Finally Friday Reads: Tossing Trump and Going Local

Good Day, Sky Dancers!

I’ve spent some time this week having to find Keely Cat, who escaped Saturday afternoon and showed up 5 days later.  Everyone was relieved she was home.  She’s included in that number.  Many neighbors helped us, and I got some very good suggestions from online friends, too.  Both BB and JJ have been holding me together and giving me some time to worry and search.  She hadn’t had her seizure meds since Saturday morning.  She’s a bit more animated than the Turtle when she has one.  I gave her a dose today and yesterday after a seizure yesterday morning.  All of us here are much more relaxed and a bit cooler.  We’ve finally escaped the excessive heat, and the house cools down at night.  All of this is a relief for me, and now it’s back to fretting about our national problems.

Several well-respected law professors and judges are insisting that Trump is not qualified to hold office again because of the 14th Amendment, and the argument is turning into court cases.   This is from ABC News.”State election officials prepare for efforts to disqualify Trump under 14th Amendment. New Hampshire, Michigan and Arizona are bracing for lawsuits.”

Efforts to keep former President Donald Trump off the 2024 ballot under the 14th Amendment are gaining momentum as election officials in key states are preparing for or starting to respond to legal challenges to Trump’s candidacy.

The argument to disqualify Trump from appearing on primary or general election ballots in 2024 boils down to Section 3 of the U.S. Constitution’s 14th Amendment, which states that an elected official is not eligible to assume public office if that person “engaged in insurrection or rebellion against” the United States, or had “given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof,” unless they are granted amnesty by a two-thirds vote of Congress.

Several advocacy groups have said that Trump’s actions on Jan. 6, 2021, fit that criteria — that he directly engaged in an insurrection. The legal theory has been pursued, unsuccessfully, against a few other elected Republicans; arguing their actions around Jan. 6 and support for overturning the 2020 election results amounted to the disqualifying behavior.

Trump has denied any involvement in the attack on the Capitol.

“Joe Biden, Democrats, and Never Trumpers are scared to death because they see polls showing President Trump winning in the general election,” Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Chung told ABC News in a statement. “The people who are pursuing this absurd conspiracy theory and political attack on President Trump are stretching the law beyond recognition much like the political prosecutors in New York, Georgia, and DC. There is no legal basis for this effort … “

The push to disqualify Trump under this constitutional clause gained more traction when two members of the conservative Federalist Society, William Baude and Michael Stokes Paulsen, recently supported the idea in the pages of the Pennsylvania Law Review. Following the Baude and Paulsen article, retired conservative federal appeals judge J. Michael Luttig and Harvard Law Professor Emeritus Laurence Tribe made the same argument in The Atlantic.

Now, threats of filings against Trump under this clause are gaining steam in a number of states, including New Hampshire and Arizona and in Michigan, a lawsuit to disqualify Trump was filed on Monday. Secretaries of state say they have started to take steps to prepare for the possibility of administering elections without the current GOP front-runner.

In an interview with ABC News, Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat, said that she and other secretaries of state from Pennsylvania, Georgia, Nevada, New Hampshire and Maine started having conversations over a year ago about preparing for the legal challenges to Trump’s candidacy.

“I’m talking every day with colleagues about this, we’re all recognizing that our decisions that we make may in some cases be the first but won’t be the last and there may be multiple decision points throughout the course of the election cycle,” Benson said. “So, I think the public needs to be prepared for this to be an ongoing issue that is it has several resolution points and evolutions points throughout the cycle.”

But as conversations grow around the use of the 14th Amendment provision, some legal scholars and election officials are increasingly concerned about the practicality of the emerging lawsuits.

I just want to get rid of him one way or another.  Mitch McConnell is getting a lot of attention after his second freeze-up that was captured in pressers.  BB wrote about this and the possible causes yesterday. While McConnell has been “medically cleared” by the physician who attends Congress, many political pundits are now suggesting something “be done” about him. This is from Jack Schafer, writing for Politico. “Why Is Nobody Doing Anything About Mitch McConnell?  Washington is paralyzed as the Senate minority leader freezes up.”

If McConnell were a bus driver or broadcaster or teacher engaged in any other occupation that, like serving as a legislative leader, demands real-time responses, he would have been benched pending a medical examination. Instead, Mitch’s verbal stoppage has been met with paralysis by the political order, which seems incapacitated by his condition. The president and others have voiced their “concerns” for McConnell’s episodes, offering verbal placeholders for the stark questions that demand answers. Instead, apart from the barest of acknowledgments that McConnell will consult a physician, and the prospect of an internal Senate GOP discussion, it’s the Washington establishment that is acting lightheaded and professing that things are fine.

