Fair and balanced. We report. You decide.

Unconstitutional to impeach a president for “provoking” a riot to overturn an election, so that we can prevent him from ever holding office again? Illegal to use legal means to severely curtail his bullying political influence on the party he dragged to the very edge of open fascism, climaxing in a violent insurrection his followers argue is no big deal? We argue, you decide.

As for the glorious four year plus reign (and counting) of our greatest citizen, MAGA-man, here are some of the highlights from the lying NY Times:

History often provides the answers to those WTF?!! questions in our political system. The dirtiest things in American politics often seem to have their roots in slavery. How can a presidential candidate win by millions of votes and still lose the election? Biden could have easily lost, in spite of winning by 7,000,000 votes, if about 50,000 votes had been changed in just the right places. What? How? The Electoral College, of course, where 55 Electors go to the winner of California whether the candidate wins by 5 votes or 5.1 million votes, as Biden did in 2020. WTF? The Electoral College was designed, in large part, to give slave states an equal say and final veto power over a bullying majority in states whose economies did not depend on human bondage.

During a century of unpunished lynching of countless American citizens, intended to terrorize them into submission (both the brutal killing and the lack of punishment for the killers), how is it that bills to make lynching a federal crime were blocked and killed in the Senate decade after decade?

A little thing called the filibuster, of course, employed by Dixiecrats (today’s solid southern Republicans) over and over to block legislation that would infringe on sacred States’ Rights to treat certain of their damned citizens however they damned well pleased. A technique once requiring stamina and deliberate, public obstruction for as long as one wanted to block a vote, the modern filibuster does not even require a long speech on the floor of the Senate, an email from any opposition senator now blocks “cloture”, an invention requiring 60 votes that allows a filibuster override and a straight vote on the bill in question [1].

The filibuster was first imagined and employed by Senator John C. Calhoun [2], “The Great Nullifier”, America’s most famous public champion of the Peculiar Institution. It was used over the next almost two hundred years by men like Calhoun to fight laws that would have benefitted those ungrateful former slaves, freed from bondage and still complaining, no matter how many of them were strung up [3]. If you call such men racist, mind you, you’re playing right into the Progressive propaganda exposed in the 1776 Report — calling racists racists is like calling Blacks the “n-word”. John C. Calhoun is laughing in his grave.

But leaving race, and arguments over who is a racist and who is a “nigger,” aside, the filibuster has primarily been a tool of obstruction used, more often that not, by minority defenders of an unjust status quo. Picture Ted Cruz in 2013 reading Dr. Seuss on the floor of the Senate, “I do not like them in a box,” delivered in his famous whining drawl, with that patented shit sniffing grin, to block some bill or a presidential appointment, back in the days when a senator actually needed to actively “filibuster”. Would you be surprised to learn that nobody has made more consistent use of the filibuster than the adorable ageless obstructionist tortoise of the Senate Mitch McConnell?

The incomparable Terry Gross did a recent interview with Adam Jentleson, author of a book setting out the history of the filibuster:

“Kill Switch: The Rise Of The Modern Senate And The Crippling Of American Democracy” is a history of how the filibuster started as a tool of Southern senators upholding slavery, and then later was used as a tool to block civil rights legislation. The book concludes with Senator Mitch McConnell’s advances in the use of filibuster as an obstructionist tool…

(talking to Jentleson later in the broadcast) … we’ve established that needing a supermajority to pass legislation was not what the founders wanted. They wanted simple majorities. You’ve talked about how the filibuster was initiated in the mid-19th century and the ways it was used to enable slave owners and to keep the institution of slavery. But you write that the only time the filibuster was used during Jim Crow with any consistency was to block any form of civil rights legislation and that this happened through the 1960s.

source

Check out the interview with the presently ubiquitous Jentleson and then write to your senators and tell them to weigh in against minority leader’s McConnell’s shameless ploy to preserve his right to block anything his party of Trump finds objectionable. He and his Republican colleagues are already attacking Biden as a hypocrite who calls for unity while his party refuses to cave to GOP demands to fairly share power with them in a way Trump’s party sneered at for four years during Mitch’s “51-49, ram it down your throats, suck it cucks” reign as the Grim Reaper.

Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin (as good a rhyme as Carl Sandberg’s folksy Yahn Yohnson from Wisconsin) a member of the block of Republican zealots (the Senate branch of the Sedition Caucus) that voted to obstruct certification of the election on January 6, recently smacked weak Democrats with a hard (if also false) choice between getting cabinet positions filled or illegally impeaching Trump [4]. For my money, Johnson, Hawley, Cruz, Tuberville, et al should be expelled using section 3 of the 14th Amendment [5] that bars those giving aid or comfort to an insurrection from serving in Congress, absent a two-thirds vote to let them stay in power.

Think of it this way, with the filibuster intact, McConnell and his less than principled ilk still win. Biden needs 60 votes (not the simple majority needed to get Kavanaugh — 50-48, and Coney-Barrett — 52-48, on the now openly partisan 6-3 Supreme Court for life) to do anything positive legislatively (or even to have his cabinet confirmed– after months of Trump’s historic denial of basic transition courtesies). If the Biden administration needs to find ten votes among the party united in opposition to impeaching a president for planning and inciting an insurrection, an actual deadly attack on Congress (Hang Mike Pence!), to get anything done, you can kiss any kind of progress away from outright cult of personality fascism goodbye. You will need not 51 votes (the margin for most of Trump’s appointees) but 60 to move anything on to the Senate floor for debate and vote.

How do you like them green eggs and ham, Sam I am?

[1] Adam Jentleson on Fresh Air:

But in the modern Senate, the filibuster looks nothing like that. And actually, speaking is not even required. All you have to do when a bill comes to the floor is have a member of your staff send an email to what’s called the cloakroom, which is sort of the nerve center of action on the floor, saying that your member, your – the senator you work for, has an objection to this bill. That single email could be a phone call, could be a conversation in the hallway. That single objection raises the threshold from passing a bill from the simple majority, where technically the rules still have the threshold today, to a supermajority of what is now 60 votes.

And that is a filibuster. There’s no speaking required. No one has to take the floor. No one has to explain themselves. If a senator raises this objection and increases the threshold from a majority to a supermajority, they never actually have to explain themselves at any point. They just do it. And it’s become accepted. And that is why it’s become normalized that most bills in the Senate require 60 votes to pass.

But I just want to emphasize that this is not actually a matter of the rules themselves because the rules still state that a simple majority is what’s required to pass. This is a matter of a procedural hurdle that’s come to be developed over the last few decades and become routinized. The reason bills need 60 votes to pass is that they can’t clear that procedural hurdle to get to the final vote. And that is the problem that is paralyzing the Senate today.

source

[2]

So the progenitor of the filibuster, its main innovator, was John C. Calhoun, the great nullifier, the leader, father of the Confederacy. And Calhoun innovated the filibuster for the specific purpose of empowering the planter class. He was a senator from South Carolina. His main patrons were the powerful planters. And he was seeking to create a regional constituency to empower himself against the march of progress and against – what was becoming clear was a superior economic model in the North. So Calhoun started to innovate forms of obstruction that came to be known as the filibuster...

…Calhoun took it upon himself to argue that there was nothing evil about [slavery]. In that same speech that you quoted, he went on to explain that slavery was not a necessary evil, but, quote, “a positive good.” He was such an ardent defender and such a vehement racist that he couldn’t even accept the sort of antebellum acknowledgement that there were parts of the institution that were evil. So it was very clear what his motivations were. He wanted to preserve slavery. And the filibuster was what he deployed to achieve that goal.

source

[3]

So what Southern senators faced starting in the 1920s was majority support for civil rights bills. These were rudimentary civil rights bills. These were anti-lynching bills and anti-poll tax bills, but they were civil rights bills nonetheless. These bills started passing the House with big majorities. They had presidents of both parties in the White House ready to sign them, and they actually had enormous public support. Gallup polled the public on anti-lynching bills in 1937 and found 70% of Americans supporting federal anti-lynching laws. And they polled anti-poll tax laws in the 1940s and found 60% support. So Southern senators started to block these bills in the name of minority rights, deploying the supermajority threshold and talking about it as a vaunted, lofty defense of minority rights, just as John Calhoun had done in his time.

