Now that the writers strike is over, I can finally start posting again! No, I’m not a WGA member. But, hey, I’m not above abusing their strike as a flimsy excuse for my own absence from this blog.
In all seriousness, I’m relieved that all parties agreed upon an equitable deal, and I hope that the SAG-AFTRA strike can be similarly resolved in due course. I need new seasons of “Severance”, “For All Mankind”, “The Mandalorian”, and “Poker Face” to occasionally take my mind off of politics.
Rare instances of exceptional writing still manage to successfully navigate the gauntlet of corporate concerns. AI will evolve into a transformative tool for mankind and could even today be an excellent research assistant. I cannot, however, imagine that AI will ever replace the creativity of a talented human writer who can fully exploit the prodigiously pliant poetic potential of the written word [… says the guy who occasionally dumps word salads onto his self-indulgent blog].
That said, I’m increasingly convinced that AI would be a much better alternate to many American politicians.
Anyway, …
I started numerous blog entries over the last several weeks but, for various reasons, never advanced any of them to publication. I’m thus taking this opportunity to clear some my drafts and post quick takes on just a few of the many topics that have recently been newsworthy.
The Orange Guy’s Court Cases
OG’s legal problems could easily fill a separate blog – which is itself the problem. As the charges mount and the various cases progress, there is a clear danger that media saturation will cause everyone to just look away. I’m a political nerd and even I’m exhausted trying to follow every filing, every hearing, and every ruling in every case in every venue. I find it useful to occasionally take a step back and review the Big Picture…
- Federal Civil Case in New York
- Major Charges: Sexual Abuse, Defamation
- OG has been found guilty of sexually abusing E. Jean Carroll in the 1990s and then defaming her by lying about it. A jury awarded Carroll $5M in damages. Appeals are pending. Subsequent charges have been filed for repeated defamation. A trial is currently scheduled to begin on January 15, 2024.
- State Civil Case in New York
- Major Charge: Fraud
- OG has been found guilty of fraud, knowingly overstating his net worth by up to $2.2B by vastly inflating asset values to obtain better loan terms while keeping valuations lower for tax purposes. A trial is in-progress on related charges and to determine damages. Appeals are pending.
- State Criminal Case in New York
- Major Charges: Falsification of Business Records, Election Law Violations
- OG has been indicted by a state grand jury on 34 counts related to his alteration of business records to conceal a hush money payment made to a porn star from campaign funds. A trial is scheduled to begin on March 25, 2024.
- State Criminal Case in Georgia
- Major Charges: Election Tampering, Racketeering
- OG has been indicted by a state grand jury on 13 counts related to his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia. While the trial for two co-conspirators is scheduled to start on October 20, 2023, no trial date has yet been set for OG.
- Federal Criminal Case in D.C.
- Major Charges: Conspiracy, Obstruction
- OG has been indicted by a federal grand jury on 4 counts related to his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results. A trial is currently scheduled to begin on March 4, 2024.
- Federal Criminal Case in Florida
- Major Charges: Willful Retention of Classified Documents, Obstruction
- OG has been indicted by a federal grand jury on 40 counts related to his willful retention of national security documents and his efforts to hide them. A trial date has not yet been set and OG is attempting to delay it until 2025.
No sane person can believe that OG is innocent of all of the above. Most of the related facts are not even in dispute! The Big Picture is thus quite obvious: OG is an amoral criminal who truly believes that laws don’t apply to him.
Of course, the devil will be in the details as the American justice system grinds through the cornucopia of cases. In the meantime, however, the devil is also the leading contender for the 2024 GOP Presidential nomination.
I’d say that Republicans should be ashamed of themselves but, alas, they have no shame.
A Military Execution
I’m well beyond commenting on most of OG’s verbal diarrhea – even at the risk of normalizing said crap. One comment, however, deserves much more focus than it has received.
OG recently suggested that former Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley deserved to be executed.
Such rhetoric from a wannabe Kim Jong Un cannot be simply ignored. Where’s the outrage from the GOP?
Hillary Mania
Contrast the above to the faux Republican outrage related to a comment by Hillary Clinton suggesting that many OG supporters need to be “deprogrammed” out of their cult.
Ya’ know, Hillary may be an old MAGA enemy, but she holds no public office and she’s not running for anything. She’s been a private citizen for many years now. MAGA-World’s continued infatuation with her is pathetic at best. But, hey, thanks for elevating her comments within the national media! I’d missed them myself. Turns out she’s absolutely right and I agree with everything she said.
