Finally Friday Reads: News from the Damned Edition

This symbol of the endless knot features the Green Wood-Dragon. Wood Dragon years come every 60 years. The dragon is associated with incredible strength, positive transformation, and challenges. The element wood symbolizes creativity and adaptability.

𝗟𝗢𝗦𝗔𝗥 𝗧𝗔𝗦𝗛𝗜 𝗗𝗘𝗟𝗘𝗞!

Happy New Year of the Wood Dragon, Sky Dancers!

It would be now if we ever needed an auspicious Lunar New Year prediction.  Fortunately, we are in the year of the Green Wood Dragon. So, here’s the soothsaying for the year from CNN.  “What’s in store for the Year of the Dragon?” The Dragon is the only mythical creature in this zodiac. That’s special.

“This year will also be significant because it’s the year when the world enters a new chapter from the eighth period to the ninth period of Xuan Kong flying star.”

She explains that there are nine Xuan Kong flying stars that affect the feng shui of the world. Each of them lords over us for two decades before passing the torch to the next star.

The year 2024 marks the beginning of the next 20-year reign under the ninth flying star.

“The number nine star represents feminine energy – so ladies are going to take over in a lot of the areas. It also represents technology, art and design as well as spirituality,” says Chow.

I always see reading these forecasts as aspirational; in other words, if we think about them, we can make them happen.  We certainly need to make something happen right now.

Yesterday was an insane news day. The SCOTUS hearing on the Colorado 14th Amendment was heard yesterday morning.  There weas a live stream broadcast of the voices only.  I heard Clarence Thomas fall asleep a few times and leave early via a young activist I follow on Threads. I also found out that was not unusual. When you’re just a paid vote, there’s not much to say, do, or think about.

I will make this our top story today, even though it appears the media is more interested in parsing every word President Biden spoke while looking through one of the more opinionated special counsel reports I’ve ever seen.  The press is less involved with the idea that Joe was not determined to have any grounds for prosecution than with the description of him as an elderly man who forgets many things. If I were questioned on the past 40 years of my life while trying to handle the US response to the Hamas attack on Israel, I’d be a bit muddled, too.  We also learned that Special Counsel Jack Smith is questioning a decision on how flooded everyone will be with various top-secret documents that the folks who moved the boxes around probably didn’t even see.

This is from NBC News. “Supreme Court signals unlikely to let Colorado kick Trump off the ballot. Trump is appealing a Colorado Supreme Court ruling that said he could be barred from the Republican primary ballot because of his efforts to overturn the 2020 election.”

he Supreme Court on Thursday signaled deep skepticism that Colorado had the power to remove former President Donald Trump from the Republican primary ballot because of his actions trying to overturn the 2020 election results.

A majority of the justices appeared to think during the two-hour argument that states do not have a role in deciding whether a presidential candidate can be barred from running under a provision of the Constitution’s 14th Amendment that bars people who “engaged in insurrection” from holding office.

Justices from across the ideological spectrum raised concerns about states reaching different conclusions on whether a candidate could run, and several indicated that only Congress could enforce the provision at issue.

Throughout the argument, the justices barely touched upon the meaty issue at the center of the case: whether Trump participated in an insurrection. The ruling is unlikely to hinge on that question.

The Supreme Court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, is tackling several novel and consequential legal issues concerning Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, enacted in the wake of the Civil War. Colorado voters filed a lawsuit saying Trump should be barred because of his efforts to defy the 2020 election results in events that led to the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.

Section 3, aimed at preventing former Confederates from returning to power in the U.S. government, says anyone who had previously served as an “officer of the United States” and was then involved in an insurrection would be barred from holding federal office.

But during the oral argument, justices pushed back on the idea that the provision can be enforced by states.

So many of these oral arguments were framed around various words.  Trump’s lawyers have been arguing various things around the applicability of the presidency to the idea of an “office.”  I just have one question. If that’s the case, why have a big parade and inaugural whoop-ti-do surrounding the president taking “the oath of office.”  If we’ve done this inaugural oath for a long time and named it as taking an ‘oath of office’, doesn’t that mean he’s an “officer of the United States.”  I hate word games, and this seemed a lot like one.

You might find it interesting that this case is known as Trump V Anderson.  Norma Anderson is a 91-year-old Legislator from Colorado and a lifelong Republican.  This is from Politico.

Norma Anderson — the Anderson in the Trump v. Anderson case that the Supreme Court will hear on Thursday — is taking on Trump over whether he is eligible to serve as president after his role in the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol.

Anderson, a lifelong Republican who rose through the state party to become one of the top GOP lawmakers in Colorado, said she immediately agreed to participate when recruited by an attorney working with the liberal government watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.

