Manifest Destiny. The Lost Cause. Rugged Individualism. Social Darwinism. The War to End War. Isolationism. Separate But Equal. American Exceptionalism. The Shining City on the hill. Climate Change Skepticism. The Death Tax. White Supremacy. States’ Rights. Eugenics. Race-neutral color-blindness. Morning in America. Law and Order. Birtherism. Libertarianism. Felon disenfranchisement. Russiagate. Pro-life.Illegal Aliens. Second Amendment solutions. MAGA, man.
Anarchist Jurisdictions [1].
Catchy slogans are great and American as apple pie and The Peculiar Institution. I have nothing against slogans, as slogans. It’s just that so many of them are so clearly stupid and destructive, created by wordsmiths, hired by “ideologues,” to serve what a less measured blogger might call “evil.” Lately we have a new one, created for a lawyered up, all-powerful Unitary Executive who is having walls built around the White House (that the Anarchists and leftist fascists he denounces are paying for) to symbolize his oneness with the people who elected him: Anarchist Jurisdictions.
These are places where teaching students the history of American slavery and our long, sluggish struggle against violent racism and other social evils is done openly. These Anarchist Jurisdictions do not obey the unwritten laws we believe to be sacred and inviolable– the truths we hold to be self-evident and unalienable [2], like our freedom itself. The president has threatened to come down hard on any state or city that is teaching young people about America’s history of racist violence. Anarchist jurisdictions, you understand. Defund the police? Defund your fucking n-word curriculum!Anarchist Jurisdictions!
Or, as Bill Barr, Mike Pompeo and Mike Pence would call them Anti-Christ Jurisdictions. These are places where God’s plan for Christendom and mankind and His generous gift of His only Son’s Uniquely Precious Life, slaughtered by (well, you know who) to cleanse the world’s Original Sin (and also our extra-crispy sin) is denigrated. De-NIG-grated. These Anti-Christ Jurisdictions refuse to recognize the divinity and sovereignty of Jesus Christ. Of Jesus Christ!While claiming we are unChristian in our hearts. US!!!
We will bring the fist of justice down hard on these rabid dogs, fight these infidels with every righteous weapon in Jesus Christ’s great arsenal.We will extirpate this sinfulness, starting in every Godless Anarchist, Anti-Christ Jurisdiction we designate!
[1]
We will leave aside, for purposes of this discussion, a small problem with this slogan, an inherent contradiction, if you like.
Jurisdiction is defined as: the practical authority granted to a legal body to administer justice, as defined by the kind of case, and the location of the issue. In federations like the United States, areas of jurisdiction apply to local, state, and federal levels. Wikipedia
[2]
Unalienable describes things, especially rights, that cannot be taken away, denied, or transferred to another person. Unalienable means the same thing as inalienable, which is now the standard term.
Over the course of Donald Trump’s increasingly divorced from reality presidency (speaking of Covid-19 in the past tense as US leads the world in infections and deaths, railing against baseless witch hunts against the stable genius, denying Russian meddling in 2020 in spite of several reports, including the bipartisan Republican-led Senate report, and so on) it is tempting, to people like me, to compare the president to current dictators and fascist leaders of the past.
Some regard these comparisons as hyperbole. “Please, Hitler killed MILLIONS! Mussolini made his enemies drink oil until they shit themselves! Please! You dilute the monstrousness of world-class, history-shaping fascists by comparing this relatively mild-mannered autocrat to them!”
So while a president who believes his power is virtually absolute, supported by an Attorney General who shares his beliefs in a Unitary Executive whose powers may not be legitimately checked or balanced by judges or Congress, may resemble an authoritarian strongman in various ways, one should be very careful comparing a US president, whatever his flaws of excesses, to, say, Hitler.
All that said, neo-Nazis all love Mr. Trump, a man who speaks their language, backing them on every issue dear to them. Recently German far-right extremists, in Berlin, mounted a pro-Trump rally. I’m not saying these Hitler-revering Germans should have the last word on Mr. Trump’s politics and potential, I’m just sayin’.
It’s impossible to follow every dirty scheme the party of Trump is involved in. The sheer number of sickening abuses of power is mind-numbing. So you check out, for the sake of your mental health, and focus on not going insane. That is part of Trump’s plan, to emotionally wear out everybody who is not a full-time diehard hater or well-rewarded loyalist. I offer a quick take on one easy to follow scandal:
Story breaks that Louis DeJoy, Trump donor and head of campaign finance for the RNC and Donald J. Trump for President, Inc. until his recent appointment as Postmaster General of the UPSS, allegedly pressured his employees to donate to the Republican party and later reimbursed them. This is illegal. Trump is asked by a reporter whether DeJoy should face prosecution. Trump answers, with some cuteness, that if DeJoy did what he’s accused of that maybe he should be investigated.
The president then points out, falsely, that DeJoy was appointed by a bipartisan commission. For the record: the “bipartisan commission” claim is an outright lie, since Trump appointed them all, 4 Republicans and 2 Democrats, ensuring 4-2 votes and Trump “wins” on everything relating to the Postal Service. Google that “bipartisan” claim and you will learn:
Trump also praised DeJoy on Monday and emphasized that the postmaster general was appointed by a “bipartisan commission,” rather than by the president. While DeJoy was appointed by the USPS board of governors—which is made up of four Republicans and two Democrats, all of whom were appointed by Trump—his selection as postmaster general has recently become a source of controversy. DeJoy was initially suggested by USPS board chair Robert Duncan, who holds leadership roles in multiple GOP super PACs, rather than the independent executive search firm hired to find a new postmaster general, Duncan has testified to Congress, and former board member David Williams testified that he resigned from the board partially due to DeJoy’s appointment, believing he was not qualified for the position.
