They’re telegraphing what’s in store
“The U.S. presidency makes the occupant of that office the most powerful person on the planet,” Andrea Pitzer declares at the opening of her latest “What Comes Next” podcast. “If you’re someone whose deficiencies cry out for more submission to you and more adulation of you, how hard it’s gotta be to have so much power and yet be denied those few extra steps that would deliver you right to dictatorship?”
Step by step, a cabal of MAGA autocrats backing Donald Trump has taken us there. Now their task is to sink the roots deeper and make it harder for lovers of freedom and defenders of our constitutional order to dislodge Trump’s nascent dictatorship.
The Washington Post (gift link):
Federal prosecutors across the country may soon be able to indict members of Congress without approval from lawyers in the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section, according to three people familiar with a proposal attorneys in the section learned about last week.
Under the proposal, investigators and prosecutors would also not be required to consult with the section’s attorneys during key steps of probes into public officials, altering a long-standing provision in the Justice Department’s manual that outlines how investigations of elected officials should be conducted.
If adopted, the changes would remove a layer of review intended to ensure that cases against public officials are legally sound and not politically motivated. Career prosecutors in the Public Integrity Section guided and signed off on the criminal investigations into alleged corruption by New York Mayor Eric Adams (D) and former Democratic senator Bob Menendez.
A Justice Department spokesperson confirmed the proposal’s existence but added that no final decision has been made. “The three people familiar with the proposal spoke on the condition of anonymity because they fear reprisals.”
No kidding? Click on over to see the AP photo of Her Imperious Blondeness, AG Pam Bondi, and ask yourself if she won’t do it. She’s ready to break into “Tomorrow Belongs to Me.” What color is her armband?
Jason Statler considers how the Supreme Court’s 6-3 presidential immunity decision last year gave Trump a blank check negotiable for not just indicting opponents, but crimes up to and including assassination of political enemies.
“If the president decides that his rival is a corrupt person and he orders the military or orders someone to assassinate him, is that within his official acts for which he can get immunity?” asked Justice Sonia Sotomayor.
D. John Sauer, now Trump’s Solicitor General (remember him from Thursday?), replied, “We could see that could well be an official act.”
Statler believes Sotomayor should have asked if that included murdering members of the Supreme Court.
Sauer last week had to be pressed on whether the Trump administration would respect lower court rulings. Generally, was the best he could do. But pressed again, Sauer said the administration would respect Supreme Court precedents.
Trump’s people are dangerous. And not maybe, possibly. Statler places (and I agree) Trump v. United States among the worst SCOTUS decisions in history, down there with Dred Scott, Korematsu, Bush v. Gore, Shelby v. Holder, and Dobbs.
Statler writing at The Farce:
The Justices should be scared
The need to confirm that the Trump regime would follow court orders revealed an anxiety that should be pulsing through every one of us.
Two Fridays ago, Stephen Miller—the “untouchable” architect of Trump’s authoritarian fantasies, as Superlawyer Marc Elias of Democracy Docket, called him—took a planted question from a Gateway Pundit “reporter” about when (not if) Trump will throw out habeas corpus. Habeas corpus, as we’ve all been forced to remind ourselves, is the right that makes all the other rights possible by allowing citizens to challenge an unlawful detention.
You obviously don’t want to give Donald Trump the power to wipe away your most central right whenever he feels like it. In the episode of NEXT COMES WHAT above, Andrea Pitzer draws on her global history of concentration camps to explain why:
I’d like to suggest another reason the executive branch wants to suspend habeas corpus: to be able to detain its opponents indefinitely without having to justify its actions. But I don’t even have to be right about the president’s current intentions with regard to habeas corpus for it to be a threat. All you have to do is ask yourself whether, if Trump were given this power with regard to immigrants but would suddenly also find himself permitted to arrest anyone he wanted—including the journalists he has repeatedly called “enemies of the people”—would he stop at the detention and arrest of only immigrants?
Trump et al. mean to “purify” this country in an unsettling fashion that Americans should recognize but won’t if they’re too young or haven’t visited the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. To further purify us, Trump wants to make English the country’s official language.
Read between the lines of Trump’s Executive Order 14224. It specifies that “Agency heads are not required to amend, remove, or otherwise stop production of documents, products, or other services prepared or offered in languages other than English.” But since those agency heads will be MAGA believers, you know what they’ll do. What Dear Leader wants done: make it harder for non-English speakers to participate in civic life, particularly in elections.
The Washington Post a second time:
To hear what this land really sounds like, go to Hilo on the Big Island of Hawai‘i and Lac Courte Oreilles Ojibwe reservation in northwest Wisconsin. Go to Mashpee on Cape Cod, Diné College in Arizona and Alaska’s Kuskokwim River. Then go to cities such as New York, Los Angeles and Houston.
President Donald Trump’s Executive Order 14224, making English “the official language of the United States,” is the polar opposite of what our society, one of the most linguistically diverse in history, is and has always been about.
In the country’s nearly 250-year history, no one had ever successfully imposed an official language; the Constitution pointedly refuses to do so. Freedom of speech means nothing if it does not mean the freedom to speak any of the world’s 7,000-plus languages. While the order does not ban languages other than English, it sends an unprecedented official signal that they are not welcome. A prime target is Spanish, which is fully and fortunately the nation’s second most-spoken language.
This is not a drill, The Lincoln Project makes plain in its latest video. “Make no mistake– they’re coming for your free speech.” The Trump adminstration is telegraphing what’s in store. Coming for you is in the planning stages. Noncitizens already know what that looks like.
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