From the fall of democracy files: The radicalized Supreme Court turns up the heat

The article quoted at length below make these key points about the Supreme Court term that will start tomorrow, Oct, 3:

• The court remains radicalized, anti-democratic, autocratic, Christian fundamentalist theocratic and brass knuckles capitalist. Based on the kinds of cases it chose to hear, it also remains intent on fundamentally transforming secular law into a combination of Christian Sharia and unregulated capitalism. 

• The court is also focused on crippling democracy and shifting power from the federal government and individuals to the Republican Party, the Christian church and businesses, especially big businesses.

• Christian nationalist (CN) dogma is heavily biased against racial minorities, women, non-heterosexuals. In accord with that bias, It is also heavily biased against the civil liberties, e.g., voting rights and voter power, that protect their rights and liberties. In one case tghe Supreme Court is going to decide, CN fundamentalists ask for state government to have unfettered power to use gerrymandering to take as much voter power as possible from racial minorities. 

• Republican Party, CN and radical right capitalist dogma are all rigidly opposed to a strong federal government. Those radical ideologies are just as opposed to the ability of voters to influence the outcomes of elections, and the federal government's ability to protect voter power. One case the court will decide would give state legislatures virtually unlimited power to reduce elections to a mere farce. That case, Moore v. Harper, if decided according to radical right dogma, will turn elections in red states into something fairly close to the fake elections Putin forced on people in annexed parts of Ukraine. Presidential elections in 2024 and thereafter will be rigged farces.

• If decided according to core CN dogma, another Supreme Court case will curtail or completely obliterate rights to same-sex marriage. At best, states will be able to openly discriminate against same-sex couples in commerce and maybe elsewhere. Next and maybe less likely, states would be left to decide the legality of existing and future same-sex marriages. At worst (most unlikely?), all same-sex marriages will be declared unconstitutional, null and void in all states.

This is an urgent warning about how radicalized and anti-democratic the CN movement, the Republican Party and hard core capitalists are. There is no basis for any of them to deny this truth. They might as well claim that the 2020 election was stolen. 

At present, the current Supreme Court can deliver huge enabling powers to all major points of radical CN, capitalist and GOP agendas. There is nothing standing in its way. If the radical right gets its way, (i) secularism will fall to Christian Sharia, (ii) weakly regulated capitalism will fall to barely regulated capitalism, and (iii) democracy will fall to Republican Party autocracy, fundamentalist Christian theocracy and ruthless kleptocracy.

We're in very deep trouble. 

  

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

For the wonks, The Guardian writes:

On Monday, the nine justices of the US supreme court will take their seats at the start of a new judicial year, even as the shock waves of the panel’s previous seismic term continue to reverberate across America.

In their first full term that ended in June, the court’s new six-to-three hard-right supermajority astounded the nation by tearing up decades of settled law. They eviscerated the right to an abortion, loosened America’s already lax gun laws, erected roadblocks to combating the climate crisis, and awarded religious groups greater say in public life.

The fallout of the spate of extreme rightwing rulings has shaken public confidence in the political neutrality of the court. A Gallup poll this week found that fewer than half of US adults trust it – a drop of 20 points in just two years and the lowest rating since Gallup began recording the trend in 1972.

Justices have begun to respond to the pressure by sparring openly in public. The Wall Street Journal reported that in recent speeches the liberal justice Elena Kagan has accused her conservative peers of damaging the credibility of the court by embracing Republican causes.

Samuel Alito, who wrote the decision overturning the right to an abortion in Roe v Wade, counter-accused Kagan (whom he did not name) of crossing “an important line” by implying the court was becoming illegitimate.

With so much discord in plain sight, you might have expected the new supermajority created under Trump to opt for a calmer year ahead. No chance.

The choice of cases to be decided in the new term spells full steam ahead. “I see no signs of them slowing down,” said Tara Groves, a law professor at the University of Texas at Austin.

From fundamental aspects of American democracy to LGBTQ+ equality, and the electoral power of racial minorities to protecting the environment, the conservative justices have selected a whole new slew of targets that fall squarely within Republican priorities. The schedule for the first two days of oral arguments this week tells the story.

