I am thankful that American court cases, however otherwise messed up and biased our system of justice is, are still decided based on the available evidence, facts proved in court, beyond a reasonable doubt. The ideologues on the Supreme Court can sometimes employ narrow legal theories to overturn a trial judge’s findings, invalidate or uphold a law, but judges in our trial courts are generally constrained by the facts in evidence in the case before them.

Some of our judges are heroic in this perilous moment when a Big Lie is better than the truth to millions of our countrymen. I think of federal judges like J. Nicholas Ranjan, appointed by Trump, who nonetheless took days to write a 140 page appeal-proof ruling dismissing Trump’s evidence-free voter fraud case as the seamless tissue of bullshit it was.

Another judicial hero is Judge Amy Berman Jackson, a trial court judge on the DC federal court. The trial judge’s first job is fact-finder, the court establishes the facts of the case before applying the law to the facts in evidence. Appeals courts review only alleged errors of law by the trial court. It is extremely rare for an appeals court to disturb the findings of fact by the trial judge.

Judge Berman Jackson’s fact finding sets out a great deal of detail in her rulings, she illustrates her decisions with vivid facts from the record. She recently denied the motion for pre-trail release filed for enthusiastic Trump rioter, Karl Dresch, after weighing the facts before her.

Here are few of the colorful facts she provided to support her findings, excerpted from many letters in support of Dresch’s motion for pre-trial release, from a long footnote of examples:

 T.L. (pastor of a local church): “[Defendant and his wife] are not yet members of the church.” “We have shared a few meals together, and [defendant] has done some work for the church. . . . That is the extent of our relationship.” “[As] a fairly quick judge of character . . . I do not believe that [defendant] is any real danger to our community or government. I ‘think’ that [defendant] got wrapped up in a movement and made some very foolish decisions.”

 A.P. (defendant’s longtime family friend): “While [defendant] may have been in the wrong place at the wrong time and got swept up in the unfortunate events of the day, I cannot imagine that he had any intent to inflict injury to persons or property.”

 P.L. (defendant’s longtime friend and local attorney): “[Defendant] has very strong political views concerning government, in particular the legislative and executive branches, and law enforcement.” “[T]o be candid, [defendant] has occasionally exercised rather poor judgement.” “I have never known [defendant] to be violent in any way nor do I believe him to be flight risk nor a person who would obstruct justice.”

 S.F. (casual acquaintance of defendant for past two years): “I can vouch for [defendant’s] sincere friendly character, morals and integrity over the time I have known him.”

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In laying out the facts that support her decision to detain Dresch as a flight risk, and a danger to society, she includes a few pages of his social media posts, here’s one, from January 7:

 On January 7, 2021, defendant commented on an unidentified post that “Mike Pence gave our country to the communist hordes, traitor scum like the rest of them, we have your back give the word and we will be back even stronger.”

and:

Bro you shoulda been there . . . . the news is all fake . . . and just to correct shit . . we wasn’t violent but we took the capitol . . . . antifa didn’t do it they may have had some idiots undercover in the crowd but it was us that got in . . . and we didn’t fuck shit up . . . I seen a broken window . . . we picked up water bottles and shit cleaned up . . it was grand . . . best day ever . . . I think it was a good show of force . . . look what we can do peacefully, wait til we decide to get pissed.

Of course, there is also a detail like this. In his home in Calumet, Michigan:

Among other items, agents located several hundred rounds of rifle (7.62) ammunition, a Russian rifle, shotgun shells, a shotgun, and an Atlanta Braves backpack. The ammunition was located in multiple places throughout the house, including the dining room, the master bedroom, an upstairs hall room, and inside the backpack. Specifically, the backpack contained a Pilot gas station receipt from Hagerstown, Maryland dated January 5, 2021, a Metro SmartTrip card, and 8 boxes of 7.62 ammunition, containing a total of 160 rounds. The boxes matched the boxes of ammunition found in the house. The firearms were identified in the Michigan State Police Report as a Mossberg 12-gauge shotgun and a Russian-made SKS 7.62 mm x 39 caliber rifle.

The Judge then turns to Dresch’s motion to set him free until the trial and analyzes the applicable law, in light of the facts.

Defendant argues that that government lacked sufficient grounds to move for his detention under the Bail Reform Act. Section 3142(f)(2) states that the judicial officer shall hold a hearing upon motion of the government or its own motion in a case that involves “(A) a serious risk that such person will flee; or (B) a serious risk that such person will obstruct or attempt to obstruct justice, or threaten, injure, or intimidate, or attempt to threaten, injure, or intimidate, a prospective witness or juror.”

