LaMouffette
LaMouffette's JournalJust throwing this out there: What if we had a higher governmental power to provide the ultimate
checks and balances on the three branches of government?
It would be a coalition of all former living presidents and all former living defense secretaries and all former living secretaries of state and select former military officers. The members of the coalition would have the ability to reject future members, such as Trump, based on misbehavior while in office.
This coalition would only convene at moments of extreme upheaval, like the one we are experiencing now, and they would, hopefully, provide a final, break-the-glass, emergency safety mechanism to remove a rogue president (Trump), remove an all-powerful Senate majority leader (McConnell), and restore balance to a lopsided Supreme Court.
This occurred to me after thinking about the warning letter that ten former defense secretaries published in the Washington Post on January 3.
We have all these former government and military officials still around, from former generals to former presidents, with hundreds of years of combined experience, and with the wisdom of hindsight and the protection of not having to run for office or be accountable to wealthy donors. If they could be convened in moments of crisis to make the final say on a president's or other elected official's ability to remain in office, I think we would have a better way of dealing with future Trumps and future McConnells.
Never gonna happen? Probably not. The Republicans already know that the only way they can win is by cheating. They would be very vocal in their opposition to any further obstruction to their efforts to lie, cheat, and steal to win elections.
But just sayin'.
The rioters have no idea what having an authoritarian government would truly be like,
and they are too stupid to realize that authoritarianism is exactly the path their Dear Leader is taking them down. They think they are defending freedom when they are actually kicking it to death with jackboots.
Speaking of which, remember when Turkey's Erdogan was in Washington in 2017 and his jackbooted thugs beat up peaceful American protesters?
[link:
This is what authoritarianism looks like. And the rioters have no idea that THIS is the 'Merica they are welcoming with their lawlessness and unfurled Trump flags.
The suspense is killing me! So I will say goodnight, DU, with a Joe Ely tune:
[link:
|Go, Georgia Dems! The free world is depending on you!
How to keep the Senate (if we win in Georgia) and the House in 2022? Do what Andrew Yang suggested:
Begin $1,000-per-month payments to Americans as a way to compensate American workers for the thousands of jobs that have been outsourced to other countries.
Yang suggested these payments as a way to offset job loss due to automation, but it's just as valuable as a way to offset job loss due to outsourcing. He proposes paying for it with a value added tax (VAT). From a 2019 PBS News Hour article:
Yang plans to give every American adult $1,000 a month in universal basic income, as a way to offset job loss from automation. The first-time presidential candidate proposes paying for the monthly distributions, in large part, by implementing a new 10 percent value-added tax (VAT) on goods and services.
[link:https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/how-would-andrew-yang-give-americans-1000-per-month-with-this-tax|
I think we should do some form of the value added tax, but more importantly, pay for it by taxing the profits of the American corporations who have moved their production, call centers, and IT departments overseas.
Many people voted for Trump in 2016 because they were angry and frustrated over the loss of manufacturing jobs to overseas outsourcing. Trump declared that he would bring manufacturing jobs back and make companies who outsourced face consequences. He didn't do that, so I have no clue why people voted for him again in 2020. But that anger over disappearing jobs is still very much there.
The Democratic Party could begin to convince lower-income Americans that they truly are the party of the people by actually enacting consequences against those companies. A tax on companies that outsource used solely to fund a monthly $1,000 payment to American workers would be something concrete and incredibly beneficial to lower-class and middle-class Americans.
When the blessed day comes when Typhoid Trump is out of office, could families of Covid victims file
a massive wrongful death class-action lawsuit against him in civil court, in other words, in a state court, so that no pardon would apply (although if he's out of office, I guess that wouldn't be a concern anymore, right?).
Can you imagine? By January 20, there could be 500,000 Covid victims, so a possible 500,000-count wrongful death suit.
I'm not a lawyer, so not sure how these class-action lawsuits work, but it's how the Brown and Goldberg families got some bit of justice for the wrongful deaths of Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldberg.
OJ Simpson has yet to pay the millions he owes from the settlement and it's a foregone conclusion that Trump would never pay up. But this murderer needs to be hounded for the rest of his sad, pathetic, stupid life and reminded daily that he is responsible for the deaths of half a million Americans and for the shattered lives of millions of Americans who lost family members because this callous idiot lied about the seriousness of the disease and failed to take action to mitigate its spread.
Laurence Tribe just explained on Lawrence O'Donnell why Trump could not self-pardon.
Tribe's reasoning was that it would violate the next article that says the president must faithfully execute the laws. He added that if presidents knew they were able to self-pardon, then they would come into office knowing they could get away with anything, since a self-pardon made them essentially above the law.
That was reassuring, until I remembered that it doesn't matter if Trump can't self-pardon because he can just resign and have Mike Pence pardon him instead.
Which made me wonder: How on God's green earth is it Constitutional, then, for a vice president to be able to pardon the president for whom he served? Isn't that almost exactly the same as the president doing a self-pardon?
And why, after Ford pardoned Nixon, didn't Congress pass a law to ensure that a vice president could not pardon a criminal president ever again?
I guess this explains why Roger Stone has that stupid-ass tattoo of Nixon on his back. At least something makes sense.
Goodnight, DUers!
Regarding Trump's pay-for-pardon scheme: Could the House bring impeachment charges in 50 days?
The president's pardon power is absolute except in cases of impeachment, right? If the House could fast-track an impeachment in December, and then the Senate voted to convict and remove him (and yes, I know that's unlikely), then maybe all of those corrupt pardons would be nullified.
Even if the Senate failed to convict Trump, another impeachment trial would at least bring this latest outrage out in the open.
Even as I write this, I know this plan is dead in the water, coming so close to Biden's inauguration. Still, you would think somehow, someway that justice would find a way to prevail.
It just makes me ill to think of the incredulous glee Trump must have felt when his lawyers first explained to him the power of the pardon: "I can pardon ANYBODY?! For ANYTHING? Nooooo! Really???? Really???? Even MYSELF?????
I'm so sick of individuals being vested with supreme power over vital government functions.
Like Emily Murphy having the supreme power to hold up the presidential transition. And Mitch McConnell having the supreme power to bring or refuse to bring bills passed by the House to the floor of the Senate. And Trump having the supreme power of granting top level security clearances—even when people like Jared and Ivanka have been denied clearances because they pose a threat to national security—and the supreme power to grant blanket pardons and to discard by executive order programs like the Iran Nuclear Treaty, which took hundreds of person-hours and massive diplomacy measures to enact. And state electors having the sole power of ignoring the majority of voters in their state and acting as "faithless electors."
Is this seriously what The Founders had in mind??? Just like capitalism running wildly out of control due to deregulation, the federal government is running amok from unregulated power in the hands of individuals and in one political party—the majority one.
The only "supreme" power in government should be the Supreme Court, and even that has the power of decision-making spread out over nine individuals (ostensibly), not just one.
This is nuts. We need a major injection of checks-and-balances before the next Trump gets elected.
The House Oversight Committee should subpoena Emily Murphy to come testify immediately.
And if she ignores the subpoena, hold her in contempt of Congress and arrest her.
She needs to publicly explain her refusal to formally recognize President-Elect Joe Biden and release the funds needed to carry out the transition to the new administration.
I don't think her excuses would hold up very well against Katie Porter and her whiteboard.
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