James Gillen

Yon Cassius has a lean and hungry look.

He thinks too much. Such men are dangerous.

• William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

NOTE: I came up with the base outline of this piece before Saturday July 13, when a gunman shot Donald Trump at the campaign podium, grazing his ear but killing at least one innocent bystander before the Secret Service took him down. So let me preface this and subsequent remarks towards Donald Trump by saying I do not endorse violence as a means of achieving political goals. Except of course, the American Revolution, World War I, Dresden, and Hiroshima.

As many have pointed out, while President Biden tries (with mixed success) to rebuild his credibility with the media and his own party, Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee and challenger, is laying low and actually following the wise axiom, “Never interrupt your enemy while he is in the process of making a mistake.” But then he may have other priorities. This coming week is the next Republican National Convention, which is always comedy gold, but this year, Trump, who is not the incumbent (NEWS FLASH: TRUMP LOST THE LAST ELECTION) has not yet picked a running mate. And in his theatrical way, Trump is apparently setting up his running mate’s coming out party for the Convention floor, and even though he’s apparently nominated three, or four, finalists to be his (A)pprentice, it’s going to take all the concentration he can muster with his very little brain to make the final choice.

The finalists in question are Florida Senator Marco Rubio, Ohio Senator J.D. Vance, South Carolina Senator Tim Scott and Doug Burgum, Governor of North Dakota. Or some other state. To address Rubio first, there’s the slight issue that Trump and Rubio are both Florida Men, and according to the rules of the Constitution, the President and the Vice President can’t both be from the same state. But like Trump cares about the Constitution. If he has to, he can make Rubio solve the problem by moving somewhere else, and Rubio will just go “Yeh, boss. Whaddeva ya say, boss.” But that gets to another reason Trump probably won’t pick up Rubio. He’s already clashed with him in 2016, and essentially broken him. He’ll be no fun to play with anymore.

The other Senator, J.D. Vance, has also opposed Trump within his party, and more forcefully. He made his reputation with the book Hillbilly Elegy, describing his hard-knocks childhood in rural poverty, and the pathologies affecting many of our white poor. Given that he later served in the military, got degrees and became a successful venture capitalist, he was in position to describe how the traditional conserative virtues of hard work and education could get poor people out of the trap of dependency. And he did. And as such a person, he realized early on that Trump was bad news for what used to be conservative values of integrity and self-reliance. Apparently at one point Vance told an acquaintance that Trump might be “America’s Hitler.” All this changed, coincidentally when Vance ran for the US Senate as a Republican in Ohio in 2022. Since then he’s been one of the more loyal and radical Trumpniks in the US Senate, to the extent that despite his heresy, Trump hasn’t felt the need to go after him. But that just indicates that Vance’s posture is exactly that, a posture. It’s what he needs to do to get over in what his Party has become. On many levels Trump would be well-served by having Vance as his running mate, or at least in his Cabinet. He is well-spoken, well-read and capable of articulating the Republicans’ new “postliberal” philosophy better than most other people in the Party. Including Trump. Which is the problem for him. Vance is not a Lindsey Graham or Rubio hanging on to his career. He is not a broken toy. He is a rising star. Potentially, a rival.

Which is part of Trump’s well-deserved reputation for bullshit. He keeps saying he hires “the best people.” No. The best people would not work for Trump. And even if he somehow bribed them to do so, he would find some reason to antagonize them and get rid of them, because he knows what a true failure he is, and can’t stand to have anyone around him who is better than he is at anything – which is most people. Except cringing worms and people so lacking in ego and soul that they will deny reality itself to be next to power, which means that any advice they could offer will always be undermined by their need to stay in proximity to power. But such people have no ambitions in and of themselves, which is why Trump feels safe with them. He would not feel safe around Vance. Nor should he.

So I still think that Trump is most likely going to pick the candidate who is most submissive and inoffensive, which is either Scott or Burgum. As I just said, for practical reasons you’re supposed to pick the Vice President who would do the best job of succeeding you if it ever comes to that, but clearly that’s not how either party wants to do it. It’s not like we even need a Vice President anymore, it’s just one of those holdovers from the Constitution that we keep holding up even though we don’t have any use for it. Such as, the rest of the Constitution. Politically, the reason you pick a Vice President is to shore up your “base” by appealing to the demographics you don’t naturally appeal to. In Biden’s case he picked Kamala Harris to appeal to women, Black voters and Asians. And we can see how well that’s worked out for him. In his first term, Trump had picked Mike Pence as his Vice President, mainly to appeal to the Evangelical types. This turned out not to be necessary, as the last eight years have proven that as long as you help the Evangelicals kill abortion rights and turn America into a country that makes Gilead look like Rio, they’ll support you even if you got convicted of sexual assault, got convicted of 34 felony counts of fraud, and were frequently seen in public with Jeffrey Epstein. So that’s not the problem. Not only does Trump not want a “postliberal” ideologue like J.D. Vance, he doesn’t need one. What he needs is somebody who is normal and likeable, which both Burgum and Scott are, and Trump is not. Also, Trump is memorable and (to some people) charismatic, while Burgum and Scott are not. Again, there’s no room for competition on Trump’s stage.

