Charles Pierce: The Hard Right Has Gotten What It Paid

[Nevilledog]

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Charles P. Pierce
@CharlesPPierce
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That’s what this carefully engineered radical conservative majority was bought and paid for.

esquire.com
The Hard Right Has Gotten What It Paid For
The Court’s decision on Friday was a victory for clinic bombers, murderous snipers, stalkers of doctors, and vandals of all kinds.
10:44 AM · Jun 24, 2022

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a40406981/roe-v-wade-overturned-what-does-it-mean/

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https://archive.ph/wtWdk


WASHINGTON — The two sides were kept apart in front of the Supreme Court by police barriers manned by Capitol Police. The Court itself is completely garrisoned with both barriers and ten-foot fences. This week, the Court ruled that you can carry your concealed Glock anywhere. Except, apparently, down the sidewalk in front of the Supreme Court. Given Friday’s events, this would seem to be a good thing.

The crowd began gathering a little after 10, when the word came down that the Court’s decision in the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization was every bit as bad as it was long feared to be. Pro-choice activists waved signs and chanted and sang. Anti-choice activists waved signs and chanted and sang, and prayed to whatever God they believe ordained that, if you have a Glock, you have more rights than if you have a uterus. Reading the 6-3 majority opinion, and the dissents thereto, is like wandering through a legal nightmare of the 19th Century. And in one line in his concurrence, Justice Clarence Thomas, who is the de facto Chief these days since, plainly, nobody’s listening to John Roberts any more, makes that awful specter into grim reality.

"In future cases, we should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, & Obergefell.”

They’re coming for it all, people. That’s what this carefully engineered radical conservative majority was bought and paid for. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse was absolutely right when he rose on the Senate floor last July 27, and tried to explain what he called The Scheme—the long-march campaign to buy a hardcore conservative majority on the Supreme Court.

You may recall that dark money emperor Charles Koch made waves when he told his right-wing network he could support neither Hillary Clinton nor Donald Trump in 2016. But the house of Koch and the house of Trump soon reached an accommodation. The house of Koch decided on a grand Trump gesture for their scheme donors—let their operative, Leonard Leo, handpick a list of Supreme Court nominees for Trump to announce early in the general campaign. For the price of known, scheme-approved Supreme Court prospects, peace might be acquired between house of Koch and house of Trump. Trump announced the list. For what it is worth, I think the rest of the accommodation was for house of Trump to turn over all energy and environmental positions in government to climate change deniers approved by house of Koch, and at the end of the day, it was probably a lot of the same dark money behind both of those accommodations…

…Leo and the Federalist Society's control ran deep. In Leo, the donors controlled an agent to orchestrate every aspect of Supreme Court judicial battles, and they provisioned him with dark money beyond imagining, and with a devious structure of front groups to hide behind while effectuating their scheme.

We are still learning about the scope of Leo's covert funding and influence, but a 2019 Washington Post expose painted a remarkable picture: a vast network of Leo-affiliated front groups; shell entities with no employees and vague connections to Leo cutouts; shared post office boxes; common contractors and officers across nominally separate entities, even some sharing Presidents; dark money funders, anonymous advertising, and enormous pay packages for operatives. It has the earmarks of a covert operation of the sort that is run by hostile countries in the intelligence arena. But this covert operation was run in America against America by Americans. By the Post's reckoning, $250 million in dark money flowed through this apparatus. Testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee's Courts Subcommittee, which I chair, has since updated that number to $400 million.

*snip*

[mopinko]

1. i knew when i saw the ads on my teevee for beer boy

we were well and truly fucked.

[NoMoreRepugs]

2. I find myself thinking that if I leave the house today and run into one of my ReThug neighbors

I am going to say or do something that will cause my children and grandchild to think less of me. I so loathe Republican voters I cannot think straight at the moment.

[2naSalit]

3. I have to go into town right now...

With the same trepidation. I'm glad I'll be wearing a mask!

[NoMoreRepugs]

5. My mask has hid a great number of my scowls - I'm assuming that's not unusual here at DU.

[Lars39]

6. I'm rethinking the 4th with in-laws etc

Rabid SBC, with son high up the missionary food chain. They cannot keep their gleeful mouths shut amongst themselves, and I will not keep mine shut if the topic arises.

[NoMoreRepugs]

7. You, me and millions of others living in the real world feel the exact same way.

I am struggling today - my 6 year old granddaughter is with us and I fear for the world she will have to face.

[Lars39]

8. I've got one about the same age.

Seriously worried for their future if these crazies aren’t stopped.

[dalton99a]

4. Kick

1. The leaked draft opinion was clearly a head-fake to buy some time. For weeks, we’ve heard that Roberts was brokering a Roe-saving compromise, however worthless that would have been. We also heard that the harshest parts of that draft opinion would be scotched during the deliberative process of the Court. That clearly was not the case. Roe was called “egregiously wrong” in the draft opinion and it was called “egregiously wrong” in the Court’s final decision.

2. Alito’s crocodile tears about enflamed debate and deepened division are goddamned insulting. The Court’s decision on Friday was a victory for clinic bombers, for murderous snipers, for the stalkers of doctors and their children, and for vandals of all kinds. Eric Rudolph won on Friday. So did Paul Hill, and John Salvi, and James Kopp. Ask a clinic escort who it was that “inflamed debate” after Casey managed to keep Roe on life-support for the last twenty years. Ask a doctor wearing kevlar who it was that “deepened division.”

The decision on Friday was so ghastly wrong and so ghastly predictable that it’s almost beside the point to quote the melancholy dissent from Justices Kagan, Breyer, and Sotomayor. It is on point and beautifully written but it is out of another time and another Supreme Court, one that recognizes that its ideological and judicial philosophies, as expressed by its opinions, have consequences in the real world. As Breyer’s dissent points out, Alito’s cheap, lachrymose maundering about debate and division ignores the division out in the states that already is ongoing, and will be much worse before (and if) it gets marginally better.