Jennifer Rubin with an excellent piece about two Democratic State lawmakers who responded to GOP bullying by directly confronting their attackers. Good for them, this needs to start happening everywhere.
Her piece is called: Distinguished pols of the week: This is what moral outrage sounds like
I’ll disclose this from the start, for anyone who may have stumbled on this post — I am a member of the nefarious left wing conspiracy, particularly now that the sides are drawn so clearly — autocracy vs. democracy, indulging and empowering unlimited mass hatreds (for the outsized benefit of the very, very few) vs. engaging with political opponents to hammer out solutions to real problems and extending the benefit of the doubt to people on the other side of the political divide. Party of obstruction, vituperation, pollution, tax breaks for the wealthiest vs. party of everything else a free people might need.
Regarding the benefit of the doubt, I’m certain that any two right wing and left wing people have much more in common than things that actually divide them. There are hundreds of things virtually everyone would immediately agree on. Both sides love their children and want the best for them. Both sides are revolted by crimes against children. Even the strictest “spare the rod spoil the child” parents do not believe it is ever right to beat your child to a bloody pulp or break their little bones. Liberals and conservatives want old people to live their final years in dignity, without fear or deprivation. Nobody, not one of us, likes these constant mass shootings everywhere in the land of the free. All Americans believe in fairness, in certain unalienable rights like the right to live with integrity and to pursue your dreams without being attacked by the government, or anybody else. There are countless things human beings everywhere, all over the world, agree on, across all political affiliations.
The science of fascism is how to mobilize grievances and galvanize the hatreds that makes humans willing to march in armies to exterminate inhuman enemies. It is only by creating artificial, black and white tribes that are not people of differing political or cultural leanings but deadly enemies, that totalitarian regimes come to and retain power.
Those who hate “majoritarian tyranny” (and this anti-democratic trope predates the John Birch Society, Libertarianism and Charles Koch, goes back to John C. Calhoun and friends of slavery decades before the Civil War) find ways to make enough voters hate the “other side” to defeat it. They help themselves stay in power by passing laws to restrict their enemies’ right to vote, by irreversibly purging 100,000 enemy voters on the eve of an election they’ll win by 40,000 (see, for example, candidate Brian Kemp, in 2016, using his power as Secretary of State to remove tens of thousands of likely Stacey Abrams voters from the voting rolls in Georgia right before eking out a victory in the Peach State’s most recent gubernatorial election. Republicans in Florida’s state government did the same for DeSantis before his narrow victory).
Their party’s members on the highest court in the land will provide crucial tactical support by ruling that the Voting Rights Act will not henceforth be enforced and that unlimited secret money to influence political outcomes is merely free speech, to which legally created eternal “persons” are entitled under the Fourteenth Amendment.
The mass influence tactic most often employed by fascistic types, it seems, is what psychologists call “projection” — projecting your problems and fears onto others. Projection 101: I am prone to outbursts of racist anger, but don’t like to think of myself as an angry person, or a racist, so I will accuse anyone who wants to dispute anything with me of being an enraged racist psychopath. The shoe might fit me much better better than it fits you, but I will angrily cram it on your foot and fuck you, now you have to defend yourself, you angry racist piece of shit! The simplicity of this technique, the old three year-old’s taunting “I know you are, but what am I?” makes it an irresistible tool for cutting off debate of any kind.
This textbook example, a statement issued by the House “Freedom Caucus” (the most rabidly aggressive right wing members of the House, the stars of MAGA world) in defense of Marjorie Taylor Greene’s right to incite whoever the hell she feels like inciting, based on whatever she feels is right, with no push back from anyone, jumped out at me, a real masterpiece of MAGA art, that, like the rest of the far right ouevre only stands as brilliant art if it goes unscrutinized. Lack of scrutiny is key for this entire playbook. The beauty, of course, is when you’re angry you can’t see nuance or scrutinize anything but doing somebody about what is making you so goddamned mad you can hardly see. The real facts cannot be allowed into the echo chamber or the alternative facts (Trump advisor Kelleyanne Conway’s brazen rebranding of the old judgmental word “lie”) can’t take hold. Let’s walk through this classic example of right wing projection:
The left’s attempts to politicize the courts:
Well, the left has created a well-funded and powerful legal fraternity and career ladder, active in virtually every American law school, where leftist law students can get internships with left wing federal judges, help them research and craft activist left wing rulings, audition for becoming judges themselves with their bold left wing activism and then, after auditioning as lower level judges and showing a fierce and unwavering fealty to the left wing orthodoxy and judicial philosophy of their legal fraternity, wind up as lifetime political appointees on the federal bench. A majority of these disciplined, proven zealots will eventually control the Supreme Court for a generation.
