Confession time, so to speak.
This Mardi Gras week, my Aunt and Uncle, who are very conservative Catholics, came from back East to visit the family in Las Vegas, cause this is where you go to observe Lent. So on Ash Wednesday we had a seafood dinner with me and my brother-in-law (who is that much more of a partisan Democrat than I am) and my uncle asked if we could have a civil discussion about the current political situation. And we did. And I confessed, frankly, that I do not see the presidential election as a presidential race between two men. I see it as a race of two men against Entropy, and Biden is going to end up winning, if only because Trump is going that much more senile, that much more clearly, and that much more quickly.
What surprised me was when my uncle confessed that he’d talked to a lot of his friends in the Republican Party, and their general concern was that Trump wasn’t electable.
But I guess it stands to reason, given that Biden is merely old by anybody’s standards, yet still functional for an 81-year old, whereas the Sundown Clown goes “Bingbongbingbangbing” and calls that a speech.
And really, in a rational universe, Trump would not be electable, but he DID get elected at least once, because just enough people in just enough states wanted him. And people like me have joked that even if he died, the Republican Party would try to stage some “Weekend at Bernie’s” scenario to prop up his corpse, cause they’ve really got nothing better. Which seems to be what they were doing last week.
On February 28, the Samuel Alito Supreme Court announced, after waiting over three weeks from the DC Circuit Court panel decision that Trump does not have “absolute immunity” from prosecution, that they are in fact going to hear his appeal even after most people thought the point was pretty well decided. If only because Ford had to pardon Nixon, implying he was still eligible for prosecution after leaving office. And the Alito Court decided that they weren’t going to start hearing oral arguments on that case until April 22, almost two months from now. This necessarily means that the prosecution on the insurrection case for a trial originally scheduled for March 4 must wait. Now on one hand, “average” length of the process means a ruling before the end of spring or maybe the summer. On the other hand, that means that you’ve put off the date for existing proceedings until then and they may take months to reach a verdict, as Trump’s New York fraud case did. And he could still appeal. And it’s not like SCOTUS needed to grant certiorari on this case, given that the DC Court had pretty decisively shot down the argument that “the president can do anything he wants, cause he’s the president”, which is Trump’s evidence for his pre-existing belief that “Donald Trump can do anything he wants, cause he’s Donald Trump.”
As Bill Maher put it on March 1, Trump’s lawyers are planning to drag it out so that none of these cases can be decided before this election. And by his lawyers, we mean the Supreme Court.
But even so, I think scaredy-cat liberals in the mainstream media are so unconfident in their candidate that they were pinning all their hopes on the courts somehow disqualifying Trump, especially since polls indicate a lot of his (non-MAGA) Republican voters have indicated that they wouldn’t vote for Trump if he got convicted on anything.
First off, you really think that the Republican Party, which has seen Trump cross every line up to this point, wouldn’t goosestep behind him as he crosses the next one? Please keep in mind, cause it seems like the media isn’t, that not only is he found guilty of epic levels of fraud counting for about half a billion in damages, HE WAS FOUND GUILTY OF SEXUAL ASSAULT. And as far as the polls tell us, if you can believe them, Trump could still win this.
And if he can’t win as it is now, think of how agitated his fan club that calls itself a political party would be if he did get convicted in criminal court. The Challenged Caligula would just stretch out his arms on the cross and play Orange Jesus and wail to his followers to save the big, rough, tough, independently wealthy strongman from the consequences of his own incompetence and immorality.
No, if you were going to go the route of disqualifying Trump, the time for that was already over by the time he announced his 2024 campaign. Which goes to what I said on Facebook when I heard the news from SCOTUS: You would think that everybody who has observed Trump, not just as a politician, but in his business career, would know that his standard legal defense is Delay, Delay, Delay, wear out the plaintiff, wear out the prosecution, make the verdict irrelevant even if it goes against him.You would think that prosecutors and judges would realize that he would do this in the event of criminal trial, for instance if he tried to assassinate his own Vice President for not assisting in a coup. And therefore given his legal right to do so it is imperative that if you are going to make a case against him on those grounds, that you charge Trump with insurrection and a coup THE GODDAMN DAY he leaves office or failing that THE GODDAMN DAY a new Attorney General is appointed to DOJ so that any necessary defense action (not to mention the unnecessary Delay, Delay, Delay) would not extend past the next election cycle.