Recalling that Mitch McConnell had blocked numerous Obama appointments, you follow that thread of the story and learn, to nobody’s surprise:
When the President took office three and a half years ago, he inherited an empty Board of Governors. For years, Congress had refused to confirm any of Barack Obama’s nominees to the Board, due to infighting on both sides of the aisle [note Time’s stunning even-handedness in not pinning the refusal to hold confirmation hearings on McConnell — ed] . Trump was therefore handed the opportunity to fill the Board of Governors with a majority of members—many of whom are business executives with ties to the Republican party—who shared his cost-cutting vision.
“I had never heard of anything like it in the U.S. government,” says James Sauber, chief of staff for the National Association of Letter Carriers, of the empty Board of Governors. “It was pretty extraordinary.”
Here’s how a fundamentally lawless, unethical man like McConnell makes something like this work (and it’s also been done with federal judgeships and at the Federal Election Commission– which hasn’t had a quorum for years — and other government oversight agencies)
There are nine slots allotted for the USPS Board of Governors. They function in a capacity akin a corporate board of a company, collectively appointing a Postmaster General and Deputy Postmaster General. The board is designed to be bipartisan by nature. While a sitting President appoints members when vacancies arise, no more than five members can be from the same party, and all nominees are subject to Congressional confirmation. Members are also elected to serve for seven year terms, ensuring that their tenure lasts through at least one Presidential administration.
By 2014, there were fewer than six members on the Board of Governors, which meant the body lacked a quorum and was unable to perform key functions. But while Obama nominated seven people to fill those vacancies, according to a 2018 report from the Congressional Research Service, none received a vote in the Senate [note again the restraint of Time in not stating what is also true, and perhaps more to the point: many Obama nominees were never allowed a hearing or vote by McConnell — ed. (1)].
No president can appoint more than five of the nine from his own party. Not a problem. Instead of nine, Trump appoints SIX, four from his party, two from the enemy party. Easy. Now he can win every vote 4-2. Nothing to it, if you have no scruples about anything but winning, your party’s as shameless as you are and your top law enforcement officer is a modern day Roy Cohn.
[1] According to the article, Bernie Sanders apparently blocked two nominees who favored privatizing the Postal Service.
Why isn’t this “high profile” case front page news? It turns on the demonstrable falsity of Trump’s repeatedly debunked claims of massive voter fraud. These false claims are being actively spread by Putin, as well, according to US intelligence reports.
Trump v. Boockvar isthe federal lawsuit brought by Donald J. Trump for President, Inc. and the Republican National Committee to prevent the Democratic Attorney General of Pennsylvania and the Election Boards of all 67 Pennsylvania counties from making voting easier and safer during a pandemic. The aim of the lawsuit is clearly to suppress the vote in a state whose twenty Electoral College votes Trump won by less than one percent (0.7%) in 2016. The judge has allowed the case to proceed without evidence of voter fraud being presented by the president’s lawyers (who were ordered to produce evidence by August 14th)
A sitting president and his party’s national committee are using campaign donations to fund an expensive federal lawsuit, forcing the massive expenditure of tax payer funds by a state/defendant trying to make ends meet during a pandemic.
Incidentally, Trump’s claim in the case — that mail-in voting:
… denies any procedural visibility to candidates, political parties, and the public in general, thereby jeopardizing the free and fair public elections guaranteed by the United States and Pennsylvania Constitutions. The most recent election conducted in this Commonwealth and the public reaction to it demonstrate the harm caused by Defendants’ unconstitutional infringements of Plaintiffs’ rights. The continued enforcement of arbitrary and disparate policies and procedures regarding poll watcher access and ballot return and counting poses a severe threat to the credibility and integrity of, and public confidence in, Pennsylvania’s elections.
is not only unsupported by evidence (in apparent contempt of a judge’s order) but these claims are identical to Kremlin talking points about the upcoming US election [1]. How a federal lawsuit is allowed to go forward, unsupported by evidence of any kind, in spite of the unambiguous order of the federal judge that Plaintiff’s submit evidence or STATE THAT THEY HAVE NO EVIDENCE, is a modern American judicial mystery. The failure of the news media to report on it is a modern American media mystery.
Judge to Trump and Putin: put up or shut up!
The judge in the case, J. Nicholas Ranjan, a Trump appointee, ruled almost a month ago that Plaintiffs must submit evidence of the massive fraud they are claiming will take place if Pennsylvania’s voting modifications for the pandemic are allowed to go forward or STATE THAT THEY HAVE NO EVIDENCE.
Judge Ranjan didn’t necessarily want to make this order against his benefactors, Trump and the RNC, he granted defendants’ motions asking for that order. Trump and the RNC plainly didn’t have good enough arguments for the judge to allow him to deny the motion and let them continue the case without a shred of evidence.
A federal lawsuit where the incumbent president and his massively wealthy party are using campaign funds to fuel a suit against a state to prevent the expansion of voting in a presidential election, during a pandemic — based on MASSIVE FRAUD they have produced no evidence of — eh, nothing to see here.
NOTHING TO SEE HERE?
