The Legal Theory
Also: Goldfinger, Robot Masters and the World's Greatest Rock Song about fiscal policy...
Let’s start at the beginning…sort of.
Donald Trump was indicted on charges of conspiring to obstruct the official certification of Joe Biden’s election victory and seeking to defraud Americans of their rightful votes which doesn’t sound all that patriotic unless your version of patriotism is limited to wearing a MAGA hat and dry humping American flags.
But Trump’s attorneys argued that he’s immune from prosecution on criminal charges and the only way he could be prosecuted for actions he took while he was president is if he was impeached and convicted first, a legal argument that seems to fall under the broad area known by America’s Top Lawyers as:
“Making Shit Up.”
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia seemed inclined to agree with my description and one of the judges asked a Trump attorney if selling a pardon could be considered an official act. And while he was at it, could a president order Seal Team Six to assassinate a political rival and call that an official act?
The Trump lawyer bobbed and weaved and weaved and bobbed and tried not to answer, but when painted in a corner, the lawyer said under the provisions of a legal theory he’d just pulled directly out of his ass, a president could not be criminally prosecuted unless he got impeached and convicted first. A questionable position which prompted an attorney on the other side to say if that’s true a president could order an assassination, then resign from office before he got impeached and would then be immune from prosecution forever.
So it’s lucky Trump’s lawyers didn’t come up with this theory in early August of 1974 because I’m pretty sure Richard Nixon would have had both Woodward and Bernstein shot from a grassy knoll twenty minutes before he announced his resignation.
All this comes up now because no other former president has been charged with a crime so there’s no precedent and nobody’s 100% sure what you can do and what you can’t do and Trump’s lawyers appear to be winging it and tossing out arguments developed after a third pitcher of margaritas in their local Applebee’s to see if anything sticks and I used the news that NASA had decided to postpone sending astronauts to the moon to once again make fun of my favorite president.
Not favorite as in: “He was a good president” – but favorite as in: “No other president has ever done more for the political cartoonists, standup comedians and late night talk show hosts of America.”
Speaking of which…
The Colorado State Supreme Court threw Donald Trump off the ballot citing the 14th Amendment that prohibits anyone who took part in an insurrection from holding public office and now that case will be heard by the United States Supreme Court.
While I generally try to avoid predictions, I won’t be surprised if Donald turns that into a shitshow with daily press conferences on the Supreme Court steps to whine about how unfairly he’s been treated.
Nostradamus Alert!
I wrote the two previous paragraphs several days before Trump defied a judge in New York during a civil fraud trial and despite being told that he wouldn’t be allowed to give a formal closing statement, Trump went off for six-minutes, attacking everybody he thinks has treated him unfairly which is pretty much anyone who believes Donald Trump needs to obey the laws that govern the rest of us.
When you’re born with a silver spoon up your butt and spent your life doing things like not paying your fair share of taxes and avoiding military service with “bone spurs” and assaulting women, all without consequence, it probably does seem unfair when at long last somebody says the rules do in fact apply to you.
In Trump’s civil fraud trial he’s being accused of exaggerating his wealth on financial statements he provided to banks, insurance companies and inebriated blondes in cocktail lounges.
I can’t wait to see him on the big stage which I’m predicting will be worth another week’s worth of cartoons which isn’t much of a prediction because you can pretty much count on Donald Trump doing something outrageous and/or stupid and, when he’s in midseason form, both at the same time.
The cartoon you just looked at was inspired by a Washington Post story about a technology trade show in Las Vegas which the writer said was a Very Big Deal because we get to see what’s coming next and after watching all six Terminator movies I had my own ideas about what that might look like.
In the Just-In-Case-You-Didn’t-Have-Enough-To-Worry-About Department: according to the Associated Press, the Alaska Airlines jet that lost a “door plug” (a piece of airline equipment I didn’t know existed) had warning lights come on three different times indicating cabin pressure problems before the door blew off, so being extremely cautious and concerned about passenger safety, Alaska Airlines didn’t use that particular jet to fly to Hawaii because they wanted it to be near an airport if and when the shit hit the fan.
Which is pretty much like continuing to drive a Ford Pinto (ask any old person – they had a problem with gas tanks exploding) but only driving it near hospitals.
Also…
The “door plug” weighed 63 pounds and fell from three miles up and landed in someone’s backyard, so now you have to worry about random pieces of airplane hitting you in the head while you mow the lawn, as well as the possibility of doing a “Goldfinger” and getting sucked out a hole in an airplane’s fuselage.
Timeout for Movie Memories…
The first movie I have any memory of seeing in a theater is Goldfinger which is a pretty great start to the Theater Going Experience, but probably scarred me for life because none of my machinegun-less cars seemed all that cool because they didn’t have automatic weapons, ejection seats, spew out smoke screens or immediately change license plates when I ran a red light.
I also get an erection every time I see a can of gold spray paint.
