One of the hallmarks of the first Trump regime was how often – and how firmly – his ragtag band of extremist weirdo lapdogs stepped on their own dicks. So, I think I’m going to take my trusty pen and paper and starting on January 20, 2025, I will start jotting down each one.
I predict a huge falling out with Elon Musk by the end of 2025. On the other hand, there could be a situation where the Federal Government subsidizes Musk by buying a fleet of hitherto-unsold and unsellable Cybertrucks for what’s left of various government agencies. Who knows. Maybe both.
People so easily forgot how badly his first reign sucked, so we’ll have to do what we can to memorialize the second.
We know Donald Trump is horrible as a person, but don’t forget that he was a shitty President, too.
So bad that even his former running mate wants nothing to do with him.
What an absolutely exhausting country this has become.
If the polls are to be believed, there is a 50/50 chance that the American electorate returns Donald Trump to the White House. His time out of office is bookended on one side by the attempted coup of January 6, 2021 and resulting riot, and on the other with his ever-increasing threats to our constitutional order and, frankly, blatant fascism.
You don’t have to listen to me. You can believe Trump’s former Chief of Staff and the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Finally, people are overcoming their reluctance to call Trump what he is – a wannabe fascist dictator thug. An American Orban or Putin. Trump would gladly silence any dissent or opposition. He would happily jettison the Constitution in favor of raw power. Declaring anything he dislikes to be “woke”, he will happily use the levers of power not to govern but to rule. The greatest threat Trumpism poses is not to privileged white people like me (although, as a child of immigrants who were not citizens at the time of my birth, I would be in line for revocation of my birthright citizenship and subsequent deportation), but to members of marginalized communities – ethnic, national, religious minorities, and anyone who does not conform to a strictly binary and heterosexual gender identity as defined at birth.
Because 99.9% of Republican “ideology”, such as it is, is what we call the “culture war.” That culture war is about reassuring cisgendered white people that they are still special like daddy said. 99.9% of that is fearmongering – about gays and immigrants and transgender people and Venezuelan gangs and migrants. These people would consider Barry Goldwater to be too woke. The American right knows it cannot win on its policy goals (see the wildly unpopularProject 2025), so it has to rely on trickery and subterfuge instead. It has to rely on gerrymandering and a systematic erosion of voting rights and access. It relies on a nakedly partisan Supreme Court to help it achieve policy aims in a blatantly undemocratic manner. Project 2025 gets implemented if Trump wins, regardless of its unpopularity.
The American right brought you the Dobbs decision, overturning Roe v. Wade. The result? Increased threats to maternal health and safety, and fetal deaths on a level you might expect to see in a third world backwater and not in a country that considers itself to be the best in the world. But more importantly than optics, these outcomes are as avoidable as they are disgusting and unacceptable. How can you reconcile being “pro-life” with increased harm to mothers and infants?
How do you excise a right to privacy from federal constitutional jurisprudence? How do you decide to allow certain states to be less free than others when it comes to reproductive rights? Why is a woman in Alabama or Texas less free to make decisions about her own body than a woman in New York or Massachusetts? How does that jibe, exactly, with the Equal Protections clause of the Constitution?
The catastrophe around abortion rights is just one example of unchecked Trumpism. Project 2025 provides the blueprint going forward for an “anti-woke” illiberal, undemocratic Christian theocracy founded on nativism, racism, and minority dictatorship. 50% or so of your compatriots are willing to go along with this because, I dunno, Trump is based and gas was $1.90 at the height of the Covid pandemic, which Trump botched to the tune of a million Americans dead.
Donald Trump would accomplish nothing. He would do nothing for education, for the poor, for upstate’s economic malaise, for Buffalo, or for anyone except the tea party and the ultrarich. The headlines related to the upstate effort to recruit Trump for governor should have read, “Lawmakers to Massage Trump Ego, Trump Reacts Favorably”.
He’s been a fascist throughout the last decade. He was a fascist last year, when he threatened the Manhattan DA with a baseball bat. So miss me with all of this. Here’s something that no one is talking about: the fact that Donald Trump’s presidency – you know, the one he actually had from 2017 – 2021 and that everyone has memory-holed – was really pretty shitty in almost every way.
The first thing that pops to my mind when I think about what a lazy and divisive chief executive he was is the time when Homeland Security shut New Yorkers out of Nexus and Global Entry because the state had begun giving driving permits to undocumented immigrants.
Then I remember how he blew up the deficit giving huge tax breaks to the ultra-wealthy while saddling the rest of us with the bill.
Then I remember how he completely mismanaged the Covid pandemic, which hit just months after he shut down the country’s pandemic response office.
Then I remember how he tried repeatedly to kill the Affordable Care Act and went out of his way to weaken it.
