A Covenant with Death

To quote William Lloyd Garrison on slavery in the Constitution:

The Second Amendment "…is a covenant with death and an agreement with hell."

(He was referencing Isaiah 28:15: "We have made a covenant with death, and with hell are we at agreement.")

Lawless Immunity

The SCOTUS immunity opinion—completely unmoored from originalism or history and tradition—is, legally speaking, bullshit—completely lawless.

As a lawyer for 24 years, and before that too, I've had a passionate belief in the rule of law, even in the face of this SCOTUS conservative supermajority's self-dealing, undemocratic decisions.

As a for-instance: Justice Thomas was in favor of Chevron deference in 2005—he wrote an opinion reaffirming it.

As that article I linked to says,

[Harlan] Crow co-founded the Club for Growth in 1999 to promote limited government and overturn Chevron. In 2010, he gave the justice’s wife, Ginni Thomas, $500,000 to start Liberty Consulting, a firm that handles anonymous political donations.

(Crow may have also afforded Thomas some other trifles.)

Now, in 2024, Thomas voted in favor of overturning the Chevron case.

The immunity decision goes farther. It allows a President Trump to commit official treason—invoke the Insurrection Act—a core power—to put "dangerous" Democrats in camps? Sure, why not; his motive doesn't matter.

Lawless? As in, made up from whole cloth.

Lawyer and excellent legal journalist Chris Geidner, wrote about Trump v. U.S. in his excellent Law Dork blog the day the decision came out:

It is a shocking expansion of presidential power to benefit Trump that transforms the presidency — and, with it, the nation.

Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the court’s decision, making those broad pronouncements in Trump’s challenge to the special counsel’s indictment of the former president for his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. Roberts did so, moreover, with no clear textual support in the Constitution — and a considerable historical record to the contrary.

But let me cite a more authoritative source.

The main takeaway of today’s decision is that all of a President’s official acts, defined without regard to motive or intent, are entitled to immunity that is “at least . . . presumptive,” and quite possibly “absolute.” Ante, at 14. Whenever the President wields the enormous power of his office, the majority says, the criminal law (at least presumptively) cannot touch him. This official-acts immunity has “no firm grounding in constitutional text, history, or precedent.” Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, 597 U. S. 215, 280 (2022). Indeed, those “standard grounds for constitutional decisionmaking,” id., at 279, all point in the opposite direction. No matter how you look at it, the majority’s official-acts immunity is utterly indefensible. (Emphasis supplied)

Trump v. U.S., No. 23-939 (July 2, 2024) (Sotomayor, J., dissenting, at 4), https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/23-939_e2pg.pdf

Arthur Schlesinger wrote about the imperial presidency. Nixon started the ball rolling. Every Republican president, starting with him, has been antidemocratic and disrespectful of the rule of law. Trump was the apotheosis—so far, at least.

The next Republican president will be the last American president. The last real, duly elected one, anyway.

This decision feels like a punch in the gut—the emptiness I feel when someone dies.

My dear friend and lawyer comrade Marty Solomon (not the Christian minister) had a contrary view:

Imagine how decent lawyers felt when Dred Scott was decided. Or Korematsu. We have a long history of really screwing up our own law and then taking a long, long time to fix it. To be an American is to learn to live in an ugly, imperfect country, probably your whole life through—yet struggle to maintain faith in your principles and the collective ability to push for change until change comes.

Unfortunately, this decision has the potential to bring the American experiment down around our ears. How would we have fixed Dred Scott if the South had successfully seceded? How would we have fixed Korematsu if the Axis had won? (Trick question: It would have fixed itself, and the group in the camps would have changed places with people outside the camps.)

I've often said that the two biggest stains on our legal system are the death penalty and the Guantanamo prison. (Not to minimize the disaster of racist policing, SCOTUS's ridiculous interpretation of the Second Amendment, the erasure of the Establishment Clause in First Amendment jurisprudence… I could go on.)

But in this case, with this decision, John Roberts and his five unindicted coconspirators stained our legal system in a way that may be its end.

Hard for me, after that, to sustain my faith ("the evidence of things not seen," right?) in the rule of law.

