I have published this video this morning. In it, I argue that Trump packed the Supreme Court of the USA with his mates, and now they're returning the favour by granting him immunity for his actions when in office. Will he use that power to persecute those who he sees as his enemies? You'd be a fool to think otherwise.
The audio version of this video is here:
The transcript is:
Trump's rigging the law in the USA so that he can pursue his enemies if he gets back into office.
What do I mean?
Trump managed to pack the Supreme Court of the USA - SCOTUS as it is called - with three new members during his period in office. That's a surprising number of Supreme Court judges for any President to appoint because there are only nine in total, and few get to appoint more than one or two as a result because they're appointed for life, sometimes at the age of 45 to 50 and can be there well into their 80s. But Trump, by chance, managed to pack that court with his nominees, and there were already some who were already favourable to his opinion there.
The consequence is that he has managed to shift the whole balance of power within the U.S. government system away from Congress or the Senate. Or even, to some extent, the President to the Supreme Court. And those are the four locations of power within that federal system.
The Supreme Court has now ruled that a president cannot be held criminally liable for his actions as President whilst in office.
Now you can see the consequence of that. You could see a President who wanted to use his period in office to pursue those who he considers to be his enemies - and I'm using the word ‘he', by the way, simply because we've not yet had a female US president - to use that opportunity. To literally victimise people who he has said have offended him.
Remember 2016? He campaigned on the basis that Hillary Clinton should be in jail.
He's now saying that Joe Biden should be spending time in jail.
There are a lot of other people who he certainly is extremely violent towards, in his language at least.
And there are a great many people who he might want to pardon for the crimes they have already committed.
Maybe the Supreme Court will let him do that.
Highest on his list will be himself because some of the cases outstanding against him, which will not be tried until after the Presidential election is over, could be suspended as a result.
Now, this is profoundly dangerous.
I don't think it would be profoundly dangerous if we didn't have the prospect of a fascist president. Let's be clear, I would trust, I think, almost every previous US president not to abuse this power. They understood the limitations of their office.
But does Trump? No. He wants to abuse. That's his whole purpose. In the hands of a fascist President, this turns the President from being, well, President into king - the person with ultimate supreme power.
Which, of course, was exactly what the U. S. rejected in the 18th century when they fought the Battle of Independence to get rid of British monarchial rule.
And they've got it back. Trump has re-established it. And the people of the USA should be very worried.
Most particularly, those who have stood out against Trump should be worried.
Because this man will play the role that fascism assigns to him, of the supreme strongman, and use it against those who he considers his enemies, but who others might think are upholders of the law.
It's a deeply worrying situation.
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Absolutely correct and for more on this I’d urge you and others to watch this clip from MSNBC, especially the opening comments from Joy Reid (for fans of Game of Thrones you’ll learn something) and the last segment from Lawrence O’Donnell. The latter is particularly pertinent because, as O’Donnell points out, in the short term there’s now going to be an event akin to the trial that Trump has tried so hard to avoid but the Supreme Court judgement now makes inevitable.
https://www.msnbc.com/all
In the last segment, the show host states “a free society needs a free press”; this is something that we all need to be more aware of in the UK where the vast bulk of the MSM is controlled by far-right neoliberal figures and interests. Leveson 2 wasn’t cancelled by Matt Hancock on the grounds that it was “too costly and time-consuming”; it was to protect and ensure the hegemonic control of the media by the far-right.
It is ironic as Trump will have more power than King George III did in the colonies in 1776.
On July 4th they should remember what they think they are celebrating.
“And the people of the USA should be very worried.”
They are!
Biden has refused to increase the number of judges in the Supreme Court to counter Trump’s power play. This is a serious error that fails to recognise that the Founding Fathers screwed up in creating four divisions of power, House of Representatives, Senate, President, and Supreme Court (although some would argue this was deliberate strategy by wealthy colonists). The control of the rich can only take place by a party or coalition of parties having a majority in a single Parliamentary institution.
The US constitution was never intended to herald a democracy.
It was always to provide a bulwark for the property owning class.
@ tony. Society cannot adequately function without individuals owning property that even now happens in China. I fail therefore to see the point of your comment.
You have missed my point.
There has aways been a myth that the USA. ( aka land of the free) was established as a republican democracy – it was not.
The idea of everyone being equal under the law is/was simply wrong. They are not.
It was designed to protect sectional interests – including slave ownership – not a form of property I assume you endorse.
“property owning class” = Slave Owning Class
“It was designed to protect sectional interests”
This is one of the reasons for the Electoral College.
@Schofield Quite a few of what are called indigenous societies do not recognise the concept of private property, particularly regarding land. John Rawls had a (surprisingly?) narrow view of property ownership rights, while the liberal tradition has indeed been mainly about the “sanctity” of private property ownership by the rich who have used their wealth to ensure its inclusion in legislation and, in fact, to steal land from common ownership – the poor had no lawyers, as Andy Wightman put it.
To try to argue that we can have our modern society without individual or collective property ownership completely misses the point irregardless of whether some exercise property ownership unfairly!
The classical justification for the existence of private property is found in Locke’s Second Thesis and reads:
”Though the Earth, and all inferior Creatures be common to all Men, yet every Man has a Property in his own Person. This no Body has any Right to but himself. The Labour of his Body, and the Work of his Hands, we may say are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the State that Nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his Labour with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his Property. It being by him removed from the common state nature placed it, it hath by his labour something annexed to it, that excludes the common right of other Men. For this Labour being the unquestionable Property of the Labourer, no Man but he can have a right to what that is once joined to, at least where there is enough, and as good left in common for others.”
