Yves here. Trump follows his line of action by having enlisted his ally, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, to threaten the very existence of Federal courts:
Speaker Johnson floats the possibility of Congress eliminating federal courts.
This comes as courts have blocked some actions taken by the Trump administration, along with Trump and his allies calling for the impeachment of certain district court judges. https://t.co/chPmITMmBL
— NBC News (@NBCNews) March 27, 2025
Congressional representatives up for re-election have to have noticed that Trump defiance of the law is not politically popular. We posted a chart from a tweet of a CNN clip that summarized this poll; it’s been reported by USA Today, further confirming that the media and political classes have likely gotten the message. From USA Today:
The three-day survey, which closed on Sunday, found that 82% of respondents – including majorities of Democrats and Republicans – agreed with a statement that the “president of the United States should obey federal court rulings even if the president does not want to.”
So while the odds do not favor this getting done (there would be massive court challenges to cutting current appropriations, and the Supreme Court is not about to vote itself out of existence; the R’s thin majority in the House makes it unlikely for the next budget to be whacked this way), the very fact that Johnson as a leading member of Congress is backing Trump threats to the judiciary is profoundly disturbing.
By Richard Murphy, Professor of Accounting Practice at Sheffield University Management School and a director of the Corporate Accountability Network. Originally published at Funding the Future
I have kept saying, since Trump was re-elected, that the likelihood was that the end of the rule of law in the USA was nigh. He is a man who has no desire to be told what to do by a judge, as he has proved time and again with his contempt for the legal system.
Now this seems to have been confirmed. As the Guardian has reported this afternoon:
Republican House speaker Mike Johnson suggested potentially defunding, restructuring or eliminating US federal courts as a means of pushing back against judicial decisions that have challenged Donald Trump’s policies
Speaking to reporters on Tuesday, Johnson, a former constitutional attorney, raised the prospect of congressional intervention in the court system.
“We do have the authority over the federal courts, as you know. We can eliminate an entire district court,” Johnson said.
I have already suggested that Trump’s grand plan is to end the US federal government – and so, in effect, the USA. It appears Mike Johnson is now endorsing the plan, and the end of US democracy.
Per Blackadder goes Forth
https://youtube.com/shorts/6_YPtnou5ak?si=Xeru5PzX2bxAajkS
Who is that, please? I’m not American, I don’t know what/who I’m looking at.
Blackadder isn’t American either. British TV comedy.
I know. :) But the video isn’t of Blackadder….it’s of some Senator giving some speech.
I dislike these video shorts which have nothing whatsoever in the description, no clue, no date, no names, no way to figure out the context or even who the person in the video is. Guess it must not be terribly important who it is.
The whole polie show ongoing reminds me of that whole Goes Forth series.
Only thing missing is the canned laughter ….
Looks like some run-of-the-mill US Senator.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Ossoff
I feel cheated for clicking on the link expecting some Baldrick wholesomeness. It’s like being Rickrolled without the Rick. Maybe it’s a misdirection that’s a part of some cunning plan.
Thank you! And yeah, same, I heart Blackadder. We’ve been taken advantage of!
Well, I did not have Johnson slits own throat politically on my bingo card. Way to save your opposition while they are busy destroying themselves. If this is one of the distractions we are to be looking out for, it is an incredibly stupid one. Even toying with this accelerates the destruction of passive political support for Trump and allies. (I have to say that if I were a politician I can’t believe I would be stupid enough to buy any promises being made behind the scenes by the tech bros and friends – including blackmail- to commit this kind of hara-kari either as real strategy or distraction.)
>If this is one of the distractions we are to be looking out for, it is an incredibly stupid one.
I have to say this is the very first thought that came to my mind.
Hey, Look, a Squirrel !!
What’s next? Outlawing Motherhood, apple pie and ice cream on a sunny day?
Pat: “slits own throat.” At this point, the highly profitable “suicide” of the élites goes on. One must recall Kamala Harris intoning “premier lethal force,” which also was slitting her own throat. Yet they are so entrenched that no alternative has emerged.
Observations: “Speaking to reporters on Tuesday, Johnson, a former constitutional attorney, raised the prospect of congressional intervention in the court system.”
Former constitutional attorney? Where have I heard that before? The descriptor is a fig leaf.
Observations: The adage is that the Democratic Party is where social movements go to die. Or be throttled. We are seeing this right now in the Bernie-AOC tour / non-event.
