Friday Reads: Sedition Edition

A revolt or an incitement to revolt against established authority,

usually in the form of Treason or Defamation against government.

This is the description of acts that fall under the area of sedition under the US Constitution and  law.

Sedition is the crime of revolting or inciting revolt against government. However, because of the broad protection of free speech under the First Amendment, prosecutions for sedition are rare.

Nevertheless, sedition remains a crime in the United States under 18 U.S.C.A. § 2384 (2000),  a federal statute that punishes seditious conspiracy, and 18 U.S.C.A. § 2385 (2000), which outlaws advocating the overthrow of the federal government by force.

Generally, a person may be punished for sedition only when he or she makes statements that create a Clear and Present  Danger to rights that the government may lawfully protect (schenck v. united states, 249 U.S. 47, 39 S. Ct. 247, 63 L. Ed. 470 [1919]).

The crime of seditious conspiracy is committed when two or more persons in any state or U.S. territory conspire to levy war against the U.S. government. A person commits the crime of advocating the violent overthrow of the federal government when she willfully advocates or teaches the overthrow of the government by force, publishes material that advocates the overthrow of the government by force, or organizes persons to overthrow the government by force. A person found guilty of seditious conspiracy or advocating the overthrow of the government may be fined and sentenced to up to 20 years in prison. States also maintain laws that punish similar advocacy and conspiracy against the state government.

And with that, lets’ start our reads with The New Yorker‘s Susan B Glasser. “It’s Not Just Trump’s War on Democracy Anymore. Republicans have gone far beyond merely humoring their losing leader.”  They have gone way way to far.  It now is taking the tone of sedition. I’m continuing some of the news BB shared with us yesterday.  You may read her post yesterday for some more background as we see more news and analysis breaking today.

We know see exactly how many representatives in the US Congress want to overturn the election and who they are.  This is beginning to look a lot more like an attempt to overthrow our legitimate government.  The first appeal to the Supreme Court to throw out the votes of certain states was rebuffed soundly on Tuesday.  The “safe harbor” date will come on December 14.  And then this happened on Wednesday.

Select Political cartoons are from The Buffalo News’s Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist Adam Zyglis.

Undaunted, in the space of a few hours on Wednesday, Trump had his campaign join an even more far-fetched lawsuit, by Texas, asking the Court to throw out millions of votes in battleground states that decided the election’s outcome—Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—all of which have already certified their results. A few hours after this news, Hunter Biden, the son of the man who did win the election, announced that Trump’s appointee as U.S. Attorney for Delaware had opened a federal criminal investigation of his tax dealings. Here, too, you could say it was all just a predictable mess. Trump has been obsessed with Hunter Biden for years; he pushed Ukraine to launch a politically harmful investigation of Biden so hard that he got impeached over it. So why wouldn’t the President join the Texas case, even though it is, as the election lawyer Rick Hasen put it, more press release than legal argument? Trump certainly has never minded losing in court.

What came as a gut punch, though, and still, even after all this time, a real surprise to me, was the announcement that seventeen other states—or at least their attorneys general—had filed a brief supporting the spurious Texas lawsuit, representing, from South Carolina to Utah, an array of pro-Trump red states. Eighteen states, in other words, are making the preposterous—and democratically devastating—argument that the Supreme Court should throw out other states’ votes because they do not like the results. So much for federalism and states’ rights and all those other previously cherished Republican principles. Up on Capitol Hill, meanwhile, a hundred and six House Republicans filed an amicus brief of their own supporting the Texas lawsuit. Some of these same Trump supporters in Congress are also now considering objecting to the Electoral College results when they are presented to the House, on January 6th, in what is meant to be a purely pro-forma procedural move. Mitt Romney dismissed the idea as “madness,” but he remains a lonely public voice against Trump, as his fellow-Republicans either fall in line or remain inexcusably silent. This has gone far beyond just humoring Trump for a few days.

In its response to the Texas case, filed Thursday afternoon, Pennsylvania called the lawsuit’s claims “moot, meritless, and dangerous,” and said that its Trump-inspired assault on results in states where Biden won amounts to a “seditious abuse of the judicial process.” The Supreme Court, Pennsylvania argued, should not only reject the Texas case but in so doing “send a clear and unmistakable signal that such abuse must never be replicated.”

Even the conservative magazine The National Review has an Editorial headline today that reads “Texas Unleashes an Absurd Kraken.”

The odds of the Texas election lawsuit prevailing in the Supreme Court might not be less than one in a quadrillion, but they are extremely remote — and should be.

