Month: December 2023

Sleepwalking into dictatorship

The first time I heard colonizer used was (IIRC) in Black Panther (2018). Since then the smear has caught on a bit, and not in a Martin Luther King sort of way. But that single word of dialogue served in the film to instantly replace the European view of Africa with an African view of Europeans. It carries racial connotations, but is anchored not as much in skin color as behavior, on what Europeans do.

We’ve used enablers in the past to describe Donald Trump’s allies inside and outside of government. Former Rep. Liz Cheney offers on “CBS Sunday Morning” a more pointed term for Trump’s confederates based on what they do. They are collaborators, and she doesn’t mean colleagues. She deploys collaborators as the French Resistance might against the Vichy government.

“If you look at what Donald Trump is trying to do, he can’t do it by himself,” Cheney tells John Dickerson. “He has to have collaborators. And the story of [Speaker] Mike Johnson is the story of a collaborator.”

“The Speaker of the House is a collaborator to overthrow the last election,” Dickerson suggests in this clip.

But Cheney means more. Johnson, et al. are collaborators in Trump’s plan for overthrowing the United States Constitution should he get reelected. Trump is blunt about his plans.

“One of the things that we see…is a sort of a sleepwalking into dictatorship in the United States.”

Something to ponder from Pwnallthethings (@pwnallthethings.bsky.social):

Humans have an incredible ability to underestimate how much worse life can get for them personally, and to rationalize themselves as the exception to what would come from putting people like this in charge of the apparatus of government

Update: Here’s the link to the full story.

A lot!

Joyce Vance gives us the low down:

Friday night, Judge Chutkan rejected Trump’s “big” argument that he couldn’t be criminally prosecuted for acts committed during his presidency because he had blanket immunity. We discussed the motion when he filed it in early October (read here if you want a refresher on its substance). At the time, I characterized the argument as a flawed one, likely to be a swing and a miss.

Judge Chutkan agreed. “The Constitution’s text, structure, and history do not support that contention [that the charges should be dismissed],” she wrote in her opinion. “No court—or any other branch of government—has ever accepted it. And this court will not so hold. Whatever immunities a sitting President may enjoy, the United States has only one Chief Executive at a time, and that position does not confer a lifelong ‘get-out-of-jail-free’ pass.’” Read her entire opinion here.

She wrote: “Defendant’s four-year service as Commander in Chief did not bestow on him the divine right of kings to evade the criminal accountability that governs his fellow citizens.” That is what his lawyers argued, that Trump was above the law. As much as the delays and the timing insert an element of uncertainty into all of this, increasingly, there are signs we have judges who believe in this fundamental American principle and are committed to putting it into action.

Judge Chutkan also ruled against Trump’s motion to dismiss on the grounds that his conduct was protected by the First Amendment. “It is well established that the First Amendment does not protect speech that is used as an instrument of a crime, and consequently the Indictment—which charges Defendant with, among other things, making statements in furtherance of a crime—does not violate Defendant’s First Amendment rights,” she wrote. In other words, if Trump pointed a gun at a random passerby and said “stick ‘em up” as a prelude to robbing them while president, he could be prosecuted for that crime and his words would be evidence of and part of the commission of the crime.

The Judge did not rule on Trump’s other pending motions, including ones to dismiss on statutory grounds and due to alleged selective and vindictive prosecution. We discussed all of the dispositive motions in some detail here. She could issue her order on the remaining motions at any time. They are even less likely to be successful than the ones dismissed tonight.

But the Constitutional issues Judge Chutkan has ruled against Trump on are the ones he can appeal in advance of trial. By ruling promptly, She has set that process in motion. Appeals mean delay—not the sort of strategic, excessive delay that is Trump’s hallmark in court proceedings, but delay as a necessary incident to the process. That doesn’t make it any less concerning as the clock continues to tick. But in another interesting development today, that may suggest an appeal could be concluded promptly, the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled against Trump on the presidential immunity issue in a civil case that has been pending for about a year. Although one case is civil and the other criminal, the legal issue is based on the same notion of immunity, that presidents can’t be prosecuted for conduct committed in the scope of their presidency.

