Official Lies Aren’t What They Used To Be

            The government’s services keep getting worse.

Even their lies.

            The Bushies told us we had to invade Afghanistan to catch Osama bin Laden and then to go into Iraq because Saddam had WMDs. As the Pentagon knew, bin Laden was already in Pakistan; as Hans Blix and Scott Ritter told us, there was no evidence Saddam had proscribed weapons.

            Sure, they were lies. But they were plausible lies. Theoretically, UBL might have snuck into Afghanistan. Saddam might have acquired WMDs. Those things could have been true.

            Now they’re giving us implausible lies. Not only are their lies, well, lies—they say things that are untrue and can’t possibly be true and that no one, no matter how stupid or uninformed, could believe.

            Democrats go on and on about how nothing is more important than defeating Trump. Democracy itself hangs in the balance! After Trump redux, the re-deluge. Like Hitler, but worse.

            But they don’t really believe that. If liberals really actually thought Adolf Trump was going to suspend the constitution and send his enemies—them—to camps, their sense of survival would have prompted them to select the most charismatic, brilliant, popular, vigorous, 2024 Democratic presidential nominee possible. Instead, they gave us Biden.

            You can’t think Trump is dangerous and go with Biden-Harris. For Democrats, protecting their party’s corporatist status quo matters more Trump’s purported threat to democracy. That’s the truth. We all know.

            Republicans won’t shut up about out-of-control deficit spending and the $34 trillion national debt which, according to them, will tank the economy because, like a family that has to live within its means except for credit cards and student loans and car loans and home mortgages, the government can’t keep spending cash it doesn’t have even though it owns the U.S. Mint and has gotten away with it for, like, a century.

            We know that the fake deficit hawks don’t actually believe what they are saying in real time, as they’re saying it, because while they’re threatening to shut down the government every few months, they keep throwing even more billions of dollars at the Defense Department than the DOD even asks for, so much that the military sucks up more than everything else the government does combined, and that’s not including the wars they put “off the books” and the proxy wars and the wars they charge to the State Department, not to mention debt service on old wars.

            These diametrically opposed lines of rhetoric represent a dramatic shift away from old-fashioned political hypocrisy. If the military is your biggest expense by far and you keep raising it, and you claim to worry about spending, you are lying. No amount of cognitive dissonance can convince us otherwise. You know we know it’s crap yet you keep right on going.

            “Normal” communication by political elites has become prima facie impossible to take seriously.

            We used to be able to accept the announcement by a defeated primary candidate that they would endorse their rival and tour for him because primary campaigns involved incremental ideological variations and hadn’t yet devolved to bloodsport.

            No more. Even after Trump implied that Ted Cruz’s father assassinated JFK and had his surrogates impugn Ron DeSantis as a eunuch and a fey cuck, he collected both men’s endorsements. Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden red-baited Bernie Sanders as an existential threat to the Democratic Party yet were rewarded with his fealty. This, we are supposed to think, is adults being adults and maybe this is so, but more than that it’s proof positive that nothing any primary candidate claims to stand for or against should ever be trusted.

            Everywhere we look, politicians are deploying lies whose obviousness is evident out of the gate. Elites will never be believed, they know it,  and they don’t care.

            Israel’s war cabinet tells its traumatized citizens that October 7th came as a surprise at the same time countless specific warnings and the IDF’s eight-hour response time (!) prove that cannot possibly have been the case. As people shout “bring them home,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says he’s trying to do just that. But that’s a lie and it has to be a lie because you don’t bomb a place where hostages you care about are being held lest you kill them and anger their captors.

            Families of the doomed hostages cannot believe him and do not believe him yet they do not demand that the bombs stop falling or that those who drop them be removed from power.

            Ukraine, they say, is a fellow democracy even though it has canceled all elections forever and its press is censored and opposition parties are banned, and as a democracy it must be defended by us, who are not really much of a democracy either as Dean Phillips and Marianne Williamson and others who have been denied access to ballots can attest. The idea that this famously corrupt post-Soviet republic could have posed as a democracy was cute on its face, of course…shut up and fly your blue and yellow flag.