Wait, that’s the right. That partisan judicial career network is the Federalist Society, the outfit Ginny Thomas and the Council for National Policy (a secret membership by invitation nonprofit corporation of the highest echelons in “movement conservatism”) made then-candidate Trump swear to choose all federal court nominees from their carefully vetted lists of candidates most dedicated to the principles of their legal fraternity.
The last century’s famous “activist” Supreme Court, the Warren Court, was an outlier in American history (most Supreme Courts are conservative, by nature and by design — only change the constitutional status quo if there is a pressing national need to do so). Chief Justice Earl Warren, appointed by Eisenhower, was a Republican and a conservative. He had the desirable judicial quirk of having strong beliefs but also being biased toward giving the cases before him a fair hearing before rendering a decision. He and his colleagues were amenable to being convinced by a superior legal argument. Warren, and his often unanimous court, ruled on the merits, the relative strengths and weaknesses, of the case presented, with an eye toward increasing, rather than restricting, the rights of citizens whenever possible.
This is a much different judicial philosophy than the one animating today’s Federalist Society Six, the 6-3 Trump/McConnell majority on our current Supreme Court, who select cases and render decisions in order to restrict rights for partisan advantage. Many of these cases are handled secretly on the “shadow docket” (where no legal argument need be noted in an unsigned majority decision) on a straight party line basis to advance their political beliefs and enhance the power of their party. John Roberts and a 5-4 Federalist Society majority invalidated enforcement of the Voting Rights Act the Senate reauthorized 98-0 and conservative president George W. Bush praised in a signing ceremony. Whose compelling liberty interest was Roberts’ activism vindicating?
On the other hand, we have Earl Warren’s most famous bit of “radical left” “judicial activism” that scandalized racists in every strata of American Society, 1954’s unanimous Brown v. Board of Education, which struck down the racist practice of segregation in public schools. After seeing vivid proof that “separate but equal” was a cruel farce, that there was nothing remotely equal in the racial separation at law, that it was a ruse to keep Blacks “in their place” by making them accept second class status and disproportionate poverty, the Warren court struck down segregation in public schools. If the proposition that segregation was racist and in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment needed proving, nine justices were convinced by the proof presented by Thurgood Marshall and the plaintiff opponents of the practice.
You need only look at photos from the Jim Crow era to see the brutal in-your-face mockery of this hoary “legal doctrine” of Separate but Equal. The modern refrigerated water fountain was for whites only, the hose marked “colored” was the equal facility for Blacks to refresh themselves on brutally hot summer days. Restaurant bathroom, whites only, the outhouse in the back, or the bushes, separate but equal. And so it was in schools, stated the Supreme Court after massive proof had been presented. Which enraged generations of a certain kind of angry white asshole, funded by white assholes of immense hereditary wealth. A group, once the lunatic fringe of the Republican party, now its highly energized base.
to achieve what they cannot at the ballot box
Leftists famously lawyered up and ran to the courts, their national committee footing the immense legal bills, before and after the last presidential election, to limit voting, contest pandemic voting rules, to have judges declare them right and their enemies shit out of luck. Leftists contested the results of the presidential election in courts everywhere their candidate lost. Leftist elected officials told left wing groups, on video, that if they didn’t stop their right wing enemies from voting en masse they’d never hold national office again. They passed laws in state after state to prevent perceived voter fraud they never proved exists (though they swear it does) and putting final electoral decisions in the hands of proven partisans ready to overturn fraudulent elections to ensure the “integrity” of those elections.
Oh, wait, that was the right doing all of those things, plus forming a well-funded dark money group, The American Accountability Foundation, to contest every single nomination by the new, illegitimate administration [1], the one who millions had been convinced had stolen the election with those eight million highly suspicious Black votes.
America is on a dangerous path
True dat, no question about that one. Sometimes all it takes is a drop of truth, to make the rest of the bullshit medicine slide right on down the old gullet.
[1] from one of America’s finest investigative journalists, Jane Mayer:
But the fierce campaign against (Ketanji Brown Jackson) was concerning, in part because it was spearheaded by a new conservative dark-money group that was created in 2020: the American Accountability Foundation. An explicit purpose of the A.A.F.—a politically active, tax-exempt nonprofit charity that doesn’t disclose its backers—is to prevent the approval of all Biden Administration nominees. . .
. . . Rather than attack a single candidate or nominee, the A.A.F. aims to thwart the entire Biden slate. The obstructionism, like the Republican blockade of Biden’s legislative agenda in Congress, is the end in itself. The group hosts a Web site, bidennoms.com, that displays the photographs of Administration nominees it has targeted, as though they were hunting trophies. And the A.A.F. hasn’t just undermined nominees for Cabinet and Court seats—the kinds of prominent people whose records are usually well known and well defended. It’s also gone after relatively obscure, sub-Cabinet-level political appointees, whose public profiles can be easily distorted and who have little entrenched support. The A.A.F., which is run by conservative white men, has particularly focused on blocking women and people of color. As of last month, more than a third of the twenty-nine candidates it had publicly attacked were people of color, and nearly sixty per cent were women.
source
Today there was sworn testimony in a lawsuit brought on behalf of Georgia voters contesting Marjorie Taylor Greene’s right to be on the ballot, as someone who took an oath to defend the Constitution and who then advocated loudly for extra-constitutional remedies to an election she claimed was stolen. The case was brought under section three of the Fourteenth Amendment, which reads:
No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.