Yet the Republicans cultivated the evangelical / fundis in U.S. Protestantism. The Republicans are now applying the Democratic Rule. People like Johnson have turned U.S. Protestantism into a Calvinist cargo cult and will now kill off what is left of it. After that, U.S. Protestantism will consist of worship of the Second Amendment and fear of sexuality.
Not to let the Democrats off the hook: The Democrats dragooned many bourgeoise feminists, who bet the farm on Hillary Clinton, Victoria Nuland, and Kamala Harris. The Democrats applied their Rule. What’s left of U.S. feminism? Rubble and complaining.
In short, “slits own throat”? Maybe. Or maybe not yet. But there’s still plenty of looting that can go on. I’m sure we can all get some stock tips from Nancy Pelosi before the Constitutional Apocalypse.
This threat confirms my worry that the plan is not to have elections in 2026. Trump has been wildly abusing his emergency authority powers. Say he goes to war with Iran. If that does not go well (or even if it does) he can declare martial law.
See this classic Game of Thrones clip. The only way this makes sense is if, as Margaery Tyrell put it, they do not intend to suffer the consequences of their actions:
Go to war, martial law, no 2026 elections. But if that happens, voters won’t get choose between a party that wants to (for example) take away our Social Security & Medicare illegally, or the other party that wants to take away our Social Security & Medicare legally.
Yves Smith: Given your excellent record in assessing Greece’s financial disaster, Russia’s conduct of the war, and Kamala Harris’s chances of winning, you now have me worried.
I am wondering: Does this maneuver stem from the Congress’s abdication of its responsibilities?
The reason I ask: Here in Italy, we are seeing a similar campaign to discredit the judiciary. The Fratelli d’Italia and Forza Italia (the heirs of Berlusconi’s legal woes) have voted for provisions that limit investigating prosecutors and judges, even as they push the “separation of careers,” which is no improvement. So many reforms these days are not improvements but just grabs for power.
In the U S of A, the discredited, self-hobbled Congress now wants to attack the third branch of government. The result is further enhancement of executive power — again, a reform that doesn’t improve a damn thing.
And not to be too paranoid: Are these efforts coming from some think tanks or advocacy groups? The way the Peterson Loony Bin goes endlessly after Social Security, for instance.
Which U.S. representative of sound mind (ahhh, well) and unbribed would propose getting rid of the federal district courts, which have only operated since, ohhh, 1790 or so. I’m hesitant to name “insanity” as the cause — although I am convinced that Johnson suffers from religious insanity (see Tocqueville).
Correct. You go down this path, then you’re going to burn the boats behind you, and press forward until you topple democracy or you are defeated. There’s no going back.
That is a scary thought. It is a plan full of risks, which requires huge pain and suffering in order to succeed and will cause more if successful. In light of Gaza and Ukraine, for the elites who would concoct such a plan, it might even be a selling point.
These are frightening times.
The Business Plot, also called the Wall Street Putsch, and the White House Putsch, seems to have taken a bit longer than originally planned …
The irony is that that plot was to take out FDR who was the creator of the modern American Empire.
And the actions taken to accomplish this long delayed plot have wrecked America, and ended the American Empire.
Trump doesn’t have a plan, he operates on instinct and impulse and always has. Anything that gets in his way he immediately wants to flatten. The courts are telling him no, so he immediately looks for a way to get rid of the courts, and of course the courtiers around him are happy to feed him nutty ideas on how he can do it. The nuttier the better because Trump loves spectacle and flash–he treats politics as pure kayfabe.
These people are firing civil servants en masse and then frantically trying to hire half of them back the next day realizing they need them to perform basic government functions…this is not the sign of people who have any kind of plan, even to get through a single day.
Project 2025 is not some fiendishly elaborate Machiavellian scheme by genius right-wing ideologues. It’s the distillation of all the fever dreams of all the very online libertarians who engaged in mental masturbation for decades on 4chan about smashing the hated state once and for all.
The problem is that our system centralizes so much power in the executive, and its checks and balances are so slow-moving and unreliable compared to the speed with which the presidency can act, that you really don’t need very much of a plan at all to wreck the whole thing. All it takes is someone willing to step on the gas and never take their foot off.
I actually hope the Republicans push this string harder. Showing willing to destroy the foundations of American democratic structure added to their arrogance concerning their unforced errors in secure communications makes plain just how thuggish and thin-skinned this gang of jackals and bullies is.
The underlying delusion about the size and meaning of the Republican victory has made these people believe they are free to say and do anything. No matter how much Trump and the Fox sycophants repeat the lies of The Great Mandate, the actual quite close outcome wasn’t a carte blanche to dismantle the government under the guise of “reform” and “efficiency”.
It’s almost amusing to see how much of Trump’s success is dependent on making critics afraid to speak out. Bullies aren’t really likeable especially when they already have so much money they don’t need your lunch money. They just want it. And if you fight back, they’ll rig the rules in their favor.
What horrible people. Will the Democrats in Congress stand up against this? Or are they so cowed and compromised that they cannot bring themselves to be courageous? There’s the question.
Deb Schultz:
“What horrible people. Will the Democrats in Congress stand up against this? Or are they so cowed and compromised that they cannot bring themselves to be courageous? There’s the question.”
They are all horrible people. Answers to your questions: Q1 is no. Q2 is yes.
Fortunately, Dems have AOC in the vanguard!
Eyes on that 2028 run. But how to select a running mate? /s
Yeah, she’s taking over the role of “sheepdog for the DNC” from Sanders. They, like the DT crowd, pander to the “base”, then tell them to hold their nose and “vote” for the “lesser evil”. And that brought us the DT2 regime. The Rs NEED their D buddies to run the charade. The oligarchy bankrolls and controls both “parties”.
“They be runnin game on us”
On a related note, here’s another egregious breach of the law – another person snatched off the street for recognizing Palestinians as human beings – https://www.boston.com/news/local-news/2025/03/26/thousands-protest-after-tufts-grad-student-arrested-by-ice-transferred-out-of-state/
One supporter got it right –
“Elizabeth Warren is not going to save you. The Democratic Party is not going to save you,” Kayali shouted to the huge crowd. “They did not save Rumeysa. She is detained. They did not save hundreds of thousands of my people murdered by U.S. bombs. This whole damn system has to go.”
If you look at the video at the link above, this young woman was not greeted with an overwhelming response when she said that.
I checked a few websites of Mass. Congressional reps. Crickets on a bunch. Ayanna Pressley, whose district this occurred in, does have a short and underwhelming press release –
“This is a horrifying violation of Rumeysa’s constitutional rights to due process and free speech. She must be immediately released,” said Rep. Pressley. “And we won’t stand by while the Trump Administration continues to abduct students with legal status and attack our fundamental freedoms.”
But of course they are just standing by. I’ve yet to see one Congressperson put themselves on the line. If some have at this point, someone please point it out.
If they get the government dismantled before the next election, or if they cancel the next election to gain more time to get the government dismantled, then it won’t matter that they “don’t have” a “mandate”.
The House Democrats tried a standup on C and CR, but Dirty Rat Schumer and the Other Nine Dirty Rats in the Democratic Caucus of the Senate doublecrossed the House Democrats. That’s what Dirty Rats do.
I will be voting in the House election ( if there is one) but I won’t be voting in the Senatorial Election ( if there even is one) because the Democratic Caucus there contains secret agent Republicans and Dirty Rats. So why vote about it?
As Jay Gould is said to have said, “I can hire half the working class to kill the other half.”
Or as Machiavelli likely advised . . .
I had been assuming the 2026 elections would be rigged, and the 2028 ones not held due to a convenient emergency. My guess now is they will just fail to have the 2026 elections at all, given how wildly unpopular ignoring the courts is.
I am beginning to wonder what the end game is here.
do they want blood in the streets? not a rhetorical question
The end game is the wedding of the century: Elon Musk Jr marrying Princess Ivanka Trump Jr.
The endgame as I see it is Israel-Gaza style division of society aka Stable Autocracy, until workers can be replaced permanently by robots.
Not possible. The US is way too large to do any such Israel-Gaza style division.
One example (of many) – the west coast. How is the rest of the US going to bypass those ports since Canda and Mexico won’t be helping?
Yes, there will be blood. I expect the military to finally move in and remove the trump syndicate. It might be peach picking time in Georgia, but it’s banana picking time everywhere else.
my real question is: is blood in the streets something they want?
are they going to use the street violence to further their goals?
Yes. Listen to the hysterical screaming on right wing radio about invasions of foreign monsters and the imperative to ignore the courts because Papa knows best. The right controls the state coercive powers and has legions of heavily armed vigilantes and wannabes. They are chomping at the bit to kill .
Just remember, knee-capping the judiciary will backfire on them. Imagine a Donkey president taking advantage of all of Orange Julius’ “innovations” like ignoring Federal Court orders … oh wait, Biden already did that in the SCOTUS student loan case.