[1]
A bulletin from the Department of Homeland Security alleges that Russian state actors are seeking to “amplify criticisms of vote-by-mail” in the U.S. election, with specific critiques echoing those made by President Trump and his allies.
additionally:
A bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee report released in August found “irrefutable evidence of Russian meddling” in the 2016 election, concluding that Russia and China are both working to “disrupt our democracy, exacerbate societal divisions, and sow doubts about the legitimacy and integrity of our institutions, our electoral process and our republic.” National Counterintelligence and Security Center Director William Evanina said in a statement that Russia is actively working to “denigrate” former Vice President Joe Biden and “boost” Trump’s candidacy
I’ve noticed a mysterious little flurry of viewers to a post I wrote two years ago about Hannah Arendt and her view of thinking and creativity. It is lack of imagination, Arendt asserted, and the dumb obedience this crabbed view of the world produces, that leads men, seeking to escape loneliness (among other things) to join movements in which they may be required to function as monsters, carry out unthinkably inhuman orders. They simply accept the rationale they are given, join a movement and execute the wishes of a Leader who may or may not be wise, capable or decent. A leader who may, in fact, be Adolf Hitler.
Adolf Eichmann, portrayed to this day as one of history’s most infamous monsters, was, as observed by Arendt during his sensational, important trial in Jerusalem, an unremarkable man of modest intellectual gifts who insisted it had been his duty to obey the laws of the new order in Germany. He spoke in cliches, often repeated stock Nazi phrases and was incapable of imagining that a regime that made mass murder ordinary, normal and lawful could have anything wrong with it. The several psychiatrists who examined him prior to his criminal trial in Jerusalem concluded he was not a “man obsessed with a dangerous and insatiable urge to kill” or a “perverted, sadistic personality” (as the prosecutor later wrote of Eichmann — and as the ad for the current Netflix offering about him suggests).
Half a dozen psychiatrists had certified him as “normal” — “More normal than I am after having examined him,” one of them was said to have exclaimed, while another had found that his whole psychological outlook, his attitude toward his wife and children, mother and father, brothers, sisters, and friends, was “not only normal but most desirable”– and finally the minister who had paid regular visits to him in prison after the Supreme Court had finished hearing his appeal reassured everybody by declaring Eichmann to be “a man with very positive ideas.”
(Eichmann in Jerusalem, pp. 25-26)
It was Eichmann’s utter lack of imagination, his willingness to believe what his superiors told him, his ambition to succeed and advance in his career, that made Eichmann the hardworking cog in the Nazi killing machine that he became. He was not troubled by conscience because what he was doing he had been legally ordered to do, he had only been doing his job. He literally could not imagine refusing to do his legal duty. A refusal to do it would have resulted in his own demotion, imprisonment, probably death — all unimaginably harsh and self-destructive outcomes. End of inquiry. Arendt was internationally vilified for “humanizing” this monster in her 1963 masterpiece. I’m with Hannah, she gives us a crucial understanding in her deep portrait of an otherwise ordinary enabler of evil.
In law school students are drilled in thinking through and articulating both sides of an argument, imagining as many avenues of legal attack to the client’s position as possible in order to defend against them. Rigorous thinking means sometimes considering ideas you might find repellant, overcoming the reflex to simply cast them out with a grunt of disgust. A mark of the agile mind, someone said (F. Scott Fitzgerald?) is being able to keep two contradictory thoughts in mind at the same time. We live in the instant information age, so here you go:
“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” [1]
We are not trained to be nimble, creative thinkers — we are trained to be earners and consumers, as well as reflexive moralists who do not dwell on crazy-making nuance. From birth, here in the United States, we are exposed to hour upon hour of commercial advertisements, teaching us what to buy. By the time we are in kindergarten we can recite countless commercial tag lines and sing (at least when I was a kid and every product had a catchy little tune attached) dozens of jingles. I often lament that I can easily sing the entire “Veep” (a lemon lime soft drink, circa 1961) jingle perfectly but can’t recite a single line of Shakespeare or the Bible accurately.
In a sense it’s not anyone’s fault that we are a largely superficial, stubbornly opinionated culture, we’ve become this way by design, for the massive profit of the beneficiaries of this commercialized state of affairs. Imagining a fundamentally different way of life is almost impossible, given the pervasiveness of the one being sold to us 24/7 and now, literally so: carried on smart devices in our pockets, with little notification sounds to remind us to look at them. We tend to latch on to whatever suits our views, gravitating to items that support our confirmation bias.
Every moral and political issue is reduced to an oversimplified false duality — yes or no. If you critique an extractive, highly polluting consumer society that may well be destroying the earth for short-term profit it is easy to see what you are: a Communist, a soul-dead enemy of freedom and liberty. There is no other frame to think about such things here, though a desperately needed one is evolving with things like The Green New Deal.
Thinking about crowds carrying torches, united in some cause, often a violent one, we can set them in virtually any epoch in history. The rationale of the march is always similar — we are in pain, we are afraid, we’re angry, we are the victims, we are going to kill the people who are victimizing us! It’s true that once we have murdered the evil bastards our miserable life remains pretty much the same, the anger, pain and fair have not vanished — but that just means we haven’t killed enough of them. It is the triumph of action without thought, without imagination, without Reason, that leads to every mass catastrophe (not caused by “Acts of God”) that humans have ever fallen into.
It’s tempting, of course, to make comparisons between a guy like Eichmann and some of the political actors of our time. What “belief system” must one accept to justify the caging of children forcefully ripped from their mothers’ arms? It’s tempting to compare the thousands in perfect solidarity at a Nuremberg rally to the crowds today at certain political rallies, the fascist goon squads of 1930s Germany to a gang of men who take up arms to protest the tyranny of mandated mask wearing to slow the spread of a deadly pandemic. These types can imagine only one version of the world, as they believe it is, with powerful, evil cannibal child molesters trying to gain the upper hand, doing whatever they can to destroy our cherished way of life.
