

Ginsburg herself, an acknowledged, highly ideological legal radical, must have been aware of the upheaval her passing would provoke. She is said to have expressed the dying wish that President Trump should not be allowed to appoint her successor.

All players are aware of what is potentially at stake, which is not just who gets to be the next President if the November color revolution attempt follows the Sharp/Soros manual, but just as importantly how major social issues, including legislation, will be treated by the Supreme Court.

Accordingly, President Trump has already asserted that he will nominate his candidate for the vacancy “without delay”. He is understandably keen to have his sympathizer on the Court should the legitimacy of his re-election be vigorously contested. Most likely he will use the political ruse of “recess appointment” to fill the vacancy while Congress is on holiday, it being understood that the nominee later would still have to undergo the confirmation process in the Senate. There is an Eisenhower precedent for that. But he (or she) would still be able to vote in the meantime, and the President in his campaign could also argue to his supporters that in November they better get out and vote for him and his party if they wish to have a friendly Supreme Court.

The other side are, of course, just as adamant that this should not be allowed to happen. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat, has threatened to reinitiate impeachment proceeding (grounds unspecified) should Trump dare to exercise his Constitutional prerogative to name a new associate justice on a schedule convenient to his own political purposes, adding rather militantly that her party are prepared to ‘use every arrow in our quiver’ to block Trump’s Supreme Court nominee.

Unsurprisingly, the cruder lot of Mrs. Pelosi’s camp followers must have taken the “arrow and quiver” metaphor to heart quite literally. For the first time in memory, a high ranking politician in the United States, in this case Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Republican, is being physically threatened with punishment by angry mobs should he put Trump’s Supreme Court nominee on the Senate agenda for a vote. Ominously, McConnell’s home address has been posted online with the obvious intention of intimidating him with a BLM, Antifa, or who knows what other sort of ‘turba divina’ should he fail to get the message of what the street expects from him and act accordingly.

I contend that the aforementioned little noticed detail speaks volumes about the degradation of American politics and vindicates the title of this analysis. In the Ukraine after the 2014 coup, mob unapproved public figures were harassed, lynched, spray-painted and dumped in garbage containers. In Bolivia last year, as the Washington-engineered coup to overthrow President Evo Morales was unfolding, public officials loyal to the government were similarly beaten and humiliated. So now finally these ghastly political manners, like a boomerang, are returning to their point of origin.

While every election is ‘the most important one ever’ in the minds of the politicos who see the other side for what it is, an existential threat to their power, this election is, I feel, finally one worth that moniker. But, that said, nearly every election truly is one where voters are presented a Hobson’s Choice where there is no real difference between the standard bearers of both major parties.

And the animating principle of these people is the accumulation of raw power, nothing more. Power, as a concept in modern political theory, is purely an outgrowth of Marxian thinking, defining everything that happens in our lives in terms of it. There are no win/wins in this worldview, only those who benefit and those who are exploited.

Basic concepts of comparative advantage and individual talents as expressed in free trade between sovereign actors are not only nullified by this doctrine but actively disparaged and denigrated through the language of envy and the rhetoric of victimization.

With the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg the day has come for the existent power structure where they have to reveal the final truth of their naked need to maintain their power.

Because replacing Ginsburg has been the most pressing concern for Democrats, Regime Republicans and their globalist backers in The Davos Crowd since the day Donald Trump was elected.

Now that she is dead a knock-down, drag-out, war without end commences in Washington D.C.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi is already talking about impeaching Trump if he dares to try and push through a replacement for Ginsburg. She’s already famously termed Congressional Republicans, “enemies of the state.”

Senator Richard Blumenthal from Connecticut has all but threatened the American people with open-ended violence if they re-elect Trump.

I take this as a direct threat to the public. https://t.co/klNfOMzOPf

— Scott Adams (@ScottAdamsSays) September 19, 2020

Scott Adams is not wrong here for calling Blumenthal to the carpet on this. Blumenthal is just saying what the Democrats have actually been doing for four years, trying to hang Trump for just being President. Blumenthal, like so many in Washington, are suffused with a Marxian lust for power and an abject and debilitating fear of losing it.

Fear of the loss of power, of all kinds, is the most powerful motivator of terrible, if not outright, tyrannical behavior. We’re all capable of it. You, me, a Senator, the cable guy or, yes, a Supreme Court justice.