This continued to be the case against every single civil rights bill that came before Congress from the time that Reconstruction ended all the way up until 1964, when President Lyndon Johnson finally was able to rally a supermajority of senators of both parties together to break a Southern filibuster against civil rights. But from the 87 years between when Reconstruction ended until 1964, the only category of legislation against which the filibuster was deployed to actively stop bills in their tracks was civil rights legislation.

source

[4] As hardball playing insurrection-supporter Senator Ron Johnson put it the other day:

[5]

Fourteenth Amendment 

Section 3 No Person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.

source

“The principles of equality and consent mean that all are equal before the law. No one is above the law, and no one is privileged to ignore the law, just as no one is outside the law in terms of its protection.”

from The 1776 Report

I glanced over former president Trump’s last minute, first and final 1776 Report, by the now-defunct Presidential Advisory 1776 Commission. The Advisory 1776 Commission, which had so much to teach us, has gone the way of Trump’s short-lived Presidential Voter Integrity Commission, alas. The report has all the earmarks of a hastily produced term paper by a know-it-all junior high school genius, submitted seconds before the teacher’s tyrannical deadline for failing the course. The timing was also perfect, released as it was on Martin Luther King Day. I looked at it so you don’t have to, but here is some of the essence.

First, as to proofreading and Freudian slips:

The advantages of union are detailed in the first fourteen papers of The Federalist (a series of essays written to urge the Constitution’s adoption), and boil down to preventing and deterring foreign adventurism in North America, avoiding conflicts between threats, achieving economies of scale, and best utilizing the diverse resources of the continent.

avoiding conflicts between threats, ya’ll.

Most importantly, I learned a great new word, “pelf” [1], a word that describes the bulk, perhaps the entirety, of the former president’s undisclosed very, very huge fortune. Stephen Miller (or somebody doing an uncanny imitation of the hateful little puke) left no stone unturned in digging up inspirational, high-minded quotes for why we must have patriotic education that instills pride, instead of lingering on painful aspects of our common history, things that divide us and make us weak and unfree. Here’s the “pelf” quote, from FDR:

The Nazi juggernaut quickly conquered much of Europe. The rule of the Axis Powers “is not a government based upon the consent of the governed,”said President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. “It is not a union of ordinary, self-respecting men and women to protect themselves and their freedom and their dignity from oppression. It is an unholy alliance of power and pelf to dominate and enslave the human race.”

In straightening out the misconceptions, apparently harbored by millions of us, about our values and history, the report enumerates our most important constitutional rights. Miller cites the three most important, freedom of religion, number one, obviously, something else, and this, possibly most important of all:

Finally, the right to keep and bear arms is required by the fundamental natural right to life: no man may justly be denied the means of his own defense. The political significance of this right is hardly less important. An armed people is a people capable of defending their liberty no less than their lives and is the last, desperate check against the worst tyranny.

Laying out our most important challenges:

At the same time, it is important to note that by design there is room in the Constitution for significant change and reform. Indeed, great reforms—like abolition [2], women’s suffrage, anti-Communism, the Civil Rights Movement [3], and the Pro-Life Movement—have often come forward that improve our dedication to the principles of the Declaration of Independence under the Constitution.

We’ll leave aside whether anti-Communism or the Pro-Life Movement are reforms, great or otherwise (were we once Communist before we wised up and reformed our great nation?) but let’s go right on to the fundamental, foundational false belief of that challenge to democracy, up there with Communism and Fascism — Progressivism. Progressives operate by a false theory of “group rights,” an idea, we learn, actually, factually, historically, undeniably, based directly on slavery advocate John C. Calhoun’s cray-cray “principled” defense of slavery, as you shall learn:

Progressives believed there were only group rights that are constantly redefined and change with the times. Indeed, society has the power and obligation not only to define and grant new rights, but also to take old rights away as the country develops.

Based on this false understanding of rights, the Progressives designed a new system of government. Instead of securing fundamental rights grounded in nature, government—operating under a new theory of the “living” Constitution—should constantly evolve to secure evolving rights.