In its decision Friday, the appellate court wrote, “When a first-term President opts to seek a second term, his campaign to win re-election is not an official presidential act.” They held the case would move forward and that while Trump could be permitted to argue that the official nature of his conduct means he can’t be held civilly accountable for it, he can’t end the case at this point on that basis.

As we have often noted here in a variety of legal proceedings where he has raised this issue, President Trump may have been entitled to immunity, but candidate Trump is not. The panel wrote, “In the proceedings ahead in the district court, President Trump will have the opportunity to show that his alleged actions in the run-up to and on Jan. 6 were taken in his official capacity as president rather than in his unofficial capacity as presidential candidate.” Good luck convincing a jury that trying to prevent state’s tallies of their citizen’s votes from being counted falls within the scope of presidential duties.

By analogy, the appellate court, with this precedent now on the books, could rule that Trump cannot dismiss the indictment at this point in the proceedings. That would let the case proceed to trial, where Trump can raise his defenses. And the appellate court in DC could do that quickly, with an expedited briefing schedule, as the legal issues were comprehensively briefed before the district court.

[…]

Democracy is on the ballot in 2024, but it’s also on the docket—the courts’ dockets. Their job is to make sure there is a process for Trump that is fair and efficient, but also one that gets the criminal cases in position, consistent with due process concerns, for juries to decide the question of Trump’s guilt, or not, in each case. That’s how our system works. Excessive delay, whether it’s a Trumpian strategy or court condoned/imposed is unacceptable. Americans need to know how juries of our peers assess the evidence against the former president before we vote in 2024. Only the courts can make sure that happens.

I wish I felt confident that any of these cases were going to go forward before the election or that Trump will be found guilty if they do. But this is a good sign, at least as far as it goes. Let’s see if the appellate courts cooperate. Fingers crossed.

Philip Bump takes the time to outline all the ways that Trump has already shown that he will fulfill the plans he’s touting on the campaign trail

[T]his would not be comparable to his inauguration in 2017, an event that took most people by surprise and demanded that he quickly figure out what, exactly, he was going to do. Positioned between the base that devoured his hostile rhetoric and the party that facilitated his election, he split the difference, bringing with him advisers (Stephen K. Bannon and Reince Priebus, respectively) from each camp.

He learned his lesson. The latter camp encouraged him to respect the informal (and, of course, formal) boundaries that accompanied the job. The former camp let him do what he wanted. By the end of his term, nearly all that was left was those enablers, and he’d discovered that most of the boundaries he’d been encouraged to respect were transparently thin. That’s the recognition that he’d take into January 2025.

Trump’s rhetoric, as the likelihood of his being renominated increases, has been less constrained even than it was on the campaign trail in 2015. He promises in explicit terms to use government power against his opponents and in support of himself. He talks about the presidency as though it is meant to be returned to him rather than as something for which he is offering himself as a candidate.

The likelihood of his renomination and his musings about what he would do if given the power of the presidency have spurred discussion about how he might use his position should he win next year. But this discussion ignores an important point: Many of the fears people have raised about what Trump might do reflect things that he did or tried to do the first time around.

We can very obviously begin at the end. Would Trump be content with two terms in office or would he seek to retain power after his second term? Well, as you’ll recall, he and his allies worked tirelessly from Nov. 3, 2020, to Jan. 6, 2021, on retaining his position despite his having lost the presidential election. He deployed nearly every tool he or his allies could think of to subvert the electoral college votes cast by states he lost. He entertained theories about special investigations, seizing voting machines and upending federal law enforcement. He pressured state actors to overturn the results without success, though at a far more substantial cost to those state officials than he has yet paid.

This is informative particularly because it shows how little attention Trump paid to institutional boundaries in a moment where he had few dissenters on his team. Oh, the 22nd Amendment says that presidents can serve only two terms in office? Rest assured that Trump can find some pliant attorneys willing to argue that there’s wiggle room. He’ll just wait in the White House until the dispute has been resolved.