So that would be the conventional way to do it, if you expect that you’re going to live forever and will never have to give up power, which Biden seems to and Trump certainly does. But as we can see from Biden, that’s not necessarily the best idea, otherwise people wouldn’t be panicking at his apparent unreadiness when he’s had an understudy waiting in the wings. Trump could die any minute, but as we can see lately, he might live forever, despite all logic. If he gives a damn about a movement that is greater than himself and is going to live beyond himself – y’know, I’m speaking hypothetically here – he would pick somebody who would be a credible face for Trumpism beyond Trump, and J.D. Vance is that guy. But that also means that Trump would have to keep somebody in his Cabinet who has clear ambitions to replace him, and to avoid that he has a paradoxical inclination to pick somebody who would be incapable of succeeding him, despite the Social Darwinist mentality of his own Party.

As much as Trump clearly wants to be so, he’s a pretty bad Sith Lord.

I had said around the time of Ash Wednesday that I told my conservative Catholic uncle that I don’t see the Biden-Trump race as a race between two men to be President. I see it as a race of two men against Entropy, and I told Uncle Joe that Biden was likely to win because Trump is going senile that much more clearly and that much more quickly.

Figures that even as the “liberal” media wants to make this contest more of a horse race than it deserves to be, Joe Biden and the Democrats all decided to help.

Joe Biden’s first 2024 debate against Donald Trump was such a catastrofuck that many insiders in the Democratic Party and political media sphere (same thing) were both implicitly and explicitly calling on him to resign and let Kamala Harris, or anybody, take over. Nancy Pelosi, who is herself real old and has retired from party leadership but not from her Congressional seat, came on “Morning Joe” for MSNBC Thursday to make the case that Joe should reconsider his candidacy. This despite the fact that he has not only repeatedly reaffirmed his case and gone back on campaign tours, other Democrats in Congress have had their own internal debates, and realized that they weren’t going to take Biden out. “On Monday evening, Biden joined a call with Congressional Black Caucus members, his strongest base of support on Capitol Hill, to cement their backing. Late Monday night, a House Democrat who is deeply skeptical of Biden acknowledged to Axios that Democrats were “folding all over the place” and “becoming resigned to Biden holding all the cards here, and us having no real say in the matter.”

Maybe because the polls, which everybody seems to care about despite their recent lack of accuracy, are still showing Trump barely leading, with third-party votes factored in. Real Clear Politics for July 10 shows Trump with a one point lead if Jill Stein, Cornel West and Robert Kennedy Jr. are counted. With just Trump-Biden, it’s a tie. Whereas in the same polling with the hypothetical of Vice President Kamala Harris versus Trump, she leads him by 2. According to Newsweek, “in Georgia, (Biden) has increased his share of the vote by 0.9 percent since the debate, though the Republican Party is still ahead by 3.5 percent.”

The worst you could say was that Biden needed the debate to be a game-changer in his favor, and it did cause him to slip, but not nearly as much as Trump needs to confirm a general election win.

Probably because the main thing going around in social media is quotes from Project 2025, which Trump swears he’d never even heard of and has nothing to do with, this despite the fact that most of the people involved in it or promoting it are at least tangentially associated with his four years in the White House. (It defeats the purpose of the word to call it an ‘Administration’.) Most of the things quoted from it seem like cartoon exaggerations of modern conservatism, which is why you need to actually read the thing to confirm, YES, this really is what these people want to do. Most people don’t quote extensively and in context because the thing is over 900 pages long. But here it is: https://static.project2025.org/2025_MandateForLeadership_FULL.pdf

And if you read it, you will see that Project 2025 is just as much a spiteful, empty-headed exercise in right-wing political correctness as you would expect from these people by now.

Pages 51-52: “(National Security Council) staff leads, under the direction of the NSA, should have the discretion to reduce the number of positions that need high-level clearances, and the NSC should be adequately resourced and authorized to adjudicate and hold security clearances internally with investigators who work directly for the NSC and whose sole task is to clear NSC officials. If certain staff are determined not to need high-level clearances, the question becomes whether they should be part of the NSC at all.” Pages 79-80: “An autonomous bureaucracy has neither independent constitutional status nor separate moral legitimacy. Therefore, career civil servants by themselves should not lead major policy changes and reforms … the Trump Administration issued Executive Order 13957 to make career professionals in positions that are not normally subject to change as a result of a presidential transition but who discharge significant duties and exercise significant discretion in formulating and implementing executive branch policy and programs an exception to the competitive hiring rules and examinations for career positions under a new Schedule F. It ordered the Director of OPM and agency heads to set procedures to prepare lists of such confidential, policy-determining, policymaking, or policy-advocating positions and prepare procedures to create exceptions from civil service rules when careerists hold such positions, from which they can relocate back to the regular civil service after such service. The order was subsequently reversed by President Biden at the demand of the civil service associations and unions. It should be reinstated, but SES (Senior Executive Service) responsibility should come first.” Pages 102-103: “Improve military recruiters’ access to secondary schools and require completion of the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB)—the military entrance examination—by all students in schools that receive federal funding … Entrance criteria for military service and specific occupational career fields should be based on the needs of those positions. Exceptions for individuals who are already predisposed to require medical treatment (for example, HIV positive or suffering from gender dysphoria) should be removed, and those with gender dysphoria should be expelled from military service.” Page 450: “The Secretary (of the Department of Health and Human Services) should pursue a robust agenda to protect the fundamental right to life, protect conscience rights, and uphold bodily integrity rooted in biological realities, not ideology. From the moment of conception, every human being possesses inherent dignity and worth, and our humanity does not depend on our age, stage of development, race, or abilities. The Secretary must ensure that all HHS programs and activities are rooted in a deep respect for innocent human life from day one until natural death: Abortion and euthanasia are not health care.” Pages 878-879: “The dominant internet platforms have disrupted democratic deliberation, as is evidenced by the Hunter Biden laptop story. They have a propensity to collude with government to advance political goals, as documents unearthed by the Missouri and Louisiana AG suits concerning the COVID response demonstrate. And they play a pivotal role in our economy. … As Judge Frank Easterbrook famously suggested, regulators should look at the cost of error in their judgments. This argument has usually been used to buttress a tentative and hands off approach to antitrust because judicial error in antitrust will persist (Type II error) and continue to damage markets, while failure to take antitrust action (Type I error) will correct itself in the long run as competitors challenge monopolies. However, failing to take antitrust enforcement action (Type I error) includes the possibility of real injury to the structure of important American institutions such as democratic accountability and free speech. If so, a more proactive approach may be warranted.”

