Because it’s no fair if your own words can be quoted against you in a so-called court of law. Even with a Trump judge you can’t get a break, they seem intent on using your protected speech against you. I think Bannon should have included this prejudicial clip with his motion to delay his criminal contempt trial by several months. Any Trump appointed judge ought to see the irony.
Category Archives: Law and Justice
Heather with a perfect frame
Excellent summation
American carnage, Trumpie’s proud legacy.
State laboratories of autocracy
Because there were stringent laws against lobbyists directly influencing federal legislators with things like lavish vacations, expensive meals. nice gifts and so on, the Koch network focused on state legislators in the various states, since there are no analogous laws about not bribing them. An organization like the American Legislative Exchange Council drafts model laws like Stand Your Ground, that are distributed at legal corporate/legislator party vacations paid for by the dark money donors of ALEC.
Fast forward 40-50 years, and Robert Reich gives you a succinct picture of how American autocrats have seized control of a majority of the state legislatures and a 6-3 anti-democracy Supreme Court that is poised to give Republican state legislatures the unappealable last word on who won the federal elections in their state.
“keep in mind, Trump reads transcripts”
Like everything else in MAGA world, the claim is bullshit. Trump can barely read a teleprompter and only does so when he thinks it will help his “brand” to stumble through prepared comments. Whether he reads or not is beside the point, the message in “Trump reads transcripts” is that you can’t hide from the wrath of this destructive, vindictive maniac, even if what you truthfully reveal is only written on a page somewhere. The bold lies of MAGA world are central to its popularity, its legitimacy! You can’t argue so-called truth with people happy with any lie that helps their cause, and who are openly calling for the killing of their hated enemies.
Against this determined onslaught we have a 79 year-old moderate chosen by his party as our leader in this perilous moment. Joe Biden promised to give his heart and soul as president. He probably has. His heart is clearly broken and his soul appears to be inconsolable too. He is blamed, by virtually everyone, for worldwide inflation, for the “failure” of all his promises to make it past the sacred, inviolable filibuster, supported to the death by two of his slim 51-50 Senate majority, nullifying all initiatives. There’s nothing sacred about the filibuster. Remember how nonchalantly fucking Mitch McConnell changed the sacrosanct filibuster rule to install a “51-49, suck it” fully MAGA Supreme Court majority after denying Obama’s nominee a hearing and leaving Scalia’s seat open for Gorsuch. And, of course, cramming Christian cultist Amy Coney Barrett down America’s collective throat to make it “6-3, suck it” while votes were being cast in the 2020 presidential election. Quite the little shit sandwich, with supremely entitled, angrily hissing victim of left wing revenge conspiracies, Boof Kavanaugh, in between.
Biden seems to live in his memory as much as in 2022. He probably remembers having coffee with Mitch McConnell years back and coming away with the impression that Mitch wouldn’t stand by silently as others tried to lynch the first mulatto president. He still believes a calm, steady approach appealing to decency is best, that Reason always wins over blind hatred (true in the long run, perhaps, but not in the short run). He acted in accord with this belief when appointing calm, steady, cautious Merrick Garland as AG, with the perfect poetic justice of the moderate Supreme Court candidate the GOP fucked out of a hearing leading prosecutions of those who trampled American democracy, restoring bipartisan faith in American justice and democracy.
American justice has most often been carried out by violence. Frontier justice, Texas justice, Home Rule justice, States’ Rights justice. Lynch mobs that support their leader’s view of things always act with impunity. The simpleton’s nuanced logic runs this way: deadly violence to keep the peace is justified when the good guys with the guns control the violence, otherwise common criminals would run roughshod over all of us. Police routinely arrest white mass murderers and quietly take them into custody, they also fill Black traffic law violators, or those suspected of such violations, with bullets from time to time. A literal lynch mob storms the Capitol, armed to the teeth, organized, led by paramilitary hate group members. The cry of the violent is always “Justice!“
So, yeah, by all means, keep in mind that Trump reads transcripts, just like he reads his second favorite book, The Bible. The book he kept at his bedside, according to his first wife, was the Collected Speeches of Adolf Hitler. Hitler knew a thing or two about how to get things done. How the will, exerted as mightily as possible, can overcome all obstacles, all logic, all so-called decency, overcome all hesitation, all so-called moral qualms (conscience being a Jewish invention, according to AH). Find men who believe you were sent by God Himself, an infallible man of destiny. When the moment calls for a screaming temper tantrum, rage, that’s how you bend people to your will.
