Category Archives: History and Politics

Trump does not contest Judge Chutkan’s statement of facts

Trump’s lawyers immediately appealed Judge Chutkan’s recent executive privilege ruling that denied former president Trump’s demand that as former president (defeated only by fraud) that he is privileged to conceal all records of the lead up to January 6 and on the day itself. We’ll find out how that argument goes on November 30th. Judge Chutkan ruled that the public need for solid information about the planning and implementation of the January 6 MAGA riot, which violently stopped the constitutional duties of a joint session of Congress, coupled with the agreement between Congress and the Executive Branch that evidence needs to be seen, means that Biden’s waiver of Executive Privilege claims made by Trump is the last word on the matter. Trump insists he has a right, as the unindictable president at that time, to hide anything that could cause him irreparable harm. It is the same stance Trump, insister on iron-clad, global, lifetime non-disclosure agreements, has always taken about everything. It is a position that appeals to many Americans– you fucking fight them until you win, no matter what.

Although Judge Chutkan offers it as background, to put her decision in context, we should note that Trump’s lawyers are not able to contest any of the facts the judge, as finder of fact, provides in that section of her decision. The only “answer” to her reconstruction of events leading up to January 6 is by reframing everything so that the most important detail is the frame: in spite of everything, the election was stolen! What did you expect the rightful president to do, sit by while it was being stolen?! Chutkan does not even go into the almost hour of detailed lies Trump told that crowd about how the vote was stolen in state after state, to make them madder than hell, in the minutes leading up to the planned permit-free march down to the Capitol. Is this something that needs public attention? You be the judge:

While not material to the outcome, some factual background on the events leading up to and including January 6, 2021, offers context for the legal dispute here. In the months preceding the 2020 presidential election, Plaintiff declared that the only way he could lose would be if the election were “rigged.” See, e.g., Donald J. Trump, Speech at Republican National Convention Nomination Vote at 22:08 (Aug. 24, 2020) in C-SPAN, https://www.c-span.org/video/?475000- 103/president-trump-speaks-2020-republican-national-convention-vote.

In the months after losing the election, he repeatedly claimed that the election was rigged, stolen, and fraudulent. For example, in a December 2 speech, he alleged “tremendous voter fraud and irregularities” resulting from a late-night “massive dump” of votes. See President Donald J. Trump, Statement on 2020 Election Results at 0:39, 7:26 (Dec. 2, 2020) in C-SPAN, https://www.cspan.org/video/?506975-1/president-trump-statement-2020-election-results. He also claimed that certain votes were “counted in foreign countries,” that “millions of votes were cast illegally in the swing states alone,” and that it was “statistically impossible” he lost. Id. at 12:00, 14:22, 19:00.

After losing the election, Plaintiff and his supporters filed a plethora of unsuccessful lawsuits seeking to overturn the results. See, e.g., Current Litigation, AMERICAN BAR ASSOCIATION: STANDING COMMITTEE ON ELECTION LAW, Apr. 30, 2021, https://www.americanbar.org/groups/public_interest/election_law/litigation/.

The United States Supreme Court also denied numerous emergency applications aimed at overturning the results. Id. In response, Plaintiff tweeted that the Court was “totally incompetent and weak on the massive Election Fraud that took place in the 2020 Presidential Election.” Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump), TWITTER (Dec. 26, 2020, 1:51 PM), https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu /documents/tweets-december-26-2020.

He continued his claim that “We won the Presidential Election, by a lot,” and implored Republicans to “FIGHT FOR IT. Don’t let them take it away.” Id. (Dec. 18, 2020, 2:14 PM), https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/tweets-december-18- 2020. A Joint Session of Congress was scheduled to convene on January 6, 2021, to count the electoral votes of the 2020 presidential election and to officially announce the elected President, as required by the Twelfth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and the Electoral Count Act.

In the days leading up to January 6, Plaintiff began promoting a protest rally to take place hours before the Joint Session convened. On December 19, 2020, he tweeted “Statistically impossible to have lost the 2020 Election. Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!” Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump), TWITTER (December 19, 2020, 6:42am), https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/tweets-december-19-2020.

During a rally, he warned that “Democrats are trying to steal the White House . . . you can’t let that happen. You can’t let it happen,” and promised that “[w]e’re going to fight like hell, I’ll tell you right now.” See Donald J. Trump, Remarks at Georgia U.S. Senate Campaign Event at 8:40, 14:19 (Jan. 4, 2021) in Campaign 2020, C-SPAN, https://www.c-span.org/video/?507634-1/president-trumpcampaigns-republican-senate-candidates-georgia.

