Trump is already working to undermine the next election

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.

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]

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Three big reasons we can plausibly hope for a sunny 2024 election

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.

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]

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Another ‘perfect’ phone call, this time in Michigan

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.

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]

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Colorado’s top court read what the Constitution clearly says

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?

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]

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Do voters even care if the House is broken beyond repair?

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!”

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]

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Chris Christie’s quixotic quest to talk sense to Republicans

You rarely see the names Chris Christie and Kris Kristofferson in the same sentence, but some of the songwriter’s most famous lyrics best describe the quixotic candidate’s current shtick:

“Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose…”

Christie’s attempt to talk sense to grassroots Republicans is obviously doomed to fail, because Duh Base is armored against anyone who dares utter self-evident truths about its fascist cult leader. If as expected he loses big in his chosen battleground, the impending New Hampshire primary, his candidacy will have the life span of a fruit fly.

Wait, I’ll amend that. A fruit fly can live 50 days.

Given the futility of his quest, Christie clearly decided that his best option in the final GOP undercard debate of 2023 was to just cut loose and take no prisoners. And maybe, just maybe, his message can make a difference in the long run – not with the cult, but with the general electorate.

The other three folks on stage – faux-surging Nikki Haley, floundering Ron DeSantis, and feral twit Vivek Ramaswamy – were, as usual, terrified of taking on the guy who’ll spend much of the 2024 campaign in courtrooms.

But Christie went there, to the max.

“The truth needs to be spoken: (Trump) is unfit,” Christie said. “This is a guy who just said this past week that he wants to use the Department of Justice to go after his enemies when he gets in there. And the fact of the matter is, he is unfit to be president. And there is no bigger issue in this race.”

“There’s no mystery about what (Trump) wants to do,” Christie added. “He started off this campaign by saying ‘I am your retribution.’ This is an angry, bitter man who now wants to be back as president because he wants to exact retribution on anyone who has disagreed with him. Anyone who has tried to hold him to account for his own conduct.”

If given more time, Christie may well have shamed his rivals by sharing the latest news: In Nevada this week, a grand jury indicted six MAGAts who posed as fake electors in 2020 and filed fake electoral votes in a bid to overturn Joe Biden’s statewide win. The indictees include the chair and vice chair of the Nevada Republican Party. (Georgia and Michigan have also charged fake electors with crimes.) Also, in Wisconsin, ten fake electors settled a civil lawsuit by admitting that their fake electoral votes were “part of an attempt to improperly overturn the 2020 presidential election results.”

The best part of the debate was when Christie challenged his rivals to denounce Trump and stand up for American democracy. They wouldn’t do it. Duh Base requires them to be spinelessly quiescent, and so they were. DeSantis did manage to get his mouth to move with a few words about Trump maybe being too old, but Christie jeered, “Ron, is he fit or not? He won’t answer…He is afraid to answer. Either you are afraid or you are not listening. Is he fit or isn’t he?”

Indeed, Christie said at the close of the debate, “I want you all to kind of picture in your mind Election Day. You’ll be heading to the polls to vote and that is something Donald Trump will not be able to do because he will be convicted of felonies before then, and his right to vote will be taken away.”

It’s amazing that so few people are making that case. The Republican cult may think it’s no big deal to run a convicted felon for president – convicted, quite likely, in the federal coup case slated for a March trial in Washington – but how would that play with independent swing voters and the grassroots Democrats who are currently whining about Biden but who’d be highly motivated to save democracy when the chips are down?

For sharing that message alone, Christie belongs on the stump. He knows it’s useless to talk sense to the cult, so he’s playing the long game. With nothing left to lose, he’s rightly telling the rest of us that if the likely felon is re-hired next November, we as a nation will have everything to lose.

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]

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Judge says Trump ‘engaged in an insurrection’ before making a curious ruling

If you’re looking for fresh evidence how we’re sleepwalking toward fascism, look no further than the pre-holiday court ruling which decreed that even though Donald Trump is an insurrectionist who “acted with the specific intent to incite political violence” on Jan. 6, he still belongs on the 2024 ballot – despite the constitutional provision that bars insurrectionists from seeking power.

This Nov. 17 ruling, in Colorado, is a classic example of how our supposedly durable institutions are failing us at one of the most crucial junctures in American history. It’s like saying, “The defendant is guilty of robbing banks, but we have to let him go free. We can’t punish him because the laws against robbery don’t mention banks.”

A group of Colorado voters recently sued to keep Trump off the state’s primary ballot, rightly citing the U.S. Constitution’s 14th amendment, which unequivocally declares that “No person shall… 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…shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same.”

Similar disqualification efforts are pending in at least 16 other states.