The Republican Sideshow
Democrats may have their fair share of circus performers, but none can hold a bright red nose to the giggle of clowns on the other side of the tent. Just since I last posted here, …
- Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-FL) was thrown out of a live theatre performance of a kid-friendly show for being massively disruptive and was caught on video in the audience giving a handjob to her date.
- Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-TX) was detained by law enforcement for being belligerent at a rodeo.
- Rep. George Santos (R-NY) has now been charged with 23 felony counts, including conspiracy, wire fraud, identity theft, money laundering, theft of public funds, and numerous FEC violations.
- Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) brought the U.S. House to a screeching halt by calling for the ouster of Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) with no follow-on plan beyond his own fund-raising efforts.
- Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) just yesterday wore a white shirt with a large, red “A” saying, “I’m wearing the ‘scarlet letter’ after the week that I just had, last week, being a woman up here and being demonized for my vote and for my voice.” So… just askin’: Has “The Scarlet Letter” been banned in South Carolina? In the book, Hester Prynne was forced to wear the letter “A” as a punishment for Adultery. Unless this was a confessional, I assume Mace’s “A” was simply indicative of an Asinine stunt.
- Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) claimed that the movie “Barbie” is brainwashing young girls with Chinese propaganda… due to a crayon drawing of a map found in the background of a scene.
- Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) continues to single-handedly block over 300 senior military promotions putting our country at risk.
- Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) displayed enlarged naked pictures of Hunter Biden during a live House Oversight Committee hearing on IRS whistleblowers. And Hunter’s whistle wasn’t even getting blown!
Step right up, Ladies & Gentlemen, to the Lamest Show on Earth!
The Former Speaker of the House
Eight Republican members of Congress backed Gaetz in his mission to oust McCarthy – which was more than enough given the GOP’s thin House majority. Of course, Democrats also voted in unison to vacate the office. Picking a Speaker is the sole responsibility of the majority party unless they explicitly want to play nice. Since McCarthy has been loathe to reach across the aisle, he shouldn’t have expected any help from the minority party. This is the way.
The problem wasn’t the loss of McCarthy as Speaker; he simply wasn’t a strong leader. The problem was that the GOP vacated the office with no clue what to do next. And, since they were stumped, they just decided to go home for the week! That’s right. Despite the facts that (1) they’re on a very short self-cut leash to fund the government and (2) nothing can get done without a Speaker, they just decided to take some time off. <sigh>
The Next Speaker of the House
So. The Gaetz Motel has a vacancy but it’s unclear who’s going to get to rent the room and when they might be able to move in.
While this is all playing out as I type, it appears that Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA) has been nominated over Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) for the Speakership after a very close internal vote within the GOP caucus. However, a vote still needs to be held on the House floor and it is as yet unclear if Scalise will have the votes there. And, if he does manage to get a majority of votes, it is as yet unclear who he will have had to fellate to get them. While it’s possible that we could have a new Speaker by the time you’re reading this, it’s also possible that we’ll be right back where started – with a weak Speaker who is again handcuffed by extremists.
Unfortunately, no one in D.C. recognized the opportunity here. In a perfect world, both parties “could” come to an agreement where they could actually get things done. It’s not the “Screw the Democrats” approach that most Republicans want and it’s not the “Power Sharing” approach that many Democrats want. Republicans currently hold a majority in the House. It’s a thin majority, but it’s a majority. Since there’s no Co-Speaker contemplated in the Constitution, a Republican should hold that office and Republicans should retain a majority of seats in most House committees. However, in exchange for supporting a sane Republican Speaker who is not under the thumb of far-right idiots, it would seem reasonable to grant Democrats some ability to bring bills to the floor to be voted up or down by a cross-party majority.
Is a world where Democracy actually works too much to ask?
Yeah… probably.
The Senate
Dysfunction has fully infected the House and the disease is spreading to the Senate.
Senators also decided to take a week off despite the approaching deadline they gave themselves to fund the government. The corporate world would see “All Hands On Deck” while Congress just sees a chance to take a vacation.
I will admit to being a bit surprised that the Senate Judiciary Committee seems poised to let Democrats name a replacement Democratic member now that Sen. Laphonza Butler (D-CA) has been sworn into the late Diane Feinstein’s Senate seat. I rather expected the GOP to put up an unprecedented, ultra-partisan fight here, but it appears that they won’t. I am thus quite happy to award GOP Senators a few Brownie Points for not being complete assholes.
