I’ve often thought that it should be a constitutional requirement for a president to be a lawyer, because at least that way you know that the person running the government knows the law. Of course that idea would be shot down with the comment that both Dubya and Ronnie Reagan were not lawyers, but actually I see that argument as proving my point, not shutting it down.
In any event, the grifting that Trump and his sidekick Elon Musk has attempted these past 58 days is getting stonewalled. Everybody from Chief Justice Roberts down to law clerks are telling Donald that what he’s doing is completely unconstitutional and no, nobody is going along with the idea of mass impeachments. (Lauren Boebert will be so disappointed. She wanted to see heads roll. When you go from slinging ptomaine burgers straight to Congress, with not even a civics class in between, your knowledge of how all this really works is necessarily lacking.)
But that’s Boebert. Jamie Raskin, on the other hand, sees the lunacy of this asylum for what it is and made this statement today.
Donald Trump is losing and losing badly every day in court. He is losing in front of Bush judges and Biden judges, Obama judges and Reagan judges. Trump’s even losing in front of judges who he himself named to the bench in his first term.
Drowning in these humiliating legal defeats but refusing to accept that we are still a nation of laws and not Royal edicts, Trump is now lashing out at the judges who have been upholding the Constitution against his lawlessness.
Trump is actually calling for the judges opposing him to be impeached.
He is not calling for the impeachment of any judges who have ruled in his favor. So his rule is clear: either rule in Trump’s favor or face impeachment.
We have impeached only 15 federal judges in the history of our country, always for professional misconduct like consistent intoxication on the bench, conspiracy to take bribes, income tax evasion and perjury.
We have never impeached a judge for the substance of his ruling in a case, much less for the substance of a correct ruling in a case. Erroneous decisions should be appealed and reversed.
The judges Trump wants to impeach and try in the Senate are simply doing their jobs. As the Supreme Court has made clear for the past two centuries, ‘It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is.’
Trump’s attack comes on the heels of a similar, shameless effort by House Republicans, who—not merely content to surrender their congressional authority to Donald Trump—are now actively working to dismantle the judicial branch of government which stands between Trump and Elon Musk, and their dream of unlimited tyrannical power over the people. My Republican colleagues have filed Articles of Impeachment against judges not for misconduct, not for corruption, but for the crime of upholding the rule of law against Trump’s plainly lawless acts.
Amazingly, Trump believes that his election means that he can do whatever he wants even in violation of the Constitution. But no president—including all those who received much higher percentages of the popular vote than Trump did, like George Washington, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan and Joe Biden—can violate the Constitution by pointing to their election results and claiming popular permission to do so.
Shazam! Raskin just dropped a ton of bricks on Trump! The bridge that is wayyyy too far are the Republicans who have filed articles of impeachment for the *crime* of upholding the black letter law, as it is written. That is performative theater and they know it. It is beyond unconscionable. And it’s yet another signpost showing us exactly how far we have fallen.
But let’s see this for what it is. Trump is a lame duck president who intends to stay in power for life. And a lot of Republicans are just fine with that. And keep a sharp, nay an eagle eye, out for what happens to the post office. Because the long game there is not to save money. The long game is to wreck the system of voting by mail and in doing so destroy our system of free and fair elections. We must hold the line there at all costs, no matter what Trump/Musk come up with as the rationale to do otherwise.
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Friends, thanks to all of you who have generously donated. Your money has gone to defray overhead expenses and will continue to go for that, as we tread water, waiting for depressed and disillusioned Democrats to rejoin the fight. If you haven’t donated and can, it would help us immensely. Thank you. Ursula
In February, the appalling Louis de Joy announced he’d be stepping down as Postmaster General. Given that he was a Trump choice and obeyed his mentor’s orders to begin dismantling the USPS, we can only assume that Trump has decided to install someone even more destructive in his wake.