From Roger Fitch and our friends down under at Justinian...

 

Last days of Nero

ROGER FITCH ESQ • FRIDAY, DECEMBER 11, 2020

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. 

From Roger Fitch and our friends down under at Justinian.

 

Post-election prospects

ROGER FITCH ESQ • MONDAY, NOVEMBER 9, 2020

Still an enormous number of hypnotised chooks in America ... What's on the cooker till January 20 ... The prospects of plunder during the interregnum ... The presidency as a private financial asset ... Republican judicial mischief ahead ... Corporate prosecutions on easy terms before the Democrats take over ... Roger Fitch in Washington rakes over the ruins 

"Shared psychosis or folie à millions has been well-documented ... contagion of symptoms dissipates when exposure to the primary person is reduced, which is why Donald Trump holds rallies like his life depended on them ... It is also the reason why he cannot leave the presidency - in addition to the possibility of prosecution" -
Yale psychiatrist. 

"Never before in US history has a president done such lasting damage to the fabric of American democracy in such a short amount of time ... The Mess Created By Trump Will Be with Us for Years." -
Der Spiegel

The long-fought election campaign is over, with America's unconventional president breaking laws to the last, even flouting federal court orders to process postal ballots. 

Despite predictions, the expected buyers' remorse among 2016 Donald Trump voters didn't happen, and more Americans than previously suspected were outed as Trump-supporters, arguably a case of mass psychosis or, as an Australian might say, hypnotised chooks. 

Even so, after four years of daylight robbery accompanied by oafish belligerence and bad manners, the president has been expelled, not by congress, but by voters, after his party spent $20 million on 300 lawsuits to deter them from voting. 

The initial election results favouring Joe Biden were predictably contested, using the game plan from the Republicans' notorious 2000 election-theft. As in the 2000 "Brooks Brothers Riot", a Republican rabble besieged vote-counting centres, now in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Arizona rather than Florida.  

The strategy was the same: harass election authorities into pausing the count (preferably while you're ahead), and then invent a pretext to go to federal court. 

It's not likely to succeed, and the New Republic found the attempt farcical, but one law prof took it seriously.

After four long days of counting, the media (of all people) declared Joe Biden Jr the winner, but the incumbent persisted in election litigation, attacking (as expected) the ballots in states with Democrat governors but Republican legislatures, e.g. Pennsylvania, where Trump's lawyers were encouraged by helpful hints from conservative justices, especially Brett Kavanaugh. 

Even so, absent supreme court intervention, come January 20th, America's comprehensively-crooked president will be removed (perhaps forcefully) from the principal crime scene, and could even face jail, more here. Some think he's a flight risk, like other autocrats who lose elections.

Sadly, Mr Trump will not be taking the Republican senate with him, as Democrats netted only one of the three senators they need to take control, although January runoffs in Georgia could result in two more. Without the senate, the Democratic house's election-law reforms, designed to avoid future chaos such as that in 2020, are doomed. 

Real judicial reform, more here and here will also be off the table, and with a newly-minted two-thirds supreme court majority, Republicans can move on from executive power to judicial mischief. 

Americans must now endure, instead of a corrupt Republican administration, a Republican-subservient supreme court, bolstered by the alarming addition of the party loyalist Amy Coney Barrett, the first justice in 151 years to be confirmed without bipartisan support. 

McConnell: the courts are ours

Judicial appointments are already paying off in the lower courts: Trump has "flipped" four of the 12 regional judicial circuits - the 2nd, 3rd, 11th and crucially, the 9th. US senate majority leader Mitch McConnell gloated about stacking the courts: 

"A lot of what we've done over the last four years will be undone sooner or later by the next election [but] ... They won't be able to do much about this for a long time to come."

•   •   •

While it lasted, and for those who could afford to invest in it, the Republicans ran the best government money could buy. For Trump personally, it may have been his most lucrative hustle: he had wonderful, cost-free benefits to exchange and unlimited government assets to exploit, including valuable intangible assets such as drilling permits and military wireless spectra.

Trump's outraged reaction to his election loss suggests he regards the presidency itself as a financial asset, not unlike casino permits, a sort of quadrennial looting licence whose renewal has been unfairly withheld. 

If only the president would now withdraw gracefully, as he did in 1987 after missing out (due to mafia connections) on Sydney's Darling Harbour casino.

