Independence Day, Part II: The Roberts Court

It's a Rarity, the Sequel That's Scarier than the Original

It’s an iconic scene: Monstrous aliens with an utter disregard for human life and contempt for all the United States ever was obliterate the White House and other vital national institutions. It happens just a couple days before July Fourth, forcing Americans to rethink their place in the universe.

It’s scary. It’s hard to imagine a sequel that is even scarier.

But now it has happened. In the sequel, once again days before July 4^th, monsters attack Washington and before our very eyes disintegrate the once venerated symbols of our national greatness, reducing to rubble the sources of our strength and indeed, our identity.

Except in this version, the destruction is not the work of special effects artists. It’s painfully, shockingly real. (Another difference with the original is that in this new version, Will Smith has been revealed to be an out-of-control nut job, Randy Quaid has actually joined the other side and the guy with the RV—in this case one donated by “a friend”—is actually one of the mega-villains.)

Independence Day, Part II: The Roberts Court is terrifying because it is actually happening.

We are Not the Country We Were

We are not the country today that we were before July 1, 2024. Many of the national institutions in which we took greatest pride now lie in smoldering ruins.  Somehow nearly 250 years of American history have been wiped away in the blinking of an eye.  Long ago, the country’s founders risked everything to shrug off the yoke of a king, to enter into a civic experiment in which no person would be above the law. We so venerated the idea, that on the pediment of our highest court, we had etched the words “Equal Justice Under Law.”

Now, with Trump immunity ruling forced upon the country by six rogue justices of that high court, five of whom were placed on the court by presidents who came into office without even winning the popular vote, all of whom lied to Congress to win the office, several of whom are demonstrably and despicably corrupt, what we once were is no longer. In the words of one of the few beacons of conscience and wisdom who remains on the Supreme Court, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the decision undoes the core principle of our democracy and renders the president a “king above the law.”

Her dissent contains words and ideas more chilling than the lines of any horror movie. “Argument by argument, the majority invents immunity by brute force.” The “extraordinary rule has no basis in law.”  Listing the consequences for the crimes of future presidents she sounds a death knell for our ideal that, as expressed by Alexander Hamilton in the Federalist Papers that our presidents be different from kings because they were “amenable to personal punishment and disgrace.” Her words: “Immune. Immune. Immune. Immune.”

The words concluding her extraordinary argument against the majority’s opinion were the most haunting of all, “With fear for democracy, I dissent.” She was joined in the dissent by Justices Kagan and Jackson, the three women alone among those seated on the court who seemed to remember their oaths of office or the words and spirit of the Constitution they swore to uphold.

We once boasted that we were a “beacon of democracy.” We once saw our democratic values as a strength, a kind of superpower that gave us the moral high ground and won us allies around the world.

But now, in the wake of yesterday’s decision, written by the majority as an act of political gratitude to America’s most corrupt and repugnant leader ever, the man who appointed the majority of them to the exalted, life term positions, all that is gone. Indeed, as we reflect on it, if we are honest we must admit the this attack on what we hold dear has been going on for some time and that the Trump decision was only a horrifying coup de grace in the wake of other sorts of coups and coup attempts that undercut the rule of law in the United States.

With the Citizen’s United decision, the Roberts court shifted the balance of power in our democracy to the rich. With the Shelby County decision, the court made it harder for many American citizens to vote. With the Dobbs decision, it stripped away a basic freedom of our majority population. In the last week, the court arrogated onto itself the right to make decisions about the health and safety of all Americans, weakening dramatically the right of the executive branch to regulate the big businesses and investors who the court’s majority serves ahead of all the rest of us.

Our Democracy Hangs By the Most Tenuous of Threads

Throughout, as its decisions in conjunction with actions taken by allies in the other branches of government profoundly exacerbated inequality in America, the conditions of equal opportunity and economic justice that are essential to leveling the political playing field were eradicated.

Today, we are no longer the world’s leading democracy. Indeed, the idea that we are a democracy at all hangs by the most tenuous of threads.

Fortunately, the end of this story has yet to be written. While the threat posed by those who are attacking us, who we are, what we aspire to be, is immense and while, for the moment, they seem to have gained the upper hand, there is still hope.

In the original “Independence Day” and indeed in the real battle for independence that gave it its name, the people rise up and defeat the enemy. That can still happen here. Short of rousing battles, the vehicle by which we can save and then begin to restore our system of government is the next election, the one scheduled for this November.

Dramatically, if we fail at that time to rebuff forces of autocracy that are seeking to deliver all power in this country into the hands of a few, led by one proto-king, one ruler now empowered to use the awesome resources of our government against us with complete impunity, then this November’s election could be the last free and fair election in our history. Thanks to this court’s ruling on Monday and the warped, fascistic ambitions of a self-described would-be dictator, we are not likely to get a second chance.

Consequently, we cannot afford to let anger or sadness be our primary reaction to the shocking developments we have witnessed this week. We must resolve to act. We must resolve to treat the upcoming election not as an ordinary referendum pitting one man or woman against another. Instead, we must see it as a moment of existential choice for our democracy, a last chance to preserve the spirit and aspirations of the first American revolution, the one that began on July 4, 1776 and whose memory we have celebrated on each and every Independence Day ever since.

A New Solemn Pledge

We must commit ourselves to actively working, devoting every ounce of time and money and creativity and doggedness we have to spare, to defeating Trump, defeating the forces that empowered this court, and elevating all those candidates, virtually all of whom are running under the banner of the appositely named Democratic Party, to office so we can begin to undo the damage they have done in much the same way that they have sought to undo that which once sought to make all of us equal in the eyes of the law. 

There is a tradition for that kind of commitment. It can be found in the final words of the document that begins, “In Congress, July 4, 1776” and ends with the promise to fight for our beliefs by pledging “our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.”