LaMouffette
LaMouffette's Journal"Is that a pardon in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?"
If the secret "pocket pardon" is a legitimate pardon that a president can grant, just think how Trump might use the power of the pocket pardon.
All of the white collar criminals currently crawling on their bellies to him and shelling out millions for any kind of pardon would be especially beholden to Trump if he gave them a secret pocket pardon. Trump could, I assume, hang onto the pocket pardon and reveal it at any time in the future—or not. Trump could use the threat of simply tearing up the pocket pardon if a recipient did not do exactly what he told them to do. He might even use it against sketchy bankers to get them to loan him money again. Or against Republican senators and representatives to get them to do his future bidding.
And he could also sell them pocket pardons without actually doing anything to document the pardons, and when, later, the recipients are like, "Where's my pardon I paid a million dollars for?" Trump can feign ignorance (something he's really good at due to already being for-real ignorant). The recipients can't sue him for Trump swindling them out of a million dollars for a pocket pardon because then they would open themselves up to charges of bribery.
The really scary thing? I think I'm starting to think like Trump.
It would be hilarious if Trump resigned the morning of Jan. 20 and VP Pence were nowhere to be found
to give Trump his pardon before Joe Biden got sworn in.
Maybe Pence got held up in traffic, or he forgot to set his alarm clock, or a mob of insurrectionists spotted him and gave chase . . .
Please, please, please forces of the universe, let this happen!
I wish I were the fly on Mike Pence's head right now.
And that fly were telepathic! What must Pence be thinking right now?
I'm sure Pence has secretly despised Trump from the beginning, but thought that being Trump's VP would be a sure ticket to the presidency for him. And now, after Pence has concealed his hatred for Trump for four years and has loyally supported through thick and thin the monster whom even his wife thought was vile, Trump is berating him and calling him the p-word.
How tempting it must be for him to go ahead and invoke the 25th Amendment! But Pence's political ambitions won't let him do that because he's afraid of sabotaging his future in the Republican Party. But now Trump's base wants to literally hang him! What to do? What to do?
Just 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?
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:
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.
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!
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Member since: Thu Jan 23, 2020, 02:36 PMNumber of posts: 2,315