Doughfacedonny is and remains the largest threat to democracy and all of our founding principles. We have to be present in the here and now. The election is proceeding apace, long lines are the norm for early voting even with the emphasis on mailing your ballot in which says to me that republican voter suppression tactics are even more brazen than last election and on and on. I remember vividly the frantic news reports in 2004 about long lines at voting places and what a great exhibition of democracy and voter enthusiasm it portended. Then we found out that those long lines were deliberately the result of republican official sabotage of voting. The resulting four years of continued republican reign of terror by Dubya and Dick C. ground more of our shattered institutions into dirt. The political press dutifully presents the long lines again this year as hoorah! evidence of voters' enthusiasm, they don't have a choice, to really get to the bottom of it would connect dots that mainstream media cannot allow to be connected. The news can present sanitized reports of republican voter suppression as long as they are compartmentalized as separate from the actual voting process. I hope a landslide blue wave is in the process of crashing the republican swamp and excising some of the right wing tumors that are strangling government at all levels.
I'll never forgive myself for jumping ahead four years ago when I scoffed at the idea of doughfacedonny pulling out an electoral college win and making my wish to the incoming Clinton administration for a financial transactions tax on Wall Street broadly speaking. The list of broken parts in government right now is beyond belief but instituting a rake on the Wall Street casino has to be a fairly high priority. It is the one relatively easy reform that would make a big difference in the biggest underlying problem in America, the concentration of wealth and power in so few hands. Obviously I mean easy in a comparative sense, breaking up corporations or instituting direct wealth taxes would be even more difficult. But an even playing field of a 0.5% sales tax on buying stocks for everyone and every institution would slowly, imperceptibly drain the real swamp of speculative (i.e. unproductive) capital. Two goals in the short term could be achieved; providing the federal government with a new revenue stream and slow down the speed of transactions. The big financial corporations compete for whose computers can be closest to the actual trading server to get their orders in nanoseconds before their competitors, the algorithms they use to manipulate markets can erase billions in wealth before a human could even recognize something was wrong, or trigger a disastrous bubble in valuations. Having an actual cost to conducting millions of transactions would slow things down, hopefully to the point that Wall Street's greed can't sink the real economy as easily as they have in the past. So, I still believe in the idea but it has to be relegated to medical therapy in the medium term or longer because we have catastrophic wounds that need triage and immediate action.
Plenty of liberal commentators have put forth the idea of expanding the number of seats on the Supreme Court. And if moscowmitch and the republicans succeed in putting the unqualified Amy on the court it will mean that a majority of justices were appointed by presidents who failed to in a majority of votes and confirmed by senators who represent 15 million fewer American citizens than the opposition. Adding seats to undermine this anti-democratic power play has the added benefit of being perfectly legal, but doesn't go nearly far enough to excise the corruption of the American judiciary. In addition to refusing to hold a hearing on Merrick Garland, moscowmitch also held open over 100 judgeships in lower courts. Placing unqualified right-winger ideologues in their 40s on the bench has been nearly the only vocation of the senate since 2017. All of trumps supreme court justices should be impeached of course, they have all lied under oath or committed other disqualifying acts. But that isn't enough.
I have learned my lesson about putting the cart before the horse. What a President Joe Biden, a Majority Leader Schumer, and Speaker Pelosi have the will to do with possible unified government is unknown. They will honestly probably spend their entire terms fighting off republican obstruction, sabotage, hostage taking, and God knows what else. What can actually be done to neuter the fascist right is far above my pay grade but I wanted to put forth an idea about combatting the right wing infestation of lower courts that as far as I can tell from initial research has not been suggested before.
The Constitution empowers Congress to make whatever inferior federal courts it sees fit to sanction. Why not the reverse? Impeaching hundreds of republican justices all the way down would take years and be extremely difficult. Why not, in this extraordinary time of fascist danger, dissolve these courts where the worst right wing ideologues currently are subverting democracy and defending tyranny? I am no legal expert but the way it appears in the Constitution, all it would take is a simply majority vote to dissolve the various circuit courts and courts of appeals. Then another simple majority vote to create a new one, just in legal terms, it would be like the infected court committed suicide and the new court would take it's place in physical location, docket, and jurisdiction. This may sound extreme, but these are desperate times, the real extremists have forced this confrontation. The cycle must be broken, in a fair system we would not suffer from minority rule and all of the corruption and abuse that stems from it. Simply cleaning up the mess left by doughfacedonny won't be enough, not by a long shot. If the new administration does not take bold steps towards rooting out republican corruption and the undemocratic structures they have used to grab power for so long, the odds are strongly in favor of Democratic voters becoming disillusioned again and staying home in 2022 as they did in 2010.
We are all suffering from PTSD stemming from election night 2016 and the accompanying horrors right up to today. It is going to be painful to remain engaged but we left too many things for history or mainstream media to sort out in 2009. Minority republican rule is like letting the same group of thugs assault and rob you over and over again, we have to defend democracy in order to defend ourselves. Passing laws that presidential candidates must release their tax returns or giving force of law to the myriad norms broken by doughfacedonny and his crime syndicate isn't enough, if Democrats even have that much energy to make the obvious changes. We have to think bigger, our lives and our children's lives depend on defending ourselves from fascism. Dissolving courts corrupted by republicans and creating new ones with judges who will defend individual rights, our democracy, and the rule of law is just one component of the restoration of the republic.
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