As our corrupted U.S. Supreme Court begins its new term this week, its Chief Justice has a lot of explaining to do. Don’t hold your breath for that explanation. At least from John Roberts. Our guest on today’s BradCast, however, just wrote a book about him and has plenty to explain about him, what has happened under his leadership to our High Court, and the long road ahead toward reforming it. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]
Our guest today, the great LISA GRAVES, knows a thing or two about the Supreme Court, from her experience in all three branches of the federal government. She has served as a Deputy Asst. Attorney General at the U.S. Dept. of Justice, the Chief Counsel for nominations on the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, and as the Deputy Chief for the Article III Judges Division of the U.S. Court System. She has also exposed a lot of the corruption of the current members of the High Court, as a longtime researcher and as founder and Executive Director of True North Research.
Her brand new book is called WITHOUT PRECEDENT: How Chief Justice Roberts and his Accomplices Rewrote the Constitution and Dismantled Our Rights. (Check out an excerpt here.)
In her most recent news letter, Graves argues that “we are in the midst of an unprecedented set of constitutional crises.” She asserts that while Donald Trump‘s “belligerent and erratic orders — and his appalling musings — are shaking the foundations of our nation, it is the U.S. Supreme Court with John Roberts at the helm that is recklessly and aggressively emboldening him.”
We begin there, after a long summer of the Roberts Court largely granting Trump’s wishes, at least temporarily, in case after case after case on the Court’s Emergency Docket (better described as its “Shadow Docket”), allowing him to largely get away with everything, no matter how radical, unlawful or unconstitutional. That, in unmistakably stark contrast to the Court’s rightwing majority blockade of far less cataclysmic executive actions attempted by the Democratic Biden Administration when, for example, President Biden was barred by SCOTUS from offering about ten thousand dollars in school loan forgiveness during the COVID pandemic (as specifically allowed by law) or when attempting to regulate deadly emissions by power plants, despite the federal Clean Air Act’s mandate to do exactly that.
Where the Roberts Court has allowed Trump to ignore the law and Constitution alike, the same corrupted majority blocked the Democratic President time after time, declaring a newly discovered “Major Questions” doctrine in the Constitution. It was apparently sitting right next to their invented “Presidential Immunity” clause they discovered last year, just in time to get Trump off the hook from very real crimes both retroactively and prospectively.
“If [Kamala] Harris had won, I don’t think this Court would be bending over backwards to allow every new initiative of a Harris Administration,” argues Graves. “What we saw when Biden was President, was the Roberts Court going out of its way to invent whole new magical phrases to try to stop signature initiatives of the Biden Administration, that were modest in themselves, and were even more modest when compared to the radical, reactionary, destructive actions of Donald Trump.”
We’ve got a lot to speak to Graves about today, including all of that, as well well as the lies told by “documented liar” Justice Brett Kavanaugh about so-called “temporary” decisions made by the Court on the Shadow Docket; how Robert’s nomination 20 years ago last month kicked off the full industrialization and weaponization of Republican Dark Money invested in seating Justices who would turn the Court, its precedents and our Constitution on their collective head; and how, even during his nomination hearings, John Roberts, a longtime anti-democratic, anti-Voting Rights Act Republican activist, was already playing the American people.
Graves also explains today what she sees as a long but viable path toward Court reform. “If we don’t do so, it is at our peril. Because the Roberts Court and John Roberts is acting with such supreme arrogance in enabling Trump and in decimating our rights,” she asserts. “It will continue to take blow after blow against our freedoms, against statutes that were passed to protect our rights, including efforts to mitigate climate change and so much more, until we reform this Court and pass laws to restore rights we’ve lost, and even expand upon them.”
“So it’s really a moral duty. It’s a moral imperative that we not give in to hopelessness,” she says, citing decades-long Civil Rights Era struggles. “Just because we can’t do it this year, it doesn’t mean we can’t be building it. And, in fact, we must be building forward, to demand that we have representatives who are going to support reforming the Supreme Court, to protect our rights and to undo the damage that has been done by this packed, stacked and captured Court.”
“The damage that has been done is done to us. We the people. So we have an obligation to work together to move those reforms into law in the years to come. Each year that we go forward, we hopefully will have the opportunity to have elections that will allow us to hold the people accountable who are advancing this extreme agenda and repel it. And in repelling it, have the opportunity to pass meaningful, real reform, the reform that’s needed as well as the substantive restoration of rights, and expansion of rights, that is every American’s rightful inheritance.”
ALSO TODAY… U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi is not just a Trump sycophant and corrupted tool. She is also a horrible human being, as she demonstrated over and over again today in obnoxious testimony before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee in her first oversight hearing as U.S. Attorney General.
Are we there yet ? I mean the place where it doesn’t get better, it only gets worse:
(AP News).
Is it time for a change (The Changing Of The Tards)?