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Tuesday
In a ruling that most of us never thought we’d see, our rightwing Supreme Court has approved immunity for presidents–or at least Trump–when they break the law when carrying out “official acts.” Horrified by how immunity “now ‘lies about like a loaded weapon’ for any President that wishes to place his own interests, his own political survival, or his own financial gain, above the interests of the Nation,” Sonia Sotomayor wrote,
The Court effectively creates a law-free zone around the President, upsetting the status quo that has existed since the Founding….When he uses his official powers in any way, under the majority’s reasoning, he now will be insulated from criminal prosecution. Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune.
And then:
Even if these nightmare scenarios never play out, and I pray they never do, the damage has been done. The relationship between the President and the people he serves has shifted irrevocably. In every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law.
Given that America’s founders had a particular king in mind when they wrote the Constitution, I share a sonnet on George III by an angry Percy Shelley, written when the British monarch was insane and a year from death. If Trump is reelected president and begins (among other things) siccing the justice department on his political enemies on the grounds that they present a danger to the republic, I could imagine him devolving into the kind of figure that Shelley describes:
England in 1819
An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying King;
Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow
Through public scorn,—mud from a muddy spring;
Rulers who neither see nor feel nor know,
But leechlike to their fainting country cling
Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow.
While this king feeds parasitically off his country, the people are suffering. Shelley goes on to mention untilled fields, which would have been commons areas seized by wealthy landowners, and soldiers firing upon protesters. (In our own, think of GOP tax cuts for billionaires and Trump fantasizing about the military shooting Black Lives Matter protesters in the legs.) In Shelley’s time, there are so-called Christians who don’t bother to open their Bibles—“a book sealed”—which sounds like those MAGA Christians who follow the gospel according to Trump. Meanwhile, many Americans feel the same contempt for the GOP House of Representatives that Shelley feels for England’s House of Lords (“a senate, Time’s worst statute, unrepealed”).
Shelley ends with a slight silver lining. More on that in a moment. Here are the final eight lines:
A people starved and stabbed in the untilled field,—
An army, whom liberticide and prey
Makes as a two-edged sword to all who wield;
Golden and sanguine laws which tempt and slay;
Religion Christless, Godless—a book sealed;
A senate, Time’s worst statute, unrepealed—
Are graves from which a glorious Phantom may
Burst, to illumine our tempestuous day.
A revolutionary optimist who believes that the long arc of history bends towards justice, Shelley does think that this leechlike monarchy is dying out and that the Phantom of liberty will burst through to “illumine our tempestuous day.” America’s Supreme Court, by contrast, appears determined to bring back authoritarian rule.
