Cagle World

To best assess the execrable essence of Mitch McConnell, you just need to connect the dots.

After the MAGA insurrection on Jan. 6, after the dead and the injured and the feces smeared on walls, McConnell tore into Donald Trump. He said, “The mob was fed lies. They were provoked by the president” who was guilty of “a disgraceful dereliction of duty.”

But when the time came to convict Trump during the impeachment trial, McConnell – and other Senate Republicans who followed his lead – voted to acquit. McConnell’s excuse: “We have a criminal justice system in this country… And former presidents are not immune from being held accountable.”

We learned this week the U.S. Supreme Court may make it impossible to hold Trump accountable in the criminal justice system prior to the November election – thanks to the MAGA justices who got their jobs courtesy of McConnell’s cynical machinations.

See how it works? That’s his legacy.

Those of us who love democracy are too dispirited to applaud McConnell’s decision to step down as Senate Republican leader. The damage he has done is too sobering to warrant any celebration. He has said that his reshaping of the Supreme Court, tilting it rightward for a generation or more, is the “most consequential thing I’ve ever done,” and he got that right.

Amazingly, he’s stepping down in part because Trump doesn’t think McConnell is loyal enough. McConnell saved Trump in the Jan. 6 impeachment trial, he has rigged the high court to minimize criminal accountability before the election – but Trump still calls him “Old Crow” and hurls racist insults at his Asian-American wife. Apparently McConnell’s criticism of Trump after Jan. 6 was unforgivable. Rest assured that McConnell’s successor as Senate GOP leader will be fitted with an airtight MAGA armband.

Trump may not to remember McConnell’s craven servitude, but we certainly do.

When high court conservative Antonin Scalia died suddenly in February 2016, it was President Obama’s right to nominate a replacement. He tapped respected centrist Merrick Garland for the seat. But McConnell, as majority leader, refused to schedule a hearing and stonewalled the process all year long.

He held the Scalia seat open until 2017 for Donald Trump and his nominee, Neil Gorsuch. Then, in 2020, during another presidential election year – indeed, just eight days before the balloting – McConnell squeezed Trump nominee Amy Coney Barrett onto the court.

So how fitting it was that within hours of McConnell’s step-down announcement, we learned that the MAGA-infested court – McConnell’s creation – has decided to throw Trump a lifeline. There are no constitutional grounds for giving a president total immunity from crimes, as the federal appeals court’s recent bulletproof decision made clear, but now the Supremes say they want to weigh in on that issue anyway. They’ve scheduled oral arguments seven long weeks from now, thereby making it highly unlikely that a criminal conviction in the federal coup-insurrection trial can happen before the election – or that the trial itself might even start before the election.

Voters in a democracy need to know whether the Republican nominee is guilty of trying to end democracy. Instead, thanks to McConnell’s machinations, we’ve been forced to take another goose step toward fascism.

And that’s before we even mention other rancid fruits from McConnell’s orchard – like the high court’s abolishment of affirmation action at most universities, its hostility to anti-gun laws, and its abolishment of women’s constitutional right to bodily autonomy (the fallout from the Dobbs ruling is obvious, most recently, in Alabama, where the state’s top jurists cited the Bible while ruling against in vitro fertilization). Thanks a lot, Mitch.

Jonathan V. Last, a wise center-right political analyst, sums it up nicely: “McConnell’s entire adult life was spent in pursuit of two goals – The placement of conservative judges in the federal judiciary and the advancement of the Republican party’s electoral prospects…Trump understood this. Which is why Trump was able to use McConnell so effectively. McConnell hates Trump. McConnell was never MAGA. McConnell is not in favor of authoritarianism. But none of that mattered because Trump was able to align McConnell’s primary goals with his own. And so in the end, McConnell became Trump’s tool just as surely as if he’d been a toadying true-believer.”

We could sure use a little humor right now, so here we go: When McConnell was a newly elected lawmaker back in January 1985, he stood at the podium in a Washington ballroom and tried to entertain with this joke: “I read about a Paris newspaper that conducted a major survey and asked French men what they did after making love. The results were indeed startling. Ten percent said they made love again. Fifteen percent smoked a cigarette. And 75 percent said they went home to their wives.”

The guy was as funny then as he is now.

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Copyright 2024 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes at DickPolman.net. Email him at [email protected]

To the shock of absolutely nobody, and to the delight of MAGA wingnuts who worship Vladimir Putin, the Republicult’s presidential candidate broke his 72-hour silence about the murder of Russian dissident Alexei Navalny by puking this babble on social media:

“The sudden death of Alexei Navalny has made me more and more aware of what is happening in our Country. It is a slow, steady progression, with CROOKED, Radical Left Politicians, Prosecutors, and Judges leading us down a path to destruction. Open Borders, Rigged Elections, and Grossly Unfair Courtroom Decisions are DESTROYING AMERICA. WE ARE A NATION IN DECLINE, A FAILING NATION! MAGA2024.”

