THEY FUCK AROUND, WE FIND OUT

The Republican-controlled Supreme Court is about to give U.S. presidents, or at least Republican U.S. presidents, a massive amount of leeway to commit crimes while in office. In The New Republic, Brynn Tannehill says that the Republican justices will someday regret what they're doing:

The conservatives on the Supreme Court have ... exposed their hubris, willful ignorance, and foolishness to the entire world in stark terms, and it will cost them and the nation dearly in the long run. They somehow presume that if Trump is elected and goes full dictator, that the power of the court, and their reputation, will save them. The truth is, Trump’s relationships with everyone he meets are completely transactional. If the court ever stops being useful to him, he will terminate it with prejudice if he thinks he can get away with it, and this court is doing everything it can to make him think he can get away with it.

... When Trump is president again, he is likely to believe that he has the option of “removing” any member of the Supreme Court who defies him. As long as the court doesn’t rule against him, they’re fine. From the justices’ perspective, they either end up neutered lap dogs of a despot, who do whatever they’re told out of fear, or they defy him and end up somewhere ... unpleasant (at best). Taking a dirt nap at worst. After all, if Trump can rub out a political opponent, can’t he do the same to an uncooperative jurist?

Or, alternately, the Court will be neutered by Democrats, according to Tannehill:

If Democrats nearly universally see the court as a corrupt rubber stamp for an autocrat, what happens if Republicans push too far on an issue? Like, say, an effective 50-state ban on abortion from the moment of conception with no real exceptions, which is almost certainly coming despite Republican claims to the contrary. Well, when the court upholds this, or implements it, it becomes highly likely that blue state governments tell the court, and the administration, to go f--- yourself.

But the bet being made by the Court's Republicans, and Republicans in general, is exactly the opposite of this. They're assuming that they'll never be at cross purposes with Trump or any other Republican president, at least not in a way that's serious enough to expose them to risk. And they assume -- probably correctly -- that Democrats are too institutionalist to defy the federal government in a way that threatens the Court's power.

Right-wingers routinely use power in ways that seem reckless, and likely to cause profound damage to America. Whenever they do, they seem to ask themselves a simple question: Is this likely to cause harm to anyone we care about? When they conclude that the answer is no, they just go ahead and do what they please.

A tax system that's significantly less progressive than the one we had in the pre-Reagan era, resulting in the kind of economic inequality not seen since the Gilded Age? Conservatives made a bet that there wouldn't be riots in the streets, and that even if inequality revived the labor movement, the workers wouldn't be at the capitalists' homes and factories with brickbats and torches, ready to kill, or burn it all down. So far, that's been a good bet.

A massive campaign to prevent a transition from fossil fuels, even as the planet burns? Elite conservatives gambled that the planet wouldn't become too unlivable, and that they'd always be able to retreat to the spots on the globe that remained pleasant. That's still working out for them.

A ban on abortions? Right-wing elitists know that the women and girls in their families will always be able to jet off to places where they can receive reproductive health services discreetly. A firearm free-for-all? The elite schools right-wingers' children attend don't seem to have a lot of mass shooters. Handing over the GOP's messaging to conspiracy-mongering propagandists? Right-wing elitists didn't suffer much harm as a result of rumors that Bill Clinton was a murderer and a drug dealer, or rumors that Barack Obama was a Kenyan-born gay communist, so how much of a problem could it be for them if the voters of their party believe the crazy talk of QAnon, Alex Jones, and Donald Trump?

You might argue that Republicans bet wrong on handing the Supreme Court over to abortion-banners. But the Dobbs decision merely put a limit on the number of House seats the GOP was able to win in 2022 -- the party still took control of the House from Democrats. Republicans still control most of the purple-state legislatures they carefully gerrymandered over the last decade or so. And the former president who made Dobbs possible still has an excellent chance of becoming president again.

So the bets are paying off. The bet that Trump wouldn't disturb right-wing elitists' comfort and leisure, and would in fact make life even cushier for them, paid off from 2017 to 2021. Elitists on the right are once again betting that while Trump might destroy democracy and the rule of law, the suffering will fall on other people, and they'll be fine.

I suppose someday they'll bet wrong, but Republican elitists are assuming that day hasn't arrived. And you can't blame them.