New Sheriff in Town; He Hates the Courts
Every so often, I wonder who’s worse: Sauron or Voldemort? Trump or Vance?
Usually, it’s no contest at all. Our president has now humiliated two heads of state, exposing both to televised debasement. He has turned the White House into a cesspool of grift, using his office to cash in on bitcoin, handing out golden watches as rewards. The sight of currency bros lining up at Mar-a-Lago, waiting to speak to the Great Man himself, is like watching a fraternity party in agonizing slo-mo. Donald Trump has bullied his way to an immoral budget bill that trades the misery of the poor for the comfort of the oligarchs. A person could be sent to Hell for less.
It would take a lot to top this record, the damage done in under four short months, but Vance came close in his recent screed against the courts. In an interview last week with the thoughtful Russ Douthat, he held forth on the proper place of judges. You might think, as I do, that it is to decide the law. That would be the Capital “L” Law, which stands apart from the results of an election and has a weight and power that derives from history. The decision of any individual judge may represent an error of judgement or undue influence, but that’s a feature of a complicated system. I personally assume that any decision rendered by Clarence Thomas represents the purchasing of his soul by the Devil, Himself. The man cannot resist the lure of cash, usually in the form of a big-ass Airstream retrofitted for the late Shah of Iran.
But the usual decision is rooted in the literature and represents the considered judgment of a temperate intellect, someone who is fluent in the inner life of the law and can see the unfolding scheme of our civilization. By that I mean a kind of secular holiness that expresses itself in centuries of decisions. A justice working in the intended way takes every question and weighs it seriously, so that it is fitted to the fundamental structures of society.
Not so for Vance, or at least not last week. An American judge, he told Mr. Douthat, should be scrupulously careful to get out of the damn way. If Americans voted for Donald Trump, then the president should be free and unimpeded. If he wants to consign Diego Garcia to the Gulag, he should be cheered for doing so. If he believes that he is entitled to declare a national emergency based on the fictional invasion of the country by Venezuela, that’s what the voters meant when they elected him. The job of the judge is to be an inanimate conduit for every fiction and enthusiasm of the MAGA electorate. No matter that there are rules and precedents that define Trump’s powers and constrain his fantasies. A squeaker of a victory in a close popular vote in a bizarre system of allocation called the Electoral College liberates the President to be a de facto monarch. Anything short of that is a spider web of judges, freed to be maniacal activists.
I think the Vice President knows all about maniacs, and he has set his course to be the leader of their band. Now that Elon Musk has scurried back to Austin, Vance is arguably the most dangerous figure in the new Administration. Our job is to oppose him at every turn and beat back the force of his fantastical imaginings. The job of the judge is to decide the law. It is not to grovel before Sauron and Voldemort.