Six Months That Shake The Republic

 It's coming up on six months since the reign of Chaos began.  Six months!  Only three and a half years to go, if we even get there.  

Things weren't going great for Chaos towards the end of June until two very important things happened: In a series of devastating decisions, the Supreme Court majority erased all doubt that they are functioning as an independent judiciary.  They are toadies of Chaos.  Similarly, a narrow majority of the US Congress demonstrated the same, by moving from a passive to an active support of Chaos with its ruinous omnibus bill, the Monster, which (among other things) is a massive redistribution of wealth upward to the billionaire class, and a sentence of suffering and many early deaths to millions of non-billionaire Americans who depend on Medicaid and Obamacare, food stamps and other support.  So they can join the least of these elsewhere in the world suffering and dying because food and medical aid has been mindlessly and heartlessly disappeared.

Thus Chaos is back on track towards full-blown dictatorship, accompanied by corruption and tyranny.  As part of the Monster, Congress passed an enormous budget for ICE, the Chaos secret police.  At $170 billion, it is a larger budget than all other federal "law enforcement" combined. Larger than the military budget of most countries.  It is expected to pay for some 19,000 new ICE thugs.  

According to Josh Marshall, ICE has long been known in Washington as the dregs of federal law enforcement.  The thugs who can't get jobs anywhere else wind up with ICE.  They already show up armed to the teeth as if in a life-threatening war zone, to prey on helpless unarmed civilians, often women and children.  In this they resemble those other brave warriors who rapid-fire slaughter school children and old people at prayer.

Let us not lose track of how extraordinary this moment is.  We have a domestic armed force who show up masked, refusing to identify themselves, who scoop up brown people without probable cause and often without warrants, who then hide their prisoners and deny them legal representation, depositing them in concentration camps far from their homes and families, often  out of the country entirely.  Their inept and sudden blitzkreig-style assaults on neighborhoods and public places cause dangerous chaos and violence. 

While they face active torture (as did Abrego Garcia) in those countries, the domestic concentration camps are already a scandal.  Apart from their obvious deficiencies, a Wired magazine report detailed the lack of adequate and timely medical care.  

The ostensible excuse for these raids used to be to get violent lawbreaking immigrants off the streets, but studies show that less than 10% of those disappeared have any criminal record.  Even more telling, NBC News reports that of known undocumented who have been convicted of sexual assault and homicide, ICE has managed to get only 6% of them.

Chaos and his minions suggest a range of motives for all this, including racism and backdoor eugenics, but the profit motive is pretty prominent, too.  In a story that hasn't gotten the play it deserves, Rolling Stone has reported that Stephen Miller, the spawn of Satan and Roy Cohn, who is running this war on the helpless unfettered from the White House, has "a substantial amount of stock" in one of ICE's "most prominent contractors" for its concentration camps.  If you google "human trafficking" you will see several definitions that come from the Justice Dept. and elsewhere in the federal government.  It's hard to see that this isn't exactly that, by those definitions.

Very recently, an ICE raid in California led to what the NYTimes called "chaos" with one man dead, and a pitched battle with the families and local witnesses involving chemical agents and possibly a shot fired.  On or about that day however, a federal district court judge ordered such raids ended in LA and six other California counties, because of evidence suggesting they are the product of racial profiling.

This particular court finding and action may not survive the appeals court, and seems likely to be reversed by the bent-over majority of the Supreme Court, even assuming that ICE pays any attention to it. But it highlights another feature of this extraordinary moment. A significant part of the federal judiciary is finding that the federal executive is acting unconstitutionally in a dizzying array of areas. That this conflict is ongoing and persistent is something new in our time.  A suggestion that the federal executive is pursuing racist policies is also highly unusual and highly significant. As well as highly accurate.

  The New York Times compiled a set of acerbic court comments by 48 different federal court judges (D and R appointees), including several on the order of "this is a path of perfect lawlessness." This observation is amplified in another historically significant statement made by a sitting member of the Supreme Court who wrote in one of her dissents that a Court decision threatens "the rule of law," and publicly warned that American democracy is in peril. 

"Wall of Shame" sculpture in Brooklyn with crimes of pardoned Capitol insurrectionists

The rule of law! Nothing much is more basic to how this country functions, as well as its appeal to people from other countries--prosperity is of course a draw, but the rule of law especially as it is applied to individual liberties and democratic processes is just as important: it is exceptional and a model.  Without it, there is chaos.  And therefore Chaos.

The basic belief (as analyzed by Heather Cox Richardson) is that, contrary to the major premise of the nation's founding document so recently celebrated, the Chaos tyrants don't believe we are all created equal.  Some are (in the words of George Orwell's fable) more equal than others.  I'm not sure that, like Richardson, I'd apply this belief to all of Magaland, but it certainly seems to be held by highly placed federal operatives like Stephen Miller and v.p. Vance.  

Chaos himself rhetorically expands the people, institutions (right now it's often universities) and categories he considers evil, preparing ground for his expanding Secret Police and weaponized Justice Dept. to come after them. Blatant extortion may not work so well with all universities or businesses as it did with, for example, the spineless Paramount brand. Considering how much damage has been done in just six months, more stringent measures may not be so far away.  All that ICE money includes lots of bucks earmarked for more concentration camps.

Meanwhile, Chaos policies become increasingly unpopular.  The most recent Gallup poll shows a walloping 79% of Americans say immigration is good for the country, including 64% of Republicans.  Only 38% support the stated Chaos policies of deporting all undocumented.  The capricious tariffs bringing chaos to the world and higher prices to the American economy continue to be highly unpopular, and in the latest polling, that includes Chaos supporters.

The Monster bill passed by Republicans is widely said to be deeply unpopular with everybody, even including businesses it is meant to benefit.  Why Rs did it anyway is partially answered by the revelation that the Medicaid cuts don't hit until after the 2026 congressional elections.  But there's also a suspicion of something darker: that those elections will not be permitted to be fair.  You can generally figure out what Chaos is doing by what he accuses his opponents of doing--the same thing.  He's been harping on fixed elections for years.  This next year will likely see more aggressive moves aimed at fixing 2026. 

not entirely fair but...

Even establishment types like James Carville are warning of this.  Whether Democrats can actually do anything about it remains to be seen.  Many if not most of its leaders are being criticized. Governor Gavin Newsom for leaving California (a state that is at war with the Chaos regime) at a critical moment to politic in South Carolina for a presidential election more than three years away.  Even Barack Obama, for not stepping up as the one Democrat with the popularity and gravitas to lead. 

So six months in, let us not lose sight of how different this all is. By standards of the previous 249 years, we have in the office of President someone who makes James Buchanan look good.  Or if you need more recent comparisons, he makes Ronald Reagan seem like an intellectual giant, Richard Nixon a paragon of moral virtue, G.W. Bush a genius of foreign policy.  He writes on the level of a distracted third grader, and cannot express a continuous thought, let alone a complex one. Whether or not he is demented in a clinical sense, his words and actions are convincing in that regard in a practical sense. That he and his minions have institutionalized overt cruelty as federal policy is perhaps their most depressing and dangerous accomplishment. 

It is true that his empire of Fox faces could implode at any time, as infighting is already obvious. Normally such a high point as the week that Chaos took control of both Congress and the Supreme Court would--especially for a Republican-- precede a massive and self-destructive act of hubris and overreach.  But Chaos has done nothing but overreach for six months, and nothing has stopped him yet.  Slowed him maybe.  But such glitches don't seem to have thrown off the momentum of chaos.