Author: jamesgillen@yahoo.com

When the Way was lost there was virtue.

When virtue was lost there was benevolence.

When benevolence was lost there was right.

When right was lost there were the rituals.

The rituals are the wearing thin of loyalty and trustworthiness

And the harbinger of chaos.

• Lao Zi, Tao Te Ching

Saturday – 4/20 – the House of Representatives finally got to vote for Ukraine (and Israel, and Taiwan) after House Speaker Mike Johnson (BR.-Louisiana) suddenly changed his mind last week and decided to move the process through after holding up the Senate foreign aid bill for more than seven months. This required going over many in Johnson’s own Trumpnik party who oppose Ukraine aid at all costs, and many “progressives” who didn’t agree with Israel aid. It also meant that the various culture-war issues that Johnson was using as a pretext for holding up aid got agreed to by Republicans and centrist Democrats, such as a demand to have China remove its interest in the TikTok social media service.

Now the press seems to be forgetting that this move was actually Johnson’s last-ditch defense of the Trumpnik position: By separating the four proposals rather than just voting up or down on the Senate bill as is, he creates a situation where the House bill gets passed to the Senate when it was all that Democrats and hawk Republicans could do to stop the MRGA (Make Russia Great Again) contingent in the Senate from filibustering it. However, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer announced on Twit that the Senate has locked in an agreement to approve the bills on the first vote Tuesday. In other words: Fuck You, Rand Paul.

I’ve been looking over some of my favorite YouTube bloggers for their opinions. Jake Broe actually thought that the Israel lobby got to Johnson, namely because of how the politics shifted after Iran directly attacked Israel with missiles. Which makes sense. Because as we know, Johnson’s brinksmanship and infinite delays were not just starving out Ukraine, but Taiwan, which is threatened by China, and Israel, which is threatened not only by Hamas, but by Hamas’ patron (and Russia’s drone supplier) Iran. And whether or not Israel can survive without American aid (I suspect it can survive a lot better against Iran than Ukraine can survive against Russia), Israel aid has been one of the proverbial “third rails” of Congressional policy, for both parties, and it’s amazing – and telling what’s happened to the Republicans – that Johnson could flip off Israel as long as he did.

So hey, thanks, Worldwide Zionist Conspiracy!

But again, that raises the question of why things changed. It’s a little easier to guess why an increasingly young and “progressive” Democrat caucus is not as fond of Israel especially as the Netanyahu government has made it more brutal and corrupt. But with the Republicans, being brutal and corrupt are selling points. And the Evangelicals who form much of the Republican base have always supported Israel because in their eschatology, Israel has to be restored in order to bring about Armageddon, so that Jesus can come back and be President again.

What’s changed is that, as I say, if Donald Trump announced tomorrow that he is a woman undergoing the process of transition, then every Republican in Congress would fight to the death for a pair of rusty garden shears to be the first one to castrate himself on the grounds that masculinity is now “gay.”

And that gets to the point that Republicans are what I call “professional Christians.” Not in the theological sense that they profess to a certain creed, but in the sense that being a certain kind of Christian is their job. It’s how they make money. And if they quit having the political opinions that are associated with that sort of faith, they could get fired. And then not only would they lose all those free taxpayer goodies from working in Washington, they might have to work in fast food or customer service like the rest of us.

Needless to say, to avoid that they would rather do anything else, even if one has to twist the definition of “Christian” like a Mobius strip. For example, outside of Congress, there’s Bill Barr, Trump’s former attorney general, who might certainly be evil but still has a brain. He at least was capable of resigning before he could be asked to fulfill Trump’s more harebrained election-stopping schemes, and in the subsequent years he went on something of a rehabilitation tour telling everyone in the press what a rotten incompetent Trump is. But he has always said he would vote for the Republican candidate because Biden is so terrible, and last week he affirmed he would vote for “the Republican ticket” (not mentioning Trump) because a second term in office for President Joe Biden would be “national suicide.”

That is not morality. That is not even ideology. That is programming.

That is “run program, if x, execute y.” All that matters is, does the candidate have an R by his name? I’m voting for him. Do they have a D by their name? I can’t vote for them.

Presumably Catholics like Barr rationalize voting for such an un-Christian Leader because the Democrats endorse horrible policies like trans rights and abortion rights. Of course Catholics always have been against abortion, but the Southern Baptists who have been at the center of modern conservatism used to support some medical allowances for abortion, even after Roe v. Wade was decided. After 1980, the Southern Baptist conference refused to allow abortion in cases of rape, incest or mental trauma. This was of course about the time that the Religious Right developed as a real force in Republican politics. In In Thy Kingdom Come, Randall Balmer recounts comments that political consultant Paul Weyrich, whom he describes as “one of the architects of the Religious Right in the late 1970s”, made at a conference sponsored by a religious right organization that they both attended in Washington in 1990:

“In the course of one of the sessions, Weyrich tried to make a point to his Religious Right brethren (no women attended the conference, as I recall). Let’s remember, he said animatedly, that the Religious Right did not come together in response to the Roe decision. No, Weyrich insisted, what got us going as a political movement was the attempt on the part of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to rescind the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University because of its racially discriminatory policies.” According to a Politico article by Balmer, “Weyrich’s genius, however, lay in his understanding that racism — the defense of racial segregation — was not likely to energize grassroots evangelical voters. So he, Falwell and others deftly flipped the script. Instead of the Religious Right mobilizing in defense of segregation, evangelical leaders in the late 1970s decried government intrusion into their affairs as an assault on religious freedom, thereby writing a page for the modern Republican Party playbook, used shamelessly (later) in the Hobby Lobby and the Masterpiece Cakeshop cases. … I recall reading through Weyrich’s papers at the University of Wyoming in Laramie, and when I came across his correspondence following the 1978 midterm elections, the papers almost began to sizzle with excitement. He characterized the outcome as “true cause for celebration.” Weyrich had finally landed on an issue — abortion — that could mobilize grassroots evangelicals. Now, (Jerry) Falwell and other leaders of the Religious Right had a “respectable” issue, opposition to abortion, one that would energize white evangelicals — and, not incidentally, divert attention from the real origins of their movement.” In such a way white Evangelicals were able to create a “big tent” with the religious humanists of the Catholic Right, even though they agreed on little else but abortion prohibition: “In a reflection of their anxiety about linking their cause to the Republican Party or the New Christian Right, the nation’s Catholic bishops highlighted their opposition to the death penalty and their concern for the poor when discussing issues of concern in the 1980 election, while saying less about abortion than they had in the previous election cycle. The bishops’ desire to distance themselves from Reagan continued after the Republican’s election to the White House. While Jerry Falwell endorsed the president’s nuclear weapons buildup and his cuts in social programs, the National Conference of Catholic Bishops condemned these measures”.

It is such a movement that inspired not only Speaker Johnson’s previous loyalty to Trump but also the loyalty of Johnson’s current main opponent and fellow Republican Marjorie Taylor, Georgia Congresswoman and Troll Doll Animated By Witchcraft. Parroting the Russian line (only without the intelligence of a parrot), she opposes Ukraine as a Nazi state (run by a Jewish guy), says that Biden is trying to get this country into a war, even as Russia continues to threaten nuclear strikes against the West, and after Johnson’s flip last week announced no less than 22 riders on his set of bills, such as calling on Ukraine to shut down its “biolabs” (which do not exist), demanding that any Congressman who voted for Ukraine should be forced to join their military, demanding a “space laser” on the border (presumably to kill unarmed civilians trying to cross) and ordering that any aid given from the package either be rendered void or sent to other recipients. It’s what you call too clever by half, only without the clever part.

I mean, in previous decades when we used the term “useful idiots” for Russian partisans, it wasn’t quite so literal.

For the sake of being “pro-life”, partisans like Rand Paul, Marjorie Taylor and J.D. Vance are supporting a country that bombs Orthodox churches, that persecutes Evangelicals and Jehovah’s Witnesses and commits rape against victims as young as 4.

That is what The Party of Life is really supporting, kiddies.

Perhaps it was for this reason that some Republicans who actually remember when their “pro-life” party was represented by Ronald Reagan and John McCain started to object, in increasingly public ways. House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul (R.-Texas) said “I think Russian propaganda has made its way into the United States, unfortunately, and it’s infected a good chunk of my party’s base”. Another hawk, Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R.-Texas) told reporters, “I guess their reasoning is they want Russia to win so badly that they want to oust the speaker over it. I mean, it’s a strange position to take. I think they want to be in the minority too. I think that’s an obvious reality.” Crenshaw added: “I’m still trying to process all the bulls**t.”

Which might explain the really interesting rumor I got from the Internet this weekend.

Saturday, Beau of the Fifth Column posted a bit saying that some Republicans have stated a position, some publicly, though he didn’t name names. But the position is that if MAGAt Republicans go through with their motion to vacate against Johnson, these Republicans would immediately resign. And as of this week, the Republican margin of majority in the House is exactly one. Meaning the House would pass to control of the Democrats and the new Speaker would be Hakeem Jeffries of New York. Beau also said that the implied threat would be that if the House and the Senate are both Democrat controlled then they can pass a resolution taking Trump off the ballots. I consider this highly unlikely. More plausible is the chance that if enough Republican Congressmen in the right states leave, this will kill the Trumpnik ace in the hole: If the Electoral College is tied or contested then the election is decided in the House of Representatives, where the vote is done by state delegation and Republicans thus had an edge even in 2020.

Keep in mind, this would make Jeffries the first Black Speaker of the House in America’s history, so if hawk Republicans are willing to contemplate that, they must be PISSED at the MAGAts.

I had pointed out a while ago that the MAGAt ultimatum has always been that if sane Republicans ever challenged Trumpnik dominance that Trump and his cult could just take their ball – that is, their voter base – and go home. Yet the Trumpniks have never asked themselves what would happen if the sane Republicans left them. We may be about to find out.

But this just gets to a point I already made about why Republicans can’t do anything even if they are in charge, because one, as Mr. Crenshaw implies, they are in spirit always an opposition, read, minority party because being in charge is no fun and implies too much responsibility. Second, the American system has been tending more and more towards giving power to the executive and while you would think that works for Donald Trump, his actual time in office and his “Project 2025” indicates the problems you get if you make the President the Emperor for real and dismiss the other branches of government. You need checks and balances if only to correct mistakes you don’t know you’re making. And if the GOP (Greedy Old Puritans) are now almost completely a Party of Trump, that may serve his concept of unitary government but it doesn’t serve government as it actually exists.

In his Trump’s own mind at least, the Republicans are the Party of Trump and each individual is just an extension of his own interests, but all these other roles in the government and all these downballot races still matter. But the appeal of being in the Trump cult is the idea that if Trump does whatever he wants and tells everybody what to do and gets away with it, you can too. Which is of course just another Trump lie. And the problem is if your office does NOT give you the effective powers of a Roman Emperor and you still want to act like you are.

As I said: “It’s one thing if the party is dictated to by one whiny little baby who has actual influence and the support of the mob. But what if you don’t have those things and you still want to be a whiny little baby? How do you expect to resolve disputes? By following rules and acting like an adult? Well, clearly that’s not cool in the Republican Party any more. So what happens when you have two or more people who don’t have a clear majority of supporters, expecting to speak for the Party, expecting to exercise supremacy when they don’t have it? What do you have then?”

It’s one thing if you’re the president and tradition and practicality give you a great deal of authority, but if you’re Joe Schmo representing the district of Kokomo, you don’t get to dictate terms like Trump. But nobody told the Trumpniks.

When Kevin McCarthy (BR.- California) acceded to Matt Gaetz (BR.- Pedophilia) and his demand to let the Speakership be challenged by only a single Congressman, he was signing his own political death warrant and he knew it, but he didn’t care, because like many politicians he cared more about the perks of his station more than actually doing anything with power. But the fact that anyone can bring a motion against the Speaker means that any one member of Congress – such as Marjorie Taylor – can act like a Trump, and that’s exactly why they wanted that to happen. And the rest of Congress – apparently now including a strong plurality of Republicans – can see why that doesn’t work.

A certain amount of compromise is necessary even if “conservatives” hate the concept more than Randians. Because everyone else on the floor is a vain political creature just like you and they’re not going to give you something for nothing any more than you would do for them. The (small r) republican system is designed the way it is to allow for negotiation between different groups. You will never have a united States of America otherwise, because we can’t all agree on everything.

This is, incidentally, one reason the First Amendment says that Congress shall make no law establishing an official religion for the government, which Trumpniks would know if they ever bothered to read it.

As Hayes Brown at MSNBC points out, the irony in Johnson’s deal is that it ends up being the way the House is supposed to work. By constitutional design. Recall that the whole clusterfuck with Kevin McCarthy happened because the House has to choose its Speaker by vote of the entire chamber, not just the majority party. “It is not the parties that are dictating what becomes law so much as the will of the majority. And the process, which has allowed for amendments rather than diktats from above and will allow members to vote as they please without repercussion from leadership, is exactly what archconservatives say they want.” This is of course the exact opposite of the way Business As Usual has been until now, where both the Senate and House leaders get to dictate the agenda without even considering whether a majority is behind them, which was how then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell was able to keep President Obama from even getting his choice for Supreme Court to a floor vote. The business of the country doesn’t get done because the party agenda is more important. But at least in this case we have a clear majority of legislators who may not agree on whether abortion is a mortal sin or whether it’s the Jews or Arabs of the Middle East who should be treated as pariahs, but can agree that helping our historic allies and defending countries against our historic enemies is a primary national interest, even if one side’s party boss – who may have ulterior motives on the matter – disagrees.

Country over party.

What a fucking concept.

“If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.”

– Rush, “Freewill”

As we could all predict by now, Donald Trump, Once and Future Viceroy for Russian North America, has not only gotten more tasteless than ever but during Holy Week decided to lean that much harder into his Christ complex than he did last year.

Like, selling a Bible that anybody could pick up for practically free and packaging it with a copy of the Constitution (which he’s also never read) and the lyrics to “God Bless The USA” all for the low, low price of $59.99. Something tells me this text isn’t going to include the Gospel passages where Christ chases the moneychangers from the Temple but again, that’s assuming that the fan club has actually read that part.

Look, all I’m saying is, if Trump wants to prove he’s Jesus, all he has to do is get nailed to a cross – live on TV, so we can all see him scream – get hung up in the air, die of exposure, and come back after three days. THEN I’ll worship him as God. Deal?

No, no, no, Feds, I am not threatening to kill a (former) president. I mean, if Trump IS Jesus, if he dies, he comes back, right? No harm, no foul!

Now if Donnie knows he ISN’T the Messiah – and we all know that even if he is, he’s too cowardly to take the chance – then maybe he should shut his fat mouth with the comparisons to Jesus.

And while he’s at it, he should quit saying he’s been treated worse than Abraham Lincoln. How do we know you haven’t been treated worse than Lincoln, Donnie? You’re STILL ALIVE, aren’t you?

For Trump to be treated as bad as Lincoln, he would have to be assassinated by a Confederate sympathizer who was angry that Trump stopped a white supremacist insurrection against the United States government. Somehow I consider that less likely than Trump opening his tomb after three days.

Although Trump is establishing a pretty good case for life after death, not just in that he is still walking around after almost eighty years of an indulgent lifestyle that would kill most men, but because he is clearly able to walk around with no brain activity. Most of us observed even when Trump was President that his command of vocabulary was greatly limited even compared to where it was a few years before 2015. Now it’s impossible not to notice how he slurs, forgets basic words and gets people’s names mixed up, like when he says that Barack Obama is the current president and not Joe Biden. Or when he twitted that Jimmy Kimmel and Al Pacino at the Oscars were the same guy.

Trump is like a dog. He’s only got so many brain cells to process a given mental activity. Like, have you ever been in a room and had a conversation with someone, and a dog is in the room, and you are talking about any number of things, and one of you says the word “food” and the dog’s ears prick up? That’s Trump. He hates the current President for usurping his throne, but he really hates Barack Obama (cause, reasons) so he fuses his present object of hatred with his primary one. Likewise, he has always hated Nancy Pelosi but currently hates Nikki Haley for impeding his path to coronation, so he kept repeating Nikki Haley’s name and blaming her as Speaker for the events of January 6, when everyone knows she wasn’t the Speaker then, it was Pelosi. But Trump’s brain isn’t complex enough to make these subtle distinctions.

The problem is, Trump is a meal ticket for a lot of people, some of whom are not even Russian. And they have to strike the balance between Trump being just dumb enough to manipulate and not so mentally incontinent that he gives the game away. So I’m sure one of his people had to tell him that he has to put a lid on these blankouts or else Ivanka is going to have to take him to a nice memory care facility where you eat dinner with plastic utensils. So Trump came up with an explanation that will satisfy the intellect of both himself and his fan club: Whenever he confuses Obama with Biden, it’s because Obama is really the one in charge and Trump calls him the President sarcastically. Or as political strategist Pee-Wee Herman would say, “I meant to do that.”

(You will recall that Trump has also adopted other campaign strategies from Pee-Wee Herman, such as ‘NEHHH!’ and ‘I know you are, but what am I ?’)

No doubt when, not if, Trump goes into a fugue state, drops his pants and looses his bowels on stage in full view of reporters and cameras, he will explain the incident after the fact as his postmodern symbolic commentary on the worth of the Democratic Party and its campaign promises. The fun will be watching the rest of his Party try to play along.

Trump said that if Biden wins, it would be “the end of democracy.” Which is really just his typical projecting. But in a way he’s right.

Because we should not be confused into thinking that “democracy” in the US actually means democracy or representative government. Americans say “democracy” to refer to our political system like we say “Levi’s” to refer to jeans or “Coke” to refer to any random soda pop when anybody who knows the difference between Coke and Pepsi and prefers one to the other would probably not appreciate the generalization. When we say “democracy” we just mean “the way we’re accustomed to doing things.” And the way America has been accustomed to doing things is that we are in effect only allowed to vote for one of two political parties, in exchange for which the two parties graciously allow each other’s existence and trade places in the government majority every once in a while. But like an officially de-segregated school where the races never hang out together, states have been grouping up into one-party blocs for a while, and people in one state can’t see the opinions of states run by another party as legitimate. This has been kind of a default in the Democratic-liberal echo chamber, but it is actually being enforced by law and legal maneuvering in Republican-run states, even in states where Democrats can’t get the time of day and such maneuvering shouldn’t even be needed. And because of such maneuvering, Republicans are starting to get a backlash even in those states. So if Biden wins, the Party of Trump will just confirm in their own minds that this government is an illegitimate imposition on their right to rule, and if Trump wins, the Democrats, and probably everyone else who doesn’t vote for Trump, will see it as a coup, even in the increasingly unlikely event that Trump has the votes to win fair and square like he did in 2016.

This is no longer a two-party system. It is one party that actually wants to have a government versus an insurgency. And when that insurgency is actually in charge, as with the Trump Organization before 2021 or the House of Representatives now, they can’t get anything done besides using government force to go after their enemies, who often include each other. And as the Republican Party becomes that much more a literal Party of Trump, where individual members only exist as extensions of the Leader’s will, it becomes that much more of an all-or-nothing situation, by his demand. In fact it has to be, as Trump’s lifelong criminal tendencies only metastasized with the opportunity of his office and the former real-estate cheat became an outright threat to national security who has to be investigated and prosecuted.

This is an all-or-nothing election, by Trump’s demand, whether anybody else wants it or not. You might wish that once this is over, we can all get back to an equilibrium between the two parties in the status quo ante, but the old order is gone and will not come back, because the people who actually run the Republican Party don’t want the old Republican Party, even if Trump dies tomorrow. As it is, we already know Trump will not simply retire and co-exist with other political actors like every other president and losing candidate before him has. This election is very simple: Do you want Donald Trump to be your King or do you want Donald Trump to go to jail?

Those are the only two choices. It is not a choice of whether you prefer the Republican or third-party candidate in Congress to the Democrat. It is not even a question of whether you think Joe Biden should be President. And it is certainly not an issue with a box of Wheaties being eight dollars at the store. The choice is: Do you want Donald Trump to be an unaccountable God-Emperor or do you want Donald Trump to be investigated and prosecuted for his crimes? Because Donald Trump, with his “presidential immunity” tactic, will accept no other terms. Any vote that is not for Joe Biden and Democrats down-ballot, whether it’s third-party, ticket splitting, or staying home, is a vote for Donald Trump to be your King. Any vote that is for Democratic candidates is a vote for Trump to go to jail. And if the Trumpniks actually seem to be leaning into the idea of “vote in November so we’ll never have to vote again”, I don’t think enough non-Trumpniks seem to be grasping the full implications of what it means to oppose Trump, why he must be opposed totally, and what would have to happen if he is defeated.

It is the reason that Mitch McConnell and various other Republican Senators who knew better did not join the Democrats in impeachment after January 6. Because it was perceived that this would mean breaking with Trump’s “MAGA” movement and if they did that, the Republican Party would effectively cease to exist. It might hold on in “safe” seats but those seats are usually safe only because of the kind of people who go along with MAGA.

We could go to war with these people. If that seems radical, just remember that they declared war on the rest of us when they decided to support an insurrectionist who wanted to overturn an election to stay in power. But as Eric Stratton would say, that would take years, and cost millions of lives.

Trump is perceived as invincible because his movement is perceived as invincible, and this reinforces his cult’s identity fusion, because the cult follows Trump because they perceive HIM as invincible. He gives them the freedom to be their worst selves because he gets to indulge his most lowbrow, evil, animal instincts and get away with it, so they think they can too. But anybody can see that it’s not entirely mutual. Trump’s underlings DO go to jail. Trump’s political followers do lose election recounts and have their “election was rigged” cases thrown out of court. Even Steve Bannon and Paul Manafort got sent to prison briefly, although Trump pardoned them, which gets to a different point.

And in a lot of those cases, a lot of those defendants expressed regret for their actions in court, once they realized their actions had consequences. But then a lot of them went back on their public statements and returned to insurrectionist rhetoric. Why? Because Trump is still a free man who gets to do whatever he wants so they figure their Savior is going to come back and restore the Kingdom.

The obvious way to break this identity fusion is to make the insurrectionists realize that consequences accrue to everybody, including the Leader.

Rhetorically speaking, kill the head and the body will die.

Here’s a really radical communist idea that you could only come up with after smoking a foot-long blunt laced with PCP. You ready?

You sitting down?
You’re holding on to your chair?
Here it is:
What if – when there is a law on the books where punishment for violation includes jail time, and someone breaks that law, they go to jail?

Seize it if you try.

Or, what if, when a defendant is found guilty at trial and sentenced to pay a settlement, and obliged to put up a bond at settlement or forfeit assets, that person actually pays the bond, on time – as opposed to getting the bond cut by more than half, and getting more time to pay it?

I know, right? It’s like no one else THOUGHT of this before!

But this gets to the flip side of the problem, which is that if Republicans don’t want to impose order on their organization (which is what a political party is for) because then the duopoly would cease to exist, the “normie” Democrat-aligned establishment is handling Trump with kid gloves and a ten-foot pole because they realize the duopoly would cease to exist if they went after the mobster who took over one of the ruling parties like a Stage 4 cancer. I have been telling Republicans, over and over and over again, that if they keep going down this path with Trump, America really will be a one-party state, and that one party will be the Democrats. And nobody wants that. Including the Democrats. Because then they’d actually have to take responsibility for something.

And the whole premise of modern American government is avoiding taking responsibility. The idea that someone, somewhere else, is going to solve the problem, and not me. Sometimes – not as often as we want to think – that actually works. It will not work with Trump, who is a barnacle on the system that will not just go away and do what he’s expected to do like Hillary Clinton or George W. Bush. At this point, refusing to confront Trump is catering to him, and that will irreversibly alter the system just as much as the radical un-American commie idea that elites who commit crimes should go to jail like everybody else.

When the republic was founded, even between the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution, the idea was not to have the kind of government that the Colonies had under George III. From now on, the premise of political science is to not have the kind of government that would cater to Donald Trump. If only because recent historical example demonstrates that giving the President unchallenged authority and unlimited benefit of the doubt only incentivizes career criminals to seek the office. Like, in addition to putting Supreme Court Justices on term limits so that the institution isn’t quite so dependent on the choices of one President, we should state flat out that the President IS under the same laws as everyone else and can be investigated and prosecuted by the FBI just like everybody else. Because impeachment will never work due to partisanship, and any truly partisan investigation untroubled by facts will flounder at the start, as even the Republicans have been obliged to acknowledge with their investigations of Joe Biden. Not only that we should take away a lot of the powers that have been given to the presidency, like the sole power to pardon, which in the cases of both Trump and Bill Clinton has been used with ulterior motive.

Of course that would not only require voting in Democrats (or non-Republicans) nationally, it would require voting in the kind of people who understand why things need to change and will actually change them. But again, it’s either that, or one way or another you are voting for the status quo, and one way or another the status quo is going to die because “conservatives” will not work to preserve it and are actively trying to destroy it. Responsibility cannot be avoided. A choice needs to be made regardless.

I already know what my decision is, but it’s not just my decision.

It’s yours.

Mister Chief Justice, and may it please the Court,

On the case of Trump vs. Alexander, where the State of Colorado asserts that Donald J. Trump is ineligible to run for president as an insurrectionist under Section 3 of the 14^th Amendment, the defense has taken two positions. One, which I will address immediately, is that because ‘President’ is not among the offices listed under section 3, that therefore it does not apply to Mr. Trump. The other argument is that the 14^th Amendment should not apply to Mr. Trump and he should be allowed to run for president because section 3 allows for the prohibition to be removed by a joint act of Congress, a position which implies that the President is in fact subject to the Amendment.

To address the first point briefly, the defense has stated that there are such things as officers who are appointed for a certain purpose, but such officers are not elected officials and would thus not be subject to the Amendment in any case. It was already mentioned that when the 14^th Amendment was being discussed for passage in the Senate it had in fact been brought up that the wording does not include ‘President’ and Senator Lott Morill said, “Let me call the Senator’s attention to the words ‘or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States.’”

This was a matter already addressed in the Colorado Supreme Court’s ruling on Judge Wallace’s position that former President Trump has committed insurrection but is still eligible to run for office because the 14^th Amendment does not specifically mention the President. It was ruled that the language is nevertheless inclusive and that the matter in question is that Mr. Trump is ineligible because he participated in an insurrection. The advocates of this position state that it is “self-executing” in the sense that such a person is necessarily ineligible to run for office in the same way that the Constitution says a 14-year old or a foreign-born citizen cannot run for President. It is not however, self-executing in the sense that there is no official determination that Mr. Trump or some hypothetical subject has or has not participated in an insurrection.

I am going to go off on a tangent here. There is a theme on social media where someone will post two frames of a movie in which he has characters react according to intelligence and common sense rather than as the plot of the movie went, and the third frame of the movie is the end credits, because if people made the sensible conclusion instead of acting as dictated by plot, the movie would be over.

The example I’m thinking of is Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones. This is the scene where Senator Amidala and the two Jedi, Anakin and Obi-wan, are captured by the Separatists under Count Dooku and led into an arena, and get rescued by the new clone army created by Chancellor Palpatine. And before that, Obi-wan tells Anakin that he was captured by Dooku, who told Obi-wan that the head of the Sith controls the Senate. And Anakin deduces that if a Sith controls the Senate and the clone army is Palpatine’s project, then Dooku and Palpatine are working together. And the third panel of the meme is “Written and Directed by George Lucas” because if the Jedi made the logical conclusion, Palpatine’s scheme would be over.

We are being asked to believe that what happened on January 6 was coincidence, not conspiracy. We are asked to believe in an absurdity. We are being asked to believe that when the president assigned responsibility to his Vice President for taking his case, then blamed that vice president for not doing so, and the mob in the Capitol reading his social media posts reacted by chanting “HANG MIKE PENCE”, that was coincidence, not conspiracy. We are being asked to believe that when testimony to a Congressional committee revealed that the president told his security to disregard the metal detectors in Washington because “they’re not there to hurt me”, that was not assisting an insurrection. When he refused to send troops to restore order for several hours and left that matter to Mike Pence himself, that was not assisting an insurrection. When supporters of the president guided tours through the Capitol halls for people who committed violence on January 6, that was not assisting an insurrection. When Jefferson Davis was placed on trial for treason after the Civil War, his own lawyers argued that he had already been punished by the provisions of Section 3 of the 14^th Amendment when he had committed no actual crime other than simply being the head of the insurrectionist government.

We are being asked to believe that we cannot declare Donald Trump ineligible for federal office as an insurrectionist because the mere fact of his actions is not enough, and he is innocent because he was not so stupid as to declare, “Ey, I’m committing an insurrection here!”

When that was never the standard when the Amendment was written and when it was previously applied.

I am going to go on another tangent and this does relate directly to the matter at hand. In board games, there is a concept known as “rules as written” because the rules as written are often different from the game as actually played. In Monopoly, it is a little-known rule that when you land on a space and you don’t want to purchase the property, you can’t just end the turn and pass to the next player. You have to set up an auction, in which all players are eligible, including the one who refused first purchase, and the winning bid wins, even if it’s less than the listed price of the property and even if it’s made by the person who refused the straight purchase.

This actually makes the game go faster because the properties get snapped up faster, but because you have to run through auctions, most players don’t bother with the rule cause they don’t want to deal with it. So for the sake of making the game easier and less complicated, we actually make it longer and more complicated.

We run the American government according to house rules all the time. For instance, we have been having the President take this country to war for decades. The last time Congress formally declared war was after Pearl Harbor in World War II. We give the President all kinds of powers that aren’t really enumerated in the Constitution. Because it’s easier than having Congress do its job. This is what happens when we do not place Article 1 ahead of Article 2.

And this is what ties to the matter at hand, because the discussions have related not only to impeachment of the president but the matter of how Section 3 of the 14^th Amendment is to be enforced or reversed. As we know, Article 1, section 2 of the Constitution states that the House of Representatives shall have sole power of impeachment, implying a simple majority vote in the absence of another threshold. Section 3 of Article 1, referring to the Senate, says impeachment cases must be tried in the Senate, and does specify that “no Person shall be convicted without the Concurrence of two thirds of the Members present.” This would seem to be an easy enough standard because in theory it allows the case to be established but only allows conviction when the guilt of the subject is clear and the offense is grave. It is assumed that because the Senate is the senior house of a separate branch of government that they are a neutral judge. In practice, we disregard the fact that since 1800, the President of the United States is the de facto leader of his political party in Congress. And thus while a preponderance of the House might be enough to send a case to the Senate, in practice a conviction in the Senate will never occur, because due to party allegiance, which is not accounted for in the Constitution, at least one-third of the Senate is going to be taking the President’s side regardless of the charge. Were that not the case, it raises the question how such an individual could get to be President in the first place.

Now on the matter of the 14^th Amendment, Trump’s defense goes between stating that the Colorado decision was improper because Congress can act once a candidate is elected but before taking office, or that the Court does not need to take responsibility in this case because it properly rests with Congress. From the text, no person may run for office who “shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion”, but, “Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.”
That is an even higher standard than the threshold for impeachment. It would require not only a two-thirds vote of the Senate but of the House of Representatives. And if we can see the practical chances of a successful impeachment, what are the chances that the joint Congress would restore an insurrectionist by a two-thirds margin?

When we say that an unethical president can be corrected and removed by impeachment, in practice we are saying “that’s not ever going to happen.” When we are saying that the issue with section 3 can be corrected by a two-thirds vote of Congress, we are saying, “that’s not ever going to happen.”

We are supposed to take the plain text of the Constitution and make that the ruling as though that were the only matter that applied.

When, in a past decision, the Court overruled precedent and decided that the the rights of citizens could be taken away by the states on a certain matter, in practice meaning that these rights apply to Americans in some states and not others, there was no consideration given as to the consequences or whether that would cause social chaos. All that mattered was the purity and the principle of the decision itself. And we are now asking whether applying the insurrection clause against one candidate, even with cause, should be avoided because that would disenfranchise voters? We are saying, in that case, that the State of Colorado cannot make that decision, if only on its own behalf?

In the past, there was no consideration as to whether the Court’s unilateral decision disenfranchised people in some states but not others, and now we’re expected to believe that that question matters?

On one recent opinion, it was remarked, “the current Court is textualist only when it suits it. When that method would frustrate broader goals, special canons like the ‘major questions doctrine’ magically appear as get out-of-text-free cards.”

And yet we are supposed to believe that courts make decisions on the law as it is written with no consideration of context or consequences, that this is a place of law, not politics.

We all know that is not the case.

And to state this is not an accusation of bias or malfeasance, it is a statement of fact. It is impossible to make a decision on law that has no bearing on politics because law shapes politics and vice versa. The law in an absolute monarchy is going to be different than the law in a constitutional republic, and necessarily that dictates the process of politics and the governance of the country. When we create this arbitrary distinction between what the law says and how the government actually works in practice, and apply it only as we select, we are making sure that the law cannot be applied practically.

Any decision you make is going to have consequences, including the decision to do nothing.

What then is the role of a separate and independent judiciary?
The role of an independent judiciary is, and can only be, to make a fair ruling that is consistent with both a small-d democracy and a small-r republican system of government. To wit – you cannot have a democracy if one man can overrule an election. You cannot have a constitutional republic if one man can override the Electoral College. The decision here for us today is not just whether Donald Trump is immune to section 3 of the 14^th Amendment, or to any laws at all, but whether the insurrection clause of the 14^th Amendment even applies or is merely an appendix that can be removed from the constitutional body without consequences. Because if it does not apply in the case of Donald Trump, then find a case in American history where it would be more appropriate.

Thursday Feb. 8, the special counsel posted his final report on the investigation of President Joe Biden on the matter of withholding classified documents.

Let’s get past the point that the only reason this investigation even happened is because The Party of Trump whined long enough and loudly enough that their wonderful little boy was not being treated “fairly” by law enforcement, belying the point that Trump is not only not ruled ineligible to run for office as an insurrectionist over the 14^th Amendment, he is not in jail awaiting trial on that matter.

And yet, Hunter Biden has committed crimes, and Joe Biden did withhold documents without justification. It was justified for Attorney General Merritt Garland to appoint a special counsel, and he appointed Robert Hur (a Trump appointee as Attorney General for Maryland until 2021), apparently in the interest of fairness.

But while the body of the 388-page report indicated that Mr. Biden had not deliberately withheld documents after being asked to present them, and did distinguish Joe Biden from Trump in that regard, Hur implied that the main issue in putting the matter to a jury trial was that “(at) trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory”.

https://www.politico.com/news/2024/02/08/biden-classified-documents-charges-special-counsel-00140509

This is the sort of thing that people on MSDNC were referring to as a “James Comey moment” where a Republican but nominally non-partisan official makes a report clearing a Democrat of wrongdoing but in such a way as to cast doubt on their fitness. I mean, let’s assume that because Biden had withheld documents, Biden had also done the same thing that Trump did, as if we could equate a shoplifter with Al Capone. Let’s bypass whether it’s a backhanded compliment to call someone “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” as opposed to a repellent and malign old man with a poor memory.

But if we’re going to take all this stuff about Biden objectively and at face value, rather than as having political motivations, then that makes the case for Trump worse.

Because if the political system – which we laughingly refer to as “the people” – dictates that the president must be crooked, must be corrupt, must be old, must be senile, then that would demand that legal oversight on the president is more of an imperative and not less. Yet, the Republican Party, which casts itself as the main check on the Biden Crime Family, wants to give unlimited and unchecked power to Donald Trump, who makes Biden look as honest as Abe Lincoln and as sharp as a monofilament knife.

While Democrats in South Carolina got their primary last Saturday and Nevada gets its primary (sorta kinda) this week, former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley doesn’t get to compete in her own state for the Republican primary until February 24. Prior to this she lost to Once and Future Viceroy for Russian North America Donald Trump in New Hampshire. Yeah, Haley did get more than 40 percent of the vote but she still lost by double digits and there is no other non-Trump competition. New Hampshire, with its Yankee libertarianism and relatively open primary system, gave Haley favorable ground that she’s not going to have anywhere else, even in her home state of South Carolina, where Republican politics are famously cutthroat.

All the more sad, because I said a while ago that one of these notTrump Republicans really needs to answer a serious question: If your platform is basically the same as Trump’s minus the personal history, then why should anybody vote for you when Trump is already running, has been president and has a built-in following you don’t have? Well, Nikki Haley has gotten as close as anybody to answering that question, by making very good points. Mainly, if she is going to have the same policies people liked about Trump, and the main criticism of Biden is that he’s very old, you can’t choose Trump as an alternative to Biden cause he’s not much younger and no less unsteady. Sure, Biden is old, he’s slow and he might be senile. So let’s replace him with Donald Trump. RIGHT. Donald Trump makes Joe Biden look like Drake.

But we should really quit thinking that Trumpniks remain in the cult because they’re voting for something constructive. Quite the opposite. There is a Politico article that was making the rounds in January where staff writer Michael Kruse did one of those mainstream-media-Trump-whisperer profiles where a journalist tries to get into the head of what the typical Trumpnik is thinking. And he discovered that they aren’t just cynical, they’re nihilistic:

And if Trump wins in New Hampshire on Tuesday (and polls say he probably will), and if he beats Joe Biden come November (and polls say he certainly might), it will be because of Johnson and the many thousands of others like him who looked for ways to quit Trump but ultimately couldn’t, didn’t and haven’t — and not remotely reluctantly but with an explicit sense of vengeance.

“He’s a wrecking ball,” Johnson told me here at the place he chose called the Copper Door.

“Everybody’s going to say, ‘Trump is divisive,’” he said, “and he’s going to split the country in half.” He looked at me. “We got it,” he said.

It’s what the Ted Johnsons want.

I’d already sussed this out. Not too long after starting this site, I explained why Trump’s fan club is completely immune to contradiction or appeals to logic:

“When these people reject any argument against Trump, what some of them are saying, consciously or not, is, “My life sucks, and it will never get any better. I am too old and too poor to retrain for a decent-paying job, assuming there are any left in my town. And the only power I still have is the chance to force everyone else to live in the existential hellhole that I am now trapped in for the rest of my life.”

And that was almost… eight years ago. Fuck, why can’t I get a job at Politico?

There used to be such a thing as conservatism in this country, but it was always inherently contradictory. As I said quite some time ago, the real issue with “conservatism” is that it is not a political philosophy. It is a governing approach towards a political philosophy. For example, in the Soviet Union, the “conservatives” were the people opposing Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms, even though that meant preserving orthodox Marxism-Leninism, which is the polar opposite of what Americans call “conservatism”. But the contradiction is even deeper in America, because conservatism means preserving the original concept of American government, which is based in 18th-century classical liberalism and anti-royalism. “All men are created equal” is not a terribly conservative concept, even if it was stated by a slave owner. There is still a valid definition of “conservatism” in America, but it is relative, not objective. It refers to conserving that old capitalist, classical-liberal tradition against a leftist tradition that really took hold after Franklin Roosevelt and somewhat resembles the approach of the Social Democratic Party in Germany, although most of its American proponents were not explicit socialists. (Indeed, in the early 20^th Century, most of the ‘Progressives’ were in the Republican Party.)

But just as modern Democrats have been associated with a certain stereotype, Republicans have become associated with a certain stereotype of “conservatism” that they have been relying on since at least Vietnam. Their influence reached its high-water mark in the Reagan-Bush period, but since then, and especially in reaction to the Clinton Administration, “conservatism” has become less about promoting ideas and more about living in the stereotype, as intellectual models like Albert Jay Nock and William Buckley made way for political entertainers like Rush Limbaugh. Much like their existing approach to Christianity, “conservatives” focus less on the policies and ideas of actual conservatives and more on the attitudes and postures they associate conservatism with: “toughness”, nationalism, fiscal discipline. Believing in the idea, the feeling, is more important than preserving the reality, which is where “conservatives” always fell down even when they were serious. It’s why they keep talking a good game about budget cutting and border enforcement and always make the situation worse when they’re in office. They don’t really examine what they want or what would happen if they get it, so the “RINOs” – Republicans in Name Only cave to Democrats to make the system work. So Republican voters, with some cause, looked elsewhere for more purist people who would actually live up to the escalated rhetoric that politicians used to get them to vote, and politics, Republican politics in particular, became that much more about the slogans than anything backing them up. In the process, the Republican Party bypassed mere hypocrisy to become the opposite of what it claims to be. Like, how the party that made “McCarthyism” a thing suddenly was okay with Russian sympathizers. Apparently all Russians had to do was trade their army coats for business suits and the Republicans didn’t notice that they never really changed…

This is how the party of “fiscal conservatism” blew up the budget deficit while cutting tax breaks for the middle class. This is how the “borders, language, culture” party blew up a border bill that their Senators demanded.

And this is how “conservatism” came down to Donald Trump speaking to his cult from a podium on January 6, braying, “you have to show strength and you have to be strong.”
“Strength”, apparently, comes from a millionaire’s son whose Daddy got him out of the draft by citing bone spurs, who needs a golf cart to travel from place to place at international summits, and who always has an excuse for why every one of his screw-ups is someone else’s fault.

To go over what I’ve said before: This is literally a Party of Trump. It does not have the priorities of a political party, like running the country or even winning elections so that it can run the country. Its priority is serving Trump. The Republican Party does not have the priorities it used to, even if it pays lip service to them. The House has been holding up aid to not only Putin’s target Ukraine but traditional Republican allies like Israel and Taiwan. Why? Because Trump wants it. This party isn’t pro-tax or anti-tax. It’s “What does Trump say?” It’s not pro-Israel or pro-Palestine. It’s “What does Trump say?” It’s not pro-life or pro-abortion rights. It’s “What does Trump say?” If a tornado threatened to wreck a Republican-run town, the government wouldn’t appropriate services to get emergency services or shelters. They’d go, “What does Mr. Trump say?”

Wait, you’d wait for Trump’s permission before ordering emergency services? “Why not?”

Cause he might say no? “Why would he do that?”
Cause he’s a petty sadist who gets off on making other people suffer, and if they make themselves suffer just to please him and make him happy, he loves it all the more?

“You’re saying Our President would try to stop us from responding to a natural disaster and let thousands of people die or go homeless, just because he can?”
YES!
“THAT IS SO COOL! That’s a REAL leader! Not like these pussy Democrats who give charity to disaster victims! Get a JOB, ya hippies!”

What’s worse, because there is no room in politics for anything more than two parties, and one of those parties IS Trump, there is no room for anything outside of Trump even outside his party. There is no practical distinction between ‘real’ conservatives (the near-extinct species of NeverTrump Republicans), between what used to be libertarians (now that the Von Mises Caucus has basically turned the Libertarian Party into the Junior Varsity Club for the Trump Party), no distinction between hack liberals and woke socialists. It’s all just, are you sane, or are you Trump? Do you believe gravity is a thing that exists, or do you believe whatever Trump wants you to believe? Cause I can tell you, if someone convinced Trump that not believing in gravity would keep him out of prison or keep him from paying his bills, he would spread some bullshit story about how The Theory of Gravity is Fake News and everyone in the Party would have to believe it, on pain of death (and that might not be an exaggeration).

Which is a real problem, because the distinctions between conservatives, libertarians, liberals and “progressives” are real and will remain when or if Trump is gone. I say ‘if’ since at this rate Trump might well be immortal. Because God is real, and He hates us all. But assuming that this stale fart of a human being will fly out the window some time before the end of the century, we will have to address why this system is as screwed up as it is, specifically why the liberal-progressive spectrum that seems so ascendant now is in fact so incompetent and unpopular that in 2016 they made Trump look like a GOOD IDEA.

I mean, to a lot of people like myself, it seemed like a good idea to get rid of the “deep state”, which prior to Trump was just “the state” and in more mature terms is defined as the liberals’ “administrative state.” But then we saw what Trump was going to replace it with.

It should be obvious what a dilemma the country is in when the Lamestream Media is practically tearing their hair out wondering why Biden is STILL falling behind Trump in the polls no matter how wonderful they say the economy is. And that’s because we need an alternative to the Democrat mainstream. And that’s not what the Republican Party is giving us. They’re giving us “Trump is like Jesus, only better, cause Jesus has to be celibate.” And if THAT was good enough for America, then the 2022 midterms would have been a “red wave” and not a missed period.

Recently one of my liberal friends had posted something from The Newsroom about why the Will McAvoy character still considered himself a Republican, even though he didn’t think his own party was that Republican any more. It’s before Trump, but it only goes to show where things were heading:

We need a REAL right-wing party in this country. Not a wrestling heel or “reality” TV villain that plays to a bad-boy fan club, and not just as a “loyal opposition” to a social-democrat default. We need a governing party that can win elections and run the country. COMPETENTLY. We need a party that admits that we have a Constitution, it is written the way it is for a reason, and we dismiss it at our peril. We need a government that admits that as rich as our country is, it cannot spend more money than it makes forever and still expect to retain prosperity.

That is not what we have. The Republican Party has not been fiscally conservative since at least Reagan, but at least they used to be able to pretend. And as I say, we’re seeing that when you can’t even lie well anymore, there is a real qualitative decline in your positions from mere hypocrisy.

Because now it’s gotten to the point where Democrats can score by applying the Republicans’ old arguments. You cannot trust Republicans in Florida to keep their hands off of business, because Governor DeSantis killed a perfectly functioning administration the Disney company had in the state, since they weren’t following the right sort of political correctness. Republicans always were against Roe vs. Wade, but ostensibly because the abortion issue should have been left to the states. Well, now that it is up to the states, they want to make sure you can’t leave a slave uterus state to get an abortion in a free state.

In short, Americans don’t need government telling them what to do. This is something the Libertarian Party could take advantage of if it chose to, but like Ron DeSantis, they’ve decided they can get more scratch by being more Trump than Trump. And it’s worked out just as well for them.

And please don’t give us this Andrew Sullivan both-sides-ism that both parties are equally bad as a means of disqualifying the Democratic Party. Whataboutism is a standard Russian tactic for disqualifying your opposition on the grounds that both sides are equally bad and therefore you only need to choose on grounds of aesthetic preference (which the Republican culture warrior making that argument assumes his side will win). But that assumes, one, your preferred side will even do what it says it will, and that’s been a Republican problem. But to act like both sides are equally bad is to avoid a necessary comparison. To be sure, both Republicans and Democrats have equally bad, anti-American nutcases. But a comparison would require asking how many nutcases are in each party and whether they comprise a controlling plurality, if not a majority, of the national party.

To wit – Every “Defund the Police” initiative has crashed and burned in every locality where it’s been proposed. San Francisco Attorney General Chesa Boudin was recalled in 2022 after his “decarceration” program and other policies helped lead to a rising crime wave. Claudine Gay was kicked out of leadership at Harvard due to her (lack of) ethics and competence, not her race or her political positions. The nutsos are not in charge on the default Left and they are not setting the agenda.

By contrast, around one-third percent of Republicans polled support the January 6 riots, and at least a quarter think it was a false flag operation to make our President Trump look bad, and it’s all of a piece with Deranged Jack Smith’s persecution of Trump on fake charges, and if you’re a Republican and you don’t believe these things, you better ACT like you do if you don’t want to get hunted down and killed. So which party is run by the crazies?

Who smeared feces on the walls at the Capitol? Who tried to kill the Vice President cause he wouldn’t throw an election? Who ran the Confederate battle flag through the Capitol hallways, which Robert E. Lee was never able to do? The ostensible Party of Lincoln, that’s who.

And if you’re still a Republican after that… you’re not really a Republican.