On January 6, Plaintiff spoke at the rally at the Ellipse, during which he repeated claims, rejected by numerous courts, that the election was “rigged” and “stolen”; urged then Vice President Pence, who was preparing to convene Congress to tally the electoral votes, “to do the right thing” by rejecting certain states’ electors and declining to certify the election for President Joseph R. Biden; and told protesters to “walk down to the Capitol” to “give them the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country,” “we fight. We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore,” and “you’ll never take back our country with weakness.” See Donald J. Trump, Rally on Electoral College Vote Certification at 3:33:04, 3:33:36, 3:37:20, 3:47:02, 3:47:22, 4:42:26, 4:41:27 (Jan. 6, 2021) in Campaign 2020, C-SPAN, https://www.c-span.org/video/?507744-1/rally-electoral-collegevote-certification.

Shortly thereafter, the crowds surged from the rally, marched along Constitution Avenue, and commenced their siege of the Capitol. 

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The long moral arc of fucking history

One Sunday late afternoon, three months before my ninth birthday, I was sitting by myself in my parents’ bedroom, at the foot of their bed. I don’t know why I was there, perhaps watching their large TV. It would not explain my memory of hearing the news that Malcolm X had been shot dead in the Audubon Ballroom in Washington Heights from my father’s alarm clock radio. I knew what it meant right away, and it felt like a punch in my young stomach. It was not that long after the JFK assassination and not long before several more lone gunmen would kill other leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy.

I read today that two of the three men who’d been convicted and jailed — fifty-five years ago — for the killing of Malcolm X (who by then had renamed himself El Hadj Malik el Shabbaz) will be exonerated tomorrow, one posthumously. The FBI, NYPD and prosecutors had withheld evidence that would have likely prevented the conviction of each of the “murderers” who spent decades in prison. The one assassin who was caught at the scene confessed in court and said he didn’t know the other two guys, that they hadn’t been the other shooters. It turns out he wasn’t lying.

The New York Times reports:

A trove of F.B.I. documents included information that implicated other suspects and pointed away from Mr. Islam and Mr. Aziz. Prosecutors’ notes indicate they failed to disclose the presence of undercover officers in the ballroom at the time of the shooting. And Police Department files revealed that a reporter for The New York Daily News received a call the morning of the shooting indicating that Malcolm X would be murdered.

Investigators also interviewed a living witness, known only as J.M., who backed up Mr. Aziz’s alibi, further suggesting that he had not participated in the shooting but had been, as he said at the trial, at home nursing his wounded legs.

Altogether, the re-investigation found that had the new evidence been presented to a jury, it may well have led to acquittals. And Mr. Aziz, 83, who was released in 1985, and Mr. Islam, who was released in 1987 and died in 2009, would not have been compelled to spend decades fighting to clear their names. . .

. . . Representatives for the two exonerated men said that the moment meant a lot to Mr. Aziz, and to Mr. Islam’s family. But Mr. Shanies, one of the civil rights lawyers representing them, said their convictions had a “horrific, torturous and unconscionable” effect that cannot be undone.

The two men spent a combined 42 years in prison, with years in solitary confinement between them. They were held in some of New York’s worst maximum security prisons in the 1970s, a decade that bore witness to the Attica uprisings.

Mr. Aziz had six children at the time he was convicted; Mr. Islam had three. Both men saw their marriages fall apart and spent the primes of their lives behind bars.

Even after their release, they were understood as Malcolm X’s killers, affecting their ability to live openly in society.

“It affected them in every way you could possibly imagine, them and their families,” Mr. Shanies said.

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We learned, decades after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., that the FBI had been secretly recording King in hotel rooms and had sent compromising materials to him along with at least one letter urging him to kill himself. That’s just the way it was in the USA in the 1950s and 1960s, and the two hundred or so years before that. Racism was out of control, American Blacks were organizing and fighting for civil rights (Malcolm rightly called them Human Rights) and even a nonviolent pastor was considered an enemy of the state by the guardians of American power, since he was seen as galvanizing a tremendous moral force.

It’s hard to untangle how fucked up all of this is, or to overstate that the final crime for which King was condemned to death was his sermon opposing the War in Vietnam (one year to the day before his murder) and his Poor People’s campaign (on behalf of all of America’s poor). Once you stray from fighting for the right to use the same water fountain as whites to criticizing the power structure of the country itself, it is probably time for you to be shot through the voice box by a lone gunman with a shady past.

I try to imagine what it’s like to be exonerated fifty-five years after your life is destroyed, or posthumously. Then I consider that this re-investigation and exoneration would never have happened at all, but for an excellent documentary Who Killed Malcolm X? by a dogged historian/researcher who thoroughly investigated the killing of his hero. Netflix aired the documentary and outgoing Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance opened a re-investigation as soon as he considered the letter from the filmmaker, Abdur-Rahman Muhammad, and watched the compelling film.

I think of the long game of history. In 2060 or so perhaps the final story of the party-line confirmation of deeply divisive uber-conservative partisan Boof Kavanaugh will finally be told, once his forty year reign on the court is done and the appropriate amount of time has elapsed for the release of the thousands of pages of Kavanaugh-related documents the judicial committee was not allowed to see. Citizens, if there any left by then, will also learn the details of the 4,000 tips the FBI received, during a rushed farce of a five-day investigation into allegations against Kavanaugh, tips that went directly to Kavanaugh’s sponsor at the White House, fellow Federalist Society all-star Don McGahn, who promptly rejected them all.

