this Supreme Court is making my fucking head explode — again

any sane SCOTUS would have quickly slapped Trump down

presidents are not kings.

it’s a no-brainer, right? it’s like the very first thing anyone learns about America. we fought a whole Revolutionary War about it. US presidents are bound by the same laws that the rest of us abide by — and for two and a half centuries, hardly anyone has had a problem with this.

but along comes big fucking baby Donald Trump, so worked up over losing an election that he sent an armed mob to the Capitol to try to overthrow his own government — and he got indicted for it. but then Donny was all nah bro, laws are bullshit and I should get to crime all I want — because mommy says I’m special and I have presidential immunity.

he pulled this shit on Judge Chutkan and she was having none of it. she literally said “presidents are not kings” in one of her rulings.

so he went crying to the DC Court of Appeals and was all Judge Chutkan is a meanie and she won’t let me have my precious immunity — and the Appeals Court was all look, fuckstick, you don’t have any immunity. get your smelly ass back in court.

did Donny then run blubbering to his hand-picked pals on the Supreme Court? you bet he did. guys, he whined, all those other courts, they just don’t get me like you do. please explain to them about presidential immunity and stuff.

any sane Supreme Court would have quickly slapped Trump with a writ of go fuck yourself, and we’d be having a DC trial right now. but we don’t have a sane Court. we have four bought-and-paid for Federalist Society hacks who sit snugly in the pocket of the plutocrats who tell them how to vote — and we have Neil Gorsuch, who just fucking hates government and is deliberately out to create as much chaos as possible.

so this Supreme Court said hmm, laws are bullshit and Donny should be allowed to crime all he wants? yeah, we should def look into this.

sigh.

how is Clarence Thomas not recusing himself from this case? his wife is an insurrectionist, for fuck’s sake. she attended Trump’s speech on January 6th. she was texting Mark Meadows a mile a minute all that day. oh wait, I forgot — Clarence Thomas is as corrupt as they come.

and Sam Alito — why doesn’t he just drop all pretenses and start wearing a MAGA hat to court? holy shit, he’s an election denier.

“Alito just suggested that the last election was ‘questionably decided’”

from yesterday’s oral arguments, check out this Trumpist fairy tale from Alito:

“Now, if an incumbent who loses a very close, hotly contested election knows that a real possibility after leaving office is not that the president is going to be able to go off into a peaceful retirement but that the president may be criminally prosecuted by a bitter political opponent, will that not lead us into a cycle that destabilizes the functioning of our country as a democracy?”

here’s Dalia Lithwick to explain the insanity of this line of reasoning.

Never mind that the president in question did not leave office peacefully and is not sitting quietly in retirement but is instead running for presidential office once again. No, if we want criminal presidents to leave office when they lose, we have to let them commit crimes scot-free. If ever a better articulation of the legal principle “Don’t make me hit you again” has been proffered at an oral argument, it’s hard to imagine it.

hey, did Trump’s lawyer once again make the ludicrous claim that Donny could assassinate his opponents? of course he did. and hey, did several of the Justices thoughtfully stroke their chins and nod in agreement? of fucking course they did.

I am in shock that a lawyer stood in the U.S Supreme Court and said that a president could assassinate his political opponent and it would be immune as “an official act.”

I am in despair that several Justices seemed to think this answer made perfect sense.

I don’t know shit about law but I do know when Supreme Court Justices are pissing on my head.

“Unbelievable that Supreme Court justices who see forgiving student loans, mandating vaccines, and regulating climate change as a slippery slope toward tyranny were not clear-eyed on questions of whether a president could execute citizens or stage a coup without being prosecuted.”

here’s how this is most likely to play out. five of the the GOP-appointed Justices are totally in the tank for Trump (Amy Coney Barrett was actually a voice of reason yesterday), but they can’t grant him complete immunity, because that would mean that Sleepy Brandon could sic Seal Team Six on his adversaries, too — including them — and they don’t want that. they want special treatment for only Trump.

so what they’ll probably do is grant Trump limited immunity — they’ll split the baby and say that presidents have immunity for political acts but don’t have immunity for personal acts, and then send the case back to Judge Chutkan and tell her that it’s her job to figure on which side of the immunity line insurrecting falls.

and when she sensibly rules against Trump, he’ll go crying back to the Appeals Court, and then up to the Supreme Court, and we’ll be right back where were are now.

except a year — or two years, or more — will have passed. the 2024 election will be long over.

this, too, is part of conservative Justices’ plan. they know that delay helps Trump. they know that delay delay delay is page one of the Trump legal playbook, and they’re only too happy to be pitch in and lend Dear Leader a hand.

justice delayed is justice denied.

our founders anticipated a Donald Trump — but they didn’t anticipate an entire political party lining up behind an amoral fascist, and they sure as fuck couldn’t imagine a corrupt Supreme Court twisting the law into pretzels to help an 88-count crime factory escape accountability forever.