That IS what you’re going to get if Trump is elected, especially since a lot of these people did work in his White House and in the text, they frequently refer to the actions that Trump took in office to enact their 2016 Heritage Foundation “mandate.”

All these scaredy-cat Congressional Democrats who are pushing Biden out saw Republican Senate Leader Mitch McConnell freeze up on camera (not just mumble through a debate, but freeze up) twice, and neither their party nor the Trump Party demanded he leave office. Though Mitch DID promise to leave his leadership post, after this year.

Which leads to another question that nobody is asking the Trumpniks: If you can see what Joe Biden looks like now and he’s only three years older than Trump, what’s your Messiah gonna look like in three years?

As Keith Olbermann put it Tuesday, “the worst outcome of the Biden situation is that there IS no outcome. That we stay here in the middle somewhere wondering if it was just a bad night.”

Spoiler, Keith: You’re going to keep wondering until he dies. Because when you’re that old and you have that obvious an episode, wondering if Biden is going to have another such episode is like wondering whether Trump is going to do something stupid and criminal.

But that goes back to the question of why everybody is so panicky at the idea that Joe Biden might have to leave office before 2025 or would die or have to retire before 2028.

It seems from my perspective that just as unwritten institutions like the filibuster are intended to prevent legislative action rather than facilitate it, the choice of Vice President seems intended to forestall a succession rather than prepare for one.

I am reminded of an Eddie Murphy routine he did about the prospect of a Black Vice President. (Years before Barack Obama, obviously.) “The President could ride through Dallas, all day, all night, with the top down. There would BE no shooting.”

That might seem racist in regard to Kamala Harris, but y’all remember Trump’s first impeachment? When all the good little Trumpniks in Congress and the Senate screamed and wailed that Democrats were trying to overturn an election? Well, they couldn’t have, because a guilty verdict on behalf of the Senate would have only acknowledged the obvious. And secondly, if a president is impeached and removed, that doesn’t invalidate the people’s vote, because his ticket running mate, the Vice President, immediately takes over, just as Ford took over from Nixon when he resigned. And you remember how everybody in the Trump Party acted like Mike Pence being President would be the worst thing in the world, worse than Adam Lambert becoming Secretary of Defense and changing all our military uniforms to mauve? That it was a fate to be avoided at all costs, certainly including what little moral credibility they had left?

That seems to be the Democrat position with regard to Harris. There already is a succession in place if anything happens to this current president either this year or in his second term. And yet Democrats are scared to death of acknowledging it.

And yet all these people who are clucking about Biden’s performance had no problem supporting him in his primaries, which were a usual exercise in an incumbent running unopposed, and everybody knew even at the time that the best case scenario is that Biden serves one more term, actually acknowledges the concept of Constitutional limits on his term (unlike Trump) and turns leadership over to Harris. That was the best-case scenario in any event. The worst that could happen is that Biden has a health issue before the end of this year, or before the end of 2028, and Harris has to take over, and everybody already knew that was the worst-case scenario, and in that event, the Administration (and Biden’s campaign funding) would continue. And yet the Democratic political-media complex wants to have a problem with that now.

News media are going to keep hammering on Biden’s debate as though exposing Trump’s embarrassing conduct for more than eight years has really hurt his support, and yet when people actually give their opinions, Biden at least fares no worse than he did. The social media feedback, contrary to CNN and MSDNC, is on the lines of, “Fuck the media, Joe had one bad night at a debate nobody watched, he’s still better than Trump on balance, I’m voting Biden.”

In fact, when I say I would vote for Joe Biden if he was in a coma, I am quite serious. Mainly because Joe Biden in a coma wouldn’t cause as much damage to the country as Donald Trump on Trump’s best day. And from my center-right perspective, Joe Biden in a coma wouldn’t cause as much damage to the country as BIDEN on his worst day.

Because while there are several Biden policies I disagree with, like his inflationary “Bidenomics”, he isn’t trying to destroy the country. Trump is. You know how the United Kingdom is the United Kingdom and not “Windsor”? Because the UK is an actual conservative country and it holds to traditions of nationhood that precede the current dynasty. Whereas Saudi Arabia is called that because the Wahhabi fundamentalist House of Saud took over the majority of the peninsula including the Two Holy Cities and decided to run it not simply as a hereditary kingdom but as their personal possession. That’s what Trump wants to do to America if he wins. And that’s the BEST case scenario.

The worst case scenario is Project 2025.

That is the “choice” you have, kids, because the “third” party candidates are unfeasible, not just in the sense that no one will vote for them, but because Robert Kennedy claimed to have a worm in his brain, the Libertarian Party got taken over by people who think Lyndon LaRouche was too liberal, and the Green Party is led by Jill Stein, who, like former Trump official Michael Flynn, actually is a Russian asset.

