First, Democrats should stress that voters need to know before the election whether Trump committed crimes—and this is due to them as a matter of right. Second, Trump is seeking these delays to end all prosecutions of himself if he regains the White House—to corruptly place himself above the law by pardoning himself or having his handpicked lickspittle attorney general do it. Democrats must say clearly that if the court helps delay the trial until after the election, it will be enabling him to do that.
Monday Reads: Broken Institutions Edition
Posted: March 4, 2024 Filed under: just because | Tags: 2024 Supreme Court Rulings, The Donnie Dotard Club House, US most dysfunctional Advanced democracy 9 Comments
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
The big news is that after taking its sweet time, the Supreme Court unanimously decided that states cannot remove Trump from their ballots even though they may have their own version of the 14th Amendment. “Supreme Court keeps Trump on ballot, rejects Colorado voter challenge. While the decision was unanimous, the liberal justices wrote a sharp concurrence that accused the conservative majority of going further than needed.” This is from the Washington Post and reported by Ann E. Marimow.
The Supreme Court on Monday unanimously sided with Donald Trump, allowing the former president to remain on the election ballot and reversing a Colorado ruling that disqualified him from returning to office because of his conduct around the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
The justices said the Constitution does not permit a single state to disqualify a presidential candidate from national office, declaring that such responsibility “rests with Congress and not the states.” The court warned of disruption and chaos if a candidate for nationwide office could be declared ineligible in some states, but not others, based on the same conduct.
“Nothing in the Constitution requires that we endure such chaos — arriving at any time or different times, up to and perhaps beyond the inauguration,” the court said in an unsigned, 13-page opinion.
While the decision was unanimous, the court’s three liberal justices also wrote separately, saying the conservative majority went further than necessary in the ruling and decided an issue that was not before the court in an attempt to insulate itself and Trump from “future controversy.”
The court’s decision to keep Trump on the ballot leaves him as the leading candidate for the Republican nomination and for now removes the Supreme Court from directly determining the path of the 2024 presidential election. The justices fast-tracked the challenge from voters in Colorado and issued their decision one day before Super Tuesday, when that state and more than a dozen others hold nominating contests. The ruling applies to other states with similar challenges to Trump’s candidacy.
In a sign of the high court’s awareness of the election calendar, the justices took the unusual step of announcing the opinion on the Supreme Court’s website on a day when the court is not in session, instead of issuing it from the bench later this month.
I think the high court’s awareness was more based on the intense criticism they are getting right now for slowing down the process of getting Trump into the Federal Court to face charges. Maybe this is a sign of hope that we’ll hear their take on “Presidential Immunity.” Plus, Clarence Thomas is facing denunciation for his absolute refusal to recuse himself from participating in cases where he has apparent conflicts of interest. Liz Dye at Public Interest makes it even more pronounced. “The Supreme Court saves Trump’s bacon.”
The Supreme Court sparked general outrage last week when it agreed to hear Donald Trump’s claim of absolute presidential immunity in his election interference case, with commentators predicting the end of democracy as we know it if the Court rules that a president is immune for crimes committed while in office.
Histrionics serve no one, however, and so it bears speaking plainly: The Supreme Court is not going to find that Donald Trump is immune from prosecution for crimes committed in office. That’s ridiculous.
But the Court’s right-wing majority is going to run exactly the same playbook they did in 2020, when they gifted the then-president almost two years of delay in turning over his financial documents to prosecutors in New York and investigators in Congress. By the time Trump wound up having to comply, he was already out of office.
This time, the consequences of delay will be even more profound. Thanks to the Supreme Court, Trump will now be able to stand for election again without facing trial for his attempts to overturn the last one.
The Supreme Court has joined the House of Representatives in becoming a dysfunctional, political, conflicted institution. The Washington Diplomat had this blunt headline last month. “US political dysfunction a threat to world stability: report.” We can no longer be trusted to behave like a developed, functioning democracy. This loss cannot be overstated in historical terms or ramifications. They refer to the US as the world’s most “dysfunctional advanced democracy.”
Many in the United States look beyond their borders and see a dangerous world with raging wars, surging violence and deepening instability.
But a new report by the Eurasia Group, a leading political risk firm, suggests that Americans would be well advised to look in the mirror and recognize that political dysfunction and threats of violence in the United States are frightening people around the world and constitute a serious threat to international stability.
“Fully one-third of the global population will go to the polls this year, but an unprecedentedly dysfunctional U.S. election will be by far the most consequential for the world’s security, stability, and economic outlook,” the Top Risks 2024 report argues.
“The outcome will affect the fate of 8 billion people, and only 160 million Americans will have a say in it, with the winner to be decided by just tens of thousands of voters in a handful of swing states… The world’s most powerful country faces critical challenges to its core political institutions: free and fair elections, the peaceful transfer of power, and the checks and balances provided by the separation of powers.”
The Eurasia Group, which was created in 1998 by political scientist and entrepreneur Ian Bremmer, analyzes global affairs through the prism of political developments and risks. Bremmer, the president of the Eurasia Group, and Cliff Kupchan, its chairman, are the authors of this year’s report, which outlines the 10 top risks the world faces. The report also discusses several issues that are less serious than they appear.
“Three wars will dominate world affairs: Russia vs. Ukraine, now in its third year; Israel vs. Hamas, now in its third month; and the United States vs. itself, ready to kick off at any moment,” the report says.
Political polarization and social disarray in the United States are seen in the report as the most serious global risk. It predicts that this year’s presidential election “will worsen the country’s political division, testing American democracy to a degree the nation hasn’t experienced in 150 years and undermining U.S. credibility on the global stage.”
“Undecided” November 4, 1944. Man in voting booth w/newspaper. by Norman Rockwell
In a June 2023 article at The Atlantic, Peter Turchin writes “America Is Headed Toward Collapse. History suggests how to stave it off.”
How has America slid into its current age of discord? Why has our trust in institutions collapsed, and why have our democratic norms unraveled?
All human societies experience recurrent waves of political crisis, such as the one we face today. My research team built a database of hundreds of societies across 10,000 yearsto try to find out what causes them. We examined dozens of variables, including population numbers, measures of well-being, forms of governance, and the frequency with which rulers are overthrown. We found that the precise mix of events that leads to crisis varies, but two drivers of instability loom large. The first is popular immiseration—when the economic fortunes of broad swaths of a population decline. The second, and more significant, is elite overproduction—when a society produces too many superrich and ultra-educated people, and not enough elite positions to satisfy their ambitions.
This is a long read but worth your time. Several events point to the shift in power due to our dysfunctional federal institutions. NATO is just one of the institutions that a return of Trump will endanger. This is from The Guardian. “Norway, Sweden, and Finland host NATO military exercises. Nordic Response aims to strengthen cooperation between countries and bolster alliance’s ability to defend region.”
Trump complains that NATO nations are slackers. The Europeans more than understand the current threat from Putin’s Russia. NATO must stand united with its most significant military defender of democracy in place for the continent to be safe. Miranda Bryant reports on the event.
A first-of-its-kind training exercise involving more than 20,000 soldiers from 13 countries has launched across northern Norway, Sweden and Finland as the region prepares to become a fully Nato territory within days.
The joint defence exercise, which runs until 14 March, was previously known as Cold Response and held in northern Norway, a founding Nato member, every other year. In recognition of Finland’s recent membership of the western military alliance, and with Sweden expected to join imminently, this year it is being designated Nordic Response for the first time.
The training exercise across air, land and sea – which will also include soldiers from the UK, US, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium and Canada – will incorporate a cross-border operations exercise in the Arctic Circle.
