We will block any attempt to have an up or down vote on democracy

We are living in a perilous time. It feels like Berlin 1932, but with a climate catastrophe chaser. Our nation, and much of the world, is teetering between more justice and democracy or very little of either, and only for a select few.

Senate Republicans, now openly the party of Trump, have made it clear that they will allow no vote, or even debate, on the provisions of the For the People Act of 2021. Most Americans approve of this law (check out the polls in West Virginia, Joe Manchin) and see it as a crucial protection for US citizens against infringement of their rights by the state government.

It doesn’t matter how strong the case for this law is, there will be no debate on it under current Senate rules. 39% of American voters simply will not stand for it!

The party of Trump greatly prefers the new think tank-written state voting laws being implemented by Republican state legislators around the country, laws that could have changed the election results in 2020, if they’d been in effect. Only a fool can miss the obvious — the party of Trump is not interested in so-called democracy, they love a strong leader. Trump, the leader, is a sworn enemy of anti-fascists everywhere.

It would be political suicide for the GOP to allow debate any law that proposes to do all these things:

This bill addresses voter access, election integrity and security, campaign finance, and ethics for the three branches of government.

Specifically, the bill expands voter registration (e.g., automatic and same-day registration) and voting access (e.g., vote-by-mail and early voting). It also limits removing voters from voter rolls.

The bill requires states to establish independent redistricting commissions to carry out congressional redistricting.

Additionally, the bill sets forth provisions related to election security, including sharing intelligence information with state election officials, supporting states in securing their election systems, developing a national strategy to protect U.S. democratic institutions, establishing in the legislative branch the National Commission to Protect United States Democratic Institutions, and other provisions to improve the cybersecurity of election systems.

Further, the bill addresses campaign finance, including by expanding the prohibition on campaign spending by foreign nationals, requiring additional disclosure of campaign-related fundraising and spending, requiring additional disclaimers regarding certain political advertising, and establishing an alternative campaign funding system for certain federal offices.

The bill addresses ethics in all three branches of government, including by requiring a code of conduct for Supreme Court Justices, prohibiting Members of the House from serving on the board of a for-profit entity, and establishing additional conflict-of-interest and ethics provisions for federal employees and the White House.

The bill requires the President, the Vice President, and certain candidates for those offices to disclose 10 years of tax returns.

source

You can see the many ways this law, which must be infuriating to Trump himself (fucking tax returns… they never fucking stop…). Regulating campaign finance would disadvantage the very wealthy donors currently able to finance campaigns secretly and dictate all political outcomes. Just the suggestion that the Supreme Court adopt a code of ethics for its “justices”– what a maddeningly insane act of radical hubris!

This law is someone like Charles Koch’s nightmare. Koch, a true Nazi bastard (check out his long, ugly life story) is an incarnation of evil in this world, like Dick Cheney, Rupert Murdoch, and a hand full of their refined and autocratic ilk. All of these men would rather see a second bloody civil war, and a mountain range of American corpses, than stand idly by for the implementation of this kind of strangling majoritarian tyranny.

The current Senate rules allows a party in power to pass any budget deal it wants on a straight party line vote, by a procedure called Reconciliation, 51-50 and done, send the law to the president for signing.

For every other piece of legislation that must pass the Senate on the way to the president for signing: the filibuster ends it.

Note: McConnell ended the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees, after blocking a record shattering number of Obama’s nominees (more than the total under all previous administrations) with filibusters, forcing the Democrats to end filibuster for presidential nominees (excluding Supreme Court, which Mitch promptly changed when he needed to).

Current Senate rules allow debate on any bill on the floor of the Senate to be killed by the filibuster, an increasingly permissive parliamentary procedure. Under current rules, any Senator of the minority party can block debate by registering an intention to filibuster — it is now, unlike only a few years back, the intention to filibuster that triggers the filibuster, there is no need for further action. All debate is immediately silenced. Once this minority party senator invokes the filibuster it requires 60 votes with the majority to allow any debate in the Senate. No further action need be taken by the minority of at least 41 who want to block debate.

Trump’s party leader in the Senate (a frequent target of Trump abuse since he made critical remarks about the leader’s riot on January 6) has announced that his focus is 100% on doing everything possible to hamstring President Biden. McConnell is betting Trump’s party will love to hear this, since MAGA nation believes that Biden is an illegitimate cheater president, a puppet of radicals, an enemy to be stopped in his sleepy tracks. There is no question that the Trump party will not tolerate debate on any federal bill related to voting (which is a pure States’ Rights issue, as the Civil War proved… to continue the incoherent MAGA/Koch narrative hewn to religiously whenever advantageous).

There will be a filibuster of any bill proposing to restore the Voting Rights Act of 1965, whether its named for John Lewis, Jeff Sessions, Orville Faubus or anyone else. From the right-wing’s point of view, re-litigating that lost civil rights war would be a grave mistake, one that should be prevented by any means necessary. Government tyranny must not be allowed, except on the state level, perhaps (see, again, The Civil War).

The filibuster is currently effortless, available to any Senator with the touch of a smart phone screen and perfect for blocking all debate on S1, formerly HR1, the proposed For the People Act of 2021.

