Throughout the history of civilization, great nations have risen and fallen, most often, according to the commonly accepted wisdom, by rotting from the inside out; usually, it seems, because of some virtue that proves, in the manner of Greek tragedy, to be a fatal flaw. While that may not be true in every case (the Incas, for example, were doing just fine until Pizzaro and his coterie of colonialist bandits showed up), there are plenty of such examples: Ur, Babylon, Assur, Rome, Egypt, the Ottomans, the Khmer, the Dai Yuan. The list, while not exhaustive, can certainly be exhaustive to read.
And the phenomenon is by no means restricted to being viewed through the opaque mists of history. Recent specimens are available in abundance, such, for example, the Soviet Union. Its fatal flaw was the concept of Marxism, which in itself is a virtuous ideal, but, tragically, an ideal to which only the likes of Mahatma Gandhi or Mother Teresa could viably aspire. The element of Greek tragedy there was, of course, the fact that most of us are far too greedy and self-interested to be good Communists, proving that Marx, while a great economist, was a hopelessly unrealistic political philosopher. Perhaps his father-in-law was right in advising him to stop growing carbuncles on his backside at the library writing about capital and go out and make some instead. Not that it would have helped the Russian people much, though – without Marx, by 1917 the Romanov empire would still have inevitably rotted from the inside out from the much more prosaic, and hardly virtuous, flaws of autocracy and a sclerotic social system centuries out of date.
Last week, the people of the United States, as well as those in the rest of world with sufficient interest, were treated to the first of two absurdist spectacles which will, potentially, comprise a key chapter in the ongoing Greek tragedy of the American Constitution’s descent onto the ash heap of history. For the international readers of this Web log, who are legion, loyal and loved (happy Valentine’s Day BTW), let’s consider a little background:
The Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution was passed by Congress and ratified by three-fourths of the States after the surrender of the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia and the subsequent dissolution of the Confederate government, the capital of which was located in Richmond, Virginia (I’m not going to say “the end of the US Civil War” because in fact, thanks to racists and white supremacists in the eleven states that once constituted the Confederate States of America, and their allies and sympathizers throughout America, it has never ended). The amendment stipulates, rather clumsily as it turned out, that anyone who has taken an oath to support the US Constitution, been an officer of the United States, and subsequently engaged in an insurrection against it, or having offered aid and comfort to those who did, cannot thereafter hold public office in service of the United States of America.
On January 6, 2021, Donald Trump, who was, according to the Constitution, still president of the United States at the time, provoked a mob that he had summoned (via Twitter and various other channels of communication) to the capital of the United States, the city of Washington DC, telling them to go to the seat of American government, the US Capitol, and “fight like hell, or you’re not going have a country anymore.” It could hardly be characterized as a coincidence that Congress was, on that day, in the process of ratifying the Electoral College votes that would, constitutionally, make Joseph Robinette Biden the next president of the United States, and call it what you will, a fracas of monumental proportions ensued. Meanwhile Trump, imitating Nero, reneged on his promise to accompany his rag-tag horde of deluded dupes to the event, withdrawing instead to the White House, engaging there in a three hour session watching the fascist putsch festivities on television (in lieu of strumming languidly on a lyre) while enraptured in a trance of egotistical solipsism.
The coup attempt failed, just barely, due to the heroic actions of the Capitol police and the refusal of Vice President Mike Pence to go along with his role in the plot. One might be forgiven for thinking that the gallows erected by Trump’s mob on the Capitol grounds for purposes of executing Pence, accompanied by the insurrectionists’ repeated chants to hang him might have played some part in that decision. When the coup failure became obvious, Trump reluctantly announced through the media that his followers, while “good, wonderful people,” should cease, desist and go home.
