Blame Chief Justice John Roberts for Elon Musk and his reactionary band of super-arrogant teenage and twenty-something marauders (a.k.a., DOGEbags) who are wreaking havoc and assorted mayhem throughout the federal establishment and destroying lives around the world. They are the reductio ad absurdam of Roberts’ historically terrible majority opinion in the infamous morally, ethically, politically and Constitutionally dead-wrong Supreme Court Citizens United decision in 2010. Back then, Roberts was just getting started flexing his dismal decision muscles that today put him on a par with historians’ ranking of Roger B. Taney of Dred Scott notoriety as the all-time worst Chief Justice. Fitting that he serves at the same time as the all-time worst President, in whose expansive pocket he seems to sit, and the all-time worst House Speaker, Mike Johnson, Louisiana’s contribution to abject servility. A trifecta unlike any other.
It is because of the Roberts Court that Elon Musk has been able to buy his way into an unelected co-presidency or, at a minimum, the new post of Prime Minister of the United States. A cool $250 million campaign contribution buys a hell of a lot of access. In Musk’s case, the purchase wins him carte blanche to do whatever the hell he wants with the U.S. government.
Pre-Citizens United, there were limits on the amounts that donors could contribute to political campaigns. Pre-Musk, legal scholars already viewed Roberts’ Citizens United opinion as dangerously wrong only because he equated corporations with individuals, conferring a First Amendment Free Speech right on the former that previously had only applied to sentient beings with a pulse and a heart. No one contemplated that a former South African born to Apartheid would contribute a king’s ransom to a political candidate in order to buy his way into masterminding a budding dictatorship.
The damage Trump and his (domestic) handler, unelected Co-President Musk, have already done is incalculable and will take years to repair if ever it can be. Shutting down the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the most important aid agency in the world, after lying that it is a “fraud and corrupt” is beyond appalling. People in Africa, Asia and Latin America are dying because they are suddenly cut off from life-giving medications and live-saving sustenance. It is not too extreme to say that what Dr. Evil and his Mini-Me are doing is illegal and, in my opinion, criminal.
Having wrecked USAID, Musk and his malign minions have gone on to perform the same amputation absent anesthesia on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), which in its brief history has returned $20 billion to defrauded Americans. Not to mention the anguish he has unleashed on the livelihoods of the 1,700 CFPB employees, who now join their 10,000 USAID fellow civil servants in employee limbo. This is only the beginning of the destruction he and Trump intend to rain down on the heads of the American people.
But don’t expect that there will be any immediate consequences for these reprehensible acts. The courts, the only guardrail left, operate with tortoise-like deliberation while Trump and Musk proceed at light speed to do their harm.
John Roberts has led a life of privilege and ambition and has experienced nary a bump in his yellow-brick road to power, fame and wealth (wife Jane brings in $10 million a year—see Rant No 740, “Not So Plain Jane”). Perhaps that’s why he understands so little about what ordinary, less fortunate people must endure, and why his decisions and opinions consistently favor the charmed class into which he was born and has lived his entire life. Someone who had to travel a harder road to the mountaintop might view the devastating implications of a Citizens United decision, which have now come to pass, differently.
Dick Hermann
February 14, 2025
It is because of the Roberts Court that Elon Musk has been able to buy his way into an unelected co-presidency or, at a minimum, the new post of Prime Minister of the United States. A cool $250 million campaign contribution buys a hell of a lot of access. In Musk’s case, the purchase wins him carte blanche to do whatever the hell he wants with the U.S. government.
Pre-Citizens United, there were limits on the amounts that donors could contribute to political campaigns. Pre-Musk, legal scholars already viewed Roberts’ Citizens United opinion as dangerously wrong only because he equated corporations with individuals, conferring a First Amendment Free Speech right on the former that previously had only applied to sentient beings with a pulse and a heart. No one contemplated that a former South African born to Apartheid would contribute a king’s ransom to a political candidate in order to buy his way into masterminding a budding dictatorship.
The damage Trump and his (domestic) handler, unelected Co-President Musk, have already done is incalculable and will take years to repair if ever it can be. Shutting down the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the most important aid agency in the world, after lying that it is a “fraud and corrupt” is beyond appalling. People in Africa, Asia and Latin America are dying because they are suddenly cut off from life-giving medications and live-saving sustenance. It is not too extreme to say that what Dr. Evil and his Mini-Me are doing is illegal and, in my opinion, criminal.
Having wrecked USAID, Musk and his malign minions have gone on to perform the same amputation absent anesthesia on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), which in its brief history has returned $20 billion to defrauded Americans. Not to mention the anguish he has unleashed on the livelihoods of the 1,700 CFPB employees, who now join their 10,000 USAID fellow civil servants in employee limbo. This is only the beginning of the destruction he and Trump intend to rain down on the heads of the American people.
But don’t expect that there will be any immediate consequences for these reprehensible acts. The courts, the only guardrail left, operate with tortoise-like deliberation while Trump and Musk proceed at light speed to do their harm.
John Roberts has led a life of privilege and ambition and has experienced nary a bump in his yellow-brick road to power, fame and wealth (wife Jane brings in $10 million a year—see Rant No 740, “Not So Plain Jane”). Perhaps that’s why he understands so little about what ordinary, less fortunate people must endure, and why his decisions and opinions consistently favor the charmed class into which he was born and has lived his entire life. Someone who had to travel a harder road to the mountaintop might view the devastating implications of a Citizens United decision, which have now come to pass, differently.
Dick Hermann
February 14, 2025
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