Currently any Republican Senator can block debate on this crucial federal election rights law, by sending an email announcing that he intends to filibuster. Once that email is received there will be no discussion of a law considered by 60% of the nation as necessary to preserve democracy, unless 60% of the minority-skewed Senate votes to end the filibuster.

Under current parliamentary rules in the Senate (which can be changed at any time by the majority party, 51-50, as Mitch did recently for Supreme Court nominees), the For the People Act of 2021 will never come to the Senate floor for debate. What do Kyrsten “Saucy thumbs down on minimum wage” Sinema and Joe Asshat Manchin not get about this?

You can read all about the For the People Act of 2021 here, at Congress.gov.

Of course, the bill is currently the hostage of a radical anti-democratic party who currently has only one trick, the same trick as its current leader’s only trick, “doubling down”. A lie is good enough, they all seem to agree, if all you want to do is win. It’s a proven winner — since at least 1932.

You really can’t make this shit up

This is from the DOJ press release of Michael Cohen’s guilty plea following the “Filing of Eight Count Criminal Information Alleging Concealment of More Than $4 Million in Unreported Income, $280,000 in Unlawful Campaign Contributions.” The details of how they orchestrated the campaign contributions crime are truly byzantine, involving the machinations of at least one unnamed David Pecker.

On June 16, 2015, Individual-1 began his presidential campaign.  While COHEN continued to work at the Company and did not have a formal title with the campaign, he had a campaign email address and, at various times, advised the campaign, including on matters of interest to the press, and made televised and media appearances on behalf of the campaign. 

In August 2015, the Chairman and Chief Executive of Corporation-1, a media company that  owns, among other things, a popular tabloid magazine  (“Chairman-1” and “Magazine-1,” respectively”), in coordination with COHEN and one or more members of the campaign, offered to help deal with negative stories about Individual-1’s relationships with women by, among other things, assisting the campaign in identifying such stories so they could be purchased and their publication avoided.  Chairman-1 agreed to keep COHEN apprised of any such negative stories.

Consistent with the agreement described above, Corporation-1 advised COHEN of negative stories during the course of the campaign, and COHEN, with the assistance of Corporation-1, was able to arrange for the purchase of two stories so as to suppress them and prevent them from influencing the election.

First, in June 2016, a model and actress (“Woman-1”) began attempting to sell her story of her alleged extramarital affair with Individual-1 that had taken place in 2006 and 2007, knowing the story would be of considerable value because of the election.  Woman-1 retained an attorney (“Attorney-1”), who in turn contacted the editor-in-chief of Magazine-1 (“Editor-1”), and offered to sell Woman-1’s story to Magazine-1.  Chairman-1 and Editor-1 informed COHEN of the story. At COHEN’s urging and subject to COHEN’s promise that Corporation-1 would be reimbursed, Editor-1 ultimately began negotiating for the purchase of the story.

On August 5, 2016, Corporation-1 entered into an agreement with Woman-1 to acquire her “limited life rights” to the story of her relationship with “any then-married man,” in exchange for $150,000 and a commitment to feature her on two magazine covers and publish more than 100 magazine articles authored by her.  Despite the cover and article features to the agreement, its principal purpose, as understood by those involved, including COHEN, was to suppress Woman-1’s story so as to prevent it from influencing the election.       

Between late August 2016 and September 2016, COHEN agreed with Chairman-1 to assign the rights to the non-disclosure portion of Corporation-1’s agreement with Woman-1 to COHEN for $125,000.  COHEN incorporated a shell entity called “Resolution Consultants LLC” for use in the transaction.  Both Chairman-1 and COHEN ultimately signed the agreement, and a consultant for Corporation-1, using his own shell entity, provided COHEN with an invoice for the payment of $125,000.  However, in early October 2016, after the assignment agreement was signed but before COHEN had paid the $125,000, Chairman-1 contacted COHEN and told him, in substance, that the deal was off and that COHEN should tear up the assignment agreement.   

Second, on October 8, 2016, an agent for an adult film actress (“Woman-2”) informed Editor-1 that Woman-2 was willing to make public statements and confirm on the record her alleged past affair with Individual-1.  Chairman-1 and Editor-1 then contacted COHEN and put him in touch with Attorney-1, who was also representing Woman-2.  Over the course of the next few days, COHEN negotiated a $130,000 agreement with Attorney-1 to himself purchase Woman-2’s silence, and received a signed confidential settlement agreement and a separate side letter agreement from Attorney-1. 

COHEN did not immediately execute the agreement, nor did he pay Woman-2.  On the evening of October 25, 2016, with no deal with Woman-2 finalized, Attorney-1 told Editor-1 that Woman-2 was close to completing a deal with another outlet to make her story public.  Editor-1, in turn, texted COHEN that “[w]e have to coordinate something on the matter [Attorney-1 is] calling you about or it could look awfully bad for everyone.”  Chairman-1 and Editor-1 then called COHEN through an encrypted telephone application.  COHEN agreed to make the payment, and then called Attorney-1 to finalize the deal.

The next day, on October 26, 2016, COHEN emailed an incorporating service to obtain the corporate formation documents for another shell corporation, Essential Consultants LLC, which COHEN had incorporated a few days prior.  Later that afternoon, COHEN drew down $131,000 from the fraudulently obtained HELOC and requested that it be deposited into a bank account COHEN had just opened in the name of Essential Consultants.  The next morning, on October 27, 2016, COHEN went to Bank-3 and wired approximately $130,000 from Essential Consultants to Attorney-1.  On the bank form to complete the wire, COHEN falsely indicated that the “purpose of wire being sent” was “retainer.”  On November 1, 2016, COHEN received from Attorney-1 copies of the final, signed confidential settlement agreement and side letter agreement.