SPOILER ALERT:
Goldfinger came out in 1964 and if you haven’t seen it, that’s on you because you’ve had 60 years to get that done, but if you don’t want me to spoil it, stop reading now because here’s the ending:
Auric Goldfinger meets his demise when a window gets shot out of a jet airplane and he gets sucked out due to loss of cabin pressure and poor script writing, but if Goldfinger had just been 50 pounds heavier he might not have fit through the window, which makes me think today’s airlines should require obese passengers to sit in the window seats so maybe they’d block any unexpected fuselage exit holes and save the rest of us.
So now you have an excuse to overeat and when you get caught scarfing down Rocky Road ice cream straight from the carton and your significant other asks what you think you’re doing, you can now honestly answer:
“Saving lives.”
Anyway…
Turns out they’ve found more loose door plugs on other Boeing 737 Max 9 jets so we can all start worrying about that.
While I’ve done my fair share (and possibly yours) of whining about Republicans and Democrats refusing to work together, a recent Kansas City Star headline – “Congressional leaders reach deal on topline spending levels” – made me realize I also get suspicious when they work together because it’s like finding your cat having a conference with your dog behind the living room couch.
It makes you wonder what the hell those two are cooking up because if they agree, someone else is probably getting screwed.
House Speaker Mike Johnson wrote that the spending agreement included speeding up the $20 billion in cuts already agreed to for the Internal Revenue Service which I’m guessing will mean fewer audits and in a previous rant I pointed out that the IRS was focusing on auditing lower income people because rich people’s taxes are considered “TFC” (Too Fucking Complicated).
Timeout (and I get three a half) for an IRS Timeline
According to a recent article from United Press International, the IRS has now collected $520 million through new initiatives that crack down on the rich, large corporations and complex partnerships that try to evade paying their taxes.
So are they doing more audits of rich people or not?
As near as I can tell, here’s the deal:
In 2022 a study came out that showed how few rich people were being audited and how many poor people were getting body cavity searches (prostate exam included) so they increased IRS funding and hired more raisin counters and went after more rich people, but now Republicans want to cut IRS funds again because making billionaires pay their taxes is not part of the GOP platform.
Here’s an article about all that:
https://www.cbpp.org/research/federal-tax/concerns-with-cuts-to-irs-funding
While we all complain about taxes (and never forget America was founded by a bunch of rich guys who didn’t want to pay theirs) in reality the richest people like the current overly-complicated system because it has so many loopholes (which means tax lawyers make a good living and politicians have votes to sell) and according to the internet, Jeff Bezos paid no federal income tax in 2007 and 2011 and Elon Musk paid zero in 2018 and Michael Bloomberg paid zero several times in “recent years” and George Soros paid zero three years in a row and if you want to read more about that, here’s an article:
Just in case you didn’t read it, but still want to be pissed off: in 2021 ProPublica issued a report that said the top 25 billionaires their analysis covered saw their wealth rise $401 billion between 2014 and 2018, but paid a federal income tax rate of 3.4%.
If you decide to read the ProPublica report anyway (it’s only 3 pages) here’s some music to listen to while you do it, the greatest rock song every written about government fiscal policy, Taxman:
According to Ian MacDonald’s Revolution In The Head, George Harrison was fed up with Britain’s high tax rate – “One for you, nineteen for me” – and took a swipe at Harold Wilson’s Labour government, but because British politicians were trying to use the Beatles for their own purposes (politicians were advised to mention the Beatles in their speeches as often as possible) the song also names Conservative opposition leader Edward Heath to prevent either side from using the Beatles to promote their policies.
OK, once again that’s it and now I have to strap on my ice skates so I can cross my lawn and go retrieve what’s left of my morning paper.
Stay warm, everybody.
Another great essay today. I have a hard time finding points with which to disagree and you managed to work in a nice Beatles reference to boot. It's a good day!
(and never forget America was founded by a bunch of rich guys who didn’t want to pay theirs)
That's actually a popular myth. They objected to the Parliament in London taxing them. Colonial leaders argued that only their local colonial legislatures could tax them because they had representatives there. (Hence, "No Taxation Without Representation", unless you live in DC of course.) The infamous tea tax which lead to the Boston Tea Party actually lowered the existing taxes, but both London and the locals in Boston understood what it really meant, accepting that London could tax the colonies.
That most Americans think the objections of the Founding Fathers was to high taxes is one of those rebranding efforts the right-wing has been so successful at for years now. I wanted to tell the Tea Partiers a few years ago, "No dears, they objected to being taxed by a government in which they had no representatives. You HAVE representation, you just don't like they they sometimes disagree with you."
The Dunning School "Reconstruction failed because Black people..." is another. It shoudl be "Reconstruction was abandoned by Northern whites."
My favorite is the "New Deal failed to end the Depression": which is true, but the implication is that government spending doesn't spur the economy. Actually, the New Deal didn't spend enough. What got the US (and other countries) out of the Depression? The war, i.e. history's biggest government jobs and infrastructure program." (OK, much of the latter was knocking it down, but still...)
"The New Deal didn't end the Depression.
OK, what did?
World War II.
OK. So government spending failed to end the Depression, which was ended instead by government spending???"