Biden also violated the Bill of Rights by interfering with citizens rights to freedom of speech – see Murthy v. Missouri.
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/23-411_3dq3.pdf
Of course, Trump has gone further, detaining legal immigrants who spoke out against the Gaza genocide without due process:
https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/27/us/rumeysa-ozturk-detained-what-we-know/index.html
I have little faith we will have a free presidential election again. Trump said as much. They are breaking all the checks and balances now precisely because they have no intention of ever ceding power again.
Then expect a civil war.
That may actually be what they want, because no doubt they think they’ll win it.
Well, yes they do. So they can invoke the Insurrection Act and mass exterminate their preferred target demographics.
If some of those demographics are more heavily armed and skilled in use of those arms than the Trump team imagines, then the Stormtrumpers and the Trump-loyal parts of Defense Department may take more casualties than they expect at first. ( Liberals are one demographic the Stormtrumpers don’t have to fear.
If Liberals practice the gun control they preach, they will be unarmed and mass machine gunning them will be as easy as mass machine gunning fish in barrels. Darwin awards for them, I guess . . . )
>>>Liberals are one demographic the Stormtrumpers don’t have to fear.
Maybe, maybe not as even in über Blue California, I believe that a some people including Democrats are armed with a few proto resistance cells rather like the Maquis. Then there is the fact that a third of the nation are Democrats and many more at least in theory believe in the ideas of the Constitution and Bill of Rights even if they despise the words liberal and democratic.
What gave monsters like August Pinochet, Mao Zedong, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and Suharto, the ability to succeed in their actions was that most people did not believe that they would go as far as they did. This disbelief is a reason for Elon Musk’s success so far.
What is more likely to happen is the decapitation strike against both the official mainstream leadership as in the Democratic Party as well as the disappearances, if not outright assassinations, of potential resistance leaders, including strictly peaceful ones, such as happened to JFK, MLK, Malcom X, Fred Hampton, and RFK, which is likely to succeed especially if the polarization continues. If an attempt is made for a Jakarta style or even a smaller El Salvadoran/Guatemalan style slaughter will likely breakdown. If nothing else, everyone else on the regime’s enemies list will be forewarned and prepared.
Grim thoughts thinking our likely future.
There’s an entire subreddit full of liberals who have decided that the second amendment doesn’t have to be the exclusive domain of right wing nutters. Lefties are arming up as they now see the danger of a rogue government. The militia types are suddenly very quiet, turns out it isn’t government tyranny when it’s your team in power.
I’ve historically been anti gun but I’m booking time at the range to take classes.
Part of me wonders if it’s to completely dismantle the federal government and transition to sovereign states that are no longer united
Why didn’t Johnsone say that they are going to stack the deck of the US Supreme Court with another dozen Supreme Court judges as well to make it a Republican Court forever. If he gets rid of District courts, I take it then that all that workload would fall to the different US State Attorneys then? I don’t think that the Trump regime is making many friends by going after lawyers, going after judges and now going after District courts. I guess that the idea is that they can do anything that they want and not worry until 2028 so we’ll see how that works out. But I ask you. Is what they are doing going to play well in Peoria?
Pressure is building for some action by the Supreme Court on how to address those Constitutional roles.
Confusion is building amongst people on who controls what, seemingly at whim.
Not a good combination in the short run, or any run.
But what will Leonard Leo decide about this? That’s the billion dollar question.
Time for a new Inquisition.
The end game is clearly to push SCOTUS into action to theoretically put their stamp of approval on a unitary executive. Pissing off John Roberts seems like a poor choice, but I also wouldn’t call it a stretch for them to have massive career ending dirt on all of the votes they need. On the other hand, someone else pointed out that bullying is the only tactic in the Trump playbook.
Good point, not just a “republican” court, a court packed with cronies and sycophants. But, it’s early days yet in the DT2 regime, give them time.
How about instead of court packing, court “de-stacking?” ICE could make a few visits to the D.C. area.
Amy Coney-Barrett … welcome to Guantanamo Bay!
Kavanaugh … see you in El Salvador!
Since it’s nearly April, my mind goes to a very real but catastrophic decision on the HMS Titanic to test out those sea legs on the maiden journey. Forget rearranging deck chairs. Republicans are all seemingly in to push on, fuel the fires more and run this bad boy quickly into that iceberg. I’d want to believe the Democrats are somewhat different but in full honesty and with hindsight….some distinctions exist but they are seemingly few. That mandate to accept the vaccine or lose your employment pops to mind from recent memory, by example.