These crowds live, as we all do today, in echo chambers that magnify whatever bias they had last night, the one they wake up with today. A few guys are getting incredibly rich running these massive echo chambers while the rest of us face ever greater peril from endlessly magnified real problems that require deep thought, serious discussion and ingenious solutions, problems that are reduced to idiotic black or white, red or blue, yay or nay.
Thinkers are easily killed by violent men of action, men with guns, ropes, bombs. Violent, unthinking emotion, time after time, prevails over reflection, understanding, mercy, wisdom. That doesn’t make the attempt to understand, to be merciful, foolish. Understanding, and imagining a better future, is the only chance we have against the hoards who increasingly believe that politically powerful cannibal child rapists are coming to get all of the little white, Christian children in America and that only one man, an admittedly flawed vessel– but one secretly filled with Christ’s love — can save them. Decency prevails, when indecency becomes impossible not to see. The unimaginable stink of the thing can finally wake dozing souls to say: enough, goddamn it.
But we have to think. We actually have to think.
[1] F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1936, yo. A year one would have done well to keep this test in mind.
He [AG Barr, interviewed on CNN] said that hostile foreign powers could send thousands of mail-in ballots to this year’s election, creating massive voter fraud. When pressed, Barr admitted there was no evidence for such a claim. The U.S. Intelligence Community has no evidence that foreign countries are trying to manipulate mail-in ballots.[Heather, this would be a great place to include a sentence on Republican “evidence” submitted in federal court two weeks ago]
Trump is also continuing his attacks on mail-in votes, insisting they will usher in voter fraud despite their widespread previous use that showed no evidence of fraud, and despite the fact that the president himself votes by mail. [or here]
Donald J. Trump for President, Inc. and the Republican National Committee, in compliance with the federal judge’s order, submitted documentary proof of massive vote by mail fraud (or stated that they had no proof) in Trump’s federal case against the State of Pennsylvania, Trump v. Boockvar. Rather than citing Barr’s admission, when pressed by an interviewer, that there is no evidence for such a claim, why not look at the filing by Plaintiffs in the federal court in Western Pennsylvania? Did they submit evidence or, as the judge ordered, did they state they had none, as the judge ordered them to do if they had none?
Americans are simply not being told anything about this “put up or shut up” moment in a federal lawsuit brought to limit voting by a party that has become used to making incendiary claims without evidence of any kind.
On the bright side, we are told today that Mr. Trump will cut through all the Deep State red tape and cure COVID-19 by November 1, or kill countless Americans trying an untested vaccine or vaccines. Either way, victory Donald!
I need to send the facts of Trump v. Boockvar to Bill Moyers and Janine Jackson at FAIR. How can it be that nobody is reporting on Trump’s non-existent evidence of voter fraud in a federal lawsuit about the immediate (and longer term) future of democracy? WTF?
In response to the pandemic, Pennsylvania made it easier for citizens to vote for president without going to polling places in person. In person voting is the preferred method for pandemic deniers to cast their votes, polls show. Pandemic deniers tend to be followers of the president who brilliantly handled the virus already, though his enemies keep snarkily pointing to the 1,000 Americans a day still dying from it, the “six million” who have allegedly beeninfected to date. A majority of Democratic voters appear to favor mail-in voting. So keeping down the number of votes cast by mail would appear to be the key to Trump winning the 20 electoral college votes of a battleground state he won by a fabulously slim 0.7% mandate in 2016– as well as every other state where it could be close.
Naturally, when they heard Pennsylvania was making it easier for absentee ballots to be cast, Trump and the RNC cried foul, fraud, unconstitutional, illegal, shameful, shameless, bloody murder, coup d’etat etc. They filed a federal lawsuit to stop it on June 29, 2020. You can see the history of this unreported on lawsuit and read all the filings in the case by clicking HERE.
The judge in that case, a Trump appointee named J. Nicholas Ranjan, ordered Plaintiffs to produce evidence of their claims of vote-by-mail fraud or state that they had no evidence. Donald J. Trump for President and the RNC were not deterred, apparently submitting 524 pages of clippings from Breitbart and FOX news, pages containing many accusations of shameless, massive electoral fraud but no proof of anything. After the judge stayed the case until October 5 for Pennsylvania courts to decide state law claims, Trump’s lawyers, on Friday, filed a request for a preliminary injunction– to prevent irreparable harm to the Trump campaign. It reads in part:
Without this relief, Defendants could begin irreversibly commingling potentially illegally cast ballots with other ballots from mid-to-late September 2020. Therefore, to prevent irreparable, constitutional harm to them and their fundamental rights, including without limitation their right to free, fair, and honest elections, and to preserve the ability to obtain an accurate count of the validly cast ballots in the November 3, 3030 General Election if this Court or any other court determines that any such ballots have been illegally cast, Plaintiffs ask this Court to modify the stay in its August 23, 2020 Order (ECF # 410) to provide for limited, preliminary injunctive relief and to modify the stay lifting date from October 5, 2020 to September 14, 2020.
Let’s run a bit of that back, because my “punchline” is embedded in legalese and is easy to miss.
…their right to free, fair, and honest elections, and to preserve the ability to obtain an accurate count of the validly cast ballots in the November 3, 3030 General Election
Trump’s motion was submitted with a glaring typo that refers to an election 1,010 years in the future, indicating either sloppiness in preparing the hurried application for emergency relief — or a more sinister intent to retain power by contesting election results for the next thousand years.
