Elizabeth Lopatto and Sarah Jeong, writing for The Verge:

The right-wing Supreme Court’s hypocrisy is not the only thing to blame for our present state of affairs. The founding fathers’ tripartite system of government was mostly working out until all three branches succumbed to some kind of contagious monarchism.

But it’s clear the Founders’ anti-king protocol is now failing. The executive is an egomaniac who simply does not believe in life, liberty, or due process. Congress, in the firm grip of naked ideologues and flaccid cowards, has flopped as a constitutional counterbalance, incapable of punishing Donald Trump for an actual armed insurrection on January 6th, 2021. The Supreme Court, on the other hand, hasn’t failed — it has actively accelerated the conflagration, even ruling that Trump has absolute immunity for acts on January 6th. This is what makes the court’s Republican supermajority so dangerous, so profoundly immoral. Congress might be too short-sighted, deadlocked, and weak in character to pump the brakes. But SCOTUS, an institution designed to step back and think about the big picture, knows exactly what it’s doing, and is chillingly enthusiastic.

The current Republican Supreme Court is unlike anything the Founders could have ever possibly envisioned — a partisan instrument of a destructive political force, neither a check nor a balance on an executive that is threatening to strip citizenship from opposition politicians and is commandeering the state national guard against a state’s people over the objections of their governor. It is a root-access attack on the system itself, a virus with the ability to overwrite the founding documents of the nation.

You can call it a lot of things: right-wing radicalism, dictator envy, anti-democratic theocracy. But one thing’s clear. “Conservative” has never been more of a misnomer. The Republicans are conserving nothing: not due process, not precedent, and certainly not the truth.

Happy (final maybe?) Independence Day! 🧨