Opinion and Commentary since 2003
According to this guy, it is illegal for a person to oppose another person being appointed to a volunteer ethics board position.
According to this guy, if two people oppose someone else being appointed to a town board, that’s an actionable conspiracy.
Bonus points for the gratuitous and silly use of “ANTIFA” like a good and obedient little trumpster.
Silly season came early this year, just oozing from the town of Cheektowaga. A town supervisor’s race explains the silliness. The candidates are Brian Nowak (D) and Michael Jasinski (R). Jasinski is being supported by outgoing Supervisor, Diane Benczkowski.
Things must not be looking too great for the Jasinski campaign, because he and Benczkowski have manufactured out of thin air probably the most transparently idiotic nontroversy, calling for the censure – nay resignation – of Councilman Brian Nowak because he had the audacity to point out that a woman under Council consideration to serve on a volunteer Cheektowaga town ethics board has flown a Confederate battle flag outside her home. So, they’re accusing him of “bribery”.
I mocked the whole thing in this post.
Well, Benczkowski and Jasinski (and Benczkowski’s lawyer, Gary Borek), believe that they can propel Jasinski to victory by libeling Brian Nowak, accusing him of making a $400,000 bribe (!) and of being mean to the Confederate flag lady.
The bribery allegation is as absurd in its supposed facts as it is politically manufactured. Nowak doesn’t have $400,000 with which to bribe anyone, and the whole thing is ridiculous. It goes without saying, I suppose, that if Jasinski and Benczkowski and Borek think that bribery took place, they should call the cops. Or the DA. There should be an investigation and, if warranted, a prosecution. Maybe if Nowak is indicted for bribery, then the town board can take that up. What it is doing now, instead, is defaming him. Libeling him. Notwithstanding the transparent bullshittery and absence of proof, this silly little wannabe-junta put forth a censure resolution, and it lost 3-3. WNYMedia took some great snippets from that meeting.
On this week’s episode of the @dianebencz and Michael Jasinski @CheektowagaInfo side show circus and 🤡 extravaganza we meet “behind closed doors” Christine Adamczyk pic.twitter.com/m0NkrzygoF
— WNYmedia Network (@wnymedia) September 27, 2023
In an election year, a month or so out from election day, Nowak, an astute, sincere, and honest politician, is being attacked in a nakedly political theatrical production where people pretend that it was somehow improper to point out that the lady applying for the ethics board admittedly flew a confederate flag outside her home.
I have to say, as an aside, I love the town commentariat wondering which flags Nowak approves. Good question. We should narrow that down. I’m willing to bet he’s not ok with Confederate flags or Nazi flags. I’d reckon that if you’re flying one of those outside your house on a busy road and you want to volunteer for the town ethics board, your feelings and opinions about race, religion, equality, genocide, and diversity are going to be called into question. It’s an ethics board.
At the town council meeting on the 26th, especially as to the “bribery” nonsense, Nowak correctly put the people defaming him on notice that he intends to pursue every legal avenue available to him in order to combat the defamatory accusations being made against him. Frankly, I hope he sues them all to Kingdom come.
Nowak’s supporters rallied behind him, and Benczkowski’s lawyer, Borek, takes to Facebook, (obvs), to attack Nowak and his supporters some more.
Borek is claiming that it is a First Amendment violation for a town board to reject an applicant for a volunteer post based on the fact that the applicant has literally, admittedlym, flown the flag of white supremacist secession, sedition, and slavery. He cites some legal cases to support his conclusion that “Dan Jones” is a “wannabe attorney.” Luckily, I am an actual attorney. So, I looked into it.
I should note that the applicant, whom I am not naming, blames her husband for his “act of rebellion” in flying that flag and she denies holding the views of genocide, slavery, white supremacy, and the subjugation of Black Americans for which that flag stands. I have no reason to doubt her protestations, but the fact remains that it was her house and that flag was flying there. If I flew that flag outside our house, I wouldn’t be married anymore. It’s not a joke, and she’s not a victim. If anyone should be apologizing, it’s the person who deliberately flew that flag or allowed it to be flown. The accusations, victimhood, and lack of contrition are absolutely glaring.