            Taiwan, Biden says, is a country that must be defended from a Chinese invasion. At the same time, Biden also says, Taiwan is not a country at all nor should it become one, China is the One China and Taiwan is part of it so China can no more invade Taiwan than the U.S. can invade Ohio, but still, we’ll defend Taiwan but really we won’t. “Realists” call this “strategic ambiguity“ but really, it’s just one of those lies-you-see-coming.

            Gender identity, woke elites insist, is not merely psychological but physically real as well: a transwoman is a woman, period. This cannot be true; a transwoman swimmer is not generically the same as her cis female competitors but they tell us that we should tell cis female athletes to chill, it’s not an issue when clearly it’s an issue but the authorities don’t want us to take their ridiculous word for it, just as it is with DEI and its clumsy flip-replacement of one form of systemic discrimination with another, they just want us to shut up.

            The era of the lie-you-know-from-the-start may be over soon.

            Next up: insane truths without the thinnest varnish of deception.

            Though not a renowned rhetorician, our president surely deserves historical credit as the first American leader to say, at the start of a war, that we will lose. Days after the U.S. military began what it plans to be a prolonged bombing campaign against Yemen, an effort to stop the Houthis from attacking ships in the Red Sea, Biden announced that future strikes would not succeed. “Are they [US airstrikes] stopping the Houthis? No,” Biden told reporters. “Will they continue? Yes.”

            They’re not even trying anymore.

(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.)

 

It’s Democratic If the Constitution Says It

Democratic-aligned pundits and legal experts argue that removing Donald Trump from the presidential ballot, as the Colorado Supreme Court and Maine’s Secretary of State recently decided to do and 12 other states are considering, is not inherently undemocratic because, even though it takes one major presidential candidate off the ballot in a two-party system it’s permitted under an obscure section of the 14th Amendment. Unfortunately, the Constitution hasn’t always been a charter that upheld the highest ideals of democratic participation.

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.)

Destroy Democracy To Save It

Groups are suing Secretaries of State across the nation, invoking the 14th Amendment to try to get Trump kicked off the ballot.

The U.S. Is Not a Democracy

            Is a system working as well as possible? Inertia lulls people into believing that legacy products are great—even that they’re perfect—without objectively considering whether it’s really true. The QWERTY computer keyboard works but the 1936 Dvorak version is superior. Skim milk makes you fatter. The U.S. may still be a shining city on a hill but our Constitution has become so out-of-date that new nations no longer refer to it as a template for their own legal charters.

Ask yourself: if our political system were created today, by a group of intelligent people, what would it look like? If the real-world system we see now falls short of that ideal, there’s room for improvement.

            What if we were to scrap our centuries-old Constitution? What if we built a shiny new government from the ground up, without considering legacy or precedent?

This is a complicated question. Only one of out of four Americans would vote to repeal the Second Amendment, so the right to bear arms might make it into a new charter. Much of that support, however, derives from voters who own the hundreds of millions of guns already in circulation. An America without a legacy of individual firearms ownership would be much less likely to codify it as a fundamental right.

            So what would an ideal representative democracy look like for the United States, 2023 edition?

Nothing like what we have now.

            Every citizen of sufficient age to exercise sound judgement should be allowed to vote. Our society currently says 18. But there are strong arguments in favor of allowing children to vote as well as for raising the age of enfranchisement to 25. If mental acuity matters, what about the one out of ten Americans over age 65 who suffers from dementia, or those with very low IQ?

Among those permitted to cast ballots, each vote ought to count equally. The principle of one person, one vote is almost universally accepted.

Yet the current system falls dismally short of our professed ideal. Due to the electoral college, the vote of a resident of Wyoming in a presidential election counts 3.6 times more than that of someone who lives in California. People in the District of Columbia enjoy no vote at all; nor do the 4 million Americans who reside in overseas territories. Gerrymandering through redistricting has radically reduced the weight of a vote cast by a Black citizen compared to a white one. Forty-eight out of 50 states either ban convicted felons, people in prison and/or on parole from voting; the U.S. has some of the most vicious disenfranchisement laws in the world.

If a representative democracy is healthy and vibrant, voters ought to be able to choose from a broad selection of candidates who represent a wide range of ideological viewpoints that reflect the broad diversity of opinions in our vast country.

In this respect, the U.S. is not a democracy.