On Monday morning, the court will fling itself into the thick of environmental controversy in the latest case threatening the ability of the federal government to counter pollution. Having curtailed in June the ability of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to curb emissions causing planet heating, the court will now hear arguments in Sackett v EPA, which has the potential to whittle down the agency’s powers to uphold clean water standards.

Then on Tuesday, the court enters blockbuster territory with Merrill v Milligan. That case could topple the last remaining pillar of the Voting Rights Act, which has safeguarded the democratic rights of African American and other minority citizens for the past 57 years.

As Michael Waldman, president of the Brennan Center for Justice, put it in a briefing this week, the case adds to the court’s upcoming docket “the raw issue of race in America”.

Merrill v Milligan concerns Alabama, where Republican lawmakers want to draw up congressional district maps that would give Black voters the power to send just one African American member to Congress out of a total of seven representatives, even though Black Alabamans make up a quarter of the state’s population.

In its brief to the supreme court, Alabama effectively invites the conservative justices to make it virtually impossible to challenge racial gerrymandering. Should the state’s view prevail, challengers would have to show that racial discrimination was the primary intent behind how district lines were drawn. [that standard of evidence of intent will be basically impossible to show]

The Alabama dispute epitomizes two visceral themes that run through several of the blockbuster cases this term: race and democracy.

The second major theme of the coming term is democracy. In addition to the Alabama racial gerrymandering case, the court has agreed to take on the highly polarized subject of the role of state legislatures in federal elections.

Moore v Harper could have “monumental implications for American democracy”, Groves believes. At the heart of the case is the debunked “independent state legislature theory”, which has been embraced in recent years by radical Republicans who argue that the constitution gives state legislatures the overriding power to regulate federal elections.

Though legal scholars have largely rejected the doctrine, four of the nine justices – Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Thomas – have paid lip-service to some aspect of it. Should they command the majority, they could give Republican-controlled state legislatures even more firepower to grab what is in effect minority rule through extreme partisan gerrymandering, with very little possible oversight from state courts.

At its most dystopian, an extreme ruling in Moore v Harper could wreak havoc in presidential elections in 2024 and beyond. John Eastman, the conservative law professor mired in legal peril over the central role he played in trying to overturn Joe Biden’s victory on January 6, put the independent state legislature theory at the heart of his notorious memo laying out the roadmap for an electoral coup.

Smith explained that the supreme court could embolden state legislatures to dictate who wins presidential elections in their state according to political whim. “That might be unconstitutional under state law, but under this doctrine state courts would be powerless to prevent them.”

As if race and the future of American democracy were not enough, the conservative justices are also bearing down once again on the right to equal treatment for same-sex couples. They have taken on a case asking whether a graphic design firm, 303 Creative LLC, should be able to turn away gay couples requesting help creating wedding websites on religious grounds.

From the fall of democracy files: Theocracy creeps into federal courts

Honestly folks, this what the slow fall of democracy to Christian Sharia and crackpot Christian Taliban looks like. This is just another warning that God is coming for us whether we want it or not. And, God is definitely not in a good mood.

The Fifth Circuit reverses and grants judgment *for* a judge who does a prayer ceremony in his courtroom before hearing cases.

Judge Jolly dissents in relevant part. His description of what the scene in Court is like is below. 1/ https://t.co/u9ocV8tpeC pic.twitter.com/5rxi4WebIc

— Raffi Melkonian (@RMFifthCircuit) September 29, 2022

Meanwhile, Vanity Fair writes: OBAMA PRIVATELY WARNED REPORTERS TRUMP WOULD DESTROY AMERICA IN 8 YEARS IN LAST DAYS IN OFFICE -- Though for some reason he thought four years would be “okay.”

I'm not alone in seeing multiple deadly threats just oozing out of the rabidly theocratic, thoroughly morally rotted, deeply corrupt Republican Party. I'll keep up the warnings as long as I can. Once they come and shut me up, I will have been shut up.

Qs: Was Obama right to think that four years of T**** would be OK, assuming he actually thought that? (I sure don't think so, but what do I know?) 

 

If you were an atheist who was a witness for the defense of a non-White criminal defendant in judge Mack's courtroom, would you get up and walk out of the courtroom for Mack's "prayer ceremony", or, would you stay and pretend to be praying out of fear that judge Mack would unfairly whack the defendant as a filthy Godless illegal immigrant atheist, even if he wasn't any of those horrible things?