I also have to note the irony of this comment Borek left to his own other comment:
So, it’s ok for Gary Borek to threaten people exercising their First Amendment rights, just to be clear. A conspiracy implies criminality, and there is no criminality at issue here. If Borek thinks there is, he should immediately report this to the police or have someone swear out a complaint, because falsely accusing someone of a crime is libel per se. Also, it is protected and non-defamatory opinion to characterize as racist someone who has admittedly, knowingly, flown a Confederate flag outside their house, and I don’t care what sort of excuses or explanations you have to try and paint yourself as the victim. I mean, if you can’t maintain a basic level of intellectual consistency within the same thread, are you even Facebooking?
When we attorneys cite cases, we look to make sure the circumstances are substantially similar. The problem with Borek’s analysis is that the case he cites is factually distinguishable from the one at hand. In Gagliardi, the Plaintiffs alleged that the government officials had retaliated against their protected speech by doing something that had a direct adverse affect on a property right – something of value, which they owned. They alleged that the Village and its officials made improper decisions as to the zoning and zoning enforcement of an industrial property adjacent to the Gagliardis’ own, which resulted in harm to their property rights.
Generally, a person can bring a claim under 18 USC §1983 if they allege that their Constitutional right to something was violated in retribution for an expression of speech. It’s not an absolute right, though. Assuming that flying a Confederate flag of white supremacy, sedition, and slavery is an exercise of free speech, what did our applicant here lose? What right belonging to her was violated? She did not lose her job. She did not lose any property right. Nothing belonging to her was harmed in any way – real or imagined. She never had a property right to sit on that ethics board.
Look at the cases Mr. Borek cites in the quote above. “Wrongful discharge”; “denied permits”. Someone lost a job. Someone’s property rights were affected. In the case of this ethics board applicant, she lost nothing to which she had any pre-existing right. She did not lose employment or remuneration – the ethics board is a part-time volunteer position. Her house was not foreclosed upon nor was any sort of zoning decision implemented to the detriment of her property right.
In Christie BB v. Isaiah CC, 194 A.D.3d 1130 (3d Dept 2021), an appellate panel found that, although a Confederate flag emblem was protected speech, it is a “symbol inflaming the already strained relationship between the parties” and that the Family Court can factor in its continued presence in analyzing what may be in the best interests of a mixed-race child.
The right to free speech is not absolute or without consequence, and the government can definitely deprive someone of a right due to speech when that speech is especially repulsive. In Pappas v. Giuliani, 290 F3d 143 (2d Cir. 2002), that Court found that a police officer’s First Amendment rights were not violated when he was terminated from the NYPD after sending bigoted leaflet materials. (Note that in our case here, the ethics board applicant did not have a job that she lost – indeed, she has not been harmed at all as to any right to which she was previously entitled.)
When a government employee is terminated as a result of protected speech – of a “matter of public concern” – courts must “arrive at a balance between the interests of the citizen, in commenting on matters of public concern, and the interest of the State, as an employer, in promoting the efficiency of the public services it performs through its employees.” (Pickering v. Board of Ed., 391 U.S.563, 568 (1968).) If the government entity believes that the speech would “potentially interfere with or disrupt the government’s activities, and can persuade the court that the potential disruptiveness was sufficient to outweigh the First Amendment value of that speech,” it has acted lawfully.
The Pappas court found that the right to speak one’s mind about matters of public concern, “is not absolute. At times, the right of free speech conflicts with other important governmental values, posing the problem which interest should prevail…For this reason, the employee’s right of free speech is sometimes subordinated to the interest of the effective functioning of the governmental employer.”
