Month: May 2024

May 30 is a new national holiday in America:
Fuck Trump Day.

Donald Trump, former Viceroy of Russian North America, on May 30, 2024 anno domini, was found guilty of all 34 criminal charges against him in a New York court. Politico:

“Just minutes before jurors revealed they had reached a decision, Merchan was preparing to send them home for the day with instructions to come back in the morning to continue deliberating. Trump appeared jovial, his allies predicting that the lengthening deliberation might signify a real battle in the jury room.

But then the judge announced that the jury had given him a note. They had reached a verdict and were in the process of filling out the verdict form.

In an instant, the smiling stopped, a smattering of gasps could be heard, and then a heavy silence filled the room. Reporters who had been packing their bags jolted upright and waited in agonizing suspense for the jury to enter the room.”

Oh, frabjous day! Callou, callay!

He chortled in his joy.

Now I know the various monsignors and cardinals in the Church of Trump have been directed to spread the dogma that this makes Trump a “political prisoner.” Well, so was the Marquis de Sade, and at least he could write books. I’m sure all the good little Trumpniks are gonna tell us the trial was “Rigged” and “STOLLEN.” Here’s at least two things to consider in regard to how the American justice system actually works, at least unless Trump gets re-elected:

One, this is a common-law system of justice in this country, where a criminal defendant has a presumption of innocence, largely because the balance between the government and one individual is necessarily unequal, no matter how much money or power the defendant has. Thus, knowing that this is necessarily the case, the English-speaking world has decided that the defendant must have factors in their favor.

Second, related to the first, is the jury system. I am not going to debate the validity of the premise of “jury nullification”, but it is always possible for a juror in any case to simply hold out and prevent a unanimous verdict against the defendant, which would ultimately lead to a mistrial that would not acquit the defendant, which could lead to a retrial but in this particular case that might have not been practical, especially if it dragged out past November, Trump got re-elected and he sent a CIA hit squad to kill Attorney General Alvin Bragg. Which he could do, if you believe his lawyers at the Supreme Court.

The verdict only ended up taking less than two full court days before deliberation, and that much time probably because there were 34 charges, which was only possible because Trump committed that many crimes. The fact that he got convicted on all charges, with no exceptions, that quickly, just confirms the immortal verdict of Mark Slackmeyer: “That’s guilty! Guilty, Guilty, GUILTY!!!”

I mean, never mind that Trump is right in that there is a two-tiered justice system in that not only does it cater to people who have money and power, it does so in his case to a truly ridiculous degree. The Sackler family has real money and power, and they didn’t get to jerk the system around as much as Trump does. As with OJ Simpson, when you’re a star, they let you do it.

Which right there is why, all the Mainstream Media whining aside, it was a good thing not to have live cameras in the court.

Since no one was able to play to the cameras and try a court case in the realm of public opinion, everyone had to focus on the facts, and that is never good for Trump. The premise, from the start, was, if what Michael Cohen did (paying Stormy Daniels to not reveal an affair with Trump during the 2016 election, thus committing election fraud, and then covering up the event and his payoff thereafter) was a crime that deserved a prison sentence, why was it not a crime for Trump, who ordered the actions?

The prosecution started with National Enquirer publisher David Pecker, who like a couple other people might be described as a hostile witness – he was still fond of Trump, but told what he knew. Specifically, Pecker confirmed that it was the business of his company to publish stories about embarrassing celebrity scandals, such as with Arnold Schwarzenegger’s affairs, and also worked on Trump’s behalf to release negative stories about political rivals like Ben Carson and Ted Cruz. But when presented with the real gold mine of Trump’s sex scandals, Pecker deliberately took a financial hit to squelch them, not just out of friendship with Trump, but to help him win his election campaign (NOT to protect the feelings of Trump’s wife, given that nobody cared if the information came out after the election). Hope Hicks, another close friend of Trump, gave her assessment that Michael Cohen wasn’t the kind of guy who would just pay Trump’s paramour money from his own pocket without compensation, out of the goodness of his heart and without recognition. Which led to the testimony of Cohen himself, which was necessary because he was the only witness who could establish that Trump paid Cohen to pay Daniels and approved the scheme to reimburse Cohen in such a way that it would square with his taxes. (The only other potential witness who could corroborate this being Trump financial officer Allen Weisselberg, who is in prison on other fraud charges and even less credible.)

