The Execution of Tyre Nichols

I doubt you can call me as a juror on this case. I've already made up my mind about what those five officers did to an unarmed Black man in Memphis Tennessee (via Jonathan Franklin and Emma Bowman at NPR):

Police said on Jan. 8 that Nichols was taken into custody after a traffic stop that involved two confrontations with officers. During the initial confrontation, Nichols fled the scene of the traffic stop, police said.

Following the arrest, Nichols then complained of shortness of breath, according to authorities, and was taken to the hospital in critical condition, where he died on Jan. 10.

His family has said the police beat him so severely that he was unrecognizable.

There was video, some of it from the body cams, one from a nearby street camera that the officers had to know was recording them (and they still didn't care):

In the videos, officers are seen dragging Nichols from his car and shouting profanities throughout the confrontation. An officer tries to deploy a Taser at Nichols and then begins to chase him on foot. "I'm just trying to go home," Nichols is heard saying. Later, officers are seen repeatedly kicking, punching and using a baton to strike Nichols as he lies on the ground. At one point he's heard yelling "Mom." Lawyers for the Nichols family says this encounter happened within 100 yards of the family's home.

The video is hard to watch. If you do, you'll notice the cops took turns beating Nichols.

...

Five cops, beating one unarmed man. If you've ever been bullied in school, you'll understand how overwhelming and terrifying that can be, getting ganged up like that.

Oh, he shouldn't have run, the defenders will opine. That just made the cops angry.

Bastards, listen up. Everybody runs when confronted with the possibility of death. Nichols must have sensed something was wrong, something was going on with these "officers of the law" that was going to end up with him bloodied and broken.

It was the cops who were over the line, not Nichols. And Nichols is the one who ended up beaten to death.

There are serious problems with law enforcement in our country. Our police aren't being trained to protect and serve, they're being trained to bully and intimidate. Our police aren't being trained to defuse situations, they're being trained to escalate to violence. Our police are getting hammered with the message that there's a war on the streets, that they're soldiers in an Us vs. Them struggle not only with gangs but with everyday citizens who can turn violent in a heartbeat. 

Everyone - who are poor minorities - are a threat to them now. It makes everyone - those poor minorities - a target.

And it doesn't matter to these police officers if they target unarmed Black men at night or broad daylight, they don't believe they'll get into trouble even as they administer beatdowns in front of street cameras or eyewitnesses. 

Our nation's law enforcement have learned nothing from Rodney King, from the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, from the execution of George Floyd, from the reckless murder of Breonna Taylor, none of that.

Unarmed Blacks are going to keep getting killed by systemic failure in our legal system - one driven by fear and racism and arrogance - on the part of law enforcement that ought to work to keep us all safe, instead of appointing themselves executioners.

Why It Matters

So there's this:

The Georgia prosecutor investigating former President Donald Trump and his allies for possible criminal interference in that state’s 2020 presidential election told a judge Tuesday that decisions on whether and whom to charge in the probe “are imminent.”

Anyone sane since 2015 is pretty much chilling the bubbly for the moment the indictments go public.

With all this... animosity I've clearly been showing towards donald trump, I have to be honest and admit Yes I am biased, and Yes I am a little too eager to see trump perp-walked to a jail cell where he can rot for the rest of his short days.

You might want to ask me "Why." Why all this hate for the man?

It's not that he's rich (whatever millions he has doesn't make him much different from other rich men), or that he lies about being richer (although the gaslighting is part of the reason I despise trump). 

It's not that he's done anything directly towards me to raise my ire. trump's never come to my door to punch me in the face, or spike my car tires, or give a book I've published a one-star review. The closest he's done was ruining the USFL in 1987. However, taking away the Tampa Bay Bandits wasn't personal, it was just heartbreaking for myself and thousands of local sports fans.

It's not that he's a Republican political figure, although my disdain for that party has been decades long watching them sink into a Culture War miasma that's wrecking the national psyche for the last 25 years.

There are reasons to hate trump, and I listed a number of them back in 2016 regarding his unfitness to serve as President, only to watch since then every argument I made proved correct.

I would argue the reason I want to live long enough to see trump in a jail cell is the horrifying reality that this man has a long history of violating laws and cultural norms, to where he has never been held accountable for any of it. This is something which offends anyone who has a sense of justice in their soul.

I've been doing research on a non-fiction project, trying to put together a simple book about the basic ideologies that drive the American political scene. Between the Big Three of Conservative, Liberal, and Moderate, with the early research pulling up a lot of stuff on Liberalism (I'm trying to find Conservatism texts that don't devolve into QAnon nuttery, so give me more time on that).

The key element I'm finding about Classical Liberalism - the Ism at the foundation of our Constitutional government - is how its primary focus is on Justice: Faith in the application and upholding of laws to promote individual equality and essential freedoms. It's not a perfect ideology - early Liberals excluded a lot of women and minorities (it even tried justifying slavery until abolitionism became the vogue) from those essential freedoms - but it did bend over time towards that justice.

For all my self-appreciation as a Moderate, I know full well my moderation leans towards more Liberal beliefs than Conservative ones (I would classify myself as Center-Left than true Centrist). It's arguably why most of my blog readership are happily enjoying my rants against the short-sighted fiscal and tax-cut policies of the Goddamned GOP, and against the Far Right hypocrites waging religious culture war bullshit on the rest of us.

My sense of Justice when it comes to donald trump raged up on the dial to 11. The numerous bankruptcies he's committed without ever getting held accountable for the fraudulent acts that had to happen to make them fail. The constant gaslighting about his business savvy when all he was truly good at was marketing himself. The preening public misbehavior. The open acts of racism he never apologized for: Such as calling for the lynching of black men accused of rape who turned out to be innocent, and his later disdain for Obama by going after his birth certificate. At no time did he ever face true public reprisal, never faced a courtroom judgment that exposed his sins for what they were.

And all of that was before he officially announced to run in 2015.

That very day was an outrage as he went Full Racist against China and Mexico. trump never looked back as he kept campaigning on hate as an agenda to the delight of rabid Far Right voters who loved the pandering. He kept getting worse, and never answered for any of it. The Republican Party leadership never suspended him, called him to account, forced him to behave better for the sake of the public discourse. The mainstream media never held him to account, never boycotted his hate rallies, or refused to give him any coverage (his oxygen fueling the flames) to teach him manners. Hell, the Beltway Media gave trump free advertising 24/7.

By all rights, the day the Access Hollywood interview outtakes got out - the day the entire planet finally understood how vulgar trump truly is - should have been the end of him. Any other political candidate would have been driven from the stage like the sexually abusive Shitgibbon that he is. trump shrugged it off, and his allies and apologists among the mainstream media doubled down on attacking Hillary Clinton as if to exonerate the crimes trump himself admitted doing. 

And when the election came that November, trump may not have won the popular vote over Hillary, but he won enough voters to abuse a broken Electoral College system to claim a Presidency that should never have gone to him.

Every act, every statement by trump became another act of injustice.

Like any person with a desire to see justice done, to see our system of laws hold everyone equal to those laws, trump's ongoing misdeeds from 2017 onward triggered in me this thought: "He can't keep getting away with it."

When the Mueller investigation started into Russian's interference with the 2016 elections, and with possible Russian ties to trump as a favored candidate, I held hope it would pan out. I still argue that Mueller's work did expose Russian interference, but that he failed to pursue trump on clear acts of Obstruction: Partly because he tried leaving it to Congress to punish trump, and partly because Attorney General William Barr distorted Mueller's results in order to absolve trump.

And so trump got away with it.

trump exposed himself to impeachable offenses when he got caught hiding illicit phone calls pressuring Ukraine in 2019 to start fake investigations into Hunter Biden to set up mudslinging attacks on Joe Biden. But because of the partisan nature of modern party dynamics, The Republican Senate refused to admit where trump crossed the line, refused to hold him accountable.

And so trump got away with that.

At some point, an honest defense of our nation's Constitutional system has to acknowledge the damage trump has done, is still inflicting, on the United States' well-being.

Which is why it matters. It matters to me, it matters to millions of fellow Americans, it matters to our future that all the things trump is under criminal investigation for today - the January 6th Insurrection, his tax fraud scams, that unfinished bribery allegation, his theft of classified documents, and the election interference in Georgia and other states - must finally bring him to heel.

It is a moral imperative as much as a legal imperative that at some point - for any of the crimes trump's committed in his pursuit of greed and power - donald trump must be indicted. It's not schadenfreude, it's not envy, it's not partisan hackery, it's not foolishness on my part or anyone else's. 

It is a straight-up moral imperative that trump stand in an American court of law and be held accountable for the laws he's openly violated. It is a moral imperative that every excuse, every deflection, every lie that trump keeps uttering to avoid the facts all come to an end.

Gods help us. Let Justice Be Done.

This Is Just Getting Embarrassing

With all the Far Right outrage over Joe Biden getting caught with classified documents from his days as Vice President at his home, finding out this afternoon that former Vice President Pence has this same problem makes this slightly enjoyable as schadenfreude (via Dustin Jones at NPR):

A "small number of documents bearing classified markings that were inadvertently boxed and transported to the personal home of the former Vice President at the end of the last Administration" were collected by FBI officials from his Indiana home, according to letters from Pence's representatives to the National Archives and Records Administration.

In a letter dated Jan. 18 to Kate Dillon McClure, the acting director of NARA's White House Liaison Division, Greg Jacob, a spokesman for Pence, wrote the documents were discovered Jan. 16 when Pence, "out of an abundance of caution" following the classified documents recovered at the home of President Biden, "engaged outside counsel, with experience in handling classified documents, to review records stored in his personal home."

Jacob said that the counsel identified a small number of documents that could potentially contain sensitive or classified information interspersed throughout the records, but added the counsel was unable to provide an exact description of the folders or briefing materials...

Can I get an "Oops?" Did anyone say "Oops" for me?!?!

There's a gag now on social media of everybody running around checking their own garages for Classified Documents, with emphasis on the likes of Obama, Dubya, Clinton, and Gore pulling in the extra hours to ensure they're not caught. Nobody wants to harass Dick Cheney (shotgun clacking in the background) and Jimmy Carter is too honest (anybody joking about Carter building Habitats for Humanity out of documents ought to be ashamed of themselves). Nobody's asking Dan Quayle because we're pretty sure he never read anything during his Veephood.

For all the genuine scandal involving donald trump - HIS problem is he knowingly took boxes of classified materials and refused to give them up - and all the faux scandal involving Biden and now Pence who are working with National Archives and the Justice Department to properly return such materials, I want to go back to what I mentioned earlier about this: We are witnessing a serious problem with the lack of proper handling of classified documents across decades of different administrations.

I saw an article yesterday from Water Girl over on Balloon Juice, and I want to refer to the points she makes about the overwhelming amount of paperwork streaming through any Presidential office:

As a mid-level person with top secret classification, his (Andrew McCabe who podcasted with Water Girl) office was a SCIF.  He worked with dozens of top secret documents every day, he says he was “buried” in top secret SCI documents.  Receiving dozens of Top Secret SCI documents every day, he would have to read them all, and he could carry those documents out of his office to another agent’s office.

The other folks he worked with also had the same classification level, so those documents could be discussed with other agents that had a need to know.  At the end of the day, those documents never left the SCIF...

McCabe: "At this level – as a principal in an organization like the FBI, as Vice President, as POTUS – you need access to Top Secret, SCI information all the time, 24 hours a day. Staffers are constantly carrying these documents around.

• At work.
• At home.
• When you travel in the US.
• When you travel overseas.

McCabe: “There are people on your staff whose sole responsibility is to take those documents, transport them, carry it, store it, protect it, and give it to you when you need it.”

McCabe: “As a principal, it is literally following you around everywhere you go.”

McCabe: “Special security folks are responsible for taking care of all those documents.”

As President or Vice President, for instance, the documents follow you to the residence, to the office, as you get ready for the next briefing or a phone call with a world leader...

In short: You can't escape the paperwork.

What's the most likely answer to the reason why Biden - and now Pence, and likely other former White House occupants except for trump, who's an asshole about it - are finding a handful of classified documents on themselves years after their tenures as Veeps or Prezes is that with literally hundreds of such documents going in and out of your hands - and the hands of your handlers - something will get misfiled, stuck in the wrong drawer, and overlooked because nothing about that folder or paperwork said "Holy Shit I Don't Belong Here."

There is a scandal here (not for trump, who is earning his fate): We have too many documents stamped as classified. There's stuff not even related to foreign policy or domestic security matters that still gets stamped by a bureaucrat somewhere as "sensitive" and so the whole system has to treat it as such, even if that information gets outdated (or outed) years down the line.

Our intelligence agencies need to get together and re-evaluate their entire classification system, to ease up on the types of materials that our Presidents (and Vice Presidents, and Cabinet Secretaries, and Senators and Representatives) have to review every day of the job.

Pretty soon we're going to find out that Socks the Cat got caught with TSI paperwork stuck under his litter box. /headdesk

(P.S. Yes I know poor Socks is dead, but I won't put it past this Republican-controlled House to go digging through his poop for the cheap political points against the Clintons... again.)

Blood on the Streets of Monterey Park

I woke up this morning to news about an Asian holiday - the Lunar New Year - getting disrupted by a gunman in Monterey Park, California overnight. Another goddamned mass shooting. At least 10 people dead (multiple wounded, so the numbers could get worse). Via NPR: 

A shooting in the city of Monterey Park, just outside of Los Angeles, has left 10 people dead and at least 10 others wounded. The attack came at the end of a day of celebration in the predominantly Asian American community in observance of the Lunar New Year. Authorities said the shooter remains at large.

Here's what we know:

The attack was at least the 33rd mass shooting in the U.S. this year — and the second in California in less than a week.

About 60,000 people — 65% of whom are of Asian descent — call Monterey Park home, according to Census estimates.

President Biden has been briefed on the shooting.

Authorities are investigating another scene in the nearby city of Alhambra.

Take a moment to look at that first stat: This is the 33rd mass shooting in the United States this year. WE ARE ONLY 22 DAYS INTO THE WESTERN CALENDAR. We are up to almost TWO MASS SHOOTINGS A DAY. We have become so jaded and worn down from gun-related deaths that we're utterly numb as a nation to this shit.

The attack focused on a large Asian community, signaling that this was racially motivated by Far Right factions hating on foreigners as part of their overall anti-immigrant mindset.

And given the high body count in just one setting, I'm willing to bet the weapon used was a military-grade assault rifle like the AR-15 (the chosen rifle for mass shooters across the USA). It is not a firearm meant for hunting wildlife, it is not a firearm meant for personal home defense. It is a firearm meant for war zones. Which is what the American landscape has turned into thanks to the Angry Guys With Guns community.

And again, nothing will get done.

There will be more mass shootings, because we're up to one per day, getting closer to doubling up, because this is how the goddamned National Rifle Body Count Association makes their money. 

And in the future, nothing will get done.

There will be more mass shootings, because we're up to one per day, getting closer to doubling up, because this is how the goddamned National Rifle Body Count Association makes their money. 

And another mass shooting, and another and another, and nothing will get done.

There will be more mass shootings, because we're up to one per day, getting closer to doubling up, because this is how the goddamned National Rifle Body Count Association makes their money.

And another... AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

...

When are we going to have political leadership in the United States willing to step up and abolish the goddamned Second Amendment? We don't need militias anymore, and we've proven the PAST 40 YEARS THAT WE ARE NOT REGULATING FIREARMS IN ANY WAY. The Second Amendment has devolved from being "Empowerment for states to form and well-regulate their own militias" to "A goddamned license to kill anybody the Angry Guys want to kill."

There is blood on every American street, rising up on a tide of unrelenting hate and violence, and it is going to drown us all until we tell the goddamned gun nuts NO MORE.

DeSantis as Bully and Panderer to Hate

Update: Many thanks to Driftglass for adding this article to Crooks & Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up. Please do me a favor and help me figure out which blog pieces I should submit to the FWA Royal Palm Literary Awards, thank ye.

There was a time I felt there was no way any human being could be worse as Florida Governor than Rick "Medicare Fraud" Scott, who bought and bullied his way into office back in 2010 and immediately mismanaged the state through ignorance and greed.

And then Ron DeSantis showed up.

This week alone revealed how bullying, callous, sadistic, and craven DeSantis can be.

First, DeSantis openly called to permanently block any pandemic prevention efforts that the federal government may mandate in the future (via Steve Contorno, Kit Maher and Chris Boyette at CNN):

Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis called on state lawmakers to make permanent existing penalties for companies that require all employees get the Covid-19 vaccination, his latest move to curtail pandemic mitigation efforts.

The proposal would extend indefinitely measures DeSantis signed in 2021 that made Florida the first state in the country to threaten businesses with fines if they required workers to get the Covid-19 vaccine. Those measures pitted DeSantis and Florida against the federal government over President Joe Biden’s efforts to get the country’s workforce inoculated – a standoff that helped boost the Republican governor’s popularity among conservatives.

Now, as DeSantis considers running for president, he is re-instigating that battle.

This time, DeSantis has encouraged skepticism of Covid-19 vaccines altogether, staking out a position far to the right of his top potential rival for the GOP nomination, former President Donald Trump, who continues to count the development of the vaccines as one of his administration’s chief accomplishments...

In addition to proposing permanent prohibitions on strict mask and vaccine mandates, DeSantis also wants to prevent doctors from losing their medical license if they stake out positions that contradict medical consensus. During Tuesday’s event in Panama City Beach, DeSantis welcomed to the stage a local dermatologist who has spread unsubstantiated Covid-19 conspiracies on Twitter...

In other words, DeSantis wants to allow uncertified, decertified, and unqualified "medical experts" to shill anti-vaccination conspiracy bullshit to scare the uninformed away from Covid vaccines that honestly work. This is how DeSantis hopes to win over the QAnon audience away from trump. In the process, he's willing to spread bad information that can get people killed.

