Refusing to Leave, Trump Schemes for Ways to Stay

They seemed like paranoia, the editorials and op-ed pieces that predicted Donald Trump would refuse to leave, ours as well, but his every move since Election Day has borne out the predictions. Even so, disbelief caused some to reassure “He’s tweeting about filing some lawsuits, those lawsuits will fail, then he’ll tweet some more about how the election was stolen, and then he’ll leave”.

There’s no sign of that. “If you count the legal votes, I easily win,” Mr. Trump said from the White House briefing room two days after the
Twelve days after election, with Twitter annotating almost all his tweets

election. “If you count the illegal votes, they can try to steal the election from us, if you count the votes that came in late”. The nation cringed and most television networks cut away, but Trump has continued ever since.

Some 20,000 came to Washington D.C. for the Trump March on November 14th.

Campaign lawyers have filed over 30 lawsuits over alleged irregularities in states where even a win in court would not overcome wide vote margins. All save one lost (poll observers in Philadelphia were allowed to stand closer to poll workers) . “He knows he’s lost” came anonymous voices from inside the White House, but as he runs short on options, Trump has gone to the new and astonishing extreme of trying to block state election boards from certifying election results while simultaneously inducing legislators to overturn their people’s vote for Biden and hand their state’s Electoral College vote to Trump.

In a seditious attempt to subvert the election, Trump invited the two most senior Republicans in the Michigan state legislature to the White House assuredly to try to persuade them to choose the Trump slate of electors rather than Biden’s for their meeting on December 14th when they will vote. White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany denied there was anything untoward. The president “routinely meets with lawmakers from all across the country”. State-level legislators? Not ever. Sydney Powell, Michael Flynn’s lawyer, said on air to Lou Dobbs, “Well yes, Lou, the entire election, frankly, in the swing states should be overturned and the legislatures should make sure that the electors are selected for Trump”. One of the legislators told a Michigan news outlet that the idea the legislature would defy the voters is “not going to happen”. If they did, it would be in defiance of that state’s 160,000 vote margin for Biden.

The Trump camp is paying $1.5 million for a recount in Wisconsin, but only of two counties which, like the challenge they’ve made to Wayne County in Michigan which encompasses Detroit, are largely Black — that ethnic group for which Trump claims to have done more for than “possibly” Abraham Lincoln.

fraud — except in court

While occasionally joining the campaign’s legal team at court, Rudy Giuliani’s job (at a rumored $20,000 a day) is to work the public with salacious allegations of election rigging that never are heard inside a courtroom. Two weeks after Election Day, Mr. Giuliani staged a frenetic hour-and-45-minute press conference at Republican National Committee headquarters, hurling accusations of fraud involving such disparate villains as antifa, two presidents of Venezuela (one dead), Argentina, a web server in Germany, disgraceful American citizens who volunteer at polling places, two voting machine companies, and, of course, George Soros.

“There was a plan from a centralized place to execute these various acts of of voter fraud”, was Giuliani’s overarching message, a conclusion he came to because he found a pattern that “repeats itself in a number of states, almost exactly the same pattern”. We were left to wonder where the place might be. Similarly, he held up sheaves of what he said were sworn affidavits, but refused to make them available for scrutiny.

In a remarkable turnabout at Fox News, reporter Kristin Fisher standing on the White House grounds began her comments with, “Well that was certainly a colorful news conference from Rudy Giuliani. But it was light on facts. So much of what he said was complete [sic] not true or has already been thrown out in court” and she called the “centralized” theory “a “bold and baseless claim”.

Fraud is alleged by Giuliani and others of the Trump campaign when out in public, but not in court. Even Giuliani himself had to say, under oath in a Philadelphia court, “this is not a fraud case”. For Trump’s attorneys to lie about fraud in court without any evidence risks legal consequences. But out of court, the thin cases of “irregularities”, mistakes, and so on become “fraud” because Donald Trump said for month s that there would be fraud.

