That Shit Was Trash
What a Rogue Court Could Learn from A$AP Rocky
In June of 2019, the rapper A$AP Rocky got into a fight on the street in Stockholm. He was here on tour. He and some members of his entourage had a beef with a guy named Mustafa Jafari outside a hamburger joint. Jafari was beaten, kicked and slashed with broken glass while he was on the ground. He ended up with a fractured rib and stitches.
Rocky went ahead and played his gig at a Stockholm arena. After that, though, he was arrested. He was considered a flight risk so he was taken into custody at Kronoberg Remand Prison to await trial. His tour was put on hold.
Rocky didn’t like it here much. “That shit was trash,” as he himself put it. He didn’t like the food and he didn’t like the water. Among other complaints, he felt he got a bad cell. It’s true he didn't get the best cell. But he didn't get the worst cell, either. He got the next cell. That's how they do things here.
Another of Rocky’s dissatisfactions concerned the Swedish legal system, wherein there’s no such thing as bail. You can’t buy your way out of custody, like in the U.S. You sit in jail until your trial, which in his case ended up being more than a month. It must have sucked. Even from the outside, it felt like a long time. Several U.S. artists were calling to boycott Sweden and a petition calling for Rocky’s release began to circulate.
Pressure was building.
At the time, to our great communal misfortune, Trump was in the White House. Unbidden, he decided to intervene on Rocky’s behalf. His calculation was that securing Rocky’s release would endear him to Black voters, which answers more questions than it raises. The American president has so much power that his gentlest suggestions carry immense weight. But Trump didn’t make a gentle suggestion, as the world would later discover. It wasn’t even mere political pressure. Working through an envoy, he threatened Sweden with trade restrictions if they didn’t let Rocky go.
They didn’t let Rocky go.
They said no, despite enormous pressure. They said no because it was the right thing to do. They said no, because Sweden doesn’t allow politicians foreign or domestic to meddle in legal cases. The Swedish constitution explicitly forbids the interference of politicians, or unrelated government offices, in the work of the courts of law, as Foreign Minister Margot Wallström pointed out at the time.
I couldn’t help thinking of Rocky last week. That’s when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Trump v. United States that former presidents (read: Trump) cannot ever be prosecuted for actions relating to the core powers of their former office, and that there is at least a presumption that they have immunity for their official acts more broadly. It was a shockingly dangerous call. It was potentially democracy destroying. And it signaled that the judiciary is no longer a functional branch of government.
As Malcom Nance wrote in his newsletter, Special Intelligence, “America now has only two functioning branches of government, and they are teetering by a thread. Do not forget that, with this ruling, Donald Trump has absolute immunity for anything he does or says as President. Anything he says or orders, no matter how corrupt or treacherous, cannot be used as evidence against him in any proceeding.”
This Court has gone rogue. These nine people serve lifetime appointments, answering to no one as they wield immense power over the lives of 333.3 million people. They don’t clap at the State of the Union to preserve the appearance of impartiality, but they’re not fooling anyone. At least five of them are current or former members of the Federalist Society—Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Amy Coney Barrett. All of them lied (in very lawyerly ways) under oath during their confirmation hearings to win congressional support. Their agenda is to tilt the country right, to advance the conservative cause, limit federal power and assert their bizarre conceptions of individual liberty. They are waging ideological war from the bench. They are taking away our rights one by one and no one is stopping them. I think someone should.
And Rocky? He went to trial and got a conviction for assault, a suspended prison sentence and an order to pay $1,270 in damages. His conviction doesn’t bar him from returning to Sweden, because he has paid for his crime. There’s an idea.
As a US citizen who is an immigrant in Europe, I truly think that Americans can only continue to believe the US is the greatest country because they are unaware of how democracy and the legal and governmental systems work in other countries.
It’s alarming. How does this end?