Democracy

The Progressive-Democratic Party and the Left in general no longer believe in democracy, whether republican or popular.  Here’s Robert Reich, Labor Secretary in the Clinton administration:

The title of his piece is the gist of the position: Don’t Impeach Trump, Annul His Presidency.  Read past the irrational hysteria in his first several paragraphs, hysteria like this:

Even if he loses in 2020, we’ll be fortunate if he concedes without being literally carried out of the Oval Office amid the stirrings of civil insurgency.
Oh, and let me remind you that even if he’s impeached, we’d still have his loathsome administration—Pence on down.

and you get to the meat of his—and their—demand.

Suppose, just suppose, Robert Mueller finds overwhelming and indisputable evidence that Trump conspired with Putin to rig the 2016 election, and the rigging determined the election’s outcome.
In other words, Trump’s presidency is not authorized under the United States Constitution.

What then? Impeachment isn’t enough.

He went on:

Impeachment would remedy Trump’s “high crimes and misdemeanors.” But impeachment would not remedy Trump’s unconstitutional presidency because it would leave in place his vice president, White House staff and Cabinet, as well as all the executive orders he issued and all the legislation he signed, and the official record of his presidency.
The only response to an unconstitutional presidency is to annul it. Annulment would repeal all of an unconstitutional president’s appointments and executive actions, and would eliminate the official record of the presidency.
Annulment would recognize that all such appointments, actions, and records were made without constitutional authority.
The Constitution does not specifically provide for annulment of an unconstitutional presidency. But read as a whole, the Constitution leads to the logical conclusion that annulment is the appropriate remedy for one.
After all, the Supreme Court declares legislation that doesn’t comport with the Constitution null and void, as if it had never been passed.
It would logically follow that the Court could declare all legislation and executive actions of a presidency unauthorized by the Constitution to be null and void, as if Trump had never been elected.
The Constitution also gives Congress and the states the power to amend the Constitution, thereby annulling or altering whatever provisions came before. Here, too, it would logically follow that Congress and the states could, through amendment, annul a presidency they determine to be unconstitutional.

[The Trump Presidency] should be annulled.

Here are the Party and the Left—anyone from either of the two heavily overlapping groups—decrying their man’s demands.  By their studied silence are they known to agree.  That Reich’s piece is so irrational does not bother them in the least.  Nor does his desire to completely rewrite history to a depth and breadth that would shame the leadership of the erstwhile Soviet Union and the ongoing People’s Republic of China.

That irrationality, however, is a threat to our great republican democracy.  Remember this in the fall.

A “secretive, corrupt and troubling process”

In a Letter to the Editor in Monday’s Wall Street Journal, Kristine Lucius, of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, decried the allegedly secretive, corrupt, and troubling process (Lucius’ phrase) with which the document release related to Judge Brett Kavanaugh is being handled by the Senate Judiciary Committee.  She even went so far as to compare the document release of then-nominee Elena Kagan with that of Kavanaugh:

When President Obama nominated Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court, then-Chairman Patrick Leahy joined with then-Ranking Member Jeff Sessions to request and receive access to her records from the Clinton White House—a full 99% of them. But now that the shoe is on the other foot, Chairman Chuck Grassley refuses to even request the same set of records for Mr Kavanaugh from the National Archives.

Couple things about that.

That Ms Lucius succeeded in getting potsful of irrelevant documentation released for committee consideration in no way legitimizes wasting committee time on similarly irrelevant documents regarding Kavanaugh’s nomination.

Besides, the secretive, corrupt, and troubling process with the Kavanaugh nomination is solely that of the Progressive-Democrat Senators. They’re the ones who said they’d vote “No” on the Trump nomination for Kennedy’s replacement even before a nominee was named. They’re the ones who said, even louder, they’d vote “NO” on Kavanaugh’s nomination the day it was announced—before any document requests were even made.

It’s the Progressive-Democrat Senators who are being secretive and troubling by keeping million pages of documentation and 300 judicial opinions away from their own eyes, having already announced their votes, and thereby making their own process corrupt.

Of course, Lucious knows all of that.

Abuse and Disinformation

Facebook is claiming to be adding a new tool for fighting these on its platform.

The Ad Archive API will allow researchers, journalists, publishers, and watchdog groups to efficiently analyze and search for ads to determine if anything untoward is happening.

Who, though, are going to be authorized access to the databases—which researchers, journalists, publishers, and watchdog groups, and what selection criteria will be used?  We’ve already seen how Facebook, under the guise of identifying what it’s pleased to call fake news, has selected “fact checkers” almost exclusively from the Left (a few tokens from the right have been invited)—Associated Press, Snopes.com, ABC News, and Politifact—as a mechanism for making the identification and then deleting the allegedly fake material.

We’ve also seen how, using this new capacity, Facebook censors and deletes Conservative posts and suspends Conservative accounts, and on being caught claiming “mistake” and undoing the deeds.  And continuing to make those “mistakes” apace.

Given Facebook‘s history of this, on what basis would we think this latest move has value?

Flipping Witnesses

President Donald Trump decries it.  So have I in writing about the Manafort case and the credibility of Mueller’s prosecutors’ witnesses.

What’s interesting to me and saddening, and what’s dangerous to our system of justice—which includes justice for the accused as well as the victim—is prosecutors’ response to Trump’s decrial.

Peter Zeidenberg, a former federal prosecutor, said that Mr Trump’s comments amount to “an absolutely outrageous statement and to any prosecutor would just be shocking to hear.”

“It’s hard to overstate how fundamental” to prosecutions cooperating witnesses are, Mr Zeidenberg said.

And Stephen Gillers, a New York University School of Law professor:

Trump’s idea would effectively demolish one of the basic and valuable tools of criminal law enforcement in the US.

It’s dangerous for our prosecutors to so blatantly and avidly rely on their ability to do the testifying by using the mouths of “witnesses” they’ve either browbeaten into testifying in a certain way or who’ve sold their testimony to the prosecutors like Thursday night hookers.

If the prosecutors can’t make their case without such witnesses, they don’t have a case to make.

Voting and Respect

I received a text message from a representative of Beto O’Rourke, Texas’ Progressive-Democratic Party US Senate candidate:

Hi Edward, this is [the rep] volunteering w/ Beto O’Rourke’s campaign for US Senate. We’re texting Texas voters today about the upcoming November election. Will you be voting for Beto O’Rourke or Ted Cruz for Senate?

I texted her back:

I’ll be voting for the one who respects our flag, our national anthem, and generations of veterans who have fought, been maimed, and killed to defend the rights of others, in the words of John Kerry, to be stupid.

You might find my blog interesting: APlebesSite.com.