Had these documents been seen, and publicized, had the FBI followed up on any of the tips, or even interviewed Kavanaugh, his friend Mark Judge and Christina Blasey-Ford, the Justice’s fiery, angry, paranoid, hyper-partisan speech in defense of himself as a victim of a cabal of powerful lying enemies would not have won the day.

For now, all we have are the words he uttered that day, after Blasey-Ford’s credible testimony, angrily snorted, slightly unhinged words that should have disqualified him from sitting on the Supreme Court, words he proudly (and unaccountably) told the world he wrote himself:

And this capsule biography of the longtime right-wing partisan, from Wikipedia:

Kavanaugh studied history at Yale University, where he joined Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity. He then attended Yale Law School, after which he began his career as a law clerk working under Judge Ken Starr. After Starr left the D.C. Circuit to become the head of the Office of Independent Counsel, Kavanaugh assisted him with various investigations concerning President Bill Clinton, including drafting the Starr Report recommending Clinton’s impeachment. After the 2000 U.S. presidential election, in which he worked for George W. Bush‘s campaign in the Florida recount, he joined the Bush administration as White House staff secretary and was a central figure in its efforts to identify and confirm judicial nominees.[3] Bush nominated Kavanaugh to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in 2003. His confirmation hearings were contentious and stalled for three years over charges of partisanship. He was ultimately confirmed to the D.C. Circuit in May 2006 after a series of negotiations between Democratic and Republican U.S. senators.[4][5][2] Two law professors performed an evaluation of Kavanaugh’s appellate court decisions in four separate public policy areas for the Washington Post. It found he had been “one of the most conservative judges on the D.C. Circuit” from 2003 to 2018.[6]

Once this ambitious Zelig of right-wing absolutism (he was involved in each of this century’s most outrageous pre-Trump right-wing stunts– Ken Starr’s most zealous assistant, involved with stopping the Florida recount in 2001, secret rulings for Dubya as White House staff secretary, rewarded by quick lifetime elevation by Bush II– after an ugly confirmation fight) has ruled on countless cases, restricting the rights of workers, voters, consumers, poor women, his political enemies, once all the unappealable damage is summarily done — and bitterly recorded in dissents — our descendants will get to learn the rest of the story of how this entitled partisan warrior managed to get a lifetime appointment to the nation’s highest court and steer that court for decades. I imagine they will feel like the previous generations (and they, themselves) got fucked, just the way those two guys who had nothing to do with the killing of Malcolm X got fucked, and then exonerated, in the long moral arc of fucking history.

Fascist-style Populism

Populism is a political appeal to what is popular among the population, and can be of the left or the right. It seems, most usually, and especially here in the US of A, it is harnessed by the right, as in the Koch-funded “spontaneous” “grass roots” Populist Tea Party, a national movement that appeared to spring up over night across the country, in a phenomenon gawked at by mass media as strong proof of a massive popular uprising against the self-proclaimed Hope and Change president, and swept a host of unapologetically angry Tea Party radicals into Congress to transform the Republican party and the US government. What we see on TV, and via social media, becomes our reality.

Just off hand, you might think that populism is good for democracy, the will of the people expressed through a mass movement. It can go either way. Most often populist movements are taken over by demagogues. The ideas are already popular — the government is a bunch of clueless elitist eggheads who don’t share our values. deciding, against our will, what we actually want! Harness this anger and you are a populist. When times are tough, populism swings right, toward authoritarianism. Here is an insightful bit from a discussion with David Sirota on a recent Deconstructed podcast:

So, in other words, human beings being thrown out of their homes, were the foam on the runway for the banks, which really tells you what you need to know about what the overall policy goal of the Obama administration was. They made a decision that they had to save Wall Street which, not incidentally, had given the most amount of money to Barack Obama’s campaign in the history of presidential politics. They made the decision that to save the economy, they had to first and foremost save Wall Street.

Now, maybe you could say it’s not corruption. Maybe you say it’s ideology. Maybe you just say it’s a principled disagreement or a principled belief. And there’s one phrase that that Geithner, I believe it was Geithner, who said: That’s how we saved the economy, but lost the country.

And what’s important to know is how historically anomalous that is from the Democratic Party itself. FDR, not that he was a perfect president, but he came in during an economic crisis. And there’s a lot of evidence — a lot of his quotes, a lot of the things he said — that he understood that if there was going to be a bailout or investments, it had to be bottom up. And he understood that it had to be bottom up for three reasons: It was morally right, people were starving; it was economically a better policy; and then he also made all sorts of statements, saying that this is the way to stop the rise of fascism — that if you do not help the working class in a crisis, then you are creating the conditions for authoritarians and fascists to take advantage of the desperation. And fascism was on the rise in the Great Depression here in the United States!