COHEN caused and made the payments described herein in order to influence the 2016 presidential election.  In so doing, he coordinated with one or more members of the campaign, including through meetings and phone calls, about the fact, nature, and timing of the payments.  As a result of the payments solicited and made by COHEN, neither Woman-1 nor Woman-2 spoke to the press prior to the election.

In January 2017, COHEN in seeking reimbursement for election-related expenses, presented executives of the Company with a copy of a bank statement from the Essential Consultants bank account, which reflected the $130,000 payment COHEN had made to the bank account of Attorney-1 in order to keep Woman-2 silent in advance of the election, plus a $35 wire fee, adding, in handwriting, an additional “$50,000.”  The $50,000 represented a claimed payment for “tech services,” which in fact related to work COHEN had solicited from a technology company during and in connection with the campaign.  COHEN added these amounts to a sum of $180,035.  After receiving this document, executives of the Company “grossed up” for tax purposes COHEN’s requested reimbursement of $180,000 to $360,000, and then added a bonus of $60,000 so that COHEN would be paid $420,000 in total.  Executives of the Company also determined that the $420,000 would be paid to COHEN in monthly amounts of $35,000 over the course of 12 months, and that COHEN should send invoices for these payments.        

On February 14, 2017, COHEN sent an executive of the Company (“Executive-1”) the first of his monthly invoices, requesting “[p]ursuant to [a] retainer agreement, . . . payment for services rendered for the months of January and February, 2017.”  The invoice listed $35,000 for each of those two months.  Executive-1 forwarded the invoice to another executive of the Company (“Executive-2”) the same day by email, and it was approved.  Executive-1 forwarded that email to another employee at the Company, stating: “Please pay from the Trust. Post to legal expenses. Put ‘retainer for the months of January and February 2017’ in the description.”

Throughout 2017, COHEN sent to one or more representatives of the Company monthly invoices, which stated, “Pursuant to the retainer agreement, kindly remit payment for services rendered for” the relevant month in 2017, and sought $35,000 per month.  The Company accounted for these payments as legal expenses.  In truth and in fact, there was no such retainer agreement, and the monthly invoices COHEN submitted were not in connection with any legal services he had provided in 2017.

During 2017, pursuant to the invoices described above, COHEN received monthly $35,000 reimbursement checks, totaling $420,000.

  

source 

You can’t touch me for any of this, FEC deadlocked! LOSERS!

Response to a thoughtful comment

I get very few comments here, I don’t know why. When I get a comment I always reply to it, as we all should when someone takes the time to express themselves to us.

I got a comment earlier today from Pasco Cruz, in reference to my recent post about the Federal Election Commission’s 2-2 vote not to prosecute Trump for the campaign finance violation his former attorney pled guilty to. Pasco wrote:

Non disclosure agreements are in no way illegal and the prosecutors literally made-up a charge that didn’t exist of “interfering with an election”. Any other lawyer should have mopped the floor with that case and thrown it right into the dumpster where it belonged, but Cohen was dumb enough to hire and trust Clinton operative and super slimey attorney Lanny Davis who was clearly working against Cohens best interests and helped to railroad him in an ruined his life all to try to make Trump look bad in the end, which really didn’t even work since Stormy Daniel’s has since come out and said she never even had sex with Trump.

There are legitimate things to rag on Trump about, but this story was made for low IQ simpletons to follow and get hyped up about. Anyone who still talks about it and cannot see it for the sloppy political hit job it was, is pathetic.

Fair enough. I took a moment to see what was on the DOJ website about the Michael Cohen plea, what the actual charges he pled guilty to were, and replied:

Pasco:

Thank you for this well-written and authoritative-sounding comment. The Cohen hush money payments to Stormy Daniels (“Woman 1”) and a former Playboy model (“Woman 2”) were found to be a violation of campaign finance laws, and Cohen was prosecuted by Jeff Sessions’ DOJ. To dismiss Cohen’s conviction for “interfering with an election” as a political hit job to hurt Trump, requires leaving out many important details. Cohen pled guilty to:

tax evasion, making false statements to a federally-insured bank, and campaign finance violations. The plea was entered followed the filing of an eight-count criminal information, which alleged that COHEN concealed more than $4 million in personal income from the IRS, made false statements to a federally-insured financial institution in connection with a $500,000 home equity loan,

and, in 2016, caused $280,000 in payments to be made to silence two women who otherwise planned to speak publicly about their alleged affairs with a presidential candidate, thereby intending to influence the 2016 presidential election.

(the whole DOJ plea announcement, including all the sordid details of the campaign finance violation [which involve the National Inquirer and David Fucking Pecker], is at https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/michael-cohen-pleads-guilty-manhattan-federal-court-eight-counts-including-criminal-tax)

Of course it is legal, as you say, in most cases, to pay someone you had sex with to sign a nondisclosure agreement. The payment itself was not the crime — it was paying them as part of a political campaign to hide facts that would have certainly hurt the candidate.