I’m sure it reads better in the original Russian.

The first six words, in particular, read as if they were personally dictated by the sneaker salesman’s murderous puppeteer. Putin’s government said that Navalny succumbed from “sudden death syndrome,” and here we have Trump parroting “sudden death.”

Not a single word of condemnation, of course. Trump is Putin’s lapdog; that’s been obvious since at least 2016, and his fealty now threatens NATO and the international order. Trump dares not defend our American values, much less question a political murder.

There once was a time when Republicans stood steadfast against Russian abuse of human rights, but that abiding party principle has gone the way of the videocassette.

Worst of all, however, Trump’s whiny Navalny message is all about himself. Did we expect anything else?

It takes a lot of toxic moxie to equate one’s legal woes with a heroic dissident’s fate, to somehow suggest that he too is a victim, to use Navalny’s death in a gulag as an excuse to rail against “Unfair Courtroom Decisions” in our courts of law, to essentially claim that he is America’s Navalny, to intimate that President Biden is no better or worse than Putin.

As Garry Kasparov, a prominent Russian dissident now living in America, remarked, “Whenever you think Trump can’t get any lower, there’s a knock on the floorboards.”

Nevertheless, as you’d expect, Trump’s agitprop is being amplified by MAGAts far and wide (“Navalny=Trump,” says wingnut activist Dinesh D’Souza). But not everyone on the right is insane. Even the Wall Street Journal thinks that kind of mantra is dangerously nuts: “Mr. Biden isn’t Vladimir Putin. Mr. Biden doesn’t invade neighbors on a false pretext, killing indiscriminately. He doesn’t make people who have fallen into disfavor fall from windows of tall buildings…If you can’t see the difference, then you have lost – or discarded – your capacity for moral reasoning.”

And conservative columnist Jonah Goldberg laments: “Condemning false moral equivalence was once central to American conservatism…The notion that Joe Biden is the moral equivalent of Vladimir Putin is a slander, not merely of Biden, but of America itself.”

Yeah, let’s talk about America. A few decades ago, George W. Bush made a lot of mistakes (most notably, invading Iraq), but I well recall what he said about American values and human rights in his second inaugural address on Jan. 20, 2005. (As a reporter, I was 10 rows below his podium.)

These speech excerpts still – or should – resonate today:

“There is only one force of history that can expose the pretensions of tyrants, and reward the hopes of the decent and tolerant, and that is the force of human freedom… America will not pretend that jailed dissidents prefer their chains or that any human being aspires to live at the mercy of bullies. (Human rights) are secured by free dissent and the participation of the governed. From the viewpoint of centuries, the questions that come to us are narrowed and few: Did our generation advance the cause of freedom? And did our character bring credit to that cause?”

If Putin’s bootlicker is returned to power in America, we’ll have our answer.

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Copyright 2024 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes at DickPolman.net. Email him at [email protected]

Now that Taylor Swift has single-handedly delivered a House election to the Democrats, George Santos is congratulating himself for writing all her songs.

But seriously, folks.

Democrat Tom Suozzi’s decisive special election victory in New York’s third congressional district (part of Queens and Nassau County) is proof – yet again – that moronic MAGA is on thin ice. Less than two years ago, voters in this Republican-trending district propelled fraudster Santos to an eight-point win. This week, with the seat vacant and Santos gone, Suozzi posted an eight-point win.

That’s quite a big swing in sentiment. I wonder why that happened…

(1) Top Trump toadies, Speaker Mike “Moses” Johnson and Elise Stefanik, stumped in person with Republican candidate Mazi Pilip. (2) Pilip said in an election eve interview that in 2020 she’d voted for Trump. (3) Suozzi touted abortion rights, Pilip did not. (4) Suozzi repeatedly lambasted Johnson’s House Republicans for burying the tough-on-migrants border bill – the bill that Trump has commanded them to bury because he thinks border chaos will help him in November.

Ah. There you have it.

Flipping this House seat from red to blue has put the screws to Johnson. His Republican majority is now thinner than a shred of dental floss. On any piece of legislation, he can afford to lose only two GOP votes. But let’s focus on the big picture: The MAGA brand continues to be toxic at the ballot box.

Thanks to Trump’s dead weight, Democrats took the House in the 2018 midterms. Democrats took the White House and Senate in 2020. Democrats boosted their Senate majority in 2022. Pundits predicted a “red wave” would power Republicans to a massive House majority in 2022, but when the dust cleared, they barely won the chamber.

