The President Has Announced His Intention to Stage a Coup

By Charles Pierce, Esquire

25 September 20

And he has made whoever he nominates to the Supreme Court an accomplice in that effort.

he story of the day was the president*'s becoming his own Reichstag Fire on Wednesday. He was asked (repeatedly) whether or not he would peaceably leave office if he loses. For the benefit of future fugitive underground historians, here's the money shot.

"Well, we're going to have to see what happens...You know that I've been complaining very strongly about the ballots and the ballots are a disaster. Get rid of the ballots and you'll have a very ... there won't be a transfer, frankly. There'll be a continuation. The ballots are out of control."

But there's another bit of presidential musing* that seems to me to be just as alarming and certainly as significant.

“I think this will end up in the Supreme Court and I think it’s very important that we have nine justices, and I think the system’s going to go very quickly...I think this scam that the Democrats are pulling, it’s a scam, this scam will be before the United States Supreme Court and I think having a 4-4 situation is not a good situation. Just in case it would be more political than it should be, I think it’s very important to have a ninth judge.”

In a truly ethical system of politics, this would put every judge under consideration to replace Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg in an impossible situation. The president* who will appoint one of them has said clearly that he expects to have a safe one in the bag when and if he fights the election results all the way up to the Supreme Court. And I will make the Toby Ziegler Wager—all the money in my pockets against all the money in Judge Whoever's pockets—that he already has asked his prospective justices for the same thing he asked the hapless James Comey in their private dinner meeting: loyalty. 

Now, it's one ongoing serious problem that the Republican Party has set up an entire mechanism by which a Justice David Souter can never happen again, and that the mechanism all but guarantees that the judges it produces will rule along party lines. That's a problem will have to be dealt with over the next several decades. But this is different by an order of magnitude from making sure that your judges will rule a certain way on environmental regulations. This is the president* telling you in advance that he expects you to violate your oath on an existential question regarding the survival of the republic. 

How can anyone possibly take that job under those circumstances? At the very least, wouldn't your professional ethics require that you announce that you will be recusing yourself from any decisions regarding the election to avoid even the appearance of a quid pro quo? And, even if the president* hinted at such an arrangement during your job interviews, isn't it your obligation as a citizen to inform your fellow citizens that these kind of shenanigans are underway? Isn't that information the country needs to know prior to electing its next president*? Isn't all this what anyone committed to an independent judiciary would do? For that matter, isn't that what a truly independent Supreme Court would do?

The president* has announced his intention to stage a coup. Judge Amy? Judge Barbara? Chief Justice Umpire? Got anything you'd like to add?