“When asked, and when duty calls, you do it,” she told POLITICO. “My reason for doing it is saving democracy. Because Donald Trump will destroy our democracy.”
The case rests on an interpretation of a clause in the 14th Amendment that says those who “engaged in” an insurrection against the United States after taking an oath to “support” the Constitution are ineligible to hold future office.

It takes a lot of chutzpah and bravery to face down the crazies in the Trump Cult.  This is from The Atlantic. “The Supreme Court Is Eager to Rid Itself of This Difficult Trump Question. It just doesn’t know how.”  This analysis is written by Quinta Jurecic

Two things seemed clear after the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Trump v. Anderson, the case concerning whether Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment bars Donald Trump from the presidency as an insurrectionist. First, most of the justices want to rule in Trump’s favor. Second, they’re struggling to figure out how to do so.

Maybe Section 3 doesn’t apply to the presidency per se, Justices Neil Gorsuch and Ketanji Brown Jackson said—and perhaps, along those same lines, it doesn’t prohibit oath-breaking former presidents from holding future office either? Or perhaps, Justice Samuel Alito pondered, the Fourteenth Amendment prohibits insurrectionists from holding office, but not from running for it? Justice Brett Kavanaugh seemed enamored of the idea that the amendment doesn’t allow states to disqualify candidates for federal office—as Colorado did here—without Congress first giving the go-ahead. In a related line of inquiry, which the justices seemed to coalesce around as arguments went on, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Elena Kagan suggested that perhaps there’s something inappropriate about allowing individual states to make decisions that could potentially determine a national election.

Brandi Buchman reports on Special Counsel Jack Smith’s move last night in the Stolen Documents Case. This is from Law & Crime. “‘Relentless and misleading’: Jack Smith shreds new Trump motion as proof he will ‘stop at nothing’ to delay Mar-a-Lago documents case.”  Judge Loose Cannon is at it again.

In a new motion, special counsel Jack Smith shredded Donald Trump’s latest attempt to indefinitely delay the classified documents case in Florida before U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, urging the court to resist the former president’s efforts to “stop at nothing” to delay facing a jury.

“Their objective is plain — to delay trial as long as possible. And the tactics they deploy are relentless and misleading — they will stop at nothing to stall the adjudication of the charges against them by a fair and impartial jury of citizens. The Court should promptly reject the defendants’ motion,” Smith wrote in the 9-page brief filed in Florida late Thursday.

A tentative May 20 trial date has been set but it increasingly looks like that won’t get off the ground as Cannon has agreed to extend deadlines for other pretrial issues. For now, the next hearing approaches on March 1 when federal prosecutors and Trump’s lawyers will convene to discuss the schedule.

Meanwhile, Smith is eager to keep things on track and in the terse motion, lamented to Cannon that Trump’s pretrial motions for the indictment were due in November and yet, he reminded her, that deadline was vacated the same day.

Trump’s lawyers were either simply unprepared or were flatly ignoring court orders, according to the special counsel, and now, three months on, as Trump’s team has filed requests to adjourn the case completely, they still come asking for more time to file pretrial documents.

“This sequence of events fully exposes the defendants’ motive here: to achieve delay,” Smith wrote.

So, I have to write about the Hur Report, which basically showed a contrast between a President who did everything to hold on to documents he purposefully heisted and one who thought his aides were doing everything correctly and didn’t check on them. It’s turned into a discussion about Biden’s mental state, which is way out of this guy’s pay level. Now, we’re just endlessly hearing about the age thing. This is from Josh Marshall, who wrote it in Talking Points Memo.  People age somewhat differently. My mother was unable to fend off dementia in her 70s. My father was good up until his 90s.  I have senior moments, but I can’t do my job or live my life. Trump’s got advanced dementia. Biden has senior moments.

Let me share a few thoughts on the Biden special counsel report.

First off, this is another example of the universal rule: Republican special counsels are chosen to investigate Democrats. And Republican special counsels are chosen to investigate Republicans. It may not have been a great idea for Merrick Garland to have a two-time Trump appointee investigate Joe Biden. But here we are. Robert Hur totally slimed Biden with these gratuitous comments about his mental acuity and memory, referring to him as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” Even if you assume they are the product of a good faith evaluation they are still wildly inappropriate.

DOJ guidelines make clear that if you’re not bringing charges you don’t bash the subject of the investigation in your announcement (a la James Comey). You certainly aren’t supposed to affirmatively attempt to demean the subject of the investigation with clearly political attacks that aren’t even related to what you’re investigating. Hur might as well have called him “Fake News Joe Biden.” It’s really that transparent and that bad.

