Welcome to the United States of Alabama.
It’s over. The transformation is complete. The entire country is now just a great ol’ big Alabama – a place where laws and rules are designed to comfort the comfortable, placate the patriarchy and coddle the party.
At the expense of absolutely everything – and everyone – else.
The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday drove home the final nail, ruling in an utterly disgusting, anti-American opinion that the president of the country all but has unlimited power and immunity from prosecution. The ruling left possible the president’s prosecution for unofficial acts, but it then so thoroughly muddied the process by which such acts could be prosecuted that it essentially granted full immunity.
I want to put this as bluntly as possible: You’re an absolute moron if you think that’s OK.
It is the sort of decision that historians note as the turning point. The thing that pushed it completely off the rails. The thing that undid it all.
Because it’s insane.
No one should hold such power in this country. Ever.
Not a Democrat. Not a Republican. No one.
This place was founded on the principles of law and order and checks and balances. Because you can’t truly have one without the other. And you can’t have sustained peace without both.
Ask Germany.
That it has come to this is no real surprise for those of us who live in Alabama. I told you eight years ago that when you elect Alabama-like people to office, you should expect the Alabamifaction of America to commence. That included the judiciary.
Because the only thing that matters in Alabama is serving the party in control, and the leaders of that party. We have molded laws and rules to better fit their behaviors and whims. We have overlooked crooked dealings and outright felonious behavior. The masses have sat idly by as we gave into the biases and appetites of the ruling elites, foolishly believing that serving the party was most important to all.
Hell, our Alabama Supreme Court has been making up laws and ignoring precedent outright for the last 30 years. The justices don’t even pretend to follow laws and precedent anymore.
In a recent opinion, the Chief Justice cited the Bible and other overtly religious texts. To placate a former governor, a justice actually used the printed rules of a board game as a guide to writing new laws.
We know all about Crazy Town here. Because that’s where we’ve been living.
But it’s easy to get there when you think you have the Bible and God on your side. That’s what Republicans have told themselves – that, much like the Blues Brothers, they’re on a mission from God. To save babies. To protect children. To not(??) feed and clothe the immigrants. To save America from the Democrats.
Once you take up that mindset, nothing you do – like leaving a woman bleeding to death in an ER instead of terminating the pregnancy that’s killing her – is without justification. Or even lacking in virtue.
There was a group of people from another country, a long time back, who were living under just such rule. The government had overstepped its authority using religion as an excuse, and in doing so had trampled on their religious rights. Fed up, those people left for a new country, where they would be free from such tyranny and the imposition of another’s religion.
We called them pilgrims.
You’re probably thinking that such a comparison is hyperbole. That it could never happen here. That all of this is just an overreaction from the left.
Boy, I don’t know … the highest court in the land, with half the Congress cheering them on, has said that religious beliefs can govern women’s health care decisions and that rioting to stop the legal counting of votes isn’t punishable.
And then on Monday, it created America’s first king.
