Tag Amy Howe

Things I think that I think you should think too

Pat Ryan Leave a comment

It isn’t any wonder that people are confused, thanks to the ongoing gratuitous lying of TFG, and the lazy characterizations of and headlines about the news of the day. There are so many examples from which to choose, here’s a recent one that’s got me annoyed.

Five years ago amid the protests over the murder of George Floyd there came a movement to end the tributes being paid to those who committed treason by taking up arms against the United States of America during the Civil War. This started with opposition to statues and other monuments to the memory of Confederate war “heroes” across the country — mainly in the states of the former Confederacy, of course — and grew to reconsidering the naming of a number of U.S. military installations, vessels and related facilities which honored the likes of Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, the Battle of Chancellorsville and many more. (I wrote about my experience in this matter ten years ago.) Over the veto of President TFG, Congress created what was known as the Naming Commission — known in that way because its full name, I swear to God, was The Commission on the Naming of Items of the Department of Defense that Commemorate the Confederate States of America or Any Person Who Served Voluntarily with the Confederate States of America — with the mandate “to create a list of military assets with names associated with the Confederate States of America and recommendations for their removal.” In January 2023 the Department of Defense leadership ordered the Pentagon bureaucracy to execute the commission’s recommended name changes.

The changes themselves generated protests. Some, like a retired Army lieutenant colonel of my acquaintance, objected to the mothballing of the familiar names of places that they felt had created their own important history, despite the character of the men for whom they were named; I get that. But the real disheartening response was from the very many people who disagreed with ending the veneration of heroes of the Lost Cause, or who dishonestly argued that the change was meant to “change history.” No, the change was meant to stop honoring people who were never worthy of the honor, people who in fact were enemies of America.

Now, along comes a president who has clearly demonstrated, over and over again in the first five months of his second term in office, that he doesn’t believe any laws or other actions of the United States Congress apply to him — a position the Supreme Court has given him some reason to believe. He also (mistakenly) believes himself the cleverest little boy in class, and of course he lies as easily and as routinely as he breathes. In a speech this week, which prompted a renewal of concerns about his improper politicization of the U.S. military, he said “he would restore the names of all Army bases that were named for Confederate generals but were ordered changed by Congress in the waning days of his first administration.” Except, of course, he isn’t doing that at all.

In a statement, the Army said it would “take immediate action” to restore the old names of the bases originally honoring Confederates, but the base names would instead honor other American soldiers with similar names and initials.

For example, Fort Eisenhower in Georgia, honoring President Dwight D. Eisenhower — who led the D-Day landings during World War II — would revert to the name Fort Gordon, once honoring John Brown Gordon, the Confederate slave owner and suspected Ku Klux Klan member. This time around, however, the Army said the base would instead honor Master Sgt. Gary Gordon, who fought in the Battle of Mogadishu in Somalia.

The Army is acknowledging reality here, stating that the “new” names just so happen to match the previous names but actually honor other people and not the Confederates who are no relation to the new honorees.

Mr. Trump, however, contradicted that explanation in his announcement, at one point saying that the Army would be “restoring” the name of one Army base in Virginia — Fort Gregg-Adams — to “Fort Robert E. Lee,” previously named for the commander of the Confederate army. The Army said in its statement that the base would be renamed to honor Pvt. Fitz Lee, a member of the all-Black Buffalo Soldiers who was awarded a Medal of Honor after serving in the Spanish-American War.

The president lied, contradicting his own Pentagon. He did it, I believe, to curry favor with those people who didn’t want the names of the traitors removed from the bases in the first place, by telling them he was undoing what Congress and the Biden Administration had done. This is just a late example of something I’ve said about him for years: he will say anything, whatever he wants to be true in that moment, with no regard for its actual truth or even if it contradicts something he himself said previously. None of that matters to him. When it comes to anything he says, I find it helpful to remember, as was suggested some years ago (sorry, can’t remember by who), that he’s behaving as he always has: he’s a real estate developer hyping his latest project, and all that matters is closing the deal.

What I also find so very annoying in this case is how The New York Times presented the story I quoted from just now: the headline is “Trump Says Army Bases Will Revert to Confederate Names” and the subhead is “The move would reverse a yearslong effort to remove names and symbols honoring the Confederacy from the military.” Not “President Pulls a Fast One, Tricks Gullible Followers Into Thinking He Stood Up To The Woke Mob And Returned Glory To White Supremacists” followed by “Bait-and-switch inserts new honorees with same names as dishonored Confederates to make MAGA mob think they beat the libs again.”