In the aftermath, the US Justice Department acted swiftly to hunt down, prosecute and jail the idiots in Trump’s throng of disaffected, brainwashed losers, charging many of them with insurrection and sedition, but dithered for years over what to do about Trump himself. Meanwhile the House of Representatives, under the leadership of one Speaker Nancy Pelosi, convened a Select Committee of Congress to investigate. That inquiry predictably produced a mountain of conclusive evidence that not only did Trump summon a mob and incite them to attack the US Congress, he was engaged in what amounted to an organized attempt at a coup to overthrow the US government and install himself as a dictator. The Committee dutifully sent its findings to the DOJ with recommendations that Trump be prosecuted for insurrection and sedition himself, just as had been many of his followers.
That kind of, sort of, halfway materialized with a federal case against Trump led by Special Prosecutor Jack Smith, which, while not exactly charging Trump with insurrection or sedition, did charge him with a number of felonies related to the failed coup plot. Trump’s lawyers threw everything they could at the case, trying, successfully, to slow it down, with the objective of delaying a verdict until after the 2024 election, in which Trump was obviously destined to be the Republican nominee (and assuming, naturally, that if Trump won the election, there would never be a verdict). One of these tactics was to file a motion with the federal appeals court in Washington DC, where Smith’s trial against Trump was being held, stating that because Trump was president when the coup attempt occurred, he is protected from prosecution for his actions related to it because of presidential immunity. The appeals court spent months writing what most legal scholars agree is a completely airtight, unanimous decision which proclaims that plotting to overthrow the United States government is not part of a president’s official duties and therefore not covered by any conceivable interpretation of the legal doctrine of presidential immunity. As expected, Trump’s lawyers appealed that decision to the US Supreme Court, who, according to law, are not required to even consider it if they don’t want to. Whether or not they will do so is scheduled to be determined beginning this week, and that decision and its sequelae will constitute the second extravaganza of legal absurdity to which we look forward.
The one last week grew out of a case named Anderson vs Griswold, filed September 6, 2023, in the District Court for the City and County of Denver, Colorado. It reads, with omissions of the legal citations indicated by ellipses, as follows:
Petitioners Norma Anderson, Michelle Priola, Claudine Cmarada, Krista Kafer, Kathi Wright, and Christopher Castilian, eligible Colorado electors, bring this action… to challenge the listing of Respondent Donald J. Trump as a candidate on the 2024 Republican presidential primary election ballot and any future election ballot, based on his disqualification from public office under Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. Petitioners seek an order declaring Trump disqualified under the Fourteenth Amendment and enjoining Respondent Secretary of State Jena Griswold (the “Secretary”) from taking any action that would allow him to access the ballot…
Now, naturally, one might expect that the Anderson referred to in the case is some Democratic radical liberal elitist with a condo in Aspen who attends Sundance and Telluride to watch foreign socialist GQBLTAI+ movies with George Soros and RuPaul. But in fact, she’s a ninety-one-year-old rock-ribbed conservative Republican who carries around a copy of the United States Constitution in her purse, and the rest of the petitioners in that lawsuit are similar – patriotic, concerned Americans who sincerely believe that Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment means exactly what it appears to say.
They’re not Supreme Court justices, of course, so what they think that particular part of the Constitution means doesn’t count for doodly-squat. According to Marbury vs Madison, it means exactly what those nine people say and nothing else, notwithstanding that the Colorado Supreme Court agreed with Ms. Anderson, et. al., and found as a matter of fact, as other judges have since that fateful day, that on January 6, 2021, President Donald J Trump, with the aid of numerous accomplices in his administration, political party, campaign, business organization, and social circle, executed a previously conceived, premeditated, widespread, extensive and intricate conspiratorial plan to engage in an insurrection against the United States of America and its Constitution.
