There is NO WAY (ZERO!) that Mail-In Ballots will be anything less than substantially fraudulent. Mail boxes will be robbed, ballots will be forged & even illegally printed out & fraudulently signed. The Governor of California is sending Ballots to millions of people, anyone.....
Get the facts about mail-in ballots
May 26
....living in the state, no matter who they are or how they got there, will get one. That will be followed up with professionals telling all of these people, many of whom have never even thought of voting before, how, and for whom, to vote. This will be a Rigged Election. No way!
Get the facts about mail-in ballots
I think our nation began its love
affair with exceptional legal complexity with the Industrial Revolution,
ramping up in the early 20th century with the complexities of a
rising federal income tax code and exploding in reaction to the Great
Depression beginning in 1929. Though presidents are sworn to protect the
Constitution and the laws of the United States, the vast body of statutes and
regulations would fill stacks of books in a substantial library – even without
the court cases filed that interpret it all. It is impossible to know even a
fraction of that collection of rules.
I used to believe that a president
didn’t need to be a lawyer to hold that job, but unless a non-lawyer were
willing to take some time to learn more than a few basics, I am beginning to
believe that legal training is a prerequisite for anyone running for the
highest office in the land. Of our 45 US presidents, 26 have been attorneys.
Taking the Great Depression as a line of demarcation into modern legal
complexity, the presidents who were not lawyers from FDR (a lawyer) on were:
Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, John F Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Ronald Reagan,
George W Bush and Donald Trump. The non-lawyers prior to W all had substantial
familiarity with governance and statutory compliance, even if they were not
lawyers.
What should delineate a lawyer from a
layman, based on legal education and bar admission, is a commitment to and an
admiration for the legal system that elected them and the constitutional
guarantees that support the democracy. I have often criticized an
almost-impossible-to-amend constitution, written in an era when 94% of the
nation were farmers and available weapons ranged from flintlocks to crude
canons, but at the core of my criticisms is a firm belief that democracy
crumbles and dies without a strong and impervious constitutional structure
dedicated to protect individual and society’s rights. In our case, it is a
mixture of majority rule with a strong body of protections for individual and
minorities against total domination by the majority.
One of the most interesting features
of the US Presidency is the leeway accorded the President, both under the
Constitution and through Congressional mandates, to issue executive orders.
While some carry the weight of law, they cannot overrule either the
Constitution or statutes to the contrary, and they are always subject to
judicial scrutiny. Franklin Delano Roosevelt (the longest serving president
before term limits were imposed; 1933-1945) had to cope with the double whammy
of recovering from the Great Depression and World War II. His 3,721 executive
orders, the most of any president, carried failed attempts to stack the US
Supreme Court and dilute its powers to review his actions, particularly as the
Court repeatedly limited significant portions of this New Deal recovery
efforts.
Despite Trump administration claims to the
contrary, at
277 executive orders, Barack Obama issued fewer executive orders than any
two-term president since Grover Cleveland. But the issue isn’t the number of
executive orders; it’s their scope and intent. Both FDR and Donald Trump tended
to tilt against constitutional and statutory precedents, FDR because he faced a
massive hemorrhage of the economy and a horrific global conflict and Donald
Trump because he was dedicated to reshaping the entire system of governance
(“drain the swamp”) and undoing virtually the entirety of the Obama legacy.
So what happens when an individual with no legal training
and zero prior experience in any elected or official governmental capacity,
particularly one with a checkered past vis-à-vis the law (tax and bankruptcy
failings, thousands of law suits, and numerous run-ins with local ordinances
and financial regulations), a CEO of a privately-held series of companies who
never faced the legal restraints imposed on publicly-traded companies, is
elected president? One with passionate anti-government followers and one who
believes that any interference with his policies is both unpatriotic (perhaps
even treasonous) and illegal? Add that an impeachment attempt, to rein in his
wanton use of presidential power, was squashed without even a trial by a Senate
dominated by his lock-step GOP supporters. You get a president who believes he
has unlimited power.
Notions of a “loyal opposition” or the checks and balances
of a free press under the First Amendment do not fit within the Trumpian vision
of governance. Most of the mainstream “press” is vilified as an “enemy” of the
people, even as Trump’s attempt to exclude certain members of the press from
White House access have been repeatedly reversed by the courts. Statutes on
immigration, Congressional limits on how appropriations must be spent,
whistleblower laws, as well as statutes on financial and environmental mandates
and absolute constitutional prohibitions are viewed as unconscionable blocks to
what Donald Trump has sworn to do.
Just listening to the President detail his objections and
introduce his intentions to issue orders in defiance of those statutes and
constitutional provisions, with the full support of his fully politicized
Attorney General, you come to the irretrievable conclusion that (a) Trump (and
most of his appointees) either do not know what those provisions are, or if
they do know, they have no respect for their mandates, constitutional or
otherwise and (b) will act in contravention of that body of law anyway, forcing
courts into a rolling and exceptionally wasteful pattern of review and
rejection. Simply, private CEO Donald Trump, never ever having had any check or
balances imposed on his corporate leadership, believes that the mere fact that
he was elected gives him the right not just to be above the law, but to be
the law.