Texas is asking the Supreme Court to invalidate the presidential election in four battleground states won by Joe Biden because, it argues, election procedures in those states violated the Constitution, and the resulting irregularities impermissibly diluted the votes of Texans.

To call this far-fetched is an understatement — it is the Kraken of constitutional law.

Texas has no standing to challenge the election procedures in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Georgia, and the Supreme Court doesn’t have the authority to order new elections in those states or bar electors from those states from voting in the Electoral College. The case was brought by Texas because the Supreme Court is required to hear all lawsuits brought by a state against other states, but it retains the power to dismiss those suits out of hand if the case is not one that a state legally can bring. If there were any prior case that lent credibility to these outlandish claims, Texas would have cited it.

The Orlando Sentinel proffered this:

We apologize to our readers for endorsing Michael Waltz in the 2020 general election for Congress.

We had no idea, had no way of knowing at the time, that Waltz was not committed to democracy.

During our endorsement interview with the incumbent congressman, we didn’t think to ask, “Would you support an effort to throw out the votes of tens of millions of Americans in four states in order to overturn a presidential election and hand it to the person who lost, Donald Trump?”

Our bad.

No kidding.

Here’s the Amicus Brief where you can see who in your state is trying to start a second civil war.  You can also read more on this crap about the 106 Republican Congress Critters here at CBS. I’d just like to apologize from the sane people living in Louisiana for the crazy district that voted whackado Mike Johnson who appears to have been a leader in the act of sedition.

Congressman Mike Johnson, a Republican from Louisiana, circulated an email, obtained by CBS News, from his personal account to GOP members Wednesday that asked them to join a friend-of-the-court brief to be filed in support of the effort spearheaded by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. Johnson was a vocal defender of Mr. Trump during impeachment proceedings.

“The simple objective of our brief is to affirm for the court (and our constituents back home) our serious concerns with the integrity of our election system,” Johnson wrote. “We are not seeking to independently litigate the particular allegations of fraud in our brief (this is not our place as amici). We will merely state our belief that the broad scope of the various allegations and irregularities in the subject states merits careful, timely review by the Supreme Court.”

On the other hand, Ohio’s AG filed its support for Pennsylvania.    This is from Cleveland.com.

Attorney General Dave Yost on Thursday filed a legal brief with the U.S. Supreme Court opposing a Texas lawsuit’s goal to effectively delay the Electoral College from voting Joe Biden the next U.S. president.

Yost, a Columbus Republican, stated in the brief that the Supreme Court lacks authority to order state legislatures in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin to appoint presidential electors. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s lawsuit argues such a move is needed because coronavirus-related changes to election rules in those states opened the door to voter fraud (claims of which have so far been unsubstantiated).

“The relief that Texas seeks would undermine a foundational premise of our federalist system: the idea that the States are sovereigns, free to govern themselves,” Yost stated in the brief, adding later: “The courts have no more business ordering the People’s representatives how to choose electors than they do ordering the People themselves how to choose their dinners.

From David Cohen at the Rolling Stone:  “Trump’s ‘Big’ Texas Supreme Court Lawsuit Is Just as Fake as All the Others. Don’t be fooled because the case was filed in the Supreme Court. It’s going nowhere — and Trump is still on his way out of the White House”

Trump’s latest ridiculous attempt to thwart the will of the American electorate comes in the form of a Texas lawsuit filed Tuesday morning. In the lawsuit, Texas is suing the states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Georgia, alleging election officials in each of those states failed to follow their state laws during the election by making it easier for people to vote absentee, early, and/or by mail, and thus — according to Texas — making it easier for voter fraud. The remedy the suit seeks is to throw out the results of all four states. Of course, all four states voted for Biden.

This lawsuit is peculiar because Texas filed it directly in the Supreme Court. Almost all Supreme Court cases start in the lower courts and take their time to work their way up to the Supreme Court. However, the Constitution allows for a small sliver of cases to be filed directly in the Supreme Court. One such category is suits “in which a state shall be a party.” And federal statute says cases between two or more states must be filed in the Supreme Court. Texas is suing four other states; thus, Texas had to file in the Supreme Court.

But just because this is the type of case that must be filed directly in the Supreme Court doesn’t mean that the court will actually hear the case. The court has discretion to hear these types of cases directly or to send them to the lower courts for development before it gets to the supremes.

