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Watching yesterday’s Senate Judiciary Committee spectacle was like watching a group of Made Men in the Mafia taking on the witness who broke omertá and talked.
It wasn’t always this way: there was a time when Republicans cared whether our democracy survived. Yesterday’s disgraceful performance, however, proved that today’s GOP only serves the Orange Caligula who squats in the White House like a malignant toad.
In November of 1934 the most decorated Marine in American history, Major General Smedley Butler, sat down in a House hearing room to describe a plot to overthrow the government of the United States, by no coincidence also the goal of Trump’s mob on January 6th.
He testified that a Wall Street bond salesman working for a J.P. Morgan-connected banker, backed by Singer sewing machine oligarch Robert Sterling Clark, had spent a year trying to hire him to lead 500,000 armed veterans to storm the White House.
They told him they had $3 million in cash and $300 million available for the oligarchs’ plan to reduce Franklin Roosevelt to a figurehead and put a “Secretary of General Affairs” in charge of the country. The weapons were to come on credit from Remington Arms, which the du Pont brothers had just taken over, and the “superorganization” of rich men they promised would back up Butler appeared right on schedule during their negotiations as the American Liberty League, financed by the du Pont brothers.
Not one member of Congress, of either party, stood up and called General Butler a liar; to the contrary, they issued a report validating his claims.
Yesterday morning, a few weeks short of ninety-two years later, Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee went after Jack Smith — the former special counsel who’d indicted Trump in two federal districts for trying to overthrow our government and stealing our secrets.
Trump’s mob ended up killing several police officers as they beat over 100 of them so severely they ended up in the hospital, smeared feces on the walls of the Capitol building, and made a serious effort to hang the vice president.
Instead of coming to hear the evidence or argue for Trump’s innocence (we all saw what he did), they came to destroy Smith and suck up to Trump.
Chairman Chuck Grassley opened the hearing by declaring that “Jack Smith’s corrupt operation undermined the rule of law and threatened our very political institutions,” and later told him, “No matter what you say, there’s no legitimate basis for what you did.”
Ted Cruz whined at Smith, “You have brought the Department of Justice into disrepute.”
Eric Schmitt bizarrely told him he “will go down as a total dirtbag” after getting his details wrong.
John Kennedy of Louisiana, a man who sits on this committee that confirms federal judges, told a career prosecutor, “You make me want to throw up in my mouth.”
Smith didn’t raise his voice. Instead, he read an opening statement that ought to be carved over the door of the Justice Department.
“Our investigation developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt that President Trump engaged in serious crimes against our nation. If asked whether to prosecute a former president today based on the same facts, I would do so regardless of whether that president was a Republican or a Democrat.
“The charges against President Trump were the result of the evidence. Grand juries in two separate districts reached this conclusion based on his actions as alleged in the indictments they returned.
“Rather than accept his defeat in the 2020 presidential election, President Trump engaged in a criminal scheme to overturn the results and prevent the lawful transfer of power.”
Smith said all that while the now-corrupted Trump Justice Department is openly investigating him on a criminal referral from Gym Jordan, while the Office of Special Counsel has opened a second probe, and while the president of the United States has publicly called him a “deranged animal” and demanded he be charged with something, anything.
The Republican Party of 1934 was the party of the men who’d financed the plot against Roosevelt, but still its politicians respected the honesty and integrity of the whistleblower. The national commander of the VFW, James Van Zandt, publicly confirmed that Wall Street’s agents had approached him, too, and Van Zandt was a Republican who went on to serve his party for twenty years in Congress.
Butler himself was a lifelong Republican. As was my dad, a Republican activist who disliked FDR, but he still gave my brother (who became a Republican campaign consultant) and me copies of Butler’s book War is a Racket and warned us to beware of any corrupt politicians of either party who’d try to destroy our democracy for their own gain.
That generation’s Republicans could despise a president’s politics but still honor the office and work to save a Democratic president from a coup. They disagreed with FDR on tax cuts and social welfare programs, but they all agreed on the importance of fighting fascism (my dad volunteered for WWII right out of high school) and preserving our form of government with its balance of powers and respect for the Constitution.
Those Republicans are apparently all gone, purged from the party along with Mitt Romney, Liz Cheney, and Adam Kinzinger. The oligarchs who tried to hire Butler to end America and replace our government with a strongman oligarchy were then outside the government; now they dine with the president and fund virtually every consequential Republican in federal office.
The bad guys are now, in other words, on the inside rather than the outside. And they showed it — sickeningly — with their attempts to pillory Jack Smith.
We all watched the violent mob read Trump’s 2:24 p.m. tweet aloud and chant “Hang Mike Pence” beneath a gallows they’d built, while the vice president’s Secret Service detail was radioing goodbyes to their families. We all saw Trump’s violent mob beat, tase, and chemical-spray the police officers sworn to protect our nation’s capitol and its inhabitants. We all saw the photographs of classified documents stacked in the public bathroom at Mar-a-Lago.
As Smith put it yesterday:
“After leaving office in January of 2021, President Trump illegally kept classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago social club and repeatedly tried to obstruct justice to conceal his continued retention of those documents.”
But the Republican senators didn’t want to hear a word of it: when the anti-democracy anti-American plotters and the party are the same people, the party has no choice left but to destroy the man who investigated them and revealed their crimes and complicity.
This isn’t the first time Made Man Republicans in Congress have twisted themselves into pretzels to kiss mob boss Trump’s ass and prove their fealty.
In the spring of 2020, while Trump was fantasizing about reopening the country by Easter and tweeting “LIBERATE MICHIGAN” at armed protesters, the House Freedom Caucus went after Dr. Anthony Fauci, a man whose work through the decades has literally saved millions of lives.