Do our leaders and national politicians have brains and inner conversations, or will they simply spew nonsense no matter the outcome?
>>>Do our leaders and national politicians have brains and inner conversations, or will they simply spew nonsense no matter the outcome?
Almost the entire political leadership along with the membership of both the Uniparty and the upper administration has been selected for both their acting skills, and their group loyalty, not for competence in doing their job’s description. Now that real leadership and competence, or at least desire for the same, is needed, they are trapped and acting as if the same old nonsense will suffice.
What I find interesting, though not surprising, is the way these cycles play out. Trump says something usually in the form of some incoherent thought, a threat as part of his extortion racket, or equivalent, then the minions rush to get on his bus.
They then know that logic will get twisted so as to become totally unrecognizable by the echo chamber and everyone will succumb to Trump – implying he is playing some form of n-dimensional chess that we just can’t see because he is way to clever.
So the mass propaganda continues to pour forth, no one stands up to Trump in any meaningful way, and they continue to openly dismantle democracy as we have known it.
Short of mass general strikes, which I bet Trump wants so he can declare martial law and seize control of everything, this is next to impossible to stop.
Oh, the art of sycophancy is soo old…
Apocriphal, of course:
– Japanese imperial court painted their teeth black because an emperor had black, rotten teeth.
– Isabelle the Castille didn’t like washing and her white clothes got a dingy, yellowish hue – white a la Isabelle
– same lady had a lisp: immitating her, now the hole of Spain has a lisp.
When will the trumpian hairstyle take over?
He’s playing quantum politics. Say something that has a superposition of meaning and then eventually settle in one position
Trump isn’t playing politics of any kind, he’s staging a reality TV show. The loyal viewers are eating this stuff up, and will continue to even as inflation skyrockets.
I hate to make a comparison like this, but it keeps coming to mind. The excerpt is from Ian Kershaw’s biography of Hitler:
I will say this process didn’t generally resemble what happened during the first Trump administration, which (ignoring Trump’s fascistic rhetoric and sympathies with the far-right) largely played out like a “normal” Republican presidency until the last months.
I do wonder where this idea came from. It’s certainly not explicit in the Project 2025 playbook (status: https://www.project2025.observer/), but would certainly remove some of the roadblocks to getting achieving the goals.
I would suggest that the aggression toward Columbia University and the Paul Weiss law firm — two very powerful and well connected organizations — were trial balloons: because the entities caved to the threats without material pushback, and there’s no apparent or effective resistance within the House and Senate, the administration sees a green light to push forward with more radical deconstruction of the government.
In potentially related news, the Israeli government has also passed legislation giving them more control over their courts.
(This is not an endorsement of any of these actions!)
Thank you! I was just wondering that
The US Constitution article 3 section 1 commands that Congress establish all of the federal courts other than the US Supreme Court, which is established by the constitution itself. People need to stop saying that there are three equal branches of government. The constitution in its structure and language makes it clear that Congress is the ultimate authority over every branch. It is not possible for the other branches to impeach a member of Congress. It is not possible for the other branches to establish their budgets. Congress has abrogated its authority to the other branches of government. Congress is supposed to declare war. They have allowed the two branches of government most removed from the authority of the people to act in ways that are unaccountable. Nothing allows Trump to refuse to execute the laws and the budget that Congress has established. Nothing allows any president to support genocide in a foreign country. Nothing forbids Congress from establishing ethical rules for the Supreme Court. Nothing stops Congress from preventing the courts from removing themselves from any accountability. Congress could stop the the legal profession from granting itself absolute immunity or inventing qualified immunity for its officers and enforcers. So, Johnson makes a proposition that is actually within the authority of Congress to do and everybody howls. I hear very little howling in the MSM over the bodies piling up in the Levant and have heard even less howling about the destruction of habeas corpus by Congress, Clinton and the Supreme Court. (AEDPA, Harrington, Pinholster.)
Revisiting the history of the Roman Senate, from the start of the Republic to the time of the emperors will give you an idea where all this can go…
“Congress has abrogated its authority to the other branches of government.”
That, in brief, is the entire problem, and has been since the beginning of the current century.
There ought to be a concept of forfeiture, as in, IF Congress does not, on a yearly or bi-annual basis:
1. Pass a budget including individual appropriations for all 12 Cabinet-level agencies, and no Omnibus/CR games;
2. Spend at least a certain percentage of their time on oversight of the executive and judicial branches;
3. invoke the War Powers Act on any Executive military deployments lacking a Congressional AUMF or War declaration;
Then, the entire Congress is deemed to have failed its duty to the Constitution. The current Congress is immediately dissolved within 30 days and new elections are held.