•   •   •

From now until January 20, Trump will see how much damage he can inflict during the "lameduck" interregnum, assisted by his scandal-plagued cabinet and 15 senior officials who hold positions illegally. As administration shredders run hot, incoming Democrats will focus on preserving official documents.

With his last 100 days underway, the administration has turned to time-honoured transition manoeuvres: e.g. poison pills (literally) and scorched-earth tactics, more here.

Public lands will be practically given away, while corporate-designed and drafted regulations are forced into effect by government agencies captured by those they regulate.

Corporate prosecutions are being settled on bargain terms. Just as the departing Obama rushed to settle his government's Deutsche Bank case before the bank's most problematic debtor could scuttle it, the outgoing Trump hopes to hobble legal options for the incoming Biden administration.

Republican governments often make sweetheart settlements with corporate defendants in lawsuits brought by Democratic administrations, witness the astonishing Tobacco case write-down from $130 billion to $10 billion in 2005, a record of government corruption that may never be equalled. 

Robert McCallum, the Justice Department fixer who ordered a settlement contrary to that reached by career prosecutors, was modestly rewarded, as US Ambassador to Australia. 

Currently, there is litigation involving pharmaceutical companies who pushed opioids, resulting in a health epidemic in which some 450,000 people died, and the Trump administration is desperate to settle the cases against the ringleader, Purdue Pharma, before Democrats and their plaintiffs' lawyers take over.  

Purdue's owners, the Sackler family, having had ample time to pay themselves retained earnings, put the company into bankruptcy; now, they're eager to settle the case, before a less corporate-friendly government takes office. 

The proposed bankruptcy settlement - subject to court approval - is predictably generous, protecting the extensive Sackler clan from any personal responsibility, and affecting lawsuits filed against the Sacklers and their company by state and local governments.

The proposed settlement suits Republicans: it deprives the mostly-Democratic states, cities and tribes of the level of compensation they anticipated.  

•   •   •

Many fear that the greedy and indiscreet ex-president could be a security threat. Giving Donald Trump confidential briefings after he's out of office doesn't bear thinking about; just imagine his profiting-making schemes for government information. 

One is reminded of Edward VIII's post-abdication behaviour, when the ex-king, briefed on war efforts, afterwards compromised Allied military secrets. 

The British government had a simple solution: a distant vice-regal posting.

But what to do with Donald Trump? 

You couldn't trust him with the Bahamas. 

Roger Fitch is Justinian's man in Washington 

From Roger Fitch and our Friends Down Under at Justinian...

 

Trumplandia

ROGER FITCH ESQ • TUESDAY, OCTOBER 6, 2020

The Reichstag is burning ... Delegitimising an election ... Covid-ridden presidential candidate ... Trump's debts pose security problems ... Stacking the Supreme Court ... An unhinged assault on the Affordable Care Act ... Judicial showdown looms ... Latest report from Roger Fitch in Washington 

"The only way we're going to lose this election is if the election is rigged." - Donald Trump

"It's a perfect example of Trump's tendency to assign his own motives and methods to others. He worries that they'll cheat because he has always cheated — on his taxes, on his wives, in his business dealings, in his philanthropy. He imagines them cheating because he actually is cheating." - Frank Bruni 

According to Le Monde, "Donald Trump torpille son premier débat". Torpedoing his debate was one way to describe a comprehensive disaster in which the president displayed his usual unbearable rudeness, continuously interrupting and insulting Biden, and lying ceaselessly. 

One writer wondered if it was Donald Trump's Senator McCarthy moment, another found it was a good debate for revealing the president's character.  

Trump was probably Covid-19 positive as his family and other hangers-on attended the debate, without face-masks, contrary to agreed rules. Within days, Trump's Covid hospitalisation engulfed the news and opinion. As the president's polls plunged and re-election prospects dimmed, the Lawfare blog posted helpful "Rules for Displacing an Ailing Presidential Candidate."

Most other news is very bad: as America's most vulnerable election approaches, the Reichstag is burning, and it's a six-alarm fire. Will the election finish the US? The Atlantic and the New Yorker are sounding the alarm. A constitutional coup is not impossible.

The Republican party seems afflicted by madness, not unlike the malignant normality of its candidate, a man who refuses to say he will accept the results of the election and whose personality traits portend disaster. He's a man who, if he loses, may not leave office, and could go to jail if he does. He has his own Praetorian guard, and his die-hard supporters, some violent, are already disrupting early voting.

