It was a nice run while it lasted, but, as the saying goes, all good things must come to an end. Granted, it wasn’t always observed in practice1, but at least it existed as a principal, a goal to strive towards.
Today six of the folks who get to wear those fetching black robes in Washington, D.C., decided it didn’t really apply to Presidents. Oh, sure, they carved out a theoretical way in which it could…but then they hemmed that approach in with enough barriers and restrictions as to make it highly unlikely, if at all possible, to hold a President accountable for actions that in anyone else would be seen as criminal.
That’s not an uncommon approach in politics. Take a look at most any community which wants to say, restrict multifamily housing, and you’ll find yes, indeedy, there are ways to apply for permits to build such. But they generally result in making potential projects so uneconomic that they’ll never be built.
Our esteemed conservative jurists did that today, granting the Presidency de facto criminal immunity, even though de jure they can claim they didn’t. All hail our new kings!
Which illustrates a peculiar conceptual failure this same conservative worldview has stumbled into in the past. When Antonin Scalia wrote the first of the two opinions which elevated the 2nd Amendment to near divine status, he did so based on clear logic…up until the time he had to explain why his arguments, which could easily have been extended to cover almost any lethal instrument, did not grant citizens the right to possess things like battle tanks, howitzers, machine guns2 or nuclear weapons.
The logic got a little convoluted at that point.
Which is, as any good financial analyst3 or programmer4 knows, is a sign You’re Doing Something Wrong. There’s a better way, someplace, that you’ve missed…because your (perhaps vaunted) logic has led you astray5.
But our six conservative jurists were either too dumb (unlikely) or too committed to getting to an answer they wanted for other reasons to see this. The price of which was creating that sure-it’s-possible-but-only-in-your-dreams framework to holding Presidents to account under the law.
That’s what we get for not fighting harder to keep rabid self-interest at bay in our society and our institutions of government. So now, if we want to win back to a better place than we’re on course to get to, we’re going to have to fight much, much harder.
Brace yourselves.
A few notes on the image in this post:
- You are welcome to use it wherever you want, provided you don’t change it. That’s because the imagery it’s based on is licensed to me that way.
- I appreciate Sam Alito inspiring me to use the upside-down flag. I wasn’t aware of its significance until the stories broke about it flying over his home. BTW, I don’t for a minute accept Sam’s argument that he had no role in the choice to fly his flag upside-down. Or, more accurately, his would have to be a very, very, very unusual marriage for him not to have had a role in the decision. I say this from experience: there are things I would do on our property that Barbara doesn’t agree with, and vice versa. At the very least, Sammy agrees with the message he claims his wife wanted to convey. Thanx, Sam!
Consult anyone with more than a minor amount of melanin in their skin and you’ll quickly find lots of examples ↩
unless they were merely de facto machine guns, aka rifles with bump stocks ↩
me, at least formerly ↩
again, me, and still ↩
This happens over and over again to me when I write big programming libraries…and it always results — when I finally see or stumble across a better way — in throwing out large chunks of my impeccably logically constructed code base. ↩