So after the defense challenged Cohen’s credibility, saying for instance that he misrepresented the nature of a phone call to Trump’s aide, prosecutors showed a photo of aide Keith Schiller with Trump just before the phone call was transcribed, demonstrating that Cohen could have had Schiller bring Trump to the phone at the same time. Then, after the prosecution rested, the defense brought one fact witness and the only other defense witness, Robert Costello, a lawyer who previously advised Cohen and had sought to represent himself as Cohen’s attorney in proceedings after the 2016 election. And this guy Costello started off by muttering contemptuous statements in testimony and then saying “strike” when challenged by Judge Juan Merchan, when only a judge can strike testimony and only the lawyer on the floor can withdraw his own question, not the testimony of a witness. (You would think an attorney would know that.) Then the next day in cross-examination, prosecutors entered evidence of conversations where Costello was acting with other members of the Trump team to keep Cohen from revealing what he knew after the election.

“Our issue is to get Cohen on the right page without giving him the appearance that we are following instructions from Giuliani or the president,” Costello wrote in one 2018 email, referencing Trump and the then-president’s close aide Rudy Giuliani.” Thus giving further evidence to the assertion that this whole thing was a coverup of a crime, not simply “hush money” over a consensual affair, and that Trump committed the acts knowingly and willingly.

In one-and-a-half days of testimony, Costello was a better witness for the prosecution than Michael Cohen was in three days.

But that’s what you would expect, because Trump doesn’t hire attorneys to be attorneys. An attorney would counsel the client on his best interests and run the case in that regard, trying to appeal to the judge and jury. Trump hires attorneys to be his legal mouthpieces and say the belligerent stuff in court that he says outside the court, only with the official veneer of a law license. That’s why defense attorney Todd Blanche theatrically accused Cohen of lying – allowing a redirect that affirmed the prosecution’s position – and why the defense called Costello, who was only there to denigrate Cohen, the judge and the process, and also prompted a cross-examination that further confirmed the prosecutors’ case. Certainly a real defense team would have counseled Trump not to spend so much time sleeping in court, which he had done so consistently that it came off as a power move to show contempt for the trial, not to mention the judge and the jury who had to be there. Maybe that explains why just before the verdict, Trump whined that he didn’t know what the charges were. Well, Donnie, maybe if you’d been awake for any of that you would know. Of course it doesn’t help that you’re a natural simpleton who’s going senile on top of that.

Now that the jury is dismissed, Judge Merchan set a sentencing date for July 11, one week after Independence Day and just four days before the Republican National Convention, where Trump is the presumptive presidential nominee. So of course his attorneys are whining for a delay in the sentencing hearing so that the convicted felon’s schedule will not be interrupted. But it’s not like Trump is actually going to go to prison yet even if he is given that sentence, since he has the right to appeal. And some people, a few of whom are actually credible, thought that there were serious issues with the prosecution’s case, and that Trump has grounds for appeal.

Now as has been pointed out, Trump can still run for president and win, even if he’s sent to prison. This is actually a good thing. As I have said elsewhere, if this were a real dictatorship or one-party regime – like the countries Trump emulates – the party in charge could slap criminal charges on an opposition candidate who threatens to win, and simply eliminate the problem that way. It’s what Putin always does and what they did in Brazil to Lula da Silva, among other examples. Plus, if this country, including the various power elites that have been propping Trump up all this time, are still going to elect Trump after all THIS, frankly, this country will have failed the Darwin Test and won’t deserve to exist.

But, in the meantime, we have a new national holiday. Next May 30, I want to celebrate by having a party with lots of hamburgers, KFC and Diet Coke. Unless Trump actually does win re-election, in which case I will either be dead, eating prison food, or underground, eating rats.