As a minority party, Republicans must be ruthless in order to maintain office. Historically, they have had to cheat to win elections, and this year, it's all hands on deck to impede an honest election November 3rd.

The Republican-controlled states are doing their bit. The vote-suppressing Texas governor ordered each county to limit its drop-off  box for ballots to one location. Democratic-leaning Harris County (Houston), with 4.7 million residents and one sixth of Texas' population, will have a single drop-off point. 

In the swing states that Trump unexpectedly won four years ago, postal ballot sabotage is underway, and planning for polling-day intimidation, reminiscent of Mr Trump's 2016 black voter deterrence. 

In addition to help through manipulation of local laws in states they control, Republicans are discussing a dodgy scheme to throw the election into the house of representatives, where, though a numerical minority, they have a one-state majority in state delegations. However, the plot, involving Republican-controlled states assigning electors, is unlikely to succeed, according to legal experts. 

Republican-aligned judges are meanwhile putting partisan paws on the election scales, and cui bono? The fix could go all the way to the supreme court and the election result itself. 

•   •   •

It's stating the obvious to call Donald Trump the craziest president, but he's also the most corrupt, and proofs are emerging that he's a spectacular tax cheat: the NY Times obtained copies of some of his tax returns and discovered he paid a paltry $750 in federal taxes in 2016 and 2017.

The debt that Trump has accumulated would probably preclude a security clearance for anyone else, one reason that national security leaders of both parties support Biden.

•   •   •

As the supreme court was about to commence its October term, the liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died (more here). Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, ignoring his 2015 dictate that confirming a justice must await election results, immediately announced plans to confirm a replacement for Ginsburg, before a name was known and even as tributes poured in for the late great justice.

A case to [re]determine the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act is scheduled shortly (see below) and Ginsburg's replacement by a radical conservative would make the longed-for destruction of the Act  more certain, as the vote of the reluctant Chief Justice would not be necessary. Expedited confirmation hearings are set for October 12. 

Curiously, the very first case heard in the new term concerned the constitutionality of the "Delaware rules" for appointing state judges for fixed terms, while maintaining party membership for the judges on a pro rata basis. 

However, the most consequential case the court will decide is probably California v Texas, the unhinged assault on the ACA. It will be argued on November 10, one week after the presidential election, and Trump's Justice Department is shamefully supporting those seeking to have the health care act struck down, even though it has twice been upheld by the court with CJ Roberts joining the liberal justices. 

The appeal is from a fifth circuit ruling that largely upheld the rogue decision of a controversial federal district judge in Texas striking down the Act, based on the removal of a tax relied upon by Roberts when he previously upheld the constitutionality of the ACA.

Gutting the ACA in the midst of a pandemic would bring chaos to over 20 million Americans with no other health insurance and the more than 135 million with pre-existing conditions who are currently protected by the ACA from discrimination or insurance coverage exclusion.

The true rationale for killing health care, other than cruelty and subservience to insurance companies, is sparing the well-off from Medicare taxes of 0.9% (earnings) and 3.8% (unearned income). 

Trump also seems confident that the extremist judge he has nominated, Amy Coney Barrett, will take his side in any judicial showdown over the election. As with the ACA, CJ Roberts is not trusted to provide the fifth vote for Trump. 

There were two likely candidates for the court, Judge Barrett, and Barbara Legoa; Trump had already put both on circuit courts, bringing a brief veneer of distinction to "movement" judges. Importantly, they were senate-confirmed. 

In the end, Trump couldn't resist the more alarming and reactionary of the two candidates, the "tainted" Amy Barrett. 

In Judge Barrett, Trump has a woman whose views are the antithesis of those of the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and she's "religious", active in a secretive group usually characterised as anti-feminist.

And quelle surprise! It turns out that, like Brett Kavanaugh, Trump's last supreme court appointment, Amy Barrett earned her party stripes doing Republican dirty work in the Bush v Gore case.

As an associate in James Baker's law firm, she fought on the Florida battlefield during the 2000 presidential heist, now seen to have retrieved the fortunes of a moribund Republican Party and facilitated subsequent court stacking not unlike, well, hers. 

From Roger Fitch and our Friends down under at Justinian..