If two women Trump paid (through Cohen) in October 2016 for their legally-binding promise to remain silent had been free to talk publicly about having extramarital sex with Trump right before the election, he likely would not have won the Electoral College vote. Their legally enforceable silence had great political value to Trump, well in excess of the $280,000 he had Cohen pay them.

As you say, there are legitimate things to rag on Trump about, and one of them was his deliberate delay in appointing a quorum on the FEC, disabling the agency that oversees campaign finance violations. Trump left the FEC without any ability to investigate or enforce campaign finance law, after Cohen pled guilty to campaign finance violations he committed at the request of Individual One (Trump).

The recent 2-2 vote among Trump’s December 2020 FEC appointees, the recusal of one and abstention of another, probably tells us more than we’ll ever know about the political fix at the FEC that kept Trump safe from being indicted in connection with that crime.

Peace and keep reading!

Looking on the Bright Side

A friend, depressed by the depressing political news that is fed to us steadily, asked me to only send her news items that contained a ray of hope. I mustered a little hope, which I will describe below.

It may seem only a small glimmer of a bright side, though all hope can be seen that way. This bright side could be the cusp of a political tipping point in our violent clash of cultures. It is nice to imagine that our Department of Justice will now pursue justice, cast a careful eye over the evidence of the Mueller and subsequent Senate investigations. A legal examination of a series of very openly transactional quid pro quos is certainly in order.

It is worth pointing out again, humans are not often ruled by reason or logic. If we were, it would be hard for nationalist racism and fascist logic to prevail in so many countries worldwide. There would be no debate, in a reasonable world, about the right of everyone to live free of terror and violence. In most places that’s a proposition you will need to fight about.

Of course, we have never lived in a calm or reasonable world, and those of us who hope for rational public debate that ends with more fairness for everyone will be waiting a long time. Here in the US we’re at the mercy of a no-compromise/filibuster political party that is anti-debate and has the means to stop any important political discussion before it happens. That we may not succeed in convincing adversaries this fierce of anything they don’t already believe doesn’t absolve us of our responsibility to act.

We need to keep in mind that it is impossible to convince anyone of anything just by clearly presenting the facts. The facts never add up to much, if you already hold a strong opinion about the matter.

At a time when a lie carries as much weight as an indisputable truth, and Big Lies have often changed the course of history, we must be creative in how we present our accursed “facts.” We have to take care to avoid sounding smugly superior (as the rest of this sentence no doubt fails to do) to those who fervently worship at the altar of powerful emotion, low-information voters of unshakably held opinions, based strictly on faith, which they believe to be infinitely superior to fallible human “rationality”.

The biggest obstacle to convincing anyone of things that are otherwise true and urgent (like the need to take energetic action to avoid total climate catastrophe) is the ease of spreading even the most easily disprovable lies in siloed, algorithm-driven echo chambers on “social media”. One of our two major parties is now, officially, the Party of the Big Lie (Trump, the loser, actually won — in a landslide), at a time when spreading a lie to millions who will never see the lie contradicted has never been easier.

The most important measure to reverse this pernicious, increasingly deterministic trend, is holding liars accountable for spreading lies. There is currently no price to be paid for spreading even the most obvious lies. In fact, in Trump’s GOP, aggressively promoting a featured lie is a certain path to promotion. See how quickly anyone who calls out the lie is attacked and unanimously canceled by quick voice vote.

There is a simple test for weighing the value of absolute “free speech,” including demonstrable lies, against speech that should be actionable in court — the harm that the false speech causes. It is the same test applied to all other free speech [2].

Under our current law you can’t shout “FIRE!” in a crowded theatre when there is no fire, because a panicked stampede is predictable if you do. Free speech does not protect an American’s right to use words to inflame hatred in a way that predictably leads to violence. Violence-provoking lies should be treated the same way in the on-line world.

How about this for a single, absolute ground rule:

promoting, supporting or endorsing an incendiary lie over “social media,”

AND

refusing to publicly retract the lie when confronted with evidence that it is a lie, and called on it by the platform’s monitors, means that you forfeit your right to use the platform.

Period.  Sounds fucking simple enough, no?

Of course there will be violent contention about what is “incendiary” as well as the definitions of “promoting” “endorsing” and any other words chosen.

It is often easier to see the incendiary nature of a lie after the fact, looking at events in light of the lie. That’s why Twitter banned Trump for life after his long, lie-filled speech on January 6th sent thousands down to the Capitol to violently interrupt the counting and final certification of Electoral College votes against Trump. When Trump eventually went on Twitter to disperse his mob, he told them they were right to be angry, that they’d been cheated, the election stolen from them all, that they were special, that he loved them, to never forget this day, but that it was time for them to go home in peace.

Twitter immediately did what it probably should have done years earlier — took away the platform Trump used on January 6th to remind rioters in the Capitol that Mike Pence had betrayed them. If they’d found Pence, and strung him up, would our discussion today be much different? Hard to know, though I think probably not, at least among Trump die-hards, now the dominant strain of the GOP.

The full damage of a lie is not when it is first told. The real harm sets in each time the lie is replicated, insisted on, every time someone else is converted to belief in something that is destructively false.

The predictable growth cycle of a lie is its most dangerous aspect.

