In which our Henry tackles the tangerine tyrant while the pond tries to round up some distractions ...

 

"Alexander Hamilton famously predicted that the courts would prove to be the “least dangerous branch” of the federal government." 

Spoiler teaser trailer alert, it's our Henry's day to fix the bucket in the lizard Oz.

In other news, the reptiles chose to write up the current disaster in LA as "extreme fire weather" involving "extreme winds", but at the very end of the Dow Jones report came something of a tell:

...This year, Southern California has been off to one of its driest seasons on record. Downtown Los Angeles has received just 0.16 inch of rain since Oct. 1, compared with a normal total of 4.56 so far, according to the National Weather Service. Northern California, by contrast, has received a bounty of rain and snow.
The fire threat has increased greatly in California and other parts of the West amid a hotter and drier climate and an expansion of homes into the wildland areas surrounding major cities. Sixteen of the 20 most destructive fires on record in California have broken out in the past decade, according to Cal Fire.

Put it another way ...

The nominees must surely include News Corp and scribblers at the lizard Oz, and now it's way past time for a slew of climate change denialist stories in the lizard Oz explaining that San Francisco burned to the ground in 1906. Sure, back then it was an earthquake wot done it, but any excuse when confronted by a distaster.

What else?

Oh dear, that mention of Greenland, and suddenly AUKUS is back at the lizard Oz in the extreme far right section of the rag ...

The lesser member of the Kelly gang got his knickers in a right royal knot, and the Melbourne shrine sent Victorians into a frenzy, but really, what a tepid bunch for a Friday.

In a bid to liven up the party, the pond should start by noting Anne Applebaum offering up The New Rasputins, Anti-science mysticism is enabling autocracy around the globe.

Inter alia:

...This New Obscurantism has now affected the highest levels of U.S. politics. Foreigners and Americans alike have been hard-pressed to explain the ideology represented by some of Donald Trump’s initial Cabinet nominations, and for good reason. Although Trump won reelection as a Republican, there was nothing traditionally “Republican” about proposing Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence. Gabbard is a former progressive Democrat with lifelong ties to the Science of Identity Foundation, a Hare Krishna breakaway sect. Like Carlson, she is also an apologist for the brutal Russian dictator Vladimir Putin and for the recently deposed dictator of Syria, Bashar al‑Assad, both of whose fantastical lies she has sometimes repeated. Nor is there anything “conservative” about Kash Patel, Trump’s nominee for FBI director, who has suggested that he intends to target a long list of current and former government officials, including many who served in the first Trump administration. In keeping with the spirit of the New Obscurantists, Patel has also promoted Warrior Essentials, a business selling antidotes both to COVID and to COVID vaccines. But then, no one who took seriously the philosophy of Edmund Burke or William F. Buckley Jr. would put a conspiracy theorist like Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—another Putin apologist, former Democrat (indeed, from the most famous Democratic family in America), and enemy of vaccines, as well as fluoride—in charge of American health care. No “conservative” defender of traditional family values would propose, as ambassador to France, a convicted felon who sent a prostitute to seduce his sister’s husband in order to create a compromising tape—especially if that convicted felon happened to be the father of the president’s son-in-law.

Rather than conservatism as conventionally understood, this crowd and its international counterparts represent the fusion of several trends that have been coalescing for some time. The hawkers of vitamin supplements and unproven COVID cures now mingle—not by accident—with open admirers of Putin’s Russia, especially those who mistakenly believe that Putin leads a “white Christian nation.” (In reality, Russia is multicultural, multiracial, and generally irreligious; its trolls promote vaccine skepticism as well as lies about Ukraine.) Fans of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán—a small-time autocrat who has impoverished his country, now one of the poorest in Europe, while enriching his family and friends—make common cause with Americans who have broken the law, gone to jail, stolen from their own charities, or harassed women. And no wonder: In a world where conspiracy theories and nonsense cures are widely accepted, the evidence-based concepts of guilt and criminality vanish quickly too.

