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Election 2020

Law Students Call For Hawley and Cruz To Be Barred From Practicing Law

11 January 2021

The fallout from the white supremacist terrorist attack on the Senate continues.  By now unless you have been living on Mars for a week you’ve seen the shocking images, watched the news and/or read on line about the assault on our nation’s capital  on 1/6/21.

All major news sources have chronicled the events that resulted in the deaths of five people including two Capitol Police officers who would still be alive were it not for this insurrection.  There is enough blame to go around and too many people deserving of it.  At the top, of course is the inciter-in-chief Donald J. Trump, the President of the United States.  But next in line (ignore for the moment McConnell, Graham, Fox News and other day-one Trump enablers) are two Senators:  Josh Hawley (R-MO) and Ted Cruz (R-TX).  Read about the role these fascists played in the attack on Democracy here and here.

Hawley and Cruz have defiantly withstood public condemnation, the outrage (some of it fake) by their peers, and the censure of supporters, mentors and donors.  Their luck may have run out though.  A group of law school students collected 4,000 signatures within 48 hours of students, faculty and alumni to bar Hawley and Cruz from practicing law.  Forever.  Read about the petition here,and here.

I agree.

Hawley and Cruz took this Oath of Office for the Senate:

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Another One Bites The Dust

2 January 2021

Depending on who you talk to this is number 90 in a long string of legal defeats for Trump and his desperate attempt to overturn the election.  As legal arguments go, this has to be the most spurious and is, without a doubt, the most dangerous.

The yahoo from Texas, Louis Gohmert (pronounced “Gomer” as in Gomer Pyle but with a “t” on the end) filed a suit alleging Pence has extraordinary powers to shred votes for President.   According to Gohmert. Pence has the power to pick the next President!

Now I am not a constitutional scholar but I can read.  The 12th Amendment to the Constitution says:

“The President of the Senate shall, in the presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the certificates and the votes shall then be counted;—The person having the greatest number of votes for President, shall be the President…”

The “votes” to be counted are those of the 538 electors in the Electoral College not the popular vote.  The “President of the Senate” is the Vice President, in this case Pence.  Nothing in the language above suggests that counting the electoral votes certified by each State includes the right to not count, reject or alter electoral votes.  And yet this is exactly what Trump through his proxy Gohmert argues in the suit.

To underscore the lunacy of this argument lets reduce it to its basest terms.  Under this argument, Pence could declare himself (and Trump as the President) the winner of the 2020 election.  This would be so even if all 538 electoral votes had been cast for Biden.  The Oscar’s letter opener for best picture could substitute the picture he favors for the Academy’s choice.

I am in jaw-dropped awe at the audacity of these desperadoes.  Gohmert will be paid in cash or in kind for his role as proxy.  He’s from Texas so he’ll be hailed as another hero of the Confederacy.  Pence is between a rock and a hard place.  He can read his lines in this sh*t show as written for him by Trump and sacrifice his political ambitions to a failed coup attempt.  Or he can open the envelope and announce Biden as the winner and incur the wrath of Trump and his base.  A wrath that given Trump’s hold over the GOP and its finances could also sink his career.   And there’s the threat oof violence  and intimidation tactics of the far right and conspiracy lunatics that will surely follow if he deviates from Trump’s script.  Trump has nothing to lose.  He sacrifice’s nothing for a chance, however remote, to stay in office.

It is clear that these miscreants don’t give a hoot about the Constitution, democratic norms like the peaceful transition of power or the stability of our country. In fact they are actively engaged in the destabilization of America.  What I cannot understand though is the fact that lawyers are allowed to file endless motions based on the flimsiest of legal arguments with zero consequences.  Without so much as a shrug from the American Bar Association whose mission is to maintain and enforce standards and protect the rule of law.  If there were any real consequences like suspension or sanction for filing these beyond frivolous lawsuits, the courts would not be flooded with them.   Is there no end to the failures of the institutions and organizations that should be bulwarks against  fascism but are instead allies?

 

What Next, Emperor Trump?

25 December 2020
Vice President Pence
Vice President Mike Pence

In the final hours of his reign Emperor Trump and his scorched earth squad of shysters and sycophants is looking to Pence to save the day.  The Washington Post explains how this hail mary works.

Somewhat disingenuously the opinion piece appeals to Pence to choose truth over Trump and right the wrongs he had a hand in inflicting these past four years.

A slavish willingness to massage Trump’s ego at the expense of the American people has defined Pence from day one.

At its best it is woefully (and willfully) naive and at its worse an exercise in sophistry to even entertain that Pence will find the conscience or the courage in this eleventh hour to serve our country with honor.  Flexible, if not nonexistent, morals, a callous disregard for the rule of law, a fanatical belief in your own infallibility and zero patriotism were prerequisites for his position.  A slavish willingness to massage Trump’s ego at the expense of the American people has defined Pence from day one.  He has been an active participant in Trump’s destruction of the democratic principles that defined our nation.  He too has lied and schemed in the service of Emperor Trump.  Whatever his motivation (which matters not one wit) he too will live on in infamy.

 

The Devil You Know (Trump) Or Biden?

15 September 2020

Since Woodward’s expose Rage and The Atlantic report that Trump called our fallen and injured soldiers suckers and losers, there’s a new strategy in play among the more literate of Trump’s supporters.  I call this strategy revisionist apologetics.  Here’s the latest example courtesy of a fellow of the American Enterprise Institute.

The new strategy has two elements.  First, acknowledge Trump’s deficiencies but cast them as character flaws/personality defects.   Trump’s racism, fascism, greed, amorality, etc. are troubling but not disqualifying flaws.  For example, serial lying  is recast as a propensity for exaggeration or hyperbole.

Having tried many different ways to attack Biden, the Trump machine has apparently decided on Biden as Bolshevik.

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Trump Lied about CoVID and Brags About Saving The Saudi Crown Prince From The U.S.

10 September 2020

Journalist Bob Woodward, of Watergate fame, conducted more than 18 hours of interviews with Donald Trump, 16 hours of which were taped.  Yesterday he released a tape recorded in February in which  Trump talks about how deadly CoVID-19 is.  He admits on tape that he intentionally downplayed the danger of the virus with the American people.  Tens of thousands of Americans died because Trump chose to deceive us about how contagious and how deadly CoVID was although he had been told so by the intelligence community and the Chinese.  He also admits on tape that the virus was dangerous to children not just to old people.  This is the complete opposite of  what he has been telling parents, teachers and state and local governments to pressure them to reopen schools.   The tapes and the interviews are the basis for Rage, a new book by Woodward to be released next week.

But before I could blog about the CoVID reveal, Woodward drops another mic from from his book.   Trump brags to Woodward that he saved Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, from suffering the consequences of kidnapping and dismembering a Washington Post journalist and outspoken critic of the Saudi regime living in the U.S (more here).  Trump is pounding his chest because he literally helped MBS get away with murder.  He saved MBS from guess who? US!   Read more about the murder of Khashoggi.

These reveals, as numerous as Scheherazade’s tales, do not move Trump’s white supremacists base. They do not faze Republican congressmen except for Mitt Romney.  They do not influence people serving in the White House to  suddenly find their patriotism and become part of the resistance.  They won’t change a single vote of those still wearing a red hat at this point.  And sadly, they won’t move anyone still “undecided” after 3 1/2 years of Trump’s kleptocracy, 180,000 dead, storm troopers in the street, corruption, civil strife, Russian bounties on our soldiers and three hundred more scandals and outrages.   No, the significance of these tell-all books and articles is in their shock value.  Every time you think that Trump cannot outrage us further, that Trump cannot go any lower, that Trump cannot do anything more despicable, he does.   And here you have proof.

Trump is an extinction-level event, a comet of chaos and divisiveness, rapidly bearing down on us.  Like an ELE there’s nothing on the other side of the election for us if we don’t eliminate the threat his presidency poses to the survival of our democracy.  Anything we say, anything we do that is not in service of that is disingenuous, or wholly complicit.

#VoteBidenHarrisToSaveAmerica in numbers so large that Trump does not get within cheating distance of another term.