DMZ America Podcast #140: Super Tuesday Leaves Two, Euthanasia Comes to Illinois, Troops in Subways

Editorial cartoonists Ted Rall (from the political Left) and Scott Stantis (from the political Right) discuss the week’s biggest stories without the boring yell fests but with force and passion.

The first segment of this week’s offering covers some major developments in the 2024 presidential campaign. The US Supreme Court followed Ted’s lead, choosing democracy over the Constitution, ruling 9-0 to invalidate the 14th Amendment cases attempting to remove Trump from the ballot. Super Tuesday saw broad sweeps by Biden and Trump, Nikki Haley’s withdrawal and progressive discontent over Biden’s support of Israel’s war against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. Scott and Ted preview the State of the Union Address and detail what Biden would have to do there—it involves violating the laws of physics—to drive a stake through concerns about his mental acuity. Oh, and it’s definitely Biden versus Trump this fall.

The second segment takes a hard turn into Illinois’ move toward legalizing doctor-assisted suicide. Scott expresses concerns about whether God would approve and whether there might be a potential for abuse. Ted gets personal about a friend and colleague who recently decided to end her life after suffering from depression.

Finally, New York Governor Kathy Hochul has ordered state police and the National Guard to New York City’s beleaguered subway system to restore law and order…and search your bags.


Watch the Video version: here.

DMZ America Podcast #135: 14th Amendment at SCOTUS, Putin Speaks, Predicting 2024

Editorial cartoonists Ted Rall (from the political Left) and Scott Stantis (from the political Right) discuss the week’s biggest stories without the boring yell fests but with force and passion.

First up this week: The Supreme Court hears oral arguments in the groundbreaking attempt by Colorado voters to remove Donald Trump from the ballot under the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. Scott and Ted dissect the arguments pro and con and explain how they would resolve the impossible choice faced by SCOTUS: put the law first, or the country.

Second: Tucker Carlson’s interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin will prove especially notable for Americans’ unfiltered chance to hear firsthand about Russia’s views on the war in Ukraine. Scott and Ted explain where we are now and lay out possible scenarios for the inevitable peace negotiations now that it is clear that Ukraine has decidedly lost.

Third: Alan Lichtman’s 1981 13-point theory on predicting presidential elections based on historical metrics gives Scott and Ted a chance to geek out over the current 2024 campaign.

 

Watch the Video Version of the DMZ America Podcast: here.

When the Constitution Threatens Democracy

            The Supreme Court faces a quandary: It must choose between democracy and the Constitution.

            Compared to Trump v. Anderson, the notorious case of Bush v. Gore was a straightforward affair: it should not have been heard. Because elections are administered by the states, the Florida Supreme Court’s 2000 ruling ought to have been the last word. The recount should have continued. Setting aside the noxious optics of a party-line court deciding an election, the Supreme Court’s decision to hear Bush in the first place was unconstitutional.

That view is bipartisan. Sandra Day O’Connor, the justice who cast the tie-breaking vote in the 5-4 decision, eventually conceded that she regretted her partisan hackery. The court declined to officially publish Bush so it can never be cited as a precedent, a tacit admission that it made lousy case law. Chief Justice John Roberts, who subsequently spent much of his nearly two decades on the bench trying to restore the court’s tarnished reputation, never wanted his court to hear another election dispute.

            With attempts to remove Donald Trump from the ballot on the ground that he’s disqualified under the 14th Amendment’s prohibition against insurrectionists holding high office spreading from Colorado to Maine to dockets in 14 other states, the Roberts court has no choice but to weigh in. States need the guidance of an across-the-board standard issued by the nation’s legal referee.

This train wreck reminds me of how, as late as the 1970s, European beachgoers were occasionally still getting blown up by mines placed during World War II; old and forgotten doesn’t always mean dead and gone. Section 3 of the 14th Amendment should have been repealed 150 years ago. Sadly for the Republic this legal time-bomb, long hidden in plain sight, is finally going off.

