This is from the end of an interview with a writer named Clint Smith about Juneteenth that Amy Goodman conducted on Democracy Now! on Friday.Juneteenth recently became a federal holiday, over the nay votes of fourteen GOP sticklers . Though, in fairness to them, it was fewer than the number (21) who opposed gold medals for the outnumbered officers who defended the Capitol on January 6 and FAR less than the number (all but six of them in the Senate) who opposed the formation of a bipartisan commission to investigate the MAGA riot. The new national holiday commemorates the day in June 1865, two months after the Confederacy surrendered — and two months after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln — that enslaved Blacks in Galveston, Texas learned that they’d been freed more than two years earlier.
AMY GOODMAN: Clint, before we end, you are an author, you’re a writer, you’re a teacher, and you are a poet. Can you share a poem with us?
CLINT SMITH: I’d be happy to. And so, when you’re a poet writing nonfiction, that very much animates the way that I approach the text. And so, this is part of the — this is an adaptation or an except from the end of one of my chapters, that originally began as a poem that I wrote when I was trying to think about some of these issues that I brought up.
[reading] Growing up, the iconography of the Confederacy was an ever-present fixture of my daily life. Every day on the way to school, I passed a statue of P.G.T. Beauregard riding on horseback, his Confederate uniform flung over his shoulder and his military cap pulled far down over his eyes. As a child, I did not know who P.G.T. Beauregard was. I did not know he was the man who ordered the first attack that opened the Civil War. I did not know he was one of the architects who designed the Confederate battle flag. I did not know he led an army predicated on maintaining the institution of slavery. What I knew is that he looked like so many of the other statues that ornamented the edges of this city, these copper garlands of a past that saw truth as something that should be buried underground and silenced by the soil.
After the war, the sons and daughters of the Confederacy reshaped the contours of treason into something they could name as honorable. We called it the Lost Cause. And it crept its way into textbooks that attempted to cover up a crime that was still unfolding; that told us that Robert E. Lee was an honorable man, guilty of nothing but fighting for the state and the people that he loved; that the Southern flag was about heritage and remembering those slain fighting to preserve their way of life. But, see, the thing about the Lost Cause is that it’s only lost if you’re not actually looking. The thing about heritage is that it’s a word that also means “I’m ignoring what we did to you.”
I was taught the Civil War wasn’t about slavery, but I was never taught how the declarations of Confederate secession had the promise of human bondage carved into its stone. I was taught the war was about economics, but I was never taught that in 1860 the 4 million enslaved Black people were worth more than every bank, factory and railroad combined. I was taught that the Civil War was about states’ rights, but I wasnever taught how the Fugitive Slave Act could care less about a border and spelled Georgia and Massachusetts the exact same way.
It’s easy to look at a flag and call it heritage when you don’t see the Black bodies buried behind it. It’s easy to look at a statue and call it history when you ignore the laws written in its wake.
I come from a city abounding with statues of white men on pedestals and Black children playing beneath them, where we played trumpets and trombones to drown out the Dixie song that’s still whistled in the wind. In New Orleans, there are over 100 schools, roads and buildings named for Confederates and slaveholders. Every day, Black children walk into buildings named after people who never wanted them to be there. Every time I would return home, I would drive on streets named for those who would have wanted me in chains.
Go straight for two miles on Robert E. Lee, take a left on Jefferson Davis, make the first right on Claiborne. Translation: Go straight for two miles on the general who slaughtered hundreds of Black soldiers who were trying to surrender, take a left on the president of the Confederacy who made the torture of Black bodies the cornerstone of his new nation, make the first right on the man who permitted the heads of rebelling slaves to be put on stakes and spread across the city in order to prevent the others from getting any ideas.
What name is there for this sort of violence? What do you call it when the road you walk on is named for those who imagined you under a noose? What do you call it when the roof over your head is named after people who would have wanted the bricks to crush you?
It is an unsettling thing to watch a right-wing movement move to an extreme position and appropriate so many of the tactical tics of, say, the Nazis.
When the Nazis controlled the mass media in Germany it was easy enough for the party to get their unchallengeable message across to every citizen. They had a network of spies who informed on disloyal citizens, anyone privately critical of the one-party narrative. These traitors met with harsh, often gruesome fates. In many cases, they were turned in by their own true believer Nazi children, loyal members of the Hitler Youth (Hitlerjugend).
An example of a debatable Nazi talking point, Jews had to be destroyed because they were responsible for the war. Hitler had invaded Poland, unprovoked, because of the Jews. The Jews, you see, were said to be a highly infectious disease that had to be eradicated. Every vice in the great German nation you could think of was a result of poisonous Jewish devilry. The only way to purify the blood of the Aryan Reich and make Germany great again was to exterminate this Judaic bacillus. The news was dispensed day after day in a way that made this controversial “theory” seem not only entirely reasonable but in urgent need of immediate action (or “aktion” in Nazi-speak).
