Trumplandia
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.
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