Fitch claims he is retiring.... I hope not. read the whole Fitch here.
Wither the Republic
Tuesday, August 5, 2025
Justinian in Donald Trump, Murdoch, Roger Fitch Esq, US Supreme Court, US
politics
Twenty years of Roger Fitch ... He says this is his
last column from Washington ... A brief history of American law and governance
since Bush II ... The Roberts' court and reshaping the Constitution ...
Hollowing out the Bill of Rights ... Murdoch's malign influence ... Shakedowns
and bribes
The American republic that followed the revolution is
gone, overthrown, not by a subsequent revolution, but following an election, by
the autogolpe of
a fascist.
History will record that the coup had the passive
assistance of congress and the active support
of a supreme court that, especially during its last two terms (here and here),
exploited constitutional
weaknesses, effectively abandoning the
rule of law established by the Constitution and Bill of Rights.
The federal republic launched by North American
colonies in 1789 lasted 236 years, more than any other modern republic. France,
which began its initial republic about the same time, is in its Fifth Republic.
The American constitution was novel and superior,
despite allowing the continuation of slavery in some states (slavery was at
that time countenanced in many nations), and notwithstanding the fact that it
was set-up by a non-representative group of white male property-owners.
There are many reasons the Americans' constitution
eventually failed: the unplanned party system and bad faith of party members;
the rude understanding of its basic tenets by the citizens; and ultimately, by
indifferent or (as now) openly hostile supreme courts.
It's fitting that Roger Fitch has appeared in the
pages of a legal journal like Justinian, as the decline of the
US is closely associated with perverse actions of institutional lawyers. Under
George Bush, they were incompetent (e.g, Alberto Gonzales), immoral
(e.g, the Torture Memo lawyers)
or simply unethical; under Donald Trump they are dedicated lawbreakers.
We've seen it before. This column began in August
2005, at the birth of the Roberts Court, with your
columnist writing about the Australian David Hicks and Guantánamo, the illegal
offshore detention camp set up by GW Bush in January 2002.
Guantánamo was and remains a blot on the rule of
law, with invented "enemy combatants" and kangaroo military
commissions for prosecuting civilian terrorists and, sometimes, lawful
belligerents. It prefigured Trump's
due process-free migrant detention at Guantánamo and abroad,
and officially-sanctioned torture, now outsourced to
foreign despots like El Salvador's Nayib Bukele.
Bukele: running Trump's offshore prison
In August of 2005, the supreme court's chosen
president, George Bush, had recently obtained a second term in an election he
actually won. The supreme court's "swing vote" in decisions, the
Reagan-appointed Sandra Day
O'Connor, had announced her retirement. O'Connor had been one of two
members of the Bush v Gore majority
with no ethical conflict, and was the only one of the five majority justices to
regret, if not repent, that case.
The present chief justice, John Roberts (then a
DC Circuit judge) was being considered for O'Connor's position, and then, when
CJ William
Rehnquist died, for chief justice. Cynics said he auditioned for
appointment through his role in a pending DC Circuit case, one of two Guantánamo Cases of
utmost concern to the Bush administration, treating, as they did, the legality
of Bush's Guantánamo scheme to imprison newly-invented "enemy
combatants" in his figurative "war on terror", men apprehended,
not just in Afghanistan, but as far away as the Gambia, and Bosnia, where
"combatants" were abducted by the US despite rulings by that
country's highest courts.
Helpfully, Roberts ruled against habeas.
When Roger Fitch took up his pen 20 years ago this
month, early in the second Bush administration, he thought the republic had
already been fatally injured by the judicial coup of December 12, 2000, the
supreme court's unprecedented and partisan intervention on specious grounds in
a presidential election in order to install a mediocrity as president,
apparently based on the brand he was wearing.
With that president's appointments to the court, a
new majority faction of conservatives coalesced with a mission to reshape
the constitution. It depended largely on altering the precedents previously
established by justices of every hue, and entailed constitutional alterations
that hollowed-out and subverted some of the most important protections of the
Bill of Rights.
Roberts CJ: Trump's man
Over time, the Roberts Court converted
those amendments into tools and playthings of corporations, religious
zealots, gun fanatics,
and other corporate or religiously-badged special interests.
The winners have been mostly conservative groups
allied with and depending upon the venality of Republicans, whose election
successes and fund-raising have been turbocharged, respectively, by the
court's Shelby County and Citizens United decisions.
The final blow: the Rucho decision
greenlighting partisan gerrymanders.
The Republicans used to be the party of the
establishment and upper-crust, their voices heard in the pages of the Wall
Street Journal, a party that included liberal and
independent voices. Sadly, after Eisenhower, and under Richard Nixon's
cynical Southern
Strategy, the "Grand Old Party" was taken over by special
interests who had not previously played the leading role.
It was the time when the old class system in the US
began to crumble under the assault of television and popular culture, when the
nouveaux riche arrived on the partisan scene, when the
polemicist William F
Buckley and subversive economist Milton Friedman introduced
a new and edgier conservatism where corporations and (conservative) Catholics
began to more openly ally with monopolists and the previous untouchables:
evangelicals, and the dregs of white southern segregationists.
The finishing touches to today's Republican party
were provided by the malignant influence of Australian blow-in Rupert Murdoch
and his fanatical rightwing News Corp, which now owns the Wall
Street Journal.
Murdoch: fanatical
Many of the party participants in the December
2000 Putsch are still around,
including two of the Bush v Gore rogue justices (Anthony Kennedy and Clarence Thomas), the
present chief justice, John Roberts, and two Republican lawyers who have since
joined the court, appointed by Donald Trump.
2000 also entrenched the Republican Party in the
rising sunbelt states of Florida and Texas, with the results we have seen, both
nationally and in other ex-Confederate states.
≈ ≈ ≈
In 2025, the US may have the trappings of a
government, but Trump's administration is a giant protection
racket, a MAGA mafia presided over by the Capo and
chief gangster, the convicted fraudster and felon Donald Trump, supported by a
supine congress and neo-fascist popular movement. Cruelty, greed and revenge
are the ruling passions of this corrupt, illegitimate regime.
Trump's shakedowns are working. Large "settlements"
have been extorted in claims with no legal basis (e.g, foreign
tariffs, Big Law threats and media
intimidation), and Trump's crude ransom demands are
being met by universities (e.g, Columbia and Harvard).
Trump and his Project 2025 minders
still have a to-do list, involving destruction of various parts of the US
constitution, most notably the separation of powers, by usurping the powers of
congress and the judiciary.
Trump is meanwhile flouting the First, Fourth,
Fifth, Sixth and Eighth Amendments, ignoring Article I's prohibition
against bills of
attainder, and emasculating civil rights in
general.
Roger Fitch bids farewell to all that.
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