If you get your news from FOX (Rupert Murdoch), or from even more extreme right-wing sources, One America News Network (OANN) or Newsmax, you get a version of reality very much at odds with the facts that can actually be established by things like court verdicts, bipartisan election certifications, real-time videos, written statements, spoken statements, sworn statements made under the penalty of perjury.
In the MAGA telling, the January 6 MAGA riot, for example, was not the result of a long, well-funded, long-planned campaign based on the lie that Trump won in a landslide and that communists, anarchists, anti-fascists (imagine how sick that is!) insane lying, violently rioting Blacks, angry radical Democrats and disloyal, lying Republicans had rigged the election against him, it was a spontaneous show of completely understandable patriotic fervor.
The 140 Capitol Police officers supposedly injured by this crowd of peaceful protesters? Never happened, radical left propaganda. OK, injured cops are speaking up, showing up in Congress to testify. Well, it may have happened, but it was not Trump fans but terrorists from antifa and BLM who did all the damage, viciously attacked the police, who all supported Trump 100% and kissed and hugged the actual peaceful Trump supporters, who behaved like normal tourists (who’d smoked crack or crystal meth a moment earlier). Actually, wait, it was an FBI false flag operation to make Trump, who actually won in a landslide, look like the inglorious loser he will never be!
A logical question I heard some pundit ask the other day: if the FBI staged this evil thing to make Trump look like a treasonous, seditious loser, wouldn’t you want a complete and thorough bipartisan investigation into the fucking FBI? Not the case with the lockstep GOP — they have learned from recent Trump/McConnell/Barr history. They want any finding about the January 6 “riot” to be dismissible as a complete and total “partisan witch hunt” and they know their solid 39% will believe that theory no matter what the radical partisan Democrat liars try to produce as “evidence”.
It is, of course, a mistake to look for logic in any of this. Just like the average disgruntled German who listened to Nazi media broadcasting every evening and came to believe as indisputable fact whatever was confidently repeated several times, the average American who gets only one political opinion, the same talking points echoed endlessly, will never even consider the likely notion that, if Trump indeed was lying about all the traitors who rigged the election against him, the dozens of lost lawsuits dismissed for lack of evidence of the rigged election, the expenditure of $50,000,000 to advertise the lie that he’d actually won, organizing a mass gathering to physically Stop the Steal and prevent the peaceful transition of power, and gave a fiery speech immediately before the riot that incited an already angry crowd to break through police barricades, fight the police and storm the Capitol, forcing legislators and their staffs to run for their lives, as the law abiding mob did $1,400,000 worth of damage to the building, maybe . . . Trump didn’t actually win in a landslide.
No matter. As we see from history, authoritarians rely on certain things, primarily blind obedience from their followers, who are inclined to believe whatever supports their view of a world run by vicious enemies who are mercilessly screwing them and need to be fought without mercy. Another common feature of authoritarian mobs is ready, justifiable, righteous violence against these rightfully hated enemies. This violence encourages obedience, or fearful silence, which also helps.
The one thing that every right-wing movement has in common is an unshakable belief in a strongman, an infallible leader with the will to destroy all of their despicable, dangerous enemies. In the case of Trumpism, that leader is Trump. As Trump’s German born grandfather [1] might have said:
The leader is always right.
The Führerprinzip (German: [ˈfyːʀɐpʀɪnˌtsiːp] (listen); German for ‘leader principle’) prescribed the fundamental basis of political authority in the Government of Nazi Germany. This principle can be most succinctly understood to mean that “the Führer‘s word is above all written law” and that governmental policies, decisions, and offices ought to work toward the realization of this end.[1] In actual political usage, it refers mainly to the practice of dictatorship within the ranks of a political party itself, and as such, it has become an earmark of political fascism.
Trump’s entrepreneurial grandfather, Friedrich Trump, trained as a barber, was deported from Germany for fleeing to avoid military service (and tax evasion when bringing in his American-made fortune). Interesting bit from Wikipedia:
As he had emigrated to America in order to evade conscription, the Bavarian Government stripped Trump of his citizenship and permanently banished him following an investigation. As a result, Trump and his family returned to the United States. He became a U.S. citizen in 1892.
