Heather Cox Richardson, on the sixtieth anniversary of the Klan murders of three voting rights activists in Klan controlled Mississippi:
Those opposed to Black equality saw the passage of the Civil Rights Act as a call to arms. On July 16, two weeks after Johnson signed the bill and a little more than three weeks after Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner disappeared and while they were still missing, Arizona senator Barry Goldwater strode across the stage at the Republican National Convention to accept the party’s nomination for president. To thunderous applause, he told delegates that “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And…moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.” The votes of the delegates from South Carolina, the state that launched the Civil War in defense of American slavery, were the ones that put his nomination over the top.
On August 4 the bodies of the missing men were found in the dam near Philadelphia, Mississippi.
It turned out that Deputy Sheriff Price, who had arrested Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman, and his boss, Sheriff Lawrence A. Rainey, were members of the Ku Klux Klan. Price had alerted his fellow Klansman Edgar Ray Killen that he had the three men in custody, and Killen called the local Klan together to attack the men when they got out of jail. Then Price dropped the three civil rights workers into their hands.
While the state of Mississippi would not prosecute, claiming insufficient evidence, in January 1965 a federal grand jury indicted 18 men for their participation in the murders. The Ku Klux Klan members, who were accustomed to running their states as they saw fit, did not believe they would be punished. An infamous photograph caught Price and Rainey laughing during a hearing after their federal arraignment on charges of conspiracy and violating the civil rights of the murdered men
Ultimately, a jury found seven of the defendants guilty. Killen walked free because in addition to being a Klan leader, he was also a Baptist minister, and a member of the jury would not convict a minister. Price was convicted and sentenced to six years in prison (he served four). Rainey, who was not at the murder scene, was found not guilty, but he lost his job and his marriage and blamed the FBI and the media for ruining his life.
Voters in the 1964 election backed Johnson’s vision of the country, rejecting Goldwater by a landslide. Ominously, though, Goldwater won his own state of Arizona and five states of the Deep South—Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina. The Republican Party had begun to court the segregationist southern Democrats.
In 1980, Republican presidential candidate Ronald Reagan spoke in Philadelphia, Mississippi, on August 3, sixteen years almost to the day after the bodies of the three men had been found.
“I believe in states’ rights,” he said. “I believe in people doing as much as they can for themselves at the community level and at the private level. And I believe that we’ve distorted the balance of our government today by giving powers that were never intended in the constitution to that federal establishment. And if I do get the job I’m looking for, I’m going to devote myself to trying to reorder those priorities and to restore to the states and local communities those functions which properly belong there.”
Why worry about a US Postmaster General/megadonor for one of the presidential candidates who has crippled mail delivery across the country?
In desperation, and madder than the overheated freaks in Trump’s war room, I wrote my congressmember today, sending a copy of my letter to the Postal board of governors:
My attached letter to the chair of the Election Mail Committee poses this question: what is the Election Mail Committee doing in relation to the nationwide slowdown in mail delivery in the months before a national election that appears likely to be decided by mere thousands of votes in a few states?
It is staggering to me, and depressing, that nobody in the government seems to be addressing this serious issue ahead of an election where unfounded claims of widespread voter fraud are embraced by a partisan official, Postmaster Louis Dejoy, in position to make sure millions of mail-in ballots (26.6 million mail in votes were cast nationwide in the 2020 primaries, 43% of all votes cast in the 2020 election were by mail — per US Census) are not received in time to be “fraudulently” counted.
Your help in bringing this issue forward – and fixing it in time for the upcoming election – will be greatly appreciated. It is impossible for me to understand why I seem to be the only Democrat with hair on fire about this obvious form of voter suppression. It can be applied surgically, pinpointed by zipcode, making it all the more pernicious.
Subtract the Atlanta-area totals from the Georgia state vote and you guarantee the man who lost the state by 11,779 votes in 2020 all of Georgia’s Electoral College votes. The math is horrific in a democracy where the Electoral College has the final say, no?