We only have two major parties. But not by choice. 62% of Americans say they want the option of a third party; dissatisfaction with the Democrats and the Republicans helps explain why the U.S. has one of the lowest voter-turnout numbers in the world. Smaller parties are barred from presidential debates, don’t receive coverage in the press, are stymied by draconian ballot-access laws drafted by Democrats and Republicans, and bludgeoned by nuisance lawsuits filed by the big two in order to drain their resources and block them the ballot.

In many elections, there aren’t even two parties. In 2016, 42% of races for seats in state legislatures were uncontested, meaning there was only one candidate on the ballot. There’s no word whether any of them was named “Saddam.” In 2022, a whopping 57% of state elections for judges were unopposed. I live in New York, where the Working Families Party provides an illusion of choice by appearing on the ballot next to the Democrats. But the WFP’s candidates are the same as the corporate Democrats.

Ranked-choice voting, promoted by progressives, sometimes leads to anti-democratic results. California’s small state Republican Party rarely has one of its candidates among the top two vote-getters who move past the first round to the general election.

Party primaries can be coronations, as when Barack Obama and Donald Trump essentially ran unopposed in 2012 and 2020, respectively.

            Candidates are not legally bound to carry out their election promises if they win. Evolving circumstances or further reflection—or dishonesty—may prompt a politician to change course after victory. But there is accountability for perfidy, whether real or imagined, in a vibrant representative democracy. Rather than outsource politics to a political class every two or four years or whatever, citizens in a high-functioning representative democracy keep informed beyond the carnival of election season, express their opinions and hold their representatives’ feet to the fire with public protests and demonstrations, as we’re currently seeing in France after their imperious president ignored popular will by increasing the national retirement age without holding a parliamentary vote.

            The U.S. does not have a high-functioning representative democracy. Voters are uninformed, don’t trust the media and can’t agree on the facts at the heart of stories and issues like whether climate change is real or Biden won the election.

            Worst of all, we fail to hold our representatives accountable when they ignore us. Abortion is no longer legal in most states, 85% of American adults favor abortion rights, yet the streets remain calm and protester-free. Two out of three Democrats want big immediate action against climate change, yet they don’t have anything to say to President Biden—who probably blew up a major gas pipeline and created an ecological disaster, and authorized oil drilling in the ecologically fragile Alaskan wilderness.

            If we were to create a new political system out of whole cloth, it wouldn’t look anything like this.

(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.)

Our Inflexible, Outdated Constitution

College of DuPage explores voter suppression and voting laws in honor of Constitution Day

           A national constitution ought to reflect a society’s fundamental values by defining a set of legal principles that can be periodically adjusted in order to reflect a society’s changing mores, culture and technology. By that standard, our Constitution is woefully out of date.

From the electoral college to gun rights to the hilariously archaic right to refuse to quarter troops in your home and the $20 threshold for a civil jury trial, the U.S. Constitution contains many head-scratching relics of an America we wouldn’t recognize. Living in the age of the musket, James Madison might not be so quick to argue for legalizing the AR-15, assuming that a well-regulated state militia was still a thing.

A work of genius the U.S. Constitution is not. It is almost impossible to amend—it is in fact the hardest to amend in the world. The immutability of the document is highlighted by the inability of the world’s most powerful democracy to enshrine a right as basic as gender equality, a principle that the vast majority of other countries, even dictatorships and authoritarian regimes, have managed to include (at least in theory) in their founding charters.

We haven’t successfully amended the Constitution in half a century—and barely then. Which is really weird. “Most liberal democracies—including the nice, stable ones in Western Europe—amend their constitutions with great frequency,” University of Chicago law professor Eric Posner pointed out in 2014: “Germany amends its Basic Law almost once per year, and France a bit more than once every two years. Indeed, most states in the U.S. amend their constitutions every couple of years.”

            Because Americans are saturated from birth to death by “living document” propaganda about the eternal majestic genius of the Founding Fathers, the constitution is treated like a sacred stone tablet personally engraved by God rather than what it is, a 234-year-old train wreck. From progressive Democrats to right-wing Republicans there is no thought, much less political will, to suggest that this relic might be altered to better serve 21st century Americans.

