Commentary: Maintaining emotional control

PD's post yesterday and comments from yesterday and today about Joe Biden being shockingly unfit for office really hit a nerve with me. I irrationally lashed out at the WSJ reporting because it came from a source I consider to be kleptocratic and authoritarian, poisoned years ago by the authoritarian monster and master propagandist, Rupert Murdoch. While that is true for the WSJ editorial pages, it is not necessarily true for its news reporting, which is usually solid and trustworthy. Profound distrust sometimes leads people to irrationality. That happened to me. It was a mistake.

Despite my loss of control, I did not let that emotional reaction keep me from accepting the reporting as basically true and very important. Bottom line, Biden is a catastrophe.

I had just posted about my own rapidly growing suspicions that Joe had lost he ability to govern some years ago. Then PD's post popped up. I now believe that Joe and the Dems are significantly more corrupt and authoritarian than I did just three days ago. Getting close to the Repubs in terms of getting close to equivalence. To me, that thought is very upsetting and frightening.

These critically important comments that PD found among Biden's public statements need to be made known and understood:

"The fact that he [Trump] doesn't abide by the rules of of democracy we've established is not my concern. My job is to make the transition workable and available."

Now I believe I know why Joe put Merrick Garland in charge of the DoJ. He was put there to do what he did. Garland successfully protected DJT from federal prosecution for his crimes. That alone could be the undoing of American democracy and the rule of law.

Biden's (1) lack of concern for democracy, and (2) his stunning misunderstanding of a key aspect of his job, protecting the constitution, democracy and the rule of law, cannot be much clearer. He is even clearer about his authoritarianism than DJT. To my knowledge, I don't think that DJT was ever this explicit about his obvious hostility to democracy. At least I don't recall him ever being that explicit.

Biden's astounding comments as quoted above are reported here starting at ~5:00:

Q: Is it unreasonable to react so strongly against Joe and the Dem Party based on all the evidence in the public record, including the two sentences I quoted above?

Who's Running The Show? Presidents and power in US.

After the stunning display of oligarchical power by the richest man on earth, Elon Musk, we see how little our votes mean and how much the donor class increasingly exercises raw power in the post Citizens United age of managed democracy. But it is not yet January 20, so it is worth asking. "WHO is the boss in the Biden Admin, both now and for several of the last 4 years?" The WSJ just published a deeply sourced and  sobering report on just that question.  As the article states: 

This account of how the White House functioned with an aging leader at the top of its organizational chart is based on interviews with nearly 50 people, including those who participated in or had direct knowledge of the operations. (WSJ: 12/19/24)

Below are just a few excerpts followed by a link to the piece, which, however is behind a paywall. It's not a pretty picture, and it reveals a state of affairs very much at odds with democratic norms, and  what we all learn about US gov't and the executive branch at school. We elected Biden, but exactly who or what did we get?

How the White House Functioned With a Diminished Biden in Charge 

 

There have already been extensive reports on how Biden was stage managed by his handlers in the last year of his presidency. However, it is now becoming clear that from early on in the Biden administration, the president was carefully managed, and became increasingly insulated from his own cabinet including crucial decision makers like the secretary of defense Lloyd Austin, who complained he did not have enough access to Biden even though the US was navigating two major conflicts, and earlier the Afghanistan pullout. The following are excerpts from the report.

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[In order] to adapt the White House around the needs of a diminished leader, they  [Biden's team including Ron Klain and other top advisors] told visitors to keep meetings focused. Interactions with senior Democratic lawmakers and some cabinet members—including powerful secretaries such as Defense’s Lloyd Austin and Treasury’s Janet Yellen—were infrequent or grew less frequent. Some legislative leaders had a hard time getting the president’s ear at key moments, including ahead of the U.S.’s disastrous pullout from Afghanistan.

Senior advisers were often put into roles that some administration officials and lawmakers thought Biden should occupy, with people such as National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, senior counselor Steve Ricchetti and National Economic Council head Lael Brainard and her predecessor frequently in the position of being go-betweens for the president.

