April 25th was worse than January 6th
When the coup hit the Supreme Court, the Republican Justices joined in.
Samuel Alito's undeniable terribleness is finally getting a smidge of the attention it deserves.
But there is something far worse than his words, his disdain, and his wife’s freak flags. That would be his actual jurisprudence, though that seems too generous of a word to describe what he’s done on the Supreme Court.
The horror of January 6th has largely been whittled down to a nub to allow the press to act as if it’s a normal thing for the Republican Party to nominate an insurrectionist guilty of numerous crimes and treacheries. But in all this whittling and sudden awareness of Alito’s coup support, we’re missing that Sam Alito is Trump’s most shameless and powerful co-conspirator.
The Supreme Court needs four votes to grant “cert” or to hear a case. Alito is almost certainly the fourth vote that granted that cert. That vote alone likely ensured Trump would not face trial on January 6th before the election, which precedes what is likely to be his inevitable next coup attempt. And it ensured the Court would hear arguments on the fiction of “absolute presidential immunity” on April 25, 2024, a date that should go down in infamy.
As I’ve been adding subtitles to the Introduction to the Ball of Threads podcast, which Marcy Wheeler recorded in the immediate wake of that April 25th hearing, I’ve been battered in the brain by the utter lawlessness of that day.
That includes the lawlessness presented by Trump’s attorneys, who argued Trump as president could drone strike any America he feels like based on any hunch he has, and – as Marcy called them – the Republican men on the Supreme Court. Neil Gorusch, Brett Kavanaugh, and even John Roberts all showed up with their usual sophistry that at least seemed bound in some way by conventional conservative perversions of the law.
But as Marcy noted, Alito's behavior resembled less a Supreme Court Justice and more a member of Truth Social reposting Trump’s comments with an emphatic “THIS!!!”
Alito’s entire framing of the case comes from Trump. Biden is after Trump. Biden is trying to keep Trump off the campaign trail. The system worked fine on January 6th because the rioters were kept six feet from hanging Mike Pence so who can blame Trump for anything?
January 6th will scar us forever. It ended America’s peaceful transfer of power and showed that Donald Trump will never peacefully accept the results of an election he loses.
But what has happened since, with a Republican Party that committed itself to carrying out the rioters’ mission of making Donald Trump a dictator, is even worse.
It’s confirmed every worst hunch I’ve had about the right: namely, they’d prefer dictatorship to defeat. With his “Appeal to Heaven,” Alito would prefer a dictatorship over victory.
When a bunch of Nazi freaks and disturbed malcontents stormed Capitol along with the military wing of the president’s supporters, some elected Republicans expressed some shame.
But when the leaders of the party, some of the wealthiest men alive, and the entire right-wing legal establishment continued that coup in the chamber of the Supreme Court, the entire party cheered along. The struggle was finished. They had won the victory over themselves. They love Big Brother.