Blumenthal knows that Ginsburg’s replacement will be the end of their power, the apotheosis of a four-generation long march through the institutions in the U.S. that has undermined basic societal structures. He knows re-electing Trump will ensure the Supreme Court will be made up of judges that tilt towards a constructionist view of the Constitution as a limited set of powers rather than an expansive one.

Every election, the Democrats have, quite cynically, pushed women farther and farther into insanity over an issue which the Supreme Court should have never ruled on in the first place, abortion. And fear over this right to murder your unborn child has corrupted women to the point that now it’s an irrational fear of a loss of control over something that would just devolve to the states or local communities, as it should.

All of this said and I don’t mean to speak ill of the dead when I say this but Ginsburg was a tyrant.

So is John Roberts. So was Antonin Scalia, Oliver Wendell Holmes and every other Supreme Court just that followed him. These are people, regardless of how they see themselves, their motivations or records as jurists, who wield the kind of power over the lives of billions that no person should possibly have.

By definition, that makes them tyrants. Some better than others on certain issues, but never forget they are tyrants, but who are, magically, supposed to be above politics.

And yet, the political calculus of who controls the Supreme Court of the world’s most powerful nation is always on the table. The elevation of the Supreme Court to the final arbiter of law in the U.S. is itself a power it was never intended to have with state Supreme Courts having as much, if not more, power than the SCOTUS.

But, again, in the long march through all the institutions by those in thrall to the siren’s song of power and its ruthless application, that issued has de facto been settled since Lee surrendered his army at Appomattox.

In their minds, the wrong person cannot control the access to the court, in this case Trump. They know he’s in line to make more appointments to the court should he win a second term.

The fear that a little bit of liberty or respect for the dignity of human sovereignty would make its way into the Supreme Court leaves the leadership of both parties saturated with fear.

Because, ultimately, these philosopher tyrants who occupy the Supreme Court are there to give the illusion of impartiality and justice, not to actually defend those high-minded concepts which have no real place in practical politics and the struggle sessions for power.

What is clear now that Ginsburg is gone is that if these power mad lose their fight over this seat and the direction of the court for the next two generations then they will dilute the court’s power just like they are actively diluting the legitimacy of local law enforcement through the subversion of local governments.

The openly Marxist rhetoric to justify the looting and burning by BLM/antifa activists while harassing their victims in and around their homes was done to lay the groundwork for a larger protest in the event of Trump winning.

And now the stage has been set for their last stand. Trump will be blocked from restoring order to the court by arm-twisting the three fake Republicans in the Senate – Mitt Romney (RINO-UT), Lisa Murkowski (RINO-AK) and Susan Collins (RINO-ME) – into voting down any appointment.

If there was ever to call in the markers on these three folks it is now. A presumably divided court will uphold ballot harvesting decisions by state Supreme Courts in Pennsylvania and Michigan, presumably to grant even more power to those who count the votes there to make sure the final tally comports with their desired reality.

They were supremely successful with this in 2018, flipping a number of seats after election night, to ensure not only a strong Democratic majority but that the most important allies of President Trump were removed.

Washington always collapses to protect itself from threats of the people having a real say over their future. And, like it or not and for all his faults (which are legion), Donald Trump is the people’s standard bearer against them.

They have gone all-in on this strategy. Men like George Soros have spent billions in support of this push for the World Economic Forum’s Great Reset. They aren’t going to allow such a little thing like the passing of a supreme court justice at the wrong time deter them from their goal.

You don’t need to have a dog’s keen nose to smell the fear and desperation that clings to these people, however. It is palpable in their behavior, their rhetoric and their over-reaction to everything Trump does or might do.

And their act is tiresome. The American people have fear porn fatigue. It’s showing up in the polls and its showing up in their hysterics. Regardless of how the election turns out, there will be no rest from the violence unleashed and the violence yet to come when millions of Americans come to the uncomfortable conclusion that they will never hold power again in their lifetimes.