These aren’t the 81-year-old senator’s only recent medical misadventures. He suffered a fall and concussion in March that sent him to the hospital for treatment. In a 2019 tumble at his Louisville, Ky., home, he fractured his shoulder. In October 2020, when reporters noticed his bruised and bandaged hands, he fended off their questions with what has become his boilerplate. “I can just tell you that I’m just fine,” he said. At that time, McConnell aides, aware of the senator’s perambulatory instability, were warning journalists not to get underfoot of the GOP leader as he walked the halls of the Senate lest they prompt another spill.

Older people fall. It’s a fact. President Joe Biden, 80, tripped on a sandbag in June. Older people experience mental lapses. That’s a fact, too. Neither a fall nor a lapse in isolation constitutes a crisis. But McConnell is not your standard-issue example of a stumbling elder who can be patched up and returned to service with little inconvenience to his peers. He’s a leader of the U.S. Senate — brokering judicial and Cabinet appointments, stewarding legislation, mobilizing his party to compete in the 2024 elections, not to mention representing Kentucky. Even a layman could assert McConnell needs advanced treatment and rest without being accused of practicing medicine without a license. And yet, only muffled words of interest in McConnell’s health by other senators have been sounded, mostly upbeat. “After he fell, obviously he was a little bit groggy when he first got back. But he’s picked up a lot more energy since then,” said Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) in July.

McConnell isn’t even the leading example of an aged legislator whose diminished capacity is ignored by the Senate so he can maintain his plush seat of power. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) appears to be in rapid physical and mental decline — and her supporters have, at least initially, concealed the severity of her health battles. In July, the 90-year-old was so out of it she had to be coached by Democratic colleague Sen. Patty Murray to say “aye” in a committee meeting. Feinstein’s condition has received more attention than McConnell’s, with a half-dozen members of the House calling on her to resign. But for senators, the Feinstein story is like a reel from the black comedy The Death of Stalin, as the senators remain as timid as the Politburo members gathered around Joseph Stalin’s deathbed who refused to replace him until he was absolutely cold.

What the Senate needs is not a legal measure like the 25th Amendment, which governs the replacement of a mentally or physically faltering president. Nor would age limits for senators, which would reduce the body’s gerontological problem, automatically remedy the current state. People under 65 can have debilitating strokes or other mentally sapping medical problems. Neither would a medical board empowered to certify the mental and physical health of legislators do the trick. Some of us barely want to heed our doctors’ advice. Who wants to assign them to review who can serve in Congress?

What the Senate needs is some spine. Instead of playing the supportive colleague for other legislators who struggle to do their jobs or otherwise turn their backs on the infirm and doddering, senators need to use their powers of persuasion, their parliamentary skills at replacing leadership and old-fashioned jawboning to persuade the mentally muddled or seriously ill to remove themselves from the pinnacles of power and even, if necessary, to resign.

GOP Candidate and former South Carolina Governor and Ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley, is less than subtle about McConnell’s condition. “Nikki Haley Calls Senate A ‘Privileged Nursing Home’ After McConnell Freezes. “We need to know they’re at the top of their game,” Haley told Fox News. “You can’t say that right now looking at Congress.” HuffPo writer Kelby Vera watched Fox, so we don’t have to.

Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley urged aging lawmakers to accept “when it’s time to go” after Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) froze up during a press conference in Kentucky on Wednesday.

Haley, who is running in the 2024 Republican presidential primary, called McConnell’s situation “sad” while appearing on Fox News’ “The Story” on Thursday, where she described the Senate as the “most privileged nursing home in the country.”

“No one should feel good about seeing that any more than we should feel good about seeing Dianne Feinstein, any more than we should feel good about a lot of what’s happening or seeing Joe Biden’s decline,” Haley said, targeting the senior Democratic senator from California and the Democratic president.

Politicians on both sides of the aisle have questioned 90-year-old Feinstein’s fitness for office following her extended absence from the capital earlier this year after a prolonged bout with shingles.

And conservatives have frequently cited Biden’s age among the reasons they believe he’s not fit to be president. Biden, who turns 81 in November, became the oldest candidate ever elected commander in chief when he won the 2020 presidential election.