            We may not see its flaws, but everyone else does. As recently as 1987, most countries’ basic legal charters were directly or indirectly inspired by the American constitution. Not any more. “Among the world’s democracies,” a 2012 NYU law review study found, “constitutional similarity to the United States has clearly gone into free fall.” When a new country like East Timor or South Sudan emerges on the world stage now, their legal experts look for guidance to the more modern constitutions like those of Canada, India, South Africa and New Zealand. The right to travel, the presumption of innocence and entitlement to food, education and healthcare—standard rights around the globe—are absent from the U.S. Constitution. The climate crisis should prompt consideration of a constitutional right of nature, as several countries have.

            If we we’re a vibrant democracy, we should act like one. We ought to ask ourselves: if we were writing a Constitution today from scratch, what would it look like?

Would a contemporary U.S. constitution include an electoral college system? Perhaps— we might join Burundi, Estonia, India, Madagascar, Myanmar, Pakistan, Trinidad and Tobago and Vanuatu, which have electoral college systems.

But probably not. It’s far likelier that popular opinion would prevail and that we’d choose our leaders the same way most of the world does. A 55%-to-43% majority of Americans told a January 2021 Pew poll that they would prefer the president to be elected by popular vote.

Lefties’ complaints about the not-guilty verdict in the recently-concluded Kyle Rittenhouse trial prompted me to start thinking about the question of what a 2021 Constitutional Convention would come up with. Legal experts weren’t surprised that Rittenhouse got away with killing two men and wounding a third. By every credible account, the jury followed Wisconsin law.

“America today: you can break the law, carry around weapons built for a military, shoot and kill people, and get away with it,” said California Governor Gavin Newsom. Well, yes. Not because the jury messed up. Because they followed the law.

Which means the law is the problem.

If you don’t think the law should allow a 17-year-old kid to take an AR-15 military-style assault rifle to a riot, play junior vigilante supercop and wind up shooting three people, I agree. The root of that craziness, however, is not to yell vague complaints about “the state of America”—it’s to repeal or amend the antiquated Second Amendment.

The constitutional right to keep and bear arms is a uniquely American oddity. Only two other nations besides the U.S. have one—Mexico and Guatemala. And those two countries’ gun laws are nowhere as liberal as ours. Mexico bans the sale or possession of automatic or semi-automatic firearms entirely; there’s only one gun shop in the whole country, on a heavily-guarded army base in Mexico City. Guatemalans can buy semi-automatic weapons, handguns, rifles and shotguns but only with a permit that is hard to get. And ammunition is rationed.

A brand-new United States freshly liberated from the yoke of British colonialism probably wouldn’t draft a Second Amendment as we know it. We’re no longer a rural society, 95% of Americans don’t hunt and guns have gotten bigger and scarier.

One of three Americans own a gun, so guns would probably remain legal. But there would be regulations limiting firepower and some sort of licensing regime. Following endless mass shootings, Americans currently favor stronger gun-control laws by a 64%-to-28% margin, according to an April 2021 Politico poll. “Almost half — 46%— said that limiting gun ownership was more important than protecting the Second Amendment, while 44% said that gun ownership rights were a higher priority,” reported The Hill. If gun rights made it into our new constitution, odds are that such a provision would be far weaker than what we have now.

But the Second Amendment, and all the rest, remains impervious to change. Which itself won’t change until we start asking ourselves: why?

(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.)

Embracing Cognitive Dissonance Is Only Logical

There are strong indications from oral arguments in the US Supreme Court that New York’s strong gun control law might be overturned. Liberals are up in arms. But there is only one logical solution to the problem, albeit gun control,a difficult one.

Trump is Still Plotting a Possible Coup

Violence erupts in D.C. after the 'Million MAGA March' as protesters and Trump supporters brawl | Daily Mail Online

            Late last month I wrote that there was a strong chance–I called it 50-50—that Donald Trump would engineer a “self coup” in order to remain in power despite having lost the election.

            The president is a desperate cornered rat. Once he leaves office, he becomes vulnerable to several criminal investigations. By far, the one he has to worry about the most is being conducted by the Manhattan district attorney into his corrupt business practices, charges that could not be discharged by a presidential pardon if Joe Biden were to issue one. “[Trump] could spend the rest of his life in prison,” I wrote, “unless he declares martial law and becomes America’s first dictator.”