Then she sets to work ruling that the section 3142(g) factors support detention on the grounds of dangerousness by clear and convincing evidence (and here, due to formatting limitations, I will not indent, but the following is all from the May 28 decision)

A. The nature and circumstances of the offense charged

The United States Capitol was not open to the public on January 6, 2021.

There was important business going on, though, because on that day, in accordance with Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution, a joint session of Congress was convened to certify the vote of the Electoral College in the 2020 Presidential Election.

This was after every single one of the fifty states, including those under Republican control or with Republican election officials, had certified its own count, and after court challenges to those counts or certifications had been rejected by more than sixty courts across the country – by state judges, and also by federal judges appointed by Presidents of both parties, including former President Trump. Vice President Mike Pence, also a Republican, was present and presiding, as the Constitution required. See U.S. Const. art. II, § 1.

The United States Capitol Police, federal law enforcement officers surrounding the building, and the members of the District of Columbia Metropolitan Police Department who were summoned to assist, were overcome.

Defendant was one of many individuals who made their way through the barricades and past the officers who were attempting to keep the crowd away from the building. He was one of the individuals who entered the closed building. And that day, the certification process prescribed by the Constitution was interrupted as members of Congress of both parties and the Vice President had to be spirited to safety or were forced to barricade the doors or hide.

(back to me) These facts are not in dispute. The “normal tourists” who forced GOP elected officials to flee for their lives and barricade themselves in safe rooms while these normal tourist crowds, after smashing their way into the tourist attraction, roamed the halls chanting “hang Mike Pence” and calling for “Nancy” to come out and face the music, had been whipped up by Trump and the most extreme members of his remaining extremist support group. Like this guy:

The judge quotes defendant again:

Ok all you conspiracy theorists . . . don’t worry I loves you all just setting the record straight. antifa did not take the capitol. that was Patriots . . . don’t give them the thunder, we the people took back our house, the news is all bullshit. and now those traitors Know who’s really in charge.

As to Dresch’s likely future actions, the judge cites the incendiary power of Trump’s ongoing lie:

Defendant’s promise to take action in the future cannot be dismissed as an unlikely occurrence given that his singular source of information, (“Trump’s the only big shot I trust right now”), continues to propagate the lie that inspired the attack on a near daily basis. See generally From the Desk of Donald J. Trump, https://www.donaldjtrump.com/desk (last visited May 27, 2021). And the anger surrounding the false accusation continues to be stoked by multiple media outlets as well as the state and federal party leaders who are intent on censuring those who dare to challenge the former President’s version of events.

She sums up, a few pages later, after reciting defendant’s criminal history, including a drunk driving high speed chase (he did an impressive 145 miles an hour crossing from Michigan to Wisconsin to evade police) that landed him in jail, he served prison time in both states:

Given defendant’s offer to return to Washington to engage in a similar effort to disrupt democratic processes again, his warning that authorities here cannot reach him at home, the utter contempt he showed for law enforcement and the safety of the community during the high speed chase, the threatening remarks directed at an individual who was reporting participants in the attack to the FBI, defendant’s other convictions for obstructive conduct, and his knowing possession of multiple weapons and a considerable supply of ammunition after two felony convictions, the Court has clear and convincing reasons to believe that defendant poses a danger to the community that cannot be alleviated by the imposition of any conditions.

The court of public opinion may contain tens of millions who sincerely believe that Tom Hanks traffics and rapes children, then kills them and drinks their blood, and that because of heinous freaks like the falsely smiling Hanks, our country is in mortal danger and only Donald Trump can save us.

The American court of law, so far, has been fairly consistent in requiring proof, beyond the sincerely, even passionately, held opinions of those who honestly believe that their violence is necessary to save us all from Satanist, pedophile, cannibal, socialist, fascist, antifa, BLM culture warriors, dangerous monsters like blood-drinkers Tom Hanks, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Talib, George Soros and company.

How about Bezos’s recent Washington Post puff piece calling radical Trumpist Senator Josh Hawley “a fierce defender of the Constitution”?

As noted, the ongoing danger of a Big Lie is the culture of lying it brings about, many other lies must be told to support the Big One. The election was stolen (not true) therefore we have a right and responsibility to bring the thieves to justice (hang Mike Pence!) and no puny police force is going to stop us (Blue Lives Matter!) we love our flags (nothing wrong with our Confederate flag, “n-words”) and some of us will beat police officers with the flagpoles (“when you catch somebody in a fraud, you’re allowed to go by very different rules”).

