LISTENING TO CLIPS from Trump's election stealing "speech" from last night, my first thought was the mad Caligula going to war against Poseidon and having his troops collect his plunder in the form of seashells, after which he demanded the Roman Senate praise him for his victory. As I recall an arch or some other monument was constructed.*
Our Senate is not much better than the Roman Senate in the most corrupt parts of the descent of Rome into the imperial system after its plenty corrupt to get on with republic failed. It should never be forgotten, that even with the history of the thing fully known to them, the framers of the U.S. Constitution used the Roman republic as a model for what they were imposing on the new country. They clearly were trying, to an extent, to repeat what had failed more than 18 centuries before expecting that it would prove incorruptible, this time. That is with all of their slave-owner, crooked lawyer-financier and inequality enabling features added. The Constitution of the United States is held up as fundamentalists hold up the Bible, only it is far more dangerous to us because it is given actual power which the Bible has never held on this continent. We are never to admit that the Constitution is the source of most of the corruption that we suffer under, or that and the Supreme Court "interpretation" of it which has only added more dangerous features to what they wrote down.
Hearing the calls for invoking the 25th Amendment to remove our own corrupt, mad and far more dangerously powerful Roberts Court crowned emperor only proves that our system, our Constitution, now corrupted into the beginning of Republican-fascism is ludicrously unable to protect us.
That amendment, framed when it was plausibly argued** that something like honor and caution would govern the actions of a Vice President and the members of a president's cabinet, is a dead letter. The provision in it for Congress to appoint others to remove a dangerous president from office have never been taken up and, without some better scheme for doing that, we are left with the sense of responsibility and honor and morals that a J.D. Vance, a Todd Blanche, a Pete Hegseth, a Marco Rubio, a Robert Kennedy, a Brooke Rollins, Howard Lutnick, Scott Bessent, Doug Burgum, Sean Duffy, Linda McMahon, Chris Wright, Doug Collins, Scott Turner, Keith Sonderling, and Markwayne Mullins have. If you could find enough morals, sense of responsibility, honesty, wisdom or even enough of the least of those attributes, intelligence among the entire group just named to make one decent public official, I doubt entirely. None of them could count on even a J.D. Vance to keep them on, he and his owner, Thiel would want their own gang of thieves in place and they might want smarter ones.
Such is who our fate is put in the hands of, by the absurdity of the Constitution and the Republican-fascist majority in the U.S. Senate who the thing relies on to shield us from the corruption and stupidity of a Trump.
Nothing that happens in November, no reform legislation, not even the desperately needed reform of the totally corrupt Supreme Court will be enough to save us in the long run without some serious and drastic reform of the U.S. Constitution - including taking the Marbury power from the Court once and for all. It was the Supreme Court that got us into this with their lie and billionaire and millionaire favoring rulings. It was lawyers among those in the presidency and Congress who couldn't imagine doing what needed to be done after the BIPARTISAN emergency clean elections legislation passed after the democracy endangering crimes of Watergate were exposed - remove the power to nullify such legislation from the Supreme Court. I have long held that even among democrats the lawyers among them would be the weakest link in securing legitimate government through egalitarian democracy and protecting it from those who were its most dangerous enemies, the rich, the racist, the profiteers and the for-show-patriots. And they will ride such nonsense as removal of a Trump through the Constitutional fictions of impeachment and the 25th Amendment into an imperial corruption that will make the Roman one look penny-ante.
I think the most insightful sentence uttered about the law under the U.S. Constitution was said by one of the most corrupt and corrupting of the robber barons, J.P. Morgan when he is said to have said, "I don't know as I want a lawyer to tell me what I cannot do. I hire him to tell how to do what I want to do, which is pretty much an accurate description of what a very large percentage of lawyers in the US are trained to do and which any rump of honest practitioners in the law have been unable or, more likely, unwilling to transcend.
