The verdict in Trump’s “hush money’ election fraud case is guilty on all 34 counts, causing many people to jump for joy and proclaim that the justice system is working fine. A part of the justice system worked and could be celebrated. However, other parts of the justice system are not working very well.
It so happens that other parts of the justice system provide some of the reasons that Donald Trump is still around and threatening our very system of government.
Let’s look at the U. S. Supreme Court. For this discussion, I will skip over the outrageous ethical issues with some of the Supreme Court Justices. At a minimum, a well-functioning Court would have two of these justices recuse themselves from participating in cases that involve Donald Trump. Justice Alito supported the January 6th insurrection with his public display of insurrectionist symbols. And Justice Thomas’s wife participated actively in the efforts to block the count of votes for the 2020 presidential election. Note also that in 2022, Thomas was the only dissent in a Court ruling rejecting Trump’s bid to block the release of White House records to Congress.
But Alito and Thomas are not recusing themselves. The Republicans like it that way as these Justices support their political positions. The Supreme Court remains the only Court with no code of ethics.
Let us address some of the issues produced by the majority of the Court. The Court’s actions have a decided right-wing political bent. The Court is treating Trump’s claim of immunity as a serious issue. Despite efforts on the part of Department of Justice lawyers, they are taking the long way around, holding up the judicial processes such that two federal trials against Trump will probably not be held before the elections in November.
The Court signaled its intent to overturn parts of the 14th Amendment to keep states from barring Trump from running for office in their state when provisions were added to the constitution long ago specifically to prevent officials who have participated in an insurrection from holding office.
The First Amendment to the Constitution states that “Congress (or anyone else) shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” This is meant to protect all religions from state-sponsored ideologies. However, the current Court is giving our law a conservative Christian direction.
Five of the six conservative Justices on the Court are conservative Christians, and some of their decisions undermine the freedom of religion by dictating that the government’s policy, say on abortion, should be the same as some Christian conservatives, ignoring the positions of millions of other Americans who have different religions and beliefs.
If you think these are exaggerations of the Supreme Court’s activities, please note that the U.S. Supreme Court installed the Republican President after the 2000 election by first stopping the Florida Court’s order to recount ballots and then later ruling that George W. Bush was the winner because there was not enough time left to finish the recount. Remember, if they had not stopped the counting, there would have been enough time to finish the count.
The Department of Justice has been problematic. It is ridiculous for Trump and the Republicans to keep proclaiming that the Biden administration is weaponizing the Department of Justice against Republicans when that is precisely what Trump did when he was President. Further, he repeatedly complained that the Attorney General should be his personal attorney and perform duties for him like the former mob lawyer Roy Cohn.
Interestingly, that is the function that his second Attorney General, William Barr, performed. A report from two independent, nonpartisan groups focused on ethics in government harshly criticized the politicization of the Department of Justice under Barr. These agencies recounted how Barr used the DOJ to further Trump’s personal and political objectives and recommended that Barr be impeached.
Among the many well-known actions by Attorney General Barr was the misrepresentation of the Mueller Report in 2018, his “contemptuous disregard for legitimate congressional oversight and his support, both tacit and explicit, for actions that undermine the separation of powers.”
Our current options are limited. We are at a point where we must use our problematic electoral system to elect people accountable to democracy, or we will slide—with eyes wide open—into totalitarianism.