The answer to a screaming temper tantrum, of course, is firmness, logic, and sometimes, a good hard slap. If the tantrum is by a president insisting on his right to take illegal action, the good hard slap is enforcement of the laws he and his allies violated. It is the enduring shame of the human race that we have so often been herded by groups of wilful men operating in a blinding rage, opposed by good people bound by moral qualms. When Trump finally goes to his reserved seat in the smoking section of Hell, the radical party of born-wealthy men like him will continue to exert its infuriated will. After all, what good is having all the money in the world if you also can’t make everyone in the world do whatever you tell them to?
Paul Waldman nails the vile absurdity of Originalism
As we’ve seen recently, the American right has found in the framers an extraordinarily effective tool with which they can roll back social progress and undermine our democracy. It may have found its most ridiculous manifestation in the tea party movement that emerged when Barack Obama was president, when people started prancing around in tricorn hats and every Republican was supposed to have a favorite Founder. But today it has gone from an affectation to a weapon, and a brutally effective one.
We saw it in the recent Supreme Court decisions that supercharged the legal philosophy of “originalism” on abortion and guns. Reproductive rights, said Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., are neither found in the explicit words of the Constitution nor “deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and traditions,” so they don’t exist as rights. As for states that want to regulate guns, said Justice Clarence Thomas, only regulations that have “a distinctly similar historical regulation” from the 18th century will be allowed. The America of 1789 becomes a prison the conservative justices can lock us all in whenever it suits them.Originalism was a scam from the start, a foolproof methodology for conservatives to arrive at whatever judicial result matches their policy preferences: Cherry-pick a few quotes from the Federalist Papers, cite an obscure 1740 ordinance from the Virginia colony one of your clerks dug up, then claim that scripture leads us inexorably to only one outcome.
How is prosecuting witness intimidation political?
When Cassidy Hutchinson testified to the J6 Committee under oath last week (a sin for present day Republicans), the committee revealed written attempts to get Hutchinson to “do the right thing” and to “remain loyal”. The tweets, likely sent under direction of her former boss Mark Meadows, made philosophical observations about what a shame it would be for a nice young woman like her to… etc. The witness tampering, and obstruction of investigations of extreme national importance, is ongoing.
Witness tampering is a felony that carries a twenty year prison sentence. The punishment is twenty years because the crime is such a serious threat to the rule of law. If you can freely intimidate all witnesses and get their memories to disappear in all relevant areas, the administration of justice stops dead. You have the rule of the mob, free to intimidate anyone who calls them a mob.
The only thing political about not prosecuting witness intimidation is a paralyzing fear that the other side will somehow use the prosecutions politically.
During Trump’s first impeachment trial, the former president (who won reelection in a landslide, necessitating the peaceful, legal, patriotic protest of January 6th…) tweeted thinly veiled threats against people who were testifying truthfully about his attempts to get the president of Ukraine to announce a fake investigation into Joe Biden’s son. He threatened witnesses publicly and in real time, as they were testifying in public hearings on television. He also swiftly took revenge on witnesses and family members of witnesses for testifying truthfully. He took his revenge lap right after impeachment failed, days after jury foreman Mitch McConnell announced he was working closely with the president’s defense team (Patsy Baloney, Federalist Society superlawyer and future White House counsel among them) to get the impeachment farce quickly dismissed.
For years prior to that hearing, and up to the present day, Trump’s standing order to anyone in his party receiving a Congressional subpoena is to tell Congress to shove its subpoena, and they’ll fight it out in courts until the clock runs out. That’s a novel and brazen approach to lawful, compulsory subpoenas, sir. The DOJ, headed first by Jeff Sessions and later by the supremely unprincipled Bill Barr (hell of a bagpipes player, I’ve heard) was clearly fine with all of their boss’s obstructive tactics, even the plainly illegal ones (someone has to prosecute crimes or they’re just partisan allegations of crimes). Trump’s handpicked political operatives at DOJ were all on team MAGA, all shared the same goal of turning the clock back to the days before that Commie Supreme Court desegregated the schools, allowed women the final choice about whether to give birth, gave civil rights to homosexual perverts, due process protections to (presumed guilty) ordinary people arrested for crimes and gave the state’s blessing to the vile practice of miscegenation, race-mixing.
