Working the System
For or against democracy
The system which, depending on your perspective, is either broken or working exactly as designed, is something Mitch McConnell has worked within for years in order to take a sledgehammer to American democracy. No elected official has done more to engineer the white Christian Nationalist super-majority of the Supreme Court than McConnel. Now the Court is itself working within the system to erode democracy further by weakening American’s faith in the Court through its anti-Constitutional rulings and unethical behavior.
Their goal, in the short term, is to advance the Republican Party’s agenda as long as that means making sure Donald Trump is installed once again in the White House to do their bidding. In the long-term, many high-ranking Republicans seem to be gunning for a theocratic apartheid state which requires rolling back the rights of women and Black Americans back to 1860s. Along the way, of course, they must enrich themselves. Because that’s how it works. They care about their ideological agenda of destroying democracy as much as we care about making democracy better, but they also demand to be richly compensated for their nefarious work along the way.
Clarence Thomas’ egregiously corrupt behavior—the gob-smacking number and value of the gifts he has received from billionaire donors that was uncovered by ProPublica in the stunning investigative report by, should be enough to undermine the Court’s credibility, but then there’s Samuel Alito.
Alito outdoes his colleague by several light-years, which is really saying something. In addition to engaging in the same kind of pay-for-play corruption as Thomas, he is an ideologue who has proven himself to be so arrogantly dedicated to his worldview, so warped by his permanent residence in the Fox bubble that he is incapable of ruling with any semblance of objectivity. He is the Court’s poster boy for putting party before country or constitution.
Last week, The New York Times reported that an upside-down flag was seen flying outside of Alito’s house in the days after the January 6th insurrection. Traditionally an upside-down flag symbolizes distress, but Donald's followers have co-opted the upside-down flag to represent “Stop the Steal.” The fact that Alito was flying it outside of his house should be a red flag, so to speak, for anybody. Alito, of course, another whiny, misogynist masquerading as a tough guy, blamed his wife. But since he lives there, he was obviously aware of it.
“I had no involvement whatsoever in the flying of the flag,” Alito wrote in an emailed statement to The Times. “It was briefly placed by Mrs. Alito in response to a neighbor’s use of objectionable and personally insulting language on yard signs.”
Their neighbors made some nasty political statements? So what? It doesn't matter what his neighbors do or what his neighbors say or what his neighbor's political beliefs are. In exchange for the justices’ lifetime appointments and their complete freedom from ethics investigations, they’re supposed to be held to a much higher standard than us mere mortals. They are supposed to be objective and apply the law objectively.
To makes matters worse, at the time of the controversy, Alito and his colleagues were deciding whether or not to take emergency action on a case related to Donald’s efforts to block Biden’s victory.
Clearly, Alito and his cohort, Clarence Thomas, have no interest in being objective, and they are absolutely and openly and unsurprisingly, given the superfluity of evidence that continues to be revealed, on the side of the Insurrectionists. What remains mystifying to me, however, is the fact that Democrats in Congress who have the power to do something are choosing to do nothing.
Dick Durbin, as Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has thus far failed to live up to his responsibilities. Whether or not a hearing would result in impeachment—extremely unlikely to impossible—we still need hearings. Republicans have often used hearings to hurt their political opponents—there’s a reason much of the American public would recognize the phrases “But her emails,” and “Benghazi, Benghazi, Benghazi.” The Senate Judiciary Committee must use them to shine a bright light on the dangerous illegitimacy of the Supreme Court.
But Durbin doesn’t appear to grasp that across-the-aisle collegiality and compromise that the Senate used to enjoy no longer exist. He continues to give the benefit of the doubt to people who are intent on burning it all down. Hearings should have been called the moment we learned that Ginni Thomas was involved in the January 6th insurrection. They certainly should have been called when we learned that Thomas himself is a bought-and-paid-for hack who does the bidding of his right-wing benefactors (particularly collector of Nazi memorabilia Harlan Crowe) for a considerable fee.
After the news of Alito’s first pro-insurrection flag broke, (we learned about a second one this morning) future Speaker of the House Hakeem Jeffries released the following statement:
“Samuel Alito should apologize immediately for disrespecting the American flag and sympathizing with right-wing violent insurrectionists. He must recuse himself from cases involving the 2020 election and Donald Trump. Congress should immediately consider legislation to impose an ethical code of conduct on a runaway Supreme Court. The Constitution demands and the American people deserve more from a justice serving on the highest court in the land than baseless election denial.”
This doesn’t go nearly far enough. We need open hearings in the Senate laying out for the American people all of the corrupt practices the super-majority of the Roberts court has been engaged in—from the potential lies some of them told to get in the Court in the first place, to the claims made against Brett Kavanaugh that were never investigated and ending with the undeclared gifts received by and the anti-Constitutional decision made by Thomas and Alito. The Court as an institution cannot survive these crises. And America cannot survive this Supreme Court.
It's one thing when your enemies act like enemies. The Democrats, on the other hand, are supposed to be on the side of protecting American democracy. Some Democrats in Congress, like Durbin and Chick Schumer, by not meeting the urgency of the moment, are allowing the authoritarian power of this anti-democratic pro-right-wing to go unchecked, and they've got to do something about it starting yesterday.
The good news is that the Democratic Party actually does care about defending democracy it’s just that many of our leaders haven’t caught up with the reality on the ground. Many of them, particularly those who have been inside of these institutions for decades, have become complacent. It’s up to us, then, to get them back in the game and remind them where they get their power.
Some housekeeping:
I’m hosting a TikTok Live (my first!) tonight at 7:00 p.m. ET with my friend and fellow Nerd Avenger, Adam Parkhomenko. It would be great to have you there.
The Nerd Avengers are up and running at Mary Trump Media on YouTube—live shows every Tuesday and Thursday at 12:00 p.m. ET. You can watch here:
https://www.youtube.com/@MaryTrumpMedia
Starting tomorrow, I’ll have a separate page here with links to new shows as well as transcripts which are available only to members of The Good in Us.
Click on this link and you’ll see it there:
https://www.tiktok.com/@mltrump?_t=8mbJGsuxUgU&_r=1
Why did it take o er three years to find out about the flag?
Mary, you are right. Those are the hearings we need and if Sheldon Whitehouse was in charge of the Judiciary Committee we might have them. But Durbin will never take the actions needed. AS you say, he thinks the Senate of today is the Senate of 1970. Those days are long gone thanks to Moscow Mitch. McConnell, naked partisan, right wing ideologue, and total garbage person first turned to scorched earth obstruction then to abuse of the rules to achieve his ideological goals - a judiciary that would impose a right wing agenda on the nation that he could never achieve legislatively. And so far he has succeeded. It is up to us to reign karma down upon him and make him regret what he has done. And that comes from keeping the Senate and the WH. Killing he filibuster. Expanding the court to neutralize the Christo-fascist 6, and dragging Alito, Thomas, and Kavanaugh thru the mud of their past and present misdeeds to the point that they choose retirement/resignation over ongoing humiliation...or the promise of criminal charges. Criminal charges that a real AG would have already brought.