Ergo, if you were, say, the Attorney General, or the Supreme Court, and you know Trump is going to Delay, Delay, Delay, (knowing that Trump is not contesting the merit of the charges so much as dragging things out in the hopes that he will win the election, or failing that to have it ruled in his favor by, I dunno, THE SUPREME COURT) any unnecessary permission for such tactics might not be a good faith attempt to protect a defendant’s legal rights but active assistance to Trump’s bad faith strategy to avoid justice for blatant crimes.
To go over, the presidential immunity argument was already well summed up when one of the DC Court justices got Trump’s attorney to admit that by their lights, Trump could use Seal Team Six to assassinate one of his political opponents, and there would be no recourse except for him to be impeached and convicted in the Senate, which is never going to happen. By this standard, the courts cannot rule against Trump. So all of the mainstream media’s experts have been telling us that SCOTUS will not actually rule that Trump’s position is valid, if only because it will make their own jobs obsolete, but then, these experts also said the Court would not decide to hear the case.
I’m thinking I should send the six conservative Supreme Court justices – and Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell – each an individual copy of William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of The Third Reich. It’s a historical study of what happens when an aristocratic elite decides to enable a deranged racist demagogue to gain absolute power, on the rationale that once he’s destroyed the rule of law, they’ll be able to control him.
And I mention McConnell because also last week, Mitch “the Bitch” announced that he was no longer going to be leading the Senate Republicans after the November elections. On one level, it is an acknowledgement that the Party of Putin has turned against him and he no longer has the influence on his peers that he once did. But I think it also indicates, as with Paul Ryan, who left a seat that he could have easily been re-elected to, that there’s no point in being in Congress without your party in charge, and McConnell sees that between November and the end of what seems to be his last term, his party won’t be the Senate majority.
But given how all these little “conservative” events seem to coordinate, it might also be a case of McConnell stepping down because he knows his work is done.
Several analyses this week have gone over the course of McConnell’s latter-day career as leader. Under a Republican president, his only real legislative accomplishment was Ryan’s tax cut for corporations and upper brackets (which also eliminated tax breaks for lower income levels and high-tax states). What McConnell did do was to use his power as Senate Majority Leader to hold up legislation that ultimately might have passed, simply by controlling the agenda and keeping it from coming to the floor, in the same way that House Speaker Mike Johnson is now holding up a Ukraine aid package that would easily pass with Republican support, despite Trumpnik opposition.
Which also indicates that McConnell could well have engineered a consensus to support Democrats in the second Trump impeachment trial, given that seven Republican Senators ultimately did vote to convict. He chose not to do so.
And of course McConnell also created an extra-constitutional power to act as a one-man veto against a president’s Supreme Court nominations by not letting Merritt Garland’s nomination on the Senate floor, citing the American people’s need to decide the matter in an election year. (They did, Mitch, which is why Barack Obama was president at the time of the opening, and not Mitt Romney.) Then, as early voting was proceeding for the 2020 election, Ruth Bader Ginsburg died and McConnell and his Republican cronies frantically maneuvered to get Amy Comey Barrett appointed as her replacement, even at the risk of exposing each other to coronavirus. Because, it was thought by many, the election might need to be decided by the Supreme Court, and even with an existing 5-3 “conservative” majority, Chief Justice John Roberts was thought to be too squishy.
All the while, McConnell facilitated appointments of judges to lower courts who will also rule for decades without being subject to vote. And since the appointment of Barrett and the end of the Trump Organization in Washington, the Supreme Court has made it clear that there is no such thing as stare decisis or “settled law” if it gets in the way of the ideological agenda. The law is what they say it is.
Which might explain why the Alito Court would be willing to entertain a case that would destroy their own authority, just as long as they keep their seats and the privileges of power. It’s been the Republican model up to now.