Fabulous piece of shit Jared Kusher comes to mind. A C student in his private school, he attended Harvard after his billionaire father, Charles, made a two million dollar donation to that institution. Now Jared is smart! Charles Kushner was involved in some illegal activity, he juggled money between companies he owned and signed false papers on behalf of partners to make larger than legal political contributions (to Democratic candidates, funnily enough). They had him dead to rights, the state’s main witness being his brother-in-law.
Charles Kushner didn’t get where he is by coloring between the fucking lines. He hired a professional scumbag to set up a meeting between a hooker and his brother-in-law. The hooker was good, picked the witness up and brought him to a hotel room rigged for video recording. Charles brought the tape to his sister and told her if her husband didn’t dummy up the video would be all over the fucking internet. His sister may have been wearing a wire, the case against Charles Kusher was now about a much bigger deal: witness tampering.
We know the prison sentence for the felony of witness tampering is twenty years. Billionaires, however, usually get a steep “best people” discount on the rare occasions they’re sentenced for crimes. Charles was sentenced to two years, served fourteen months, presumably because his behavior was so good. Jared never forgave fellow piece of shit Chris Christie for prosecuting his innocent father. Charles eventually got a pardon from Trumpie, no doubt one of the many Jared had his nose buried in while the planned coup d’etat was being feverishly enacted all around him while he was so busy working on a stack of pardons that he had no idea of any plans. He told J6 investigators he was too busy working on pardons to listen to people like Patsy Baloney whining about Trumpie’s proposed, allegedly illegal plans.
Pardon me for this rant. I’ve extended every benefit of the doubt to Joe Biden, not my first pick among the Democratic candidates, nor even my tenth. Under the horrific circumstances, I think he’s doing a decent job. I extend the benefit of the doubt to Merrick Garland, a methodical, capable prosecutor probably building a complex and difficult racketeering case (RICO) against Trump and his myrmidons, as he tries to restore public faith in the impartiality of the DOJ. I’ve heard RICO cases are not hard to win, but are also, unless perfect, not hard to get thrown out on appeal. Clearly it would be a fatal disaster if Trump was about to be locked up as a political mob boss, appealed and had the case overturned. Seen that way, it is understandable, and smart, that Garland is building a careful, airtight case against a criminal syndicate.
But if Garland doesn’t bring prompt prosecutions against people we know are actively committing the felony of intimidating witnesses to cover the gigantic criminal ass of the most prodigious liar the world has ever known, what the fuck? What the fucking fuck, Merrick?
Patriotic video for July 4th
True not only of American autocrats
This is the essence of law in every totalitarian state. Protect the ruling party, prosecute all potential enemies.
The Federalist Society method
The Federalist Society method for radical social change is a page from any democracy to authoritarianism legal playbook. You need to change the laws to protect the interests of your patrons by moving power to institutions you already control. You take the legal result you want, have legal scholars create a doctrine that will support a ruling in your favor, promulgate that doctrine in the media (the “Independent State Legislature Doctrine” for example [1]) as you find the perfect legal case to apply that doctrine to and strike down a hated law or regulation. Select the ideal federal district where the carefully chosen case can be brought, ideally a place where any appeal will be heard by a panel of Federalist Society members. Preserve all arguments, no matter how far-fetched, for appeal and wind up at the Supreme Court, controlled by your members. Have numerous Federalist Society scholars submit amicus (“friend of the court”) briefs, giving legal support for the desired ruling.
If the case calls for throwing out state law to have your desired result, you have a doctrine ready (unregulated gun rights too sacred to be left to the states). If it calls for overriding federal law, use a different doctrine (Christ says life begins at fertilization, federal government has no right to contradict the Messiah, only states can do that). Heather Cox Richardson provides detail on two chilling examples (see footnotes). The rulings are often legally and logically ridiculous, but no worries, the ends justify the means, plus, we have the votes. Plus, nothing infuriates the libs like an irrational, inappealable in-your-fucking-face “fuck you”.
