The intrigue: The “Rule of Five” law allows any five members of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee to request federal agencies to provide information about “any matter within the jurisdiction of the committee.”
The intrigue: The “Rule of Five” law allows any five members of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee to request federal agencies to provide information about “any matter within the jurisdiction of the committee.”
I really do appreciate your excellent summary of events, and it is interesting to frame it as Georgia ignoring the Supreme Courts ruling rather than Jackson, but I wonder to what extent Georgia ignored the Supreme Court ruling with Jackson’s blessing. You could argue that it is really Pam Bondi ignoring court orders, and not Trump, but, of course, Trump could tell Pam Bondi (or whoever) to stop ignoring court orders. In theory the executive branch’s role is to enforce the orders of the court, and, by making it clear to Georgia that he had no intention of enforcing court orders, this could have enabled the state government to continue on in illegal activities that, if the rule of law were followed, should not have happened.
You clearly know more about this than me, so I’m not trying to argue, but the failure of the rule of law is obviously always a collective failure, and many many people enable it, and it still seems fair to me to pin some of the blame on AJ, though obviously not as much as I was implying.
The 19th century was a time of letter-writing, not Signal group chats. For that reason, I think that if the governor of Georgia had explicitly asked Jackson for permission to defy the Supreme Court, we would probably have a copy of that letter or at least a mention of its existence in the correspondence or journals of these men or of their secretaries. I also don’t think Jackson was so brazen as to give a go-ahead to defy the Supreme Court. Such an action would have undoubted started a major incident if the press found out about it, and may have even caused the unravelling of the federal system, and Jackson was certainly no idiot and knew this.
With respect to the current situation, I think the current president and attorney-general are more or less just as willing to disobey the courts. Georgia officials in the Cherokee incident(s) only did so because they were politically accountable only to the white, landowning, citizens of Georgia, who were behind them every step of the way. In a similar vein, the voters seem to have delivered a message to Trump in 2024 that there is no political cost to authoritarianism and disrespect for the rule of law. Or, at least, that’s the message Trump thinks the voters sent him. In reality, such a cost does exist, and it’s why Trump lost in 2020. Though Allan Lichtman’s prediction of the 2024 presidential election outcome was definitely wrong, I still think that his overall message, that voters care more about whether the incumbent president is good or bad than whether their opponent is good or bad, makes a lot of sense to me. But I’m no expert in that.
I mean, you do realize people don’t have to write a letter that says “let’s break the law together.” People in the 19th century were capable of waltzing over to the hermitage, chatting in a backroom, and leaving with an “understanding”.
The Georgia officials took their actions with the accurate perception that the federal government would choose not to enforce federal law. And they were right, and AJ was the person who happened to not be enforcing the law. He doesn’t have to write down on a piece of paper that he didn’t enforce the law, we see that he didn’t.