Here is where the false (not mistaken, incorrect, or controversial, mind you– FALSE) Progressive idea of “group rights,” ironically embraced by many descendants of former slaves, comes from. This is a hilarious irony so few appreciate as we continue to snarl at each other instead of working together to make America great again:

And yet over the course of the first half of the 19th century, a growing number of Americans increasingly denied the truth at the heart of the founding. Senator John C. Calhoun of South Carolina famously rejected the Declaration’s principle of equality as “the most dangerous of all political error” and a “self-evident lie.” He never doubted that the founders meant what they said.

To this rejection, Calhoun added a new theory in which rights inhere not in every individual by “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” but in groups or races according to historical evolution. This new theory was developed to protect slavery—Calhoun claimed it was a “positive good”—and specifically to prevent lawful majorities from stopping the spread of slavery into federal territories where it did not yet exist.

Miller (I assume this bigoted, limited, blowhard, Trump’s “Minister of Hate”, wrote and had the first and final edits on the Commission’s educational, inspirational text) gives us the prescription going forward for how we must educate our youth:

States and school districts should reject any curriculum that promotes one-sided partisan opinions, activist propaganda, or factional ideologies that demean America’s heritage, dishonor our heroes, or deny our principles. Any time teachers or administrators promote political agendas in the classroom, they abuse their platform and dishonor every family who trusts them with their children’s education and moral development.

Miller’s solution is a SCHOLARSHIP OF FREEDOM, the antithesis of what is taught at American universities (with few exceptions):

Universities in the United States are often today hotbeds of anti-Americanism, libel, and censorship that combine to generate in students and in the broader culture at the very least disdain and at worst outright hatred for this country. [4]

Of course, the most important thing is REVERENCE FOR THE LAW (the report was clearly already at the printer when the President’s Advisory Committee watched the president and his son whip up an angry lawless mob, urging them to give strength to patriots trying to overturn an election he insisted was stolen)

The principles of equality and consent mean that all are equal before the law. No one is above the law, and no one is privileged to ignore the law, just as no one is outside the law in terms of its protection.

In his Lyceum Address, a young Abraham Lincoln warned of two results of a growing disregard for the rule of law. The first is mob rule: “whenever the vicious portion of [our] population shall be permitted to gather in bands of hundreds and thousands, and burn churches, ravage and rob provision stores, throw printing-presses into rivers, shoot editors, and hang and burn obnoxious persons at pleasure and with impunity, depend upon it, this government cannot last.”

But Lincoln also warned of those of great ambition who thirst for distinction and, although “he would as willingly, perhaps more so, acquire it by doing good as harm, yet, that opportunity being past, and nothing left to be done in the way of building up, he would set
boldly to the task of pulling down.”

Whether of the Left or of the Right, both mob rule and tyrannical rule violate the rule of law because both are rule by the base passions rather than the better angels of our nature. Both equally threaten our constitutional order.

Then the loyal, shameless Miller picks up his trowel

When crimes go unpunished or when good men do nothing, the lawless in spirit will become lawless in practice, leading to violence and demagoguery.

Patriotic education must have at its center a respect for the rule of law, including the Declaration and the Constitution, so that we have what John Adams called “a government of laws, and not of men.”

As for “SLAVERY”, no worries, we weren’t doing anything everyone else wasn’t doing, PLUS:

Thomas Jefferson also held slaves, and yet included in his original draft of the Declaration a strong condemnation of slavery, which was removed at the insistence of certain slaveholding delegates. Inscribed in marble at his memorial in Washington, D.C. is Jefferson’s foreboding reference to the injustice of slavery: “I tremble for my country when I reflect that
God is just; that His justice cannot sleep forever.”

James Madison saw to it at the Constitutional Convention that, even when the Constitution
compromised with slavery, it never used the word “slave” to do so. No mere semantics, he insisted that it was “wrong to admit in the Constitution the idea that there could be property in men.”

Which is why, the historical reason, boys and girls, we have THE n-word today. Forget about those other thousands of words you can look up that start with N — you know the word we’re talking about. Don’t say it, and everything will be cool. Unity and healing, y’all.

By the way, typical of “group rights” group-think, President Biden (got to wish him luck) immediately disbanded the 1776 Commission by executive order.

[1]

pelf/pelf/nounARCHAIC

1. money, especially when gained in a dishonest or dishonorable way.”damnation dog thee and thy wretched pelf!”