Then, DeSantis issued an order to cancel high school programs offering AP African-American classes, claiming they offered no "educational value," all part of DeSantis' attacks on anything teaching our teens about racism as "Woke". From Abene Clayton at the Guardian:

Ron DeSantis, Florida’s Republican governor, has rejected a new advanced placement course in African American studies from being taught on high school campuses. He argues that the course violates state law and “lacks educational value”.

This move is the latest in a series of actions to keep conversations and lessons about race, sexuality and gender identity off the state’s school campuses.

DeSantis officially banned the course in a letter from the state education department to the College Board, the organization that administers college readiness exams like the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT). They also oversee advanced placement (AP) courses, which allow students to earn college credits in subjects like English and chemistry.

In the summer of 2022, the College Board announced a pilot program to “offer high school students an evidence-based introduction to African American studies” would be launching in 60 high schools across the country during the 2022-23 school year and will be set to expand to other campuses the following year.

“Like all new AP courses, AP African American Studies is undergoing a rigorous, multiyear pilot phase, collecting feedback from teachers, students, scholars and policymakers,” the College Board said in a statement.

DeSantis, a one-time Donald Trump ally, plays an active role in stoking social and political anxieties, primarily among white Americans, that stem from conversations about race and gender that occur on K-12 public school campuses. In April 2022, he signed the Stop Woke Act, which severely limits “race-based” discussions at schools...

If DeSantis wants to shut down any AP program - which has educational value by encouraging student research, debates on topics, and college-level study that all earns high schoolers college credit for passing the tests - he better be ready to shut down AP American History. When I took that in high school, AP American covered the factual history of slavery, racism, the causes of the Civil War, the rise of Jim Crow segregation, and the Civil Rights movement. 

This is Republican DeSantis: Refusing to let history be real about the damage racism has done to America, and relying on hitting us all over the head with comforting White Affluence lies.

And this afternoon, it's reported that DeSantis is demanding the public universities give him information on which college students are transitioning genders (AP News via the NBCNews website):

Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is asking state universities for the number and ages of their students who sought or received gender dysphoria treatment, including sex reassignment surgery and hormone prescriptions, according to a survey released Wednesday.

Why he’s conducting the survey wasn’t completely clear. DeSantis has been criticized by LGBTQ advocates for policies seen as discriminatory, including banning instruction on sexual and gender identity in early grades and making it easier for parents to remove books related to the topic in public schools.

The survey is similar to one the governor is forcing state universities to complete regarding spending on diversity, equity and inclusion and critical race theory programs.

The current memo asks universities to “provide the number of encounters for sex-reassignment treatment or where such treatment was sought” as well as data for students referred to other facilities. It says to protect students’ identities when completing the information.

The survey requires a breakdown by age, regardless of whether the student is age 18 or older, of people prescribed hormones or hormone antagonists or who underwent a medical procedures like mastectomies, breast augmentation or removal and reconstruction of genitals...

One would think that there are federal laws in place - such as HIPAA - that protects individuals' privacy rights regarding their health care treatment.

But this is DeSantis as bully, running roughshod over the rules and regulations in order to score political points with a rabid religious Republican voting base eager to expose, embarrass, and even arrest trans and gay people for simply existing.

If these universities want to curry favor - and not lose any state funds - they will find ways to disclose the information DeSantis wants, and then those poor adults - college students are 18 and thus adults - are going to suffer harassment, discrimination, or worse. Considering most of the college boards and presidents are political appointees, they are beholden to DeSantis and the Far Right already.

This is all happening because the Republicans are obsessed with Culture War bullshit. All because DeSantis wants to out-pander trump in the 2024 Republican Race to prove who can be more sadistic.

Cruelty is not only the point with DeSantis, it's his goddamn campaign strategy.

The Difference Between Two Scandals

Over the last couple weeks, a new scandal arose that echoed the trumpian scandals of last August, where reports emerged of how classified documents - from his tenure as Vice President under Obama - were found in President Biden's possession. As Becky Sullivan and Elena Moore note over at NPR:

President Biden is facing a Department of Justice investigation after his lawyers found classified documents at his Delaware residence and an office in Washington, D.C.

They were found in multiple instances, with a White House lawyer announcing on Saturday that five more pages had been found at Biden's home.

On Thursday, Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed former Justice Department official Robert Hur to lead the DOJ probe.

"This appointment underscores for the public the department's commitment to both independence and accountability in particularly sensitive matters, and to making decisions indisputably guided only by the facts and the law," Garland said Thursday.

The announcement came just a few days after news broke that classified documents had been found at Biden's private office less than a week before the midterm elections in November — a discovery that led the DOJ to launch an initial inquiry.

This is all coming on the heels of the large-scale investigation into donald trump's mishandling - in some regards, the outright theft - of classified and other White House documents he took with him when he left office in January 2021. Indeed, trump's political and media allies quickly jumped on this story, attacking Biden for hypocrisy at the least and criminal misdeeds at the worst:

Critics of Biden, including many Republicans, have seized on the revelations to raise new complaints about the Biden administration's handling of the Trump classified document saga, including the FBI raid of Mar-a-Lago.

"Another faux pas by the Biden administration by treating law differently based upon your political beliefs. Treats President Trump one way but treats President Biden a whole different way," said Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy in a press conference Thursday...

Republicans have already vowed to use their new House majority to probe Biden's handling of the classified documents and how federal agencies responded.

On Friday, Republican House Judiciary members sent a letter to the attorney general announcing their inquiry into the handling of the documents and the appointment of Hur. Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, chair of the House Judiciary Committee, and Rep. Mike Johnson, R-La., demanded "all documents and communications" between the DOJ, FBI and White House related to the "mishandling of the classified documents" and the appointment of the special counsel.

So as this scandal turns political, are the Republicans right to claim unfair treatment?

No. There are clear differences between what's happening with Biden and what's happening with trump. Above all, trump's own misconduct in his mishandling of documents:

In Trump's case, the National Archives was the first to identify the missing documents and request their return.

Trump initially resisted returning them, and his lawyers at times misled federal investigators. After months of back-and-forth between the government and Trump aides, 15 boxes of documents were returned in January 2022. According to the FBI, the boxes included 184 classified documents, including 25 marked "Top Secret," as well as others denoted with labels indicating they contained national security information, such as "FISA." But more documents still remained at Mar-a-Lago, and ultimately the FBI raided the resort in August to retrieve the rest.

By contrast, Biden's team appears to have found a smaller number of documents, and returned them to the federal government promptly.

There's no evidence yet if Biden's people were guilty of any intentional removal of classified documents, but they are clearly abiding by the laws to ensure those documents are returned and no others left out there. trump and his people are kicking and screaming and refusing to respect the laws at all.

The scale of trump's scandal is far greater than anything yet pinned to Biden, and yet trump and the Republicans - looking for any excuse to punch Biden and hurt his 2024 re-election chances - would have us believe trump is a victim and Biden the crook. That's nowhere near the truth, and nowhere near the severity of damage trump committed, according to Donald Ayer, Mark S. Zaid, and Dennis Aftergut over at The Atlantic (paywall):

Even if, at some point, evidence of potential criminal conduct develops in the Biden case, in no proper prosecutorial universe should that affect or deter Special Counsel Jack Smith’s investigation of Trump. In the unlikely event that both men did commit crimes, that would be no reason not to prosecute Trump—or Biden, for that matter, once he is out of office. No person is above the law.

But these two cases are not equivalent. For starters, let’s consider the two stories through the lens of the statutes cited in the Mar-a-Lago search warrant approved by a federal court.

Individuals violate the Espionage Act when, among other things, they willfully retain national-defense documents and fail to return them to a proper government official upon request. In November, Biden’s personal lawyer discovered the classified documents and returned them to the government without a request. So that statute does not apply. Biden has denied knowing that he had the documents.

The contrast with Trump is stark. The National Archives and Records Administration first asked him to return missing documents in May 2021. The following January, Archives officials retrieved 15 boxes of government records, and on June 3, 2022, his lawyer signed a sworn statement that all documents responsive to a grand jury subpoena were being returned after a “diligent” search...

In August, a federal court was provided evidence that the lawyer’s statement was likely false, and the court issued the search warrant that allowed the FBI to seize upwards of 11,000 documents from Mar-a-Lago. They included more than 70 documents marked “Secret” or “Top Secret,” some apparently containing information whose disclosure could conceivably endanger the lives of American intelligence sources overseas.

The apparent obstruction of justice—with evidence pointing to Trump’s direct involvement—makes up the serious misconduct here, more serious than a former president simply having removed documents from their proper place. Trump’s lawyers repeatedly asserted in court that the Mar-a-Lago documents were “personal,” effectively admitting that Trump took them and kept them.

The centrality of concealment to the case is made even clearer by the second statute cited in the Mar-a-Lago affidavit. It subjects to prosecution anyone who “knowingly … conceals [or] covers up … any record, document, or tangible object with the intent to impede [or] obstruct … the investigation or proper administration of any [federal] matter.”

In short: trump took documents knowingly, and then lied about having those documents, got other people to lie for him, and refused to give up what he had for more than a year, and it all ended up requiring a warrant to search and retrieve those documents that could well be harmful to our nation's security. 