This notion is especially destructive when applied to land. For who can be said to have mixed their labour with the land? Is it the tribe that had hunted in the forest for generations or is it the loggers who cut down the forest? Is it the villagers in a remote Chinese mountain village who have managed the land for two and half millennia using the traditional “well” system or is it the government promoted ranchers, who are there to help satisfy the increasing demand for meat from the richer eastern provinces? And who decides the issue?
But what about the concession in the last sentence?
It is easy to convince oneself that one has left enough for others, especially if one can convince oneself these “others” have few needs or that one has left them better off than before. Thus displaced people from western provinces of China who form the bulk of the “migrant labour” force who clean the streets of Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou without a right of permanent residence in these cities and without the right to send their children to the cities’ schools are supposed to feel grateful for having been “lifted out of poverty”.
What Locke saw as a moral justification for property turns out to be an excuse for the powerful to exploit the powerless.
‘Twas ever thus
Increasing the size of the court could be seen as setting a dangerous precedent, starting an arms race as successive Presidents add more and more judges (though there is a good argument for increasing to 13, to match the present number of circuits). A better alternative might be a Federal Judges ‘strike’, ignoring SCOTUS rulings on the grounds that that court is now illegitimate.
I like that idea!
“(though there is a good argument for increasing to 13, to match the present number of circuits).”
This is an excellent reason for adding more Judges. Also 13 SCOTUS Judges would prevent (or make it more difficult) any POTUS from appointing a majority or a “swing” majority” to the bench.
I really think “13 SCOTUS Judges” needs to codified in the US Constitution.
Trump us going to be the next US president unless the Democrats can find a serious candidate pretty quickly.
Future historians will be interested in comparing his power with his authority, his power being what he is legally entitled to do and his authority being what, in practice, he can get away with. These are never exactly the same as people can find all sorts of ways of being uncooperative, of keeping to the letter of the law while completely undermining its meaning, others can find reasons for turning a blind eye to infractions.
The next four years will put a lot of strain on US civil society and institutions. I don’t think it is possible to predict the final outcome, but what is certain is that we are all cursed to living in interesting times.
Americans need to rip up their constitution and start over in regard to division of powers. This isn’t going to happen until the shit really hits the fan! Trump backed down before the Chinese over import tariffs for retaining power reasons so it’s possible he may not be the big troublemaker everybody predicts. He will of course slash taxes dramatically on the rich and push the tax burden further onto the shoulders of those who can least afford them.
I think that, on the whole, it is better to have a written constitution than not. But it’s important to realise that, like anything else, it will have flaws. I have met many Americans who treat their constitution like holy writ. Thus they will debate what is meant by the second amendment instead of debating whether it is needed at all.
Bernard Hurley
The very fact that there IS a second and other) amenement means that the original consitution (and, therefore, its amendments) are capable of being, indeed should be, amended.
@Cyndy Hodgson. Logically one would think so but that doesn’t seem to be the attitude of a lot of Americans.
That immunity applies to Biden as well. Just sayin’…
And what crime has he committed?
Barring Gaza?
Ah, apologies for lack of clarity. What I was trying to say was it’s what Biden *could* do with that immunity to stop Trump, by ‘doing unto Trump what Trump would do unto you’ first. Not that i’m advocating it, naturally, nor would Biden use it, but these things are two-edged swords.
I agree entirely, its very scary. It’s worth noting that it wasn’t ‘by chance’ that Trump got three Supreme Court nominations. The first should have been Obama’s and the third should have been Biden’s, it was the Republicans in Congress that abandoned convention to help Trump engineer this situation.
I’m wading my way through “Project 2025”. I seem to have an obsession with knowing what my enemy is thinking. I’m finding it quite terrifying. Not only is the content a manifesto for a fascist dictatorship, it’s the ideology of the people who wrote it which gives me severe jitters. Be in no doubt that Trump, if elected, will punish his opponents whoever they are, and whatever office they may have held. Almost every major appointment in every Department will be filled by Trump-supporting politicos, leaving no career civil servants (or whatever the US equivalent is). Think of the chaos. No experience of Government administration. No experience of diplomatic relations, and no understanding of the rules by which international treaties and organisations function. An all powerful military, answerable only to Trump as Commander in Chief, which will be drafted in to suppress civil dissent. Ripping up of climate mitigation laws. Refunding of fossil fuel exploration and extraction.
And I’ve only got a quarter of the way through.
There’ll be no pushback from a UK Government, either. Lammy is a Washington man. Starmer, despite being a bully, is a coward. He already gets his security briefings on the Israel/Gaza conflict from the US State Department, and they are content to accept Israel’s assurances that no war crimes have been committed, the IDF acts within international law and the Geneva Conventions, and no US weapons have been used to kill Palestinians.
If you add in the financial backing from far right libertarian anti-democracy billionaires like Peter Thiel, and the ideological influence and power which the Heritage Foundation et al have (including AIPAC) then Trump, if elected, will never cede the Presidency.
The Democrats urgently need to dump Biden; rethink their unconditional arming of Israel and make a huge effort to engage their young, angry voters.
They say this is going to be a revolution, and a bloodless one if the left do not oppose it
Muse on that, too
“Starmer, despite being a bully, is a coward. ”
The two often go together. Often the only way a coward can deal with dissent is by bullying.