And so what 2009-2010 leading into the Trump-era suggests is that FDR was right, because the Democrats, the modern version of the Democrats, didn’t do what FDR did. And it ended up creating the conditions for Trump.

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FDR, not that he was a perfect president, but he came in during an economic crisis. And there’s a lot of evidence — a lot of his quotes, a lot of the things he said — that he understood that if there was going to be a bailout or investments, it had to be bottom up. And he understood that it had to be bottom up for three reasons: It was morally right, people were starving; it was economically a better policy; and then he also made all sorts of statements, saying that this is the way to stop the rise of fascism — that if you do not help the working class in a crisis, then you are creating the conditions for authoritarians and fascists to take advantage of the desperation. And fascism was on the rise in the Great Depression here in the United States!

Think of the enraged army of MAGA populists across the country who now routinely call to violently threaten Republican legislators who “disloyally” voted for an uncontroversial bipartisan infrastructure bill they negotiated, a bill that will benefit their communities, a long overdue allocation of resources for the mutual good — and the good of US big business, by the way — that Trump touted when he was president (though he was too busy with other things to do anything about it). According to our right-wing populists, all we really need are strictly constitutional gun laws that respect our sacred Second Amendment right to bring our non-regulated guns wherever we want, as part of goddamned political speech. If you think that’s a problem, cucks, suck lead.

This kind of enraged populism is the necessary precondition for mob rule and autocracy.

Mr. Biden? Mr. Garland? Congress? Senate supporters of the sacred filibuster over the right to vote?

Nice subpoena

[The House January 6 Select Committee] also subpoenaed John McEntee, a young Trump loyalist who had been the former president’s baggage handler before Trump installed him as the White House personnel director, in charge of hiring for the executive branch. McEntee was reportedly present for many of the key conversations around trying to overturn the 2020 election. 

An article today in The Atlantic by Jonathan D. Karl, the chief Washington correspondent for ABC News, calls “Johnny” McEntee “the man who made January 6 possible.” McEntee purged the administration of anyone he did not consider sufficiently—that is to say, totally—loyal to Trump.

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John McEntee, I’ve been waiting for more news about this promising young man. He had MAGA greatness written all over him, think of Matt Gaetz with athletic ability.

Three faces we should all know

John Durham

John Durham, Special Counsel appointed by Bill Barr to investigate and root out the “traitors” who brought the “baseless, lying, partisan witch hunt” investigation into collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians to the Department of Justice. Durham has now been at his work longer than Mueller was. He recently issued a third indictment, arresting a man who allegedly did the same kind of thing Mike Flynn did — lying to conceal the fact that he was lying.

In Flynn’s case the lies were eventually deemed ‘immaterial’ by Barr. In the case of the indicted Clinton-supporting alleged liar who gave unfounded rumors to the author of the anti-Trump Steele Dossier (a document which was not, in fact relied on by Mueller – the definition of ‘immaterial’ lies when investigating the oringes of the “Rusher thing”), and allegedly lied about it to Durham’s investigators, he will face justice.

Durham’s face (and this seems to be his official DOJ photo) says a lot about him — he is fierce, implacable, deeply conservative, a devout Catholic (like fellow Christian dominionists [1] Bill Barr, former White House Counsel Pat Cippolini, Mick Mulvaney, Mike Pompeo) and a dogged ratter.

So as not to appear “political” Biden’s Attorney General Merrick Garland has authorized Durham to continue hunting for the partisan liars who brought the fake and embarrassing “Rusher thing” in an attempt to compromise and humiliate the honest and never the least bit corrupt or “transactional” Donald Trump.

Presumably the same fear of appearing partisan has restrained Garland from convening grand juries to indict any of the people we now know conspired with the defeated former president1 to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Not Rudy Giuiliani (who brought numerous baseless post election lawsuits promoting Trump’s Big Lie and, prior to the election, played a key role in the smearing and ouster of US ambassador Marie Yavonovich, so as to promote a fake Ukrainian investigation into Hunter Biden), not either of the two lunatic fringe Federalist Society lawyers, Jefferey Bossert Clark and John C. Eastman, who energetically served the mad former president in his mission to remain in office after losing the election.

Jeffrey Bossert Clark

Clark is the ambitious Trump appointed weasel [2] who wrote a letter based on Trump’s lies and tried to pressure the acting Attorney General into signing the letter to top Georgia officials falsely claiming there had been massive voter fraud in Georgia, that there was an ongoing DOJ investigation into that fraud. Both claims were false, knowing lies, in Barr’s phrase “bullshit.” Clark gave it his best shot in the days immediately before the January 6 riot, he was ready to step in as acting AG, sign the lying letter himself, if Trump said the word. Trump backed down under pressure from DOJ officials and his own White House Counsel.