Both Biden and trump can end up in trouble violating the Presidential Records Act, but trump is on the hook for Espionage and Obstruction charges on top of that. The fact that Biden and his people are willingly returning the documents to National Archives without a fight lessens the possibility of getting charged on the Presidential Records Act, as the special counsel may well determine the matter settled. In trump's case, the open contempt he's displayed towards the Records Act would establish a good reason to charge him for violating it (the special counsel investigating trump may have to include those charges to justify the espionage and obstruction charges).

There's other cases that establish how intent to conceal and remove documents is a serious matter threatening trump's situation (back to the Atlantic article):

In 2005, Sandy Berger, a former national security adviser to President Bill Clinton, pleaded guilty to unlawfully removing government documents. In 2003, years after his government service, he had gone to the National Archives to review files, and as he left, a staffer spotted what appeared to be paper protruding from Berger’s pant leg. Stuffing documents into his trousers to hide them, along with his later attempt to throw the records into a construction site, was powerful evidence of willful and unlawful intent.

In 2015, David Petraeus, a former general and CIA director under President Barack Obama, pleaded guilty to having given his mistress and biographer, Paula Broadwell, classified material that he had improperly retained. Petraeus had falsely attested to having no classified material in his possession. Like documents taken and concealed in clothing, false statements are compelling evidence of a guilty mind and a cover-up.

One of us (Mark S. Zaid) has represented many clients who have accidentally taken classified documents home or unintentionally left them in unsecured environments. Those cases involved no deliberate flouting of law but rather negligent or reckless conduct. These situations are routinely resolved through administrative proceedings, such as suspension or revocation of security clearances or other sanctions short of prosecution.

Those first two stories are similar to trump's misconduct, whereas the third relates much to how Biden is handling things. You can spot the difference there: Intent and getting caught in lies will get you charged; Working with investigators and admitting mistakes will keep you out of courthouses.

It would be nice if the mainstream media would recognize that what's happening to Biden does not excuse what trump did, nor should Biden face the same legal punishments awaiting trump. This is not a Both Sides scandal: trump's misconduct is clearly more dangerous to the national well-being.

I would even argue there's a third scandal at play here, one far greater than anything Biden or trump are directly at fault. We are witnessing repeated failures of national security when it comes to current and previous Presidential administrations concerning the mishandling of classified documents. This is something going back even before 2005, there's been breaches of security - some of them intentional like Dick Cheney's office exposing CIA operatives for partisan retribution - that are happening at the expense of domestic and foreign policies. 

Granted, part of the scandal is how far too many agencies have the power to classify anything as secret, which expands the likelihood of both accidental and intentional taking of documents that people shouldn't be taking. Still, this is all serious harm to both policies and people. If any other special counsels need hiring, AG Garland better have someone investigating how to stop such damaging leaks from happening (again and again). 

I do want both special counsels investigating Biden and trump to do their jobs, do them effectively, and assign fault to those who mishandled our government's classified information. I do hope that Jack Smith, the special counsel investigating trump, reaches the proper conclusion of prosecuting trump for his willful misconduct throughout the whole affair.

And I do hope people recognize that not all scandals are equal. They all depend on the intent - sincere versus scheming - of the persons violating the laws.

You Know What? Mint That Coin, Just Do It Already

...In fact there are three freely convertible currencies in the Galaxy, but none of them count.
The Altairian Dollar has recently collapsed,
the Flainian Pobble Bead is only exchangeable for other Flainian Pobble Beads,
and the Triganic Pu has its own very special problems.
Its exchange rate of "eight Ningis to one Pu" is simple enough, but since a Ningi is a triangular rubber coin six thousand eight hundred miles along each side, no one has ever collected enough to own one Pu.
Ningis are not negotiable currency, because the Galactibanks refuse to deal in fiddling small change.
From this basic premise it is very simple to prove that the Galactibanks are also the product of a deranged imagination.
-- Douglas Adams, from the Restaurant at the End of the Universe (to be read in Stephen Fry's voice) 

With the wingnut Republicans regaining control of the House - and again back on their obsession with destroying the federal government and the global economy in one fell swoop, even with all the warnings about what the damage will be - the talk about government shutdowns has returned.

The Democratic response to the Far Right threats of massive spending cuts has been mixed, bouncing between allaying fears to bringing up alternative spending methods to outfox the Tea Party/Freedom Caucus hijackers hoping to crash the whole bus over the cliff. One thing the liberal and left-leaning blogging punditry keeps throwing out there is the "MINT THE COIN" idea.

The Coin refers to a law on the books allowing the U.S. Mint to issue a platinum-based coin with any denomination (face value) assigned to it as needed. For example any one-ounce gold coin has a $50 face value, the half-ounce gold coin is $25, etc. When they passed the law in the 1990s, the intent was to give the US Mint a means to raise money selling to avid coin collectors who buy these things up not for the metal's worth but for the collectible value. 

At the time, the idea was that a collectible platinum coin could go for like $500 or $100 or something above the gold coin (capped at Ye Olde Fiddy). Thing was, when the Republicans became more radical and more desperate to gut the federal government's fiscal capabilities since then, someone got the idea that the U.S. Mint using the backing of the "Full Faith and Credit" clause in the Constitution could issue a platinum coin with a face value more than what the federal debt would be, and using that to pay off said debt so the radicals would lose the "debt ceiling" hostage they've been threatening to kill since the Obama years. Various government officials and economists have looked at the scheme, and announced "it could work."

With the debt ceiling crisis back for 2023, the Mint the Coin talk is back as well. As Mike the Mad Biologist blogged recently: 

This bit of arcana matters because Speaker McCarthy in his desperate attempt to stop getting punched in the nuts on national television over and over again to win the House Speaker position has promised to use the debt ceiling–the process where Congress sets a cap on the amount of debt that can be issued–as economic terrorism to force all sorts of horrible policy, including sweeping Social Security cuts. Admittedly, this is a long-standing Republican strategy, but it’s become increasingly likely they will do this...

This is really stupid and ridiculous, but so is any Congress that contains QAnon conspiracists, outright fraudsters, and pedophile pimps. Meanwhile, Biden won with the majority of the vote. It’s time for him to exert his popular mandate and protect the full faith and credit of these United States...

Minting the Coin may be a ridiculous option, but it has the value of being 100 percent legal compared to some of the other options ahead of us to avoid the GOP shutdown. Dylan Matthews noted at Vox:

The Obama administration found the idea too unserious there to use, but the legal case for minting the coin is as solid as platinum. Just ask debt ceiling hardliner Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT), who was sufficiently concerned about the option to introduce legislation to close the platinum coin loophole. The plain text of the 1997 law clearly allows the treasury secretary to do this, and Jay Powell, the Fed chair who in a past career was an expert on the debt ceiling and its dangers, is arguably legally required to accept the coin as a deposit.

You can also imagine more serious variations on the concept. Progressive economist Mike Konczal once proposed issuing a $20 billion coin every day to keep the government running until Congress agrees to abolish the debt ceiling for good. And a $20 billion coin is, what, 1 percent as silly as a $2 trillion one?

The other options Matthews explores - Invoke the 14th Amendment's clause that the validity of the Public Debt shall not be questioned, argue that the debt ceiling is unconstitutionally interfering with the mandates Congress already gave to the Executive branch, or issue "quasi-debt securities" like government war bonds to temporarily avoid the debt crisis - all have the problem of getting challenged in the courts. Any of that would risk the possibility this current Supreme Court - controlled by Far Right jurists - using the situation to rewrite the Constitution, and giving the wingnut Republicans the chance to collapse the federal government.

The Platinum Coin can't be challenged, not in a way that could risk nuking our nation's ability to literally print money. Silly idea, yes. Legal idea, still yes.

The whole "Mint the Coin" thing is so silly I love it. It's absurdism brought to a political stage already overwhelmed by Far Right hypocrisy and faux Fox-Not-News outrage. Republicans want to destroy our nation's economy with another government shutdown? Here's a single coin to resolve the whole matter, nyah.

Hell, I want the Mint to print that coin now, just for the thrill of it. Think, A TRILLION DOLLAR COIN, small enough to fit in a pocket. It'll be like Scrooge McDuck's Number One Dime, a tempting target of cat burglars everywhere. The comic book and action movie industries would have a field day coming up with stories about the Coin Heist to End All Coin Heists. And then all you gotta do is go to a country that won't press charges and slap that coin down on a bank counter and demand the bank cash it in for you. BWHAHAHAHAHAHAHA (dude, could that happen?)

You could put the Platinum Coin behind glass and take it on a tour to every Economics college across the nation. It'll be the Mona Lisa, the King Tut Coffin, the unreleased copy of the Batgirl movie of coins. Have students working towards their MBAs lining up $5000 a ticket just to press their noses against the glass and dream of touching that coin.

Get that coin pressed today, US Mint, and President Biden could use it as the coin flip to this year's Super Bowl!!! YES!!!!!

So many possibilities with a Platinum Trillion-Dollar Coin.

Do it, Treasury Secretary Yellen. PRINT THE COIN. BECOME A GOD. BWHAHAHAHAHA.