Trump also entertained the idea of deploying federal troops to aid his efforts to retain power, using the authority given to him under the Insurrection Act. (Given the tumult that would have followed, there probably would not have been much time spent considering the irony of using the act to foment an insurrection.) The Associated Press recently explained how the act might allow Trump to use federal troops should he again be elected. But it’s not as though he hadn’t explored the idea while in office.

When protests emerged in the late spring of 2020, Trump repeatedly suggested that he wanted to deploy troops against the (mostly left-wing) protesters; he has subsequently stated that he wished he had. His administration deployed unidentified law enforcement officers into the streets to tamp down the unrest. When Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper publicly objected to using the act, Trump was reportedly incensed. Concern was so widespread in the last days of Trump’s administration that senior military officials released a statement reminding those in the military of their duty to defend the Constitution.

[…]

Trump has also recently mused that the various indictments he faces — including one for trying to overturn the 2020 contest — give him leeway to deploy federal law enforcement against his political opponents. But here, too, we’ve already seen Trump cross a putative boundary.

He entered office under the cloud — using his word — of the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. Trump was frustrated that the Justice Department didn’t do more to curtail the probe. He fired Attorney General Jeff Sessions after the 2018 midterms and nominated former attorney general William P. Barr to take his place. Barr had been publicly critical of the Russia probe and quickly appointed U.S. Attorney John Durham to conduct an investigation into the investigation.

The Durham probe ended up lasting longer than the Russia investigation itself, extending into Biden’s presidency under the protection of Durham’s being appointed special counsel. But it failed; Durham showed no significant new evidence that the Russia investigation should not have been undertaken or was a function of anti-Trump bias. Durham obtained an indictment against a lawyer linked to Trump’s 2016 Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, but the lawyer was acquitted at trial.

That’s just one point of leverage Trump’s administration deployed. His former chief of staff also revealed that Trump sought to have the IRS target his political opponents with audits.

One way in which Trump hopes to reduce friction in a second term in office is by overhauling the federal bureaucracy, allowing him to install sympathetic actors more broadly. This, too, he tried to effect during his term in office. In October 2020, he signed an executive order making it easier to fire longtime government workers, but he ran out of time to implement it.

The Biden administration tried to institute a safeguard against Trump’s policy change, but it probably would be trivial for a second Trump administration to sidestep it. It is therefore safe to assume that Trump would move more quickly to upend the bureaucracy should he win in 2024.

On Tuesday, Trump suggested on social media that the government should “come down hard on” MSNBC “and make them pay for their illegal political activity” — casting the channel’s frequent criticisms of him and his politics as somehow violating federal regulations. He’s long been outspoken in his dislike of the media and critical coverage, including by disparaging reporters personally. But there were also reports during his presidency that he aimed to use government regulators to block a merger involving the parent company of CNN, one of his most frequent targets.

There are other things that could be collected in the category of “warnings that Trump has already manifested,” like his use of pardons to benefit himself. But the point has presumably been made: Trump already did or explored doing many of the things that observers now warn he might do during a second term in office.

And, importantly, he has to date paid little to no cost for doing so. He learned that he could do what he wanted and still retain power, still be his party’s nominee. So why not try again?

He’s not just blowing smoke or talking trash on the trail. I would hope we’ve learned by now that assuming he’s just a harmless entertainer is absurd. Yes, he’s full of shit with the bragging and the lying. But he has taken actions that should prove that when he says he’s going to do something, he means it. In the past he was unaware of just how much power he could wield. You can bet that if he were to reclaim the White House he will believe that it is unlimited.

Check this out:

They have lost their minds

He’s not lying.

Biden does some mild corporate bashing. And it’s smart politics:

President Joe Biden took aim at corporations for charging prices he said were artificially high even though the rate of inflation has slowed and some shipping costs have fallen.

“Any corporation that has not brought their prices back down, even as inflation has come down, even as the supply chains have been rebuilt, it’s time to stop the price-gouging,” Biden said at the launch of a new White House supply chain initiative. “Give the American consumer a break.”

