We all know that sometimes the Orange Polyp flies into a childish rage. When he does he often sues somebody and makes them spend thousands of dollars defending against a frivolous suit. Here in America, contrary to what I learned in law school and while practicing law, there seems to be little consequence for a wealthy litigant who hires an army of lawyers to fight endless frivolous legal battles to bludgeon his enemies. The American Rule says that the other side isn’t going to be able to recoup legal fees, even if the suit gets tossed out of court after a few rounds of expensive legal wrangling, so it’s win-win for a rich guy who uses lawsuits to attack people he hates. The lawyers too seem immune from any consequences for filing and prosecuting their unethical, technically illegal, expensive, process-abusinglawsuits.
Now he is suing the New York Times for publishing true facts about him, based on documents his niece Mary Trump provided them. He is also suing Mary, the niece he ripped off when she was a teenager, after the death of her father, Fred Christ Trump Jr., Fred Christ Trump the first’s one-time favorite and all-around good guy. The Polyp used lifelong medical care for Mary’s disabled infant nephew as leverage in the fight over the contestedwill.
A week after they went to court, a Trump family company cut off health insurance to Mary Trump, her mother, brother and her brother’s family, including Fred III’s 9-month-old son William, who had suffered from seizure disorders and would be diagnosed with cerebral palsy. Donald Trump acknowledged the termination of the insurance was related to the fight over his father’s will.
“When [Fred III] sued us, we said, ‘Why should we give him medical coverage?’” he told The Daily News at the time. Mary Trump told the newspaper that by contesting the will she was fighting for their father to be recognized. “He existed, he lived, he was their oldest son. And William is my father’s grandson,” she said.
Litigation over the will and the health insurance became the vehicles for the Trumps to hurl insults and raise grievances that had hung in the air for years.
Mary Trump had this to say about her uncle’s frivolous lawsuit “Donald is a fucking loser.” His lawsuit is a loser too, of course, since, in order to proceed the Polyp must undergo the deposition the NY Times and Mary Trump will demand. Since he is unable to refrain from lying, saying anything under oath, subject to the penalties for perjury, is always a problem for him. Here is the heart of the Polyp’s claim against his niece, his suit accuses the NY Times and:
As Glenn Kirschner put it when reviewing the case:
Let’s face it, if there’s anybody who knows what it’s like to be motivated by a personal vendetta, a desire to gain fame, notoriety, acclaim and a financial windfall, it’s the orange one.
How to get tax exempt status, keep your wealthy donors secret and spend unlimited amounts to promote lies useful to your larger mission — a one party corporate-private state to protect the interests of the super-wealthy in perpetuity. From another excellent investigative report by the great Jane Mayer:
One recipient of Bradley money is True the Vote, a Texas-based group that, among other things, trains people to monitor polling sites. Mitchell has served as its legal counsel, and hacked documents show that she advocated to the I.R.S. that the group deserved tax-exempt status as a charity. To earn such a designation, a group must file federal tax forms promising not to engage in electoral politics. In a letter of support, she asserted that “fraudulent voting occurs in the United States,” citing a 2010 case in which the F.B.I. arrested nine Floridians for election violations. But, as with many voter-fraud allegations, the details of the case were less than advertised. The accusation involved a school-board election in a rural Black community in which a campaign had collected dozens of absentee ballots, in violation of the law. The charges were eventually dismissed. The judge found “no intent to cast a false or fraudulent ballot.” True the Vote, which was granted tax-exempt status, has since been the subject of numerous complaints from voters, who have accused it of intimidation and racism.
Speaking of partisans monitoring polling sites and hovering over voters to intimidate them, particularly in states where you can carry a gun without a permit, there are new provisions in the Democratic attempt to save democracy, tweaks to the John Lewis Voting Rights Bill, to give voters a minimum 8 foot distance from hovering, partisan poll watchers. For every step American fascists take, supporters of democracy must devise a counter-measure. All this takes a lot of time, and if we are to have fair elections again in 2022 there is no time to waste protecting the right to vote and the right to have those votes counted by impartial officials.
Of course passing any voter protection law will require a radical change in the hearts of at least ten Senate Republicans, to overcome that tool of “bipartisan compromise” the filibuster. Or, more realistically, it will require carving out a filibuster exception for Voting Rights , as McDonnell did for Supreme Court confirmations when he abolished the filibuster and 60 vote threshold for the confirmation of controversial, ideologically pure Supreme Court justices, members of a right wing legal fraternity chosen by that fraternity for their fidelity to corporate interests, dark money in politics, religious rights and partisan voting shenanigans being fine, unless they INTENTIONALLY target the people most effected by these laws, ON THE BASIS OF RACE. Also, of course, dedicated to outlawing abortion across the country for women without the money to fly to clinics outside the country for their own discreet procedures.
Sheldon Whitehouse has done a series of excellent presentations on the corrosively corrupt power of dark money in judicial appointments, and state takeovers by allies of ALEC (Joe Manchin III is a member of ALEC, naturally). Here is part of it, delivered during the rushed hearings before Amy Coney Barrett was shoved down America’s throat, 52-48, days before the election as Trump planned his insurrection to steal back the soon to be “stolen” election. In these remarks from the Senate floor Whitehouse described the rash of 5-4 Supreme Court decisions, decided on purely partisan lines, 80 cases of pure simple majority 5-4 judicial activism by members of an ideologically pure right wing fraternity, taking their orders from the people who secretly put up $250,000,000 in dark money to get their judges on the federal bench, because… they are making America great again, for the wealthiest and least principled among us.
Whitehouse outlined the main goals of the anonymous billionaire polluters and privilege protectors who fund the lifetime appointments of right wing superstars: unlimited dark money in politics, demean and diminish the civil jury, weaken regulatory agencies, allow the legal suppression of votes for partisan advantage. Now look at the EIGHTY [80] 5-4 partisan decisions made by the Roberts Court and note how consistently those goals were met in every case. The ideological score on those party-line cases is 80-0. A pretty good return on a quarter of a billion dollars in dark, tax-deductible money.
Here is Whitehouse, last week, describing the audition and appointment of Boof Kavanaugh [1], the snarling, lying (“Boof”, according to Kavanaugh, means gassy, not having alcohol poured into your asshole, through a funnel and tube, ‘Devil’s Triangle” is a drinking game, nothing to do with sex between two guys and a woman, as its common meaning would have it, and Team Kavanaugh quickly posted some changes to Wikipedia, from an office in the Capitol building, as Boof was making up the drinking game), super-ambitious partisan who, after he got tearful at his confirmation hearing about his likely defeat, came out in the final round kicking, biting, hissing, gouging and scratching — to preserve his life, which George Soros and liberal Jews, getting revenge on behalf of the Clintons, were trying to destroy with paid lying liars accusing him and an army of them making FBI complaints about his unfitness for office. Thankfully, in spite of American Jesuits and various bar organizations calling for Kavanaugh to withdraw from consideration, Trump ordered the FBI to quickly investigate Kavanaugh VERY CAREFULLY and in a TOP SECRET manner (all tips vetted by Don McGahn) that would ensure nothing bad would be found or revealed about the petulant, entitled candidate for a lifetime of joining his right wing colleagues for a series of unappealable 5-4 Federalist Society rulings.
Thankfully, we are only a month or two away from Biden’s Committee of Legal Experts issuing their report. A report all legal scholars agree will confirm that the Constitution allows Congress to change the number of Supreme Court justices, particularly when preserving the integrity of the judiciary is the goal.
[1]
As for the traumatized woman, Christine Blasey-Ford, who, with nothing whatsoever to gain and everything to lose (and who, along with her family, has paid a steep personal price), testified about Kavanaugh’s drunken, traumatizing behavior, well… she was just part of a calculated, orchestrated, well-financed Clinton-backed cabal of extremists who hate him because he loves God and his family and doesn’t believe any of that godless crap they preach. As for the official Catholic publication in America removing their endorsement of him, or the similar American Bar Association position that, in light of these serious allegations, Boof needed to remove his name from nomination – what don’t you get about George fucking Soros?!!!
Trump has no friends, his type never does. They regard men as base coin to gratify their passions, in a phrase used to describe Napoleon’s attitude toward other humans. Some humans’ blindly driving ambition is useful, can greatly benefit the man who knows how to skillfully use others to his own advantage. As base coin, these ambitious types can be cast away at any time and replaced by other tarnished instruments.
Nobody truly likes a deeply damaged, loveless motherfucker [1] like our former president except for ambitious lackeys and angry mobs. Angry mobs adore his relentless in-your-face, norm and common decency smashing assault on liberals, queers, mass media, disloyal party members, Muslims, Mexicans, women of color, disloyal Jews, Blacks, cripples, losers, non-Scandanavian immigrants, socialists, anti-fascists, etc. He rules his spineless, platformless (2020 RNC platform — whatever the big guy wants) party by terror. The famously vindictive man’s sure, vicious revenge, guaranteed to be visited on anyone opposing his will, is a constantly reinforced reminder that he will not be opposed, no matter how insane his demands. Here’s the thing:
This particular angry, boastful, lying Orange maniac did not invent any of the corrupt, lying, authoritarian routine he practices, and while he certainly wasn’t their first choice, radical right billionaires have found their audacious front man to be very useful for their larger purpose, keeping everyone distracted and enraged as they game democracy to protect the privileges of vast inherited wealth in perpetuity. This Orange Polyp, since he is a malignant narcissist and an amoral opportunist, is their go to guy in the war of the few to keep hold of everything, in the face of the rising threat of the John Birch and Federalist Society’s great enemy, ‘majoritarian tyranny’.
Here is what former Trump lawyer John Eastman [2]advised Trump to do in a two page Privileged and Confidential memo entitled Scenario for January 6. This is the action plan part of what Glenn Kirscher and many others have called a blueprint for insurrection.
1. VP Pence, presiding over the joint session (or Senate Pro Tempore Grassley, if Pence recuses himself), begins to open and count the ballots, starting with Alabama (without conceding that the procedure, specified by the Electoral Count Act, of going through the States alphabetically is required).
2. When he gets to Arizona, he announces that he has multiple slates of electors, and so is going to defer decision on that until finishing the other States. This would be the first break with the procedure set out in the Act.
3. At the end, he announces that because of the ongoing disputes in the 7 States, there are no electors that can be deemed validly appointed in those States. That means the total number of “electors appointed” – the language of the 12th Amendment — is 454. This reading of the 12th Amendment has also been advanced by Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe (here). A “majority of the electors appointed” would therefore be 228. There are at this point 232 votes for Trump, 222 votes for Biden. Pence then gavels President Trump as re-elected.
4. Howls, of course, from the Democrats, who now claim, contrary to Tribe’s prior position, that 270 is required. So Pence says, fine. Pursuant to the 12th Amendment, no candidate has achieved the necessary majority. That sends the matter to the House, where the “the votes shall be taken by states, the representation from each state having one vote . . . .” Republicans currently control 26 of the state delegations, the bare majority needed to win that vote. President Trump is re-elected there as well.
5. One last piece. Assuming the Electoral Count Act process is followed and, upon getting the objections to the Arizona slates, the two houses break into their separate chambers, we should not allow the Electoral Count Act constraint on debate to control. That would mean that a prior legislature was determining the rules of the present one — a constitutional no-no (as Tribe has forcefully argued). So someone – Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, etc. – should demand normal rules (which includes the filibuster). That creates a stalemate that would give the state legislatures more time to weigh in to formally support the alternate slate of electors, if they had not already done so.
6. The main thing here is that Pence should do this without asking for permission – either from a vote of the joint session or from the Court. Let the other side challenge his actions in court, where Tribe (who in 2001 conceded the President of the Senate might be in charge of counting the votes) and others who would press a lawsuit would have their past position — that these are non-justiciable political questions – thrown back at them, to get the lawsuit dismissed. The fact is that the Constitution assigns this power to the Vice President as the ultimate arbiter. We should take all of our actions with that in mind.
NOTHING TO PROSECUTE ANYONE FOR, ON MY SIDE!!! TOTAL WITCH HUNT!
