Last days of Nero
Pardon me ... Trump's Dolchstosslegende ... Republicans' strong electoral showing down ballot ... Tejano vote ... Victory for Koch candidates ... Census case in Supreme Court ... The wreckage continues ... Oil leases in Alaska ... Last minute federal executions ... Roger Fitch, our man in Washington, reports
"... in all of Anglo-American history, no monarch, royal governor, president, or other executive officer has tried to pardon himself ... the idea of a self-pardon is so antithetical to the constitutional structures of England and the United States ... that no one has ever had the effrontery to try it" - Just Security
"A self-pardon would be the ultimate act of constitutional onanism for a narcissistic President" - historian quoted in the New Yorker
• • •
It was a near-run thing. The attempted coup failed, but democracy got a scare.
"Shameless" has lost all meaning under Donald Trump, but many were still shocked by the loser's clumsy efforts to corrupt Republicans among Michigan's official election canvassers (they ultimately confirmed Biden's win). Georgia's governor rebuffed a seditious request that he call a special legislative session to overturn the state's popular vote, and subversive appeals to Republican legislators in Pennsylvania also failed.
Even after the last two states whose votes Trump contested had approved electors supporting Biden, far-fetched lawsuits continued, but on December 9, the safe harbour deadline for submitting electors passed. A last-minute supreme court appeal failed, but disgraced Texas AG Ken Paxton filed an absurd "motion" invoking the court's original jurisdiction.
Paxton, who's awaiting trial for securities fraud, was joined on cue and at public expense by Republican AGs of 17 states, a sign of how desperate Republicans are to annul a fair but uncongenial election result.
Within days, the supreme court summarily threw out the case. What did Texas AG Paxton hope to get out of it? Perhaps a pardon by Trump for possible federal crimes, but that won't help him with the state felony charges.
Trump's four-year demolition derby, his dismantling of America's political system, is ending - capped by an election more outrageous than the infamous 1876 presidential election (more here), and there was fraud: Donald Trump's.
Aside from possible pardons, what's left is a final money-raising hustle, a grift by the greedy president, fleecing his credulous followers on his way out.
• • •
The dolchstosslegende conspiracy
While many felt Schadenfreude in Trump's humiliation, Der Spiegel called it the end of a Spuk: a nightmare/haunting.
There's another German noun going around: Dolchstosslegende. The history-ignorant Trump has contrived a stab-in-the-back conspiracy with an uncanny resemblance to the one concocted by anti-Semites and others after Germany's1918 defeat: the supposedly traitorous surrender to the Allies by "November-criminals" in the German government.
It took the Nazis 15-years to cash in on their back-stab myth, but the Trumpist timeframe is much shorter. As Politico put it:
"Like the German military who saw the Spanish Civil War as a testing ground for the Luftwaffe, the GOP may come to see 2020 as the election that illuminated the path to seizing power over the will of American voters."
• • •
US election: queuing to vote
At least the election set a record for citizen participation, perhaps because of less dependence on in-person voting, where poll locations, opening hours, conditions of access and other variables can be manipulated. The Covid-based expansion of absentee and postal voting resulted in a turnout of 160 million - the highest in American history.
Full US voter suffrage was achieved after the 19th Amendment (1920) enfranchised women in 30 hold-out states, and the 26th Amendment (1971) lowered the voting age to 18; since 1976, voter turnout in presidential elections has fluctuated from about 50%-58%. This year, 66.7% of the voting-age population participated, and both presidential candidates received more votes than any before them, Biden getting seven million more than Trump.
Yet the Democrats suffered crushing and unexpected losses for other elective offices in states Biden won. Winning down-ballot, Republicans increased their hold on the states that will redraw legislative districts following the 2020 census, districts they are free to politically gerrymander thanks to the supreme court's partisan 2019 Rucho decision.
Already, the Republicans' state-based advantage allows them to design 188 of the 435 congressional districts, compared to the 73 drawn by Democrats, who consistently win the overall popular vote in congress.
Republicans took additional seats off incumbent Democrats this year, and surprisingly, with minority and women candidates. 82% of Koch-candidates were elected, as the malign influence of Charles Koch, the billionaire investor in politicians, was felt.
A disappointment for Democrats was the soft Latino support, particularly the collapse of the Tejano vote. Historically, even the dead vote Democrat in majority-Hispanic counties along the Rio Grande, and Texas Democrats were shocked when Republicans won some places for the first time in a hundred years.
Trump peeled off the Tejano vote while losing the state's broader Latino vote, and he's forging ahead with his cynical census scheme to disempower Latinos by reducing their representation in congress.
The census case just arrived in the supreme court, and at argument, the majority seemed unimpressed by the government's counter-interpretation of the Constitutional's plain requirement that "people", not "citizens", be counted.
• • •
Looking for oil leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge
Whatever Joe Biden's faults may be, a sentient human being will be in charge: no more incoherent rants and malignant Tweets. Puerto Rico won't be swapped for Greenland. There will be peace with Denmark.
The US will soon have secretaries of education and interior who believe in public education and public lands, and a CIA director who's not a former torture-camp commandant. The Voice of America won't become Trump's voice, and the attorney general won't function as the president's personal attorney. Immigration courts may be independent again, and the FCC, FDA and Agriculture Department won't belong to the industries they purport to regulate.
While he remains, the lame-duck president is continuing the wanton damage he's inflicted on the US for the last four years, e.g, weakening environment and worker protections (more here), and overturning civil service arrangements in place since 1883.
The administration is steamrolling changes to regulations so it can open up public land for oil leases in Alaska, in the previously-untouched Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The period for public comment remains open, and litigation over the highly-contentious exploration and drilling continues, yet the Bureau of Land Management has scheduled an auction for January 6 (more here), two weeks before Biden, who's against leasing, assumes office. Land could be offered for as little as $2 an acre.
The "Justice" Department is rushing with indecent haste to execute those under federal death penalties, using doubtfully-procured drugs, and only days before Biden, who opposes capital punishment, takes over.
Heretofore, only a handful of people have been executed for federal crimes, and before Trump, none for 30 years. The Trump administration has managed to execute eight people, and is keen to expedite deaths, using, in addition to federal protocols, the often controversial practices of the state where the crime occurred.
Twenty-one states have no death penalty, including Michigan, the first (1847) English-speaking jurisdiction to abolish it. Most of the states that still have death penalties rarely or never use them.
• • •
Sadly, the 2020 elections saw the loss of a charming American anachronism. The citizens of the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations finally agreed to drop the three last words from the state's title, for misguided ("plantation" means settlement), if politically-correct, reasons.
There are still four Commonwealths.