Among the followers of this new political movement are some of the least wealthy Americans. Among its backers are some of the most wealthy. George O’Neill Jr., a Rockefeller heir who is a board member of The American Conservative magazine, turned up at Mar-a-Lago after the election; O’Neill, who was a close contact of Maria Butina, the Russian agent deported in 2019, has promoted Gabbard since at least 2017, donating to her presidential campaign in 2020, as well as to Kennedy’s in 2024. Elon Musk, the billionaire inventor who has used his social-media platform, X, to give an algorithmic boost to stories he surely knows are false, has managed to carve out a government role for himself. Are O’Neill, Musk, and the cryptocurrency dealers who have flocked to Trump in this for the money? Or do they actually believe the conspiratorial and sometimes anti-American ideas they’re promulgating? Maybe one, maybe the other, possibly both. Whether their motivations are cynical or sincere matters less than their impact, not just in the U.S. but around the world. For better or for worse, America sets examples that others follow. Merely by announcing his intention to nominate Kennedy to his Cabinet, Trump has ensured that skepticism of childhood vaccines will spread around the world, possibly followed by the diseases themselves. And epidemics, as we’ve recently learned, tend to make people frightened, and more willing to embrace magical solutions.

And so on and on, but that's only a warm-up for our Henry's act this day in the lizard Oz, under the header Donald Trump is set for a titanic Supreme Court clash, Entire swathes of his agenda were subject to legal challenge in Trump’s first term; that is certain to recur but in a legal context that places substantially greater obstacles in his path.

Seeing our Henry grapple with the beast is mildly entertaining, though the snaps were a little bland ... President-elect Donald Trump. Picture: AFP

.... and it took our Henry some five minutes of valuable reading time to attempt a little both siderism ...

Barring a last-minute intervention by the Supreme Court, New York State Judge Juan Merchan will sentence Donald Trump on Friday, US time, for falsifying business records with the intent to defraud.
Many Americans will consider the move, which would brand Trump as the first convicted felon to become president of the United States, a victory for the rule of law. Many others, however, will see it as the outcome of politically driven charges that would never have been elevated into a felony had the defendant not been named Donald J. Trump.
The critics will, in other words, view it as confirming Trump’s claim that the American legal system is so deeply politicised as to be structurally corrupt.
And President Joe Biden’s purported justification for the sweeping pardon he granted his son – that without it, Hunter Biden was likely to be persecuted merely for who he is, rather than for what he has done – can only strengthen that perception.
That the American legal system, particularly at state level, has a political overlay is undeniable. Unlike Europe, the public system of law enforcement in the United States emerged after the coming of near universal white male suffrage and the development of a strongly competitive party system.
Forged, during the middle years of the 19th century, in the tumultuous aftermath of Jacksonian populism and under the impact of a crime wave associated with breakneck urbanisation, it was, from the start, intensely controversial. In one state after the other, the Jacksonians and their heirs mounted campaigns arguing that unless the newly formed institutions of criminal justice – including professional police services, public prosecutors and state judges – were directly accountable to the electorate, they would be exploited by elites to suppress the common folk.

The reptiles tried to help out with an AV distraction:

United States Studies Centre Director of Research Jared Mondschein claims US President-elect Donald Trump’s hush money trial outcome will have “no ramifications” on his presidency. “I haven’t seen the Supreme Court wanting to weigh in too much on cases involving the President if they don’t absolutely have to,” Mr Mondschein said. “Nothing involving that case has any ramifications for what he can and could do as President.”

Of course it's all idle speculation until the penny drops ... and in the interim, our Henry offered up his usual history lesson, sans ancient Greeks and Romans...

It's remarkably dull, but never underestimate our Henry's capacity for comedy ... it sometimes takes a little time, but he'll usually get there ...

