Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
The AP is reporting that the state of Michigan is filing multiple felony charges for each of the 16 Republicans who signed a fake electoral vote certificate.
I AM SO NOT A LAWYER, but reading through the felony complaints, I would imagine there are strong incentives for people to plead and squeal.
Forge around and find out — Michigan editionPost + Comments (46)
The story is old and familiar. Hitler led the Nazi party in the last Weimar Reichstag. In the autumn 1932 elections, his share of the vote declined, but the Nazis remained the largest political force in the body. So when the last center-right to right-wing coalition fell, President Hindenberg named Hitler as the new Chancellor–the head of what was still, nominally, a coalition government.
And then he got to work, consolidating authority in his office, isolating non-Nazi figures in the government, exploiting the false-flag of the Reichstag fire, and then achieving a majority in the parliament in an election in the spring of 1933 in which unreliable sectors of the electorate were subject to all the varieties of voter suppression that Hitler’s men could come up with.
Today we learned via the New York Times of Trump’s men working along very similar lines to similar ends:
Donald J. Trump and his allies are planning a sweeping expansion of presidential power over the machinery of government if voters return him to the White House in 2025, reshaping the structure of the executive branch to concentrate far greater authority directly in his hands.
Their plans to centralize more power in the Oval Office stretch far beyond the former president’s recent remarks that he would order a criminal investigation into his political rival, President Biden, signaling his intent to end the post-Watergate norm of Justice Department independence from White House political control.
Mr. Trump and his associates have a broader goal: to alter the balance of power by increasing the president’s authority over every part of the federal government that now operates, by either law or tradition, with any measure of independence from political interference by the White House, according to a review of his campaign policy proposals and interviews with people close to him.
That’s the overview. The details are worse:
“The president’s plan should be to fundamentally reorient the federal government in a way that hasn’t been done since F.D.R.’s New Deal,” said John McEntee, a former White House personnel chief who began Mr. Trump’s systematic attempt to sweep out officials deemed to be disloyal in 2020 and who is now involved in mapping out the new approach.
“Our current executive branch,” Mr. McEntee added, “was conceived of by liberals for the purpose of promulgating liberal policies. There is no way to make the existing structure function in a conservative manner. It’s not enough to get the personnel right. What’s necessary is a complete system overhaul.”
…
“What we’re trying to do is identify the pockets of independence and seize them,” said Russell T. Vought, who ran the Office of Management and Budget in the Trump White House and now runs a policy organization, the Center for Renewing America.
The Fuhrerprinzep is strong in Mr. McEntee and Mr. Vought, but it’s vital to recognize that Trump is the face of this effort, but the campaign is one as old as Reagan’s mainstreaming of the John Birch Society’s politics. This is what a substantial and now dominant fraction of the GOP and its oligarchs have been seeking for a long time–really since class-traitor FDR conceived of government as something that could serve the broad public.
The justification for this would-be coup is that hallmark of conservative argument–a bogus constitutional argument that requires those who advance it to ignore both the plain language of the text and 250 years of experience:
The legal theory rejects the idea that the government is composed of three separate branches with overlapping powers to check and balance each other. Instead, the theory’s adherents argue that Article 2 of the Constitution gives the president complete control of the executive branch, so Congress cannot empower agency heads to make decisions or restrict the president’s ability to fire them. Reagan administration lawyers developed the theory as they sought to advance a deregulatory agenda.
An aside: to call this a “theory” is a bit of MSM normalization of extremism. It was an ad hoc argument by radical right wing figures to provide a fig leaf of cover for their otherwise untenable claims.
Trump is in it for himself–as the article notes, “Personal power has always been a driving force for Mr. Trump. He often gestures toward it in a more simplistic manner, such as in 2019, when he declared to a cheering crowd, “I have an Article 2, where I have the right to do whatever I want as president.”
That’s pretty clear. We already know from the actions of GOP figures in the states and on the Supreme Court that actual free and fair elections are a threat to their rule. A President that achieves the unitary executive model of government can shape elections any way he wants; Trump made it clear that he thought he could do that in 2020! If he gets in again that’s the starting point.
All of which is to say that though the NY Times piece does not IMHO state the fascist threat clearly enough, it’s still a clear and pretty unflinching account of the clear and present danger that Trump himself and the movement that is attempting to use him pose to the United States.
2024 really is an existential election.
Open thread, as per usual.
Image: William Hogarth, An Election Entertainment, 1755
Nothing like discovering you’ve been indicted on 31 37* counts of various national security law violations (including, apparently, sharing military secrets with any car dealer from Grosse Pointe willing to cough up the Bedminster entry fee**) and then losing two of your top lawyers–the ones who just took the “Yup. He’s going to be indicted” meeting with the DoJ):
“A firm to be named later” is simply perfection. It’s kind of like trading an MLB starter for a bag of snacks and a minor league utility infielder with a noodle arm.
I’ll repeat here advice I gave yesterday on social media, free, gratis, and for nothing: any Florida-licensed attorney considering taking on this client needs to get paid up front for the estimate (with a generous contingency) of what it’ll take to work from indictment to verdict.
Even if the money’s coming from Trump’s PAC, would you want to bet on his honoring any invoice presented after a conviction?
Anyway–there’s a long road ahead and there are no sure things except for Box Hoax in the fourth at an upstate track where the local wise guys have taken an interest. So we have to take our schadenfreude when it’s offered, right?
This thread is as open as the 24-hour Denny’s in Sparks, Nevada.
**Might be hyperbole. Might not. Impossible to tell with this guy.
Image: Thomas Eakins, Baseball players practicing, 1875.
