Trump Fought The Law And The Law Ran Home To Its Mommy
The new MAGA chart topper!
Donald Trump’s defense counsel posing as a federal judge, Aileen Cannon, dismissed the charges against him for stealing classified documents, some of which he stored in his Mar-a-Lago bathroom. She accepted the absurd argument that Jack Smith was improperly appointed as special counsel. You could probably tell the fix was in a couple weeks ago when Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, spouse of a prominent coup supporter, suggested in his concurrence to the horrible immunity ruling that Smith’s position had no legal basis.
Trump’s skating on charges that aren’t just serious crimes but are further proof that he’s unfit to serve as president … again. (Of course, Trump has treated real-live women worse than he did classified documents.)
Cannon’s 93-page ruling doesn’t really address the actual crimes Trump committed so much as the legal minutiae around special counsel appointments and regulations. It’s especially ridiculous when you consider that a special counsel was picked specifically to avoid a potential conflict of interest with the Department of Justice, which was within its rights to prosecute Trump for stealing classified documents and refusing to return them.
Attorney General of the Ages Merrick Garland appointed Smith in the first place after Trump announced his 2024 presidential campaign. It was shortly after the 2022 midterms, so very early and a transparent effort to frame any investigation into his many, many crimes as politically motivated. That would’ve been less of an issue if Garland hadn’t proceeded — to quote Emma Peel — “at the pace of an infirm, gravely debilitated, very old snail.”
“Based on recent developments, including the former president's announcement that he is a candidate for president in the next election,” Garland said back in 2022, “and the sitting president's stated intention to be a candidate as well, I have concluded that it is in the public interest to appoint a special counsel.”
Even if you don’t support Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee (according to recent polling, that’s about 60 percent of you), please make a point of voting for him anyway because Jack Smith did the job he was assigned as best he could and doesn’t deserve to get shipped off to Siberia. (Vladimir Putin would probably let Trump use the forced-labor camps there as part of America’s new, post-democracy “special relationship” with Russia.)
The documents case was also considered the most open-and-shut of the federal cases against Trump, which is probably why Cannon shut it down. Right now, it’s hard not to feel like the broken alternate universe Superman, who a corrupt President Lex Luthor taunted: “You’re as much responsible for this as I am, so go ahead, fix it somehow, put me on trial, lock me up, but I’ll beat it and then we’ll start the whole thing all over again.”
12 Senate Democrats said yes to Aileen Cannon.
NBC News political reporter Sahil Kapur posted on social media, “Fun fact about Judge Aileen Cannon: She was confirmed by the Senate on Nov. 12, 2020, after Donald Trump had lost the election. McConnell, then the majority leader, confirmed a series of judges in lame duck session, which hadn't happened for an outgoing president in generations.”
Kapur apparently defines “fun” like your aunt who’d describe running routine errands with her “going on an adventure!” It’s true, though, that Cannon was confirmed in the lame-duck session almost a week after Trump lost the 2020 election and still refused to concede. It’s not a shock that Mitch McConnell would keep stacking the courts with far-right hacks under 40 — Cannon was 39 in 2020 — until he shrivels even more and finally dies. The far-less “fun” fact is that 12 Senate Democrats voted to confirm her: Chris Murphy, Tom Carper, Chris Coons, Maggie Hassan, Catherine Cortez Masto, Jackie Rosen, Tim Kaine, Mark Warner, Joe Manchin, Patrick Leahy, Dianne Feinstein, and Doug Jones, who’d just lost re-election so I’m not sure what he had to gain from his support for Trump’s nominee.
This was hardly your normal lame-duck session because Trump refused to concede the election he’d lost and was actively blocking Biden’s transition. On November 9, McConnell had defended Trump’s burgeoning coup: “Our institutions are actually built for this,” he said on the Senate floor. “We have the system in place to consider concerns and President Trump is 100 percent within his rights to look into allegations of irregularities and weigh his legal options.”
All Trump’s claims were baseless, and Democrats could’ve rightly argued that if Trump didn’t immediately accept the people’s verdict, they would block his nominees. Yes, Republicans had the majority but Democrats didn’t even try to force McConnell to keep enough Republicans around during the lame-duck to confirm his judges. This was just a month after Democrats warned that there could be consequences for Republicans’ shameless drive-through confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett. Technically, they kept their word — there could have been consequences for Barrett, but instead they chose to wear big “Kick Me Hard” signs on their backs.
When Cannon, a member of the overtly political and far-right Federalist Society, was assigned Trump’s documents case, several Democrats stood by their confirmation votes.
“Unlike some people, who will adhere strictly to political guidelines in voting for confirmation, I don’t do that. I try to look at more than just a party affiliation, and that’s why I ended up voting for her,” said Sen. Tom Carper from Delaware. “It’s not my job, [and] it’s not the job of the Senate, to determine what judges are going to be assigned to that particular case.”
The Vetting Room legal blog wrote in 2020 that there were “few controversies in [Cannon’s] background,” but that arguably is because Democrats have not effectively communicated to the average voter how partisan the Federalist Society actually is. Federalist Society-approved judges are Republican operatives in black robes.
Carper’s fellow Delaware senator and institutionalist chump Chris Coons said, “We have to make a decision on whether or not to vote for a judge based on what we know about them then, not knowledge about what they might do sometime in the future. Judge Cannon … was rated as qualified by the ABA, was a federal prosecutor [and] was making progress in terms of diversity goals for the district courts in Florida.”
That last line will haunt me to the grave, just as Cannon’s confirmation to the federal bench should equally stalk those 12 Democrats. Donald Trump returning to the White House is a horrifying prospect by itself, but I can’t bear the thought of Clarence Thomas smugly retiring to Harlan Crow’s private island to hunt baby unicorns while Cannon replaces him on the Supreme Court. On the upside, Trump never pays his debts.
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I'm 66, Biden is the best president of my lifetime and it's not close. But, he could do so much more.
There really is no group of people more deserving to lose than the Democrats. Unfortunately their losing means disaster for all of us. It's a hell of a catch, that Catch-22.
If we survive this election, there needs to be some serious repercussions for the "civility Democrats" who still think it's 1996, and have not learned how to fight. Primary them, drive them out, get fighters--moderates, liberals, progressives, whatever works for the constituency, so long as they are fighters who understand that the Republicans are an existential threat and not just something to crow about in fundraising emails, but something that these pols will act on.
Republicans have their own built in enforcers--the Tea Party, now MAGA constituency, that would never tolerate a Republican adhering to "blue slips" or filibusters if they stood in the way of something they wanted. Democrats do not yet have such a thing--perhaps because they're conditioned to think that because the Tea Party was bad, their intraparty tactics were bad too--but they'd better get to it quick because the party is rotting from the inside out, and could be taking us into a long twilight as a country.