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Politics Short Essays Writings

Called It

Well, I called the SCOTUS decision on the 14th amendment, reasoning and all.

The Lowest Court continues to be a purely political animal. The counterbalancing denial of presidential immunity will come next.

The liberal justices attempted to split hairs on the question of federal enforcement, but they signed on anyway.

The decision is a sad one for history – a last kick in the pants to Reconstruction. Not even the slavers managed to take out an entire existing clause.

Categories
Argumentation Politics Short Essays Writings

A Tale of Two Cases

SCOTUS has two big calls to make soon. One is whether Colorado can disqualify Trump via the 14th amendment, and the second is whether he is immune to prosecution in his election case.

As I never tire of saying, SCOTUS is a political committee more than an legal body. But the reasoning they will use is interesting to me from the perspective of a rhetorician.

My expectation is that they will follow the easiest path, which is to reverse the Colorado SC but deny Trump immunity, as it would open the smallest can of worms of the four possible futures. My reasoning follows.

State’s rights nonsense aside, I suspect the justices in any written decision won’t touch upon the actual dispute at hand (which is whether Trump attempted to subvert a presidential election) with a pole of any length. Instead, they will insist upon a federal procedure for invoking the 14th by an act of Congress, parallel to passing a bill without the President. And since Congress can’t even pass the simplest aid package at the moment (I am tempted to write “can’t even wipe its own backside with either house,” and so I will do both), the 14th is therefore shoved back into its post-Reconstruction role as a paper tiger. Ignoble, but at this point, inevitable.

The immunity case offers a way to salve the hack job on the Colorado decision; it’s a straightforward no. If the justices grant Trump immunity, they also grant Biden and Obama immunity, and no Trump appointee will be allowed to make that call. The immunity case, like all of Trump’s appeals, is just a delaying tactic.

Rhetorically, it’s the easiest path. SCOTUS comes off fairly neutral to most, even if it’s anything but.

Categories
Politics Short Essays Writings

The Most Important Map

I’d like to post a direct link to the most important and frightening map that I’ve seen in a long while.

It is a projected military map of Eastern Europe with a fully Russian-occupied Ukraine and a nest of divisions poised at the border of Poland.

Poland understands best of all what this map means. It’s why Finland and Sweden ran to NATO.

Note Belarus does not get the benefit of an ‘occupied’ color; the red reflects the reality.

The Baltics were already exposed, but on this map, they look ripe. Would NATO honor its obligations if a Russian division crossed the border of Estonia? Putin has called every bluff of the West so far.

The image is part of a larger article entitled “The High Price of Losing Ukraine” by ISW, a hawkish thinktank. Subtract their default American-power-leveraging attitude, though, and they are dead right about Ukraine.

In early 2022, there was a resigned expectation in the West that Ukraine would crumble quickly and this hypothetical map was a done deal, meaning that the U.S. would have to fortify Europe again at great cost.

But Ukraine didn’t crumble, and Russia is now in a proverbial bear trap.

There’s only two reasons for a Western politician not to vote to send Ukraine every artillery shell and piece of equipment we can. The first is that such a person is a Russian asset, wittingly or not; the second is rank stupidity. Neither is mutually exclusive.

Isolationism isn’t a sane option in a world where we already have two fingers plugged into two different dikes – Taiwan and South Korea.

Putin will take what he wants unless he is physically stopped from doing so.