So your “realistic” choices are, Donald Trump: A corpulent swine that somehow learned to walk on two trotters, wear a business suit and make almost human-like whinnies and oinks that some interpret as speech. A pathological criminal who has been convicted of 34 counts of fraud, and, lest the media forget, sexual assault.

Or, Joe Biden. Who really is too old for the job of president. Or frankly any other job besides Walmart exit greeter. And yet, he’s doing it. And our economy is recovering from COVID. We have reaffirmed our international alliances, which are more important than ever thanks to threats from Vladmir Putin and Xi Jinping (y’know, Trump’s friends). And we got through four years without the president threatening to leave NATO, without Hunter Biden getting appointed Minister Without Portfolio in the White House outside congressional approval, and without the president starting another nationwide pandemic because he didn’t want to admit it was happening. And four years ago, Joe Biden ran against other Democrats for president because he knew he was the only candidate with the resume, the name recognition, and (unlike the Clintons) the reputation for normalcy to counter Trump. And Biden beat them, then he beat Trump.

As inadequate as Biden in particular and Democrats in general are, Biden can easily step over the limbo bar of Trump’s behavior, and that means every other Democrat can too. And yet, Democrats themselves seem to think that’s not enough.

But as Gary Johnson said, some day the Sun will swallow the Earth. And lately, I take great comfort in that thought.

As the Trump Era drags on, I find the interesting thing is that it makes liberals more conservative.

First, they’re starting to realize the value in preserving institutions and traditions, as opposed to replacing the entire government with radical ideologues and cronies, not to mention, having a Supreme Court that takes the plain text of the Constitution and says “this just means whatever I want it to mean.”
Second, they’re starting to realize that an all-powerful government that can do anything (to anybody) is a danger to liberty, at least as long as they’re not running it.

Third, they’re realizing they can’t trust the mainstream “liberal” media. And this at least is consistent with the leftist point that the media is just another Big Business that is out to promote its business model and keep access to power. And since the business model of “news” is less information than entertainment, it’s in the MSM’s interest to have an entertaining buffoon in the White House as opposed to a dull functionary like Joe Biden or Hillary Clinton.

The problem for them is that the buffoon in question is a dysfunctional man-baby who would put them in jail for making fun of him, and if he gets re-elected, there’s not going to be anyone who will stop him from doing it this time.

But then our media wouldn’t be the first would-be stringpullers who enabled a pathological demagogue in hopes that when they’d helped him remove all the guardrails against absolute power, that they’d be able to control him.

Everyone could see that not only was Biden having a truly terrible night at the CNN debate, but the two “journalists” they hired to witness it would not even attempt to fact-check Trump in real time, even as they ran interference for him by cutting Biden off for time, among other things. We can say that, but nobody forced Biden to go to that debate and stare wide-eyed and slack-jawed every time Trump was on the mic. Granted this is a natural human reaction at Trump’s capacity to machine-gun hose the air with bullshit. But as someone who’s watched TV debates, let alone participated in them, Biden should have known the cameras were going to show him and his opponent side-by-side for contrast, cause that’s what they do.

Trump is a vicious little bully who lies with every word that comes out of his mouth, including “and”, “the” or “Donald Trump.” It would be more instructive to recount those blue-moon occasions where Trump says something objectively true (like, Hillary is crooked) or that he sincerely believes (like, Putin respects him). As Bill Maher said, “he never would have been able to get away with that if Joe Biden was there.”

It was so damn bad that the New York Times – which apparently is still mad Biden wouldn’t give them an interview – felt compelled to present an Editorial Board opinion that Biden had to step down. So, after a whole weekend, what is the public’s opinion of this crushing media offensive on Biden?

USA Today showed Trump up three points where the candidates had been virtually tied. Data For Progress showed Trump up three points against Biden (and incidentally, in hypotheticals, he was also up 3 against Kamala Harris and more than that against other prospective Democrats). The NYT itself was still showing Trump only 1 point ahead of Biden in Wisconsin. In the Morning Consult poll, Biden’s numbers actually went UP.

And I have no doubt that the Biden-Harris campaign is raising more money than ever, if only because it is now impossible to avoid the fact that our nation is just one step away from answering the question, “What if we had a dictator who was written on ChatGPT?”

How? How is it that this debate hasn’t killed Biden? Well, I’m starting to think that the defining aspect of the Trump Era, Trump’s completely unjustified capacity to avoid the political consequences of his actions, is finally starting to accrue to the other guy. Just as everybody knows that Trump is a racist, rapist, Russian-sympathizing, pathological liar, mental defective and career criminal who wallows like King Pig in a pool of his own shit, and that’s why we love him so, Joe Biden is real old and that’s built in to his position. Criticizing Biden for being real old is like saying Bill Gates is real rich. It’s almost beside the point now. Expecting him to have a “senior moment” is no more momentous than Trump zoning out in the middle of a speech. On balance, it happens a lot less often. And every time the media exposes Trump’s malfeasance, his fan club rallies around him because the collective “They” are picking on their sweet little boy when it’s only pointing out the obvious. Well, now you see Biden getting people to rally around him because it seems like the media are picking on him in his moment of weakness. It’s not like they don’t have evidence. After all, it’s not like the Times told Trump to quit the race after he was convicted of 34 felonies.

But it’s probably a case of the same motive that the Trump club has in standing by their man no matter what: Because they’re scared to death of what happens if Those People win. And in the case of the Left (which now means anybody who’s not a Trump cultist) they have far more cause.

One of my friends told me the other day that “now I’d vote for Biden even if it was a ‘Weekend at Bernie’s’ thing.” I said, “it may come to that.” I don’t know if Biden will even get past 2025. But just as long as he gets past 2024, I’m still voting for him.