[1]
Of course, sometimes motherfucker simply means motherfucker, but a few words are in order about using this vulgar and inflammatory phrase to describe a vulgar man who treats others like his slaves.
My father, during a few years of my school life, taught a group dynamics seminar where, at one point, he asked Black kids and White kids to give their thoughts on the word “motherfucker.” It’s origin on the plantation, of course, was a guy like Thomas Jefferson, rich, powerful, entitled, who, if he found your mother beautiful, was at liberty to fuck her, since he actually owned her body and controlled her actions. If a child was born, the motherfucker owned another slave, it was win-win for him. So the term was always ambiguous and multi-edged for male slaves on the plantation, you hated the motherfucker, but also, damn.
My father asked an Italian gang leader from a Brooklyn high school what the word motherfucker meant to him.
“That’s the last word you hear before the fists start flying and the chains and gravity knives come out,” he said, looking across at the Puerto Rican and Black gang leaders. The Black kid smirked. My father asked him what ‘motherfucker’ meant to him.
“Where I come from ‘motherfucker’ is one of the most useful and versatile words we have,” he said. “Contrary to the usage given by my Italian-American colleague over there, it doesn’t generally mean I want to fight you, unless I say it right before I’m going to fight a motherfucker. In that case, I use it as a deliberate provocation, otherwise it means a lot of things, depending on the context.”
For example?
“The late great John Coltrane played like a motherfucker. Miles Davis is a motherfucker. Are you crazy, motherfucker? That motherfucker is hilarious. Motherfucker… please… That algebra test was a motherfucker. This motherfucker thinks his shit don’t stink. That motherfucker can’t take a joke. Relax, motherfucker. Motherfuckers were dancing in the street. Motherfucker be like…” and he imitated an idiosyncratic motherfucker they all knew.
My favorite dictionary definition of all-time is Merriam-Webster’s explanation of the word ‘squeamish’: “Exhibiting a prudish readiness to be nauseated.” This language-scrupulous Caucasian motherfucker has a prudish readiness to be nauseated by the word ‘motherfucker,’ and also by the unexpurgated ‘n-word’ and the common ‘f-word’. Oh, my.
[2]
Eastman spoke at the January 6 rally that preceded the attack on the Capitol. He retired from his position as a professor at Chapman University a week after January 6, which occurred amid protests from faculty at the Southern California university over his participation in Trump’s efforts to overturn the election.
Eastman told the Washington Post that his memo merely “explored all options that had been proposed.” In an interview on Tuesday, Eastman told CNN that the two-page memo had been only a preliminary draft. He provided CNN with a longer six-page memo laying out numerous other scenarios for Pence to follow on January 6. Eastman told CNN that during the January 4 meeting he’d had in the Oval Office with Trump and Pence, he had told Pence he should only delay certifying votes in the seven states, not try to throw the election to Trump.
The reality, however, is that a delay was simply another avenue to stop Biden from taking office.
According to a Mother Jones article, entitled FBI Seizes Oath Keeper Lawyer’s Phone in “Seditious Conspiracy” Investigation, the Department of Justice is looking into Seditious Conspiracy charges in connection with the January 6 MAGA riot to stop the final certification of Biden’s victory/Trump’s electoral loss. You will google this story in vain, no other media has published a peep about this search warrant or the investigation into Seditious Conspiracy.
Glenn Kirschner did a piece on the warrant and the seditious conspiracy investigation at the time, based on the Mother Jones reporting, and noted that it is encouraging, a sign that the DOJ is putting its prosecutorial ducks in a row for a real prosecution of the conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election. It is a conspiracy there is ample, public evidence for. The evidence demonstrates intent, the involvement of numerous co-conspirators, and dark money funders of the conspiracy [1], with new pieces of graphic evidence emerging daily.
Yesterday we had this one from the NY Times, about a legal memo outlining various vote fraud conspiracy theories and explaining why they were unfounded, conspiracy theories that, though debunked, were nonetheless lyingly deployed in the conspiracy to overturn, and steal the “stolen” election.After Trump’s team got this memo, on November 13, dismissing as baseless each of these wild counterfactual conspiracies, they went to court to make meritless legal claims based on information they knew to be false. The Times report begins:
Two weeks after the 2020 election, a team of lawyers closely allied with Donald J. Trump held a widely watched news conference at the Republican Party’s headquarters in Washington. At the event, they laid out a bizarre conspiracy theory claiming that a voting machine company had worked with an election software firm, the financier George Soros and Venezuela to steal the presidential contest from Mr. Trump.
But there was a problem for the Trump team, according to court documents released on Monday evening.
By the time the news conference occurred on Nov. 19, Mr. Trump’s campaign had already prepared an internal memo on many of the outlandish claims about the company, Dominion Voting Systems, and the separate software company, Smartmatic. The memo had determined that those allegations were untrue.
The legal memo referred to in the article (and linked to above) examines claims like the CEO of Dominion Voting Machines having ties to Antifa. It concludes he does not. The memo appears to be silent on Q’s role in the resurrection of a dead Venezuelan socialist and his apparent zombie involvement in the stealing of the disputed election for Chinese Communist Puppet Biden, with the assistance of Italian anti-democracy hackers. No connection was found, the memo reported, between Dominion Voting Machines and the notorious, shady, sneaky, radical Communist Jew George Soros.
One troubling aspect of the memo Glenn Kirschner referred to as a blueprint for insurrection (wait, that was the other memo, written by former law professor, then Trump-lawyer John Eastman, which described an insane claim Pence could make to swing the election to Trump on January 6– I’ll put a link to this batshit crazy memo in a future post [2]), is its heavy reliance on the NY Times and Washington Post to dispute claims Trump and his followers continue to make. Like so (though this bit cites AP):
What the hell’s up with that?Trump lawyers citing the fake media?!!!