My father, once a skinny Jewish kid growing up in Peekskill, NY, was a lifelong Detroit Tiger fan. That’s because when he was a boy the Tigers had a big, slugging first baseman named Hank Greenberg. Greenberg was a large, powerful Jew who hit home runs like Babe Ruth, one season almost breaking Ruth’s record. Jews reportedly went into shock when the 6’3″ athlete ducked into Yom Kippur services in Detroit — nobody had ever seen a Jew that big. I was surprised to see, after my father died, that his 1941 Peekskill High School yearbook, under a picture of my father’s thin, bespectacled face, had printed his name as Irving “Hank” Widem. I always knew he’d idolized Greenberg, I never knew he’d gone by that name in High School.
Babe Ruth was by far the greatest Major League baseball player ever. As a pitcher he was among the best to ever play the game, though he is famous for his batting. Before switching to full-time right fielder and setter of mind boggling home run records (he famously hit more home runs by himself, a couple of seasons, than other full teams hit), he also set pitching records that stood for decades.
As a home run hitter, there was really nobody to compare to him. If he’d been up as many times as Hank Aaron, who decades later broke Ruth’s career home run record infour thousand more at bats than Ruth had, he’d have hit hundreds more home runs. The current record holder, asterisk Barry Bonds, batted 1,448 more times (about three seasons for the Babe) and hit 48 more home runs. Plus, Babe Ruth hit .342 for his career (tied for sixth highest lifetime batting average among modern players).
When my father was fourteen, a decade after Ruth set the 60 home runs in a season record that would last 34 years, Hank Greenberg hit 58 in a season. I suspect anti-semitism probably played a role in Greenberg getting nothing to hit the last few weeks of that season, when he could have hit home runs 59 and 60, but, if so, that is not something that should be taught in American classrooms (as it would only serve to undermine American Exceptionalism and make beleaguered white Christian patriots feel bad…).
Maybe the most impressive number Babe Ruth left behind was his lifetime slugging percentage of .690. Slugging percentage measures how well a player hits for power, how many extra base hits (doubles, triples and home runs) he gets. Ruth averaged that gaudy number, over his long career. For comparison, superstars Willie Mays and Mickey Mantle, two great Hall of Fame sluggers, 20 and 21 on the all-time list, had career slugging percentages of .5575 and .5568.
When a current player is red hot, hitting home runs in bunches, his slugging percentage may soar to approach Ruth’s lifetime average for a short time, but by the end of the season it will almost always be below .600. Many modern-day sluggers in the Hall of Fame never approached Ruth’s .690 average slugging percentage in even a single season.
Here is the top of the all-time slugging percentage list. Turkey Stearnes, Mule Suttles and Oscar Charleston, belated (posthumous) Hall of Famers, superstars of the Negro Leagues and victims of the racial segregation of baseball until after their careers were over, have recently been added to the list, as I learned last night after a few minutes of computer querying [1]. Check out where Hank Greenberg winds up on the very short list of baseball power hitters who have slugged at least .600 for their careers. And what company he is in!
To put that in perspective, five “white” major league Hall of Famers, Ruth, Williams, Gehrig, Foxx and Greenberg have had lifetime slugging percentages of .600 or more. (Eight, if you include the other three Hall of Famers, which you should, it’s an American sin that they were forbidden play with the other greatest players of their time by a hallowed racist tradition, see FN 1; nine if you include Barry Bonds, who is creeping toward induction into the Hall of Fame after an amazing career).
* Barry Bonds, is the sixth major league player to slug over .600 for his major league career, and he had some out of the world slugging percentages in his older years .863 when he was 36 (higher than Ruth’s best one season slugging percentage), .799 when he was 37, .749 at 38 and .812 at 39, after he went on his special, controversial asterisk fitness regime. Without those final few superhuman seasons, including the 73 home run season, at an age when most baseball players are slowing down, he would havie been under .600 for his career. For those who like eye-popping stats, here are the remarkable numbers Bonds put up for his career.
[1]
Suttles, Stearnes and Charleston were three superstars of the Negro Leagues, from the openly racist decades before Major League Baseball became racially integrated. All three are now in the Baseball Hall of Fame, inducted decades after each of their deaths, posthumously honored among baseball’s immortals, as they say.
Mule Suttles was a power-hitting first baseman in the Negro Leagues from 1923-1944.
Turkey Stearnes was a five-tool centerfielder who played in the Negro Leagues from 1923-40.
Oscar Charleston, another slugging centerfielder from the Negro Leagues played from 1915-1941.