Meanwhile, in special elections big and small, in House and state legislative contests, Democrats have won (including a Pennsylvania House race this week). In races and referenda where abortion rights were highlighted, Democrats have cleaned up – in red Ohio, red Kentucky, red Kansas, in swing Wisconsin, and last fall in Virginia, where the Republican governor campaigned for abortion curbs and lost both state legislative chambers.

Credit Trump with those debacles, thanks to the erasure of Roe v. Wade. Which he continues to brag about.

This week’s New York tally – which should terrify the six New York Republican congressmen who sit in districts that went blue in the 2020 presidential election – is further proof that Trump is wreaking havoc inside his cult. Democrat Suozzi correctly calculated voters are fed up with the MAGA doctrine of dysfunction. Mike Johnson’s decision to tank the Senate’s bipartisan border bill, at Trump’s behest, gifted Suozzi with a golden opportunity to say, in essence, “I too want to be tough on the border, there’s bipartisan support for being tough on the border, but these House Republicans refuse to govern.” That message resonated with the Nassau County college-educated voters, who pay attention to what’s actually going on in Washington because they have brains in their heads.

Stuart Stevens, a veteran GOP strategist who’s in touch with reality, tweeted: “Republicans who are asking why they keep losing elections are like the guy who walks into the ER with a nail in his head, asking why he has a headache. A party led by a rapist that believes it can fix its problem with women by attacking Taylor Swift, with weird little creeps like Mike Johnson as a public face in Congress…Is there really any question why this party is losing?”

And has Donald Trump learned anything from his latest humiliation? As if.

As soon as he learned that Mazi Pilip was soundly beaten, he attacked her. On social media he called her “this very foolish woman” – woman, of course, being one of his favorite pejoratives. He said that she lost because she hadn’t been sufficiently MAGA and sufficiently adoring of him (this quote is real: “I WANT TO BE LOVED!”).

It’s a long road to November, but my advice to Trump is simple: You do you.

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Copyright 2024 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes at DickPolman.net. Email him at [email protected]

What a hoot it was – hoot is the mildest word I can conjure – to hear House Speaker Mike Johnson insist on “Meet the Press” that he is master of his domain. When asked whether America’s most detestable criminal defendant is pulling his strings, Johnson said: “He’s not calling the shots. I am calling the shots.”

Permit me to fact check. Johnson’s head is so far up Trump’s rear, he can smell Putin.

Right-wing Republicans have squawked since forever that the only way to save this country from being overrun by non-white immigrants is to enact tough enforcement at the southern border. But now that they’ve finally gotten what they’ve always professed to want – a bipartisan Senate bill, with President Biden moving rightward in the spirit of compromise – Johnson and the rest of his MAGA misfits are decreeing that the whole package is DOA in the House.

These denizens of Dysfunction Junction have no interest in governance. They’re performance artists in thrall to a contemporary Caligula who wants to bang on the border crisis as a campaign issue. Trump has spoken “at length” with Johnson, his House pet, about the border crisis (we know this because those quoted words are Johnson’s), and Trump has made it crystal clear that if the House were to vote for an actual solution, and that if Biden were to sign that actual solution, Trump would lose one of his favorite demagogic weapons.

Far better, in other words, to sabotage a set of hawkish solutions that Republicans have long wanted – billions of bucks to increase border staff, beefed up anti-fentanyl trafficking, far tougher standards that asylum seekers must meet in order to stay in America, emergency provisions that would allow the feds to shut down the border, and much more.

Conservative commentator David Frum calls it “a border hawk’s dream bill, plus frosting and candles…Republicans will never get a better bill than this. If they say No now, they are saying they prefer border chaos.”

But chaos is precisely the point. That and fear-mongering. That’s how Trump got traction in 2016, and he needs to recycle those toxic elements now, to scare people and thus distract from his 91 felony counts. (Indeed, he has already lost the economy as an issue; he’s been openly rooting for it to fail, but the rebound has foiled him.) Besides, he’d prefer an ongoing border crisis than Biden getting credit for alleviating it.

Plus, by sabotaging the border solution bill, servile Mike Johnson helps Trump serve his master in Moscow. The package includes $60 billion for Ukraine, which badly needs American aid as the second anniversary of the war draws near. There’s no better way for Trump to signal his continued gratitude for Putin’s 2016 electoral help than to undercut Ukraine’s existential fight for freedom. If that sickens our western allies, and sows more distrust of America’s resolve, so be it.

For months, the House GOP’s mantra was: “We’ll pony up money for Ukraine, but only if we get tough on the border.” Now comes a massive package that gets tough on the border…and the House GOP pulls a fast one: “Never mind what we said before, we still don’t wanna send money to Ukraine.” And, naturally, this switcheroo echoes the whims of their sun god, who tweeted today that a border bill “should not be tied to foreign aid in any way, shape or form!”

