Trump’s violent insurrection didn’t quite work — but six people in black robes went much further, without weapons
As we learn ever more details of Donald Trump’s attempted coup to overthrow the American Republic — what might be titled “Six Days in January” — we realize just how close it came to succeeding. The evidence indicates that the then-president’s approach to staying in the presidency was similar to the “bold, persistent experimentation” to deal with the Great Depression that Franklin D. Roosevelt advocated when running for the office in 1932: “Take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.” Apart, of course, from the “admit it frankly” part, that appears to be exactly how the Trump plan to steal the election worked. If one method failed, the conspirators would move on to the next, with a violent insurrection being the final option if all else failed.
It is now clear that there was another alternative, in the event that the attempt to end democracy through a violent attack on the Capitol failed: In Guthrie’s terminology, to rob Americans of democracy with a fountain pen instead of a six-gun.
Two days after Cassidy Hutchinson provided a riveting account of how the then-president was determined to overthrow the government by force, the three people he appointed to the Supreme Court showed how to overthrow the government by decree.
Full democracy — which was first achieved in the United States in 1964-65 — is incompatible with promoting the interests of a small minority over those of a vast majority. The objectives of the greedy few might stand a better chance in the least democratic branch of the American Republic. In 1982, the Federalist Society was created to develop an alternative legal outlook to the then-dominant social and economic views in the profession. This long game has worked magnificently. All six of the Supreme Court justices who voted to overturn Roe v. Wade and to severely limit regulation of business in West Virginia v. EPA came out of the Federalist Society.
Those two bookends on the court’s final week nicely show that a price the forces of greed were willing to pay to assure America would have a new Gilded Age was to give us a Gilead Age.
The Supreme Court of the United States now in effect holds that corporations and zygotes are persons, but women are not.
https://www.salon.com/2022/07/09/seven-days-in-june-a-coup-more-effective-than-donald/