Good opinion piece: https://www.yahoo.com/news/opinion-supreme-court-just-showed-184314188.html. Excerpts below:
I have badly underestimated Donald Trump. Thursday was the day that his justices — it turns out that they are indeed his justices on the Supreme Court, just as he claimed — got it through my thick head: Trump is not just competent but masterful. He is not just capable, he is supreme.
Crime is a largely private endeavor. Corruption is public. It seeps into the muscle and sinew of democratic society and institutions; it devours from within. The Supreme Court, drunk on arrogated power, cut loose from rudimentary ethics, has been eaten alive by it. But the court is just one plot of a vast terrain that Trump has conquered — not with crime, but corruption.
Crime is when you launch a violent attempt to overthrow the republic. Corruption is when you convince an entire political party to pretend they didn’t watch it live on television, or cower from it inside the Capitol while dozens of police officers were being bludgeoned by the mob.
Crime is when you make off with top-secret documents. Corruption is when a MAGA judge can’t find time to schedule your trial, or process the mountainous evidence of your guilt.
Crime is when your lawyers tell the Senate not to convict you in an impeachment trial because you can be charged in court. Corruption is when your lawyers inform the Supreme Court that you are immune from criminal courts and only the Senate can judge you — but, alas, the senators have missed their window.
But it was the Republican Supreme Court — mostly men again — that put the shiv a little deeper in democracy’s back this week. Originalists or textualists, all sounded more or less Trumpist as they seriously entertained Trump’s argument that his assaults on the constitutional order are protected by the Constitution itself. There is no way to make honest sense of such a liar’s mash. But Larry, Moe and Curly aren’t just chairing committees in Congress. They wear robes and furrowed brows now, too. And they seem eager to pretend that crimes are just constitutional exercises of power, and that one ex-president is a king.