Asked by a reporter whether the Trump campaign was investigating fraud in any of the states Trump won, Chief of Staff Mark Meadows hastily non-answered and retreated into a waiting government car.

stop the count

In July, Mr. Trump began insisting that the winner be declared on election night. “Must know Election results on the night of the Election, not days, months, or even years later!”, he tweeted. Just as forecast, on Election Day he insisted the election was over that night, when in-person voting had him leading. Democrats, more mindful of Covid exposure, were expected to be heavier users of mailed ballots to be counted in the days after, which is why Trump tried to make them illegal. “STOP THE COUNT”, he tweeted two days after the election. But don’t stop in Arizona, where at that point he appeared to be ahead.

The most repeated claim, in Trump’s tweets and from backers such as Lindsey Graham, was that observers were not allowed into counting rooms, easily refuted by those on site, as in Detroit where in answer to a complaint more than 200 GOP challengers were tallied inside TCF Center where votes were counted. Even at Fox News a reporter shot down allegations that GOP poll-watchers were being blocked in Philadelphia, saying on air, “That’s not true. That’s not true. That’s just not true.”

As Pennsylvania became the key battleground state, Democratic Philadelphia had become a target. But the GOP’s own election leader called voter fraud claims “completely ridiculous”, earning a blast from Trump on Twitter. Rudy Giuliani claimed that dead people had voted. City officials found no instance.

Attorneys general of about a dozen Republican states backed a suit before the Supreme Court that seeks to throw out mailed ballots in Pennsylvania that were received after Election Day, but they are too few to affect Biden’s lead.

In Michigan, the Trump campaign filed a lawsuit with almost 250 affidavits attached but the GOP’s poll watchers reported no significant evidence of fraud.

The president claimed that software on machines made by Dominion Voting Systems deleted and switched 2.7 million Trump votes to Biden, again with no evidence. That arose and metastasized from an on-air comment by a writer at OAN, the arch-right news channel. The notion even drew a denial from a federal agency overseeing cybersecurity.

HAIL MARY

With court cases failing, it became a search for voter fraud as the GOP scrambled for something to invalidate some key states’ vote. Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick even offered a $1 million prize to anyone who could come up with instances of widespread fraud. The Trump campaign urged allies to speak out publicly to encourage people to report evidence or firsthand accounts of suspicious voter activity. Attorney General Barr issued a nationwide letter to all U.S. attorneys, to the Justice Department’s criminal division, and to the FBI director authorizing all to hunt for cases of fraud. Doing so before state counts are verified had never been done. A top Justice Department official objected and quit then and there.

SUBVERTING CERTIFICATION

With the cascade of law suits, they hope to cause irresolution enough in the courts to get in the way of states certifying election results by the “safe harbor” date of December 8th. That was the key date in 2000 when the Supreme Court called a halt to recounts in Florida and handed the presidency to George W. Bush. December 8th is not a deadline by law, but six days later the chosen electors in all the states must meet and cast their ballots for president and vice president. The states’ governors then certify the electors’ votes.

Or so it is supposed to go unless Trump succeeds in persuading one or two Republican governors or state legislatures to overrule the majority vote for Biden in their state and submit a slate of Trump electors instead. The head of the Pennsylvania Republican Party mentioned this as one of his “options”. Nothing wrong with that, said Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. “I think everything should be on the table”.

Even the conservative National Review headlined that as “The Completely Insane Electoral College Strategy”, calling it “a poisonous idea that stands out as radical and destructive”. Wouldn’t that be the same that Trump excoriates Democrats for doing — in his imagination ?

The target of the litigation, counter suits, delaying tactics to cause failure to certify, and suits to block states from certifying, has always been the Supreme Court, part of the reason for rushing Amy Coney Barrett through Senate confirmation to provide an insurance vote. He has mentioned repeatedly his belief that the election will wind up in the high court where he expects the majority of justices to side with him and declare him the winner. His three nominees — Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett — are to repay him for their lifetime appointments.

MAN UP? GUESS NOT

Trump’s unparalleled narcissism makes losing intolerable. His pathology is so advanced that he needs to create his own narrative of events. He seems actually to believe his version in order to continue. This is a trait noticed early on. The version he is gradually adopting for self-consolation is that he won the election, but then it was stolen from him. Or that Biden won, but only because the election was rigged.