Probably it would require a Con Amendment, but this would end the current situation where Congress’ job description is 1) Day trading 2) Fundraising
Interesting idea. Would the just dismissed members of Congress be eligible to run again? Because there might be 15 or 20% that we’re trying to do a good job and people might want to re-elect them. On the other hand, the dismissed members would probably have an advantage over the newcomers when it comes to campaigning.
For me, I like the simplicity of sortition, and having faith in the ethics of the average working person, in a “if you build a place for it then it could manifest” kind of way.
Since we’re in the realm of pure thought experiment, I’d say let them run again as members of a “failed” Congress.
Taking the money out of the equation would be a better overall solution, IMO. But we can’t have that because SCOTUS stinks.
It follows from what you say that the next big play will be what happens in Congress before the next elections. That will be their best chance to formalize the policies of Trump’s executive orders. We’ll see what kind of sausage can make it through the screen of ambition and local interest that Congress will impose. If Trump really is all tactics and no strategy, that could be a political management problem for him, and he’ll have to cut a lot of deals.
My guess is that the result — if they can do it — will look like an open regularization of extra-constitutional power, something that has usually been episodic or obscured in the past. The Democrats will likely remain supine, at the behest of their consultants and big funders.
As far as civil conflict goes, I live out in very conservative region, and most people seem passive and concerned about their private lives. When a few do talk about revolution or violence, their targets seem very far distant and abstract — none of them are organized, or even think about what comes next. As a group, they are politically passive, like most of the population.
From the Dark Enlightenment article the other day it seems that the DOGE-bags want to create a US of Singapore, and while that sounds creepily dystopian I’m pretty sure they lack the competence. I think Yves take, of a Russia of the 90’s, ruled by Boris Yeltsin and the oligarchs, is more likely.
It’ll be a Singapore-style repressive Panopticon, but with Haiti-level services and social welfare.
I just wanted to apologize for being a soothsayer when it came to My Kevin (since ’07)
In retrospect, all he did was sort out colors of Starburst candy for the Donald, not try and wreck the country as this insipid evang Johnson is longing for~
Sorry!
Getting rid of Federal District courts would not remove the requirement of due process. Fewer courts would mean a higher caseload on the surviving ones, though. And possibly worsen the problem of “blanket” injunctions that extend beyond the immediate parties to the case.
There are things Congress can and probably should do to rein in the worst judges. Congress can change the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure to make temporary injunctions limited to only the parties directly involved in a dispute. That would stop nationwide injunctions at the District Court level. There are currently 11 circuits, and there probably should not be injunctions that extend beyond the jurisdictional reach of each of the 11.
Class actions resulting in injunctions would still extend beyond the class representatives to the full class. Congress could also change the law to eliminate subject matter jurisdiction from certain Federal Courts.
Of course, all of these would be incremental and require a majority in the House and probably a filibuster-proof 60 votes in the Senate. Therefore, they won’t happen, and we’ll get kayfabe instead. Sort of like how the DOGE cuts were never included in the CR that just passed Congress.
getting rid of the courts and then creating a new court system that you will fill with trumps people would seem to be a plan.
It is a sight to beheld to see a political party use political power. The Democrat Party could learn something, or not.
You know, I can always dream:
“February 25, 2009: AP
Today the Obama administration arrested and detained the CEO’s of Citibank, JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, and Countrywide for their role in the sub-prime mortgage crisis and subsequent Global Financial Crisis. Jamie Dimon and others were transferred to Guantanamo Bay, despite an emergency injunction issued by a Federal District Court.
When asked why he did not heed the injunction, President Obama smiled and said “it’s for the good of our democracy … these terrorists must face a military tribunal.
President Obama’s approval rating hit 98%”
Laws are for the poors and political opponents!
The law and taxes are for the “little people”
I think you mean abuse, but I take your point.
Why would they? The current situation suits the Democratic Party leadership just fine. They do not want to actually be a politically-active party. They would rather roll-over in the face of Republican opposition and then fundraise off of the damage that the Republicans did in the process. Winning elections against Republican candidates is entirely unnecessary in in regards to the financial goals of the Democratic Party as they are mainly interested in keeping the spigot open on the flow of money from their wealthy donors.