I would like to be able to think about other things, write about things I love, things that cause me wonder — like the mischievous, versatile diminished chord — but most days, living in Berlin 1932, when 39% of my countrymen believe anything their leader tells them, the Bizzaro world where the “Big Lie” is the one told by people who claim the former president is lying about having won the 2020 election in a landslide, I’m transfixed by the steady stream of revelations of every horror one would expect at a historically perilous moment like this one. Trump is the US manifestation of the “autocratic” (fascist) monster that is rearing its deadly, racist, nationalistic head worldwide, in Poland, Brazil, Hungary, Turkey, Russia, the Philippines, India and so forth. If this country is to be any kind of bulwark against autocracy, our Department of Justice has a lot of work to do, and not much time to do it.
Every day there is more evidence of the depraved indifference, and cowardly cynicism, of one of our two major political parties. They are concerned only with consolidating power and making the country a minority run one-party state. The leaders of the other narrow majority party (though they represent a sizable majority of voters) do not show resolute courage very often, either. We have constant new proofs of the reality TV superstar former president’s corruption, megalomania and destructiveness. Every day, of course, we wait for a moment of possible accountability for past crimes. A reckoning for these crimes is the only way to avoid the clear and present danger the out-of-control violence stoking superstar presents.
Here is the latest, a trove of insane post-election emails from Trump’s final White House Chief of Staff, a former Tea Party Congressman and a founder of the Freedom Caucus, trying to get the acting Attorney General, the man who headed the DOJ briefly (after even Trump gunsel Bill Barr jumped off the sinking ship with other survival-oriented rats) to file a conspiracy- based Supreme Court lawsuit to try to overturn the election results. The Washington Post editorial:
MANY REPUBLICANS want the nation to ignore and forget President Donald Trump’s poisonous final months in office — the most dangerous moment in modern presidential history, orchestrated by the man to whom the GOP still swears allegiance. Yet the country must not forget how close it came to a full-blown constitutional crisis, or worse. Tuesday brought another reminder that, but for the principled resistance of some key officials, the consequences could have been disastrous.
The House Committee on Oversight and Reform on Tuesday releasedemails showing that the White House waged a behind-the-scenes effort to enlist the Justice Department in its crusade to advance Mr. Trump’s baseless allegations of fraud in the 2020 election. On Dec. 14, 10 days before Jeffrey Rosen took over as acting attorney general, Mr. Trump’s assistant emailed Mr. Rosen, asserting that Dominion Voting Systems machines in Michigan were intentionally fixed and pointing to a debunked analysis showing what “the machines can and did do to move votes.” The email declared, “We believe it has happened everywhere.”
Later that month, Mr. Trump’s assistant sent Mr. Rosen a brief that the president apparently wanted the Justice Department to submit to the Supreme Court. The draft mirrored the empty arguments that the state of Texas made to the court before the justices dismissed the state’s lawsuit. Piling on the pressure, then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows also dispatched an email asking Mr. Rosen to examine allegations of voter fraud in Georgia. A day later, Mr. Meadows apparently forwarded Mr. Rosen a video alleging that Italians used satellites to manipulate voting equipment. These were just some of the preposterous White House emails claiming fraud in arguably the most secure presidential election ever.
To his credit, Mr. Rosen rebuffed the White House’s entreaties to deploy the Justice Department’s vast powers on behalf of Mr. Trump’s lie, adding his name to the roster of honorable state and federal officials who showed fidelity to truth and duty at that crucial moment. Some have paid with their jobs. Republicans committed to the “big lie” are gunning to replace others, including those with vote-counting responsibilities. If Mr. Trump or another candidate again presses false fraud claims, many Republican officials may find it more difficult to resist the pressure to back the lie — or, indeed, may eagerly participate in advancing it.
Given Mr. Trump’s reckless actions after losing the 2020 vote, and the violence they spurred, the newly released emails are unsurprising. But consider that fact for a moment: It is unsurprising that the president of the United States leaned on the Justice Department to help him try to steal an election. The country cannot forget that Mr. Trump betrayed his oath, that most Republican officeholders remain loyal to him nonetheless — and that it could be worse next time.
The dynamic 47 year-old extremist freshman member of Congress made a ridiculous and hateful comparison last month between officials who mandate the wearing of masks during an infectious airborne pandemic and the Nazi perpetrators of “The Holocaust” who forced Jews to wear “gold stars”. Mask wearing mandates, in her opinion, are the same as what the Nazis did when they forced Jews to wear stars and operated death camps where millions were killed (and the passive voice used).
Asked about her headline grabbing comment afterwards, she did what her savvy fundraising type always does, she “doubled down” to delight her contrarian base. Making someone wear a paper mask is the same as Hitler himself forcing you to wear a gold star, gassing you and shoving your corpse into an oven, so there! Fortunately for her, the party she aspires to lead is very tolerant of this kind of arguable hate speech, the First Amendment (for their speech) is almost as sacred to them as the Second Amendment.
