Tag Archives: 14th-amendment

Federalist Society Endgame

The Federalist Society, a rightwing judicial fraternity, was created and is funded by ultra wealthy, right wing privilege holders. It was established to use the law to better protect the privileges of our best citizens, which is to say, inheritors of vast wealth, and those who join their ranks through their own efforts. It is devoted, by strict doctrine, to giving their political benefactors political wins in every possible case. Their judges often do this, especially in cases otherwise lost, by going well past what they need to find in order to make their rulings.

Their style of activist judging always includes a political victory for their agenda, to dismantling the regulatory/administrative state, limiting “majoritarian tyranny” (will of the voters) and ensuring full rights of citizenship only for our best citizens, corporate and human, regardless of the facts, the law, a 98-0 vote in the Senate.

For example, the Supreme Court Federalist Society contingent went much further than necessary to overrule the Colorado courts where Trump was disqualified as an insurrectionist. Without touching the facts of his insurrectionist plan and shameful, criminal behavior they made a ruling that allows every elected federal official who aided Trump in his insurrectionist plan to overturn election results forever immune from disqualification under the constitutional clause designed for that purpose by the framers of the 14th Amendment. The Federalist Society Six effectively wrote one of the most important democracy enforcing clauses out of the 14th amendment. In the name of demented Originalism, or some other Federalist Society endorsed doctrine pulled out of their collective, doctrinaire ass and protected not only Trump but his wide circle of elected insurrectionist henchmen and henchwomen.

In Georgia, Federalist Society member and political appointee Judge McAfee ruled correctly that there was no actual conflict of interest between the DA prosecuting Donald Trump and his criminal co-conspirators, and anybody else involved in the case. He did this after a long delaying circus in which the DA was asked extensively about her sex life and her father was interrogated about it too. The Klan itself could not have staged a more amusing spectacle than the one McAfee allowed.

Then after ruling properly, so as not to be overturned on appeal, he went out of his way to besmirch Fani Willis by writing of her “unprofessional” demeanor on the stand , a “stench of mendacity” and recommending a host of ethical and disciplinary remedies for her uppity attitude. He made these disparaging, jury poisoning remarks in dismissing an unsuccessful attempt to smear the district attorney, who, it turns out, had no conflict of interest of any kind. The Federalist Society spin, smearing a political opponent he could not legally remove from the case, is perfectly permissible among these endgame motherfuckers. McAfee gave his team the smear the frivolous motion was intended to create, after providing team Trump with a healthy and distracting delay.

Take Federalist Society member and former DOJ official MAGA Robert Hur. The finding of his report was that Joe Biden did not have the requisite intent to commit the crimes that Donald Trump has clearly demonstrated, as proved by his many attempts to cover up the crime and his repeated obstruction of justice. Hur distinguished the behavior of the two presidents to make the contrast and show that Biden lacked Trump’s clear criminal intent. That was the take away, Biden has not committed the crimes Trump stands accused of and that was all Hur was appointed to decided.

But a report stating that Biden was innocent of the crime Trump is a criminal defendant for was in no way helpful to the MAGA, or as I think of it, the American Nazi, cause. Hur therefore made the focus of his report, and the Breaking News headline takeaway, Biden’s cognitive feebleness. Based on lies? Going well beyond the scope of your appointment? Call me pisher!

The Trump-appointed federal judge in Florida (who assumed office after Trump lost reelection, talk about letting the voters decide), Aileen “Loose” Cannon, who, giving her the benefit of the doubt, is probably too stupid and inexperienced to handle a high profile, politically charged espionage case against her benefactor regarding his illegal retention of top-secret government documents, at least has experienced, brilliant Federalist Society counsel available to her.

This allows her to endlessly delay a trial that Trump will 100% lose with little risk to herself or her already damaged professional reputation. By not making any final orders about anything, Cannon has been able to spin this straightforward case out with no end in sight. And arguably because she has made no final orders of any kind, she has not given DOJ grounds for an appeal. Things she has done, no matter how stupid (inviting amicus briefs from the likes of Stephen “Death to immigrants” Miller and Citizens United), how biased toward one party (and against the federal government) or how clearly designed to give a criminal defendant the delay he always demands, are protected under her discretion as the trial judge.

If you had any cause to wonder whether allowing the widespread appointment of members of a doctrinaire right wing extremist judicial fraternity could cause any problems for democracy, the rule of law or the fair administration of justice, look no further than the loyal judicial fraternity members referenced above.

Another unappealable John Roberts special

As he did in striking down enforcement of the 1965 Voting Rights Act simply by ignoring inconvenient facts, like many sessions of vigorous debate in Congress, thousands of pages of data considered, ongoing attempts by states with a history of racist laws to disenfranchise voters and suppress the vote, the unanimous Senate vote to re-authorize the Act, the near unanimous vote in the House, and the Republican president’s warm public embrace of the Act as he signed it into continued law, Roberts made the plain text of the Fourteenth Amendment a matter of Federalist Society opinion about whether an insurrectionist is eligible for federal office, absent a specific, constitutionally sound law passed by Congress.

In the Voting Rights Act case the holding was 5-4: the Voting Rights Act worked beautifully to eliminate racially discriminatory voter suppression and no longer needs enforcement.  In this Colorado decision to disqualify an insurrectionist, textualists and liberals apparently agree that Colorado had no right to remove Trump from their ballot, no matter what their factual findings may have been, and therefore that no state may remove Donald Trump, or any candidate for federal office, from the ballot, absent Congress passing a new law to enforce section three of the 14th Amendment. 

