​Congress has the power to bar the president and its members who supported the insurrection from continuing in public office and ever holding office again.
 
While Article I, Section 5 of the Constitution outlines the steps to expel a member of Congress, it requires a two-thirds vote, which is a pretty high bar and unrealistic in the current environment. But there is another Constitutional provision that clearly provides an alternative:
 
Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment states in pertinent part: “No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any state, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States,…to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.”
 
Section 3 was originally directed at those who supported the Confederacy in the Civil War. It provides an alternative expulsion mechanism for ridding the federal government of seditionists and insurrectionists. It can be invoked to dump Trump immediately and forever. It can also bar Senators Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz, their Senate colleagues and the 137 Representatives who joined in the attempt to overturn Joe Biden’s legitimate election, from serving in Congress now and in the future. All it takes for each chamber to rid itself of these traitors is a House or Senate resolution passed by a simple majority vote.
 
Allowing these anti-Americans to continue in office is an unacceptable stain on America. They need to be removed from the privileged positions and institutions they have irretrievably tarnished. Moving forward requires that their treasonous behavior is officially denounced as being beyond the pale, and that a clear precedent be established that such conduct will not be tolerated.
 
Losing their positions is a necessary first step to cleanse America of these political pariahs. They violated their oaths to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution, whereby they swore to "…support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same;…” They not only failed to do that; they actively thumbed their noses at it.
 
Some members of this loathsome crew are asserting that they were merely exercising their first amendment rights. No. They incited and abetted an attempt to take down the U.S. government. As Justice Brandeis stated in delivering the unanimous opinion of the Supreme Court in Sugarman v. United States (1919): “…`freedom of speech' does not mean that a man may say whatever he pleases without the possibility of being called to account for it.” it is not only the right, but the constitutional duty of the Congress to banish them.
 
But their punishment should not end with expulsion. Along the way, their nefarious doings also violated numerous federal criminal laws. It can begin with 23 U.S. Code §2384, “Seditious Conspiracy,” that explicitly covers their illegal conduct. The wheels of justice need to grind them all into the political and judicial dust.
 
Dick Hermann
January 12, 2021

​Sedition
 
I never contemplated that “checks and balances” would take the form of the President of the United States inciting a fascist mob to storm the legislative branch. That’s quite a “check” on Congress. However, not a whole lot of “balance.”
 
The tyrant-president did not do this alone. He had plenty of co-conspirators whose words, like those of aspiring autocrat Trump, mattered: Rudy Giuliani, who urged the fanatic rabble to initiate “trial by combat;” Donald Trump, Jr. who revved up the barbarian hordes, warning members of Congress inclined to follow the Constitution and not object to Joe Biden’s electoral vote count that “we’re coming for you;” Rep. Mo Brooks telling the mob it was time to “kick ass;” Sen. Josh Hawley, whose fist pumping on his way into the Capitol was intended to get Trump supporters’ pulses racing; and Sen. Ted Cruz, the oleaginous Trump bootlicker whose lies leading up to the attempted coup aroused the passions of the great unwashed. More on these two craven congressional Quislings below.
 
All of these democracy destroyers merit the full punishments that the law allows. They must be held to account. For the conspirators who fomented insurrection—Trump, Giuliani and Junior, that means indictments and ultimately prison for the many U.S. criminal code provisions they transgressed: seditious conspiracy, insurrection, knowingly and willfully advocating and abetting overthrowing the government by force or violence, inciting a riot, treason and perhaps felony murder. For their congressional colleagues, it should mean expulsion from office under Article I, Section 5, Clause 2 of the Constitution.
 
Shakedown
 
Another “perfect” phone call? Reprising his attempted telephone shakedown of Ukraine’s president in which he threatened to withhold desperately needed military equipment unless the foreign leader manufactured evidence against Joe Biden, Donald Trump attempted the same strong-arm tactic on Georgia election officials. This brazen attempt to commit election theft was accompanied by threats of prosecution if the Georgia officials did not illegally flip the Georgia results to Trump. Fortunately for American democracy, they refused.
 
Trump’s Kool-Aid-besotted base probably has not listened to the president’s 62-minute, feverish phone call or read the shocking transcript. Consequently, they will continue to believe that their cult leader is not the criminal mob boss that the rest of America and the world know all too well.
 