Justifying the January 6 riot at the Capitol requires endless new lies — BLM did it, antifa faked it by posing as a MAGA mob, there was no riot, only Trump supporters died (so where’s the harm? That one trampled to death? shit happens) the cops were lying, only a few of the 140 “injured” were seriously hurt, the “lost eye” story is bullshit, the cop who was “killed” died of a natural heart attack, the videos of the rampage were fake, the protesters were law-abiding, nonviolent tourists, for the sake of our country we need to just move on, there’s no need for a Commission, radical Democrats are just trying to get revenge out of blind hatred of Trump, like they always do, and so on.


While we live in this Age of Trump, the age of wildly insane lies taken, literally, as gospel, the only good political news I see at the moment is the heavy shit storm gathering over the head of the defeated former president who insists he actually won in a landslide. The evidence of Trump’s lifelong pattern and practice of cheating and obstructing justice is rapidly mounting. His day of reckoning in several different courts of law approaches.

I don’t see how he beats the rap in the upcoming Georgia criminal case, where he violated the election meddling statute with great thoroughness and specificity– and is recorded doing so. His best hope may be a stand-off between Ron DeSantis’s Florida troops and federal forces in an interstate extradition battle.

A criminal conviction and more major losses in civil court (where cases are decided, 99% of the time, based on the evidence), plus the conclusions of the January 6 Commission,  should loosen Trump’s death-grip on all but the diehard 39% of his cult of personality. Full public disclosure of the extent of Trump’s corruption and contempt for the law will give his many mostly silent, terrified enemies on the right a shot of courage.

Revelations from the likely Rudy Giuliani prosecution should have a similar effect, even in our arational nation. I think bad news in court for Trump could sway many “swing voters” away from his party.   When he had an attorney general who would constantly fix things for him, Trump didn’t need to worry about the law coming down on him. Now he has great reason to worry about the law finally catching up with him, after a long life of getting away with whatever he wanted because he’s super smart, and a big star, and, when you’re like that, you know, they let you do it.

The pieces seem to be nicely lined up for an obstruction of justice case: 

Former White House Counsel Don McGahn will finally testify under oath that Trump asked him to create false records of their conversation about firing Mueller. Having Trump’s first White House lawyer testify that Trump told him to create a false record is a firm building block for an obstruction of justice prosecution.

Trump’s most competent and accomplished enabler, Bagpiper Bill Barr, the AG who advised Trump to have his people defy all subpoenas and muzzle critics, is in the federal court record as a man judges found “lacks candor”. Three federal judges, in three different cases, concluded that Barr’s rationalizations were not credible and his legal reasoning was in the service of partisan politics. Barr was most recently found “disingenuous” when he tried to illegally conceal other records, falsely classified as “deliberative memos” drafted the day he misleadingly told America and the world that Mueller’s report had found basically nothing on Trump.

Barr’s demonstrated lack of candor, and his relentless. public re-election campaign-related criminal investigation into the the origins of the Mueller “witch hunt” require a DOJ re-examination, based on the actual documents. The same goes for Barr’s rationale for falsely announcing that the Mueller Report basically exonerated Trump for both criminal conspiracy with a foreign power and obstruction of justice. Barr’s conduct was an integral, and crucial, part of that obstruction of justice.

Barr’s repeated untruthfulness, including his lies about the secret Mueller “memo” he classified as supposedly used in his deliberations to declare Trump “exonerated” as he’d promised to do before Trump hired him, will come into play in the obstruction of justice case against Trump.

Add to that all the evidence that has come out since Mueller concluded he had insufficient evidence to find “criminal conspiracy” between Trump’s campaign and the Russians. We have more details about Trump’s corrupt quid pro quo pardons to Manafort and Stone, both of whom lied to Mueller for Trump’s sake, to cover up their closely coordinated work with the Russians. The secret internal polling data that Manafort gave Putin (via Kilimnik) steered Russian influence efforts toward American voters in close districts in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, the three states that gave Trump his Electoral College victory [2].

There are a hundred other related details including Trump’s partially successful attempt to disrupt a joint session of Congress (mission accomplished) to prevent the peaceful transfer of power after he lost the election he still claims he won in a landslide (70% of Republicans polled believe Trump won in a landslide).  How about his enlistment of Republican allies like Ted Cruz, Lindsey Graham and Kevin McCarthy, each of whom made pilgrimages to meet with him in Florida in a show of loyalty, to promote his Big Lie and continue to obstruct formation of a January 6 Commission?

Truly sickening that it is taking so long, but such is life in a democracy hovering on the brink of extinction. It takes time for a prosecutor to make a strong, airtight case ready to be tried in court. Hopefully the rule of law will prevail, before it’s too late for law.

You people are such fucking losers.

[1]

outside of the unlimited dark money “free speech” of corporate persons, of course.

[2] Remember this?

The most important states, though, were Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Trump won those states by 0.2, 0.7 and 0.8 percentage points, respectively — and by 10,704, 46,765 and 22,177 votes. Those three wins gave him 46 electoral votes; if Clinton had done one point better in each state, she’d have won the electoral vote, too.

source

Heritage

Voting fraud conspiracist and Heritage Foundation (Mike Pence’s current employer) stalwart Hans von fucking Spakovsky rears his ugly head:

And in a March article for the New York Times, Nick Corasaniti and Reid J. Epstein outlined the role of Heritage Action in Georgia’s and Arizona’s voting restrictions, noting that at least 23 of the proposed state bills that dealt with voting had language that looked like that of Heritage.