The Court in Pappas found that the proper functioning of a police department is dependent on the respect and trust of the community and the perception that it enforces the law fairly and without bias. If the police treats one segment of the population with contempt, that population will see the police as an oppressor, and the work of the police is impaired.
The police officer in Pappas distributed leaflets hostile to Jewish and Black people, and the Court found that these statements damaged the effectiveness of the police department. They cause harm and strife. “The restrictions of the First Amendment do not require the [NYPD] to continue the employment of an officer whose dissemination of such racist messages so risks to harm the Departnment’s performance of its mission. “A policeman may have a constitutional right to [speak his mind], but he has no constitutional right to be a policeman.” Pappas, 290 F.3d at 147, citing McAuliffe v. Mayor of New Bedford, 155 Mass. 215, 220 (1892), cited in Connick v. Myers, 461 U.S. 138, 143-44 (1982).
Likewise, our prospective ethics board member has a constitutional right to fly all the Confederate flags she or her husband wants; she does not have a constitutional right to be a member of the town ethics board.
If the town feels that it would harm the reputation of the ethics board, or the board’s performance of its mission by appointing someone to it who arguably espouses Confederate viewpoints, then it is incumbent upon the Council, which appoints people to that board, to vet these prospective members and prevent the appointment of people who fly flags which stand for chattel slavery of Black people.
I think that the situation involving our Confederate-flag-waving ethics board applicant more closely follows the situation in Pappas, and the town’s hand is even stronger because there wasn’t a firing – there was a declination to appoint. The town didn’t take her flag, or her property, or any right belonging to her.
What would have happened had the board failed properly to vet this person and it came out later that this now-member of the ethics board had on a couple of occasions had a pro-slavery treason flag flying in front of her house? Would that have been better? Or would that have harmed the reputation and interests of the town and its ability efficiently and without disruption to carry out its activities?
At the town board meeting on September 26th, at least one town board member objected to the fact that Nowak did what he did at an open council meeting. Yeah, he did. But he literally just passed around photographs to the other members of the board, and told them that they should take that into account. He said accurately what it showed. He did not show the pictures to the public, even to this day. He didn’t get up and accuse anyone of anything untrue.
The town of Cheektowaga has residents from myriad backgrounds, religions, and skin colors. It absolutely should not blindly or ignorantly be hiring someone to any town office – elected or not, paid or not, who has flown a flag of sedition and racial hatred outside their house. These three should be thanking Nowak for bringing this to their attention before the appointment so as to avoid a lot of bad press and embarrassment later.
Dear Mabel,
The war is not going as planned. The sweltering August heat persists into these early days of September, and our window air conditioners can scarcely keep up. Our rations of cold quinoa are more frequently replaced by hot takes as we muster from time to time to do battle with the woke Yankees who would end our very way of life. Our crippling monotony is broken only by the occasional rush of excitement when the Yankees fly their flag, which would turn me into a woman at the slightest provocation. What, dear Mabel, will become of us if we are forced against Heaven to treat every person as a person?
Our general has taken our Bud Light, leaving us parched. We are entertained periodically with “Sound of Freedom” and “Try That in a Small Town”. One day we were ordered to show reverance to the ballad of “Rich Men North of Richmond” and the next day it was lost at the battle of Target Aisle. Our lifted pickups roll coal to own the libs, yet these are but fleeting successes. Oh, Mabel, how our leaders forsake us in these trying times. We do not know for how much longer we might sip from the cold brews of pumpkin cream, which soothe us in times of despair. If you could spare it, please Venmo me some Greybacks to sate my thirst.
In South Cheektowaga, though, the battle flag flies high, reminding all who see it for what we stand – seditious rebellion against the united States, the enslavement of Africans, the divine supremacy of the white race, and secession in order to secure for ourselves and our descendants these unending ideals for which we fight. Must not these voices of truth and feudal plantation honor be included within the “diversity” about which the woke Yankees cry incessantly? Woe be unto those who would impose on us the woke mind virus to infect us with ideations of “equality” and “liberty.”