As a result, between 1832 and 1860, nearly three-quarters of the states in the Union gave voters the right to elect the system’s key officials, with the states that had the broadest franchise taking the lead.
Alexis de Tocqueville, who observed the initial steps in that direction, was stunned when he learned that “some state constitutions provide for election of members of the courts and require them to submit to frequent re-election”. He ventured “to predict that these innovations (will) lead to disastrous results”.
Whether the consequences were disastrous is a matter of opinion. What is certain is that the number of high-profile cases being prosecuted rises significantly in the lead-up to prosecutorial elections.
Equally, statistical studies find that the convictions secured in those cases are especially likely to be overturned on appeal, suggesting they should not have been brought in the first place.
The claim that Trump was the victim of a political trial is therefore not entirely fanciful. But while that trial, as well as the slew of other cases involving Trump, did not prevent his decisive victory, it has made the entire US legal system, which was already subject to ferocious attack, even more politically contentious.
The heat is only likely to rise as the Trump administration seeks to implement its agenda. Entire swathes of his agenda were subject to legal challenge in Trump’s first term; that is certain to recur but in a legal context that places substantially greater obstacles in Trump’s path.
At the heart of those obstacles lie the limits the Supreme Court has recently placed on executive action. In effect, the Supreme Court has moved to enforce the separation of powers, notably by imposing on legislatures the undivided responsibility for taking, rather than seeking to avoid, legislative decisions.
Thus, in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organisation (2022), which reversed Roe v Wade (1973), the Court remanded to legislatures a decision it characterised as a matter of policy and politics, rather than of constitutional law.
At around the same time, it decided, albeit with very little public attention, a quartet of cases, beginning with Alabama Realtors (2021), that extended the “major questions doctrine”. While the Court had previously treated that doctrine as an exception to a wider set of principles, it determined that it would no longer uphold major decisions by executive agencies unless the relevant statutes contained a clear statement authorising the decisions at issue.
Loper Bright Enterprises (2024) then substantially qualified the principle, embodied in the Supreme Court’s 1984 Chevron ruling, that courts should allow executive agencies a wide margin of policy discretion in their interpretation of statutes.
As is already apparent from Ohio Telecom Association (2025), Loper Bright significantly reduces the scope executive agencies have to argue their interpretation is permissible, even if it might be considered a reasonable construction of an ambiguous statute.
Lastly, expressing its concern about instances in which agencies drastically change their interpretation of an unchanged statute, the Court has signalled its intention to subject those instances to heightened scrutiny. As a result, the Trump administration will almost certainly require explicit legislative approval for many of the sweeping changes in domestic policy it has promised to make.

That's it? That's all he's got, the Supreme Court will save the day and Greenland, and King Donald I will focus on the price of eggs?

It's amazing how mug punters keep on falling for the pea and thimble trick ... and how FAFO pundits love to clutch at straws ...

With the Republicans holding a paper-thin majority in the House of Representatives and falling below the 60-vote threshold required for significant legislation in the Senate, those approvals will be extremely hard to secure, obstructing, and in some cases dooming, Trump’s domestic agenda.
There is, as a result, every chance of a clash between the Supreme Court and the president whose ferocity could easily rival that which, during the New Deal, provoked Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s 1937 statement that “the balance of power between the three great branches has been tipped out of balance by the Courts in direct contradiction of the high purposes of the Constitution” – a statement that accompanied Roosevelt’s ultimately unsuccessful attempt to stack the Supreme Court.
But while the Court was then moving, however hesitantly, in Roosevelt’s direction – thus calming the conflict – there is very little chance of the current Supreme Court altering course. Yes, Trump nominated three of its nine members; but those nominations have, if anything, merely strengthened the block on the Court profoundly hostile to unbridled executive discretion.
In the end, a titanic clash between Trump and the Supreme Court would be entirely unsurprising. Trump is a revolutionary, who spurns legalism and has a strongly Jacobin, voluntaristic, conception of politics that sees the world as a war to the finish, in which no holds are barred, between friends and foes.
In contrast, the Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Roberts is a profoundly conservative institution, utterly committed to its role as the guardian of the constitution and of the rule of law.

The pond knew he'd deliver ...

...the Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Roberts is a profoundly conservative institution, utterly committed to its role as the guardian of the constitution and of the rule of law.

Uh huh ...

Oh yes ...roll noisy jaffas down the Thomas and Alito aisle please, while hooting at the implausible lines delivered up on the screen ...

Our Henry did offer a final fatuous par ...

Alexander Hamilton famously predicted that the courts would prove to be the “least dangerous branch” of the federal government. It may well be the paradox of the coming years that Democrats, who have spent the past decade excoriating the Roberts Court, finally come to appreciate its virtues, while Donald Trump and his allies discover that it is nowhere near as innocuous, easily manipulated or readily intimidated as all that.

Uh huh ...

Meanwhile, that lesser member of the Kelly gang, one Joe, was getting his knickers in a knot.

Over in the news section, he was diligently saying that all would be well, in Bipartisan support for AUKUS leading into new Donald Trump era, Leading Democrats and Republicans say the pact is a model for how the US should engage with allies, as Donald Trump entertains using force against friendly nations to expand America’s footprint.

It was good news ...