They also wrote that Heritage plans to spend $24 million to change voting laws in Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, Texas, and Wisconsin before the 2022 election, and that the person behind the Heritage voting policies is Hans von Spakovsky, who mainstreamed the idea of voter fraud in the Republican Party, although experts agree it is vanishingly rare.

source

Hans von fucking Spakovsky [1]. Of whom a judge wrote, after dismissing his testimony as the biased presentation of a partisan activist posing as an expert witness:

The Judge, Julie Robinson, wrote von Spakovsky’s statements were premised on several misleading and unsupported examples and included false assertions. She said his generalized opinions about the rates of noncitizen registration were likewise based on misleading evidence and largely based on his preconceived beliefs about this issue, which has led to his aggressive public advocacy of stricter proof of citizenship laws. Von Spakovsky maintains a database of what he calls some 1,300 cases of vote fraud

[since 1982, yo!, putting the prevalence of proven voter fraud in the 0.0001% category– ed].

source

A giant think tank that writes conservative laws that are introduced by party members in 47 states is a vital part of that political party. The highly partisan nonprofit Heritage Foundation (authors of the original Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, as I recall) once again rolls out the discredited lies of von Spakovsky, who has been keeping the massive Heritage Foundation database of electoral fraud going back to 1982 (hundreds of cases!!! more than a billion votes, yes, but HUNDREDS of cases!!) to justify enhanced protections for “electoral integrity”.

These new Heritage Foundation approved laws make all the changes to state voting that Trump and the RNC went to court seeking last time. State and federal courts prevented GOP state legislatures from implementing measures to make it harder to vote the last time around. That’s why the Republican controlled states are busily tightening up their voting laws, to ensure minority freedom from majoritarian tyranny!

Lest we forget, Joe Manchin, the Voting Rights Act you support strengthening had its heart cut out by 5 Heritage Foundation embracing Supreme Court conservatives who overruled President George W. Bush, who had immediately signed the extension of the law that passed 390-33 in the House and, after further debate, 98 to 0 in the Senate.

Although there was no hint of this overwhelming bipartisan support in John Roberts’ infamous Shelby County decision, as he struck down the law citing lack of evidence of ongoing voter suppression, there had been 21 hearings where 15,000 pages of evidence of ongoing discrimination in the states under pre-clearance were considered before the law was unanimously reauthorized by the Senate. As Dubya said (from RBG’s dissent) when signing the extension of the 1965 law:

recognizing the need for “further work . . . in the fight against injustice,” and calling the reauthorization “an example of our continued commitment to a united America where every person is valued and treated with dignity and respect.” 

Nice try, Mr. Manchin, but you already face opposition from the Heritage Foundation and a couple of their senators on the other side of the aisle.

Hey, just because challenging drop-boxes, mail-in voting, illegally giving water to people waiting on line to vote, reducing voting hours to end at 5 pm and so on didn’t work to stop Trump’s defeat in 2020 doesn’t mean that implementing these measures into state laws won’t work like a miracle in 2022 and beyond!

These right-wing bastards are nothing if not persistent, and they fight, wielding every weaponizable lie, with the desperate fury of a dying breed.

Hans von fucking Spakovsky, former head of Trump’s secret electoral strategy conference of Republican state officials. I figured it was only a matter of time before he crawled back out from under his rock. Let’s see that handsome face one more time, Hans.

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[1] As I wrote a few months back (before the 2020 election):

But here’s the really creepy part. A right-wing lawyer working for the Heritage Foundation is advising a group of Republican state attorneys general on how to use disproven legal theories about electoral fraud to take control of state elections and “safeguard the integrity of the upcoming election” to support the president and his followers. This man, Hans von Spakovsky, is the Heritage Foundation’s expert on voter fraud:

HANS VON SPAKOVSKY: All we have to do is look at the many cases, proven cases of absentee ballot fraud to understand that the problem with absentee or mail-in ballots is there the ballots that are most vulnerable to fraud, to being stolen. And they also…

ANDREA BERNSTEIN: Hans von Spakovsky who is well known to ProPublica’s Jessica Huseman.

JESSICA HUSEMAN: Hans von Spakovsky is a longtime voter fraud conspiracy theorist, and he got his start like many people who are now doing strange things in the world of voting in the 2000 election.

ANDREA BERNSTEIN: After that, he went to work for the Justice Department under President George W. Bush.

He eventually wound up at the Heritage Foundation where he became their resident expert in making thinly-sourced voter fraud claims.

ANDREA BERNSTEIN: In 2018, von Spakovsky was called in to be an expert witness in a federal trial over a Kansas law that required proof of citizenship in order to vote. Von Spakovsky was there to present data on noncitizen voting.


JESSICA HUSEMAN: The judge basically dismissed all of his testimony, called it cherry picked, called it biased. Said that he was more of an activist rather than an unbiased expert witness. And her opinion basically said that she gave his testimony no real credence in her decision.