And yet, I feel I have no choice.

Catherine the Great, the Bestest Bulldog in All the Land (Part two...)

Schnorring

In my previous (first) Catherine the Great blog post, I mentioned her penchant for schnorring. Begging. Or, in the honorable sense that I can't help but use with such a sweet, affectionate hound (1), "fundraising." (She is my favorite canine charity. Sorry, Lisa Milot—though Athenspets has a special place in my heart. And may Bagel's memory be for a blessing. Sandra Lawson, a Reconstructionist—as am I—rabbi I follow on FB, used that traditional Jewish blessing for someone who has died, a reference to Proverbs 10:7, referring to their own late dog.)

Anyway, the point: This is schnorring.

Not merely an example, nor an ideal. This is, I aver, the veritable Platonic ideal of schnorring. (I said what I said.)

Professional fundraisers the Jewish community over should hang their heads in shame (and go give love to their very fortunate domestic animals, of whatever sort). 

1. Given the extent to which she uses, and enjoys, sniffing the air, and given her relative jowliness (and the fact that she's gentle enough that she could retrieve an undamaged bird, in shallow water), Catherine is a scenthound. I will not be entertaining any questions at this time.

Catherine the Great, the Bestest Bulldog in All the Land (Part One of Many)

This is Catherine the Great.

Catherine's guardians live across the street.

I have very liberal borrowing privileges, however.

Catherine, as the title says, is the bestest bulldog in all the land.

Wicked smaht

She's also wicked smaht.

An immediate example: She's quietly lying under my desk. I hadn't petted her in a while. So she put her (hefty) paw on my sneaker. I petted her, but there the paw resides, as she licks it (but hopefully not my shoe).

She wanted more attention, and she knew how to get it.

(Her paw was on my sneaker for a while. The pressure varied and increased periodically. Wicked smaht.)

Other examples

Hot, hot, hot

I went to get her one day in the early afternoon. The pavement was hot, and Catherine was not having it. Once she was "encouraged" to leave the concrete at her guardians' house—stubborn, as the breed name implies—she ran across the pavement, on the most direct path to grass on the other side.

How did she know to do that? Do dogs see far enough into the infrared that she could see the relative temperatures?

Bed

She is food motivated. (Again, no surprise.) I move her dog bed (yes, we have one, at her guest house) near our dining table at dinner time. I usually sit at the table after dinner. (I'm more comfortable on a hard chair than sunk into my usual place on our couch.) One night she was schnorring for food right next to us.

I gestured to the bed… and she went.

(I reinforced that, and taught her the command word "Bed." It works… sometimes. And yes, I have her guardians' permission to educate her, or try.)

Walkies

When I take her out, she sniffs around, walks to the grass, urinates or defecates, sniffs around some more… and then she decides when we're done and going back to our house. No hesitation: She turns around and starts walking. Trudging. (As one of her guardian's dowager guardians said, she's probably usually in pain. Bulldogs and osteoarthritis, like sand in a bathing suit.)

Canine autonomy, I tell you. (I eat a lot of beef and chicken for someone—a lawyer—who uses the expression "nonhuman person.")

N.B.: From that definition, "'Schnorring' is also a respectable and honorable profession – that of fundraising." Speaking of which, she was schnorring—fundraising!—at me about her own victuals, before she splooted on my cool home-office tiles. Growling and loud barking, and the occasional paw. Quite opinionated.

I better go.

Preliminary Introduction

 Howdy, y'all.

Back in the day (2004–2013), I kept a blog, The Scrivener (the link is on the new main page).

As I wrote in 2014,

Now, I am writing. Some blogging, keeping a journal, an occasional screed, a magazine article. (And this.) Life gets better—much. And—pain recedes.

Well, I've lived since, as one does. Better, I don't know about. But, living still.

Not as much writing of late, and few screeds.

Which is where our story begins again.

Stay tuned.

(The fragment from 2014 is from my prize-winning essay "Keep Writing." As prolix as I am, the word limit for the contest was 250 words. My winning entry came in at 249. The essay can be found here.)