Supreme Court Chief Justice Samuel Alito has had a rough month.

On May 16, the New York Times published an article detailing how in January 2021, an upside down US flag was flown at the household of Alito and his wife, in the wake of a pro-Donald Trump attack on the US Capitol to stop the confirmation of the Electoral College vote, an attack in which several protestors carried not only white nationalist flags and Confederate flags but the upside down US flag. This week another NYT article detailed how one of Alito’s other homes had flown an “Appeal to Heaven” or Pine Tree Flag during the summer of 2023, a flag that is also used by Christian nationalists and is presented outside the office of current House Speaker Mike Johnson (BR.- Moscow Oblast).

Now the upside-down flag, like the Gadsden Flag, was in past times used by left-wing Vietnam-era protestors, not to mention libertarians, but nowadays they have been co-opted by the “freedom lovers” who think that slavery is okay as long as it’s to Trump, or Putin.

More immediately, Alito, and the rest of the conservatives on the Court, continued to show a consistent pattern this week with the Thursday decision on Alexander vs. South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP, ruling in favor of the South Carolina government’s redistricting of state territory to dilute black majority neighborhood votes and increase the Republican majority in coastal districts. Alito, who wrote the opinion, stated that the lower court ruling that “race predominated in the design of District I in the Enacted Plan was clearly erroneous” and that in keeping with prior decisions, even if partisan gerrymandering violates the Constitution, it presents political questions beyond the federal court system to decide, and since this is (apparently) not a race-based gerrymander, the Supreme Court cannot interfere.

Begging the question, why is that any more fair or why there should be any mandate to restrict the votes of any community, racially comprised or not. It would be just as arbitrary to restrict the votes of a white community composed of Masons, Seventh-Day Adventists or Star Trek fans, and I’m sure that if such a case ever went to the courts, judges would dismiss it as ridiculous. But when it comes to restricting the votes of one of our only two “real” parties, and one that happens to be the predominant choice of a racial minority, somehow that’s okay.

And Clarence Thomas, as he does, went on to say the quiet part really loud. In his concurrence Thomas went farther than Alito, who seemed at pains to disassociate the abstraction of the legislation from its racial impact, to say that Brown vs. Board of Education was “a boundless view of equitable remedies” and ought to be reviewed.

As I said earlier, “In the Dobbs case, Justice Samuel Alito decided that the Fourteenth Amendment due process standard did not apply in the case of abortion and that there had been no legal precedents or language in the original Constitution allowing it. Now, while many right-wingers have objected that the result of Roe v. Wade created a federal standard when the abortion issue should have been left to the states, Alito’s position blanks out the point that we had a Fourteenth Amendment in the first place because we already tried leaving the issue of slavery up to the states and that didn’t work out. Which brings up the relevant point that if the Reconstruction Amendments were meant to correct an institutional racism that had more precedent in American law than the standard going forward, and Alito has decided that these amendments do not apply to women because there was no previous historical standard protecting abortion rights, then there’s all kinds of things they don’t have to apply to.”

It would be one thing if the Alito Court were cutting away New Deal precedents and “penumbras” of a “living document” that aren’t actually stated in legislation or constitutional amendments, but as we can see in Dobbs and several other cases (including the 14^th Amendment question of whether an insurrectionist can run for president or whether a president can be made immune to any prosecution, despite all precedent), SCOTUS is ignoring not only the spirit but the actual words of the laws. And not laws from FDR or LBJ eras, but laws created in the 19^th Century. Back when the anti-slavery party was Republican.

That leads into the whole matter of creating presidential immunity, and one would think that even Thomas and Alito wouldn’t create a presidency that is effectively above them and would make their own jobs obsolete, but Alito in particular seems besotted with the idea that the laws don’t count if they go against Trump. What small costs are dignity, independence and the protection of laws compared to the chance to serve at the feet of our eternal Lord and Master, and bask in the radiance of His supernaturally bronze skin?

