Where Am I?

   

Where Am I?

“The attacks are not random. They seem designed to intimidate… The threats and harassment are attacks on our democracy, on our system of government. And they ultimately risk undermining our Constitution and the rule of law.” 

 Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, May 1st, at a Judges conference in Puerto Rico

I live in a nation that threatens to take away Harvard’s accreditation along with their non-profit tax status. A country where the President of the United States cries foul when his direct orders can be second guessed by a judge, one he appointed, shining a constitutional light on an 18th century statute that was clearly directed at a president dealing with a wartime invasion… and his MAGA followers are outraged. While 9 out of 10 citizens polled believe that the executive, judicial and legislative branches of government are and should be co-equal, that other “1” – represented by MAGA voters, seek to dispose of constitutional limitations (from presidential term limits, due process as a precondition of depriving someone of life, freedom and property, media freedom to criticize, birthright citizenship to the requirement for warrants for searches, a ban on cruel and unusual punishment and congressional oversight on matters of taxation and spending) – and believe that a strongman-led executive branch with deep-reaching biases toward the rich should prevail against the other two branches.

I have been a practicing lawyer for over five decades. I have been on the adjunct faculty of two UC universities (Berkeley and UCLA), published three books and dozens of professional articles, I’ve been blogging since 2008, with a heavy emphasis on socio-economic-political issues… and while I know the Constitution might do with a little updating, it has been our set of guiding principles for a quarter of a millennium, a foundational document for which hundreds of thousands of American soldiers have given their lives to protect… the greatest protection we have against tyranny. That Donald Trump and his third-rate Attorney General, Pam Bondi, seem to find that document irrelevant and cumbersome, who believe that dissent of any kind is to be crushed, and virtually the entire base of Republicans in Congress, agree with that rejection of a constitutionally-determined state, is both shocking to me… and represents the antithesis of my life as an attorney.

For those who want constitutional law to be profoundly simplified: our democracy is predicated on majority rule but not at the expense of individual rights and liberty. Aside from procedural process, the Constitution is heavily focused on protecting those individual rights. Idolatry and royalty were firmly rejected by George Washington, and if you must find a Biblical admonition in support of that value, look no further than the Second Commandment which equally rejects the notion of a “strongman” who rules absolutely. And yet, cabinet meetings, if translated into a neutral language, mirror the kind of idolatry reflected in the vainglorious praises of North Korea’s Kim Jong-un. Using the awesome power of the Department of Justice, eschewing any pretense of neutrality, as the President’s personal law firm, allows targeted retribution of individuals, institutions without any of the protections that the Constitution accorded all people in this nation.

Those attacks referenced by Associate Justice Brown-Jackson noted above, mirrored in words from Chief Justice John Roberts, have led to an increase in serious threats to judges and their families across the country. Radical rightwingers rail at the thought of an individual federal judge able to issue injunctions nationwide, the obvious result of interpreting the Constitution. The assumption that that judge has unchecked preemptory powers is false. Don’t like the ruling, the remedy is clear: appeal. But a challenge to a regulation or statute or presidential edict has to start somewhere; and that initiation point is at a trial court level, with rare exception. If Congress votes to limit judicial powers, hence demoting the judicial branch to less-than-equal status with the other branches of government, that autocratic effort should properly be struck down as unconstitutional. Neither the Congress, nor the President nor the Attorney General has a constitutional right to interpret statutes or the Constitution… no matter what they may believe; that right resides solely with our courts.

One of the largest “democracy destroyers” is the lapse of any semblance of integrity in Congress where insider trading appears to be rampant, to the personal-wealth-driven President to Supreme Court justices accepting millions of dollars of economic value from entities and individuals who routinely bring appeals to that court. In Trump 1.0, the President decried cryptocurrency as a sham. Even as the UK is passing legislation to protect its consumers from that sham, by proscribing buying crypto using a credit care, Trump 2.0 has literally doubled his net worth in under 18 months by embracing a Trump-family crypto, adding legitimacy with his efforts to create a federal crypto reserve. What, he wasn’t making enough selling Bibles, sneakers, watches, clothing, etc.?

Although he was touted as eliminating corruption and inefficiency from the federal government, Elon Musk’s DOGE clearly was never intended to do that. From promising to cull $2 trillion from the federal budget, Musk’s efforts actually increased the cost of government, threatened fundamental and very popular government programs, all focused on finding a way to cut taxes for the richest people in the nation. That Musk and Trump-designated federal agencies have secured all of the personal data of everyone living in the United States was autocratic gravy to a retribution pledge from the autocrat we call Trump.

In the process of this litany of destruction, Trump has trashed our global credibility, tanked the US dollar, sent prices skyrocketing and decimated our economy, from which we may never recover. People are pulled off the streets and, with nothing more than an unproven accusation, shipped off to a foreign prison/torture chamber with little or no hope of salvation. Many attribute such actions to rapidly evolving dementia, only amplifying what I think are Trump’s existing clinical cases of narcissism and anti-social personality disorder. Musk has been diagnosed with Aspergers. But then again, autocrats have to believe in self-delusion, eschew empathy, just to do what they want to do.

I’m Peter Dekom, and what we have here is a total breakdown of a nation that is rapidly designing itself to serve only a relative rich few… at the expense of everything and everybody else.