Then I remember how he deliberately and cruelly separated immigrant children from their families.
Then I remember how he refused FEMA assistance to jurisdictions that had not voted for him.
Then I remember Sharpiegate and buying Greenland and legitimizing Kim Jong Un and the nepotism and the corruption and how they did nothing when Saudi Arabia murdered and dismembered a Washington Post columnist and Green Card holder and then dissolved him in acid and how he adores dictators like Orban and Putin and how he has never actually uttered a negative syllable about Putin and how he wants Ukraine to capitulate and how he completely botched Covid and told people that maybe injecting bleach was a good idea to pursue.
Then I remember how he kicked almost a million people off of SNAP food aid.
Then I remember how he gutted the right to overtime pay through regulatory shenanigans.
Then I remember how he began to dismantle environmental protections.
Then I remember how his Department of Education went out of its way to funnel money to religious organizations and weakened protections against fraud due to for-profit colleges and predatory lending practices.
Then I remember how he gleefully ignored norms of governance and we just let him do it – things like holding the 2020 RNC Convention on the White House Lawn or hiring his kids or making money off of the sale of hotel rooms to foreign diplomats and federal agencies or releasing his tax returns or health records.
Then I remember how he was able to stack the Supreme Court with right wing judges-for-life who completely shat on any semblance of conservatism by jettisoning stare decisis and overturning Roe v. Wade and rolling back voting rights and abolishing affirnative action.
Then I remember all of it. How every day was exhausting. How every policy and practice was designed to enable Trump’s dictatorial ambitions, erode constitutional democracy, and to elevate raw cruelty as not only an aspirational ideal but set policy goal.
Donald Trump isn’t running on his record because his record sucks. What I don’t understand is why Democrats aren’t going after his record, because it sucks. Oh, your gas only cost $1.80 a gallon in 2020? That’s because we were all locked down because he botched Covid, for fuck’s sake. Oh, grocery prices shot up after the economy opened back up, yeah because demand skyrocketed and companies also decided to grab some profits while they could.
How are the markets doing? How’s unemployment? The big numbers are all at historically good places. While everyone expected a recession after the post-Covid recovery, instead we got a soft landing.
It’s not enough to say that Donald Trump wishes he could be like Orban or Putin or any other neo-fascist dictator. It’s not enough to point out that he’s a sexual predator, an Epstein acolyte, a dirty old man, a doddering old fool, (just compare a 2016 speech to a 2024 speech). He was a crappy President who made the country weaker, sicker, less free, less stable, and poorer.
The Donald Trump presidency of 2017 – 2021 was an abject failure. A disaster. It will hopefully go down in history as a one-off aberration and not an indication of a fundamental dumbing down of America or a turn to authoritarianism led by malignant billionaires like Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and others.
Harris and Tim Walz make an amazing team, and the Biden Administration’s return to policies that put Americans first is something that we must continue.
LOCALLY
NYS Proposition One: In New York, everything that Proposition One says is already settled law. This proposition would add these provisions into the Constitution to prevent some future rolling back of these freedoms and liberties – you know, like how they’re doing on the federal level. Please vote YES on Proposition One.
Erie County Proposition One: Listen, if you want Republicans to do what they always do in this region and plunge something into fiscal disarray, then go ahead and vote for them. Proposition Two would allow a simple legislative majority set the sales tax rates in the county and this only makes sense. Vote YES on County Proposition One.
District Attorney: Gardner’s ads against Keane are pretty despicable and anyone who goes around saying “make crime illegal again” should be laughed out of contention for any serious job. Using a 40 year old ticket from when Keane was a college senior is weak as fuck and Gardner uses that because he doesn’t have really anything else to run on except vibes. Vote Keane.
One is centered around a cultish strongman figure who promises retribution, violence, and dictatorial rule. His followers love him because he directs his vitriolic hatred at the people they fear the most – literally anyone who is not an obedient follower of the cult. It could be easier to say it is a movement of white supremacy and Christian nationalism – a reactionary faction sparked by hatred over the two-time election of a black president, and fueled by weird people who think that it’s wrong for other people to be different from them. One thing is for sure, they do not tolerate dissent. These people who yell “sheeple” loudest are the biggest “sheeple” of all.
On the other side, we have a typically dysfunctional Democratic party. Joe Biden is the current President and leader of that party. He had a pretty disastrous debate performance a few weeks ago, and this led people to complain that Biden had deceptively hidden his true ability to function from the electorate. How this can be reconciled with the decision to do an early debate is anyone’s guess. But, after that performance, it was a full-court press (no pun intended) by beltway media clickmeisters, big-money donors, and some fearful Dems with big followings to convince Biden to step aside.