And so it was last Thursday, that Trump’s team of lawyers confronted the team representing Anderson and friends, and the legal theater of the absurd commenced. First of all, Their Worships of the Court considered the mighty semantic question of whether or not the president of the United States is an officer of the United States, as described in Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment. No, really, I’m not making this up. Yes, I know, it’s like debating whether or not the Pope is Catholic, but let’s just say the current Supreme Court of the United States has a decidedly unique sense of humor. They listened intently and posed what sounded like serious questions while Trump’s lawyers argued that the President is not an “officer” within the meaning of Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment, claiming that the phrase “officers of the United States,” as used in other constitutional clauses such as Appointments Clause and Impeachment Clause, establishes that the President is not an “officer” because each of these clauses lists the Presidency and “officers of the United States” as separate categories. And then they asserted that the Supreme Court’s precedent in the case, Free Enterprise Fund vs Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, established that “officers of the United States” are only appointed, never elected. Additionally, they contended that Section Three only applies to those who have violated an oath to “support” the Constitution, as required for members of Congress under Article VI, while the president only swears to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution.” Therefore, Trump’s lawyers argued, the president is exempt. Furthermore, they contended that even if the Presidency is an “officer” as the term is colloquially understood, that does not necessarily mean that the President is an “officer of the United States.”
At this point, it should be noted that in their brief, Trump’s lawyers pressed on into even more freakishly antipodean reaches of semantic asininity, arguing that he did not “engage” in an “insurrection” on January 6, 2021. And to emphasize their manifest contempt for common sense, reason, the intelligence of the justices, the public and the future historians who will record their amoral betray of the principles underlying American freedom, Trump’s lawyers maintained that his statements were protected political speech under the First Amendment. So, presumably, according to them, is crying “fire!” in a crowded theater.
Strangely, not one single justice of the Supreme Court asked one single question about this issue during the oral arguments last Thursday. Perhaps they found the actual facts of the case to be insufficiently amusing. Or perhaps Trump’s lawyers’ estimation of their intelligence was accurate. We will never know.
Instead, everyone dived into the question of the relationship between the enforcement of Section Three and the legal concept of Federalism, where Trump’s lawyers argued that, under Section Five of the Fourteenth Amendment, only Congress can enforce the Disqualification Clause. Why that should be necessary for this particular enumerated disqualification for the office of president, among the several others which appear in the Constitution that are self-executing, such as the age requirement of thirty-five years, remains a mystery to all but Their Worships and God Almighty, I fear. The justices appeared to take Trump’s lawyers seriously as they asserted that their fun-house mirror view of the law is supported by Chief Justice Chase’s circuit court decision in the matter In re Griffin and Congress’ subsequent passage of the Enforcement Act of 1870 (two remarkable works of legal absurdity themselves, dating from early Reconstruction), on the basis of which they maintained that, in the absence of easily discernible standards for states to determine whether a potential candidate has “engaged in insurrection,” disqualification by a state court is inappropriate. They also argued that Section Three cannot be used to remove Trump from the ballot because its text only forbids insurrectionists from holding office, not from running for office and being elected. They then demonstrated that MAGA Republican advocacy of States’ Rights is manifestly situational, prevailing with the strength of granite, for example, against impoverished pregnant women in need of an abortion, but yielding like butter for wealthy fascist criminals who would be king. Wallowing in hypocrisy, they claimed that the Constitution bars the Colorado Supreme Court from deciding this case because the Electors Clause of the Constitution limits the ability of state courts to review election claims, and then had the utterly shameless temerity to suggest that, when a state law issue is closely related to a question of federal constitutional law, the Supreme Court may overturn otherwise-binding state judicial interpretations of state law. (Except, of course, when the states feel like suppressing minority voters’ rights, permitting big business to pollute the air, allowing the extinction of federally protected species, restricting citizens’ ability to bring class action suits against dishonest corporations, busting labor unions, forcing twelve-year-olds to bear their rapist’s children, banning books, letting ordinary people run around with unlicensed concealed firearms in public and so forth, in which case they believe, like good all MAGA Republicans, the Supreme Court can absolutely do no such thing.)