Well Ain't This A Kick? My Subtle Decades-Long Influence On the Political Discourse

So here I am, reading up on books on the various political ideologies - the Isms as I call 'em - so I can write a book on American Isms to pass along to my nephews and niece to ensure they don't get suckered in by the worst of dogma out there (slightly worried I may be too late as they've mostly finished college, and my twin brother had a copy of Atlas Shrugged in his house, dammit man how could you?!?!).

I've gotten a few books on liberalism already - Liberalism and Its Discontents by Francis Fukuyama is incredibly concise and easy to read, by the by - and a book on conservatism which was kinda meh, and today through the Interlibrary Loan system a copy of Moderates: the Vital Center of American Politics from the Founding to Today by David S. Brown, which I sat down to read after dinner when I got home from work today.

So I get to the Introduction of the book, and there's a quote about "Moderate" as a definition on the Urban Dictionary website. UD is an informal, oft-times sarcastic, blunt, and vulgar open source dictionary, been around since the heady early days of the Internet. There can be honest and insightful entries on Urban Dictionary, and the "Moderate" definition could well be considered one.

When I saw that quote, I muttered to myself "That looks damned familiar..."

So I hopped onto Urban Dictionary, something I hadn't done since 2006 I think, and looked up that quote, and goddammit I was the one who wrote it.

This was almost 20 years ago!!!

It's the top ranked definition on the site, which may explain Brown's willingness to quote it. Still, it's getting quoted by professors in their political science/history books. I'm getting the "Mark Twain Pithy Snark" Treatment over here, and damn my ego won't stop jumping up and down.

Now all I need to know is if my edits to the Wikipedia articles on "The Gunfight at the OK Corral" are still up. (checks) Nope, nope they all got edited out years ago. /deep sigh

I am ever so thrilled that my world-view on moderates as a political ideology has had some influence however meager on the discourse. I am a little miffed Brown didn't quote me by name: Dude, it's right there in the byline! Best I can figure, if Brown tried reaching to me through my UD account, it was on an old Selfin.org email I had when I lived in South Florida, and I lost that login ages ago (SEFLIN Freenet shut down by the time I left from there in 2003). By the time this book got published in 2016, he probably had no way to know where I was on the Intertubes. 

Alas, as time flows from then to now...

(long contemplative thought)

OKAY NOW BACK TO READING THAT BOOK! THIS RESEARCH AIN'T GONNA READ ITSELF! FOR THE HORDE!!! LET'S SEE IF BROWN QUOTES FROM RUDE PUNDIT NEXT!!!

Fiscal Injustice On Display

In the follow-up to the guilty verdicts dropped on donald trump's corporation about a month ago, today we see the justice imposed for trump's fraudulent tax schemes. The judge imposed the largest possible fine allowed under the law... and yet the fine was honestly not enough. Via Ilya Marritz, Andrea Bernstein, and Brian Mann at NPR:

A state court in New York has ordered two companies owned by former President Donald Trump to pay $1.61 million in fines and penalties for tax fraud.

The amount, the maximum allowed under state sentencing guidelines, is due within 14 days of Friday's sentencing.

"This conviction was consequential, the first time ever for a criminal conviction of former President Trump's companies," said Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg.

Bragg said he thinks the financial penalty for decades of fraudulent behavior wasn't severe enough.

"Our laws in this state need to change in order to capture this type of decade-plus systemic and egregious fraud," he said...

In context, the level of fraud trump and his corporation committed was in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Business listings - via AtoZ Databases, which is behind paywalls - put the Trump Organization's yearly revenue around $1.6 billion . Forbes magazine estimated in 2022 the value of trump's personal holdings around $3.2 billion. trump may not be the richest duck in Duckberg, but he's still rolling in enough cash that $1.61 million is literally pocket change to him. It is roughly a tenth of a percent to trump.

This is where we run into the problem with the American legal system: The limitation - nay, inability - to effectively punish wrong-doers proportional to the crimes they've committed.

In terms of massive fines or penalties to discourage would-be reckless never-do-wells from committing those crimes, there will never be a fine large enough to do so. Greed is too much a motivation for those who think they will never get caught.

Punishment itself is not an effective deterrent to stop crime. Poor people who commit crimes do it because they have to. Rich people who commit crimes do it because they want to get richer. The sad thing is, we can't walk away entirely from the penalty system we have to uphold the laws. We still need some form of a penalty for law-breakers, so those of us who are law-abiding can keep faith in the legal system.

The injustice comes into play when we look at the burden of punishment we inflict on the guilty (and sadly on the falsely accused). Poor criminals are often hit with fines in the thousands of dollars that they can't afford to pay, forcing them deeper into poverty (SEE the unjust fine system that decimated the Ferguson MO community) and more likely to commit more crimes to escape the trap. Rich criminals are often hit with fines in the thousands of dollars, which barely puts a dint in their wallets as they head out to another part of the financial industry to run another fraudulent scam.

Fine a petty thief who tried to sneak off with a flatscreen TV worth $500 with a $10,000 fine and watch that thief lose his bank account, lose any legal means of employment to pay it off, lose any property his family owned (because they'll get sucked into the debt), and never get out of that spiral. Fine a white collar criminal who set up a scam fundraiser for $10 million with a $1 million fine, and watch that rich crook walk away with $9 million that his victims can't even sue to get back except for pennies on every dollar. There are thousands more victims of white collar crime than there are grocery stores bemoaning the loss of $3 bread loaves to shoplifting.

The income inequality adds onto the injustice of a legal system that punishes the poor too much and fails to punish the rich at all.

If there were any justice in this system, the criminal trial involving the Trump Organization should have included felony charges on donald trump (and the rest of the upper management like his elder kids who were part of the scams) instead of just the company itself. The fines shouldn't be capped to an arbitrary number - which is set at a level decades ago no longer reflecting the insane wealth of the few today - but scaled to the level of revenue/income the guilty actually have, so that the rich pay a greater burden for their sins compared to the poor struggling to get food on their tables. Any criminal act that defrauded people directly should require all money stolen from them recouped and given back, supplanting any civil court attempt to recover those funds.

One of the greatest open scandals of our legal system is how law enforcement fails to take financial fraud seriously as a problem. It comes up every time there's a stock market crash or bank run or "too big to fail" failures. The damage caused by white collar crimes are far greater and far reaching than anything a poor crook can pull off, and yet we punish the poor crook with a jail cell while the rich crook goes sailing to the Caribbean on whichever yacht the IRS didn't impound.

When you look back on the terrible history of going after white collar crime in this country: We jailed Martha Stewart because she was a bitch, not a criminal mastermind. And we jailed Martha Stewart for less than what the investment firms did to our housing market in 2007, for less than what donald trump and his corporate lackeys did with their tax dodging schemes.

Any legal reforms need to start with the reality that we must hold the wealthy criminals accountable, no more walking away, no more slaps on the wrist. Send the rich to jail like they were pot dealers (and free all those who are only guilty of pot dealing or other misdemeanor petty-ante shit). 

The International Far Right Denial of Democracy

So there I am trying to edit the non-fiction book of blog articles when news comes down the pipe that Brazil - which had just rejected Jair Bolsonaro, a bullying trump-lite President in last year's election - suffered their own insurrection riot of that SOB's supporters. Government buildings - especially the Presidential Palace and the nation's Supreme Court - raided and destroyed. I jumped to the Guardian's coverage for more details (via Tom Phillips and Andrew Downie):

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has ordered the federal government to take control of policing in Brazil’s capital, Brasília, after hundreds of hardcore supporters of the former president Jair Bolsonaro stormed the country’s congress, presidential palace and supreme court.

The massed attack was a stunning security breach that was immediately compared to the 6 January invasion of the US Capitol by followers of Donald Trump in 2021.

“What we are witnessing is a terrorist attack,” the news anchor Erick Bang announced on the GloboNews television network as word of the upheaval spread. “The three buildings have been invaded by coup-mongering terrorists.”

Shocking video footage showed the pro-Bolsonaro militants sprinting up the ramp into the Palácio do Planalto, the presidential offices, roaming the building’s corridors and vandalizing the nearby supreme court, whose windows had been smashed.

Lula, a veteran leftist, was sworn in as Brazil’s new president last Sunday in celebrations attended by hundreds of thousands of Brazilians.

But thousands of pro-Bolsonaro extremists have refused to accept Lula’s narrow victory in October’s election, spending recent weeks camping outside army bases across the country and calling for a military coup.

Lula was not in Brasília on Sunday but he gave an angry speech blaming Bolsonaro for the chaos and promising that “anyone involved will be punished”.

It's interesting the rioters waited for Lula to be outside of the capitol - he was in Sao Paulo - to pull off this coup attempt. Also interesting that the organizers did not get any military support in this, relying instead on the state police to guide the protestors instead of stopping them. There's been calls to arrest a security official who may have aided in the staging, who has ties to Bolsonaro and was reportedly seen in Orlando where the ex-President fled to exile (via Adriano Machado with Reuters):

By 6:30 p.m. local time (2130 GMT), some three hours after initial reports of the invasion, security forces had managed to retake the capital's most iconic three buildings.