But we need more than that. After all, the whole reason that Trump won the first time is that being “not as bad” as Donald Trump was simply not enough. And we’re going to need more than that if Republicans are going to keep raising up people like J.D. Vance who are just as unethical as Trump but younger and smarter.

You would think, with the backbench that the Democratic Party has, can’t they find a national candidate who isn’t corrupt (like Bob Menendez), a dull political hack (like Amy Klobuchar or Kamala Harris), incredibly old (like Joe Biden or Bernie Sanders) or all of the above (namely, Hillary Clinton)?

This matters for the coming election, not to mention the next one after that, assuming there is one. Because this is all affected by the big news from Monday. The Supreme Court finished its term, a good weekend past the last Friday in June, and waited until July 1 to display its conservative consensus on the question of Trump’s presumed immunity from prosecution and investigation, waiting that long possibly because they knew no one would like the result.

In the case, aptly titled Trump v. United States, https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/23-939_e2pg.pdf the Samuel Alito Court ruled for Trump, and therefore, against the United States.

The Court has made a blanket ruling that anything the president does as an official act – by his own definition – cannot be prosecuted, and materials related to such action cannot be used as evidence against him. As others have pointed out, this ruling would have invalidated US v. Nixon.

However SCOTUS remanded to the District Court the question of whether “a prosecution involving Trump’s alleged attempts to influence the Vice President’s oversight of the certification proceeding would pose any dangers of intrusion on the authority and functions of the Executive Branch.” Thus not exactly killing, but also not disputing, the premise that a president who is sworn to uphold the Constitution can, let alone must, use his authority to overturn a lawful Constitutional election just cause it didn’t go his way.

The Chief Justice (technically John Roberts) wrote in his opinion for the Court that “The president occupies a unique position in the Constitutional scheme.” “Then, misreading the design and purpose of the Constitution itself, he argues that the Framers “sought to encourage energetic, vigorous, decisive and speedy execution of the laws’ by placing in the hands of a single, constitutionally indispensable individual the ultimate authority that, in many in respect to the other branches, the Constitution divides among many.” that there “exists the greatest public interest’ in providing the president with ‘the maximum ability to deal fearlessly and impartially with the duties of his office…. (T)he nature of presidential power,” Roberts explains, “requires that a former president have some immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts during his tenure in office. At least with respect to the president’s exercise of his core constitutional powers, this immunity must be absolute.” That immunity would ensure that “when the president exercised… authority, he may act even when the measures he takes are ‘incompatible with the expressed or implied will of the Congress’…. And the courts have ‘no power to control the president’s discretion when the acts pursuant to the powers vested exclusively in him by the Constitution.’”

Thus presenting the truly astounding theory that the legislature is exercising too much power, while the president, be he Republican or Democrat, is not exercising nearly enough.

The party of constitutionalism and small government, ladies and gentlemen.

And in order to assert this “decisive” agenda, the Alito Court – the ‘textualist’ and ‘originalist’ Court – is asserting a premise found nowhere in the Constitution, not even implied in the Constitution, not even in the common and dangerous civil tradition that the president should not, and therefore never will be, investigated for suspicion of real crimes. Now even that tradition is replaced with the force of a ruling that comes not from the legislature or executive order, but the judiciary.

In other words, they are legislating from the bench, which apparently is the worst thing in the world when a liberal judge does it but seems to be the expected function of a conservative justice.

This was pointed out by Justice Sonia Sotomayor in her dissent, pointing out the very nightmare scenarios raised by her, and by the lower court justices, in their questioning of Trump’s attorneys, on questions that the majority has just decided in the affirmative: “Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune.”

Left unsaid in Sotomayor’s dissent was the obvious: If the president fires Samuel Alito or Clarence Thomas, or for that matter, Sonia Sotomayor, he’s immune.

You might say, the president doesn’t have such power in the Constitution, but what difference does that make, when you, the Court, have decided that anything the president does as an official act cannot be challenged except by impeachment and then a two-thirds conviction vote in the Senate, which will require at least a third of the president’s own party to defect, which is NEVER going to happen?

What is the argument against the point that you, the Court, have declared that Article II in fact DOES mean the President can do anything he wants?

The fact that the conservative majority seems to think that Joe Biden will not abuse the power they have just given him before he leaves office only betrays the bad faith of their argument: Not every president can be trusted with such power.

This only confirms that we are never going to get justice against Donald Trump from the judiciary, which had always catered to Trump in his civilian career even before he had the power to appoint his own judges. Which means the only chance of holding him accountable, whatever one thinks of Joe Biden’s more-obvious-than-ever weaknesses, is to vote for Biden against Trump. After all, if Trump is above the law while in office and can do anything he wants while in office, the obvious step is to make sure he never gets back in office.

As you know by now, June 27, incumbent President Joe Biden had his first 2024 debate against once and possibly future Viceroy for Russian North America Donald Trump, and the universal consensus is that Joe did not have a good night. Which is a polite understatement on the level of “Maybe the Germans should have brought more winter supplies to invade Russia”, “Napoleon was a pretty good artillery captain” or “Michael Ironside has been in a few bad movies.”

If nothing else I got an answer to my question as to why so many people hate Joe Biden and can’t give him credit for anything his Administration does, because Americans can only see the superficial and optics are everything. And Donald Trump understands this better than anyone else. And that is why he has been leading Biden, because Biden actually looks his age while Trump wears a Tribble on his scalp and paints his face the same color they gave David Soul in that one Star Trek episode with the giant lizard head.

