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Yet another modest proposal

Sunday, May 29, 2022

We read in this morning’s New York Times that the state of Texas has (and other states with fascist legislatures soon will) made it illegal for a corporation to decline to do business with gun makers and other merchants of death. In another era, this blatantly unconstitutional interference in interstate commerce would be considered…umm…I know!: Blatantly unconstitutional! In this era it should also be considered unconstitutional if one applies the unconstitutional ruling in Citizens United, since if a) corporations are entitled to all the rights of actual human beings (and then some, actually), and b) investing money in politicians is a form of speech with which the government is barred from interfering by the First Amendment, then it only makes sense that the Texas statute is unconstitutional since a) corporations are entitled to all the rights of human beings, and 2) investing money is a form of speech with which the government is barred from interfering by the First Amendment.

However, we can probably count on the present Supreme Court telling us that Texas is not at all interfering with interstate commerce, and as to Free Speech, well, spending money is only speech when it’s spent to buy politicians, particularly Republican, politicians.

So, I’ve no doubt that Gavin Newsom will (and I hope Ned Lamont will follow his lead) anticipate my modest proposal by proposing legislation in California that duplicates the Texas law, except that it would penalize corporations for doing precisely what Texas requires of them.

Alas, I am confident Brett and his pals can find a way to let Texas have its way while deploring the blatant unconstitutionality of California’s law. Still, it’s worth the effort if only to further undermine the public’s faith in an institution that has now abandoned all pretense of impartiality or actual belief in the rule of law.

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More Republican Election fraud—What a Surprise!

Wednesday, May 25, 2022

This is truly unbelievable. Well, in this day and age not unbelievable, but it should be, being yet another example of Republicans committing the crimes that they accuse Democrats of committing:

Five candidates vying for the right to challenge Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) are facing the possibility of being eliminated even before the primary election after a state board found their campaigns filed thousands of fraudulent signatures.

Michigan’s Bureau of Elections issued a formal recommendation late Monday that the five candidates — including two leading contenders — be removed from the August primary ballot. The recommendation will go before the four-member Board of State Canvassers, a bipartisan panel made up of two Democrats and two Republicans, who meet on Thursday.

It goes without saying that all five are Republicans. The candidates are trying to blame the folks who uncovered the fraud and the people they paid to gather the signatures. Funny how whenever you read about actual voter fraud, there’s a Republican involved.

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George pleads guilty

Thursday, May 19, 2022

It seems W has unwittingly pled guilty to being a war criminal:

Former President George W. Bush on Wednesday inadvertently condemned “the decision of one man to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq” as he delivered remarks criticizing Russia’s assault on Ukraine.

This got me thinking about a post I wrote at the end of February, in which I observed that there was no meaningful distinction between what Bush did and what Putin did. In looking through my archives, I realized that for reasons I can’t reconstruct, I never posted it. So here it is. I wrote it on the 28th of February, when it would have been more timely, but what the heck, now that George has acknowledged its truth, I might as well put it up:

The international criminal court is considering charges against Putin for war crimes and crimes against humanity. He is no doubt guilty of those things, but let us pause.

Back in law school some of the professors would note that some legal arguments, made by judges or by lawyers, amounted to distinctions without a difference. That is, they attempted to amplify an irrelevant fact into a sufficient reason to decide that controlling precedent or clear statutory language did not apply to the case at issue.

I would submit that anyone who would argue that there is any meaningful distinction between what Putin is doing in Ukraine, and what Bush did in Iraq, would need to rely on this type of argument. Both invaded countries that posed no threat to them based on rationales that were based on lies, which even, had they been true, would not have justified the actions they took. It really is as simple as that. Perhaps the only distinction, which I would argue is not a legitimate difference, is that Bush managed to get a majority of the United States Congress to pretend to believe his lies and endorse his misadventure. So far as I know, Putin felt no need to get his rubber stamp legislature to do as our Congress did.

Neither one will ever actually face a trial before the International Court, but it’s impossible to argue that only one deserves to be indicted. America is lucky that few countries have raised this issue in response to our push for sanctions.

After I wrote the above, I stumbled across this in which we learn that our actions in Iraq were different in some way:

Some of the things that we did in the nineteenth century or in the 1970s or out of our anger and grief after 9/11 were bad, okay, but they aren’t the same. They were another era with different rules, different motivations, different moralities and different levels of social and political maturity.

The fact is that, confining ourselves just to the Iraq situation, the situations are pretty much the same. We attacked a sovereign nation without any actual provocation. That shouldn’t stop us from doing what we can to stop Putin, but as is the case with our other crimes against humanity, (e.g., slavery and genocide of Native Americans) it’s important that we acknowledge our history and learn from it.

