Day: December 22, 2020
“It’s called the Covid relief bill, but it has almost nothing to do with Covid. Congress found plenty of money for foreign countries, lobbyists and special interests while sending the bare minimum to the American people. I am asking Congress to amend this bill and increase the ridiculously low $600 to $2,000.”
He’s right on both counts. It’s two kinds of crap
- Crap: The stimulus check is chickenshit
- Other crap: The bill is full of bullshit unrelated to COVID.
I suppose this is true, but doesn’t matter.
Giuliani now exists in a hazy and bizarre Twilight Zone in which none of his criminal actions matter from the beginning of time until January 19th, as long as he doesn’t break any state or local laws.
First of all, if he committed Federal crimes in the past, Trump can pardon him for those.
But more significantly, Rudy may NOW commit any federal crimes he wants to commit. He is quite literally above the law, because any federal crimes he commits between now and January 19th can be pardoned by Trump as he exits – even if Rudy commits those crimes on Trump’s behalf!
All of that sounds incredible, yet it is completely legal and constitutional. (Basically a variant of this already happened with Roger Stone, who committed crimes on Trump’s behalf, then was pardoned by Trump.) Trump and Rudy can now exploit a loophole in the American legal system. The normal constitutional remedy for this type of behavior on the part of the President is impeachment, but there is simply no time to pull that off with a lame duck President. Our founding fathers gave us no mechanism to deal with a President corrupt enough to take that kind of advantage of his final days in office. Apparently they could never imagine that a scoundrel of that magnitude could win the office.
Similarly, it doesn’t matter whether Trump can pardon himself. He doesn’t need to as long as Pence is on board. The same sort of loophole applies to him. He can commit any Federal crime he wants to between now and January 19th, as long as he steps down that day and allows President Pence to be sworn in and issue a Nixon-style pardon to Trump. That’s perfectly constitutional, and comes with an unchallenged precedent in Ford’s pardon of Nixon. The only question is whether Pence is willing to be a faithful lapdog. I guess you can forgive the Founding Fathers for missing this one, because they did not create a system in which the President and Vice-President would be partners. In the 1796 and 1800 elections, they were opponents. (Second highest number of electors became VP). It was not until the 12th Amendment in 1804, about 16 years after the ratification of the Constitution and nearly 30 years after the Declaration of Independence, that the modern system became operative.
Isn’t it always the last place you look?
“Despite the Last Supper having taken place in Roman-occupied Jerusalem, 40-year-old amateur archaeologist and longtime enthusiast of grail lore Barrie-Jon Bower believes that the grail in fact lies buried in a secret crypt beneath a river in the West London suburb of Hounslow.”
I had my money on Poughkeepsie, NY, right behind the Market Street Sunoco. According to the legends of the Wappinger tribe, that’s just where it was buried by Joseph of Arimathea’s ne’er-do-well brother, Chuck of Arimathea, the first non-native to sail to America, a century and a half before Columbus. Although many of the early explorers were worshiped by the natives as gods, Chuck was so obviously inept that he was actually scorned as an inferior and had to conclude his life as a humble tradesman, selling and repairing used moccasins.