The Norwegian military said the exercise was intended to demonstrate “a unique level of cooperation and interoperability as they cross borders on land, sea and air”.
Nordic Response is part of an ongoing series of Nato exercises, Steadfast Defender, involving 90,000 soldiers. It is also closely aligned with the UK-led naval exercise Joint Warrior, which ran between Scotland, Norway and Iceland last week.
The latest exercise, which started on Sunday, will involve more than 50 submarines, frigates, corvettes, aircraft carriers and amphibious vessels at sea, over 100 combat, maritime surveillance and transport aircraft, and thousands of soldiers on the ground using artillery systems, tanks and tracked vehicles.
Most of the activity will be centred on northern Troms county and the west of Finnmark county in Norway, but there will also be maritime activity along the coast of the north of the country and exercises across borders in northern Finland and Sweden.
The newly elected Finnish president, Alexander Stubb, the Norwegian prime minister, Jonas Gahr Støre, and the Swedish crown princess Victoria are all scheduled to visit.
November 1940, illustrated by Dorothea Cooke.
There are many headlines today about how Trump is more trusted than Biden and rated as better at handling all kinds of things, including the economy. Then there’s the Biden is ‘too old’ headlines (”Biden’s mental acuity is doubted by 6 in 10 Americans, AP-NORC survey finds” via the AP) concurrent with headlines like this one from The Independent. Trump crowd goes silent as he confuses Biden and Obama again.”
They’re both too damn old, frankly Plus, some wonderful people aren’t stale old white men out there. But please, Biden is sane and moral. Trump has the worst personality disorders possible and definitely has dementia. Plus, Trump cheats at everything and lies about it! Here’s the latest on the Trump Team’s campaign of deceit. And yes, it’s yet another headline from across the pond. They are old buddies, the Brits. The BBC reports that “Trump supporters target black voters with faked AI images.” This is on top of Russia outwardly influencing Republican Congress members!
Donald Trump supporters have been creating and sharing AI-generated fake images of black voters to encourage African Americans to vote Republican.
BBC Panorama discovered dozens of deepfakes portraying black people as supporting the former president.
Mr Trump has openly courted black voters, who were key to Joe Biden’s election win in 2020.
But there’s no evidence directly linking these images to Mr Trump’s campaign.
The co-founder of Black Voters Matter, a group which encourages black people to vote, said the manipulated images were pushing a “strategic narrative” designed to show Mr Trump as popular in the black community.
A creator of one of the images told the BBC: “I’m not claiming it’s accurate.”
The fake images of black Trump supporters, generated by artificial intelligence (AI), are one of the emerging disinformation trends ahead of the US presidential election in November.
Unlike in 2016, when there was evidence of foreign influence campaigns, the AI-generated images found by the BBC appear to have been made and shared by US voters themselves.
One of them was Mark Kaye and his team at a conservative radio show in Florida.
They created an image of Mr Trump smiling with his arms around a group of black women at a party and shared it on Facebook, where Mr Kaye has more than one million followers.
How do people not see this man’s severe Personality Disorders? I will end here with a political analysis from the Washington Post by Philip Bump. “The institutions of government aren’t going to protect democracy.” This is why it is up to ‘We the People’ to fucking VOTE! If I can hold my nose to vote for Biden twice, you certainly can, too!
The effort to reframe Trump’s actions as understandable, if not acceptable, has been broadly successful. It is not only the case that most Republicans think that Biden’s election was illegitimate, it is also the case that traditional media outlets have at times treated as controversial not the question of whether Trump met the unclear standard of “insurrection” but even whether he tried to subvert the election results. Other Republicans have internalized the idea that the way in which Trump responded to his loss was within the bounds of acceptability — not only by petulantly refusing to concede defeat but by treating the relentless, norm- and law-bending effort to wring victory from defeat as part of the process of winning power.
Because there has been no accountability for Trump.
On Monday morning, the Supreme Court offered its assessment of a state Supreme Court decision in Colorado barring Trump from the ballot. Unsurprisingly — given the ideological constitution of the court — it declined to endorse the idea that Trump was ineligible to hold the presidency. But the decision was unanimous.
“Responsibility for enforcing Section 3 against federal officeholders and candidates rests with Congress and not the States,” the decision read. “The judgment of the Colorado Supreme Court therefore cannot stand. All nine Members of the Court agree with that result.”
Justice Amy Coney Barrett emphasized that latter point again in a concurrence.
“All nine Justices agree on the outcome of this case,” the Trump appointee wrote. “That is the message Americans should take home.”
But several liberal members of the court added some nuance, arguing that the conservative majority also decided “novel constitutional questions to insulate this Court and petitioner” — that is, Trump — “from future controversy.”
“Today, the majority goes beyond the necessities of this case to limit how Section 3 can bar an oathbreaking insurrectionist from becoming President,” Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson write. “Although we agree that Colorado cannot enforce Section 3, we protest the majority’s effort to use this case to define the limits of federal enforcement of that provision.”
The superficial agreement on the decision erodes in the details, which isn’t uncommon. The result, though, is that the institution of the Supreme Court has decided that the institution of Congress is the only element of the American system that can apply the 14th Amendment to a candidate. And Congress, very obviously, won’t do so for Trump.
One would assume that a democratic system predicated on checks and balances would have some process in place to enforce punitive measures when democracy itself was threatened or undermined, but it does not. It has decisions from motivated actors, enough of whom agree politically or ideologically with Trump that his specific actions are waved away. Instead of a defense of democracy, we are repeatedly asked to believe that anything short of Trump retaining power doesn’t count as a substantive challenge to democracy and, therefore, that his participation in the democratic process should be defended.
Had he retained power after Jan. 20, 2021? Then, perhaps, his efforts to do so would have been considered a legitimate threat. And by then, the system that we would assume might hold him to account would already be destroyed.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Finally, Friday Reads: Justice Delayed is Justice Denied
Posted: March 1, 2024 Filed under: just because | Tags: @repeat1968, DeadbeatDon, John Buss, presidential immunity, Presidential Impunity, SCOTUS, Signs of a failed democracy 3 Comments
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
It’s been a week! At least New York State is going after #DeadbeatDon and his millions of dollars owed. However, the Trump Syndicate’s stall tactics are making it more unlikely we will see any kind of federal trial before the election season in the stolen documents or insurrection trials. The weirdest news on all the Trump trials is today’s headline about the Georgia Courts having a hacker ransom on the Election Interference Case. This headline is from Business Insider. “Hackers threaten to release Trump documents from Georgia case if they don’t get a ransom by Thursday.” This looks like there is likely more interference from Russia with Trump Chaos Love. Jacob Shamsian reports on what details we have at the moment.
The hacking group responsible for taking down Fulton County’s websites in Georgia is threatening to publish documents from the state’s court system — including ones related to the criminal case against Donald Trump — unless it gets paid a ransom.
In a message posted online Saturday, in both English and Russian, the hacking group called LockBit said the stolen documents “contain a lot of interesting things and Donald Trump’s court cases that could affect the upcoming US election.”
Initially, LockBit set a Saturday, March 2, deadline for the payment, according to the cybersecurity reporter Brian Krebs.
It has since moved up that deadline to 8:49 a.m. ET on Thursday, February 29, LockBit’s restored website shows.
It’s not clear how much money the group is demanding. The hacking group’s demands are often negotiated in private, Dan Schiappa, the chief product officer at the cybersecurity firm Arctic Wolf, said.