Brasilia Governor Ibaneis Rocha, a longtime Bolsonaro ally facing tough questions after Sunday's security lapses, said on Twitter more than 400 people had been arrested and authorities were working to identify more...

Rocha, the Brasilia governor, said he had fired his top security official, Anderson Torres, previously Bolsonaro's justice minister. The solicitor general's office said it had filed a request for the arrest of Torres.

Torres told website UOL he was with his family on holiday in the United States and had not met with Bolsonaro. UOL reported he was in Orlando, where Bolsonaro is now staying...

It's too much of a coincidence for Torres and Bolsonaro to be in the same city when all of this went down.

Bolsonaro may be denouncing the violence in public, but he's spent the last months since losing the election acting out the trumpian playbook of refusing to accept electoral defeat, claiming rigged elections, and stomping off in a snit before the changing of the guard to discredit the traditional display of peaceful transfers of power.

Much like how it played out here in the US with trump's MAGA believers, Bolsonaro's supporters - overwhelmed by years of pro-authoritarian Far Right bleating - bought into the lies and reacted with violence.

We now have a January 8th Insurrection to bookend with the January 6th Insurrection.

We shouldn't have been surprised by this. The links between these acts of violence - separated between two nations - made this inevitable. As mentioned before, Bolsonaro and trump consider each other allies, trump in particular happy that a fellow dictator wanna-be won Brazil's election back in 2018. Of course, trump made an open pitch for his buddy in this election cycle. Of course, trumpian handlers like Jason Miller and Steve Bannon were claiming the winning results for Lula were false, and worked with Bolsonaro behind the scenes for whatever purpose. 

This riot in Brazil is part of the overall attempt by the Far Right forces interlinked across the globe - from Russia to Hungary to Iran to Syria to trump in the United States and now Bolsonaro with Brazil - to discredit democratic institutions - installed as liberal methods of forming governments answerable to the people and the law - as weak, broken, and deserving of overthrow.

It's to those wingnuts' discredit that the democratic institutions are pushing back now, defending the system of fair elections against these rioters who are protesting out of fear - that they've been told to fear and hate by their instigators - instead of justice.

Justice should come soon for those (trump and his allies) who stirred up violence here in Washington DC, and justice should come soon for those (Bolsonaro and his allies) who stirred up violence in Brasilia.

The Weakest Speaker

It took fifteen tries.

Kevin McCarthy lost the Speakership vote 14 times, equaling the 0-14 futility of the 1976 Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Even after a long delay Friday afternoon where he and his allies offered the Freedom Caucus holdouts everything under the sun, he still failed to get over the 218 hurdle of claiming the Speaker's job overseeing the US House of Representatives.

It took one more round of open begging to Matt Gaetz - that he's not under indictment yet after the revelations of the Greenberg scandal still angers me - before McCarthy edged out the count due to several Freedom Caucus holdouts to switch to "Present" to lower that threshold to 216. 

Whatever deal McCarthy offered also triggered an incident where another congresscritter had to be restrained from punching Gaetz in the face. It turned out Rep. Mike Rogers (AL) found out that a committee chair he was set to take was getting offered to Gaetz as a buyoff.

Rogers shouldn't be surprised. In the pursuit of the job title and the glory that comes with it, McCarthy was willing to sacrifice and trade away everything else - including his pride and honor - just so he could wield the gavel. 

So what exactly did McCarthy sacrifice? Tom Sullivan at Hullabaloo passes along what he gleaned from CNN: 

• A McCarthy-aligned super PAC agreed to not play in open Republican primaries in safe seats.
• The House will hold votes on key conservative bills, including a balanced budget amendment, congressional term limits and border security.
• Efforts to raise the nation’s debt ceiling must be paired with spending cuts. This could become a major issue in the future when it is time to raise the debt limit to avoid a catastrophic default because Democrats in the Senate and the White House would likely oppose demands for spending cuts. (Personal note: Those spending cuts more than likely attempts to gut Social Security and Medicare)
• Move 12 appropriations bills individually. Instead of passing separate bills to fund government operations, Congress frequently passes a massive year-end spending package known as an “omnibus” that rolls everything into one bill. Conservatives rail against this, arguing that it evades oversight and allows lawmakers to stick in extraneous pet projects.
• More Freedom Caucus representation on committees, including the powerful House Rules Committee.
• Cap discretionary spending at fiscal 2022 levels, which would amount to lower levels for defense and domestic programs.
• Seventy-two hours to review bills before they come to floor.
• Give members the ability to offer more amendments on the House floor.
• Create an investigative committee to probe the “weaponization” of the federal government. (Personal note: This is the committee the MAGA wingnuts want to start to harass the Justice Department and FBI for their investigations of trump and other Far Right leaders)
• Restore the Holman rule, which can be used to reduce the salary of government officials.

To be fair, a handful of these concessions - like the 72 hour review time on bills heading to a floor vote - are reasonable. Others, such as the power to amend bills when they reach the floor and forcing appropriation bills to face separate votes, are likely to slow down the House's operations if not kill legislation outright. The 'Separate Appropriation' requirement is a likely move to cut Food Stamps funding away from Farm Bills, something that's been bugging the hard-line GOP for decades.

Something not mentioned in Sullivan's list but a key element of the powers that McCarthy traded away: The Motion to Vacate requirement dropping all the way down to a single member of Congress able to call that motion to remove a sitting Speaker - which is now McCarthy himself - on any whim. Granted, it would take a full House vote to complete the motion and remove a Speaker, but we're talking about a process that would openly kneecap the leader of the House - and technically the leader of the majority party - without consequence or limit. The one time it had been used back in 2015, it didn't succeed but it undercut the authority of then-Speaker John Boehner and led to his eventual resignation. 

McCarthy is essentially giving the Freedom Caucus a veto power over anything a Speaker brings to the floor of the House, and the means to delay everything and harass everyone as they go on an ideological warpath.

If there's any good news, a lot of the deals McCarthy made are things that will never survive outside the House. The planned Balanced Budget Amendment vote - which would insanely cap annual spending to force draconian spending cuts - requires a two-thirds vote in the House to begin with, and there's no way the Democrats will back it. The US Senate - currently under Democratic control - will never agree to term limits or any House bill demanding harsher immigration policies (or funding that Godless trump Wall). The Senate will block - or at least reduce the damage of - any attempt by the House to undo Biden's infrastructure and budget victories from 2021-22, including the wingnuts' open calls to defund the IRS. The threat of capping discretionary spending - even defense spending at a time the Pentagon wants to support Ukraine's defense against Russia - would raise howls among pro-military supporters even among the GOP House ranks.

The bad news: The Far Right wingnut circus we just endured this past week to vote on a Speaker will now turn into the Far Right wingnut circus recklessly investigating sham conspiracy theories surrounding Hunter Biden's Russian-tampered laptop. Another circus will recklessly investigate the FBI for doing their damn jobs investigating trump, yet another circus will recklessly investigate sham claims of voter fraud in 2020, and I wouldn't be surprised if McCarthy allows Jim Jordan to reopen Benghazi and recklessly investigate Hillary's emails just for nostalgia. 

We will see within the first week of Congressional activity the Freedom Caucus freaks drumming up any excuse to file impeachment against both Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. Any excuse - from unproven voter fraud of 2020, to anything Biden (didn't) do for his son Hunter, even the excuse of Biden being too old (and Harris too ethnic) - will do.

Any chance of sanity will depend on any number of disgruntled "sane" Republicans - I doubt any moderates have survived - saying "fuck it" and turning on the wingnuts that turned their House into a clown car. Problem is, the "sane" Republicans have yet to lift a finger to stop this madness since the 1990s, and I doubt any of them have grown a spine strong enough to push back against the downward spiral into madness.

There won't be any sanity coming from McCarthy. He's sold that along with any integrity or pride he ever had. And he sold all that on the cheap. He's going to be the weakest Speaker of the House in modern memory - possibly in U.S. history - and he's going to be too busy holding onto the backside of the monster he's unleashed for dear life.

When the Cougar-Eating-People's-Faces Party Starts Eating Their Own

There is an article by Jonathan Chait at New York's Intelligencer, it is behind a paywall, but it is considered already one of the best insights into the self-destruction of the House Republicans as they repeatedly vote (and fail) on the Speakership well into the third day: 

Reporters attempting to discern the conflict have taken to describing the competing factions as “conservatives” (the far-right members opposed to Kevin McCarthy’s bid for Speaker of the House) and “moderates” (the much larger faction of Republicans loyal to him). But these labels do very little to clarify the strange mania devouring the House Republican caucus. If you define conservative in traditional terms — meaning loyal to the conservative movement of Goldwater and Reagan and opposed, in principle, to any new taxation or social-welfare benefits — the entire Republican caucus is composed of conservatives. McCarthy’s loyalists aren’t moderates and don’t describe themselves as such.

Indeed, the division has barely any real ideological content at all. What Republicans are fighting over is whether to accept the limits of sharing power.