Press aides who compiled packages of news clips for Biden were told by senior staff to exclude negative stories about the president. The president wasn’t talking to his own pollsters as surveys showed him trailing in the 2024 race.

Presidents always have gatekeepers. But in Biden’s case, the walls around him were higher and the controls greater, according to Democratic lawmakers, donors and aides who worked for Biden and other administrations. There were limits over who Biden spoke with, limits on what they said to him and limits around the sources of information he consumed....

While preparing last year for his interview with Robert K. Hur, the special counsel who investigated Biden’s handling of classified documents, the president couldn’t recall lines that his team discussed with him. At events, aides often repeated instructions to him, such as where to enter or exit a stage, that would be obvious to the average person. Biden’s team tapped campaign co-chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg, a Hollywood mogul, to find a voice coach to improve the president’s fading warble. Biden, now 82, has long operated with a tightknit inner circle of advisers. The protective culture inside the White House was intensified because Biden started his presidency at the height of the Covid pandemic. His staff took great care to prevent him from catching the virus by limiting in-person interactions with him. But the shell constructed for the pandemic was never fully taken down, and his advanced age hardened it...The system put Biden at an unusual remove from cabinet secretaries, the chairs of congressional committees and other high-ranking officials. It also insulated him from the scrutiny of the American public. 

The strategies to protect Biden largely worked—until June 27, when Biden stood on an Atlanta debate stage with Trump, searching for words and unable to complete his thoughts on live television....

[Early on in his term, Biden's team] issued a directive to some powerful lawmakers and allies seeking one-on-one time: The exchanges should be short and focused, according to people who received the message directly from White House aides.

If the president was having an off day, meetings could be scrapped altogether. On one such occasion, in the spring of 2021, a national security official explained to another aide why a meeting needed to be rescheduled. “He has good days and bad days, and today was a bad day so we’re going to address this tomorrow,” the former aide recalled the official saying.

While it isn’t uncommon for politicians to want more time with the president than they get, some Democrats felt Biden was unusually hard to reach.

That’s what Rep. Adam Smith of Washington found when he tried to share his concerns with the president ahead of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021. Smith, a Democrat who then chaired the powerful House Armed Services Committee, was alarmed by what he viewed as overly optimistic comments from Biden as the administration assembled plans for the operation.

I was begging them to set expectations low,” said Smith, who had worked extensively on the issue and harbored concerns about how the withdrawal might go. He sought to talk to Biden directly to share his insights about the region but couldn’t get on the phone with him, Smith said.

After the disastrous withdrawal, which left 13 U.S. service members and more than 170 Afghans dead, Smith made a critical comment to the Washington Post about the administration lacking a “clear-eyed view” of the U.S.-backed Ashraf Ghani government’s durability. It was among comments that triggered an angry phone call from Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who ended up getting an earful from the frustrated chairman. Shortly after, Smith got an apologetic call from Biden. It was the only phone call Biden made to Smith in his four years in office, Smith said.

“The Biden White House was more insulated than most,” Smith said. “I spoke with Barack Obama on a number of occasions when he was president and I wasn’t even chairman of the committee.”

Rep. Jim Himes of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said his interactions with the White House in the past two years were primarily focused on the reauthorization of a vital section of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that authorizes broad national security surveillance powers. Biden’s senior advisers and other top administration officials worked with Himes on the issue....

But Biden wasn’t part of the conversation. “I really had no personal contact with this president. I had more personal contact with Obama, which is sort of strange because I was a lot more junior,” said Himes, who took office in 2009. Congress extended the surveillance authority for two years instead of the administration’s goal of five years.

 

Cabinet Members:

 

Interactions between Biden and many of his cabinet members were relatively infrequent and often tightly scripted. At least one cabinet member stopped requesting calls with the president, because it was clear that such requests wouldn’t be welcome, a former senior cabinet aide said.

Multiple former senior cabinet aides described a top-down dynamic in which the White House would issue decisions and expect cabinet agencies to carry them out, rather than making cabinet secretaries active participants in the policymaking process....