The group — led by a hacker using the pseudonym LockBitSupp — appeared to become operational again over the weekend after a February 20 law-enforcement raid. A group of agencies, including the FBI and the United Kingdom’s National Crime Agency, took down 34 of its servers and changed its website to a series of messages bragging about the law-enforcement operation. The same day, the US Department of Justice unsealed an indictment accusing two Russian nationals of being involved in the group’s hacking operations.
By Saturday, LockBit was back.
On a new website, the group posted a message claiming it had backup copies of documents taken from the Fulton County government’s website. It also renewed its ransom demands.
The post claimed that the FBI acted quickly because the leak of documents in Trump’s criminal case could affect the 2024 presidential election — although court documents show that the FBI’s investigation into LockBit and coordination with international law-enforcement agencies has been ongoing for years. It characterized LockBit’s relationship with the FBI as a sort of romantic rivalry and promised that the group would hack more government websites in the future.
“Personally I will vote for Trump because the situation on the border with Mexico is some kind of nightmare, Biden should retire, he is a puppet,” the message said.
Joyce Vance provided this depressing analysis on her Substack Civil Discourse. “We’re Going To Need More Coffee.”
The legal landscape in three of the four criminal cases against Trump continues to shift in his favor this week, following the Supreme Court’s decision to hear the presidential immunity appeal in the D.C. election interference case, creating at least a two-month delay for Trump. Today, requests for trial dates emerged in the Mar-a-Lago case, giving rise to concerns that the scheduling Trump requested, if adopted by Judge Aileen Cannon, would effectively block the D.C. case from going to trial before the election, even if the Supreme Court rules against Trump.
That’s only one of the important things that happened today. E. Jean Carroll filed a stinging response to Donald Trump’s efforts to get out of filing an appeal bond, pointing out that his appeal to the court to trust him was worth about as much as a promise to pay up written on a paper napkin. A transcript released of Hunter Biden’s testimony on the Hill yesterday shows him sparring with Matt Gaetz, suggesting that Gaetz wasn’t the right person to lay into Biden about drug use. A federal judge in Texas halted enforcement of a new state law that would allow Texas police to arrest people suspected of illegally crossing the border because immigration enforcement is the job of the federal government under the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause. In other words, it wasn’t exactly a slow news day. But we’ll focus tonight on the scheduling issues in the Mar-a-Lago case.
Today, Donald Trump, “on behalf of all of the defendants,” filed a proposed schedule for the Mar-a-Lago case. He led with the claim that, “As the leading candidate in the 2024 election, President Trump strongly asserts that a fair trial cannot be conducted this year in a manner consistent with the Constitution, which affords President Trump a Sixth Amendment right to be present and to participate in these proceedings as well as, inter alia, a First Amendment right that he shares with the American people to engage in campaign speech.”
But his lawyers note that since the Judge wants them to propose a trial schedule, they will, although it’s clear that their real request is for a trial after the election. Trump and his co-defendant Carlos De Oliveira propose an August 12 trial date, which means jury selection will start that day, and trial commences after the jury has been seated. Interestingly, their co-defendant Walt Nauta doesn’t want the trial to start until September 9. This is likely because his trial counsel is unavailable between August 5 and August 23, 2024, for “personal reasons.” It’s not unheard of for a judge to direct lawyers to change their vacation plans, if that’s what’s going on here. But if the government wants to try all defendants together and the Judge doesn’t intervene, then this is really a request for trial to start September 9 at best but really, never.
The government’s counterproposal, also filed today, was for a July 8 start. That seems to suggest that Jack Smith believes the Supreme Court won’t be sending the D.C. case back to Judge Chutkan in time for a trial in July or perhaps even in August.
Former Wyoming Congresswoman Liz Cheney had this to say at The New Republic. As reported by Greg Sargent. “Liz Cheney Nukes the Supreme Court Over Trump Delay—and Hands Dems a Weapon. What percentage of voters know that Trump can cancel prosecutions of himself if he wins back the White House?”
In the wake of the Supreme Court agreeing to hear Donald Trump’s demand for absolute immunity from prosecution—potentially delaying his insurrection-related trial until after the election—Democrats should take careful note of Liz Cheney’s response to the decision:
The court’s decision is terrible news, to be sure, but it gives Democrats an opportunity to clarify a few crucial points, and they should seize it.
As many have noted, the Supreme Court didn’t have to agree to review an appeals court ruling against Trump, who is demanding immunity from prosecution for conspiring to obstruct the official electoral count and defraud the United States, among other charges. The high court could have simply let the lower court ruling stand, given that Republican-appointed and Democratic-appointed judges unanimously ruled that Trump’s efforts to overturn the election don’t constitute official acts—and thus don’t get immunity—a clear-cut legal case.
“This is not a difficult legal question,” Maryland Representative Jamie Raskin, a constitutional law professor, told me. “All the Supreme Court has done is to introduce several months of gratuitous delay right before the presidential election.”
Speculation is rampant about that “gratuitous delay.” I don’t care much for Nikki Haley and her endless head fakes, but I agree. This is from NBC News. “Nikki Haley calls for all Trump legal cases to be ‘dealt with’ before November. The Republican presidential candidate’s comments came in an interview with NBC News’ “Meet the Press” moderator Kristen Welker in Virginia. I’m not a big fan of Kristen Welker, but at least there was a discussion.
Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley said that all of former President Donald Trump‘s legal cases should be “dealt with” before the presidential election.
“I think all of the cases should be dealt with before November,” she said Thursday in an interview with NBC News’ “Meet the Press” moderator Kristen Welker in Falls Church, Virginia, where voters will cast their primary ballots Tuesday.
“We need to know what’s going to happen before it, before the presidency happens, because after that, should he become president, I don’t think any of it’s going to get heard,” she continued.
Haley spoke a day after the Supreme Court agreed to decide whether Trump could claim presidential immunity in response to criminal charges. It could take months for the high court to reach a decision, pushing back the potential timeline for his election interference trial.
“I just think a president has to live according to the laws, too. You don’t get complete immunity,” she said, addressing the Supreme Court’s decision to take the case. She added that presidents should not get “free rein to do whatever they want to do.”
This headline from The Rolling Stone says it all. “Trump’s Team’ Literally Popping Champagne’ Over Supreme Court Taking Up Immunity Claim. The former president is unlikely to stand trial in the Justice Department’s election interference case before November.”
Various Trump advisers and sources close to the former president and 2024 GOP frontrunner were jubilant about the Supreme Court’s decision, with all of them now viewing it as highly unlikely that a federal election interference trial will happen before Election Day. Though a Trump criminal trial in New York is expected to begin next month, the former president’s team had long viewed a Jan. 6-related trial as more politically damaging. For months, Trump’s lawyers expected the federal trial to start this summer, and they have actively prepared for that scenario. Now, they likely don’t have to worry about that timeline.
The Trump 2024 campaign was fundraising off the court’s latest move hours after it happened. “BREAKING FROM TRUMP: My case is going to the SUPREME COURT!” the campaign texted supporters. “Presidents NEED IMMUNITY.” (This is, however, a position that Trump doesn’t actually hold when it comes to President Joe Biden, who he wants prosecuted.)
Trump has long been campaigning on the idea that presidents, particularly himself, should have free rein to commit crimes while in office — including crimes that “cross the line,” as he wrote on Truth Social in January.
Yes, Trump is doing his usual KKK rally speech wherever he goes. This time, it was at the US/Mexico border. This is from Raw Story. “‘
Trump’s visit to Eagle Pass, Texas, was capped with a press conference to discuss U.S. border patrol policies likely to be at the heart of the 2024 presidential campaign.