A black U.S. District Court Judge in Mississippi — one of America’s most bigoted-against-Blacks states — issued on August 4th a 72-page decision, Jamison v. McClendon, containing a plea for the U.S. Supreme Court to discontinue its imposition of police legal immunity when police are being accused of — while on the job — having violated Constitutionally guaranteed rights of American citizens (such as by shooting innocent persons — such as George Floyd). Legally immune police is what defines a police state; and, so, this was a black judge’s request for the U.S. Supreme Court to end the existing police state it imposes in America — to end a police state that this judge attributed to (and which he documented to have been produced by) choices that the U.S. Supreme Court itself had made, and that only they therefore can possibly reverse.

His basic point was that nothing which allows a public official to violate the U.S. Constitution is Constitutional, and that therefore these U.S. Supreme Court decisions themselves violate the U.S. Constitution, and should therefore be reversed by the U.S. Supreme Court, which created this situation of legal immunity for police misconduct.

The decision by this judge, Carlton W. Reeves, asserted: “The Constitution says everyone is entitled to equal protection of the law — even at the hands of law enforcement. Over the decades, however, judges [at the U.S. Supreme Court] have invented a legal doctrine to protect law enforcement officers from having to face any consequences for wrongdoing. The doctrine is called ‘qualified immunity.’ In real life it operates like absolute immunity.” Because of U.S. Supreme Court rulings, he had to — in the particular case at hand that he was ruling on — grant a police officer’s “qualified immunity” from prosecution, regardless of what is Constitutional, or even justice in any meaningful sense. Implicitly, he is saying, in this ruling, that because of the existing legal tradition of stare decisis or adhering to existing juridical tradition — and especially of doing so when the prior rulings come from a higher court, most especially from the U.S. Supreme Court — he is required, in the present case, to issue a ruling that violates the U.S. Constitution itself. And so, he did that, he admits. This is an exceptionally bold ruling, far beyond what is normal. Basically, he says that in order for him not to be reversed on appeal, he had to rule against the U.S. Constitution, in the particular case that he was ruling on. He was pleading with the U.S. Supreme Court to end this, so that judges in the lower courts will be able to enforce — instead of compelled to violate — the Constitution.

This ruling by judge Reeves was extremely tactful, such as by its saying, “A review of our qualified immunity precedent makes clear that the Court [he pointedly didn’t say “the Supreme Court,” but that’s what he was actually referring to] has dispensed with any pretense of balancing competing values [meaning that only police are protected, their victims are not — the public is being jeopardized — by these decisions from the U.S. Supreme Court].” Then, Reeves went on to say, “Our courts [he was referring here to today’s U.S. Supreme Court] have shielded a police officer who shot a child while the officer was attempting to shoot the family dog.117.” That was a case which had been only recently decided by the U.S. Supreme Court, on June 15th, and which decision by this Supreme Court was ignored by the nation’s press, since that decision exposes how totalitarian this country has actually become. That Supreme Court decision, which (especially because of the recent headlines about the George Floyd murder case) should have been front-page news throughout the country, was instead hidden from the public by the ‘news’-media, though that decision — and the others which were similarly dismissed that day on the very same ground of “qualified immunity” of police officers — probably constituted the most important decision of the current Supreme Court term, and directly relate to the George Floyd case. That June 15th decision (now virtually a precedent protecting the murderer of George Floyd) ruled in a slew of cases that had been brought against police officers by their victims. This Supreme Court dismissed all of them, on the basis of this absurd court-precedent, which had been established in 1967, and which was further defined in 1982. It’s “qualified immunity”, and asserts that police are allowed to do anything to anyone unless Congress has passed a specific law against what they did, and in that law, has described and identified exactly the same circumstances that the claimant against the police is claiming had existed — each and every detail of it — in his/her specific case. It’s a Supreme-Court precedent, for a police state (unaccountable government-officials) to be ‘Constitutional’ in America, and this black judge in Mississippi was here essentially begging the U.S. Supreme Court to reverse the precedent that the 1967 Supreme Court had established (and which had been reaffirmed and worsened yet further, by the Supreme Court in 1982). It is horrific judge-made ‘law’ that is no real law but instead nothing but an extremely evil precedent, which today’s Supreme Court continues to impose; and judge Reeves expressed that he reluctantly is bound to follow it and therefore he pleads requesting the U.S. Supreme Court to reverse itself on this matter.