            I acknowledged that Trump “doesn’t have the support of the military—but he doesn’t need it.” Instead of a Latin American-style military coup, I said, “his would be a ‘police coup’ carried out by the numerous local police departments whose unions endorsed him for reelection, alongside federalized state police and deputized paramilitary MAGA goons.”

            It hasn’t happened yet, and maybe it won’t, but nothing has changed about Trump’s precarious legal situation. No human need trumps the motivation for personal survival. An intelligent assessment of Trump’s thinking must begin with the question: why wouldn’t he attempt a coup?

            Patriotism? Love of country? Respect for constitutional norms? I won’t go as far as many of the president’s other critics, who call him a narcissist who doesn’t care about anyone except himself. They don’t know that. Neither do I.

Here’s what I do know: whatever love of country and the craftwork of the Founding Fathers is in Trump’s soul cannot possibly weigh as heavily on his mind as the prospect of dying in prison, the first president in history to have faced prosecution and conviction. And that’s after months or years of humiliating hearings and trials and appeals where he has to sit quietly and watch his lawyers try to save his skin as prosecutors try to “flip” members of his family lest they, too, wind up inside the Graybar Hotel.

A more powerful reason to hesitate is the possibility of failure. If Trump’s “police coup” goes belly up, he goes to prison, possibly for treason, for life. Terrifying yet no worse than the New York charges that he’s so scared of. Anyway, what would you rather go to jail for, cheating on your taxes or trying to take over the government?

The only reason I can imagine that Trump would leave office peacefully on January 20th would be that he is psychologically broken. It’s theoretically possible. But the continuing rambunctiousness of his Twitter feed and recent public statements reveal zero evidence that he’s resigned to his fate.

Feel free to dismiss this column as the paranoid rant of a left-wing political cartoonist, albeit one who told you we would lose the Afghanistan war and predicted that Trump would win the 2016 election when everyone else was telling you something different. But you should probably consider this: The dean of Very Serious Journalist Persons, columnist David Ignatius of the Washington Post—a foreign affairs writer so mainstream and respectable that he supported invading Iraq and argued that the CIA should not be held accountable for torture—now agrees with me. In doing so, he draws upon some interesting deep-state sourcing.

“Not to be alarmist,” Ignatius wrote on December 26th, “but we should recognize that the United States will be in the danger zone until the formal certification of Joe Biden’s election victory on Jan. 6, because potential domestic and foreign turmoil could give President Trump an excuse to cling to power.”

“Trump’s last-ditch campaign [for Republican members of the House and Senate to challenge the electoral college vote count certification on January 6th] will almost certainly fail in Congress,” Ignatius says. I agree.

“The greater danger is on the streets, where pro-Trump forces are already threatening chaos. A pro-Trump group called ‘Women for America First’ has requested a permit for a Jan. 6 rally in Washington, and Trump is already beating the drum: ‘Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!’” Ignatius worries. “Government officials fear that if violence spreads, Trump could invoke the Insurrection Act to mobilize the military. Then Trump might use ‘military capabilities’ to rerun the Nov. 3 election in swing states, as suggested by Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser.”

Trump officials recently discussed martial law at the White House.

Ignatius continues: “The Pentagon would be the locus of any such action, and some unusual recent moves suggest pro-Trump officials might be mobilizing to secure levers of power.” If I were his editor, I would have reworded this because it wrongly implies that Trump is planning a coup with Pentagon support. What Trump really requires, as I wrote a month ago, is Pentagon neutrality. He needs troops to remain in their barracks. As long as the armed forces stay out of the way of local and state police, a coup may succeed.

Ignatius’ description of Trump’s latest behind-the-scenes maneuvers is worth quoting in its entirety:

Kash Patel, chief of staff to acting defense secretary Christopher C. Miller, returned home ‘abruptly’ from an Asia trip in early December, according to Fox News correspondent Jennifer Griffin. Patel didn’t explain, but in mid-December Trump discussed with colleagues the possibility that Patel might replace Christopher A. Wray as FBI director, one official said. Wray remains in his job. Another strange Pentagon machination was the proposal Miller floated in mid-December to separate the code-breaking National Security Agency from U.S. Cyber Command, which are both currently headed by Gen. Paul Nakasone. That proposal collapsed because of bipartisan congressional opposition. But why did Trump loyalists suggest the NSA-Cyber Command split in the first place? Some officials speculate that the White House may have planned to install a new NSA chief, perhaps Ezra Cohen-Watnick, the young conservative recently installed to oversee Pentagon intelligence activities.