Here’s the text of the law, 18 USC Section 2384, Seditious Conspiracy:
If two or more persons in any State or Territory, or in any place subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, conspire to overthrow, put down, or to destroy by force the Government of the United States, or to levy war against them, or to oppose by force the authority thereof, or by force to prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United States, or by force to seize, take, or possess any property of the United States contrary to the authority thereof, they shall each be fined or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both. For a seditious conspiracy charge to be effected, a crime need only be planned, it need not be actually attempted.
Let’s look at just a few elements of the conspiracy to use force to prevent, hinder or delay the execution of law of the United States (note, the Trump-incited MAGA riot tried to prevent, and succeeded in hindering and delaying, the vote certification that is the last official act by Congress to ensure the peaceful transfer of power).
A president loses his bid for re-election, but not to worry. He has set the stage for contesting the results, by repeatedly claiming the only way he could lose was by massive voter fraud. There has been no proof of widespread voter fraud in any American election in recent decades. The diligent, ideologically-driven fraud hunting voter fraud myth promoters that support people like the former president have found about 1 fraudulent vote per million, according to their database that goes back to 1982. The candidate brought literally hundreds (300?) cases in various courts before the election, attempting to limit the number of ballots that could be cast in contested states.
Low turnout has historically helped his minority party. His hand-picked Postmaster General, a “mega-donor” to his campaign, took valiant, brazen steps to slow the mail and limit the votes in urban districts, places the president and his gunsel had designated enemy territory– Anarchist Jurisdictions — by removing and dismantling high speed mail-sorting machines. The former president’s cabinet level supporters constantly warned the public of unfounded, but theoretically possible, potential massive electoral fraud in urban Anarchist Jurisdictions where the former president was understandably hated for simply protecting his religious, rural base.
The election featured massive voter turnout, the largest in American history, during a pandemic that was surging as the election got closer. Every attempt was made by the Republican National Committee to thwart mail-in voting, the safe from of voting favored by anti-Covid Democrats. Republicans, the pro-freedom, pro-COVID party, were willing to show up in numbers, in person, maskless and proud, to support their candidate. To the dismay of the MAGA faithful, record numbers of Democrats stood on line for hours, masked and keeping a safe distance on line, to vote in person. Trump bragged about getting the most votes ever for an incumbent, 74,000,000, which was true, oddly enough. As for the record 81,000,000 votes his opponent got — fake news! Fraud. Communists, anarchists, antifascists, Antifa!!! and other enemies, plotting, stealing and lying, as they always do. The former president lost every one of the sixty post-election cases his myrmidons brought in various courts, he lost for lack of evidence, for lack of any credible legal claim. Fake judges, disloyal, sickening, a conspiracy against a great president, an ongoing miscarriage of justice!
All of this is well-known, by anybody who does not live in Rupert Murdoch’s echo chamber (or the unimaginably even more fair and balanced Newsmax, OANN, Breitbart, Der Sturmer). Then, on January 6, the day a joint session of Congress officially certifies the election, results of which were recounted, more than once, in more than one state the former president lost, the Orange Polyp plans a rally. A huge, wild rally he tweets to his followers they must attend. A gigantic crowd shows up, spurred, in part, by $50,000,000 in ad buys to promote the stolen election. Say that again? FIFTY MILLION DOLLARS IN ADS (PAID FOR BY “DARK MONEY”) TO CONVINCE AMERICANS THE ELECTION HAD BEEN STOLEN [3]. Before the stirring speeches about a stolen landslide victory and the need to fight like hell to take back our country, a stirring propaganda video, portraying American carnage and Trump as our only savior, was played on a giant screen behind the bulletproofed podium in front of the barricaded White House where the president would deliver the final remarks prior to the march on the Capitol [4].
The large crowd that marched down to the Capitol, along with Trump himself, thankfully, did not all choose to break the law by attacking police and storming the building. Had the entire crowd surged in behind the violent leaders it is likely that many lives would have been lost in the fight for the Capitol. An unknown number of the boldest and most violent, an estimated 800, stormed the building to disrupt the final certification of Trump’s loss. Bands roamed the halls calling for Mike Pence and Nancy Pelosi, to kill them and decapitate the line of succession (apparently they hadn’t googled “third in line” or they’d have also been after President pro tempore of the Senate, Chuck Grassley). When the National Guard finally arrived hours later, after Capitol police had been instructed not to use anti-riot gear against the surging MAGA mob, and surrounded the building, they did not corral and mass arrest the hundreds who had broken down barricades and assaulted the police, as the law-abiding among us might have assumed, the pro-Trump mob was allowed to peacefully disperse. Eventually about 600 of these folks were tracked down and arrested, charged with various fairly minor crimes. The first plea deals have been made with a small wave of these defendants.
America heard Trump violate every letter of the Georgia law in a recording of the early January call when he tried to cajole, influence, threaten, convince, persuade, pressure, intimidate, and otherwise move Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger to give him a break and just “find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have.” No consequence, nine months later, though there is an ongoing criminal investigation in Fulton County that has not been reported on since the grand jury was convened in April. So, why WOULDN’T Trump try again with Raffensberger, this time with an even bolder lie?
When the Abu Ghraib torture and prisoner abuse story broke, a couple of grunts, who’d taken selfies with prisoners they were humiliating, per the directives of Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, were eventually prosecuted and thrown into prison. The architects of the torture program, those who wrote the tortured legal justification for illegal “enhanced interrogation” (it’s not torture unless the pain is like organ failure) and war mongers like Dick “Other Priorities” Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld who gave the orders for Americans to “go to the dark side”, after ensuring secrecy at torture sites, suffered no consequences at all, outside of lifetime university tenure (John Fucking Yoo), a lifetime federal judgeship (Jay Fucking Bybee) and other honors, along with their comfortable lives.
So you can convict a bunch of zealous, hopped up grunts in Trump’s ragtag, extra-legal army, put a few in jail, but how does this do anything to prevent the repeat of this kind of violent putsch? Without holding the planners, organizers, funders and inciters of the riot accountable, and prosecuting them for instigating a seditious riot, the hope for avoiding the next one is approximately… none. We learned that $3,500,000 was paid to the organizers of the “event”— who, exactly, got paid, for what [3]? Why no charges for seditious conspiracy against the rioters who stormed and defaced the Capitol to prevent the peaceful transfer of power?
