#dahlia lithwick

"Indeed, the word law is too generous to contain the plea deals and the willing ignorance and the prison transfers that were granted to Jeffrey Epstein and his co-conspirators at every turn. And the word injustice is far too small to describe the spectacle of hundreds of survivors who have still not been given a reckoning or a measure of genuine accountability, whose unredacted names appeared in public documents and who had never been contacted by the Department of Justice."

Dahlia Lithwick

Liz Plank, on her Substack, describes the nausea and disorientation felt by women realizing this past week that we had all been gaslit yet again. Those of us who cannot even begin to imagine a permission structure that allowed and encouraged passing young girls around, trading insults and articles about them (“your littlest girl was a little naughty”), and bonding over the hysteria of #MeToo can barely comprehend why it was that this class of men always took the gift and the freebie and the shitty watch and the plane trip, because access to yet more of the same somehow became the coin of the realm. What Plank describes as “trust bias”—the psychological tendency to assume that others are operating within the same moral and ethical universe as yourself—means that we are all, once again, annihilated by the fact that America’s shared moral universe is a collective fiction, one that constrains one class of people and merely titillates another. We err when we call what is being done by ICE officials to citizens and noncitizens on the streets of American cities “law,” just as we err when we call what has thus far been afforded the Epstein survivors “justice.” Indeed, the word law is too generous to contain the plea deals and the willing ignorance and the prison transfers that were granted to Jeffrey Epstein and his co-conspirators at every turn. And the word injustice is far too small to describe the spectacle of hundreds of survivors who have still not been given a reckoning or a measure of genuine accountability, whose unredacted names appeared in public documents and who had never been contacted by the Department of Justice.

Pam Bondi may be in charge of many officials and many investigations and many legal things at the DOJ, but what she is protecting is neither justice nor law. And that means that what Plank describes as a trust bias is also an exquisitely American “law bias,” and we should dispense with the notion that we are all in some group compact to protect and preserve the same things. The law is neither protecting the vulnerable nor constraining the Epstein class. And perhaps we should stop referencing that word to mean either project, much less deploying it to describe both. What Bondi, and Donald Trump, and Lutnick, and Todd Blanche are doing under the banner of law and law enforcement and pardons and immunity and impunity is an operatic performance of a single truth: The “law” will now protect those who are within the network of favors and privilege and secrets and side-eyes and snickers and abuse of young girls, and the “law” will also abandon those who are not. What Bondi did this week under the bright lights of the U.S. Congress was to personify that the law is a word for the thing that is “weaponized” when it’s used against the president, and is the thing that is bestowed benignly on those who seek his grace. This is a protection racket, and we are being conditioned in plain sight to recognize that it protects itself and it preys on everyone who refuses to buckle.

—Dahlia Lithwick at Slate.

The Republican Supreme Court is only "originalist" when it furthers GOP aims to be originalist.

The US Constitution nowhere mentions presidential immunity. But because of some obscure comment by Benjamin Franklin, the Bush-Trump justices act as if it's written on top of the document in bigger print than the Preamble.

When you vote for president and US senator you are voting for the folks who appoint and confirm Supreme Court justices. Remind vote slackers and the third-party curious about this.

What the Wrights and the other donors purchased when they bought access to Supreme Court events and parlayed that access into lavish vacation homes and dinners was not unlawful. But it was, and is, within the power of the justices who benefited from all of these efforts to have avoided them. They did not because they seem to have believed that they were engaged in acts of casual friendship. That is frankly just sad, at a personal level. But it also tells you all you need to know about why this court will keep burning its own legitimacy candle at both ends. They don’t even recognize it as a problem. The unfettered and lucrative sucking up, lobbying, and currying of favor—and the attendant rewards—are all recast as harmless socializing.