The June 15th U.S. Supreme Court ruling had been dissented from by only a single member of today’s U.S. Supreme Court, and that person happens also to be its only black member: Clarence Thomas. All of the white members reaffirmed this police-state precedent. Ironically, Justice Thomas, who along with judge Alito is the farthest-rightwing member of the U.S. Supreme Court, dissented against the police on that occasion. And, of course, all of the Democratic-Party appointees to this Court (the Court’s liberals) voted for the police, against the public, in that June 15th ruling. Today’s Democratic Party is liberal Jim Crow. (The Republicans are conservative Jim Crow, which is closer to the 19th Century variety.) The Democratic Party’s nominee for the Presidency, Joe Biden, was one of the U.S. Senate’s leading segregationists, and he was condemned for it by Senator Ted Kennedy, the NAACP and others (though the U.S. ‘news’-media hid — and continue to hide — that fact, too).

I had headlined on June 20th about this June 15th ruling, “U.S. Supreme Court Reaffirms U.S. Police State”. The Court in that decision had reaffirmed that America’s law-enforcement officers have this “qualified immunity” from prosecution, and so the Constitutional rights of Americans are effectively meaningless if the police abuse them. (As originally established in 1967, police have “qualified immunity” if they have acted “in good faith,” but since 1982 they posses this immunity even if they clearly did not.)

As the libertarian lawyer Jay Schweikert put this matter on June 15th: “the Supreme Court let stand an Eleventh Circuit decision granting immunity to a police officer who shot a ten-year-old child in the back of the knee, while repeatedly attempting to shoot a pet dog that wasn’t threatening anyone.” The officer who had been accused in that particular case, Corbitt v. Vickers, was Deputy Sheriff Michael Vickers, of Coffee County, Georgia. He had been chasing a suspect, who happened to cross into the yard of Amy Corbitt, who at that time happened to be chatting with another adult, Damion Stewart. One of her children was referred to in the case as “SDC.” Here is how the lower court ruling stated the incident:

At some point after Vickers and the other officers entered Corbitt’s yard, the officers “demanded all persons in the area, including the children, to get down on the ground.” An officer handcuffed Stewart and placed a gun at his back. …  Then, “while the children were lying on the ground obeying [Vickers’s] orders … without necessity or any immediate threat or cause, [Vickers] discharged his firearm at the family pet named ‘Bruce’ twice.” The first shot missed, and Bruce (a dog) temporarily retreated under Corbitt’s home. No other efforts were made to restrain or subdue the dog, and no one appeared threatened by him. Eight or ten seconds after Vickers fired the first shot, the dog reappeared and was “approaching his owners,” when Vickers fired a second shot at the dog. This shot also missed the dog, but the bullet struck SDC in the back of his right knee.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled for Deputy Sheriff Michael Vickers. The case against Vickers was one in a batch of eight throughout the country challenging the existing court-precedent of “qualified immunity,” and the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling dismissed all of them (“certeriori denied”) for the same reason: “qualified immunity” stands as-is — is valid as-is. (“Certeriori denied” means that at least five of the nine ‘Justices’ were satisfied with the existing legal precedents on the matter and with the appeals court’s application of those precedents to the given case — so: nothing gets changed. In this batch of 8 cases, 8 ‘Justices’ voted against accepting any of these 8 cases.) In each one of these cases, the appeals court had ruled in favor of the police officer, on the basis of his “qualified immunity.” And, so, 8 members of this Supreme Court approved of that. In other words: no matter how bad a police officer is, he has this legal immunity, and the only recourse that might be even possible is to reassign or maybe even fire him, if the Police Department decides to do so. Police officers are above the law, but they can be fired in some circumstances.

Here is how the Rutherford Institute, which backed all of these cases against the officers, phrased the officers’ argument in one of these cases:

Qualified immunity shielded the defendants’ actions from liability because Petitioner could not point to any factually identical case clearly establishing that law enforcement officials exceeded the scope of Petitioner’s consent to enter her home when they essentially destroyed her home. That reasoning sets an impossible standard. Because courts are free to advance to the ‘clearly established’ prong of the qualified immunity inquiry without first deciding threshold constitutional questions, it is unlikely that a body of case law with closely analogous factual circumstances will ever develop.

In other words: the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 8 to 1 that unless Congress will pass a new law which will specifically apply the 4th and the 14th Amendments so as to enable prosecution of law-enforcement officers who do the specific listed sorts of things that unequivocally are identified in such new statutes as being prohibited under those Amendments, America’s law-enforcement officers are free to continue doing these sorts of things and to avoid any sort of legal liability for having done them.

