The Only Working Branch of Government This Week ~~ BY DAHLIA LITHWICK

 https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2023/10/gop-chaos-scotus-stakes.html

~~ recommended by emil karpo ~~



Maybe SCOTUS realizes what’s at stake.

Drew Angerer/Getty Images

OCT 07, 20235:50 AM

Drew Angerer/Getty Images

 

If you’re inclined to believe that the chief benefit of American democracy lies in its pure entertainment power, then this past week has been good to you. Between whatever it is that we’re calling the ongoing fight over the House speaker’s chair (Fight Club?) and whatever it is we’re calling Donald Trump’s loose lips that can quite literally sink ships (Treason?) and his creepy monarchic new efforts to quash his Jan. 6 prosecution (Caligula?), it’s been a hell of a week for high-level political circusing. And that doesn’t even scratch the surface of the George Santos/Vivek Ramaswamy/threats to shoot shoplifters mayhem that barely even makes headlines anymore.

But if you are in the camp that finds all these risible efforts to drive American democracy straight over the cliff’s edge, not one good thing happened this week—just an abundant overuse of the popcorn-box emoji. The fight for the soul of the Republican Party, whether it plays out in the House or in the GOP primary, reveals how truly sick and broken the load-bearing pillars of our politics really are; hamstrung by a fringe group of toddlers with matches who don’t just court instability, they actually see violence and chaos as the single most useful weapon in their arsenal. As Will Bunch notes, the fact that so much of the corporate media has failed to engage with the seriousness of this very moment defies belief. But we appear to be willing to froth and bubble along, secure in the knowledge that anything as funny as Kevin McCarthy being ousted from his GOP leadership position for not being insurrectionist-y enough can’t also be deadly serious.

I’ve spent this week looking for the signs and divinations of any kind of institutional pulling back from the brink, and it seems to me that the only entity that seems to have been working to get its own crazy under control is the Supreme Court, the branch of government that at present also happens to pose the greatest threat to the continued experiment that is constitutional democracy. It is the Supreme Court that soundly rejected and repudiated the Alabama Legislature’s efforts to ignore its June holding in the Voting Rights Act case. It is the Supreme Court that at least sounded, this past Tuesday, as though it wasn’t all that interested in striking down entire federal agencies as unconstitutional. This week at the Supreme Court, Justice Clarence Thomas even managed to recuse himself from a case in which he had a conflict of interest. A few weeks back, he managed to choke out an amended disclosure form.

None of the justices have spent the summer openly trashing one another in speeches or to the press, as they did after the Dobbs leak last year. And while I have no illusions that the upcoming term will go well, it is now at least absolutely plain that all the nutters on the 5^th Circuit auditioning for Matt Gaetz status on the federal bench are not going to be able to overmaster the saner minds at the high court. It’s not James Ho’s judiciary yet—and neither is it Samuel Alito’s. Chief Justice John Roberts has made it clear that whatever MAGA poison is seeping through the GOP primary and the House Republicans, it’s not going to set fire to One First Street anytime soon.

None of the Justices have spent the summer openly trashing one another in speeches or to the press, as they did after the Dobbs leak last year.

It’s noteworthy that the one branch of government that is wholly unaccountable to the American public seems to have come to the understanding that Trump and Trumpism will take the republic down with it. It’s quite staggering that the same six-justice supermajority that has chucked precedent after precedent over the last years, and done so with impunity, nevertheless appears to understand the very material risks that come with reckless and thoughtless “jolts to the system,” as John Roberts has put it.

If you had told me that the out-of-control Roberts Court that gave us Dobbs and Bruen and the praying football coach and the undisclosed private flights to Koch events would become the one branch of government capable of modulating its own conduct in the face of chaos and self-immolation, I would never have believed you. And yet I strongly suspect that the Roberts Court is collectively about as terrified of the grift, the violence, and the existential threat to democracy that is Trumpism as I am.