The second theory makes sense, from a poetic, non-evidence based point of view. Hitler and the original Nazis often vowed that their racially purereign would be “The Thousand Year Reich.” Their administration was in power twelve years before self-destructing, as any regime based on hatred, rage, brutality and mass murder ultimately must destroy itself. Still, there are shades of so many of the original Nazi beliefs and techniques among Mr. Trump’s hard core of personally loyal party of the Leader zealots, haters and scofflaws, that it’s no surprise their lawyers made this Freudian slip.
Now if only the nationalnews media would report on this crucial election case! Drawing attention to the president’s Twitter endorsement of truckloads of armed men driving in a caravan to violently confront protesters in Portland is important — but so is this federal case about how actual votes will actually be legally cast in 2020.
Fascists and their followers are capable of anything, have no shame, and they never sleep; neither can the rest of us, until our imperfect but crucial democracy is protected.
The analysis below is from Janine Jackson’s excellent Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) podcast CounterSpin. For starters, though, do youthink flagrantly violating the 1939 Hatch Act (it is unlawful to use the trappings of the office you hold to campaign for re-election) is nothing more than a violation of the The Emoluments Clause or harmless Abuses of Power or Obstruction of Congress?Here’s Janine:
… Al Gore was accused of violating the Hatch Act for making campaign fundraising phone calls from his White House office as vice president. The New York Times editorial page (3/5/97) called for an independent counsel to launch a major investigation; the House spent $7 million investigating, and the Senate held three months of hearings.
Here is her whole piece:
After the spectacle of a Democratic National Convention featuring more Republicans than Latinos, Americans got a Republican Convention featuring—to pick just one thing— gleeful violations of the Hatch Act. That’s the law that prohibits federal employees from taking part in partisan political activities. So, things like having the Secretary of State make a campaign speech from Jerusalem, where they’re engaged on state business, or the first lady stumping with the White House Rose Garden as backdrop, or the head of Homeland Security performing a naturalization ceremony, with Trump looking on, as part of the convention—all patently illegal and unethical.
USA Today (8/26/20) framed the Trump campaign’s flagrant violation of laws against the use of the Executive Branch for political purposes as a partisan disagreement.
But besides framing it as “many Democrats were outraged,” as did USA Today (8/26/20), elite media normalized the behavior with passivity, like the New York Times headline (8/26/20), pointed out by Eric Boehlert in his newsletter Press Run (8/27/20), “At RNC, Trump Uses Tools of Presidency in Aim to Broaden Appeal.”
The same press corps for whom this is just “oh there he goes, breaking with precedent again,” had a very different response, Boehlert reminds, when Al Gore was accused of violating the Hatch Act for making campaign fundraising phone calls from his White House office as vice president. The New York Times editorial page (3/5/97) called for an independent counsel to launch a major investigation; the House spent $7 million investigating, and the Senate held three months of hearings.
But Trump, he’s just “using the tools of presidency” (or he “leverages powers of office,” as an updated version of the headline read).
For the New York Times (8/3/20), Trump threatening to ban a company based on the nationality of its owners, and then demanding a cut of any resulting forced sale, is simply an “impulse to act as CEO” that his “predecessors would have avoided.”
It evokes another recent Times headline, when Trump was threatening to ban the app TikTok, explicitly because of its “Chinese ownership”—or else, he said, it could get taken over by Microsoft, in which case the US Treasury should get a cut since it was his threat that made the sale possible? The BBC, with restraint, called that “almost Mafia-like behavior,” but, as Dan Froomkin of Press Watch spotlighted (Twitter, 8/4/20), the New York Times (8/3/20) described it in a headline as Trump’s “Impulse to Act as CEO to Corporate America”—his “interventions in company dealings based on his own instincts” being, you guessed it, “a departure” from the “approach of predecessors.”
Elite journalists are no doubt clearing their shelves for the awards they expect to win for the fearless and high-minded excoriations of the Trump presidency they will write…when it’s over. Too bad they can’t muster up that courage while it matters.
A brutal method some humans with poweruse to dominate others is violently punishing them for understandable anger that they themselves provoked in the other. You treat people unfairly, even brutally, and ruthlessly keep the pressure on them. Then, when resentment finally turns to anger, use violence to “put down” that anger and restore “law and order”.
We can see this same mechanism at work in our personal lives, when somebody insists we have no right to our strong feelings — no matter what may have caused them.
On a political level, it works the same way. Subjugate them, abuse them, make them mad, when they get mad point out that they are dangerous and insane, then surround them with the now ubiquitous SWAT teams empowered to use any violent means necessary to “keep the peace”. SWAT, we learn from the internet, is Special Weapons and Tactics, and these highly militarized police teams originated in Los Angeles in the late sixties in response to the Watts Riots.
Works every time, if you have a monopoly on state violence, make and enforce the laws, you have nothing to fear but the injury and death of as many people you don’t care about as needed to maintain the status quo. If the enraged bastards don’t like it, fuck ’em, bring in the militarized anti-insurgency riot police.
You can’t read any serious history of the United States and not understand that most of today’s American blacks are the descendants of chattel slaves (property with “no rights a white man is bound to respect”[1]) and, after the end of slavery, the victims of more than a century of unpunished, state-tolerated terrorism by white supremacists. You’d have to be Bill Barr to insist that open racism, upheld by law and traditionally enforced by deadly violence, is not a large part of our history as a society. Law enforcement and our legal system have been integral to this arrangement, always steadfastly protecting private property, if not always human life.
In law school our Constitutional Law casebook had a footnote to a case called US v. Cruikshank. The footnote was one sentence, to the effect that federal enforcement of all race-motivated violence had been left to the criminal codes of the individual states as a result of Cruikshank. Since every case in our system has a number for citation, and Cruikshank’s is 92 U.S. 542, I was able to read the legalistic Supreme Court decision that decided:
that the Bill of Rights did not apply to private actors or to state governments despite the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment.