Corrupt on-the-take Republicans Andy Biggs and Ken Buck wrote that the “economic calamity” that came out of the way Trump was handling the pandemic lay with Fauci’s recommendations and suggested Deborah Birx was padding the death count; Biggs branded Fauci a fearmonger who’d “replaced faith with fear” on the very morning Fauci testified that reopening America prematurely would mean needless suffering and death.
Fauci was right. The Lancet Commission later found that roughly 40 percent of the 450,000 Americans dead by early 2021, around 180,000 people, would still be alive if we’d merely matched the rest of the G7 with masks and shutdowns, and a peer-reviewed study in PLOS One put the avoidable-deaths toll here in America under Trump at more than 316,000 by the fall of 2021, most of them in the South, most of them before the vaccines arrived. We had the second-worst Covid death rate in the world.
Fauci, these Republican lickspittles concluded, had to be destroyed for the simple reason that the corpses were Trump’s, and the doctor was the witness who was willing to say so to America.
As I lay out in The Last American President, Roy Cohn, was — in addition to being Trump’s lawyer and mentor — the lawyer for all five of New York’s mob families. He taught Trump well.
— Mob families go after witnesses, so Trump’s toady AG is now “investigating” Jack Smith.
— Mob families reward their soldiers who do the boss’s dirty work, so on his first day back in office Trump pardoned more than 1,500 people from January 6th, including hundreds who’d been convicted by juries for sedition and for assaulting police officers.
— Mob families, when they get control of local politicians, get honest cops fired, just like Trump, Patel, and Blanche are doing with the DOJ, FBI, and Jack Smith.
— And mob families require every Made Man to submit to public demonstrations of their loyalty to the mob boss, which is what Grassley, Cruz, Schmitt, and Kennedy were doing yesterday morning.
Not one of them disputed a single fact in any of Smith’s criminal indictments against Trump. They just made sure the boss saw them sneer.
As I wrote in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy, this is what the du Ponts and the Morgans wanted in 1934 when they tried to hire Butler: a government that answers to money instead of the law or the Constitution.
It took ninety years and a failed reality-television host with a documented history of criminal fraud, rape, and mob connections, but they finally got it.
As Smith told the senators yesterday:
“[T]he rule of law faces challenges unlike any we have experienced in our lifetime,” and that “individuals are threatened with criminal prosecutions because they are perceived to have opposed the president.
“Predetermined outcomes increasingly seem to take precedence over the Justice Department’s long-standing core values, traditions and norms.”
No Republican contradicted Smith on the facts; they all know how corrupt and criminal their boss is. They’re just too terrified or bought-off to say it out loud.
Ironically, the Butler hearings opened exactly two weeks after the 1934 midterm elections, when American voters, instead of punishing Roosevelt’s party the way they punish nearly every president’s party, expanded its majorities in both houses and drove the Liberty League’s politics into a ditch.
The oligarchs who wanted to destroy our democracy back then were beaten by one honest general and then by an election. This time the honest man has done his part and bravely said to these craven cowards that he will not be silenced.
The final stage of an attempted strongman takeover is when the law itself has been corrupted, turning the awesome power of the state to imprison against those who’d previously served and enforced the law. Yesterday proved that we’re there now.
The election is five weeks from yesterday. Call your senators at the Capitol Switchboard at 202-224-3121 and tell them you watched what they did to Jack Smith. Check your registration at vote.org, find your state legislators at openstates.org, and then make sure everybody you know does the same thing on November 3.
If you believe the men who saved this country from fascism in 1934 deserve better heirs than the disgusting spectacle we saw yesterday, please share this article, subscribe to the Hartmann Report at hartmannreport.com, and help keep independent, ad-free journalism like this alive.
Democracy’s a team sport, and this is the season. Tag, we’re it!
Louise’s Daily Song: “Jack Smith Stares Down Trump”
Comments on Tuesday’s Daily Take:
Trump Has Trotted Out the Old Republican “Chicken in Every Pot” Scam Again: Who Will Fall For It This Time?
Oh come now, Mr. Hartmann. You well know that Smitty is Making Amerika Great Again. How do I know, you muse? Ha! I just went to fill up (mind you I had a quarter tank already) my ancient Audi Quattro 2.0 T. Now, I had to take a trip a couple of days ago and filled up. The price: $6.49 per gallon (89 octane). Today, two days later, it was $6.79.9 per gallon
~ Rohn Kenyatta
There’s a sucker born every minute. A sane-washing legacy media repeating at the expense of reporting. A supine Democratic “leadership” dedicated to supporting an eroding status quo. Will independent media and boat-rocking Democrats save us? Not if Schumer, Gillibrand, Jeffries, and Third Way centrists, etc., can help it.
~ Tom Halstead
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The October book of the month is The Hidden History of American Healthcare, by Thom Hartmann. Buy a copy Kindle edition.
”Why Sickness Bankrupts You and Makes Others Insanely Rich”
Other countries have shown us that affordable universal healthcare is not only possible but also effective and efficient. Taiwan’s single-payer system saved the country a fortune as well as saving lives during the coronavirus pandemic, enabling the country to implement a nationwide coronavirus test-and-contact-trace program without shutting down the economy. This resulted in just ten deaths, while more than 500,000 people have died in the United States.
Thom Hartmann connected all the dots in this post, so there isn't much to add other than to say moneyed interests are pretty damn persistent in getting to their feudal oligarchic paradise. It is so sad that one whole party (and part of the other) has devoted itself to representing the opponents of human freedom and justice, simply because it pays better. The devil you worship will destroy you too.
Thank you for my daily dose of sanity.