Myth’s Note: Happy Independence Day, Americans! Rather than starting with my usual meme, I’ll be ending things on a lighter note. After this politically charged long-form read (15 minutes or so), I think you’ll want the palate cleanser. Without further ado, let’s begin …
Remarks at Amherst College – President John F. Kennedy (October 26, 1963)
I look forward to a great future for America – a future in which our country will match its military strength with our moral restraint, its wealth with our wisdom, its power with our purpose.
Source: Reuters / Jonathan Ernst 
Remarks by President Biden on the Supreme Court’s Immunity Ruling (July 1, 2024)
The presidency is the most powerful office in the world. It’s an office that not only tests your judgment, perhaps even more importantly it’s an office that can test your character because you not only face moments where you need the courage to exercise the full power of the presidency, you also face moments where you need the wisdom to respect the limits of the power of the office of the presidency.
This nation was founded on the principle that there are no kings in America. Each — each of us is equal before the law. No one — no one is above the law, not even the president of the United States.
TRUMP v. UNITED STATES - Justice Sonia Sotomayor, dissenting (July 1, 2024)
Today’s decision to grant former Presidents criminal immunity reshapes the institution of the Presidency. It makes a mockery of the principle, foundational to our Constitution and system of Government, that no man is above the law.
[…]
Looking beyond the fate of this particular prosecution, the long-term consequences of today’s decision are stark. The Court effectively creates a law-free zone around the President, upsetting the status quo that has existed since the Founding. This new official-acts immunity now “lies about like a loaded weapon” for any President that wishes to place his own interests, his own political survival, or his own financial gain, above the interests of the Nation. Korematsu v. United States, 323 U. S. 214, 246 (1944) (Jackson, J., dissenting).
The President of the United States is the most powerful person in the country, and possibly the world. When he uses his official powers in any way, under the majority’s reasoning, he now will be insulated from criminal prosecution. Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune.
Let the President violate the law, let him exploit the trappings of his office for personal gain, let him use his official power for evil ends. Because if he knew that he may one day face liability for breaking the law, he might not be as bold and fearless as we would like him to be. That is the majority’s message today.
Even if these nightmare scenarios never play out, and I pray they never do, the damage has been done. The relationship between the President and the people he serves has shifted irrevocably. In every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law.
[…]
Never in the history of our Republic has a President had reason to believe that he would be immune from criminal prosecution if he used the trappings of his office to violate the criminal law. Moving forward, however, all former Presidents will be cloaked in such immunity. If the occupant of that office misuses official power for personal gain, the criminal law that the rest of us must abide will not provide a backstop.
With fear for our democracy, I dissent.
Biden-Trump Debate Transcript - CNN (June 28, 2024)
Jack Tapper (CNN): I’m going to give you a – a minute, President Trump, for a follow-up question I have.
After a jury convicted you of 34 felonies last month, you said if re-elected you would, quote, “have every right to go after,” unquote, your political opponents. You just talked about members of the Select Committee on January 6th going to jail.
Your main political opponent is standing on stage with you tonight. Can you clarify exactly what it means about you feeling you have every right to go after your political opponents?
President Donald J. Trump: Well, I said my retribution is going to be success. We’re going to make this country successful again, because right now it’s a failing nation. My retribution’s going to be success.
Remarks by President Biden on the Supreme Court’s Immunity Ruling (July 1, 2024)
This is a fundamentally new principle, and it’s a dangerous precedent because the power of the office will no longer be constrained by the law, even including the Supreme Court of the United States. The only limits will be self-imposed by the president alone.
This decision today has continued the Court’s attack in recent years on a wide range of long-established legal principles in our nation, from gutting voting rights and civil rights to taking away a woman’s right to choose to today’s decision that undermines the rule of law of this nation.
For 40 years, Chevron U. S. A. Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc., 467 U. S. 837 (1984), has served as a cornerstone of administrative law, allocating responsibility for statutory construction between courts and agencies. Under Chevron, a court uses all its normal interpretive tools to determine whether Congress has spoken to an issue. If the court finds Congress has done so, that is the end of the matter; the agency’s views make no difference. But if the court finds, at the end of its interpretive work, that Congress has left an ambiguity or gap, then a choice must be made. Who should give content to a statute when Congress’s instructions have run out? Should it be a court? Or should it be the agency Congress has charged with administering the statute?