 

Reelecting the thief-in-chief

ROGER FITCH ESQ • TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 8, 2020

US elections ... Republican plots to steal the outcome ... Supreme Court in the wings ... Declaration of an election "emergency" ... Prospects of state and federal criminal indictments ... Fictions at the Republican National Convention ... Long-term Washington hand Roger Fitch reports 

With eight weeks to go, America is lurching towards electoral disaster. In 15 years covering Washington, Fitch has seen a lot, but the extraordinary crimes of Donald Trump, the institutional damage he has inflicted, go far beyond George Bush's criminal mischief. They threaten the republic itself, at least the part that survived Bush v Gore, the supreme court's notorious intervention in the 2000 election: partisan meddling that could happen again. 

In the light of Bush v Gore, maybe the eighteenth century republic never made it into the twenty-first: in either one, Trump qualifies as the worst, most dishonest president in American history. Even petty grifts are assiduously pursued. What else can one expect? He assumes everyone is as venal as himself, including political appointees and government hires. As New York Magazine observed in 2018:

"It is hardly a coincidence that so many greedy people have filled the administration's ranks. Trump's ostentatious crudeness and misogyny are a kind of human-resources strategy. Radiating personal and professional sleaze lets him quickly and easily identify individuals who have any kind of public ethics and to sort them out ... Trump is legitimately excellent at cultivating an inner circle unburdened by legal or moral scruples. These are the only kind of people who want to work for Trump, and the only kind Trump wants to work for him."

AG William Barr and his politically-compromised Justice Department aggressively assist and defend the president, so it is civil litigants who must try to constrain President Trump's lawless acts and omissions, in actions launched by CREW, cases filed by states (especially California), and the 400 lawsuits of the ACLU.

The ring is closing on Trump's personal tax and financial affairs: in theory, New York State could bring down criminal indictments before the election. There's also talk of federal prosecutions after Trump leaves office, for crimes committed while president. Will he go from the White House to the Big House? Protection from federal prosecution is only possible while he's in office, and limitations run. Is he plotting to avoid jail, through an election concession deal with Biden? 

Trump has never had majority support, and should be on course to lose his re-election bid. Yet, many foreign observers, with a touch of premature Schadenfreude, profess a belief he can't lose: not because Republicans will steal the election, but because (as they think) a majority of Americans somehow prefer him to win. Only a few (e.g. the Guardian, and the Canberra Times) address the dire, democracy-ending consequences a Trump victory could bring.

President Trump can only win re-election by cheating. As in Brazil, Turkey or a dozen other corrupted former democracies, the leader openly opposes uncongenial votes being counted. The question, then, is not whether Trump will attempt to steal the election, but how he will do so. The goal: forestalling, interdicting and/or destroying votes for the opposition. 

Some of these methods have already been tested in the party primaries, with 550,000 ballots rejected. Such feints have been furthered by the shadow docket of the supreme court, which previously gutted the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v Holder. 

Practices of Republican states and the US Post may include: 

• caging (purging) suspect voters from existing voter rolls, a project upheld by a Trump-packed supreme court, despite clear language in a federal statute that prohibits purges for non-voting; 

• flouting federal voter registration law, as well as inhibiting voter enrolment by restricting time, manner and/or location of registration, while manipulating  postal service and timeliness; 

• closing polling places, reducing the opportunity to vote in person; 

• intimidating voters at the polls on November 3rd, a violation of federal law (the American Bar Association is organising legally-trained poll workers); 

• opposing universal mail-outs of absentee ballots by Democrat jurisdictions; 

• forbidding witnessing of voter signatures on absentee votes by postal workers, as is customary, while slowing the post to hinder timely delivery; 

• restricting or blocking drop boxes; 

• limiting personnel and equipment necessary to sort postal ballots, e.g, forbidding overtime and obstructing pick-up, same-day sorting and delivery; 

• failing to provide clearly-dated postmarks.

Just Security has a timeline of Trump's USPS dismantling, now being orchestrated by Postmaster General Louis DeJoy. DeJoy, a party mega-donor with serious conflicts of interest, is being sued by 21 states; his "equipment reductions" and staffing changes arguably violate 18 US Code 1701 (Obstruction of Mails). 

Postmaster-General DeJoy: at the heart of the sleazy inner-circle

Interestingly, it's lame-duck Republican legislation that saddled the Post Office with the unnecessary and unusual debt that set off the chaos. 

