Lmst

I've been working through some kind of painful and grim thoughts in my mind about the endgame of the dissolution of the US Constitution. I figured I'd say them aloud to see if others have thought this through or whether someone disagrees with my analysis.

I begin with an observation I've made before elsewhere, but that seems a relevant basis for thinking any of this matters: Many of us are disappointed with the recent corruption of the Supreme Court of the US (SCOTUS), and it is common to see it as all of one kind. But that creates a kind of hopelessness. In essence, if it's one big cabal of aligned corruption, intent on dissolving the Constitution, that's kind of "Game Over". I don't see how that can be overcome.

But Raw Story recently ran a piece [1] that confirms I'm not alone in thinking there are different ways to factor the Supreme Court. On BlueSky [2], I put it more succinctly and with, I think, better focused urgency:

«It's POSSIBLE that GOP SCOTUS, like some GOP voters, didn't take the danger seriously, figuring they could tweak stuff later if problems arose. It's possible some only wanted more quiet corruption, not a total end to the Constitution (and their own power with it). If so, they'd better say so soon.»

In a sense, as I've previously cited, the US has been a kind of unappreciated dictatorship for a long time, it just didn't get to play out until the recent corrupt capture. While justices were maintained, somewhat by accident and somewhat by conscious strategy on both sides, in a kind of 3-3-3 balance (conservatives, moderates, liberals), the effect of that dictatorship was relatively benign. But as a tilt was allowed, and really unfairly taken by people lying to get in, and by abuse of various Senate rules in ways that were plainly not good faith application, the balance shifted, and this came to matter in ways I described last fall in my American Dictatorship essay [3].

Soon none of this will matter. The German sociologist Max Weber is noted, among other things, for his characterization [4] of a political state as a "human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory". This is notable now because we think of ourselves as living in a democracy because the rules of democracy have pragmatic utility in effecting change. But as Trump successfully asserts changes that make those rules less potent, for example by eliminating people with an interest in enforcing the rules or by building up alternative bodies like DOGE or militias with the practical power to parry state action, the notion of what the US political state is, at the level of its core DNA, is dynamically altered, perhaps soon irreparably.

So it matters to act before that cancer kills democracy. There is not much time.

The two things I see as hurting us right now most acutely are these:

a. The bogus suggestion that the President is a king whose actions cannot be challenged, even when they are counter to the Constitution as long as they are arguably official acts.

b. The use of over-broad pardon power, allowing POTUS to effectively deputize any person, agency, or army to do his unlawful or unconstitutional bidding with a feeling of protection.

These two things effectively mean our Constitutional system of laws are a joke in the hands of an out-of-control POTUS. I don't hold out much hope of Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Thomas will care to change this. But Roberts and Barrett seem to have some guilt and are enough to swing the Court.

And yet they have no enforcement power.

So one might say they are really not relevant already, but I will here disagree. They have an unexercised power that in the general case is troublesome to me, but in this case can't worsen things from the already horrific situation, and could matter.

1/2 (continued in first comment on thread)

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