At a time when we just honored our American military heroes, Trump pursues unconstitutional discrimination and gerrymandering through the US Census, and floated pardons for some who violated the military code of justice against atrocities and murder of prisoners. McConnell asserts last minute Supreme Court packing rights for Republican lame ducks, and refuses to allow House legislative reforms onto the Senate Floor to reduce foreign influence in the 2020 elections
Honor, Truth, and Duty in a commander have never been so obviously deficient as they are in the impeachable executive of Putin’s choice.
Now in the May 30 New York Time’s “Deceased G.O.P. Strategist’s Hard Drives Reveal New Details on the Census Citizenship Question“, a dead Republican strategist along with Trump’s commerce secretary nonagenarian Wilbur Ross, is revealed in an attempt to deceive the Supreme Court into allowing a racially discriminatory citizenship question on the census.
Thomas B. Hofeller, was a leading Republican strategist, whose friend, the Trump transition official responsible for census issues, Mark Neuman, was revealed by Hofeller’s daughter’s gift of digital files to Common Cause to have lied last year in a deposition in the Manhattan census lawsuit about the discriminatory results of the administration’s move to include a citizenship question, which was planned to enable generations of anti-democratic Congressional gerrymandering.
”In their court filing on Thursday, lawyers for the plaintiffs said that “many striking similarities” between Mr. Hofeller’s study and the department’s request for a citizenship question indicated that the study was an important source document for the Justice Department’s request.
The filing also says flatly that Mr. Gore and Mr. Neuman “falsely testified” under oath about the Justice Department’s actions on the citizenship question.”-NYT (5)
Every political move made by this lying administration and their Russian-Republican Party is to replace American democracy forever with minority government by their wealthy donor class and racially polarized supporters.
By for the first time in the nation’s history, not counting the population, not including children, but counting only voting age Americans, they would effectively disenfranchise recent immigrants, families with higher birth rates, and exclude the recently unborn from proportionate representation by deceitful gerrymander under a packed conservative court.
Whither Utah’s delegations with it’s large Mormon families? Likely collateral damage in the lust for eternal Republican domination, IMO.
Appoint Justice Merrick Garland?, not in 2016. Trump’s final month 2020 conservative judiciary appointments? Sure, said Myth McConnell.
Orwell’s 1984 is now looking tame compared to Republican’s plans for your dystopian country.
In a generation, you’ll hear that Benedict Arnold, not George Washington, was the first President for life. After all, he has more in common with Trump.
Unpaid debt, lawsuits, clandestine communications and collusion with the enemy British for a £20,000 bribe to betray his command led Arnold to flee and turn against his country, commit war crimes, and execute American captives. All behaviors committed or endorsed by Trump.
At every turn, the lying and covering by this yet to be indicted felon betrays the American people, it’s military and most egregiously his own supporters, who shun history at their peril, out of either ignorance or complacency.
Trump may not have sent Cubans and ex-CIA to a physical break-in as Nixon did, but he has scoffed at constitutional democratic traditions and invited the KGB/GRU/Russian oligarchs into the Democrat’s back door and the door of the oval office for secret discussions.
CNN analyst Zachary B. Wolf (1) wrote May 23, in “Most presidents don't pardon murderers. Trump did, and may again”, that:
"In terms of ‘has there ever been an instance where the commander in chief has preemptively pardoned a US service member facing a court-martial for murder?’ No, I'm not aware of that," answered Chris Jenks, an expert in the law of armed conflict at law professor at the Southern Methodist University Dedman School of Law who is a former Army judge advocate.
"You have an entire military justice apparatus," he said, which is set up to make sure justice is served. It starts with the (ethical) Navy SEALs who reported (Trump’s pretrial pardon candidate) chief Edward Gallagher (for murder and obstruction), for example, and continues through the Naval Criminal Investigative Service agents who collected evidence and the admiral who recommended that Gallagher be prosecuted in military court.”
Gallagher’s supporters allege unlikely prosecutorial misconduct.
"What's the point of having the military justice system if it's not allowed to operate?" asked Jenks. "What are you saying to the commanders and the judge advocates who participate in the process when you don't let the military justice process proceed?"
"The broader unstated point is the President and those who support pardons are trying to position themselves as this is an us against them. But when you think about who is the us and who is the them -- it's US service members on both sides of this equation."
Retired Army Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling said on CNN that usurping the military justice system will hurt the military as a whole.
A professional military or a Trumpian mob?
"If you lose control of your forces, you're no longer a military force, you're just a mob," said Hertling, a CNN analyst, writes Wolf.
If the president not only politicizes our military but turns parts of it (and ICE) through pardons and bluster into a loyal Schutzstaffel for his party, not only has our democracy failed, but our expectations of fair treatment for our sons and daughters of the volunteer military are imperiled in future conflicts.