One of the key differences between the two major parties is that Democrats accept the reality that their agenda is not going to move forward when the opposing party occupies the White House. Democratic partisans might grow angry at their leaders for failing to stop it, but members of Congress generally understand that there are limits to the power of the opposition, and even the most unrealistic Democratic rank-and-file voters don’t expect their leaders to actively advance liberal policy in the face of a Republican president. Progressive Democrats wanted to defend Obamacare from Donald Trump’s repeal attempt. They weren’t demanding that Nancy Pelosi somehow force Trump to enact Medicare for All.

Republican voters, by contrast, expect and demand that the conservative agenda be advanced even — perhaps especially — under Democratic presidents. The Republican caucus is routinely gripped by frenzied efforts to compel Democratic presidents to roll back the welfare state. Newt Gingrich shut down the government to pressure Bill Clinton to sign a capital-gains tax cut and reductions to Medicaid and Medicare. Republicans used both shutdowns and the debt ceiling to try to blackmail Barack Obama into repealing his signature health-care plan...

Do note that in 2017 when Republicans had enough control to repeal Obamacare, they fought amongst themselves so viciously that in the end they couldn't agree to any replacement for it, and the whole effort collapsed on itself. The only thing the Republicans could do was the one thing they all agreed on: massive tax cuts for the rich.

Half the reason why Republicans want Democrats to do their dirty work for them is because in some respects they know they're too incompetent to do it properly. The other half of the reason is that Republicans are sadistic freaks looking to force Democrats to kill their own ideals. It drives Republicans crazy when Democrats refuse to break themselves, and it makes the Far Right believe they need to become even crazier about "Owning The Libs" when there are better things they can do with their time. Back to Chait:

This is why Democrats tend to splinter when they hold power but unify in opposition while the reverse holds true for Republicans. Democratic demands expand when the party holds full control of government and contract in opposition. Republican aspirations paradoxically become more grandiose during Democratic presidencies, which draw Republican minds deeper into the fever swamps of hysteria, making them more insistent on demands for maximal confrontation. These demands are inevitably impossible, causing Republicans to turn, again and again, against their own leaders...

Because this anger has no productive channel, it returns again and again in the form of internal recriminations. The House caucus during Democratic presidencies for the last quarter-century has been an endless procession of coup attempts. Gingrich was deposed for failing in his holy mission of forcing Clinton to slash government. John Boehner and Paul Ryan were driven into retirement. The House Republican caucus will be a cauldron of rage, because the party, at its core, does not believe it should be forced to share power...

What the Freedom Caucus is doing right now - the three straight days of foiled voting for McCarthy to the Speakership - is for multiple reasons. Above all, the insurgents genuinely do not trust McCarthy as he is the Establishment figure they fear would compromise with Liberal Dems on any issue. They are 20 nihilists in the face of 200 other Republicans who actually do want government to work (because it would help their rich business allies the most). The Freedom Caucus wants to squeeze every last bit of power - with none of the accountability - they can get from McCarthy and the other Republicans so that the Freedom Caucus holds all veto power to punish everyone - even the eventual Speaker - for infidelity to the Far Right dogma. 

One more reason they're doing this: This vote standoff is preventing the US House from doing anything else. They are delaying their rules getting voted on, they are delaying committee assignments, they are delaying any legislation getting passed quickly to the floor to send to the Senate and thence to the White House for signing. The Freedom Caucus is getting the government shutdown of their dreams, and they barely have to lift any finger to do so.

The terrifying thing is that this was the perfect year for the extremists to hold the entire House hostage. If the Republicans HAD won the midterms with a massive Red Wave takeover - with 30 or more seats as projected - the overwhelming number of Republicans would have crossed the 218 threshold for McCarthy to win without conceding a thing to his haters. Because the Republicans hold a meager 5-seat advantage, there are enough Far Right wingnuts willing and able to block McCarthy from winning outright.

This is now a purity test by the Freedom Caucus on the rest of the House Republicans. If McCarthy tries to break the impasse by making a deal with Democrats to let him win - either by supporting him or by voting "Present" to lower the 218 threshold - the Far Right MAGA voting base will crucify him and primary his ass in 2024. If any other Republicans break the deadlock by voting "Present" to let the Democratic leader Jeffries win a plurality count, those Republicans will be the ones crucified and ousted in 2024 primaries as well. There aren't enough promises McCarthy can make to flip enough wingnuts, so that's not an option. The only other end is for McCarthy to drop out and let another - someone only the Freedom Caucus can trust to be their puppet - more extremist candidate win, with the implied threat to "moderate" Republicans not to oppose.

There is an option out: There are at least 14 Republican representatives who come from districts that voted for Biden instead of trump. Several of their districts went for Biden by double digits, to where if they did flip first to the Democratic party they would avoid the threat of 2024 primary removal and win over enough Democratic voters to stay in office. That would shift majority control to the Democrats, letting Jeffries win the Speaker spot, and negate everything the Freedom Caucus is trying to impose.

The Freedom Caucus - and their media allies, when they wake up from sleeping through the intraparty fighting - will raise holy hell if that happens, and those congresspeople will be under severe harassment by MAGA voters declaring them traitors to America the party. But it will break the deadlock.

It will also break the Republican Party, with a fracturing that would spread not only to the Senate but to the state legislatures and to the lobbyist SuperPACs forced to take sides.

It all depends on if there's enough Republicans sitting on the Centrist/Moderate fence to grow a collective spine and make a move against the wingnuts. This is a fight that has been long in the making, ever since the 1990s Culture War shifting of the GOP to further conservative extremism. 

This is going to depend on who rusts first.

Chaos in Congress: Conservatives Caught Cluelessly Conflicted

(Looks at the article title) Does that make ANY sense...? 

Anyways, as mentioned yesterday, the House Republicans were all set to implode today when they opened the 2023 congressional session and were supposed to vote in a Speaker of the House.

And they failed.

Three times. Via Deirdre Walsh and Dustin Jones at NPR:

Leadership of the House of Representatives remains in limbo as California GOP Rep. Kevin McCarthy faces internal opposition to his bid for speaker.

On the first day of the new Congress, McCarthy failed to secure the 218 votes necessary to become speaker of the House in three rounds of voting. The House cannot conduct any business, including swearing in new members, until a speaker is chosen.

Tuesday's vote was the first time in a century that the election of a House speaker took multiple ballots to complete. The longest vote in U.S. history took place in 1855, lasting 133 rounds over two months, from December 1855 to February 1856.

McCarthy faces a Republican bloc of critics who want changes to the way the House operates. Although he's given in to many of their demands, he remains short of the votes needed.

Instead of celebrating their return to the majority on the first day, McCarthy and other GOP leaders were sorting out how to respond to an open rebellion that showcased division and cast doubt on their ability to govern.

As expected, the Freedom Caucus - the Far Right members who genuinely want to shutdown government in order to gut every social net and deregulate every industry and send us all back to the 1850s - refused to accept any deal from McCarthy, essentially putting the burden on the majority of other Republicans to figure out a way to break the impasse. Even with the clear evidence that 203 other Republicans won't side with them, these handful of extremists are going to double down on withholding their votes - backing Jim Jordan, an extremist wingnut - because they know they've got the rest of the GOP in a bind.

This is even after McCarthy is willing to give them committee chairs, willing to give them the Motion to Vacate power, willing to let them "investigate" - in truth, to harass and defame - the FBI and DOJ for daring to investigate Republican misdeeds (such as insurrection), and willing to let them gut their own congressional Ethics office so they can break even more rules.

You can't make deals with extremists, Republicans. The Freedom Caucus group will keep moving the goalposts and demand more, they will take more hostages and demand more. They will keep insisting the point, to where they will have all the power to abuse everyone else with none of the accountability our constitutional system requires. Even this block on the vote plays into the Caucus' interests: They are holding up the entire House of Representatives to where nothing can get done (just the way they like it).

To be honest Republicans, you need to make the hard decision now and kick the Freedom Caucus to the curbside. Take away all the promises you made to them because obviously they didn't work as incentives. McCarthy, you're going to have to make a deal with the House Democrats. You can make a deal, because at least the Dems want government to work.

The House Democrats shouldn't make too many demands other than: 

• Ensure the 'Motion to Vacate' is back to how Pelosi had it in 2019 (Only the party leaders can request that motion), so that the few members of the Freedom Caucus can't veto a thing; 
• Put a majority of Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee and any other committees that could be used to harass the Justice Department while they investigate trump for his misdeeds;
• Agree that the Hunter Biden laptop is compromised, and not worthy of congressional investigation (this will be a problem, because even mainstream Republicans want to embarrass Biden's family for political points);
• Promise not to file impeachment charges against Biden and Harris unless credible allegations of official misconduct is uncovered (this will also be a problem);
• Deny every congressperson - 20 of them - who voted against McCarthy any committee assignment as their punishment;
• Reinstall the electronic security gates to ensure the gun nuts don't waltz into the House chamber with freaking firearms;
• Less talk and more rock. Oh c'mon, every deal should include this as a clause.

You can even throw in the Sanity Clause while you're at it.

Either McCarthy and the rest of the sane members of the House Republicans make a deal with the House Dems that both parties can agree to, or McCarthy and the sane members of the House Republicans have to deal with the insanity of repeating the same roll call vote over and over while the Freedom Caucus holds up the entire system.