A few weeks later, for some reason, she visited the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC. It is a moving exhibit, as you walk from room to room, floor to floor, you experience the various stages of the mass murder over the course of those horrific final Hitler years. First you are put in a special category, your civil rights stripped away, state sanctioned violence increases. Then you lose your citizenship and are stateless, without the protection of any national government. Then you’re forced to move into crowded disease infested ghettos. Eventually they put you into overstuffed cattle cars and ship you East, where, if you don’t die during the brutal trip, you will either be worked to death or immediately gassed.
Sekhnet and I will never forget the room full of shoes and the mountain of human hair shorn from victims and put to all sorts of uses by the industrious Nazi state. There is a large photo of a woman on the wall, a victim of the Nazis, with a beautiful soulful face, one of her dark eyes not quite aligned with the other. Her face is particularly haunting, staring sightlessly over this room of shoes and hair. The freshman Congresswoman from Georgia was apparently also moved by her walk through the museum.
Then she stepped in front of the cameras to apologize for making the mistaken comparison between mask mandates and Hitler’s insane mass murder project (and doubling down on that comparison, one assumes).
Not easy, to admit being wrong, to express sorrow for a public statement. Many people find it almost impossible to do this, even in their personal lives. Many in her party have never done it, will never do it. Rather than being seen as a sign of humility and sensitivity, apologizing is seen in our culture as an admission of weakness and the cultural reflex against admitting fault is strong. So, you’ve got to hand it to her, she summoned the integrity to admit she was wrong, acknowledge that there really was a deliberate, mechanized Nazi mass murder of millions (contrary to the doubts many of her supporters might have about it) and that perpetrating the Holocaust was much worse than forcing people to wear masks in crowded public places to slow the spread of a highly infectious disease. It had been a mistake, she said, to compare the two things.
That said, the Democrats, in her opinion, are still acting like a bunch of Nazis, with their dangerous “national socialism,” but she was wrong to compare mask mandates to that terrible event that was the crowning glory of the Nazi regime.
Still, you know how unforgiving fucking liberals are. There’s no satisfying some of these loser bastards. Here’s Stephen Colbert:
I try to be fair, so here is the noxious Nazi piece of shit’s apology for her mistake, as edited by Forbes (you won’t see her smiling assurance that Democrats are still Nazis — oh, that doubling down was in response to a reporter’s smart-ass question, after she delivered her heartfelt written apology):
Here is the Washington Post’s take on her learned remarks about the party of powerful Jewish pedophile cannibal Satanists being Nazis:
Despite the name, the Nazi party was not a socialist party; it was a right-wing, ultranationalist party. Even so, Greene told attendees at the rally in May: “You know, Nazis were the National Socialist Party. Just like the Democrats are now a national socialist party.”
Asked Monday about that statement, Greene declined to disavow it and instead renewed her criticism of Democrats.
“You know, socialism is extremely dangerous, and so is communism,” she told reporters. “And anytime a government moves into policies where there’s more control and there’s freedoms taken away, yes, that’s a danger for everyone. And I think that’s something that we should all be wary of. … I’ll never stop saying we have to save America and stop socialism.”
It is certainly frustrating waiting for justice to be applied to our former (and future, and present, if you ask him) president. We are a nation of laws, we are told, and most laws are absolute for most of us. Obstruction of justice, which the law-is-for-chumps Mr. Trump did at virtually every turn, is a federal crime that he needs to be prosecuted for and convicted of.
I’m not sure what is taking the Fulton County DA so long about prosecuting the former president for his clear violation of Georgia criminal law. If you listen to the tape of Trump’s 18th post-election call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger, with the Georgia law in front of you, it is hard to imagine how any lawyer would be able to defend Trump against the charge that he committed every illegal act listed in the law in his attempt to influence election results, using threats, cajoling, joking, personal appeals to convince the fellas to find him a lousy, stinkin’ 11,780 votes, one more than needed, to give him the state. The search “status of Fulton County, Georgia criminal case against Trump update” brings up March 2021 “updates”, as does every related search. Nothing since then. WTF, y’all?
Since childhood, Trump has never been held accountable for anything, which is why he behaves the way he does. He has never paid a price for anything that wasn’t immediately forgiven or reimbursed by somebody else. His numerous bankruptcies, for incompetent management of a string of business ventures, did not harm his gold-plated luxury brand or his personal fortune. The tax avoidance schemes of his father, of Trump himself, though brazen, are perhaps typical of plans used by the super-wealthy to avoid the payment of taxes. There may be nothing criminal about what appears to be a long history of Trump tax fraud. There may be tax-related criminal charges coming, assuming the Manhattan DA, who let Trump and his children off for their apparent fraud in connection with the Trump SoHo a few years back, makes good on getting an indictment and conviction this time.