Fiddly bits of news

It's so absurd. One just has to go with the flow.

From the shameless hypocrite files

New York Times: DeSantis, Once a ‘No’ on Storm Aid, Petitions a President He’s Bashed. The Florida governor, who as a congressman opposed aid to victims of Hurricane Sandy, is seeking relief from the Biden administration as Hurricane Ian ravages his own state. He said: “As you say, Tucker, we live in a very politicized time.”

Ron, tell your supporters to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. What are you, a socialist or something? 

From the Armageddon Coming Soon files

Someone reported yesterday that once Russia annexes the four chunks of Ukraine that Putin invaded and forced to vote for annexation, Ukrainian efforts to conduct military resistance there will be considered attacks on the sacred Russian motherland. That will be Putin's excuse to respond with tactical nuclear weapons.

Post apocalypse

From the democracy is screwed files

The NYT reports that former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is trying to cap a stunning political comeback by defeating the incumbent Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil’s elections on Sunday. What a choice, da Silva is a deeply corrupt liberal politician and Bolsonaro is a deeply corrupt tyrant.

From the Armageddon again files

Pentagon Plans to Set Up a New Command to Arm Ukraine, Officials Say. The mission in Germany would streamline a training and assistance system that the United States and its allies created on the fly after Russia’s invasion, officials said.

From the democracy is screwed files

Ginni Thomas tells Jan. 6 panel she still believes false election fraud claims, chair says. “The information was typical of a lot of information we received from other people who were involved in this effort around Jan. 6. A lot of: ‘Well, I believed something was wrong,’” select committee chair Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), told reporters Thursday of Thomas’ testimony. 

As usual, Thomas provided no evidence. But like other radical right stolen election cultists, she has the faith. No evidence, but lots 'n lots of faith.

From the corrupt, radical right Christian nationalist Republican judge files

Judge Aileen M. Cannon told Donald Trump’s lawyers Thursday that they did not need to comply with an order from special master Raymond J. Dearie and state in a court filing whether they believe FBI agents lied about documents seized from the former president’s Florida residence. Thursday’s ruling was the first clash between Cannon, a Trump appointee who has generally shown the former president deference in litigation over the Mar-a-Lago investigation, and Dearie, a federal judge she appointed as an outside expert in the case, who appears to be far more skeptical of Trump.

No doubt, judge Loose Cannon will give the ex-president what he believes he deserves. The Cannon will deliver no justice and vindicate no law because she knows the ex-president is a gooood boy. She has blind faith, just like Ginni Thomas.

From the radical right attack files: How the GOP wants to protect lies and hate speech

The Atlantic writes:

Is This the Beginning of the End of the Internet?

Occasionally, something happens that is so blatantly and obviously misguided that trying to explain it rationally makes you sound ridiculous. Such is the case with the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals’ recent ruling in NetChoice v. Paxton. Earlier this month, the court upheld a preposterous Texas law stating that online platforms with more than 50 million monthly active users in the United States no longer have First Amendment rights regarding their editorial decisions. Put another way, the law tells big social-media companies that they can’t moderate the content on their platforms. YouTube purging terrorist-recruitment videos? Illegal. Twitter removing a violent cell of neo-Nazis harassing people with death threats? Sorry, that’s censorship, according to Andy Oldham, a judge of the United States Court of Appeals and the former general counsel to Texas Governor Greg Abbott.

A state compelling social-media companies to host all user content without restrictions isn’t merely, as the First Amendment litigation lawyer Ken White put it on Twitter, “the most angrily incoherent First Amendment decision I think I’ve ever read.” It’s also the type of ruling that threatens to blow up the architecture of the internet. To understand why requires some expertise in First Amendment law and content-moderation policy, and a grounding in what makes the internet a truly transformational technology. So I called up some legal and tech-policy experts and asked them to explain the Fifth Circuit ruling—and its consequences—to me as if I were a precocious 5-year-old with a strange interest in jurisprudence.