Trump is, beyond measure, the stupidest person to have ever held the American presidency, and considering the likes of Franklin Pierce, Andrew Johnson, Calvin Coolidge, George W. Bush, and others are his competition for that, that is saying a lot. But he is a corrupt idiot who was tutored by the infamously corrupt and extremely powerful lawyer-liar-crook Roy Cohn. He apparently learned everything he needed about the law and lawyer tactics that he would need to rob, steal, cheat, swindle, wear down to climb to the top rank of criminals in United States history from that one corrupt lawyer. I would be surprised if he hadn't, actually learned less from his putrid father, the KKK-Nazi loving Fred Trump. And it should never be forgotten that Cohn prospered for decades, half a century as a corrupt, crooked and loathsome lawyer, not in some eutrophic swamp like Louisiana or Alabama but in the capital of American sophistication and media scrutiny, New York City. The one and only time that the members of the bar really did anything to hold him to account was when he was finally on his deathbed dying of AIDS even as he was pretending he was straight and getting celebrity TV journalists to cover for him, one of the most famous of those having pretended to be his girlfriend, briefly. And the judges and "justices" were in on that and so many other examples of corruption, both in the career of Cohn and in the CV of Donald Trump.
Putting a Band Aid on the gutted American democracy is what I expect will happen, it will not work, the Supreme Court will make sure of that. Especially if the Congress passes effective laws. The Constitution is the cause of all of it, the faulty ideas it consists of, the intentional anti-equality corruptions baked into it, the added corruptions that its structure did nothing to overturn or prevent. Without that, with the practice and scheming of corrupt lawyers and others - look at the authors of Project 2025 - will only get another chance to try again.
As an aside, election rigging is also baked into the Constitution in order to prevent real representative democracy. The original 3/5ths provision which, after emancipation turned into the even more corrupt 5/5ths under Jim Crow (and which the John Crow Supreme Court has revived) was stealing the power to vote from Black People while giving those who enslaved them and maintained post-bellum apartheid against them the voting power they were given through counting them in the census. Trump's legislation which his speech pushed is a Republican election rigging law. As have been the Roberts Court's rulings that allows states to deny Black People, Latinos, Native Americans and, as the Court explicitly green-lighted DEMOCRATS the representation that their numbers give them a right to.
I will leave that point which could be elaborated on by saying that the structure of the Senate has de-facto election rigging in it by giving low-population states far, far more electoral power than those in even the largest states. Vote rigging in reality is baked into the Constitution from the start. Those in the largest states have been played for chumps from the start of the thing and never so much so as today.
One of the stupidest things in our Constitution is that the 1st Amendment is so flawed that even with the witness to the Holocaust, slavery, America's genocide of the original American People, etc. WE ARE TO NEVER LEARN FROM AND PREVENT SUCH ATROCITIES. The ideologies those are based in are to ALWAYS HAVE ANOTHER CHANCE TO SUCCEED AND MURDER MILLIONS IF NOT MORE, FOREVER. We are to never, ever learn even the hardest lessons of history, not even during the lifetimes of those who experienced and witnessed those terrible lessons. It has given rise to the insane post-WWII ideology of "free speech absolutism" which went from such champions of Molly Ivins and myriads of other leftist and liberal democratic journalists, lawyers, academics, etc. There is nothing so telling as to the insane folly of that ideology that it is now the favorite ideology of the Trumpists, the Murdochian fascist-porn industry titans, and fascists and Nazis and, lest anyone not realize they are the most powerful of all of these, Americas indigenous fascists, the white supremacists. ONLY ONCE THEY HAVE POWER THEY WILL USE EVERY ORGAN OF POWER THEY HOLD TO SUPPRESS, WHAT, THE FREEDOM OF THEIR OPPONENTS TO OPPOSE THEM. Look at what the "civil libertarian lawyer" led Brit Labour government has done in that regard, as an example.
Until we make lying not only wrong again, but a meaningful liability to those who lie for fascism, America's democracy is as dead as the Roman Republic was. And I mean as it was in 1787, not just in 40 AD.
* UPDATE: I was going on memory, it was a massive lighthouse not an arch, which erosion on the coastline destroyed. I think any Democratic candidate who promises to destroy Trump's monuments to himself will probably gain votes for that promise. It is insane that a criminally corrupt and insane president can do what Trump has been allowed to do in that regard but it only proves how insanely corrupt our Constitution, as it really is, allows things to get. WITH THE SUPREME COURT AND LOWER COURTS ALLOWING IT.
** It is entirely relevant that those who wrote and adopted the 25th Amendment were the generation who experienced and fought WWII against fascism and Nazism. Their children (my age cohort), grandchildren and great grand children have proven to have forgotten or never learned what their experience taught them. We can't rely on that happening again, not short of a democratic recovery from as bad or worse here than happened in Europe, Asia and elsewhere then. We can learn from that history or we can fall for libertarian insouciance such as "free speech-press absolutism" is made of.
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