From mewling sychophants
In May, Judge J. Michael Luttig (retired) cited Thomas Paine’s Common Sense (1776): “For as in absolute governments the king is law, so in free countries the law ought to be king; and there ought to be no other.”
The respected conservative judge published his reflections on the Declaration of Independence this week. He reformatted the colonist’s 27 incictments against King George III for modern ears and for our present, sorry circumstances. They will sound very familiar unless you are a Republican congresswoman from South Carolina. Luttig tells The Ink that he finds “astonishing parallels between the 27 grievances of the American colonists” and what he sees in Donald Trump’s Republican misrule.
With initiatives in his first 100 days, Luttig tells The Ink, Trump “is consciously and deliberately acting contrary to the Constitution and laws of the United States, that portends the end of the rule of law in America.”
Being a judge, Luttig indicts not just Trump but the Roberts Supreme Court for its presidential immunity ruling. Luttig calls it “the single worst decision in American history from the Supreme Court, even worse than Dred Scott and others for the reason that it did structural damage to the Constitution of the United States, unlike and in a different way than any of the prior abhorrent decisions of the Court had done.”
Roberts himself is presiding over “the end of the rule of law in America.”
That’s twice. You don’t need a weatherman or a retired federal judge to know which way that wind blows.
Can you hear Donald Trump whining and declaring it fake news? Have you seen an entire national political party chasing his limousine like teenage girls clutching copies of Tiger Beat? Mewling sychophants lead us, and that’s on us.
Not to leave you on that grim note, here’s a sermonette: July 4th in the Face of Fascism
As bad as things are, we cannot forget that others faced worse with less resources than we have. We are not the first Americans to face a power-drunk minority in public office, determined to hold onto power at any cost. This was the everyday reality of Black Americans in the Mississippi Delta for nearly a century after the Klan and white conservatives carried out the Mississippi Plan in the 1870s, erasing the gains of Reconstruction and enshrining white supremacy in law.
And overcome they did. May we all.
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