“What I will say is, right now, the Senate is the most privileged nursing home in the country,” Haley went on. “I mean, Mitch McConnell has done some great things, and he deserves credit. But you have to know when to leave.”

She then repeated her call for term limits and mental competency tests for elected officials over the age of 75.

“I wouldn’t care if they did them over the age of 50,” added Haley, who is 51. “But these people are making decisions on our national security. They’re making decisions on our economy, on the border.”

“We need to know they’re at the top of their game,” she continued. “You can’t say that right now, looking at Congress.”

Haley suggested it was time for “new faces, new voices [and] younger generations” to work in government before saying, “We need to have everybody else understand when it’s time to go.

Please, please tell me that the new voice for Trumperz isn’t Vivek Ramissmarmy.  The last thing we need is another TechBro in a position to wreck society. This is an opinion from the New York Times by David French.  French is not one of my favorites, and he’s Republican, but this is the voice of reason here.  “The Articulate Ignorance of Vivek Ramaswamy.”

Now let’s fast-forward to the present moment. Instead of offering a plausible explanation for their mistakes — much less apologizing — all too many politicians deny that they’ve made any mistakes at all. They double down. They triple down. They claim that the fact-checking process itself is biased, the press is against them and they are the real truth tellers.

I bring this up not just because of the obvious example of Donald Trump and many of his most devoted followers in Congress but also because of the surprising success of his cunning imitator Vivek Ramaswamy. If you watched the first Republican debate last week or if you’ve listened to more than five minutes of Ramaswamy’s commentary, you’ll immediately note that he is exceptionally articulate but also woefully ignorant, or feigning ignorance, about public affairs. Despite his confident delivery, a great deal of what he says makes no sense whatsoever.

As The Times has documented in detail, Ramaswamy is prone to denying his own words. But his problem is greater than simple dishonesty. Take his response to the question of whether Mike Pence did the right thing when he certified the presidential election on Jan. 6, 2021. Ramaswamy claims that in exchange for certification, he would have pushed for a new federal law to mandate single-day voting, paper ballots and voter identification. Hang on. Who would write the bill? How would it pass a Democratic House and a practically tied Senate? Who would be president during the intervening weeks or months?

It’s a crazy, illegal, unworkable idea on every level. But that kind of fantastical thinking is par for the course for Ramaswamy. This year, for instance, he told Don Lemon on CNN, “Black people secured their freedoms after the Civil War — it is a historical fact, Don, just study it — only after their Second Amendment rights were secured.”

Wait. What?

While there are certainly Black Americans who used weapons to defend themselves in isolated instances, the movement that finally ended Jim Crow rested on a philosophy of nonviolence, not the exercise of Second Amendment rights. The notion is utterly absurd. If anything, armed Black protesters such as the Black Panthers triggered cries for stronger gun control laws, not looser ones. Indeed, there is such a long record of racist gun laws that it’s far more accurate to say that Black Americans secured greater freedom in spite of a racist Second Amendment consensus, not because of gun rights.

Ramaswamy’s rhetoric is littered with these moments. He’s a very smart man, blessed with superior communication skills, yet he constantly exposes his ignorance, his cynicism or both. He says he’ll “freeze” the lines of control in the Ukraine war (permitting Russia to keep the ground it’s captured), refuse to admit Ukraine to NATO and persuade Russia to end its alliance with China. He says he’ll agree to defend Taiwan only until 2028, when there is more domestic chip manufacturing capacity here in the States. He says he’ll likely fire at least half the federal work force and will get away with it because he believes civil service protections are unconstitutional.

The questions almost ask themselves. How will he ensure that Russia severs its relationship with China? How will he maintain stability with a weakened Ukraine and a NATO alliance that just watched its most powerful partner capitulate to Russia? How will Taiwan respond during its countdown to inevitable invasion? And putting aside for a moment the constitutional questions, his pledge to terminate half the federal work force carries massive, obvious perils, beginning with the question of what to do with more than a million largely middle- and high-income workers who are now suddenly unemployed. How will they be taken care of? What will this gargantuan job dislocation do to the economy?

Ramaswamy’s bizarre solutions angered his debate opponents in Milwaukee, leading Nikki Haley to dismantle him on live television in an exchange that would have ended previous presidential campaigns. But the modern G.O.P. deemed him one of the night’s winners. A Washington

Post/FiveThirtyEight/Ipsos poll found that 26 percent of respondents believed Ramaswamy won, compared with just 15 percent who believed Haley won.