There's still the 12th Amendment nightmare, a disputed election where uncounted ballots are destroyed and a state names its own electors. Also frightening: Trump might declare a sham "election emergency". 

•   •   •

The US Senate has released the final instalment of a report on Donald Trump's 2016 Russian canoodling, and it goes beyond Robert Mueller's findings.

The report - with critical analysis by Trump's own party - was a surprise, but a lot of Republican senators are on record as to what they really think of Donald Trump.

Even so, in the alternative universe that is today's Republican Party, the ceremonial re-endorsement of the thief-in-chief went ahead. The dog-whistling racist Republican National Convention turned out to be a cynical exercise in science fiction, in which Trump was imbued with such mythical qualities as empathy and competence, thus intentionally trolling the press.

For all practical purposes, Trump's 20,000 lies were incorporated as party policy, while Democrats were collectively portrayed as violent anarchists, even as Donald Trump seemed to be fomenting race war.

By contrast, the 2020 Democratic National Convention was more upbeat, with a relatively restrained party platform. For a stronger one, the Democrats could have recycled the platform from their 1928 National Convention:

"Never in the entire history of the country has there occurred ... such a spectacle of sordid corruption and unabashed rascality as that which has characterized the administration of federal affairs under ... Republican rule. Not the revels of reconstruction, nor all the compounded frauds succeeding that evil era, have approached in sheer audacity the shocking thieveries and startling depravities of officials high and low in the public service at Washington. From cabinet ministers, with their treasonable crimes, to the cheap vendors of official patronage, from the purchasers of seats in the United States Senate to the vulgar grafters upon alien trust funds ... from the givers and receivers of stolen funds for Republican campaign purposes to the public men who sat by silently consenting and never ... uttering a word in condemnation, the whole official organization under Republican rule has become saturated with dishonesty defiant of public opinion and actuated only by a partisan desire to perpetuate its control of the government."  

 

 

 

 

 

 

From Roger Fitch and our friends down under at Justinian

 

Clinging to the wreckage

ROGER FITCH ESQ • MONDAY, AUGUST 10, 2020

Trump's fresh rampage ... Taking the USA beyond proto-authoritarianism ... A chaotic post-election scenario ... Cheating might save the day ... Flouting the Supreme Court's rulings ... The odour of corruption ... Reichstag fires and the president's brown shirts ... Absentee voting and the postal system ... Our Man in Washington Roger Fitch reports  

 " ... [W]hat can you say about a person who, before speaking before an adoring crowd, raises his eyes to heaven and calls himself the chosen one? What can you say about an administration where the secretary of state says, 'Perhaps Trump has been sent by the good lord to save Israel from Iran'? The country is being run by madmen ... [but] I don't think it is fascism. It is essentially tin-pot dictatorship." 
Noam Chomsky

 

"Be wary of paramilitaries ... When the pro-leader paramilitary and the official police and military intermingle, the end has come."
Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons From the Twentieth Century 

 

"Throughout his time in office, he [did] everything possible to drive people away ... not a single thing that he has done as president ... would make anyone who voted against him in 2016 want to vote for him in 2020 ... he ha[s] done everything imaginable to animate people who had not voted in 2016 (or who voted for a third party candidate) to turn out and vote for his opponent this year ... Democrats were choosing among ... people who would all surely beat Trump at the polls"
Neil Buchanan 

 

People used to joke about Donald Trump's emotional pathology. Was he, perhaps, a menstruating man? 

Since the president's impeachment, no one's laughing. The senate's failure to convict and remove Trump when they had the chance has clearly emboldened the president, who has been on a fresh rampage of impeachable acts. One legal writer posited what the Spanish call an autogolpe: self-coup.

There is now fear that a bad-faith president, one of low intelligence, supported by dishonest state officials and partisan media, might claim victory while losing; it's happened before, although Donald Trump won't have a first cousin calling the election early, as Fox News' John Ellis did for George Bush in 2000.  

The Pentagon is being urged to complete contingency planning for Trump's expected malefactions; in any case, there will be chaos on election day; post-election "Trump amendments" to the constitution have been proposed. 

Trump's (diminishing) support never quite reached Umberto Eco's Ur-Fascism; even so, after Trump, people may well speak of a time when some Americans "flirted" with fascism. The f-word is already in use, as the president ventures beyond proto-authoritarianism and incipient fascism. 

