The Daily Reid: A wannabe king and his stooge Court

Leonard Leo's hand-crafted Supreme Court swings wildly from shredding the constitution to avoiding it altogether ... all to serve the king they crowned.

The Roberts Doctrine

To paraphrase the old Kanye West, back when he was still great: John Roberts … does not care … about Black people. He apparently doesn’t care all that much about them having the opportunity to vote, or to go to college … nor does he seem to care about Section 3 of the 14th Amendment … or State laws barring insurrectionists from their ballots based on Section 3. He doesn’t seem to mind all that much if oil and gas companies despoil the Earth (or if they get sued over it, since that puts the power right back in the hands of the courts). And he doesn’t seem too pressed about rich people buying elections. What the current chief justice does seem to care a LOT about, is his reputation… his … legitimacy. Well the court’s legitimacy, anyway, or at least the perception that it still somehow exists after he and Leonard Leo’s other recruits effectively ignoring the constitution to let Trump back into office so he can “act boldly (and of course deliver more tax cuts and deregulation to Leo’s friends) and gave him the powers of a king. Roberts seems to care about not looking like the guy who ripped away healthcare and abortion rights from millions of Americans, but that seems like cold comfort given his apparent lack of persuasiveness when it comes to issues of political-religious dogma, and where we are now.

The Roberts court has in almost every way been an activist one, which has leaned heavily into the idea of repealing the 20th century, and ripping up the various rights that were expanded to groups beyond wealthy white Christian men during what’s been called “The American Century.” John Roberts may or may not want the whole 20th century to go away but he certainly strikes me as a monarchist, not so different from the Hyde to his Jekyl, the irascible Sam Alito or his partner in brazen apparent corruption, the notorious vacation mascot, Clarence Thomas. The court under Roberts’ watch has seemed to aggressively seek to not just replace the American president with a would-be king, but to become his most powerful hands and lord ministers.

But when it comes to the regime they so assiduously birthed, Justice Roberts and his fellow conservatives have suddenly rediscovered their modesty, issuing narrow, technocratic rulings that allow the court to obey their chosen king, while covering themselves in the veneer of judicial restraint.

So far this week, Roberts has declined to order the return of a mistakenly deported Maryland man from the Salvadoran gulag the regime shipped him off to … and the five Leo men on the Court have refused to stand in the way of the regime disappearing people — most with no criminal record and many with active asylum claims — using the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 — a wartime law once used to lock Japanese Americans in concentration camps based solely on their racial identity.

From the BBC:

The US Supreme Court has cleared the way for President Donald Trump to use a rarely-invoked wartime powers law to rapidly deport alleged gang members - for now.

A lower court had temporarily blocked the deportation of alleged Venezuelan gang members to El Salvador on 15 March, ruling that the actions under the 1798 Alien Enemies Act needed further scrutiny.

Trump has alleged that the migrants were members of the Tren de Aragua gang "conducting irregular warfare" against the US and could therefore be removed under the Act.

While the administration is claiming the ruling as a win, the justices mandated that deportees must be given a chance to challenge their removal.

"The notice must be afforded within a reasonable time and in such a manner as will allow them to actually seek habeas relief in the proper venue before such removal occurs," the justices wrote in the unsigned decision on Monday.

"The only question is which court will resolve that challenge," they wrote.

Monday's ruling said the challenge - brought by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) on behalf of five migrants - was raised improperly in a Washington DC court and not in Texas, where the migrants are confined.

The 5-4 ruling, with Amy Coney Barrett partially joining the dissent of the three liberal women (touching off a fresh round of maga attacks on her) versus all five conservative men, came with this scathing and frightening dissent by Justice Sotomayor:

And of course, Trump and his regime are already going there…

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Tuesday that President Donald Trump is exploring legal pathways to “deport” U.S. citizens to El Salvador, where the administration has already arranged to house deported immigrants in a prison known for its human rights abuses. (Watch the video, above.)

Leavitt suggested the effort would be limited to people who have committed major crimes, but Trump has also mentioned the possibility of sending people who commit lesser offenses abroad.

Any such move on the part of the Trump administration is certain to be challenged in court. It is also not clear what legal authority could be used to justify expelling U.S. citizens from their homeland.

“These would be heinous, violent criminals who have broken our nation’s laws repeatedly. These are violent, repeat offenders on American streets,” Leavitt told reporters at a press briefing.

“The president has said if it’s legal, right, if there is a legal pathway to do that. He’s not sure, [and] we are not sure if there is,” Leavitt continued. “It’s an idea that he has simply floated and has discussed very publicly in the effort of transparency.”

Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One on Sunday that he “love[s]” the idea of removing U.S. citizens, adding that it would be an “honor” to send them to El Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele — an eager partner in Trump’s schemes.

Trump also proposed the idea in March, when Tesla vehicles were being vandalized and set ablaze in protest of CEO Elon Musk’s heavy-handed involvement in the Trump administration. Musk has been running the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, taking credit for huge cuts to the federal workforce and federal services.

And it’s hard to cobble together in your mind, a five-count on this court that would stop him. That’s how far we’ve fallen.

No wonder the world hates us and foreigners are losing interest in coming here even to visit, or investing here. Trump is clearly unhinged — signing orders to allow our federal lands to be ripped apart for coal mining and claiming coal miners wouldn’t want to live lavishly like he does, because they’d rather be underground … mining coal. That’s when he’s not hurling insane tariff threats at China or banging on about Hannibal Lecter while he’s eating the economy with fava beans, with a nice Chianti.

And then there are the erasures…

"The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became the truth."

- George Orwell, 1984

While Donald Trump is busy living out his 19th century economic fantasy and taking our 401ks and people’s retirements down with it, his sordid regime is almost frantically pushing to scrub out the history of women, gay and trans people, and especially Black Americans from this nation’s official records, and where they are allowed to remain, to sanitize them into nothingness.