Miss Keely is home.

Republicans make me want to run away from my own country. Trumper and his cult make our country look like something from a Dystopian Science Fiction novel.  But for right now,  Keely is back, my children and their children are in safe states, and I live in a community of Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs. Cultural pride and civic responsibility are a thing down here, even though some of our elected politicians seem to forget about it as quickly as others.

I really fear for this year’s governor’s race.  Trumpsters and his tricksters have made me hypervigilant about local elections.  I hope you’re hypervigilant about yours, too. This is from the Louisiana Luminator.  The commentary is by Greg LaRose. “Questions abound as the Louisiana governor’s race heads into the homestretch.”  The presumed leader in the race, Jeff Landry, refused to show up to the debates. What makes these guys so uncooperative with the Democratic process?  Well, they don’t want democracy.

Even apparent frontrunner Attorney General Jeff Landry, who’s firmly aligned himself with former President Trump and his far-right followers, is a man of mystery to many. He will bypass all but one televised debate, a key opportunity to get his message to the public. The one event he’s committed to so far will take place in a friendly setting he could attempt to pack with his own supporters.

Landry has said he intends to call a special session once in office on the topic of crime. He hasn’t shared any specifics on what he has in mind, other than vilifying authorities in the state’s largest cities for a “catch and release” approach to criminal justice. His plans for education are equally uncertain, other than his frequent conservative appeal to parental rights and rejection of the “woke mob.”

It’s hard to say whether this lack of detail from Landry’s stances will affect his appeal with moderate voters who have been key in recent governor’s races. Sure, Louisiana has grown more conservative as of late, but it’s in question whether its citizenry has moved as far to the right as other Southern states.

Stephen Waguespack and Treasurer John Schroder are positioning themselves as the anti-Landry candidate, although both are strongly conservative in their own right.

Waguespack’s recurring campaign message attempts to frame him as the outsider in the race, but many view him as the quintessential insider given his business lobby background and position in the Jindal administration. He has laid out policy plans if he becomes governor, but he still has to win over voters who may not be convinced he’s the most qualified for the job.

Schroder has been by far the most aggressive in taking on Landry. The two have a history of clashes going back to their time together on the State Bond Commission, which the treasurer chairs and whose procedural financial decisions Landry has attempted to politicize.

Yet in some ways, Schroder is farther right than anyone in the field. He’s selectively played this card on the campaign trail, but it’s not clear yet whether or how he would manifest these views if elected governor.

Hunter Lundy has attempted to position himself as the Christian conservative alternative in the field. Thanks to his ample self-funded campaign, he’s conveyed that message fairly well based on his showing recent polls. Chances are low he can find enough far-right leaning fellow independents to make a serious bid, but he could possibly take enough votes away from Republicans in the race to make the primary more interesting.

And Colorado Springs has the same problem we do in Louisiana. Business Handouts that do nothing but secure political contributions to their puppets.

There are more Republicans and each of them are pretty out there in right field. We do have a candidate for the Democratic party who is likely to win the run-off.  But, the race won’t be easy for Shawn Williams.

Democrat Shawn Wilson could well fall into this same category, even as a favorite to make the runoff as the endorsed candidate of his party. People know him primarily for his role as former secretary of the state transportation department, but that’s not necessarily the positive association Wilson wants it to be.

It’s questionable whether he can follow the path of his old boss, Gov. John Bel Edwards, and appeal to enough moderate voters to give Landry, should he make the runoff, a serious run. Edwards made his anti-abortion stance clear from the start, and Wilson, though personally “pro-life,” espouses the political views of the abortion rights crowd.

What Edwards also had going for him in the 2015 election was running against a hugely unpopular candidate in David Vitter, who didn’t even carry his home Jefferson Parish in the runoff. Edwards also had the support of trial lawyers and his West Point pedigree

For every effort to paint Landry in a negative shade comparable to Vitter, the state Republican Party and political action committees have responded with huge ad buys to boost the attorney general’s profile.

Whether any other candidate can take the momentum away from Landry — or he somehow does so himself — is increasingly in doubt as Election Day nears.

Let us know how things look in your state!  It’s important we keep democracy alive in our states.  It’s also important we don’t elect people with massive discrimination plots and an eye on decimating the local public school systems.

Anyway, I’m going to try to have a nice relaxing day today and just enjoy the return of my prodigal kitty.

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?