The Supreme Court was hit by a flurry of damaging new leaks Sunday as a series of confidential memos written by the chief justice were revealed by The New York Times.
The court’s Chief Justice John Roberts was clear to his fellow justices in February: He wanted the court to take up a case weighing Donald Trump’s right to presidential immunity—and he seemed inclined to protect the former president.
“I think it likely that we will view the separation of powers analysis differently,” Roberts wrote to his Supreme Court peers, according to a private memo obtained by the *Times. *He was referencing the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals’ decision to allow the case to move forward.
Roberts took an unusual level of involvement in this and other cases that ultimately benefited Trump, according to the Times— his handling of the cases surprised even some other justices on the high court, across ideological lines. As president, Trump appointed three of the members of its current conservative supermajority.
I don’t think that’s their fault. They specifically addressed a two party system in multiple writings (they didn’t like it) in addition to explicitly stating that they expected future generations to update the constitution as necessary to protect the republic from those who would seek to undermine or replace it. We didn’t heed their warnings and now here we are.
To be clear, I don’t think the framers were infallible or able to see all possibile challenges that our nation would face. However, they seem to have been pretty damn good at learning from history and that’s something modern Americans are absolutely abysmal at. For all their faults they have a lot to teach us in that respect.
The problem with this is that it requires people in power to vote to limit their own power. And while there have been some, certainly, who have been willing to do so, getting a supermajority of people willing to do it is simply not something I see as remotely possible anymore.
It assumes a democracy of well informed voters that is capable of creating enough Cincinnatus figures that they can reliably voted in. That’s not the worst assumption for them to have. It’s a similar assumption to what fucked over the ussr and ccp. The problem is that the average person only cares about bread and circuses and that when the going gets rough or they start losing a certain percentage of the population is comfortable abandoning democracy for perceived security.
One could argue that situation would occur if we were smart enough to repeatedly elect those kinds people