Trump must also be held accountable for this seditious act. While the Biden Justice Department will hopefully have its hands full bringing him to justice for inciting his followers to storm Congress, the Georgia Attorney General has no such distraction. Georgia Criminal Code §21-2-604(a)(1) states: “A person commits the offense of criminal solicitation to commit election fraud in the first degree when, with intent that another person engage in conduct constituting a felony under this article, he or she solicits, requests, commands, importunes, or otherwise attempts to cause the other person to engage in such conduct.” The penalty is 1-3 years in prison. Another section of the Georgia Criminal Code makes it a felony to conspire to commit election fraud. Our resident despot can’t self-pardon himself out of a state crime.
 
Sherman
 
It’s been 157 years since General William Tecumseh Sherman left Atlanta a charred ruin while burning his way to the sea. Donald Trump left Atlanta intact but charbroiled the Republican Party, losing it both the two Georgia runoffs and the U.S. Senate by his scorched earth demolition trek through Georgia. His lies and bombast about rigged elections and attacks on state Republicans for doing their constitutional duty confused and deterred thousands of Republicans from voting. At the same time, as in 2018, he once again energized Democrats disgusted with his boorish behavior and wicked ways to come out and vote in droves. Malevolence, self-absorption, villainy and ineptitude are never a great combination.
 
Shame
 
The 150 or so congressional Republicans who, even after the Capitol insurrection, continued to deny the will of the American people and opted for fascist autocracy over republican democracy deserve to have their treachery and cowardice memorialized in a Hall of Shame. Come the next several election cycles, these seditious traitors should be marked for a pull-out-all-the-stops effort to defeat them and send them back to the ignominious futures they so richly deserve. Deterring the next autocrat wannabe—Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, Kevin McCarthy (a worthy heir of his 1950s namesake), Stephen Scalise and their disgraceful ilk—from attempting a similar coup d’état in the extremely unfortunate event that one of them comes to power down the road, is crucial. Sadly, we will likely have to wait at least two years to begin the process of cleansing Congress and America of these execrable proto-Fascists.
 
Dick Hermann
January 8, 2021

​Many respectable law firms and individual attorneys declined to represent Donald Trump and his allies in their futile quest to reverse the results of the 2020 election. That left more dubious members of the profession as the only lawyers willing to take on not only a lost cause, but also one reeking of falsehoods. While lost causes are perfectly within the parameters of legitimate legal representation, knowingly advocating lies is not. Doing so prompts sanctions that can, and in this case absolutely should, be applied to the likes of Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, Jenna Ellis and the rest.
 
One of the first things drummed into a budding attorney’s head is that s/he is an “officer of the court.” What that means, among other things, is that the attorney has an obligation to promote justice, including an absolute ethical duty to tell judges the truth. As an officer of the court, a lawyer’s duty is to serve the interests of justice, not just those of the client. In the 60-plus Trump attempts to deny the will of the people, truth was not high on these attorneys’ lists.
 
In addition, Rule 11 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, mandates that an attorney represents to the court that the action s/he is bringing is not frivolous and is supported by evidence. These standards were knowingly and serially abused by Trump’s lawyers. The federal courts may impose “an appropriate sanction” on Rule 11 violators. Here’s hoping that they will and that it will be harsh.
 
Most states have similar rules in place for ridiculous lawsuits filed in their courts.
 
Finally, there are the American Bar Association’s Model Rules of Professional Conduct, which have been adopted or adapted by all fifty states and the District of Columbia. A number of the Model Rules apply to the Trump legal team’s attempt to subvert the electoral decision and make a mockery of the judicial process:
 
Rule 3.1: Meritorious Claims & Contentions. A lawyer shall not bring or defend a proceeding, or assert or controvert an issue therein, unless there is a basis in law and fact for doing so that is not frivolous,….
 
Rule 3.3: Candor Toward the Tribunal. (a) A lawyer shall not knowingly: (1) make a false statement of fact or law to a tribunal or fail to correct a false statement of material fact or law previously made to the tribunal by the lawyer; or…(3) offer evidence that the lawyer knows to be false.
 
