SCOTUS Anoints a “King Above the Law”
 July 2, 2024 Hello, Meteor readers, Emphasis on the hell, amirite? The last few weeks have been a horrific look into how far our now exceedingly right-wing Supreme Court will go to decimate the government in service to one aspiring autocrat (and their own billionaire benefactors). So much has happened since even yesterday; the disastrous debate feels like a million years ago.  But! We’ve got you covered, with an explainer on what exactly the Supreme Court presidential immunity ruling means. (Spoiler: its whole point is chaos.) And overseas, Mariane Pearl illuminates the far-right victories in France’s snap elections and why President Macron even called a snap election in the first place. (Spoiler: he is a dumbass.) All you fascists bound to lose, Julianne Escobedo Shepherd  WHAT’S GOING ONKing for a day (or forever): Yesterday, as you surely know, the Supreme Court weighed in on the concept of presidential immunity from prosecution—which, when a convicted felon is running for president, feels quite pressing. In a 6-3 decision, the Court ruled that presidents have full immunity for “official” acts, but not for “unofficial” acts—and it is up to the lower courts to determine what differentiates one from the other. There’s a lot of talk about the long-term implications of such a ruling and what the “official”/“unofficial” divide even means. But let’s be honest: This whole thing is confusing. So let’s look at it in the simplest terms possible. First, there is the immediate effect of the ruling: Donald Trump is already trying to overturn his hush-money conviction in New York. As a result, his sentencing will be delayed while the courts wait for the appeals process to sort itself out. And his charges related to January 6 probably won’t be brought to trial until after the election—or ever—as Washington, D.C. Judge Tanya Chutkan hears whether he was acting in an “official” capacity when he tried to block Biden’s presidency from certification. Then there’s what this means in the long term. In 2016, Trump infamously said that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and get away with it. Let’s apply the ruling to that statement to better understand the fresh hell the Supreme Court hath wrought.  PROTESTORS GATHERED OUTSIDE THE COURT YESTERDAY TO VOICE THEIR THOUGHTS ON THE DECISION. (VIA GETTY IMAGES) If Trump, as president (🤮), shot some guy he didn’t like on Fifth Avenue himself, that would not be an “official act,” and he would be open to prosecution. But if Trump, as president (again, 🤮), called Seal Team 6 from the White House and said, “There’s a man I think is a terrorist on Fifth Avenue, take him out,” that is an “official” act, even if the man on Fifth Avenue was not a terrorist—and it would technically fall under immunity. (I’ll come back to this, stay with me.) But here’s the big hitch in the giddyup: Because the Supreme Court chose to lob this back down to the lower courts, they’ve given any future president something more potent than immunity—and that is cloud cover. Ostensibly, any president will now be emboldened to act in any horrific manner they see fit and simply claim that they’re doing so in an official capacity. And knowing how high the bar is to bring forth a charge, they can rest safely in the feeling of immunity. Bringing back the Seal Team 6 example: Say Trump instructs them to shoot a random guy on Fifth Avenue. Trump is, in the immediate, immune. But say the victim’s family wants to seek justice. Prosecutors would first have to prove the act was “unofficial,” untangle the immunity web, and land a favorable ruling; only then could they bring a charge. That’s months or years of legal work just to BRING FORTH A CHARGE. [The infamous “we’re talking about practice” speech begins to play in the background. IYKYK.] The wheels of justice were never meant to turn this slowly. In other words, as Justice Sonya Sotomayor wrote in her dissent: “In every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law.” —Shannon Melero AND:
  BONJOUR!Why Are French Women Voting Against Themselves?Ahead of the second snap election, Marine Le Pen’s anti-feminist, far-right party gains powerBY MARIANE PEARL  SOME PEOPLE HAVE HUNGRY EYES AND SOME PEOPLE HAVE FASCIST EYES. (VIA GETTY IMAGES) As the U.S. faces an impending election and threats from the far-right, an ally across the ocean grapples with its own extremist resurgence right now. On July 7, France will vote in the second round of its snap parliamentary elections, which President Emmanuel Macron called to try to undermine the success of the far-right National Rally (RN) party, led by the charismatic, fascistic, anti-feminist Marine Le Pen. During the European elections in early June, Le Pen secured a third of the votes—twice more than the President himself. The snap election, then, is a risky gamble through which Macron hopes to reassert his political authority by gaining a clearer majority at the National Assembly—the French equivalent of the U.S. House of Representatives. Unfortunately, it’s not going well. The first round of elections on June 30 put the RN ahead with about a third of the votes. (The leftist New Popular Front