Another Provocative Flag Was Flown at Another Alito Home
The justice’s beach house displayed an “Appeal to Heaven” flag, a symbol carried on Jan. 6 and associated with a push for a more Christian-minded government.
"The American law system is becoming increasingly broken in two key ways. The perennial problem, always there but now magnified by Trumpish impunity, is that there’s one legal system for the poor and another for the rich. Trump might well be convicted of felony fraud, but with money for lawyers and appeals, he’s unlikely to face punishment anytime soon, if ever."
"The second crisis is newer and more menacing: the Supreme Court and a swath of the lower federal judiciary have been infiltrated by militant Catholics, trained by Leonard Leo, a knight of the religious Sovereign Military Order of Malta and billionaire dark money purser. …
The real emergency in our legal system is the militant Catholic takeover of the federal court system, led by Leonard Leo, K Street’s Knight of Malta."
"All six Republican-appointed justices reached the Court with the backing of the Federalist Society, with a billionaire-funded, religious-right-backed mandate to 'make America great again' – that is, to take us back to the America of the 1920’s, when capitalism was unrestrained and racial and gender hierarchies were uncontested."
Greg Olear continues his valuable reporting on the coterie of hard-right Catholics who have such influence on our federal government and who control the Supreme Court as a bloc. The coterie includes Leonard Leo, who is the kingmaker for the court, Kevin Roberts of Heritage Foundation, and Robert P. George of the Federalist Society.
As Greg Olear notes, many of us may look at the blastocyst in the test tube and have trouble seeing the baby in the test tube — looking at you, Alabama Supremes. But that does not stop Leonard Leo of the Federalist Society and Robert P. George, a hard-right Catholic closely aligned with Leo, from their determination to impose on all of us by force of law the assertion that a blastocyst is a person.
"Donald Trump’s new 'let the states decide' position on abortion rights is a ploy. The real plan being cooked up by the Leonard Leo crew is to have the Supreme Court rule 'that a fetus qualifies as a "person" under the due process and equal protection clauses of the 14th Amendment,' which would make federal law the rightwing fairy tale that any abortion is equivalent to murder."
As Michael Podhorzer says, while our eyes are fixed on the sordid drama unfolding at the Supreme Court, we should not forget that behind those sordid Supremes lies the Federalist Society that has packed the Supreme bench for a reason:
The Federalist Society project is "to replace America’s liberal democratic constitutional order with an illiberal, revanchist one that does not protect civil rights or constrain the worst excesses of capital, and that allows the Court to make policy without democratic accountability."
These, the gruesome reality of pregnancy loss, are not words we often hear during Supreme Court oral arguments, buttoned-up proceedings where the justices prefer theory and abstraction to blood and organs."
"On Wednesday, the right-wing justices really preferred the safe world of legal abstraction, where they could pretend that Idaho’s abortion ban — which only has an exception to save the woman’s life — won’t inevitably leave women to gruesome suffering."
Of course they are never going to admit the human cost of their decision to impose on the whole nation the view of the minority of religionists whom they represent.
Tom Carter's piece here, "A decade of failing to persuade the New York Times to pay attention to Leonard Leo," is important. It details his failed attempts to get New York Times to track Leonard Leo and his (and his cronies') outsized influence on the federal government for years now.
As he notes, NY Times and other corporate media outlets have typically refused to deal with this story, even as Leo packs the Supreme Court.
"An urgent question for the judiciary is how a sham case [the mifepristone case] made it to the Supreme Court’s docket. The answer is that it did so because the Supreme Court continues to coddle, humor, and occasionally reward a cohort of reactionary Federalist Society judges."
Michael Podhorzer tells us what we can expect from week 3 of Trump's January 6 insurrection trial:
"Nothing. The trial was originally set to begin the first week of March, Now it hasn’t, thanks to the actions of the three Federalist Society justices Trump appointed to the Supreme Court – including the one he was able to choose because the Republican Senate refused to consider Obama’s nominee,"
"and another whose appointment was rammed through the Senate even after voting had begun in the 2020 election because 'he needed to ensure there was a ninth Justice in place because he was "counting on" the Supreme Court to "look at the ballots.’”
"This is a plea to the media that instead of saying that Trump’s trial 'has been delayed and may not reach a verdict before Election Day,' to accurately say that 'the justices Trump appointed to the Supreme Court have delayed his trial for attempting to overturn an election he lost, with the result that there may not be a verdict before Election Day.'”
Eric Segall warns that with the current Supreme Court, there's a constitutional apocalypse on the horizon:
"Since Justice Kennedy retired and Justice Ginsburg passed away, the Roberts Court has been on a conservative rampage, overturning Roe, turning the Second Amendment into a super-charged destroyer of reasonable gun reform," (continued in /2)
"ending affirmative action, greatly strengthening the free exercise clause, ignoring and/or distorting the establishment clause, and trying to return to a libertarian, pre-New Deal understanding of the administrative state. In other words, the justices in a very short time have implemented a substantial part of the Federalist Society's most important policy agenda."
The #AngloSaxon capitalist model ruined earth for humanity and many other species. #BigOil has been its undertaker, b/c #BigOilKnew.
If capitalism hadn't made the #GreenRevolution possible, human society would already have reached the #overshoot (1) point at the end of the last century:
In 1968, the #biologists Paul and Anne #Ehrlich wrote the book The #PopulationBomb"...
The US #SupremeCourt said it will rule on Trump’s bid for immunity from criminal prosecution, taking up a historic case that will determine whether Trump will stand #trial for 2020 #ElectionInterference.
Pardon sounds of my old inherited-from-my-grandmother kitchenaid mixer. I’m baking scones for my very decent neighbors who electively used their snow blower to clear my driveway - I do not know their political affiliation, IRL I hope we can relate to one another w/o the polar political hatred.