Saturday Report 3/26/22: Was the Supreme Court Involved with the Jan 6th Coup & Overturning the Election?

The Best of the Rest of the News

Image by Orna Wachman from Pixabay

— Was Clarence Thomas trying for a twofer? Back in 2000 there were huge questions about whether Al Gore or George W. Bush won Florida and thus the White House. It was so bad and so close — even after Governor Jeb Bush purged over 90,000 Black Florida voters off the voting rolls just months before the election, claiming they had the same names as Black felons on a list Governor George W. Bush had provided from Texas — that the Florida Supreme Court ordered a statewide recount to get to the bottom of things. Clarence Thomas and four other Republican appointees on the US Supreme Court decided to ignore/override the 10th Amendment (state’s rights) and shut down Florida’s Supreme Court’s order, something the Supreme Court had never done before under circumstances like this. The decision in Bush v Gore was so egregious that the five cons on the Court even wrote into the decision that it should never, ever be used as precedent for any other case. Now, it appears that Justice Thomas and his buddies on the Court may have been considering trying it again, if only one of Trump’s 60+ lawsuits could have even a tiny thread of credibility to make it up to SCOTUS. His wife’s advocacy for overturning a clean and fraud-free election is corrupt, to say the very least. She was even suggesting Biden and Democrats should be sent to Guantanamo Bay: “Biden crime family & ballot fraud co-conspirators (elected officials, bureaucrats, social media censorship mongers, fake stream media reporters, etc.),” she texted the President’s Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, “are being arrested & detained for ballot fraud right now & over coming days, & will be living in barges off GITMO to face military tribunals for sedition.” Congress needs to open an impeachment hearing into Clarence Thomas’ behavior over at least the past 20 years on the Court.

— After the single most racist confirmation hearing before the US Senate in my long lifetime, Republican leader Mitch McConnell says he’s not going to vote for Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson. The level of disrespect Republicans on the Committee — particularly Cruz and Blackburn — showed to Judge Jackson was astonishing and beneath the standards (as low as they’ve become) of that body. The saddest part, as we saw with Cruz checking Twitter after his rant to see how he did, is that white people publicly harassing a Black woman still sells among the “conservative” fringe of American politics. As Senator Raphael Warnock pointed out, questions like Cruz’s “Are babies born racist?” wouldn’t have happened if she were white. Apparently “I like beer!” and threats of retribution like we saw from Brett “Beerbong” Kavanaugh will get you onto the Court, but reasoned attempts to honestly address complex issues like race and gender identity just get you trashed on Fox “News.” I’m embarrassed for my country.

— Republicans in Arizona just passed the most extreme voter purge in history, requiring anybody who registered to vote more than 18 years ago to re-register before their votes can be counted. If fully implemented, it could cause as many as half the voters in the state to be in eligible to vote. Back in 1980, Heritage Foundation co-founder Paul Weyrich told a group of Reagan campaign activists that the best way for the GOP to win elections was to reduce the number of voters, giving Republicans more “leverage.” This legislation is just the latest phase in the GOP War on Voters.

— Meanwhile, the US Supreme Court — without hearing any arguments or pleadings — chose to cancel a voting map that would have created a largely Democratic (and Black) congressional district in that state. This is the second so-called “shadow docket” (in other words, outside the normal rules of the Court) ruling that will make it easier for Republicans, even when they lose statewide elections, to end up with a majority-Republican Congressional delegation and keep GOP control of their state house and senate.

— What’s going on with Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg’s decision to abandon his office’s prosecution of Donald Trump and his family? Nobody knows and Bragg isn’t saying, but the NY Times has revealed that his two senior prosecutors — who were preparing to take Trump before a grand jury as early as this past week — left behind blistering resignation letters asserting that they definitely could have put Trump behind bars. Has Bragg been bought off? Threatened? Blackmailed? Nobody knows, but this story isn’t over. Good government advocates in New York are now asking Governor Kathy Hochul to take the prosecution over at the state level.

— Another plus for open, honest democracy: it looks like Putin’s losing his war against Ukraine because of corruption in his own government. “Live by the sword, die by the sword” goes the old saying, and Putin appears to be on the receiving end of the corruption he, himself, has fostered over the 20+ years he’s run Russia. As I noted last weekend, the Ukrainian minister in charge of ending corruption “thanked” Putin’s Defense Minister for stealing billions from the military budget while sending tanks into battle with egg cartons for armor, cardboard bulletproof vests for Russian soldiers, and food rations that expired in 2004. Democracies, regardless of the outcome of this war, are having a moment in the sun, showing the world how dysfunctional corrupt oligarchies inevitably become.

— The Turner Diaries narrative that animated Tim McVeigh to blow up the Oklahoma City Federal Building in the hope of starting a race war in America live on. Three neoNazis were recently indicted in federal court for trying to blow up a large part of the US power grid. Their theory was that the ensuing darkness and chaos would provoke well-armed white people to go out into the streets and slaughter Blacks, provoking a full-scale race war that the more-well-armed whites would win. Most Americans don’t even know about this case, but if these three dudes had been Black or Muslim you can bet their names would be on the tongues of every Republican in Congress and wall-to-wall in the media.

— Geeky Science: What will be the impact of finding plastics in our blood? A first-ever study has found that microscopic particles of plastic are in the bloodstreams and organs of virtually every American, particularly in babies who are bottle fed. While it’s well known that some plastics contain chemicals that cause cancer or bend the genders of amphibians and other animals, nobody knows