Category Archives: politics smells like meat

Christ…

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What’s America coming to when you can’t even listen to a decent American Congressman argue on youTube that the racist “Democrat” [1]  party should be outlawed in peace these days…?

these ads are out of control… why do we have to get past these when we’re trying to digest a straightforward patriotic expression from a member of Congress!

Mr. Gohmert (R-Texas) introduced a resolution in Congress that would ban the Democratic Party.   Because they are the party of the Ku Klux Klan and slavery, argues Gohmert.  Beyond that:

“Their strategy is if we can keep America in turmoil, the riots, the economic problems that Covid has caused, then it’s better for getting rid of Donald Trump.  And it’s sad, but it appears they don’t care so much about letting America heal because they want the political advantages they think come from seeing America devastated, just so they can get back in power.   That is horrendous, the Republicans have never felt that way and still do not.”

 

 

[1]  Representative Gohmert does slip up and refer to the hated Democrat Party as the Democratic Party a few times.

History is always written in blood

History is always written in the blood of the powerless.  Famously written by the “victors,” it casts the suffering and deaths of those who wound up on the short end of things as somehow necessary, a historical necessity for a greater good.   “You can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs,” some winners are prone to saying, by way of expressing minor regret about the inevitable — that some “eggs” had to be “broken” so we could enjoy what we have on the table in front of us now.

We watched the public lynching of an American man recently, under the knee of a cop who kneeled on him for 8 minutes and 46 seconds — the last almost 3:00 of which the dying man was already unconscious.  We know the exact time frame because of an uninterrupted video of the slow-motion murder by suffocation. 

The video, taken by a high school girl who filmed the entire 8:46 without flinching, left no doubt that we were watching a lynching, a brutal murder committed with, at minimum, depraved indifference to human life.   The man who was killed was handcuffed, subdued, lying face down on the ground begging for his life, in the end calling for his mother.   

George Floyd’s public murder woke people up.   With a serial scofflaw as president, condemning those who took to the streets to protest this lynching as “antifa” extremists (being anti-fascist was until recently a mainstream American value), invoking police violence against peaceful protesters as “law and order,” the time was past due for an accounting.    America has never had a reckoning of any kind with our murderous history of enforced inequality at law.   

That’s an uncomfortable thought for the powerful (and even more so for the powerless, I dare say).   You cannot have forgiveness without some kind of process of reconciliation, some remorseful acknowledgement by the perpetrator that it was wrong to — say, tolerate lynching for hundreds of years.     The symbols of American racism are all around us.  The Edmund Pettus Bridge, where the recently departed John Lewis had his head split open by police while peacefully protesting, in fact, kneeling to pray, in 1965, was named for a Confederate officer, US Senator and Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.   Very uncomfortable!!!

Mike Pompeo, to the rescue.  The Koch Brothers’ former personal congressman from Witchita, one of America’s most powerful religious Evangelical Christians, did a little history writing of his own the other day.   With supreme confidence, he made the following remarks at a recent meeting of the Commission on Unalienable Rights.    Note the several sleights of hands Mr. Pompeo employs to make history right.

“These days, even saying that America’s fundamentally good has become controversial… They want you to believe that America’s institutions continue to reflect the country’s acceptance of slavery at our founding.   This is a dark vision of America’s birth.  I reject it.” 

“They want you to believe…”– how ominous!    Pompeo, Trump’s Secretary of State, went on to single out and flay a favorite right-wing whipping girl, the New York Times. 

“The New York Times’s 1619 Project, so named for the year that the first slaves were transported to America, wants you to believe that our country was founded FOR human bondage.   They want you to believe that America’s institutions continue to reflect the country’s acceptance of slavery at our founding.     They want you to believe that Marxist ideology that America is only the oppressors and the oppressed.”

You understand the logic here:  only a Marxist (godless Commie) could see any connection between our centuries of race-based chattel slavery, a bloody Civil War followed by a hundred years of unchecked, violent Ku Klux Klan rule in the former Confederacy, racist laws nationwide well into the twentieth century [1], a punitive criminal justice system singling out people of color for incarceration and destroying countless lives for non-violent “drug crimes”, the murder by police, without legal consequences, of unarmed civilians, mostly people of color.   This is clearly a strictly Communist-only reading of our great history.  Only a godless Marxist could see it in that hateful way, real Americans understand that, says Pompeo.  

“The Chinese Communist Party must be gleeful when they see the NYT spout this ideology.   Some people have taken these false doctrines to heart.  The rioters pulling down statues thus see nothing wrong with desecrating monuments to those who fought for our unalienable rights, from  our founding to the present day.  This is a dark vision of America’s birth.  I reject it.”

Reject away, sir.   Historical facts, documented and recited, equal Communist-approved “ideology,” nicely done legerdemain, Mike.  Great men, including men who took up arms against our nation, heroes like Edmund Pettus and Nathaniel Forrest Bedford, daring Confederate general and founder of the Ku Klux Klan (photo below) must be remembered in monuments to their greatness, whatever lawless, godless, Marxist, America-hating  rioters might feel about it.

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“It’s a disturbed reading of our history, it is a slander on our great people.  Nothing could be further from the truth of our founding.”

That the first slaves arrived on these shores before the Mayflower brought the families of our founding fathers here, false!   A disturbed reading, a slander.  Nothing could be further from the truth!   

What the hell do you actually mean by these fighting words, Mike?

I’m tempted to simply say “fuck that fucking pig-faced puto,” but that will change no hearts or minds.   Assuming hearts and minds are still involved, once this kind of angry, determined erasure of history is forcefully undertaken by powerful men.

Do you have a duty to forgive someone who has badly hurt you and then tells you to just fucking get over it, asshole?   Kneeling on your neck until you’re dead — your problem, jerkoff, not mine.  Critical “history” — a bunch of deliberate Commie slanders, NOTHING COULD BE FURTHER FROM THE TRUTH.  Who are you going to believe, the lying New York Times or my unidentified riot-geared federal troopers and their tear gas, truncheons and blanket immunity from prosecution for breaking your head?