Leave out a few key facts, ignore the central one (Trump planned, advertised, aided and gave comfort to participants in a riot that shut down the government in a violent attempt to keep him in power), reframe the narrow issue that you are looking at, et voilà, you can pull any politically expedient holding you would like out of your corporate “balls and strikes umpire” ass.  You can even broker a deal to make it a unanimous 9-0, including the spouse
of a powerful participant in the attempt to overthrow the election of 2020.

The Court declines to intervene in many cases because of their Political Question Doctrine and professes, under federalism, to defer to states on abortion, criminal law, family and business law, voting rules and procedures and many other matters, but reaches the conclusion, without touching the finding that the candidate in question, at minimum, aided and abetted insurrection, or Colorado’s evidence-based finding that he did, that this political question is one they can unanimously decide, bindingly, on behalf of all fifty states. The plain text of their sacred originalist Constitution, and the expressed, well-documented intent of the framers, be damned.

What I don’t understand is how this dog shit decision was 9-0. This time nobody on the Court has a word to say about the stench?

Here is Jesse Wegman’s right on analysis from today’s NY Times.

MAGA 1861-style

Fascinating, disturbing but not surprising bit of American history I’d never heard about, from an op-ed in yesterday’s NY Times by Akhil Reed Amar (link to full piece here)

Mr. Trump’s lawyers legitimately ask what counts as a disqualifying insurrection. Section 3, they note, was clearly aimed at oath-breakers who had backed insurrections akin to the Civil War. In that calamitous insurrection, more than half a million people died. The Jan. 6 Capitol riot, they argue, pales in comparison.

But Section 3’s authors actually had not one but two recent insurrections in mind. Before the bloody insurrection that began when cannons roared at Fort Sumter in April 1861, there was the first insurrection of the 1860s, led by cabinet members of outgoing President James Buchanan, including John B. Floyd, the war secretary, and Philip Francis Thomas, the treasury secretary, among many others. A shadowy network of affiliates and co-conspirators aimed in several and nefarious ways — including mayhem, military subversion and even murder, if need be — to prevent the lawful counting of President-elect Abraham Lincoln’s electoral votes and to thwart his lawful inauguration in early March 1861.

From one angle, the first insurrection was even worse than the giant insurrection that followed. It aimed not merely to shrink the union, but to undo a legitimate presidential election for all Americans.

On Feb. 13, 1861 — the closest equivalent of Jan. 6, 2021 — Congress met to certify Lincoln’s victory. Malicious anti-Lincoln men congregated near the Capitol. But thanks to Gen. Winfield Scott’s steely defense, the Capitol held.

In some ways, the insurrection of 2021 was worse than the first insurrection of 1861. The Capitol did not fall in 1861, but it was breached in 2021.

source

Lincoln won the Electoral College in the election of 1860, although he was not on the ballot in any of the eleven states that seceded and formed the Confederacy (to get on the ballot a certain number of signatures was needed, people collecting signatures for Lincoln were run out of town or lynched). I’d never heard, until today, about the MAGA-like machinations of sitting government officials, their henchmen and a mob to try to keep Lincoln out of office, two months before full scale Civil War broke out. The second time Lincoln won, of course, during the Civil War, he was shot in the head at close range, days after Lee surrendered to Grant, by an enraged Confederate shouting “sic semper tyrannis!” thus may it always be with tyrants. 

History comes up with very similar ugly scenarios over and over, like disgusting burps from a meal that was right on the edge of food poisoning. The traitor who led the Confederate army in a war that killed more Americans than any other was honored years later with his likeness on a US postage stamp. The president of the Confederacy was tried criminally, for treason, but the trial was too divisive and political and the new DOJ, I guess, finally just threw up its hands on prosecuting him. Old Jefferson Davis walked away with a wry smile, no harm, no foul. Here’s a piece about that shameful failure of justice, first long delayed, then shadily negotiated, then denied.

During World War II pro-Nazi gangs in America and pro-Nazi members of Congress, literally calling themselves America First, who propagandized for, aided and gave comfort to actual German Nazis who had declared war on the United States, an enemy the US was then fighting… uh, no convictions, because there were passionate, angry people on both sides, particularly the violent, pro-Nazi side. Rachel Maddow did a brilliant audio series on this shit show, called Ultra, highly recommended. Steven Spielberg immediately bought the screen rights for this suspenseful film noir tragedy.

No trial for the antidemocratic masterminds, Bannon, Eastman, Giuliani, Kerik, Flynn and their ilk, who sat in the War Room at the Willard Hotel coordinating the “Green Bay Sweep” the plan by MAGA congressmen and senators to block the certification of Biden’s election and swap in fake electors, including incitement of a violent riot, based on incendiary lies believed by millions, to discard the ballots of millions of Black people and voters in Anarchist Jurisdictions and keep their leader in power? The stink of it all is sickeningly familiar. 

Like the ongoing racist, misogynist attacks against the Black, female Fulton County DA who is now under fire, in our craven corporate bottom-line media, for calling the attacks against her racist. Her private life, her sex life, is fair game for these scumbag defendants, and the media takes it seriously, rattles on about some undefined appearance of impropriety and maybe she should walk away. 

As I was taught early on in law school, if you have the facts, pound the facts, if you have the law, pound the law, if you have neither the facts nor the law, pound the table. These table-pounding fucks are trying to stir up enough of a foul stench that the court system itself walks away, as has happened before in our storied, often erased history.