Go to the Heritage Foundation’s website. Alongside Project 2025: Presidential Transition Project, blueprint for an America based on the credo of the Thousand Year Reich (Führerworte haben Gesetzeskraft — “the Führer’s word has the force of law”), you can see the database a far right crank named Hans von Spakovsky has been maintaining since the 1980s. Here are my own calculations, based on the Koch’s own Hans von Spakovsky’s important work.
If the relentless 0.00025% fraud rate seen since 1982 increases tenfold (to 25 ten thousandths of one percent), the tally in the 2024 election nationwide might feature literally dozens of fraudulent votes, possibly even triple digits! This is why the GOP is hammering the fraudulent theme of MASSIVE ELECTION FRAUD in MAIL-IN VOTING, as Bill Barr publicly did for weeks before the 2020 election (before telling Trump, after he lost, that the fraud argument was bullshit).
Repeat a lie enough times and, in politics as in any family, it becomes the truth.
Main technique: remove the context needed for an informed discussion and you can win any argument among emotionally stirred up people.
Take a video clip of Joe Biden smiling and giving a thumbs up to a paratrooper who has just landed. Edit out the paratrooper. Now Biden is seemingly smiling, a little dementedly, and giving a thumbs up to the air, before his aide puts a hand on his back and leads him back to the group of G7 leaders. Sure makes the old man look dotty as hell, doesn’t it? Rupert Murdoch’s FOX thought so, so did the tens of millions who saw the edited footage.
Nazi logic, like the “logic” of anyone who can never be wrong no matter what (and will kill you to prove it), is absolute. Make an assertion, stick to it, come hell, high water or the best arguments of entire associations of learned experts (Jews, üntermenschen, cucks, liars, Muslims, feminazis, Jesuits, etc.). Repeat it over and over, bash the face of any enemy who tries to refute it using dirty tricks like evidence and common sense (especially if these villains are Jews, üntermenschen, cucks, liars, Muslims, feminazis, Jesuits, etc.).
Take my man Steven Gow Calabresi, co-founder and chairman of the board of directors of the venerated “conservative-libertarian” judicial fraternity The Federalist Society. Check out his position on Alito’s and Thomas’s clear violation of the federal statute requiring Supreme Court justices to recuse themselves from any case in which the justice’s impartiality might reasonably be questioned.
The petulant fifth-grader tone of this esteemed legal scholar’s writing puts me in mind of our favorite seething private schooler, Boof Kavanaugh:
From my probably futile letter to the US Post Office Board of Governors:
Regardless of which party is actually favored or disadvantaged by the suppression of mail-in ballots, it is indisputably anti-democratic (not to mention unconstitutional) to suppress a citizen’s right to vote based on a public delivery service’s inability/refusal to fulfill its basic contract with people who pay for and rely on their services (see details about weeks’ delayed and undelivered certified mail on last page.)
From my probably futile e-message to the Senate Committee that oversees the Post Office:
subject: Letter to the US Postal Board of Governors
I’d like you to have a copy of the letter I sent to the board of one of the agencies your committee oversees.
During a nationwide disruption of mail service, as partisan chatter ramps up about massive mail-in voter fraud (which does seem to occur at a steady 0.00025%, according to the Heritage Foundation database) and the RNC begins bringing lawsuits to limit the counting of mailed ballots postmarked on time but received late, it is hard to understand how nobody with oversight is taking action to correct long, random, system-wide mail delays.
In an election expected to be very close in the five or six states that decide every presidential contest, eliminating as many as a few thousand “late” votes can swing the election to one side or the other. Deliveries from the new Atlanta mail processing center were 98% on-time in its first year, 2022. Then the efficiency rate was corrected: 2023: 52%, 2024 YTD 72%.
I would love to be in communication with your committee on this issue. If there is anything else I can provide, or any answer you have to reassure me that steps are being taken to correct this systemic bug in time for an election untainted by this form of voter suppression, please have your office get in touch with me.