Pray for us, Mabel.
Yours, John
Oops, sorry.
It was actually a guy with a Hungarian surname who supplied drugs to a woman with an Irish surname who was about to testify as a witness in a trial involving alleged racketeering and bribery by members of the Italian mob.
To my knowledge, all the people involved are American citizens.
This is the text of a letter I wrote to the Casilio campaign and other listed candidates / electeds who are hosting what is being called a “Migrant Crisis Forum” tonight.
Will pitchforks and torches be provided, or should your anti-immigrant posse bring their own?
I am truly disappointed that I am unable to join your “migrant crisis forum” this evening. I would very much have appreciated the opportunity to tell all of the participants, to your faces, how ashamed and disgusted I am by your use of some of the most vulnerable people in our community as pieces in a political game of checkers. Your flyer for this event invites people to have their “voices heard” because Democrats have “blindly welcomed this crisis without any input from residents.” I wasn’t aware that asylum-seeking refugees, whose cases are being managed by a coalition of local resettlement agencies, needed to subject themselves and their housing and safety to your right-wing base.
I say “ashamed” because western New York already has a reputation for being especially racist and xenophobic. Stoking hatred and politicizing Immigration is an easy play for craven politicians who wish to attain power through fear.
Here we have an invitation to a “migrant crisis forum” hosted by people with Italian surnames like “Casilio” and “Todaro” and Polish ones like “Zachowicz” and “Jasinski”, with Kracker and Ortt bringing up the Teutonic rear. Mr. Zachowicz’s campaign even hosted a recent “Party in Polonia” without a hint of irony.
How soon we forget. It was a short century or so ago that white Anglo-Saxon protestants were aghast over the influx of what they considered to be uncouth Catholic immigrants from places like Italy, Ireland, and Poland. These immigrants were derided as degenerate, disease-carrying ne’er-do-wells whose presence in the country was a negative development in all respects.
Now, people fleeing some of the worst violence and political oppression in the world from places like Venezuela, Cuba, and sub-Saharan Africa trek thousands of miles, with just a few belongings, making a perilous journey to come to America to find peace and asylum and a chance at the same prosperity that people like the Casilio family enjoy today. Venezuela is a post-Stalinist socialist failed state. It must have taken a lot for you all to opt for “hate immigrants” over “hate communism” but hey ho, it’s a new, edgier Republican Party than the one I remember.
The tell here is that you don’t refer to these people as refugees or asylum seekers – you rely instead on “migrants” and you know full well that a large swath of your supporters considers these legal refugees as “illegals”. You know they’re not illegal, but you’re not going to correct anyone if they say it. You know that given some help and a work permit, they’d be overwhelmingly good for this region and a net asset, but for some reason you’re not really looking for solutions to a problem – you’re looking for scapegoats. After all, it’s an election year and you have literally nothing else.
When you stoke fear and hatred against refugees, as you have, and as you are, and as you will continue to do (because of politics), you embarrass yourselves. You shame your families. You bring disgrace to your own ancestors who endured exactly the same kind of hatred, scorn, and defamation a century ago.
There’s a difference, though. The difference is that your ancestors weren’t fleeing persecution when they left Poland or Italy. They were just seeking a better economic situation. They came to a country where everyone was from somewhere else and the force of old-world prejudices was blunted. They came here for opportunity and freedom. Yet you would deny this to people who are no different from the Casilios and Todaros and Jasinskis and Zachowiczes of yesterday. Here you all stand, ready to pull the ladder of opportunity up behind you. Here you all are, taking a lazy focus-group-approved, push-poll fueled move to stoke fear, hatred, and division against people who left behind everything they had – and everyone they knew – to start fresh in a free country. Here you all are, making sure that the absolute worst people in our community have someone new to hate and to fear. As refugees from Burma, Sudan, and Somalia enrich our little region with their culture and labor, you insult them and anyone else whose path to this country came about due to war and oppression.