A Colorado district judge, Sarah Wallace, got the case. After meticulously sifting the factual evidence, she concluded beyond a reasonable doubt that “Trump materially aided the attack on the Capitol,” that he “acted with the specific intent to invite violence and direct it at the Capitol with the purpose of disrupting the electoral certification” of Joe Biden’s victory.

Bottom line: “Trump engaged in an insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021 through incitement.”

Then she got cold feet.

She inexplicably concluded the aforementioned 14th amendment allows an insurrectionist to run for president. In her words, “there is scant direct evidence regarding whether the Presidency is one of the positions subject to disqualification” – despite the specific language that prohibits any officer of the United States from holding any office if that officer engaged in insurrection.

Don’t words matter anymore?

In what conceivable universe is the office of the president not covered by the words any office, civil or military, under the United States?

My beef is shared by principled conservatives who believe in the literal meaning of words and phrases and sentences. Two such legal scholars, William Baude and Michael Stokes Paulson, recently assessed the 14th amendment and concluded that of course the presidency meets the definition of any office. They write, “At the risk of belaboring the obvious: Article II (of the Constitution) refers to the ‘office’ of President innumerable times. It specifies the length of term for which the President ‘holds his Office,’ certain minimum qualifications for eligibility ‘to that Office,’ what happens upon the President’s removal ‘from Office,’ or inability to discharge ‘the Powers and Duties of said Office,’ and the oath he shall take before entering ‘on the Execution of his Office.’ If the Presidency is not an office, nothing is.”

One of our most eminent conservatives, former federal appeals judge J. Michael Luttig, was clearly blown away by the ruling that keeps Trump on the ballot: “It is unfathomable as a matter of constitutional interpretation that the Presidency of the United States is not an ‘office under the United States’…It is plain that the entire purpose of (the 14th amendment), confirmed by its literal text, is to disqualify any person who, having taken an oath to support the Constitution, engages in an insurrection or rebellion against the Constitution. The former president did exactly that when he attempted to overturn the 2020 election and remain in office in rebellious violation” of the Constitution.

The Colorado voters who sued to keep Trump off the ballot are appealing Judge Wallace’s decision, understandably so. Rather than follow the logic of her own decision, Wallace let Trump off on a technicality thinner than a thread of dental floss, and kicked the can to the higher courts. Maybe she really believed that her splitting of hairs was prudent; maybe she was worried about the death threats that would inevitably flow in if she’d disqualified the insurrectionist.

Granted, it’s great that Trump has finally been branded an insurrectionist in a court of law – a finding that may buttress Jack Smith’s criminal case in the Washington trial slated for March. But we’re engaged in a war to save democracy, and institutional timidity won’t cut it. Fascists feast on loopholes.

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]

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Welcome to the world of MAGA machismo, where muscles trump brains

Ladies and gentleman, here is your United States Senate, then and now:

Sen. Daniel Webster on March 7, 1850: “It is fortunate that there is a Senate of the United States (with) a just sense of its own dignity, and its own high responsibilities, and a body to which the country looks with confidence for wise, moderate, patriotic, and healing counsels.”

Sen. Markwayne Mullin on Nov. 14, 2023: “I’m not afraid of biting. I will bite. I’ll bite 100 percent. In a fight, I’m gonna bite. I’ll do anything. I’m not above it. And I don’t care where I’ll bite by the way.”

Scientists have long told us that we humans evolved from apes. Maybe now we’re going backward.

This week, the “honorable” Mr. Mullin – a meathead Oklahoma Republican with a martial-arts body who now inhabits what was once known as The World’s Most Deliberative Body – put on quite a show.

At a Senate hearing Mullin got mad at witness Sean O’Brien, president of the Teamsters union, because O’Brien had hurt his feelings in a string of mean tweets. O’Brien had challenged him to a confrontation “Anyplace, Anytime.” Senators since time immemorial had long ignored such silly taunts and conducted themselves in a manner appropriate to their high station in public life, but hey, was a manly man of real manhood supposed to just let a taunt like that go unanswered? Of course not!

“Sir,” he sneered at O’Brien, “this is a time, this is a place. We can do it right here…Stand your butt up then,” whereupon he rose from his seat and started to twist off his wedding ring to maximize his punching power because I guess what real men do in bars down near the tractor pull. Then came this classic admonishment from the committee’s chairman, Bernie Sanders: “Oh stop it! Sit down, you’re a United States senator!”

Mullin is just the latest manifestation of kickass machismo inspired by faux manly man Donald Trump, who set the tone in 2016 when he said this about a protestor at one of his rage rallies: “You’re not allowed to punch back anymore. I love the old days. You know what they used to do to guys like that when they were in a place like this? They’d be carried out on a stretcher.”