We learn:
Last summer, then-Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen sent a memo allowing federal prosecutors to consider sedition charges against police reform demonstrators, particularly in Portland, Oregon, where clashes between rioters and federal authorities raged outside a federal courthouse. It was never used.
But the memo said the Justice Department believed the statute doesn’t require proof of a plot to overthrow the government and could also be used when a defendant tries to oppose the government’s authority by force.
Fair is fair, justice is justice, the status quo is the status quo and good enough will just have to do. Merrick Garland was tearful at his confirmation hearing, expressing gratitude for this beloved country that had rescued his family from death at the hands of a prior iteration of Trumpism, back in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s. So far, scrupulous about appearing fair and impartial, he has not shown the stomach to stand up in the fight against unprincipled zealots, united behind clearly disprovable lies, and ready to do whatever it takes to make this country great again, including physically attacking and massacring whatever hated enemies need to be taken out of the way, including many Blue Lives Matter traitors, or generals, who believe the rule of law is more important than allowing a very stable genius to continue his world-changing work of making this country great again.
[1]
Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democrat from Rhode Island who has tracked the flow of dark money in American politics, told me that a “flotilla of front groups” once focussed on advancing such conservative causes as capturing the courts and opposing abortion have now “more or less shifted to work on the voter-suppression thing.” These groups have cast their campaigns as high-minded attempts to maintain “election integrity,” but Whitehouse believes that they are in fact tampering with the guardrails of democracy.
One of the movement’s leaders is the Heritage Foundation, the prominent conservative think tank in Washington, D.C. It has been working with the American Legislative Exchange Council (alec)—a corporate-funded nonprofit that generates model laws for state legislators—on ways to impose new voting restrictions. Among those deep in the fight is Leonard Leo, a chairman of the Federalist Society, the legal organization known for its decades-long campaign to fill the courts with conservative judges. In February, 2020, the Judicial Education Project, a group tied to Leo, quietly rebranded itself as the Honest Elections Project, which subsequently filed briefs at the Supreme Court, and in numerous states, opposing mail-in ballots and other reforms that have made it easier for people to vote.
Another newcomer to the cause is the Election Integrity Project California. And a group called FreedomWorks, which once concentrated on opposing government regulation, is now demanding expanded government regulation of voters, with a project called the National Election Protection Initiative.
We now know that Donald Trump’s scheme to steal the 2020 election was put into writing, and we can all read it. Call it the Trump coup memo: John Eastman, a lawyer representing Trump, wrote a memo outlining how Vice President Pence could supposedly subvert Trump’s election loss in Congress on Jan. 6, the day of the violent mob assault on the Capitol.
What fraction of the money Mr. Trump did spend after the election was plowed mostly into a public-relations campaign and to keep his perpetual fund-raising machine whirring, with nearly $50 million going toward online advertising, text-message outreach and a small television ad campaign.
I’d never seen this video, until more than a month after the riot. The two minute propaganda video, apparently narrated by Trump himself and fired up with a triumphant hiphop soundtrack, begins at 1 minute 19 in this youTube, and resumes at 6:56, 8:54 and afterwards.
Would it surprise anyone to learn that in Florida prior to the 2000 election, the one that the Supreme Court declared Bush/Cheney had won by 537 votes in Florida once they ordered vote recounting stopped, 100,000 voters had been purged from the Florida voter rolls? Shades of candidate Brian Kemp using the power of his office to purge more Georgia voters than that when he narrowly defeated Stacey Abrams in Georgia. Voter purges alone will not allow the radical GOP to keep winning close elections in the face of “majoritarian tyranny”.
The party that represents less than half the country needs a hard hitting legal theory that sounds damned constitutional, or at least is good enough for a Federalist Society 6-3 win on Biden’s high court, made the law of the land in a narrowly tailored, unappealable summary opinion by Boof Kavanaugh or fellow nonpartisan, non-ideological constitutional scholar Amy Coney Barrett. That’s where the so-called Independent State Legislature Doctrine comes in.
TheIndependent State Legislature Doctrine allows a minority party that controls a state by permissible partisan gerrymandering (6-3 says you have to prove the gerrymandering is intentionally racist to successfully challenge it, nothing wrong with partisan officials using their power to benefit their party) to overrule the will of the rest of the state’s voters, just like the Orange Polyp kept demanding after losing in 2020.
The great Jane Mayer traces the origins of this controversial theory from the unprecedented, one-off 5-4 party-line 2001 Supreme Court decision that gave the presidency to a man who’d lost the popular vote:
Like many conservatives of her generation, Cleta Mitchell was galvanized by the disputed 2000 election, in which George W. Bush and Al Gore battled for weeks over the outcome in Florida. She repeatedly spoke out on behalf of Bush, who won the state by only five hundred and thirty-seven votes. A dispute over recounts ended up at the Supreme Court.
Few people noticed at the time, but in that case, Bush v. Gore, Chief Justice William Rehnquist, along with Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, hinted at a radical reading of the Constitution that, two decades later, undergirds many of the court challenges on behalf of Trump. In a concurring opinion, the Justices argued that state legislatures have the plenary power to run elections and can even pass laws giving themselves the right to appoint electors. Today, the so-called Independent Legislature Doctrine has informed Trump and the right’s attempts to use Republican-dominated state legislatures to overrule the popular will. Nathaniel Persily, an election-law expert at Stanford, told me, “It’s giving intellectual respectability to an otherwise insane, anti-democratic argument.”
Barack Obama’s election in 2008 made plain that the voting-rights wars were fueled, in no small part, by racial animus. Bigoted conspiracists, including Trump, spent years trying to undermine the result by falsely claiming that Obama wasn’t born in America. Birtherism, which attempted to undercut a landmark election in which the turnout rate among Black voters nearly matched that of whites, was a progenitor of the Big Lie. As Penda Hair, a founder of the Advancement Project, a progressive voting-rights advocacy group, told me, conservatives were looking at Obama’s victory “and saying, ‘We’ve got to clamp things down’—they’d always tried to suppress the Black vote, but it was then that they came up with new schemes.” . . .