Rule 4.1: Truthfulness in Statements to Others (such as the media and public). In the course of representing a client a lawyer shall not knowingly: (a) make a false statement of material fact or law to a third person;
 
Rule 8.4: Misconduct: Maintaining The Integrity Of The Profession. It is professional misconduct for a lawyer to: (a) violate or attempt to violate the Rules of Professional Conduct,…(c) engage in conduct involving dishonesty, fraud, deceit or misrepresentation; (d) engage in conduct that is prejudicial to the administration of justice;
 
Either Rudy et al. never read the Model Rules or thought they could get away with ignoring them. They cannot, nor should they. At this writing, complaints have been filed with at least five state bar disciplinary agencies – in Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, New York and Pennsylvania – accusing as many as 23 different Trump attorneys of either filing “frivolous” lawsuits or engaging in other professional misconduct. Discipline can range up to disbarment, which any Trump attorney who participated in this contemptible attempt at a coup d’etat richly deserves.
 
The vast majority of lawyers are principled individuals who take their responsibilities to society seriously. Unfortunately, a few bad apples like the Trump legal team give the profession a black eye. The way to redemption is to excise them permanently from the ranks of practitioners.
 
Dick Hermann
January 1, 2021

​Donald Trump’s countless times’ siding with Russia and Vladimir Putin against the United States during his four-year demolition of the presidency raises the question of where his loyalty lies. Even in his waning, democracy-decimating days in office, he continues to line up with Russia. His latest kowtow to the Kremlin: his denial of the unanimous conclusion of U.S. intelligence agencies, endorsed by his own Secretary of State and Attorney General, that Russia is behind the most intrusive, successful and dangerous hack ever of the U.S. government’s computer systems. Instead, he lays the blame on China absent any evidence whatsoever.
 
This follows his silence when Russian opposition leader, Alexei Navalny, was recently poisoned during an attempted murder by Putin’s thugs, and before that by his silent assent to Russia putting bounties on the heads of American troops fighting in Afghanistan.
 
These disturbing incidents only scratch the surface of Trump’s bizarre enthusiasm for Russian interests over those of his own country. He also encouraged and welcomed Russia’s 2016 assistance to his election campaign. He sided with Putin’s denial of U.S. election interference over the unanimous conclusion of U.S. intelligence agencies. He consistently undermined NATO, Putin’s highest foreign policy priority. He revealed classified information to Russia’s ambassador and foreign minister in an Oval Office meeting. He has been a super-spreader of Russian disinformation, the most egregious example being the fiction that Ukraine, not Russia, interfered with the 2016 election. In the eyes of our president, Vladimir Putin can do no wrong.
 
It needs to be asked whether Trump’s love affair with the Kremlin is mere autocrat-envy, or is there a more sinister explanation? The evidence points to the Russians having some information about him that he is desperate to keep hidden.
 
It’s likely not something sexual. We have seen time and again that Trump has no shame when it comes to partying with and paying off porn stars and centerfolds or cavorting with the late Jeffrey Epstein’s stable of underage Lolitas, not to mention dissing and dismissing the two dozen women who claim he sexually harassed them or worse.
 
More likely, it has to do with Trump’s nefarious business activities. Within that context, there is no evidence that Trump’s behavior as eager Putin doormat and chief bootlicker is connected to any Moscow business deals. Trump tried and failed three times (1983, 1987 and 1996) to conclude Russian real estate deals. Money laundering for Kremlin criminals, however, is another matter.
 
Money laundering is something for which Trump has already been outed and slapped on the wrist, but its extent may go much farther than civil punishment and open him up to serious criminal liability as well.
 
On March 6, 2015, the U.S. Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) imposed a $10 million civil penalty against the bankrupt Trump Taj Mahal Casino Resort for willful and repeated violations of the Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) for its lax anti-money laundering controls. Trump’s Atlantic City casino admitted to several BSA violations. FinCEN said that the Trump Taj Mahal “has a long history of prior, repeated BSA violations cited by examiners dating back to 2003.” Earlier, FinCEN assessed a $477,700 civil money penalty against the casino for currency transaction reporting violations.
 
Trump Taj Mahal admitted that it failed to: report suspicious transactions, file required currency transaction reports, and keep appropriate records. The fine resulted from IRS and Justice Department investigations.
 
