So Here's What Has to Happen -- and of course it won't

Protests in Washington DC at the first G W Bush inaugural -- that most Americans still have no idea happened at all -- on January 20, 2001. 

The Department of Justice must be abolished. The Federal Courts must be shut down. The Supreme Court must be reformed and the radical justices must be removed.

Of course it can't happen and it won't happen because no authority will take on the responsibility for doing it. The Congress is a joke, and the Executive has Other Priorities. The People have no direct power -- that they're willing to use -- at all.

Throughout the years since the Supreme Court lawlessly cancelled the 2000 election vote count and awarded the Presidency to George W. Bush, the very concept of the Rule of Law has come undone. It's simply meaningless. And the the fact that the vast majority of the DoJ's legal staff stays on the job no matter what, and the courts continue to follow the lead of a lawless and dangerous Supreme Court, and the Congress tries to come up with even more outrageous lawlessness, and the White House doesn't care and is generally disinterested in the whole mess makes a mockery of "justice" in this country.

Of course the DoJ could be shut down tomorrow if the legal staff walked out. They won't do it, but that would shut it down. If the SCOTUS minority simply refused to participate in any more rulings by that body and requested that, say, the Congress initiate impeachment proceedings -- for the entire Court -- there would be some notice taken.

If the either of those things happened, the Federal Courts could not function. And if all of it happened at once, perhaps the public would notice that the entire federal justice system has become so corrupted and politicized in this country that it shouldn't be allowed to function any longer.

It deserves to be shut down and regenerated/reformed from the ground up.

Which is why it will never happen barring Revolution that overthrows the entire rotten bunch of criminals who rule from behind the gates of their Palace on the Potomac.

Instead of what should be done, we will be treated to more endless arguments over more endless years, arguments over legal minutiae and parsing, we'll see ever more corrupt investigations and prosecutions, more authoritarianism, more autocracy, more torture, more excuses, and more dithering by the representatives of the People in Congress assembled, more outrageous and lawless rulings from the bench, more tired ennui from the legal profession, more careerism, more failure.

This path was laid out when protest against the lawlessness of the Supreme Court's rendering on December 12, 2000, was allowed to fade away and the ruling was widely accepted.

We know what's happened since, in the Name of the Law, and it ain't pretty.

Scott Horton has been chewing this cud for quite a while and his ruminations over the OPR report on the Torture Memos is worth a gander. But like too many others with a JD and a platform in this country, he is resigned to accept this outcome as just another sorry example of Things Gone Awry. Nothing to be done about it now. Pity.

Sigh.