The answer Chevron gives is that it should usually be the agency, within the bounds of reasonableness. That rule has formed the backdrop against which Congress, courts, and agencies—as well as regulated parties and the public—all have operated for decades. It has been applied in thousands of judicial decisions. It has become part of the warp and woof of modern government, supporting regulatory efforts of all kinds—to name a few, keeping air and water clean, food and drugs safe, and financial markets honest. And the rule is right.
This Court has long understood Chevron deference to reflect what Congress would want, and so to be rooted in a presumption of legislative intent. Congress knows that it does not—in fact cannot—write perfectly complete regulatory statutes. It knows that those statutes will inevitably contain ambiguities that some other actor will have to resolve, and gaps that some other actor will have to fill. And it would usually prefer that actor to be the responsible agency, not a court. Some interpretive issues arising in the regulatory context involve scientific or technical subject matter. Agencies have expertise in those areas; courts do not. Some demand a detailed understanding of complex and interdependent regulatory programs. Agencies know those programs inside-out; again, courts do not. And some present policy choices, including trade-offs between competing goods.
Agencies report to a President, who in turn answers to the public for his policy calls; courts have no such accountability and no proper basis for making policy. And of course Congress has conferred on that expert, experienced, and politically accountable agency the authority to administer—to make rules about and otherwise implement—the statute giving rise to the ambiguity or gap. Put all that together and deference to the agency is the almost obvious choice, based on an implicit congressional delegation of interpretive authority. We defer, the Court has explained, “because of a presumption that Congress” would have “desired the agency (rather than the courts)” to exercise “whatever degree of discretion” the statute allows. Smiley v. Citibank (South Dakota), N. A., 517 U. S. 735, 740–741 (1996)
Today, the Court flips the script: It is now “the courts (rather than the agency)” that will wield power when Congress has left an area of interpretive discretion. A rule of judicial humility gives way to a rule of judicial hubris.
In recent years, this Court has too often taken for itself decision-making authority Congress assigned to agencies. The Court has substituted its own judgment on workplace health for that of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration; its own judgment on climate change for that of the Environmental Protection Agency; and its own judgment on student loans for that of the Department of Education. See, e.g., National Federation of Independent Business v. OSHA, 595 U. S. 109 (2022); West Virginia v. EPA, 597 U. S. 697 (2022); Biden v. Nebraska, 600 U. S. 477 (2023).
[…]
Source: Leigh Vogel / Getty Images for NRDC 
Today, the Court strips the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) of the power Congress gave it to respond to “the most pressing environmental challenge of our time.” Massachusetts v. EPA, 549 U. S. 497, 505 (2007).
[…]
Congress charged EPA with addressing those potentially catastrophic harms, including through regulation of fossil fuel-fired power plants. Section 111 of the Clean Air Act directs EPA to regulate stationary sources of any substance that “causes, or contributes significantly to, air pollution” and that “may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare.” 42 U. S. C. §7411(b)(1)(A). Carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases fit that description. See Cite as: 597 U. S. ____ (2022) 3 KAGAN, J., dissenting American Elec. Power, 564 U. S., at 416–417; Massachusetts, 549 U. S., at 528–532.
EPA thus serves as the Nation’s “primary regulator of greenhouse gas emissions.” American Elec. Power, 564 U. S., at 428. And among the most significant of the entities it regulates are fossil-fuelfired (mainly coal- and natural-gas-fired) power plants. Today, those electricity-producing plants are responsible for about one quarter of the Nation’s greenhouse gas emissions. See EPA, Sources of Greenhouse Gas Emissions (Apr. 14, 2022), Curbing that output is a necessary part of any effective approach for addressing climate change.
[…]
… there are good reasons for Congress (within extremely broad limits) to get to call the shots. Congress knows about how government works in ways courts don’t. More specifically, Congress knows what mix of legislative and administrative action conduces to good policy. Courts should be modest.
