The Daily Populous Tuesday September 17th, 2024 evening edition
Authored by esquire.com and submitted by 1900grs

I confess, I fell for Chief Justice John Roberts’s whole shtick for longer than I should have. That whole “institutionalist” jive got by me far too easily. The presence on the Supreme Court of obvious hacks like Mr. Justice Thomas and Mr. Justice Alito obscured the fact that Roberts is one of them. Over the weekend, The New York Times turned on all the lights.

Former President Donald J. Trump, seeking to retake the White House, had made a bold, last-ditch appeal to the justices. He wanted them to block his fast-approaching criminal trial on charges of attempting to overturn the 2020 election, arguing that he was protected by presidential immunity. Whatever move the court made could have lasting consequences for the next election, the scope of presidential power and the court’s own battered reputation.

The chief justice’s Feb. 22 memo, jump-starting the justices’ formal discussion on whether to hear the case, offered a scathing critique of a lower-court decision and a startling preview of how the high court would later rule, according to several people from the court who saw the document. The chief justice tore into the appellate court opinion greenlighting Mr. Trump’s trial, calling it inadequate and poorly reasoned. On one key point, he complained, the lower court judges “failed to grapple with the most difficult questions altogether.” He wrote not only that the Supreme Court should take the case—which would stall the trial—but also how the justices should decide it.

The NYT apparently was presented with a massive leak of the internal Court documenting exactly the size of the thumb Roberts put on the scale as regards the destabilizing constitutional heresy that is U.S. v. Trump. (Think Tom Robbins’s Sissy Hankshaw doubled and redoubled.) In one instance leading up to that grand finale, even Alito wasn’t enough of a sure thing for the Chief.

In a momentous trio of Jan. 6-related cases last term, the court found itself more entangled in presidential politics than at any time since the 2000 election, even as it was contending with its own controversies related to that day. The chief justice responded by deploying his authority to steer rulings that benefited Mr. Trump, according to a New York Times examination that uncovered extensive new information about the court’s decision making.

This account draws on details from the justices’ private memos, documentation of the proceedings and interviews with court insiders, both conservative and liberal, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because deliberations are supposed to be kept secret.

The chief justice wrote the majority opinions in all three cases, including an unsigned one in March concluding that the former president could not be barred from election ballots in Colorado. Another case involved a highly unusual switch. In April, the chief justice assigned Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. to write a majority opinion saying that prosecutors had gone too far in bringing obstruction charges against some Capitol rioters. But in late May, the chief justice took it over.

This breach of Court secrecy is every bit as unprecedented as the preview we got of Justice Alito’s torching of Roe v. Wade. It is further evidence that the Court is cracking up, but this time, Roberts doesn’t have the excuse of being the hall monitor in Bedlam.

During the February discussions of the immunity case, the most consequential of the three, some of the conservative justices wanted to schedule it for the next term. That would have deferred oral arguments until October and almost certainly pushed a decision until after the election. But Chief Justice Roberts provided crucial support for hearing the historic case earlier, siding with the liberals.

Then he froze them out. After he circulated his draft opinion in June, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the senior liberal, signaled a willingness to agree on some points in hopes of moderating the opinion, according to those familiar with the proceedings. Though the chief justice often favors consensus, he did not take the opening. As the court split 6 to 3, conservatives versus liberals, Justice Sotomayor started work on a five-alarm dissent warning of danger to democracy.

Justice Sotomayor reappears in the NYT account in its treatment of the “immunity” decision.

At the justices’ private conference meeting that day, Justice Sotomayor protested that she did not see how the court could reverse the appellate decision. It would look like the Supreme Court was being used to delay the trial, she said, according to someone with knowledge of the proceedings. So she and the other liberal justices focused on the crucial question of timing. Every day that the court waited to hear the case was a benefit to Mr. Trump, diminishing the possibility of a trial before the Nov. 5 election. At the meeting, some of the court’s most conservative members said they did not want to hear the case until the start of the next term in October, according to several court insiders.

So now Judge Tanya Chutkan has to pick her way through the obstacles set up by the Chief Justice in trying to obtain justice for the victims of the January 6 insurrectionary violence—both the literal victims of the violence and the victims at which the violence was aimed, which is to say all of us.

boston_homo on September 17th, 2024 at 13:21 UTC »

"The deep state", like literally every accusation coming from the right, is pure projection. There's not a single member of the "conservative" Supreme Court majority that isn't tainted by corruption, in some cases going all the way back to Reagan. The Heritage Foundation's long game of focus on SCOTUS, the one branch of government that is untouchable, is as brilliant as it is evil.

CurrentlyLucid on September 17th, 2024 at 12:55 UTC »

Most corrupt SC in history.

BarbieTheeStallion on September 17th, 2024 at 12:51 UTC »

We’ve known the fix is in, the question is what we do about it.