. . . In 2013, the Supreme Court struck down a key section of the Voting Rights Act, eliminating the Justice Department’s power to screen proposed changes to election procedures in states with discriminatory histories, one of which was Arizona. Terry Goddard, a former Arizona attorney general and a Democrat, told me that “the state has a history of voter suppression, especially against Native Americans.” Before Rehnquist became a Supreme Court Justice, in 1971, he lived in Arizona, where he was accused of administering literacy tests to voters of color. In the mid-two-thousands, Goddard recalled, Republican leaders erected many barriers aimed at deterring Latino voters, some of which the courts struck down. But the 2013 Supreme Court ruling initiated a new era of election manipulation.
And note the raft of voter suppression laws that were ready to become law in Republican controlled states immediately after John Roberts pulled that legally and ethically shaky yet unappealable Shelby County opinion out of his learned, corporate lawyer ass. Although he pretended Congress hadn’t studied a mass of recent data in many hearings before reauthorizing the Voting Rights Act with stunning bipartisan numbers [1], 98-0 in the Senate, and the law was enthusiastically signed by George Dubya Bush, Roberts rested his decision on the crackpot idea that racism is no longer a factor in American voting since we had elected a what used to be called mulatto as president (was not Obama as “white” as he was Black? anywhere but in a racist society, the People rest).
the justices [three of the 5-4 majority in Bush v. Gore] argued that state legislatures have the plenary power to run elections and can even pass laws giving themselves the right to appoint electors
The benefit of technical arguments under the independent state legislature doctrine to subvert election results is that they have an aura of respectability and expertise. Lawyers in fine suits making legalistic arguments are much more appealing than desperate lawyers making unsubstantiated claims of ballot box stuffing and other chicanery. The doctrine would be a strong vehicle for a bloodless coup.
The theory reminds me of the one that says the vice-president, a candidate for re-election who has seemingly lost his bid, has the power to overrule the states trying to certify vote tallies that go against him. A good theory, I suppose, if you have a cushioned extremist majority on an ideologically packed Supreme Court, tens of millions of angry, credulous adrenalized citizens addicted to the incendiary outpourings of right wing mass media, a Department of Justice too high-minded to prosecute a powerful scofflaw demagogue [2] who continues to spray gasoline on the many fires he set, and, in a pinch, a violent, well-funded mob ready to riot again any time they are called on to stand by. And when you’re a huge star, and the organizer, promoter and funder of a riot in the Capitol to forcibly stop the peaceful transfer of power, they let you do, it’s true, they let you do it!
[1]
Only when you read Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s dissent in Shelby County v. Holder (another magnificent piece of clear, precise legal and moral logic) do you realize the audacity of the Roberts majority’s legal sleight of hand. You learn that the reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act was passed, after 21 hearings and 15,000 pages of evidence of ongoing discrimination in the states under preclearance, by a vote of 390-33 in the House and, after further debate, 98 to 0 in the Senate. Reading the John Roberts decision you’d have no reason to suspect that President George W. Bush signed the reauthorization into law a week later, as Ginsburg writes:
recognizing the need for “further work . . . in the fight against injustice,” and calling the reauthorization “an example of our continued commitment to a united America where every person is valued and treated with dignity and respect.”
[2]
This particular angry, boastful, lying Orange madman did not invent any of the shit he practices, and while he certainly wasn’t their first choice, radical right billionaires have found their audacious front man to be very useful for their larger purpose, gaming democracy to protect the privileges of vast inherited wealth in perpetuity. This Orange Polyp, since he is a malignant narcissist and an amoral opportunist, is their go to guy in the war of the few to keep hold of everything.
Glenn Kirschner has been promoting the indisputable idea, with everything we’ve seen the last six years or so, where norms and all pretense of fair play are thrown into the shitter along with all other democratic values, that justice matters. “Justice matters” is Glenn’s mantra and coat of arms, and he’s been fighting a hard public fight to encourage his former employer, the US Department of Justice, to pursue accountability for crimes like Seditious Conspiracy for the conspirators who planned, funded and facilitated the January 6th MAGA riot.
Usually the man to turn to for encouragement after some really bad MAGA news, sometimes even Glenn Kirschner gets discouraged, which is heartbreaking to see, but at the same time, it shows that even the most dogged fighter for justice just gets frustrated and tired sometimes. Here he is asking a simple and basic question, and right back on the case the next day:
Excellent portrait of the consummate moderately right wing sack of shit, member of the far right corporate American Legislative Exchange Council, coal broker and chairman of the Senate Energy and National Resources Committee, this podcast, which Robert Reich heard and excerpted this from:
The Texas anti-abortion law, which deputizes citizens to act against anyone who even intends to help any woman get an abortion in the short window of time before the fetal heartbeat can be detected, a couple of weeks after the first missed period, is reminiscent of the old Fugitive Slave Act. You can hear an excellent legal discussion in the most recent episode of Dahlia Lithwick’s Amicus podcast. Here’s a bit about this deadly new law (for poor women in Texas), from that discussion:
…this does hark back to some very dark American history and dark American history that has been supported through the United States Supreme Court. So the fugitive slave acts provided for citizen participation in the establishment, the furthering the preservation of American slavery. It weaponized the citizenry, deputized citizens to surveil, to start to apprehend people who were in violation of US laws by escaping themselves out of slavery, out of an inhumane situation. And there were bounties that were provided for their success and surveilling and successfully apprehending, obtaining individuals who dared to exercise liberty, autonomy and freedom.
And when you think about this Texas law, there are certain analogs that eerily resemble that of the Fugitive Slave Act in that it provides for a right of action of private citizens. It provides for financial renumeration of those citizens who are able to successfully peg someone who has aided or abetted an individual in obtaining an Abortion.
And what this means with the law written in such broad terms that this could implicate the Uber driver, the Lyft driver, the bus driver, or the receptionist that works at an abortion clinic, virtually anybody who has been in the way of the path of a person exercising the constitutional right to terminate a pregnancy?