“Nobody can explain to me how allowing millions of people from places unknown, from countries unknown, who don’t speak languages,” Trump said in a fragment sentence. “They’re truly foreign languages — nobody speaks them.”
Meanwhile, Chris Hayes had this to say on Threads.
I feel like I’m losing my mind, but it’s…pretty wild for SCOTUS to just not have issued an opinion on the Colorado ballot case with the actual voting happening on Tuesday. I know the Colorado Supreme Court decision is stayed and he’s on the ballot. And we all know they’re gonna find a way to over rule the CO SC but still seems like you should issue the opinion before the voting in question actually happens.
Colorado votes on March 5th. I really feel that we’ve already lost our democracy in so many ways that something significant needs to be done NOW. At least the Democratic Majority in the Senate is trying to legislate. Today, Senators Durbin, Warnock, Schumer, Booker, Blumenthal, and Butler reintroduce the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. This bill would update and restore critical safeguards of the original Voting Rights Act. Another necessary action to Stop the Runaway Supreme Court. Don’t even get me started on all this hoopla on the border when Ayatollah Mike is blocking a bi-partisan bill led by a Conservative Republican Senator that would pass. This is from the Brookings Institute. William A Galston writes, “The collapse of bipartisan immigration reform: A guide for the perplexed.
Last October, Senate Republicans made it clear that they would not back additional aid for Ukraine without a bill that would help secure the southern border of the United States. With the blessing of both Senator Chuck Schumer, the Majority Leader, and Senator Mitch McConnell, the Minority Leader, a bipartisan team of senators began negotiations to produce a bill that enough members of both parties could accept to overwhelm objections from progressive Democrats and America First Republicans.
The team negotiated for four months to produce this bill. It took less than four days for its support among Republicans to collapse. Why?
The easiest explanation is that Republicans in both the House and Senate yielded to objections from their all-but-certain presidential nominee, former president Donald Trump. Once the House Speaker stated publicly that he would not allow the Senate bill to reach the House floor for a vote, Republican senators were unwilling to run the political risk of supporting a measure that would not become law.
However, there are deeper reasons for the deadlock over immigration. The last comprehensive immigration reform was enacted almost four decades ago, during Ronald Reagan’s presidency. This bill represented a grand bargain between elected officials who sought to extend legal protection to millions of migrants who had entered the U.S. illegally and officials who were most concerned about stemming the flow of such migrants. The bill accomplished the former but had no discernible impact on the latter, leading many conservatives to denounce it as an “amnesty” bill.
This failure to launch legislation, along with the complete inability to pass a budget for a fiscal year about half-gone, is misgovernance on the part of the MAGA cult.
So, this has been a rough week. I hope we can relax some this weekend. It just kills me that so many of our institutions have given Trump impunity. That’s more appropriate than this entire fakery of presidential immunity. The Constitution says no one is above the law. You don’t need a fancy schmancy law degree to know that. You should learn it in Civics class sometime in your secondary education. No one should be able to walk away from the rule of law in this country.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Mostly Monday Reads: Surrealistic Wallow
Posted: February 26, 2024 Filed under: just because | Tags: fetus fetishists, IVF, Ruth Marten, Tracking Fascist Trump Policies, Trump Donation Scams, War against Women, White Christian Nationalists 5 Comments
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
It’s difficult to check the headlines these days. It’s like living in an alternate America where bizarro rules apply. But hey, it’s what a small minority of White Nationalist Christians want, and they’ve worked hard to get elected officials at all levels to turn us into everything we were warned about in The Handmaid’s Tale and by Hillary Clinton. We’ve talked a lot about it here, but David French provides some elucidation in his opinion piece in today’s New York Times. ” I suppose it only gets serious attention when a man writes about it. I watched Rob Reiner’s interview with Ari Melber last week. Now I feel I should definitely see this film.
The problem with Christian nationalism isn’t with Christian participation in politics but rather the belief that there should be Christian primacy in politics and law. It can manifest itself through ideology, identity and emotion. And if it were to take hold, it would both upend our Constitution and fracture our society.
The sociologists Samuel Perry and Andrew Whitehead define Christian nationalism as a “cultural framework that blurs distinctions between Christian identity and American identity, viewing the two as closely related and seeking to enhance and preserve their union.” The author and pastor Matthew McCullough defines Christian nationalism as “an understanding of American identity and significance held by Christians wherein the nation is a central actor in the world-historical purposes of the Christian God.” Both definitions are excellent, but what does ideological Christian nationalism look like in practice?
In 2022, a coalition of right-wing writers and leaders published a document called “National Conservatism: A Statement of Principles.” Its section on God and public religion states: “Where a Christian majority exists, public life should be rooted in Christianity and its moral vision, which should be honored by the state and other institutions both public and private.” That’s an extraordinary — and ominous — ideological statement, one that would immediately relegate non-Christians to second-class status. It’s utterly contrary to the First Amendment and would impose a form of compelled deference to Christianity on both religious minorities and the nonreligious.
But Christian nationalism isn’t just rooted in ideology; it’s also deeply rooted in identity, the belief that Christians should rule. This is the heart of the Seven Mountain Mandate, a dominionist movement emerging from American Pentecostalism that is, put bluntly, Christian identity politics on steroids. Paula White, Donald Trump’s closest spiritual adviser, is an adherent, and so is the chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, Tom Parker, who wrote a concurring opinion in the court’s recent I.V.F. decision. The movement holds that Christians are called to rule seven key societal institutions: the family, the church, education, the media, the arts, business and the government.
One doesn’t have to go all the way into Seven Mountain theology, though, to find examples of Christian identity politics. The use of Christianity as an unofficial but necessary qualification for office is a routine part of politics in the most churchgoing parts of America. Moreover, one of the common red-America arguments for Trump is that he might not be devout himself, but he’ll place lots of Christians in government.
Ruth Marten
The thing that struck me about this, having never and still not being a fan of French, is that I’m really tired of people defending a religion whose roots have never been benign. Its roots were all so the reason many folks came here to escape whatever brand of it was most toxic at that point in history. It’s worth getting everyone to know about what kind of danger lurks in this current version of fascism. It’s also tiring to hear “not everybody …”.
It’s also worth noticing that Mike Johnson may not be able to get much done, but he’s working diligently on getting fertilized more rights than living, breathing women. This is from the Washington Post. “Republicans who say they support IVF backed a bill protecting life ‘at conception’, The antiabortion bill in the House has no provisions for processes like in vitro fertilization.” The story is reported by Mariana Alfaro.
Prominent congressional Republicans are coming out in support of in vitro fertilization days after the Alabama state Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos are people and therefore that someone can be held liable for destroying them.
But many of the same Republicans who are saying Americans should have access to IVF have co-sponsored legislation that employs an argument similar to the one the Alabama Supreme Court used in its ruling.
The congressional proposal, known as the Life at Conception Act, defines a “human being” to “include each member of the species homo sapiens at all stages of life, including the moment of fertilization or cloning, or other moment at which an individual member of the human species comes into being.” The bill would also provide equal protection under the 14th Amendment “for the right to life of each born and preborn human person.”
I’ve been watching the back-and-forth between Hillary and Lady Lindsey on Threads and Twitter.
We need to win these rights permanently before we lose them forever.