Techdirt founder Mike Masnick, who has been writing for decades about the intersection of tech policy and civil liberties, told me that the ruling is “fractally wrong”—made up of so many layers of wrongness that, in order to fully comprehend its significance, “you must understand the historical wrongness before the legal wrongness, before you can get to the technical wrongness.” In theory, the ruling means that any state in the Fifth Circuit (such as Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi) could “mandate that news organizations must cover certain politicians or certain other content” and even implies that “the state can now compel any speech it wants on private property.” The law would allow both the Texas attorney general and private citizens who do business in Texas to bring suit against the platforms if they feel their content was removed because of a specific viewpoint. Daphne Keller, the director of the Program on Platform Regulation at Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center, told me that such a law could amount to “a litigation DDoS [Denial of Service] attack, unleashing a wave of potentially frivolous and serious suits against the platforms.”

To give me a sense of just how sweeping and nonsensical the law could be in practice, Masnick suggested that, under the logic of the ruling, it very well could be illegal to update Wikipedia in Texas, because any user attempt to add to a page could be deemed an act of censorship based on the viewpoint of that user (which the law forbids). The same could be true of chat platforms, including iMessage and Reddit, and perhaps also Discord, which is built on tens of thousands of private chat rooms run by private moderators. Enforcement at that scale is nearly impossible. This week, to demonstrate the absurdity of the law and stress test possible Texas enforcement, the subreddit r/PoliticalHumor mandated that every comment in the forum include the phrase “Greg Abbott is a little piss baby” or be deleted. “We realized what a ripe situation this is, so we’re going to flagrantly break this law,” a moderator of the subreddit wrote. “We like this Constitution thing. Seems like it has some good ideas.”

Everyone I spoke with believes that the very future of how the internet works is at stake. Accordingly, this case is likely to head to the Supreme Court. Part of this fiasco touches on the debate around Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which, despite its political-lightning-rod status, makes it extremely clear that websites have editorial control. “Section 230 tells platforms, ‘You’re not the author of what people on your platform put up, but that doesn’t mean you can’t clean up your own yard and get rid of stuff you don’t like.’ That has served the internet very well,” Dan Novack, a First Amendment attorney, told me.

“A lot of people envision the First Amendment in this affirmative way, where it is about your right to say what you want to say,” Novack told me. “But the First Amendment is just as much about protecting your right to be silent. And it’s not just about speech but things adjacent to your speech—like what content you want to be associated or not associated with. This law and the conservative support of it shreds those notions into ribbons.”

The implications are terrifying and made all the worse by the language of Judge Oldham’s ruling. Perhaps the best example of this brazen obtuseness is Oldham’s argument about “the Platforms’ obsession with terrorists and Nazis,” concerns that he suggests are “fanciful” and “hypothetical.” Of course, such concerns are not hypothetical; they’re a central issue for any large-scale platform’s content-moderation team. In 2015, for example, the Brookings Institution issued a 68-page report titled “The ISIS Twitter census,” mapping the network of terrorist supporters flooding the platform. The report found that in 2014, there were at least 46,000 ISIS accounts on Twitter posting graphic violent content and using the platform to recruit and collect intelligence for the Islamic State.

I've argued here many time that dark free speech (deceit, lies, slanders, irrational emotional manipulation, flawed motivated reasoning, etc.) has been the single most potent weapon America's radical right has used, among other bad things, to divide and polarize society, foment irrational distrust, destroy respect for inconvenient truth and expertise, corrupt democracy and the rule of law, and attack civil liberties. 

But maybe we are at a new point in the Republican Party's attack on democracy, secularism, civil liberties and the rule of law. Maybe equally or more effective tactics will come from subversion of federal courts by extremist radical right judges. Ex-president T**** publicly stated that judges are a core focus for him, and he acted that way while in office. T**** appointed the rotted judge here, Andy Oldham to the 5th circuit appeals court in 2018. Radical right Christian nationalist judges have subverted and dominate the US Supreme Court. That will very likely be the situation for some years to come. 

For at least the next few years, more extremist rulings from T**** judges and other radical right Republicans on the federal bench can be expected to continue. The goal is to inflict serious damage to democracy, secularism, inconvenient facts and truths, civil liberties and the rule of law. It's not clear that our democracy and our rights can be defended when the attacks come from a subverted, anti-democratic federal judiciary. I cannot see any way to stop or blunt the damage that Republican federal judges already have and will continue to inflict. There are good reasons to believe these attacks on democracy and civil liberties by radical right extremists will continue.

Acknowledgment: Thanks to milo for bringing this article to my attention.