Mullin subsequently doubled down on a podcast with those aforementioned remarks about fighting-biting, and then he went on right-wing Newsmax: “This is not anything new,” because “Andrew Jackson had nine duels while he was president and finished all nine of ’em.”

That is absolute nonsense. Jackson dueled a lot in his younger days, but never as president. And I question whether it’s wise to justify one’s behavior by invoking a genocidal slaveowner who liked to duel more than 220 years ago.

Anyway, Mullin’s self-advertised lust for fisticuffs – and, on the same day, ex-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s playground move, elbowing a Republican rival in the kidney – has prompted me to ponder why guys like that seem so compelled to assert their (toxic) masculinity. Forgive me if this sounds like dime-store psychology, but it would appear that deep down they feel threatened by our 21st century culture (gender equity, empowered sexual minorities, and much more), all of which have stoked their resentments and fears of appearing “soft” and “weak.”

Josh Hawley, the Republican senator from Missouri, talks about stuff like this. So do macho motivational gurus like Joe Rogan and Andrew Tate. The latter, in particular, wants guys to step up and double down. If this strikes you as kind of sad, rest assured you’re not alone. Sean Illing, a commentator on the Vox website and former philosophy academic, has written: “It’s the weak person’s vision of a strong person. It’s the 19-year-old Nietzsche reader who didn’t make it past the preface.”

The local news folks in Mullin’s Oklahoma don’t seem impressed, either. They put him on the air and posed this question: “Senator, we tell our kids so often, ‘Do not resort to violence.’ You challenged someone you disagreed with to a fight. How do you justify that?” Well, Mullin sure put those snowflakes in their place: “Fights happen. Boys are boys.”

I’ll side with Bernie Sanders on this one. When Mullin rose up, ready to rumble, Bernie exclaimed, “God knows, the American people have enough contempt for Congress, let’s not make it worse!” But this is what happens when MAGA meatheads confuse muscle with governance.

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]

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The GOP’s shrinking junior varsity team has no clue what to do about abortion

Unlike you, dear reader – who’d prefer to boil your eyeballs than watch another Republican “presidential” debate – I dutifully endured Wednesday night’s farce-a-thon, patiently waiting for the GOP’s shrinking junior varsity to address the most timely political issue plaguing the party: Abortion.

Given all the humiliating defeats Republicans suffered in Tuesday’s elections – from Ohio to Kentucky, from Virginia to Pennsylvania – I was interested to hear whether these candidates (minus AWOL Trump) had any new ideas on how to halt the losses that have piled up ever since Trump’s high court theocrats killed Roe v. Wade.

Finally, 99 minutes into the two-hour event, the topic came up. And they have no clue what to do.

To get there I had to slog through so much muck along the way – like when Vivek Ramaswamy attacked Nikki Haley’s daughter and Haley responded by calling him “scum.” Or when Tim Scott, declared “we have sleeper terrorist cells in America, thousands of people have come from Yemen, Iran, Syria and Iraq,” despite zero evidence that it’s true. Or when candidates vowed to strengthen our (supposedly) weak military without ever mentioning that a fellow Republican, dumb jock Senator Tommy Tuberville, is holding up hundreds of military appointees.

Ron DeSantis brought up Tuesday’s election debacles (“We saw last night, I’m sick of Republicans losing”) without acknowledging why Republicans have been losing – namely, because independents and young people and suburban women are furious about the Republican crusade against reproductive rights. He also neglected to mention he’s part of the problem, having signed a Florida law that bans abortions after six weeks of pregnancy (i.e., virtually all abortions). He had nothing to say about what he’d do about abortion if he were president (he won’t be). He also said Republicans need to “do a better job” on abortion referenda, without ever explaining how.

Nikki Haley riffed – as she did in previous debates – about how we as a nation need to find “consensus” on abortion, but that’s rhetorical vapor. There is no possibility of “consensus” because either you believe that women have the right to control their bodies free of government meddling, or you don’t. Meanwhile, she’s sorta kinda opposed to the enactment of federal restrictions on abortion, but only because it’s politically unlikely, given the high bar of 60 filibuster-proof Senate votes and a Democrat in the White House.

Tim Scott declared, “I would certainly as president of the United States have a 15-week national limit. We need a 15-week federal limit,” which (1) ain’t gonna happen, for the reasons Haley cited, and (2) Virginia Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin championed that very same proposal in Tuesday’s statewide elections… and got his butt kicked, losing both legislative chambers.

