Some good news today. Sort of. An appeals court voted 2 to 1 that Congress has the right to get Trump’s financial information. Is it a surprise that the 1 was appointed by a certain very stable genius? That single vote is probably the real news, though it will be overlooked for the most part.
Before Individual-1 started residing in the White House, we were already part way toward a judiciary ready and willing to interpret the law to benefit one political party over the other, more specifically to create a body of law that implicitly declared that there was one set of laws for Democrats and another for Republicans. We saw it recently when the Supreme Court ruled in favor of gerrymandering, which has overwhelmingly been used as a device to entrench Republican minorities as majorities in state legislatures and Congressional delegations.
We are going to see this more and more. Congressional power wielded by Republicans will be absolute; Democrats will be reduced to impotence. The same will hold for presidents. On the other hand, the judiciary will be impotent when it comes to restraining Republicans, but all powerful in the case of Democrats.
The case involving Trump’s tax returns is a no-brainer, as are the many cases that will be filed and litigated regarding Congress’s power to obtain evidence in an impeachment inquiry. It may be that Roberts will feel the need to throw Trump under the bus that is already on top of countless folks Trump threw there. I’d say the chance of the appeals court ruling being upheld is 50%, when it should be 100%. But looking forward, once the court does not have to deal with the antics of a man who continually confesses to his own criminality, it will be free to impose a bipartate system of laws. We can expect to see it in full flower should the Democrats take both houses and the presidency in 2020. Medicare for All, if passed, will be found unconstitutional, and questions will be left hanging about Medicare for Some and Social Security. Presidential directives and administrative regulations will be squashed. If the Republicans make a comeback in 2024, deference to the coequal branches will suddenly be back in fashion, brought to you by absurd distinctions even Antonin (“this case cannot be cited again”)Scalia would have trouble stomaching (though he would). We have gone through this before in our history (see the Supreme Court’s fight against progressivism in the first three decades of this century, not to mention the transfer of the protections of the Fourteenth Amendment from the freed slaves to corporations), though I tend to doubt that there has ever been the level of intellectual dishonesty we are going to see in the years ahead. That dissenting vote in the Trump tax case is just one of many harbingers of things to come.
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