News chunks: A legal analysis of a DJT USSC filing; Wall Street's propaganda problem

A fascinating TPM article analyzes the implications of how DJT asked the USSC to rebut the Colorado lawsuit asking to keep him off the ballot under the insurrection clause of the 14th Amendment. Instead of focusing just on threshold issues (“technicalities”), any one of which could easily let Trump off the hook, he asked the USSC to hold that the Colorado trial court was wrong on its finding of facts that led it to decide that DJT did engage in insurrection. That’s a lot riskier tactic because the USSC does not have the power to decide if a state court’s fact findings are wrong. All the USSC can do is say that in finding facts, the Colorado court violated DJT's due process, equal protection or some other constitutional right(s) in the way it found the facts.

Unless the USSC goes full rogue and violates some key limits it is supposed to operate under, it will have to accept the Colorado state Supreme Court holdings about (i) questions of Colorado election law, (ii) questions about who in Colorado had standing to even bring a lawsuit, and (iii) the fact findings of the Colorado trial court. The USSC is empowered to decide constitutional issues, not matters of fact or state laws unless those laws violate the constitution. This is a significant limitation on what the radical Republicans controlling the USSC can do. It is expert at distorting the meaning of the Constitution to fit with its kleptocratic, Christotheocratic, plutocratic, autocratic and government-hating ideologies.

As a threshold issue, the USSC could rule that (i) Congress would need to act before the Disqualification Clause takes effect, or (ii) the insurrection clause applies to everyone who participated in an insurrection except the president. For DJT, those are easy ways out of the 14th Amendment disqualification clause problem. But that's not what DJT is asking the USSC to do. Despite that, I believe that the most likely outcome will be for the radical Republicans who control the USSC will decide to protect Trump by deciding to let him off the hook on a threshold issue.

As best I can tell, Trump’s galaxy-sized ego pushed him to demand that his corrupted, morally rotted radical Republican USSC totally reverses the entire legal record showing that he engaged in a treasonous coup attempt on 1/6. If that reasoning is wrong, then the next most likely reason for this riskier tactic is that he is scared out of his wits that he will lose on all threshold issues and thus needs to dispute every damn thing he and his lawyers can think of doing. By doing it this way, DJT openly invites the USSC to go full-blown rogue and establish itself as (1) an unaccountable political institution that is above the law and Constitution, but (2) loyal to DJT. 

How this plays out will be interesting to watch. If the USSC decides to go rogue, American democracy and its rule of law will have finally fallen. We will be more or less a fascist-Christofascist state. If the USSC lets DJT off on a technicality, the USSC simply keeps the path clear for DJT and the radical Repubs to establish a a fascist-Christofascist state, while the USSC can continue to pretend it isn't an political organ of the authoritarian radical right Repub Party. A fig leaf of dignity will be left in place for thew USSC to hide behind.

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A NYT opinion (not paywalled off) by Paul Krugman raises an interesting possibility about a Wall Street propaganda tactic that used to work but doesn’t seem to work so well any more:

All Wall Street wants is a good hypocrite — someone who can convince the Republican base that he or she shares its extremism, but whose real priority is to enrich the 1 percent. Is that too much to ask?

Apparently, yes.  

If you’re not a politics groupie, you may find the drama surrounding Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, puzzling. Until recently, few would have considered her a significant contender for the Republican presidential nomination — indeed, she arguably still isn’t. But toward the end of last year, she suddenly attracted a lot of support from the big money. Among those endorsing her were Jamie Dimon, the head of JPMorgan Chase, a new business-oriented super PAC called Independents Moving the Needle and the Koch political network. 

If this scramble sounds desperate, that’s because it is. 

What we’re witnessing are the death throes of a political strategy that served America’s plutocrats well for several decades but stopped working during the Obama years.

That political strategy was famously described by Thomas Frank in his diatribe “What’s the Matter With Kansas?,” which drew criticism from some political scientists but nonetheless seemed to capture a key political dynamic: Wealthy political donors wanted policies, especially low taxes on high incomes, that were generally unpopular; but they could get these policies enacted by supporting politicians who won over working-class white voters by appealing to their social conservatism, then devoted their actual energy to right-wing economics.

Thus in 2004, Republicans mobilized socially conservative voters in part by organizing referendums banning gay marriage; then, having won re-election on social issues and the perception that he was strong on national security, President George W. Bush proceeded as if he had a mandate to privatize Social Security. (He didn’t.)

This strategy didn’t always succeed, but it worked pretty well for a long time — until the G.O.P. establishment lost control of the base, which wanted genuine extremists, not business-friendly politicians who just played extremists on TV.

If I had to identify the moment it all went wrong, I’d point to a largely forgotten event: Eric Cantor’s shocking June 2014 primary defeat by an obscure Tea Party challenger. Cantor, the House majority leader, was so deeply embedded in conservative economic ideology that he once marked Labor Day by celebrating … business owners. By booting him, Republican primary voters in effect signaled that they no longer trusted that kind of figure.

And then, of course, the 1 percent-friendly establishment was unable to block the rise of Donald Trump who, whatever else you may say about him, is the real thing when it comes to extremism. But Trump was more a consequence than a cause of the Republican unraveling.

What’s so striking to me is the political obtuseness of big money. Any moderately well-informed observer could have told big bankers that a MAGAfied Republican Party isn’t going to nominate anyone who might make them comfortable. Someday, perhaps, reasonable people will once again have a role to play within the G.O.P. But that day is at least several election cycles away.

For now, rationality has a well-known Democratic bias. And throwing money at Nikki Haley won’t change that.

Poor Wall Street. All they ask is no taxes, no regulations, no government, no social conscience and no blowback for social or environmental harm and human deaths or extinct species. Why can’t they just get what they want?