If I were young, I would be living abroad, or planning on living abroad. The US and UK are not going to be places with high qualities of life.
As some comments have already pointed out: the institutional rot and corruption has been happening for years now. We have had past emperors who have flouted the law, and got away with due to the complicity of Congress and the courts. (Carpet bombing SE Asia (Nixon), the Iraq debacle (Bush Jr.), the largest financial crimes in US history (Obama) The system of “checks and balances” has been crippled and broken by the internal rot.
Depending on how one defines it, I don’t believe the US has had a functioning democracy for a long time, certainly not since Citizens United and other decisions have formalized political bribery and oligarchy.
The DT2 regime sure looks like the logical conclusion to the decades-long downhill slide, and this should come as no surprise. Now the mask is off and the ugly final stages for the Decline And Fall of the US Empire (reference to Edward Gibbon) are clear for all to see.
We agree with JohnnyJames observations.
The whole of America is in Crisis-Form. From bought-off federal/state/county Judges to most every State/Federal politician. Much of this emerged from the Reagan/Thatcher years as Neo-liberalism developed, enabling Big $$$ to corrupt the Executive, Judicial, and Legislative Branches of “America.” Yet the symptoms were already there when the Bankers first instituted into Law “The Fed.”
But what is really heart-rendering is the majority of common citizens in the US who can only grasp a small segment of the turmoil that’s going on. Recent polls reveal nearly 60% of the citizens are functionally illiterate. We desperately need a well educated society of people.
Never in our life have we wished to live in a different country, other than America. Yet if we don’t make that decision very soon, we may not be able survive. And we are not being dramatic, either.
Chris Hedges today:
“And this is where we are. None of the liberal institutions, including the universities, the commercial media and the Democratic Party, will defend us.
They will remain supine, hypocritically betray their supposed principles and commitment to democracy or willingly transform themselves into apologists for the regime.
The purges and silencing of our most courageous and accomplished intellectuals, writers, artists and journalists — begun before Trump’s return to the White House — is being expedited.
Resistance will be left to us. Enemies of the state.”
https://consortiumnews.com/2025/03/27/chris-hedges-surrendering-to-authoritarianism/
Thanks for that link. Hedges points out the tenuous legal authority being dredged up from the worst parts of American history:
So protesting the Gaza Genocide goes against US foreign policy. Glad we got that cleared up; now we know that Genocide is official US Government foreign policy under both Biden and Trump.
Good article, but I would just change the title to “Collaborating With and Cheer-leading for Authoritarianism”
The end game for the Oligarch in Chief and his minions may be to set in motion the Doomsday Project Continuity Of Government (COG) plans that were laid decades before 9/11, to suspend the Constitution and rule the USA from their bunkers. Peter Dale Scott covered this in detail in The American Deep State. This will allow the techno-fascist billionaires to create their “Freedom Cities” without hindrance of the judiciary, or state or local government.
https://books.google.com/books/about/The_American_Deep_State.html?id=fNZLDgAAQBAJ
About those “freedom cities”. They used to be called charter cities and one of the leaders for this movement seems to be The Charter Cities Institute. These was primarily a thing in Africa and Central America, but it looks like Trump has rebranded it and is moving it forward.
So here’s the website that seems to be the organizing force, and they have a podcast, with a transcript. (They’ve changed the name of the podcast from charter cities to freedom cities and they have three new podcast episodes under the new name) https://chartercitiesinstitute.org/category/podcast/
This episode from April of last year seems like a good place to become familiar with this effort: https://chartercitiesinstitute.org/podcast/episode-65-mark-lutter-on-the-charter-cities-ecosystem-zanzibar-and-the-caribbean/
The USA has been on this path for many decades, I was discussing these issues with my HS teacher Paul Moura in 1969.
The question then was how long it would take for the USA to become a formal Autocracy, the answer is now.
What comes next is civil unrest followed by Martial Law, then chaos and Warlordism.
Destroying civil society including the public health system in the middle of one Pandemic with another on the Horizon alone will cause a LOT of deaths and disruption.
Add in the fact of climate disasters and unwinnable wars of choice and the earth will have a sustainable number of Humans in just a few years.
That number may well be zero.
I wonder if the Trump Admin is stupid enough to “Overturn” Bruen Vs NY with an executive order?
Remember, 2025 is the year of Deagal’s prophecy. US population falls to 100M, or something like that.
We’re barely past the first quarter. Lots of time left!
You might think that it can happen quickly, but look at Gaza. Those people survived for 17+ months?
