A NEW BEGINNING (No, not another Star Wars movie title)

There needs to be a list of what a Biden administration with at least a 50-50 senate needs to do, starting day 1, and lasting 90 days (3 months). Because history tells us that America as a country has ADHD and cannot concentrate, agree on anything, or hold a purpose for any longer than that. Actually, 10 days would be better, but that amount of time will be necessary just for the incoming Democratic Senate chairs to find where the outgoing Republican asswipes (I'm talking to you, retired Lindsey Graham) hid the gavels, and the Biden Administration will need to find out where the Trump staffers, clutching their newly granted pardons, hid everything they couldn't actually destroy.

Here's my short list:

(1) Campaign finance reform: outlaw all private contributions, all solicitations for private contributions as bribes or solicitations of bribes, and publicly finance every federal campaign, requiring all holders of FCC licenses to provide a certain amount of time within 90 days of every election free of charge as a public interest.

(2) Defang all dark money by requiring every attack ad or every ad promoting a candidate to be first previewed by the attackee or opposing candidate, who then can film a responsive ad, twice as long, that will air, free of charge, immediately after every airing of the attack/promoting ad. So when the dark billionaires try to attack Joe Biden with blatant lies (he wants to kill all of your children! Defund police and bring on the purge! He is in a coma and is controlled by dangerous anarchists!) Joe can calmly appear in a response ad, be sane, and dispell the lies before they can infect the body politic.

(3) Eliminate the filibuster in the Senate and all Senatorial "courtesy" that allows a single senator to block or delay legislation- something that exists nowhere in the House, but which still manages to function. This will avoid the repeat of the Republican minority managing to delay or block every meaningful attempt by the Obama Administration.

NOTE: the foregoing are all "process" legislation or rules that will allow the following to move forward:

(4) A voting rights act. Restore Section 5 of the voting rights act, which required jurisdictions from historically segregated States or jurisdictions to "preclear" changes in voting with the Justice Department, from laws and rules great and small, from State laws purging voting lists and affecting the abilities of convicted felons to vote (as in Florida, where the voters approved a referendum to restore their voting rights, immediately blocked by the States's legislature which required them to pay back all fines in full before they could vote) to eliminating precincts. This time, make it nationwide. This law was struck down in a 2013 Supreme Court case, Shelby v. Holder, on the dubious (and manifestly incorrect) grounds that a new age had dawned and State sponsored discrimination was a thing of the dark past- a ruling immediately shown to be wrong only days later when the State of Texas enacted voter ID legislation intended to suppress minority voting rights, and in the months and years to come as numerous other jurisdictions did everything possible to suppress minority voters.

(5) Immediately make Medicare available to every person under 65 who wants to sign up- but at a cost equal to the incremental cost to the United States Treasury, so that it's revenue neutral. Slowly phase in subsidies for persons of lower income to increase participation, funding those subsidies in part with....

(6) A "fair tax" act that will require the wealthy to pay taxes on their capital gains, dividends, and interest, for Medicare and Social Security (currently exempt) and on a restoration of the estate tax to estates valued over one million dollars and...

(7) A restoration of the taxes on the wealthy that were rolled back in the Republican tax breaks for the super rich act of 2018.

(8) A civil rights act that will eliminate the concept of qualified immunity and which will allow those whose civil rights were deprived and who were deliberately injured or through gross negligence or reckless conduct under color of State law by any actor- including judges, district attorneys, and every other actor, but not personally against them but against the entity which employs them.

CLARENCE THOMAS WAS RIGHT! (Yes, I'm shocked, too).

Steve Martin's standup was genius, and I had not only watched him on Saturday Night Live but also purchased his album (vinyl, of course) "Let's Get Small." One of his short bits was to tell the audience that he had a joke tailored to a small segment- just the plumbers, which he assured the audience had a convention in town and many of them were at the show. Then he'd tell the "joke" with an obviously made up phrase for the "plumbers"- and the audience reacted with utter silence. And he'd follow up with: "Oh, they're not going to be here until the next show?" Which was funny, and they laughed. Ok, I guess you had to be there.