Attorney Schweikert headlined on June 15th “The Supreme Court’s Dereliction of Duty on Qualified Immunity”, and he wrote about the Court’s ruling:

It’s impossible to know for sure what motivated the Court to deny all of these petitions. But one possibility is that the Justices were looking closely at developments in Congress — where members of both the House and the Senate have introduced bills that would abolish qualified immunity — and decided to duck the question, hoping to pressure Congress to fix the Court’s mess. It is certainly encouraging that so many legislators have finally turned their attention to qualified immunity. But the mere fact that Congress can fix this mess doesn’t absolve the Supreme Court of its obligation to fix what it broke — the Court conjured qualified immunity out of nothing in the first place, and the Justices had both the authority and responsibility to correct their own blunders, no matter what happens in the legislature.

An evil that was introduced by the U.S. Supreme Court cannot be eliminated by the U.S. Congress and a good President. Nor can it be eliminated by successfully going through the lengthy and arduous process of passing a new Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. No matter what types of actions by law-enforcement officers would be specifically listed in any such new law or new Constitutional Amendment, it would fail. An arbitrary, basically evil, U.S. Supreme Court will always be able to place its imprimatur upon and validate new rationalizations for the police-state that they have been constructing in this country, especially after 9/11. (This particular evil, however, was introduced by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1967, and has been and remains virtually ignored by the press since then, though it protects police officers in the George Floyd case and all other cases where police injure or kill innocent people. “Black Lives Matter” protesters get the news-coverage, but “qualified immunity” doesn’t, because this is where the rubber really hits the road and the power-structure would really be under threat — and they own the media, and the President, and Congress, who appoint and confirm new members to the U.S. Supreme Court.)

Congress and the President can’t fix this, even if they wanted to; they can’t fix a problem that they didn’t themselves create; but Congress and the President can condemn and shame the Court — which they never do. Better yet, they can impeach and remove all of the sitting ‘Justices’ and replace them with decent people — such as Carleton Reeves. But each of this Court’s members was placed there by the Congresses, and by the Presidents. It’s an extremely vicious circle, and no part of it can fix other parts of it. (A good example of this is Joe Biden himself, the U.S. Senate’s leading northern segregationist, who also was the head of the Senate’s Judiciary Committee, whose approval was needed by each new member of the U.S. Supreme Court. America’s press hides the reality, so that it can continue — they’ve even hidden, from the public, the fact that Biden was the most influential segregationist in the Democratic Party.)

This isn’t a failure ONLY by the U.S. Supreme Court. It is instead an expression of the American system as it now exists, and which failure renders the U.S. Constitution itself almost meaningless, especially as regards the rights of the people and the obligations of federal officials at all levels in the government. There is no accountability; there is only blame. And, as in any authoritarian system, all blame goes downward, and all praise goes upward. That’s the reality. It’s totalitarianism. The U.S. Constitution is by now just a string of words. America’s Founders are dead, gone, and no longer really even an influence. That’s the reality. Pretending otherwise (such as Schweikert does, who urges Congress to pass news laws in order to ‘solve’ this problem) won’t fix anything. Drastic changes are needed. And the American public has proven itself not up to the challenge, still refuses to face the reality. This is system-failure. And the public simply refuses to face it. It’s a nation of myths. There are Republican Party myths, and there are Democratic Party myths, but the worst myths of all are the bipartisan ones, which protect the people in power, of all  Parties. (Ultimately, the people in power in America are its billionaires. In effect, they own the Government.)

Judge Reeves happens to be a black Democrat in Mississippi (appointed in 2010 by the black Democrat, President Obama). He opened his decision by citing, as the reporter Madison Pauly phrased it, “19 killings of Black people at the hands of police before turning to the case before him, which involved a Black man, Clarence Jamison, who was subjected to a lengthy and humiliating traffic stop and search by a white police officer.” However, Reeves’s lengthy decision downplayed the racial aspect of the case before him, and even avoided the racial aspect in each of those 19 earlier cases, which he was citing against “qualified immunity” — the Supreme Court doctrine that Reeves was compelled to apply to the case-at-hand. Being tactful, Reeves didn’t want to overemphasize the fact that “qualified immunity” functions as a new type of Jim Crow law — no law at all, but only invented ‘law’, from the Supreme Court, that violates published statutes and even the U.S. Constitution. And, yet, the only judges who have forcefully dissented from “qualified immunity” are black ones, such as the Democrat Reeves, and the Republican Thomas. They don’t do it on account of their political Party, or even because of their ideology; they do it because they are Black, and because they have suffered or personally know people who suffer from the U.S. Government’s institutionalized (such as at the Supreme Court) racism — of which institutionalized racism, “qualified immunity” is a significant part.

