Hanging Ten ✡️🌻✡️🌻✡️

Trolls: The Supreme Court is trolling us, the term is almost up but still no rulings on presidential immunity, abortions for women who show up at emergency rooms bleeding out, domestic abusers owning guns, and the power of administrative agencies like the EPA to keep poisons out of our drinking water. That could change at 10 AM EDT this morning, or we may have to wait until July 1 or even later.  Louisiana’s Republican dominated legislature and Republican Governor are trolling too. This week Governor Jeff Landry signed a bill mandating that an 11” by 14” large font poster of the Ten Commandments be hung in every one of Louisiana’s public-school classrooms. The Ten Commandment is the list of all the shall and shalt not’s that evangelicals conveniently ignore when felonious, repeat adulterer Trump, who they treat as one of the other gods that they’re not supposed to pray to or idolize, violates them. The Louisiana law is clearly at odds with the First Amendment’s establishment clause, or at least at odds with how the First Amendment has been interpreted until now.  Louisiana’s Governor knows that, as does Texas’ very right- wing Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick who has promised that Texas will follow suit with a similar display requirement shortly, but they both also know that the religion friendly SCOTUS conservative justices have shown a willingness to toss precedent aside and might be open to reconsidering that whole separation of church and state thing, because maybe the founders only intended that provision to apply to religions other than Christianity?  Add Florida judge Aileen “loose” Cannon to the list of judicial trollers. It turns out that it’s not just liberal leaning legal pundits who think she’s totally ill-suited to preside over the purloined documents case.  Yesterday the NY Times reported that two federal judges in Florida, including the Bush appointed chief judge of Cannon’s Southern Florida District, had urged her to step aside when the purloined documents case was assigned to her.  It’s highly unusual for that to have happened, that it did reveals that her more experienced senior colleagues had serious reservations about her lack of experience and/or her political leanings.  As we know, she refused and as a result the “slam dunk” case is being slow walked into oblivion.  As part of that slow walking, Cannon has scheduled several days of hearings on whether Special Counsel Jack Smith was unconstitutionally appointed or is otherwise acting without legal authority.   Numerous courts have already rejected nearly identical constitutional challenges to other special counsels, Cannon knows that but is holding these hearings anyway perhaps because doing so allows her to appear productive when all she’s really doing is spinning wheels in the hope that Trump wins, makes his cases go away, and appoints her to a higher court.

The Race: Abetted by the Murdoch publishing empire, Trump and his surrogates have spent the past few months claiming that “doddering” President Biden is suffering from dementia and thus unfit for office.  The problem with that strategy is that by harping on Biden’s fitness, Trump has set a low bar for Biden’s debate performance, meaning if Biden shows up and is mostly lucid, he’ll have exceeded expectations.  It’s not like word salad spewing Trump, only three years younger, is all that coherent or the picture of robust youth.  So, with the date for the first debate approaching, Trump has pivoted to disparaging CNN’s terms of engagement, calling the debate rules and the lack of a studio audience, rules and conditions that he already agreed to follow, unfair and the questions, which he doesn’t or shouldn’t know, biased.  Sound familiar?  It should because Trump’s already suggesting that the 2024 election will be unfair as well and that any polls like this week’s ones from Fox that show him a smidge behind Biden, fake news. To be fair, the Biden team is hoping that Trump acts out so don’t be surprised when Dark Brandon Biden tries to goad him because a raving, crazy Trump bolsters their case.  Though CNBC reports that Trump kind of freaked out a number of the business executives by being incoherent and off topic during a recent confab, many of them are so enamored of the specter of more tax cuts that they remain fully in his camp, which partially explains why Trump is now raking in the big bucks again, surpassing Biden whose early fundraising lead has disappeared. That’s bad news, but better news is that absent a last minute save from the Supreme Court Trump advisor/right- wing podcaster Steve Bannon will be in jail come July 1 because yesterday the DC Court of Appeals rejected his bid to remain out of prison while he appeals his contempt of Congress conviction to the Supreme Court, concluding that his appeal lacks merit since SCOTUS is unlikely to take his argument seriously. Much to his chagrin, Bannon won’t be going to one of those relatively “cushy” Club Fed prisons, he isn’t eligible because he still has a pending criminal case against him in NY related to charges that he defrauded donors to his faux “build the wall charity.”   

#BringThemAllHomeNow