They’re a lot tougher than us. They’ve been accustomed to living in a war zone and subsisting on bread and unclean water for years.
What happens when Boobus Americanus gets to the grocery store and finds it looted?
I can’t even… Conservatives have been extremely successful with a generational project, through the Federalist Society, of installing conservative jurists in Federal courts. So to then go and suggest we just, well, get rid of the Federal courts entirely. Wowzers.
And this is the kind of thing you see in shall we say, less stable, governments, where the court system is attacked.
And now, in America, brought to you by today’s Republican party!
What a stupid timeline.
Yeah, one should always pay heed to the classics. As Aristotle used to say, oligarchy always comes up top… iron rule and such…
Justice Story’s “Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States” provides the argument for separation of powers and the role of judges. Of course, as a Supreme Court judge he would have a bias (compared to say, Jefferson). Another contemporary source is a compendium of writings “State Papers on Nullification” which examines the federalism aspect of powers.
I find these interesting as coming from the vantage of the1830s. Far enough removed from the “founders” as to allow a measure of objectivity but not ancient history either, so how theory and practice related were real time considerations.
Today there seems to be a new federalism, where state AGs use federal district courts to advance state sovereignty/power.
As Johnson knows, that is only possible at the behest of the Israel lobby. The might well order it if judges stymie their efforts to national socialize the US university system, which may be what Johnson’s threat display is about.
Stephen Kotkin and Peter Robinson talked at the Hoover Institute a little while back —
and Stephen was saying, in response to the comment that America is so very polarized today, that he was not worried about polarization, which is normal and strong throughout American history. Demonization is the big issue, and is different:
the belief— and, let’s face it, the media here is too often to blame, as well as political manipulators and the gov. and party machines –“that if the other side gets into power, the world comes to an end. “
“If Trump gets in the USA is finished.”
“No, if Biden gets in we’re done.”
This is where we are now. And the balance among our institutions is now breaking down.
When a perceived threat is believed to be existential, then everything is justified. All rules are gone —violence is justified, anything goes.
This kind of existentialism and demonization are a lie and bad.
Our current extreme situation comes from this demonization — and sometimes from all sorts of good ideas that have had perverse and unintended consequences.
Stephen goes on to say (N.B.>> bc here is an area we could reshape )
that our system is designed to thwart any move towards a broad coalition.
Primaries are one example: no cross party vote allowed; and only a small percentage of people vote in these to begin with.
You can get 50% + 1% and you can ram through your agenda for your constituents. You can get three Supreme Court justices and colossal tax cuts with the smallest margin —and can reinvent all institutions from top to bottom.
This also includes the attempt to federalize voting rules, etc. under Biden.
How stupid is all this? And it’s because of the demonization!
The “If the other side wins it’s the end of the world” mentality makes for this extreme move away from the center, and away from the notion of people having far more interests in common than not.
Today this is about to climax.
We need to find a way to get the system back to the median voter. you don’t get all you want with 51% of the vote —neither party should! (Trump got 49-50 million, Kamala 47+ million, as I recall. Every politician likes to believe they have a mandate.) Kotkin cites some of the ideas of Yuval Levin on how to use incentives.
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As far as the American tendency for Lawfare, this caught Solzenhitsyn’s eye even in 1979.
I find it compelling that Solzenhitsyn wrote about this in his ’79 Harvard graduation speech —in a section of that talk entitled ‘Legalistic Life,’ and coming from a Russian who endured the Gulag, it’s a strong statement, the fact that he noticed the excess of this abuse of law in America enough to focus on it in a limited speech.
“Legalistic Life:
“If one is right from a legal point of view, nothing more is required, nobody may mention that one could still not be entirely right, and urge self-restraint or a renunciation of these rights, call for sacrifice and selfless risk.. (An oil company is legally blameless when it buys up an invention of a new type of energy in order to prevent its use. A food product manufacturer is legally blameless when he poisons his produce to make it last longer: After all, people are free not to purchase it.)…
“I have spent all my life under a Communist regime and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed. But a society with no other scale but the legal one is also less than worthy of man. A society based on the letter of the law and never reaching any higher fails to take advantage of the full range of human possibilities. The letter of the law is too cold and formal to have a beneficial influence on society. Whenever the tissue of life is woven of legalistic relationships, this creates an atmosphere of spiritual mediocrity that paralyzes man’s noblest impulses.
“And it will be simply impossible to bear up to the trials of this threatening century with nothing but the supports of a legalistic structure.” – Solzenhitsyn