One must conclude from Bush’s inadvertent admission, that somewhere in the depths of his disordered brain, he realizes the extent of his guilt. Perhaps he’ll consider turning himself in to the International Criminal Court and invite Vlad to join him.

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The rule of law continues to crumble

Saturday, May 14, 2022

The courts, well stocked with right wing nutjobs, particularly in the Confederacy, seem to be competing with each other to see who can make the most outlandish decisions, discarding not only years of precedence, but basic legal principles that even a child could understand.

The latest example (See also) is a decision from the 5th Circuit upholding a Texas law that:

 makes it illegal for any social media platform with 50 million or more US monthly users to “block, ban, remove, deplatform, demonetize, de-boost, restrict, deny equal access or visibility to, or otherwise discriminate against expression.

Of course the law provides the now commonplace ability for those offended by being “blocked, banned”, etc., to bring lawsuits seeking to enforce their right to be provided a platform from which to spew their vitriol, with the statute framed in such a way as to make it impossible for the social media platform to prevail.

I used to think that I could perform an occasional service on this blog by explaining some of the finer points of the law, but this one is too obvious. The First Amendment forbids the government from interfering in speech. It does not give each person the right to demand a platform from private parties. This law is so blatantly unconstitutional it’s hard to count all the ways in which it transgresses. There’s the fact that a state is impermissibly interfering with interstate commerce. There’s the fact that the state is requiring a publisher to publish things it prefers not to publish, which turns free speech on its head.

The 5th Circuit, taking a lesson from the Supremes, took this action without issuing a decision. Maybe the challenge of overturning mountains of precedent seemed like too much, so why bother. Far easier to issue a 15 word ruling simply setting the lower court’s legally correct ruling aside.

One irony of all this is that even rightwing judges don’t appear smart enough to see that a ruling such as this could come back to haunt them. From what I’ve seen, it’s far easier to get banned from Twitter if you’re on the left than on the right, and, consistent with the rule that if they accuse the left of something, they are in fact doing it themselves, it’s folks on the right who get all outraged by being dissed by folks on the left, who, assuming the law is fairly applied will be able to turn the law against the right. Oh, wait, I forgot that the courts will surely find a way to construe it so it only protects right wing speech.

Just a few years ago I would have written that “even this Supreme Court would never uphold this decision”, but now I’m stuck with saying that there’s a better than even chance they’ll find a way to do so. It won’t make any sense, but Alito’s recently leaked opinion proves beyond doubt that making sense is no longer a priority among the extremists on the court.

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Chapter Infinity in IOKYAR

Sunday, May 8, 2022

You really truly couldn’t make this stuff up, this being just a quick update of it’s okay if you’re a Republican.

It’s okay to commit voter fraud if you’re a Republican. Seems like one Billy Lanzilottie, a “23-year-old GOP operative, South Philadelphia ward leader, and chairman of the Republican Registration Coalition” arranged to have more than three dozen mail ballot applications sent to a PO Box he controlled. Of course, it was all on the up and up because:

…Aiming “to help pump out the Republican voter turnout,” he said, he began going door-to-door earlier this month and signing up residents of the 26th to vote by mail.

He’d hand them a form on which he or people he works with had already filled out the voter’s name and his P.O. Box as the destination, he said. Having the ballots sent there was a “convenience to the voter,” he said, so it could be hand-delivered to them later by someone they trusted.

“There’s been a number of problems with the post office lately,” he said. ”Checks are being stolen out of the mail. They like it this way because I’m someone they trust.”

Except:

But many of the voters said they don’t know who Lanzilotti is and had no idea he was submitting mail ballot applications in their names.

Sure sounds a lot like what they accuse Democrats of doing, doesn’t it?

Also, Republicans also appear to feel that it’s okay to hold an elected position even if you just murdered your wife:

A Lebanon [Indiana] man accused of killing his wife in March and dumping her body in a creek is among the candidates to advance in a local election after Indiana’s primaries Tuesday. …

The 40-year-old has been incarcerated in the Boone County Jail since March after police said he told investigators he threw a concrete flower pot at his wife, Nikki Wilhoite, the night before and dropped her body over the side of a bridge.

Well, I suppose at least he’s honest, given the fact that he confessed.

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More on the post Roe world

Thursday, May 5, 2022

Since my post of a few days ago I’ve read a lot of speculation about which precedents the court will destroy next. Most of the speculation is sound, but some should give one pause, if one believed that the right wing members of the court have even a shred of intellectual honesty. For instance, a blogger at Above the Law speculates that New York Times v. Sullivan may be overruled:

As for remaking First Amendment jurisprudence, well, the notoriously thin-skinned Donald Trump campaigned on the idea he would “open up” libel laws. And he isn’t a one off — no, both Justices Thomas and Gorsuch have invited the Court to revisit Sullivan. Do we really think Alito, Kavanaugh, and Barrett will hold the line here? Sure, some academics still have faith that the core of the actual malice standard will remain intact, but I’m not so certain.