Ratified in 1868 just after the Civil War, the 14th Amendment’s prohibition on citizens who had participated in insurrection or rebellion from holding high office was soon rendered obsolete, a legal version of the human appendix, by the postwar Ulysses Grant Administration’s blanket Amnesty of 1872. In a bid to reunify a fractured nation all former officers of the Southern government, including notorious figures like former Confederate President Jefferson Davis and John C. Breckinridge, the U.S. Vice President from 1857 to 1861 who became the Confederacy’s Secretary of War, received pardons.

The forgiveness was real. Nine former Confederates were elected to Congress including Alexander Stephens, the former Confederate Vice President. President Grant encouraged Breckinridge to reenter politics but he declined.
            For all practical purposes, Section 3 died at the age of four. (Which is why there’s no helpful case law.) Yet, like the New York “blue law” that makes it a crime to carry an ice cream cone in your back pocket in public on Sundays, this historical curio has remained on the books since the era of the horse and buggy, forgotten until some enterprising attorneys for some plaintiffs in Colorado resuscitated this legal relic for their novel assault against Trump.

            Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), a former constitutional law professor, argues that the 14th Amendment can’t isn’t undemocratic because it’s in the Constitution: “If you think about it, of all of the forms of disqualification that we have, the one that disqualifies people for engaging in insurrection is the most democratic because it’s the one where people choose themselves to be disqualified.” Slavery was in the Constitution too.

Trump has such a commanding lead in the primaries that he will almost certainly be the Republican presidential nominee. We have a two-party system. You don’t have to be a constitutional scholar to see that knocking one out of two of the major-party presidential candidates—who happens to be ahead in the polls—off the ballot is inherently undemocratic as well as a perfect recipe for political unrest.

The last time a major presidential candidate didn’t appear on some state ballots was Abraham Lincoln in 1860. Trouble ensued.

Trump probably deserves to be disqualified. But this is not about him. Disenfranchising tens of millions of his supporters would be deeply destabilizing to democracy. How better to feed into Trump’s narrative that our elections are rigged than to deprive voters of the basic choice to vote for or against him?

The plain language of the 14th Amendment does not offer much hope to Trump and the Republicans as they argue before a Supreme Court dominated by originalists. The Colorado Supreme Court was probably correct when they determined that the offices of president and vice president were originally intended to be covered by the provision. There is a strong argument that January 6, 2021 qualified as an insurrection or rebellion as the amendment’s drafters understood those terms in 1866. Section 3 appears to be intended to be self-executing, meaning that appeals to due process are unlikely to prevail; like it or not, a secretary of state or state supreme court can simply look at Donald Trump and declare: I see an insurrectionist. Section 5, which allows Congress to make such a determination, describes a non-exclusive right.

If the Roberts court follows Section 3 to the letter, Trump will be disqualified.
            Theoretically, Congress could solve this dilemma. A two-thirds vote in both the House and the Senate would allow Trump to remain on the ballot. Democrats could declare that they value democracy so much and have so much confidence in American voters to do the right thing in a fair election that they would provide the necessary support. But such an extraordinary gambit would require statesmanship, risk-taking and putting patriotism above party, traits in short supply on Capitol Hill.

We Americans venerate the Constitution. But Section 3 of the 14th Amendment is a nightmare. Given the choice between correctly interpreting the original intent of its Reconstruction-era drafters and allowing the 2024 election to proceed as normally as possible given the advanced ages of both frontrunners and the legal perils faced by Trump, the Supreme Court construct a convoluted rationale for, say, why the presidency isn’t a government office or how the 14th contains an implied right to due process.

The Supreme Court should ignore the Constitution, gin up a BS justification to keep Trump on the ballot and choose democracy.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

DMZ America Podcast #106: A Big Week of Supreme Court Opinions

Syndicated Editorial Cartoonists Ted Rall (from the Left) and Scott Stantis (from the Right) analyze the issues and news changing our world. This week’s podcast is entirely dedicated to a historic week of opinions handed down by the Supreme Court of the United States.

First up, a look at a pair of landmark cases affecting higher education. Ted and Scott put into perspective the court’s decision to end race-based Affirmative Action and President Biden’s Student loan forgiveness program. Ted concisely explains the basis for the build-up of resentment over decades towards Affirmative Action and what led to the court’s ruling. Scott takes a victory lap after arguing for months that Joe Biden’s Student Loan Forgiveness program was executive overreach and should and would be struck down.