While it’s true that the annual rate of inflation has cooled from its high last summer, this doesn’t translate directly into falling consumer prices. It only means that prices are rising at a lower rate.

Prices for some everyday goods have fallen over the past year, a reality reflected in lower Thanksgiving costs this year, for example. And lower costs have in turn left some consumers with more money in their budgets for things like Black Friday shopping, which rose 7.5% this past weekend over a year ago.

Now it’s true that prices aren’t likely to actually come down for most things. It’s just not how it works unfortunately. But certain things do, like high gas and egg prices, the latter of which, it turns out, were a result of price gouging, and they are goods that virtually everyone buys. So the idea persists and in this dog-eat-dog world of economic propaganda, I see no harm in Biden ginning up a little populist corporation bashing for the greater good. And besides, they really could lower prices and, in fact, some are because of competition.

Remember when Donald Trump held a press conference to announce that?

He made the announcement in response to an attack on Dallas Police in 2016:

And you remember how tough he wanted to be on protesters, right?

Well…

What a concept

The passing of Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, the first woman named to the U.S. Supreme Court, has received a flood of remembrances. But one in particular emphasizes what differentiates her from justices who came later. She was a politician first, “rising to become the majority leader of the Arizona state Senate” (Politico, Peter S. Canellos):

In its history, the court has been divided almost evenly between justices whose primary experience was in electoral politics, law practice or academics, with many of the academic-minded justices having spent significant time as judges on federal courts. But over the years the profile of a judicial nominee shifted strongly in favor of scholarly judges. Today, potential Supreme Court justices tend to establish their judicial ambitions at a very early age, often in their 20s, attain lower-court appointments in their 30s or early 40s and thereby position themselves for appointment to the high court before they reach middle age.

O’Connor “brought a practicality to the court that most of today’s justices lack,” the Washington Post Editorial Board writes in outlining her contributions as “an avatar of change and progress” who was also “painstakingly centrist.” O’Connor, the Board continues, “was a living argument for thinking beyond the ordinary litmus tests in selecting judges and other powerful officials.” Late in life she confided to a friend, “Everything I stood for is being undone.”

That’s because today, with a heaping helping of encouragement and resume-polishing assistance from the Federalist Society (founded the year after O’Connor’s appointment), aspiring justices today need not dirty their hands with compromise or bother themselves with the messy fallout from their decisions. O’Connor was not such an ivory tower creature.

Politico again:

By the standards of 1981, O’Connor’s experiences were highly useful for a high-court nominee. County courts are where the judicial rubber meets the road, where real-life disputes find their way into the legal system. O’Connor was charged with achieving a just result for prosecutors, defendants and civil plaintiffs in a wide array of cases. Her time on the campaign trail had also put her in contact with average people, helping her to better understand their expectations of the government and justice system.

Implicit in her role as Senate majority leader — for which she was the first woman in any state — was a certain amount of deal-making and compromise. This was not, of course, reflexive compromise, but rather the need to decide carefully when to draw a sharp line of principle and when to accept deals that achieve only some worthy aims. Presumably, a key consideration in any deal must be the greater good of the public.

As the court has become a combat zone in which rarefied ideological battles play out, having a legislative history and a life outside of law and the courts has become disqualifying. More’s the pity. It has left us with a court peopled with justices with more concern for legal theories and less for the practical impacts of their decisions on ordinary people.

Some of the same nominees who, by dint of their slender record, could pose as neutral arbiters of the Constitution for the purposes of the confirmation process brought to their court work the haughty certitude of faculty-lounge debates. Whatever its outward attempts to portray civility, the court in its written opinions took on the character of a law-school debating society. Confident in their ideology and surrounded by like-minded figures, justices often voted a party line on divisive social issues but defended their stances as matters of high judicial principle. In their rock-ribbed views of the Constitution there was little room for interpretation, let alone compromise.

For many years, O’Connor was the main antidote to this tortured dynamic. She was widely advertised as the court’s swing justice. It fell to her, along with fellow justices David Souter and Anthony Kennedy, to craft a middle ground on abortion in the 1992 case of Planned Parenthood v. Casey. That opinion became a virtual fly paper for critics on the left and right. And yet now, in the wake of O’Connor’s death, many legal and political leaders are yearning for just such a compromise.