Today the united position of the GOP is that any claim they ran for their lives on January 6 is a bold-faced lie, they were never afraid of the innocent, totally unarmed (virtually no firearms seized afterwards) law-abiding mob they barricaded the doors against and fled from in terror! They claim there is no need for any investigation — which could have dire political consequences for certain elected officials (like the firebrand from the state of Q) who may have aided the peaceful mob — unless you also investigate the claimed terrorism of Black Lives Matter, antifa and the treacherous machinations of traitor Republicans. You do remember the (rare) rioting Barr and Trump used to bring in federal riot troops night after to restore peace in the first of many “anarchist jurisdictions” that needed pacification after the totally justifiable murder of George Floyd and massive nationwide so-called “peaceful” protests by violent haters!!!

Then we have this sobering (and encouraging) poll about the apparently declining but still prevalent Republican belief that Blacks, antifa and disloyal Republicans stole the 2020 election for Biden (down from 70%, by the looks of it) and some eye-popping number crunching (from Heather Cox Richardson’s latest):

If that 14% contains the politically committed 0.01%, the group that has most of the money in America, well, we see the results every day. You get the “spontaneous” creation of the nationwide Tea Party, Election Integrity laws that make it harder to vote, Stand Your Ground Laws that make it easier to legally kill people you’re afraid of, Anti-Protest Laws that make it a felony to assemble while granting immunity to those who run over now felonious protesters in the street, and for religious types, a solid anti-abortion majority on the Supreme Court to finally end government coercion and ensure maximum liberty, etc.

We’re in one heap of a mess, folks, but I like the direction things are going. With every new detail that comes out about the US under Mr. Trump and his gunsel Bill Barr (check out the Manafort stuff– his actual lies to Mueller are now laid out, un-redacted, in black and white [1]), things look a little better, justice-wise. It is inconceivable to me that honest investigations, grand juries and actual prosecutions will not change the face of GOP politics in the coming months. If only fucking Sinema and Manchin had the integrity of your average turd…

[1]

O`DONNELL: And what was your reaction to what we learned in the newly- unredacted — well, we, the public, learned in these newly-unredacted documents about Paul Manafort dealing with the Mueller investigation and the ways he kept lying to them about Konstantin Kilimnik?

SCHIFF: Well, it`s pretty interesting because in two respects. First, you`re right. It shows Manafort was a bigger liar than we knew, and we knew he was a pretty big liar to begin with. But it also shows the degree of collusion between the campaign chairman for Donald Trump and Russian intelligence.

Here Manafort and Gates, his deputy chairman, are repeatedly giving an agent of Russian intelligence internal polling data, internal strategic documents about their efforts in battleground states and key demographics within those battleground states.

So, you know, this is going on while the Russians are doing a secret social media operation to help the Trump campaign. And so it`s hard to find something more graphic than that in terms of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians and the same Russian intelligence that`s working on the social media campaign.

But what`s also interesting about it is this is now the second federal judge in ordering these things to be unredacted, who has essentially said Bill Barr was misleading the country, misleading the country by saying there was no evidence of collusion, misleading the country by saying that he was compelled to conclude that you could not indict the president on obstruction.

And he`s also — the judge is also saying that essentially Barr has been dishonest with the court about what that memo is about. It`s not about just deliberations.

Apparently it`s about spin. And it`s for that reason, because it`s about how do they spin this pre-decision, this predetermination that they weren`t going to indict the president no matter what — how do they spin that? That`s not something that can be concealed from the public. So it`s interesting at many levels.

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It is a scary thought, breathing out and never breathing in again. Anxiety often expresses itself in this image — I can’t breathe! — Oh my God! — the breath catching, a rising fear of no more oxygen coming in, not enough oxygen, drowning on dry land as the last bit of sand tics through the hourglass of the long soap opera that was, until a second ago, your life.

I saw only one last breath in my life. It was my father’s. A few minutes earlier he’d sent everyone else away, telling them I’d stay with him, that everything was fine. They went down to have a break, to eat dinner in the hospital cafeteria. My father waited until they were gone and then said “I don’t know how to do this.” I assured him that nobody did, that it would be fine.