Next up, a pair of cases impacting the workplace: the Postal Worker and the Web Designer,(which sounds a lot like a really lame Hallmark Christmas romance movie). The mailman refused to work on his Sabbath; the web designer refused to create a site for a LGBTQ couple. When does common sense check bigotry? Scott and Ted’s spin on these decisions may surprise you.

In the last segment, Ted and Scott applaud the court shooting down, yet again, Independent State Legislature Theory (ISL), which would have allowed states to set up draconian voting procedures that would have served to deny ballot access to millions of voters.. They end up tying everything up in a neat little bow. You should listen.

 

Watch the Video Version of the DMZ America Podcast:

DMZ America Podcast Ep 106 Sec 1: Supreme Court Overturns Race-Based Affirmative Action

DMZ America Podcast Ep 106 Sec 2: The Cases of the Postal Worker and the Web Designer

DMZ America Podcast Ep 106 Sec 3: Death to the Independent State Legislature Theory

DMZ America Podcast #99: Biden Runs Again, Tucker & Lemon Out, Minnesota Throws Granny Under the Train

Award-winning political cartoonists Ted Rall (from the Left) and Scott Stantis (from the Right) analyze an eventful week’s breaking news and current events on the DMZ America podcast.

President Joe Biden released a video on Tuesday announcing his bid to run for reelection next year. Scott and Ted discuss what’s missing from the video—promises, bragging about low unemployment, Ukraine—and what it portends for the Democrats’ campaign strategy. An 1892-style rematch, between the President and former President Donald Trump, both very old men, now looks all but certain.  Is this what democracy looks like?

On Monday cable news networks gave the axe to two bold-face names in opinion journalism, Fox News’ Tucker Carlson and CNN’s Don Lemon. Did Dominion Voting Systems negotiate Tucker’s head on a plate as part of its $787 million settlement with Fox? Did CNN use Tucker’s demise to bury its decision to part ways with its gay Black morning anchor? What does it say about corporate media and what happens to both men now?

A Minnesota grandmother, 94, is poised to receive justice from a sympathetic Supreme Court after county tax officials seized her condo over $2300 in unpaid property taxes and pocketed that along with $40,000 in equity just because they could, Constitution and property rights be damned. Scott and Ted go over the state’s increasing tendency to steal individual property via the government’s wide-scale abuse of eminent domain and civil asset forfeiture laws. How long will Americans put up with official thievery?

 

 

Watch the DMZ America Podcast – Video Version:

DMZ America Podcast Ep 99 Sec 1: Biden Is Running Again

DMZ America Podcast Ep 99 Sec 2: Tucker and Lemon Get the Axe

DMZ America Podcast Ep 99 Sec 3: Government Is Stealing Our Property

DMZ America #81: Southwest Airlines, Mark Santos and Section 42

What’s to blame for mass cancellations and dysfunction at the formerly beloved Southwest Airlines? Long Island has a new Congressman-elect, Mark Santos. But nothing he told us about himself seems to be true. Ironically, his lies make him look worse than the reality of his hardscrabble upbringing. Supreme Court is allowing Section 42 to remain in place, trapping tens of thousands of asylum seekers at the Mexico border. Surely there’s a better way. Editorial cartoonists Scott Stantis and Ted Rall break it down for you.

 

 

Denying Reality Is Bipartisan

Democrats complain that Republicans don’t live in the reality based world on issues like climate science, vaccines and economics. But they engage a lot in magical thinking as well. In the run up to the 2022 midterm elections in particular, the dream of things that they have to know will and can never happen.

Want Abortion Back? First, Women Have to Die.

            The Supreme Court has sent a message: we’re no longer in the business of ratifying social change. No more legislating from the bench. If Americans want abortion, same-sex marriage and contraception legalized as opposed to merely tolerated, they should look to Congress.

            Distraught over the overturning of Roe v. Wade, many women are searching for a quick fix—and they’re right. A 20,000-abortion-per-week nation can’t go to 10,000 overnight without dire social, economic and medical consequences. But the system won’t give us the rapid remedy we need.

