According to the internet, over Trump’s first and second terms, courts have blocked Trump Administration actions over 200 times, so if you’re looking for a place that’s out of control, you can start right there in the Oval Orifice.
As Trump has demonstrated on numerous occasions (and those 200 incidents don’t include the crap he’s tried to pull as a private citizen) he doesn’t really give a flying fuck about the Rules or the Law or the Constitution or the Go-Directly to Jail Monopoly Cards; he just does whatever he feels like doing and dares someone to try and stop him.
Which is interesting behavior for someone who considers himself a Law-And-Order President.
Also interesting that a bunch of Law-And-Order Conservatives support this guy and have no problem with him ignoring any law or Constitutional Amendment he finds inconvenient.
During his recent political rally that Trump forced over 800 military leaders to attend, Trump suggested that the US military could use American cities as “training grounds” which is—and once again let’s go with—“interesting” because the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 generally prohibits the use of US military on US soil because someone smarter than the people currently in power thought it would be a good idea to keep civilian law enforcement separate from military power.
During the Iraq war in which we tried to use the military to act as policemen—which as you might recall didn’t go all that great—some military leader whose name I didn’t write down at the time, said the military was great at doing two things:
1. Breaking stuff.
2. Killing people.
And if what you wanted the military to do wasn’t on that list, you were talking to the wrong people because it was like asking Edward Scissorhands to make balloon animals; you probably aren’t going to be thrilled with the results.
Bottom line: you don’t do watch repair with a sledge hammer.
So generally speaking you want to keep civilian law enforcement separate from the military although The Insurrection Act of 1807 provides an exception:
The governor or legislature of a state can request help to put down an insurrection and that’s what states are suing about; they haven’t requested help. But a president can send troops without a request if a rebellion makes it impractical to enforce federal laws using ordinary means or if an insurrection or violence is depriving state inhabitants of their constitutional rights and the state is unable or unwilling to protect them.
Which is how and why Dwight Eisenhower sent federal troops to Little Rock, Arkansas to enforce desegregation and JFK sent troops to the University of Mississippi and the University of Alabama for the same reason.
If you want to read more on this subject, here’s an article from the BBC, but I’ll warn you up front the BBC doesn’t include nearly as many puns, digressions or sophomoric jokes:
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwy9z7yg2n7o
So according to the stiffs who write for the BBC, the president can deploy the National Guard without a request from the state in question if “there is a rebellion or danger of a rebellion” against the US government and in my (and whole bunch of other peoples’) opinion Trump is using anti-ICE protests as an excuse to send in the National Guard and Illinois governor JB Pritzker (a Democrat) said Trump is trying to “manufacture a crisis.”
Which leads us to…
As you might have already noticed Trump only wants to send the National Guard into cities run by Democrats and while reading about this issue I came across some interesting “facts” (it’s the internet, so who knows…maybe a Nigerian prince does want to give me some money if I’ll just send him my bank account number) but apparently numerous studies have shown that Red States have more per-capita gun deaths than Blue States.
(I’m guessing because Red States have looser gun laws and more guns).
Just looked it up and, yup, that’s part of the reason and they also think poor education and lack of social services has something to do with it and gun suicides account for the majority of all gun deaths so maybe giving hard liquor and a handgun to a guy working a dead-end job and kind of pissed off and/or depressed about it isn’t the best idea we ever had.
If having more guns doesn’t keep us safer—and the numbers say it doesn’t—the pro-gun Republicans have some ‘splainin’ to do. And the Republicans have ‘splained’ this by claiming the problem is cities run by Democrats in Red States. (Somehow I knew it would be the Liberals fault.)
But cities do tend to be more Liberal than Rural areas and there are a variety of explanations for this and I always figured if I was the one gay dude in West Cowfart, Missouri I’d probably move to Kansas City or St. Louis although I think it’s pretty unlikely there’s just one gay dude anywhere.
There might be just one dude who has admitted he’s gay, but there’s probably at least one more gay dude who hasn’t come out and goes to the Southern Baptist church and married some poor, clueless woman he met in high school and makes gay jokes with his buddies down at the Cowfart Saloon, but hates his life and will die frustrated, which—if we only go around once and I’m pretty sure we do—is a crying shame.
Anyway…
Another possible reason for cities being more Liberal is there are just more people, which also means people of all different types and you have to learn to get along with them or at least not freak the fuck out every time you see someone different than you because you’re going to spend all day seeing someone that’s different than you.
Nevertheless, my now 100-year-old mom semi-recently announced: “People are all the same.”
Being a thoughtful and often irritating son, I replied that if there was one thing I could guarantee her, it was that people aren’t all the same and the only reason she thought that is she never leaves the house and at this point in her life knows about six people, three of whom are dead.
Y’know, maybe I should take my mom to San Francisco and, more specifically, the Folsom Street Fair (which celebrates kinky lifestyles) and see if she still thinks people are all the same and I should do that before she dies although the shock of attending the Folsom Street Fair just might kill her.
I think we’ve established people are not all the same because there are at least two kinds of people:
1. People who get their underwear in a twist every time someone does something they wouldn’t do, like get a face tattoo or let someone lead them around in public while wearing a dog collar and a leash or—even more radical—vote for a Democrat.
And…
2. People who say fuck it, that’s got nothing to do with me so go ahead and get your lip pierced.
These days we’ve definitely got a government chock-full of the first kind of people and they want to control you and make decisions for you—unless you want to own a Gatling gun and then they’d be happy to sell you one—and right now Donald Trump is trying to control the Americans who disagree with him.
And since over 75 million people voted for Kamala Harris a whole bunch of Americans disagree with Donald Trump and he’s now using the military to try to control them because that bugs the living shit out of him.
Today’s Lesson
People are not all the same, so my mom is wrong, but so am I because according to Google and the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, there are 16 personality types and even that sounds a bit low because I’ve dated women who had at least twice that many.
Other people think there are three personality types and some think it’s four or five and right now I’m wishing Donald Trump had at least two personalities because the one he’s got now sucks shit.
Have a nice weekend and if you feel like it, get a face tattoo or a lip ring because frankly, Scarlett, I don’t give a damn.
Gee, I thought I was the only one who thought the BBC always seemed to have their knickers in a twist about SOMEthing and really needed to lighten up.
More and more Trump reminds me of a fellow maniac who liked to dress his goons up in Black Shirts and turn them loose. That was back in the 20's and'30's. If Trump starts sporting that look along with his omnipresent red tie - that does it, I'm leaving.
But where would I go? We see them here, we see them there, we see those damned fascists everywhere.
How did the world get so broken? Ricky, there is mos def some 'splainin' to be done. Get Lucy on it.