Here’s what sucks: These temporary setbacks for Fascism won’t stand.  I was gonna save this article for Sunday, but what’s going on now would never have been possible without Chief Justice John Roberts:

In the past 10 weeks America has witnessed an extraordinary outpouring of decisions from its highest court that should make Trump very happy indeed. The six rightwing justices who control the court – three of them given their lifetime seats by Trump himself – have effectively greenlighted the president’s explosive and law-busting agenda.

The supermajority has granted Trump 18 straight victories in the administration’s requests for emergency relief. Steve Vladeck, a leading supreme court scholar at Georgetown University Law Center, has tracked the decisions in his Substack, One First, noting that the rulings have been handed down largely in the legal darkness.

They have been piped through the court’s so-called “shadow docket”, where important affairs of state are decided at speed and with little or no debate or deliberation. By Vladeck’s count, seven of the orders have been issued without any explanation, leaving the American people clueless as to the justices’ thinking.

Yet the emergency rulings, though temporary in nature, could have seismic consequences. For as long as they hold they have the potential to cause untold suffering to millions of people targeted by Trump.

That includes countless federal employees who can now be fired at whim after decades of loyal public service; transgender people purged from the military; more than 1 million individuals from Venezuela, Haiti, Cuba and other countries who are being stripped of their status to remain in the US; immigrants singled out for deportation to war-torn third countries where their lives are in danger.

Legally, the consequences are also profound. Several of Trump’s actions given temporary go-ahead are of dubious legality, violating congressional or international laws and running roughshod over fundamental tenets of the US constitution.

By conceding to Trump’s wishes, the justices have for now approved what Vladeck has called “a truly unprecedented amount of lawlessness by the executive branch”.

Prominent jurists have held Roberts responsible for emboldening Trump’s drive towards an authoritarian presidency. J Michael Luttig, who served on a federal appeals court for 15 years, put the criticism starkly.

“The chief justice is presiding over the end of the rule of law in America,” Luttig told the Guardian.

In Luttig’s view, the court under Roberts is “acquiescing in and accommodating the president’s lawlessness. And it is doing so without briefing, without argument, without deliberation – and without even a single word of explanation of its decisions.”

For Luttig, this is more than just the 6-3 supermajority of the court expressing its conservatism. This is a fundamental distortion of the American legal system.

“The supreme court was never intended to function like this. Never before has it entertained such challenges from the president, and never before has it decided them so flippantly.”

The message for which Roberts is most famous was deployed during his Senate confirmation hearings for the role of chief justice in 2005. In a speech dripping with faux humility, he presented himself as the impartial arbiter of the law.

“Judges are like umpires,” he said. “Umpires don’t make the rules, they apply them … Nobody ever went to a ball game to see the umpire.”

“Supreme court reporting has been generous to Roberts, and has reinforced the idea that what is happening in his court is a sort of normalcy, when it is not normal at all,” said Lisa Graves, the former chief counsel for nominations for the Senate judiciary committee and founder of True North Research, a watchdog investigating rightwing groups that undermine democracy.

Graves has reappraised the chief justice’s 20-year record and come up with a very different narrative than that of Umpire Roberts. Her conclusions are laid out in her forthcoming book, Without Precedent, which will be published next month.

In it, she argues that Roberts is anything but the modest judge he claims to be. Rather, he has used his power as chief justice to promote a rightwing agenda from the moment George W Bush placed him in the court’s central seat in 2005.

“He has consistently shown hostility towards civil rights, trade unions and environmental protections, approaching the law with the rigidity of a rightwing ideologue. That was true from the time when as a young man he chose to clerk for the most regressive supreme court justice, William Rehnquist, and it remains true today,” Graves said.

Great article.  Please read it.  You’ll come away knowing that Roberts’ carefully-constructed moderate veneer has made him the perfect vessel to enable a right-wing takeover of the country.

Dog Bites Man: Audit Of Congo’s Opioid Grant Windfall Uncovers Institutional Non-Compliance.  Who ever could have foreseen this when BHL’s minions dumped a shitload of money on what was then, and remains, a nebulous proposal?:

On Thursday, AOA released the second round of grantee audits and found two of the three recipients to be in compliance.

The report says Congo Legacy Center failed to prove sufficient grant management and oversight of grant deliverables and requirements and that the organization’s record keeping is inadequate.

Congo Legacy Center was awarded $475,000 during Phase 1B of grant funding in June 2023.

The grant was awarded for plans to fund the Congo Tarir Project, which detailed the renovation of a facility located at 501 West 28th Street in Wilmington.

The results?  Basically out of compliance with everything:

From the three findings within Congo Legacy Center’s performance audit, — analyzing the period from Sept. 1, 2023, to July 31, 2024 — AOA concludes the organization did not maintain or provide documentation to support the requirements identified in its grant agreement and was not in compliance with the expenditure of grant funds in various categories.

AOA analyzed 35 transactions totaling $183,089, and the results revealed 21 of 35 transactions (60%) were not consistent and/or not in compliance with the signed grant agreement. Of the total amount tested related to other expenses, $145,480 (79%) of the items were not in compliance.

The total amount of payroll transactions and other expense transactions tested were $256,422. The testing results showed that $218,813 (85%) were not consistent and/or in compliance.

Additionally, the grant budget allocated $80,000 for a Program Coordinator position. AOA tested 11 months worth of funding for that position ($73,333) and auditors found no entries in the general ledger for payroll for this position, meaning it does not appear that grant funds were used to pay for a Program Coordinator.

AOA also found documentation was not available to show the business relationship between related party organizations, concluding that funds were disbursed to related party entities without supporting documentation or signed contracts to support the expenditures.

I love the smell of graft in the morning.  Here’s the so-called happy ending:

Berry says while he was not involved directly in the audit, he does not believe there was any issue with cooperation between Congo Legacy Center management and the audit process.

He also says there is no intention of referring the audit to DOJ for further investigation, nor will there be an attempt to claw back any funding.

Oh. Nothing to see here, folks.  Just your everyday insider misuse of public funds.  Here’s Spotlight Delaware’s take on this. It’s laced through with skepticism, as well it should be.

What do you want to talk about?