Ah, fuck that fucking pig-faced puto.  America is better than his ilk.

 

 

[1]  Bill Moyers: Let me read to you. Here’s a quote from a Maryland statute in 1957 — 1957! — that you include in the book:

All marriages between a white person and a Negro, or between a white person and a person of Negro descent, to the third generation, inclusive, or between a white person and a member of the Malay race or between a Negro and a member of the Malay race, or between a person of Negro descent, to the third generation, inclusive, and a member of the Malay race, or between a person of Negro descent, to the third generation, inclusive, and a member of the Malay race or between a Negro and member of the Malay race, or between a person of Negro descent, to the third generation, inclusive, are forever prohibited and shall be void; and and any person violating the provisions of this section shall be deemed guilty of an infamous crime and be punished by imprisonment in the penitentiary for not less than eighteen months or more than 10 years.

That was Maryland law. 

[not ruled unconstitutional until 1967]

and

Moyers:  Bilbo [powerful racist Senator from Mississippi, Theodore Bilbo] said, “One drop of Negro blood placed in the veins of the purest Caucasian destroys the inventive genius of his mind and palsies his creative faculty.” Is it true that the Nazis thought the one-drop rule too extreme?

Whitman: They did indeed. They never proposed anything nearly as extreme as the one-drop rule.

(source– an excellent, if chilling, rundown of some of America’s racist laws and their influence on racial law in the Third Reich)

Of course, as every real American knows, Bill Moyers, long time PBS talk show host (PBS… yo), who, as a young man, worked for and applauded LBJ for his Civil Rights legislation, is a freedom hating old Marxist who spreads slanders against our great, white, Christian nation.

The federal courts under Trump

I found out recently that 86 year-old national treasure Bill Moyers could finally no longer stand to sit idly by.   A few months ago he started a podcast version of his great long-running PBS interview and reporting show.   In March he spoke with Dahlia Lithwick, award-winning reporter on the Supreme Court.    You can hear the whole interview here (or, if you’re pressed for time,  more quickly read the whole transcript).   

Donald Trump, a man with no particular political ideology, outside of a deep, lifelong commitment to the privileges of the wealthiest, is the perfect tool for his ultra-conservative and fervently Christian backers.   He has no objection to picking judges off a list prepared by an extreme right/religiously conservative organization.   Both of his Supreme Court picks came off the Federalist Society list of committed conservative ideologues.   His lifetime appointments to the federal bench are all chosen for their loyalty to a conservative corporatist, “pro-life” worldview.   Trump himself doesn’t care, he was for abortion rights before he was against them, but his wealthiest and most religious backers certainly care fervently.   When it comes to his donors, Mr. Trump aims to please.

At the end of the discussion between Bill Moyers and Dahlia Lithwitck we hear this:

Bill Moyers: Dahlia, conservatives have long understood that elections every two and four years are as much about the courts as about the legislature and the executive branch. And they’ve made the appointment of judges, well, quite frankly perhaps the chief issue in their campaigns. That’s been a pretty smart strategy, hasn’t it?

Dahlia Lithwick: I’m glad you asked about this, because since the Meese revolution, there has been a concerted effort—

Bill Moyers: Ed Meese was the attorney general, for Ronald Reagan.

Dahlia Lithwick: This is a decades-long, very organized, very focused, very well-funded effort to win the courts and with an understanding that if you control the courts, almost nothing else mattered.

And what we’ve seen, if I can go back to the 2016 election, we went into that election with one vacancy. Antonin Scalia had died the February before the election. Mitch McConnell had held up the Merrick Garland confirmation, and so there was a vacancy on the court.

There was an 83-year-old, an 80-year-old, and a 79-year-old on the court that year. And with no disrespect intended to octogenarians, it might have been a good time for progressives to look at the court and say, “Holy cow. This is the most important issue going into this election.”

Donald Trump campaigned on the fact that he was going to change the court, only appoint people who would overturn Roe. There were people like Ted Cruz and John McCain who went into that election in November of 2016 pledging in their Senate races that if Hillary Clinton won in 2016 they would hold the Scalia seat open for four more years or eight more years. No one was going to be seated on their watch.

And on the other side, we had Democrats running for the Senate who had had a seat stolen under their noses and said nothing in their Senate races. And by a two-to-one margin, voters who prioritized the Supreme Court broke for Donald Trump. So that was entirely — sort of choice that voters made in 2016 that whatever their issues were, the court was not amongst them.

And as a consequence, we saw not just the two Supreme Court seats that Donald Trump has been able to fill with Gorsuch and with Kavanaugh. But we’ve now seen 191 federal judges seated in three years. That outpaces Obama’s record for seating judges in eight years. It is unprecedented for anybody to pack the courts the way Donald Trump has done it. And it is for exactly the reason you started with. It is because, for whatever reason, conservatives laser focus on the courts and progressives rank it number eight, nine, 10, or 11 in their priorities.

It would appear not all fascists are of the “left-wing” sort POTUS denounces

Granted, violently stirred emotions are stronger motivators than soundly reasoned thoughts, granted there are some very powerful people feeling dangerously desperate right now — but, take a moment to look this over.   We are at a historical moment of peril, for many reasons, including the escalating insanity of folks to whom too much is never enough.

A friend recommended Boston College American history professor Heather Cox Richardson’s daily news digest, which I’ve been getting nightly (arrives in NY around 3 a.m.) for the last few weeks.   Generally very well-done, thoughtful summaries of some of the day’s most important stories.  This one, even if you don’t read all the details, is worth reading for the full context of this bit at the end:

It is not just officials who are objecting to the administration’s authoritarian demonstrations. There was a new force on the Portland streets this weekend: moms. Dressed in yellow shirts, wearing helmets and masks, several hundred women are forming chains between the officers and the protesters. They call themselves the Wall of Moms, and are chanting: “I don’t see no riot here; take off your riot gear,” and “Feds stay clear, moms are here!” Officers tear gassed them last night, but they came back tonight in bigger numbers.

