America’s Primary Check and Balance is Gone – The Judiciary

America’s Primary Check and Balance is Gone – The Judiciary

Governing By Egotistical Whim vs Sustainable Strategy

Donald Trump is on a tear. Just after his Phase One victory – freeing the Israeli hostages, sending supplies into Gaza – and his never-ending deployment of federal or federalized troops into blue cities, the budgetary shutdown has given him an opportunity to blue pencil and retroactively veto passed Congressional approvals for government agencies (if they seem to be leaning to woke Democratic Party allocations) and, simply by fabricating a label – for a non-existent group (“Antifa”) – he can justify steam-rolling over his opponents (even the entire Democratic Party) just by applying that label to anyone he dislikes. He is building a superhighway to one party rule.

In international matters, his tariff regime is an utter failure; US prices are rising rapidly now as most of the world resents his efforts at global financial control. His Big Beautiful Bill is doing wonders for the richest in the nation, but his cuts to the ACA subsidies and Medicaid/SNAP funding are massively driving up healthcare premiums, deductibles and co-pays… while our federal deficit is reaching unjustifiably high levels at a time when the interest costs have not been this high for decades.

To understand the “bully whim” Trump style of “diplomacy,” you have to know it only works when those you are bullying have no alternative. With the exception of Iran and its surrogates, most of the rest of the Middle East is addicted to US weapon systems, and no individual country in that sphere of influence is a superpower. The primary superpower blocs are the China-Russia-North Korea cabal (with Iran drawing its military supplies from that bloc), the Western bloc (UK, EU, Japan, Canada and Australasia), India and the United States. Just as Donald Trump has been able to use his sway with Middle East leaders to force all the parties there to his Phase One triumph, he had little success with superpowers who have been carefully planning their responses to expected Trump moves, based on what they learned about the President in his 1.0 administration.

India denied that Trump had anything to do with the peace agreement with Pakistan, and when India refused (despite false statements from Trump to the contrary) to give up buying oil from Russia, the United States continued to assess a 100% new tariff against India. Prime Minister Modi quickly showed up at Chinese celebrations and functions, even though China had once been India’s worst enemy. As Trump rolled out additional tariffs against a resisting China, Beijing refused to buy US soybeans, instantly replenishing its stocks from Argentine sources – which led American farmers to declare Trump’s efforts as Farmageddon, exacerbated by Trump’s shoring the Argentinian currency with tens of billions of US dollars because he liked the local autocrat. Then China placed a serious export limitation on rare earths (China controls 70% of that supply), needed for every sort of sophisticated electronics and avionics app, impacting the US and Europe.

Phase Two of the Gaza peace plan is already unraveling – Israel continues to insist there can never be a Palestinian state, and Hamas continues to refuse to disarm – so Trump is focusing his rebuild of lost political capital in next wave of blue city invasions, as he builds his case to invoke the Insurrection Act. But the only way he can do that is if the Supreme Court continues to allow Trump’s statements of peril to substitute for lower federal counts’ findings of no evidence of the insurrection and rebellion (no, Chicago is not a “war zone,” and Portland is not “burning to the ground”). San Francisco is next… and grants to blue states and cities are now contingent on accepting Trump’s dictator orders.

Writing for the October 10th Los Angeles Times, Jason M. Blazakis , professor of practice at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies and director of the State Department’s Counterterrorism Finance and Designations Office in the Bureau of Counterterrorism from 2008 to 2018, tells it as it is: “President Trump’s executive order designating antifa as a ‘domestic terrorist organization’ was never really about antifa. It was about building a template for repression. Now, with his latest order on ‘Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence,’ the blueprint is clear: free expression, political dissent and municipal autonomy are in the crosshairs.

“I’ve argued in the past that the antifa order was legally flimsy and practically unnecessary. Antifa is not a structured organization. It’s more an idea than an entity; a loose coalition of individuals dedicated to countering fascism. And while some have crossed the line from peaceful protesters to violent agitators, violence already has ample legal remedies under state and federal law. The danger of the order is in its symbolism, as the administration begins to stress-test just how far it could go in labeling domestic opponents as enemies of the state.

“This new executive order goes much further. Cloaked in the language of protecting Americans from terrorism, it opens the door to weaponizing federal law enforcement against the right’s political rivals. The Justice Department is now directed to treat broad swaths of dissent in Democratic-led cities, from Los Angeles to Portland, Ore., to Chicago, as ‘organized political violence.’ In practice, this could mean turning Joint Terrorism Task Forces — entities designed to track designated foreign terrorist organizations such as Al Qaeda and Islamic State — inward on Americans, investigating protest organizers, city officials, charities and journalists whose views run counter to the administration’s agenda… That should alarm every American. The task forces bring the full investigative powers of the FBI, Homeland Security and state and local law enforcement together under one umbrella. Using those tools to surveil political opponents would chill lawful protest and erode civil liberties.”

Look at reality. “Six months into Donald Trump’s second term, his administration is at war with the federal judiciary, evading court orders blocking its agenda, suing judges for alleged misconduct, and veering toward what multiple current and former federal judges say could be a constitutional crisis.

“The administration this summer sued the entire federal district court in Maryland after its chief judge temporarily blocked immigration removals. It also filed a judicial misconduct complaint recently against the chief judge of the powerful DC District Court, James ‘Jeb’ Boasberg, over comments he reportedly made in private to Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts in March.

“The standoff is unlikely to end anytime soon. [Recently], an appeals court ruled that Boasberg cannot move ahead in his effort to hold Trump administration officials in contempt for misleading him in a fast-moving case in which migrant detainees were handed over to a Salvadoran prison… As Trump-appointed judges across the country continue to deliver the administration wins, the federal judiciary’s ability to be a check on the executive branch has slowly been diminished.

“‘They are trying to intimidate, threaten and just run over the courts in ways that we have never seen,’ said one retired federal judge, who, like about a half-dozen other former and current judges, spoke to CNN anonymously given the climate of harassment the Trump administration has created and the tradition of jurists not to comment publicly on politics and ongoing disputes.” Katelyn Polantz, writing for CNN, August 10th. Freedom has sadly left the building, limping badly.

I’m Peter Dekom, and notwithstanding the largest protests in American history (“No Kings’), Trump and his minions are convinced that they can rig future elections, impose their will on the American public without judicial or congressional restraint, and outwit the global masters of sustained strategic planning merely from the force of Donald Trump’s megalomaniacal personality.