I know that everyone gets it, intellectually, that our president is full of it. We all knew that last November, but he won anyway. Still, how come we seem to have to relearn the lesson day after day after day? I believe most people, including me, still start by hearing “the president” say something and think, hmm, that’s interesting, or terrific, or stupid or illegal, but our default reaction to Trump anytime his lips are moving should be, no, that’s not right. Honest reporters of the news do a pretty good job pointing out his “errors” but they must respond to such a tsunami of crap that the constant corrections can blend into the background noise.

On a related issue, I think it’s just wrong that anyone credit Trump himself for coming up with the ideas for the many rotten things being done by our government in his name. He’s not stupid, but he’s not educated enough about how the government works to have figured out how to short-circuit it, to sabotage it, to subvert our national ethos. Those ideas are coming from the smart, educated, devious and subversive supplicants in MAGA nation and the Christian nationalist world who are and have been using Trump as a figurehead to undermine our democracy and turn (or return) America into the nation of white Christians they believe it was and should be again. Maybe we can talk more about that another day.

Courting trouble for the former guy

Pat Ryan Leave a comment

Former President I Will Not Be Ignored got a little more of what he’s been begging for yesterday: attention from our nation’s judicial system.  In response to his ridiculous-on-its-face insistence that former presidents enjoy lifelong complete criminal immunity from prosecution for actions taken while in office, lest they be indicted by forces of the opposing party the instant they leave office, a federal appeals court panel ruled – unanimously – that he is off his rocker.  Essentially.  In a legal sense.

At public arguments in January, the three judges expressed concern over the most extreme implications of Trump’s view, with one suggesting it would allow a future president to order the assassination of a political rival. But in their opinion Tuesday, they said it is Trump’s own alleged crimes — “an unprecedented assault on the structure of our government” — that threaten democracy if left beyond the reach of criminal prosecution.

“We cannot accept former President Trump’s claim that a President has unbounded authority to commit crimes that would neutralize the most fundamental check on executive power — the recognition and implementation of election results,” the judges wrote. “Nor can we sanction his apparent contention that the Executive has carte blanche to violate the rights of individual citizens to vote and to have their votes count.”

When he “warns” that all political parties would legally attack former leaders from other parties if those leaders did not enjoy legal protection, it’s a textbook example of the projection associated with his narcissism: in fact, such a thing has never happened in the past, but it is something that he himself has already promised he will do if he becomes president again next year.  This case could still go to the Supreme Court; we will know within weeks.  But we do know that the Supremes will be hearing a Trump case tomorrow, a case over his Constitutional eligibility to ever become president again.

The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on Thursday in what is shaping up to be the biggest election case since its ruling nearly 25 years ago in Bush v. Gore. At issue is whether former President Donald Trump, who is once again the front runner for the Republican nomination for president, can be excluded from the ballot because of his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attacks on the U.S. Capitol. 

Although the question comes to the court in a case from Colorado, the impact of the court’s ruling could be much more far-reaching. Maine’s secretary of state ruled in December that Trump should be taken off the primary ballot there, and challenges to Trump’s eligibility are currently pending in 11 other states. Trump warns that the efforts to keep him off the ballot “threaten to disenfranchise tens of millions of Americans” and “promise to unleash chaos and bedlam if other state courts and state officials follow Colorado’s lead.” But the voters challenging Trump’s eligibility counter that “we already saw the ‘bedlam’ Trump unleashed when he was on the ballot and lost.”

At issue is a section of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, approved in the years following the Civil War to prevent former rebels from entering government and continuing their rebellion.  Paraphrasing here, it prohibits anyone who’d previously been a U.S. government official, and then later “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” against the Constitution, from later serving in government again.  Pretty sensible, right?  In other words, among the requirements to be president, one must be at least 35 years old and not have previously been a traitor.

Trump’s arguments that the 14th Amendment doesn’t apply to him are from the same book as his “presidents need to be able to commit crimes with impunity” arguments in the immunity case he’s currently losing.

Trump’s first, and main, argument is that Section 3 does not apply to him because the president is not an “officer of the United States.” In other provisions of the Constitution where the phrase “officer of the United States” appears, Trump notes, it does not apply to the president – for example, the clause that requires the president to “Commission all the Officers of the United States” and the impeachment clause, which lists the president and vice president separately from “civil Officers of the United States.” Moreover, Trump adds, the Supreme Court in 2010 indicated that the phrase applies only to federal officials who are appointed; it does not extend to elected officials like the president.