So, that is why I am ashamed. As for disgusted, all of this is disgusting. When my parents came to this country from an Eastern European dictatorship, my father was drafted only 3 years after his arrival, receiving expedited citizenship and he served this country during the Vietnam War. They encountered no problems in the melting pot of Queens, New York, but when stationed in the South Carolina of 1969, they were treated to exactly the kind of vile, hateful rhetoric and behavior that you all now gleefully heap on people from Congo and Ghana and Venezuela.
Someday, I hope and pray that your children or grandchildren will ask you about the history of each of your families and the unique and rich history they all brought to this country, and the difficulties they faced and sacrifices they made to succeed in the New World. And I hope you know and learn of those stories. And then I hope someday that you are confronted with the legacy of your lies, fear, ignorance, and hatred. Maybe someone you love will come under the care of a Venezuelan nurse who came here in 2022, or a Congolese physician. You should look that person in the eye and tell them the truth about how you talked about them when they were penniless, alone, afraid, and vulnerable.
Our region likes to tell people that we are a city of good neighbors. That we are kind and welcoming. That we are friendly and that we celebrate our diversity. Your cheap and lazy “migrant crisis” rhetoric really puts the lie to all of that.
Shame on all of you.
Erie County Sours on Refugees
Erie County has a lot of descendants from Polish and Italian and Irish immigrants, among others. These people proudly celebrate things like the Italian Fest and Dyngus Day and St. Patrick’s Day, but far, far too many of our neighbors here in the nominal city of good ones would like very much to tell the new immigrants from Ghana and Venezuela and Somalia and Yemen and Burma (etc. ad infinitum) to please just fuck off. Not just to fuck off, but to go anywhere but here. Ironically enough, the long-ago immigrants who came here from the Old World of the late 19th and early 20th century were, for the most part, economic migrants leaving not violent oppression but simple poverty. And good for them. The asylum seekers now making headlines are fleeing not just poverty alone, but political and gang violence. They are fleeing lawless failed states and oppressive totalitarian regimes. They are not “illegals” but lawfully in the country and would very much like to take some sort of menial work that you and your kid don’t want to do, in order to rebuild their lives in a new country. Some of them will succeed and others will fail, but not one of them is less deserving of a chance to become an American than any prior immigrant or refugee. =
To the people whose biggest pet peeve is why those refugees did not seek refuge via some other way, you can thank your master Trump, who shuttered the US offices worldwide that helped to vet and process asylum claims.
I also want to criticize the local TV news, especially Channel 2, which has really helped to fuel distrust and hatred of refugees thanks to clumsy reporting by Ron Plants. Look at these posts to xitter:
I don’t know whether it ever occurred to anyone to just leave the asylum seekers the fuck alone? These people who gave up and risked everything – including their lives – to flee violence and persecution only to come to western New York to be pummeled with more hatred and misinformation, distrust and suspicion egged on by the local GOP (“guns over people”) and media dullards?
You’re really going to go on the television and insinuate that helping 115 kids get an education is a terrible burden that no district in WNY should bear? I am absolutely sickened by people with Polish and Italian surnames taking the lead on heaping scorn and derision on these refugees, and fueling hatred and resentment of them. Obeisance to Trump and gratuitous cruelty are the two platform planks that make up the contemporary GOP. It was absolutely disgusting for failed politician Stefan Mychajliw to refer to immigrants as an “infestation” but now it’s become Republican policy to be as nativistic as they can get away with without being overtly racist about it.
The Trump Tax Hike
Hey, remember when the Donald Trump tax reform was passed back in 2021, which cut taxes on the wealthiest Americans?