Biden Impeachment
There’s no question that Hunter Biden leveraged the fact that his father was Vice President and/or President in his businesses. Okay. And? Company boards are rife with “name” members and leveraging a famous last name for marketing purposes isn’t exactly breaking news in corporate America.
Would Neil Bush have been on the board of Silverado or been given a multi-million-dollar consulting contract with Grace Semiconductor if he had a different last name? Would Billy Beer have been a thing if his brother hadn’t been the President? Would anyone give a damn what Ginni Thomas thinks if her husband wasn’t on the Supreme Court? And I’m not even going bring up OG’s kids.
If Hunter Biden is guilty of crimes, he should be tried in a court-of-law like anyone else. The Republican Special Prosecutor seems quite capable of handling any such prosecutions without “help” from the U.S. House.
If there was any influence peddling resulting in inappropriate actions taken by Joe Biden, that would also be worthy of legal pursuit. However, the GOP has produced zero evidence of any wrongdoing here. If they had such evidence, we’d be seeing daily Special Reports on Fox News. Instead, in the midst of numerous real crises, Republicans are focused on holding impeachment hearings to prove that Joe Biden took phone calls from his kid.
It’s all political theater. And on that note, …
Paxton Impeachment
The failure of the Texas Senate to remove TX AG Ken Paxton from office was no big surprise. It may have looked like a trial, but that was also just political theater. Neither side did a great job presenting their cases. No, scratch that. The arguments from both sides were absolutely pathetic. These were the best attorneys in Texas? Wow. I really shoulda gone to law school. In the end, though, none of it mattered. It was quite obvious based on the pre-trial motions that the prosecution was going to end up a couple of votes short. I suspect that the votes to convict on one or two charges were VERY close in the closed-door sessions. However, if the the two-thirds mark wasn’t going to be met, Republican Senators had little reason to take the political hit of casting a public vote against Paxton. Justice be damned.
Now, we can only hope that the federal fraud charges against Paxton eventually stick.
Governing
As our government deals with all of the above, let’s take one brief moment to reflect on the fact that NONE of the above has anything to do with governing. On that front:
- Our elected representatives barely and temporarily avoided defaulting on our national debt for no particularly good reason.
- Our elected representatives only managed to pass a stop-gap budget measure the keep the government’s doors open for 45 days.
- Our elected representatives are busy randomly assigning blame for a decades-long conflict in the Middle East since they are structurally incapable of responding to the recent terrorist attacks in Israel.
- Our elected representatives can’t even manage to take a vote on continued aid to Ukraine.
Our elected representatives suck at their jobs.
Congressional Redistricting
This topic deserves more attention than I’m going to give it at the moment. For now, I mostly want to mention the rather surprising SCOTUS win for a fair congressional map in Alabama and a probable SCOTUS loss for a fair map in South Carolina.
Despite the best efforts of the Alabama GOP to gerrymander most of the state’s Black voters into a single district, a 5-4 SCOTUS ruling will now require a new 2024 map in Alabama that gives Black voters a fighting chance to elect their chosen representatives in two of the state’s seven congressional districts. While that’s only a net increase of one district, the principle matters. Racial gerrymandering is both wrong and illegal. Approximately 27% of Alabama voters are Black and they should have a proportional voice in their government.
On the flip side, oral arguments were recently heard for a similar case in South Carolina. That state is arguing that their map was not racially gerrymandered but was instead politically gerrymandered simply to give Republicans more seats than they deserve. The fact that the gerrymander also just happens to limit racial representation is a mere coincidence. Unfortunately, a SCOTUS majority seems to be perfectly okay with this argument.
There are redistricting cases pending in other states and I may come back to this topic. In the meantime, Democracy Docket is a good resource for keeping up-to-date.
2024 Elections
I’ll try to rerun my analytics with updated data in the near-ish future. For now, I’m going to do my broken record thing:
Can we PLEASE stop conducting and obsessing over national popularity polls? Such polls are meaningless to the nominating process given the way party primaries are scheduled and conducted. Such polls are also meaningless to the general election given the Electoral College. There is no relevant information to be gleaned from national polls. Just. Stop.
Epilogue
Well, that was fun.
We do live in interesting times.