The hearing was live streamed to anybody interested in hearing it in real time. I heard about an hour of Marjorie and then the closing arguments of both lawyers. Here are some new things I learned from Marjorie Taylor Greene’s testimony today.
She seems to have a fairly spotty memory for someone her age. She didn’t recall making any of the strong statements she made about the need to stop the peaceful transfer of power. When her own words were played on video she said they were taken out of context, but didn’t elaborate except to call CNN a lying outfit. She swore she had no recollection about people she talked to before or after January 6th because she was very busy running her new Congressional office. Her recollection is particularly poor when it comes to specific contacts of her’s who were arrested for the violent assault on the Capitol.
She says she really has little control over what appears on her Facebook page, or on her Twitter feed. She said she has many staffers and does not directly authorize the videos, even ones that have been on her facebook page for a year-and-a-half, prove good for fundraising (Biden stole Trump’s presidency and the radical left thinks we’re idiots) and are never taken down.
Marjorie believes that socialist liberals are out to portray her as stupid, her followers as not smart people. But she insists her supporters are smart enough to know that when she encourages them to show up in numbers on January 6th to flood the Capitol because it’s a 1776 moment, or that Pelosi and others might need to be executed, and we need you all there to help us right this evil injustice of a stolen election, that she is only referring to a peaceful lawful march to the Capitol to keep the pressure on fainthearted Republicans to legally overturn a stolen election. In other words, free speech. Plus, after the riot was stopped she immediately urged everyone to be peaceful and to obey the law.
I may have missed it, but when she spoke of a planned peaceful march to the Capitol, I thought the lawyer questioning her should have asked her if she was aware that the organizers of the January 6th Stop the Steal protest rally had not sought a permit for any kind of march that day. Why involve all those extra police and spend all that extra money when you can all just march down there as a bunch of individual free citizens and go into the people’s house which you already own and don’t need an invitation to, or permission to enter, even when its closed for a joint session of Congress?
And besides words like “fight like hell or you won’t have a country anymore”, or her “we can’t allow the peaceful transfer of power Joe Biden wants” are obviously metaphors meaning be peaceful, don’t insult the police, don’t hit them, gouge their eyes out or spray mace at them, if they tell you the building’s closed obey their lawful orders, and all like that.
And, of course, when she said that Nancy Pelosi had committed treason and that treason was punishable by death, she was a private citizen, in 2019, come on, she was just a regular person trying to get elected to Congress. In other words, she hadn’t taken the oath of office yet, the oath to defend the Constitution, so like are you going to go all the way back to when I was in high school looking for things I said that you can use to crucify me? (her lawyer interjected that bit about going all the way back to high school for compromising comments she made a year or two before the riot) [1].
And what we learned most of all is that she, like Boof Kavanaugh and her party’s raging leader, is the victim of a dark money-funded nefarious witch-hunt campaign, by cannibal pedophiles, no doubt, to bring shame to the people who voted her into office as their duly elected representative. (in the very election that was rigged against Trump!)
In summary, she is merely the victim of enraged, insane partisans trying to stop democracy by taking her off the ballot on some weird and farfetched old legal theory about not helping and encouraging, aiding and comforting, people who want to violently overturn a corrupt and evil election and stop them from “peacefully” putting a monster in the White House.
Her lawyer’s closing focused on the need to look only at the peaceful, lawful rally at the Ellipse that preceded the riot, something that was 100% protected by the Constitution, to wit, the First Amendment rights to free expression and to peacefully assemble, and that it’s not fair to punish someone merely for supposedly aiding and abetting a riot she later tweeted, once it was underway, should be done lawfully and peacefully. In fact, he took pains to read “or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof” right out of the Fourteenth Amendment.
Once the briefs are filed next week and the judge has a chance to weigh all the evidence and arguments, this could be a very interesting and helpful case going forward. Brad Raffensberger will then have to weigh the administrative law judge’s decision against his own political future and the number of death threats he recieves before likely leaving Marjorie on the ballot. I found it fascinating to watch how outwardly calmly Marjorie conducted herself during most of the part I saw, Like others before her she preferred to come off as a pinhead with the memory of a housefly rather than truthfully answer almost any question under oath. Her composure was particularly surprising after some of the overheated rants she made on right-wing media in the days leading up to her forced sworn testimony in a baseless case launched, no doubt, by moneyed Jewish space laser wielders and four black elected women she denounced by name in recent “out of context” rants.