Tonight’s protest was one of the largest this month.

Literally put tears in my eyes and a waver in my voice, trying to read that paragraph aloud to Sekhnet.  Moms organized to protect peaceful protesters now protesting secret — likely illegal — federal police violence — tear gassed.    

The Times, I see, had a headline today: Vet Had a Question for the Feds in Portland.  They Beat Him in Response.   Used a little tear gas on him, and broke his fingers with their clubs, as anyone would.  
The H-word!   Oy, the H-word!!!! [1]

———- Forwarded message ———
From: Heather Cox Richardson from Letters from an American <heathercoxrichardson@substack.com>
Date: Mon, Jul 20, 2020 at 3:04 AM

July 19, 2020

Trump is shifting his reelection pitch, and it has frightening implications for the country.

Over the weekend, the federal crackdown in Portland, Oregon continued, with people in unmarked camouflage uniforms arresting peaceful protesters and taking them away in unmarked vehicles. And then, they appeared—for now—to let them go. The administration appears to be constructing a scene of violence and disorder for the news media to show to viewers.

It seems clear that the Trump campaign—which got a new director last Wednesday– is going to make its case for reelection on the idea that there is violence in America’s cities that must be addressed with federal force, and that only Trump is willing to do so.

This is an apparent attempt to overshadow the increasingly alarming news about the coronavirus, which is now burning across the country with renewed vigor. Even as Republican governors are backtracking and asking people to wear masks, Trump continues to insist—falsely– that our spiking numbers are because of increased testing and that the virus will eventually disappear.

In an interview tonight with Chris Wallace on the Fox News Channel (remember, Wallace is an actual reporter, not an entertainment personality like Tucker Carlson or Sean Hannity), Trump claimed—again, falsely—that some of the states are rolling back their reopening not because of the ravages of new coronavirus infections, but because they are trying to hurt his chances of reelection. “Many of those cases are young people that would heal in a day. They have the sniffles and we put it down as a test. Many of them — don’t forget, I guess it’s like 99.7 percent, people are going to get better and in many cases they’re going to get better very quickly,” he said.

When Wallace asked him how he would “regard your years as President of the United States,” Trump said: “I think I was very unfairly treated. From before I even won I was under investigation by a bunch of thieves, crooks. It was an illegal investigation.” Wallace tried to steer him back on track: “But what about the good—” Trump interrupted: “Russia, Russia, Russia.”

Wallace: “But what about the good parts, sir?

Trump: No, no, I want to do this. I have done more than any president in history in the first three and a half years, and I’ve done it through suffering through investigations where people have been—General Flynn, where people have been so unfairly treated….”

He went on, rehashing his grievances, until Wallace finally bade him goodbye.

From this wreckage, the campaign is trying to find a new, winning issue in law and order.

The footage from Portland shows what looks like a war zone, but the Department of Homeland Security’s own list of the actions of the “violent anarchists” in the city consists of graffiti, torn down fences, and fireworks, all situations the local police insist they can handle. The mayor, both senators, and the governor of Oregon have all asked for the federal troops to be removed, but the administration refuses. Yesterday, Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler said the protests were winding down before the federal troops came in and escalated the situation.

In an interview today on the Fox News Channel, Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, said that Trump is working with Attorney General William Barr and Acting Department of Homeland Security Chad Wolf to roll out a new plan to “go in” to make sure communities– like Chicago and Milwaukee—across the country are safe. People are assuming that means more federal troops in those– and other– cities, but Meadows did not, in fact, say that explicitly.

The Trump campaign immediately retweeted Meadows’s interview. Trump himself tweeted: “We are trying to help Portland, not hurt it. Their leadership has, for months, lost control of the anarchists and agitators. They are missing in action. We must protect Federal property, AND OUR PEOPLE. These were not merely protesters, these are the real deal!” The argument appears to be that we should not pay attention to the administration’s failure to protect us from coronavirus because it promises now to protect us from “violent anarchists.”

On Friday, The US. Attorney for the District of Oregon, Billy Williams, recognized that the administration’s tactics in Portland had gone too far. He stated: “Based on news accounts circulating that allege federal law enforcement detained two protesters without probable cause, I have requested the Department of Homeland Security Office of the Inspector General to open a separate investigation directed specifically at the actions of DHS personnel.”

Oregon Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum didn’t wait for an investigation. On Friday, she sued the Department of Homeland Security and the Marshals Service in federal court to try to get a court order to stop federal agents from arresting people in Portland. The complaint blames the federal agents for “the current escalation of fear and violence in downtown Portland.”

On Sunday, the chairs of the House Judiciary Committee, the House Homeland Security Committee, and the House Oversight Committee, wrote a letter to the inspectors general of the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice asking them to investigate “the Trump Administration’s use of federal law enforcement to violate the rights of our constituents.” They tied the events in Portland to the larger story of the attack on protesters at Lafayette Square in Washington, D.C., and to the deployment of cold water cannons, pepper spray, and tear gas on those protesting the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline across the Standing Rock Reservation.

But, they noted, they had an even broader concern. “The legal basis for this use of force has never been explained—and, frankly, it is not at all clear that the Attorney General and the Acting Secretary are authorized to deploy federal law enforcement officers in this manner. The Attorney General of the United States does not have unfettered authority to direct thousands of federal law enforcement personnel to arrest and detain American citizens exercising their First Amendment rights. The Acting Secretary appears to be relying on an ill-conceived executive order meant to protect historic statues and monuments as justification for arresting American citizens in the dead of night. The Administration’s insistence on deploying these forces over the objections of state and local authorities suggest that these tactics have little to do with public safety, but more to do with political gamesmanship.”