The case arose from a massive racist pogrom in Grant Parish, Louisiana where a huge army of angry local whites attacked and slaughtered at least 150 blacks who were in Colfax, some of whom (a small group of armed black Civil War veterans) were defending the duly elected government. The whites were not having this, killed the black defenders as they surrendered, went into a frenzy of murderous violence that left dozens of mutilated, burnt bodies — the corpses of men, women and children– all over Colfax on Easter Sunday, 1873.
Ninety-eight perpetrators were identified and eventually charged by the newly created US Attorney in Louisiana (the DOJ was created to enforce citizens’ rights under the Fourteenth Amendment). By the time the case got to the Supreme Court only three or four defendants were still involved — charges against the rest had all evaporated. When the case got to the Supreme Court our unappealable justices ruled — uh, nothing to see here, the indictments were faultily drafted, riddled with fatal flaws — for example, the DOJ’s absurd contention that defendants evinced:
an intent to deprive the same persons of the ‘free exercise and enjoyment of the right and privilege to the full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings for the security of persons and property’ enjoyed by white citizens.
plus, the new laws were confusing, unenforceable, an intrusion onto the constitutionally protected criminal prosecution monopoly of the individual states, further, it is the right of each of the defeated Confederate States to decide how best to accommodate their own Negros to full citizen status and equal protection of the privileges and immunities newly conferred upon their, until recently, chattel, selves (not to say ‘persons’).
The Supreme Court case ruled strictly on the law, made almost no mention of the underlying racially-motivated massacre of blacks by a racist white “militia” of former Confederate defenders of “the Lost Cause.”
This case became the unappealable legal framework for the hundred years of anti-black terrorism that followed — let the states decide how to deal with their own citizens, black and WHITE alike. Notably, (as in Kavanaugh’s recent ruling banning extension of mail-in voting in Wisconsin that made only a glancing reference to the pandemic) the case stuck to a narrow question of law. There was no mention of the massacre itself, only of two or three murdered individuals, two blacks (one named Tillman, as I recall) and a white, and whether Cruikshank et al’s killing of them constituted an enforceably unconstitutional deprivation of a legitimately protected federal right [2].
I was gratified to see that someone has finally written a full book-length treatment of this atrocity (there was almost complete darkness on the subject when I was in law school, right before the turn of the century), it is referred to in this excellent (and horrific) short opinion piece The Massacre That Emboldened White Supremacistsfrom the New York Times.
The citizens of our nation are famously inattentive to our history. For example, from the above opinion piece:
As Americans debate the merit of tearing down monuments to founding fathers, a monument to the men who massacred Black Americans in Colfax 147 years ago stands unopposed and largely unnoticed. Two blocks off Main Street, a 12-foot marble obelisk is the focal point of the Colfax cemetery. An inscription carved into its base declares it was “erected to the memory of the heroes” who “fell in the Colfax Riot fighting for white supremacy.” On the north side of the present-day courthouse, a historical marker reads, “On this site occurred the Colfax Riot in which three white men and 150 negroes were slain” and added that the episode “marked the end of carpetbag misrule in the South.”
During an ongoing nationwide protest over the continued brutality toward and killing of unarmed blacks by police, unarmed blacks continue to be brutalized and killed by police. Last week, a Wisconsin man named Jacob Blake was shot by police seven times, in the back, for … as far as we know, being an alleged domestic violence perpetrator with a warrant out for his arrest — who may have been in possession of a hidden knife.
A Kenosha police spokesman told the news media that Blake was reaching into his car for a knife, or perhaps even had a knife on his person, when police shot him seven times, in the back. Maybe that accounts for why the man, who amazingly survived seven bullets in the back, had been shackled to his hospital bed until yesterday– you can’t be too careful with a man who might have been reaching for a knife after having an arrest warrant for misdemeanor domestic violence and third degree sexual assault filed against him last month. Never mind that he is currently paralyzed with a spinal injury caused by a police bullet– we can’t be too careful with potentially violent perps like Jacob Blake!
As often in these cases, the sordid-sounding history of the man killed or severely injured by the police is immediately brought into the story. Police usually don’t shoot innocent people, the familiar story goes, this guy was a THUG. He had a KNIFE and CRIMINAL INTENT. He had an arrest warrant against him for A SEX CRIME. Trayvon Martin, the teenager killed by a white vigilante who shot him to death “standing his ground” under Florida law, was reputed to have had marijuana in his system when he died.Michael Brown, the kid shot to death in Ferguson, Mo., was shown, on store surveillance video, stealing a box of cigars or something mere hours before he was killedby a police officer. George Floyd was a convicted FELON! Even though he was meekly cooperating with the police when they killed him, he was BIG and REALLY SCARY!! Breonna Taylor, the Emergency Medical Technician shot to death in her own apartment in the middle of the night by plain-clothes officers who broke down her door pursuant to an erroneous no-knock warrant? Suspected (although mistakenly, as it turned out) site of an illegal drug storehouse!!!
I don’t know how a black person in America bears this kind of regular, obscene outrage, day after day, year after year, century upon century. I am not black, and my head keeps threatening to explode every time I hear the latest fucking variation on the same goddamned story about some guy who might be reaching for a knife who needed to be shot over and over by those duty-bound to serve and protect.
Humor break (c/o a friend earlier today):
A racist, a hypocrite and a liar walk into a bar.
The bartender says: “what are you having, Mr. President?”