[1] from the commies at Business Insider:
“She’s a traitor to our country, she’s guilty of treason,” Greene said of Pelosi in a 2019 Facebook video, according to CNN. “She took an oath to protect American citizens and uphold our laws. And she gives aid and comfort to our enemies who illegally invade our land. That’s what treason is. And by our law representatives and senators can be kicked out and no longer serve in our government. And it’s, uh, it’s a crime punishable by death is what treason is. Nancy Pelosi is guilty of treason.”
When former President Donald Trump told an angry mob that had burst into the Capitol that Mike Pence had betrayed them, it was not the first time in American history that a US president advocated hanging his own vice president. Perhaps there was no irony involved in the fact that the other president was the largely ignorant Trump’s favorite president, noted man of violent temper Andrew Jackson.
Unlike Trump, who with perfect deniability (his intent is still being debated by great legal minds) merely noted that his vice president was a traitorous coward and incited an angry mob to make good on their threat to hang him, Old Hickory announced that he was ready to go down to South Carolina and personally hang his seditious vice president. You can’t make this shit up.
John C. Calhoun, employing an early version of the now new again Independent State Legislature Doctrine, secretly authored South Carolina’s refusal to obey a federal law under a States’ Rights argument. He argued, arguably seditiously, that a state need not follow a federal law that it found repugnant to its traditions or offensive to its own interests, in this case the harm it would do to slaveholders to obey this federal tariff against Great Britain. South Carolina announced, almost thirty years before taking up arms against the US in the “War of Northern Aggression,” that it was officially nullifying this odious federal law in South Carolina. Predictably, Jackson was furious and ready to go down to South Carolina and personally hang John C. Calhoun.
It wasn’t that they disagreed about slavery, Andrew Jackson a self-made man of the people, had risen from modest circumstances, made his fortune in the slave trade. Jackson was not a man who took kindly to being undermined by his second-in-command, which is not hard to relate to, really.
Read all about the Nullification Crisis of 1832–33, in the online Britannica encyclopedia: https://www.britannica.com/topic/nullification-crisis
It only makes sense that I didn’t know this additional origin of the term “motherfucker” until recently because we are in a country where one can live to be an old man without ever hearing of the Red Summer of 1919. Red Summer, an exceptionally long and ugly season, had little to do with the communist scare, the decades-long J. Edgar Hoover-driven Red Scare that was the rationale for cracking down on workers’ rights. The red of the summer of 1919 was the blood spilled in over 36 American cities in pogroms against blacks, many of them returning veterans from World War One, the War to end War (and make the world safe for democracy). You know, as enraged citizen mobs do from time to time in the land of the free and the home of the brave.
And so I shouldn’t have been surprised to learn that the plausible description of the supremely flexible term motherfucker that my father laid on me as a boy was only part of the inflammatory word’s origin story. After the year 1807, when the “importation of such persons as the states shall see fit to admit” via the Atlantic slave trade was outlawed, the plantation system labor market would have to be replenished by native slaves reproducing so their monetized children could be sold.
So we learn of breeding farms, where these slave selling motherfuckers would force slaves to have sex with each other, to impregnate the females and produce more human capital. The men who ran these farms didn’t give a damn what degree of relation there might have been between the slaves, anymore than they would have considered the ancestry of a goat or other farm animal they were breeding, as long as they were of sturdy stock. More than one female slave was forced lie with her own child, in order to produce new baby slaves. A strong slave man would be forced to have sex with his own mother, to produce offspring his masters could sell. Who is the actual motherfucker in this scenario, is not hard to reckon.
This is a horror story, though true, documented and painful, that must, according to the faithful of MAGA world, never be discussed among today’s innocent, white, Christian school children. To force it on them is as evil as once upon a time forcing a young man to have sex with his own mother! That’s why we made it illegal in several states, so far, to teach this horrific racial, uh, stuff.
Jesus, it is so hard not to hate the present day evil motherfuckers who perpetrate this brazen, shameful erasure of vast, destructive, evil crimes that went on, with perfect legality, for generations. Ah, anyway, at the risk of seeming righteously angry, fuck those motherfuckers.
The filibuster, which is now virtually automatic under Mitch McConnell, was introduced in the Senate over two hundred years ago by the advocates of a free market that included slave labor, men like South Carolina’s John C. Calhoun (pictured below), spokesman for the Peculiar Institution and perfecter of the modern filibuster [1]. It is a parliamentary device designed to defeat any proposal by cutting off all debate in the Senate [2]. The filibuster doesn’t just stop a vote on a proposed law, it blocks public discussion of the proposal in the Senate.
