The Rule of Law Strikes Back

 

It’s hard to say what constitutes an emergency these days. We can look in any direction and see one coming. We constantly blink in disbelief that one deranged individual seems bent on bringing down the whole planet, for no discernible reason other than it looks like fun.

Yes, for a certain kind of sociopath, blowing shit up does look like fun. The same sort of fun a delinquent middle schooler might have setting off illegal cherry bombs in the boys’ room. Same mentality, a billion times more dangerous.

There’s a race against time going on. For reasons that have the whole world baffled, the only chance of stopping this monster is waiting for the midterms and hoping for the best. That’s, um, eight months away.

As infuriating as that is to us, imagine what it’s like for people in other countries, none of whom have any control over the cataclysmic disruptions, born of sheer whimsy, that now threaten their lives. Living inside the economic blast radius of this stupid war, how enraged they must be at America to allow a madman like this to run a dishwasher, let alone a country.

Other countries have remedies for this kind of danger, both formal and informal, ranging from judicial tribunal to legislative mandate to discreet execution.

At this point, I would gratefully accept a military coup. Turning the country over to the generals couldn’t be worse than where the mad king is taking us. I would even take JD Vance as an interim — very interim — president, on the assumption that at age 41 he has something to look forward to, while Trump clearly does not.

Trump’s behavior, rather, brings to mind the crime novel Eight Million Ways to Die, by Lawrence Block, in which the main character is driven through Manhattan by a Sri Lankan taxi driver who “drove as if he believed in reincarnation, and the sooner the better.”

Barring some amazing turnaround by the Republican Party, barring them growing a spine and agreeing that Trump really could kill us all, the midterms are all we’ve got. It sucks, I know, but it’s the current reality.

And yes, it’s galling to think about the people who could possibly stop him but won’t, mostly because they’re in it with him. Vance, Rubio, Miller, Bondi, Hegseth, Patel, Leavitt, and much of the GOP congressional caucus — they’re all in too deep to turn back. They’re totally invested in the dictatorship, and they need to keep it going for the same reason Trump does: they’re guilty of crimes that carry sentences of twenty-to-life, and they know it. So just like Trump, they double down.

They buy in, even more, to the madness of the mad king, and they’re committed to doing evil things in his name. They will certainly try to tamper with the midterms in any way they can. They’ll try to nationalize them, mess with the voter rolls, send ICE to polling places, or declare a national emergency and cancel them altogether.

But the good news — and now that I’ve thoroughly bummed us all out, I owe us some — is that this will by no means be a slam dunk for them. I’m happy to say that the rule of law is hanging in there, at least so far.

After a year of high anxiety and crippling uncertainty, the legal and judicial systems are pushing back in ways that, knock wood, will make it really difficult for the vandals to steal the midterms, even if they weren’t idiots.

Judges at the federal level are finally starting to walk back that firehose of executive orders that so traumatized the country last year. It took a while for the courts to catch up with the backlog of atrocious orders, but they have indeed stepped up. With fewer and fewer exceptions, they have ruled according to the law, as opposed to Pam Bondi’s fantasies. And these judges come from every point on the political spectrum, including Trump appointees.

What this means, I think, is that Trump’s aura of inevitability has been badly punctured. Consider what has come down from U.S. district courts just in the last few weeks:

One federal judge spanked RFK Jr over his takedown of the CDC’s immunization policy board. All the real disease experts had been removed and replaced with anti-vaccine hacks, just in time to promote a growing and totally avoidable measles epidemic. The judge ruled that the overhaul violated multiple laws. She rejected the new appointees, voided their actions, and put a hold on all recent changes in vaccine policy. The measles virus itself was, unfortunately, outside her jurisdiction.

Another federal judge ordered, in effect, the un-dismantling of Voice of America. I had thought this was a lost cause, but evidently not. The judge ruled that the shutdown of VOA was invalid, and he ordered broadcasting resumed immediately. He also ordered the staff — who had been on paid leave for the last year — to return to their jobs.

In Minnesota and Colorado, U.S. District Court judges brushed aside USDA head Brooke Rollins’s demand that the two states “re-certify” their 100,000-plus SNAP households. Without any prior notice, she had ordered the states to conduct in-person interviews with every household within 30 days — a logistically impossible proposition — and threatened to cut off all SNAP payments to those states if they didn’t comply. In both states, the federal judges told Rollins, in effect, to fuck off.

I could go on — there are dozens of more examples — but you get the idea. And in all these cases, the judges didn’t just defend the rule of law, they stood up for common sense, rational thought, and basic decency. Their written opinions were unequivocal and bluntly stated, with a wholly appropriate undertone of moral outrage.

And let’s not ignore the courage it took to issue these rulings. Death threats are now part of the job, and most judges can’t afford personal security. Yet they’ve continued to call bullshit on the pseudo-legal glop put in front of them by Bondi’s DOJ. And every time they rule against the government, they put more pressure on the Supreme Court to think twice before overturning them on appeal.

Speaking of which, SCOTUS may have itself emboldened the feistiness of some of these lower-court judges, with two recent and unexpectedly rational decisions. One was the shooting down of the Trump tariffs, and in the process driving a stake through the “national emergency” argument. The other was blocking Trump from using the National Guard as his personal secret police in places like, say, Minnesota.

These decisions could easily be taken as a signal to the lower courts that the six Grand Inquisitors may be questioning whether national self-immolation is in anybody’s self-interest, let alone their own.

So I’m guessing most of these rulings will stand on appeal. The cases being brought by the government are generally idiotic, and it would take a blatantly corrupt appellate court to overturn them. Not that it can’t happen, but it’s getting less likely.

It helps that in every case these judges are facing the gang that couldn’t litigate straight. Every day, we hear of some judge losing patience with DOJ lawyers who show up in court with cases they themselves know to be politically driven, legally asinine, and steeped in bad faith. The government is in danger of losing all credibility with its own court system.

All this bodes well for the midterms, especially when you consider that each state controls its own elections, that SCOTUS has already hinted that the “national emergency” gambit won’t play, and that the legions of lawyers being deployed by civil liberties groups are a lot smarter than the doofuses they’ll be meeting in court.

I won’t say Trump can’t yet mess with the midterms, but I don’t see a path for him to do it through the legal system, even with a corrupt SCOTUS nominally on his side.

In which case, what’s a mad king to do? Whatever that turns out to be, we can be quite sure he’ll be putting America last.