Of course, every American knows that joke is bullshit and totally implausible bullshit, at that. The president famously doesn’t take a sip of alcohol, having seen his older brother die of alcoholism (and being too nice, which is what really killed him, according to his little brother). The president is high on life, obviously, and gets his joyfulness the natural way — by being a good person and leading a great life.
Still, there’s that small kernel of truth in the joke since the man is a racist, a hypocrite and a liar many times over. He can’t help it, that’s just the way he is, has always been, nothing he can do about it.
Except to proclaim himself the Law and Order President. The most lawless man ever to sit in the Oval Office, a man openly contemptuous of all rules, traditions and norms, and many laws as well (all of those things are for LOSERS), positions himself as the Law and Order candidate. He’s running against his own failure to end the American Carnage he warned of in his first State of the Union, in every dark, divisive, incendiary speech he’s made since. Presumably, since he’s the infallible strongman who broke it, he’s the only one who can fix it.
ROTFLMAO!
[1] From no less an authority than Chief Justice Roger Taney of the Supreme Court, in the infamous 1857 Dred Scott decision that was one of the factors leading to the Civil War.
[2] The Cruikshank court dismissed the indictments against every remainingwhite man who rode into town as part of that enraged army and participated in the indiscriminate slaughter, after delineating the charges in its opening section:
This was an indictment for conspiracy under the sixth section of the act of May 30, 1870, known as the Enforcement Act (16 Stat. 140), and consisted of thirty-two counts.
The first count was for banding together, with intent ‘unlawfully and feloniously to injure, oppress, threaten, and intimidate’ two citizens of the United States, ‘of African descent and persons of color,’ ‘with the unlawful and felonious intent thereby’ them ‘to hinder and prevent in their respective free exercise and enjoyment of their lawful right and privilege to peaceably assemble together with each other and with other citizens of the said United States for a peaceable and lawful purpose.’
The second avers an intent to hinder and prevent the exercise by the same persons of the ‘right to keep and bear arms for a lawful purpose.’
The third avers an intent to deprive the same persons ‘of their respective several lives and liberty of person, without due process of law.’
The fourth avers an intent to deprive the same persons of the ‘free exercise and enjoyment of the right and privilege to the full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings for the security of persons and property’ enjoyed by white citizens.
The fifth avers an intent to hinder and prevent the same persons ‘in the exercise and enjoyment of the rights, privileges, immunities, and protection granted and secured to them respectively as citizens of the said United States, and as citizens of the said State of Louisiana, by reason of and for and on account of the race and color’ of the said persons.
The sixth avers an intent to hinder and prevent the same persons in ‘the free exercise and enjoyment of the several and respective right and privilege to vote at any election to be thereafter by law had and held by the people in and of the said State of Louisiana.
‘The seventh avers an intent ‘to put in great fear of bodily harm, injure, and oppress’ the same persons, ‘because and for the reason’ that, having the right to vote, they had voted.
The eighth avers an intent ‘to prevent and hinder’ the same persons ‘in their several and respective free exercise and enjoyment of every, each, all, and singular and several rights and privileges granted and secured’ to them ‘by the constitution and laws of the United States.’
The next eight counts are a repetition of the first eight, except that, instead of the words ‘band together,’ the words ‘combine, conspire, and confederate together’ are used. Three of the defendants were found guilty under the first sixteen counts, and not guilty under the remaining counts...
I realize the “news” under our vulgar distractor-in-chief is a constant torrent of diarrhea coming at us through high-powered spray hoses and at this point most of us reflexively turn away from it. Still, the news media has not been following what several of them have fairly characterized as a crucial election 2020 story, teasing a federal ruling– by a Trump appointee– on the virtual non-existence of frequently claimed voter fraud.
I should make a separate category for this case so you can have my many posts on it all in one place. I’ll do that now. OK, click the link to view my several posts in order HERE.
The Trump campaign and the RNC brought a federal lawsuit in key swing state Pennsylvania to stop the expansion of absentee voting, which included provisions for the widespread use of drop boxes for mail-in ballots. The lawsuit was filed on June 29, 2020. There were hundreds of documents filed in this case, (410 as of last filing) you can see them all here. Click on any entry to read the public filing (any news service, incidentally, could do the same).
You can, for example, read the judge’s entire short August 13 order to Plaintiffs, granting Defendants’ motions to compel the production of actual evidence of the RNC/Trump campaign’s claims. JUDGE RANJAN’S ORDER IS HERE and at the bottom of this post for your scrolling convenience [1].
You will notice, if you read the judge’s order, that he orders Plaintiffs to produce specific, responsive evidence and that “if there are no responsive documents, Plaintiffs must state as much.” The judge details exactly what specific evidence (or admission they have none) Plaintiffs must provide in section 2) of his order.
He gives them until the close of business the following day, August 14th, to provide the evidence (which has never been produced anywhere) of the massive voter fraud and abuse they predict, or admit they don’t have evidence.
Reading the order I at first believed I may have been seeing another encouraging judicial profile in courage: a judge, appointed by Trump, telling him that his case would not go forward without evidence. Then the media went silent on this case.
I did my own research (tip of the hat to my old friend from law school who provided me the link to the docket). In light of further reading, Judge J. Nicholas Ranjan does not appear to be performing any kind of profile in courage, as I will explain in a moment.
The bold-faced type below is from the August 14 New York Times report of the order. Facing that is a section of the August 23 Reuters account of the same thing, phrased not as an “order” but as the judge asking the campaign to do something they simply declined to do, assuring the judge they’d win the case without evidence.
