Famous Harvard Constitutional Scholar Laurence Tribe amplified the assertion by political analyst Michael Podhorzer that SCOTUS justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito are interfering in the 2024 election. From Podhorzer’s long assessment of the current dangers facing American democracy, Tribe selected and shared Podhorzer’s conclusion that:
“By shielding Trump from standing trial before a jury in two of his felony cases, Trump’s three appointments to the Supreme Court, along with the even more MAGA Justices Alito and Thomas and Judge Aileen Cannon, have already irreparably interfered in the 2024 election.”
Michael Podhorzer
“By shielding Trump from standing trial before a jury in two of his felony cases, Trump’s three appointments to the Supreme Court, along with the even more MAGA Justices Alito and Thomas and Judge Aileen Cannon, have already irreparably interfered in the 2024 election.”…
— Laurence Tribe (@tribelaw) June 20, 2024
Podhorzer is full of lament about the current state of affairs, seeing the government’s increasing vulnerability to autocracy and the system of checks and balances between the branches eroded by bad faith actors.
The erosion of public faith in the system isn’t organic, he asserts, but is rather part of a plan to undermine the rule of law in order to subvert it, creating a situation at present where “somehow, Topic A continues to be whether duly prosecuting Trump will erode confidence in the legal system, despite overwhelming evidence that the DOJ has been scrupulous in affording him every possible deference.”
Podhorzer believes that “instead, we should be asking whether it erodes confidence in the legal system when the judges Trump appointed intervene to shield him from accountability.“
Podhorzer illuminates the long game of the Federalist Society, an influential think tank, which Hillary Clinton and others have called the GOP’s judiciary pipeline to the Supreme Court, as well as federal appeals and district courts. (The organization purportedly exerts substantial influence on SCOTUS decisions, including the results of Bush v. Gore and Citizens United.)
Podhorzer hardly exposes the Federalist Society for its methods, as the Federalist Society itself, led by legal operative Leonard Leo, is public about its desires for the courts — if not always about how it exerts influence or how it is financed.
In sports, coaches often remind players to play the game they’re in, not the game they wish they were in. Conservative groups like the Federalist Society have been, according to Podhorzer, very effective at this — to the detriment of democracy, in his opinion and also in Tribe’s. Podhorzer asserts that “Republican-appointed justices have been legislating from the bench, protected from congressional reversal by a filibuster that requires the support of GOP senators who represent only 21 percent of the US population.”
[Podhorzer references here a governing imbalance exacerbated by the filibuster: Red states like North Dakota, South Dakota and Alaska — with populations of less than a million people — each have two Senators, the same number California and New York have, with their combined population of 70 million.]
In separate sections called Tipping the Scales of Justice (#1 and #2), Podhorzer excoriates what he sees as unnecessary judicial delays in cases against Trump, including that “after the D.C. Circuit’s unanimous rejection of Trump’s immunity claims, at least four SCOTUS justices reversed their December position and agreed to hear the immunity question” — a decision on which is still pending.
He then takes on Judge Aileen Cannon‘s indefinite postponement of a case that “should have already gone to trial [concerning] the 40 felony charges Trump faces for his handling of presidential documents after leaving office.”
Tribe uses other pundits — often funnier ones — to express his opinion on the dangers currently facing the republic. John Oliver, below, tearing into the Heritage Foundation’s Project 25, leads Tribe to write: “Here’s more about the terrifying, terrible, tyrannical, innocuously named Project 2025 — labeled as though it were just another bureaucratic scheme when in fact it’s a plot to destroy America as we know it.”
Here’s more about the terrifying, terrible, tyrannical, innocuously named Project 2025 — labeled as though it were just another bureaucratic scheme when in fact it’s a plot to destroy America as we know it: https://t.co/pQGARt6mNq
— Laurence Tribe (@tribelaw) June 20, 2024