Think about that for a second, the tyrannical nature of that parliamentary move, an increasingly popular political ploy, with no constitutional support, that can presently be launched by any one senator in the minority party and requiring a super-majority to defeat. It rests on the idea that if people heard the argument, heard the reasons the policy was desirable, our side would lose. The only way to prevail, particularly if the act would be wildly popular, is to kill the idea before it can make its case.
So it is between people sometimes. If I am afraid of something you have to say, for any reason, I can filibuster you simply by making clear my refusal to talk about it. End of story. Good night and have a very nice day.
[1]
Mitch McConnell’s claim that “the filibuster is the essence of the Senate” has been tossed aside by his opponents as bad history, violently inconsistent with how Jefferson, Hamilton or Madison aimed to structure the Senate, and perhaps even unconstitutional. All true. But what McConnell’s screed should remind us is that the filibuster has always been the essence of the politics of white supremacy — even as it now poses a broader threat to democracy itself.
McConnell draws on a playbook stretching back to John C. Calhoun, who as vice president in 1841 forged the filibuster into a conscious instrument to block majoritarian democracy as part of his project of creating a durable framework for slavery in a nation he knew would eventually vote against it. Calhoun, generations of Southern senators and now McConnell have shared a determination that majority votes should not be the last word in the United States. Privileged minorities should be able to override the will of the entire people — if their interests are endangered. Yes, Calhoun was focused on slavery and race, but his first filibuster was over national banking. The interest he sought to protect from a national majority was that of the South as a region, extending beyond slavery to issues like tariffs. . .
. . . While the filibuster — the essence of Mitch McConnell’s Senate — is the most powerful weapon the right-wing opponents of democracy have seized, Republicans in 2020 are deploying the full panoply of anti-democratic strategies devised over two and a quarter centuries by Calhoun’s followers. The most important campaigns being waged by conservatives at this moment emphasize the spread of gerrymandered districts, purged voter rolls, legalized bribery, a politicized judiciary, state pre-emption of local home rule and crippling the executive authority of majoritarian governors, even Republican ones.
source
[2]
Gardenier was one of the earliest champions of the filibuster, a term that refers to the use of obstructive tactics such as long, dilatory speeches and the repeated introduction of parliamentary motions to block or delay legislation. Today, filibustering is almost exclusively associated with the Senate, where individual Senators wield extraordinary power over debate. In the modern House, on the other hand, the majority party rules, and individual Members have little influence concerning the course of debate; over the years, the House, which is more than four times the size of the Senate, has developed rules which strictly control who can speak and for how long.
Thom Hartmann produced an excellent short digest (below) of the problem with American oligarchs not paying taxes, being in open revolt against even a 20% minimum corporate tax (under FDR the rate was 48% on the wealthiest corporations). Joe Manchin and that narcissist asshole from Arizona, of course, support the billionaires on this insistence that they’re entitled to every penny they earn or inherit, making it unchallengeably bipartisan, thanks to the “bipartisan filibuster”. Hartmann presents the many popular programs instituted by Democrats against the united opposition of the Republican party, up to 1980, when the GOP regained national power.
On the Republican side, since Reagan, we have the slashing of tax on the wealthiest, protection of giant corporations, increased abuse of the filibuster and the dismantling of the administrative state. Also, a corruptly appointed majority of anti-abortion justices on the Supreme Court, legalizating, 5-4, unlimited secret money in political campaigns, eviscerating (5-4) Voting Rights and brazenly protecting unlimited gun and corporate rights.
Compare that policy record against these Democratic policies opposed by Republicans. Here’s Hartmann’s list (most of it):
Social Security, the minimum wage, [child labor laws– ed], unemployment insurance, world class public schools, free to inexpensive state colleges, the right to unionize, civil rights legislation, voting rights legislation, publicly owned utilities, new highways and airports, quality mass transit, antitrust laws to maintain competition and protect small businesses, Medicare, the Environmental Protection Agency, Medicaid, school lunch programs and food stamps, workplace nondiscrimination for women and racial minorities, federal deposit insurance to protect people from bank failures, Head Start and literally hundreds of laws that protected consumers and the environment from corporate predation and dangerous products.
As Franklin Roosevelt said: On the one hand there has been a vast majority of citizens who believe that the benefits of democracy should be extended and are willing to pay their fair share to extend them. And on the other hand there has been a small but powerful group which has fought the expansion of these benefits because they do not want to pay their fair share.
The next clip (both are from the video below) describes what the federal government accomplished for the citizens of our democracy just during the first few years of the New Deal, including this statement by FDR about the oligarchs of his day:
“You would think, to hear some people talk, that those good people who live at the top of our economic pyramid are being taxed into rags and tatters, but what is the fact? The fact is that they are much further away from the poor house than they were in 1932 and you and I know that as a matter of personal observation.”