Axios, the news website, reporting on the Trump-Johnson sabotage of the border package, suggested that their behavior could backfire: “It’s a new risk (for Republicans) in November, if voters decide they can’t govern.” But that will (and should) happen only if a sufficient share of voters pay attention in the first place.

In 1948 Harry Truman won an election that everyone assumed he’d lose because he stumped successfully against the “do-nothing Republican Congress.” Joe Biden might want to give that a try.

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Copyright 2024 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes at DickPolman.net. Email him at [email protected]

In this week’s New Hampshire Republican primary, the key statistic was not Donald Trump’s underwhelming margin of victory – he beat Nikki Haley by 11 points after crowing that he’d win by 30 – but, far more importantly, this one right here:

Independent swing voters, who were free under state rules to participate in that primary, rejected Trump in a landslide. Haley racked up 61 percent. He got 37.

Translation: The guy who’s been found liable for rape, the guy with four indictments and 91 felony counts, is strong within the party he has transformed into a cult – indeed, strong enough to steamroll the primary calendar and snatch a third GOP nomination – but he’s woefully weak with the swing independents he needs to pull off a November Restoration.

Disgusted as you probably are with the prospect of putting up with this demagogue for yet another campaign year, your reflexive pessimism may tempt you to conclude that New Hampshire’s swing voters are outliers, that they’re not in sync with the nation’s indies. But in truth they seem to be; according to one national poll in December, President Biden is trouncing Trump with independents by a margin of 12 points.

Even Fox News’ Brit Hume saw the key New Hampshire stat and clanged the alarm. He said on the air Trump’s showing was “weak” and after defeats in 2020 and 2022, “he has a lot of losses on his book.”

44 percent of everyone who voted in the New Hampshire primary said they’d refuse to cast November ballots for Trump if he’s convicted of a crime prior to the election, according to exit polls. Trump is trying to stall all his trials. No wonder he’s begging our highest court for a crackpot ruling of “total immunity.”

MAGA Theater, lest we forget, does not draw its spectators from the America mainstream. If you steeled yourself to watch victorious Trump preen on stage, you were rightly nauseated. He was clearly annoyed by his winning margin and Haley’s refusal to kiss his ring. So, of course, he mocked the attire she wore (“the fancy dress that probably wasn’t so fancy”) and warned that if she’s not careful, she might wind up getting investigated for “stuff she doesn’t want to talk about.” He bellowed that he’d beaten Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire in 2016 and that he’d beaten Biden in New Hampshire in 2020 (he lost the state both times), and, of course, his fans lapped it all up – none more so than his newest simpering supplicant, ex-candidate Tim Scott, last seen on a debate stage declaring his love for “Judeo Christian values” but now burbling “I love you” to Trump.

In the words of center-right political commentator Matt Lewis, “The Party of Lincoln has metastasized into a decadent and perverse cult of personality that calls evil good and good evil.” Heck, it’s even possible “that a Jesus-Reagan ’24 ticket still would have fallen short of beating Trump within the current GOP electorate.”

The current GOP electorate will likely grease his third nomination. It’s hard to envision where Haley can get traction, especially since most contests are closed to independents. But the current GOP electorate isn’t big and broad enough to elect a president, especially one who’s running for office to stay out of jail.

And Trump isn’t just weak with independents; he has also alienated a sizable share of traditional Republicans, whose votes he can’t afford to lose. Ron DeSantis (remember him?) has dutifully kissed Trump’s ring, but he also surfaced earlier this week on a conservative radio show and said: “When I have people come up to me who voted for Reagan in ’76, and have been conservative their whole life, say that they don’t want to vote for Trump again, that’s a problem…a huge warning sign.”

Center-left political analyst Simon Rosenberg, who mocked the conventional wisdom about a “red wave” in the ’22 congressional elections, and who therefore got it right, said this about Trump: “He is a weaker candidate than he was in 2016 or 2020. He is far more degraded, extreme, dangerous. His performance on the stump is far more erratic and unhinged. He keeps making deeply consequential unforced errors like coming out against (Obamacare) and admitting he ended Roe…Republicans are making a huge mistake in nominating him this year.”

Which brings us back to that New Hampshire independents stat. Granted, we inhabitants of the American mainstream shouldn’t wipe our brows in relief and assume for a millisecond that democracy will be saved in November. But it’s definitely worth remembering that when this Great and Powerful Oz huffs and puffs, there’s a very beatable con behind that curtain.

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Copyright 2024 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes at DickPolman.net. Email him at [email protected]

Donald Trump took a break from the campaign trail earlier this week to watch one of his flunky lawyers contend in court that any and all crimes he may have committed in office are hereby magically excused because he was acting in his role as monarch el supremo.