On January 14th Clark resigned his post at the Department of Justice and immediately went to work for a far right nonprofit that brought lawsuits against mask and vaccine mandates and abortion providers. The latest on this fucker, who cited a vague privilege instead of testifying before the January 6 Committer on Friday:

“The Trump taint is sticking to Jeffrey Clark,” Business Insider reported Thursday. “In the 10 months since the would-be Justice Department coup, Clark’s name has been scrubbed from the conservative legal group where he’d landed his first post-Trump job. He lawyered up in the face of congressional scrutiny. But, just days before his Friday interview with the House committee investigating the January 6 attack on the Capitol, Clark parted ways with the defense lawyer Robert Driscoll, Politico reported late Wednesday.”

Clark is just the latest attorney to suffer repercussions for their relationship with Trump.

“In the eyes of several former colleagues, Clark has joined the ranks of once respected conservative lawyers — including former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, the former prosecutor Sidney Powell, and the constitutional scholar John Eastman — who have been burned flying too close to Trump,” the report noted.

After Clark stonewalled the January 6 Committee last week he should have been found in contempt and locked up pursuant to Congress’s power of inherent contempt, until he agreed to testify truthfully. Unfortunately, while legal, it would appear as “political” as the prosecutions Merrick Garland is thus far not pursuing. To the party that honors rules and norms, and places a quaint reliance on empirical facts, this kind of hardball tactic is apparently inconceivable.

Which brings us to another Federalist Society stalwart and former dean of a presumably right wing law school, John Eastman.

This jackass, who spoke at the January 6th Stop the Steal rally and subsequently lost his job, turns out to have authored a battle plan for Mike Pence to defy the Constitution, and more than 200 years of precedent, on January 6th and insist that since there were alternate slates of electors from each swing state Trump lost (there were no alternate electors — every state had certified its electors a month earlier) he was invoking his (imaginary, counter-factual) Twelfth Amendment power to disqualify the electors in those disputed states, call the election undecided for lack of an Electoral College majority and send it to the gerrymandered House for a straight party-line vote (that would, under the rules for deciding a deadlocked election, bypass the actual majority in the House) where Trump could be declared president by the loyal members of his own party, who enjoyed a majority in the House for this purpose only. You can read this braying jackass’s short, to the point, memo to Pence HERE.

Under Eastman’s learned constitutional analysis, the Vice President who loses a re-election bid, under powers arguably (but only by someone insane) granted by the convoluted, procedural 12th Amendment, has the absolute final say on whether or not he lost his re-election bid. Clearly the intent of the Framers, no?

The absurdity of this claim aside, Eastman provided step by step instructions for how Pence needed to proceed, to sidestep constitutional and procedural objections and silence Democrats when they “start to howl”. Eastman was in the war room at the Willard Hotel, taking the short walk over to exhort the crowd to go to the Capitol, shortly before the January 6th Stop the Steal rally unaccountably turned into a violent assault on the Capitol. His hotel bills, we learned recently, were paid by the Trump/Pence 2020 campaign.

Of course, indicting him for anything — and how can you indict a lawyer for a good faith argument for illegal actions to overturn a certified election? — would only play into the hands of the really hardcore right wingers who want a violent overthrow of democracy. And so, in Biden and Merrick Garland’s judgment, you dig, we must avoid the appearance of being overtly on the side of not overturning US elections, because, you know, it would only infuriate powerful American Nazis.

Makes me wanna holler.

[1]

Dominionism, or Christian Dominionism is a term coined by social scientists and popularized by journalists to refer to a subset of American Christianity that is conservative, politically active, and believes that Christians should, and eventually will, take control of the government. The term is sometimes used as a “catch-all” by bloggers to describe any politically active Christian, but not every conservative, politically minded Christian is a Dominionist.

Christian Dominionists believe that God desires Christians to rise to power through civil systems so that His Word might then govern the nation. The belief that “America is a Christian nation” is sometimes called “soft dominionism”; the idea that God wants only Christians to hold government office and run the country according to biblical law is called “hard dominionism.”

Dominion theology’s beliefs are based on Genesis 1:28, which says, “Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth” (emphasis added).

This verse is taken by Christian Dominionists as a divine mandate to claim dominion over the earth, physically, spiritually, and politically. However, this is taking a large step away from the text, which only says to have dominion over the creatures of earth, and to “subdue” the earth. It is likely that this verse simply means for humanity to a) multiply and expand over the face of the earth instead of staying in one place and b) keep and take care of all other living things. There were no political entities in Genesis 1.

However, dominion theology goes even further with this verse, leading to two other philosophies: Christian Reconstructionism and Kingdom Now theology. Christian Reconstructionism is an intellectually high-minded worldview, most popular among the more conservative branches of Christian faith. Reconstructionism says that dominion will be achieved by each Christian excelling in his or her individual field (Christian artists taking dominion of the art world, Christian musicians taking dominion of the music world, Christian businessmen taking dominion of the business world, etc., until all systems and fields are “subdued”).

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[2] From a January 24, 2021 story in the New York Times

WASHINGTON — It was New Year’s Eve, but the Justice Department’s top leaders had little to celebrate as they discussed Jeffrey Clark, the acting head of the civil division, who had repeatedly pushed them to help President Donald J. Trump undo his electoral loss.