The voters dismiss this argument, countering that the president has been called the “chief executive officer of the United States” since long before the 14th Amendment was drafted. As with the phrase “office under the United States,” they say, Section 3 simply uses the phrase “of the United States” to distinguish between federal offices, such as the presidency, and state officers.

The voters also discount Trump’s reliance on other provisions of the Constitution. They note that although the appointments clause requires the president to appoint some “officers of the United States,” it also indicates that the Constitution provides for the appointment of other “officers of the United States” – including the president and vice president – by the electoral college. And the impeachment clause, they reason, provides for the impeachment of the president and vice president separately from “all civil Officers of the United States” because (unlike other officials) the president and vice president play both civil and military roles.

Section 3 also does not apply to him, Trump continues, because when he is sworn in the president pledges to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution” – rather than “support” it, as Section 3 requires.

The voters contend, however, that “Section 3 is about violation of a sworn duty, not about pedantic wordplay.” The oath that the president takes to “preserve, protect and defend” the Constitution is an oath to support the Constitution, they insist.

The voters add that an interpretation of Section 3 that excludes the president, while still applying to all other officials – including “postmaster or county sheriff” – who took an oath to support the Constitution and then engaged in insurrection would be at odds with the purpose of the provision. Moreover, they suggest, it would be an exception that would apply only to Trump, because “every other President (except, of course, George Washington) had previously sworn a constitutional oath in some other federal or state capacity.”

Trump pushes back against any suggestion that it would be inconsistent with the purpose of Section 3 to hold that the president falls outside its scope. When the 14th Amendment was ratified, he contends, there weren’t any former presidents who had supported the Confederacy, so the drafters would not have had any reason to exclude the president from serving again.

There are a couple of schools of thought among Never Trumpers and other reasonable people: is it better to invoke the Constitution to keep the former guy from being on the ballot for president this year and not take a chance that he wins, or just let the election runs its course and have him suffer electoral defeat?  Of course, we’ve seen what happens when he loses an election fair and square, and we’ve seen what happens when he wins.  I found E.J. Dionne’s argument of how his mind has changed on this question to be persuasive.

Though I agreed that Trump had, indeed, engaged in insurrection, I thought it would be best for the country to have him go down to defeat again in a free and fair election. Keeping him on the ballot so voters could decide was the path to long-term institutional stability and might finally force a reckoning in the Republican Party.

Many people I respect continue to hold versions of this view. But the more I read and listened, the clearer it became that Section 3 was directed against precisely the conduct Trump engaged in. [Emphasis added] Its purpose is to protect the republic from those who would shred the Constitution and destroy our system of self-government. What Trump did in advance of the attack on the Capitol and on Jan. 6, 2021, legally disqualifies him from the presidency.

The record is clear that the legislators who wrote and enacted the amendment in the wake of the Civil War were not just thinking of the Confederacy’s leaders but also of “the leaders of any rebellion hereafter to come.”

Those are the words of John B. Henderson, a Republican senator from Missouri, when he cast his vote for the amendment in 1866. They are recorded in a powerful amicus brief filed with the Supreme Court by a distinguished group of historians of the era: Jill Lepore, David Blight, Drew Gilpin Faust and John Fabian Witt.

The amendment’s authors, they argue, “hoped not only to prevent a resurgence of secessionism but also to protect future generations against insurrectionism.” It was intended “to bar anyone who has betrayed an oath to uphold the Constitution from becoming President of the United States.”

(snip)

And to argue that barring Trump from the ballot is “antidemocratic,” wrote professors Carol Anderson and Ian Farrell in another brief, is “ironic … as he bears by far the most responsibility for attempting to subvert democracy on Jan. 6.” An effort to overthrow constitutional procedures, wrote [Sherrilyn] Ifill, should be distinguished from political protests, even those “accompanied by sporadic acts of violence.” Demonstrators are not the same as a mob trying to hijack the government.

(snip)

Throwing Trump off the ballot would seem, on its face, the opposite of democracy. Yet the whole point of Section 3 is to protect constitutional democracy from anyone who has already tried to destroy it. If its provisions don’t apply to Trump, they don’t apply to anyone. The court would not be disqualifying him. He disqualified himself.

The court convenes at 10 a.m. ET tomorrow; you can listen live to the arguments here or download the clip later.

ALSO: The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake with insight into the damage done to Trump by the loss in his immunity claim case.