Ruth Marten
Here’s a fascinating article from ProPublica. “Inside the Internal Debates of a Hospital Abortion Committee. In states that banned abortion, doctors are forced to wrestle with tough decisions about high-risk pregnancy care. “I don’t want to have a patient die and be responsible for it,” one Tennessee doctor said. This report is written by
Sitting at her computer one day in late December, Dr. Sarah Osmundson mustered her best argument to approve an abortion for a suffering patient.
The woman was 14 weeks pregnant when she learned her fetus was developing without a skull. This increased the likelihood of a severe buildup of amniotic fluid, which could cause her uterus to rupture and possibly kill her. Osmundson, a maternal-fetal medicine specialist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center who helps patients navigate high-risk pregnancies, knew that outcome was uncommon, but she had seen it happen.
She drafted an email to her colleagues on the Nashville hospital’s abortion committee, arguing that the risk was significant enough to meet the slim exception to Tennessee’s strict abortion ban, which allows termination only when “necessary to prevent the death of the pregnant woman or to prevent serious risk of substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function.” She pleaded with her fellow doctors to spare this woman the gamble when her baby wasn’t even viable.
Then came the replies.
One doctor wasn’t “brave enough.”
Ruth Marten
We’ve finally got some folks in the media noticing that Trump is a drooling idiot these days. It’s Salon today. Maybe tomorrow, some of the East Coast rags will pull it together. “Trump’s CPAC speech showed clear signs of major cognitive decline — yet MAGA cheered. A confused Donald Trump kept up his threats of retribution during this weekend’s conservative confab. This is written by Chauncey DeVega.
Donald Trump was in his full glory over the weekend at the annual Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) conference. For his MAGA people, Republicans, and other neofascists and followers, Trump is like a father figure, preacher, teacher, confessor, lover, and god messiah prophet all in one person. In that way, CPAC is Donald Trump’s “church family” – only the church is full of fascism, hatred, wickedness, cruelty, and other anti-human values, beliefs, and behavior. Trump masterfully wields and conducts this energy.
Donald Trump’s speech at this year’s CPAC was truly awesome. As used here, “awesome” does not mean good, but instead draws on the word’s origins as in “inspiring awe or dread.” In his keynote speech on Saturday, Trump said that America is on a “fast track to hell” under President Biden and the Democrats and that “If crooked Joe Biden and his thugs win in 2024, the worst is yet to come. Our country will sink to levels that are unimaginable.”
He continued with his Hitler-like threats of an apocalyptic end-times battle between good and evil and that the country would be destroyed if he is not installed in the White House. Of course, Trump continued to amplify the Big Lie about the 2020 election being “stolen” from him and the MAGA people. He also made great use of the classic propaganda technique, as though he learned it personally from Nazi Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels: Accuse your opposition of that which you are guilty of.
If you want some really frightening things from Trump and his White Christian Nationalists/Fascists, check out Just Security. “American Autocracy Threat TrackerA Comprehensive Catalog Based on Donald Trump and His Associates’ Plans, Promises, and Propositions.”
Former President Donald Trump has said he will be a dictator on “day one.” He and his advisors and associates have publicly discussed hundreds of actions to be taken during a second Trump presidency that directly threaten democracy. These vary from Trump breaking the law and abusing power in areas like immigration roundups and energy extraction; to summarily and baselessly firing tens of thousands of civil servants whom he perceives as adversaries; to prosecuting his political opponents for personal gain and even hinting at executing some of them. We track all of these promises, plans, and pronouncements here and we will continue to update them in real time.
We assess there is a significant risk of autocracy should Trump regain the presidency. Trump has said he would deploy the military against civilian protestors and his advisors have developed plans for using the Insurrection Act, said he would invoke the Alien Enemies Act to conduct deportations of non-citizens, continued to threaten legally-established abortion rights, and even had his lawyers argue that a president should be immune from prosecution if he directed SEAL Team Six to assassinate his political enemies. Trump also seeks the power to protect his personal wealth as he faces staggering civil fines, and to bolster his immunity as he faces 91 criminal charges in prosecutions in different parts of the country.
While Trump has claimed he will be a dictator for only the first day of his administration, his promise to do so–even for 24 hours–is antithetical to American democracy. History teaches us that dictatorial powers, once assumed, are rarely relinquished. Moreover, Trump cannot possibly achieve his stated goals for the use of that power (in immigration and energy policy) in one day, meaning that his “dictatorship” would of necessity likely last much longer.
Trump’s former advisors—those with the most experience watching him govern behind the scenes—believe he is a danger to the country. John Bolton, Trump’s former National Security Advisor, said, “I think Trump will cause significant damage in a second term, damage that in some cases will be irreparable.” Alyssa Farah Griffin, former Trump White House Director of Strategic Communications, noted, “Fundamentally, a second Trump term could mean the end of American democracy as we know it, and I don’t say that lightly.”
Trump’s dictatorial aspirations are complemented by an extensive pre-election plan to fundamentally alter the nature of American government: the Heritage Foundation’s 2025 Presidential Transition Project (Project 2025). Created by Trump allies and staffed by those including his past and likely future administration appointees, it is in the words of Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts, a plan for “institutionalizing Trumpism.” Trump has returned the compliment, saying of Roberts (and Heritage) that he’s “doing an unbelievable job, he’s bringing it back to levels we’ve never seen … thank you Kevin.”
This is your bedtime reading if you want nightmares.
I hope no one has their inheritance in the hands of a Trump Cult Member. Who would trust their money to anything Trump-related? Well, CNBC has some answers. “Trump and his favorite fundraising platform both face donor problems.” Of course, they do. This is reported by Brian Schwartz.
Every so often, Matthew Hurtt receives concerning emails. The subject lines are each slightly different: “Stop charging my account,” “Urgent!” and “Donation not approved,” but the people who send them all want the same thing: to halt the Republican political contribution platform WinRed from making any more automatic, recurring withdrawals from their accounts.
Hurtt is chairman of the Virginia-based Arlington County Republican Committee and says he’s reviewed a “few dozen” of these types of emails since the 2020 election. When WinRed processes a contribution to a Republican campaign, the charge shows up on the donor’s credit card or bank statement as a payment to “WINRED http://www.GOP.com, Arlington VA,” according to a statement provided by Hurtt and reviewed by CNBC.
As a result, people often mistakenly believe their money went to the Arlington County Republican Party, he said.
“Cancel account and stop billing my credit card,” Oklahoma resident Samie Elliot wrote in a January email that landed in Hurtt’s inbox. She later explained to him that neither she nor her husband, who are both retired, recalled ever signing up for recurring monthly political donations and that these charges have been occurring for at least a year.
Federal Election Commission records, however, paint a very different picture of the Elliots. According to campaign finance reports, WinRed processed $14,300 in political contributions from Elliot and her husband, Orin Elliot, between 2020 and the end of 2023.
These donations all appear to have been small, recurring contributions. Exactly the kind that Elliot said they did not recall signing up for. Samie Elliot did not respond to requests for comment.
“Every one of them has told me a similar story: elderly, sometimes dementia, and don’t remember donating month after month,” said Hurtt, who shared nine email exchanges with CNBC for this story.
“As a county committee chairman who struggles to raise money, it infuriates me,” he said.
WinRed did not respond to requests for comment.
I was going to try to find something cheery and not frightening today, but it is what it is. I’ve left some easter eggs in the links to the artist Ruth Marten, whose surrealistic art is featured today. Enjoy!
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Mostly Monday Reads: Hell Realm Overexposure
Posted: February 19, 2024 Filed under: just because | Tags: Donnie Dotard, Trump Burnout, Trump officially WORST PRESIDENT EVER!, Trump-Putin 2024, Uncle Clarence Thomas 6 Comments
“Quite the fashion statement.” John Buss, @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
I guess the endless TV coverage of Trump’s trials and tribulations wasn’t enough to send most of his followers to our safe space. We now get to watch Trump dupe the cult with more branding and marketing scams.