A large number of the alleged casino money launderers were Russians. The Taj Mahal was a magnet for Russian money, including Russian mafia money, says Seth Hettena, an investigative journalist and author of Trump/Russia: A Definitive History.
 
But this is only one aspect of Trump’s money laundering on behalf of Russians. According to the McClatchy newspapers, people connected to Russia or former Soviet republics paid $109 million in cash for 86 Trump-branded properties, with many of them using shell companies. Some buyers appeared to spend above market value for their properties, a classic money laundering practice. All-cash real estate deals are also a money-laundering red flag. Trump also sold a $41 million Palm Beach estate to a Russian oligarch and close Putin associate for $95 million, much higher than its market value, only four years after buying it. The transaction’s timing came only months after Trump Entertainment Resorts filed for bankruptcy and when Trump was having trouble finding any banks that would lend to him.
 
Someday we will probably find out just what it was that caused Trump to spend four years advocating for a U.S. adversary intent on subverting our democracy. That could reveal how and why Trump became a Russian asset.
 
Dick Hermann
December 28, 2020

​Fascism-- a political philosophy, movement, or regime that exalts nation and often race…and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader,…and forcible suppression of opposition.
--Merriam-Webster Dictionary
 
With the exception of blips like the Bull Moose (1912) and Reform Party (1992) insurgencies, American democracy has enjoyed stable two-party competition for most of its history. For the past 164 years, that meant Democrats and Republicans, both of which respected timeless norms such as democracy, the rule of law, and the Constitution.
 
No more. This two-party constancy has now been shattered, upended by the divide in the former Republican Party, now split into what little remains of traditional conservative Republicanism and the much larger Trump cult that has veered off into unrepentant autocratic Fascism.
 
With Trump at least partially losing his dominance of the news cycle and some diminution of his relevance to the public discourse, it is possible that a handful of his cowardly congressional disciples will rediscover their spines and once again walk and talk like the pre-Trump GOP, concerned about deficits and debt, the size of government, limits on executive power and the nefarious activities of traditional enemies like Russia. The bolder among them may even experience an epiphany and resume working across the aisle with their Democratic colleagues to actually get things done.
 
I don’t expect that a return to democratic norms will be embraced by a majority of what we used to label “Republicans.” I suspect that the bulk of its congressional membership will continue to adhere to and spout the Trump lines and lies, fearful of being “primaried” in future years by even more committed Trump toadies, or of being tweeted against by Trump. American soldiers risk their lives to defend us in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria while crypto-Republicans are terrified of a tweet!
 
We can expect this Fascist Party faithful to continue to obstruct everything President Biden tries to do. They will do everything in their power to make life difficult for him and thus for American progress. As evidence of that, we can point to the large majority of purportedly House Republicans (126 out of 196) who signed onto the disgraceful amicus brief submitted in support of the outrageous Texas attempt to overturn the results of the presidential election. Fortunately, the U.S. Supreme Court swatted away that seditious assault on our democracy and sacred rule of law with appropriate dripping contempt.
 
The Trump Fascist Party (“TFP”) in Congress will disrupt, disinform, deny and deflect as vigorously as their champion did during his destructive four years at their helm. You can also expect that their state legislative colleagues will do all they can to suppress the vote so that, although a dwindling minority, they can continue to hold power and usurp the will of the majority. They are already busily at work doing that in many states where they control the legislative branches—making it more difficult to vote by mail; restricting early voting; and adapting other Jim Crow era tactics to the present circumstances.
 
While they will dishonestly cling to the Republican label as long as they can in order to camouflage their Fascist inclinations, make no mistake. They are Fascist to the bone.
 
The media owes it to the public to daily remind its readers, viewers and listeners that these are dangerous Fascists out to destroy the America that has served us so well for two-and-a-half centuries. Then, in 2022, we must begin the process of returning them to civilian life.
 
Dick Hermann
December 18, 2020

​“Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”
--Lord Krishna from the Bhagavad-Gita
 
This famous quotation came to worldwide attention after it was uttered by J. Robert Oppenheimer, scientific director of the Manhattan Project, in the early morning of July 16, 1945 upon witnessing the detonation of Trinity, the world’s first atomic bomb, in New Mexico’s high desert. His resort to this Hindu declaration was a warning to humanity about the implications of what he and his 2,000 physicists working on the project had unleashed.
 