Joe Biden will be President until next January. He will not be seeking re-election, and his Vice President, Kamala Harris, is expected to run in his stead with overwhelming support. She is an excellent candidate – smart, capable, and qualified. I was not a big proponent of Biden being forced out of this race like this, but am gratified that, once done, Democrats rallied around the Vice President as the only correct and logical choice to take over. It is a big risk either way, but Trump’s support and opposition is so baked-in that there was no real perceptible polling change after the failed attempt on his life, or after the kooky yawnfest that was the Republican National Convention.
On the other end, on my socials, I saw snarky posts from Gen-X Bernie die-hards not making any bones about their full-on gerontophobia. Their hatred of the incumbent reaches Let’s-Go-Brandon proportions, perhaps intentionally. These same people spent much of 2016 and 2020 railing against what they perceived as top-down DNC engineering of a Presidential race, and here they were in 2024 demanding top-down DNC engineering of a Presidential race. Snake emojis and “Kamala the cop” and “Mayo Pete” spring to mind.
The America that Democrats embody at this moment in 2024 is messy, like democracy itself. When you have a big tent of competing interests, they sometimes make aggressive noises at each other before eventually uniting for the common good. The Democrats’ America is about lowering inflation, investment in infrastructure, energy production and independence, job growth, supporting unionization, health care for all, lowering drug prices, defending and supporting liberal democracies like Ukraine, pressuring autocratic regimes like Hungary, and ending the slaughter in Israel and Palestine. The world is a complicated and chaotic place and all of its problems can be dealt with in a serious way that advances our interests, or it can be all reduced to sloppy sloganeering and veneration of tyrants.
It is, when you think about it, quite astounding that we find ourselves here.
Incidentally, as an aside, I listened Monday to “analysis” on WBFO offered by Dr. Shyam Sriram of Canisius’ political science department. He argued that Democrats are stuck on identity politics and offer no substantive policy proposals. He then said that Vivek Ramaswamy, a Trump mini-me, ran on policies. This is madness. I set forth above the policies on which Democrats are running. The race that Democrats ran in 2020 was heavy on policies, most pressing of which was handling of the pandemic that killed over a million Americans. Ramaswamy ran what amounted to a right-wing meme campaign, heavy on slogans and light on substance. It failed with catastrophic celerity in a party defined by a cult of personality.
Dr. Sriram argued that, in deciding on a running mate for Vice President Harris, Dems should avoid selecting a white candidate for the sake of some sort of ethnic balance. I don’t know who said that or where he got that idea, but I’m pretty sure that Harris’ campaign is going to select someone who is ready to become President at a moment’s notice, possibly someone who has relevant experience that she lacks, and also someone who can deliver votes in swing states like Pennsylvania or Arizona. I don’t know what questions were asked of Dr. Sriram, but the idea that Vivek Ramaswamy could be held out as a prime example of a campaign based on substance was too absurd to let go. Ramaswamy engaged in identity politics like crazy, ingratiating himself to white evangelicals, being transphobic, and disenfranchising Americans between the ages of 18 – 25.
In Ramaswamy’s and Trump’s America, we also have the Supreme Court, which has in the last two decades devolved into a corrupt, corruptable, and politically unchecked fiefdom. It has taken in recent months to make fundamental changes to what we understand to be American values. For decades, the conservative movement has moaned and wailed against “activist” courts and judges, which had interpreted the Constitution in ways that expanded our ideas of freedom, liberty, and privacy. The “activist” courts declared that segregation was violative of the Constitution, that a right to privacy exists in the Constitution that prevents government from intervening against interracial marriage, use of contraception, same-sex marriage, and the right of women and their physicians to have the freedom to decide whether a pregnancy needs to be terminated either by choice in its earlier stages, or due to medical necessity later on. All of this has now changed. Contemporary conservatives reject the idea of a federal, constitutional right to privacy because it is inconsistent with their need to wield raw power and to rule, unobstructed by democratic or legal considerations.
We had for years understood as a society that our elected leaders – even the President – are not nobility immune from liability for criminal acts. Yet the Supreme Court, which now has a “conservative” majority, is as activist as any in history. Just last year, it took the unprecedented step of taking away womens’ reproductive decision-making rights. Seldom had the highest court in the land shrunk people’s individual rights in modern times, yet here we are. This year, the court granted to Presidents the right and ability to act with impunity from criminal liability as to any “official” acts. Impeachment is specifically set up in the Constitution as a political tool to remove Presidents when they commit high crimes or treason. It stands to reason that, if the Constitution anticipates criminality in the chief executive that would allow for political trial and removal, then sanctions set forth within the underlying criminal statutes would also be applicable.
