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"It's much worse." [View all]
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2024/4/29/2237893/--It-s-much-worse"It's much worse."
Monday, April 29, 2024 at 6:21:25a EDT
Munchausen
Rarely have I thought that a single quote would justify a diary — but after reading Yale historian, Timothy Snyder’s X thread that was posted yesterday — a clear-eyed delineation of the right-wing justices’ placement of dynamite at the door of Democracy, revealing how even the key objection to their inexplicable consideration of “immunity” is blunting what it really means, I felt it was important to place it here.
The link to the thread is here. The unbroken quote is below (the bolding within, mine):
Right-wing justices postulate Trump's "immunity." The objection is that this makes him a king. Not so. It's much worse.
A king can be subject to law. Even George III was subject to law. The American Revolution was justified by the notion that he had overstepped the law.
This discussion of immunity is something else.
The justices are not discussing any constitutional system at all, including a constitutional monarchy.
Justices are instead flirting with the idea that a single person can be outside any constitutional system, outside the rule of law as such. What justices seem to find charismatic is dictatorship, specifically fascist dictatorship. It is making an exception for a person that attracts them.
That is the basis of Nazi legal theory (Carl Schmitt). The law and the constitution are just there so we can find the person, the Leader, the Führer, who breaks them, who makes an exception.
A king can be subject to law. Even George III was subject to law. The American Revolution was justified by the notion that he had overstepped the law.
This discussion of immunity is something else.
The justices are not discussing any constitutional system at all, including a constitutional monarchy.
Justices are instead flirting with the idea that a single person can be outside any constitutional system, outside the rule of law as such. What justices seem to find charismatic is dictatorship, specifically fascist dictatorship. It is making an exception for a person that attracts them.
That is the basis of Nazi legal theory (Carl Schmitt). The law and the constitution are just there so we can find the person, the Leader, the Führer, who breaks them, who makes an exception.
Snyder then noted that he wasn’t making any specific claims that the justices “read Schmitt” — but that their “affinity for fascist law” is “troubling”.
The point here, being: “immunity” isn’t simply making a president (and in this case, an ex-President and all future presidents) a “king” — it’s placing them beyond even that which kings are subject to.
Fascism coming to America would no longer be a mere specter — a barricade or position from which we fight to protect our Democracy from the threat of those would seek fascism here; it will have arrived. We would, from that point on, exist behind enemy lines. And existing there, we may find ourselves, as a people now all-but powerless against tyranny, longing even for the days of kings — who were, beneath their crowns, at least subject to the law.
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