ANDREA BERNSTEIN: The judge, Julie Robinson, wrote von Spakovsky’s statements were premised on several misleading and unsupported examples and included false assertions. She said his generalized opinions about the rates of noncitizen registration were likewise based on misleading evidence and largely based on his preconceived beliefs about this issue, which has led to his aggressive public advocacy of stricter proof of citizenship laws. Von Spakovsky maintains a database of what he calls some 1,300 cases of vote fraud.

So, naturally, he is now working behind the scenes for Mr. Trump’s re-election. He has apparently been hosting Republican-only strategy meetings for state government officials involved in overseeing the 2020 election. The frequency of these meetings is increasing as the already contested election approaches, and officials of the Trump administration are involved in the strategizing.

ANDREA BERNSTEIN: Von Spakovsky’s meetings were attended by state, secretaries of state. These officials are often partisan but their job is to ensure the integrity of their state’s elections.


MIKE SPIES: The purpose of the meeting was essentially to sort of jointly strategize.


ANDREA BERNSTEIN: And, again, only Republican officials were invited to the meetings. Up until 2020, they met basically a couple of times a year in Washington. Republican congressional staffers sometimes came and on at least one occasion so did officials from the Justice Department, Trump appointees.

Purge, classic style

A purge is almost never a good thing, though in the sense of a good vomit after gross overeating or over-drinking, it makes a lot of sense. A new democratic government does well to purge diehard fascist members of the former government, but in general, purges are the work of autocrats who need to periodically weed out the disloyal and make terrifying examples of them. A frightful spectacle of vengeance deters those inclined to think for themselves instead of doing exactly what the leader demands.

When I hear the word purge I always think of the underground chamber where my favorite writer, Isaac Babel, was condemned, after a long stint in prison, one of millions of victims of Stalin’s purges. Babel pleaded with his interrogators, men who worked for Beria [1], Stalin’s chief of torture, to let him just continue writing. Babel’s mock trial was short, only a couple of minutes in that tiny, airless room, after which he was taken from that dark chamber and into a nearby courtyard for a couple of gunshots. A trunk of Babel’s unpublished writings, safeguarded by his friends, disappeared, never to be heard of again. That’s a purge.

Yesterday the GOP purged Liz Cheney from Republican leadership in a basement room at the Capitol, by a voice vote. This shouting out of “yay” or “nay” spared potential embarrassment for any individual Republican who would otherwise be on the record in favor of removing Cheney for the high crime of insisting that a violent riot, caused by Trump, watched worldwide on live television, had taken place on January 6, to support a lie that Trump had won the election in a landslide.

You don’t necessarily want your face attached to a vote to do that, since you can’t predict the future, so you meet in a large room in the basement, in a kind of lynch mob, and do it fast. The “yays” have it, Liz Cheney is purged. The whole thing took 16 minutes.

The problem with a purge that does not actually kill your enemy, as any good dictator knows, is that the opposition tends to organize around leaders who remain unbowed during a purge. Cheney, as hideous as her torture-endorsing right-wing politics are — and she is truly a chip off the old aptly named Dick Cheney — has taken a basic and principled position against perhaps the boldest single lie in American political history. Certainly the boldest lie ever told by a president who sent a mob to stop the certification of an election he lost, and, if they got lucky, lynch his vice president and decapitate the government by taking out the next two in line, Democrats Nancy Pelosi and Patrick Leahy.

“Stop the Steal”, in a nutshell, is the wildly counter-factual idea that Trump had the election stolen from him, by a bipartisan cabal of evil bastards, after four glorious years during which his ruthless enemies continually persecuted him for no reason except their radical hatred, that he actually won the 2020 election in a landslide, as he still insists he can prove.

How much courage does it take for a Republican to admit that the whole Trump thing, with its $50,000,000 ad budget to spread the infuriating lie (an ad buy that ended on January 6), with its $3,500,000 organizing budget to bring a massive crowd to Washington, DC to forcibly shut down Congress and “stop the steal,” is a lie? Trump’s claim that a rigged election was stolen from him is one of his trademark “transactional” lies, this one based on the paranoid fantasy of a former president who cannot accept the reality that he lost an election.

You would not think it would take much courage, but outside of Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, you seldom hear a peep from the Red team to contradict the obvious lie of their vindictive strongman leader. It would be nice to hear from Reince Preibus, John Kelly, Mad Dog Mattis, Sessions, Barr, H.R. McMaster, John Bolton, Chad Wolf, former Trump cabinet members Elaine Chao and Betsey DeVos (both of whom resigned right after the January 6 riot) and many others, on this. The united cowardice and calculation of virtually all Republicans in support of America’s Greatest Lying Loser is hard to fathom.

We are balanced on the rim of an active volcano, all of us, along with our democracy. This is going to remain an ugly fight, but it is a crucial fight, existential.

I take a certain amount of consolation from the actual facts in evidence and from the general rule of actual proof in our legal system. Virtually every lawsuit based on a demonstrable lie must fail, as we saw over and over with the dozens of Trump/RNC election lawsuits dismissed for lack of evidence of their claims. There are very few cases where a judge has the discretion, by ruling narrowly along an ideological crevasse (a Boof Kavanaugh speciality), to rule in support of ideology and contrary to the facts. It must be done with skill to avoid being overturned on appeal (unless you write for an unappealable court, of course, as Kavanaugh now does).