Both of these reports can’t be true. The judge’s order of August 13 was clear and explicit. It was actually an order, and not a polite ask the party could politely decline by telling the judge their case would be just fine without the evidence. You can see for yourself below [1] or on the actual docket of the case (above) that the “ask” narrative is ridiculous. How does a mainstream news organization make that kind of rookie blogger error?
Reviewing the filings on the online docket, we can see that Plaintiffs filed nothing on August 14, in spite of being ordered by the judge. Contempt of court? They don’t seem to have filed anything responsive to the judge’s order after August 14th either, which is surprising and confusing, since the only two stories updating the progress of the case (Reuters and this one, from the Intercept) cited their submission of hundreds of pages (“over 300 documents”, “524 pages”) of non-responsive documents containing no evidence of voter fraud.
Judge Ranjan writes well, and his analysis of the applicable law appears to be sound. He appears to be a qualified judge, unlike some of his recently appointed extreme-right ideologue colleagues (some deemed unqualified by the non-partisan American Bar Association). Yet he crafted a few beautifully tell-tale lines in his opinions in this case which suggest he may not be as dispassionate in this matter as his August 13 order might make him appear. Here are two.
The first is from his August 13 order to Trump 2020 and the RNC to produce evidence (addressing defendants’ request for attorneys fees for being forced to fight a lawsuit brought without evidence, to suppress the vote):
4) Pursuant to Rule 37(a)(5)(A)(ii), the Court finds that Plaintiffs’ positions were substantially justified, and so will not award reasonable expenses or attorneys’ fees.
That might be fair enough, if that subsection of Rule 37 states some legal ground for presuming a lawsuit “substantially justified” until proven otherwise or something like that. On the other hand, if the cited rule is not so generous, Judge Ranjan summarily concludes that the RNC/Trump positions were “substantially justified” even without seeing any of the evidence he ordered them to produce. In that case — hmmmm…
As to Trump’s “substantially justified” lawsuit, this next bit is as close to analysis as we get from the judge. The audacity of this amazingly supple sentence would make legalistic wordsmith and prose contortionist Robert Mueller III blush and fall on the floor:
In the context of recently analyzing why the law compels him to “stay” the case until the resolution of related state law cases, he crafts this wonder of a sentence, which I have carved up a bit, for emphasis and ease of appreciation:
…while Plaintiffs do assert one facial constitutional challenge and allege a few violations of statutory provisions
that are probably not ambiguous,
these claims are intertwined with those that are less clear. [2]
Dig it, I’m not saying every one of these assertions are necessarilylegallyambiguous, a few of them are probably not, one is arguably an actual constitutional claim, but those claims that are probably not ambiguous are freely mixed in and entangled with claims for which we have even less confidence of their probable unambiguity, if you know what I’m sayin’.
I read that abortion of a sentence, the truth of what I was actually reading hit me hard and my heart sank. The words that came into my mind next were these, uttered recently to a cheering audience in red MAGA hats by the innocent and heroic non-perjurer Michael Flynn (and much in the news lately as well):
Where we go one, we go all.
[1]
ORDER GRANTING MOTIONS TO COMPEL [ECF 366, ECF 368]
After considering the parties’ submissions on the motions to compel, the Court hereby ORDERS as follows:
1) As to the motion to compel filed by the Democratic Party Intervenors [ECF 366], Plaintiffs shall respond fully to the Democratic Intervenors’ Interrogatory Nos. 1-9 and Document Requests Nos. 1-4 and 9 with specific information or documents requested and/or specifically identify by Bates number which document(s) produced are responsive to each Document Request and Interrogatory. If there are no responsive documents, Plaintiffs must state as much.
2) As to the motion to compel filed by the Sierra Club Intervenors [ECF 368], the Court finds that instances of voter fraud are relevant to the claims and defenses in this case, particularly since Plaintiffs are reserving their right to introduce such evidence or retain an expert regarding the same. Plaintiffs shall produce such evidence in their possession, and if they have none, state as much. More specifically, Plaintiffs must respond fully to the Sierra Club Intervenors’ Document Request Nos. 1 and 15, “as narrowed to include documents, data, analysis and communications relating to allegations Case 2:20-cv-00966-NR Document 374 Filed 08/13/20 Page 1 of 2 2 in the Amended Complaint concerning potential or actual fraud or voter misconduct,” including as relates to: a) “non-uniform procedures concerning drop boxes in Pennsylvania”; b) “fraudulent voting resulting from the use of drop boxes, absentee ballots, or vote-by-mail in Pennsylvania”; c) “fraud resulting from the use of third-party groups to collect absentee or mail ballots in Pennsylvania”; d) “the existence and/or prevalence of fraud, ballot harvesting, ballot manipulation or destruction, or duplicitous voting in Pennsylvania”; and e) “the prevalence and/or counting of absentee or mail ballots in Pennsylvania that lack a secrecy envelope, whose envelope contains any text, mark, or symbol which reveals the elector’s identify, political affiliation, or candidate preference, or whose envelope does not include on the outside envelope a completed declaration signed by the elector.”
3) Plaintiffs shall provide supplemental responses and documents consistent with the foregoing no later than August 14, 2020.
4) Pursuant to Rule 37(a)(5)(A)(ii), the Court finds that Plaintiffs’ positions were substantially justified, and so will not award reasonable expenses or attorneys’ fees.
[2] Judge Ranjan concludes:
Thus, the state court’s resolution of the uncertain questions could narrow even these claims, or at least cause Plaintiffs to present them in a different posture. Under these exceptional circumstances, the mandatory elements of Pullman abstention are satisfied.
gratuitousblahg 