[2] on American slavery and abolition:

The most common charge levelled [sic] against the founders, and hence against our country itself, is that they were hypocrites who didn’t believe in their stated principles, and therefore the country they built rests on a lie. This charge is untrue, and has done enormous damage, especially in recent years, with a devastating effect on our civic unity and social fabric. 

Many Americans labor under the illusion that slavery was somehow a uniquely American evil. It is essential to insist at the outset that the institution be seen in a much broader perspective. It is very hard for people brought up in the comforts of modern America, in a time in which the idea that all human beings have inviolable rights and inherent dignity is almost taken for granted, to imagine the cruelties and enormities that were endemic in earlier times. But the unfortunate fact is that the institution of slavery has been more the rule than the exception throughout human history.

…The foundation of our Republic planted the seeds of the death of slavery in America. The Declaration’s
unqualified proclamation of human equality flatly contradicted the existence of human bondage and, along
with the Constitution’s compromises understood in light of that proposition, set the stage for abolition.
Indeed, the movement to abolish slavery that first began in the United States led the way in bringing about the end of legal slavery.

This conflict was resolved, but at a cost of more than 600,000 lives. Constitutional amendments were passed to abolish slavery, grant equal protection under the law, and guarantee the right to vote regardless of race. Yet the damage done by the denial of core American principles and by the attempted substitution of a theory of group rights in their place proved widespread and long-lasting. These, indeed, are the direct ancestors of some of the destructive theories that today divide our people and tear at the fabric of our country. 

[3] The, like, totally unfair tyranny of “Civil Rights”

The Civil Rights Movement was almost immediately turned to programs that ran counter to the lofty ideals of the founders. The ideas that drove this change had been growing in America for decades, and they distorted many areas of policy in the half century that followed. Among the distortions was the abandonment of nondiscrimination and equal opportunity in favor of “group rights” not unlike those advanced by Calhoun and his followers. The justification for reversing the promise of color-blind civil rights was that past discrimination requires present effort, or affirmative action in the form of preferential treatment, to overcome long-accrued inequalities. Those forms of preferential treatment built up in our system over time, first in administrative rulings, then executive orders, later in congressionally passed law, and finally were sanctified by the Supreme Court. 

[4] This includes restoring patriotic education that teaches the truth about America. That doesn’t mean ignoring the faults in our past, but rather viewing our history clearly and wholly, with reverence and love. We must also prioritize personal responsibility and fulfilling the duties we have toward one another as citizens. Above all, we must stand up to the petty tyrants in every sphere who demand that we speak only of America’s sins while denying her greatness. At home, in school, at the workplace, and in the world, it is the people—and only the people—who have the power to stand up for America and defend our way of life.

The GOP, after failing to overturn certified election results, is now the party of healing and calming things down, blaming angry Democrats for once again stirring the shit pot by dwelling on an unfortunate invasion of the Capitol nobody saw coming. The title above comes from the equally compelling initial response of official Republicans — that the mob in Trump merch that laid siege to the Capitol was actually, probably, a bunch of radical Antifa and Black Lives Matter terrorists (in white face, presumably) looking to make innocent Trump supporters look bad. You had Trump loyalist Matt Gaetz, from the floor of Congress, indignantly stating this self-evident truth:

I know Matt would appreciate the rugged, masculine frame I put his fighting words in. Matt, I must add, seems to be a total douchebag, although very entitled and coming by it honestly. One can’t help but applaud the sophistication of his defiant “I Know You Are But What am I?”. Far more violence by the LEFT than by his people, you dig, not just a little, but worse by a mile, by far more than a mile.

And, although all FBI threat assessments in recent years (and, notably, there was no threat assessment issued prior to the Trump rage riot of January 6) and leading up to a locked down inauguration, support the opposite of this claim, there is no other reason to doubt Mr. Gaetz’s veracity. As Alan Dershowitz dementedly pointed out defending Trump in his first impeachment “trial”: if he truly believed he wasn’t lying, or if he lied for what he truly believed were the best interests of the country, then he wasn’t lying.