The Sullivan case required that a plaintiff prove actual malice when asserting a libel case against the press.

It strikes me that if the “justices” decide to do this, they will have some heavy lifting to do when they have to explain why the new rule applies to the New York Times and MSNBC, but not to Fox, which by any reasonable measure would suffer the most from such a ruling. I suppose they could always go with the rationale of the lower court judge who ruled that Tucker Carlson could not be sued for libel because no reasonable person would ever believe anything he said, that rationale of course ignoring the fact that it’s the unreasonable people that we have to worry about. The whole thing might pain Roberts a bit, as he has this thing about the court’s reputation, but he’s not even the swing vote anymore, so he’ll have no choice but to go along.

The article at Above the Law is well worth reading. It also argues that Brown v. Board of Education may be on the chopping block. I wonder what Ginni will say to Clarence to get him to stay in step with the movement and vote to overturn Brown.

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Where we may go after Roe goes down

Tuesday, May 3, 2022

Yesterday we learned (no need to link, everyone knows about it by now) that the Supreme Court is planning to reverse Roe v. Wade. It’s actually a bit of a surprise to me, as I expected that they would simply gradually chip away at it until it was all but overruled, but never expressly so.

Before I go on, a hat tip to the person who leaked the draft opinion, since there can be no question but that we would not otherwise have learned about this until after the election, which is when those judges who insist the court is absolutely non-partisan, would have released it, lest they hurt Republican chances in the mid terms.

I imagine I won’t be the first to make the following predictions, but I’ve purposely avoided reading commentary on the decision until after I post this, so I can honestly say these were my initial thoughts, unprovoked by pundits of the right or left.

I think the future course of American law on reproductive issues is an “and/or” proposition. The right will agitate for, and the court will, unless the Democrats get their act together:

  1. Overrule Griswold v. Connecticut, and leave it to the states whether women can have access to birth control. We’ve already seen the beginning of this movement among politicians cultivating the Trumpists. And no, I will not digress into an irrelevant discourse about the probability that Trump himself has likely paid for a good number of abortions as well as encouraging his sex partners to use birth control. Oh, wait I did digress. Anyway, whatever rationale the court is using to overrule Roe (I haven’t read the opinion) will of necessity also provide support for overruling Griswold. Needless to say, such a decision would not be particularly popular with the majority of people in this country, but the court is, in other areas, doing its best to make sure the will of the majority has no bearing on who gets elected or what laws get enacted. So, that’s one thing we’ll be hearing about.
  2. The other half of the “and/or” will require some pretzel logic by the court, as I do know, despite having not read it, that the draft opinion states that the question of abortion should be left to the states. The problem is that some states will not only opt to keep it legal, they will likely make it easy for out of staters to obtain abortions. And, of course, from the point of view of the anti-abortion establishment, every sperm is sacred, so allowing any abortions at all cannot be tolerated. So, we’ll see lawsuits brought seeking to nullify the right to abortion in such states by declaring a fetus a person from the moment of conception, and all abortions murder. This will require some fancy footwork on the part of Amy and her pals, as there would be all kinds of precedents they’d have to ignore, but don’t put it past them.

Life is full of ironies. We likely wouldn’t be faced with this possible future if Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a fierce defender of abortion rights, had done the right thing and retired while Obama had a Senate majority.

It is to be hoped that the Democrats can, at least, capitalize on this development by making it a part of their campaign, not only be attacking the reversal of Roe, but by warning that the soon the Republicans will be coming after your birth control pills. They say they will, but we’ll see.

UPDATE: Having now gotten my predictions out, I have perused my preferred sources of punditry. Here’s a good accounting of the horrors to which we can now look forward.

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The F-Word makes an appearance

Friday, April 29, 2022

It has been apparent for some time that the Republican Party is dominated by people who prefer fascism to democracy. Trump has been fairly up front about it. However, the media has been reluctant (is that the right word, or is “terrified” a better choice?) to drop the F-word in connection with the Republican Party.

So it was sort of refreshing to see that this obvious reality was acknowledged recently on Morning Joe, which I don’t watch because 1) I don’t have a TV, and 2) even if I did, I can’t stomach the bullshit, the occasional intrusion of reality notwithstanding.

Joe and his guest were discussing a poll, which among other things established that (Surprise!) Republicans are exceedingly tolerant of racist and anti-Semitic politicians. Joe seemed to think that only the anti-Semitic part qualified them as fascists, but at least it’s a start:

MSNBC host Joe Scarborough called out Republican voters later on in the segment for their turn to fascism. Scarborough said, “Less than half of Republicans believe that uttering antisemitic remarks, spewing antisemitic remarks, is a serious problem and a roadblock to being elected.”