Cause at this year’s CPAC – which now stands for Cucked Putin Admirers’ Conference – speakers like Jack Posobiec openly bragged that they were trying to end democracy. Which is itself a tacit admission that they don’t have the country on their side, cause if they could reliably get more votes than the Democrats, they wouldn’t need to destroy the system. The CPAC motto this year was “Where Socialism Goes To Die.” Yes. “Conservatives” are getting rid of socialism and replacing it with a new system. One where only one party gets to run the government, only one party has a say in anything, and that one party is run by one man, and that one man gets to say what can be told by the press, what businesses are allowed to sell, what schools are allowed to teach, what people are allowed to read, who people are allowed to marry, and indeed, whether or not you get to live or die.
Y’know, I think there was a word for this in political theory, but I guess “conservatives” killed it.
You know what a conservative is? A conservative is a guy who owns a bank. A conservative is the police commissioner who is friends with the guy who owns the bank. A conservative is the security guard who is hired by the bank owner to protect the bank. A conservative is somebody who realizes everybody has to work together in the system, if only for his own benefit.
Donald Trump is the guy who robs the bank. Donald Trump is the guy who shoots the security guard, or has his henchmen do it. Donald Trump wants to loot the system that supports him for as much as he can, and doesn’t care if he destroys it in the process, as long as he gets his money now. And when he does it, he smirks to his fan club, and brays, “I’m robbing the bank FOR YOU. I’m doing crime FOR YOU.” And because a lot of these people have been, or think they have been, ripped off by banks, they cheer him on. Never mind that THEY ain’t gonna see a red cent of that money. Some of which may be from their deposits. Because their identity fusion is so complete that if Trump is screwing The Man, then they’re happy.
The difference being that with John Dillinger or Bonnie and Clyde, no matter how much street cred they had, they weren’t going to rob a bank, come right outside the bank and stage a press conference then walk away scot free after hollering and whining that it is mean, unfair and politically biased to prosecute them for blatant crimes that would get anyone else in jail.
If anything the bias is what’s kept Trump out of jail. And that’s the joke. He wouldn’t be getting so many breaks from “the system” if the system didn’t want him. Because someone – the courts, Congress, and yes, even our horse-race media – have always had some reason to let him go and keep doing crimes, because someone always saw some advantage in keeping things on this track even if Trump’s personality means he could turn on them at any moment.
The only thing that has ever stopped Trump and his Party of enablers is a pissed-off American public going to the polls and saying: NO MORE.
The problem is that 2020 wasn’t enough. Because as Jon Stewart said, upholding democracy – as in, public participation in the system – is a lunchpail fucking job, day in and day out, and it never ends. This year we don’t just need to say ‘no more’ to the Republicans, but to this entire government. This election is just the start. We need to start pressing on actions that make this government child-proof.
If putting the Supreme Court under the same ethics guidelines as every other level of the judiciary was not a campaign issue before, it needs to be now.
If appointing more Supreme Court justices (if only to match the 13 Districts) was not a campaign issue before, it needs to be now.
If requiring term limits for the Supreme Court- and probably Congress- was not a campaign issue this year, it needs to be now.
If establishing what constitutes insurrection and how that standard is to be enforced was not a campaign issue this year, it NEEDS to be now.
And if there is any one concrete step to take in this regard, it is to do what California has already done and Nevada is proposing to do on its general election ballot, and make the “primary” a bipartisan contest that really serves as the elimination round for a general election, because otherwise, as we have seen in the Nevada caucuses, the fix is in, and the result is simply the party apparatus forcing their candidate on the national convention no matter how big the plurality is against them and no matter how politically incompetent they are and how unpopular they are heading to the general election. That was what happened to Clinton in 2016, and it may be happening to Trump now. Cause if his Party is stacked to make sure he wins, and there’s no chance for Nikki Haley, why are people still going to state contests and giving her over 20 percent of the vote?
You can’t really get rid of political parties, but you can remove the incentives from the system that incentivize hacks, demagogues and crazies.
To do otherwise is to witness, and ultimately assist, the death spiral of the American experiment.
You know who the enemy is.
You know what they want, and how they plan to get it.
The only one who can stop them is you.