Commentators all over the political spectrum agree that there is no way the Supreme Court will touch this case. Take your pick among the almost endless reasons why: There is no legal basis for one state to complain about the election procedures of another state. There is no constitutional requirement that states have similar voting rules or procedures. The justices, even the extreme conservatives appointed by Trump, will not want to interfere with an election that wasn’t that close. And, possibly most important, the justices will have no interest in overturning the votes of millions of people and thereby anointing themselves the final decision-makers in presidential elections. There is just no world in which this lawsuit succeeds, as it is completely frivolous.

Nonetheless, Trump has labeled this case “the big one” and filed a motion yesterday to intervene. In plain English, that means he wants to join Texas as a party in the case because he has a stake in its outcome. Other politicians are clamoring to get on board. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, eager to show his boundless loyalty to the man he has called “utterly amoral,” a “serial philanderer,” a “narcissist at a level I don’t think this country’s ever seen,” and a “pathological liar,” has offered to argue the case in the Supreme Court. And 18 states filed a brief yesterday supporting this lawsuit.

Seriously, this really shows we have a large number of Americans who never had a civics course and are still walking around upright. Over here in reality land where facts, rule of law, and reality matter, Time gives Joe Biden and Kamala Harris the shared title of Person of the year.  This is probably one of the reasons why Trumperz is tweeting like a magpie today.

Biden and Harris share a faith that empathetic governance can restore the solidarity we’ve lost. Biden told TIME he has lately been reading about Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first 100 days, when FDR worked to pull the nation out of the Great Depression, a feat that helped restore confidence in democracy. “We’re the only country in the world that has come out of every crisis stronger than we went into the crisis,” he insists. “I predict we will come out of this crisis stronger than when we went in.” Their challenge is, above all, not about any one policy, proposal or piece of legislation. It is convincing America that a future exists, for all of us, together. It is nothing less than reconciling America with itself.

We’re still counting down the days until January 20. Our nation is still being held hostage to the malign intent of Trump and his cronies for 39 days.

Come on we can do this!  We can pull through all of this together.  We have a country to rebuild!  We also have to do as much as we can to get those Georgia Senatorial seats which both have been declared too close to call if you believe FiveThirtyEight.

Hang in there!  Be safe!

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?

Friday Funky Fee Fee Reads: Cry Baby Cry!

Portrait of Marcelle Roulin December 1888 by Vincent van Gogh –

Good Day Sky Dancers!

This is the kind’ve headline I’ve been waiting to read!  From Raw Story: ” ‘The president is humiliated’ and doesn’t want to be seen in public: CNN’s John Harwood.”   Who’s the snow flake now?

CNN White House correspondent John Harwood on Friday said that President Donald Trump has not spoken in public for the past eight days because he’s simply too embarrassed about his defeat at the hands of President-elect Joe Biden.

While talking with CNN host Jim Sciutto, Harwood explained why the president has completely disappeared from the public eye even though the novel coronavirus pandemic has been setting records for infections and hospitalizations over the last week.

“The president is humiliated by the outcome,” Harwood explained. “He understands that he has lost the election, but he does not want to face that music publicly, so he’s been hiding out in the White House, hasn’t been talking before cameras as he typically does every day for a week now.”

Harwood also said that the president is desperately trying to maintain some kind of relevance in the public eye, which is why he’s trying to convince his supporters that the election was stolen from him.

“He’s throwing up these bogus lawsuits which aren’t going anywhere, which are getting tossed out of court as fast as he files them to try to string this out,” he said. “He’s fundraising for his political action committee as well as his legal fund, and he’s trying to create… a sense of grievance going forward so he will have something to rally his supporters around.”

Helene de Septeuil
Mary Cassatt, 1889

We always knew it was around white grievance.  But what about people dying and suffering from the pandemic?  How about all those understaffed and overworked healthcare providers?  What about all the children separated and orphaned by this President at the border? Then, there’s all that pandemic aid to people and businesses about to expire?  Is any one home in the Republican party to work on that?

This is exactly what former President Obama says about this situation via Politico “‘There’s damage to this’: Obama slams GOP for lining up behind Trump’s fraud claims. The president’s campaign has continued to mount legal challenges in several states aimed at reversing the election’s outcome.”  Even when Trump does nothing, he does harm to the country.

Former President Barack Obama said in a new interview that it “has been disappointing” to see congressional Republicans remain supportive of President Donald Trump’s baseless claims of widespread voter fraud and his refusal to concede the 2020 White House race to President-elect Joe Biden.

“There’s damage to this,” Obama said in an interview with “CBS Sunday Morning” that is set to air in full this weekend. “Because what happens is that the peaceful transfer of power — the notion that any of us who attain an elected office, whether it’s dog catcher or president, are servants of the people, it’s a temporary job, we’re not above the rules, we’re not above the law — that’s the essence of our democracy.”

