As with everything with the fascists running the American government, it is not enough for you to give them everything they want. They will always want more, and they will keep kicking you in the dick over and over until you give it to them. Hello, congressional Republicans! Columbia University! Harvard! Paramount! Jeff Bezos! Any country trying to negotiate a trade deal or anything else!
At the top of this list should be Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts and his conservative douche noodle colleagues on the Court. SCOTUS has spent the last few years handing Donald Trump victory after victory after victory, reinterpreting the Constitution and existing laws (when they have bothered to interpret them at all instead of just waving their hands and saying Eh, sure, you do you) to make the ambulatory sack of crap with both the coloring and the cognitive abilities of a bowl of orange Jell-o the most powerful president in American history, more king than elected leader, really. The Court’s obsequiousness will go down in history as one of the low points in the life of the Republic even if it’s lucky enough to last another 250 years or more.
And yet it is still not enough, as evidenced by Trump-allied legal group America First Legal, the allegedly intellectual wingnut vomitorium founded by Stephen Miller. Back in May, AFL sued John Roberts and the group that administers the entire federal court system over the novel theory that the White House is really in control of the government’s judicial branch. A novel but completely predictable argument from a group founded by Miller, who thinks the only limits on the president — well, this president — should be his own imagination.
Anyone who has read the Constitution is probably confused by AFL’s interpretation, what with it being a load of horseshit stacked so high that air traffic controllers need to issue hazard warnings to pilots of low-flying aircraft. But it’s what AFL is arguing.
On Thursday, Roberts filed his response to AFL’s lawsuit. And that response was, unsurprisingly, a polite That’s not how any of this works. Which means we can expect an angry truth storm from the president’s vanity Nazi social media site any minute.
The original AFL lawsuit takes the form of a FOIA lawsuit. The legal group is asking for access to certain judiciary records. AFL gets to this ask this way:
But, in doing so, it asks the courts to cede massive power to the White House: the bodies that make court policy and manage the judiciary’s day-to-day operations should be considered independent agencies of the executive branch, the suit argues, giving the President, under the conservative legal movement’s theories, the power to appoint and dismiss people in key roles.
Talking Points Memo went on to report that legal scholars it consulted reacted to the suit with “a mixture of dismay, disdain and laughter.” Which is how everyone reacts to everything in the Trump era, and you would think we’d have all learned our lesson by now.
What’s funny here — not ha ha funny, more ironically funny in that Roberts is in a way being hoisted on his own petard — is that AFL is making the same argument that Roberts and the rest of the Court’s conservative wing have accepted in handing the Trump administration a whole bunch of victories with regard to independent agencies in other parts of the government:
America First Legal was asking Roberts to apply the logic that had been used to decimate executive branch independent agencies to the agencies that manage the judiciary and, by extension, to himself.
That’s when the Court has even bothered using logic, instead of issuing shadow docket orders without any explanation, as it did this week to empower Trump to fire Democratic members of the Consumer Product Safety Commission. That decision came on Wednesday. Roberts filed his hilariously ironic response in this other case on Thursday. Then, presumably, he spent several hours staring into a mirror and telling his reflection, Everyone else gets screwed by Trump no matter what, but you’re different.
Why not, it’s what they all keep telling each other while they hand Trump millions of dollars in bribes and let his administration take over their curriculum planning.
This move by AFL really should not be a surprise, though that does not take away from the jaw-dropping cojones and trollishness on display here. It is certainly far from the first time that the Trump administration has mistaken — or perhaps we should say “mistaken” — the judicial branch for the executive.
I, John Roberts, Swear To The American People That We Do Not Hate Them
What Heinous F*ckery Did The Supreme Court Dump On Us THIS Time?
Back in the first weeks after Trump’s January inauguration, Elon Musk’s DOGE boys were flooding the federal bureaucracy with letters demanding employees of various agencies accept buyouts and save themselves the trouble of getting fired in the mass layoffs the administration had planned. A lot of those letters went to employees of the various federal district and circuit courts. This forced administrators to clarify for all those workers and for Musk’s band of overachieving virgins that no, DOGE was an executive branch agency and therefore had no power to fire anyone from the judicial.
As we all know by now, telling anyone on Trump’s side “no” is akin to what Gene Wilder told Cleavon Little about dealing with Mongo: “Oh no, don’t shoot him. If you shoot him, you’ll just make him mad.” Telling a legal organization closely associated with Stephen Miller “no” is never the end of it. And we should assume that if the judge in the DC district court where the lawsuit was filed rules for Roberts, AFL will appeal to the DC Circuit. And if it loses there, it will appeal to SCOTUS, which will then get to decide whether it wants to hear a case about whether it should destroy its own independence.
Officially destroy it, anyway. That the Supreme Court has destroyed itself by voluntarily becoming a subsidiary of The Trump Organization isn’t really in doubt.
On the other hand, if the district judge fucks with SCOTUS by ruling for AFL, that could bring on the sight of John Roberts appealing to the circuit court and then all the way up to the Supreme Court. Where he would presumably be advised to recuse himself, though we wouldn’t count on him doing so.
How realistic are any of these scenarios? Probably not very, but our motto in the Trump era is “Assume the worst-case scenario at all times.” It has yet to let us down.
[TPM / TPM]
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