Today, I found out there’s a shitty gold ‘parfum’ to go with those shitty gold sneakers. If there is anything like overexposure, this is it! You may brace yourself and see it here if you have the intestinal fortitude. I guess we know how he thinks he will pay his lawyers now since New York State has shut down the Trump Family Crime syndicate.
If you’ve got Trump Burn-out, you are not alone. I frankly think the East Coast media has some masochistic addiction to it. This is from the New York Times. “Anti-Trump Burnout: The Resistance Says It’s Exhausted. Bracing for yet another election against Donald Trump, America’s liberals are feeling the fatigue. “We’re kind of, like, crises-ed out,” one Democrat said.” I’m not tired of despising him. I tire of seeing and hearing about him. Katie Glueck has the byline.
Democrats are hardly alone in their political fatigue: A Pew Research Center survey last year found that 65 percent of Americans said they always or often felt exhausted when they thought about politics.
“Exhaustion is underlying the entire attitude toward our presidential election,” said Whit Ayres, a veteran Republican pollster. “When you’ve got two people that are opposed by 70 percent of Americans who want a different choice, it creates frustration, anxiety and discouragement.”
Ah, yes, the patented NYT bothersidersm.
Democratic pollsters and strategists say that no one is more motivating or terrifying to their voters than Mr. Trump.
Buoyed by strong showings in special elections last week, and other recent contests including a successful write-in campaign for Mr. Biden in New Hampshire’s primary, many believe their voters will grow increasingly engaged as the general election nears and Mr. Trump’s legal problems unfold.
He confronts 91 felony charges across four cases, is poised to be the first former president to face a criminal trial and now has staggering financial problems. He has also privately expressed support for a 16-week national abortion ban, with some exceptions, The New York Times reported on Friday, and Democrats see abortion rights as a powerful motivator for their base and for some swing voters.
But there are pronounced warning signs on the left, as well.
A CNN poll recently asked how motivated Americans were to vote in the election. Republicans, out of power and eager to regain it, were more likely to say “extremely motivated.” A Yahoo News/YouGov poll asked voters last fall about their attitudes toward the 2024 election. Thirty-nine percent of Democrats picked “exhaustion” from the list of sentiments offered (a close second to “dread”). Just 26 percent of Republicans chose “exhaustion.”
Broadly, surveys have shown erosion in the party’s standing with traditional Democratic constituencies. On the left, some groups have warned of funding challenges and voter apathy, and the most visible source of in-the-streets energy is progressive frustration with Mr. Biden over his support for Israel.
Lauren Hitt, a spokeswoman for Mr. Biden, said there was tangible evidence of enthusiasm in recent weeks, including on the fund-raising front.
She also signaled that the campaign’s messaging would go beyond simply opposing Mr. Trump, drawing contrasts with Republicans on abortion rights and gun safety as she described the stakes of the election, and nodding to Mr. Biden’s policy accomplishments on issues like combating climate change and child poverty.
“This election determines whether we build on that progress or we lose so many of our fundamental freedoms,” she said in a statement.
This has to end. Trump is pathologically narcissistic and chaotic. His dementia is worse than ever. There has to be some way of getting him out of the limelight. Today’s headlines are scathing. Every Anti-Trump Republican is out there with some form of media presence. This is even more maddening to me. Where were these people when they were feeding their base all the red meat that Trump now uses to his benefit? The last Trump nod to Putin has really got them squawking in the Chicken Hawk coops. Here are two examples.
This is from CNN. “Cheney warns of Republican Party ‘Putin-wing’ after Navalny death.” Jack Forrest reports on her interview on Sunday.
GOP former Rep. Liz Cheney on Sunday warned of a Republican Party “Putin wing” after former President Donald Trump responded to the death of outspoken Kremlin critic Alexey Navalny without actually mentioning him or Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“We have to take seriously the extent to which you’ve now got a Putin wing of the Republican Party. I believe the issue this election cycle is making sure that the Putin wing of the Republican Party does not take over the West Wing of the White House,” Cheney told CNN’s Jake Tapper on “State of the Union.”
President Joe Biden and Trump struck dramatically different tones in their respective responses to the death of the jailed Russian opposition figure.
Biden, in his comments at the White House following the announcement of Navalny’s death, forcefully pinned the blame on “Putin and his thugs.”
“Make no mistake: Putin is responsible for Navalny’s death. Putin is responsible. What has happened to Navalny is yet more proof of Putin’s brutality. Nobody should be fooled,” Biden said.
Trump, meanwhile, said nothing directly about Navalny in a post that his campaign said was his official response to the opposition leader’s death – instead posting more than 20 times about a variety of topics including his criminal cases and his political opponents.
“When you think about Donald Trump, for example, pledging retribution, what Vladimir Putin did to Navalny is what retribution looks like in a country where a leader is not subject to the rule of law,” Cheney said Sunday.
The former president earlier this month also said he would encourage Russia to do “whatever the hell they want” to any NATO member country that doesn’t meet spending guidelines and would not offer such a country US protection – a stance that NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg said “undermines all of our security, including that of the US, and puts American and European soldiers at increased risk.”
“He’s basically made clear that under a Trump administration, the United States is unlikely to keep its NATO commitments,” Cheney said. She called Trump’s comments “dangerous” and said they show “a complete lack of understanding of America’s role in the world.”
Bill Kristol has joined the Anti-Trump Republicans at the Bulwark and writes this with Andrew Egger. “Trump-Putin 2024. Plus: Some good takes and some terrible takes on the significance of Alexei Navalny.”
We were slow in awakening to the threat of Putin. We have been sluggish in responding to that threat once awakened. But it is the most urgent foreign policy threat we face.
A broad coalition of political forces in the United States, ranging from Mike Pence on the right to Bernie Sanders on the left, is anti-Putin. Against them stand Donald Trump and some of his acolytes, who are pro-Putin.
The likely nominee of one of our two major political parties is pro-Vladimir Putin. This is an astonishing fact. It is an appalling fact. It has to be a central fact of the 2024 campaign.
But the political professionals say foreign policy doesn’t matter in elections. Americans vote on the economy. Or immigration. Or abortion rights.
That’s true to some degree. But not as much as we might think—particularly now that the post-Cold War era has ended in the wake of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. The world we now live in seems more like that of 1972, or 1980, or 1988. In such a world, issues of foreign policy and national security matter in selecting a president. Putin matters.
And American voters know who Putin is. In an August Gallup poll, 95 percent of all Americans had an opinion of the Russian dictator, making him better known than any American politicians other than Biden and Trump. In that poll, Trump was seen favorably by 41 percent of Americans and unfavorably by 55 percent, while Biden’s favorable/unfavorable split was 41 percent to 57 percent.
Putin’s numbers in that poll? 5 percent favorable, 90 percent unfavorable. A YouGov poll last week was a bit rosier: 13 percent in favor of the Russian dictator, 81 percent unfavorable.
It’s actually striking that all the work of the pro-Putin right—from Trump himself to Tucker Carlson—has had so little effect in improving Putin’s image. Putin turns out to be a very hard sell.
Which is all the more reason to hang Putin around Trump’s neck. It could well make Trump a harder sell to some number of swing voters.