The Supreme Court as it is currently constituted is a threat to our democratic republic. Donald Trump and Trumpism are, likewise, threats to our democratic republic. You may have heard by now of “Project 2025“, which is a 900-page handbook written by overpaid preppies from the so-called “Heritage Foundation.” What it amounts to is a “Neo-Fascistic Autocracy For Dummies”. Without getting into details, which you can research for yourself, it would amount to a return to the US as it existed pre-New Deal. The federal government would be reduced to little more than a tool to oppress anyone who exists outside the prescribed norm of white, male, and at least nominally Christian. Project 2025 will make you poorer, less free, and easier to be ruled. It will subjugate the women in your life, treat minorities of every stripe cruelly, outlaw things like abortion, contraception, and being in any way gender non-comforming, and put an end to things like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.
I like to consider myself politically pretty normal. I don’t go in for extremism on any end of the political spectrum. To me, the Trump people and the Project 2025 people are really weird on a fundamental level. I don’t get the appeal of any of it. I look at the meltdowns that the Trump people have displayed online and on TV over Biden dropping out and it’s quite clear that they’re not processing the news well. One local Trumpy congressman demanded that Biden resign the Presidency because he decided not to run for re-election. Not sure how a decision not to serve four more years equates to an inability to serve 100 more days, but these people are just having a hard time processing the fact that they are running a convicted felon against a former prosecutor, a guy pushing 80 against a woman in her 50s. You’d be panicking, too.
In the choice between these two Americas, I choose the one that is built on competence and hope. I choose the one that is founded on diversity of ideas, visions, and people. I choose the one that looks forward and not backward. I choose the one based on making life better for average people, not the one that wants to take rights away. I choose the one that thrives on innovation and change and not the one that trafficks in fear and hatred. I will prefer the messy democratic republic over strongman autocracy. I will also insist on the power of the Supreme Court being checked, whether through congressional action or rules concerning ethics and terms of office. No person in our government ought to exist as an untouchable entity above the law – not the President, and not the Supreme Court Justices.
When November rolls around, I am going to vote enthusiastically for Kamala Harris for President. I can only hope that the US can imitate the wholesale rejection of conservative ineptitude and right-wing fearmongering we recently saw in the UK and France, respectively.
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. =
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.
President Trump and his congressional allies hoodwinked us. The law they passed initiallylowered taxes for most Americans, but it built in automatic, stepped taxincreases 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.
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.
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:
The main character has a shitty job that doesn’t pay much.
His job does not offer much meaning to his life, so he comes home and gets drunk.
The world is a complicated mess.
“Rich men North of Richmond” want “total control.” No explanation for this is noted.
You’re “taxed to no end” and this results in your “dollar ain’t shit.” The federal income tax rate for someone with a job so shitty and low-paying that it constitutes the opening lyric to a conservative anthem would be rather low, maybe 10%.
Just before he swings two verses at short fat people eating “fudge rounds” “milking welfare” he complains about “rich men north of Richmond” caring more about “minors” on “an island somewhere” than “miners.” So, an assumption has to be made that this song is about the poor and working class. The concept of solidarity for the working class doesn’t jibe with the jab against people on welfare.
The main character laments how “Young men are puttin’ themselves six feet in the ground ’cause all this damn country does is keep on kickin’ them down.”
Then repeat prechorus and chorus.
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.
I need to return briefly to a theme touched on the post immediately preceding this one. The profound dishonesty of the entire conservative movement is embodied by Justice Samuel Alito and encapsulated by something that happened just last year.
For years, it has been conservative dogma – wholly false – that the Supreme Court should be made up of jurists who “call balls and strikes” and do not allow their policy preferences or ideological beliefs to color how they rule on matters of great import for the citizens of this country. That the court should not “legislate from the bench” and merely interpret the Constitution as its drafters intended.
We can call bullshit on this sort of rhetoric by looking at the Court’s conscience-shocking reversal of the Roe v. Wade decision. It is not “conservative” to ignore stare decisis or to literally use the power of the court to strip women in this country of what had been between 1973 – 2022 a Constitutional right to personal privacy.
The author of the majority’s decision was Samuel Alito, who is also the most likely suspect with respect to the early leaking of that shameful screed, unique in that it shrunk rights for women in this country, rather than expanding them. Alito’s decision was released on June 24, 2022.
Literally a month or so later, Alito gave a speech in Rome, Italy wherein he mocked foreign criticism of the Dobbs decision. That speech was given at an event organized by Notre Dame University Law School’s “Religious Liberty Summit”. I’m sure it was all about religious liberty for Muslims and Jews and Hindus and Buddhists, what with it being a speech by a Catholic justice hosted by a Catholic school in Rome.