 

Cabinet members most often met alone or with a member of the president’s senior staff, including Brainard, the economic adviser, or National Security Adviser Sullivan. The senior adviser would then bring the issue to the president and report back, former administration officials said.

 

Traditionally, presidents have more frequent interactions with certain cabinet secretaries—often Treasury, Defense and State—than others. 

But Treasury Secretary Yellen had an arm’s length relationship with the president for much of the administration. She was part of the economics team that regularly briefed the president, but one-on-one discussions were more rare, and she typically dealt with the NEC or with the president’s advisers rather than Biden directly, according to people familiar with the interactions. 

Defense Secretary Austin also saw his close relationship with Biden grow more distant over the course of the administration, with Austin’s regular access to Biden becoming increasingly rare in the past two years, people familiar with the relationship said. 

During the first half of the administration, Austin was one of the cabinet members who would regularly attend Biden’s presidential daily briefing on a rotational basis each week. That briefing would be followed with a routine one-on-one in which Austin and Biden would meet personally behind closed doors. 

Officials familiar with these meetings said they helped cabinet members to understand the commander in chief’s intentions directly, instead of being filtered through others, such as Sullivan, the national security adviser.

But in the past two years—a period when the wars in Ukraine and Gaza demanded the president’s attention—Austin’s invitation to the briefing came less frequently, to the point where the one-on-one meeting was seldom scheduled. When the one-on-one meetings did take place, they were more typically virtual meetings, not in-person. Still, Austin could always get an unscheduled meeting with the president if he needed it.

Campaigns:

Biden’s team also insulated him on the campaign trail. In the summer of 2023, one prominent Democratic donor put together a small event for Biden’s re-election bid. The donor was shocked when a campaign official told him that attendees shouldn’t expect to have a free ranging question-and-answer session with the president. Instead, the organizer was told to send in two or three questions ahead of time that Biden would answer.

At some events, the Biden campaign printed the pre-approved questions on notecards and then gave donors the cards to read the questions. Even with all these steps, Biden made flubs, which confounded the donors who knew that Biden had the questions ahead of time.

Some donors said they noticed how staff stepped in to mask other signs of decline. Throughout his presidency—and especially later in the term—Biden was assisted by a small group of aides who were laser focused on him in a far different way than when he was vice president, or how former presidents Bill Clinton or Obama were staffed during their presidencies, people who have witnessed their interactions said.

These aides, which include Annie Tomasini and Ashley Williams, were often with the president as he traveled and stayed within earshot or eye distance, the people said. They would often repeat basic instructions to him, such as where to enter or exit a stage.

The president’s team of pollsters also had limited access to Biden, according to people familiar with the president’s polling. The key advisers have famously had the president’s ear in most past White Houses.

[During] the 2024 campaign, the pollsters weren’t talking to the president about their findings, and instead sent memos that went to top campaign staff.

Biden’s pollsters didn’t meet with him in person and saw little evidence that the president was personally getting the data that they were sending him, according to the people.

People close to the president said he relied on Mike Donilon, one of Biden’s core inner circle advisers. With a background in polling, Donilon could sift through the information and present it to the president.

But this summer, Democratic insiders became alarmed by the way Biden described his own polling, publicly characterizing the race as a tossup when polls released in the weeks after the disastrous June debate consistently showed Trump ahead. They worried he wasn’t getting an unvarnished look at his standing in the race.

Those fears intensified on July 11, when Biden’s top advisers met behind closed doors with Democratic senators, where the advisers laid out a road map for Biden’s victory. The message from the advisers was so disconnected from public polling—which showed Trump leading Biden nationally—that it left Democratic senators incredulous. It spurred Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) to speak to Biden directly, according to people familiar with the matter, hoping to pierce what the senators saw as a wall erected by Donilon to shield Biden from bad information. Donilon didn’t respond to requests for comment.

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So, again, I ask, "Who's running the show?"

 

 

Is Joe Biden corrupt, stupid, incompetent and/or deeply insulting?

