An excess of venality
Guns everywhere for everyone - Supreme Court to decide ... Judiciary stuffed with Trumpists ... Bannon mired in Congressional contempt ... Insurrection of January 6 ... Ex-president consumed by litigation ... From Roger Fitch, Our Man in Washington
Trump's most lasting damage has been to the courts, through the appointment of partisan judges with an ideological agenda; the incipient harm has already become apparent in the supreme court's new term.
In a case already argued, the gun enthusiasts are back, and this time they're claiming a constitutional right to carry weapons everywhere without hindrance. As the Nation headlined, "Supreme Court Is Poised to Give a Giant Gift to Gun Nuts"
It's a matter left undecided in the court's infamous 2008 case, DC v Heller, but it's of major importance, as right-to-carry laws lead directly to increased violent crime.
The latest lawsuit seeks to knock out New York State's highly effective, 108-year old gun regulations in order to complete the right-wing reinterpretation of the Second Amendment.
In Heller (2008), the court discarded 70 years of precedent and discovered a previously-unknown Second Amendment personal right to keep and bear arms without regard to the military exigency referred to in the amendment.
New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v Bruen concerns a purported right to carry arms outside the home, and has attracted over 80 briefs. Interestingly, the court will also be looking at the 1328 Statute of Northampton. More here on the statute, followed in the UK until 1970.
The supposed ambiguity in the English statute, exploited by right-wing law profs, turns on the translation of the English law's Latin: was it carrying arms, or merely wearing armour, that was proscribed? New York Magazine has more. There's a further claim by weapon-afficionados that the English Bill of Rights of 1689 protects gun-toting. It's news to the English.
If grim forecasts are borne out, the supreme court is on the cusp of making the US almost unliveable. Not just for women, e.g, the Texas abortion-bounty law, but also in daily life, where safety and health regulations, including those touching on guns, vaccines and the air citizens breathe, are on the line.
In an alarming certiorari grant, the new super-conservative majority on the court may be signalling its support for the most deadly attack in decades on the modern administrative state, and, with coal and the EPA involved, life on the planet itself.
It's a horrifying redux of the toxic "non-delegation" theory of legislation that could affect 99% of America's regulatory statutes. A (federally) unregulated corporate nirvana could result.
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A house subcommittee is investigating the government's 2020 coronavirus response and has uncovered the depths of Trump's pandemic incompetence. Even so, Texas and other red states have sued to block the Biden Administration's mild vaccination requirements for federal contractors who operate in their states.
The states lost, but the Trump-stuffed Fifth Circuit came through for the party's public-health sceptics: an all-Republican panel struck down the OSHA-issued employer vaccination mandates. The Commerce Clause analysis was described by one constitutional law professor as "reactionary and bonkers".
By contrast, the appeal of Trump's claims of executive privilege over National Archives papers, rejected by a DC judge, will be heard by a panel of Democrat-appointed judges.
It remains to be seen which appeals circuit will hear the inevitable "faith-based" challenges to President Biden's reversal of Trump administration rules that allowed religious-based anti-gay discrimination.
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Bannon: Trump's little mate
After dithering for weeks, the Justice Department has indicted Trump's mate Steve Bannon for contempt of congress. Some had worried that the ever-cautious attorney general, Merrick Garland, would delay charging Bannon, or not charge him at all; after all, in October, Garland let the five-year statute of limitations run against Michael Cohen's unindicted co-conspirator in the Stormy Daniels hush-money payments: "Individual-l", one Donald Trump.
It was another Houdini escape for El Caudillo de Mar-a-Lago. The payments, clear violations of election law, were under investigation by the Federal Election Commission as Trump's term ended, but holdover Republican appointees on the evenly-divided commission engineered a case closure on technical grounds.
If scandal and disgrace fail to sink Trump or his Republican caucus, there's still a faint prospect that the congressional insurrectionists could be expelled, as they were in 1866, and Trump himself could be disqualified (or "lustrated") from office.
It's essential that Trump be stopped from standing again, as all the indications are that he's planning a coup in 2024; that's why so much depends upon the work of the House Select Committee that is currently investigating the unsuccessful 2020 coup attempt.
Even as the committee was sitting, shocking new evidence emerged of Trump's efforts to cling to power, e.g, the Eastman memos, and now, the Ellis and McEntee memos. Jenna Ellis was a Trump campaign lawyer; Johnny McEntee was the 29-year-old White House personnel director who forced out Defence Secretary Mark Esper for (among other things) resisting Trump's efforts to involve the Pentagon in his Putsch.
Even with the overwhelming evidence of wrongdoing, there's little time left for house Democrats to deal with Trump. The recent Virginia state elections exposed the continuing credulity of Republican voters, a softening of Democrat support and most worryingly, 2020 Biden voters with a short memory.
In November 2022 there will be congressional elections. Inflamed by the ceaseless Stolen-Election lie and powered by gerrymanders that would make Bjelke-Petersen blush, Trump's Fox-fed Lumpenproletariat will regain control of the House of Reps and put an end to its inquiries into Trump's malefactions.
Yet there's no lack of ongoing litigation (here's the latest list), with a fresh grand jury inquiry into the Trump Organisation. Trump remains in personal legal peril with the January 6th jailings: his aiding and abetting the Capitol occupation would be one of the easiest cases for prosecutors to prove. As well, there's the incriminating Hatch Act violations of underlings in which he's implicated.
Teapot Dome Scandal ... plunder of public assets by presidential cronies
The Washington Post has produced a three-part report on the January 6th insurrection before, during and after the coup attempt.
The Guardian also has a report, and ProPublica found the sources of the riot funding. Now, congressional complicity in the Trump coup plot is coming to light; subpoenaed witnesses at the January 6 committee hearings are said to be singing like canaries.
If all else fails, there is hope that defamation suits will bring down Trump and his legal hacks, and his mad media accomplices, too.
The Trump International Hotel, meanwhile, has been sold at a spectacular loss to an investment group, after the Trump Organisation lost $70 million on it during the lessee's surprise presidential term. Look for a Waldorf Astoria in Washington's Old Post Office.
The venality of the Trump administration now exceeds any in American history, including the 1921 Teapot Dome Scandal. That involved the private looting of publicly-owned assets, what we now call fossil fuels, by the officials and corporate cronies of a corrupt president. Sound familiar?