The letter went on: “This is a matter of utmost urgency. Citizens are concerned that the Administration has deployed a secret police force, not to investigate crimes but to intimidate individuals it views as political adversaries, and that the use of these tactics will proliferate throughout the country. Therefore, we ask that you commence your review of these issues immediately.”

It is not just officials who are objecting to the administration’s authoritarian demonstrations. There was a new force on the Portland streets this weekend: moms. Dressed in yellow shirts, wearing helmets and masks, several hundred women are forming chains between the officers and the protesters. They call themselves the Wall of Moms, and are chanting: “I don’t see no riot here; take off your riot gear,” and “Feds stay clear, moms are here!” Officers tear gassed them last night, but they came back tonight in bigger numbers.

Tonight’s protest was one of the largest this month.

—-

Notes:

https://judiciary.house.gov/uploadedfiles/2020-07-19_letter_to_doj_dhs_ig_regarding_special_deputations_portland.pdf

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/portland-mayor-feds-escalated-the-situation

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/07/oregon-sues-government-detaining-protesters-unmarked.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/19/us/politics/republicans-contradict-trump-coronavirus.html

https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/moms-form-human-shield-front-152544392.html

protests:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/17/opinion/portland-protests-federal-agents.html

I’m not linking to the FNC transcript because FNC always messes up the newsletter, but you can google: “Transcript: Fox New Sunday Interview with President Trump”

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[1]   How the squeamish in Germany probably referred to Mr. Hitler, circa 1936.

From an article, by her, about AG Barr on Bill Moyers’s website:

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

Heather Cox Richardson teaches American history at Boston College. She is the author of a number of books, most recently, How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America. She writes the popular nightly newsletter Letters from an American. Follow her on Twitter: @HC_Richardson.

 

Inter-branch Dispute Court, long overdue

Congress’s right to oversee the Executive Branch by summoning its employees  with reasonable subpoenas has always been upheld by our federal courts.  Nixon was required, by a unanimous Supreme Court, to turn over the incriminating tapes that ended his presidency .  Clinton’s appeal for executive immunity from civil prosecution over sexual improprieties he engaged in while he was governor of Arkansas was also turned down by a unanimous Supreme Court.   

Our current president, the most unscrupulous one we’ve had so far, aided and abetted by the most openly unprincipled Attorney General in our history, insists on the Unitary Executive’s right to a blanket protective shield against all prosecution, all subpoenas, and investigations of every kind.

If you are litigious, and wealthy enough, you understand that you can delay almost any matter almost indefinitely, if you have an army of lawyers willing to brazenly advance arguments they know they will eventually lose.   

I couldn’t help myself, the other day I read part of the recent Vance/Mazars Supreme Court decision, and, to my amazement (but not surprise) Kavanaugh’s “concurrence” with the majority was actually an amplification of the dissent by the two farthest right  Justices, Mr. Thomas, the Black Klansman, and Samuel Alito.  Kavanaugh stressed, by agreeing with the main thrust of their narrow dissents, that the court was “unanimous” in agreeing that the president may litigate every possible legal theory to his heart’s content, ’til the cows come home, ’til American women of color walk on the moon.  Because he’s an ordinary citizen, in the eyes of the law, he may use the delaying tactics available to any ordinary citizen of great wealth.   Fair is fair.

What a slimy fellow our Mr. Kavanaugh is.  What a slimy legal system we have here under the American Rule (each side pays their own legal fees– except for poor people accused of crimes punishable by at least a year in prison).

Former federal prosecutor Glenn Kirschner gives a good account of the most recent farcical turn in this hideous — if straightforward —  case where the Court ordered Mazars to turn Trump’s tax documents over the NY County DA.   Instead of complying with the Supreme Court’s order to allow Mazars to release his tax records (why on earth would he?)  Trump sent a small army of lawyers to court to try again to block his accountants, Mazars, from turning his tax records over the Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance Jr.’s grand jury.   Their arguments were exceedingly feeble, even ridiculous, but once they lose on the merits they’ll have another appeal.   The legal process will take months, for no good reason in such an important separation of powers case.  As Nixon famously said “Americans have a right to know if their president is a crook.”

Kirshner advocates for a real and very practical solution to the problem of an unscrupulous president exploiting the delays of the courts for his own “nefarious” purposes (Kirschner used that great word a few times to describe the president’s motives and actions) — an expedited Inter-branch Dispute Court with a realistic and short time frame for resolving things like the rights of the House to have subpoenas complied with. 

The IDC, a federal court hearing only inter-branch disputes, would work on a streamlined and uniform schedule: 72 hours to present legal briefs, 72 hours to argue in court and present testimony and evidence, 72 hours for a ruling.  Resolution of the issue in nine working days.  Sounds about right to me.  It would go a long way to restoring the checks and balances intended by the Framers, the Original Intent conservatives claim to revere (except when they have the presidency).

Check it out, very well presented.

 

 

I Am SO Judgmental

It’s hard for me not to be, especially living through this deadly public denial of an out of control pandemic.  As the disease rages, and new infection records are set almost daily, we are barraged by constant public denials of the proven best ways to control the spread of this killer disease, by many of those in power here in the land of the free and the home of the brave.  If only I could stop being so darned judgmental…

I look at our floridly insane president, an incoherent man living in his own, demon-infested, world.   He cannot answer a simple question posed to him, he rambles about unrelated matters he thinks will make him look good.   He lives the life of the tormented rich man from old Yiddish curse, racing from room to room of his mansion, the Devil in hot pursuit.   

We can pretend he’s not insane, as we do, even when confronted with the latest proof of his madness, but it changes nothing.   “We must not let science stand in the way of the fact that the president wants the schools open,” says his most recent press secretary yesterday, sealing the deal, in case there was any doubt.

Donald Trump’s revered grandfather, Frederick, by the way, died of influenza in the 1918 Pandemic.   You can’t make this shit up.

What has me so judgmental today in particular?   I’m thinking about the under-reported story of how much richer the richest Americans have grown during this time of suffering and plague and judgmentally wondering why this story is not on the front pages. 

