(REUTERS)

During an absurdly obsequious, three-and-a-half-hour televised “cabinet meeting” this week, Donald Trump said he can “do whatever he wants as president,” and suggested that Americans might support him becoming a dictator.

So far, the Roberts court seems to be goose-stepping along, having granted nearly all of the Trump’s administration’s 19 emergency appeals on its shadow docket, where rationale and legal precedent are conveniently omitted.

The Republican majority on the high court has long wanted to gut the administrative state in service to expanded executive power that will in turn protect oligarchic interests over those of the common man. Their nihilistic legal philosophy holds that almost all regulatory agencies and laws should give way to private, for-profit interests.

Although the court’s majority does not officially label itself free-market capitalist, it’s rulings reflect support for a severely limited regulatory environment and laissez-faire capitalism, where private entities rather than the federal government drive and regulate for-profit activity.

In their view, government services that protect, educate, and serve the public, science that saves lives, and social programs providing safety nets to vulnerable populations could be better provided — if at all — by private ventures that turn a profit.

As Trump and the MAGA majority on the high court gut the administrative state and eliminate federal services, American casualties will continue to mount.

Gutting FEMA, lying about climate science

In the southwest US, just since 1970, nighttime temperatures have increased by about 4.5 degrees. In that time span, US heat-related deaths have doubled.

As heatwaves intensify throughout the world, there’s no lingering scientific debate about the root cause: greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, mostly from burning fossil fuels. The only truly emergent climate science is medical: data now show that more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is killing more people, causing serious kidney damage, speeding up biological clocks and aging people prematurely — more than smoking or drinking.

In the UK, where news outlets are legally required to present information accurately, contrasted with US corporate-owned media selling propaganda, Imperial College London's Grantham Institute reported that heat-related deaths caused by climate change tripled this year alone, accounting for 1,500 deaths from climate change over a short 10-day period.

In the US this week, more than 180 Federal Emergency Management Agency employees wrote a letter to Congress criticizing Trump’s plan to drastically scale down FEMA as its unqualified director shifts more responsibility for disaster response to the states. Their letter commemorated the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, when 1,833 Americans died. For their candor and concern, many employees who signed their names have been placed on leave.

The anti-science movement now leading the US government refuses to acknowledge the link between carbon emissions and rising temperatures, in deference to Trump and the GOP’s fossil fuel donors, despite rising weather-related deaths in Texas, Arizona, and Florida, where heat deaths are the primary weather-related cause of mortality. At the same time, hurricanes, catastrophic flooding, and tropical cyclones along the Gulf Coast, wildfires in the West, and increasingly violent tornadoes in the heartland are killing more people and destroying infrastructure at record pace.

In late July, as if mocking the loss of life and habitat, the Trump administration proposed to rescind several Environmental Protection Agency regulations, including the Endangerment Finding that served as the legal basis for regulating greenhouse gases. Trump’s EPA initiative will repeal carbon pollution standards for power plants and eliminate greenhouse gas emission rules for cars and trucks, simultaneously accelerating climate change and degrading public health.

Trump’s EPA heralded the legal reversal as undoing “the underpinning of $1 trillion in costly regulations (to) save more than $54 billion annually.” They did not factor in the tens of thousands of Americans now dying annually from heat and climate-related events, nor the cost of rebuilding communities destroyed by calamitous weather, which Forbes estimates will reach $38 trillion by the year 2049.

Anti-science governance kills

Republican rejection of climate science in favor of their fossil fuel donors is already killing thousands of Americans each year. Their rejection of medical science is killing Americans in other ways.

Under Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., medical science has become so politicized that long-accepted medical data is now questioned. This week, CDC Director Susan Monarez refused to rubber-stamp Kennedy’s unscientific directives to fire dedicated health experts, and accused him of weaponizing public health for political gain. Kennedy urged Monarez to resign for “not supporting President Trump’s agenda.” Monarez refused, so the White House fired her, prompting three top agency scientists to resign rather than be complicit in causing unnecessary death, including the chief medical officer and the director of the CDC’s infectious-disease center.

The Monarez firing comes on the heels of Kennedy restricting approval of COVID vaccines to high-risk groups, which will lead to more preventable deaths. It is undeniably true that the coronavirus killed Americans at far higher rates than people in other wealthy nations, with more than 1.2 million U.S. covid deaths.

Due in large part to Trump’s denials and mismanagement, the COVID-19 pandemic ranks as the deadliest disaster in US history. If a new and more virulent strain returns, the death count could increase exponentially.

MAGA Court should check its Catholic bona fides

Republicans politicized the pandemic just as they have politicized gun control and climate science, churning anti-vax, anti-mask, and anti-climate-science sentiment into political power through culture wars. These initiatives are killing Americans in record numbers, and the MAGA majority on the Supreme Court is letting Trump get away it.

Last week, by a vote of 5-4, the Supreme Court allowed the National Institute of Health, the largest public funding source for biomedical research in the world, to terminate $783 million in medical grants on the thinnest of rationales: because they were “linked” to DEI initiatives.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson in dissent described the ruling as “Calvinball jurisprudence with a twist. Calvinball has only one rule: There are no fixed rules. We seem to have two: that one, and this Administration always wins.”

She might have added, “No matter how many Americans die in result.”

The Republican majority on the court consists of six Catholic justices. They should be ashamed of the loss of life they are condoning.

In the words of Father Michael Pfleger, a priest for more than 50 years, they should look into the “mirror and address the violence coming from the White House … address the violence of cutting Medicare and Medicaid … address the violence of refusing to ban assault weapons.”

They should accept responsibility for the loss of human life and liberty that attends their dismantling of an imperfect but salutary federal government 250 years in the making.

Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense. Her Substack, The Haake Take, is free.