Being cast out of the presidency after all the work of a campaign has to be disappointing beyond the ordinary citizen’s imagination. But all others in our lifetimes have handled it gracefully. Donald cannot. Breaking with yet another tradition, he has not conceded and probably never will. His former lawyer, Michael Cohen, said, “He’d rather burn the house down than turn over the keys to the new owner”. Nor will he attend Biden’s inauguration, Cohen predicts, because “he, himself, fundamentally cannot sit in a chair, knowing that the cameras are on him and that the world is looking at him as a loser”. Cohen thinks the president might not even return to the White House from Mar-a-Lago after the holidays.

The Twitterati jumped on a tweet of Trump’s that began, “He won”, heralding it as the first instance of acknowledging his loss (the tweet continued, “because the election was rigged”). Trump was quick to come come back with “I concede nothing!”.

blocking the transition

Far from conceding, Trump is doing everything to disrupt Joe Biden’s transition. Outgoing presidents have been scrupulous about helping to prepare the incoming administration; it’s for the good of the country and to show the world what a peaceful transition looks like in a democracy. Barack Obama was greatly impressed by the thorough job George Bush’s administration did for his administration. Obama (and Biden) made certain to reciprocate in kind for Trump, who now lies that Obama did a terrible job as cover for his own shambles.

This president’s ethics are bankrupt. Trump has refused to allow the General Services Administration to turn over funds for Biden’s transition expenses and is in the process of wholesale firings to hollow out the government of experienced career public servants. The White House has commanded heads of all government agencies not to cooperate with Biden’s transition team. The agencies normally carve out space for the newcomers and make themselves available, having prepared extensive briefing books to teach the new teams how their departments work and where programs stand — a 440 page briefing book at USAID, for example. But that agency’s acting deputy administrator, John Barsa, told personnel that Biden had not officially won the election and not to aid in the transition until his election is confirmed by the GSA.

The media tends not to mention that Trump’s desperation may lie not so much in his psychological horror of losing than in his fear of what awaits when he no longer has the protection of the White House, where his Justice Department rules that a sitting president cannot be indicted. He may be safe from Joe Biden who signals that, like Obama before him, he wants to move forward and not litigate the past, but he also signals that he will restore an independent Justice Department free to decide cases to pursue on its own. Wary of that, Trump may try to engineer a pardon for himself for federal crimes (such as attempting to obstruct the Mueller investigation), but other indictments await in the civilian world. Together, these threats may be the driver of his manic attempt to overturn the election.

IT CAN HAPPEN HERE

Mr. Trump has been extraordinarily successful in convincing a large segment of the public that his claim of a stolen election is true. He has sown distrust in the government, its institutions, the media, and now has done what may be irreparable damage to Americans’ confidence in their electoral system. He has sold his followers on the belief that he brings them the truth and anything to the contrary is fake news. How many millions of the almost 74 million who voted for Trump think the incoming president has stolen the election? Hadn’t Trump told them beginning months ago that “the only way we can lose…is if cheating goes on”? Doubting the democratic system became their truth. A poll says that 70% of Republicans accept Trump’s disinformation about the election not being “free and fair” and even seem ready to discard democracy.

If you scroll Trump’s Twitter account, as we do regularly, you will find that it teems with believers in fraud and “Stop the Steal”. On the Saturday almost two weeks after the election, an estimated 20,000 Trump supporters came to Washington D.C. to protest that the election was stolen, with the president showing up in a motorcade to wave his thanks. It grew ugly when some 300 counter-protesters showed up and fistfights and bottle throwing began.

Fox News, where millions of Trump followers get their information, fell in behind Trump’s claims, although with some exceptions. The night after the election, Laura Ingraham said Democrats were trying to

“destroy the integrity of our election process with this mail-in, day-of registration efforts, counting after the election is over, dumping batches of votes a day, two days, maybe even three days after an election”.

Voters postmarked by Election Day but clogged in the postal system should be disenfranchised in her view. Newt Gingrich, once speaker of the House, made an appearance, warning that,

“As they watch Joe Biden’s Democratic Party steal the election in Philadelphia, steal the election in Atlanta, steal the election in Milwaukee, …the greater the rage is going to be”.