It also seems hypocritical for a jurist-for-life who is supposed to be somehow above politics – at least in the fairy tales they told us in school – to opine on matters of current political events. Or to whine so shrilly about criticism leveled at him.
The part that is fundamentally corrupt has to do with the fact that Notre Dame’s Religious Liberty Initiative invited Alito and paid for his and his wife’s travel to – and lodging in – Rome. Imagine that! An all-expenses paid trip to the Eternal City! Now, consider that Notre Dame’s Religious Liberty Initiative filed an amicus brief in the Dobbs case, arguing for the outcome that Alito delivered.
The Leonard Leo coup has seen its first major success. Gutting affirmative action in college admissions – that’s low-hanging fruit. For decades, movement conservatives have focused their efforts on manufacturing an artifically biased right-wing Supreme Court in order to reach the goals they cannot accomplish through electoral politics.
The movement conservative right-wing Supreme Court – completely out-of-touch (by design) with the people of this country, have today gutted our entire civil rights infrastructure. It is no surprise or accident that at least two of the Court’s right-wing members maintain a level of ethics and good government one might expect from a Russian oligarch. Alito and Thomas – Leonard Leo’s pets.
It was not too long ago – 60 years – that the Jim Crow South still had legal, institutionalized segregation in public accommodations. Whites-only water fountains, waiting rooms, means of egress, etc.
The pain and anguish and hard work of the ensuing six decades do not matter one whit to a movement hell-bent on ensuring that white elites maintain their slipping grip on power and institutionalizing one specific subset of Christianist ideology on the entire population.
It’s why today’s Republicans are so busily gutting and weakening voting access and rights in a way that is specifically designed to most adversely affect voters whom they perceive to be friendliest to centrism and Democrats. They are a fundamentally anti-democratic coterie of liars, hypocrites, and charlatans.
It is only thus that a contrived, fake “controversy” over a website for a gay couple that never existed could reach the highest court, and that court would rule that it is ok for places of public accommodation to discriminate against a protected class, so long as the discrimination is arguably based on moral or religious beliefs.
Just think! Soon we may have the benefit of living actual history with storefronts in East Aurora or Williamsville peppered with “no gays” (certainly any such establishment would use a stronger, more offensive epithet), or “trans not allowed” or “interracial couples need not apply.” Perhaps we can usher in a return of the Green Book – digitized for our “modern” era – so that LGBTQ couples and people of color can find which places of nominally public accommodation are welcoming to them.
Run a public opinion poll on that and find out whether normal Americans agree with a return to institutionalized segregation and bigotry.
But this post is the principal reason why the Leo Christianist right are having such a lovely time and a field day – they’re making the right people (namely, “libs”) angry. Owning the libs is the central ideological feature of modern conservatism, and nothing makes these snowflakes happier than making sure that any historically marginalized group from black folks to gay folks are spat upon and treated as dirt. They are fighting the war against “woke!” They are battling something they call the “woke mind virus!”
I am not a Christian of any ilk, so perhaps one of you who is can explain to me – reconcile for me – Christian religious doctrine with a political ideology grounded in hatred and cruelty?
Just wait until someone with a business open to the general public decides that their morality dictates that they not serve white heterosexual couples, or conservatives, or people with tattoos or facial hair.
Certainly religious doctrines deserve to be protected by the Constitution, which is why the Court did not – and cannot – force churches or other places of worship to solemnize same-sex unions, and cannot force a religion to recognize or perform such marriages. That is fine. What this right-wing ideology is doing, however, is giving a place of public accommodation the same treatment as a religious organization or facility.
I guess they were right about the arc of the moral universe and its length. Rest assured that history will view this coup-Court as a national embarrassment and disgrace. Someday.
Welcome to the tyranny of the unelected Christianist dictatorship-for-life.
Bills player Jordan Poyer and his wife, Rachel Bush, are very vocal pro-Trump conservatives, and they are completely free to be exactly that. Literally no one in the world is trying to take away from them their right to be as right-wing and pro-Trump as they wish.
This being a free country, anyone has the right to adhere to just about any other political ideology or faction, and possesses a concomitant right to think that Donald Trump is a proto-fascist idiot buffoon who has done more to divide America and to stoke its most base and disgusting hatreds than any other contemporary mainstream political figure.
Poyer and Bush have the right to give Trump and his family as many of their dollars as they wish.
Others have the right to boycott Trump completely.
This isn’t hard stuff to grasp.
This means that anyone has the right to condemn and to not associate with Trump any more than a Trumper can be compelled to love Hunter Biden. The woke are also free.