Chris Christie acknowledged that, in the post-Roe era, different states are going to have different abortion laws, but he never said what he’d do about the religious Republican zealots on Capitol Hill who are currently agitating for some kind of national ban. Indeed, nobody on stage uttered the name “Mike Johnson,” the zealot who runs the House and has co-sponsored a bill mandating a national abortion ban at roughly six weeks.

Lastly, ghastly Vivek Ramaswamy jabbered that Ohio’s abortion-rights referendum “effectively codifies abortion all the way up until the moment of birth without parental consent,” which is a blatant lie (big surprise). In reality, parental consent for minors stays on the books in Ohio, and “up until the moment of birth” is standard right-wing demagoguery, because late-term abortions (for emergency medical reasons) are exceedingly rare. Like, less than one percent of the national total. He also had nothing to say about what Republicans should do going forward, which is fine by me, because he isn’t worth another noun or verb.

What about the frontrunner, who skipped last night’s debate and took refuge among his suckers at a rally up the road? He’s not saying much about abortion, either – but he’s on record with this braggadocio: “I got rid of Roe v. Wade…I was so honored to have done it.”

“Thanks a lot, ball and chain!” no other candidate will ever dare say.

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]

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Did you hear about Speaker Mike and the dinosaurs on the Ark?

To the shock of nobody, Speaker Mike Johnson has already proven himself to be a contemptible little man, pitching a crackpot deal to fund aid for Israel by swiping the money from the bolstered IRS program that cracks down on rich tax cheaters.

Surely Johnson must know that by letting the rich off the hook, it shifts the tax burden to the middle class, right? Maybe he consulted his Bible and found a comforting passage – something like, “Be not honest about what thee knows, lest it enlighten even those in thrall to thou.”

But what fascinates me most about Speaker Mike is his Biblical devotion to the dinosaurs. It’s kind of funny, until we examine it closely.

Given the MAGA GOP’s steady descent into madness, I suppose it’s no surprise that the cult would award the speaker’s gavel to a guy who thinks the earth is only 6,000 years old and thinks that prehistoric creatures hitched rides on Noah’s Ark. But hey, the Book of Genesis says that on the sixth day of creation all land animals, humans and dinosaurs alike, were created at the same time; as Mike decreed unto us in a 2021 interview, the ark episode “is one way to bring people to this recognition of the truth, that what we read in the Bible are actual historical events.”

I’ve got say, that’s quite a brain twister.

That’s what they teach at the Ark Encounter theme park in Kentucky. Mike is personally and professionally close to Answers in Genesis, the group that founded the park; prior to his House career, Mike did legal work for the park. He and the group sing the same hymn. The group says that what’s written in Genesis, about the dinosaurs and everything else, “is a simple but factual presentation of actual events.”

For the sake of argument, let’s ignore the fact the Earth is scientifically estimated to be 4.5 billion years old, and that dinosaurs predated humans by roughly 65 million years (according to geological findings). As Janet Kellogg Ray, an adjunct biology professor in Texas has written, “The timeline just doesn’t work.” But even if we contrive to ignore the timeline, and instead take Speaker Mike at his word, we’re still stuck with a serious conundrum:

How the heck did Noah fit those weighty dinosaurs on board without breaking the boat?

Take, for instance, the Tyrannosaurus Rex, which weighed roughly seven tons. Or consider the far more capacious Titanosaurus, which reputedly tipped the scales at anywhere from 57 to 85 tons. Noah’s boat, according to Genesis, was only 450 feet long and 75 feet wide, so how did he manage the miraculous feat ascribed to him by the Bible – especially on a boat made of wood?

Those creatures surely stressed the vessel – unless, maybe, Noah’s contractor had miraculous foresight and built the boat with steel plating, aluminum, fiberglass and epoxy resin. That would’ve kept it afloat for 40 days, although…well…there would’ve been another problem: In that time the notoriously carnivorous T. Rex would’ve eaten all the little two-by-two animals.

The Bible doesn’t address that particular problem, which is quite an omission for a purported “factual presentation of actual events,” but no matter. Speaker Mike insisted in a 2022 podcast that the Kentucky ark and creationist museum is a can’t-miss: “For all of our friends who have not made a visit, it’s hard to describe. It’s really an awesome experience.”

I don’t begrudge Bible adherents for believing what they want to believe. After all, freedom of worship is constitutionally enshrined. What’s dangerous, however, is a House Speaker who’s tethered to fairy tales. The same guy who believes that dinosaurs bestrode an ark 6,000 years ago despite all factual geological evidence also believes that Trump won the last presidential race despite all factual legal evidence – and, if necessary, he’ll likely say the same if Trump (or any other Republican) loses in 2024.

And that’s not funny at all.

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]

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