They’d best not hold their breath.

Free at last!

George Santos is Rep. Santos no more. In a bipartisan vote that handily exceeded the two-thirds requirement, the U.S. House voted to expel the mutiply indicted Santos on Friday morning.

Not to worry, George Washington Anthony Elizabeth Taylor Devolder Kitara Julius Caesar Santos will land on his feet, even if he has (for now) denied he is in talks with “Dancing With the Stars.” He’ll have no trouble staying busy. Facing 23 felony charges (he has pleaded not guilty) Santos has a full schedule planning for his trial in September next year:

The schemes laid out by prosecutors are wide ranging. Prosecutors in the Eastern District of New York say he falsified campaign reports with fake donations and fictional personal loans to artificially bolster his standing. They say he stole from donors, using their credit cards without authorization and through a Florida company called Redstone Strategies. And they have charged him with collecting more than $20,000 in unemployment payments when he was, in fact, employed.

Prosecutors say that Mr. Santos used the money on personal expenses, including designer goods and credit card payments. (House ethics investigators added more detail, showing that Mr. Santos used donor funds on Botox treatments, his rent and a website called OnlyFans known for adult content.)

Santos will have his Trumpish revenge on his former colleagues sooner (Newsweek):

Santos hit back on X, formerly Twitter, in a series of posts. He wrote that he will report four of his former colleagues, three Republicans and one Democrat, who voted against him to the Office of Congressional Ethics. Those listed were New Jersey Democrat Rob Menendez and Republicans Nicole Malliotakis, Mike Lawler and Nick LaLota. Newsweek has reached out to the offices of Rep. Nicole Malliotakis, Rep. Mike Lawler and Rep. Nick LaLota by email, as well as that of Rep. Rob Menendez by telephone and voicemail message.

Posting on X, Santos wrote that he would request an investigation into Malliotakis, “regarding her questionable stock trading since joining the Ways and Means committee this Congress.”

The disgraced former congressman accused Lawler of “questionable campaign finance violations,” adding: “Congressman Lawler owns portion of Checkmate Strategies and he uses the same firm that he is a beneficiary of to pay for services related to his campaign. The concerning questions are; is Mr Lawler engaging in laundering money form his campaign to his firm then into his own pocket?” Newsweek has not as yet been able to verify Santos’ claims.

In recognition of his accomplishments in the field of public corruption, Michelle Goldberg declares Santos a Child of the MAGAverse:

Should the blessed day ever arrive when Donald Trump is sent to federal prison, only one of his acolytes has earned the right to share his cell: George Santos, who on Friday became the sixth person in history to be expelled from the House of Representatives, more than seven months after he was first charged with crimes including fraud and money laundering. (He’s pleaded not guilty.) A clout-chasing con man obsessed with celebrity, driven into politics not by ideology but by vanity and the promise of proximity to rich marks, Santos is a pure product of Trump’s Republican Party. “At nearly every opportunity, he placed his desire for private gain above his duty to uphold the Constitution, federal law and ethical principles,” said a House Ethics Committee report about Santos released last month. He’s a true child of the MAGA movement.

No less than the trees and the stars….

That movement is multifaceted, and different politicians represent different strains: There’s the dour, conspiracy-poisoned suburban grievance of Marjorie Taylor Greene, the gun-loving rural evangelicalism of Lauren Boebert, the overt white nationalism of Paul Gosar and the frat boy sleaze of Matt Gaetz. But no one embodies Trump’s fame-obsessed sociopathic emptiness like Santos. He’s heir to Trump’s sybaritic nihilism, high-kitsch absurdity and impregnable brazenness.

