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Why I am cautiously optimistic about the election

While Biden was not even in my top 5 choices last time, I still voted for him over Trump and will again. And I’m pretty sure he is going to win, for the following reasons:

Trump’s support isn’t as good as it seems. The man lost the popular vote the first time he ran, never even reached a 50% approval rating his entire time as President (unlike every other person who has been President), and lost his second election by an even larger amount. A majority of Americans don’t want him.

And a large percentage of Republicans don’t want him this time, either. As a semi-incumbent, he should be getting the numbers that Biden is getting in the primaries, but instead, quite often, he’s lucky to get more than 50% of the registered Republicans voting for him. Many old-school Republicans (the kind who aren’t part of the Trump cult) can’t stand him, see the harm he will cause, and while they may not vote for Biden, they aren’t going to vote for Trump, either. They’ll probably just stay home.

The Republican party doesn’t have a lot of money. People just aren’t contributing to them in the same way they are for the Democrats. There are stories all over the states where the local parties are going broke. Which leads to the next point:

Trump has taken over the party. The head of the party is now Eric Trump’s wife. You remember Eric, who took money meant for a children’s cancer charity? Well, you can bet that any money the party raises isn’t going to go to the campaign. It’s going to go to Trump (and probably his legal fees, assuming he pays them).

Moreso, these people have no real experience in running a campaign, and they just fired all those who do.

Trump’s legal worries may influence the undecided. The Trump cultists will never change, and as Trump once said, he can shoot someone on 5th Avenue and still have their support. It’s difficult to imagine how anyone can be undecided in this election, but apparently there are a lot of clueless folks out there who can’t tell the difference between as a well-meaning old guy and a lying, cheating, raping idiot who wants to be a dictator, but perhaps the more Trump spends time in court, the more these undecideds may think that maybe they don’t want a criminal as President.

Democrats have done better than expected in recent elections. We’ve managed to win quite a few special elections and in those that we didn’t win (in very red areas) we did much better than expected and much better than the polls predicted. Some of that is because we’re angry and pissed, and that gets people to the polls.

And we’re tremendously angry about abortion rights. In red states where this was on the ballot, pundits were shocked to see that even conservative voters voted to keep abortion legal. Many states are putting the issue on the ballots in November, which hopefully will bring more Democrats out to vote to protect this right (and then they’ll vote for the Democrats running as well.)

And, let’s face it, there are still some reasonable Republicans and moderates out there who may come out to vote because while they don’t agree with Democratic policies, they don’t want someone in there who has vowed to be a “dictator on day one.” Some patriots will put the country’s needs over the party’s.

All we have to do is hold the states we won last time. All over the country, purple states are becoming bluer all the time. It’s not that hard. We can lose Georgia, Arizona and Nevada and still win.

There are more of us than there are of them. Democrats have won the popular vote in every single election except one since Bill Clinton, and the only reason Republicans got into office was because of the electoral college. We can overcome that by showing up in huge numbers in the swing states where our votes are tremendously important.

If we lose, it will be because we stayed at home and didn’t vote, or wasted our vote on a third party candidate. And then we can scream and shout all we want as our country moves toward a Putin-friendly dictatorship, but it won’t do any good because it will be our fault.

And now, a caveat: The GOP knows all this, so they plan to use their secret weapon: cheating. They’ll do everything they can to make it harder for anyone to vote; they’ll use the judges they’ve appointed to throw out ballots whenever possible; they’ll lie in campaign ads and use connections in Russia and China whose goal it is to dismantle American power; and otherwise claim to have won if they lose despite all evidence to the contrary (just like they did last time).

cartoon by Patrick Chappatte

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My choice this year

Clay Bennett
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A New PayPal scam

My wife is an award-winning artist who, like other creative people, gets targeted with scams on-line from people claiming they want to buy her art. I’ve blogged about one scam they’ve used before.

This is one of her art pieces. It’s made out of dryer lint. No, really. Check out her web page.

Here’s how this one works:

They want to buy something from you. You give them the price. It’s usually for a lot of money, because that way, you’re very excited to have sold something for such a huge amount. That makes you more willing to make sure it happens.

Then they send you a message saying they paid. You then get an email that looks like it’s from PayPal (it isn’t) that says your account can’t accept this money because the account needs to be updated to a business account. “Once updated, the money will be available to you. Please deposit $500 into your account to activate the business account.”

You contact the person and they say, “OK, I’ll pay to update the account and then when you get confirmation that it has been approved and my payment has gone through, you can refund that money to me.” (Or, alternatively, you are provided with a link to PayPal so you can make the payment yourself, but of course, the link is a fake one that doesn’t go to PayPal.)

If you do this, you’ll get another fake email saying the account is active and the payment went through. You’re then asked to refund the $500 to the person, who also gets your credit card and banking information that they can use to hack into your account later. See how it works?

Heidi and I do have fun taunting the scammers though before finally calling them out and blocking them. Heidi then publicly posts the scammer’s name and email on her Instagram page to warn others.

Remember: the internet is full of scammers. Always be wary.

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Wrecking Ball

Bill Bramhall

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Supremes allow insurrectionist to stay on the ballot

cartoon by Ann Telnaes

I don’t say this very often these days, but I agree with the Supreme Court, which held today that states cannot remove federal candidates from state ballots.

I don’t want Trump on the ballot, of course — I want Congress to kick him off (which they won’t do because of all the Trump cultists in the House).

But I also don’t want states getting to decide this. You know that if the court agreed that states could do this, half of the red states would find ways to keep Biden off the ballot just because they can. It’s not like they need a reason.

That’s why this decision was unanimous, with even the liberals agreeing.

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The party of Putin

Nick Anderson
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Law? Precedence? Logic? A conservative judge needs not these things!

