Boston Globe Letters, May 5, 2022 Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, political activist and wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, certainly advanced bizarre conspiracy theories in her text messages to Donald Trump’s White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, urging him to resist certification of the 2020 election results (“No kid gloves: Jan. 6 committee must…
Category: History
A Black Woman on the Supreme Court? Of Course!
(A part of this piece appeared in the Wall Street Journal) Joe Biden’s loudly proclaimed desire to appoint a Black female to the Supreme Court is, well …. very recent. Janice Rogers Brown had been the first Black female on the California Supreme Court for seven years when President George W. Bush nominated her to the DC Circuit Court…
America’s Voting Laws Are Just Fine
Daily Lynn Item Op-Ed, January 18, 2022 Two malicious myths, one promoted by the political left and the other by the right, continue to roil American politics. Fringe conspiracy theorists on the right still insist that the 2020 Presidential election was stolen from President Trump. Although it has been demonstrated to a certainty that President…
Russia Never Ran Out of “Useful Idiots” in America
Wall Street Journal November16,2021 Kimberley Strassel is spot on in her analysis of Mr. Durham’s complex indictment of Igor Danchenko (“Hillary Clinton’s Russian Helpers,” Potomac Watch, Nov. 12). I would not, however, conclude as she does: “We can’t know what the Kremlin’s goal was in 2016.” In the efforts recited in the indictment, and in…
The Trump Insurrection
When I wrote You can live with President Biden, I took great consolation from the likelihood that the Republicans would probably hold the Senate. I wouldn’t have believed anyone who told me that the Republicans would lose both Georgia Senate seats and their Senate majority and that it wouldn’t be the worst thing that happened…
After the Ball is Over 4: Texas at the Supreme Court
I will be brief here, as the issue I am discussing may be resolved by the U.S. Supreme Court tomorrow afternoon. Texas has brought an action in the in the Supreme Court against the States of Georgia, Michigan and Wisconsin, seeking an order requiring the legislatures of those states to take action to ensure that…
After the Ball is Over 3: A Plague of Lawyers
Election Day is Tuesday. An astounding percentage of eligible voters have already voted by mail or in person at available sites. As I write, four days before the election, voters nationally have already cast 62.2% of the total votes case in 2016. The early votes in Texas have already surpassed the total vote there in…
Replacing RBG
I have written frequently here of the Kabuki theater of Supreme Court nominations. Each Senate actor has a highly scripted role to play. There are different parts to be played by the Senate actors, depending on whether they in the Majority party in the Senate and whether they are in the nominating President’s party. Following…
“The Second Most Powerful Man in the World”
With good cause, historians have long lauded General George Marshall as the central military figure in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s prosecution of World War II. As “the Organizer of Victory” Marshall swiftly morphed the tiny U.S. Army (16th largest in the world in 1936) in the second largest and best-equipped in the world by war’s end….
After the ball is over …. will Trump go home?
The chattering classes are all atwitter. “Will Trump go, if he loses the election?” It all depends on who says he lost. Some of his critics still maintain he really lost in 2016. If the Electoral College results, opened and counted by Vice President Mike Pence in the presence of a Joint Session of Congress…
Whose Prosecutorial Discretion Is It, Anyway?
News outlets and social media are aflame with denunciations of Attorney General William Barr’s order to change the prosecutor’s sentencing recommendation to the judge in the case of Roger Stone, a gadfly Trump supporter. The excitement was created by the dramatic “resignations” of four Assistant U.S. Attorneys who had originally submitted a memo recommending a…
It’s Mueller Time 2: Obstruction
Recently in It’s Mueller Time!,” I discussed the Meuller Report’s treatment of the issue of whether President Trump or his campaign criminally conspired with the Russians during the 2016 campaign (“Russian Collusion”). I relied on Attorney General William Barr’s summary of the principal conclusions of the report. Since then the full report with very limited required…
MonkfishOnCape 