What’s interesting about the law, Dahlia, is that after Roe v. Wade, there was Planned Parenthood v. Casey. And what comes out of there is that there should be no obstacle placed in the path of a woman and terminating a pregnancy. And Texas has flipped that on its head, which instead you may sue anybody who aids and abets a person on the path of terminating a pregnancy. It is a very dangerous law and it is very dangerous and alarming what has happened at the Supreme Court.
And, as you recall, there were some very religious Christians who truly believed that God and Jesus truly blessed the institution of slavery. These cocksure pieces of shit never change, since God tells them they are 100% correct, why would they change? Amy Coney Barrett and her pious ilk would be right at home with those righteous slavery defending motherfuckers.
The original, extra crispy, grass roots Ku Klux Klan arose in the defeated Confederacy right after the end of the Civil War. They viscerally hated blacks, feared their new constitutionally guaranteed electoral power and tortured and terrorized as many as possible. For a brief time, the newly formed Department of Justice, enforcing federal law against terrorist groups like the KKK, locked up all the Klan leaders. Then the Supreme Court made it clear that groups of murderers like the Klan were subject only to state law, the Ku Klux Klan Act and the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments be damned.
During the rapid industrialization of the US in the early twentieth century, a new Ku Klux Klan arose, a more inclusive, corporate klan if you will. Because it was set up by marketing experts, paid a bounty for each new dues paying member (and these experts both became millionaires based on their commissions) they needed to expand their net, make the old Klan tent bigger by appealing to a wider spectrum of hatreds, tailored to local custom. In the cities where most of the industrial jobs were located it was the goddamned Jews and Italians, godless Jews and Catholics pouring into the country by the millions (until the restrictive 1924 Immigration Act, that is). In places where Latinos were hated the most, it was the goddamned Latinos! Chinese? We fucking hate ’em! Join us and we’ll make them regret being Asian! Ten dollars is all it takes to join. A big tent, open to all haters. By 1924 there were 2.4 million proud, card carrying Ku Klux Klansmen and women, though the men, as men will, committed most of the muscular atrocities against their hated enemies (the women had their backs, though).
One hundred years ago this week, The New York World began to publish a 21-part explosive exposé on the inner workings of the Ku Klux Klan.
It was a sensation. At least 18 other newspapers across the country ran The World’s bombshell reporting. According to The Columbia Journalism Review, “The series drew two million readers nationwide. New Yorkers stood in line for copies. And the Justice Department and several congressmen promised to investigate the group.”
The World would win a Pulitzer Prize for its efforts.
But, as I read through that coverage to write this column, I was struck by just how resilient Klan ideology has been in the years since The World exposed the group’s systems and rituals; its ideas have been repackaged and dressed up — or, disrobed, as it were — but the core tenets remain the same. I was even struck by how many of the same tactics are still being used to preserve white supremacy and subjugate racial, ethnic and religious minorities in this country.
It proves to me that Klan thinking is not really about the organization itself or its tactics — the night riding or cross burning — but about the very meaning of America and who controls it.
As one of the Klan’s “grand goblins” put it in a 1921 speech: “America for real Americans! Guardianship against the alien, the anarchist and all who would subvert that banner, be they white or black or yellow!”
It is that widening of the scope of hatred and oppression that first jolted me as I studied the Klan’s history. By the early 1920s, its leaders had moved on from primarily anti-Black hatred. To grow the brand, they had to grow the ring of bias. As one of The World’s articles put it, “Now the negro has become a side issue with it. Today it is primarily anti-Jew, anti-Catholic, anti-alien, and it is spreading more than twice as fast through the North and West as it is growing in the South.”
That is not dissimilar from today, when xenophobia and Islamophobia have taken a more prominent role.
In fact, The World wrote that at times the Klan would tailor its message of hate by region, appealing to Japanophobes on the Pacific Coast, framing itself as a bulwark against radicalism in the “Central West,” fanning hatred of immigrants on the Atlantic Coast and stoking fears about Jews and Catholics throughout the country. As The World put it, “Wherever a prospective member lives, he has been promised that his pet aversion will be made an object of Klan action.”
This sounds eerily similar to the successful campaign that Donald Trump ran in 2016.
Many of his supporters view America not as a grand idea, malleable and expandable, but as a white man’s invention in which the displacement and slaughter of Native people and the enslavement of Africans was a necessary evil.
So they demand a strict deference to that idea of America because, to them, it promises a society bowing at their feet, a nation defined by its reverence for whiteness.
At one of the Klan’s initiations, members were told to say, “All men in America must honor that flag — if we must make them honor it on their knees!”
Anyone else remember how Trump supporters treated Colin Kaepernick?
Furthermore, the Klan realized, much as Trump did, that hate was an industry and that the right — or wrong — man could milk it for profit. As The World wrote at the time:
The original Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, Inc., modestly begun five years ago, has become a vast enterprise, doing a thriving business in the systematic sale of race hatred, religious bigotry and “100 percent” anti-Americanism.
Perhaps the last lesson and similarity between the Klan of the 1920s and Trump’s legion of supporters are that exposure doesn’t necessarily lead to eradication. After The World’s exposé, the Klan didn’t shrink; its membership surged.
Just four years later, in 1925, anywhere between 30,000 and 50,000 Klan members marched down Pennsylvania Avenue in D.C., in what The Washington Post called at the time “one of the greatest demonstrations this city has ever known.”
In 1913, eight years before The World’s articles, Louis D. Brandeis, soon to be nominated as a Supreme Court justice, wrote a piece in Harper’s Weekly under the headline “What Publicity Can Do,” arguing that “sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants.”
But in journalism, this idiom is more complicated. Sometimes, the infected court the infection. Sometimes, the light you shine on evil also illuminates the path to it. Sometimes, publicity is advertising.
Consider how this continues to manifest today. Over the past few years, we’ve seen how the press has amplified all manner of conservative fictions and fever dreams, from election denial to the rise of QAnon conspiracy theories to the lunacy of the anti-vax movement.
Sometimes people are drawn to these, and what we believe to be fact and logic repels them. Sometimes when we expose evil, we create or amplify its allure. Sometimes people willfully plunge into — and are consumed by — the flame that provides the light.