During this pandemic, between March 18 and June 17, our 614 American billionaires increased their wealth by $584,000,000,000.00.   

These are people who each already had over ONE THOUSAND million dollars, becoming richer by an average of another almost THOUSAND MILLION dollars, during a time of historically disorienting fear and mass suffering.  Take this little factoid, from the above article (which originally appeared at Common Dreams. It is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. Feel free to republish and share widely):

Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Warren Buffett, and Larry Ellison—the five wealthiest billionaires in the U.S.—saw their collective riches grow by $101.7 billion between March 18 and June 17, according to the new report. A dozen other American billionaires saw their wealth more than double during that same period.

By now, a month after these figures were published, we are pushing closer to an additional trillion (A MILLION MILLION) dollars in wealth for the wealthiest and most deserving among us.  And why not?

Screen Shot 2020-07-17 at 4.15.02 PM.png

It’s not as if it would be fair to take that money, earned fair and square, and use it for the public good.   Do not wonder how many PPEs, incomprehensibly still in short supply in Jared’s America, could be immediately manufactured and distributed with a fraction of that kind of money.  Unthinkable!   That would be Marxism!  Unconscionable, sick, unAmerican!

It’s not as if a trillion dollars would be more than a drop in the bucket anyway, once you divide it by the 100,000,000 or more Americans already in increasingly desperate need.   Let’s do the math, shall we, based on last month’s $584B total.   

Shoot, that’s only $5,840 a person (or a shade under $13,000 each if we gave it only to the 45,000,000 recently unemployed Americans), how much good could that pittance actually do for anyone?   How long would that really prevent a foreclosure or eviction, anyway?  Is delaying the inevitable a good use of the hard-earned money of our most valuable, precious and productive citizens?

I keep wondering why I am so fucking judgmental.   Why does it make me so angry that someone who already has a THOUSAND million dollars has an indisputable right to have infinitely more than that?   Why does the eternal well-funded argument by the finest Americans about their right to pay as little tax as possible piss me off so much?   

Maybe it’s because I come from a once poor family and I am repelled by greed and contests of heedless vanity.   Maybe it’s because my grandmother, Yetta, living in a land of pogroms sanctioned by local aristocrats, found hope and courage in the message of international brotherhood preached by the Marxist emissaries who arrived in her hellhole part of the world, holding out a better vision for the future than endless poverty, oppression and violence.

On a louder and more immediate note:  I don’t know why the hell I am so fucking judgmental.

 

 

Why We Need An Expedited Judicial Process to Help Control the Occasional Unscrupulous President

Without an expedited process to bring evidence of a president’s alleged illegal conduct before a court, someone like Donald Trump can do what he has done since he learned the art from his master Roy Cohn in 1973 — run out the clock on consequences while working public opinion.   

Trump lawyers routinely file motions and appeals to tie up and almost endlessly prolong any matter under litigation, burying adversaries in papers and legal fees.  They have done this for decades and do it constantly since Trump has become president.  There is no consequence, under the American Rule (each side pays its own legal fees) for a wealthy person who uses litigation as a sword and shield this way.

The law has processes to expedite relief when the alternative is irreparable harm without adequate legal intervention.  Michael Flynn’s lawyers went to court last month to get a court to grant an emergency decree instantly dismissing his case without a hearing.  The DC Circuit Court panel did so, 2-1.   They ordered the trial judge to immediately dismiss the case without a hearing. 

There needs to be a process for expediting resolution of matters involving a manically litigious president and the public interest.  

Whenever anyone has tried to hold Donald Trump legally accountable for anything in his long, tricky, unaccountable life, his army of lawyers gets to work filing mountains of papers, making arguments that are often ridiculous (“yes, he could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue and nobody could arrest him or investigate while he’s president”), but not technically “frivolous” (which would get them thrown out of court instantly– with ethical consequences for the lawyers). 

In 2018 the NY County DA, Cyrus Vance Jr.  subpoenaed Mr. Trump’s tax records from his accountants, Mazars, to determine whether Trump had falsified records to hide hush money payments to a porn star to keep quiet about their sexual liaison in the days before the 2016 election.   Mr. Trump’s former personal lawyer Michael Cohen is back in prison, in part for that crime.

In 2019, Trump’s personal lawyers sued the Manhattan DA, and Mazars, to prevent the disclosure of the tax fillings. Trump v. Vance (and Mazars, et al)  was one of the cases recently decided by the Supreme Court.  Trump’s lawyers brought the protective case on shaky legal grounds that John Roberts easily disposed of but the years of delay caused by bringing a lawsuit and vigorously litigating a case they knew they’d eventually lose, were years of unaccountability that Trump gained. 

The result was predictable:  the Supreme Court ruled 7-2 that Mr. Trump’s accountants will eventually have to turn over the tax records, but it could be many months, or even years, before the public sees them.  It also left open the possibility, strongly endorsed by four of the five conservatives, that Trump’s lawyers could use new delaying tactics to prolong even this straightforward case indefinitely.

In the related case of the president’s blanket refusal to allow his accountants to comply with Congressional subpoenas, Trump v. Mazars, the Court ruled the same way, also 7-2.  The second case was brought by Trump’s personal lawyers in an attempt to block his accountants, and Deutsche Bank, from turning over subpoenaed documents from before Trump was president.  One presumes these documents contain compromising information the president does not want known. 

The 7-2 majority ruled that the president has no legal grounds to issue blanket orders to everyone he has ever done business with to treat all his relationships and records as top secret.   The public has a right to know if the president is entangled, say, with shady foreign (or domestic) oligarchs (here we call them ‘philanthropists’) that he may be indebted to.  If Congress has a legitimate “legislative” need to see documents, and the subpoena passes a new four part test, the president may not block compliance with the subpoena.