Leading Democratic and Republican congressmen say the AUKUS security pact is a model for how the US should engage with allies and that its domestic political support is growing, as Donald Trump entertains using military and economic force against friendly nations to expand America’s global footprint.
The bipartisan endorsement of the landmark trilateral security agreement from the Democratic co-chair of the Congressional AUKUS Working Group, Joe Courtney, and the Republican chairman emeritus of the powerful House Foreign Affairs Committee, Michael McCaul, comes less than two weeks before the inauguration of Donald Trump ushers in a new-era for America in world affairs.
Mr Courtney and Mr McCaul framed the AUKUS agreement as an instrument to rally democracies in the Indo-Pacific while ­deterring Chinese aggression.

But over in the far right section, Joe began to show signs of deep anxiety in Donald Trump should publicly state his position on the future of AUKUS Trump’s talk of acquiring Greenland, reclaiming the Panama Canal and campaigning for Canada to become the 51st state raises questions about his attitude to AUKUS.

Joe seemed to be triggered by a snap, US president-elect Donald Trump.Picture: AFP

It set off the snowflake and a bout of hand-wringing followed ...

Donald Trump should make his position clear on the landmark AUKUS agreement and telegraph his expectations of Australia under the security partner­ship. And he should do this soon.
AUKUS is about military deterrence against China in the key region of strategic importance to the US – the Indo-­Pacific – and has the backing of Republicans and Democrats in congress.
But Trump appears to be the missing piece of the puzzle.
He is breaking all the rules by talking about acquiring Greenland in a key challenge to Denmark, reclaiming the Panama Canal and campaigning for Canada to become the 51st state.
These actions must raise questions about his attitude towards Australia and the future of the AUKUS partnership.
While Anthony Albanese raised the agreement with Trump in their call following the US election, it is not obvious what plans the incoming president has in store for the AUKUS framework.
He may be an enthusiastic supporter, push for some form of renegotiation or perhaps want greater defending spending from Canberra.
Yet instead of making his expectations clear to allies and partners, the president-elect this week shocked the world by sketching out his plans for US territorial expansion.
Trump reserved the option of using the military to seize control of Greenland, a Danish territory, and retake the Panama Canal while also threatening Canada with economic coercion in his quest for it to become the 51st state.
This does not help the Albanese government.
It will most likely serve as fuel for critics of the AUKUS agreement at home – including those within Labor – who say it will only lock Australia in to a radical world view under a second Trump administration.

Sheesh, Joe, settle down, everything's going to be fine ...

Despite the reptiles' love of drilling, unnerved Joe continued with his anxiety attack ...

Comments on the strategic importance of the agreement from the Democratic co-chair of the congressional AUKUS Working Group, Joe Courtney, and the Republican chairman emeritus of the house foreign affairs committee, Michael McCaul, reveal the deep wellspring of support for the security partnership in the US.
This is welcome. Courtney says Australia is pumping $3bn into the US submarine industrial base and more than 100 ­Australians have already graduated from nuclear submarine schools in South Carolina and in Connecticut.
In addition, for the first time, the USS Hawaii had an Aus­tralian officer at the helm when it arrived in Perth in 2024.
McCaul makes clear that AUKUS is a vehicle for the military deterrence of China, arguing that it “keeps Chairman Xi (Jinping) up at night” and served as a “prime example of how we should be partnering with and trusting our allies”.
This shows the mechanisms are already in place for AUKUS to deliver and evolve over time.
Yet its evolution would be well served if Trump were to reveal his position on the future of the agreement.
It remains within his power to elevate its strategic profile and meaning within the wider region.
By contrast, Trump’s hope to establish a sphere of influence stretching from north to Central America by incorporating other nations and territories has already been dismissed as a fantasy by Panama, Canada, Greenland, Denmark and various leaders across Europe.

Sheesh, the pond well remembers that the tangerine tyrant built a fabulous wall, big enough to rival Hadrian's or the Chinese ones, and better still, made Mexico pay for it ... and he's best buddies with the liar from the shire...

...so everything's A OK. If we just offer him Tasmania, we can do some kind of deal ...

