Winter at Soda Lake, Drumheller Channels north of Othello, WA
The search for sanity and resistance amid the torching of democracy
—Talking Heads, Life in Wartime (1979)
On the first day of winter the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee made public a 97-page report from its majority staff which—at any other time in the past fifty years or so—would have been the talk of our towns. In copious detail, (backed by more than 800 pages of exhibits) the report laid out blatant instances of ethical misconduct by two current members of the Supreme Court—Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito—as well as former Justice Antonin Scalia, a venerated pillar of the conservative legal movement who passed away nine years ago while on an expenses-paid retreat at an upscale ranch in southern Texas.
As the report notes in its executive summary, the committee’s work was driven and built upon the un-refuted findings of a team of investigative journalists at Pro-Publica, whose reporting series Friends of the Court recently earned the Pulitzer Prize for public service. Not that Pro-Publica’s exemplary journalism needed validation beyond the Pulitzer, but the Judiciary Committee’s corroborative conclusions are unusually blunt and damning.
For example:
• “Justice [Clarence] Thomas Flouted Federal Law by Failing to Disclose Millions of Dollars in Gifts and Other Items of Value.”
• “Justice [Samuel] Alito Failed to Report Private Jet Travel and Accommodations for a 2008 Luxury Fishing Trip to Alaska.”
• “Justice [Antonin] Scalia Established the Practice of Accepting Gifts of Luxury Travel and Failing to Disclose It as Required by Federal Law.”
As other journalists (notably the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer) have also reported the snowballing corruptions of the nation’s highest court have accrued over several years. They parallel the rise of the revanchist Federalist Society and a web of dark money and influence largely controlled by its secretive fundraiser and coordinator, Leonard Leo whom Justice Thomas once described as “the number 3 most powerful man in the world.” As the Washington Post reported in May of 2023, Leo even directed tens of thousands of dollars in payments to Clarence Thomas’s wife Ginni (a political activist and open supporter of Donald Trump’s MAGA movement) but with the admonition that the funds be conferred with “[n]o mention of Ginni, of course.”
No surprise, then, that one of the committee’s billboard findings is: “Leonard Leo has made a Career of Leveraging Private Access to the Justices.”
All told, the committee’s report is devastating—not only documenting ethical violations, but the court’s grim refusal to subject itself to the formal ethical scrutiny that applies to all other judges in state and federal courts. It comes at time when the court’s rulings—i.e. Trump v. Anderson (2024), Trump v. U.S. , and its repeal (2024) of the so-called Chevron doctrine—has never been more influential in shaping the outcome of national elections and the very shape of government itself.
It is hard to wrap all this in the parlance of journalism, in the way a sports reporter would cover a basketball game where teams compete between the lines with mandatory compliance to rules and decorum. Because, in this contest, it’s as though one team shoots basketballs while the other launches mortars with undisguised intent to maim its opponents and crater the court. This is how and why an hours-long riot can be re-cast by its instigator and his ardent supporters as “an act of “love” and those imprisoned for storming the capitol on 1/06/21—attempting to injure or kill police officers in the process—are redeemed as “hostages.”
The court’s response to the Pro-Publica investigation (which continues) has been to ignore it. When Chief Justice Roberts was invited by the Judiciary Committee to testify about the Supreme Court’s ethics morass and his plan to address it, he declined. Likewise, the court’s response to the Judiciary Committee’s report has been crickets—just a sweeping caution from the Chief Justice warning, basically, that threats and harsh criticism of the court are not good for the court.
It is hard to wrap all this in the parlance of journalism, in the way a sports reporter would cover a basketball game where teams compete between the lines with mandatory compliance to rules and decorum. Because, in this contest, it’s as though one team shoots basketballs while the other launches mortars with undisguised intent to maim its opponents and crater the court. It’s not merely a matter of breaking norms and rules, it’s igniting an entirely different sort of conflict in which grievances are manufactured and conflicts inflamed not to serve any genuine public purpose but to empower the arsonist(s). This is how and why an hours-long riot can be re-cast by its instigator and his ardent supporters as “an act of “love” and those imprisoned for storming the capitol on 1/06/21—attempting to injure or kill police officers in the process—are redeemed as “hostages.”