The Congressional subpoena case was sent back to the lower court for Trump’s lawyers to file additional papers to delay resolution until after the 2020 election (when the subpoenas in question will evaporate anyway, as a matter of law).   It makes no difference whether Trump’s lawyers make winning or losing arguments (they mostly lose), the game is to delay resolution of issues for as long as possible.  They win by delaying.

It is the same with all of his claims about temporary presidential privilege and a ridiculous blanket immunity for him and anyone he’s ever spoken to — claims the president was encouraged to make in a letter from his new Attorney General Bill Barr.   Barr knew these claims were absurd, the Supreme Court had twice before unanimously ruled, in the cases of Nixon and Clinton, that the president must obey a lawful subpoena. 

Barr also knew how long the cases would take to get to the Supreme Court, and how the Court would likely send them back to a lower court for further legal wrangling, as happened in the case Trump’s lawyers brought to stop the production of documents that could damage the president’s reelection chances.  If all else fails, Trump’s lawyers can raise (and have) a brand new quasi-legal claim: presidential harassment.

Justice’s Kavanaugh and Gorsuch did a nice dance in voting with the majority while also siding with the two hardcore dissenters, the Black Klansman and fellow arch-conservative Samuel Alito, on the proposition they highlighted that the President may use any delaying tactics the law allows, for as long as he is able to delay the eventual resolution of matters, the interests of justice notwithstanding.  It is, after all, the American way to rule for the president’s expansive powers, when the president is a conservative Republican.  Here’s Kavanaugh:

JUSTICE KAVANAUGH, with whom JUSTICE GORSUCH joins, concurring in the judgment.

The Court today unanimously concludes that a President does not possess absolute immunity from a state criminal subpoena, but also unanimously agrees that this case should be remanded to the District Court, where the President may raise constitutional and legal objections to the subpoena as appropriate. See ante, at 21–22, and n. 6; post, at 11–12 (THOMAS, J., dissenting); post, at 16–19 (ALITO, J., dissenting). I agree with those two conclusions.

Like Solomon himself, cutting the baby in half.

“But wait,” you will say, “Solomon didn’t cut the baby.  That was the point of the story– he didn’t cut the baby.”

Yes, and this hardcore Federalist Society zealot, Mr. Kavanaugh, is no Solomon.

For an excellent analysis of these two cases, I highly recommend this recent episode of Trump Inc, entitled “Temporary Presidential Immunity is Not a  Thing.”

We need a way to have quick legal rulings on matters a criminal president can nonchalantly have an army of lawyers delay almost endlessly, as they cases work their way through the court with thousands of other cases.   Former Federal Prosecutor Glenn Kirschner advocates a special court, the Inter-branch Dispute Court,  where these matters between branches of government are decided on an expedited schedule.  72 hours for the parties to submit their papers, 72 hour for an argument, a legal ruling 72 hours later.  A criminally inclined president would no longer be able to hide evidence or corruption or criminality using the slowly grinding legal process.

What is the problem with setting up a court like this, outside of it being UNFAIR to an unethical president who is used to freely operating like a mob boss with everyone in his pocket?

As Justice Boof Kavanaugh stated was the president’s absolute right, in the unanimous opinion of the Court, the president’s lawyers exercised his right to come up with a new series of legal arguments against Mazars releasing tax documents to DA Cyrus Vance and announced their intention to start new litigation in that case, under a new legal theory that will take months to debunk.  Read all about it HERE.

No Surprises, but still

For a “transactional” person like Donald Trump, life itself is about the necessity of “winning” every single “transaction”. Every imaginable interaction in life, by the way, can be seen a transaction — a business deal. His niece stated the obvious about the upbringing that brings about this kind of mentality in this excerpt from the book the Trump family has been in court trying to prevent the release of:

“Fred [Sr.] hated it when his oldest son [Fred Jr. –ed.] screwed up or failed to intuit what was required of him, but he hated it even more when, after being taken to task, Freddy apologized. ‘Sorry, Dad,'” Mary writes, adding that Fred Sr. would “mock” Freddy for apologizing.

“Fred wanted his oldest son to be a ‘killer.'”

Mary describes this incentive structure in the Trump household as having “destroyed” Donald Trump, with Fred Sr. leaving no room for emotions or vulnerability.

“That’s what sociopaths do: they co-opt others and use them toward their own ends — ruthlessly and efficiently, with no tolerance for dissent or resistance.”

source

Donald, the second youngest of five children of the sociopathic Fred Trump Sr., neither dissented from nor resisted his autocratic father’s demanding job description for him: win at any cost. The mythical “small million dollar loan” that Trump claims started his fabulously successful career as a billionaire businessman was calculated at $400,000,000 in today’s dollars (source: lying NY Times). Those hundreds of millions were provided by Fred Sr. over several decades to bail out his inept heir in the course of several huge business failures and bankruptcies. Who cares?

That’s why we have courts! Donald Trump is the most litigious man ever to become president of the United States. How many times has Trump been involved in litigation? Many, as plaintiff and defendant both. This no-doubt lying account claims he has been in court 4,095 times in the last three decades. When we say “he” we mean his legal team, of course.

Trump learned about the power a rich person can wield using the courts at an early age, from master of the dark art of weaponized lawsuits, the disgraced Roy Cohn. Cohn famously, and audaciously, counter-sued the US Department of Justice in 1973 when it brought a lawsuit, under the Fair Housing Act, to force the Trumps to integrate their federally subsidized apartment complexes. The outrageous accusation that this good American family was racist just because they didn’t rent to colored people was defamation! The case was tied up in court for years, by Cohn’s wrangling with the DOJ, until a settlement was worked out: the Trumps would allow federal inspectors to make sure the Trumps were following the law, but without any admission of wrongdoing from the Trumps. Trumps win!

The more than twenty lying women, with their vicious accusations right before the 2016 election that Trump was a transgressive, sexually aggressive pig — virtually every one of these liars a dog he wouldn’t rub against with Mike Pence’s putz, by the way — they would all be sued right after the election, Trump promised. Not one was. SO WHAT!?? All this senseless hatred for a man who won the election fair and square. Just jealousy.