These words seem particularly appropriate again today when contemplating our current world destroyer as he annihilates every remaining norm he has not already shattered in his four years of behaving like a presidential wrecking ball. His attempt to destroy American democracy is every bit as world-altering and consequential as the advent of the nuclear age. His attempted coup d’état may not succeed in keeping him in office, but it may upend what we have come to realize is the fragile democratic basis of our government.
 
The alternate universe in which Trump’s base resides is unfortunately impervious to facts. This is a huge problem for the incoming Biden administration and for the country’s future, given the base’s delusional belief that Biden is an illegitimate president. I don’t know how or if this Big Lie can be surmounted, but I am convinced that the ability to turn this country around and bring it back to a semblance of normalcy depends upon Biden being able to do just that.
 
If the economy can bounce back strongly, I don’t think it will be necessary to convince all 74 million Trump voters that facts matter and that President Biden was duly elected. It might be possible to persuade a substantial cohort of them who currently persist in occupying a dream world divorced from reality, notwithstanding that their dreamscape will be daily fueled by the lunatic fringe media intent on continually feeding their delusions.
 
A robust economy hinges on the execution of four transformative policies that will help them in tangible ways positively affecting their pocketbooks, all four of which were beyond Trump’s attention span or capabilities: (1) Managing the pandemic responsibly and moving past it toward economic restoration. (2) Successfully tackling the opioid epidemic. (3) Creating good paying jobs in exurban and rural areas through extensive infrastructure and retraining initiatives. (4) Focusing on the job-generation that intelligent climate change policies can effect. In short, demonstrating that they are no longer being left behind and will clearly be better off than they were during Trump’s destructive, do-nothing tenure.
 
A pocketful of cash would be a powerful antidote to fear, anger, resentment and fantasy.
 
Dick Hermann
December 11, 2020

“Just an old sweet song
Keeps Georgia on my mind.”
--Hoagy Charmichael & Stuart Gorrell
 
The second most important election of the last four years will take place on January 5th in Georgia, the state that provided the most surprising result on November 3rd when it went Democratic for the first time in a generation.
 
There are two formidable Democratic Senate candidates, Rev. Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff. Warnock, the head pastor at Atlanta’s iconic Ebenezer Baptist Church, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s pulpit, is pitted against Republican Sen. Kelly Loeffler. Ossoff, a 33-year old entrepreneur, is up against Republican Incumbent David Perdue.
 
Here’s what Loeffler and Purdue have in common:

1. Both are credibly alleged to have used inside information to profit from the Covid-19 pandemic.
2. Both are outspoken racists. At an October rally, Perdue mockingly mispronounced Vice-President-elect Kamala Harris’s first name despite having served with her in the Senate for the last four years. His campaign also put out a doctored photograph of Ossoff, who is Jewish, altering the size of his nose, a classic Nazi trope. Both despicable outrages were naked appeals to the racist and anti-Semitic components of the Trump base. Loeffler, who owns the Women’s National Basketball Association’s Atlanta Dream, criticized her team for wearing uniforms that said “Black Lives Matter” in line with all the other WNBA teams. Her own players are actively working against her re-election.
3. Both supported Trump’s most disgraceful policies—ripping babies from their mother’s arms and putting them in cages; attempting to take away healthcare from 23 million Americans; remaining silent whenever Trump encourages white supremacists and QAnon conspiracy theories about Democrats eating children and similar nonsense.
4. Both want to terminate the Affordable Care Act in the middle of an out-of-control pandemic and relieve insurers from the Act’s prohibition against denying insurance on the basis of pre-existing conditions.
5. Both are avid proponents of the Jim Crow voter suppression tactics that cropped up in Georgia and around the country during the presidential election: closing down voting locations in minority areas; putting minority voters through ringers if they wanted to cast ballots; etc.
6. Both demanded the resignation of fellow Republican, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, in spite of his running a clean and fair election that Joe Biden won in the state that was the poster child for suppressing the vote in 2018. They want to replace him with someone who will return Georgia to the good old days of rampant voter suppression and stolen GOP victories.
7. Both are spineless followers of Mitch McConnell’s blanket obstructionism that refuses to allow the Senate to get anything constructive done for the American people.
8. Both spew the Trump line about fraud and rigged elections absent any evidence, and lie about Ossoff and Warnock, both centrists, being socialists.
9. Both are complicit in Trump’s petulant attempts to trash democracy and bring down the nation in revenge for his electoral loss; his allowing Covid-19 to run rampant, spreading disease, hospitalizations  and deaths at record rates; and his decimation of our national security leadership that puts the nation at risk.
10. Both support the president’s efforts at impeding the Biden presidency by issuing a barrage of executive orders and regulations designed to make life difficult for the incoming administration. These two sorry excuses for Senators have no intention of working across the aisle.