Also, of course, since Reagan ended the Fairness Doctrine in 1987 [1], there is no penalty in American politics for telling massive, easily disprovable lies, which can now be broadcast to the nation with no consequences for the untruthful (you can always later retract any reports based on lies, reported in error, that could make you liable for a crime). As the president knows very well, unless you lie under oath, and they have the balls to indict you, and they can prove you had the intent to commit perjury (rather than simply, say, a ratlike survival instinct), there is no harm and no foul for public lying. They let you do it, when you’re a star.

Virtually all kills in political street confrontations in the USA have been racked up by white male killers from the extreme right, lately Trump’s army — but, it may be equally true that this is false, no? It is considered gauche and provocative to call attention to the sickening fact that angry, armed white men railing in the name of some kind of liberty have killed virtually everybody who was killed by domestic terrorists in the U.S., whether you call these goon squads “right wing militias”, “patriotic white supremacists”, “lynch mobs”, “gunmen” or aspiring “death squads”.

But, of course, that kind of opinion is in the eye of the beholder, really. No facts can be cited, since no records of such violence are kept, or even reported in our newspapers or on TV. When you have an armed mob of angry white men descending on the statehouse in Michigan, pursuant to an angry presidential tweet urging them to rise up and fight the tyranny of a Democrat [sic] governor who is stealing their right to infect whoever the hell they want, and members of said armed mob are later arrested for a conspiracy to kidnap, try and execute the governor, you can say this:

The purpose of these kind of idiotic statements is to nullify any reasonable reliance on inconvenient fact, to destroy critical thinking and make everything subject to “skepticism”. The DOJ at the time of the arrest of these terrorists in Michigan was run by supreme Trump loyalist Bill Barr (a disappointment to the boss when he arbitrarily would not cross certain legal lines for fear of prosecution by a future DOJ). The current FBI director was appointed by Trump, after one who wouldn’t play ball was fired for not dropping an investigation into Trump’s friend, who later pled guilty to a felony and had to be pardoned. These Trump appointees, Barr and FBI director Christopher Wray, had evidence that armed thugs in Michigan had been actively planning the kidnapping, “trial” and public execution of a sitting U.S. governor. The FBI arrested these men, they have been charged with serious crimes and will stand trial in an actual court.

Of course, we’ll have to see if this is a problem. Kraken-releasing Flynn attorney Sidney Powell may have an argument that it’s no problem at all. “Sidney said to me, before Rudy fired her, and many times since — and I’m not paying that Italian shyster for the shit legal service he claims to have provided me and is now trying to gouge me for — Sidney said ‘this is maybe no problem at all, sir’. They all call me ‘sir’, I don’t know why, I tell them to call me Fuckface like my closest friends do, but, you know, I have the best people, the best people…”

We’ll have to see if there’s a problem.

Meanwhile, it is quite possible, according to the Sedition Caucus that attempted to overturn certified election results in several states, that, just days before Trump leaves office, dangerous and insane RADICAL DEMOCRAT hoards finally went mad and set off to lynch the Vice President, Nancy Pelosi, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and others. We’ll have to see if this is true. We’ll have to see if there’s maybe a problem. You never know until you see, and sometimes, when you see, you still don’t know. We’ll have to see, you know?

[1] Heather Cox Richardson:

The roots of modern right-wing extremism lie in the post-World War II reaction to FDR’s New Deal and the Republican embrace of it under President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Opponents of an active government insisted that it undermined American liberty by redistributing tax dollars from hardworking white men to those eager for a handout—usually Black men, in their telling. Modern government, they insisted, was bringing socialism to America. They set out to combat it, trying to slash the government back to the form it took in the 1920s.

Their job got easier after 1987, when the Fairness Doctrine ended. That Federal Communications Commission policy had required public media channels to base their stories on fact and to present both sides of a question. When it was gone, talk radio took off, hosted by radio jocks like Rush Limbaugh who contrasted their ideal country with what they saw as the socialism around them: a world in which hardworking white men who took care of their wives and children were hemmed in by government that was taxing them to give benefits to lazy people of color and “Feminazis.” These “Liberals” were undermining the country and the family, aided and abetted by lawmakers building a big government that sucked tax dollars.

source

After the Civil War Congress amended the Constitution to abolish slavery (13th), extend equal protection of the laws to all citizens (14th) and ensure that male former slaves and previously freed black men could vote (15th). Each of these Amendments had a loophole or two that could be quickly exploited by the enemies of equality under law.