Yours in the fight to protect our experiment in democracy,
G. Gordon Liddy (should I have used my real name?)
Mighty white of them to acquiesce by accepting the results of an American election, I say.
Note the legalistic cunning of the masterful paragraph below. Reminds me of the elegant arguments the Defenders of the Faith constructed during the Spanish Inquisition, to explain, irrefutably, why Jesus Christ, His Father and the Holy Spirit are all deliriously happy to hear the screams of heretics and infidels tortured and burned alive.
I do not myself believe that there was fraud in the counting of ballots or voting machine malfunctions. I do believe, however, that the unprecedented use of mail in voting over a period of many weeks, with the loss of the secret ballot, and drop boxes, produced a fundamentally illegitimate Biden victory in 2020 in Pennsylvania and elsewhere. I simply do not believe that in an honestly held traditionally run presidential election that Joe Biden would get 181,866 more votes for President in 2020 in Pennsylvania than Barack Obama got in 2008.
This belief-based argument citing the unproven massive fraud of mail-in voting (a wingnut conspiracy theory denied even by corrupt partisan Bill Barr, who tirelessly promoted it prior to the 2020 election) was penned by the esteemed co-founder of the far right judicial fraternity and judicial appointment pipeline The Federalist Society. Thanks to a 2016 deal with candidate Trump, brokered by housewife Ginni Thomas, KellyAnne Conway, Sloppy Steve Bannon and other members of the secretive, by invitation only nonprofit Council for National Policy, that as president Trump would only appoint Supreme Court and other federal judges from the “Fed Soc” list, the Federalist Society controls a neat, doctrinaire 6-3 lock on the current Supreme Court.
The radical right’s goal of absolute, permanent power is so close they can taste it. They are throwing caution to the wind with one radical 6-3 decision after another, angry, self-righteous, arbitrary, vindictive, punitive, as their type is. They are currently in a mad dash to ultimate, permanent holy victory over a nation of irredeemable sinners and nonbelievers, as Jesus Christ Himself has ordained for the USA. Sadly for them, no dignified figurehead is available, they have to march behind an unhinged Hitler wanna-be, but so be it. An American Hitler is a small price to pay to fulfill the will of the One True God.
Notice the elegant construction of Professor Calabresi’s “argument”. In the opening he nonchalantly acknowledges there’s no proof for any of the fraud claims repeatedly made in courts by Trump and the RNC, claims made without producing evidence of any kind. He doesn’t mention that these false claims, that led to the riot at the Capitol, are still insisted on, are a litmus test for remaining in the Republican party. Then he does a nice sleight of hand, continuing to frame his argument, supporting the completely toothless fraud claim — now directed at another unproven form of claimed fraud — not weighed down by the legal burden of proof, or using anything as base as ordinary evidence, but with unsupported insinuations and beliefs about mail fraud and the hated drop boxes — both of which he claims also violate the constitution’s requirement of a secret ballot.
The argument, thus teed up, is no longer one of rigid legal proof tied to a reasonableness standard, but, is transmogrified into a more mystical matter of absolute belief. He does this operatic move in the manner of Alito and the rest of the disciples of Scalia (Antonin Scalia was the original beloved faculty advisor of this brotherhood of originalists co-founded by the supremely ambitious Calabresi, an apparent Alito wannabe). Persuasion is then based on an absolute moral claim, an appeal to deeply held personal belief, faith, if you will, which, in the proper case, trumps fallible, soulless, human-made law every time. This is always true if you have a one vote majority that always votes as a block.
A non-negotiable higher moral purpose is the infernal thing these politically radical Christian devils always righteously claim when stealing from the poor, forcing the powerless to remain so, gutting regulations that protect Americans, decreeing that girls raped will bear their rapist’s child, as God wills it. In a pinch, this judicial fraternity points to their admirably unyielding fealty to a particular ancient holy book they are all inspired and united by. Then, righteous and freed from the tawdry burdens of producing evidence and making an actual legal argument, in any sense, the distinguished law professor, like the rest of his accursed tribe, boldly makes his case.