“That tells you a large chunk of the Republican Party right now, a large chunk of the Republican base are, — I’ve been using the word ‘fascist’ for some time.”

“That there is a fascist strain in the Republican Party for at least a third or so of those members,” Scarborough said.

There’s more to fascism than anti-Semitism and racism, and the Republicans have touched all the bases, book burning and demonization of trans people being just the latest examples.

The Democrats won’t win elections by ignoring this. It’s probably true that they won’t win if they don’t learn how to promote their own successes and attack the Republicans on multiple fronts. Two of the most fascistic fascists, Abbott and DeSantis, have gone out of their way to harm their states in their endless quest to feed raw meat to the base. Democrats have to learn how to exploit that fact. Abbott and DeSantis are the most prominent examples, but the argument applies to most Republicans. Still, it’s important that Democrats point out the obvious: that the Republican Party is now the American Fascist Party and if it prevails in the next two elections, we can kiss representative democracy goodbye.

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Another thing Democrats won’t do

Sunday, April 24, 2022

I agree with the premise of this post over at Politicus USA, and my purpose here is simply to amplify on it a bit.

It appears that Trump is a bit sensitive about perceptions of his intelligence, and he’s stupid enough to use the fact that he passed a test designed to diagnose senility as proof that he’s a genius. That in itself proves that either he’s stupid and/or that he’s correctly concluded intuitively that his followers are so stupid that they’ll swallow his bullshit.

I think the “and” is the operative conjunction.

Intelligence, broadly understood, comes in many forms. I think that Trump had and still has a real talent for grifting, even as he continues to drift deeper into senility. But by other measures, he’s never been particularly intelligent, and he’s rapidly shedding any intellectual capacity he may have had.

It is a fact that it’s easy to get under Trump’s skin, and when something is under his skin, he doesn’t react particularly well. Jason Easley, the author of the post to which I’ve linked, concludes:

If the failed former president runs against Joe Biden in 2024, it is now clear how President Biden can get under his skin.

He’s absolutely right. The question is: will Biden and/or the Democrats as a whole beat on this drum and get under his skin. It’s what the Republicans and Fox tried to do to Biden, but they couldn’t sell it because it isn’t true and that became obvious to anyone listening to Biden. The more the Democrats beat on this theme, the more idiotic statements Trump will make, and at some point, even the media, which has steadfastedly refused to comment on Trump’s obvious intellectual deficits, will be forced to cover the issue.

This is just one small example of the benefits the Democrats could reap by going on the attack. But don’t hold your breath.

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Both sides are equally bad! Republican edition

Wednesday, April 20, 2022

Every once in a while you read about one or more Republicans doing the right thing and you get sort of stunned. But then, if you look closer your faith in the party of fascism is fully restored. If they do something right, it will always be for all the wrong reasons.

Case in point, the Tennessee GOP just voted to remove a loathsome Trumpist carpetbagger from the primary ballot for a (presumably safe) open Congressional seat in Tennessee.

The Tennessee GOP voted Tuesday to remove former State Department spokesperson Morgan Ortagus and others from the ballot.

The former State Department spokesperson and Fox News contributor thought she had an inside track on running for Congress by moving to Tennessee after her time in Trump’s White House and working for Mike Pompeo. Alas, it was not to be as Tennessee Republicans don’t take kindly to carpetbaggers and found some novel ways to keep her and a few others off their ballot.

Ortagus made local headlines in March when she scored a big ZERO in a talk radio quiz about the district she wanted to represent.

Sounds good, right? Well, as you would expect after remembering these are Republicans we’re talking about, it turns out that for once, the media’s shibboleth about both sides being equally bad, turns out to be absolutely true. You see, as one of the folks responsible for keeping her off the ballot explained, Trump does not really care about her, and what they’ve done was for the sake of preserving the GOP’s monopoly on bigotry of all forms:

One Tennessee Republican opined that the only reason Ortagus had gotten Trump’s endorsement was that she’s a Jew.

“I don’t think Trump cares one way or the other,” he said. “I think Jared Kushner — he’s Jewish, she’s Jewish — I think Jared will be upset. Ivanka will be upset. I don’t think Trump cares.”

The Tennessee Republican in question is one Fred Nicely. Nicely “is also the same guy who last week made the Hitler reference as a former homeless person who made good”.

Of course Ortagus is incensed that Nicely would be openly anti-Semitic in the case of a Trump supporter, though one has to wonder whether, if she gets into Congress, she will join the rest of the nutjobs and cast aspersions on the Democratic Congresswomen who are Muslims.

At all events, it’s good to see some disarray among the Republicans. There’s an old saw about revolutions eating their own, and maybe the table is being set already.

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