On this episode of The Final Countdown, hosts Angie Wong and Ted Rall discuss news from around the world and domestically, including Trump’s victory at the Iowa Caucuses.
The Final Countdown – 1/12/24 – Trump Lashes Out at Opposing Counsel in Defiant Speech at Civil Fraud Trial
On this episode of The Final Countdown, hosts Angie Wong and Ted Rall discuss current events from around the globe, including Trump’s civil fraud trial.
DMZ America Podcast #131: Debating the Gaza War
In the latest DMZ America Podcast, editorial cartoonists Ted Rall (from the Left) and Scott Stantis (from the Right) explore the threat of the Israel-Hamas War spreading from Gaza, where 1% of the total population has been killed, to Iran, the Red Sea and Lebanon and beyond. Ted, who sympathizes with the cause of Palestinian emancipation, presses Scott, who supports Israel’s response to Hamas’ October 7th attack, on what line Israel would need to cross before he would consider them to have gone too far. It’s a tough debate, and a passionate one, but the guys manage to keep things civilized and productive enough to agree on what policy the U.S. should adopt toward the Netanyahu government in light of the flattening of Gaza and the humanitarian crisis.
Watch the Video Version of the DMZ America Podcast: Here.
The Final Countdown – 1/11/24 – South Africa Takes Israel to Court for War Crimes in Gaza
On this episode of The Final Countdown, hosts Angie Wong and Ted Rall break down topics from around the world, including South Africa
The Final Countdown – 1/10/24 – Germany Faces Serious Disruptions over Railroad and Farmer Protests
On this episode of The Final Countdown, hosts Angie Wong and Ted Rall cover breaking news from around the globe, including the railroad and farmers’ strikes in Germany.
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.)
The Final Countdown – 1/5/24 – Iowa Caucuses Becomes Last Stand for Some Republicans
On this episode of The Final Countdown, hosts Angie Wong and Ted Rall talk about current events domestically and globally, including the Iowa Caucuses.
DMZ America Podcast #130: Another Ivy League President Fired, Israel Gone Wild and America’s 250th Birthday
In the first DMZ America Podcast of 2024, editorial cartoonists Ted Rall (from the Left) and Scott Stantis (from the Right) discuss the world in politics and current events.
First, Claudine Gay resigned as president of Harvard University after drawing criticism for failing to clearly condemn antisemitism at a Congressional hearing, and then being exposed as allegedly having plagiarized dozens of times in her academic career. Right-wing conservatives are celebrating having claimed a scalp and dealt a blow against DEI, but should liberals mourn her departure?
Second, Israel claims responsibility for the drone assassination of a leader of Hamas in a suburb of Beirut, Lebanon. On the same day, two bombs killed over 100 people attending a memorial service for an Iranian general assassinated by an American drone in 2020. Are the two events linked? Will there be repercussions in the form of a larger regional conflict?
Finally, we are coming up to the 250th anniversary of America. It’s anybody’s guess what it will be called.
Watch the Video Version of the DMZ America Podcast here.
Ceasefire in Gaza, An Offer Israel Can’t Refuse—Yet It Is
The Left is doing something right.
And it’s something that I initially disagreed with, even though I didn’t comment in a public space.
When Israel overreacted to Hamas’ October 7th attack on western Israel with a brutal saturation bombing campaign against the Palestinian civilian population of the Gaza Strip, defenders of human rights, antiwar activists and supporters of the Palestinian liberation movement demanded a ceasefire.
To me, that felt like yet another example of the Left settling for too little, negotiating against itself. Ask for the stars, I usually advise, and you might settle for the moon. Ask for the moon and you might wind up with nothing. A ceasefire isn’t an armistice, much less a peace agreement. It’s merely an interruption in a war. What kind of antiwar activist doesn’t ask for an end to a war?
One of the most famous examples is the Christmas Truce of 1914, when German and British troops crawled out of their trenches and met in no-man’s land to exchange presents, play soccer and celebrate the holiday together. A day or two later, however, World War I resumed. It’s a cute story that changed nothing.
Israel owes the people of Gaza nothing less than an immediate cessation of hostilities and official acceptance that the current conflict is a war crime for which top Israeli governmental and military officials should be prosecuted. The IDF should withdraw. Israel should pay to rebuild everything it destroyed and compensate the families of dead and wounded Palestinians. It should house everyone it has displaced on Israeli territory, in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem if need be. It should recognize a free and sovereign Republic of Palestine in Gaza and the West Bank, with East Jerusalem as its capital, within 1967 borders along with a safe corridor to connect the currently non-contiguous borders. The 700,000 settler-colonists should leave the West Bank and return to Israel.
A ceasefire seems so tiny by comparison.
Which is why it’s proving effective as a demand.
When people confront two parties engaged in a conflict, one of their first reactions is to try to assess which, if either, is right (or at least more right). This determination is affected by such cognitive biases as whether one side looks or acts more like the person making the assessment. In the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, some Americans have baked-in personal allegiances because they are Jewish or Muslim.
Which leaves the other 97% of the population. Citizens of the United States are notoriously ignorant about politics and cultures beyond their borders. To the extent that they pay attention to the Middle East conflict, there has been a historical bias in favor of Israel, a fact that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his ally President Joe Biden relied upon at the beginning of the war in Gaza. As we have seen in the past, however, Israeli overreaction has prompted the public to take a closer look and, following the usual practice, led them to a “pox on both of their houses” stance. Deputy National Security Adviser K.T. McFarland repeated that trope in 2020 when she claimed on Fox News that in “…the Middle East, they’ve been fighting for 4,000 years. It’s been an ethno-sectarian battle and psychodrama, and they’ve been killing each other for millennia. Their normal state of condition is war.” (This is not even a little bit true, but let’s leave that for another time.)
20,000+ dead Palestinians into the latest episode of the conflict, the Gaza war has become a catastrophe too big to ignore or dismiss with glib inanities. Day after day, as Americans’ social media feeds fills with bloody images of dead Palestinian babies, initial public sympathy for Israel has given way to a feeling that the Palestinians of Gaza are victims at least as much as the Israelis of October 7th. Choosing sides is no longer easy. But one thing is clear: the carnage has gone on too long and, even if a long-term conclusion like a two-state solution is impossibly elusive, the bombing simply has to stop.
By mid-December, three out of five American voters—with few differences between political parties—supported a ceasefire, up significantly from October. The public had caught up to the pro-Palestinian activists. By not asking for much, the Left appears moderate and reasonable.
Meanwhile, voters keep reading headlines in which the Israeli government is refusing a ceasefire. To the contrary, Netanyahu says the war will continue for “many more months.” Israel is framing itself as rabid, overreaching and bloodthirsty.
Because it is out of sync with public opinion, good will for Israel is ebbing like the pulse of a man bleeding to death from a gunshot wound. Although older voters still tend to support Israel, a mere 28% of voters between ages 18 and 29 told the latest New York Times/Sienna College poll that they believed Israel was seriously interested in a peaceful solution. On the other hand, half said the Palestinians do want peace.
(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.)