President Trump and his congressional allies hoodwinked us. The law they passed initially lowered taxes for most Americans, but it built in automatic, stepped tax increases every two years that begin in 2021 and that by 2027 would affect nearly everyone but people at the top of the economic hierarchy. All taxpayer income groups with incomes of $75,000 and under — that’s about 65 percent of taxpayers — will face a higher tax rate in 2027 than in 2019.
For most, in fact, it’s a delayed tax increase dressed up as a tax cut. How many times have you heard Trump and his allies mention that? They surmised — correctly, so far — that if they waited to add the tax increases until after the 2020 election, few of the people most affected were likely to remember who was responsible.
Guess what? That’s starting now! Those rich men north of Richmond sure did a number on you all.
This is why the right-wing are going in so hard on culture war bullshit like Bud Light and Disney and drag queen story time and whatever other outrage they can concoct – it’s to keep you poor, angry, armed to the teeth, and blaming someone else.
Right-Wing Terrorism
We all saw it on January 6th, well it continues apace as these monsters who scream bloody murder about “antifa” and “BLM” have their acolytes going around literally murdering people who dare to fly an LGBTQ flag outside of their private business. This is the future that the right-wing want.
Didn’t hear about the cold-blooded murder of Laura Ann Carleton in Lake Arrowhead? Don’t know that a right-wing lunatic murdered her for the crime of flying a pride flag? I’ll bet you that you would have heard all the fuck about it had she been flying a Trump flag and some young zoomer leftist killed her. That’s because the whole notion of there existing a “liberal media” is a joke and a lie. The media in this country are owned by millionaires and corporations. If they have an underlying agenda at all, it is to protect and defend whatever status quo exists to enable them to continue to make money. The murder of Laura Ann Carleton will never get the attention it deserves, as an avatar for nascent right-wing eliminationist violence. They tried to hang Mike Pence, they tried to murder the governor of Michigan, and now they have a lunatic shampoo magnate running around calling himself the “maximum leader” waiting to create a “Foundationalist” society that is violent and medieval.
This Nazi shampoo cult sounds right up Mychajliw’s depraved alley.
It is high time that the conservative movement and Republican party underwent its reckoning for barrelling full steam ahead into authoritarian cultism, but only Chris Christie, the opportunistic New Jersey loudmouth, has the guts on the right to say what needs to be said about Trump – that he’s a loser, a fraud, un-American, and anti-American.
Two of the myriad asylum seekers now being temporarily housed in Erie County have now been arrested for committing sexual assault or rape. These are obviously heinous crimes that should – and are – being prosecuted with vigor.
But it is not their status as “migrants” or “asylum seekers” or “refugees” that caused the predation. Immigrants do not hold a monopoly on sex crimes, nor are sex crimes any more or less heinous depending on the alleged perpetrator’s visa status.
For Republican candidate for County Executive Chrissy Casilio to roll a podium into the parking lot of a hotel housing refugees in order to heap scorn and derision on Mark Poloncarz over a migrant’s crimes is interesting. Is it the crime that is bad? Because if rape is bad, then should she not be holding a press conference outside every rape location? Or is rape only bad – or especially bad – when the alleged perpetrator is a refugee from Venezuela or the Congo? I mean, it’s bad in all cases, so either every case deserves this sort of attention or it does not.
What all of this really underscores is that the Republicans have literally nothing to run on. They are not a political party with a platform or a set even of shared ideals – they are a ragtag collection of MAGA cult adherents who lurch from culture war item to culture war item and dig in especially deeply when it has to do with minorities or immigrants who are not white.
Chrissy CaBoom is more familiar with making pronouncements on Facebook or at Clarence Republican Committee meetings, safely ensconced in the town where her father is Supervisor and their surname carries a lot of weight. Elsewhere, it’s all coming across a bit tired. With nothing really to run on, she’s taking advice from trolling idiots and going after Mark Poloncarz for two migrants who committed a crime for which CaBoom’s hero Donald Trump himself has already been found liable. So on the one hand CaBoom and her party slavishly pledge fealty to a sex predator and on the other hand somehow think they possess a moral high ground enabling them to criticize the sex predation from someone else because they’re seeking asylum, as if that person isn’t then duly prosecuted and, if guilty, deported.