Hartmann points out the $1.7 TRILLION ($1,700,000,000,000) windfall America’s now several hundred billionaires received during the pandemic and then plays the rest of FDR’s comment:
“A number of my friends who belong in this very high upper bracket have suggested to me on several occasions of late that if I am re-elected president they will have to move to some other nation because of high taxes here. Well, I will miss them very much.”
It is hard to keep track of all the flying poop, as thoughtful Merrick Garland knits his brow over the facts and the law and how best to follow them, but this model prosecution memo, by Barbara McQuade, lays some of it out — the part about Trump’s plan to coerce Pence to throw out votes that made him lose the election, and the conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding — as clearly as possible. Then she analyzes the legal cases. The actions taken by the conspirators were varied, frenzied and included throwing every possible kind of shit against the wall to see what might stick as a talking point on right wing media to amplify widespread belief in unfounded lies and justify overturning an election lost by the incumbent. Here are a few nuggets (her full memo is linked at the bottom of this post):
In a separate suit, Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Tx) brought an action on Dec. 28 to declare Pence had authority to reject the election results. In a response submitted by the Justice Department on Dec. 31, Pence opposed the suit.[47] Pence’s brief said, “A suit to establish that the Vice President has discretion over the count, filed against the Vice President, is a walking legal contradiction.” The district court and court of appeals dismissed the suit in the following two days. . .
. . . Later on Jan. 2, 2021, Trump and attorneys Rudolph Giuliani and John Eastman conducted a Zoom conference call with 300 legislators from swing states won by Biden.[55] According to Michigan State Sen. Ed McBroom (R), who participated in the call, the Trump team urged the legislators to overturn the choice of voters in their states, but provided no evidence of voter fraud.[56] As McBroom reported: “I was listening to hear whether they had any evidence to substantiate claims” of significant voter fraud that could change the results in Michigan.”[57] “(T)he callers did not provide additional information, he said, and he did not support a delay in the electoral vote count.”[58] . . .
. . . Also on Jan. 5, Eastman met with Short and Jacob at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. Eastman argued that Pence should reject the Biden electors, according to two sources.[104] By the end of the two-hour meeting, Eastman had conceded that having Pence reject Biden electors was not a viable plan. Eastman later denied so conceding.[105] . . .
. . . Late on the evening of Jan. 5, Trump issued a false statement that Pence had agreed to take action beyond counting votes on Jan. 6.[110] According to reporting, Trump directed his campaign to issue a statement that he and Pence were in “total agreement that the Vice President has the power to act.” In fact, this statement was false, the exact opposite of Pence’s position, and was issued without consulting with the vice president or his office.[111] Soon after issuing the statement, Trump called Giuliani and then called Steve Bannon who was also at the Willard Hotel. Trump said that Pence had not caved. Pence was “very arrogant,” Trump repeatedly said.[112]
[even fascistic secret torture memo author/professor John Yoo advised Pence he had no legal right to do what Trump had demanded]
“I advised that there was no factual basis for Mike Pence to intervene and overturn the results of the election,” said Yoo, who now teaches law at the University of California at Berkeley. “There are certain limited situations where I thought the Vice President does have a role, for example in the event that a state sends two different electoral results. . . . But none of those were present here.”[140] . . .
. . . At about 2 p.m., protestors broke a window at the U.S. Capitol and climbed inside.[142] The Senate and House of Representatives soon went into recess and members evacuated the two chambers.[143] At 2:24 p.m., Trump tweeted, “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution.”[144] The Capitol would not be secured again until about 6 p.m.[145] . . .
Barbara McQuade concludes that
This evidence is sufficient to obtain and sustain convictions of charges for conspiracy to defraud the United States and for obstruction of an official proceeding.
and lays out the case for each. She acknowledges certain dangers in prosecuting a former president with an angry private army, but concludes the only thing worse than the possibility of deadly violence by his followers is not prosecuting the lawless turd. Merrick?
When, on Election Night 2020, Donald Trump announced, as the votes were being counted, that he frankly did win a rigged election, it was just they they kept counting these late, fake votes, he was nodding to his plan, with PostMaster General/Trump megadonor Louie DeJoy, to delay millions of mail-in ballots until they arrived too late to be counted.
Trump and DeJoy had done everything imaginable to make it harder to vote by mail: removed mailboxes in Democratic-leaning areas, dismantled high speed mail sorting machines in several Democratic voting cities, announced slowdowns in mail delivery, suspended overtime pay customarily paid to ensure prompt delivery.
Hans von Spakovsky, insane far right conspiracy-monger and keeper of the Voter Fraud Database at Heritage Foundation (documenting the steady infinitesimal fraction of fraudulent votes, a hundredth of a tenth of a percent — 0.001% — fraud since the 1980s), met secretly with the Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA, MAGA, RAGA!) prior to the 2020 election to limit drop boxes in large Democratic counties and engage in other chicanery that would advantage the bloated Orange faux populist in an election he was in grave danger of losing.