I listened to the entire audio of the federal appeals court hearing – no cameras, alas – and it was perversely breathtaking to hear this MAGA water boy plant his flag on the summit of Mount Stupid. Never mind the fact that J. Dean Sauer sounded like Don Corleone gargling gravel; more importantly (if you get my Better Call Saul reference), his arguments for blanket immunity made Slippin’ Jimmy McGill sound like Clarence Darrow.

As you undoubtedly know, Trump is trying to delay his March 4 criminal trial, the one where he’s being prosecuted for plotting to overturn the 2020 election and lead a violent insurrection, in the hope that he can win in November and can kill off the proceedings as the new (and last-ever) president. Hence his strategy to gum up the courts as long as possible with an immunity claim that’s found nowhere in the Constitution, in our laws, or in our history.

It’s a long straight line from screwing the small contractors in Atlantic City to screwing over the institutions of government.

The three appeals judges were not charmed in the least by Don’s desperate con. In the words of Republican appointee Karen Henderson, “I think it’s paradoxical to say that his constitutional duty to ‘take care that the laws be faithfully executed’ allows him to violate criminal law.” Which is precisely what Tanya Chutkin, the judge in the criminal trial, wrote last month when she tossed Trump’s immunity claim in the trash: “By definition, the president’s duty to ‘take care that the laws be faithfully executed’ does not grant special latitude to violate them.”

It was fun to hear Sauer get punked by tough questioning. When the MAGA lawyer insisted that a president is allowed to do virtually anything, Judge Florence Pan, a former federal prosecutor, asked him: “Could a president order SEAL Team Six to assassinate a political rival?…You’re saying a president could sell pardons, could sell military secrets, could order SEAL Team Six to assassinate a political rival.”

Sauer replied that a president would indeed be immune – unless the House impeached him and the Senate convicted him; only after a Senate conviction could he be charged with a crime. Pan then asked, “But if he weren’t (impeached), there would be no criminal prosecution? No criminal liability for that? So your answer is no.”

Three years ago, when Trump was impeached by the House for fomenting the Jan. 6 insurrection, Trump lawyer Bruce Castor argued exactly the opposite. He told the Senate that there was no need to convict Trump because the criminal justice system was the proper place to prosecute and convict. In Castor’s words, “After he’s out of office, you go and arrest him…The Department of Justice does know what to do with such people…a former president is subject to criminal sanction after his presidency for any illegal acts he commits.”

Let’s play out that SEAL Team Six hypothetical. According to lawyer Sauer’s reasoning (such as it is), a president is free to order the assassination of rivals as long as he has 35 flunky senators in his pocket to shield him from an impeachment conviction. And there’s another loophole: A president could order some hits on domestic foes and simply resign on the eve of impeachment proceedings. Either way, there’d be no Senate conviction and a mobster president could not be criminally prosecuted.

And to think that Sauer went to Harvard.

Judge Pan tortured Sauer one more time. She asked him: So you’re saying that if Trump had been convicted by the Senate, he would’ve lost his blanket immunity and it would’ve been OK to prosecute him? Sauer refused to give a straight answer. Pan repeatedly said, “I’ll ask you one more time…Yes or no?” Sauer finally said, well, not this prosecution, because this prosecution – Jack Smith’s trial slated for March 4 – has “problems” and “issues.”

In all likelihood, Trump will lose the immunity ruling. One big question is whether our highest court will take up the issue, drag its heels, and thus postpone the trial.

This week, 19 former Republican congressmen signed an open letter: “The federal courts are confronted with Trump’s gambit to use the appellate process to delay the trial until after the November election… Permitting delay would therefore not only undermine the rule of law, it would undermine the integrity of the 2024 election.”

That’s precisely what the criminal defendant intends. He is now as he always has been. In 1968, he pleaded “bone spurs” to dodge the military. In 2024, he’s pleading “immunity” to dodge the slammer. The arc of the MAGA universe is long, but it bends toward nonsense.

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Copyright 2024 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes at DickPolman.net. Email him at [email protected]

Democrats have entered the hand-wringing phase of the election season, fretting about Joe Biden and poised to leap from their windows. But everyone needs to chill. I foresee many reasons why Uncle Joe is likely to defeat the worst excuse for a human being to ever fail upward.

Wow, deja vu! I wrote that same opening paragraph way back on April 12, 2020.

The conventional wisdom at that time was that Biden was a shaky candidate with shaky prospects of beating Trump. But I said the old guy was being vastly underestimated – and I was proven right in November when he won all the swing states, plus Georgia and Arizona, and racked up more votes than any presidential candidate in history.

What I said then is just as true now. I wouldn’t change a word, for these three reasons:

Biden is the anti-fascism candidate. Trump’s 2020 coup plot, his Jan. 6 incitements, and his current vows to end democracy as we know it, obviously play well with duh dolts in duh Republican base, but the majority of the electorate refuses to swallow his criminal swill. President Biden says, “Our (campaign) message is clear, and it is simple: We are running a campaign like the fate of our democracy depends on it. Because it does.”