News out of AL:

Former Huntsville physician Shelinder Aggarwal, who was previously described as a “pill mill doctor” by federal investigators, was one of the 1,499 people to have their sentence reduced last week in the largest single-day act of clemency in modern history carried out by President Joe Biden.

In 2017, Aggarwal was sentenced to 15 years in federal prison for illegally prescribing controlled substances and conducting health care fraud involving $9.5 million in unneeded and unused urine tests, as AL.com previously reported.

“This defendant directly contributed to the opioid epidemic that is plaguing our nation,” said 2017 FBI Special Agent in Charge Roger C. Stanton.

“He also cost taxpayers millions of dollars by fraudulently claiming government reimbursement for thousands of lab tests that he never used to treat patients. I applaud the work of my agents and our partners to shut down Aggarwal’s pill mill and hold him accountable for his actions.”

In 2012, about 80 to 145 patients a day visited Aggarwal’s clinic, according to previous investigations.

Initial patient visits typically lasted five minutes or less, and follow-ups two minutes or less.

Aggarwal did not obtain prior medical records for his patients, did not treat patients with anything other than controlled substances, often asked patients what medications they wanted and filled their requests, prescribed controlled substances to patients who he knew were using illegal drugs, and did not take appropriate measures to ensure that patients did not divert or abuse controlled substances.

In 2012, Alabama pharmacies filled about 110,013 of Aggarwal’s prescriptions for controlled substances, according to the Prescription Drug Monitoring Program (PDMP) for Alabama,

That would equal about 423 prescriptions per day, if he worked five days a week, and resulted in about 12.3 million pills.  

Aggarwal listed on the clemency list show he is at a halfway house in Montgomery and is set to be released on Dec. 22.

Pipe dream: Impeach Biden right now. Get him out. He is unfit for office, assuming he actually is in office.

Qs: Is it unreasonable to (1) be angry at Joe for granting clemency to a major criminal like Aggarwal, or (2) suspect that Aggarwal might have donated money to some corrupt Alabama Democratic politician who wanted to repay Aggarwal, but if not that, then why grant clemency to this psychopath goon with blood on his hands? 

Joe, anyone home?

Update: The Georgia state RICO lawsuit against DJT

Two judges on a Georgia state appeals court panel of three, has tossed Fani Willis off the prosecution for DJT for his crimes in GA. The two argued that Willis was disqualified to prosecute DJT due to an appearance of a conflict of interest, not any actual conflict of interest. The two judges had to make up new law to boot her off. No law or prior GA court decision has ever done this. The actual law requires proof of an actual conflict of interest.

I take this decision as evidence of MAGA rot spreading to and poisoning state courts, like it is doing to federal courts. What is interesting is that when MAGA politicians, judges and other elites are in situations of actual conflicts of interest, it is treated as a Democrat lie or something too trivial to pay any attention to. DJT routinely operates with huge actual conflicts of interest and it doesn't even slightly faze MAGA. MAGA eats conflicts for breakfast and forgets about it by lunch.

Willis has appealed to the GA supreme court. I do not know if MAGA has rotted that court. If so, she is gone and DJT once again likely will get off the hook for his crimes. If not, the outcome is still unpredictable. 

Law & Crime writes:

The decision by the Georgia Court of Appeals on Thursday morning to scrap Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis and her office from the state’s felony prosecution of Donald Trump came with a strong rebuke from one of the court’s three appellate judges, who dissented on account of being “particularly troubled” with the circumstances surrounding the move.

“We have no authority to reverse the trial court’s denial of a motion to disqualify,” wrote Judge Benjamin Land in his dissent. “None.”

The dissent by judge Benjamin Land in the 32 page decision (1) lays out the difference between an appeals court and a trial court, and (2) explains why it is very bad to just make up laws as you go, as MAGA judges sometimes do, especially Republican judges on the US supreme court. 

