Supreme Court Has Very Good Reason For All This Bad Faith Bullsh*t, We're Sure

Supreme Court pretending Trump's working in good faith is bad faith ouroboros.

Supreme Court Justices attend the 60th Presidential Inauguration, Jan. 20, 2025. (DoD photo by Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class Vanessa White)

It’s a careful little dance the anti-constitutionalist Supreme Court justices do when they side against the president.

He is, after all, the guy they blessed two short years ago with monarchical powers, as to ensure he would not spend the rest of his days where he belongs: in prison. With every Trump-centric case that comes before them, members of the Court’s radicalized right flank appear to feel obliged to come up with ways to help the president retain the presumption of good faith, a presumption that has served as jet fuel for the American fascist movement over these past 10 years.

John Roberts and Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito and the rest of the red-pilled justices are usually all too happy to let Trump have his unconstitutional way. But it’s when they are put in a bind and have to side against him that things get interesting and, I think, revelatory. This usually happens when the mad king’s mad policies might affect their money, their 401k, all the fortunes they have amassed from the oligarchs that appointed them and — in at least one case — made their pesky financial problems go away.

They had to do this calculated legal dance when they killed the president’s illegal tariffs. In no way would the Supreme Court rightwingers acknowledge that the “economic emergency” that purportedly justified the tariffs was, in fact, bullshit, and in bad faith. Regime officials were not saying what they meant when they cried about the economic calamity that left the president no choice but to unleash his nonsensical and destructive tariffs on everyone in the world besides the Russians for whom he works. In striking down the tariffs, the Roberts Court took extraordinary efforts to shield the president against accusations of bad-faith policy making.

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Normalizing the president’s jarringly blatant criminality, they know, is only possible if he has the legal presumption of regularity, of good faith. Without this, the jig, as they say, is up. The game is exposed for what it is.

The Court’s right-wing majority, giddily undoing the gains of the 20th Century one ruling at a time, makes painstaking efforts to “avoid saying Trump is a clearly bad faith actor not entitled to the presumption of regularity the executive is typically afforded,” as Mike Sacks, senior advisor at Court Accountability Action and a former congressional candidate, said so succinctly back in January. That was when the Roberts Court considered the Trump regime’s politically motivated firing of Lisa Cook, a Democratic appointee to the Federal Reserve Board and its only Black woman member. Trump had to pretend he wanted to fire Cook because she had made an error on her mortgage application a while ago. You and I and everyone except for the six conservative justices know her firing was punishment for a perceived enemy of the regime, someone who would not fall in line as easily as they would like.

The regime, as you probably know, has used this bad-faith mortgage fraud tactic against a few of its opponents who have become targets of Trump’s ratfucking vengeance campaign. Just recently Trump elevated the guy who invented accusing Trump enemies of “mortgage fraud” to be director of national intelligence. It’s quite bad!

This week the Roberts Court blocked the president from immediately firing Cook because, according to Roberts, the Federal Reserve has extra-special powers or something. (This might be called the 401k Exception, which they don’t teach in the libs’ law schools.) They did grant the senile god-king the power to annihilate the American civil service and replace it with fascist goons who know way too much about Roman soldiers. So Trump has that going for him, which is nice.

Cook, the Court ruled, could keep her job at the Fed while a lawsuit challenging her dismissal plays out in the courts. The case could take months — possibly years — to resolve.

The Cook case, I think, offers a terribly clear example of how Roberts and his anti-democracy crew have protected the president’s presumption of good faith, the same as any other president in the country’s history. For the bad-faith actors who dictate national policy from the bench, Trump being the first president in the Fed’s 112-year history to try to fire a board member has no bearing, no legal weight. This, they know but they will not say, must be put to the side if his regularity is to remain intact.

The Court’s majority, Sacks said, had to “figure out how to side against Trump without vitiating the presumption of good faith” in the Cook case. They seem to have found that narrow path, for now. That path, however narrow, is always accessible for justices of such bad faith. They always find a way to preserve Trump’s darkly comical presumption of good faith. Alito, a veritable master of bad-faith legalism, is fresh off saying with a barely perceptible smirk that there is simply no way to know if the president is a racist. My 10-year-old daughter knows better.

While Trump hangs on to his presumption of normalized good faith among the SCOTUS justices using him to eviscerate American representative democracy, his weaponized Justice Department has lost this presumption among federal judges who do that weird thing where you abide by the bounds and limitations of the US Constitution.

In case after case — from topics ranging from habeas corpus to immigration law to mortgage and tax fraud — judges appointed by both Democratic and Republican presidents have said, in so many words, that they can no longer offer a good-faith presumption to the regime’s lawyers.

Just Security, a non-partisan digital law and policy journal, has compiled a comprehensive list of cases in which federal courts have denied the good-faith presumption to government attorneys. Scroll through these cases and the judges’ responses and you will see a court system that has largely seen through the bad-faith bullshit of an authoritarian regime that has no issue with lying about its actual intent, its real purposes, in using the law as a weapon to advance their radical cause and destroy their opponents.

Nowhere has this presumption of regularity and good faith been more strongly denied than in the case of the Broadview Six, where Trump DOJ lawyers manipulated grand juries and violated bedrock constitutional principles to arrive at a preconceived result: that anti-ICE protesters had committed serious crimes and needed to serve prison time. The Broadview Six case, as horrifying as it was, exposed the Trump regime for what it is: an anti-democracy wrecking ball of incompetent fascist chuds who believe — with good reason — they can use small-d democratic institutions to tear apart representative democracy and put the finishing touches on that thing we used to call the Rule of Law.

I think we can and should take some solace in the court system waking up to the regime’s bad-faith legal tactics. Even if this awakening does not apply to the only court that really matters — the Supreme Court, where jurists remain willfully asleep to this reality — we should have hope that the judicial branch can withstand this authoritarian onslaught and maybe, just maybe, punish those who tried to use the system against itself with a whole bunch of bad faith.

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