And Biden has the wind at his back. According to a newly-released national poll, most Americans, by a decisive margin of 56 to 33 percent, say that Trump is “definitely” or “probably” guilty of a crime in connection with the “illegal effort to overturn the 2020 election.” Most Americans, by an even more decisive margin of 63 to 33 percent, say that Trump’s Jan. 6 insurrection actions should either “disqualify” him from the presidency or, at minimum, “cast doubts on his fitness for the job.”

Biden is the abortion rights candidate. Trump committed political suicide by rigging the U.S. Supreme Court with an anti-Roe majority, and Biden will relentlessly twist the knife. No other issue has inflamed the American mainstream more than the MAGA war on women’s reproductive rights and privacy. Democrats reaped the rewards in the 2022 midterm elections (despite conventional wisdom predictions of a “red wave,” Republicans barely won the U.S. House), and in a slew of 2023 contests.

This year, Biden will rightly warn women voters that if Republicans win the presidency and both congressional chambers, they’ll push for a national abortion ban. Trump has cut and run on the national ban plan, but the forced-birth movement within the Republican base wants it bad. Keep it up, zealots. Biden will appreciate it.

Biden is the healthy economy candidate. Yeah I know, millions of Americans don’t think things are all that great, and Fox News in particular continues to feed the fiction that Biden is ruining us. But this year he’ll have ample opportunities to share key facts with the majority of Americans who presumably still believe in facts.

Gas prices at the pump continue to plunge, GDP growth hit 5.2 percent in the last quarter, and interest rates are projected to drop this year (thus helping more people to buy houses). Biden’s numerous legislative achievements have created jobs, saved shaky labor pension plans, bolstered domestic semiconductor manufacturing ($200 billion in new private investment, thanks to Biden’s CHIPS Act), and generally improved millions of lives in real ways.

Starting this week, for instance, all the major insulin manufacturers are offering $35-a-month caps on their products – an expansion of the caps that were previously reserved only for Medicare recipients, as mandated by Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act.

This is called governing. It’s not as exciting, as, say, threatening the lives of judges or smearing feces on Capitol walls, but governing for the common good still seems to me like a campaign asset.

Yeah I know, the polls continue to claim that Biden and Trump are virtually tied, but it’s a waste of time to take the public’s pulse far in advance of election day. Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama were all deemed to be in deep trouble on the eve of their re-election bids, and Democrats in particular are notorious for peeing their pants. What I see this year (barring some unforeseen event) is an experienced president with a solid record of accomplishment facing off against a craven fascist with 91 felony charges and a track record as an adjudicated rapist, adjudicated fraudster, and adjudicated insurrectionist.

So get a grip, people. Skip the woe for Uncle Joe. Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg, who virtually stood alone in 2022 when he presciently mocked the “red wave” meme, wisely wrote the other day that we ended 2023 “on an upbeat, optimistic note…with momentum, in my view in a far better place than Republicans, who are, in just about every imaginable way, an historic s— show.”

And if, as I anticipate, the majority of voters in swing states cast their ballots for sanity, the forecast for America will be sunnier in 2025.

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Copyright 2024 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes at DickPolman.net. Email him at [email protected]

Just to remind ourselves of the existential stakes at play in 2024, let’s ring out the old year by wringing one more authoritarian mess from the MAGA playbook.

By now you’ve perhaps heard about the phone recording unearthed by the Detroit News, featuring the 2020 election loser on the horn with two Michigan election officials, pleading with them not to sign the certification of Joe Biden’s decisive statewide win in that crucial Rustbelt state. This revelation, which jibes with Donald Trump’s actions in Georgia and other states, bolsters the federal criminal charges that he sought to overturn the 2020 election results in a multi-pronged assault on the democratic process.

In the words of Ty Cobb, one of his many former lawyers, the Michigan phone call “shows the depths to which Trump personally participated in fraudulently pimping the Big Lie,” and confirms “the core conspiracies charged by the special prosecutor.”

Trump was stomped in Michigan by a margin of 154,000 votes, but somehow he got it into his meathead that massive fraud was the cause – bad things musta happened in Detroit where Black people vote, or whatever – and even though there was no such evidence, he wanted those two election officials to screw up certification in the state’s most pivotal county. And his bogus plea was echoed on the phone call by one of his toadies, Republican national chairwoman Ronna McDaniel.

The two election officials on the receiving end of the call were Republicans. They’d already voted to approve certification, but hadn’t yet joined the rest of their colleagues to sign the official documents. On the recording, Trump told them that it would look “terrible” if they signed; in his words, “How can anybody sign something when you have more votes than people?” (That was a lie.) And if they signed, the public would “never know what happened in Detroit…Everybody knows Detroit is crooked as hell.” (Nothing happened in Detroit.)