 
In sum, these two Senate mediocrities are a terrible reflection on their state and the nation. If this despicable duo wins, Mitch McConnell will continue to control the Senate and roadblock everything the Biden administration wants to do to move the country forward out of the pandemic and the chaos and catastrophes of the Trump Era and back to a strong economy. Georgia surely can do better.
 
Ossoff and Warnock, in contrast, are both ethically grounded and have achieved success through hard work. They have the best interests of Georgians and the country in their hearts and minds. They both have records of good behavior, decency, humanity and empathy, in stark contrast to their sleazy opponents. Character counts.
 
Dick Hermann
December 4, 2020

Just because Donald Trump, only the fourth president in 100 years to lose his re-election bid, is devoting his limited energy and attention span to subverting our democracy doesn’t mean his minions aren’t busy elevating his and their customary cruelty to a new level. Trump’s stooges are feverishly at work screwing the most vulnerable among us. Here’s just a few of the malevolent things they are doing on their way out the door into a well-deserved oblivion:
 
Continuing the Immigration Assault
 
For four years, the Trump administration has vandalized immigration. They have made getting into this country legally almost impossible. Their guiding principles have been malice, racism, lies and contempt for international law and human decency.  They don’t even try to hide it. Now they are at it again in a last ditch attempt to destroy the few human lives their viciousness has not yet touched.
 
In September we learned that an ICE prison in Georgia was sending immigrant women for unnecessary hysterectomies that the women didn’t consent to or even realize were happening. Congress’s attempt to investigate this criminal outrage is being stymied because those victims who have agreed to testify are suddenly being deported.
 
Similarly, Cameroonian asylum seekers who allege they were physically assaulted, pepper-sprayed and threatened into signing their own deportation orders are being fast-tracked for deportation so that they too cannot be called to testify about what they have suffered at the hands of Trump’s immigration goons.
 
Not to be outdone in vindictiveness by ICE, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services recently announced that it is making it harder to become a naturalized citizen, effective December 1. The new citizenship test has 128 questions vs. 70 on the old one. Many of the new questions are more difficult than the current ones. I challenge members of Congress, especially Republicans, to answer them correctly. As Senator-elect Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) recently stated: “Our government wasn’t set up for one group to have all three branches of government — You know, the House, the Senate, and the executive.” Sheesh!
 
One More Kick in Disabled People’s Teeth
 
It isn’t enough that candidate Trump back in 2016 mocked a disabled reporter for his disability or that millions of coronavirus survivors are likely to have lasting disabilities. The Trump toadies at the Social Security Administration have just issued final rules making it much harder for disabled individuals to receive Social Security Disability Income (SSDI) and Supplemental Security Income (SSI) benefits and to put in jeopardy the SSDI and SSI benefits of people currently receiving them.
 
They are replacing the impartial, independent corps of administrative law judges (ALJs) who decide these cases with internal agency lawyers who are Social Security Administration employees beholden to their bosses’ edicts. Expect the number of needy, deserving people who will be denied these essential benefits to skyrocket.
 
The second rule increases the number and frequency of "continuing disability reviews" (during which beneficiaries must prove they're still disabled). This new rule is intended to make it easier for the government to throw people off the disability rolls.
 
Both rules will go into effect in December.
 
As with everything Trump and his cronies do, the result in all these cases is callous cruelty. The viciousness of these reprobates knows no bounds. Expect more of the same before they’re gone.
 