Trump and his people brought hundreds of extremely feeble court cases, prior to the election, based on unfounded theories of massive Democratic election fraud, trying to limit absentee voting in all forms during the deadliest phase of the Trump pandemic. None of these Hail Mary cases had the desired results, though Boof Kavanaugh and co. tried their best with a couple that reached the top court.
Frankly, we did win, in an historic landslide, he still insists, frankly. Frankly, this election was rigged, by us, but not well enough apparently, to stop the counting of votes at 10 pm Election night when I was still leading in all the tallies, though fading fast because of a fake flood of massive Democrat [sic] fraud in a rigged election that brought many more Republicans to power than expected but, on the same ballots, fraudulently fucked the rightful president.
We learned recently (unless you get your news from FOX, OANN, Newsmax, Breitbart or Der Sturmer) that two days after the election, before the final count was certified, and showed that Trump lost to Biden by a healthy margin, the defeated president’s oldest boy was already at work (this was treacherously revealed by the traitorous Liz Cheney and her friends on the fake January 6 Committee) texting the White House chief of staff, hatching the mad, multi-pronged plan to keep his father in power, using all the leverage at the president’s disposal.
Once this shit-show stolen election nonsense and the riot that stopped the certification of Biden’s victory for several hours were officially over (they’ll never be over to a good 30% of the very best Americans!), it was time for norms and democracy to reassert themselves. Or so it appeared to many Americans.
Talk of doing away with the elitist Electoral College that put Trump and the aptly named Dick Cheney in office over the will of the voters? No, not any more, we’re too divided, too many other pressing problems, like stopping the next insurrection/tourist visit/legitimate violent political discourse. Talk of adding five justices to the Supreme Court? No, it sounds too partisan when we already have a partisan 6-3 Trump majority poised to invalidate much of the constitutional order. Talk of ending the filibuster for Voting Rights, as it was ended to put three Federalist Society vetted extremists on the Supreme Court, each one appointed by a slim, sub-filibuster majority? Well, there was some talk, but talk is cheap. So is Trump, the Republican National Committee is picking up the tab for his dozens of ongoing and past lawsuits. To be determined, will they pay his legal bills when Merrick Garland finally follows the facts and the law and… whoa! they directly lead to… unbelievable, the former president . . . the DOJ finally prosecutes the Notorious Orange Polyp for a few of his many crimes against democracy?
Frankly, we should find that out before very much longer, or my name isn’t Robert Mueller the Third!
It depends entirely on how extreme the right wing majority of the Supreme Court is at any given time.
Chief Justice Earl Warren, Eisenhower appointee and bitter disappointment to lovers of the status quo (the Koch Brothers’s loveless father Fred was a charter member of the “Impeach Earl Warren” John Birch Society, which arose after Brown v. Board ruled in 1954 that segregation in schools was unconstitutional) wrote the 9-0 opinion that struck down laws like Virginia’s 1924 Racial Integrity Act. Here’s the Republican chief justice starting off the unanimous opinion in Loving v. Virginia, one of the cases Trump’s base courting followers are prepared to revisit with an eye to overturning, returning the power to violate post-Civil War amendments to the Constitution in the name of illimitable States’ Rights and “federalism”:
MR. CHIEF JUSTICE WARREN delivered the opinion of the Court.
This case presents a constitutional question never addressed by this Court: whether a statutory scheme adopted by the State of Virginia to prevent marriages between persons solely on the basis of racial classifications violates the Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment.[n1] For reasons which seem to us to reflect the central meaning of those constitutional commands, we conclude that these statutes cannot stand consistently with the Fourteenth Amendment.
In June, 1958, two residents of Virginia, Mildred Jeter, a Negro woman, and Richard Loving, a white man, were married in the District of Columbia pursuant to its laws. Shortly after their marriage, the Lovings returned to Virginia and established their marital abode in Caroline County. At the October Term, 1958, of the Circuit Court[p3] of Caroline County, a grand jury issued an indictment charging the Lovings with violating Virginia’s ban on interracial marriages. On January 6, 1959, the Lovings pleaded guilty to the charge, and were sentenced to one year in jail; however, the trial judge suspended the sentence for a period of 25 years on the condition that the Lovings leave the State and not return to Virginia together for 25 years. He stated in an opinion that:
Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And, but for the interference with his arrangement, there would be no cause for such marriage. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.
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How could any God-fearing, authoritarian personality having white person, in the throes of racial pride, dispute this common sense 1959 opinion of a totally non-racist Virginia judge?
Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And, but for the interference with his arrangement, there would be no cause for such marriage. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.
Malay?