Umberto Eco: listed 14 properties of fascist ideology

Some observers wrongly assume Republicans have a future, let alone a majority, in America: the party in fact is in a demographic death spiral; only cheating can save them. Most of the major cities in the US are Democratic; it is only through diabolical gerrymanders and vote suppression (e.g. Florida's unconstitutional poll tax) that Republicans cling to office.

•   •   •

Aside from Trump's sententious and often false tweets, Americans are increasingly subjected to his executive orders, the incoherent, often-lawless edicts of an erratic leader in his final months of mischief. Such a purported order was used to justify the roll-out of federal heavies in Democratic cities (see below), ostensibly to counter urban crime.

There is an unprecedented crime wave underway: at the top, where Donald Trump is flouting the supreme court's recent decisions on DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) and transgender rights. 

After losing the supreme court cases on gender equality, in one of which the White House filed briefs opposing the pleadings of the government's own Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Trump pushed ahead with regulations licensing continued discrimination - even against the homeless. 

The president is also fighting subpoenas for his tax returns in New York State's criminal investigation, after losing the supreme court case on that very matter; perhaps he expected New York State to pursue the  hands-off approach to white-collar crime currently offered at the Justice Department.

Stonewalling Cyrus Vance Jr turned out to be a legal blunder: the Manhattan DA's memorandum of law supporting dismissal of Trump's claims revealed that the Trump Organisation was under investigation for bank and insurance fraud. Deutsche Bank - almost the only bank lending money to the serial bankrupt Trump - has already responded to the DA's criminal subpoenas for his financial records. The Post has more. 

Manhattan DA Vance: Trump Organisation under investigation for bank and insurance fraud 

Deutsche Bank is meanwhile investigating questionable transactions between the president's son-in-law Jared Kushner and Deutsche employees.

The president's personal pecuniary interests trump everything. The FBI, now on Pennsylvania Avenue, has congressional support to build a new headquarters outside downtown DC, but Trump opposes the move: it would make the Bureau's headquarters across the street from Trump International Hotel available for redevelopment and possible commercial competition. Even Republicans can smell this corruption.

•   •   •

Following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, congress explicitly rejected a federal police force in the US, but Donald Trump, aided by his servile (Acting) Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf and Attorney Gerneral William Barr, is busy using a back door to create one.

Trump established the first beachhead in Portland, Oregon, with heavily armed, unidentified and camouflaged federal agents "stretching the limits of their authority", as the New York Times delicately put it. 

It was a manufactured crisis, quickly seen by some as "made-for-TV fascism" and "performative authoritarianism". 

With electoral doom increasingly likely, Donald Trump has ignited multiple Reichstag Fires (perhaps literally, in the case of the Democratic headquarters in Arizona) in Democratic-governed cities, with Portland the first regional sortie, following his unsuccessful assault on Washington, DC.

Unmarked federal agents in Portland

Chicago and Philadelphia remain particular targets of  Mr Trump. Just as Herr Hitler must have cracked down first on unreliable cities such as Hamburg and Dresden, Mr Trump has in his sights every city and state with elected Democrat leadership. Some Democratic officials are calling him out on "fascist tactics". 

Portland reminded Michael Dorf of Putin's Crimean manoeuvres, while Steve Vladeck pointed out the likely illegality and Neil Buchanan feared Chilean-style desaparecidos. 

After extensive litigation and bad publicity (war-zone surveillance aircraft circulating overhead), the Trump incursion backfired spectacularly, and a withdrawal of federal forces from Portland was negotiated.

•   •   •

How low are the Republicans prepared to go, to steal the 2020 elections? Most states (not Texas) offer "no-excuse" absentee ballots. With absentee voting beginning as soon as September, Republicans are desperate to limit its use; there's even speculation they'd be willing to see the US postal service fail, in order to prevent absentee ballots being timely counted. 

Paxton, Texas AG: no absentee voting on Covid grounds

In Texas, AG Ken Paxton successfully appealed a state judge's decision allowing voters afraid of Covid-19 to use the disability provisions of  the law and vote absentee. Paxton threatened to bring felony charges against groups who promoted such voting.

The irony? Paxton has himself been awaiting trial since 2015 on three counts of felony securities fraud.

He was re-elected for another four years in 2018.

Only in Texas.