These moves follow the post-election firings of the Secretary of Defense and top officials at Homeland Security.

Ominous as hell, though I think Ignatius’ conclusion misses the point: “With firm control of the NSA and the FBI, the Trump team might then disclose highly sensitive information about the origins of the 2016 Trump Russia investigation.”

A more obvious motivation for hijacking direct control of the nation’s top foreign and domestic intelligence agencies is command and control during a coup. The NSA and FBI would monitor and disrupt resistance inside government as well as in the streets.

“Trump won’t succeed in subverting the Constitution,” Ignatius assures us. Maybe.

It’s going to be an eternity between now and January 20th.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of “Political Suicide: The Fight for the Soul of the Democratic Party.” You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

Mail-in Balloting, the 12th Amendment and Impending Doom

Letters to the editor: On vote-by-mail

            More than 80 million Americans are expected to cast mail-in ballots this fall, representing a 16-fold increase over 2016.

            This is probably going to cause a constitutional crisis of epic proportions.

            The problem isn’t the possibility of fraud that Donald Trump has been going on about. Cases of possible double voting or voting on behalf of dead people Daley-machine-style are statistically insignificant, amounting to at most 0.0025% of mail-in votes.

            The real issue is that the ballots may not be counted on time, triggering the insanity of the 12th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

            The date to remember is December 14th, when the delegations of the Electoral College meet in their respective states. That’s a hard deadline. Each delegation can only certify their state’s vote counts if they are 100% complete—machine votes cast in person at polling places on election day, early votes, absentee ballots, write-ins and, this year, COVID-19 mail-in ballots. If the state fails to certify on time, its electoral college votes aren’t counted.

            Within each state, there is a canvassing/certification deadline for county officials to submit their results. Most are in late November. California, with a December 11th deadline, cuts it close and usually files its national certification last.

            State election officials are doing their best to meet the challenge. They are hiring additional staff, buying new tabulation machines and installing drop boxes. Even assuming that they will be able to hire the additional personnel they need in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, the practical impediments to meeting the December 14th deadline are daunting. Mail-in ballots are manually opened and signatures must be visually compared, sometimes several times, to Board of Election records.

Then there are technicalities. For example, 16 states require mail-in ballots to be submitted with an extra “privacy envelope.” In the battleground state of Pennsylvania, 6.4% of absentee ballots submitted in a 2019 election were rejected because voters neglected to insert their ballot inside the privacy envelope inside the mailing envelope—a significant margin that could change the outcome on a national level. Both parties are gearing up for legal challenges about issues like this across the nation.

“Every absentee or mailed ballot, even if dropped off directly at the designated county drop box or polling center, most likely will not get counted on Election Day, and it can easily be challenged and delayed and even rejected on a technicality,” Jed Shugerman writes at Time. “Every mailed or absentee ballot, in an envelope with signatures, is its own hanging chad, its own built-in legal delay.”

            If enough states are embroiled in vote-counting controversies to prevent either President Trump or former Vice President Biden from achieving the 270 electoral votes required to declare them president-elect on December 14th, the obscure 12th Amendment kicks in.

            Used only once—in 1825 to elect John Quincy Adams—the 12th Amendment triggers a bizarre “House of Cards” series of remedies guaranteed to eliminate any remaining belief that the Framers wrote a perfect document designed to withstand the test of time, or that the United States is a democracy.

            After the new 117th Congress convenes on January 3rd, the House of Representatives would vote to elect the president and the Senate would elect the vice president. “Each state delegation gets one vote, and 26 votes are required to win [out of 50 states],” reports the Associated Press. “In the Senate…each senator gets a vote, with 51 votes [out of 100 seats] required to win.”

            Even if Democrats enjoy another “blue wave” election that allows them to pick up congressional seats, they will not capture 26 state delegations in the House of Representatives. Trump would win. If Democrats have taken back the Senate, they could select a vice president to replace Mike Pence.

            It wouldn’t matter if a newspaper recount were to determine later on that Biden should have won both a popular and electoral vote landslide. Trump would remain in the White House.