Having ransacked federal websites to remove any traces of racial and gender diversity, sacked personnel at every agency with the Supreme Court’s approval (with the Food and Drug Administration the latest to face the chainsaw) and forcing those who remain to constantly justify their presence, the wicked gaze of the regime is now trained squarely on Black museums, monuments, and the Smithsonian’s second most visited treasure, the National Museum of African-American History and Culture, colloquially known as the “Blacksonian.” From April Ryan at Black Press USA:

“Black people are not going to stand for this,” says Nikole Hannah Jones, the author of the 1619 Project. She is responding to reports that President Trump is targeting the slavery section of the National Museum of African-American History and Culture. The museum’s slavery facts and substantiating artifacts of the 250 years of the enslavement of Africans in America, curated by historians, are the bull’s-eye for the Trump administration. “I think that this is a sign of a deep sickness to think that you could go to the National Museum of African-American History and Culture and feel the need to erase how Black people got here,” emphasized Jones, who added, “To erase or minimize the slavery and freedom part of that story is to create a fantasy of how we got here. We literally would not be in the United States without slavery.”

According to sources, Smithsonian officials are secretly strategizing to stave off presidential actions for Republican support to preserve the history. Smithsonian officials hope once they have secured Republican support, they can present the attempt to save the artifacts and museum integrity to President Trump. In its lower portion, the museum takes tourists on a historic timeline journey from American slavery to Jim Crow, the Civil Rights movement with the casket of Emmett Till, and simulations of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, among other noted moments in American history. “We cannot be a free democratic society when you have the most powerful people in the world who will take control of a history museum and force them to tell a lie,” said a distraught Jones, who has been tracking the museum’s movements more closely since its director Kevin Young left his post last week after four years on the job. Over a million people visited the museum in 2022, making it the second-most toured Smithsonian Museum.

This desperation to rewrite the history of the United States and replace the truth with happy slaves in the fields and noble slave owners is so bizarre and desperate, it’s almost psychotic. And it filters both down from the Trump regime, its inadequate men like Pete Hegseth and the Project 2025 Christian nationalists, and up from the maga base. The stories I’ve heard in just the past few days about maga visitors hectoring and harassing workers at Black historical sites — barking at African-American park rangers and guides at historical monuments with slags like: “you would have been my slave back in those days” and demanding that they alter their retelling of the history of those sites to the white visitors’ liking would chill you to the bone. And because these are federal employees, they can’t say what’s on their minds. They have to bite down their rage, like many of their grandparents and great-grandparents had to do in the bad old days before the civil rights movement’s mid-century triumphs and with as much dignity as they can muster, absorb the abuse (or risk getting fired.)

We are going back in time. And no, those were not “the good old days.”

I think a lot about the Black families who combed their attics and basements for cherished family heirlooms to donate to the Smithsonian and other federally funded museums, and the proprietors of the Lorraine Motel and the many churches and private homes who turned those properties over to the National Parks Service in hopes that they would be cherished and protected for posterity by a federal government that at this point, barely exists. They intended those gifts to serve as silent educators of future generations. Now, Trump and his noxious regime stand in a position to seize, bury or burn them all if they see fit, in order to make even the possibility of such education, including for future white generations, disappear.

Meanwhile, the regime apparently plans to restore the monuments to Southern treason to honored places in our national landscape, as if to spit in the face of the very union they pretend to govern. The message to those of us who aren’t white, straight, male Christian conservatives is clear: this is not your country. We can erase you or we can even deport and remove you, and there is no law, no court, and no God or reason that will stop us. Project 2025 is now the law of the land, and our people, and even some of your people, voted for it. Now everyone will kneel to white supremacy, or be banished to a hell on earth.

There is no protection for Black lives or Black treasures in a country ruled by a neoconfederate regime. And there is no hope of consistent protection or even decency in a nation where a third of all voters keep insisting on electing men like Donald Trump, and another third choose to sleep through creeping fascism. And the victims of this rot are not going to just be Black folks, or Latino immigrants, or pro-Palestinian protesters. All of us are going to suffer for the egregious mistake of returning a felonious monster to the White House.

Trump and far too many of his fellow Republicans have repeatedly demonstrated, in every way they possibly can, that they don’t necessarily believe there was really anything wrong with enslaving millions of African people, and then subjugating the inheritors of their scarred and tormented lives. They don’t necessarily believe there was really anything wrong with pushing the bodies of white, Asian, Latino and Black laborers and even their children to the brink of death in 12 hour-a-day sweatshops, while the rich men who owned the factories and mills got fatter and the blood in their veins got colder, and their wives took their powerlessness and votelessness out on their maids. They certainly don’t believe the rich should pay taxes. They believe the poor should pay, through tariffs if necessary. They don’t seem to believe in providing a dignified retirement to the elderly or food and medicine to the poor or the dignity of work that also allows time for leisure to American men and women, or in bodily autonomy for women or that trans folk should just be allowed to live their lives in peace or books should be allowed to challenge our civic assumptions. They certainly believe in money — in allowing the few to hoard as much of it as they possibly can while the rest figure out how to make it, somehow. And as the Bible says, the love of money is the root of all evil.

Trump himself has long made it clear that he cares nothing about any American of any race, creed or color—only about himself. And yet, he has been imbued by tens of millions of voters, greedy, overconfident tech bros, and a bought and paid for Republican party and Supreme Court with almost unlimited power to destroy this nation in order to rebuild it as his, his chosen oligarchs’, and likely Russia’s and Saudi Arabia’s personal plaything.

Let’s hope we survive this nightmare long enough to outlast and defeat this mad king and his Golgoth army.