We misunderstand what we’re living through if we overdress it with the benefits of our doubts, or accept that we must we shield our eyes, our conscience and our dignity in order to find common cause.
Consider the ‘kayfabe’…
Wrestlers at Memorial Hall in Kansas City, 1988 (photo courtesy Wikimedia images)
In gathering this piece there was a word that kept popping up that I was unfamiliar with. I watched a smattering of televised “professional wrestling” in my youth so I’ve understood the drift of it for quite some time without knowing it had been condensed into a single word—“kayfabe.” This was explained to me by one of my bright, young research assistants—also my son—whom I knew would know. Mirriam-Webster defines “kayfabe” as: “the tacit agreement between professional wrestlers and their fans to pretend that overtly staged wrestling events, stories, characters, etc., are genuine” when in fact they’re not.
There are distinct subgroups of Trump voters who are on board for different reasons. But the essential buzz of the movement is to own the libs — not just to mock and stymie progressive aspirations for tolerance, equality and commonwealth, but to supplant democracy with a regime that tilts and bends toward white, patriarchal authoritarianism and unfettered capitalism. There are broiling contradictions in this (witness Steve Bannon’s raging vow to take down Trump’s most powerful booster Elon Musk). But, then, there’s always been an asterisk on kayfabe—that you never know when the overtly staged fiction will burst open with genuine animus, making it all the more entertaining.
The promise of the Trump show is that it never ends. No matter the tragedy there’s always a juicy lib or two to blame, whether its Nancy Pelosi, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the “fake” news, a non-MAGA governor, or the Obamas. Whether any of it is true is practically irrelevant, it just needs to confirm and reinforce an underlying prejudice or grievance.
Recovering wildfire burn area in the Palisades neighborhood, west of Spokane
‘It will start getting cooler. You just watch…’
The devastating wildfires still burning in Los Angeles started late on the morning of January 7th. The next morning, as the fire was escalating, the president-elect assigned the blame to California’s Governor Gavin Newsom whom Trump, true to form, referred to as Gavin “Newscum” in his post.
Trump had no water to offer, but he did have gasoline for a political fire— accusing Newsom of setting aside water for endangered fish in the San Francisco estuary (nearly 400 miles to the north) that could have been available to fight the wind-whipped wildfires enveloping the Los Angeles suburbs. Several new organizations, including the BBC, quickly debunked Trump’s baseless charge that water needed to fight the fires in Los Angeles had been diverted to the estuary recovery project. But, as Trump proved when he loudly and falsely accused Haitian immigrants of eating their neighbors’ pets in Springfield, Ohio, it’s not the essence of the truth that matters, but the repetition, indignation and innuendo packed into the smear. In short, it’s pure political kayfabe.
We misunderstand what we’re living through if we overdress it with the benefits of our doubts, or accept that we must we shield our eyes, our conscience and our dignity in order to find common cause.
Among the most influential voices in the MAGA Greek choir is that of Charlie Kirk, the young (31) co-founder of Turning Point USA, a nation-wide, hyper-conservative political action group for which Kirk is a prolific fund-raiser and lead spokesperson. As hurricane force winds whipped the deadly fire through Palisades, Altadena and other LA suburbs, Kirk took to his podcast to blame the emerging catastrophe on Kristin Cowley, Los Angeles’s lesbian fire chief. Kirk alleged that the out of control wildfires are what happen “when you focus your government on diversity, equity, inclusion, LGBTQ pet projects, and you are captured by environmentalists” instead of focusing on “the basic stuff” of fire prevention.
What Trump’s and Kirk’s followers didn’t hear (one of Kirk’s podcasts is entitled, “The Great Climate Change Hoax”) was any signal that rapid global warming induced by human fossil fuel emissions may have set the stage for the fierce winter blaze. This is how Trump handled that issue as he was schooled by Wade Crowfoot, the head of California’s Natural Resources Agency when Trump visited Sacramento, in September 2020.
To be sure, one can’t prove beyond a reasonable doubt the LA fires wouldn’t have happened were it not for human-induced climate change. But there’s broad consensus among climate scientists that the rapidly warming planet is far more likely to have increased the odds of LA’s blazing tragedy than the disclosure by the city’s fire chief that she is a lesbian who promotes diversity, equity and inclusion.
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