            Women will have to die. They’ll have to die in ugly ways. Their deaths will have to be public.

            Congress won’t help. Bless her heart, Elizabeth Warren articulated the Democrats’ plan, which is magical thinking at its finest: “If we pick up two more senators [in November], we can ditch the filibuster and make Roe the law of the land.” Odds of Democrats losing seats and Senate control are solid; odds that they’ll gain two or more seats are slim to none.

            Neither will the Supreme Court. Only one justice, Clarence Thomas, is likely to die in the next year or two. He’s 74, overweight and rumored to be in poor health. Even if Mitch McConnell allowed Biden to hold a vote and the president were to replace Thomas with a liberal, the conservative majority would remain 5-to-4. Adding new (liberal) justices to the Supreme Court is a pipe dream that would require a 60-vote Democratic supermajority, not to mention changing Biden’s mind about packing the court.

            We the people won’t act either. Now that Roe is no more, look at what has happened in the streets: Nothing, unless you count a few sporadic, easily-ignored, low-attendance protest demonstrations. Pro-choice groups like NARAL are still fundraising, not mass-mobilizing.

            Want abortion back? Women are going to have to die hard, ugly, public deaths.

            A 2021 study estimates that 140 additional women will die each year in the U.S. due to complications from pregnancies that otherwise would have been terminated in abortions.

            Vaguely- and carelessly-written statutes allowing for abortions in case of medical emergencies will kill even more. Women with heart conditions and diabetes are at higher risk of death during childbirth, but what level of risk rises to an emergency? Who makes the call, a doctor or a judge? How many doctors will take the safest course—for themselves—and refuse to perform a needed abortion? Some abortion bans are so sweeping that the procedure isn’t permitted even in case of a miscarriage, which can lead to fatal sepsis unless the fetus is removed.

“What does the risk of death have to be, and how imminent must it be?” University of Michigan reproductive health professor Lisa Harris asked in The New England Journal of Medicine. “Might abortion be permissible in a patient with pulmonary hypertension, for whom we cite a 30-to-50% chance of dying with ongoing pregnancy? Or must it be 100%?”  Doctors in states where abortion is now illegal will probably “wait to that very last minute when it’s clear that a patient will die to do the procedure, and that’s just not an ideal time to do any kind of intervention.”

Pathetic and absurd and wrong, yet plainly true, is that the quickest and likeliest route toward codifying abortion rights into federal law will begin with one, or more likely several, highly-publicized cases of women who suffer hideous deaths because Roe is no more. If enough of those tragedies go viral on social media, there may eventually be enough horror and outrage across the political spectrum to persuade some Republicans to join Democrats into passing an abortion-rights law.

            This, of course, is no guarantee. Many thousands of innocents have been slaughtered in mass shootings, all caught in gruesome high-definition video and spread via social media, yet Congress has barely begun to act on gun control measures. Cops routinely murder Black men on video yet the police remain woefully un-defunded. Women’s deaths may be like that, piling up with nary a “thought and prayer” for a generation or more until the United States rejoins the developed world and restores Roe.

            Without the Supreme Court, a functional Congress or sustained, energetic grassroots activism, however, outrage prompted by social media and high-profile martyrs are all we can hope for under this current system.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of a new graphic novel about a journalist gone bad, “The Stringer.” Order one today. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

Supreme Court to Progressives: Wake Up

            The Supreme Court just sent us a wake-up call. Pro-reality Americans, i.e. the 40% of voters to the left of the Democratic Party, should be grateful.

            A freedom essential to half the population never should have hinged upon a flimsy and poorly-reasoned legal opinion. Congress should have followed the example of other countries where abortion is legal, and passed a federal law decades ago. Instead, neither party acted on behalf of women. (And let’s not forget men—many of them want/need their partners to have abortions.)

Democrats are not the answer. They had the chance to codify abortion in 2009, when they had a 60-vote supermajority in the Senate and control of the House. Then-President Barack Obama chose not to lift a finger. “Not the highest legislative priority,” Obama sneered as he focused on what he cared about, doling out trillions to Wall Street megabanks. Instead he channeled his inner laissez-faire Republican, urging Americans to “reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies.” Women should despise him and the do-nothing Democrats.