Huddled in the department’s headquarters, they noted that they had rebuked him for secretly meeting with Mr. Trump, even as the department had rebuffed the president’s outlandish requests for court filings and special counsels, according to six people with knowledge of the meeting. No official would host a news conference to say that federal fraud investigations cast the results in doubt, they told him. No one would send a letter making such claims to Georgia lawmakers

When the meeting ended not long before midnight, Acting Attorney General Jeffrey A. Rosen hoped that the matter was settled, never suspecting that his subordinate would secretly discuss the plan for the letter with Mr. Trump, and very nearly take Mr. Rosen’s job, as part of a plot with the president to wield the department’s power to try to alter the Georgia election outcome.

It was clear that night, though, that Mr. Clark — with his willingness to entertain conspiracy theories about voting booth hacks and election fraud — was not the establishment lawyer they thought him to be. Some senior department leaders had considered him quiet, hard-working and detail-oriented. Others said they knew nothing about him, so low was his profile. He struck neither his fans in the department nor his detractors as being part of the Trumpist faction of the party, according to interviews.

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Filibustering the Right to Vote

Seeing it from their point of view, American Nazis are right to fear both federal government coercion/law enforcement and majoritarian tyranny/democracy. Their party has only one idea, outside of loyalty to a dangerous maniac they fear: cripple the government, take it over, bend democracy to the needs of the few, the entitled, and fuck the rest of these “entitlement mentality” putos.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 is arguably the most effective anti-racism, democracy protecting law in our history. It cured much of the abuse it was enacted to fix. It enjoyed broad support under Nixon, Reagan, Bush I and, under Bush II it was reauthorized in the Senate 98-0, just a few years before Dubya’s appointee John Roberts took a sharp gut hook to it, pulled it hard and gave the Voting Rights Act a nice, thorough evisceration [1].

Check out the numbers the Voting Rights Act kept getting reauthorized by in Congress:

(that Senate tally for 1982 doesn’t look right)

Here is what is included in the proposed John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act that Republicans unanimously (minus one) filibustered for the 3rd time the other day

Here’s a good, short video tour

Heather Cox Richardson:

Republicans are holding tight to the idea of pre–Civil War Democrats that our system of democracy gives to the states alone the power to determine how people within those states live, and who in those states gets to vote to determine those rules. After that idea led to the Civil War, Republicans overturned it with the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution, which give the federal government the power to protect equality within the states.

Since World War II, the federal government has taken that charge seriously, protecting minority voting in the Civil Rights Act of 1957, the Civil Rights Act of 1960, and, most thoroughly, in the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Since the passage of that measure, Congress repeatedly reauthorized it by large, bipartisan majorities, most recently in 2006, when the Senate voted unanimously in favor of it. But then in 2013 the Supreme Court gutted that law, and now, only 8 years later, Republican senators claim federal protection of voting rights is an assault on states’ rights.

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/november-4-2021?r=74gv9&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&utm_source=

One year anniversary of 2020 election cigar

[1]

A guided tour through the benign seeming, bloodlessly vicious Roberts decision, and highlights of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s brilliant dissent are at https://wp.me/p2DHRV-j6q

Why incoherence is so dangerous

It is pointless to have a discussion with a person taking an incoherent position. Not only will you learn nothing, but no problem can ever be resolved reasonably.

If someone is content to stand on incoherent “logic” there is very little you can really do about changing their mind. A person clings to an incoherent position because he truly believes it. There is almost no way to move them off of their deeply held belief.

I know that ‘incoherent’ sounds judgmental, but consider a few examples, from the world of recent politics. and one drawn from my personal life.

Take Joe Manchin III’s warning to progressive Democrats to stop playing games if they want his obstruction of Biden’s agenda to end.

Manchin, enjoying his moment as the most powerful man in the Senate, timing his pantsing of Biden perfectly for maximum political effect, calls “bullshit” on the progressive caucus for not trusting a suddenly all-powerful rich guy opposed to a $15/hr minimum wage to vote for the Democrats-only Climate Catastrophe mitigation and social spending infrastructure bill after the bipartisan bill, which addresses long overdue disasters in waiting like crumbling bridges and treacherous roads, is passed.

His reason for not signing on to Build Back Better — he insists he is concerned with the cost of the radically scaled down proposal. In all the months he’s been fighting against it and making progressives cut programs from it, he tells us he has not had a chance to grasp the finances of the proposal.

These are not arguments that can be countered successfully by arguments based on fact. The Build Back Better plan was intended to pay for itself by increasing taxes on billionaires and corporations to just under what they were before Trump slashed them in a $1.9 TRILLION dollar giveaway to America’s wealthiest. Manchin is against raising taxes on the wealthiest and expresses concern that the unfunded bill will be far too expensive.