This Kavanaugh-like bitch is auditioning as hard as fellow Yale Law alum and frat brother for life Boof Kavanaugh himself did for that coveted and hard-earned spot (and Boof sweated blood producing writings and radical rulings like a devil as he was left off one Fed Soc list of 25 Supreme Court candidates after another, until finally jumping the whole line to become an aggrieved martyr whose very life Soros, Streisand and the Clintons were intent on destroying). The 66 year-old Calabresi, with age and time against him, is putting his prayers on the realization of his network’s Project 2025, and seating himself on the bench where Alito or Thomas previously set their sweaty butts, keeping the seat warm and aromatic for their boy, Mr. Calabresi. Calabresi apparently personally adored Antonin Scalia, the patron saint of the brazenly corrupt assholes who were his protégés, the transactionally uxorious Alito and the morally limber Black Klansman, among many others.
When I say this Calabresi fuck is going full Nazi, I don’t mean that as a gratuitous insult, it’s descriptive of the type of rabid partisan that this well-educated, well-indoctrinated, impeccably credentialed true believing asshole is. Think I’m exaggerating? Here you go:
Biden said as a candidate in 2020 that he was a moderate liberal, but he proceeded to govern like Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren except for the refusal of two brave Democrats, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, to go along with that nonsense. Manchin and Sinema will both be booted out of the Senate come January 3, 2025, as a result. Biden said as a candidate that he would depoliticize the criminal justice process. Instead, his Department of Justice has used an unconstitutionally appointed Special Prosecutor to indict former President Donald Trump—the first time in history that a former President has been indicted. Hillary Clinton was given a pass on the misuse of classified documents, but not so Donald Trump. Biden’s Democrats even got Trump unconstitutionally convicted for altering business records to conceal the Trump Organization’s involvement in First Amendment protected speech in a New York State trial that was truly a charade.
We are now about to choose again between Donald Trump and Joe Biden in a presidential election year—2024—which is totally free of the fears of infection in public places caused by Covid. Here are three things we should insist on: 1) a return to truly secret ballots cast in polling booths with the curtain shut behind the voter; 2) no use of drop boxes, and 3) that everyone votes on the same day, with the same headlines in mind, and not over the period of a month.
The loss of the secret ballot, the use of drop boxes, and of same day voting is a huge change in our democracy, which ought to be abandoned now that Covid is gone. You cannot fill out a ballot at home in most cases without your family members knowing how you voted and that means the sudden loss of the secret ballot. Partisan canvassers may also observe how people vote, intimidating them and undermining their independence.
The secret ballot is of central importance in elections, especially when candidates generate the passionate feelings of hatred that are generated by Donald Trump and Joe Biden. This is a hatred that pits family members and even long-time friends against one another sometimes ruining long-cherished relationships. If ever, there was to be a presidential election for which the secret ballot was essential, it is this year’s rematch between President Trump and Joe Biden.
What’s the point of having unappealable power if you don’t use it on behalf of your generous benefactors to do things that can’t be otherwise done legally in a democracy?
The GOP has gone full Nazi (check out the latest seig heiling somersaults from Federalist Society co-founder Steven Calabresi — post coming soon). All of America’s wealthiest reactionaries (many of our current 813 American billionaires — up from the pre-pandemic 640) have gone all in with the clearly insane, iron-willed criminal candidate that many of them were, until recently, still hoping to replace with someone more stable, capable and reliable.
The big talking point on the right, since Trump’s recent conviction in NYS criminal court, is LAWFARE, the selective weaponization of the “justice” system against innocent members of their party, including vicious leftist attacks on the ethics of perfectly fair Supreme Court justices guilty of simply loving their wives and having generous billionaire personal friends.
