#originalism

A comic I drew about leaving the Mormon church.

Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale.

The attendees of the Constitutional Convention were clearly against absolute rulers. There is nothing about immunity for presidents or other officials. The only time any form of the word immunity is mentioned is in Article IV Section 2 where it is used in relation to extradition.

The Trump-Bush "originalists" on the US Supreme Court have gone from following the original language of the Constitution to coming up with their own very original ideas on how to decide cases.

Here is the reality that we're living with today:

As long as Donald Trump is the standard-bearer for the Republicans, every institution they control will contort itself in his image in an effort to protect him. – Adam Serwer at The Atlantic (archived)

Trump needs to be defeated at the polls in November. And the only way to defeat him is to vote for Joe Biden. "Protest votes" for impotent third-party candidates who have no chance of winning are as useful as used toilet paper.

Don't rely on the current Supreme Court, some hypothetical sequence of convoluted actions, or some unlikely deus ex machina thunderbolt to rescue us. Nobody will save us from us but us.

We need to get out of our comfort zones and push the envelope around people we know. That doesn't mean getting into time wasting arguments with MAGA cultists; it does mean challenging Trump-curious comments from low information voters. Seeds of doubt planted now can germinate later this year.

People who feel nostalgic about the Trump years should be reminded that those included 2020 which saw the US with the worst COVID-19 response of any industrialized country. There's also Trump's attempted January 6th coup, his surrender to the Taliban, and the enormous tax breaks for the filthy rich.

Teri Kanefield has written a great summary of the practice— link and except are below. This has been a contentious issue from the beginning. Just because you have the privilege today, don’t expect that people in power want you to keep it.

A government “of the people, by the people, and for the people” raises a question: Who is included? Who are the people? It is obvious that if you can’t vote, you are not one of the “people” in “We the People.”

If you zoom out and take a look at the history of voting rights from 30,000 feet, you see this:

In the colonies and early America, the right to vote was restricted to white men who owned property. (Some colonies imposed other restrictions.)

“Jacksonian Democracy,” the era of President Andrew Jackson, expanded the franchise to all white men. The Jacksonian idea was that a poor barely literate white man on the frontier should have the same voice as a well-educated easterner. (Jackson—an unrepentant enslaver, a slaughterer of Native people, and a fan of white men on the frontier—despised East Coast “elites.” As a practical matter, those elite Easterners generally didn’t approve of taking land from Native people, whereas those white guys on the frontier were fine with raiding and plundering lands belonging to Native people, so Jackson wanted their votes.)

After the Civil War, the vote was extended to Black men in theory. In practice, voter suppression tactics and terror tactics kept most Black men from the ballot box.

The 19th Amendment added all women, in theory. In practice, it added white women.

The Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of the 1960s attempted to expand the right to vote to all Americans by enforcing the 14th and 15th Amendments. The 26th Amendment lowered the voting age to 18.

The current Supreme Court majority is not a fan of these voting rights acts and has sought to cut them back on the grounds that the Constitution does not contain an affirmative right to vote.

Until you get to that last part, you might think that “the history of voting in the United States has been characterized by “a smooth and inexorable progress toward universal political participation” until Justice Roberts and the current Supreme Court majority. Nope. This is from the Oxford Companion to American Law: