Four Conservative SCOTUS Justices Tell Us They Will Do Whatever Trump Tells Them To

The most naïve people in America aren’t the Trumpers who believe whatever insane lie some shitposter at the Kremlin comes up with, nor are they the adults who still believe in fairy tales like Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny. Thinking that Joe Biden is the antichrist or that a jolly old man is going to come down a 46-year-old’s chimney to deliver presents is far more grounded in reality than the people who still believe that the Supreme Court is an institution centered around the rule of law, in defiance of all available evidence and reason over two and a half centuries. It never has been. It’s a self-appointed unelected super legislature that has long been dedicated to the classic American passions of racism and fealty to capital, and yesterday, four conservative justices reached a new low for an institution whose very existence is defined by finding new ways to debase itself.

Today, the New York judge who presided over Donald Trump’s hush money case sentenced him to an “unconditional discharge,” which means that he is now a convicted felon according to the state of New York, but will face no further penalties. Trump tried to get the Supreme Court to block this, something that every single legal expert you can find said would have been a blatantly improper action and overreach by the Court, and it almost worked. The Supreme Court voted 5-4 to not block it, which means that the four justices who voted to do so have made it very clear that they have no personal agency, and their entire life going forward will be spent waiting around for their dear leader to tell them what to do.

Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito are not legal scholars, they are political hacks no different from Matt Gaetz. They voted the way that Trump wanted them to, coming after a shady phone call between Trump and Alito where they supposedly discussed appointing a former Alito clerk for a mid-level position in the incoming administration. Jay Willis of Balls and Strikes detailed the absurdity inherent in this grade school-ass excuse from the incoming president and one of our Supreme Court justices.

Certainly, there would be nothing higher on a president-elect’s list of priorities right now than making final decisions about which generic-looking BigLaw partner gets to serve as in-house counsel to which executive agency. Surely, a famously detail-oriented executive like Donald Trump insists on personally calling the references of anyone he considers for mid-level administration jobs. And of course, there is simply no way for Trump to vet his former staffer, who has not worked for Alito in over a decade, other than requesting an off-the-record conversation with one of nine people who will decide whether he must endure the indignity of a criminal sentencing before taking the oath of office.

What little was left of American jurisprudence that was not already totally captured by major capital has now been completely destroyed by the Roberts Court. The conservative Supreme Court is nothing more than a rubber stamp for Donald Trump, and this vote demonstrates that our descent into authoritarianism is going to be determined in large part by the Supreme Court’s PR agent, Chief Justice John Roberts, and whether he can convince one of the Court’s reactionary conservatives like Amy Coney Barrett to join him in momentary opposition to it. They were the only conservatives on the Court who demonstrated any kind of a sense of shame with this vote, and Roberts in particular has a history of picking legal layups like this to supposedly demonstrate how his tongue is not permanently affixed to the bottom of Trump’s boot (only most of the time).

Roberts knew that had he struck this down, this would have launched another wave of rhetorical attacks on the Court, and fending those off is his primary job. He is managing the decline of an American institution under the biggest partisan hacks it has seen since Reconstruction, all while trying to tell us that what we all see is happening is actually not. The Supreme Court is a lawless institution dedicated to Trump’s reactionary agenda, and the legacy of these conservative Supreme Court justices will be that they spent the final chunk of their careers with Trump’s hand up their asses, abandoning their agency as humans and supposed legal scholars so they can bow at the feet of the saddest autocrat mankind has ever seen.