So here's an in joke for just the lawyers in the audience. It has to do with the fact that we as "liberals" are conditioned to say that "Nancy Pelosi is good" and "right" and "Justice Clarence Thomas is bad" and "wrong" on any subject on which they disagree. Well, this may confound some people, but once I actually read the Supreme Court's decision last week in Trump v. Mazars, the case in which the Court ruled in a 7-2 decision (Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas both dissenting) that Trump didn't have absolute immunity to keep his tax records private, my opinion is that Thomas and Alito were right and that Pelosi and her cohorts fucked up.

The case held that Congressional subcommittees are entitled to subpoena the financial records, including tax returns, of Donald Trump, but Justice Roberts, writing for the majority, noted that this was a case of first impression- the first time that the Supreme Court ever had to rule on any direct dispute between Congress and the President regarding whether or not a Congressional Committee had the inherent authority (that means that it is nowhere spelled out in the Constitution) to subpoena records from the President.

Justice Roberts, writing for the majority- which, amazingly, included Justices Gorsuch and Kavenaugh- held that Congress had that power. But he also ruled that Congress first had to satisfy a "four part test" once it went back to the District Court, and liberal pundits were moaning in print and on television that this let Trump off the hook because he could "run out the clock."

But here's the thing: the House Democrats fucked up. The committees' subpoenas and the lawsuits by Trump fighting them predated the "perfect phone call" to the President of The Ukraine last July. And the committees that tried to get the records- and there were three of them- never once mentioned the word "impeachment" in any of their inquiries or their court arguments. And even more confounding: the one committee, the House Ways and Means Committee, which by a 100 year old statute had the explicit authority to get the tax returns- didn't even try. Had the committees used the word "impeachment" to justify their subpoenas, there would be no four part test. Had Ways and Means subpoenaed the IRS to turn over the President's tax return, the statute gave neither the IRS nor the President any right to challenge the request.

https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-kleinbard-trump-tax-returns-20190409-story.html#:~:text=The%20statute%20permits%20the%20chairman%20of%20the%20House,session.%20An%20unauthorized%20public%20release%20is%20a%20felony.

So the real shock I had when I read the Supreme Court's opinion was that ALL NINE JUSTICES AGREED THAT CONGRESS HAD THE AUTHORITY TO GET THE PRESIDENT'S TAX RETURNS AND FINANCIAL RECORDS! Even Alito and Thomas, who said that if Congress had just said that they wanted the records to investigate criminal wrongdoing of the president to impeach him- then they could get them. Here's what Justice Alito, quoting Clarence Thomas, for whom I otherwise have no use and who is not remotely qualified to sit on any court, let alone the Supreme Court, wrote:


"The House can inquire about possible Presidential wrongdoing pursuant to its impeachment power, see ante, at 17-21 (THOMAS, J., dissenting), but the Committees do not defend these subpoenas as ancillary to that power.

Instead, they claim that the subpoenas were issued to gather information that is relevant to legislative issues, but there is disturbing evidence of an improper law enforcement purpose."
Trump v. Mazars USA, LLP (2020)

So the upshot is that the House, led by the ever so cautious to a fault Nancy Pelosi, who squelched any mentions of the word "impeachment" for as long as she could until finally even the newest, most moderate House members could no longer abide the criminality of Trump and she had to let the inquiry go forward- but she narrowed it to only issues with the Ukraine (with which I strongly disagreed in a letter that, incredibly, the New York Times published last December- I wanted the House to go big and go wide in their investigations for impeachment), was too clever by half by refusing to mention the word "impeachment" when they sought Trump's records. And had they done so, they would have long since had all of the documentation of the fraud and the Russian money laundering and other mentanglements that they could have wanted.
Of course, even if they had obtained (or still do obtain) every last one of those records, and even if absolute, unquestionable evidence of fraud and other criminal acts were revealed, none of that would have mattered to the Senate Republicans (other than Mitt, who showed some real mettle), or to the Trump cultists.

Susan Collins would have been "concerned," but as she walked past the still warm corpse lying on Fifth Avenue after Trump shot the guy, she would have said that he had "learned his lesson."

https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-aide