But Biden’s age in itself isn’t an insurmountable issue. It’s been the given for quite some time. And he has proven to be pretty sharp on several occasions this year, notably the State of the Union speech, though I recall his voice was going out there too. But in this week’s debate, Joe just seemed out of it. Like, he’d been roped into a Juneteenth celebration and he had no idea what that music was. Sure he focused and started swinging back at Trump by the second half, but that didn’t correct the lethal first impression, especially if you, like many viewers, watched for five minutes, shot your TV and then started looking up prospects for a work visa in Ireland.

The point is, Biden’s performance was so bad that after the debate, all through the night various insiders with ears in the media started making noises to the effect that Democrats need to replace him at the Democratic National Covention.
Guys: Are you really going to go there? Because if you’re serious, you need to explore just how serious your options are.

First off, as I have said, if the president dies or has to retire, he already has a replacement set up, and in this case the replacement is Kamala Harris. And frankly: If people thought Kamala Harris was up to snuff, Democrats would not be in a state of total panic right now. Indeed my position is, and has been, that Biden is only running for a second term because he knows Kamala Harris would be even less popular versus Trump than he is.

And then the second question is not whether they can pull off a brokered convention. If that decision is made, then the process is secondary. The question is who they nominate. Because just as the awful truth of the Republican Party is that there is nobody (except maybe Nikki Haley) who has a chance of winning a national election other than Trump, there is probably no one in the Democratic Party with the national profile and popularity to win the race other than Joe Biden – except perhaps Bernie Sanders, who like the running candidates is real, real old, and technically not a Democrat.

The people with the strongest profile are in different categories. First, Senators like Sanders or Elizabeth Warren. In these cases, that would be taking an incumbent Senator away from the Democrats when their margin is only technical, one seat is guaranteed to flip Republican because Joe Manchin isn’t running in West Virginia, and Democrats are going to need a Senate majority if they win the White House or especially if they don’t. Then you have some non-elected people who are prominent Democrats like Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, but in his case, he ran for President as an openly gay man and found out that certain demographics of Democratic voters aren’t as “progressive” on that issue as he needed them to be. And then of course you have Gavin Newsom, Governor of California. I’m sure he’s sincere when he says he’s supporting Biden, if only because of the practical issues involved in switching horses mid-stream. But if someone gave him a serious transition plan, I’m also sure he wouldn’t turn it down.

And then there’s Biden himself. All the news insiders are saying that the only one who can make him step down is him, and the only people who might convince him to do that are people of the same stature whom he respects, namely: Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. But then, they’re the ones who decided Hillary Clinton was a better candidate than Joe Biden in 2016, so how good is their judgment on this matter?

On an online forum for The Bulwark staff, Bill Kristol declared his position by saying, “If there is no solution, then there is no problem.” You just go with what you have, which is still the most realistic option.

And it just points out the critical difference between liberals and “conservatives” – liberals still act like facts matter. They still act like they have standards. When Biden or some other Democrat is stupid or incompetent, they will actually call it out. They may try to spin somewhat, but they don’t deny what they see. Whereas for the past few weeks, at least, Trump’s fan club and pet media have seen him on the podium insult his own audience or go into a fugue state, and they still act like he built the Pyramids, wrote the King James Bible and invented sliced bread.

Maybe Democrats need more of that. And I think I saw some of that when I looked at the YouTube comments on various people’s pages. I saw people saying basically the same things: “I’m worried, but I can’t vote for Trump.” “We can’t let Trump win.” “I’d rather vote for a ham sandwich than Trump.”

Wishful thinking and denial of reality. Democrats ought to try it out. It’s worked great for Republicans so far!

The June 27 CNN debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump was already expected to be a low point in the history of our republic and the choices it allows itself to have in government, and if anything, it exceeded expectations.

Leading up to this debate, Republicans seemed so eager to talk down expectations that they almost seemed scared of Joe, like he was going to stage the same comeback he did at the State of the Union speech, cause he was on COCAINE! You’ve heard of Cocaine Bear? This is Cocaine Biden!

If Joe had been coked up, he might have been better off.

For the first time, I actually saw what all the Biden-haters have been seeing in him: Joe looked scared, and lost, and OLD. Meanwhile, Trump was doing his usual rambling, evading, bragging Gish Gallop, but at least he seemed to know where he was, which is more than you could say for him in the last few weeks. As many people pointed out, shutting off the other candidate’s mic was assumed to kill Trump’s main weapon, but it actually served to his advantage by allowing him to focus, and made it that much harder for Biden to counter him, when he actually did.

And after the fact I saw a whole bunch of commentators like Keith Olbermann say that the CNN anchors did not challenge Trump on his various lies and evasions about January 6 in particular, but the thing is, it is not the job of reporters to hold Biden’s hand – or the voter’s hand – and point out the stuff that everyone knows isn’t true. Saying “that’s not true”, like Kaitlin Collins did in rump’s townhall lovefest, isn’t enough. What matters in a debate is FIGHTING BACK, and fighting back twice as hard. Imagine if Joe had been just as forceful and direct as Trump was, but with facts on his side. Of course the facts were on his side anyway, but in a TV debate, everything is optics. In this particular case, facts don’t matter. Certainly that was Trump’s strategy. What you need to do is win the day, and as we have seen with the Republican Party, far too many people who know better are willing to meekly surrender and march behind a moronic, dick-swinging bully who shits on everything he touches, as long as it seems like he’s winning. And right now, it seems like Trump’s winning.