In fact, Justice Reeves’s lengthy ruling is virtually a book about how gradually white racists — first, Democrats in the states of the Confederacy, and then increasingly in both Parties and throughout the entire country — have taken over and made ‘law’ from and by the Supreme Court, whenever the electorate itself isn’t willing to go quite that far into White-supremacy and vote for overtly racist candidates. It’s a brief, but fully documented, book about how the Confederacy has increasingly become the system of Government over the entirety of the United States (such as it is in regard to “qualified immunity” — a nominally non-racial precedent).

The August 4th ruling by Reeves was well discussed in an article by Matt Agorist, on August 16th, “Federal Judge Makes Radical Move to End Qualified Immunity for Bad Cops, Nationally”. A good description of the “qualified immunity” concept itself is here.

Currently, the phrase “American justice” is simply oxymoronic. Such a thing doesn’t exist, though some people are lucky and therefore think it does.

Jim BOVARD

The brutal Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd has sparked violent protests, looting, and arson attacks in Minneapolis and St. Paul. A police precinct building was torched and destroyed and the Minnesota National Guard has been called out to restore order. But the killing in Minnesota is the latest reminder that politicians and judges—through federal law and judicial interpretation—have turned police into a privileged class that is most often unaccountable, if not entitled to oppress other Americans.

Almost everyone agrees that Floyd’s death was a horrendous injustice. President Trump, who urged police officers in 2017 to not “be too nice” to suspects they arrested, condemned what the police did to Floyd as “a very bad thing.” Former Minneapolis police chief Janeé Harteau said that the video of Floyd’s killing was “the most horrific thing I’ve seen in my career and in my lifetime.” Washington, D.C. Police Chief Peter Newsham declared that the officers’ actions were “nothing short of murder.” Derick Chauvin, the police officer who killed Floyd was arrested today and charged with murder; he and three other police involved in Floyd’s death were fired earlier this week

Floyd was killed by Chauvin pressing his knee on Floyd’s neck for eight minutes after he was handcuffed and laying face down in the street. Floyd repeatedly declared, “I can’t breathe.” It didn’t matter. ACLU attorney Carl Takei told the New York Times that police departments that permit “chokeholds try to differentiate between cutting off the flow of blood, which renders someone unconscious, and cutting off the flow of oxygen, which is deadly.” This dicey distinction often goes amiss, as in 2014 when Eric Garner was killed by a New York City policeman’s chokehold. But how did government officials ever acquire a right to strangle people who fail to instantly submit to their commands?

Such killings would likely not occur without the sense of impunity conferred on police in much of this nation. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, a top contender for Vice President candidacy for Joe Biden, was the chief prosecutor for Hennepin County (including Minneapolis) from 1998 to 2006. Klobuchar, who was nicknamed “KloboCop” by detractors,  “declined to bring charges in more than two dozen cases in which people were killed in encounters with police” while she “aggressively prosecuted smaller offenses” by private citizens, the Washington Post noted. Her record was aptly summarized by a headline early this year from the Twin Cities Pioneer Press: “Klobuchar ramped up prosecutions, except in cases against police.”

Minnesota cops also benefit from their state’s so-called “police officer’s bill of rights,” which impede investigations into killings by police and other misconduct.

Outrage over police abuses have become a regular occurrence in modern American life. In 1994, the ACLU and the National Rifle Association  jointly called for President Bill Clinton to appoint a national commission to investigate “lawlessness in law enforcement.”  In 2014, after violent protests over a police shooting in Ferguson, Missouri, Attorney General Eric Holder declared that “we must seek to rebuild trust between law enforcement and the local community.” But unjustified police shootings usually spark brief uproars and promises of reform— but no fundamental rollback of law enforcement’s lethal power and prerogatives.