We are a nation of laws, and you violate them at your own risk. I know that I am paying about as much in penalties as Trump paid to the IRS in total tax for 2017. I’m being punished for being a year late filing my 2019 taxes. The fine, about the amount of tax I owed (and paid) is on an income perhaps one hundredth of what the former president’s was. Unlike Trump, I have no appeal of that fine under the law. Interest is being added for every day I am late paying the full amount. I can argue all I want, I just have to pay the outrageous, disproportionate (it’s as large as the tax bill I paid — a 100% penalty rate) non-negotiable fine. Fair or not, it’s my punishment for breaking the law and an indelible lesson to me going forward. It is a mistake I don’t plan to make again.
As for Trump, since he never learned a lesson like this, he knows as much now as when he was an out of control five year-old bullying his mom.
Here are some selections from the Boston Globe series making the case that we cannot ensure democracy going forward unless we prosecute our norm, rule and law busting former president (who claims to still actually be the president, Biden is a cheating liar, as illegitimate as the Birther President, Biden’s radical pal, ask any of the tens of millions of the base who believe this). The short Boston Globe series approaches the corruption and irregularity of the troubling Trump presidency from several angles, asking some basic questions along the way.
Is a president, deep in debt ($400,000,000 of it coming due very soon, from Mr. Trump) who continues to operate his businesses (having his sons run them), while fighting to hide all financial records, an obvious target for crafty foreign manipulators to take advantage of? The Globe gives a few examples:
Take Saudi Arabia’s payments to the Trump Hotel, which totaled $270,000 between November 2016 and February 2017. Those payments came just a few months prior to Trump finalizing one of the largest arms deals in US history with the kingdom. He also later went on to protect the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, after the brutal killing of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi. “I saved his ass,” Trump bragged to the journalist Bob Woodward, in reference to bin Salman. “I was able to get Congress to leave him alone. I was able to get them to stop.”
To avoid these kinds of conflicts of interest (Saudi Arabia is also a longtime tenant in Trump Tower) the Globe advocates for two laws (you listening, Kyrsten? Joe? Dianne Feinstein? [1]). One is a law requiring a sitting president to divest from all of her businesses when taking office (generally done, but not by Trump). The other is the mandatory production of tax returns for all candidates for the presidency (another tradition Trump ignored). Pretending to be under audit for five years would no longer be a lawful excuse for a presidential candidate refusing to produce tax returns. The tax returns would show who the candidate got paid by, who he owes money to and whether it is likely he is a crook.
Nepotism, a mark of autocracy and monarchy everywhere, while technically illegal for US government appointees, arguably does not apply to appointments by the president and vice president. It can be accomplished if one finesses the law a little, for example, by not paying wealthy appointees a salary for their public service, even as that service may also enrich them in many other ways, as Ivanka and Jared’s experience as public servants illustrate. Loss of salary is the current penalty for violating the anti-nepotism law, so if you forgo a salary to make a lot more money while in office, well… nobody’s business, under our current laws. The reason for a stronger anti-nepotism law is clear.
That distrust [of officials appointed by nepotism] would be justified. Filling up key government posts with close relatives of the president, for example, will probably result in a staff that’s more loyal to the president than they are to government institutions, or even to democracy itself. Nepotism is also unlikely to produce the most competent government; Kushner, for example, was profoundly unqualified for his wide-ranging role, and the American people paid the price when he took a leading role in the Trump administration’s coronavirus response. . .
. . . When Trump hired Kushner, some legal scholars argued that the president does not have to abide by the federal anti-nepotism statute. That’s why, in order to ensure that this degree of corruption does not take place, Congress should pass a bill to make explicit that the president cannot appoint a relative to any official government post, even if they forgo a salary. In the event that a president’s relative is widely perceived to be the best qualified for a certain role, that appointment should require a waiver from Congress so that the candidate can be evaluated on their merits. Appointments of family members should be the exception, not the norm.
Obstruction of Justice while in office, anyone?Protected, as Mueller concluded, by an Office of Legal Counsel memo, from the days of Nixon, that advises the DOJ against indicting a sitting president for any crime. So, even if you can’t exonerate him in the face of an impressive amount of evidence, you also cannot accuse him of obstruction either, since that would be unfair to the guy who wouldn’t be able to defend himself until out of office. What’s a law-abiding Boy Scout Special Counsel to do?
Right out of the gate, Donald Trump appeared to break the law and brazenly admit it to the entire nation — not with remorse but with pride and conviction. Within four months of being sworn in, Trump fired FBI director James Comey, which the White House insisted was a decision rooted in Comey’s mishandling of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private e-mail server. But Trump rebuffed his Department of Justice’s line of reasoning in a television interview with NBC, saying that he was planning on firing Comey because of the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. . .