And Biden’s performance was the sort of thing that has caused people like Bill Maher to say that Joe shouldn’t be running, and it’s “selfish” of him to hold on when he could die any day. For one thing, there’s a big difference between the President and Ruth Bader Ginsburg: If the president dies, or has to retire, there’s already a replacement set to go. In this case, that replacement is Kamala Harris.

NOW do you see why Joe is still running?

Because if you tell most Americans the choice (if they can’t stand Trump) is either Biden or Harris, most Americans would prefer Biden, probably including a majority of Democrats. After all, if Democrats had preferred her in the 2020 primaries, she would probably be president now.

But that means the issue is both Biden and Harris. You would think that with all the advantages of incumbency, which Trump no longer has, that Democrats would be able to put off the issue of whether they wish to be led by Harris, and if not her, whom, until after they win in 2024, but now more and more Democrats are starting to wonder.

The Telegraph: “White House aides have spent the last three weeks claiming that any stories about the US president’s age and mental capacity were manipulated “cheapfakes” or outright lies. But those at home watching the two men on stage tonight were left with an unavoidable conclusion: Mr Biden struggled to hold his own, and Donald Trump wiped the floor with him.” Reuters, quoting “Top Biden Donor Who Did Not Wish To Be Named”: “There is no way to spin this. His performance was disqualifying.” Analyst Amy Walter: “To be sure, Trump did not ‘win’ this debate as much as Biden lost it. Trump lobbed multiple falsehoods and lies. He failed to make a positive case for his second term, spending more time litigating Biden’s failures. But, Trump is leading in the polls and doesn’t need a ‘rest’ in the way Biden does.” USA Today: “That’s a good man. He loves his country. He’s doing the best that he can,” said Van Jones, a Democratic political analyst for CNN. “But he had a test to meet tonight to restore confidence in the country and of the base, and he failed to do that.” Jones added: “We’re still far from our convention. And there is time for this party to figure out a different way forward if he will allow us to do that.”

Jones was not the only person to say that. And indeed, the Democratic National Convention is not until mid-August. But what are we saying? Are we saying that a party convention isn’t the de facto coronation of the guy who’s got all the organizational bigwigs on his side? Especially since he’s the president?

People say that this election, and this debate in particular, go to show us how screwed this country is, but if the United States is to truly be a representative republic, it has to be led by the people who matter the most: Really old white guys who have no clue what they’re doing.

Are we going to say that Democrats aren’t going to do what they’re “supposed” to, that they’re going to do what they did before the 1980s, and actually get people on the floor to put younger, newer leaders forward and let the community decide, on the basis of who the best choice really is???

What kind of Commie un-American idea is that?!?

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

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

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

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

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

Oh, frabjous day! Callou, callay!

He chortled in his joy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why wait?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You’re at WAR, Democrats.

At some point, you should try shooting back.

Before the Supreme Court for Republicans Of The United States – SCROTUS – held arguments April 25 on Viceroy Trump’s theory of absolute presidntial immunity, it was assumed by Conventional Wisdom that the conservative, one-third Trump appointee court would seek to tactically delay a decision so that federal trials against him could not proceed before the election, but ultimately would not give him a win.

Now, people aren’t so sure.

San Francisco Chronicle: “Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, two of Trump’s three high court appointees, and (Samuel) Alito said their concern was not the case against Trump, but rather the effect of their ruling on future presidencies.

“Each time Justice Department lawyer Michael Dreeben sought to focus on Trump’s actions, these justices jumped in. “This case has huge implications for the presidency, for the future of the presidency, for the future of the country,” Kavanaugh said. The court is writing a decision “for the ages,” Gorsuch said.

“Justice Amy Coney Barrett, the other Trump appointee, seemed less open to arguments advanced by Trump lawyer D. John Sauer, searching for a way a trial could take place.”

Bloomberg: “Alito offered some support for Trump’s legal arguments, saying it could be destabilizing if presidents are concerned they’ll be criminally prosecuted when they leave office.

“A stable democratic society requires that a candidate who loses an election, even a close one, even a hotly contested one, leave office peacefully,” Alito said. He questioned whether presidents will now fear they’ll be “criminally prosecuted by a bitter political opponent” rather than going into a “peaceful retirement.”

“Will that not lead us into a cycle that destabilizes the functioning of our country as a democracy?” Alito asked.

Alito and Clarence Thomas are both very old guys and would probably like to retire, but only if they can make sure that their replacements would be conservatives, and conservatives of their ilk. So even if an “absolute immunity” decision would end up undermining their own authority, they will probably support it so that they can ensure their effective dynasty is continued, which it would not be if they died with President Biden (or Harris) in charge. The result would be “Our Lord Trump will reign o’er us forever and ever, because we, the Supreme Court, will protect him.”
That seems to be the art of this deal.

The problem at that point is that America would no longer be America.

At that point, we would not have rule of law any more, we would have rule by the biggest gang. The thing that the Wittgenstein of Witlessness doesn’t seem to get is that the Right is not the biggest gang. And you would think that Alito and Thomas would be smart enough to know that, but apparently not.

Several former military commanders filed an amicus brief on this case, summarized somewhat by an article by Ray Mabus, former Secretary of the Navy: “Imagine a large group of activists assembled outside the White House, peacefully protesting a recent decision by the president. They are waving signs denouncing the new policy, holding banners demanding change and chanting slogans about that president. As their numbers begin to swell, as their voices grow louder, the president issues an order to military commanders: Take them out.