Even more extreme is the President’s position, now before
the Supreme Court, that he cannot even be investigated while in office, even if
he were to commit murder in front of many witnesses: “[The] president's lawyers argued in the U.S. Court
of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit in Trump v. Vance, the thesis that a sitting president
cannot be investigated would mean that Trump could literally shoot someone on
Fifth Avenue, and police and federal investigators would be powerless to do
anything about it.
“That is not just a metaphor. As the
president's lawyers made clear in their arguments in the 2nd Circuit, the
theory of ‘temporary absolute immunity’ means that for the four or eight years
Trump is president, ordinary law enforcement measures against him would be
entirely suspended. There could be 50 witnesses to the shooting, and not only
would the police be barred from arresting or even stopping the president from
his murderous spree. They could not even call the eyewitnesses in for
questioning, as the president would have the right to block any such subpoena
and insist that the witness not appear. According to Jay Sekulow, one of the
president's lawyers, even requiring witnesses to testify would constitute
"presidential harassment" that would interfere with the ability of
Trump to do his job…
“The nub of the president's argument is that Article II of
the Constitution gives him ‘temporary absolute immunity’ until he leaves
office. Worse, Trump thinks it extends immunity to anyone who holds his private
records, even third parties who did not take part in the potential wrongdoing
under investigation. His argument is that Article II temporarily places a sitting
president personally beyond the reach of ordinary judicial processes, whether
civil or criminal, and that it does this in order to protect the president's
ability to govern without harassment.” Newsweek, May 15th.
Trump’s utter disdain for the free speech and free press
provisions of the First Amendment is anything but subtle. As social media is
flooded with deep fake videos, utterly unproven conspiracy theories, Russian
bots spreading pro-Trump falsehoods, Trump has reveled in his ability to say
absolutely anything without the slightest regard for the facts (part of his
18,000 presidential fact-checked lies to date and counting) and accuse anyone
who opposes him with blatantly false narratives. His social media tool of
choice, Twitter, has until recently published his factually fabricated tweets
without comment or objection. Until May 26th.
Twitter added a little message to Trump’s May 26th tweets
(reproduced above), suggesting that readers follow that information icon to a
more truthful and contradictory body of proof that there is little or no basis
to believe that vote-by-mail has any meaningful level of fraud. Trump was
outraged. At first, he threatened to take the entirety of Twitter down. Forget
the First Amendment, Emperor Donald. Then, based on some obvious legal advice
that still is unlikely to withstand judicial scrutiny, he opted for a different
tact: “President Donald Trump,
triggered after Twitter
applied fact-checking labels to two of his inaccurate
tweets, will order U.S. regulators to reexamine a law that shields social-media
companies from liability for content posted on their services, according to
media reports.
message to Trump’s May 26th tweets
(reproduced above), suggesting that readers follow that information icon to a
more truthful and contradictory body of proof that there is little or no basis
to believe that vote-by-mail has any meaningful level of fraud. Trump was
outraged. At first, he threatened to take the entirety of Twitter down. Forget
the First Amendment, Emperor Donald. Then, based on some obvious legal advice
that still is unlikely to withstand judicial scrutiny, he opted for a different
tact: “President Donald Trump,
triggered after Twitter
applied fact-checking labels to two of his inaccurate
tweets, will order U.S. regulators to reexamine a law that shields social-media
companies from liability for content posted on their services, according to
media reports.
“The
White House’s proposal would seek to curb protections afforded to internet
companies under Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act. According
to the law, ‘No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be
treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another
information content provider.’ That lets companies like Facebook,
YouTube and Twitter moderate
content on their services as they see fit, while protecting them from lawsuits
over content shared on them.
“Trump’s
order seeks to empower federal regulators to reinterpret Section 230, to
examine whether content moderation policies of companies like Facebook and
Twitter engage in ‘selective censoring’ that would be grounds to remove their
legal protections…” Variety.com, May 28th. Trump signed that
executive order on May 28th.
The
next day, in response to the violent protests in Minnesota against the death of
an African American who suffocated while being arrested, Donald Trump release
the bottom tweet above, to which Twitter added the above admonition against
Twitter’s policy against “glorifying violence.” War had been declared between
the President’s favorite platform to reach his base… and the President. Aside
from the serious constitutional questions, many asked if the President could even
live with the very rules he proposed.
In the
end, we have a rogue president with a substantial and probably well-armed
constituency that is locked in support of virtually everything Trump chooses to
do (with rather dramatic support from Republicans in Congress)… assaulting the
Constitution, flaunting total disregard for statutes he dislikes – all during a
pandemic that fosters consolidated power – threatening to decimate the very
democracy that elected him.
I’m Peter Dekom, and while some
erroneously believe that our system of government is strong enough to endure
this assault on its bedrock principles, history is replete with the ashes of
nations that also made that assumption.
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