Yet Trumpers like Poyer and Bush demand to foist their adherence to that cult on others. When they are confronted with the fact that not everyone thinks in lockstep with them, they throw a predictable tantrum on social media. Like your aunt, who thinks that she has taken away Facebook’s right to use her images by posting some spam she found.
Poyer was set to host at a Trump country club a celebrity golf tournament to benefit the ECMC Foundation – a charity set up to raise funds that benefit the hospital and enable donors to offset some of their tax burden by taking a deduction against their donation.
If the intent was purely charitable – to raise money for an ECMC charitable initiative – then Poyer could have had the self-awareness to recognize (or react to the fact) that many people do not want to in any way be associated with the Trump name – directly or otherwise. For the uninitiated, Trump is currently under arrest and indictment in New York and the federal courts for various and sundry crimes.
Poyer and Bush demand to hurl their Trump support in your face, whether you like it or not, and then to complain wildly when you do not. Poyer took to Instagram to take his ball and go home, and then make-believe he doesn’t get it.
“Am I stressed about it? Not even the slightest bit,” he said. “Am I upset about it? A little, but I’m not even upset about the tournament being canceled. I’m upset about this is where we are in America.”
You’re not upset that you canceled the tournament? Then why the hell are you holding the tournament? Is it about ECMC or about your ego, or your ideology, or your obeisance to Trump? His wife, Rachel Bush, famously maintains an especially aggressively hostile pro-Trump Twitter feed so this feigned ignorance about “where we are in America” is a bit rich.
If raising money for ECMC was the primacy concern, Poyer could have – and certainly would have – been more thoughtful about where he chose to host his tournament. If the aim was purely charitable in nature, then he’d have chosen a course that does not come with obvious political baggage.
People have a right to object to participating in something involving the Trump name. A more cynical person might suggest that the whole point of this being scheduled at a Trump course was specifically to bring about the sort of poor me victimhood we’re seeing. “See, the woke Soros libs did it again.” Yeah, well, the libs detest Trump and don’t want to give him any money or anything else. It’s especially ridiculous, given the ECMC mission, vision, and values, many of which are in complete opposition to everything for which Trump and Trumpism stand. How do Poyer and Bush reconcile their devotion to Trump with their support for a hospital that is a “top performer in LGBTQ health equity“? Geez, who knew these two were so woke?
Poyer complains, seemingly without irony,
“I believe in the universal law that the energy you put out is the energy you get back and we’re not doing that right now. All we do is fight with each other all day. Fight with each other about politics, about religion, about race. The issues that come up are the issues we create. … It blows my mind that we sit here in America today with these issues.”
Yes, Mr. Poyer – it blows my mind, too.
The issues that come up are the issues we create.
The energy you put out is the energy you get back.
It’s helping others. It’s sharing those experiences and about being open about we’re not perfect. Nobody is perfect…. The thing is we need each other. We are we arguing over (stuff) that does not matter?
“It seems like our egos get in the way of being a good human being. (Not) sharing love, sharing conversations, sharing laughter with people who may not believe in the same things that you do, it’s a huge problem in America right now.
Our egos taking over the majority of our lives. A lot of us don’t even know who we are anymore. We’re run by that ego self, run by the materialistic side, run by the things that don’t really matter.
Are Poyer and Bush ignorant, or do they know exactly what they’re doing? Do they really think it is ridiculous that people would object to participating in something involving Trump? Do they think that they are the only people who are permitted publicly to have political beliefs? A charitable person would want to maximize participation and go out of his way to avoid controversy.
But ego and arrogance win. It’s not about the right to love Trump or be a conservative – you have to, too. It’s now a matter of principle for them that next year they will try to do the same thing, having not learned anything from this or listened to anyone about it. For just one second if Poyer and Bush could set their colossal egos aside and consider for just a nanosecond why people object to Trump, maybe their “can’t we all just get along” wouldn’t ring so hollow. Maybe they could learn something and choose a less obviously controversial venue. That is, if they really care about being uniters rather than dividers.
They will frame this as an issue about their rights rather than an issue about public relations, respect, and inclusivity, (lol). Maybe they get a few seconds of airtime on Jesse Watters’ show. Or the Five. Or Gateway Pundit.
But ECMC – whom they misidentify as a sponsor, rather than a grantee – is really only an afterthought, in the end.
There was a small handful of local lawyers who tried to make a name – and some coin – for themselves by challenging the government’s ability and right to impose quarantines and restrictions during a pandemic emergency. The Covid-19 pandemic killed well over a million Americans, and counting. Covid antibodies helped end the pandemic emergency – whether through infection or injection. Or both.
One of the lawyers in question is the person who penned the thing I reproduce below. It is important to remember that the pro-Covid argument he and others propounded was that the government did not have the right to, e.g., tell kids in school to wear masks, to keep school populations down to enable distancing, or restaurants to require patrons and staff to wear masks when not eating or drinking.