Even many of Mr. Trump’s supporters can probably stipulate that Mr. Trump is a liar, a big one, a bad one, that he appears to have a compulsion to say whatever it is he thinks he needs to say to win a given “transaction.” It’s all just “business” these things of life are all just transactions, stories to be told persuasively to get what you need.

So if, for example, he’d been forced to fire his National Security Advisor for lying to his Vice President, and then that same man lied to the FBI and then cooperated with an illegal witch hunt started after his boss exercised his perfectly legal right to fire an FBI director who refused to be loyal and drop the case against the man… well, that’s what the law is for. To make ugly looking things like that go away.

His trust in his loyal, racist Attorney General Jeff Sessions was betrayed when Sessions followed the advice of DOJ Ethics lawyers and properly recused himself from supervising the Special Counsel’s investigation into a matter Sessions had been caught being untruthful about. There were many contacts between Russians and the Trump campaign, including by Sessions, and Russia, even the Republican Senate acknowledged, interfered in all 50 states during the election. Still — Sessions had to go for that betrayal of his boss, the transaction was completely unacceptable, left the president open for literally anything. Trump eventually found the incarnation of Roy Cohn in his current unprincipled Attorney General, Bill Barr, a man who had unscrupulously auditioned for the job, promising to protect the Unitary Executive no matter what charges were leveled against him.

If Comey had only made the “Flynn thing” go away, as Trump had asked, no need to appoint the Special Counsel, no need to document the 140 instances of coordination between Trump’s campaign and the Russians, no need to detail the ten specific acts of too close to call (if an OLC memo prevents charging a sitting president) obstruction of justice committed by the president whose lawyers insisted could neither be accused of, charged with or investigated for anything, while president.

“So are you saying the president could literally shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue and he couldn’t arrested or even investigated for the shooting?” asked an incredulous federal judge at one point during a another of the many hearings Trump’s lawyers initiated to delay resolution of relatively simple matters that their client would eventually lose on (delay is as good as victory in many lawsuits, we learn).

“Yes,” said Trump’s lawyer, with a straight face.

So, sure, the president’s assertion of a blanket immunity for everything he ever discussed with anyone, under any circumstances and all documents pertaining in any way to the president or his business affairs — not constitutional. The president’s insistence that he can’t be investigated, that nobody he knows can ever be compelled to obey a legally issued subpoena? Balderdash. And yet… he wins by dragging things out again and again, keeping things hidden.

His big idea is that once Flynn is free of charges for the crimes he committed and pleaded guilty to, crimes Barr now realizes were actually, likely, crimes committed against Flynn by Trump’s enemies, the Mueller witch hunt will be shown to be yet another piece of this criminal betrayal by his vicious, sick enemies. No Flynn guilt, no reason Comey shouldn’t have dropped the unfair, illegal case. No need to fire Comey, no special prosecutor witch hunt, no stain on his perfect presidency.

Today, big surprise, we get the sparing of longtime Trump ally Roger Stone, a man afraid of death if he was forced to report to prison for his 40 month sentence. Well, we can say this, Bill Barr, the president’s top legal advisor, has learned a few things from his own sordid history.

A pardon is an acknowledgment that the person being pardoned was guilty of what he was charged for. The pardoned person can later be compelled to come to court, or before the House or Senate, and be questioned under oath about the matters he was guilty of. All kinds of ugly, potentially dangerous details can come out. Commutation of a sentence, on the other hand, means that the details of the crimes of someone like Roger Stone are now protected by the Fifth Amendment, since without the pardon he can further incriminate himself about. Stone can never be compelled to utter a word about anything related to his crimes.

Dirty tricks committed by Stone, Wikileaks, Gucifer 2.0, Russia, on behalf of Mr. Trump’s campaign? Go jump in a lake. Tweets about the trial judge in his case featuring her face in the crosshairs of a rifle? Free speech, same as threats to witnesses against him. Parties he and his buddy attended at the sumptuous home of Jeffrey Epstein? Please…

Devils and darkness. As long as the darkness is complete, what goddamned devils are you even talking about, man? And, beyond that– so what?!

He always shows his true colors!

One thing you have to say for our compulsively lying president, he manages to always show what he really believes, even when he tries not to. It’s a kind of involuntarily brutal honesty, if you will.

Right after he had Bill Barr viciously clear out peaceful protesters so he could walk to a nearby church to glare and hold up a Bible, the mayor of DC had workers paint BLACK LIVES MATTER in giant yellow letters on the street where he staged his religious tableau. Mayor Muriel Bowser also renamed the street Trump had walked on “Black Lives Matter Plaza”.

The other day NYC mayor Bill de Blasio announced that NYC would be painting a gigantic BLACK LIVES MATTER on Fifth Avenue in front of Trump Tower. The president was quick to respond with this clever, soul-revealing line, delivered by tweet:

(the mayor) … is going to paint a big, expensive, yellow Black Lives Matter sign on Fifth Avenue, denigrating this luxury Avenue.

You get that word choice, right, from the man with the vocabulary of the average fifth grader (this is the guy with the “best words” — the one who parsed a legal requirement recently as “hortatory rather than mandatory” as someone told him to do) deNIGrating, you get it? de-NIG-grating. Clever, eh?

Just in case you missed how he really feels, he added:

Maybe our GREAT Police, who have been neutralized and scorned by a mayor who hates & disrespects them, won’t let this symbol of hate be affixed to New York’s greatest street.

BLACK LIVES MATTER– symbol of hate. Statue of generals who took up arms in the bloody insurrection against our nation — symbol of our glorious history. After all, as the president said (in the lead up to his death cult vigil in front of Mount Rushmore tomorrow, to celebrate the signing of the Declaration of Independence):

We have to cherish our past. We have to cherish good or bad. We have to understand our past. We have to understand our history. Because if we don’t know our history, it could all happen again. We have to know our history.