The core ideology of the Klan lives on in a more palatable form, in suits and uniforms, among lawmakers and judges, pushing back against progress and forward in the form of gentrification.
One hundred years later, pointy-hat white supremacy has evolved into soft-shoe white supremacy: same goal, less gauche.
I was listening to the Orange Polyp’s niece, Mary Trump, discuss the collective PTSD we have been recently suffering as a nation, as a planet. When her uncle, always the selfish, abusive prick he is now, was declared president in 2016 she had a full-blown PTSD reaction. She pointed out that the trauma her PTSD awakened was not related to her infamous uncle, it was just that the election of somebody so rotten, narcissistic, unethical, racist, nakedly “transactional” and unconcerned with the well-being of anyone but himself, filled her with terror. She knew that the worst among us had once again been elevated to a position of immense power. She was not wrong to feel that way. Donald Trump’s power over others is based on terror of his inevitable reprisals, backed with barked threats of violence and revenge, actual outbreaks of violent pay back, and continual atrocious betrayals of public and private trust that her famously transgressive uncle has never been held accountable for.
Covid-19 arrived just in time for her insane, powerful uncle to weaponize it, killing hundreds of thousands, who died needlessly as the former president divided the country on how to deal with a deadly pandemic, based on personal loyalty to him and a twisted notion of “freedom from tyranny”. The pandemic, he insisted, was a hoax perpetrated by Biden’s puppet masters in the Chinese Communist Party, that threatened the controversial incumbent’s undeniable landslide re-election strategy. Dr. Fauci is seen as a Commie traitor by tens of millions of Americans who continue to follow the former president’s scattered thoughts on the pandemic. How the Polyp is still walking around a free man, with the many serious crimes there is probable cause to believe he committed, including electoral interference, obstruction of justice and incitement to insurrection, is a mystery out of a dystopian science fiction novel.
Think of a childhood nightmare, like any good horror movie, where the monster finally leaves the scene and you can take a breath and wipe the sweat off your face. The next part of the dream happens under a beautiful blue sky, birds singing, a gentle breeze wafting through the flowers. Suddenly the bloody hand of the monster bursts up out of the earth, followed by the hideously muscled body, and the fucker is back, more terrifying than ever, and chasing you to your death by heart attack. In a healthy sequel to this nightmare your subconscious might have you suddenly stronger than the monster, grabbing the fucker and shoving it into a strong box you then lock, chain and throw into the middle of the deepest ocean. More often, though, the monster simply waits its next opportunity to chase you to a gruesome death. The terror this triggers is PTSD.
When someone rules by terror, an abusive parent, a partner, a bullying boss, a political leader, PTSD is always waiting. When you are in the grips of an abuser you don’t have time to process the trauma, all of your life force is focused on survival, particularly when the abuser appears to be all-powerful. Any moment the abuser can re-traumatize you, you have to be constantly vigilant, which is exhausting. Every abuser demands silence from his victim, snitches get stitches. If the abuse becomes well known the abuser risks people stronger than him coming to stop him from acting out against those weaker. In our current system we appear to have a shortage of people strong enough to resist the societal pressures to get rich, maintain privileges, etc. and strong enough to call bullshit on abuse in a way that can’t be ignored.
I’ve got no answer to the ultimate question of how we fight systemic abuse, except to keep finding allies and keep fighting, directly addressing the traumas we all face, with whatever means are at our disposal, in spite of how exhausting the fight is. In a nation of laws, as we are always told this is (and it’s certainly a nation of strict, even draconian laws when it comes to poor people and minorities) enforcement of the law against criminal abusers is the only protection the rest of us have. If criminals can openly threaten any reprisal imaginable, and send goon squads to harass and threaten direct violence, at say, school board meetings, and there is no consequence for this — the results are grimly predictable. We don’t actually live in a nation of law, we live in a nation of slaveholders and slaves, with a militarized army of slave catchers ready to use deadly force to enforce the bloody status quo and wink at the “crimes” committed by the protected class.
Of course, to speak of slavery in a nation that long ago outlawed it, except as punishment for a certain class of law breakers, is like comparing any other form of harmful abuse to rape. Rape is rape, slavery is slavery, a death camp is a death camp, certain things are indecent to compare other things to, we are often reminded. Indecency, of course, is famously in the eye of the beholder. Ron Deathsantis in Florida killing 69 children, and counting, with his Trump-inspired orders against reasonable pandemic precautions in his state, a hero to his enraged base, is an indecent motherfucker. The sassy Republican woman who heedlessly governs another Covid-19 hotspot, South Dakota, the muscular worm who governs the Hang ’em High state of Texas, heroes to some, indecent, irresponsible reckless killers to others.
PTSD is an illuminating frame to see things in — we are all suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder in a nation, in a flooding world that is also on fire and subject to drought, where there is now no penalty for public lying, even spreading lies that incite deadly violence and the dismantling of our democracy. The First Amendment protects the right tell even the most disgusting lies, we know, just as the Second Amendment, per Antonin Scalia, protects the right of zealots in Texas to outlaw all regulation of guns, including the need for a permit to carry or use one. The lack of accountability for and “rehabilitation” of our wealthiest criminals, top war criminals, traitors like Robert E. Lee (unaccountable for his treason and leading an armed rebellion that resulted in 700,000 American deaths, honored in his lifetime and pardoned posthumously by Gerald Ford…), adds to the power of our collective trauma. Our collective trauma is cumulative, since traumas of past generations get passed on in the form of reality-based terror, and ongoing reality-confirming violence, and each generation adds new layers to the constantly evolving, never-addressed trauma.
Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is exhausting, and debilitating, and can only be overcome with hard, patient, painful work, usually involving other PTSD victims. Most of us, of course, are famous for not wanting to do hard, painful work, particularly if it takes tremendous patience. More challenging still, because this is collective, national PTSD, based on collective, national traumas, it will require much of this hard, painful work to be done a public level, in full view of everyone. It will require painful admissions, apologies and reconciliation. It will require objective justice. Let’s fucking do it, I say.