Obama also described the fraud allegations leveled by GOP lawmakers as disingenuous, saying that “they obviously didn’t think there was any fraud going on, because they didn’t say anything about it for the first two days” after Election Day, when the results in some key swing states were still unsettled. The election ultimately saw Democrats lose seats in the House of Representatives and underperform in competitive Senate races across the country, even as Biden clinched the presidency.

Still, Trump’s campaign has continued to mount legal challenges in several states aimed at reversing the election’s outcome, and congressional Republicans have broadly endorsed those efforts. Only a handful of Senate Republicans have acknowledged Biden as president-elect, although a growing number of top GOP senators have begun calling for Biden to receive intelligence briefings as part of the transition process the White House is working to slow.

More irregular, selfish stuff from the guy who lost while the world and the country danced and celebrated in the streets. What on earth will the kids reading history books a hundred years make of this?

Susan Comforting the Baby (no.1)
Mary Cassatt
c.1881

Meanwhile, the fallout continues.  This horrifying news comes via WAPO : “More than 130 Secret Service officers are said to be infected with coronavirus or quarantining in wake of Trump’s campaign travel”,

More than 130 Secret Service officers who help protect the White House and the president when he travels have recently been ordered to isolate or quarantine because they tested positive for the coronavirus or had close contact with infected co-workers, according to three people familiar with agency staffing.

The spread of the coronavirus — which has sidelined roughly 10 percent of the agency’s core security team — is believed to be partly linked to a series of campaign rallies that President Trump held in the weeks before the Nov. 3 election, according to the people, who, like others interviewed for this report, spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the situation.

The outbreak comes as coronavirus cases have been rapidly rising across the nation, with more than 152,000 new cases reported Thursday.

El niño del pichón (1901), de Pablo Picasso

Alex Parene of The New Republic calls Trump’s current behavior–and those of fellow Republicans–a Coup.   “A Coup Is a Coup, It’s still an illegitimate power grab, even if Republican operatives are only doing it to protect Trump’s fragile ego.”

“They all know he lost,” the former Republican strategist Tim Miller said of other Republicans, “and they are lying about it to protect his little feelings.”

The knowledge that Trump lost apparently extends to the White House, and even the president himself, according to The Wall Street Journal. “Trump understands that the fight isn’t winnable,” the paper wrote, but its source described the president’s “feelings” as “let me have this fight.”

Before the election, Trump seems to have expected the same level of unflinching support from the institutions of the conservative movement that George W. Bush received in 2000, with the entire conservative media and legal apparatuses working to ensure that the ballot box would be no obstacle to his reelection. Instead, he ended up with a legal team led by a man most recently in the news for a creepy appearance in the sequel to Borat. And Rupert Murdoch—if we can guess his intentions through the actions of Fox News—has seemingly cut bait, trying to ease his audience into accepting that Trump has lost the election.

But, apparently believing it would be too cruel to cut Trump off from his institutional support base completely, conservatives decided to arrange for him a sort of Make-a-Wish Foundation version of Bush v. Gore. Before he is out of his misery, everyone will expend a lot of energy creating the appearance of challenging the results of the election in order to appease the president.

One issue arising from that scheme is that creating the appearance of challenging the results of the election in order to appease the president requires actually challenging the results of the election, in real life. The Trump campaign has filed numerous actual lawsuits in actual courts, and it is still weighing, reportedly, an insane strategy of suing to delay vote certification in certain states in the hopes that Republican state lawmakers decide to try appointing pro-Trump electors. As Ford wrote, such schemes are unlikely to work. But even if the conservative operatives behind these efforts are only going through the motions of seizing power, without any real expectation of success, they are still trying, however feebly, to seize power.

Felix Schlesinger, The New Dress,

Susan Glasser at The New Yorker explores this further: “Is This a Coup, or Just Another Trump Con? A post-election report from Minsk-on-the-Potomac.”  

At times, during this unnerving week in America’s capital, it has felt as though we were watching events unfold in Minsk or some other dictator stronghold where elections are not stolen the day votes are cast but in the weeks afterward, as the defeated President holes up in his palace, defying reality and increasingly urgent crowds in the streets. Here in Minsk-on-the-Potomac, Trump has been perpetrating the Big Lie, claiming the election was stolen from him and apparently persuading millions of Americans to go along with this evidence-free fantasy. Biden, so far, has urged calm. It’s an “embarrassment,” he told reporters Tuesday in Wilmington, Delaware, where he continued to plan his transition, took congratulatory phone calls from world leaders, and appointed a White House chief of staff. The official line from Biden has been clear and simple: concession or no concession, Trump will have to leave office at noon on January 20th, and that is that.