Greatest president EVER, yo. Certainly the most very stable genius ever to rule from the Oval Office.

Follow the Judicial Logic, if you can

A few last words on Judge Rao’s ideologically-driven decision on Flynn’s emergency application for immediate dismissal of the case against him. I can’t let this one go, because, as Federalist Society spokesman and former Boeing lawyer Judge J. Michael Luttig wrote in the NY Times the other day, this case is “the most consequential political constitutional case in recent memory.” True dat.

Judge Rao’s legally legless 2-1 decision takes a historically destructive position, like the most notorious of our cases. In this “not unusual” case she rules that the requirements of the law must yield to even the most seemingly irrational, partisan demands of a powerful president.

See if you can follow the logic of former law professor Noemi Rao (appointed by the current president to fill the seat left vacant when B. Kavanuagh was promoted):

Whatever the precise scope of Rule 48’s “leave of court” requirement [court decides when and how to dismiss case — ed.], this is plainly not the rare case where further judicial inquiry is warranted.

Nothing rare here, “plainly not”? Defendant admits guilt and then DOJ, two years later decides that what he pleaded guilty to was not actually a crime? Is there one other case in this category in anyone’s memory?

Because legal errors ordinarily may be corrected on appeal, a writ of mandamus is proper only if there is “no other adequate means to attain … relief.” Cheney, 542 U.S. at 380. Although “an abstract concern with the separation of powers,” does not rise to the level of an irreparable injury, In re Al Nashiri, 791 F.3d 71, 79–81 (D.C. Cir. 2015), we have found the requisite harm as a matter of course when a party alleges the district court’s action usurps a specific executive power. See In re Cheney, 406 F.3d 723, 731 (D.C. Cir. 2005) (en banc); Fokker Servs., 818 F.3d at 749; Cobell v. Norton,
334 F.3d 1128, 1139–40 (D.C. Cir. 2003); In re Sealed Case No. 98-3077, 151 F.3d 1059, 1065–66 (D.C. Cir. 1998).

In this case, the district court’s actions will result in specific harms to the exercise of the Executive Branch’s exclusive prosecutorial power. The contemplated proceedings would likely require the Executive to reveal the internal deliberative process behind its exercise of prosecutorial discretion, interfering with the Article II charging authority. Newman, 382 F.2d at 481 (citing United States v. Cox, 342 F.2d 167, 171 (5th Cir. 1965)). Thus, the district court’s appointment of the amicus and demonstrated intent to
scrutinize the reasoning and motives of the Department of Justice constitute irreparable harms that cannot be remedied on appeal.

So because Flynn’s lawyer, in asking for this rare, emergency relief, alleges that harm to the Executive Branch will be grievous and irredeemable, we must grant a no appeal decision to Flynn, no matter what the other facts of this highly unusual case?

We must also assure ourselves that issuance of the writ “is appropriate under the circumstances.” Cheney, 542 U.S. at 381. The circumstances of this case demonstrate that mandamus is appropriate to prevent the judicial usurpation of executive power.

Here the harm alleged, “usurpation of executive power,” is to the government, not to Flynn, the party making the emergency application for extraordinary relief. Flynn, the one seeking the emergency decree (with the legal support of Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham, Ted Cruz, et al) has an appeal available, if the trial judge tries to do something beyond the scope of the court. That fact alone rules out the extraordinary relief Judge Rao grants to Flynn.

Finally, each of our three coequal branches should be encouraged to self-correct when it errs. If evidence comes to light calling into question the integrity or purpose of an underlying criminal investigation, the Executive Branch must have the authority to decide that further prosecution is not in
the interest of justice.

This president, in particular, has demonstrated his readiness to self-correct. Obviously. He does this by doubling down, attacking critics, firing whistleblowers and watchdogs, vilifying them as disloyal traitors, stupid idiots, sick, dangerous, crooked, little, insane, smelly, “dumb as a bag of rocks,” while obstructing all investigations and so forth. Like any self-correcting branch of government will do.

Because this is not the unusual case where a more searching inquiry is justified, and because there is no adequate remedy for the intrusion on “the Executive’s long-settled primacy over charging decisions,” Fokker Servs., 818 F.3d at 743, we grant the petition for mandamus in part and order the
district court to grant the government’s Rule 48(a) motion to dismiss the charges against Flynn.

Not the unusual case? Judge Rao rules for the benefit of a party not in court, the Executive Branch — that alone is kind of unusual. Flynn has the usual right of appeal, which, again, means he is not eligible for the extraordinary legal remedy of mandamus. So what, reasons Judge Rao, if the moving party has no right to what the court seeks to grant, what about POOR UNFAIRLY PERSECUTED MR. TRUMP?!!! Poor Mr. Barr!!!

Not the unusual case, you dig. Nothing to see here! Fokker! Fokker!!!

I really wanted to end there, but this bit from her response to the excellent and legally impeccable dissent is worth reading:

First, the dissent glosses over the presumption of regularity to which the Executive is entitled in the exercise of its prosecutorial discretion. While the district court is not a “rubber stamp” when considering whether to grant “leave of court” under Rule 48, Ammidown, 497 F.2d at 622, any judicial inquiry is strictly bounded by the presumption of regularity, and the presumption is overcome only in extraordinary cases and by “clear evidence to the contrary,” Armstrong, 517 U.S. at 464.

Here, while forcing a judge to “rubber stamp” a motion he doesn’t like the smell of, there will be, pursuant to the writ of mandamus, no clear evidence of anything, outside of the government’s sudden, irrefutable insistence that a guilty man committed no triable crime, will be permitted. Just like in Trump’s impeachment– no evidence allowed! No hearing whatsoever will be allowed prior to “leave of the court” to dismiss the case as ordered by a superior court. How you like that Catch-22?

Not the unusual case, you dig. Nothing to see here! Fokker! Fokker!!!