Supreme illegitimacy

[T]he upside-down flag incident is about much more than Alito’s conflicts of interest or poor character. The most important takeaway is that but for Alito and his similarly conflicted fellow justices, Donald Trump would almost certainly be a convicted felon for J6 by now.

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In this instance, we have to make the rebuttable presumption that the decision to hear Trump’s appeal of the decisive, unanimous DC Circuit rejection of his immunity claims depended on Alito’s and Thomas’ votes. As such, the only legitimate move for the Court to make on the immunity case now would be dismissing it as improvidently granted [i.e., it should not have taken the case in the first place].

  Weekend Reading

And they still would have assisted Trump in escaping justice by having taken it in the first place.

[W]hile the Congress absolutely should be considering impeachment proceedings against Alito, as well as moving forward on court reform, the immediate business the media and Congress should be putting to Chief Justice Roberts is, at a minimum, to demand a full accounting of Alito and Thomas’ roles in agreeing to hear the Trump and Fischer appeals, as well as their roles in the Court’s ongoing consideration of those cases.

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More broadly, at least five of the justices themselves should be dismissed as improvidently confirmed: Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett are the only five of 116 SCOTUS justices to be approved by senators representing a minority of the American people. Of all the justices to serve in the last century and a half, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett are the only ones to have been named by a president who did not win the popular vote. And, of course, Gorsuch and Barrett both owe their seat to Mitch McConnell. That is the case with Gorsuch because McConnell illegitimately refused to fill a vacancy when Obama was president. It is true of Barrett because McConnell illegitimately rammed through her nomination after tens of millions of Americans had cast their ballots, and as every survey and forecast indicated that Biden would be the next president. Moreover, although it was obvious at the time, it has since been more substantiated that both Thomas and Kavanaugh perjured themselves at their confirmation hearings.

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The best way to end charges that the Court is corrupt is to stop corrupt justices from serving on the Court.

It’s long past time we acknowledge and reckon with the extent to which our present national dysfunction is the fruit of the poisoned tree – the illegitimate SCOTUS majority.

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The Supreme Court has not only transformed itself into a democratically unaccountable lawmaking body; it has used this illegitimate power to create a one-way ratchet that makes the rest of our system less democratically accountable.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE 05/21/2024: