James Gillen

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.

Well, we have just passed the milestone of 2024’s first election, the Republican Iowa Caucus. In this, Donald Trump, despite being the incumbent president (as far as his Party is concerned) only got 51 percent of the total vote, though that was still 10 percent more than his two main challengers combined, Ron DeSantis at 21 percent and Nikki Haley at 19. The remaining 9 percent was held mostly by Vivek “I’ve Got A Timeshare In Florida That I Would Love to Sell YOU” Ramaswamy, and once he realized how things would play out in a real election, Ramaswamy quickly suspended his presidential campaign.

So there’s that much good news. The bad news is that this makes Ramaswamy the leading candidate to be Trump’s running mate. The good news is that being Trump’s running mate makes one the prime target for assassination by fellow Republicans if (when) Trump loses the general election.

And just Sunday, DeSantis himself suspended his campaign after deciding to not even bother going to New Hampshire. So now Haley is thought to have a better chance of upsetting things in the New Hampshire primary, which is open to non-Republicans, and might also have a chance in her home state of South Carolina, although it’s doubtful this will do more than slow Trump’s path to Party nomination.

But the margins of the discussion, like, the fact that New Hampshire is an open primary and Iowa is closed to non-party members, or the fact that Democrats didn’t have a caucus yet because that Party moved its primary schedule, get to a point that explains a lot of what is wrong with our current election system. It’s the fact that the process is decided more by party officials than by state or federal governments. And this will cause conflicts between party and government when the government decides to set a standard.

It already has. In Nevada, a primary is mandated by state law (passed in 2021, largely to counter the clusterfucks of the last two national elections), to take place this year on February 6. But while the Democratic Party has dropped the caucus format and gone with the state primary, the Republican Party has decided to stick with their caucus on February 8, probably because the primary election process also includes mail ballots, which current Republican dogma holds are the work of the Devil, or worse, Dr. Fauci. So Republicans are able to vote in both contests, but the state party has dictated that only votes from the caucus will count, and candidates who run in the primary will not be eligible to run in the caucus. Naturally, Trump is running in the caucus.

In the Colorado Supreme Court case that is now scheduled for the US Supreme Court, the State of Colorado had ruled Trump ineligible to run for president in his party’s primary on 14^th Amendment grounds. The Nevada case is the exact opposite, where the state Republican Party (that is, Trump) said, “No, we’re not going to be in the party primary, because we don’t acknowledge the state position as valid.”

Nor is this strictly a Republican-created issue. As mentioned, Iowa no longer has Republican and Democrat primary/caucus elections on the same day, because the national Democratic Party decided to rearrange the primary schedule because unlike Republicans they didn’t want rural white folks in Iowa and New Hampshire to be the primary representatives of their party. Naturally, the status-conscious people in Iowa and New Hampshire didn’t like that. Iowa had its Democratic caucus moved to the same day as the Nevada primary while the primary in South Carolina (where Biden really sealed the primary race in 2020) goes before both of them. So, New Hampshire, where state law apparently dictates that it hold the nation’s first primary, is still supposed to be holding its primary for both major parties on January 23, and because of the disagreement the incumbent president’s name will not be on the Democratic ballot. “The state’s attorney general is accusing the DNC of voter suppression and sent the organization a cease-and-desist letter last week that threatened further legal action.” Conversely, the Democratic National Committee will not count the delegates from New Hampshire just as the Republican National Committee will not count votes from their Nevada state primary.

The fact that state parties generally set the standards for nominating ballot candidates gives the Supreme Court an out in the Colorado case, and potentially rule that since that is the precedent, each state can decide for itself what rules to set and which candidates to approve. But that gets into the point that the President is the only office where voters across the country vote in one race, yet by our Electoral College system, the results are determined on a state-by-state level, and so barring a candidate in some states but not others would hurt their chances in the Electoral College (however unlikely it is Trump could win Democrat-majority Colorado). And as Trump’s lawyers stated to the Supreme Court (in a rare valid point) :“A ruling that reverses the Colorado Supreme Court while remaining agnostic on President Trump’s eligibility … will only delay the ballot-disqualification fight”.

Milblogger Jake Broe (a Nevada resident) has said that he switched from registered independent to Republican just to vote in the Nevada caucus and vote for Nikki Haley because that’s the only way we’re going to have a Republican party that supports Ukraine. Which I frankly think is naive. Because I remember when I switched from Libertarian to Democrat in 2016 just to vote in the Nevada caucus for Bernie Sanders, because if the Republican Party was going to nominate Trump, we damn well needed someone other than Hillary Clinton to be his opponent. Well, Hillary’s people had other plans. I posted on Facebook in real time about the shenanigans they pulled at the Clark County Democratic Party convention to keep the Bernie people from getting a majority vote, only to fail after dragging things out till near midnight, only to succeed in the end at the state convention in Las Vegas: “The rules specifically (laid) out that all convention votes must be done by voice vote, and that only the convention chair can declare the winner or call for a more specific method of voting among the thousands of delegates. During the vote the convention chair, Roberta Lange accepted the “yeas” even though the “nays” were louder than the “yeas” in the room. Both preliminary and final delegate counts showed that Clinton supporters outnumbered Sanders supporters in the room, though many Sanders delegates had left after Lange’s decision and did not stay to be counted in the final count. When Lange accepted the “yeas”, some Sanders supporters confronted Lange and other members of the party’s executive board on the main stage. The event was quickly shut down after that. Casino spokeswoman Jennifer Forkis said the event ran over its allotted time by about four hours, meaning security hired for the event would soon leave their shifts. “Without adequate security personnel, and in consultation with the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department and event organizers, a decision was made that it was in the best interest of everyone in attendance to end the event,” Forkis said in a statement.”

Why am I STILL voting for Democrats after that crap? Because Republicans are more crooked and less reasonable than THAT.

The whole POINT of this year’s Republican caucus is specifically to thwart the popular will and get the guy the party fanatics want. That is basically what all caucuses are about, because they are more convenient for the political fan clubs and people with time on their hands as opposed to regular folks with jobs and kids.

And that is a big part of why this country’s political system is as screwed up as it is. In the Republican Party especially, you can’t get to the general election without being the biggest whacko, which either undermines the party’s chances in the general election, or ensures that the seat will be taken by a whacko. Even in the Democratic Party, the obvious self-dealing machinations of the presidential nomination process, especially in 2016, helped alienate a lot of voters that the party really needed and may need even more now.

Because the fact of the matter is, any political system that forces us to choose between the likes of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump is already broken. If you seriously tell people that the only way they can avoid fascist dystopia is to vote for Hillary Clinton, well, don’t be surprised if you get the result you got in 2016. I personally think Joe Biden is an infinitely better choice than Clinton and even she would be infinitely better than Trump. But partisan programming means that the kind of people who base their identity on being “conservative” or Republican or “Christian” means that they would never vote for a Demonrat, which means that they would vote for a three-headed Chaos mutant who eats babies (said mutant would also be infinitely better than Trump) regardless of their qualms, rather than vote independent or stay home – and even though non-Republicans with conscience and forethought who don’t like the Democrat for whatever reason would rather vote for an independent or stay home.

Which is why we need various steps to reform – or give an enema to – the federal government. Such as child-proofing the White House to make it explicit that the FBI can investigate and prosecute a President who is suspect in crimes and to make it explicit that the President and other executive officials are “officials” under Section 3 of the 14^th Amendment. We also need to standardize election laws on a national level, at least for federal offices. And a big part of that is making sure that the election process is decided and regulated by governments, not by state parties with ulterior motives or bias. Otherwise you keep what we have now: instead of a party structure that facilitates the working of government, we have a government that exists to facilitate the establishment parties. And the results of that are all around us.

I had thought of doing something on pop culture leading into Christmas/New Year’s, but I wanted to give my opinion on the Colorado Supreme Court upholding a suit to bar Donald Trump from running for President in that state on the grounds of the 14^th Amendment. Special Counsel Jack Smith, smelling an opportunity, asked the US Supreme Court to expedite a ruling after the Trump team had already appealed, but this Friday the Court gave a unanimous decision pawning the matter off to the Court of Appeals for DC.

Like it matters. If the courts don’t give King Donnie the ruling he wants, he’s going to keep going up the ladder to SCOTUS so that his justices will give it to him.

So for snap analysis: It’s almost certain that the three liberal women – Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson – would rule against Trump. It is also almost certain that Clarence Thomas, whose wife Ginni petitioned to help the coup followers, would find some way to rule for Trump.

And then you have Chief Justice Samuel Alito. The 14^th Amendment seems to be plain and clear language, but the whole premise of Dobbs v. Jackson is that the 14^th Amendment is plain and clear language, but its meaning opposed Alito’s political agenda, so he just pretended that the Amendment didn’t apply.

This leaves the other four “conservatives” – Chief Justice (in name only) John Roberts and the three Trump appointees, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Comey Barrett, all of whom have ruled against Trump in the past, notably in a case before January 6, where Texas petitioned to throw out the election results in four states and it was ruled that Texas did not have standing to challenge another state’s election procedures.

To recap: The 14^th Amendment states in Section 3, “No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability. “

The case was originally taken to the Colorado courts by a coalition supported largely by NeverTrump conservatives. Previously District Court Judge Sarah Wallace had made a ruling that Trump had committed insurrection but was still eligible to run for office because the wording of the Amendment didn’t specifically bar running for President. And as many of us would point out, that position would mean that Nathan Bedford Forrest or Jefferson Davis or some other Confederate that the law was written for would be barred from running for Senator but NOT President.

Wallace’s ruling created an artificial dichotomy. It actually would have been more fair to rule completely in Trump’s favor and say that his free speech and actions on January 6 did not constitute insurrection and therefore he is not barred by the 14^th Amendment. If one has decided one matter (is Trump an insurrectionist?) then that decides the other matter. If it is established that one is an insurrectionist then one is ineligible to “hold any office, civil or military, under the United States”. This was the logical finding of the Colorado Supreme Court.

It has also been stated by Laurence Tribe and other judicial scholars that the 14^th Amendment is “self-enforcing” – that without the mentioned two-thirds vote of each House, the candidate in question is necessarily ineligible under the Constitution, just as one is ineligible to run for President at younger than 35 years old, and just as, under the federal Constitution, Arnold Schwarzenegger could run for Governor in California under its laws but not run for US President because he was not born in this country.

The Amendment is however not self-enforcing in that it has not clearly been established that Trump (or some other person) has committed insurrection, which is why the courts need to take this up. So, had Trump by his actions concerning the 2020 election, “engaged in insurrection or rebellion against (the Constitution of the United States) or given aid and comfort to the enemies thereof”?

Well, after Mike Pence refused to certify Trump’s fake electors, Trump twitted that “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage” to do right by him and suddenly the crowd at his rally got even more violent and started chanting “HANG MIKE PENCE!” Coincidence? Well, given how many of these people thought to bring zipties, riot gear and a hanging scaffold to the proceedings, probably not.

Of course given that, as with Schwarzenegger being elected Governor, states can do as they will in their own sphere, the appeals court or SCOTUS could simply uphold the Colorado ruling as applicable only there (and Colorado is a liberal state where all the Supreme Court justices were Democrat appointees, so not like Trump was likely to win there anyway).

But wait – wouldn’t leaving the matter up to individual states mean some keep Trump on the ballot and some wouldn’t? Wouldn’t that undermine the chances of winning the Electoral College even if Trump states affirmed his right to run? Wouldn’t that be CHAOS? Well, Samuel Alito has made clear that it is not his job to care about the direct consequences of taking a national matter and leaving it to be decided by individual states, it is only his job to rule as he sees fit. Fiat justitia ruat caelum.

It is assumed (by Trumpniks and liberals who take them seriously) that any ruling against Trump’s sacred right to run for an office that he plans to abolish once he gets power will undermine Americans’ trust in government. Of course every time the Party of Trump says that no one trusts the government, they are eliding the question of who is generating that mistrust. Contrary to their position, the feds are not going to turn McDonald’s vegan, and they are not forcing white girls to have sex with dark-skinned guys who will get them pregnant, arrange for government-funded abortions, and then raise the abortions as trans. If anything, you talk to the “progressives” and they will tell you that the Biden Administration isn’t radical leftist enough. Perhaps because the Administration, unlike the radical leftists, do not think that the radical left in America is a majority with a mandate.

The reason that no other candidate is being treated like this is that no other candidate has acted like this, because other candidates knew that acting like a five-year-old wannabe Czar was not going to work. As I say, we are not dealing with white privilege, we are dealing with orange privilege, because not even other rich white people get a free ride as much as Trump does. Ask Sam Bankman-Fried.

And then there’s the otherwise valid matter that we should be leaving the matter of Trump’s fitness for voters to decide. First off, this is blanking out the point that the people DID vote on Trump after he was impeached the first time, and they wanted him out.

Republicans say, we’re not allowing “the people” to vote? Are these the same Republicans who sneered at Clintonoids when they lost the Electoral College that “it’s a republic, not a democracy”? Aren’t these the same Republicans who whined when the Dollar Store Duce got impeached the first time, wailing that Democrats were “thwarting the will of the people”? Weren’t they the same ones who supported their boy after the January 6 coup attempt, thereby showing what they think of the popular will AND the Electoral College?

In fact, the whole reason we have all these counter-majoritarian institutions like the Electoral College and the 14^th Amendment – and liberals, you need to read this too – is precisely to make sure we do not elect a criminal (and/) or unqualified moron President just because he got the most votes.

The irony being it used to be “conservatives” who correctly assessed liberals in government granting the President and federal government all sorts of powers they did not have in the original interpretation, while liberal Justices and legal scholars interpreted the Constitution as “a living document” that could be interpreted according to contemporary mores, in practice meaning, however the people in charge wanted government to be. Now in practice it’s the alleged conservatives who are interpreting the Constitution according to their contemporary standard, not “presidents have term limits”, “presidents are subject to the law” or “insurrectionists are ineligible to serve in federal office”, but according to the living document of the Republican Constitution, which is “Donald Trump was sent to us by Heaven, like Vishnu incarnating as Lord Buddha to enlighten the masses, lo, he shall reign o’er us forever and ever- ergo, Donald Trump can do whatever he wants.”

You can only rely on this Court to do what it thinks best for this Court, and most of the time that means a reactionary agenda. But again – you can count on the three liberal women to vote against Trump. You can count on Thomas and almost certainly Chief Justice Alito to go for Trump. That means the balance is with the other four, Roberts, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett, who are certainly willing to promote the reactionary agenda but also seem to have some grounding in reality. And that means asking themselves if the reactionary agenda is best served by allowing a candidate who would almost certainly make the Court obsolete if he is allowed to run again and gets back into power. And they, like every other “conservative” who had a chance to call Trump to account and refused to do so before now, have to ask if they’re any safer as Trump’s step-and-fetch boys than standing up to him and risking the wrath of Meal Team Six. Ask Mike Pence and Lindsey Graham how that works.

If “conservatives” didn’t want to be in that situation, well, maybe they shouldn’t have put all their bets on the horse who is not only a raging authoritarian but a raging incompetent at it.

Happy Festivus, everyone. The Airing of the Grievances will continue until Trump is put in prison where he belongs.

EDIT: The case that SCOTUS sent back to the Court of Appeals was not the Colorado 14th Amendment case, it was the case on Trump’s claim of presidential immunity.

I regret the error. Specifically, the error of Trump being president.

In a true Hanukkah – or Festivus – miracle, a bipartisan Congress managed to pass an 886 billion dollar defense spending bill December 14, which includes money for Taiwan and $300 million for Ukraine. It is frankly the best our allies will be able to get since the House refuses to pass President Biden’s request for $61 billion in emergency aid to Ukraine. This on the same week that Vladimir Putin’s main ally in the European Union, Hungarian strongman Viktor Orban, held a planning session with Republican members of Congress, at the same time that Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelenskyy (unsuccessfully) petitioned House Speaker Mike Johnson for the aid.

The worst case scenario is that killing Ukraine’s field army support will, at this rate very slowly, let Russia conquer Ukraine. Which, given their rate of success thus far, is still not very likely. I mean, no one wanted to support Ukraine when it was invaded in the first place because the “experts” all assumed Ukraine didn’t have the wherewithal to fight off the largest land power in Europe. But no, the Ukrainians had to disappoint everyone by fighting back cause they didn’t like being targets of genocide. And now we’re stuck with them. But even if Ukraine was militarily defeated, it might make Putin cream his slacks, but it wouldn’t actually end things. It would just turn the country into a very, very large Afghanistan, with a much longer border and more access points to send supplies to the resistance. Consider how much good American money did going TO Afghanistan to help the locals fight occupation compared to all the good it did IN Afghanistan when we were the occupation fighting the locals. Because money isn’t the only factor. The critical factor is a population that doesn’t want you there.

Supposedly Zelenskyy and his allies in Washington tried pointing out to Republicans that the money we spend to help him over there is money that we don’t have to spend fighting Russia in NATO territory, and it’s money that is steadily degrading Putin’s war machine. Except liberals forget, that’s exactly why the Party of Putin doesn’t want to do that anymore.

I honestly think most of the “Freedom Caucus” would rather send military aid and supplies to Russian soldiers than Ukrainian – or American – ones. Seriously, it’s not like Moscow is going to. Won’t someone think about the looters and rapists?

The thing is, it’s not like Ukraine is the only country at stake here. The bill in question is also supposed to send aid to Israel as it defends itself against Hamas. (While we’re talking about looters and rapists.) It’s supposed to give aid to Taiwan even as Communist China continues to take a more aggressive posture in the South China Sea.

Protecting Israel and opposing Red China were the reflex positions of the Republican Party. What changed?

Well, as I’ve said more than once, if Trump announced tomorrow that he is a woman and starting the process of transition, 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.”

It’s like this because the entire Republican Party is simping for Trump, who has long been simping for Vladimir Putin, who, as a direct result of his war of choice, now has to simp more and more to Chinese President Xi Jinping, so that he can replenish the military arsenal he wasted so that he can keep killing Ukrainian civilians. (If he kills Ukrainian soldiers, it’s kind of an afterthought.)

So there’s your new boss, Republicans. A communist, atheist, Chinese.

Think about that while you’re having your White Christmas.

Republicans didn’t have time to help our allies this week, but they could find time to stage a vote approving an impeachment inquiry on Joe Biden. This despite the fact that no one on that side can tell us what the charges are. I mean, Democrats had that on Trump. Whether you agree or not, Republicans had that on Clinton. Normally, you’re supposed to have evidence of real crimes and then start an impeachment. Republicans want to start an impeachment and then hope they’ll find real crimes.

Thus confirming that even when impeachment is justified it is completely useless for the stated intention of holding the president (or other official in question) to account and is much more about partisan political games.

Why? Because Republicans want to smear shit on Joe Biden’s face in the hopes that no one will notice that their boy is a talking, shambling Shit Elemental.

It’s of a piece with how Trump says he’s going to be dictator “for Day One,” he thinks Obama is still the President and he says Biden is going to start World War II, but the Republican response is “But Biden is THREE YEARS OLDER!”

Begging the question: Even if we conceded that point, if you can see how Joe Biden is now, what is your boy Trump going to look like in three years?

So as Congress prepares to go home for the holidays, having done everything it can to make the world worse, this year I refer to the European pagan tradition that has at least as much to do with Xmas as the struggles of a refugee family from Palestine. Specifically I refer to the Wiccan principle of Threefold Return. That is: This year, I wish that everything Republicans do returns to them threefold.

I wish that their sources of funding dry up when they most desperately need them.

I wish that voters see just how senile and unfit their Leader is.

And I wish that that Leader is prosecuted by the full force of a US government that no longer has any reason to play nice.

You’re a scum sucking maggot, you’re cheap and you’re haggard, Happy Christmas you arse, I hope it’s our last.

This Tuesday, Sean Hannity had Donald Trump on a town hall show for Fox, and Hannity interviews with Trump are always amusing because for once Sean has to be the smart one in the room. But he had one of those by now predictable comedy moments where Hannity would try to reassure the straights that Trump isn’t going to do anything rash or stupid and then Trump doubled down on the stupid. Specifically: “I want to go back to this one issue though, because the media has been focused on this and attacking you. Under no circumstances, you are promising America tonight you would never abuse power for retribution against anybody-“

Trump: “Except for Day One.” Aside to the audience, “Look, he’s going crazy.” He then went, “I want to close the border and I want to drill, drill, drill.” Lots of cheering at that. But not only is that all stuff you would need more than one day to implement even if you were God-Emperor, it’s just more red meat to the audience that doesn’t care about anything but being played to, which is exactly why he said that.

Of course the real reason Trump would only need to be dictator “for Day One” is that on that day, he’d sell the country to Vladimir Putin and then we wouldn’t have America anymore.

The Atlantic devoted its entire December issue to a set of articles called “A Warning.” I can’t quote The Atlantic directly cause there’s a paywall, but one essay was reprinted on MSN. Money quote: “A good pitchman identifies a problem and sells a solution. A great one creates the problem to be solved. Trump, having lived his life as an endless ad, has mastered the art of problem-making. He churns out shock and amusement and outrage and absurdity with factory efficiency. He makes the world seem hard. And then he offers himself up as the person who will make America easy again.”

Which is exactly why Trump did not solve any problems in office, why he did not keep (most of) his promises and why he would not do so if elected again. If we solved the border problem, we would no longer have a border problem and then Republicans wouldn’t have any motivation. Trump, and his Party, have to keep making things worse and then offer themselves as the solution to the problems they create. If they solved the problems, people wouldn’t need them anymore. But that’s if you’re thinking logically. The point of Trumpism is not thinking logically. The point is the emotional indulgence of finding an enemy and getting mad at them.

All these Lamestream Media types are so fucking scared of Trump like he’s some invincible Dark Lord, but he’s not. He’s the guy who stares at the can of orange juice for five minutes cause it says “CONCENTRATE”. He’s so dumb he thinks he should’ve gotten a five cent coupon on his Nickleback album. The main differences between Trump and the ratty old bum at the gas station who begs you for change while screaming conspiracy theories are a few million dollars and no excuse for that haircut.

The problem is not Trump, it’s the liberals who think he’s a Dark Lord, and thereby give him credibility in the eyes of the people who hate them. But more than that, it’s those people, who are alienated from “normie” liberal culture and take Trump seriously because he’s the only politician who thinks and acts and talks like them.

Certainly leftists don’t need an excuse to hate this country, and its freedom, and its capitalism, but there is a problem here. Lenin may have been a little early in predicting it, but we are selling ourselves the rope by which we hang ourselves. This is why we have a dysfunctional “gun culture” in this country: Not because of an evil Second Amendment that was NOT causing mass shooters to pop up every fuckin’ day prior to the late 20^th Century, but because it serves the profits of gun manufacturers. This is why we have networks and radio hosts who appeal to rage more than reason, because rage sells. That is how Trump got to be a thing. And because of the way the Electoral College works, state by state, that is the reason why the mechanism the Founders intended to prevent a demagogue from using the vulgar mob to take power became the only reason that result occurred. Because if it had been a simple majority vote in 2016, Trump would not have been president.

Because while there may be a critical mass of gullible people who could swing the margin in limited circumstances, the simple majority is not fooled. Because, for now, most people have enough of a value system to put one foot in front of the other every day and pay their bills and not cause problems for others, as opposed to making the world worse and blaming everyone else.

Indeed, this general observation moves me to make it an axiom: Freedom promises emotional indulgence, but sustaining it requires emotional discipline. When you don’t have discipline, you get manipulated by people who want to put you under their control. Or worse, they don’t, and you just cast about making things worse for yourself and the world around you.

If you want to know what a second Trump term would look like, we don’t need to speculate. We have it now in the House of Representatives. Which is, for now, under a Republican majority. Because they only had a five seat majority to begin with, making it that much more difficult to rule unilaterally without input from the other side, as the Republicans are obliging both parties to do now. But they lost one of those votes last week when they got rid of George Santos (BR.-New York). Who’d never actually been convicted or even charged with a crime, as his defenders pointed out. Not like you need to be charged with an actual crime to be impeached though. Still, it was a mystery. This is a party of moralists defending an openly gay drag queen. This is a party that rails against the corruption of the “Biden Crime Family” while Santos won an election with fraudulent claims and used campaign money on personal expenses, a party that defends a man who engages in so much pathological lying that he actually exceeds Trump. But yet enough Republicans voted with the two-thirds majority necessary to expel him, despite the fact that Santos exemplifies all their demonstrated virtues. For example, hypocrisy. Like, acting like Santos’ mendacity is a dealbreaker when they still worship Trump. Of course, Santos doesn’t have a fan club of wannabe murderers who will storm the Capitol for calling him to account, so that’s one thing.

Then this week, former House Speaker (In Name Only) Kevin McCarthy (BR.-California) announced that he was not only not running for re-election next year, he is leaving Congress at the end of the year, which will drop the majority of the House GOP (Grabbing Our Pudenda) to three. The governor of California would then have to call a special election, and of course, Gavin Newsom is a Democrat. And he has a little bit of leeway as to how long he can wait to do so…

Which is just the latest example of why McCarthy lost his position even though Mike Johnson is obliged to do the same things that he did to work with the rest of the government: It’s not so much that hardliners disagreed with McCarthy’s policies, it’s that he’s a petty drip of a human being and nobody likes him.

To the extent that this taxpayer-funded Trump Fan Club does any work, it’s mainly in obstructing the actual process of government. Like, before the end of the year, the House is supposed to provide funding for the government. And Speaker Johnson is holding up both Ukraine AND Israel aid over various beefs and shifting goalposts. Right now, the pretext seems to be a demand for increased border security. In principle, I would be going along with this.

Yes. Lest my other posts make me seem like a flaming liberal, I direct you to recall the great Jeff Daniels quote from the pilot episode of The Newsroom: “I’m a registered Republican. I only seem liberal because I think hurricanes are caused by high barometric pressure and not by gay marriage.”

Really, we need to crack down on illegal immigration and trade imbalance. We need a strong border policy. I mean, the Iroquois didn’t have one, and look what happened to them.

The problem is that the words “principle” and “Republican” not only don’t go together as well as they might have once, now they’re actually opposed magnetic poles. This applies to pretty much everything, but in this particular case, we have the bogus immigration system that we do because both parties want it that way, for reasons I have already gone over. That being the case, border policy, again, is just a lame pretext for obstruction, because the Republicans’ Master’s Master thinks it’s more fun to kill Ukrainians if they can’t shoot back. Killing Jews is less a priority, but Putin is Russian, so it frequently comes down to that anyway. Besides, Iran is Putin’s friend, and Iran funds Hamas. It was only recently pointed out to me that the October 7 raids over Israel’s border took place on Putin’s birthday. Suddenly it made a lot more sense.

And as we can see, it’s all Republicans can do even to accomplish a negative and obstructive agenda. They can’t actually be FOR anything, because while there may be a “silent plurality” of Republicans who remember when it was still politically correct to speak at a high-school level, they won’t have a majority without the dedicated Trumpniks, so that obliges them to be Trumpniks too. What else are you going to do, let the DEMONRATS win and take credit for everything??

But shutting the Democrats out in order to rule unilaterally requires everybody to be on the same page (especially with such a small majority), and that’s impossible when the purpose of your party is to indulge your emotions and petty grievances at taxpayer expense, as opposed to running a government. So these guys end up fighting each other at least as much as the Democrats.

They can’t control the process, because they can’t control themselves. At the same time, they will not acknowledge this and step aside to let the grownups take over. So the result is just extended displays of bullshit and grandstanding.

But that’s what you get when one of the two parties allowed in government is basically the January 6 riot in business suits.

There are a whole bunch of comparisons that could be made here; I’ve referred to The Picture of Dorian Gray. I could also refer to the Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde. For the sake of their own self-image, Republicans want to think they’re well-behaved, Good Christians ™ like Mike Johnson, but like Dr. Jekyll, they want the freedom to indulge the Id. So they have Trump. The knuckle-dragging, rapist Mr. Hyde who doesn’t care who gets hurt as long as he gets what he wants. They’ve said it themselves. They like Trump cause “he fights.” They think that actual Christianity is “weak“. Their only complaint is “he’s not hurting the people he needs to be“.

And as Adam Serwer said, “the cruelty is the point.”

Of course, in the story, as with real cases of drug use, Dr. Jekyll built up a tolerance to his formula, such that the Hyde persona became his default and he needed more and more drugs to get back to “normal.” This led to cascading liabilities, culminating in Hyde killing someone, so Jekyll ended up killing himself to escape justice.

The Republican Party used to have it both ways, having Trump be their “fighter” while still having the cultural memory of being one of America’s two “real” parties, but the longer they are addicted to Trump, the more they become Trump, and the harder and harder it will be to pose as civilized humans. Only the Trump will remain. At that point they will indeed die, either because voters see that they’re not a “real” party anymore, or their increasing disdain for the republic and active opposition to it will oblige various levels of law enforcement to put them down. In this case it would be more “suicide by cop.”

It’s either them or us.

But the political bargain assumes that those with a monopoly on force are better than us. When it becomes clear that they are not, and that they will not follow the rules they enforce on the rest of us, people start to realize that there is no reason for the public to follow the rules either. You can only game the system for so long before there is no longer a system to game.

–Me

Rick Wilson famously said, “Anything Trump touches dies.” Unfortunately that may include the American republic.

Over the past year there have been initiatives in several states to disqualify Once And Future Viceroy for Russian North America Donald Trump from running for President, the most advanced of which was in Colorado. This idea is based on the 14^th Amendment, which states in (ostensibly) clear language, Section 3. No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.

District Court Judge Sarah Wallace ruled on the case this month, and said on one hand that Trump had clearly engaged in insurrection with his support of the January 6 riots, and yet also ruled that because the wording does not specifically bar a person from being President as opposed to Senator, Representative, or elector OF a President, that therefore Trump still gets to run in Colorado. Apparently “officer of the United States” doesn’t count. As several talking heads pointed out, this would mean that Nathan Bedford Forrest would be clearly barred from running for Senator but NOT President, such is the “logic” of this decision. Note, “Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability” is also the threshold required to convict an impeached officer in the Senate.

It would have been more consistent to either bar Trump from running on the grounds that he had committed insurrection OR ruled the matter in his favor on the grounds that his free speech did not in itself constitute insurrection. By ruling that he had in fact engaged in insurrection yet also ruling that, once again, the laws of this country do not apply to King Donnie, First of His Name, this judge pleased no one, including Trump’s team, who are making an appeal to a higher court along with the NeverTrump Republicans who filed the initial case. Now at least one of those talking heads also theorized that Judge Wallace was counting on exactly this, because her case that Trump engaged in insurrection was a “finding on fact” which is much harder to eliminate than her conclusion, which is a legal opinion. But still: Candy-ass. She knew how things were going to end up, she just didn’t want to be the one blamed by Trump’s mob of trogs.

There is nothing wrong with the US Constitution that cannot be or has not been reformed with the Amendment process. It contains everything it needs to enforce its provisions. But it still needs actual people to enforce them, and this is where America falls down. We are where we are because a Beer Belly Putsch tried to dispatch the core of the United States government, up to and including Trump’s own Vice President, and yet Putin’s Little Bitch Boy still gets to stink up the air with his mouth because a critical plurality of Americans think rule by “strong”man is a good idea. (Even if I agreed with those people, the problem is that Trump is neither strong nor a man.)

If it was a matter of the country going fascist because that is what a majority really wanted, that would of course be awful, but it isn’t even that simple. The last presidential election, not to mention all the midterm elections and special elections surrounding abortion prohibition, have all made it clear that the Trumpniks are not a majority in this country, yet they still have enough numbers to do real damage. Indeed, that is why they fight as viciously and maniacally as they do, because they know that despite all their protests to the contrary, Middle America is not on their side.

Not that it would matter if the rest of the country is against them if their chicanery works next time, because it doesn’t matter that not all the Palestinians are with Hamas, or that not all the Venezuelans support Maduro, or that Putin’s war of choice is increasingly unpopular. What matters at that point is that the thugs run the government and they will kill you for not obeying orders and being politically correct. Which is why we have to defend the republic while we still have it.

And yet that seems to be too much for some people.

As rump continues to get both more brutal and more stupid by the week – for instance threatening to prosecute Joe Biden even though supposedly Barack Obama is actually running things – President Joe Biden is also getting more unpopular by the week. One columnist dismissed Biden’s press secretary: “I would put the president’s stamina, the president’s wisdom, ability to get this done on behalf of the American people, against anyone,’ (Karine) Jean-Pierre said. ‘Anyone, on any day of the week.’

“Biden staffers can play make-believe all they want, but voters are smarter than that.”

When Trump won once and is now leading in the polls, saying “voters are smarter than that” immediately disqualifies your argument.

A huge part of the problem is a drop in support among the voters Biden needs most, young voters and people “of color.” A big part of that, apparently, is Biden’s approach towards Israel as it bombs the hell out of Gaza.

OK, so you’re mad because Biden is siding with the Israelis over the Palestinians. So, apparently the solution is to just hand the government back over to Trump, whose son-in-law handed the West Bank over to Israeli settlers. Gee, I’m glad that makes sense to you, cause it makes no sense to me AT ALL.

Lincoln was wrong. You may not be able to fool all of the people all of the time, but if you can fool enough of the people enough of the time, the rest of it doesn’t matter.

People like me didn’t vote for Hillary Clinton in 2016, and look what happened. Now little boy Trump feels entitled to power, and he’s gotten more spoiled, stupid and evil than ever. EVEN Hillary Clinton would have been a better choice than him. And Biden is a better choice than Hillary Clinton. If only by virtue of the fact that he’s not Hillary Clinton. I mean, until we got Trump Virus ™ I could almost understand people preferring the Trump economy to Biden’s, but after 2020, why would anyone in their right mind vote Trump? I mean, I would ask Herman Cain, but…

Fact is, Trump didn’t win the election in 2020 when he had all the advantages of incumbency, and it’s hard to see how he could win with all the liabilities he’s piled up since, and especially since there are fewer sympathizers in position to help him cheat. What he needs is another 2016 where he had just enough people in just enough states to either vote for him or not vote for the Democrat. And this is why Democrats are so hyper-sensitive about “spoilers.” But who exactly is going to do that? Right now the press seems to be focusing on a few candidates:
-Senator Joe Manchin, Democrat of West Virginia: He’s not running for re-election next year because West Virginia is the most Trumpnik state of the Union and it’s a miracle he’s held office as a Democrat this long. At the same time, Manchin has so much vanity and sense of entitlement – even by Senate standards – that he seriously acts like he has a mission to lead the country as President. This despite the fact that he can’t win his home state (and as Al Gore could tell you, that’s no way to win the Electoral College) and has no national following outside it, as opposed to-

Robert Kennedy Jr.: Who uses his family name and “progressive” reputation to foist policies that are the exact opposite of progressive. Like the time he said that the COVID virus was “targeted” for Whites and Blacks but not Chinese and Ashkenazi Jews. Now, wait, in his defense, if you’re Chinese and you’re going to spread a virus in America, who else is going to eat in Chinese restaurants?

Democrats are so scared that because he’s a Kennedy, Bobby is going to take Democrat votes away from Joe Biden, but he seems most likely to attract people like himself: aging ex-liberal Baby Boomers whose counterculture skepticism has curdled into paranoid conspiracy theory. In other words, the kind of people who weren’t going for Biden anyway, would have preferred Trump but might like another choice. Thus, he seems more likely to “spoil” things for Trump than Biden. Assuming he gets that far. In my opinion, Kennedy’s real problem is that his voice is completely shot, it’s hard to follow what he’s saying, and I don’t think most audiences would have the stamina to sit through one of his speeches, nor do I think that he would have the stamina to speak for very long.

And then you have the Greens, who don’t even have the name recognition of Jill Stein this time, and you have Dr. Cornel West, and I somehow doubt that the kind of people who would vote for Cornel West would want a result where Trump ends up winning the election.

And something tells me that all those “progressive” kids who aren’t going to vote for Joe Biden over Palestine are the same kids who weren’t a factor when they complained about Bernie Sanders losing the 2020 primaries, which he might not have if they’d voted for him then.

Face it, kids: We’re stuck. It’s either Joe Biden or Donnie Clownboy, and it’s a much easier choice than the media wants you to believe. I can understand why that’s not good enough for you. That’s why I voted “third” party for years. I mean, if you don’t want Joe, his designated successor is Kamala Harris. She ran against him the last time, and if that was good enough for liberals, she’d be at the head of the ticket and not him. And that’s all I need to say about that for now.

You want to do something about these lousy choices, we first need some better ones. There no longer is a center-right alternative to the duopoly, and again, the Greens are that much less a factor than the Libertarians. Even more important in the long run, we need to make the alternatives feasible. You’d first need the non-partisan runoff system like they have in California or the initiative they’re proposing for the 2024 ballot in Nevada to effectively make the primary round the first round of a runoff process.

It would mean changing the Electoral College to work like it already does in Maine and Nebraska, where Electors are apportioned by district and not winner-take-all. Yes, that would mean Republican districts in New York and California count for their candidate, which I’m sure is why Democrats will not change the Electoral College no matter how much they bitch about it. It would also mean that Democratic districts in Texas and Florida would count for their candidate, which they may not have considered. If you can shift enough of Texas to the Democrats, then the Republican Party will go the way of the Whig Party, only more archaic and with a smaller Anti-Slavery contingent.

But that’s going to be next year at the earliest, and only in some places. In the meantime you have the aforementioned problem: Republicans are getting increasingly belligerent and authoritarian at the same time as they get more unpopular (or perhaps vice versa) and thus neither they nor their Messiah will accept their reality. I mean, that would require listening to what voters want, which I guess defeats the purpose of being in government. As it stands, the 2024 campaign cycle will end in only one of two ways: Either Trump becomes God-Emperor or Trump goes to jail. Why not just cut to the chase?
It’s going to end up that way because the kind of party that would nominate a Trump is not going to listen to anyone else. The only way out of this is if enough Republicans see the light and nominate someone in their clown car to be the nominee instead of him. They’d still have lots of problems (as Trump would put it) but would be less likely to create a fascist regime. Based on the last eight years, I see little reason to think that would happen.

Although I could be wrong.

Hey, if you were paying attention to Washington political maneuvers inthe last few weeks – and you probably weren’t – you knew that the big story was how the Banana Republican caucus in the House of Representatives screwed themselves by voting out Speaker Kevin “King Pissboy” McCarthy (BR.-California) without selecting a replacement. This was really bad for their public relations but it also screwed the whole House because by law no work can proceed if the House doesn’t have a Speaker. At first they tried to nominate Steve Scalice (BR.-Louisiana), who on one hand told a local journalist he was “like David Duke, but without the baggage.” On the other hand, in today’s Republican Party, that made him the reasonable moderate. Which is probably why the Gossip Girl mentality of the caucus turned against him. Instead the consensus started to turn towards Gentleman Gym Jordan (BR.-Ohio) who previously was most famous for his time as a wrestling coach at Ohio State University, where he was “accused of turning a blind eye” to widespread sexual abuse of male students by staff physician Dr. Richard Strauss. This probably explains how he got the endorsement of Donald Trump. And yet despite his support for corruption and sexual degeneracy, Jacketless Jim Jordan couldn’t get more votes from the Trump Party than Kevin McCarthy did. In fact it only took three rounds of voting to make it clear he couldn’t clear the majority, and each round he actually got less votes than the last time, almost as if some people were holding out to make it clear how unpopular he was.

Allegedly one of the reasons Jordan couldn’t clear the hurdle is that like any good acolyte of Trump, Gym refused to admit that Joe Biden won the 2020 election fair and square, and therefore Donald Trump is the real president. One of the Congressmen who took this position was Ken Buck (BR.-Colorado) who told journalists that Jordan’s election denier posture was the main reason he wouldn’t vote for him. And, yet, Buck and literally every other Republican decided on October 25 to vote in Mike Johnson (BR.-Louisiana) as the new Speaker despite the fact that he’s that much more an election denier than Jordan is. “(Buck) drew a distinction with Jordan, arguing that Johnson did not engage in efforts to overturn the election at the same level that Jordan did. … But Johnson, too, was seen as an active player behind the scenes in in the effort to overturn the election results in late 2020 and early 2021. He collected signatures from fellow House Republicans in December 2020 for a legal brief that supported a lawsuit seeking to throw out the election results in key states, according to The New York Times. That lawsuit was defeated.”

So is Buck another spineless hypocrite like Susan Collins who goes along with the Mob regardless of their alleged principles? Well, he’s a Republican, so that goes without saying. But even if he had principles, it comes down to this: The Catholics have the Credo, the Muslims have the shahada, and the Church of Trump has “the election was rigged and stolen.” Excuse me, “STOLLEN.” This is what you have to believe, or at least pretend to believe, to be in the club, cause if you don’t, you won’t get far.

Basically, they’re ALL Trumpniks, so even if somebody like Buck would have had better taste, he didn’t have other options. Johnson is simply the Trumpnik election denier who had the least enemies. That, and Jordan’s example proves once again that being a bullying moron doesn’t work quite as well on Republicans if you’re not Trump.

Johnson at least seems well-mannered and capable of speaking standard English as opposed to Modern High GooGoo Muck or whatever Marjorie Taylor’s first language is, but he said in his first speech from the House podium, “I believe that Scripture, the Bible, is very clear: that God is the one who raises up those in authority” and told Sean Hannity “Someone asked me today in the media, they said, ‘It’s curious, people are curious. What does Mike Johnson think about any issue under the sun?’ I said, ‘Well, go pick up a Bible off your shelf and read it.’ That’s my worldview.”

Y’know, any time somebody says they follow the Bible, I seriously doubt they mean ALL of it.

Which goes to the fact that so many liberals and moderates find it odd that this professionally pious man would be so devoted to President Coup de la pousse’, but I’ve already gone over the issue several times: These people are a lot more concerned with power than their declared morality, and they’re just as willing to adapt to Trump as he is to them.

The irony being that the Party of Trump’s lust for power at all costs is what made their leadership of the House so precarious and why it continues to be so even now. The Constitution requires the House to elect its leader from the entire floor, and since that rule was created before duopoly politics was a thing, the House doesn’t have the Senate’s ad hoc precedent of assuming that the majority party’s leader automatically runs the chamber. Both chambers are designed to run on consensus, and that normally happens because the idea is that the elected represent their district or state, not their party dictator. As is, McCarthy and other Republicans whined that this all happened because Democrats wouldn’t vote to save him, which is like whining about water being wet. Not like it’s Democrats’ obligation to vote for McCarthy in particular, especially after the way he treated them. Not like McCarthy HAD to prostitute himself so deeply for the sake of the gavel that he would allow a one-person motion to vacate, specifically to appease Matt Gaetz (BR.-Bugfuckerstan), knowing he would do exactly that for any reason or no reason at all, and it’s not like Gaetz HAD to challenge McCarthy, especially without a replacement in mind. If Republicans had a bigger majority in the chamber, they would have more room to maneuver, but they don’t, which in itself ought to tell them they don’t have the mandate to rule unilaterally. As of now, Democrats under Hakeem Jeffries (D.-New York) are not going to cooperate with Republicans, especially if they want to put election deniers in authority. As for Republicans, a large reason their internal standoff lasted so long was because no one was going to reach across the aisle. Republicans aren’t going to negotiate with Democrats any more than Israel is going to negotiate with Hamas, because Republicans hate Democrats MORE than Israel hates Hamas.

Oh yeah. Speaking of that:

Not even counting the fact that Hamas used the Yom Kippur period to raid Israeli kibbutzim, and kill Israeli civilians, and expatriate bystanders, AND Palestinians, in the wake of their barbarism, the politically correct crowd has decided that anti-Semitism is making a comeback. Really, it never left. But in Sydney, you had protests at the Opera House chanting “Gas the Jews“, you have similar statements coming from the Left in this country, and just recently a Telegram channel for the Russian Muslim community spread rumors that Russia was planning to resettle Israeli refugees on their land. According to the Institute for the Study of War, “The Telegram channel called on Makhachkala residents to demonstrate at the airport on the night of October 28 and 29 and posted flight tracker data for the plane from Israel ahead of its arrival on October 29. …Demonstrators also checked identification documents in search of Israeli citizens, although there are no reports of demonstrators finding any Israeli citizens. Demonstrators have chanted ‘death to Jews’ and have also occasionally gotten physical with security personnel at the airport.” (Remember, with Putin’s Russia, nothing is a coincidence.)

All you “anti-Zionists” wondering why Israel has so little regard for internal minorities or the international community, it’s because the international community clearly has little regard for Jews.

I personally think that if world civilization ever straightens up enough to create a real space program that breaks the lightspeed barrier and reaches alien civilizations, within 40 years of first contact, the natives of Alpha Centauri will be blaming TheJews for everything bad that has ever happened to them since the dawn of time.

Not that Israel doesn’t deserve condemnation – on its own terms. I used to think calling it an apartheid state was an exaggeration, but not so much these days, especially under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is clinging to office mainly to stay out of jail, owes his position to the nutcase religious right, and foisted a scheme to kill the judiciary’s power of independent review so that he would have that much more unitary control. No wonder Trump used to love him so much. Here’s the thing, Israel, very much unlike Hamas-run Gaza or Hezbollah-dominated Lebanon, is still a pluralist society where people from all walks of life (including the military) have been fighting against Netanyahu’s bullshit.

In theory, there’s a real difference between “anti-Zionism” and anti-Semitism, for instance with ultra-Orthodox Jews who don’t see the secular Zionist state as the legitimate government for the Holy Land. In practice, with those few exceptions, there IS no difference. The distinction is the idea that there is something uniquely illegitimate about the Israeli government not just in policy but in its existence, for example the idea that you can enforce BDS (Boycott, Divest, Sanction) policies against it, but not against Communist China, whose human rights violations are that much more egregious, to say nothing of the United States, Israel’s main financial support and diplomatic shield in the United Nations.
But see, you can’t push Red China around, and you can’t push the US around. You can, apparently, push Israel around, or you think you can, and the fact that you can justifies doing so. But of course THAT position isn’t amoral.

If nothing else, the whole situation gives the lie to the idea that it’s impossible to be racist if you’re in an oppressed community, or that racism is defined only by power relationships. The Jews were an oppressed community practically everywhere, did that mean the Israelis learned fair play? Not really. And if being oppressed automatically gives the Palestinians the moral high ground, are they going to learn mercy and compassion when they get the chance to practice it? Well, Hamas gave us the answer to that question.

As a secular humanist, I would prefer that a religious ethnostate like Israel not even exist, but we know that it has to because Jews have not been safe as a minority in other countries – even the United States, to some extent. That’s part of why the US has basically treated Israel as having a blank check for support, because we know what would happen if it didn’t have one.

Which in a roundabout way gets back to the original subject, because the House prior to Mike Johnson still had to vote on aid to Ukraine, which is attacked by Russia. The House Republicans are dancing on Trump’s strings, and Trump is dancing on Putin’s strings. Hell, he’s practically twerking. Now under Speaker Johnson, the Republicans are obliging the rest of the government to choose between aiding Ukraine and aiding Israel, or in the case of one bill, choosing between Israel aid and funding the IRS.

Matt Gaetz started with a weak Speaker who was nevertheless capable of appealing to both Trumpniks and establishment Republicans, and now he has maneuvered things to where the House is led by someone who is that much more Trumpnik and election denying than McCarthy was. And in the interim he left the House leaderless and unable to approve foreign aid, and about the same time, Hamas, supported by Iran, which is an ally of Russia, decided to attack Israel. Almost as if they were waiting for a cue.

No, I can’t say for sure that Matt Gaetz is a paid agent of a foreign power. I am saying that if he were, it would be impossible to tell the difference.