The thirteenth left open a loophole that allows the involuntary servitude of convicts, which has come in very handy for American business (and is indispensable to the State of California in fighting increasingly severe wildfires). The fourteenth was almost immediately judicially nullified, for use by individuals, for close to a century, (though corporate “persons” made excellent use of it all along) and states were allowed to apply equal protection and due process of law as they saw fit, under “States Rights”. As for the Fifteenth, well, states that didn’t want “black” voting were very creative in coming up with ways of legally quelling it, when they weren’t simply terrorizing potential voters by letting people lynch them.

There is this third section of the 14th Amendment, the amendment intended to extend the protected rights of federal citizenship (specifically the Bill of Rights) to the citizens of all states and has, since 1963, been used countless times to vindicate the rights of those unconstitutionally screwed by state and local governments nationwide. Section three was included because men who had engaged in violent insurrection against the United States were coming back into Congress, and fighting to be heard in lawmaking. We didn’t want blood-smeared traitors, who had recently endorsed the butchering of our army, sitting in the national legislature, making speeches for the slaveholders who’d so recently been robbed of so much of their wealth after losing the war.

Section three of the Fourteenth Amendment is a historical footnote today, a legal oddity that spells out no procedure, but is intriguing nonetheless in light of the continued endorsement of violent insurrection (“this is a moment for unity and healing” [1] “let insurrectionist bygones by bygones, the president learned his lesson” [2] “don’t divide us further, libtard cucks!” [3]) by many members of the Republican party. Like the ones who voted yesterday against Congress officially asking Pence to invoke the 25th Amendment to remove an increasingly desperate, out-of-control president whose predictably wild criminality, including calls seeking to rig the vote count and to violent insurrection inside the Capitol by extremist militias, has soared as uncontrollably as the rampaging pandemic he bears not a whit of responsibility for. If a few breaks had gone differently (for instance if hero Capitol cop Eugene Goodman had not led rioters away from an unsecured door of the Senate chamber) there would likely have been a hostage situation in the Capitol. I wonder how Republican unifiers would have spun Mike Pence swinging from a gibbet [4].

Well, as always, you be the judge. Here’s that pertinent part of the 14th Amendment, see if it applies to anyone you can think of.

Section 3:

No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability. 

[1]

The federal government has had no response whatsoever to Trump’s attempted putsch the other day. Silence from the federal government — no statement from any federal authority. So, you know, we can all move on, because Mr. Trump is quietly heading to Alamo, Texas, to run his perfectly appropriate insurrection from there, as the FBI suddenly gets busy tracking rightwing militia (domestic terrorist) plans for the coming week. Too bad about Pence, though. Let’s have unity and healing, y’all!

[2]

No reason to make people feel bad, we’ve heard apologies from some who were arrested after storming Congress chanting “Hang Mike Pence”. They admit they made a mistake. They regret their actions, or at least they say they do after they’re arrested, some of them. Very fine people, on all sides, on all sides!

[3]

After all, as our raging president continues to claim, this election was stolen from him by the traitorous radical Left, who are intent on dictatorship after mobilizing the Blacks, the Mexicans, Muslims, the Chinese, Iran, the Mass Media, Mass Transit, transsexuals, homosexuals, homophiles, homophones, atheists, secular humanists, Communists, Leninists, Socialists, Liberals, Maoists, Trotskyites, disloyal Republicans, Jews, Puerto Ricans, Samoans, and the cannibal pedophile elites who run Hollywood and the Democrat [sic] party. They know who they fucking are!

[4]

How is it that Congress has not passed rules for mask wearing in the House and Senate? Several members of Congress were infected with COVID during the lockdown when Congress was under siege by an armed right-wing mob. They were infected by Republican colleagues who refused to wear masks. Representative Pramila Jayapal, who was infected by these proud “anti-maskers”, reported that they mocked the attempts of others to give them masks. How, even now, that is there no rule in place? Trumpist contrarianism, yo. Time for unity and healing, bitches.