They are openly playing a brutal game, as they move the country toward a Christian fascist autocracy. We are to understand that no matter how popular a given position is among voters, whatever fix Congress might make, whatever the unanimous upholding of a law might say about its necessity to a free democracy, the final say is left to the Federalist Society majority on the highest court in the land. They just ruled, 6-3, that the Clean Air Act does not give the Environmental Protection Agency the right to regulate things like carbon emissions that pollute the air, presumably because that exact phrase was not used in the law creating the EPA (just a guess) [2]. Media reports this devastating anti-climate ruling as “SCOTUS hamstrings Biden’s plans to combat Climate Change,” as though the 79 year-old Biden is the only victim of this criminal ruling. The only beneficiaries of the ruling are outfits like Exxon, Koch Industries and Halliburton, major drivers of “Biden inflation” as they reap record profits by raising gas prices to near-record levels.
I read Shelby County v. Holder during the 2020 election. That was the 5-4 “conservative” ruling that overruled a 98-0 Senate vote to reauthorize the Voting Rights Act and the strongly expressed support of the previous Republican president. The Federalist Society knows that their side loses any election in which there is massive voter turnout, so making voting more difficult is a big win for them. John Roberts was careful not to touch the law itself, he merely made it impossible to enforce that law, short of going to court again and again in every jurisdiction that might violate the law with new voter suppression methods. The law prevented chicanery to suppress the vote among minority populations, and required preclearance for new laws to make voting harder in jurisdictions that had previously resorted to such chicanery. Roberts waved a judicial wand to make the history of voter suppression disappear, because the Voting Rights Act had fixed it. See, no need for enforcement!
Roberts cited voting statistics from formerly openly racist districts to show that there was equal access to the polls for whites and Blacks, then voting in numbers reflecting their relative size in the population. Proof that there was no further need to enforce the Voting Rights Act. He falsely claimed that Congress had wrongly relied on forty year old data when reauthorizing the Act. There were numerous hearings and a mountain of current data presented before gigantic majorities in both houses of Congress reauthorized the law and George W. Bush held a signing ceremony where he underscored the importance of this law to our democracy.
But, you know, that all smells too much like democracy, “majoritarian tyranny,” for persecuted mega-donors like “Mr. Dark Money”, Charles Koch. So, as soon as Shelby County was decided, numerous Republican-controlled states immediately enacted laws to suppress the vote. Just as many anti-abortion “trigger laws” went into effect as soon as the Unappealable Six struck down Roe v. Wade in a masterpiece of judicial illogic.
There is only one solution to this illegitimate, inconsistent, rabidly partisan court. It, along with the rest of the federal bench, was packed with committed Federalist Society zealots by the unprincipled Mitch McConnell, using his power to obstruct Obama and the idiot Trump who kept his promise to the Council on National Policy (in return for them blessing his candidacy) to select judges only from Federalist Society lists of its top ideologues. The illegitimately packed Supreme Court must now be rebalanced and there is no constitutional reason not to expand the court. Biden has shied away from this fight, kicking the can down the road by appointing a bipartisan panel to explore the issue before letting it quietly die. Biden has many other fights on his plate, against unified Republican opposition and two bought and paid for Democratic defenders of the obstructionist filibuster. He also doesn’t have the votes, with Manchin and Sinema scrupulously “neutral” on allowing any legislation to come up for a vote in the Senate.
Now the president calls for a filibuster carve out to allow the Senate to codify Roe 51-49. As if any such law would not be quickly litigated by the Federalist Society and struck down by the Federalist Society Six — three of which were appointed by razor thin majorities after McConnell’s filibuster carve out for Supreme Court justices. Biden didn’t call for a carve out to make federal rules for federal elections, to protect voting rights as state after state made laws that would not have passed the pre-Shelby County Voting Rights Act. He didn’t call for a carve out for legislation to mitigate Climate Catastrophe. He doesn’t have the votes now, I understand, but, come on, man, part of your fucking job is inspiring confidence in people who voted for you. How are Democrats supposed to pick up Senate seats, to allow his administration to get anything done, when Mr. Biden is hesitant to speak truth to power? Power concedes nothing without a demand, as Frederick Douglass, Trump’s facebook friend, noted many moons ago.