came in second, with Macron’s centrist alliance in last place.) It looks increasingly likely that the presidential alliance will lose its relative majority in parliament to Le Pen’s party—and that women voters are a determining factor, with 33 percent voting for the RN in a 2024 poll, compared to 30 percent of men. (That’s a 12 percent increase in female support from 2019.) Even if the RN doesn’t win an absolute majority, it could still become the largest party in the country—and thus have Jordan Bardella, Le Pen’s 28-year-old protegé, become prime minister, a role whose political power is second only to the president. Like Le Pen, Bardella is pushing for the party’s “de-demonization”—a strategy meant to normalize a group traditionally known as fascist insurgents—and he’s especially focused on women, stoking anti-immigration and anti-Muslim fears while reframing them as supposedly feminist. His language plays on extreme nationalism and the trope of Western supremacy; in a 2023 speech to the European parliament, he declared, “Our European values will always be outstandingly superior to those which enslave women [and] imprison them behind headscarves.” Ahead of the snap elections, thousands of people rallied in Paris against the RN’s regressive stance on women’s rights—particularly reproductive rights. The National Rally, which has opposed women’s rights since its founding in 1972 and more recently opposed enshrining abortion rights in the French constitution, has historically voted to stop funding family planning organizations, moved against gender equity in the workplace, and proposed subsidizing women who want to stay at home to raise their children. In LePen’s 2017 political manifesto, she mentions the word “woman” only twice across 144 proposals, and only in reference to family and safety. For feminists, such a fact is revealing enough. As the French philosopher Camille Froidevaux-Metterie wrote this month in Le Monde, “For women, voting for the RN is like pointing a gun at yourself.”  ANOTHER ANTI-FASCISM RALLY IN TOULOUSE AHEAD OF THE SECOND ROUND OF PARLIAMENTARY ELECTIONS. (VIA GETTY IMAGES) None of this started with Marine herself; in fact, the National Front—the RN’s original name, until it was rebranded in 2018—is a family business. Jean-Marie Le Pen, Marine’s father, founded the party with former Nazis who fought with the extremist Waffen SS during the second world war, as well as former members of the OAS, a far-right paramilitary organization which conducted terrorist operations during the Algerian war. Jean-Marie Le Pen is well-known for his xenophobic, Islamophobic, and misogynistic views; he once stated that the Nazis’ gas chambers were but “a detail” in the history of WWII, and that the idea that women should have ownership over their bodies was “ludicrous.” Marine Le Pen took over for her father in 2012 and has since proven herself much shrewder, particularly in the way she weaponizes her gender. In 2016, for instance, she wrote that “the migrant crisis signals the beginning of the end of women’s rights.” Le Pen regularly demonizes Islam, linking the hijab and burqa with religious oppression; with the RN’s victory on June 30, French women who wear hijab are terrified of what’s next. “Knowing that 10.6 million people voted for a party promoting the ban of the veil in the public space is hurtful,” one 22-year-old told Al Jazeera this week. “I am feeling betrayed by France.” A GLOBAL RIGHTWARD SHIFT France and the U.S. aren’t alone: Hard right governments and parties are advancing around the world. This week alone, Italian Prime Minister Georgia Meloni has made plans to rewrite the country’s constitution in order to gain more power. In Germany, the far-right AfD—which has mimicked Nazi slogans, excused the actions of the SS, and repressed protesters at its annual conference—came in second in the European Parliament elections. The Netherlands has just ushered in its own far-right government, and last month, Spain’s hard-right Vox Party held a rally with far-right leaders from around the world, including Argentina’s Javier Milei, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, and Israel’s Amichai Chikli. One thing these political parties have in common is their vicious Islamophobia, and, relatedly, their virulently racist views on immigration and regressive approaches to the role of women. History tells us that fascism starts with the demonization of the most vulnerable among us—and that one of the surest antidotes is the political organization of progressive women. “It is not a coincidence that women’s equality is being rolled back at the same time that authoritarianism is on the rise,” wrote Erica Chenoweth and Zoe Marks in Foreign Affairs. “Aspiring autocrats…have good reason to fear women’s political participation: when women participate in mass movements, those movements are both more likely to succeed and more likely to lead to more egalitarian democracy.”  Mariane Pearl is an award-winning journalist and writer who works in English, French, and Spanish. She is the author of the books A Mighty Heart and In Search of Hope.  FOLLOW THE METEOR     Thank you for reading The Meteor! Got this from a friend?
|