Judge Lands's dissent in the Georgia Appeals Court argues:

Because the law does not support the result reached by the majority, I respectfully dissent. I am particularly troubled by the fact that the majority has taken what has long been a discretionary decision for the trial court to make and converted it to something else entirely. If this Court was the trier of fact and had the discretion to choose a remedy based on our own observations, assessment of the credibility of the witnesses, and weighing of the evidence, then perhaps we would be justified in reaching the result declared by the majority. But we are not trial judges, and we lack that authority. Given the unique role of the trial court and the fact that it is the court which has broad discretion to impose a remedy that fits the situation as it finds it to be, we should resist the temptation to interfere with that discretion, including its chosen remedy, just because we happen to see things differently. Doing otherwise violates well-established precedent, threatens the discretion given to trial courts, and blurs the distinction between our respective courts.

Our role as appellate judges is critically important, but it often requires restraint. We are here to ensure the law has been applied correctly and to correct harmful legal errors when we see them. It is not our job to second-guess trial judges or to substitute our judgment for theirs. We do not find the facts but instead defer to the trial court’s factual findings where there is any evidence to support them. “We review the trial court’s ruling on a motion to disqualify a prosecutor for abuse of discretion. Such an exercise of discretion is based on the trial court’s findings of fact which we must sustain if there is any evidence to support them.” (Citations and punctuation omitted.) Neuman v. State, 311 Ga. 83, 88 (3) (856 SE2d 289) (2021).

Here, the trial court expressly found that appellants failed to show that the district attorney had an actual conflict of interest, failed to show that she received any material financial benefit as a result of her relationship with Nathan Wade, failed to show that she had a personal stake in the conviction of any defendant, failed to show that her relationship with Wade involved any actual impropriety on her part, and failed to show that their relationship, including their financial arrangements, had any actual impact on the case. Because there was some evidence presented to the trial court that supported these findings, we are bound to accept them. Neuman, 311 Ga. at 88 (3). The majority does not dispute these findings. Rather, it holds, with the citation of no supporting authority and apparently for the first time in the history of our state, that the mere existence of an appearance of impropriety, in and of itself, is sufficient to reverse the trial court’s refusal to disqualify the district attorney and her entire office. As shown below, the law does not support this outcome; rather, it compels precisely the opposite.

Where, as here, a prosecutor has no actual conflict of interest and the trial court, based on the evidence presented to it, rejects the allegations of actual impropriety, we have no authority to reverse the trial court’s denial of a motion to disqualify. None. Even where there is an appearance of impropriety. Our binding precedent and the doctrine of stare decisis require our restraint and do not permit us to impose a different remedy than the one chosen by the trial court simply because we might see the matter differently and might have chosen to impose another remedy had we been the trial judge. (emphasis added)

Update: Post election analyses

Just get 'er done, damnit!

People are still trying to figure out why the election turned out as it did. My working hypothesis is that (i) anger and alienation about wokeness, (ii) Biden-caused inflation (mostly a mirage), and (iii) the border immigration mess were the top reasons for Harris losing. The Hill discusses data from a recent poll:

Our poll, the first postelection poll specifically focused on trust in government, reveals that while voters are less trusting of the government as a result of the election, they believe the government will be more effective and can get things done.

Put another way, our poll suggests that Democrats ran the wrong campaign. Whereas they ran a “values campaign,” focused on a government Americans could trust, what voters really wanted was an effective government, and on that, they preferred Donald Trump.

Indeed, we found that a plurality (39 percent) of Americans said the 2024 election results made them less trusting of the government. Similarly, a 41 percent plurality of Americans say the election makes them less confident that the government will share “fair and accurate information.”

And yet, a plurality (40 percent) of Americans believe the government will be more effective at getting things done going forward, versus 36 percent of Americans saying the government will be less effective.

Among independents, the discrepancy is even more pronounced, underscoring this voting bloc’s desire for an effective government over one that is trustworthy.

By a 13-point margin (39 percent to 26 percent), independents said they are less — rather than more — trusting of government following the election. And by a similar 11-point margin (39 percent to 28 percent), they feel less — rather than more — confident that the government will share fair and accurate information going forward.