Sean Hannity told viewers “we have serious reports of irregularities and fraud and not allowing vote counters to observe counting”. Sidney Powell alleged that Democrats “were flipping votes in the computer system or adding votes that did not exist”

, with no demand for proof coming from program host Maria Bartiromo. Tucker Carlson said,

“The outcome of the presidential election was seized from the hands of the voters, … and now resides in the control of lawyers, and courts, and highly partisan clearly corrupted city bureaucrats…Many Americans will never again accept the results of a presidential election.”

Inversion is a common propaganda technique. It is, of course, the Trump camp that has put the election in the hands of the lawyers and the courts.

Shamefully few Republicans in Congress spoke out against the president’s destructive lying. They know elections first hand, and as Connecticut’s Democratic Senator Chris Murphy said, “Every single one of my colleagues knows” that Trump lost the election. Yet, placing themselves before country, with only their next election in mind, they did not want to earn the wrath and desertion of the Trump “base”. That was the case with Mitch McConnell, safely re-elected and doubtless Senate majority leader again, where he will do everything to thwart Biden’s initiatives as he did with Obama. For him, there was nothing objectionable about Trump’s torrent of lawsuits. “Perfectly OK to complain about a particular system if you don’t like it”. Let the courts decide.

The irony is that, in drawing heavy attention to the process of how America votes, Trump inadvertently spurred election authorities across the land to run the smoothest, most trouble-free election in memory. The New York Times contacted the election commission heads in all 50 states to find that not one of them reported any fraud. States conduct elections. The federal government takes no part. Nevertheless and unbelievably, Trump took credit! “Now they are saying what a wonderful job the Trump administration did in making 2020 the most secure election ever…except for what the Democrats did. Rigged election!”

Nov 24 2020 | Posted in Takeover | Read More »

If All Else Fails, a Coup?

We are in the period of greatest unease, the 77 day interregnum between the election and inauguration with a defeated Donald Trump still president. Of one so beset by narcissism that he cannot tolerate losing, one who seeks vengeance for very slight, it was feared that he would lash out with acts of destruction that would throw the country into chaos and endanger the nation’s security. Trump is on course to do exactly that.

Our companion article covers his attempt to use lawsuits and the courts to hold onto power by reversing president-elect Biden’s victory. In parallel he is working his way through his enemies list in a campaign to seek retribution against anyone who has crossed him or intimated disloyalty.

First to go after the election was Mark Esper, secretary of defense, fired by tweet by a president not man enough to fire in person. After positioning military units should they be needed in D.C.’s Lafayette Park against protesters, he and Joint Chiefs Chairman Mark Milley walked to the church for the president’s photo-op, but both did an about face a few days later, Milley saying, “I should not have been there. My presence in that moment and in that environment created a perception of the military involved in domestic politics”. There’s speculation that Milley would soon be let go. “Milley has run afoul of a faction of top Trump aides who are purging officials all over the government”, said a Washington Post opinion column. CIA Director Gina Haspel might be cashiered as well for having obstructed Trump’s wishes to have top-secret materials declassified that he believes would reveal wrongdoings in the Russia investigation.

Four senior civilian officials overseeing policy and intelligence at the Defense Department were fired or resigned. Trump’s National Security Adviser, Robert O’Brien, is orchestrating a mission to remove the entire top leadership there and replace it with Trump loyalists. Replacing Esper as (acting) defense secretary is Christopher Miller, a former Special Forces officer seen as loyal to the president. Retired Army General Anthony Tata, a frequent Fox News guest known for anti-Muslim sentiments, replaced the Pentagon’s top policy chief, James Anderson, who was forced out. Retired Army Colonel Douglas Macgregor has been hired as a senior adviser to Miller.

