The Supreme Court is the Play!

I’m really mystified—though, given the state of corporate media, I guess not so much—why EVERYONE seems to be missing the real threat to democracy in 2024. It’s not the election. Even if the Democrats win, it’s what comes after the election that is going to end democracy in the United States. And it should be no surprise, that threat is the supreme court. Two statements last week make this crystal clear. The Trump Maggots are telling us exactly what they’re going to do, but everyone in the media is making the wrong assumptions about what that means. The idea that there’s going to be another attack on the Capitol, or challenge in the Senate, is idiotic. Republicans learned from their mistakes in 2020 and are going to take a completely different tact—well, they’re going to hope for a different outcome, anyway; the plan is still the same. The end game is the supreme court. Only this time they’ve been bolstered by recent decisions protecting Trump and so their belief—not unjustified—is that this time they won’t need evidence, that the supreme court is going to take away the victory from Kamala Harris and simply award it to Trump.

The first indication that this is the play came from Trump campaign official Chris LaCivita. In an interview prior to the Republican Convention he said, “It’s not over on Election Day, it’s over on Inauguration Day.” The meaning is clear, but the media has missed it. In 2020 the supreme court failed to listen to any of Trump’s petitions because of lack of evidence at the lower court level. But after dozens of unconstitutional decisions by a corrupted right-wing court, it seems that this time Trump believes they will side with him no matter what. A perfectly reasonable expectation. Meanwhile, the media is focused on all of the statewide manipulation going on that Republicans are engaging in so that it doesn’t have to come to that. Either way, the prospect of a Republican-rigged election looms large on the horizon. The second clear indication, however, that the corrupt supreme court is the final end game came from Trump himself, when he called in to Fox on Thursday and claimed that he doesn’t need votes, because he has lawyers. Again, the implication is clear. He doesn’t really care about the election itself, only what comes after, the lawsuits that will be pushed up to his corrupted judges on the supreme court.

The maddening part is how ignorant the media seems, even MSNBC. A blog post yesterday by Steve Benon was frustratingly titled, “Why in the world does Trump keep saying, ‘We don’t need the votes’?” BECAUSE THE SUPREME COURT’S THE PLAY! He doesn’t care about the election. In the blog post Benon cites Trump saying he doesn’t need the votes, and even puts a clip from the Fox program, but only AFTER THE LAWYER REMARK. The post was then picked up by a number of other outlets, but no one has seemed to understand that the shift in the supreme court to openly and unconstitutionally supporting Trump means that they could very easily throw the election to him if Harris wins. And then what happens? It doesn’t matter about the electoral votes or the certification if the supreme court can just anoint a winner as they did in 2000. The problem with keeping our collective heads in the sand until it happens, is that by then it will be too late. And attempts to rectify the situation after the fact will quickly be labeled as election interference by the very corrupt party that has stolen the election in the first place.

The only proactive solution to this is for Biden to pack the court as soon as election day is over. He can legally put four more justices on the court, confirmed by a Democratic Senate, and neutralize the corrupt right-wing justices before they have a chance to take the victory away from Harris. But will he do it? I honestly can’t imagine a scenario in which he does. But then I also didn’t think he would step down, either. So I suppose that is a small sliver of hope. The real danger at this moment is that no one is seriously thinking through the Republican legal strategy, which, as I said, is the same as last time. The monumental difference this time, however, is the supreme court’s clear signal to the right that they’ll do whatever they want, legal evidence and Constitution be damned. And if we let that happen, I can’t think of a way to reverse it that doesn’t involve the kind of presidential overreach that would make Biden and the Dems look like the bad guys. If the news media stays asleep on this, and gets blindsided by a supreme court decision in January, the real bad guys will have won. This needs to get out now, so that the corrupt justices know we’re on to them, and especially so that Biden can have some time to think this through with his people and, hopefully, do what’s best for the nation once again.