Here’s a little partial scorecard:
The criminal trial of seemingly criminal Senator Bob Menendez (D-NJ), indicted September 22, 2023, is underway as you read these words (assuming it’s some time around June 10, 2024)
The criminal trial of a crack addict named Hunter Biden (you’ve seen photos of his genitals, displayed in the House of Representatives, now watch the trial itself) who lied on an application for a gun permit, a charge brought after a six year investigation by a Trump appointee made Special Counsel by the current AG, that was being disposed of in a plea deal (rejected by a Trump appointed judge on July 27, 2023) is currently about ready to go to a jury.
On June 9, 2023, Trump was indicted for violations of the Espionage Act, and criminal charges related to false statements by defendant Trump and his lawyers and multiple efforts to obstruct an FBI investigation, one year ago yesterday. The case has been postponed indefinitely based on a grab bag of defendant’s fringe legal theories the sitting judge, appointed by Trump after “losing” the 2020 election, has not yet had a chance to rule on (rendering her so far impervious to appeal, yo).
Trump was indicted for Election Interference, disrupting an official proceeding and other crimes in the federal court in D.C. on August 1, 2023. That case has been delayed indefinitely by the 6-3 Federalist Society Supreme Court, since December 2023 when they refused to expedite DOJ’s request to immediately hear Trump’s frivolous appeal, and rule on the absurd non-issue under consideration by the Federalist Six (the thorny, novel legal question: can a former president ever be indicted for anything done while president, including murder of his political opponents?) is unlikely to be ruled on in time for the full evidence against Trump to be heard by the public before the 2024 election.
Trump and eighteen co-conspirators were charged by Fulton County DA Fani Willis for a criminal conspiracy to overturn the results of the 2020 election in Georgia. They were indicted on August 15, 2023, a few pleading to lesser charges to avoid possible felony convictions. The case is now on hold because the appeals court in Georgia is planning to hold more hearings regarding the consentual relationship between the Fulton County DA and a prosecutor she hired for the criminal prosecution. Although the appeal appears to be as frivolous as the Trump defendants’ original stinking, racist dumpster of a motion to dismiss the prosecutor, bear in mind that the totally colorblind justice system of the state of Georgia continues to take any kind of colorable sexual improprieties between Black government officials as VERY serious matters of public concern.
In the one case the cognitively diminished 78 year-old former president (as of Flag Day, June 14) was indicted for and stood trial for (or rather, slept trial for), the unanimous jury convicted him on all counts. The jury found that Trump’s falsification of business records to cover up pay offs to silence two women whose stories would have hurt him in the upcoming 2016 election, payoffs made right after the “grab ’em by the pussy” recording was released by the Clinton campaign shortly before the election, had been established beyond a reasonable doubt.
That is the standard of proof in a criminal trial, a fairly high bar. Beyond a reasonable doubt. Just as the standard for recusal by a Supreme Court justice is set out with perfect clarity in federal statute for every right wing “textualist” with eyes to read it:
Of course, to the members of the orthodox, highly partisan “conservative-libertarian” federal judicial fraternity/ federal judgeship pipeline, the Federalist Society, citing this law out of context this way, and focusing unfairly on the word “shall”, making recusal mandatory if the judge’s impartiality might reasonably be questioned, is just another example of an armchair liberal cuck loser cripple, deranged on steroids and worse, pathetically trying to weaponize “justice”, waging more feckless Leftist partisan lawfare, ranting impotently while a good Christian conservative has loud, righteous sex with the cuck’s wife in the other room.
Fascists must destroy the citizens’ ability to obtain information, analyze it and make critical decisions. They do this through violence, after flooding them with propaganda that mobilizes their grievances to instill an overpowering sense of fear and rage in the population. Once enough disaffected people become terrified and enraged, they will all goosestep just fine, thanks, and the most violence prone among them will happily commit any idealistic violence the leader might require to seize and keep power.
So much of what these American Nazis are currently doing is literally translated from the original German. Stay tuned for the co-founder of the Federalist Society’s recent full embrace of the vaunted Federalist Society credo: Führerwortes haben Gesetzeskraft! He didn’t want death camps, if there was any choice in the matter, but since there is no choice? Death camps it shall be, sir!
