The Daily Escape:
Peony, Fields of Wrong, CT – June 2023 photo by Wrongo
(There will not be a Sunday Cartoons column this weekend. Wrongo and Ms. Right are attending a memorial service for family member Bob W.’s mom.)
The week ended with a ton of political news. First, as Mark Joseph Stern reported in Slate:
“The Supreme Court’s 5–4 decision in Allen v. Milligan on Thursday, which found that Alabama’s congressional map violates the Voting Rights Act’s ban on racial vote dilution, sends two clear messages. First, a bare majority of the court—Chief Justice John Roberts, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, and the three liberals—believes that the VRA still plays a meaningful role in maintaining a multiracial democracy (or is willing to defer to Congress’ judgment on the matter). Second, that same majority of the court does not look kindly upon red states’ race to shred decades of precedent in an effort to wipe out the voting power of Black Americans.”
The good news is that the decision means that Alabama must create a second Congressional district in which the voting power of Black voters is not diluted by gerrymandering. It is likely that Alabama will add a second Democratic representative to its Congressional delegation.
Even better, Democracy Docket says that the holding in Allen v. Milligan will likely result in a net gain of six Democratic seats (five in other states) in the House in 2024.
Second, Trump is being indicted in Florida. He, along with a staff member at Mar-a-Lago, are facing 37 felony charges related to the mishandling of classified documents. This good news is offset by learning that judge Aileen Cannon is again assigned to hear the DOJ’s case that Trump wrongly held classified documents, failed to return all of them, and then obstructed the efforts of the National Archives and the FBI to recover them. Here’s a link to the indictment.
Mega millions of words will be written about this before there’s a trial or a guilty plea. Hold off on a victory lap until Trump is convicted. About a quarter of the classified/national security documents seized from Mar-a-Lago were found in Trump’s office. It will be difficult for Trump to persuade a jury that he didn’t know about the documents and chose not to return them.
Also, the Trump lawyers who were the front men for this indictment have quit the case. The attorneys, Jim Trusty and John Rowley, did not explain in detail why they had resigned.
Does MAGA now stand for: Make Attorneys Go Away? Or possibly, Make Attorneys Get Attorneys? Although it appears the parting was amicable, it would be irresponsible not to speculate! And it’s difficult to believe that the lead attorney’s last name is Trusty.
But Trump wasn’t the only MAGA mishandling secrets this week. The HuffPo reported that Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) made an eyebrow raising claim during a TV interview with Laura Ingraham on Fox:
“Greene said she read a document inside a SCIF ― a sensitive compartmented information facility ― related to bribery allegations Republicans have made against Biden…Then, she described that document while speaking to Laura Ingraham on Fox News”
Wrongo has experience with reading documents in SCIFs. NOBODY takes notes on what they’ve read. It’s a violation of national security regulations. When you enter a SCIF, you check all electronic devices before entering, and can’t take notes while inside. And usually, information revealed in the SCIF can’t be repeated outside of it. But Greene held up her notes to the camera.
Mark Zaid, an attorney who specializes in national security, tweeted:
“Hey @FBI, if this information was classified sounds to me like the Congresswoman is admitting to a crime. And if it was not, @SpeakerMcCarthy should remove her privileges for violating the trust she was afforded as a Member of Congress to review sensitive information.”
— Mark S. Zaid (@MarkSZaidEsq) June 9, 2023
But McCarthy won’t do anything. The GOP is building a wall around Trump, and minimizing the mishandling of documents by Greene will just be part of the play. To be a Republican in 2023 is to love Trump. They no longer love him for a particular reason: He’s what the Party has become.
There was plenty of orange air outside of the Mansion of Wrong this week. So, let’s pray for brighter skies while we settle into our Saturday Soother, where we try to forget the political news and the impending climate disaster. Let’s try to relax for a few moments. This week, George Winston died. He was a composer who became the signature style of New Age music in the 1980s. Wrongo was mildly interested in him at the time but came to admire and respect his work in the past few years.
Here’s Winston in 2020 playing Vince Guaraldi’s “Cast Your Fate to the Wind”:
Re Allen.. I read some of Judge Thomas’s dissent. Its focus is that the court should be color blind and that the rulings in the past have been “disastrous.”
On the face of it, this sounds like an ideal. But what it leaves us with is a situation where the majority can use sophisticated software to cram voters they don’t like – black voters – into the fewest districts thus shrinking their power.
The court also has been averse to challenges to gerrymandering (over a longer period) suggesting the gerrymandering is in essence a political act and more or less the right of the winners.
Ignored in all this is any right to equal treatment by non political actors – voters, who are helpless in the face of political power they don’t have. So in a number of states, 40-50 % of a state become represented by representatives whose party is limited to 25-30 of the votes in the legislature.
Worse still is Thomas (whose agenda is unclear but appears to stem from disappointment with liberals after his graduation from law school). Thomas seems to practice willful ignorance of what is going on – which is that as soon as Shelby was decided that GOP led states made ardent efforts to stifle the numbers of minority voters (who are mostly black in the South) from voting and also to reduce their power when they do vote.
For me, I agree with conservatives that color blindness is an ideal. I have also been suspicious of “de facto segregation” that makes the racial patterns in Northern states equal to de sure segregation in terms of legal remedies. But in the end, for the US, the issue of how blacks were treated and the consequences of that are like a permanent weight against our culture. We are doing better but as we have seen with the rise of the right – its very much still festering.
Worse still was that the voting rights act was renewed, so the court should have deferred to Congress.
As for Thomas he apparently was a fish out of water in college and especially law school. Some of this is that he came from a Gullah speaking area and so his English would have been at best strange to well educated mostly bigger city kids. When he graduated he did not get offers from law firms. This has long been a complaint of those at the forefront of change – so women too. He is still angry at liberal and out to get them.