John Harris: The US Supreme Court Is Begging For a Legitimacy Crisis

By Dilip -

The most generous appraisal of life in the Trump years actually dates from 1850, by a writer reflecting on Napoleon, a leader one imagines Donald Trump could readily admire: “There’s a certain satisfaction in coming down to the lowest ground of politics, for we get rid of cant and hypocrisy.” Are we at the lowest ground? We are close, for sure. And it turns out Ralph Waldo Emerson was right: There is a certain satisfaction. The president may bend the truth and often break it — an average of more than 50 false or misleading claims a day, says The Washington Post —but in some essential ways he exhibits a lack of pretense that is surely a key element of his appeal to supporters.

It was Mitch McConnell who felt compelled to weave a web of hypocritical casuistry to explain why he pushed a vote to confirm Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court days before a presidential election when in February 2016 he blocked President Barack Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland on the grounds it was an election year. Trump, if not more honorable, was arguably less insulting when he stated the obvious: Republicans have the votes and there’s no principle at work other than we will do it because we can.

Here’s something Emerson neglected to remind us, however, about a brand of politics that is free of hypocrisy and cant: It is pretty damn frightening. At a minimum, we are now about to find out what it is like when the Supreme Court joins the rest of us on the low ground — liberated from the pretense that it is anything but another arena in the battle for power.

“How many divisions does the Pope have?” Joseph Stalin supposedly asked. The Supreme Court has the same number. Its power, like that of pontiffs, rests on mystique — on faith that its judgments are grounded in procedure, precedent and timeless principles. Mystique, in turn, inevitably requires a measure of artifice....

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/10/29/supreme-court-begging-for-legitimacy-crisis-433573

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Jonathan Freedland - Donald Trump's plot against democracy could break America apart

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HARRY BLAIN: America’s Wars always Come Home

Jill Lepore  A History of America’s military spending

Jonathan Freedland: Trump is destroying democracy in broad daylight // Chauncey DeVega: Vigilantes are preparing ‘to launch a coup’

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Donald Trump and American carnage // Will Urban Uprisings Help Trump?

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Justice in America: Authorities are Cracking down Hard on Black Protesters while Treating White Supremacist Reopeners with Kid Gloves

Protests in USA over the death of unarmed black man George Floyd at the hands of police - 25 cities have imposed curfews

Mukul Kesavan - Donald Trump and the global equalization of awfulness

Karl Marx: Letter to Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States of America; 1865

President Dwight D. Eisenhower's Speech on the American Military Industrial Complex, January 17, 1961


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