Justice for all

Trump/MAGA's substitution of the whims of the Leader for historic American democratic norms and law provokes our resistance from many viewpoints and among many very different people. Why would such a violent tearing of the national fabric not do so?; this a a country of 340 million individuals with very different histories, needs, and life experiences. MAGA desperately wants to erase all that and subjugate where it can't.

 

Many of us recoil from and repudiate MAGA's vision.

 

For some, the energy for that struggle comes from our visceral reaction to the abduction of family and neighbors.

 

For some, it's sheer stubbornness, a defiant sense of self that has kept us going through life's challenges and serves in this moment.

 

For some it's recoil from gratuitous cruelty in the service of a sick cartoon of a god rendered a nasty tribal totem. 

 

And for some, it's allegiance to a reasonably coherent ethical system which repels MAGA's fatuous formulas. The country has many such belief systems, but we are learning that in the past century the country had erected a legal edifice to embody our diverse core beliefs. Trump/MAGA can't stand for that.

Attorney and commentator Liz Dye reports how one federal judge reacted to MAGA in court:

Judge rules that anti-woke is just racism
You can put lipstick on a pig, but it's still a rancid bigot.

 

Earlier this week, a federal judge in Boston explicitly called out the Trump administration for its “palpably clear” discrimination against racial minorities and LGBTQ+ Americans in a case involving canceled grants from the National Institutes of Health....

Judge [William] Young, who was appointed to the federal bench by Ronald Reagan in 1985, called the terminations “arbitrary and capricious.” But he went further than other judges in the many impoundment suits, calling the administration out for its flagrant animus against racial and sexual minorities.

“I am hesitant to draw this conclusion — but I have an unflinching obligation to draw it — that this represents racial discrimination and discrimination against America’s LGBTQ community,” he said, according to Politico. “That’s what this is. I would be blind not to call it out. My duty is to call it out.“

...“You are bearing down on people of color because of their color,” the judge hammered on. “The Constitution will not permit that.”

... In 1954, [lawyer Joseph] Welch’s “Have you no decency, sir!” marked the beginning of the end for Sen. Joe McCarthy. Public support for his witch hunt collapsed, and he died in disgrace three years later. But decency is in short supply these days, and the White House is digging in.

“It is appalling that a federal judge would use court proceedings to express his political views and preferences,” White House flack Kush Desai sneered. “How is a judge going to deliver an impartial decision when he explicitly stated his biased opinion that the administration’s retraction of illegal DEI funding is racist and anti-LGBTQ?”

A hit dog will holler. And maybe that dog will win a reprieve from the Supreme Court, too. But even so, it still matters when old bulls of the judiciary, particularly conservatives like Judge Young and Judge Royce Lamberth, who enjoined attacks on trans prisoners, call out the Trump regime for turning civil rights laws on their head.

“I’ve never seen a record where racial discrimination was so palpable,” Judge Young fumed. “I’ve sat on this bench now for 40 years. I’ve never seen government racial discrimination like this.”

Once upon a time, (1782 to be specific) we affirmed a national motto: E Pluribus Unum -- out of many one.  That's in the national DNA and it isn't going away.