Originalists, or textualists, harken back to the “original intent” of the Framers of the Constitution in 1789, gleaned from the centuries old writings they left, which are, according to them, as sacred and inviolable as the other articles of their deep religious faith, as indisputable as the fact that God dictated much of the Old and New Testaments. Originalism, by going back to 1789, removes focus from the evolution of the document, the evolution of our democracy, and the freedom and equality-expanding amendments starting right after the Civil War and continuing through a woman’s right to vote, more than a half century later, and, eventually, starting in 1965, the actual federal enforcement of most of these rights.
Here are the two Virginia statutes that were violated by this illegal interracial couple, pursuant to the totally non-racist Racial Integrity (Election Integrity?) Act of 1924:
The two statutes under which appellants were convicted and sentenced are part of a comprehensive statutory scheme aimed at prohibiting and punishing interracial marriages. The Lovings were convicted of violating § 258 of the Virginia Code:
Leaving State to evade law. — If any white person and colored person shall go out of this State, for the purpose of being married, and with the intention of returning, and be married out of it, and afterwards return to and reside in it, cohabiting as man and wife, they shall be punished as provided in § 20-59, and the marriage shall be governed by the same law as if it had been solemnized in this State. The fact of their cohabitation here as man and wife shall be evidence of their marriage.
Section 259, which defines the penalty for miscegenation, provides:
Punishment for marriage. — If any white person intermarry with a colored person, or any colored person intermarry with a white person, he shall be guilty of a felony and shall be punished by confinement in the penitentiary for not less than one nor more than five years.
Other central provisions in the Virginia statutory scheme are § 20-57, which automatically voids all marriages between “a white person and a colored person” without any judicial proceeding,[n3] and §§ 20-54 and 1-14 which,[p5] respectively, define “white persons” and “colored persons and Indians” for purposes of the statutory prohibitions.
Virginia is now one of 16 States which prohibit and punish marriages on the basis of racial classifications.[n5] Penalties for miscegenation arose as an incident to slavery, and have been common in Virginia since the colonial period.[n6] The present statutory scheme dates from the adoption of the Racial Integrity Act of 1924, passed during the period of extreme nativism which followed the end of the First World War. The central features of this Act, and current Virginia law, are the absolute prohibition of a “white person” marrying other than another “white person,”[n7] a prohibition against issuing marriage licenses until the issuing official is satisfied that[p7] the applicants’ statements as to their race are correct,[n8] certificates of “racial composition” to be kept by both local and state registrars,[n9] and the carrying forward of earlier prohibitions against racial intermarriage.[n10]
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Here is the state of Virginia’s argument, summarized by Warren:
Thus, the State contends that, because its miscegenation statutes punish equally both the white and the Negro participants in an interracial marriage, these statutes, despite their reliance on racial classifications, do not constitute an invidious discrimination based upon race. The second argument advanced by the State assumes the validity of its equal application theory. The argument is that, if the Equal Protection Clause does not outlaw miscegenation statutes because of their reliance on racial classifications, the question of constitutionality would thus become whether there was any rational basis for a State to treat interracial marriages differently from other marriages. On this question, the State argues, the scientific evidence is substantially in doubt and, consequently, this Court should defer to the wisdom of the state legislature in adopting its policy of discouraging interracial marriages.
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Here’s an abstracted bit of the Court’s reasoning:
The Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals, in its opinion, stated that the legitimate purpose of Virginia’s anti-miscegenation law was to “preserve the racial integrity of its citizens,” and to prevent “the corruption of blood,” “a mongrel breed of citizens,” and “the obliteration of racial pride.” Accordingly, the reason for Virginia’s law rests solely racial discrimination.
Racial classifications must be subjected to the most rigid scrutiny. Here, Virginia’s law serves no purpose other than to further invidious racial discrimination. As such, the law clearly violates equal protection. The State’s argument that the law is “applied” equally to whites and African-Americans must be rejected because same-race couples are not punished criminally.
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Oral arguments in the Loving case were heard fifty-five years ago today.
The 1967 Loving v. Virginia ruling unanimously overturned the Supreme Court’s previous unappealable last word on the subject, the definitive, unanimous 1883 ruling in Pace v. Alabama, where this Alabama law was upheld as perfectly constitutional in the United States of America:
If any white person and any negro, or the descendant of any negro to the third generation, inclusive, though one ancestor of each generation was a white person, intermarry or live in adultery or fornication with each other, each of them must, on conviction, be imprisoned in the penitentiary or sentenced to hard labor for the county for not less than two nor more than seven years.
The question presented in 1883 was:
Since the state law of Alabama had a different set of statutes covering adultery and fornication between a white couple and a Black couple than that between an interracial couple, did the two year imprisonment of the interracial couple Tony Pace and Mary J. Cox violate their equal protection rights under the 14th Amendment?
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9-0 the Pace court replied — nah! The unappealable law of the land for over eighty years, and the facts of Pace were arguably even “worse” than the facts in Loving, in that case the husband, Tony Pace, a Negro, had tried to marry a WHITE WOMAN!
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