Our legal system is in many ways brutal, openly favoring the rights and privileges of the wealthy, and corporation persons, over everyone else. Criminal justice is applied in a systemically unjust manner that routinely incarcerates small-time criminals (disproportionately “non-white”) while leaving the most powerful criminals free to ply their lucrative trade. There is no legal enforcement of “ethics,” a concept applied on a strictly voluntary basis by anyone with the power to decide whether to abide by ethics recommendations.

For all its flaws, our legal system is bound by rules that even the most partisan judge cannot simply ignore. For example, you can insist on your deeply held opinion that Hillary Clinton is a vicious criminal who needs to be locked up. To lock her up you will need actual proof of a crime.

In the case of Trump and his loyalists, their crimes are many, and now shown with more and more powerful evidence. Now that Trump is no longer a sitting president (even Kevin McCarthy admitted yesterday that Biden is the actual president [2]) he does not have the shield of that OLC memo about not indicting POTUS.

Trump and his followers have been brazen, and relentless, but not always very smart. Even the purportedly brilliant legal mind of Bill Barr was addled, and not always smart, while he served as Trump’s zealous gunsel for the second half of Trump’s term. The entire story of Trump’s seamless obstruction of justice (new chapters written daily, stay tuned!) is now fair game for prosecutors and juries, and more and more facts, previously hidden (as part of the obstruction) are coming to light.

To take one thread as an example:

Former White House Counsel Don McGahn, interviewed under oath by Mueller’s investigators, recounted a shameless attempt by Trump to obstruct justice, followed by an even more shameless attempt by Trump to have McGahn create a lying record, denying that Trump ever made the first shameless ask.

McGahn’s public testimony under oath would have been deadly to Trump during the first impeachment trial (had Pelosi had the wisdom to allow an additional article of impeachment for Obstruction of Justice based, in part, on the ten examples Mueller laid out).

Even though Republicans under McConnell had the power to prevent all witnesses from testifying in the first impeachment “trial”, as they did, after vowing to work closely with Trump’s defense team, no chance could be taken that would allow McGahn (a right-wing zealot in his own right, promoter of Gorsuch and Kavanaugh for Supreme Court) to be deposed or testify. Barr suggested Trump invoke an imaginary all-encompassing presidential immunity that covered anyone Trump had ever talked to from ever testifying to anyone. McGahn’s subpoena to testify was held up in court for two years. Until the other day, when his long refusal to obey the subpoena ended with a deal for McGahn to answer a few questions [3].

We now have published facts that were hidden from Mueller, from the public, some key facts were zealously hidden by our disingenuous former Attorney General. It now is possible, for example, to prove that Trump’s then campaign manager, Paul Manafort, had a direct channel to Putin in his long-time friend Konstantin Kilimnik, and gave the Kremlin important secret polling data that allowed Russia to help Trump most efficiently. The facts are going to continue crushing Trump and his myrmidons in court.

It is dangerous, of course, to underestimate the power of organized rage and blind obedience in human affairs. Our experiment in democracy faces a grave danger from the forces of enraged white grievance and a party that now speaks for that grievance in one voice, “the yeas have it”. This free-floating anger has found an avatar in Donald Trump, an unapologetic hater, a man who will never, ever stop fighting.

It would appear, looking over his public history, that Trump, an angry bully since childhood, lives to fight. This fight-to-the-death-and-beyond spirit appeals to certain underdogs who feel that fighting is their only option. It also appeals to all cynical Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham types who simply attach themselves to what they perceive to be power, in any form. The fight is waged amid the silence of the mass of GOP officials and absurdist claims by little known partisans like Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-GA), who insist, during public testimony, that footage of the “riot” was no different than what could be shot of any tourist group, they were just there enjoying themselves!

By not actually stringing Liz Cheney up yesterday after the mob shouted its approval of her being stripped of her party leadership position, Trump’s followers in Congress may have made a huge mistake. If I had to bet on a Republican presidential candidate for 2024, my money would be on Liz Cheney over DJT. For one thing, it may be very hard, no matter how strong and organized the denial is, for Trump to run against the findings of the eventual January 6 Commission, and the verdicts in state criminal courts of Georgia and New York. Last time Trump had the indomitable Bill Barr fixing everything for him, this time, no such luck for Donnie Bonespurs.

[1]

Naturally when Beria, one of history’s most infamous sadistic torturers and rapists, was eventually arrested (in one of Stalin’s final purges, I think) he cried, screamed and whimpered like a terrified baby. I guess it occurred to him that if “what goes around comes around” is true, he had a horrible death waiting for him. Which he sure enough did.

[2]

“I don’t think anybody is questioning the legitimacy of the presidential election,” Mr. McCarthy told reporters after meeting with Mr. Biden and congressional leaders at the White House to discuss infrastructure spending. “I think that is all over with. We’re sitting here with the president today. So from that point of view, I don’t think that’s a problem.”

source

[3]

The House Judiciary Committee and the Biden administration have struck “an agreement in principle” to resolve a two-year-old fight over a subpoena for testimony from Don McGahn, a former White House counsel to President Donald Trump, lawyers said in a court filing on Tuesday evening.

Trump has not signed off on the deal, however, according to the status report submitted to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. The former president could try to take legal action to block any testimony from McGahn, but the filing from the House and the Justice Department — now under the control of appointees of President Joe Biden — seems to try to head off such a move by noting pointedly that Trump “is not a party to this case.”

source