No, none of this was an hallucination or a nightmare. This is not an excerpt from a play by Ionesco, Jarry, Genet or Camus. All of that actually happened during oral arguments in the Supreme Court of the United States last Thursday. And the smart money says Anderson et. al. will lose the case to the man who has lately promised that, if elected president of the United States on the Republican ticket in 2024, to become a dictator on day one, and who recently invited Vladimir Putin to invade any NATO members who “don’t pay their dues.” And right now, this monstrosity, this lunatic, this sexual predator, this consummate bigot, this grifter, this con-man, this pathological liar, this buffoon of encyclopedic ignorance, this insurrectionist is running five percent ahead of Joe Biden in the polls. Samuel Beckett, phone home, reality seems to have surpassed even your bizarre, unreal and weird imagination. Is this how the United States of America will end, not with a bang, but with a preposterous burlesque? All I can say is, don’t miss the next exciting installment of Tom Collins’ World Wide Web Log.
Unlike Ms. Anderson, Willemina Forrestal Winthrop-Singh Nfume most certainly is a Democratic radical liberal elitist with a condo in Aspen who attends Sundance and Telluride to watch foreign socialist GQBLTAI+ movies, if not with George Soros and RuPaul, with people very much like them. She’s an advisor to the Biden for President campaign, and like many of my Democratic visitors lately, she stormed into my office this morning in an absolute snit.
“Collins,” she bitterly complained as she plunked her statuesque and corpulent frame directly in the chair in front of my desk, “that Korean [expletive] [expletive] [expletive] kimchee Robert Kyoung Hur has got a lot of God-damned [expletive] gall to impugn President Biden in an official investigative report to the Attorney General! There’s nothing wrong with Biden’s cognitive abilities, and his memory works just fine! The whole thing is just Hur kissing up to Trump, who said he couldn’t remember things over a thousand times during the depositions for all of those law suits and indictments! That whole report is just a steaming pile of [expletive]!”
“Speaking of kissing, do you kiss you mother with that mouth?” I inquired. “Give him a break – he’s a Republican, and they’re madder at him for not prosecuting Biden for violations of national security laws than you are for putting some ageist snark in a work product that announces there’s no case to be had there.”
“It’s the same thing Comey did to Hillary Clinton!” she fumed.
“If you mean by that it was a Republican DOJ official spouting smack about a Democratic presidential candidate, then yeah,” I agreed. “But Hur and Comey have the same concerns, and they were just covering their posterior glutei maximi. They have their families to think about, you know.”
“By which,” she huffed, “you mean, what?”
“By which,” I explained, “I mean that, like Comey, Hur found nothing. So there they were, Republicans in the age of Trumpism, with Trump’s followers running around with AR-15’s, plastic handcuff twist-ties, bear spray and ball-peen hammers, SWAT-ing people’s homes, filling up their message queues, inboxes and voice mails with death threats, rape threats, arson threats – you know, the whole 1930’s NSDAP brownshirt routine, the police doing not much of anything about it and private security costing more than a custom Maybach. So they figure the report has to say something to keep Trump from sending the MAGA goons to harass, assault or murder them or their relatives some time in the future. Consequently, they make some snide comments about the Democrat they were investigating. It’s the same thing lawyers in their situation did during the Weimar Republic. Can you blame them?”
“Hell, yeah,” she shot back. “I sure as [expletive] can blame them! I don’t want America to end up like the Weimar Republic did!”
“Neither of us do,” I agreed. “And both Hur and Comey are entertaining the same pathetic fantasy – that if Trump becomes dictator, because of what they did to Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, they will be safe, when in fact, it will be them, and people like them whom the MAGA thugs will come for first. And after that, of course, Trump will turn on his dupes and have them eliminated, just like the successor authoritarian government to the Weimar Republic did during the Night of the Long Knives. Instead of being angry, you should feel sorry for such fools – if their strategies succeed they’re dooming themselves and their families to destruction.”
“If their strategies succeed,” she spat, “I’ll save my pity for the rest of us!”
“And if the Democrats had a strategy that involved running anybody other than the one person in its stable of potential candidates who could lose the presidential election to an inept, juvenile imitation of Mussolini,” I pointed out, “neither of us would have to be concerned with whom we should sympathize.”