That is a take on it that I wasn't aware of. Some people want government to do something, even if it amounts to doing bad things. I'm among the 40% plurality of Americans who believe the government will be more effective at getting things done going forward. The things I am highly confident it will get done is mounting and sustaining an all-out attack on American democracy, the rule of law and civil liberties. That applies especially to minorities that God and MAGA both hate and want to oppress. 

How far DJT, MAGA, the billionaire oligarchs and Christian nationalists will get in their quest for corrupt authoritarianism is the open question. I suspect they will get pretty far because there is nothing likely to stop or significantly slow them that I can see. DJT and MAGA definitely are gonna try to git 'er done come hell or high water.

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Institutional distrust

Slate writes:

A Novel Theory of Why Trust in Everything Is Declining

The evidence that residents of the United States don’t trust their institutions goes beyond election results. It’s also visible in the falling number of Americans who get news from what were once known as “mainstream” sources, and in the declining share of people who say in polls that they, uh, trust institutions.

Whose fault is this? Some influential voices toward the center of the political spectrum—Nate Silver, Matt Yglesias, the New York Times’ David Leonhardt—blame the influence of bumbling, know-it-all leftist elites in media and politics. Silver calls it the Indigo Blob, an informal alliance of “progressive institutionalists”—educated media figures, academics, activists, and political staffers who (among other things) pushed the Democratic Party too far left on social justice and “identity politics” issues, triggering a working-class backlash over issues ranging from police reform to COVID-era shutdowns. To that list, Yglesias would add issues of “biological sex” (i.e., trans rights), while Leonhardt blames the left for Biden’s alleged lenience on border security. Broadly, they say, the self-appointed progressive “expert class” and its values are out of step with the public.

The federal judge who issued a key ruling ordering Biden to reopen the border to asylum applicants was a 77-year-old first appointed to the bench by Ronald Reagan. These perceived institutional failures can’t entirely be pinned on highly educated progressives.

Americans also despise—or at least distrust—a number of groups that aren’t affiliated in the common imagination with Democrats or liberals at all. “Defunding the police” might not be popular, but only a modest 51 percent of respondents in Gallup’s trust survey this year said they had “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in the police as an institution. “The medical system” clocked in at 36 percent, churches and organized religion at 32 percent, and both banks and “large technology companies” at 27 percent. “Big business” (16 percent) was one of the least popular institutions named in the poll, ....

Perhaps the answer has something to do with the first institution I mentioned: Our beloved free press. Thanks to the innovative work that tech monopolies have done in the advertising market, it’s increasingly difficult to sustain a media outlet whose business mostly involves the costly process of nonpartisan fact-gathering and reporting. That’s especially true at the local level, where newspapers often simply don’t exist anymore—but it’s also true nationally, where the country is headed in the direction of having one reportorial omnipublication (the New York Times) and a few others that are mostly for people who work in business. Concurrently, the right wing has developed its own media apparatus, while social media and streaming platforms now allow public personalities to build their own audiences directly.

All else being equal, people prefer to hear what they want to hear, and disregard the rest. What this often (though not always!) rewards is pandering to simple, polemical worldviews—Everyone else is stupid, they’re all lying to you, this or that particular group is responsible for everything in the news that is upsetting—rather than uncertainty or curiosity. It’s a good time to be a person who says everything is bullshit.

Groups that feel like they’re under attack will look for their own messengers to deliver polemical responses which reject every criticism and assign blame somewhere else; this is what “stanning” is. Crucially, the political center is just as subject to these incentives as everyone else; there are centrism stans, too, who find “illiberalism” at the scene of every crime. It is a polarization-optimized discourse. And everything it touches gets a little dumber and more difficult to trust.

[Stanning in politics refers to the phenomenon where individuals exhibit an intense, often obsessive, form of support for political figures, akin to the fanatical devotion seen in celebrity fandoms. This term has evolved to describe a deeply personalized and extremely online devotion to politicians, characterized by one or more of (i) one-sided relationships with politicians, feeling a personal connection despite no real interaction, (ii) development of cult of personality where politicians are the center of a cult-like following and supporters view them as saviors or messianic figures, (iii) extreme devotion that leads to a lack of accountability with politicians not held responsible for their bad actions or corrupt policies, (iv) etc. .... In summary, stanning in politics represents a shift where political support transcends traditional voter-politician relationships into something more akin to celebrity fandom, with all its associated behaviors and implications for political engagement and accountability.]