Insanity is repeating the same mistake expecting a better result. Well, there are no better results dealing with goddamn wingnuts, Republicans. It's about goddamn time you all learned what the rest of the nation learned since 2010, and stop dealing with Jim Jordan and the rest of those lunatics.

Drama In the Rotunda Involving No Llama. Bumma.

You know, when a political party wins control of the House Of Representatives, they tend to already have their ducks in a row when it comes time to vote for the Speakership. Usually it's the guy (or gal) who'd been leading the gang of congresscritters while in minority opposition, so it ought to be a no-brainer.

So here we are in 2023 with the Republicans regaining control of the House and proving they got no brains at all. Via Brad Dress at the Hill:

Nine House conservatives expressed doubts about electing Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) as the next Speaker of the House, calling for a “radical departure from the status quo” ahead of the Tuesday floor vote.

In a Sunday letter obtained by The Hill, Reps. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) and Chip Roy (R-Texas) led seven other hard-line Republican House members and members-elect in calling McCarthy’s responses to their pre-election demands “insufficient...”

McCarthy won a Republican conference vote for the Speakership last month but must garner the support of a majority of the House on the floor Tuesday to secure the position...

Under other circumstances, a small number (nine among 435 congresscritters) like this would be easily ignored while the Speaker-to-be makes arrangements to secure the 218-vote minimum to clear the hurdle. Unfortunately, the Red Wave Ebbtide the Republicans suffered this midterm gave the Republicans a mere 5-seat majority (and that's with a guy in George Santos who's going to get extradited to Brazil sooner than they thought). It's one of the narrowest party majorities in House history, and it's the narrowest during the most partisan division between factions since the Civil War.

It's kind of an open secret - hell, I blogged about it years ago - that the ever-ambitious McCarthy was an embarrassment of a leader, committing faux pas in a way that denied him a Speakership back then, and he was only Minority Leader during the 2018-22 Democratic cycle because nobody else wanted the job and he still had some favors to call in. 

Well, now McCarthy is trying to win over the more extremist, pro-trump members of the GOP, and he's finding out the Freedom Caucus and other rabble-rousers are hungrier for power than he realized.

Tengrain noted this back in December, when the insurgents were issuing demands that McCarthy cannot or dare not deliver:

The letter from HFC Chair SCOTT PERRY (R-Pa.), Republican Reps. CHIP ROY (Texas), DAN BISHOP (N.C.), ANDREW CLYDE (Ga.), PAUL GOSAR(Ariz.) and Reps.-Elect ELI CRANE (Ariz.) and ANDY OGLES (Tenn.) makes several demands of any would-be Republican speaker, including that they:

Reinstate the “motion to vacate” — basically, allowing any member of the House to force a vote to oust the sitting speaker. The letter notes that the rule was “in place for a reason from 1801 to 2018”;

Provide the House with 72 hours of notice on every bill and grant members the ability to amend legislative text;

Promise that Republican leadership and associated outside entities (like the McCarthy-aligned Congressional Leader Fund) will not wade into primaries;

Give conservatives more representation on so-called “A” committees, including the House Rules panel;

Use must-pass bills to try to secure a number of policy wins, including: (1) leveraging the annual defense authorization to reinstate service members who were dismissed due to their refusal to get the Covid vaccine, (2)forcing any debt ceiling increase to be accompanied by spending cuts, and (3)requiring the farm bill to include cuts to food stamps.

So demand #1 is a culture war item that serves as a MAGA get out of jail card in the military, #2 is to assure that there will be a forced recession if the gubmint cannot stimulate the economy (and don’t kid ourselves, “spending cuts” is the dog whistle for Social Security and Medicare) and #3 is just about cruelty...

This was something I noticed back in the early 2010s, when the "Tea Party" Republicans - made up of the Freedom Caucus leaders of today - were insistent on gutting the federal government during their shutdowns to impose the most amount of cruelty on the poor and working classes as much as possible. THAT hadn't changed. What they're doing now is making sure McCarthy can't pull a Boehner stunt to pass legislation to compromise with a Democratic Senate and White House.

That "Motion to Vacate" is also a kind of "No Confidence" vote that was in the rules for hundreds of years - part of the Jefferson Rules of Order passed down from session to session - that got used several times to undercut Boehner and Paul Ryan during those budget fights, leading to Pelosi and the Dems refusing to set that rule when they retook power in 2018. It's a license to let the backbenchers throw bombs at the party leadership without penalty, and McCarthy was reluctant to bring it back... until this weekend, when he caved on that issue.

Funny thing was, the insurgents - represented by Matt Gaetz at that conference meeting - refused to support McCarthy with that move, insisting on further power. 

Something something, "Moving the Goalposts," victory for wingnuts, repeat.

So we're looking at an eventful Tuesday on Capitol Hill one way or another.

Either McCarthy surrenders on every issue his own party extremists want - which runs the slight risk of irking the remaining moderate caucus members (and yes, there are about 30 of them left) - or he fails to make the Speakership on the first ballot, which makes him look weak before he can do anything about it.

It's something that hasn't happened often, in fact not since 1923 (via Ronald G. Shafer at Stars and Stripes (paywalled)):

Today, Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) is struggling to win enough votes to be elected speaker when Republicans take narrow control of the House, as he faces opposition from some right-wing members of his party. As a result, it may take more than one ballot for anyone to gain the 218 votes, or the majority of votes cast for candidates, needed to win the speakership. McCarthy has warned fellow Republicans against a floor fight, saying, "If we play games on the floor, Democrats could end up picking who the speaker is."

The last time a speaker election took more than one ballot was in 1923, when Speaker Frederick Gillett (R-Mass.) was reelected on the ninth ballot.

But the longest speaker vote began on Dec. 3, 1855, when the 34th Congress convened. Democrats controlled the Senate, but no party controlled the House after the disintegration of the Whig Party. About a third of House members were Democrats. The rest belonged to a mix of parties, including the new Republican Party. Many were members of the secretive American Party, also known as the Know Nothing party...

Finally, on Feb. 1, 1856, Democrats adopted a new strategy. First, they backed a new speaker candidate, proslavery Rep. William Aiken Jr. (D-S.C.), the 50-year-old son of railroad magnate William Aiken Sr., after whom Aiken, S.C., was named. Second, Democratic leaders announced that they would propose the next day a previously rejected resolution to elect a speaker with only a plurality vote. Under this plan, if a majority of members failed to elect a speaker in three consecutive votes, the candidate who got the most votes on a fourth tally would win.

Aiken was sure to win over enough Southern House members to gain a plurality and the speakership, newspapers reported. "We think we can count 109 votes for Mr. Aiken, if jealousy or something else does not defeat him," a Washington Star correspondent wrote. That night, Democratic President Franklin Pierce congratulated Aiken in advance on his victory...

Talk about counting chickens before they hatched.

The fourth, plurality vote began. As the clerk tallied the total, "the excited crowd on the floor and in the galleries looked on in silence," the Picayune reported. "The suspense at this crisis was agonizing. Every eye turned and every ear inclined with intense interest towards the clerk's desk to hear the result."

Just before 7 p.m., the clerk announced the total: 103 votes for Banks, 100 for Aiken. Some lawmakers who had been expected to switch to Aiken had not come through. "As the result was announced, the audience in the galleries manifest their joy by peal after peal of deafening cheers," the Picayune wrote. "The ladies waved their handkerchiefs wildly and clapped, and [anti-Banks] gentlemen stamped and raved, and swore."

So the lesson here is, Have a Solid Majority That Outnumbers Your Extremist Caucus in the House First.

The speculation about what will happen to McCarthy circles around the uncertainty of where the insurgent votes could go. There is an official challenger in Andy Biggs (AZ), but there's still a possibility the Freedom Caucus members or other factions waiting in the shadows backing the likes of Jim Jordan (OH). There is even the possibility that if not enough House Republicans show up to actually vote, a united effort from the Democratic House members backing newly chosen leader Hakeem Jeffries (NY) can place Jeffries in minority control as Speaker.

The Speakership is a powerful office: It sets the committee members (meaning Jeffries could exile the pro-trump Republicans to minor duties that won't affect policies or push for impeachments), oversees floor debates (Jeffries can limit when and how long Republicans can scream for the cameras), and disciplines the House if someone (hint: anybody from the Freedom caucus) gets out of line. Even with the Republicans controlling a slim majority of actual votes, A Speaker Jeffries can limit the amount of damage the Republicans can do.

If this happens - if the Republicans collapse in disarray in failure to control the Speaker's office - things can get very nasty very quick within their own ranks. Accusations of betrayals between the factions could lead to genuine schism, a possible end to the Republican Party itself at the national level.

That's too far to speculate, though. There is often enough self-control among the party leaders to pull back from the brink of their own implosion. It's all about power, and the House Republicans would be foolish to blow apart at the moment of seizing that power for themselves.

Then again, the Freedom Caucus is made up of wingnuts who want to watch the world burn.

Wouldn't hurt to warm up the popcorn.