The question is, what’s going on? Trump may be replacing the top leadership with those who will offer no resistance to his removing all troops from Afghanistan by year-end (an impossible logistical task on such short notice, by the way, except by leaving the Taliban all our weaponry and equipment, but didn’t we once make that mistake?). That would be to satisfy a promise to his base not yet kept. Miller has been a critic of the Afghanistan war and in a 2019 interview with Fox News’ Tucker Carlson, Macgregor said he would advise the president to get out of Afghanistan “as soon as possible”. But Trump is commander in chief of all the military. He doesn’t need to shuffle Pentagon leadership to give the order to pull out of Afghanistan. A number of voices have raised concerns that something altogether different is afoot.

trump before country

What if Electoral College members in enough states dutifully adhere to the votes of their people to verify Joe Biden as the new president. What if for that reason the election is not thrown to the House of Representatives to decide according to the 12 th Amendment. What if no court cases pass muster to be accepted for review by the Supreme Court?

The worry is that this is a president who has shown no concern for this democracy, who knows that millions are behind him, who will stop at nothing. Those shifts at the Pentagon. Is he stocking the leadership with people who think the Biden election is illegitimate and think a coup will save the country, keeping Trump as president for another four years? Consider the auguries:

Less than a handful of Republicans in Congress have spoken out to urge the president to end the lawsuits and accept the verdict of the people, starting with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell who said about how states conduct the election, “we have to adapt to how states choose to do it”, virtually an invitation to tamper with certification. In support of the president’s actions, he said it’s, “OK to complain about a particular system if you don’t like it”. Wisconsin Republican Senator Ron Johnson, whose committee labored to find dirt on the Bidens, says congratulations to Biden are premature

Why is Mike Pompeo and his wife off to seven countries in Europe and the Middle East (and at significant taxpayer expense). Still not acknowledging that Trump had lost, off he went to countries whose leaders had already congratulated Biden. What business would a lame duck secretary of state be able to conduct unless he thought he would be staying on? Is he secretly briefing our allies about a January surprise if all other of Trump’s schemes fail? Is that far-fetched? Didn’t he say after election results were clear that “there will be a smooth transition to a second Trump administration”?

Timothy Snyder is a Yale professor of history and author of the often-quoted book, of “On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century”. He knows what to look for. In an op-ed in The Boston Globe he cited further indicators, chief among them that a claim that an election is illegitimate is the standard self-justification of a dictator for taking action to remain in power. And here we have a president who lost an election saying instead that he won “by a lot” if we don’t count the “illegal” votes that stole the election. He has been shouting in all-caps tweets for months to persuade his followers that the election would be “rigged”. Snyder writes,

” The more you care about suppressing votes, the less you care about what voters want. And the less you care about voters want, the closer you move to authoritarianism.”

The General Services Administration must certify that Joe Biden has won the election to make it the law of the land. The GSA chief, Emily Murphy, has refused to sign off, depriving the Biden team of funds for the transition. Trump has told all agencies not to cooperate with the transition. Is that according to a plan that there won’t be one?

We’ll know that when and if the GSA does sign off. If after that Trump continues his order not to cooperate, every senior official will have to choose between following the law or the president.

The time is propitious for a coup. Dr. Richard Wolff, professor emeritus of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, told Salon that “economics always contributes to the attempt to make a coup”. We have an economy of pronounced inequality where the wealthy grow richer money while the lower income groups had until only recently made no headway for decades, then an economy struck low by a pandemic with job losses in the millions. This in a society split into two huge factions of fellow Americans who cannot tolerate each other’s politics and cannot even agree on what is true. One recent survey showed that half of the country is dissatisfied with our political system.

Esber was fired because he resisted using the military against civilians. He would have been in the way of Trump calling upon what he has more than once called “my military”. Trump has said, “I have the support of the police, the support of the military”, as part of a boast of having the “toughest people” on his side who “don’t play it tough — until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad”. That is Trump’s mindset. The nation is in a state of turmoil and Trump may still be thinking, “Only I can fix it”.

Nov 19 2020 | Posted in Uncategorized | Read More »

With Pandemic Raging Again, Will Supreme Court Kill Obamacare?

Today, the Supreme Court will hear arguments why the Affordable Care Act should be struck down in its entirety versus why it is too important not to continue undisturbed. If the justices decide the former, the consequences will be calamitous.