Every anti-immigrant (R) weasel with a Polish or Italian surname should be routinely called out for especial ridicule.
The way you could tell that “Rich Men North of Richmond” was going to become a “conservative anthem” is this lyric in particular:
Lord, we got folks in the street, ain’t got nothin’ to eat
And the obese milkin’ welfare
Well, God, if you’re 5-foot-3 and you’re 300 pounds
Taxes ought not to pay for your bags of fudge rounds
It is a gripe song. It is whiny. Poor me. To backtrack for a second, these are the narrator’s central complaints:
I am old enough to remember when protest songs were about shared values and unity, not dividing. I’m also old enough to remember when conservatives were all about taking personal responsibility and pulling oneself up by their own bootstraps. Under Limbaugh’s law, the song’s protagonist is poor simply because he isn’t trying hard enough.
The welfare queen trope as set forth in this song is also a dog-whistle – if the main villain is supposed to be “rich men north of Richmond” why would the song devote so much time demeaning people who, like the song’s protagonist, are poor and struggling? Why would someone who expresses solidarity for “miners” downtrodden by DC politics not also express solidarity for other people whom this system has ill served?
This is why it’s a conservative anthem – because it doesn’t really attack politicians nearly as much as it attacks welfare queens, and it doesn’t take a genius sociologist to figure out exactly what’s being talked about here.
Every vote mattered so dearly in 2016 and I will never not be mad about people on the left working their damnest to tear down the Democratic nominee, and I can draw a straight, dark line directly from that behavior 7 years ago to this week.
The sharing and repetition of smear after lie after libel against Hillary Clinton helped ensure that Donald Trump would hasten in this current kakistocracy. It was nothing new. It was easy to hate Hillary Clinton. After all, she was a female Democrat with influence who was smart, savvy, professional, and competent. All of this is a lot of people’s kryptonite, to this day.
Donald Trump selected fully 1/3 of the current, corrupt Supreme Court – the same court that embodies what amounts to a coup by the likes of Leonard Leo and his ultra-right-wing, Christianist ideology. All of this matters tremendously, and the disingenuous cries about the “neoliberal shill” who “can’t be worse than Trump” because “Democrats are just rainbow Republicans” really didn’t do the country any good.
The Supreme Court’s legitimacy is reliant, in large part, on people’s confidence in the impartiality, independence of that body, and its separation from politics. Well, how’s that working out? Anyone feel real confident in today’s Supreme Court? The one where Trump got to pick Barrett in direct defiance of the supposed rule that prevented Obama from picking Garland? The one where Samuel Alito is being feted by billionaires – organized by Leonard Leo – and by right-wing Catholic special interest legal clinics that have business before the court as a payoff for his reversal of Roe v. Wade? The one where Leonard Leo hooked Clarence Thomas up with a billionaire benefactor to pay off his kid’s private school tuition, buy out his mom’s house, and take him on million-dollar junkets all around the world via yacht and private jet?
The 30-year-long smearing of Clinton won, as did the 40-year effort to turn back the clock on America through the Courts.
I know it’s trendy for many of the same people who hated this woman from the left to mock cries of “vote harder”. Ha ha, so droll. But now is not the time to discount the importance of voting. There was a primary election just this week on the (R) side where a nepo-candidate won by like 20 votes. Votes matter. Votes for Hillary Clinton mattered. Those who spouted foreign and right-wing propaganda to advance a leftist argument against Hillary Clinton are as culpable for this week’s absurdity from the Court as any MAGA voter.
It is time for the Supreme Court to have a mandatory retirement age or a term limit of some sort. It has become an unaccountable junta with zero oversight and zero accountability to anyone – not Congress, not the American people.