“Our military leadership would then be faced with an impossible choice. They’d either have to follow the clearly unlawful order of their commander in chief, and commit crimes for which they could be prosecuted, or openly defy that order.

“This is not a far removed hypothetical, but a very real choice service members could face if the president of the United States is immune from criminal prosecution. “

Trump is assuming that once he gets in charge and appoints himself dominus et deus, he will be invincible because civilian resistance could not stand against the US military. But that assumes all of the military will stand with him. When they, and our NATO allies, now know that he thinks soldiers are suckers and he insists on being Putin’s little bitch.

This demand to the Court also rests on a critical flaw. As I have said, the weakness of this Roman-inspired republic is that like Rome, it grants more and more power to the executive rather than the Senate, which increasingly can’t get anything done. As a result, we have assumed the president to have more authority than he strictly has under the Constitution. War making powers, for instance. The assertion of the normie culture has been, “the President can do anything he wants, cause he’s the President.” Which is now Donald Trump’s best justification for his lifelong belief that “Donald Trump can do anything he wants, cause he’s Donald Trump.”

And while his lawyers may insist that while their argument in the abstract hypothetically applies to ANY president, it’s very easy to bring the matter back to reality. Trump is asking for absolute power. He’s saying, “The King can do whatever he likes”, but he’s NOT the King. Common sense (which granted seems to be in short supply at the Alito Court) indicates that the ruling doesn’t apply to just Trump. Ask these people if all these hypotheticals they are blithely discussing would apply in the abstract to Joe Biden.

Could Joe Biden order somebody to ice Donald Trump?
Could Joe Biden order a crackdown on right-wing media ranging from Reason Magazine to Newsmax?
Could Joe Biden, the day after presidential immunity was created by SCOTUS, then immediately declare Dobbs v. Mississippi to be null and void and sign an executive order making the previous Roe v. Wade standard nationwide again?

I think we all know how Chief Justice Alito would react to that hypothetical.

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

Memo to Future Fascists: Don’t declare absolute power until you actually HAVE it. Like that nice Hitler boy, he knew what he was doing.

Which is why when you listen to some of these talking heads, you’re getting an assessment: The three liberal justices will not vote for Trump, Thomas (who of course has not recused himself in a case where he has personal interest) will certainly vote for Trump, Alito is at least 90 percent likely to vote for Trump, Neil Gorsuch is at least 50 percent likely to vote for Trump, which leaves Brett Kavanaugh, Amy Comey Barrett and nominal Chief Justice John Roberts as the balance, and while they seemed ambiguous, they also don’t seem to be totally on Trump’s side. So the thinking now is, “Of all the nine justices, Gorsuch appeared to be steering his like-minded colleagues toward a decision that could result in sending the 2020 subversion case back to the district court in Washington for more hearings with instructions about what acts constitute official or private actions.” That would of course, still be a delay, and would definitely drag things out past the election, but that would also mean that SCROTUS wouldn’t have to worry about giving President Biden absolute immunity. So at least somebody‘s thinking ahead.

But even entertaining this mishegoss demonstrates the emotion and illogic of the Alito Court, which in attempting to decide a matter once and for all for their side just ends up creating a bigger rats’ nest. This same week, the Court held arguments on a State of Idaho law that forbids abortion for any reason other than the potential death of the mother, leading, among other things, to 55 percent of OB-GYNs in Idaho leaving the state for fear of being prosecuted if the government rules against their medical decisions. A possibility that could not have occurred without Dobbs vs. Mississippi. In that decision, Chief Justice Alito ruled that a national right to abortion did not exist because there is no affirmative precedent for it, even though this opinion had to assert a position not only against stare decisis but the wording of the Fourteenth Amendment, “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States”. So there should be no right to abortion because it isn’t positively stated in the Constitution. But there should be a right to presidential immunity when there’s nothing in the Constitution on that subject one way or another? Because it’s never come up before? Because nobody other than this particular subject forced the issue before, unless you count Nixon, which brings up the question that Justice Ketanji Brown-Jackson asked Trump’s attorney D. John Sauer, “What about the pardon?”

Mr. Sauer asserted for his client that the president must have absolute immunity from prosecution or the office will be crippled, raising the question of why no other president, including Richard Nixon or Bill Clinton, have made such an argument in the face of investigation. It is telling how much the republic has deteriorated that no president before Trump would make such an argument, and no other Supreme Court would take it seriously.

To assert, okay, maybe we shouldn’t let this obviously compromised and senile Russian asset have complete immunity but maybe the president in the abstract deserves some level of privilege for “official acts” is to assert a presidential power that never existed in the letter of law and was assumed not to exist in the spirit of the law, prior to a largely Trump-appointed Court. If such privilege were granted, would that lead to Mr. Alito getting more, or less, legal hassles in future cases?

Maybe … they shouldn’t give the president that privilege.

This is the judiciary, not the legislature. To create an interpretation beyond both the wording and spirit of the original law is effectively legislating from the bench. Which I thought “conservatives” were against. They should just stick to the script and what it says.

What is the term for that? Textualism? Strict constructionism? Constitutionalism?

Gee, if only we had a conservative Supreme Court that operated on that philosophy!

When the Way was lost there was virtue.

When virtue was lost there was benevolence.

When benevolence was lost there was right.

When right was lost there were the rituals.

The rituals are the wearing thin of loyalty and trustworthiness

And the harbinger of chaos.

• Lao Zi, Tao Te Ching

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

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

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

So hey, thanks, Worldwide Zionist Conspiracy!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Country over party.

What a fucking concept.

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

– Rush, “Freewill”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Seize it if you try.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s yours.