He also gave them marching orders – “We’ve got to fight for our country. We can’t let these people take our country away from us” – and McDaniel echoed Der Leader: “If you can go home tonight, do not sign it…We will get you attorneys.” Trump echoed that offer (um, bribe): “We’ll take care of that.”

So it went on the evening of Nov. 17, 2020. It could’ve been a lot worse – at least Trump didn’t say, “Find me 154,001 votes”” – and in the end the county and state certified Biden’s win. But the recorded phone comments add fuel to Jack Smith’s federal indictment, which mentions Trump’s post-election Michigan meddlings. The Detroit News (put your hands together for local journalism!) obtained the recordings, four in all, from someone who didn’t want to be identified “for fear of retribution by the former president or his supporters.” Oh you betcha.

Even Fox News has caught a whiff of Trump’s Michigan stink. Republican strategist Karl Rove didn’t mince words: “I think the former president has a problem with this…I think this is what we would call election interference. The former president should not have been doing this. These people are supposedly independent election officials…If this recording is true, he is creating another problem for himself,” as a criminal defendant.

So is this mutt going to be tried and convicted or what?

Here’s a New Year’s resolution: Don’t give up hope.

The marquee coup trial in Washington, D.C., scheduled to start March 4, will likely be pushed back because a federal appeals court (and perhaps the Supreme Court) first needs to rule on Trump’s preposterous claim that anything he did while still in office blessed him with total immunity from prosecution.

Mindful of the trial calendar, the appeals court will move quickly in January. Trump will lose his immunity bid (there’s no legal precedent for total immunity), and after Trump’s desperate attempts to delay justice are fully exhausted, there’s every reason to believe that the federal trial in D.C. will happen prior to the November election. Indeed, the Biden re-election campaign, in a new message, has succinctly framed the stakes for 2024:

“The choice for voters next year will not simply be between competing philosophies of governing. The choice for the American people in November 2024 will be about protecting American democracy and the very individual freedoms we enjoy as Americans.”

It’s binary: Democracy or fascism. Choose the latter and what happened in Michigan will look benign.

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Copyright 2023 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes at DickPolman.net. Email him at [email protected]

Shortly after the Colorado Supreme Court declared in an explosive ruling that Donald Trump can’t appear on the state’s 2024 ballot because he’s an insurrectionist, one of the former president’s flacks fumed in predictable fashion about “George Soros” and “Crooked Joe Biden” and a judicial plot that’s “un-American.” But the Trump campaign’s statement failed to mention the most important words of all:

The U.S. Constitution.

That was quite an omission, given what the document’s 14th Amendment clearly says (with my emphases): “No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.”

The Colorado Supreme Court, unlike Team MAGA, apparently knows how to read plain text.

The judicial majority took the literal language of our core governing document and applied it to the obvious facts that were documented in a five-day trial in a lower state court.

Conclusion: “President Trump incited and encouraged the use of violence and lawless action to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power (on Jan. 6).”

Therefore: “A majority of the court holds that (he) is disqualified from holding the office of president under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution. Because he is disqualified, it would be a wrongful act under the Election Code for the Colorado secretary of state to list him as a candidate…”

This ruling is indeed explosive – historic, unprecedented, all kinds of hyperbolic adjectives – and the Colorado judges darn well know it: “We do not reach these conclusions lightly.” However, “We are likewise mindful of our solemn duty to apply the law, without fear or favor, and without being swayed by public reaction to the decisions that the law mandates we reach.”

Oh yeah, that “public reaction.” It’s already intense, in all the predictable ways, and even many of us who applaud the Colorado ruling are a bit discomfited to discover we have yet another bomb in our midst, saddling our fragile democracy with yet another stress test. MAGAts are accusing the court of interfering with the 2024 race and they insist voters should decide the next election – which is hilarious, because Trump’s insurrectionist acts were designed to overturn what the voters had already decided in 2020.

Meanwhile, similar boot-Trump-off-the-ballot bids are active in more than a dozen other states (a handful of citizens, mostly Republicans and independents, initiated the Colorado lawsuit), and the organizers in those states are likely to be emboldened by the Colorado ruling…but hang on, because, in all probability, we’ll soon get a bat-signal from the U.S. Supreme Court.

It’ll be fascinating to see how that gang behaves. States have the right to conduct their own elections, and conservatives supposedly believe in state’s rights. Indeed, the Colorado court’s majority opinion shrewdly quoted Trump appointee Neil Gorsuch, who, as a lower-court federal judge in a different case, applauded “a state’s legitimate interest in protecting the integrity and practical functioning of the political process.” He wrote that a state’s legitimate interest “permits it to exclude from the ballot candidates who are constitutionally prohibited from assuming office.”