Below is a document that noted local emailer Carl Paladino sent to his broader campaign list. It is a shocking compendium of nonsense masquerading as legal analysis. In order for it to be valid, it would have to ignore and negate literally the entire text of the United States Constitution as adopted in 1789, and its various and sundry Amendments.
The fundament of the American Constitution is that the people are sovereign; not any one individual. The entire point of the Declaration of Independence and the American Revolution was to overthrow a corrupt and unfair system whereby the people of the thirteen colonies had little or no say in their own affairs. The Declaration is most remembered for the clause that begins “[w]e hold these Truths to be self-evident…” but the remainder of the document is a list of grievances specifically directed against the King. The Declaration demands that a government be “instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”
The Constitution sets up the framework for the institution of this government. The preamble to the Constitution ironically turns the royal “We” – the majestic plural – on its head with “We, the People.” If you look carefully at George III’s 1763 Proclamation, partially reproduced above, his preferred pronoun was “we.” The same is true of many monarchs.
And so, the entire point of the creation of this republic was to eliminate monarchical rule and to replace it with representative democracy. It was a radically progressive notion at the time, one that Europe took seventy-or-so years to begin to duplicate in earnest.
There is, in the United States, a “presidential sovereign immunity.” In fact, many elected officials and public servants at every governmental level enjoy some level of immunity from legal action. (We prefer to call it governmental immunity because – you guessed it – the people are sovereign). The qualified immunity that an average police officer enjoys is currently a source of debate. Whilenot expressly mentioned in the Constitution, it is agreed that a President enjoys absolute immunity from civil liability – that is lawsuits for money or injunctive relief – for decisions taken while in office. A President is not immune from such liability for pre-office wrongdoing, however.
As to the question of whether a President can be prosecuted for criminality, he cannot, for so long as he holds the office. The method to deal with Presidential illegality is supposed to be impeachment, and after the President reverts to private citizen, he can then be subject to prosecution. The notion of impeachment is seemingly now an anachronism, as it requires elected officials to treat government and their offices seriously. We know now that the Republican Party has devolved into a personality cult that will literally tolerate and uphold any type of illegality from Donald Trump, including an insurrection. While the Parliament of the United Kingdom – including almost all Conservative MPs – take their duties to their government seriously, Republicans do not. Donald Trump was impeached on two occasions – once for threatening to withhold aid to Ukraine if its President did not help him smear Joe Biden, and once for fomenting insurrection. Republicans simply let him get away with it.
The criminality of the Trump Administration is unprecedented in American history and one which the Founders could not reasonably have foreseen. How could a person in the 18th century have envisioned that executive power would be wielded so clumsily and with such malign intent by someone doing, in turn, a bad imitation of late-1980s era John Gotti or Howard Stern.
The federal criminal charges against Donald Trump are set forth here. Aldinger recounts two recent cases, Bruen and Dobbs (both written by Supreme Court Justices who have in recent months been exposed as billionaires’ playthings ). Bruen overturned New York’s handgun registration laws while Dobbs overturned Roe v. Wade, presumably allowing states to ban all abortion in all cases, if they choose. Dobbs in particular has the dubious distinction of being the first Supreme Court decision to take away from one class of people a Constitutional right, which a prior Court had declared to exist.
Everyone knows that allowing any freak to waltz down Madison Avenue in possession of a concealed handgun is exactly what the Framers intended, what with that pesky “well-regulated militia” language being effectively ignored by successive Courts. Similarly, the idea of a right to privacy is very important when, for instance, it works with the First Amendment to prevent disclosure of million-dollar SuperPAC donors, but not at all important when it comes to a woman maintaining control over her own reproductive system.
Aldinger seemingly argues that the President of the United States should enjoy the same sovereign rights and privileges as the “King of England, the King of France, or the Holy Roman Emperor” as they existed in 1789. Aldinger argues that these three monarchs – hereditary heads of state – were “all above the law” and so, too, should the President of the United States, even though he is elected. Aldinger argues that even today, Charles III – the UK’s head of state – enjoys sovereign immunity. But that is because Charles III is, and Louis XVI, and Leopold II were, sovereign monarchs. In the United States, the people are sovereign, and in order to buy into Aldinger’s argument, you have to reject that idea entirely. We in the United States do not have a monarchy or a dictatorship, nor were Presidential powers set up in the Constitution to create a pseudo-monarch to wield supreme executive power by decree. Alexander Hamilton agreed with Aldinger that the President should be a quasi-kingly figure, and the Constitutional Convention rejected this in the 1780s, so why on Earth are we discussing it in 2023?