. . . It might sound reasonable to say that indicting a sitting president could pose political problems — and potential national security risks — because a criminal trial would effectively incapacitate a president. But an indictment does not necessarily mean that the president has to sit through a criminal trial. That could always be postponed until a president leaves office. In that 1973 memo, the rationale for not indicting a sitting president, even if all proceedings are deferred until they are out of office, rests merely on the perceived damage the image of the office of the president might endure. “The spectacle of an indicted president still trying to serve as chief executive boggles the imagination,” the memo said.
A greater spectacle, however, is a reckless, authoritarian president who is seen on the world stage bending the rule of law to his will. That’s why presidents should be indicted for crimes that they commit, with their trials postponed to when they leave office. Had Mueller been able to operate under a guideline that allowed for Trump’s indictment, the former president probably would have faced legal accountability for his early acts of obstruction of justice. That, on its own, could have deterred him from obstructing justice later in his presidency, as he did during his first impeachment inquiry.
So while presidents should not, for logistical reasons, be required to be a part of a criminal trial while in office, they should not be immune from indictments. Because until presidents can be indicted, they will always be, by definition, above the law.
Corrupt presidential pardons given as part of a quid pro quo, a dangled pardon in exchange for lying to protect the president from criminal or civil liability, need to be overturned, and explicitly outlawed. The pardon power has generally been used to correct injustices, Trump wielded his pardon power in a characteristically “transactional” way, arguably to obstruct justice in several famous cases (Stone, Manafort, Flynn, Bannon, etc.).
But Donald Trump has proved that a president can use his pardon power not as a corrective for injustice but in exchange for political and personal favors — or even as a tool of coercion or manipulation — and get away with it. In stark contrast to his immediate predecessor, Trump granted clemency to only 237 people. And though some of those acts of clemency included commuting unjustly long sentences for minor offenses, over 100 of them, according to the Lawfare Blog, were granted to people who either had personal connections with the former president or advanced his political cause. Trump was hardly the first president to use his pardon power nefariously, but his blatantly corrupt use of it should be a wake-up call to lawmakers of both major parties that executive clemency must be reformed to limit its potential for abuse.
Boston sucks! Boston sucks!
[1]
The senior senator from California, on why she sees no need to fix the filibuster rule:
“If democracy were in jeopardy, I would want to protect it,” she told Forbes on Wednesday. “But I don’t see it being in jeopardy right now.”
“Moderate” Arizona senator Kyrsten Sinema recently gave her rationale for opposing any change to the crippling filibuster rule, even a carve out for voting rights. She claims that senators need to change their behavior, not make any adjustment to the parliamentary rule, shamelessly abused by filibuster king Mitch McConnell, that allows 35 senators, or even one, to block debate (no debate!) on any bill they, or their big donors, don’t like.
This line about a sorely needed change of heart apparently echoes her predecessor Barry Goldwater, who famously said, in opposing the 1964 Civil Rights Act
“This is fundamentally a matter of the heart. The problems of discrimination can never be cured by laws alone.” Or as he told a crowd later: “You cannot pass a law that will make me like you or you like me. This is something that can happen only in our hearts.”
Here is what Martin Luther King, Jr. said to that sensible “laws can’t change hearts” shit:
“It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can keep him from lynching me and I think that is pretty important, also.”
Pretty important, also. The filibuster was used for more than a century to block every attempt to make lynching a federal crime [1]. Lynching, proponents of the status quo argued, was a matter of States’ Rights, something for each local jurisdiction to lawfully decide according to its customs, like common murder, divorce, most other laws. It was left up to a state like Texas (number three in lynchings, US leader in executions since 1976 with 563), or Mississippi (leader in lynchings with 583 documented lynchings), to decide what to do when some goddamn trouble maker/rapist who deserved to die was strung up by righteous patriots as an example to other dangerous raping rabble rousers to keep their damned radical beliefs to themselves. Hell, isn’t lynching one dangerous raping maniac preferable to mass murder of the rapist’s whole raping community?
A federal anti-lynching law may not have changed what was in people’s hearts but it would have allowed a jury that was not composed of local lynching supporters, and lynching tolerant local judges (some of them members of groups like the Ku Klux Klan), to apply a uniform law and decide any case involving the unfortunate death of somebody who, in the considered opinion of the unrepentant murderers, and local authorities, was in desperate need of a hard lesson.
