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 presidentwasa 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.
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 WarOne, 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 ofthe 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.
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.
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.
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]
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.
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.
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?
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!
Their marriage would have been illegal in the state of Virginia and all across the former Confederacy had it not been for the unanimous 1967 Supreme Court decision in Loving v. Virginia [1]. An example of “judicial activism” that is on the table for these Federalist Society Six to overruleat last.
What harm could come from giving states back the authority to imprision citizens for race crimes, as the Framers arguably intended?
“we’re not partisan hacks!”
[1]
The case involved Mildred Loving, a woman of color,[note 1] and her white husband Richard Loving, who in 1958 were sentenced to a year in prison for marrying each other. Their marriage violated Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act of 1924, which criminalized marriage between people classified as “white” and people classified as “colored“. The Lovings appealed their conviction to the Supreme Court of Virginia, which upheld it. They then appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which agreed to hear their case.
On June 12, 1967, the Court issued a unanimous decision in the Lovings’ favor and overturned their convictions. Its decision struck down Virginia’s anti-miscegenation law and ended all race-based legal restrictions on marriage in the United States. Virginia had argued that its law was not a violation of the Equal Protection Clause because the punishment was the same regardless of the offender’s race, and thus it “equally burdened” both whites and non-whites.[4]
As appalling as the behavior of the Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Cruz, Cotton, Hawley, Blackburn, et al was as they attacked and tried to provoke the supremely qualified Ketanji Brown Jackson, having no substantivecriticsmthey focused on their populist talking points, Critical Race Theory, children’s books about racism, violent crime, particularly sexual crime, rape and pedophilia, with a few snide asides about defending Nazis and the questions abouttranssexuals, the failure of Democrats on the committee to call out this harassment was equally despicable.
The final party-line vote (three nays from the coatroom from three of the GOP’s biggest assholes) and the Republican en masse walkout during applause for Ketanji Brown Jackson when her confirmation was announced could not have been more like a choreographed Klan rally if the party of Trump had actually worn pointy white hoods while pulling their racist, misogynisticstunts. Such is politics in the age of Koch/Trump, good people on both sides, on both sides.
Compare the confirmation numbers of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Trump’s second appointee Brett “Boof” Kavanaugh, a man who demonstrated his lack of judicial temperament when he snarled, hissed, snorted and whined about a secret cabal of powerful left-wing dark money-fueled hitmen and liars determined to destroy hislifeas revenge for his decades of work as a right wing partisan. Recall that the Trump Administration and Don McGahn made sure to classify thousands of pages of Kavanagh’s partisan writings that would have brought the Federalist Society star’s judicial impartiality into serious question.McGahn also personally took care of the 4,000 FBI tips that came in during a rigorous six day FBI investigation into allegations arising from Kavanaugh’s prep school days.
Ginsburg was more forthright in discussing her views on topics about which she had previously written. The United States Senate confirmed her by a 96–3 vote on August 3, 1993. She received her commission on August 5, 1993 and took her judicial oath on August 10, 1993.
Boof, 50-48, lifetime tenure, second straight party-line Supreme Court justice vote after McConnell abolished the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees. Yeah, it was a bipartisan confirmation, I know, pile of shit and living monument to lucrative corruption, Joe Manchin, voted with Trump’s team.In fact, you could say it was Manchin’s vote that put Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court.
After a contentious confirmation process that became focused on allegations of sexual assault, the final vote was far less dramatic, with every senator previously indicating how he or she would vote. The final two hold outs, Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.V.), both decided to support Kavanaugh.
This from an interview with the Washington Post, under the headline: Trump deflects blame for Jan. 6 silence, says he wanted to march to Capitol
By Josh Dawsey April 07 at 7:19 AM ET PALM BEACH, Fla. — Former president Donald Trump voiced regret Wednesday over not marching to the U.S. Capitol the day his supporters stormed the building, and he defended his long silence during the attack by claiming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and others were responsible for ending the deadly violence. “I thought it was a shame, and I kept asking why isn’t she doing something about it? Why isn’t Nancy Pelosi doing something about it? And the mayor of D.C. also. The mayor of D.C. and Nancy Pelosi are in charge,” Trump said of the Jan. 6, 2021, riot in a 45-minute interview with The Washington Post. “I hated seeing it. I hated seeing it. And I said, ‘It’s got to be taken care of,’ and I assumed they were taking care of it.”
Ten dimensional chess, yo, terrifying to even contemplate the next move…