Are we sure that Hur let his political bias get in the way of his professional judgment? Can we draw that from his background as a politically connected Republican lawyer? I don’t even think it’s a serious question. The lengthy and gratuitous comments speak for themselves. Of course he did.

The descriptions in the report sound bad because they are designed to sound bad. These are from a five hour discussion the day after the October 7th attacks on Israel when I’m sure Biden was focused on that unfolding crisis. Without watching the interview we have no way of knowing whether these are representative of the tenor of the conversation or cherry-picked gotchas.

But there’s no crying in baseball. Entirely justified outrage from Biden supporters won’t counter whatever damage these comments will have. The White House will need to get Biden in front of interviewers, where he actually does quite well, and in widely seen venues, to counter it. It’s really as simple as that.

On the merits, some of these quotes that Hur came up with really do suggest that Biden knew in some sense that he had classified material in the documents or at least made references to it being in his possession. I need to look more closely at the specifics. And it’s still a prosecutor’s brief. But that did surprise me. And not in a good way.

Emptywheel has a few things to say about the report, too. “ROBERT HUR’S BOX-CHECKING.”  She really breaks it down for us.

This is a closing argument. This language is wildly inappropriate in a declination memo, because Hur didn’t find the evidence to back this story!

Worse still, it’s stupid. Because all Biden needed for vindication was that 40-page memo, the one he mentioned in the very same sentence as he mentioned the classified documents. The one stored inside the house, not in a discarded box in the garage. The one he never used during the 2020 election.

But Hur was undeterred by a stupid motive argument.

Next, after admitting that the FBI never succeeded in tracing the Afghan documents, much less proving they were in the basement of the Virginia house, he used this photo analysis to claim that the box found in the garage is the same one that appeared in two pictures taken in Biden’s Wilmington office in 2019, shortly after everything was shipped from Virginia to Delaware.

If you look at news aggregators like Memorandum, you’d think this was the only story in the world to follow right now.  What we have here is a failure to communicate.  A few articles like this are up today, given Nevada’s debacle of a primary/caucus vote. Blocking votes is a Republican strategy. “How Trump turned the GOP into the party of lawless disorder. Can Republicans win by promoting contempt for the rule of law? We’re about to find out.”  It’s written by David R Lurie at Public Notice.

In the wake of his loss, Trump gave up any pretense of standing for law and order. He schemed to undue the outcome of the election, culminating in a violent attack on the Capitol by Trump supporters in a desperate attempt to prevent the certification of Biden’s victory.

With his recent victories in the Iowa caucus and New Hampshire primary, Trump made it a virtual certainty that he will again be the Republican Party’s presidential candidate. But as he prepares for his third general election campaign, Trump is making clear that he will be a very different candidate this time.

It is Trump the insurrectionist who will be running at the top of the 2024 GOP ticket. Trump has discarded even the pretense that he intends to “fix” the nation, let alone foster order and respect for the rule of law. The upcoming election is therefore lining up as a test of whether an anti-law and order Republican can win the presidency. Trump and his supporters have made that all the more clear over the past several weeks, after Trump’s early primary victories sealed his status as the presumptive GOP presidential candidate.

Trump celebrated his New Hampshire win by setting out to further alienate women voters. During his “victory” speech, he relentlessly engaged in misogynistic and racist attacks on his sole remaining primary opponent, Nikki Haley.

Trump them flew to New York for the apparent purpose of drawing further attention to the fact that a jury found him liable for sexually assaulting and then defaming E. Jean Carroll. He devoted his short time in the courtroom to expressing contempt for Carroll, the judge and even the jury, which proceeded to award Carroll more than $83 million.

Unsurprisingly given all this, a recent Quinnipiac University poll found that, just over the past several weeks, Trump managed to widen the already gaping gender gap he faces in November. Women voters now support Biden over Trump 58 to 36 percent, versus 53 to 41 percent in December 2023. Apparently pleased with that debacle, Trump indicated that he plans to spend the campaign shuttling between courtrooms wherein he is a criminal defendant.

Then, after the GOP successfully forced Biden to accept a “border security” bill filled with GOP priorities in return for providing funding for Ukraine, Trump stepped in to successfully pressure Republicans to scuttle the Republican bill.

Trump, and his most loyal MAGA acolytes, were open and transparent about the reason for their about face: They want the Department of Homeland Security to remain as overwhelmed and under-resourced as possible during the months prior to the election. In short, they want to maintain an appearance of chaos.

All this chaos is really tough on this old lady.  But I’m now near the incoherent stream of blather from the Orange One. Neither too much wine or lack of sleep or signs of aging make me sound this insane.  Trump sounds like he has an inchoate understanding of reality day in and day out.

This is only early February, and I already feel overwhelmed by the election stupidity. Do we have any functional institutions anymore?

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?