On the other side of the partisan spectrum, the ascendant figures are free/non-thinkers like RFK Jr. and Joe Rogan who “question everything,” even things that don’t need questioning, like the polio vaccine or federal deposit insurance.

Why don’t our institutions, with the exception of the hornet eradication apparatus, work? One reason might be that polarization-optimized discourse does not tend to build consensus around measured, fair, and accurate assessments of institutional failures. It fails to create the shared sense that something scandalous is happening; even when Republicans and Democrats are both angry about the same thing, it can be for different reasons.

Having just written an entire article about the dangers of universalized single-cause explanations, though, I would be remiss in putting the blame for dysfunction and discontent entirely on the media. As a mid-level member of the Indigo Blob, I also believe the usual suspects are at fault too: money in politics and the sclerotic U.S. legislative system, the failure of regulation to check the stock market’s collective expectation of indefinite earnings growth, the concentration of wealth and rise in the relative cost of basic components of the American Dream, bad-faith right-wing propaganda, the refusal of older generations to loosen their grip on their property values and political norms, blah blah blah.

Without a system that can build consensus, though—even the kind of phony, hypocritical, ideologically bracketed consensus we used to manufacture right here at home when this country was great—all of that stuff is academic.

On reflection, I'm confused by that analysis. Not sure what the point is. In summary: Various things caused the results we got.

And that ends this incisive update about what happened and why.

Invasive rot in the USSC

The six radical right authoritarian judges that dominate the USSC, have made clear their intention to be unprincipled, making things up as they go. They are contemptuous of norms that get in the way of cementing kleptocratic authoritarianism into American law. The moral and legal rot process is well underway. It's rationally not deniable. Litigator Sherrilynn Ifill writes about a norm, adding things to the record without notice, blatantly broken by the deeply corrupt cynic Sam Alito:

I am still enough of an institutionalist that it pains me to hear Supreme Court justices embarrassing themselves on the bench. So as I listened to Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito engaging with Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar during oral argument in the case challenging Tennessee’s ban on the provision of gender-affirming drugs for minors earlier this month, I couldn’t help but cringe.

Shuffling through papers that he suggested were studies from various European countries that urged caution in the provision of puberty blockers to teens, Alito engaged in a “gotcha” line of questioning, insisting that Prelogar—the meticulous and unmatched litigator who has masterfully led the solicitor general’s office under President Joe Biden—had somehow misled the court about the accumulated scientific consensus on the effectiveness of puberty blockers for teens experiencing gender dysmorphia. His derisive tone and relentless questioning were typical for Alito and not what concerned me.

It was instead the contempt that Alito showed for the rules that govern the boundaries of litigation in our system. None of the studies he referenced as the basis of his questions to Prelogar had been part of the record in the case. None had been presented before the judge who tried the case. Justice Alito appeared to have, as the saying goes, “done his own research,” which he was now injecting into the case. And this embarrassed me. [embarrassed her, scares and angers me]

What has received too little attention is how this court’s headlong rush toward achieving its [kleptocratic authoritarian] ideological aims is undermining the rules that govern our system of litigation in its wake.

Why do all these rejections of previous norms and rules of litigation matter, one might ask? What difference does it make how the court strips away rights and protections? What matters is that they do it, and that the lives of millions of Americans will be affected, surely? In my view, the way they do it matters because the conservative justices in their haste and stubborn determination are pulling down not only long-standing substantive protections for marginalized people, but also the standards that hold our system of litigation together.   

More and more, the conservative majority’s approach has put the rules and norms that govern our system of litigation in the crosshairs as much as the substantive rights of marginalized groups. (emphasis added)

That speaks for itself. Our democracy, the rule of law and our civil liberties are all under severe, direct attack. That is a fact, not an opinion.