Judge says a terrorism enhancement would be appropriate in Rhodes's case.
(Rhodes is jotting notes.. and judge reads off some of his findings)
— Scott MacFarlane (@MacFarlaneNews) May 25, 2023
Open Thread
The Oath Keepers officially include terroristsPost + Comments (241)
Trump presents a real collective action problem for the GOP. His die hards are a big enough portion of the GOP base that no individual office holder can risk pissing him off, but collectively he’s looking more and more like a stone around the whole party’s neck.
— The Fig Economy (@figgityfigs) April 5, 2023
If recent history is any guide, since they’re true believers, it’ll take some time for this to lead to meaningful moderation on anything.
If that means cementing further losses, good.
— The Fig Economy (@figgityfigs) April 5, 2023
And if it means that anti-Trump Republicans are able to break out as a meaningful force and splinter the vote further, extra good.
— The Fig Economy (@figgityfigs) April 5, 2023
I sense a theme here… pic.twitter.com/591kEgIcxi
— @mbaram (@mbaram) April 5, 2023
Per Rolling Stone, Trump Team Says Only ‘Thirsty’ ‘Cockroaches’ Would Claim He’s Sad About Getting Arrested:
Donald Trump wants everyone to know that he was not at all saddened about getting arrested and having to plead not guilty to 34 felony charges stemming from an alleged sexual encounter with a porn star. “I can say that at least for this moment right now, I am in great spirits,” Trump wrote in an email blasted out to supporters after his historic arraignment in Manhattan on Tuesday. But behind the scenes of that crafted public image, cracks have begun to show in the former president’s famous self-confidence, according to those who know him well.
Despite the bravado, one person close to Trump was struck by how “shitty and pissed off” he has sounded in private the past few days when discussing the charges. Two other sources who currently work for Trump note to Rolling Stone, one completely unprompted, how “unhappy” or obviously “deflated” the former president looked in the video and photos of his Tuesday court appearance…
Trump’s team is taking pains to make sure none of that brooding reaches his supporters. According to two sources with knowledge of the matter, Trump has cared so much about curating this perception of being unshaken that he himself in recent days encouraged allies to tell the press and public that his mood was “great,” and he was stronger than ever.
And in a sign of just how much the former president wishes to convince the public that he wasn’t feeling down about getting criminally charged, in the earliest hours of Wednesday morning, Trump’s spokesperson Steven Cheung sent Rolling Stone a statement fervently disputing the characterizations of the ex-president’s mood. “These unnamed sources who speak about President Trump’s mood have no idea what they’re talking about and are simply lying to make it seem like they know what’s going on,” Cheung says. “In fact, they are on the outside looking in, and it’s desperate, sad, and thirsty beyond belief. They are cowards and should stop acting like cockroaches scurrying around in the dark.”…
Trump had hoped, Rolling Stone reported Monday, to turn the booking into a high-profile display of public persecution, sending a message to his supporters and galvanizing his campaign. Instead, he got a more muted proceeding, with few statements to the public. By evening, he was back to running for president, delivering a short — by his standards — address to supporters at Mar-a-Lago. In a rambling speech filled with grievances, a hoarse and tired-looking Trump fumed at what he claimed were “racist” and “radical-left lunatic bomb-thrower” prosecutors pursuing him in New York, Georgia, and the special counsel’s office…
Humorous coda!
Late Night Open Thread: Life Among the Savage MAGAtsPost + Comments (169)
Republicans want nothing more in the whole world than to look at your kids' genitals, because they're perverted freaks. https://t.co/IcReTcmK4h
— Leonid Baezhnev ?? (@rev_avocado) April 5, 2023
??Some kids have it tough growing up without worrying about shooters, book bans, omitted history, rainbows, & 2 Dads.
The GQP are forcing our kids from having a normal childhood experience. Think of that when you vote next time.#ResistanceUnited #ProudBlue #DemVoice1 pic.twitter.com/7qBj5FqopA— ?? Scotty Supports Ukraine??????? (@MrScottLads) April 6, 2023
I feel like most Americans don’t want genital inspections of their kids and democrats should run hard against these fascist perverts. https://t.co/h2WgDbZCaE
— David M. Perry (@Lollardfish) April 5, 2023
Late Night Open Thread: GOP, the ‘Groomers Or Perverts’ PartyPost + Comments (33)
Update: the next piece is up.
I was just about to write about something that’s bugging me a lot these days–the ProPublica’s terrible, no-good, craptastic piece on the claim that the COVID pandemic got its start as a lab leak, compounded by a tone-deaf and disingenuous defense of the major journalism fails in that work–when news hit my Mastodon feed of Talking Points Memo’s report on Mark Meadows’s texts documenting the plot to overthrow the United States:
The vast majority of Meadows’ texts described in this series are being made public for the very first time. They show the senior-most official in the Trump White House communicating with members of Congress, state-level politicians, and far-right activists as they work feverishly to overturn Trump’s loss in the 2020 election. The Meadows texts illustrate in moment-to-moment detail an authoritarian effort to undermine the will of the people and upend the American democratic system as we know it.
TPM teased the story in its morning memo (which I didn’t see until just now), and is doling out the material in chunks. So far, all we have is the intro article linked above, describing the material and sketching out where gaps in the record remain. No juicy stuff yet. But they’re making a big deal out of this, so I expect some serious sedition to drop over the next hours and days. Any guesses as to the top traitors to be outed by their own texts?
And the inevitable (NSW):
Oh yeah: this thread is, of course, open.
Image: Plate from a pirated series of Hogarth’s Rake’s Progress, “He and his Drunken Companions raise a Riot in Covent Garden,” 1735.