[1] from the great Heather Cox Richardson:
The court also said today that it will consider making even greater changes to our country. It will hear Moore v. Harper, a case about whether state legislatures alone have the power to set election rules even if their laws violate state constitutions.
The case comes from North Carolina, where the state supreme court rejected a dramatically partisan gerrymander. Republicans say that the state court cannot stop the legislature’s carving up of the state because of the “independent state legislatures doctrine.” This is a new idea, based on the clause in the U.S. Constitution providing that “[t]he times, places and manner of holding elections for senators and representatives, shall be prescribed in each state by the legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations.” Those adhering to the independent state legislature theory ignore the second part of that provision.
Those advancing the independent state legislature theory also point to another clause of the Constitution. It says: “Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors.”
Until now, states have interpreted “legislatures” to mean the state’s general lawmaking processes, which include shared power and checks and balances among the three branches of state government. Now, a radical minority insists that a legislature is a legislature alone, unchecked by state courts or state constitutions that prohibit gerrymandering. This interpretation of the Constitution is radical and new. It caught on in 2015, when Republicans wanted to get rid of an independent redistricting commission in Arizona.
This doctrine is, of course, what Trump and his allies pushed for to keep him in power in 2020: Republican state legislatures throwing out the will of the people and sending electors for Trump to Congress rather than the Biden electors the majority voted for.
That doctrine would also give to state legislatures the power to control who can vote, and how and where they can do so. It would strip power from elections commissions and secretaries of state, and it would take from state courts the power to challenge gerrymandering or voter suppression. Republicans currently control 30 state legislatures, in large part thanks to the gerrymandering and voter suppression in place in a number of those states.
Revered conservative judge J. Michael Luttig has been trying for months to sound the alarm that this doctrine is a blueprint for Republicans to steal the 2024 election. In April, before the court agreed to take on the Moore v. Harper case, he wrote: “Trump and the Republicans can only be stopped from stealing the 2024 election at this point if the Supreme Court rejects the independent state legislature doctrine (thus allowing state court enforcement of state constitutional limitations on legislatively enacted election rules and elector appointments) and Congress amends the Electoral Count Act to constrain Congress’ own power to reject state electoral votes and decide the presidency.”
And yet in March, when the Supreme Court let the state supreme court’s decision against the radical map stay in place for 2022, justices Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Clarence Thomas, and Brett Kavanaugh indicated they are open to the idea that state courts have no role in overseeing the rules for federal elections.
In the one term Trump’s three justices have been on the court, they have decimated the legal landscape under which we have lived for generations, slashing power from the federal government, where Congress represents the majority, and returning it to states, where a Republican minority can impose its will. Thanks to the skewing of our electoral system, those states are now poised to take control of our federal government permanently.
[2] Heather:
Today, the court’s decision in West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency reversed almost 100 years of jurisprudence by arguing that Congress cannot delegate authority on “major questions” to agencies in the executive branch. At stake were EPA regulations that would push fossil fuel producers toward clean energy in order to combat climate change. The vote was 6 to 3, along ideological lines. That the court agreed to hear the case despite the fact that the rules being challenged had been abandoned suggested they were determined to make a point.
That point was to hamstring federal regulation of business. The argument at the heart of this decision is called the “nondelegation doctrine,” which says that Congress, which constitutes the legislative branch of the government, cannot delegate legislative authority to the executive branch. Most of the regulatory bodies in our government are housed in the executive branch. So the nondelegation doctrine would hamstring the modern regulatory state.
To avoid this extreme conclusion, the majority on the court embraced the “major questions” doctrine, which Chief Justice Roberts used today for the first time in a majority opinion.
That doctrine says that Congress must not delegate “major” issues to an agency, saying that such major issues must be explicitly authorized by Congress. But the abuse of the Senate filibuster by Republican senators means that no such laws stand a hope of passing. So the Supreme Court has essentially stopped the federal government from responding as effectively as it must to climate change. And that will have international repercussions: the inability of the U.S. government to address the crisis means that other countries will likely fall behind as well. The decision will likely apply not just to the EPA, but to a whole host of business regulations.
As recently as 2001, the Supreme Court unanimously rejected the nondelegation argument in a decision written by Justice Antonin Scalia, who said the court must trust Congress to take care of its own power. But now it has become law.
gratuitousblahg 