The moment of his death, maybe fifteen minutes later, was perfectly captured by some poetic Jewish writer two thousand years earlier: like removing a hair from a glass of milk. His death was entirely peaceful, his breathing gently slowed and finally stopped. His last breath was gone a few seconds before I knew it for sure. One benefit, I understand, of dying from liver cancer, it just quietly shuts everything down, making you more and more tired until you simply…

You might think knowing that we all will die would bring out the best in us, our empathy, our higher nature. It is a humbling thing to understand that every life ends with a last breath, the humblest of us and the mightiest. Sadly, the fearsome inevitability of death leads many to indulge the worst side of themselves. Might as well take as many of these fuckers down as I can before I die in a glorious hail of bullets!

We’re living through a time as bad as any in human history. This is a time of vast human panic, irrationality, fear, rage and hopelessness. There are good reasons to be afraid, to be angry, to feel hopeless. Look at the facts. Heck, just look at the lies.

During a deadly, highly contagious pandemic we had autocrats in several large countries telling their nations that the whole thing was a hoax created by our enemies, only weak people believed it, only the pathetic died from it. It would be over soon. No need to worry. A few million died worldwide, continue to die, whose fault is that? Don’t blame the Strongmen!

Our own exceptional American Strongman, the orange one, simply told the nation it was not his fucking problem, that’s what States’ Rights are for, let the states fight it out, that’s what the Constitution was written for, the Civil War fought over.

A few months later, before and after another party-line acquittal in a “partisan” impeachment for doing nothing but speaking his angry mind, in a masterful show of his epic, childish will, he refused to accept the results of the election. He attacked the counting of the votes cast by the American people, denounced it as fraudulent, tried to convince state officials to change the certified vote tallies.

His case is pretty much air-tight, in his mind: a president who, according to the lying polls, had supposedly never cracked 50% in popularity during his time in office got more votes in 2020 than he did in his landslide of 2016. His vote tally, 74,000,000, almost 47% of the vote, set a record for votes cast for an incumbent, therefore– obviously– he won. He continues to insist he won, in a landslide.

His opponent tallied 81,000,000 votes, and there is no real question about those numbers, so Trump and his myrmidons kept reminding people that this corrupt, lying, sleepy, nefarious puppet of the Chinese Communist Party had stolen the election by nefarious means, exactly as he predicted his opponent would do when he himself was attempting to rig the election (in part by conspiring to limit mail-in voting, smug Louis DeJoy ruthlessly removing urban mailboxes and dismantling high-speed mail sorting machines in cities, backed by hundreds of lawsuits and aided in this anti-theoretical mail fraud campaign by no less than Bill Barr)!

70% of the former president’s steady 39% believe the election was stolen from their man, in fact, more than that — 70% of all Republicans. $50,000,000 was spent on an advertising campaign to convince the credulous that the election had been stolen from Trump, no matter what Republican state officials, and every court Republicans brought lawsuits in, kept saying. Finally, another $3,500,000 was spent to organize the rally the Capitol rioters attended to get fired up right before they marched down to breach the Capitol, like normal tourists, and Stop the Steal on the day the vote for the thieving Biden was being certified and made official.

Outside of the millions Trump milked MAGA nation for, all the dark money that funded this incendiary lie came from secret sources, like the money that funds “climate change skepticism” during a time when we are witnessing new instances of rapidly unfolding climate catastrophe weekly. Among these dark money funders, and possibly the smartest of them, is Charles Koch, an evil zombie who refuses to die. Koch (the surviving Koch Brother — Charles and David beat their other two brothers to a pulp in years of litigation) is the mastermind engineer of the radical right-wing long game.

Koch enjoys plenty of company and generous tax-deductible support among his well-born, fellow-traveler classmates. Their billions make sure the credulity of the masses of “low information” Americans serves the cause of liberty from government coercion. The autistic genius billionaire Robert Mercer, who supported Lyin’ Ted to the end, threw his money, expertise and support behind Trump, when the time came, and Mercer’s support– plus the campaign-saving introductions to Steve Bannon and Kellyanne “Alternative Fact” Conway — was critical to the Mercer family’s new candidate’s success. Their endgame is all the same. Pay no tax, preserve absolute liberty from “coercion”, have a strong, violent police force, and fuck the poor.

Men like these die only after inflicting tremendous suffering on as many of the rest of us as possible. It seems to me that the suffering they inflict means as much to them as the profit they reap from inflicting this harm. We had one of the worst of them, for four years, attacking almost everybody in the world, daily, on his hyperactive Twitter feed. It was quite clear from his angry, vindictive behavior, that no victory was complete for him without somebody he hated being publicly humiliated.