Sometimes people ask me legal questions about how certain conservative judges make their decisions when it seems to run counter to general legal policies like standing and precedence and the answer is simple:

They don’t give a fuck.

They don’t care about the law. They were appointed by Trump and his cultist followers in state houses and the Senate to accomplish certain goals and if the law gets in the way, just to ignore it.

That’s why it must be really hard to be a law professor these days. You have to say “Here’s the law, unless some judge wants to completely ignore it.”

This just confirms the main theme from my book about the Constitution that came out a few years ago: All law is politics. It’s just so much more political these days than it has ever been in my lifetime.

This article is depressing so here’s a picture of my cat River Song when she was a kitten. You’re welcome

Who indeed

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Let’s ask Aaron Burr if the President is immune from prosecution

A guest blog post from Hoyce McGurgle

I find it awfully interesting that there is so much discussion about the ludicrous claims Donald Trump and his lawyers are making about him essentially having total immunity because he used to be President of the United States. Full disclosure, I’m not a lawyer, but I do have a degree in History and I feel like a pretty important precedent was set on this kind of thing already in our history. Gather ‘round, folks. It’s story time!

Let me tell you a tale about a member of the executive branch at the highest levels of power blatantly committing the highest of crimes and facing the consequences for it. No, I’m not talking about Richard Nixon — he wisely bowed to reality and resigned before being hit by that particular legal freight train. No, there’s an even better precedent in our nation’s history. We need to go back waaay further than the Nixon Era though. All the way to 1804, in fact. I’m talking about Aaron Burr. 

Most folks today know who Aaron Burr was because of the spectacular musical Hamilton. Or, if they’re old enough, perhaps from a famous Got Milk commercial that was aired a lot in the 90’s. But a lot of history nerds like me already knew about him. For those who have somehow missed the musical (you’d be forgiven for missing or forgetting about the commercial) a brief recap. 

This is what Burr really looked like, although history doesn’t record what his singing voice was like or whether he smiled more and talked less

Aaron Burr was an orphaned scion of a rather well respected family. He served in the Revolutionary war and was considered a bonafide war hero. After the revolution he went into the legal profession and, eventually, politics where he ran in the election of 1800 against Thomas Jefferson to be the third President of the United States. He lost, of course, which is why you’ve never heard of President Burr. However, back then the Constitution called for the runner up in the Presidential Election to be Vice President under the guy who had just beaten him. (As an aside, even the Founding Fathers realized this maybe wasn’t the best idea and it was promptly amended in time for the election of 1804.)

Vice President Burr was awfully salty about his loss and blamed Alexander Hamilton for it, as Hamilton had supported Jefferson in the election despite the fact that the two had always been political enemies. This was compounded when Burr, realizing Jefferson would not select him to be his running mate under the new VP selection process, ran for Governor of New York and was defeated, thanks again in part to Hamilton. This naturally led to the famous duel where on July 11, 1804, a sitting United States Vice President shot a man and killed him (probably with less singing involved than Lin-Manuel Miranda implied, though). It was the 18th century equivalent of standing on Fifth Avenue and shooting a man. 

And so it came to be that the Vice President of the United States became a fugitive. The states of New Jersey (where the duel took place) and New York (where Hamilton subsequently died) both issued warrants for the arrest of Burr, who decided it would be a fine time to visit his daughter in South Carolina for an extended period of time. Burr would go on to be officially indicted by a New Jersey grand jury. 

Burr never saw trial for the death of Hamilton though because he still had enough friends in high places to pull strings and because there was a legal complication of the circumstances. New York had strict laws against dueling, but the duel had taken place in New Jersey which didn’t. Not to mention that by this point, three years had passed and Burr was facing a whole heap of new legal trouble and had been arrested for his part in a conspiracy to secure a chunk of American and Mexican territory and proclaim it as a new nation backed by England. So, in the face of actual treason, the legally complicated murder trial was just kind of forgotten about. 

All this is to say that it seems pretty clear by Burr’s legal woes that the answer to the question of “can the highest levels of executive power be held responsible for crimes committed” is a pretty clear and definitive “YES.” Burr was subject to arrest, indictment, and trial for crimes committed as Vice President AND after he left office. The only time any arguments of executive privilege came up was in Burr’s treason trial when the defense wanted documents from President Jefferson’s administration and Jefferson cited Executive Privilege … and lost! Justice John Marshall famously denied Jefferson’s claim and ordered the president to supply the requested documents.

At no point did anyone claim that Burr should have immunity for crimes he committed while in office or afterwards just because he used to be Vice President. In fact, Justice Marshall’s ruling that Jefferson had to produce the subpoenaed documents was specifically viewed as setting the precedent that the President himself is not above the law and needs to accede to the judiciary. 

And it’s not like a whole lot of interpretation of the Constitution was left to guesswork back in those days. There wasn’t a whole lot of “oh, what did the Framers mean when they wrote this?” This was 1807, the Framers of the Constitution were still alive (the biggest hint of that is the fact that the guy who wrote the Declaration of Independence was President at the time.) Surely they’d have chimed in with their two cents if the interpretation wasn’t what they intended. Or even changed things afterwards like they did with the process of electing a Vice President!

The arrests and trial of Aaron Burr told us 220 years ago everything we need to know about the ludicrous claims of immunity for Donald Trump today. No one is above the law, no matter what their office. Period.

I’m just hoping that nobody tries to write a hip-hop musical about this mess though because the thought of someone rapping in Trump-speak is making my brain hurt. 

Hoyce is a Boston-based transplant from the Pocono Mountains. Although he has a degree in History with an emphasis in Political Science, most of his writing tends to be for fantasy gaming or occasional posts on Facebook. 

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Half time half wits

Nick Anderson