“I’ve had about enough of your moral relativism, Collins,” she barked. “Time is money, and I’m talking about money Act Blue has collected from Democrats who want to win the 2024 presidential election! So make with some ideas about how to neutralize that [expletive] drivel that [expletive] [expletive] cockroach Hur spouted in his [expletive] ignorant half-[expletive] [expletive] report, and do it pronto!”
“Well,” I opened, “there’s a solution I proposed to the Trump people, years ago, to deal with his own foot-in-mouth disease – operant conditioning.”
She squinted at me skeptically. “What the [expletive] do you mean by that?”
“A device,” I explained, “controlled either by a person or, today, I suppose it could be controlled by artificial intelligence, that administers a mild electric shock when the subject, say, in Biden’s case, enters Grandpa’s Story Mode and begins to digress into relating an anecdote that…”
“No!” she strenuously objected. “Absolutely not! The President of the United States is no [expletive] lab rat!”
“Okay,” conceded, “but I would observe that tests of the device performed by an independent research team in Switzerland demonstrated highly effective results.”
“What if it leaked to the press a week before the election, huh?” She stared at me intently. “Ever think about that?”
“What if it was classified Top Secret, compartmentalized information?” I countered. “Care to think about that?”
“Forget it,” she commanded. “I couldn’t even consider suggesting it.”
“Hey,” I responded with a shrug, “it’s your election campaign. How about you hire a personal trainer to work with him to stay on topic when he talks, avoid confusing subjects and use mnemonic devices to remember important items?”
“And as what,” she scoffed, “are we supposed to present this person’s job description?”
“Call them an elocution coach,” I offered, “a public address facilitator, a linguistic editor… hell, call them a spiritual advisor; would you like me to prepare a list of candidate position titles?”
“No,” she grumbled, “that won’t be necessary at this time.”
“Have you tried the post-game video approach?” I asked.
“What do you mean, ‘post-game video?’” she snapped.
“Show Biden what he looks like when he starts rambling away about how things used to be in Scranton sixty years ago,” I elaborated. “Show him what he looked like last night when he forgot who the prime minister of Lower Slobovia is, that sort of thing. Then hold a discussion, a debriefing, an evaluation, an assessment of the… fumble… as it were, and focus in on how to avoid that tomorrow. It works for the NFL, the NBA, major league baseball, hockey, tennis, lots of sports and…”
“Doing that would just make him irritable and angry,” she protested. “He’d just tell us to turn the [expletive] video off and start yelling at us!”
“All right then,” I continued, “maybe we could address that overly-mild mannered delivery of his instead. Face it, he’s up against an opponent who at least knows how to get and hold onto the attention of the audience. Why don’t you show him some old films of JFK giving his speeches and try to encourage Biden to at least get his Irish up when he has a few million people watching him pitch job creation through elimination of fossil fuel emissions with electric vehicles or whatever? If you sign on to that, I can get you in touch with some excellent tutors.”
“Joe’s too old for that,” she flatly declared. “He’s convinced he already knows how to make a speech. He wouldn’t listen to them. He’d say he has his own style, it’s worked since he was elected to the Senate, and he’s not changing it.”
“Okay,” I said with a sigh, “have you thought about giving him a Pepsi with a couple of lines of cocaine dissolved in it before he goes out there in front of the cameras?”
“What!” She sat bolt upright, astonished. “How dare you suggest such a thing?”
“All right,” I relented, “how about a triple espresso instead? Do that, and at least nobody will call him ‘sleepy Joe Biden’ anymore.”
She thought about it for a moment. “I’d have to check with his doctor.”
“Bottom line,” I advised, “he’s got to get more focused, more cogent, more interesting to listen to, and more magnetic to hear, and he’s got to do it fast. And speaking of doctors, if it takes a prescription to do it, well, then, you should get him one. Could I send you a list of qualified of specialists?”
“Fine,” she acquiesced, rising to leave. “If that’s what it’s going to take, email it to me, encrypted, by close of business.”