Nice to have to read about the worst president ever on President’s Day! Kristol apologizes for being Debbie Downer. I shamelessly will wear the title until we get no more years of Trump Trauma. But here we go! Off his Rocker is a perfect way to lead into Tim Dickinson’s latest at The Rolling Stone. “Trump Compares Himself to Navalny in Bizarre Presidents’ Day Rant. On Truth Social, Trump groused about his expensive court losses and compared himself to the Russian dissident who died in an arctic penal colony.”
IT’S PRESIDENTS’ DAY, and America’s 45th is having a real one.
Donald Trump spent the morning of the Monday holiday railing against the nearly half-billion-dollar court judgment levied against him for fraud in New York state, and grotesquely comparing himself to the Russian political dissident Alexei Navalny, who died last week in an Russian arctic penal colony.
Trump started shitposting not long after dawn on his Truth Social network. Stinging from his massive court defeat, Trump seemed determined to keep litigating his fraud case in the court of public opinion. In seething ALL CAPS, Trump railed against the court finding that he and his family business had fraudulently and systematically overstated the value of real estate assets — including by inflating the square footage of Donald’s own Trump Tower penthouse apartment.
the “crooked, hand picked judge” whom he claimed failed to include in court calculations the “brand value” of the Trump name, which the former president modestly suggested is “known and accepted to be worth many billions of dollars.” (Over the weekend, Trump attempted to leverage that brand value with the launch of $400 “Never Surrender” high tops at Sneaker Con.)
The annual President’s Day poll of America’s historians ranking Presidents is out. Here are the results from the New York Times. “Poll Ranks Biden as 14th-Best President, With Trump Last.” President Biden may owe his place in the top third to his predecessor: Mr. Biden’s signature accomplishment, according to the historians, was evicting Donald J. Trump from the Oval Office. This is reported by Peter Baker. TRUMP IS OFFICIALLY THE WORST PRESIDENT EVER!!
President Biden has not had a lot of fun perusing polls lately. He has a lower approval rating than every president going back to Dwight D. Eisenhower at this stage of their tenures, and he trails former President Donald J. Trump in a fall rematch. But Mr. Biden can take solace from one survey in which he is way out in front of Mr. Trump.
A new poll of historians coming out on Presidents’ Day weekend ranks Mr. Biden as the 14th-best president in American history, just ahead of Woodrow Wilson, Ronald Reagan and Ulysses S. Grant. While that may not get Mr. Biden a spot on Mount Rushmore, it certainly puts him well ahead of Mr. Trump, who places dead last as the worst president ever.
Indeed, Mr. Biden may owe his place in the top third in part to Mr. Trump. Although he has claims to a historical legacy by managing the end of the Covid pandemic; rebuilding the nation’s roads, bridges and other infrastructure; and leading an international coalition against Russian aggression, Mr. Biden’s signature accomplishment, according to the historians, was evicting Mr. Trump from the Oval Office.
“Biden’s most important achievements may be that he rescued the presidency from Trump, resumed a more traditional style of presidential leadership and is gearing up to keep the office out of his predecessor’s hands this fall,” wrote Justin Vaughn and Brandon Rottinghaus, the college professors who conducted the survey and announced the results in The Los Angeles Times.
Mr. Trump might not care much what a bunch of academics think, but for what it’s worth he fares badly even among the self-identified Republican historians. Finishing 45th overall, Mr. Trump trails even the mid-19th-century failures who blundered the country into a civil war or botched its aftermath like James Buchanan, Franklin Pierce and Andrew Johnson.
The Independent is frank about the dishonorable loser who wears the 45 label. “Trump ranks as worst president in US history in new academics poll. The results are in from the US academics, and it does not bode well for the GOP nominee.” This is Amelia Neath’s take.
Mr Trump ranked in the very last place, scoring just 10.9/100 – the same spot he occupied in the previous survey (he was not included in the first survey, which was conducted during Barack Obama’s presidency).
He was also awarded “most polarising” president in the poll.
Meanwhile, Abraham Lincoln stood at the top of the presidential rankings, as the country’s greatest president, with an average score of 93.9/100.
Franklin D. Roosevelt came in at number two, followed by the nation’s first president, George Washington. Fourth place went to Theodore Roosevelt and fifth to Thomas Jefferson.
Respondents were able to disclose their own political leanings, which produced an interesting insight into how the presidents fared between differing parties.
Unfortunately for Mr Trump, the Republican scholars did not help his low ranking, as he still came out in 41st place out of 45 among Republicans only. Among Democrat scholars, he placed 45th.
President Joe Biden meanwhile was ranked at number 13 by Democrats and at a low 30 by Republicans.
Mr Rottinghaus and Mr Vaughn said that Mr Biden’s ranking may have been influenced by him being viewed as Mr Trump’s greatest blocker.
“Biden’s most important achievements may be that he rescued the presidency from Trump, resumed a more traditional style of presidential leadership and is gearing up to keep the office out of his predecessor’s hands this fall,” they wrote in an article for the Los Angeles Times.
Makes me proud to be a lowly little undergrad History major. (sniff, sniff)
Two last things to tie back to the post title and the featured funny by John.
This is a headline from The Guardian. “John Oliver offers to pay Clarence Thomas $1m a year if he resigns from supreme court. Late-night host gives justice, under fire over undisclosed donations, 30 days to accept offer, which includes a tour bus.” Hot Damn!
Okay, so I will leave you to your President’s Day activities. Share your thoughts!
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
I may binge-watch a few things today, including Northern Exposure. I wonder what wanders around Mar-a-Lardo in Florida since a moose wouldn’t work.
Finally Friday Reads: Is it possible to be Overwhelmed and Underwhelmed at the same time?
Posted: February 16, 2024 Filed under: just because | Tags: "presidential immunity", Fani Willis, Fulton County DA Fani Willis, John Clifford Floyd III, Trump Fraud Case, Trump trials 5 Comments
“Republicans, any minute now… ” John Buss @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
I’ve been blogging long enough to remember Fridays as a quiet news day. We’re facing President’s Day on Monday. We can’t talk about Presidents these days without the overwhelming need for lawyers. This is crazy. I feel like I’m watching a TV Lawyer Drama. My mother loved them, so I remember everyone from Perry Mason to the Law and Order series. Real-life court drama is far whackier than I ever thought. Just think, I was called for jury duty this month. I can think of a few states that are probably running out of jurors by now.
I’m watching the Fulton County District Attorney’s father testifying why Black Americans keep cash on hand. He’s retelling a story about the time he had a Fellowship at Harvard, and a restaurant nearby would not take any of his credit cards. The store even displayed an AmEx sign, but they would not take his. This happened when Fanni was 3. This is another story from Black America that Wipipo must see.
I’m not sure you watched her yesterday, but she left her accusers looking pretty bad. This is from Talking Points Memo. “Fani Willis Endures Disrespect, Racist Tropes, And Public Humiliation.” It’s written by David Kurtz.
The smoldering confrontation in an Atlanta courtroom between District Attorney Fani Willis and the coterie of Trump co-defendants had so many layers of gender, race, and power dynamics that it felt like a theatrical production in which the playwright got a little too exuberant and ended up with an over-the-top script.
Any playwright would die for Willis’ meme-a-minute dialogue, throwing off lines so memorable and original that it was hard to keep up:
“A man is not a plan.”
“I’m not going to emasculate a black man.” (Oh, but she did.)
“I’m not a hand holder.”
The hearing was ostensibly about whether her romantic relationship with the special prosecutor she hired to manage the RICO election interference case was disqualifying. But that was a thin veil over the roiling cauldron of disrespect, racist tropes, and public humiliation that the defendants were indulging in.