It turns out there is currently a quorum of postal board governors, five of the seven appointed by President Biden, who can remove Trump megadonor Louis DeJoy as Postmaster. Been working on a letter, asking them, essentially, what the fuck? Here are the first few paragraphs:
Dear Governor (name):
I am writing to urge you to act to immediately to do whatever is necessary to replace Trump mega-donor Postmaster Louis DeJoy, who has effectively ended faith in the US Postal Service by severely disabling its formerly reliable service in multiple ways. It is essential that he is replaced while there is still time to protect the right to vote by mail in 2024 from Mr. DeJoy’s highly effective efforts to slow mail delivery to nullify those lawfully cast ballots.
The current Postmaster has introduced complete unreliability to a postal service that, until his stewardship, was remarkably consistent in its timely delivery of billions of items daily. I am 68 and have used the mail regularly since childhood. Until Mr. DeJoy took over the Post Office, delivery time was virtually always 3-5 days, over many decades.The US Postal Service, our democracy’s longtime dependable delivery service, relied upon by millions for checks, medications, letters, information, money orders, gifts, etc. has been under attack by the far right for years [1].
I understand that, due to Republicans blocking President Obama’s five nominees for the Board of governors that President Trump appointed seven governors and that they selected Trump nominee mega donor Louis DeJoy as Postmaster. President Biden’s appointment of five governors restored a quorum that could remove Mr. DeJoy. I don’t understand why a proven partisan like Mr. DeJoy, a man who has objectively done such damage to the Post Office, is still in position to continue crippling the business that he is CEO of.
I would greatly appreciate an explanation of why, two continued vacancies on the Board of Postal Governors aside, the present quorum of governors is allowing the clearly partisan Postmaster to exercise seemingly unchecked power as he hobbles mail delivery ahead of an election, expected to be close, that will feature millions of mail-in ballots.
As Postmaster, Mr. DeJoy has disabled dependable mail delivery and undermined Americans’ faith in the safety and efficiency of the USPS, under the color of “cost cutting” to reduce the Postal Service’s gigantic, legislatively imposed deficit [see footnote]. Reasonable hope of anything arriving by mail within any kind of predictable time frame is gone nationwide. Mr. DeJoy’s determined, successful efforts to hamper mail delivery appear to be part of the far right’s familiar, long-running attack on “the administrative state” – attack an institution, gain control over it and cripple it (see, e.g., the 118th Congress).
These are a couple of paragraphs I removed from the draft (I originally thought I was writing this letter to my senators and congressman):
It is a tribute to the power of propaganda, Rupert Murdoch, incendiary lies spread on unregulated social media, a brazenly partisan, aggressively activist Supreme Court, its 6-3 majority all members of an extreme right judicial fraternity, the deliberate destruction of norms, ethics, long held notions of civility and citizenship and the unlimited, tax-deductible dark money of America’s most reactionary oligarchs, the ravenous greed of corporate mass media, that the upcoming election, based on the relative accomplishments of each of the candidates while in office (one running, counterfactually, on denying he lost the previous election to the incumbent), can even be remotely close.
Personally, I think Biden wins by fifteen or even twenty million votes, but as history shows, the power of dead slaveholders gets the last word, with the Electoral College. Even a 2,000 vote margin, surgically spread across enough districts in a few key states can bring us, with mathematical precision, Project 2025. Heaven help any American with reservations about a dictatorship of the corporate/White Christian Nationalist right, massive deportation camps for millions and all the rest. Heaven help Rosie O’Donnell and the thousands on that enemies list with her.
Here is the footnote:
[1] I could not resist including this pertinent bit of context (even as I know some of it wasfinally addressed in The Postal Service Reform Act of 2022):
Committees of Correspondence were essential for organizing in the period leading up to the American Revolution, illustrating the danger this citizen ability to freely communicate poses to those who would be tyrants. The radical right’s project of undermining “the administrative state” made the USPS a logical target.