So, yes, Kyrsten, laws cannot change hearts, and you also cannot legislate morality. The best legislators can do is make and enforce laws against things like lynching, defying Congressional subpoenas, lying under oath during a confirmation hearing (whether or not the lies are “material”) and protecting democratic values like universal adult suffrage, non-partisan counting of votes, and so forth.
In the absence of that kind of national consensus about basic right and wrong, good luck changing behavior — especially when behavior to obstruct all debate, including violent behavior, is rewarded by dark money donors and cheering mobs of angry citizens, ready for further orders from their outraged leader.
I’ll continue my presidency in August, assholes
[1]
As Adam Jentleson writes in his invaluable 2020 book, Kill Switch: The Rise of the Modern Senate and the Crippling of Democracy: “The filibuster has mainly served to empower a minority of predominantly white conservatives to override our democratic system when they found themselves outnumbered.” He notes that in the almost nine decades between Reconstruction’s end and 1964, “the only bills that were stopped by filibusters were civil rights bills.” A bipartisan team of opponents, but mainly Southern Democrats, filibustered the 1964 Civil Rights Act for roughly two months before it ultimately passed. (In those days, senators actually had to speak and hold the floor in order to filibuster; now they just have to vote to block debate.)
When Adam Schiff and the House Intelligence Committee began investigating the July 25, 2019 Perfect Call between Trump and new Ukrainian president Zelensky (not long after Mueller wrapped up his investigation into the tangled relationships between the Trump campaign and strongman Vladimir Putin, and the obstruction thing), Trump targeted Schiff for personal abuse.
He told an interviewer that Schiff was insane. “I think he is a maniac, I think Adam Schiff is a deranged human being. I think he grew up with a complex, for lots of reasons that are obvious. I think he’s a very sick man.”
He might also have mentioned that Schiff is paranoid, he thinks the president has singled him out for an open-ended dirt gathering investigation, that the FBI is spying on him, his staff and his family. Of course, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean the president hasn’t ordered the FBI to spy on you, your staff and your family. It turns out to have been no fantasy, the Trump DOJ was spying on Schiff, and others, including Trump’s own White House counsel.
How the gag orders to the companies who provided the data the FBI used in their snooping into these lives did not expire until years after the illegal, fruitless investigations closed, is another one of those things US lawmakers need to fix. When a baseless secret government investigation is over, the gag order should expire with it.
The communist sympathizers on MSNBC never missed a chance to create a snarky headline at President Trump’s expense. They named one of their segments, in the lead up to Trump’s first impeachment:
A perfect illustration of why Trump is so disdainful of the “free press”. Enemies of the best people, you understand, a bunch of rats releasing sensitive information that could hurt these very fine people. The next thing you’ll have these sick, dangerous terrorists inciting people to demand so-called democracy.
By the way, speaking of releasing sensitive information, fifty years ago this week the New York Times began publishing the Pentagon Papers. The disclosure of the secret information, hidden from the public and lied about by US president Lyndon Johnson, was the beginning of the end of the long, bloody military project we call the Vietnam War. For those too young to remember:
The Pentagon Papers, officially titled Report of the Office of the Secretary of Defense Vietnam Task Force, is a United States Department of Defense history of the United States’ political and military involvement in Vietnam from 1945 to 1967. The papers were released by Daniel Ellsberg, who had worked on the study; they were first brought to the attention of the public on the front page of The New York Times in 1971.[1][2] A 1996 article in The New York Times said that the Pentagon Papers had demonstrated, among other things, that the Johnson Administration had “systematically lied, not only to the public but also to Congress.”[3]
The Pentagon Papers revealed that the U.S. had secretly enlarged the scope of its actions in the Vietnam War with coastal raids on North Vietnam, and Marine Corps attacks—none of which were reported in the mainstream media. For his disclosure of the Pentagon Papers, Ellsberg was initially charged with conspiracy, espionage, and theft of government property; charges were later dismissed, after prosecutors investigating the Watergate scandal discovered that the staff members in the Nixon White House had ordered the so-called White House Plumbers to engage in unlawful efforts to discredit Ellsberg.[4][5]
In June 2011, the documents forming the Pentagon Papers were declassified and publicly released.[6][7]
In a six part series, which any American (or anyone else) can read without encountering a pay wall (Mexicans will pay for the paywall…) the Boston Globe editorial board makes a clear, overwhelmingly strong case for the need to prosecute the former president if we are to save American democracy.
As simpering Trump toady Lindsey Graham put it, after voting to acquit the commander-in-chief who’d incited a violent attack on the Capitol, doubling down on his desperate efforts to prevent the peaceful transition of power (one of his last big crimes in office) “if you believe he committed a crime, he can be prosecuted like any other citizen.” Indeed.
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