His America longs for the good old days, when a rich guy like him could hire goons to break legs, have a mob string up any charismatic opponent, call in a favor from the military, if things got really bad between him and the workers he was trying to screw out of their pay.

Those great lost days when America was great, before the “political correctness” that has made us a “laughingstock” are what MAGA is all about. A time (before women could vote, apparently) when bitches didn’t need $130,000 bribes to keep their big mouths shut about a great man’s innocent “side-action,” when angry Blacks (ungrateful for not being enslaved AND being allowed to vote) didn’t try to sell this horse-shit about their lives mattering, when politically correct losers didn’t suddenly become “woke” and believe that crap about “all men being created equal”.

Obviously that’s not true, they say, people were never created equal, the men who wrote that owned other human beings, creatures they regarded as inferior. There are such things as genetics, eugenics, blood, soil, glory, after all. Only a weak nation allows itself to be taken over by soft-hearted eggheads who think they know everything, feel superior because they arrogantly feel the “truth” is on their side.

This MAGA type dies, like anyone else, but the worst of them are prepared to do things, like participate in a violent mob to stop an election being certified because their enraged leader lied to them, that more thoughtful people wouldn’t do. They die, no question, as we all do. The only question is how many of us will breathe our last before they’re done fouling the air with misdirected anger, miscalculated vengeance and unquenchable desire for the illusion of total domination?

I don’t know what it will take for Sinema and Manchin to stop behaving like oblivious obstruction-enablers and recognize the filibuster for what it is and has always been– a tool of obstructionist racists, first slaveholders ably assisted by their public servant, and inventor of the Senate filibuster, John Calhoun, and later generations of Dixiecrat klansmen who used it to block all anti-lynching and civil rights legislation. 

The filibuster does not encourage “bipartisanship” as these two asshats keep insisting. It promotes the opposite, particularly when one of the parties embraces the radical “alternate reality” of their enraged leader. As the filibuster is currently constituted, it allows one member of the minority party to block debate on anything not budget-related, with an email. Then it’s 60 votes or suck it if you want to discuss a bill on the Senate floor.

Here’s a point Schumer should make to those two holdouts, today — OK, you don’t want to abolish the filibuster, not ready to go there, fine.  What’s your objection to changing the rule back to what it was just a few years ago — you stand up and talk and when you stop talking, if nobody else from your party immediately steps up, filibuster over?  Why not put the burden back on the party filibustering, instead of the one trying to get on with normal Senate business?

And we add this second change to the filibuster rule — we’ve banned reading the phone book or Dr. Seuss, canceled Green Eggs AND ham, your standing, talking filibuster has to be speeches on the merits of your meritless objection.   

Make those two changes to the filibuster rule and it’s game over for Mitch, Lindsey, Lyin’ Ted, Hawley, Ron Johnson from Wisconsin and their Big Lie embracing ilk.  There is no merit to their positions on anything in the debate over voting rights, the violence of American policing, investigating the January 6 Trump riot, raising the minimum wage, doing everything that can be done to avoid climate catastrophe.

Their objections and obstructions are frequently based on demonstrable lies — as in the ridiculous and dangerous case of their now “peaceful” January 6 non-insurrection. The clown in Congress who recently dismissed the Capitol riot as a normal tourist event is on videotape screaming and crapping his pants as he frantically barricades the door against the peaceful MAGA tourists on that sunny January 6. Those 70 Capitol Police who’ve retired or quit since the peaceful riot? Faint-hearted alarmists who do not know a transformational lie when they see it.

I truly don’t get why that reasonable change to the out-of-control filibuster rules would even be an ask for Sinema or Manchin.

Then again, they don’t pay me the big bucks to suggest these kind of policy strategies.  I hope this will be the issue that finally gets Democrats off their asses to pressure the two “moderate” holdouts to get the filibuster under control. 

If not this issue — a bipartisan investigation to hold the lying propagandists and provocateurs responsible for the riot at the Capitol that stopped the certification of a fair election as members of Congress hid from the peaceful tourists (and later Kevin McCarthy announced that there’s no debate that Biden is the president), truly a matter of Superman’s “Truth, Justice and the American Way” — what issue would be important enough?

Manchin and Sinema could continue to enable Mitch and the slim minority to hold on to its unchecked ability to obstruct until one of the older member of the Democratic caucus finally has a debilitating stroke (as many of us often feel about to have when reading about Manchin and Sinema). Then, that day, hello Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and goodbye filibuster, motherfuckers!