Willis came in red hot, literally running from her office to the courtroom when it was her time to testify. She took over the room. She raised and waived objections from the witness chair. She refused to be led down primrose paths by defense counsel. She talked over everyone: defense counsel, the judge, and her own team. I couldn’t help but think that Trump himself would secretly admire her command and bravura.
But it wasn’t the performative high dudgeon that Bill Clinton patented and every politican since has doubled down with. It was the seething, barely controlled anger of a Black woman put in a position none of her white male counterparts have had to endure, at the hands of a criminal defendant no less. White prosecutors have used the power of the law to torment Black people for centuries, but a Black woman becomes prosecutor and finds herself tormented by white criminal defendants.
The author concludes thusly.
Most of the news coverage elided the racial and gender power dynamics at play. But Black people recognize this modern day spectacle of demeaning and dehumanizing treatment: Willis’ personal life scrutinized, her sex life exposed to public ridicule, her ways of handling money and relationships treated not as a difference of culture or social class but as unethical and disqualifying. And racists recognize it, too! Fox News was beside itself with the spectacle. To take one example, actually just one word: “pedigree.”
I think that when young women see this, they will have their Anita Hill Moment. We still have a long way to go before women, and black women, in particular, are not singled out for things that white men basically do all the time. It’s only a problem when anyone else does it.
All of this is part and parcel of the Legal Clowns around Trump and his criminal and insurrectionist cronies. We all have to watch people get sullied so that Donald Trump looks like he’s not alone with his inappropriate, criminal, and traitorous behaviors. As I said, yesterday was a display of Law and Republican Disorder. Hunter Biden should consider a large number of civil suits over this one. The headline and story are from the AP. “FBI informant charged with lying about Joe and Hunter Biden’s ties to Ukrainian energy company. This guy was the center of attention for right-wing media for weeks and months. Sean Hannity considered his testimony to be the smoking that would lead to the impeachment of Joe. Well, their guy’s a bigger liar than Trump, and he’s in trouble.
An FBI informant has been charged with fabricating a multimillion-dollar bribery scheme involving President Joe Biden, his son Hunter and a Ukrainian energy company, a claim that is central to the Republican impeachment inquiry in Congress.
Alexander Smirnov falsely reported to the FBI in June 2020 that executives associated with the Ukrainian energy company Burisma paid Hunter and Joe Biden $5 million each in 2015 or 2016, prosecutors said in an indictment. Smirnov told his handler that an executive claimed to have hired Hunter Biden to “protect us, through his dad, from all kinds of problems,” according to court documents.
Prosecutors say Smirnov in fact had only routine business dealings with the company in 2017 and made the bribery allegations after he “expressed bias” against Joe Biden while he was a presidential candidate.
Smirnov, 43, appeared in court in Las Vegas briefly Thursday after being charged with making a false statement and creating a false and fictitious record. He did not enter a plea. The judge ordered the courtroom cleared after federal public defender Margaret Wightman Lambrose requested a closed hearing for arguments about sealing court documents. She declined to comment on the case.
This headline from NBC explains the Trump Legal Team’s decision to not take his residential immunity charges to the Supreme Court last night. I guess he can delay things more, but here’s the analysis by Lawrence Hurley. “Trump opts against Supreme Court appeal on civil immunity claim over Jan. 6 lawsuits. The decision not to seek high court review means cases brought against Trump over Jan. 6 can move forward in district court, although he can still mount an immunity defense.” In other words, we still get to hear his whiny, irritating voice say they took A-WAY my prezidental immunity.
Lawsuits seeking to hold Donald Trump personally accountable for his role in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol can move forward after the former president chose not to take his broad immunity claim to the Supreme Court.
Trump had a Thursday deadline to file a petition at the Supreme Court contesting an appeals court decision from December that rejected his immunity arguments, but he did not do so.
The appeals court made it clear that Trump could still claim immunity later in the proceedings in three cases brought by Capitol Police officers and members of Congress.
“President Trump will continue to fight for presidential immunity all across the spectrum,” said Steven Cheung, a Trump spokesman.
The civil lawsuits against Trump are separate from the criminal case against him that also arose from Jan. 6. On Monday, Trump asked the justices to put that case on hold on immunity grounds.
Trump’s lawyers argued that any actions he took on Jan. 6 fall under the scope of his responsibilities as president, thereby granting him immunity from civil liability. The U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia rejected that argument, ruling that Trump was acting in his role as a political candidate running for office, not as president.
We’re expecting today’s ruling on the civil Fraud case in New York State’s District Court. This is from The Guardian. “Ruling expected in Donald Trump’s $370m New York fraud trial. Judge delayed ruling to set fine in trial over Trump’s New York business dealings after late-breaking information came to light.” Live updates to the site are ongoing.
A judge is expected to rule on whether Donald Trump should pay a $370m fine in his New York fraud trial and face a lifetime ban from the New York real estate industry.
The New York attorney general’s office sued Trump for inflating the value of his assets on government financial statements. Trump’s adult sons, Donald Trump Jr and Eric Trump, and two former Trump Organization executives, Allen Weisselberg and Jeff McConney, are also defendants in the case.
The New York AG’s office initially asked for $250m in disgorgement, or the amount of money that was wrongfully profited after Trump fudged his net worth. In their written closing arguments in January, prosecutors ended up bumping up their disgorgement figure to $370m.
Prosecutors are also asking the judge, Arthur Engoron, to ban Trump from the New York real estate industry. It’s a similar punishment to that which a New York federal court meted out to “pharma bro” Martin Shkreli after he was found guilty of price-gouging a life-saving drug. Prosecutors in the Trump case cited the Shkreli ruling as an example of what they see as a fitting punishment for Trump.
The fine and a ban would be on top of the punishment Engoron instructed in his September pre-trial ruling, when he ordered the cancellation of Trump’s business licenses. Trump, who has denied any wrongdoing, has appealed that ruling and will undoubtedly appeal a second guilty verdict.
Lara Trump won’t back down as she debuts her latest hit! John Buss @repeat1968
Tick Tock, Mother Fucker! There are some other related Trump drama/trauma. Headlines include Lara Trump as RNC chair.
- Washington Post: Inside Trump’s ouster of Ronna McDaniel as RNC chair
- Neil Baron at The Hill: The law is clear: The Supreme Court must not allow Trump on the 2024 ballot
- Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling of the New Republic: Judge Cannon—Yes, Judge Cannon!—Just Shot Down a Trump Delay Tactic
- New York Times: Trump Privately Expresses Support for a 16-Week Abortion Ban
I think we all can agree that we’ve just had enough of him and want him to go away no matter what it takes!
Just one last sad note today. This is from Jim Heintz, writing at the Associated Press. “Alexei Navalny, the fiercest foe of Russia’s Putin, has died, Russian authorities say.”
Alexei Navalny, who crusaded against official corruption and staged massive anti-Kremlin protests as President Vladimir Putin’s fiercest foe, died Friday in the Arctic penal colony where he was serving a 19-year sentence, Russia’s prison agency said. He was 47.
The stunning news — less than a month before an election that will give Putin another six years in power — brought renewed criticism and outrage directed at the Kremlin leader who has cracked down on all opposition at home.
Putin may have killed him, but Navalny’s memory will live on in the hearts and minds of many.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
peej
Carissa
bostonboomer
dakinikat
ecocatwoman
mablue2
Mama Lopez
peggysue22
quixote
skydancingguestblogger
Mona (aka Wonk the Vote)
Sky Dancing 
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