The Ante-1776 Wing of The Supreme Court

"Donald J. Trump v United States" is aptly named

The Redcoats are coming.

Trump v United States is just that.

It is a trial over the most egregious anti-American crime ever committed: an attempt, by a man occupying the presidential office, to overturn an election, keep himself in office, and end the American Constitutional Republic.

Ignoring the enormity of the crime and the pressing need to see it brought before a jury is in itself criminal negligence.

Yet, that is just what the “conservative” Supreme Court did yesterday.

Actual conservative Judge Michael Luttig put it neatly: “The Court and the parties discussed everything but the specific question presented.”

“This is the actual crisis,” Susan Glasser writes in the New Yorker, stating what should be the obvious. “The present worry is not what some theoretical future President will do to destroy the constitutional order but what this specific former President has already attempted to do and threatens to do once again.”

Listening to the questioning by four of the “justices” (considering the idea that a president is above the law is not something that indicates one is an actual Justice) yesterday was mindboggling.

What Holding a President Subject to Law Destroys is Monarchy

Holding a president subject to the law, they suggested, would destroy the presidency. No. As the Founders understood, what placing the president under the law destroys is monarchy.

In the world of fact—a world from which they blasted off long ago—placing the president under, not above, the law is essential to the American Experiment in democracy.

Even to entertain the idea that a president should be totally above the law is to say that those who participated on the patriot side in the American Revolution were on the wrong side.

“Wasn’t the whole point that the president was not a monarch,” Justice Elena Kagan asked rhetorically, “and the president was not supposed to be above the law?”

As Heather Cox Richardson points out in her latest Letter, Georgia State University Constitutional law professor Anthony Michael Kreis captured the absurdity of the “conservative” position nicely:

Unbelievable that Supreme Court justices who see forgiving student loans, mandating vaccines, and regulating climate change as a slippery slope toward tyranny were not clear-eyed on questions of whether a president could execute citizens or stage a coup without being prosecuted.

They were worrying about a phantom neutering of the presidency at some point in the future and ignoring the clear and present danger of a former president is dead set on neutering the American people and the Constitutional Republic.

Take America Back … to before 1776

It is now clear that the “when” to which the Trump movement wants to “Take America Back” is not just to before 1964, before 1933, before the Progressive Era, or even before the Enslavers’ Rebellion. It is to before 1776—to when America was ruled by a king.

“In seeking to return to the Presidency,” Glasser wrote, “it’s as though [Trump] has reimagined America as a kingdom and himself the king, an absolute ruler whose actions, no matter how sordid, cannot be stopped or subject to prosecution in a court of law.”

Stop calling the Alito-Thomas-Gorsuch-Kavanaugh gang on the Supreme Court the “conservative wing.” There is nothing conservative about pondering the possibility that a president is above the law. Nothing, that is, conservative in American terms or lower-case R republican terms. It would only be conservative in an absolute monarchy.

They are the monarchial wing, the anti-1776 and ante-1776 wing.

An image from a 2017 essay in Foreign Policy, “The Madness of King Donald,” provides us with a glimpse of what the ante-1776 wing of the Court might give us:

Image by Bruce Emmett

If they have their way, we may be looking at Junior as a future King Donald II.