Pardon me?
Trump might not be the first Republican to use pardons for political ends*, but his apparent belief that every arm of the government, including the military and judiciary must serve only at his imperial whim, is the one of the worst internal threats to our American constitutional democracy and the rule of law since Benedict Arnold, who also, according to historian Eric D. Lehman, author of Homegrown Terror: Benedict Arnold and the Burning of New London,as quoted by John Seven’s article (2) in History.com, had personal flaws:
“Some seemed to point to him ‘lacking feeling,’ i.e. sociopathic, but others showed him having too much feeling—he couldn’t control his temper. The number one thing I found across all of them was his selfish ambition, which came from a profound lack of self-esteem as a child and young man,” Lehman says.
Trump and his corrupt son-in -law Jared, as Arnold did, have sought back secret back-channel with foreign enemies including Putin and other Russians. Benedict Arnold used his Tory wife and her friends as couriers to the British, offering surrender of the American fort at West Point for a £20,000 bribe. Trump likes his wives from the former Soviet Empire.
Trump, as did Benedict Arnold, suffers from personal debt, a tendency to litigate and avoid payment of loans, engage in creative or lost accounting of expenses, and is raised with a falsely aristocratic sense of privilege and entitlement.
Barr none, Russ-publicans will investigate the investigation.
There should be no question why the FBI and intelligence agencies began an investigation of Trump’s campaign. His self-serving actions, psychological and financial history, and much of his early foreign policy fit the pattern of known traitors and aided Putin’s territorial aggression and destabilization of NATO’s democracies.
Trump’s ethics (and previously planned Memorial Day pardons) could justify Arnold’s massacre of the surrendered American defenders at the Battle of Fort Griswold/Groton Heights after he had deserted to fight for the British Army. British troops under Arnold massacred surrendered defenders in the fort, lending inspiration to the American victory of Yorktown, when the Marquis de Lafayette reportedly yelled, "Remember Fort Griswold!"(4)
Honorable British officers were loathe to serve under Arnold the traitor, just as Trump’s cabinet generals have abandoned his administration.
Trump’s pathetic need for adulation and parades, his threats, love of successful contemporary dictators, his coddling of war criminals within our military, suggest a deep pathology more typical of an evil despot and thief than a commander-in-chief.
Trump’s refusal to understand and respect the necessary work of government beyond matters of Trump brand, personal gain and self-aggrandizing requires nothing short of his expedient removal.
Traitors like Trump and Arnold, who, once empowered, would take the American military and the law into their own hands, conspire with foreign enemies to pay off personal debts, absolve murders or cover up this greedy president’s abuses, deserve their just penalty, not tainted pardons. Had Arnold not deserted his post to flee aboard the aptly named British ship Vulture, he may likely have been hung for treason in time of war.
A clear and present danger.
An embattled and unrepentant Trump is easy prey for the mischief of Putin and other despot’s attempts to destroy American global power and prestige, even if he has not been a willing participant from the start.
Why is the disease still not worse than the the treatment?
Congressional investigations and the free press continue to successfully educate the public, so that those who perversely hold for Trump, who have long abandoned any conscience and loyalty to the law by excusing his treasonous lies, who remain willfully blinded enablers of his unconstitutional assaults, may be forced to obey the demonstrations at their door.
Courageous federal judges may buy sufficient time for America’s nightmare to be ended, but for now, Republican minority Trumpists refuse to accept and protect true constitutional democracy. If Republican/Fox propaganda is allowed to continue programming the Trumpist minority, we need rightfully fear the tar, the feathers, and pitchforks of civil disorder, and Putin’s style of state kleptocracy for oligarchs will hold sway.
American industrial might, strength and morals won the fight against fascism 74 years ago. Under a weakened and fraudulent president who pays lip service only to the first of these, Trumpists risk reversing that allied victory of democracies against fascism, dictators and genocide.
A real Tea Party ended unfair taxation by of a foreign tyrant. The Republican Tea Party of 2008-2020 has enriched its legislators by successfully restoring preferential taxation for stateless corporate donors and oligarchs like Putin’s allies.
Americans cannot afford to buy what these liars are selling.
(*Bush 41 and Trump-favorite two time Attorney General William Barr used pardons to avoid prosecutions for illegal weapons sales to the enemy in Iran-Contra.)
References:
(1)
https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/23/politics/war-crimes-pardons-trump/index.html
(2)
https://www.history.com/.amp/news/why-did-benedict-arnold-betray-america
(3)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benedict_Arnold
(4)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Groton_Heights
(5)
Deceased G.O.P. Strategist’s Hard Drives Reveal New Details on the Census Citizenship Question
New York Times May 30, 2019,
by Michael Wines