Today, the Court is not. Section 111, most naturally read, authorizes EPA to develop the Clean Power Plan—in other words, to decide that generation shifting is the “best system of emission reduction” for power plants churning out carbon dioxide. Evaluating systems of emission reduction is what EPA does. And nothing in the rest of the Clean Air Act, or any other statute, suggests that Congress did not mean for the delegation it wrote to go as far as the text says. In rewriting that text, the Court substitutes its own ideas about delegations for Congress’s. And that means the Court substitutes its own ideas about policymaking for Congress’s. The Court will not allow the Clean Air Act to work as Congress instructed. The Court, rather than Congress, will decide how much regulation is too much.
The subject matter of the regulation here makes the Court’s intervention all the more troubling. Whatever else this Court may know about, it does not have a clue about how to address climate change. And let’s say the obvious: The stakes here are high. Yet the Court today prevents congressionally authorized agency action to curb power plants’ carbon dioxide emissions. The Court appoints itself—instead of Congress or the expert agency—the decision maker on climate policy. I cannot think of many things more frightening. Respectfully, I dissent.
Source: Eric Lee / The New York Times 
But evidently that was, for this Court, all too piecemeal. In one fell swoop, the majority today gives itself exclusive power over every open issue—no matter how expertise-driven or policy-laden—involving the meaning of regulatory law. As if it did not have enough on its plate, the majority turns itself into the country’s administrative czar. It defends that move as one (suddenly) required by the (nearly 80-year-old) Administrative Procedure Act. But the Act makes no such demand. Today’s decision is not one Congress directed. It is entirely the majority’s choice.
[…]
It barely tries to advance the usual factors this Court invokes for overruling precedent. Its justification comes down, in the end, to this: Courts must have more say over regulation—over the provision of health care, the protection of the environment, the safety of consumer products, the efficacy of transportation systems, and so on. A longstanding precedent at the crux of administrative governance thus falls victim to a bald assertion of judicial authority. The majority disdains restraint, and grasps for power.
[…]
Congress would usually think agencies the better choice to resolve the ambiguities and fill the gaps in regulatory statutes. Because agencies are “experts in the field.” And because they are part of a political branch, with a claim to making interstitial policy. And because Congress has charged them, not us, with administering the statutes containing the open questions. At its core, Chevron is about respecting that allocation of responsibility—the conferral of primary authority over regulatory matters to agencies, not courts.
[…]
Today, the majority does not respect that judgment. It gives courts the power to make all manner of scientific and technical judgments. It gives courts the power to make all manner of policy calls, including about how to weigh competing goods and values. (See Chevron itself.) It puts courts at the apex of the administrative process as to every conceivable subject—because there are always gaps and ambiguities in regulatory statutes, and often of great import. What actions can be taken to address climate change or other environmental challenges? What will the Nation’s health-care system look like in the coming decades? Or the financial or transportation systems? What rules are going to constrain the development of A.I.?
In every sphere of current or future federal regulation, expect courts from now on to play a commanding role. It is not a role Congress has given to them, in the APA or any other statute. It is a role this Court has now claimed for itself, as well as for other judges.
And that claim requires disrespecting, too, this Court’s precedent. There are no special reasons, of the kind usually invoked for overturning precedent, to eliminate Chevron deference. And given Chevron’s pervasiveness, the decision to do so is likely to produce large-scale disruption. All that backs today’s decision is the majority’s belief that Chevron was wrong—that it gave agencies too much power and courts not enough. But shifting views about the worth of regulatory actors and their work do not justify overhauling a cornerstone of administrative law. In that sense too, today’s majority has lost sight of its proper role.
And it is impossible to pretend that today’s decision is a one-off, in either its treatment of agencies or its treatment of precedent. […]
Biden-Trump Debate Transcript (June 28, 2024)
President Joseph R. Biden: The idea that somehow we are this failing country, I never heard a president talk like this before. We – we’re the envy of the world. Name me a single major country president who wouldn’t trade places with the United States of America. For all our problems and all our opportunities, we’re the most progressive country in the world in getting things done. We’re the strongest country in the world. We’re a country in the world who keeps our word and everybody trusts us, all of our allies.
Crisis of Confidence Speech - President Jimmy Carter (July 15, 1979)
[…] The erosion of our confidence in the future is threatening to destroy the social and the political fabric of America.