He takes up the Republican mantra of “fiscal responsibility”, whenever “tax and spend” Democrats have the presidency and majorities in Congress. What kind of Commie economy destroying bullshit is trying to get a $15/hr. minimum wage?!!

Republicans are also united against increasing the IRS budget for law enforcement so that tax evasion by corporations and billionaires can be detected and the scofflaws can be fined, taxes collected. Figure that one out. Manchin, apparently, is also against this, along with funding for enforceable ethics standards for members of Congress .

Now, without taxing the wealthiest, since we can’t pay for this (and it’s not like the $7.8 TRILLION [1] — over ten years– for our military, don’t even suggest that!) we have to cut some of the things that will unfairly impact the wealthy, even if they also help millions, including millions of children growing up in dire poverty.

Dental, vision and hearing as part of healthcare for seniors? COMMUNISM! We all know that the teeth, eyes and ears have nothing whatsoever to do with a person’s health! Same for those too poor to afford decent childcare, eldercare, go to junior college, a few weeks of paid leave for new parents and so forth. HOW WE GONNA PAY FOR IT? DON’T TELL ME TAXES OR ENFORCEMENT OF THE TAX CODE OR TIGHTENING UP ETHICS RULES ON SITTING LOBBYISTS/SENATORS!

You can agree or disagree with Manchin’s conservative positions, his constant, roosterish sabotage of Biden’s presidency, but it is difficult to find coherent reasons from someone iike Manchin. They will say or do anything to maintain their position and their power. Incoherence is no longer any kind of handicap in public life.

Look no further than the new governor of Virginia, former CEO of the Carlisle Group, just a regular dad in a vest concerned with “parents’ rights.” You see, he is strongly against the teaching of Critical Race Theory to Virginia kids, since it is a divisive theory that views American history through a lens that makes former slaveholders and those who took up arms on their behalf look like bad people and presents a false view of a racially divided nation where racism is embedded in every aspect of our legal and social system.

The theory is not taught in any Virginia school, except perhaps a law school here or there, and the only exposure any child or parent will ever have to it is in the denunciations of cynical, dog whistling politicians like Mr. Youngkin, and around the clock on Murdoch’s FOX news, but IT WORKS. White people as a group are afraid of the voting power of Black and brown people and demonizing Critical Race Theory works wonders mobilizing that terror. It is a terror former governor of Virginia Thomas Jefferson knew well:

“Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever…”
—Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 1782

Jefferson was referring to the “hideous blot” on our nation’s ideals and morality that was represented by chattel slavery. Glenn Youngkin has vowed that ugly shit like this polarizing history will never be taught in his state, where (victimized, “white”) Parents’ Rights will be respected.

Coherent? Not particularly. A potent political message? Indeed. Particularly when Joe Manchin III is on board, fighting the president’s signature policy initiative in the name of imaginary “bipartisanship” — he stands with the solid 50 vote GOP bloc that will oppose anything that would make Biden look like a competent deal-maker.

Like the filibuster Manchin is devoted to, his kind has been a feature of our democracy since the days when slavery was being debated in the Senate. For a few generations they were known as Dixiecrats, guys who protected the right of angry mobs to lynch what are now politely called “n-words” without the damned federal government swooping in tyrannically to crush States’ Rights.

Personal anecdote:

Someone expresses anger, judges you harshly for being narcissistically unaware of your ongoing violation of a long standing moral rule they made years ago and never told you about. When they tell you about this long violation, you can apologize, but you are still accountable for violating an agreement you never even knew about!

How fucking dare you?!! You don’t get to use the fucking f-word, you fucking fuck, because you use it abusively while I only use it as a last resort, in justified outrage. My right to continue being angry at you, in spite of your so-called “apology”, is not in dispute.

Without the guide of Reason, in other words, laying out an argument based on things that can be reasonably agreed on, we are only flailing emotional creatures subject to being inflamed by appeals to loyalty from those who speak loudly to our anger, fear and other strong emotions that keep us from asking reasonable questions, confident that we will get a reasonable answer.

A quick look around confirms that we are living in largely incoherent times where a strong, angry argument — denying there is anything that can be fairly talked about — is enough to carry the day, whatever the merits, or senselessness, of that argument may actually be.

[1]

The House passed a $768 billion 2022 defense policy bill on a 316-113 vote late Thursday — authorizing a $24 billion increase to topline spending over the Biden administration’s budget proposal — a move that potentially lessens debate conflict as the legislation moves forward.

source

Hostage holder blasts colleagues for holding infrastructure bill hostage

Fossil fuel lobbyist/senator Joe Manchin III, a cartoonish rich southerner used to telling those less well off what they actually want and deserve, decried the members of his party who are holding the bipartisan infrastructure bill “hostage.” He made his hostage video, demanding that progressives in his party trust people like him, and the several bipartisan Republicans who have been outspoken about the need to address climate catastrophe — wait, that would be zero Republicans– as Biden met world leaders to plan for reducing the mass extinction zombie apocalypse that will be unleashed if the climate continues to warm at its present rate.

