It’s Been a Busy Week
With election season hurtling blindly toward the possible end of American democracy as it is, it’s tough to remind yourself that there’s a whole world of other news going on. As John Oliver noted on Sunday’s show, a major hurricane dubbed Helene is currently doing untold damage to the Southeastern United States. Meanwhile, those states’ Republican elected officials are trying to run away from their recent attempt to shut down the government (which would have prevented the Biden administration from rushing prompt aid to their constituents), while running to hang out with Donald Trump for smiling photo ops a safe distance from the storm surge. In addition, Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israeli government assassinated the leader of Hezbollah in Lebanon, which should really help out in those peace talks that Netanyahu is in no way interested in.
But Oliver, living and filming as he does in the Big Apple, spent the bulk of his show-opening news rundown on New York Mayor Eric Adams, who was indicted on multiple bribery, influence peddling and illegal campaign contribution charges. Mainly but not exclusively taking the form of lavish accommodations and air travel upgrades supplied by Turkish officials and business interests. As Oliver noted however, Adams’ (alleged) corruption sucked all New Yorkers into his web of graft and free hot towels as well, with the Turkish money triggering matching campaign funds totalling some 10 million dollars. Sorry to tell you, New York taxpayers, but you just bought yourself a mayor—and you didn’t even get a free stay at the Istanbul Four Seasons for your trouble.
Oliver, being the sort of satirist who knows how fairness helps you truly slide the knife in cleanly, asserted that Adams—unlike the $3 fare-jumper shot by one of the mayor’s beloved NYPD officers last week—deserves due process. Which is nice of Oliver, even if he then went on to read out a particularly incriminating series of emails and texts underscoring the undeniable fact that white collar criminals think their privilege will protect them when their texts explicitly haggling over their bribes are read out in court.
As Oliver suggests while playing some of the Mayor’s outspoken public pronouncements over the years, swagger is no match for investigators armed with subpoenas and your cell phone. Noting that not even New York’s recent string of deeply weird mayors like “goober slenderman” (de Blasio), “millionaire lawn gnome” (Bloomberg), or recently disbarred insurrectionist and Borat 2 costar Rudy Giuliani managed to get indicted, Oliver played some of Adams’ greatest, weirdest hits.
Apart from the seeming sole metaphor Adams whips out to demand ultimate loyalty from New Yorkers (see below), there’s Adams’ statement that he daily reminds his hand-picked administration officials (a startling number of whom are under separate criminal investigations) “we’ve got to follow the law.” “I’m not convinced you have a ton of respect for the law,” said Oliver, “if every day you have to hype yourself up into obeying it.” Keeping with the incriminating weirdness, Oliver also showed a clip from the very real 2017 Turkish comedy New York Masali, where Adams, playing himself, is approached for political favors by a couple of grinning Turkish businessmen, with whom the mayor takes a selfie. As they say, you can’t write this stuff.
Then there’s the clip of Adams, less than a year ago, giving the key to the city to none other than also under-indictment alleged sex trafficker Diddy, to whom Adams happily compared himself as the “bad boys” of their respective fields. As Oliver put it, “Hey, you might not want to associate with that guy because things aren’t looking great for him right now. And if you’re wondering which one I’m talking to, the answer is yes.”
And Now This…
Sticking with the defiant Eric Adams, the first “And Now This” segment traced the mayor’s incessant return to a single metaphor. That being that he is a pilot, all of New York is the plane, some passengers are hoping for the plane to crash, and there are no parachutes. As a way to tell people to shut the hell up and let you do whatever you want, or else, the analogy is more than a little strained. As deployed again and again by Eric Adams to multiple crowds of variously receptive New Yorkers, the adamant bullying implicit in the comparison is more than a little creepy.
Naturally, Oliver and his staff superimposed that footage of old-timey prototype airplanes crashing clumsily to earth over Adams’ speeches. (Note: Despite Eric Adams legal troubles and the seemingly inevitable ignominious end of his political career, New York City does not appear to have crashed and burned as of this writing.)
Our Main Story Tonight
As if people uninterested in living under the rule of a sundowning kleptocrat with glaring fascist dictator tendencies needed another reason to vote—and vote hard— in the coming election, John Oliver’s main story examined how Donald Trump and his ultra-conservative backers have well and truly screwed our judicial system. And how, thanks to the decades-long machinations of the Christian nationalist Federalist Society and a guy that Oliver insists on referring to as “Leonard F**king Leo,” not just the Supreme Court but the all-important lower courts that decide Americans’ rights big and small are very much on the 2024 ballot.
