Ex-Trump officials warn about unintended consequence of Supreme Court immunity ruling https://t.co/zbX62MguBI
— Raw Story (@RawStory) July 4, 2024
According to NBC News, a pair of former DOJ officials "said it would give Trump cover to improperly pressure the Justice Department for his own political benefit — to prosecute an enemy or go easy on an ally — by saying he was executing his official duties as president." One warned: “It gives him tacit approval to keep doing it. It sets him up to do the things he has said: to investigate people and send them to jail.”
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Former Justice Department official Jeffrey Clark, an ongoing Trump loyalist who was indicted alongside him in the Georgia election racketeering case for his role in trying to overturn the results in that state, had a similar — if positive — assessment of that.
“He can investigate whom he sees fit to investigate, working with the Justice Department,” he said on a podcast this week. “And he can prosecute whom he sees fit to prosecute.”So Biden can investigate Clarence Thomas, and send him to jail?
Cool.😎
The majority on the Court didn't reject the idea that Trump could commit murder and get away with it or order people to assassinate people, that was right there in the court record and they didn't refute that. They also didn't address that with the pardon power he could immunize his thugs. I have every confidence the Roberts Court, having given him dictatorial powers retroactively would be OK with him pardoning the people he sends to kill. Considering how they reject the concept of rights eminating from the enumerated rights in the Constitution when it is The People who have, it's remarkable how many of those they invent for themselves and those in power. Especially as they just took away powers in regard to regulatory agencies of the executive. As Clare McCaskill said the other day, they're just making it up.
ReplyDeleteAs much as everyone is consumed by SCOTUS and the Trump decision, I have been more moved by a decision that has received little attention, Grants Pass, the case regarding homelessness. For my seminary class, Introduction to Theology…, we have been reading Roberto Goizueta, a Hispanic theologian who writes on liberation theology as it applies in the US and particularly a Theology of Accompaniment (Caminemos Con Jesus: Toward a Hispanic/Latino Theology of Accompaniment) and Hans Jonas, a Jewish theologian writing about morality after Auschwitz (Mortality and Morality: A Search for the Good after Auschwitz). As a weekly reflection for the class I submitted the following:
ReplyDeleteLast Thursday evening I was working on my Goizueta reading and was deep into the section on choosing to option for the poor. Such lines as “That is precisely why our society continues to alienate, abandon and exclude the poor- because face-to-face with the poor, one is forced to confront intrinsically relational reality”, [I]n its deepest sense, poverty refers to the act of solidarity with the materially poor, an act undertaken voluntarily as a protest against the evil of material poverty.”, and “This preferential option for the poor, or identification with the least significant, reveals 1) a God who is identified with the poor, who in turn reveals (2) the injustice and idolatry of those who, seeking God elsewhere, deny the poor the dignity bestowed on them by God.” Friday morning I went to work (for those from the synchronous class, I am a full time lawyer by profession) and I logged into a legal site to see the latest decisions being handed down by the Supreme Court. One of those was Grants Pass, a case about an anti-camping ordinance that effectively criminalizes homelessness. The conservative majority of the court upheld the ordinance. As the dissent says, the ordinance criminalizes an essential biological function for those too poor to have a place to live. The homeless are fined, jailed, with the ultimate goal to drive them from the locality. (These fines and incarcerations of course increase their poverty and make it even harder to obtain employment or housing). From my computer screen I can, even without moving my head, look up and look through my office window across the Merrimack River in Manchester, New Hampshire to the far shore where there are often homeless encampments.
I finished the Goizueta reading over my lunch hour. “We live in a U.S. society, however, for whom the present is divorced from the past and future. It is no accident, then, that this society systematically depreciates its elderly, while abandoning its youth to violence, poverty, and self-hatred.” Yes, our society, including its most august institutions, does this to the elderly, youth and most certainly the poor by any measure. The whole experience has been completely jarring and disassociating. I am not unfamiliar with the realities of poverty. For seven years I volunteered monthly at an inner city soup kitchen and food pantry. We not only served food but sat and ate with our guests. For 5 years to that same program, I led our congregation’s annual project to provide a complete set of a week of groceries to over a hundred families to bridge them when their SNAP benefits ran out to the end of the month. I am not naïve to the incredible challenges the poor face in our US society with a minimal frayed safety net and cultural, racial and other barriers that are near insurmountable. Nearly 35 years of AA meetings has also on a near daily basis put me in contact with addicts, the poor and the homeless. It was seeing the official stamp of approval from our highest court for not only optioning the poor, but the exact opposite of excluding the poor that was so emotionally and spiritually jolting. The SCOTUS decision is not without consequence. Monday, the Manchester mayor, based on the Grant Pass decision, announced the city council would consider an anti-camping ordinance. Tuesday night the council passed the ordinance with immediate effect. Yesterday the police started arresting the homeless.
ReplyDeleteWhy, as a society, do we want the homeless and poor to be invisible, to literally disappear? Is it our fear, “but for the grace of God do I?”. Is it fear of our own mortality, to see those that on a daily basis live so close to the line of death (and too frequently cross over from overdose, exposure, drowning in the river, violence, untreated illness and more). Both Jonas and Goizueta instead call us into responsibility with the others. With Jonas, “we intuitively recognize in this ontological distinction of man – his capacity for responsibility - not only its essentiality by also a value.” This responsibility extends to those in the future, but I think his call for responsibility is more immediate. When discussing Auschwitz (pg. 133), Jonas states “Dehumanization by utter degradation and deprivation preceded their dying, no glimmer of dignity as left to the freights bound for the final solution, hardly a trace of it was found in the surviving skeleton specters of the liberated camps.” As Jonus makes brutally clear, responsibility and morality for the future arises from and must include the present. Goizueta calls us into optioning the poor, with added caution that we need to be in relationship with the poor, otherwise we will end up treating them as objects despite our best intentions. “The struggle for social justice will, in the long run, simply perpetuate the dehumanization of poor persons if not undertaken together with poor persons.”
ReplyDeleteJonas and Goizueta both speak of the denial of dignity to those excluded. To start with conferring dignity, by a path of relationship, then accepting responsibility from that dignity and relationship, to finally arrive at a morality that reflects our caring and love for the “other”, the poor, the outsider, the marginalized, the oppressed, seems a parallel of the two theologians. If only we could even begin this journey as a society.
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All add this to the reflection, the Goizueta writing is the most radical and insightful reading I have had on US culture and a theological alternative thereto. It even puts much of the left to shame, with its recognition that American individualism and ultimately economic individualism over political and religious individualism infects all aspects of our culture. To read and recognize how it can even turn multi-culturalism into a further reinforcement of the dominant culture has been eye-opening. The centrality of relationship and love as fundamental has been deeply affecting.