Manchin III waited until his party’s president was at the world climate summit to withdraw his support for even the severely truncated Build Back Better that gave Manchin everything demanded on behalf of his fossil fuel donors and his own coal interests. What is Manchin’s actual policy position? He’s a Republican, the largest recipient of fossil fuel money in the Senate. Here is the one man filibuster’s semi-coherent sounding defense of his latest obstructionist stunt:

I looked up whether the coal magnate, who has been opposing tax increases on billionaires and corporations to fund the initiatives of Build Back Better, had voted for or against Trump’s massive tax giveaway to corporations and the wealthiest Americans. Manchin III was as good as his stated anti-debt principles on that vote, though his staff’s spelling on the press release was about as good as Trump’s.

Have a look at how Manchin phrased his opposition and disappointment not to be able to support Trump’s Short Sided [sic] 1.9 trillion dollar tax break for the wealthiest Americans. If only the sides had been longer!

https://www.manchin.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/manchin-disappointed-to-vote-no-on-short-sided-and-rushed-tax-bill-

The conclusion of his statement on why he couldn’t vote for Trump’s bipartisan tax bill:

“While I am disappointed that we were not able to take advantage of this historic opportunity and pass real tax reform, I will continue to work with President Trump to help the working class and reign in our debt – something I know he cares deeply about.”

Joe Manchin III

That’s “rein in,” genius…like the reins mounted ICE agents used to whip them Haitians at the border, yee hah!

Incoherence is no longer a problem

If emotion is the only reliable indicator of what we should believe, incoherence is no longer a valid critique of anything. Facts are not only inconvenient in political debate, they are irrelevant to millions of Americans. Listen to any of Joe Manchin III’s recent statements for a potent example of willful blindness and easily demonstrable, bombastic, self-righteous incoherence.

With the fire hose of false fecal matter constantly streaming from the Trump machine it is easy to lose track of single details.  In fact, that’s by design of the fire hose of diarrhea, it just keeps coming, it’s revolting, maddening, and the latest burst instantly covers the disgusting stuff already on the ground.  It’s exhausting to be exposed to this kind of unyielding onslaught and in the end enough good, reasonable people tune out that it becomes easy for evil plans to flourish.

On New Year’s Eve 2021, a few days before Trump and his enablers made their final push to pressure Pence to resteal the Stolen Election, with the outlandish Eastman memo, days before the storming of the Capitol, the Washington Post ran an article with the curious title of 

Pence seeks rejection of lawsuit that aimed to expand his power to overturn the election

The lawsuit was brought on behalf of Trump’s bid to overturn the election by one of the most openly idiotic members of Congress, Trump die-hard Looey Gohmert of the great state of Texas.   Gohmert’s suit sued Pence to make him give Pence the power to overturn the election.   

You get the theory of the lawsuit?   Gohmert sued Mike Pence, as Vice President, to force him to give himself the power to overturn the election on January 6th, leaving it up to a willing House to vote Trump into office for another four years.

The Washington Post explains what was unusual about Gohmert’s moronic, frivolous lawsuit.

To win a lawsuit, a plaintiff must convince a judge that the interests of the person they are suing are opposed to their own — there must be some controversy or conflict between them that could be resolved through the litigation.

This baseless hail Mary lawsuit, which Pence and the DOJ urged the court to dismiss, did not present a genuine controversy that a court could decide.  Pence was the wrong guy to sue to make Pence the final arbiter of who won the 2020 election.   

Aside from John Eastman’s insane (but audacious) six point plan for how Pence could brazen it out on January 6th to keep himself and his boss in power, nobody has ever tried to argue that the VP effectively decides if he and his running mate lost the election that has just been certified. The notion that the loser could legally declare himself the winner of a democratic vote is classically incoherent. The DOJ, in urging the court to dismiss the frivolous lawsuit, was more circumspect than I can be.

“The Vice President is not the proper defendant to this lawsuit,” wrote Deputy Assistant Attorney General John V. Coghlan.

“The Vice President — the only defendant in this case — is ironically the very person whose power they seek to promote,” he added. “A suit to establish that the Vice President has discretion over the count, filed against the Vice President, is a walking legal contradiction.”

Pence followed the law, a crime for which a lynch mob was sent to administer justice. In the days after the riot, Pence and the rest of the GOP had their come to Jesus moment when they closed ranks behind the insane former president and amplified his Big Lie about Trump’s massive landslide victory snatched from him by bipartisan conspirators who upheld the validity of the Stolen Election.

Looking for the conspirators in the Seditious Conspiracy prosecution that should have begun months ago? Here is a partial list: Louie Gohmert, Jefferey Clark, Steve Bannon, John Eastman, Donald John Trump, Texas AG Ken Paxton, Lyin’ Ted, Madison Cawthorne, Mo Brooks, Rudy, Mike Flynn. The proof of their criminal conspiracy to overturn an election result they hated is already in the public record, Merrick.