Dear Amy,
You are the herpes of American law, the incurable rash that Trump rubbed into the bloodstream of the Republic. Not lethal, but permanent. Not catastrophic in one blow, but humiliating forever. A chronic infection we didn’t ask for but can’t get rid of, no matter how many ointments of reason or antibiotics of precedent we try. You flare, you blister, you ooze, you scar. Then you retreat, smug behind your robe, humming as if nothing happened — until the next time.
Dobbs was your first raw sore, the angry welt across the reproductive system of the nation. Women’s rights split open like cracked skin, leaking pus into every state rushing to outlaw choice. You called it fidelity to text, but it was a lesion, weeping down generations, crusting over with bans, flaring again every time someone thought they could control their own body. You were the virus announcing itself in the blood, the pain that made America realize it was infected for life.
Then came affirmative action, another outbreak, the rash crawling across admissions offices, itching through the skin of equality. You didn’t just strike policy; you reopened scars from centuries of discrimination, rubbing grit into old wounds until they bled fresh again. A line of oozing sores running down the face of education, visible to everyone except you, smiling as if welts were wisdom.
Trump v. United States was the grotesque lesion that should have ended the illusion of neutrality forever. That pustule swelled with pus and immunity, an open sore big enough to cover murder, treason, and coup. You called it jurisprudence, but the smell was unmistakable: rotting flesh, infected power, a boil so rancid it made separation of powers itself reek like gangrene. That wasn’t fidelity — that was a suppurating ulcer dressed in Latin.
The racial profiling decision was your cluster outbreak, a whole constellation of sores blooming across the Fourth Amendment. Bright red, inflamed, itchy as hell. You handed ICE a license to scrape skin raw, to poke and prod entire communities like dermatologists of tyranny. You didn’t just legalize bigotry — you industrialized the rash, turned neighborhoods into petri dishes, lives into lesions, families into scar tissue.
And then there’s your shadow docket, your favorite rash. Sudden, secret, festering in the dark. No arguments, no daylight, just flare-ups popping overnight, leaving scars by morning. A string of hidden sores across the body politic, scratching at rights until they bleed, while you stand there humming like an antiseptic nun, pretending emergency orders aren’t dripping pus straight into democracy’s veins.
You are not jurisprudence, Amy. You are recurrence. You are stigma. You are the permanent cold sore on history’s lip, the lifelong itch in the groin of democracy. You don’t kill the Republic; you humiliate it, burn it, scar it, force it to live with the shame of having caught you from a reckless tryst with Donald J. Trump. Your legacy won’t be wisdom or fidelity. It will be sores, blisters, ulcers, outbreaks. It will be the memory that once we let you in, there was no cure, no end, only the shame of knowing you’d flare again.
Unforgivingly,
Rook T. Winchester
Editor-in-Chief, Closer to the Edge
P.S. You’re not a justice. You’re America’s rash. And the scabs you leave will itch for generations.
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She’s a disgrace
Can’t scotus judges be impeached?