As you no doubt recall, at the end of the Bush/Cheney lame duck 109th Congress, by voice vote in the House and unanimous consent in the Senate, legislators passed the Postal Accountability Enhancement Act of 2006. The law imposed a mandate on the USPS that applies to no other business in the world, requiring it to pre-fund its pension and health insurance for retirees to the year 2056, ensuring the pension rights of postal workers not yet born while imposing ten years of pension prepayment costs, at $5,500,000,000 annually, on the Post Office, a self-sustaining government agency that gets no taxpayer funding. Suddenly there was a huge USPS deficit and an urgent need to cut costs regarding mail delivery, if not privatize the Postal Service outright.
How is a judge who has already shown bias towards a criminal defendant, the former president who appointed her to her lifetime position, by unlawfully taking his case and abusing her discretion in bending over backwards to accommodate her benefactor, not easily disqualified from sitting in judgment in a criminal case against him when she has already demonstrated reversible bias in the case he brought to prevent the criminal case she is, again, the sitting judge on?
Former President Donald Trump, in possession of dozens of boxes of government documents he unlawfully retained after leaving the presidency, brought a case in federal court to block the government’s ability to touch him for the ongoing criminal act he was engaged in. He filed the case in a federal courthouse where the only sitting judge was the one he appointed after losing the election. He had picked Federalist Society endorsed Aileen Cannon because of her extreme loyalty to the cause, presumably MAGA.
His incoherent case was captioned Trump v United States. It sought a ruling that a former president is entitled to do anything he feels like doing regarding government documents, secret or not, as he leaves office and forever after. It was his Roy Cohn style attempt to go on the offensive to preempt the Espionage Act and obstruction of justice charges Jack Smith brought after massive evidence of Trump’s crimes was recovered at one of the crime scenes, the open and shut, now maddeningly stalled United States v. Trump in federal court in Florida.
The crack Trump legal team’s largely incoherent pleadings in Trump v. US, his attempt to block Smith’s case, failed to establish what Aileen Cannon‘s jurisdiction was to hear this case. Without a basis for jurisdiction, a federal judge cannot hear a case. Cannon returned the papers to Trump’s attorneys directing them to fix this fatal flaw in its paperwork, suggesting several dubious theories of jurisdiction to them.
Trump’s attorneys returned the papers without providing grounds for jurisdiction, so, instead of dismissing it, as any law-abiding judge would be obliged to do, Aileen Cannon provided a grounds for jurisdiction for team Trump herself. She would take the dubious case as an exercise of the court’s equitable jurisdiction, basically to avoid what would otherwise be a grave injustice. Then she continued with the proceedings, ruling for Trump at every turn. The only problem was that the case still had no basis in law, except for the judge’s extremely shaky claim of a certain kind of special jurisdiction.
In the end, after an appeal by the DOJ, she was forced to dismiss the case.Here is the reversal and order to dismiss Trump v US concisely described by legal experts.
The 11th Circuit found that Cannon “improperly exercised equitable jurisdiction” in hearing the case and that the entire proceeding should be dismissed. Notably, the court also found that regardless of the status of a document in question (personal or presidential), the government maintains the authority to seize it under a warrant supported by probable cause.
The panel wrote, “The law is clear. We cannot write a rule that allows any subject of a search warrant to block government investigations after the execution of the warrant. Nor can we write a rule that allows only former presidents to do so.”
I am left with only one question now, as Aileen Cannon continues to dither and delay, postponing hearings, inviting far right third parties to make oral arguments for Trump, refusing to gag a violence threatening, lying defendant, threatening the DOJ with sanctions, postponing trial indefinitely and holding off ruling on a long line of incoherent and frivolous motions by team Trump. It is a question I’m sure I share with tens of millions of aggravated Americans:
What the fucking fuck? I mean, seriously, Jack, Merrick, nothing can be done about this glaring appearance of demonstrated judicial bias/incompetence/disdain for law in our republic of law?
gratuitousblahg 