The confidence that we have always had as a people is not simply some romantic dream or a proverb in a dusty book that we read just on the Fourth of July.
It is the idea which founded our nation and has guided our development as a people. Confidence in the future has supported everything else -- public institutions and private enterprise, our own families, and the very Constitution of the United States. Confidence has defined our course and has served as a link between generations. We've always believed in something called progress. We've always had a faith that the days of our children would be better than our own.
Our people are losing that faith, not only in government itself but in the ability as citizens to serve as the ultimate rulers and shapers of our democracy. As a people we know our past and we are proud of it. Our progress has been part of the living history of America, even the world.
We always believed that we were part of a great movement of humanity itself called democracy, involved in the search for freedom, and that belief has always strengthened us in our purpose. But just as we are losing our confidence in the future, we are also beginning to close the door on our past. […]
Remarks by President Biden on the Supreme Court’s Immunity Ruling (July 1, 2024)
I concur with Justice Sotomayor’s dissent today. She — here’s what she said. She said, “In every use of official power, the president is now a king above the law. With fear for our democracy, I dissent,” end of quote.
So should the American people dissent. I dissent.
May God bless you all. And may God help preserve our democracy. Thank you. And may God protect our troops.
By 2025, American democracy could collapse, causing extreme domestic political instability, including widespread civil violence. By 2030, if not sooner, the country could be governed by a right-wing dictatorship.
We mustn’t dismiss these possibilities just because they seem ludicrous or too horrible to imagine. In 2014, the suggestion that Donald Trump would become president would also have struck nearly everyone as absurd. But today we live in a world where the absurd regularly becomes real and the horrible commonplace.
Source: Associated Press / Charlie Neibergall 
Joe Biden’s parting gift to America will be Christian fascism - Chris Hedges (March 18, 2024)
Fear—fear of the return of Trump and Christian fascism—is the only card the Democrats have left to play. This will work in urban, liberal enclaves where college educated technocrats, part of the globalized knowledge economy, are busy scolding and demonizing the working class for their ingratitude.
The Democrats have foolishly written off these “deplorables” as a lost political cause. This precariat, the mantra goes, is victimized not by a predatory system built to enrich the billionaire class, but by their ignorance and individual failures. Dismissing the disenfranchised absolves the Democrats from advocating the legislation to protect and create decent-paying jobs.
Fear has no hold in deindustrialized urban landscapes and the neglected wastelands of rural America, where families struggle without sustainable work, an opioid crisis, food deserts, personal bankruptcies, evictions, crippling debt and profound despair.
They want what Trump wants. Vengeance. Who can blame them?
Source: Real America’s Voice’s War Room 
Kevin Roberts (Heritage Foundation President): In spite of all this nonsense from the left, we are going to win. We're in the process of taking this country back. No one in the audience should be despairing.
No one should be discouraged. We ought to be really encouraged by what happened yesterday. And in spite of all of the injustice, which, of course, friends and audience of this show, of our friend Steve [Bannon] know, we are going to prevail.
[...]
If people in the audience are looking for something to read over Independence Day weekend, in addition to rereading the Declaration of Independence, read Hamilton's No. 70 because there, along with some other essays, in some other essays, he talks about the importance of a vigorous executive.
[...]
And so I come full circle on this response and just want to encourage you with some substance that we are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.
Source: Associated Press / Julia Nikhinson 
We’re a failing nation right now. We’re a seriously failing nation. And we’re a failing nation because of him.
[…]
… we’re in a failing nation, but it’s not going to be failing anymore.
We’re going to make it great again.
Biden-Trump Debate Transcript – President Donald J. Trump (June 28, 2024)
If you enjoyed today’s piece, and if you also share my insatiable curiosity for the various interdisciplinary aspects of “collapse”, please consider taking a look at some of my other written and graphic works at my Substack Page – Myth of Progress. That said, as a proud member of this community, I will always endeavour to publish my work to r/collapse first.
My work is free, and will always be free; when it comes to educating others on the challenges of the human predicament, no amount of compensation will suffice … and if you’ve made it this far, then you have my sincere thanks.
For those of you who have endured this article, here’s one last gift for your efforts. You probably feel exactly the same way I do.