            The Democratic Party and its allies in the media have been pushing mail-in balloting, but voters who want to see Joe Biden elected and are willing to brave the health risks should consider showing up for early in-person voting. In-person ballots are far less susceptible to rejection over technical issues like security envelopes, they are counted immediately and they thus meet the December 14th deadline for certification.

            As my readers are aware, I do not support either Trump or Biden and will be voting third party, probably for the Greens, this fall. But I don’t support disenfranchisement either. I want everyone’s will to be expressed.

            No matter what happens, no matter who wins, American politics are about to become extremely dangerous. Democracy fails when the losing side refuses to accept the legitimacy of the winning side. That will certainly be the case this year.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of the biography “Political Suicide: The Fight for the Soul of the Democratic Party.” You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

 

Delay the Election? Presidents Often Do Things They Can’t Do

Trump Won't Steal the Election, but Your Governor Might | The NationThe stock response to President Donald Trump’s suggestion that the general election might be delayed because voting during a pandemic would involve a record number of mail-in ballots, a format he argues is unreliable and susceptible to fraud, is that he doesn’t have that power.

NBC News is typical: “The president has no power to delay an election.” [Emphasis is mine.]

What the president understands, and most mainstream commentators fail to accept, is that it is easier to ask for forgiveness than to get permission. That goes double when the powers in question are limited by a document that lies in tatters, repeatedly ignored.

            Liberal politicians and news outlets point out that the Constitution assigns the scheduling of elections exclusively to Congress. Republicans tepidly (and troublingly) stopped short of denying Trump’s power to push back the big day, while insisting that the election ought to take place on time. “Never in the history of this country, through wars, depressions and the Civil War, have we ever not had a federally scheduled election on time. We will find a way to do that again this November 3rd,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said.

In an era of rampant cynicism it is sweetly naïve and the amusingly charming to see Americans put so much faith into the constitutional checks and balances they learn about in high school civics class. “‘Trump can’t delay the election,’ experts say,” reads a headline in The Washington Post.

            Since when has a 221-year-old piece of paper stopped presidents from doing anything?

I think first of war powers. Article 1, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution clearly states that the right “to declare war” resides exclusively with Congress. Such key founders as George Washington, James Madison, Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton—men whose right to define original intent can hardly be questioned—believed that presidents could not dispatch troops without legislative approval except in cases of immediate self-defense. Congress signed off on sending soldiers and sailors to the Quasi-War with France in 1798, naval conflicts with the Barbary States of Tripoli and Algiers, and clashes with Native American tribes in the West.

Congress has since abdicated its war-making powers to the executive branch. Congress hasn’t issued a formal declaration since World War II. Yet we have fought countless wars. Presidents have launched military attacks against Korea, Vietnam, Libya, Grenada, Lebanon, Panama, Serbia, Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. Some of these wars of aggression were legalistically constructed as “police actions” or “peacekeeping missions” under the aegis of the UN. The fact remains, this is not what the drafters of the Constitution intended. And it has never been amended. Presidents do what they want; lawyers twist logic to justify their illegal slaughters.

President Abraham Lincoln earns democracy points for holding the 1864 election during the Civil War. Yet he suspended habeas corpus and ignored a ruling by the chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court saying that he didn’t have the power to do so. George W. Bush’s Military Commissions Act of 2006 also suspended habeas, for anyone the U.S. government arbitrarily defined as an “enemy combatant.” Until the Supreme Court ruled against him two years later, Congress was complicit with the MCA. Even after the court ruling, the internment facility at Guantánamo Bay remains open; 40 men remain there, not one of whom has ever been charged or tried under basic constitutional standards.

FDR almost certainly didn’t have the constitutional right to send 127,000 Japanese-Americans to internment camps during World War II. Yet he did.

From domestic surveillance by the NSA that violates the agency’s founding charter to asset forfeiture programs that allow the police to seize money and property from people who have never been charged, much less convicted of a crime, Americans live in a society oppressed by a political class that takes no notice of constitutional limits it deems inconvenient.

Does the president have the legal right to delay an election? No.

Does he have the power? Yes, unless We The People refuse to accept it.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of the biography “Political Suicide: The Fight for the Soul of the Democratic Party.” You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

css.php