Much of the media coverage quickly framed the Minneapolis killing as another example of systemic racism by police. There are many bigoted cops who have unjustifiably shot or otherwise abused innocent black citizens but people of all races, creeds, and colors are at risk from lawless lawmen. As the Washington Post noted, “In 2017, a Minneapolis police officer shot and killed Justine Damond, an Australian woman who had called police about what she believed was a possible sexual assault near her home.” The Montgomery County, Maryland Police Department continues to refuse to provide camcom videos or any other evidence on its predawn no-knock raid in Potomac, Maryland, in which police reportedly shot 21-year-old Duncan Lemp as he lay sleeping in bed in his parents’ house. The Lemp case has been largely ignored by the nation’s media (except for my American Conservative articles here, here, and here).

Focusing on racial bias also risks obscuring the fundamental problem: the Supreme Court has effectively given police a license to shoot, pummel, or falsely arrest ill-fated citizens across the nation.

In the wake of the Civil War, freed southern blacks were terrorized by lynch mobs and other attackers. Congress responded to Ku Klux Klan violence against freed southern blacks by enacting the Civil Rights Act of 1871 to authorize lawsuits against any person acting “under color of” law who causes a “deprivation of any rights… secured by the Constitution and laws.” But in a series of decisions beginning in 1967, the Supreme Court gutted that law by permitting police and other government agents to claim they acted in “good faith” when violating citizens’ rights. In 1982, the Supreme Court granted government officials immunity unless they violated “clearly established statutory or constitutional rights of which a reasonable person would have known.”

Regardless of centuries of court rulings that clearly demarcated citizens’ constitutional rights, the Supreme Court decided government officials deserved “qualified immunity” unless a prior court case had condemned almost exactly the same abusive behavior. Federal judge Don Willett declared in 2018 that “qualified immunity smacks of unqualified impunity, letting public officials duck consequences for bad behavior—no matter how palpably unreasonable—as long as they were the first to behave badly.”

The Supreme Court effectively added an asterisk to the Constitution that expunged much of the Bill of Rights. In a 2018 case absolving a reckless shooting that killed a motorist, Justice Sonia Sotomayor angrily dissented that the court’s decision “tells [police] officers that they can shoot first and think later, and it tells the public that palpably unreasonable conduct will go unpunished.”

How does the Supreme Court’s idealism on “good faith” G-men play out in the real world?  Courts have “approved qualified immunity for cops who allegedly shot people without cause, sicced a dog on a man who was surrendering, tased a driver who was stopped for failing to buckle his seat belt, and ordered a 17-year-old boy to disrobe and masturbate so they could take pictures of his erect penis,” Reason columnist Jacob Sullum reported in 2019. That year, a federal appeals court bizarrely granted qualified immunity to Fresno, California, police officers who stole $225,000 during a search of two businessmen.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said yesterday that his committee would hold a hearing on police violence to analyze “why does this happen, how often is it, is it an aberration.” Graham said the video of Floyd’s killing is “hard to watch, and I just imagine how many people died without videos.”

But Congress has, as usual, been asleep on the job. As Dan Alban, an Institute for Justice attorney and  the nation’s most effective litigator against asset forfeiture abuses, observed, Congress could pass legislation “clarifying that there is no qualified immunity” for civil rights lawsuits against state and federal officials.

But the problem goes far beyond qualified immunity. Politicians criminalize practically everything in daily life and then tell police “be nice”—or maybe mandate that cops attend  sensitivity training. The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in a blizzard of new mandates and prohibitions that further empower police. A video went viral earlier this month of a New York Police Department officer tackling and pummeling a young black man who was suspected of violating new dictates on social distancing. One wonders if there are a hundred such instances of idiotic brutality for each one that trends on Twitter today

Minneapolis City Council Vice President Andrea Jenkins announced yesterday that city officials will “create a healing space at the site of the [burnt-down] 3rd Precinct so that people can grieve, express their concerns, their anger, in a safe and humane way.”  It remains to be seen whether a  “healing space” will deter the unjustified looting and violence that has proliferated in Minnesota. But rather than pillaging Family Dollar, Aldi’s, and Target, folks infuriated by Floyd’s killing should focus their wrath on the legislators and judges who have effectively given police a right to kill.

theamericanconservative.com