A reader and I had a brief (but interesting, I think) conversation about presidential immunity:
Craig: If I had told you five years ago that the U.S. Supreme Court would be considering the assertion that every American was subject to our nation’s criminal statutes except for the most powerful person in the country, you would have told me I was insane.
Reader: But if the president doesn’t have immunity, he can be charged with crimes by his political opponents.
Craig: Perhaps he would do well not to commit crimes like the ones following the 2020 election, resulting in four independent grand juries’ handing down four different indictments containing 91 felony counts.
This concept (“don’t commit crimes“) seems to have worked well for the last 240 years. But then Trump, a career criminal, comes along, tries to overthrow the government, and now we may be looking at a dictatorship.
It’s hard to imagine how our Founding Fathers would have felt about this. They certainly could have made an immunity clause a part of the Constitution. Do you think they simply forgot? Our maybe they didn’t think it wise to install an authoritarian head of state.
Renewable Energy
America’s Cultural, Moral, and Spiritual Decay
Former Republican strategist Steve Schmidt makes an important point here, one that makes us wonder exactly how long it’s going to take to repair the damage that Trump has inflicted on our country.
Let’s say that the midterm elections shift the balance of power in congress and Trump is removed from power in the first half of 2027. Perhaps this will happen on the basis of his senility, using the 25th Amendment. Or better, he’ll be impeached and convicted for any of dozens of the crimes he’s committed.
As much of the physical damage as possible will be undone, almost overnight. No Trump names on public buildings. Tariffs removed. Science re-instated as the pillar of policy making and public health. No more idiot sycophants in key positions. Iran and the U.S. (somehow) move back into the relationship we had before Trump’s asinine and illegal war.
The vast majority of Americans and virtually everyone else on Earth will breathe a huge sigh of relief.
But even if this happens swiftly, it will most certainly not make the “Trump phenomenon” vanish into the mist. People all around the globe will continue to regard the former envy of the world as a nation of hateful idiots, and it’s likely that this perception, as many have suggested, will take a generation or so to lift.
Canadian PM Mark Carney is predicting that, given the implosion of the U.S., that a new world order is forming with Europe as its center. Maybe “a generation or so” won’t get the job done. Maybe American dominance is gone forever.
And maybe that’s not such a bad thing. Imagine for a moment that billionaires didn’t control every facet of life here, and that our nation morphs into one that resembles the more enlightened places on this planet, where its people are well-educated and feel a distinct level of compassion for one another.
Renewable Energy
Rejection of Science Comes at a Cost
As the U.S. crawls further into the woods of anti-vaxxers and other conspiracy theorists, everyone living here encounters a variety of threats.
Renewable Energy
What Are We Willing to Believe?
There is a mountain of physical evidence that the Earth is far more than 6000 years old, despite what we’re told in the bible. For one, we have the carbon-dating of dinosaur bones that have been around for hundreds of millions of years.
Some people invoke the theory of “satanic interference” to explain this. That is, the devil himself plants these fossils for us to find, in an attempt to discredit the true word of God.
To me, that’s a stretch, but it’s not too different from what Mike Johnson says here about voter fraud. He even uses the word “diabolical.”
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