But is it? That we are reduced to even asking this question is a defeat for the United States and a win not only for Trump but for all the Trumpists to come, who will forever have the example of a President of the United States flouting the most basic principle of American democracy: accepting the election results and the consequences that come with them.

Ah, yes!  Those Consequences!

But, less we lose hope The NYT reminds us: “As Soon as Trump Leaves Office, He Faces Greater Risk of Prosecution. The president is more vulnerable than ever to an investigation into his business practices and taxes.”

President Trump lost more than an election last week. When he leaves the White House in January, he will also lose the constitutional protection from prosecution afforded to a sitting president.

After Jan. 20, Mr. Trump, who has refused to concede and is fighting to hold onto his office, will be more vulnerable than ever to a pending grand jury investigation by the Manhattan district attorney into the president’s family business and its practices, as well as his taxes.

The two-year inquiry, the only known active criminal investigation of Mr. Trump, has been stalled since last fall, when the president sued to block a subpoena for his tax returns and other records, a bitter dispute that for the second time is before the U.S. Supreme Court. A ruling is expected soon.

Mr. Trump has contended that the investigation by the district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., a Democrat, is a politically motivated fishing expedition. But if the Supreme Court rules that Mr. Vance is entitled to the records, and he uncovers possible crimes, Mr. Trump could face a reckoning with law enforcement — further inflaming political tensions and raising the startling specter of a criminal conviction, or even prison, for a former president.

But then, Trump is just the least of our worries. We have a Congresswoman that things the QAnon thing is real even though it’s short life appears to be over as a conspiracy. And then there’s this Congressman who thinks we fought World War 2 to defeat socialsim.

But worse than any of these congress critters is this terrible Judge with a Life time appointment to SCOTUS. This is from Mark Joseph Stern writing for Slate “Sam Alito Delivers Grievance-Laden, Ultrapartisan Speech to the Federalist Society. The justice railed against COVID restrictions, same-sex marriage, abortion, and the alleged persecution of conservatives.”  The Republican party is still knee deep in demonstrably  against the democratic and secular values that this country was founded about.  Plus, they hate people that don’t look or act like them even if they have no reason to participate or be a voyeur to it.

These comments revealed early on that Alito would not be abiding by the usual ethics rules, which require judges to remain impartial and avoid any appearance of bias. The rest of his speech served as a burn book for many cases he has participated in, particularly those in which he dissented. Remarkably, Alito did not just grouse about the outcome of certain cases, but the political context of those decisions, and the broader cultural and political forces behind them. Although the justice accused several Democratic senators of being unprofessional, he himself defied the basic principles of judicial conduct.

For instance, the justice criticized state governors who’ve issued strict lockdown orders in response to COVID-19, referring to specific cases that came before the court. Alito said these “sweeping” and “previously unimaginable restrictions on individual liberty” have served as a “constitutional stress test,” with ominous results. The government’s response to COVID-19, Alito continued, has “highlighted disturbing trends that were already present before the virus struck.” He complained about lawmaking by an “elite group of appointed experts,” citing not just COVID rules but the entire regulatory framework of the federal government.

Alito also warned of a broader, ongoing assault on religious liberty. “In certain corners,” he alleged, “religious liberty is fast becoming a disfavored right.” Alito condemned the Obama administration’s “ protracted campaign” and “unrelenting attack” against the Little Sisters of the Poor, which refused to submit a form to the federal government opting out of the contraceptive mandate. The group alleged that submitting this notice burdened its religious exercise. Alito also disparaged Washington state for requiring pharmacies to provide emergency contraception—which, he claimed, “destroys an embryo after fertilization.” (That is false.) Finally, Alito rebuked Colorado for attempting to compel Jack Phillips to bake a cake for a same-sex couple.* He noted that the couple was given a free cake and supported by “celebrity chefs.”

It would be nice to think we could be less watchful given Trump’s exist from the world stage and back on to the stage of fools. The problem is that he left a lot of fools there making decisions that could wreck our lives including the ones caught up in conspiracy theories dating way way back.  The old Roman empire event a Roman Religion and now the Republicans want the American Empire to embrace the one they made out of thin air too.

We’re not quit ready to run any victory laps down here in New Orleans.  We’re making calls in to Georgia now try to ensure Mitch McConnell’s future damage will be limited.  Down here in the South you learn the losers never admit they lost and never quit.

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?