Finally, the scribblers at Crikey have returned from their seasonal slumber, with Charlie Lewis offering up Islam, net zero and ‘woke’: Welcome to the Tony Abbott risk to Western civilisation scale, With so many threats to Western civilisation, it can be hard to keep track. That's why Crikey has put together a definitive ranking. (paywall)

Charlie obviously spent the holydays reading up on threats to Western Civilisation:

Two former prime ministers met in Sydney last week, with Tony Abbott attempting to help Liz Truss’ book 10 Years to Save the West inch above the Ultimate Air Fryer Cookbook on the bestseller list by “launching” the tome a mere six months after its release.
So just what is threatening the West according to these colossal figures in the world of second-hand embarrassment? According to their agreed-upon thesis, the threats can be traced back to “the various mind viruses”, as Abbott put it. “Whether it’s the woke mind virus, the net zero mind virus, whether it’s the appeasement of our external enemies mind virus, all of which are doing so much damage.” This is a Rhodes scholar, talking like a punctuation-free YouTube comment, if that gives you any indication of the state of modern conservatism.
Given the sheer volume of threats Abbott and friends have told us Western civilisation is facing, we thought it might be useful to give a ranking, so that next time you’re warned of an imminent danger to everything we hold dear, you’ll know just how worried to be.

Spoiler alert, punters will be very pleased to learn that climate change is a very low threat - as per the header, the existential threats were Islam, "the woke mind virus", and western civilisation itself.

That's just a fancy way of introducing a bonus, from David Lying at the helm and Bob Day, two voices from the distant past the pond had completely forgotten about.

The reptiles promised only a light two minute read, so where was the harm in How the Coalition blew its chance in Senate, Two former senators, David Leyonhjelm and Bob Day, take issue with Tony Abbott’s view of history.

It began with a tame snap of the onion muncher, Former prime minister Tony Abbott. Picture: Martin Ollman/NewsWire

Can't get enough of that man, albeit with a cheesy grin ... but it raises a serious, neigh solemn, neigh portentous and problematic issue. 

Why don't the reptiles regularly show off the source of his enduring fame ...

What followed was as tame as the cheesy grin snap. 

It truly still is the holyday silly season:

Tony Abbott says that the centre-right Coalition government he led into office in 2013 began strongly enough by stopping a wave of illegal immigration by small boats and by repealing a carbon tax and a mining tax. But Senate obstruction, he says, sabotaged his first, economically reforming, budget.
The former prime minister says that if the clock could be turned back, he would have insisted that all his frontbenchers provide a detailed blueprint of what needed to change to make a difference in their portfolio area, and explain how their proposed changes reflected the Coalition’s “smaller government, bigger citizen” political instincts.
As most will recall, the Coalition led by Tony Abbott did indeed go to the 2013 election promising to “abolish the carbon tax, abolish the mining tax and stop the boats”.
Upon election, seven centre-right Senate crossbenchers (we were two of them) voted in support of these three pledges, giving the government the numbers it needed (33 plus seven) to get its legislation passed. Most of us tried hard to help him get his budget through too, and we voted to approve the Trans-Pacific Partnership, bring back the Australian Building and Construction Commission, and appoint a wind farm commissioner, all of which the Greens opposed.
Shortly after, we met with the prime minister and put to him what we called a 40-40-40 game plan: “40 votes (a Senate majority) to fix 40 years of unfinished business and set the nation up for the next 40 years.” It had been 40 years since a Liberal government under Malcolm Fraser had a majority in the Senate, an opportunity it had squandered.

Uh huh ... did we really need to be reminded of those plans for a thousand year Reich at this moment?

Luckily, it was just a two minute waste of time, as the reptiles had promised:

We tried valiantly to convince the prime minister the best way to get the Coalition’s policies through the parliament was to elect more senators like us. That is, if the Coalition couldn’t win a majority in its own right, it should at least attempt to achieve a majority with the support of minor party senators. Needless to say, our suggestion was not taken up. In fact, the exact opposite happened. With Malcolm Turnbull as prime minister, the Coalition teamed up with the Greens to change the Senate voting laws and get rid of those very senators who had supported it!
As a result, and as predicted by John Howard, the Greens increased their Senate seats from 10 to 12, Labor went from 25 to 26, centre-left parties increased from one to three, the Coalition lost a seat, and the centre-right parties dropped from seven seats to three. From 33 plus seven (a centre-right majority) to 32 plus three (a centre-right minority); a loss of five Senate seats!
But what would we know? We accept that a builder, a vet, a blacksmith, a soldier, a footballer, a sawmill manager and an engineer might not know a lot about politics, but we did bring to the parliament a perspective that career politicians did not.
David Leyonhjelm and Bob Day are former senators.

Losers, wastrels, drop kicks and wasters of valuable time ... but the good news is that the infallible Pope has returned to celebrate events in a timely way, though the pond is still catching up ...