Let’s see if our highest court can find a way to steer around that.

David Frum, the sane conservative commentator, writes: “The U.S. Supreme Court now has the opportunity to offer Republicans an exit from their Trump predicament, in time to let some non-insurrectionist candidate win the Republican nomination and contest the presidency…back to a race where the Biden-Harris ticket faces more or less normal opponents, rather than an ex-president who openly yearns to be a dictator.”

But, unless we’re pleasantly shocked, we have to assume that the MAGA-influenced high court majority will act hypocritically and pound Colorado with a federal hammer. As in, each state has the right to ban or allow abortion as each state sees fit (because state’s rights), but no state has the right to run its own election as it sees fit (because federal power). I would love to be proven wrong.

Yeah, the Colorado ruling likely tees us up for yet more political turmoil. So what else is new. And the most dire predictions – violent street riots if Trump was ever indicted – never came true. Most importantly, the law is the law.

Where are we as a nation if the literal language in the Constitution is deemed to mean nothing?

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Copyright 2023 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes at DickPolman.net. Email him at [email protected]

When word spread that the MAGA-infested House of Representatives had formally voted to launch an impeachment probe of President Biden, I was reminded of a scene in Alice in Wonderland, the one where the Queen of Hearts tried to rig a jury trial.

“Sentence first!” she declared. “Verdict afterward!”

The House is even worse. Its battle cry is investigate first, evidence afterward.

The chamber’s nutjobs, led by a religious fanatic who likens himself to Moses, don’t have a scintilla of anything that warrants a formal probe. In the words of Republican Senator Mike Rounds of South Dakota, the House needs “a strong case before they actually do an impeachment inquiry. Otherwise, they can be seen as crying wolf.”

But that’s OK with the loons who’ve driven the House into disrepair. They’re only interested in ginning up (phony) stories for the right-wing infauxtainment complex and giving the MAGA hordes something new to drool about. When Troy Nehls of Texas was asked to list the evidence of Biden’s high crimes and misdemeanors, he replied: “All I can say is, Donald J. Trump 2024, baby.”

As for Mike Johnson, the House Speaker and aforementioned religious fanatic, here’s what he believed back in 2019: “You can’t impeach a president because you don’t like him. That’s not how this system works. We’re in a constitutional Republic. You don’t have to the right to do it.” But now, armed with amended marching orders texted to him by God, he fervently believes what he formerly opposed.

Indeed, with Trump in the docket as a criminal defendant, what better way to muddy the waters than to insinuate that the purported “Biden crime family” is somehow worse than their Sun God? And turning the House into a de facto Fox News studio is heckuva lot easier than doing the hard job of governance, which this ship of fools clearly has no interest in.

Yeah, governance.

That strikes me as an important feature of the job – especially now, with so much stuff languishing on the to-do list. For instance, there’s the crucial emergency aid money for Ukraine; aid money for Israel; humanitarian money for Gaza; border legislation; the farm law, up for renewal, that helps rural America’s agricultural and food aid programs; the annual fund-the-government bills that were supposed to be passed months ago but are still held hostage by the nutjobs as the House careens from one shutdown crisis to the next…all of which require actual work, as opposed to dishing out soundbites for the saps.

I need not review all the reasons why the chamber has sunk to this level of dysfunction. It’s sufficient to connect the dots back to 2010 – in retrospect, a pivotal year in politics – when the national GOP shrewdly focused on winning state legislative races and succeeded beyond all expectations. (Naturally, the national Democrats, with a dearth of foresight, were asleep at the switch.) Propelled by that year’s red wave, the new state GOP lawmakers redrew congressional district maps, creating and gerrymandering scores of safe Republican seats. It’s gotten to the point that Republicans in those districts now worry about one thing only: getting primaried by people more MAGA-batty than them.

Plus, of course, we have the MAGA war on factual reality – as best explained by Steve Bannon, who says duh movement’s big goal is to “flood the zone with s—.” The phony impeachment probe is merely the latest Exhibit A. Republicans are hoping that the smoke they pump out about Joe and Hunter will somehow paint them as worse than Trump (despite his 91 felony charges, and a corrupt company that has already been found guilty of tax fraud and bank fraud). And given what we know about huge swaths of the American public, the MAGA strategists have grounds for hope.

The big question is whether enough voters in 2024 will have sufficient awareness to return House Republicans to minority status, where they languished while Nancy Pelosi got stuff done. Because what we have now, to borrow underdog Harry Truman’s successful 1948 battle cry, is “a do-nothing Congress.”

Or, as Alice said to the Queen of Hearts, “Stuff and nonsense!”

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Copyright 2023 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes at DickPolman.net. Email him at [email protected]