As ever, Oliver provides an outline of how the thing that’s f**ked got that way, just how f**ked we currently are, and how we might—with a little luck and a whole lot of civic-minded action—just manage to unf**k ourselves. A Last Week Tonight story about something so far-reaching and seemingly intractable as rampant and systemic right-wing conquest of our judicial system is an exercise in John Oliver goosing the depressing reality with just enough righteous outrage couched in cheeky digressions. (There’s this depressed-looking owl that’ll carry you through the roughest bits.) He’s going to slap us with laughs in order to keep us from sinking into despair basically. And despair is something, in Oliver’s report tonight, that’s awfully hard to avoid.
There’s the fact that Mitch McConnell (R-One Foot in the Grave) successfully stonewalled so many of Barack Obama’s judicial picks that Donald Trump was essentially handed the keys to the judgeship loony bin. Installing hundreds of beyond right-wing ideologues with no respect for precedent or sense of shame over how egregiously they put evangelical opinion over logic and public policy has been one of Trump’s most appalling and damaging legacies, according to Oliver. (And really let that statement sink in.)
Sure, the three hand-picked conservative rubber stamps Trump packed SCOTUS with get all the press as they destroy civil rights, women’s rights, regulatory power over corporations, and literally declare that a President Trump could straight-up murder a political opponent as long as it’s “official.” (Seriously, his lawyers argued that—and won.) And don’t get Oliver wrong, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett are the pits. But in taking on the behind-the-scenes plotting of Leonard F**king Leo, Oliver examines how this conservative takeover took place right under our “it can’t happen here” noses.
Leonard Leo (sorry, Leonard F**king Leo) emerges in Oliver’s piece as the dweeby mastermind behind the intentional sabotage of an entire government branch. Oliver shows the condescending plutocrat sneering at “the left” for using “scare tactics” about a raft of stolen right-wing judgeships destroying Roe v. Wade. (A strategy to keep in mind whenever a MAGA Twitter account tells you you’re overreacting.) Leo is also shown dodging a reporter pointing to a single untraceable donation behind one of his judge-installing plots, airily claiming he doesn’t concern himself with politics, “only ideas.” (Something to keep in mind whenever anybody says they’re “just asking questions” about, say, racist stereotypes of women’s equality.)
As Oliver notes, with some 200-plus of the 900 federal judgeships firmly in the pocket of Leo and his conservative cronies thanks to McConnell and Trump doing their bidding, right-wing justices have been busy on the Federalist Society’s two main goals: enacting The Handmaid’s Tale and removing any and all restrictions of greedhead corporate plundering. Oliver used the beyond-ludicrous case where a hand-shopped Texas judge named Matthew Kacsmaryk ruled that plaintiff doctors could sue to ban the widely used abortion drug Mifepristone (aka RU-486) because—and no, this isn’t a joke—doctors prescribing it might feel “stress.”
Despite this being both legal and logical bullcrap, Trump appointee Kacsmaryk went ahead and banned the drug unilaterally, and even though this rights-grabbing nonsense was too far even for this Supreme Court, Oliver rained on our relief by noting how the conservatives basically just kicked the can down the road by saying these particular plaintiffs lacked standing to sue. So until Leo can pump money into an anti-choice plaintiff who’s head isn’t so ludicrously up their own butt, the drug remains legal.
Then there’s the less-publicized but equally destructive Chevron decision, where the six conservative SCOTUS justices struck down regulatory agencies’ ability to enforce environmental and public health policy. Essentially, the right-wing branch of the Judicial Branch gave the long-awaited green light for powerful corporations to loot, despoil, and exploit in the pursuit of profits, something that Leonard F**king Leo and other wealthy and unscrupulous power-mongers have sought since the ruling went into effect in 1984. As Oliver notes, Chevron was one of the most-cited cases in American judicial history, and the six right-wingers not only took out the bottom piece from the judicial Jenga stack, they flipped over the whole table because that’s precisely what they were installed to do.
Conservatives frame this gutting of groups like the Environmental Protection Agency as merely restoring balance to the three branches fo government, with Neil Gorsuch mocking such government regulations as that whole “don’t rip tags off mattresses thing” as silly examples of government overreach. Except, as Oliver pointed out, apart from Gorsuch employing the single hackiest stand-up comedy trope to back up his point, requiring tags on mattresses allows consumers to see if—as one actual case Oliver cited—their baby’s crib padding might burst into flame like “a miniature Wicker Man.”
