TWIT: This MAGA Court

credit: N. Anderson
Wackydoodle sez: sez: Long live the king!

The insulting hot-head known as US Person, wants to direct your attention to two leaked memos from the Supreme Court that show how Chief Justice John Roberts is the chief MAGA Justice.  He committed a trifecta of corruption on behalf of Don the Con behind the Court's curtain of impartial authority; ripped away for good after the public release of these confidential communications. 

In February he sent a memo to his colleagues excoriating the district and appellate court opinions rejecting  Trump's claim of presidential immunity that would protect him from the criminal prosecution for his role in the January 6th Insurrection. Not only did he say that the Court should take up the defendant's appea, but also suggested his preferred outcome. He told his fellow Justices, “I think it likely that we will view the separation of powers analysis differently” from the appellate court's analysis, which he view as inadequate. As a result of his suggested outcome the Court handed down a wide immunity grant unprecedented in US history, in effect making the President above the law.

John Roberts wrote all three opinions in favor of Don 'Legit': the immunity decision; limiting of the obstruction of official proceedings crime to documentation;  and rejecting Colorado's barring of candidate Trump based on the 14th Amendment's insurrection clause. In the Fischer obstruction case, Roberts removed Samuel Alito from the case just days after it was made public that the Alito household was flying a US flag upside down, which is a recognized distress signal and a symbol of the "Stop the Steal" movement after the January 6th riot. Roberts then sided with the liberal minority to push a decision on immunity before the election. It is noteworthy that Roberts cited Alexander Hamilton in his opinion. It is considered by critics to be a tortured piece of legal scholarship untethered to the Constitution in an attempt to prevent Trump becoming the first US president to be convicted of a treasonous crime while in office.

The fact is that Hamilton was a monarchist, flat out. When the constitutional convention took place in Philadelphia in 1787, Hamilton advocated not just for a strong, independent executive, but a return to monarchy. He knew that proposition would not get past the other delegates, so he settled for the flawed compromise that was hammered out of the secret deliberations. There would be an independent, single executive but not without legal restraints and election every four years.  In his book, The Hamilton Scheme, historian William Hogeland details the philosophic tension--Marx would have called it a dialectic--between egalitarian impulses* and the control by an interstate oligarchy that existed in the colonies even before 1776. That dialectic continues to this very day between those who would restrain "The Democracy" with an authoritarian central government. Men like Roberts are instrumental in the effort to finally bring this about two hundred fifty years later.  Moderate centrist? NOT.

 *Those impulses were in the forefront in of Shays' Rebellion, 1786-1787, in which western Massachusetts' agrarians rose up in violent protest against farm foreclosures, aggressive debt collections, and political cronyism. Residents were paying higher taxes--to pay off war indentures held by elites--than they had paid under the British Crown.  Many of the rebels were former members of the Continental Army; one of their leaders, Daniel Shays, fought at Bunker Hill. In September 1786 Shays and about 600 armed men closed the courts in Springfield, MA. As the situation deteriorated between the rebels and government officials, a private army was raised to confront them since there was no standing army. The Continental Army had been demobilized, Shays' led a march to the Springfield arsenal in Spring of 1787 to gather weapons. They were anticipated by the state's armed force. Shooting  began, killing two rebels and wounding twenty. The rebels retreated from the scene, and some escaped to Vermont where they were given sanctuary by Ethan Allen. By the summer of 1787 many rebels were granted pardons by new Massachusetts Governor John Hancock. The legislature passed debt relief bills and reduced taxes. Shays was pardoned in 1788, returning from Vermont to settle in Sparta, New York where he became a minor celebrity and died in 1825. This armed insurrection motivated more members of the Confederation Congress, including Hamilton, to advocate anew for a strong, central government with power to tax citizens directly and establish permanent military forces.  

Shays' Rebellion--a misnomer since Daniel Shays was only one of several leaders of a popular movement--was not the first or the last of popular insurrection against elite rule, what Hogeland terms the "Money Connection" and what the 19th century Populist Party called the "Money Power".  North Carolina "Regulators" rose up against the Money Power  in a rebellion against corruption and hard money (specie) that culminated in their defeat at the  Battle of Alamance, 1771.   The Whiskey Rebellion (1791-1794) took place in Pennsylvania over Treasury Secretary Hamilton's unfair excise tax on whiskey--a popular beveridge and important artisanal industry in western Pennsylvania-- that had to be put down by 13,000 militia commanded by Washington himself.