Saturday, March 26, 2022

Christian nationalist rot in federal courts

“EVERY system for converting votes into power has its flaws. Britain suffers from an over-mighty executive; Italy from chronically weak government; Israel from small, domineering factions. America, however, is plagued by the only democratic vice more troubling than the tyranny of the majority: tyranny of the minority.” -- The Economist, July 2018


Lately, I have been urgently warning about how extremely anti-democratic, authoritarian and crackpot Christian nationalism is and its elites are. That rot is beginning to fully manifest itself in the federal courts, including the US Supreme Court. A federal trial court and a federal appeals court ruled for the authoritarians regarding the US military chain of command. Fortunately, the Supreme Court stopped this military coup attempt by Christian fundamentalist Republican Party (CNRP) politicians wearing black robes.

The bad news is that three of the six Republican CNRP Supreme Court justices just voted to assert political control of the US military from the bench. The three were Thomas, Gorsuch and Alito. Fortunately, three Democrats and the other three CNRP justices said no, the court did not have power to command the US military. So for now, this avenue of attack in the long-desired anti-democratic CNRP coup has been blocked. Vox writes:
The Supreme Court on Friday evening decided, no, it was not going to needlessly insert itself in the military chain of command above President Joe Biden.

The Court’s decision in Austin v. U.S. Navy SEALs 1-26 largely halted a lower court order that permitted certain sailors to defy a direct order. A group of Navy special operations personnel sought an exemption from the Pentagon’s requirement that all active duty service members get vaccinated against Covid-19, claiming that they should receive a religious exemption.

A majority of the Court effectively ruled that, yes, in fact, troops do have to follow orders, including an order to take a vaccine.   
But as Kavanaugh correctly notes in his concurring opinion, there is a long line of Supreme Court precedents establishing that courts should be exceedingly reluctant to interfere with military affairs.
Judge Reed O’Connor, a notoriously partisan judge in Texas who is best known for a failed effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act, ruled in favor of the service members who refused to follow a direct order. And the conservative United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit refused the Navy’s request to stay key parts of O’Connor’s order.

That left the responsibility of restoring the military’s proper chain of command to the Supreme Court. Though the Court’s order does not wipe out O’Connor’s decision in its entirety, it temporarily blocks that decision “insofar as it precludes the Navy from considering respondents’ vaccination status in making deployment, assignment, and other operational decisions.”

But the astonishing thing about the SEALs order is that the Supreme Court needed to intervene in this case at all.
Well, not astonishing if one just considers the political and social situation we are in. There are CNRP politicians (judges) in the federal judiciary. Everything is on the table all bets are off. We are at war.

Some thoughts come to mind. Hard core CNRP ideology is politically and socially insane, but not clinically insane. These crackpots hold beliefs that are considered by experts to be within the range of clinically normal. The CNRP ideology appears to be held by most Republican elites, donors, and maybe most of its rank and file. Collectively, they are a minority. 

In American society, it is a minority political Christian fundamentalist movement that is seeking power over an unwilling majority. In a functioning democracy, that should be politically and socially insane, but America no longer has a functional democracy or society. Both are broken. We are witnessing in real time the efforts of a radical CNRP minority to rise to power and subjugate and oppress all opposition by force in a God-sanctioned and blessed tyranny of the minority.

Note this comment in the Vox article: there is a long line of Supreme Court precedents establishing that courts should be exceedingly reluctant to interfere with military affairs. Exceeding reluctance is not a complete bar to an eventual take-over of the US military by the Supreme Court. That is the opening the CNRP needs to eventually wear down the authority of a Democratic president. This could be an avenue of CNRP attack on democracy and separations of powers that we will be seeing more of in the years to come. 

The CNRP movement is patient, persistent, creative, powerful and endlessly well-funded, increasingly via access to growing streams of tax dollars. In America, wealth = power. This political movement will not stop trying to overthrow democracy, secularism, pluralism until bigoted Christian sharia law, autocratic Christian theocracy and a Christian kleptocracy have been installed. The CNRP onslaught is now coming openly and from all directions.

Those 24 Navy SEALS who filed the lawsuit should be dishonorably discharged and put on the terrorist watch list. They knew exactly what the were doing.

In consonance with those thoughts, consider this bit of news from the last day or two: Ginny Thomas, wife of Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas who just voted for the CNRP attack on democracy, had said that “the Biden crime family” and “ballot fraud co-conspirators” would be “living in barges off GITMO to face military tribunals for sedition.” That is QAnon thinking and belief right out in the open.

That is the CNRP movement speaking loud and clear. Note that the wife of a US Supreme Court justice advocates suspending habeas corpus and the right to an open trial for American citizens. Also note that her husband, a Supreme Court justice, voted to keep his wife’s texts secret so none of us would ever know about any of this.[1] 

Two other quick thoughts. The parallels of the CNRP and Russia are glaring. No moral qualms stand in the way of the demagogue’s sacred goals. Majority opinion is irrelevant. The rule of law is irrelevant. Only power and wealth are relevant.

In the coming weeks, the CNRP Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade will come. About 25 states have passed trigger laws that automatically ban abortions if the Supreme Court ever overturns Roe. Looks like that time is at hand. The last day of the court’s term is June 30, so that could be the date the decision is handed down and made public. Immediately thereafter, the CNRP judges will get the hell out of town so they can hide from the backlash that would come. 

They will still claim and believe that they are fair and neutral. In my opinion, that level of self-delusion qualifies as clinical insanity. 


Footnote: 
1. The New York Times wrote in Jan. of 2022:
The Supreme Court on Wednesday refused a request from former President Donald J. Trump to block the release of White House records concerning the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, effectively rejecting Mr. Trump’s claim of executive privilege and clearing the way for the House committee investigating the riot to start receiving the documents hours later.

The court, with only Justice Clarence Thomas noting a dissent, let stand an appeals court ruling that Mr. Trump’s desire to maintain the confidentiality of internal White House communications was outweighed by the need for a full accounting of the attack and the disruption of the certification of the 2020 electoral count.
Not only did the CNRP Thomas with his blatant conflict of interest not recuse himself from voting in that decision, he alone opposed it to protect his CNRP wife. That is the moral standard the CNRP movement operates under, i.e., no moral qualms. CNRP elites fight in the name of God. All tactics, lies, corruption and moral concerns are swept into oblivion as the Christian soldiers fight on to re-establish a Christian dark ages society and law.

If it had been a Democratic judge who did the same, the entire Republican Party and its Fox News propaganda arm would be screaming bloody murder in self-righteous moral outrage. But when one of their own does it, we get silent Republican complicity. 

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