Dick Hermann
November 27, 2020

“It is impossible that a man who is false to his friends and neighbours should be true to the public.”
--Bishop Berkeley, 1750
 
What a sad, repulsive, classless, no character man is Donald Trump. The man-baby in the White House cannot accept that the American people resoundingly rejected him at the polls in a free, fair and honest election marred only by massive Republican voter suppression of minority voters nationwide. Every time one thinks Trump cannot go lower, a new bottom calls out to him like a mythological siren. For Trump there is no bottom.
 
His final repellant acts as president violate the oath he took as well as common decency, honor and humanity. Having abandoned any pretense of performing his presidential duties, he stages coups d’état at the Defense and Homeland Security Departments, installing unqualified bootlickers in place of the people he fired by tweet. He spouts wild, unsubstantiated conspiracy theories and alleges a stolen election rampant with nonexistent voter fraud—laughable given that the alleged wrongdoing only affected him and no other Republicans down-ballot. Some conspiracy! He launches clown car election lawsuits, unsupported by any evidence, that get laughed out of court.
 
The worst elements of this awful man’s scorched-earth approach to his final days are:

1. his disinterest in and lack of any action whatsoever to tackle a pandemic raging out of control in the country he swore to protect. Despite the number of cases, hospitalizations and deaths surging, all he cares about is wreaking vengeance and havoc on his government and his people. It falls to the President-elect to behave responsibly while the lame-duck incumbent wallows in self-pity and false accusations. His execrable conduct will be rightly condemned by history, but that is small recompense for the millions of Americans suffering now because of his behavior;
2. the threat to national security of Trump’s refusal to allow a transition to the new administration. The 9/11 Commission noted that the 2000 transition delay contributed to the delayed intelligence that might have helped us obtain an early warning of Al Qaeda’s plans to attack us. Trump’s advisers had to talk him down from launching a military attack on Iran. His decision to pull troops out of Afghanistan opens up that country to becoming a terrorist haven once again;
3. his wholesale adoption of two Nazi tactics that aroused the German public and paved their way to power and dictatorship: the “stab in the back,” i.e. that corrupt politicians were guilty of sabotaging the army in the field at the end of World War I, turning a sure victory into defeat. Trump has adapted that to his rigged election falsehood; and “the Big Lie,” a Joseph Goebbels invention that in its Trumpian manifestation asserts that the election was rigged and Trump really won. Both, of course, are total twaddle. The problem is that Trump’s followers believe this poppycock to the detriment of our fragile democracy and the rule of law. His contamination of our democracy is not something we will easily correct; and
4. his all-out assault on democracy represented by his effort, after all else (lies, conspiracy theories, distortion, disinformation) failed, to overturn the election through subversion, namely attempts to persuade Republican state legislatures to pick their own slate of electors in defiance of the popular will. The incalculable damage this sabotage does to America will long outlast Trump.

 
Trump has four goals in mind with his indecent conduct: (1) to delegitimize a legitimate election. Sadly and inexplicably, his supporters actually believe this nonsense; (2) to make President-elect Biden’s job more difficult; (3) to desperately cling to office because come January 20, 2021, he loses his protection against the 10 criminal and civil investigations and cases awaiting him; and (4) to bring the country down in flames with him if he doesn’t get his way.
 
Equally vulgar is the way senior Republicans have once again fallen in line behind this reprehensible man masquerading as a president. Lindsey Graham, Ted Cruz, Kevin McCarthy and Mitch McConnell, stooges all who have bought into Trump’s con/coup, deserve the condemnation of all Americans and of history for their disgraceful conduct. They dishonor the oath they took to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution, and they run roughshod over the rule of law and democratic ideals for which so many Americans have fought and died. Of course these patsies know better, but they cower in fear of being tweeted against by the autocrat they chose to follow and his loyal base. They are beneath contempt.
 
I supported President Ford’s blanket pardon of Richard Nixon. I believed the country had been through enough and did not need to countenance the prospect of more Nixonian anguish. This time, however, is different. Trump and his enablers need to face justice for their criminal and treasonous conduct. A reckoning must be had. Accountability is as American as apple pie.
 
Dick Hermann
November 21, 2020