            The overturning of Roe v. Wade shines a spotlight on other rights that rest upon the shaky foundation of a Supreme Court decision: men’s right to have sex with one another, same-sex marriage, marriage between different races, parental rights over child-rearing and the sale of contraceptives. This is no way to run a government.

            Whether or not the right-wing majority of the Supreme Court is mean and stupid is less important than fundamental truth that has been revealed: the separation of powers is broken.

            When something is important, there oughta be a law.

Not a ruling.

When a majority of voters arrive at a societal consensus on an issue like those mentioned above, a functional political system responds with a corresponding law negotiated and passed by a legislature. The U.S., however, is too riddled with partisan dysfunction and corrupted by corporate lobbyists to effectively address advances in culture and technology. Thus Congress can’t or won’t accommodate the 7 out of 10 Americans who want a European-style national healthcare system and higher taxes on the rich or the 56% who want to slash Pentagon spending.

Because Congress is impotent, the highest court of the judicial branch has been stepping in to legislate from the bench rather than limit itself to its intended role as arbiter of conflicts between laws and the constitution.

            Americans have accepted the bastardization of the separation of powers because the result tended to respect popular opinion. In 2015 when the Supremes legalized same-sex marriage, for example, 57% of voters agreed. (Now it’s 71%.)

Not any more. The rightward shift of the court following Trump’s three appointees, embodied by polls that show voters wanted to keep Roe by a two-to-one margin, and that New Yorkers were 80% in favor of the SCOTUS-overturned state gun law, have exposed the limits of expediency over ordered governance.  “Up until a couple years ago, it used to be the case that where the court fell was well within the lines of the average Americans’ positions,” notes Harvard public policy Professor Maya Sen. “Now we are estimating that the court falls more squarely in line with the average Republican, not the average American.”

            Short of revolution—which I favor—those who wish to see American laws represent current American political and social values have one way forward. Forget the courts. Voters must force legislators to legislate and the president to sign popular bills into law.

            The majority isn’t always right. Sometimes politicians should lead the people before they’re quite ready. In general, however, a representative democracy that ignores the will of the people is a failure.

            Americans who support a woman’s right to choose an abortion — all women, not just those privileged enough to live in a blue state or those in red states with enough money for travel expenses—face a choice.

They can embark on something this country hasn’t seen since the 1960s with the brief exception of the 2021 Black Lives Matter demonstrations, which were unusually intense and effective because they were fueled  by the COVID lockdown: a sustained campaign of angry agitation. We need a relentless round of street protests. Economic and cultural boycotts should turn red states into backwater pariahs. Voters can exert financial pressure via contributions that makes congressmen and senators on the wrong side of history and public opinion miserable enough to support a federal law legalizing abortion whether they like it or not. Republicans are obvious targets because Democrats need at least 10 GOP senators to federalize abortion rights. Democrats who aren’t fierce allies of choice (hello, Manchin) should be primaried out or face voter boycotts. Protests should erupt in every city, every day, loud and disruptive and terrifying to the powers that be.

Or pro-choicers can bemoan the HandmaidTale-ification of America, attend one or two photogenic parades on a conveniently-scheduled Sunday afternoon and recite ridiculous fantasies about packing the Supreme Court (you’d need a 60-vote supermajority) or hoping that its conservative members die under Democratic rule. Meanwhile, Southern women will have to drive a thousand miles to terminate a pregnancy

Roe was unsustainable. The liberal court was never going to last. Now that the bubble has burst, don’t whine. It’s time to organize.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of a new graphic novel about a journalist gone bad, “The Stringer.” Order one today. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

DMZ America Podcast #54: Roe v Wade Killed, Guns, Ukraine and Male Masturbation

The DMZ America podcast falls off of the rails hard, but first Ted and Scott discuss the SCOTUS decision to throw abortion back to the states. Earlier the court struck down a New York gun law. Then the boys discuss Ukraine and living the narrative vs reality. Finally, the conversation inexplicably turns to masturbation and involuntarily celibates aka Incels.

 

 

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