Aldinger argues that the example of European autocratic monarchies was the norm in 1789, so we must have somehow magically intended to adopt that model ourselves, despite all evidence to the contrary. Although Charles III is the head of state, he is not head of government. In the US, the President is both. France has no king and the Holy Roman Empire no longer exists. Extending Aldinger’s “place yourself in 1789” logic, women cannot enter into contracts or own property. Although women’s right to vote was guaranteed via Constitutional amendment, the Equal Rights Amendment has yet to be ratified.
Aldinger, however, misapprehends the idea of impeachment; he supposes that the sole and exclusive remedy afforded to our democratic republic to deal with a criminal and corrupt President is to impeach, convict, and expel him from office. He argues that impeachment is the sine qua non of any subsequent criminal prosecution – a substantive and procedural prerequisite, “…but the Party convicted shall nevertheless be liable and subject to Indictment, Trial, Judgment, and Punishment, according to Law.”
I do not read that passage as a prerequisite because it is not drafted as such. There is no clear language setting forth that conviction on impeachment is a prerequisite to criminal prosecution; instead, they are separate and distinct processes. Impeachment is not a criminal sanction, but a political one – it removes the President from office. There is no fine or imprisonment that accompanies conviction on impeachment. Indeed, there is nothing in the Constitution that immunizes a former President from criminal exposure, whether impeached and convicted by Congress or not.
While Mr. Aldinger deems it necessary to repeat that Charles III has extraordinary rights as King, the Constitution does not “allow the President to give state secrets to anyone with impunity – including to themselves in their capacity of being a private citizen.”
It bears mentioning at this point that Aldinger’s argument about impeachment and sovereign immunity must fail because Donald Trump has not been Emperor-King President since late January 2021. The crimes alleged in the federal indictment all occurred after his departure from office. The allegation is that he illegally retained public documents – many of them classified and secret – without right or authority to do so.
Aldinger goes on to suggest that Trump – as the “sovereign equivalent of a monarch” has the full right to give any state secret to anyone, at any time. This would be true were we not a democratic republic with a system in place of checks and balances. In reality, the Presidential power to declassify is not absolute, is subject to limitation, and can typically only be done via Executive Order, as Trump himself was well aware. An Executive Order from 2009 sets forth the current guidelines for Presidential declassification, and this set of regulations from NARA further sets forth how the process of declassification must be administered. When Presidents declassify documents, some information contained therein may continue to be classified, as seen in these redactions. This is what it looks like when a President declassifies secret information, and it is not done lightly and the idea of a standing order of declassification does not exist in our country.
So, we know that Trump is not a king, and does not possess monarchical, absolute powers. We also know that Donald Trump, as a private citizen, was in possession of numerous materials that should properly have been left with the National Archives or otherwise protected due to their classification, and that Trump repeatedly failed and refused to cooperate with efforts to do that. Aldinger’s proposed scheme would enable the office of President to be a license to commit any crime under the sun, with impunity from criminal prosecution absent the precondition of impeachment, conviction, and removal from office. An outgoing President, he argues, could even pardon himself on his way out of the White House. How little Aldinger thinks about the office of President and our institutions of popular government.
In his text, Aldinger differentiates President Trump from “citizen Trump”, but that’s the whole point of this democratic exercise we’ve endeavored to perfect since the 18th century – the President is just another citizen. He has temporary powers and privileges lent to him through the Constitution – and laws and regulations promulgated thereunder – but he is not above the law.
If, as alleged, Trump retained classified materials that had not properly been declassified, then as a private citizen he had no right to possess them and had a duty immediately to return them. The indictment itself is damning. Others have improperly retained classified information inadvertently, and when discovered they have immediately rectified the breach – Clinton, Biden, Pence. But Trump refused to cooperate and knowingly kept some of America’s most sensitive secrets in his country club hotel/residence.
As mentioned above, Aldinger was big on suing the government for Covid restrictions – he simultaneously thinks the government possesses the powers of a king, but not enough power to take temporary emergency action to protect people from infectious disease. It is a good distillation of modern conservative thought – its “exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.” The law protects Trump and MAGA, but does not bind them. Trump can crime all day long with impunity. But were one to apply this reasoning to a Clinton, or even Joe Biden’s private citizen son, the law binds them but ought not protect them. The law binds governments and prevents them from requiring masks and distancing, and ought not protect them. As you would expect, the notion of government being powerless to act during pandemic is ahistorical nonsense.
We know that there is not a low low enough for Donald Trump, and that his depravity and illegality are limited only by his own imagination. That a lawyer would dream up and publish this piece of ahistorical, unsupported, un-American rubbish to justify it can only mean that we have found our next Sidney Powell.