Similarly, Oliver played a clip of never-passed-a-single-bill Congressman Gym Jim Jordan (R-Criminal Accomplice) obnoxiously putting air quotes around the word “experts” while claiming that elected officials like him should decide, say, how much deadly dioxin should be in your drinking water. “Look, I’ll give him this,” began Oliver, patiently lining the Ohio Republican up in his sights, “When Jim Jordan says ‘I may not know how many parts per billion is necessary,’ he’s absolutely right. After all, he’s a man who prides himself on not knowing things. Whether it’s science, technology, or indeed the alleged sexual abuse happening to college wrestlers on a team he coached—Jim Jordan has built a personal brand on not knowing what’s going on.”
All of this, as is the case with so, so many Last Week Tonight exposés, is liable to sap the will of even the heartiest among us. And Oliver, unlike another notable Brit, doesn’t slip us a spoonful of sugar with our bitter medicine. There are Democrat-written bills stalled in Congress that would undo much of the havoc wrought by Trump and Leonard “You Know the Middle Name” Leo, but without a majority of elected officials not beholden to either lobbyist dark money or Christian nationalist dogma, they’re not going anywhere. For John Oliver, the solution to all this judicial f**kery is as simple as it is desperately vital—vote.
Vote Democratic because aging right-wing SCOTUS goblins Alito and Thomas are approaching retirement to their benefactor’s private islands, and a second Donald Trump term would guarantee we’ll live under his eye for generations. Vote Democratic up and down the ticket so that President Kamala Harris will have a functional, not-monstrous majority to actually redress some major wrongs and appoint judges who examine the facts before the court without checking with their Bibles and/or Leonard F-ing Leo first.
Vote Democratic up and down the ticket.
Anyway, that’s what John Oliver says.
And Now This…
Having exhausted the young person shaming potential of avocado toast, local news pundits are now moving on to their latest kink: feet. Because nothing else whatsoever is going on in the world, Last Week Tonight unearthed a shocking number of news teams taking airtime to tut-tut at Gen Z for not wanting to show off their bare feet in sandals.
Now some might say that the proliferation of online foot-perving might be behind young people covering up and thus denying middle-aged creepy dudes the opportunity to mentally despoil said tootsies. Or that middle-aged news anchors maybe, crazily, should have other things on their mind than the next generation’s footwear habits. One thing we can all agree on, however, is that the roundtable of local news types shown spending a full several minutes sharing their own fond childhood reminiscences of their pals who had extra toes should all be on some sort of watchlist.
Cardus Endus
Dubbed with the posthumous title Dameum Acclaimum, Last Week Tonight‘s final title card paid respect to Dame Maggie Smith, who died on Friday at the age of 89. A riveting presence her entire, impossibly long career, Smith is probably best known for stealing all the scenes in the Harry Potter movies and on Downton Abbey, where her practiced, withering put-downs could strip a butler raw at 50 paces.
Smith won [checks long, long list] two Oscars, five BAFTAS, three Golden Globes, four Emmys, five SAG awards, and a single Tony, because she was such a slacker. Renowned in her later career for being majestically imperious, Smith was also a hoot. Check out 1976’s goofball murder mystery comedy Murder By Death for impeccable proof. When her society detective hubby (David Niven, along with Smith parodying The Thin Man‘s Nick and Nora Charles) discreetly informs her why anyone would need to lock up dead bodies, Smith takes a beat before letting a sly smile curl her lips. “Oh, that’s tacky,” she purrs, getting the biggest laugh in a cast filled with comedy stars. RIP, mum.
Last Lines Tonight
“At this point, finding out Leonard Leo had a role in a major conservative court case is like finding out a ventriloquist dummy has a hand up its ass. It’s basically assumed.”
Sorry, that’s “Leonard F**king Leo”
[On Congress’ new, not-expert ability to make environmental policy] “Legislators can be good at many things. Making speeches. Raising campaign moey. Getting uncontrollably horny during Beetlejuice the Musical. Escaping to Mexico when their constituents need them the most. But they don’t posses universal expertise in technology, medicine, or food safety.”
Noting how the likes of Tommy Tuberville (R-DumbF**kistan) will now be able to overrule actual scientists
“As one commentator wrote, [overturning Chevron] has opened the door so that the worst judges can issue nationwide injunctions, essentially one-man vetoes of entire agencies in real time based on personal opinion. Which is just fully not how the government is supposed to work. There’s a reason that Schoolhouse Rock video doesn’t end with some random judge in Mississippi suddenly wiping his ass with that bill.”
on legal precedent’s new role as outhouse toilet roll
“You know things are bad when Supreme Court justices are crying alone in their offices. Instead of where they usually cry, which is on national TV being credibly accused of sexual assault.”
On Justice Sonia Sotomayor revealing how the right-wing scotus takeover has made her break down in tears