The real problem is that with a president or legislator you could try to correct such malfeasance by kicking them out of office, but you can’t do that with a Supreme Court Justice, and the contempt of Alito in his recent behavior is that he is acting precisely in awareness of this. This is why every other major office in the Constitution is subject to election and even local judges are normally elected by the public in limited terms, as opposed to being a monarchy or College of Cardinals. But, we have decided that such a judiciary is necessary in order to be above partisanship. The problem arises when the justices are appointed by partisan politicians to serve partisan ends and Republicans in particular start court processes in preference to their own legislation because they aren’t subject to popular vote.

That being the case Democrats are weighing their options. Thomas and Alito are not going to recuse themselves on anything, and given that the Charleston decision was 6 votes against three liberal dissents, it wouldn’t matter if only the two most obviously corrupt justices were taken out. It has been suggested in the wake of Alito’s partisanship that at least one house of Congress call the justices for testimony on their decisions, apparently on the assumption that the liberals will do so even if the conservatives refuse. That’s a good idea, but I have an idea that’s a little more… provocative.

Recently I also said that we need to call Trump’s – and Alito’s – bluff on the matter of presidential immunity. “Common sense (which granted seems to be in short supply at the Alito Court) indicates that the ruling doesn’t apply to just Trump. Ask these people if all these hypotheticals they are blithely discussing would apply in the abstract to Joe Biden. … Could Joe Biden, the day after presidential immunity was created by SCOTUS, then immediately declare Dobbs v. Mississippi to be null and void and sign an executive order making the previous Roe v. Wade standard nationwide again?”

Why wait?

I think President Biden should sign an executive order now to do what his party is talking about and federalize the provisions of Roe v. Wade, specifically that abortion is legal up to the point of “quickening” or fetal viability, and have that enforced nationwide by the Justice Department.

Because for one thing, that would oblige the Alito Court to make a decision.

As I also said: “Because even if nobody in this case is arguing that the President’s authority allows him to destroy the balance of powers and nullify a SCOTUS ruling, what would THEY be able to do about it, if they themselves have declared that anything the president does cannot be prosecuted (short of impeachment and removal from office, which would require a two-thirds vote of the Senate, including Democrats, meaning, IT’S NEVER GOING TO HAPPEN), just as long as he says the two magic words “official act“, which will strike him with a lightning bolt and give him superpowers?”

That is in fact the situation right now. If, even prior to Alito ruling in favor of Trump’s position (which of course he is not going to unless the election ends up in Trump’s favor) the current president takes a pen and wipes out Alito’s (and Trump’s) main judicial legacy, what alternative is there except to press an impeachment? I’m sure that Johnson’s House would be glad to do so as everyone forgets for a moment how much they all hate Marjorie Taylor, Matt Gaetz and Mike Johnson. But again, impeachment is never going to work because it requires two-thirds of the Senate to convict, it is currently 51-49 Democrat, and that means Republicans would need to pull away 18 Democrats – over one-third of the delegation – to vote against their President on an issue that they have been wedded to ever since Dobbs.

What other way would there be except to rule that the President IS subject to law and there ARE other legal means to stop him from going too far?

And let me be clear: That WOULD be going too far. To act directly against a Court ruling would not only be to overrule the prerogatives of the judiciary but the prerogatives of the legislature, which as conservatives have told us should have made the standard on federal abortion rights in the first place, as opposed to SCOTUS “legislating from the bench” in Roe. That is for one thing why Democrats are talking about creating federal legislation to that effect as opposed to going to a Court that is not theirs and that they will not soon be able to get back.

Which is why Biden’s executive order should also come with a detail.

It should be time-limited to apply only through the date December 31, 2024, since everybody knows that if Donald Trump gets re-elected he can immediately reverse the order. There would also be a gap between January 1, 2025 and the inauguration on January 20, so if Democrats care about making this work they need to not only re-elect Joe Biden but make damn sure that Trump and his Meal Team Six can’t try again to do what they did on 2021. For one thing I presume Biden will not be making sure that local law enforcement and Capitol Police are suspiciously without reinforcement on January 6.

So that, if the Democrats want this override to actually last, they need to do the constitutional thing and draft that legislation, and have it ready to go by the time of the Democratic National Convention and campaign on it. Oh, and while they’re at it, they should draft legislation mandating that the Supreme Court is under the same ethics codes as lower courts, and expanding SCOTUS to 13 members (one for each District) AND giving them term limits. And campaign on THAT.

(Incidentally, this would also call the Democrats‘ bluff and force them to address the issue seriously, rather than keeping it as a political football the way Republicans did with their constituents for years before Dobbs.)

Put this Court on the ballot. Because whether anyone admits it or not, it already is.

The last time a president (a Democrat) seriously tried a court-packing scheme to change a hostile Court, it was widely considered a failure. After the Supreme Court ruled several times against Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal bills, in 1937, Roosevelt supported a Judicial Procedures Reform Act. This would have allowed the President to appoint one new Justice to the Court for every current member who was over the age of 70, and at that time, that would have been six more Justices. This was rightfully seen as court-packing and obviously intended to achieve a partisan result, and the legislation died on the vine as even Democrats went against their president on the matter. But the joke is that the proposal failed, but not really. Shortly after the proposal, the Supreme Court ruled for the liberal position on West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish with a 5-4 margin as Justice Owen Roberts, who had ruled often against the liberals, agreeing with a Washington state law establishing a minimum wage. Popular wisdom called this “the switch in time that saved nine” although deliberations on the case had been made before FDR’s court-packing scheme. “Chief Justice Hughes wrote in his autobiographical notes that Roosevelt’s court reform proposal ‘had not the slightest effect on our [the court’s] decision’, but due to the delayed announcement of its decision the Court was characterized as retreating under fire. Roosevelt also believed that because of the overwhelming support that had been shown for the New Deal in his re-election, Hughes was able to persuade Roberts to no longer base his votes on his own political beliefs and side with him during future votes on New Deal related policies. In one of his notes from 1936, Hughes wrote that Roosevelt’s re-election forced the court to depart from ‘its fortress in public opinion’.” This also meant that such radical legislation as Roosevelt proposed was really not necessary.

That also meant that those justices, such as Willis Van Devanter, who wanted to retire did so without the expectation that they would be replaced by a conservative, and over the years FDR managed to make additional appointments that created a friendlier Supreme Court. Of course, part of this was because he had the time to do so. Roosevelt was elected four times, against the previously unwritten tradition that a president would only serve two terms, and died in 1945, very old and frail, shortly after his last re-election. And after his death, largely Republican-sponsored legislation quickly led to the Twenty-Second Amendment to the Constitution, specifying that no person can be elected President more than twice or in any event serve more than ten years including time as acting President. In the Wikipedia article on the Amendment, it was noted that the founding presidents felt a two-term limit to be practical considering the factors of time and aging, with Thomas Jefferson writing in an address, “If some termination to the services of the chief magistrate be not fixed by the Constitution, or supplied by practice, his office, nominally for years, will in fact, become for life; and history shows how easily that degenerates into an inheritance.”

The terms of the Supreme Court justices, like their number, and their code of ethics or lack thereof, are not set by the Court itself, all present conduct aside. They are traditionally set by Congress. The size of the Court was only set at nine after the Judiciary Act of 1869, and had previously been changed no less than six times in the nation’s history, usually for partisan reasons. As it is, two of Donald Trump’s three Supreme Court appointments were because of the deaths of Antonin Scalia, who had health conditions, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who was very old and frail. Ironically, FDR’s court-packing scheme failed because it was easily seen as an attempt to unbalance the American separation of powers, while the creation of presidential term limits directly after his death was deemed necessary to enforce a limit that previous men had been willing to enforce on themselves.

But now, frankly, it’s the other way around.

You’re at WAR, Democrats.

At some point, you should try shooting back.