Santos learned from the master and earned his star in the MAGA Walk of Shame:

As New York magazine’s Shawn McCreesh reported in March, at a Manhattan birthday party for the Breitbart editor Emma-Jo Morris, Santos was “the ‘It’ girl. His wrists are bedizened with bling from Hermès and Cartier, and fawning fans line up for selfies.” A month later, The Intercept’s Daniel Boguslaw described Santos being feted at a bar in Washington: “A milieu of young conservatives, operatives and House staffers were assembling to howl in the next-gen model of Donald Trump’s societal wrecking ball, and the name on everybody’s lips was George Santos.” A hard-core MAGA group called Washington, D.C. Young Republicans posted about Santos’s “inspirational remarks” at that event, including his insistence that his enemies will have to “drag my cold, dead body” out of Congress. Gosar chimed in with an admiring response: “Based.”

Adam Serwer, Goldberg reminds readers, observed that for Trumpists, “the cruelty is the point.” Beyond that, however, “Rule breaking is key to Trump’s transgressive appeal; it situates him as above the strictures that govern lesser men while creating a permission structure for his followers to release their own inhibitions.”

Perhaps that is part of Trump’s appeal to evangelicals. Their faith is a web of prohibitions and peer pressure to conform to the oversold image of what a Christian husband or wife is. Add to that prohibitions on drinking or dancing or fun outside church and the pressures to deliver must be intense, almost but not quite cult-like.

Trumpism is like a papal indulgence to throw off all that and … indulge. Indulge in hating your enemy, in bathing in riches, in lying and cheating. All secure in the belief that their liberation has received the Donald J. Trump Seal of Approval.

“Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”

Polar bear babies!

Mierlo, November 30, 2023 – A healthy polar bear has been born in Dierenrijk. The delivery took place peacefully in the Frimas polar bear maternity. Mother and the newborn are doing well.

Head animal caretaker Stephan Rijnen: “In early November, we noticed that the mother was retreating to the maternity room. From this, we could deduce that the mating we observed in March was likely successful! A polar bear gestation lasts about eight months, so we had to wait a bit. Tuesday morning, we reviewed the camera footage and discovered good news! A young polar bear the size of a guinea pig was lying with mother Frimas.”

The maternity room is a separate enclosure connected to the indoor enclosure of the polar bears in Dierenrijk. This space is built so that pregnant polar bears can withdraw for childbirth. When designing the maternity room, the natural behavior of female polar bears in the wild was also taken into account.

Rijnen: “In the wild, the expectant mother goes into winter hibernation, in the snow den she has dug herself. First, the mother eats to fullness so that she is strong enough to survive the winter. The birth of the cubs also happens in this tranquility. Only upon awakening will she meet her offspring.”

Therefore, the mother and the newborn will remain safely in the maternity room for the next few months. Rijnen: “In about a month, the eyes will only open. The cub needs to grow before facing the outside world. Right now, it’s still too small.” It is expected that the newborn will grow an average of 200 grams per day in the coming months.

In Dierenrijk, a screen will be set up showing a live connection to the maternity room. “This way, visitors can still catch a glimpse of the development of the young polar bear!” says Rijnen.

Threats

The status of polar bears in the wild is ‘vulnerable.’ This means that if the natural habitat of polar bears is not better protected, the species is at great risk of extinction.

Polar bears are threatened because their habitat is shrinking, mainly due to climate change. As the ice melts, it becomes difficult for polar bears to hunt ringed seals, the main food source for the species. In the search for food, polar bears increasingly enter inhabited areas, leading to conflicts between the local population and polar bears. This results in dangerous situations for both the local population and the polar bears.

The polar bears in Dierenrijk are genetically the most important pair in the European management program. The management program ensures a healthy population in zoos. Each species has one studbook keeper from this program who critically examines both the genetic background of the animals and the available space for offspring in European zoos. Based on this information, the studbook keeper provides advice. Rijnen: “Currently, in Europe, there are only three polar bear pairs with a recommendation. The question remains, of course, whether young animals actually result from these recommendations. It makes it extra special that we have succeeded here at Dierenrijk!”

Polar Bears International

Through the Wildlife Foundation, Dierenrijk supports Polar Bears International. This organization not only protects the polar bear but also the ice on which these bears depend. Polar Bears International does this through education, research, and by engaging in political discussions.