Almost all of the 23 million people and families — roughly 11 million who bought insurance on federal and state exchanges and 12 million

who obtained coverage from Medicaid expansion — would lose coverage under the Act, and in the midst of the most severe health crisis in a century.

Millions more have, owing to the pandemic’s blow to the economy, lost jobs that provided employer-paid health insurance — three million so far estimates the Urban Institute and possibly millions more if the renewed spread of Covid-19 causes businesses to close this winter. Many of those Update: November 11: In something of a surprise, Justice Brett Kavanaugh joined Chief Justice John Roberts suggesting that it didn’t seem necessary to strike down the entire act because parts are unconstitutional.”I think it’s hard for you to argue that Congress intended the entire act to fall if the mandate was struck down when the same Congress that lowered the penalty to zero did not even try to repeal the rest of the act,” Roberts told the attorney representing Texas, one of the states fighting the law.
    

furloughed might qualify for Obamacare’s subsidized insurance, but not if the Court takes away that opportunity.

Gone as well will be the prohibition against denying coverage for reason of a pre-existing condition, as well as its companion rule that insurers cannot cancel policies when someone becomes ill. The popular provision of family plans covering sons and daughters until age 26 — some two million young adults according to the government — would also end.

Consensus opinion has come to think that the Court would not go so far as to strike down the entire law. But what the justices are most likely to retain, rather than face the wrath of the country, is the pre-existing conditions protection, the family plan coverage to age 26, and other popular provisions. It is the insurance program itself and the subsidies that make it affordable that are presumably most in jeopardy, as they are at the root of the case.

THE CASE

In 2017, Republicans tacked onto the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act a proviso that the penalty for not buying insurance be reduced to $zero. A Texas-led coalition of 18 states — all having Republican governors and state attorneys general — sued the government in 2018 with the argument that the effective elimination by Congress of the penalty rendered the entire law invalid. Judge Reed O’Connor of the Federal District Court in Fort Worth agreed, striking down the entire law as unconstitutional. He based his decision on the longstanding legal doctrine called “severability” which holds that excising one part of a law invalidates the rest if the rest relies for its continuance on the part that was excised. O’Connor called the penalty — enacted under the Congress’s taxing power — the “keystone” of the law. Its reduction to $0.00 orphaned the requirement to buy insurance that was linked to that tax, which meant for him that the mandate is now an unconstitutional demand.

In December of last year a three-judge panel of the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans seemed a bit shocked at the severity of the Texas judge’s ruling. They agreed 2-to-1 that the mandate to buy insurance was unconstitutional, but sent the case back to Texas asking O’Connor to “conduct a more searching inquiry” into whether other parts of the law could be allowed to survive, to “employ a finer-toothed comb” in going over the almost 1,000-page law, pointedly asking whether its many other provisions — Medicaid expansion, protection of persons with pre-existing conditions, and so forth — are dependent on the individual mandate to buy insurance. The two judges in the majority even took the Texas jurist to task in their opinion with…

“It may still be that none of the A.C.A. is severable from the individual mandate…But it is no small thing for unelected, life-tenured judges to declare duly enacted legislation passed by the elected representatives of the American people unconstitutional.”

This January, 20 Democrat-led states led by California Attorney General Xavier Becerra petitioned the Supreme Court for expedited review of the appeals court ruling, arguing that healthcare and its insurance is too important for the matter to bounce back and forth between lesser courts and should be resolved.

In June, Attorney General Bill Barr’s Justice Department pressed its objective by submitting a brief to the Court asking it to overturn the Affordable Care Act entirely, declaring, “The individual mandate is not severable from the rest of the Act” and pointedly arguing that Obamacare’s pre-existing condition rules must be overturned as well.

That brings us to the November 10th hearing.

LAISSEZ CARE

Republicans have been against the Affordable Care Act (ACA) from the outset, ideologically averse to yet another large-scale government program. No Republicans voted for it and the Party has voted without success to repeal all or parts of the Act more than sixty times. The penalty for not buying insurance was key to nudging people to buy and thus make for a larger funding pool to cover the healthcare of those with costly illnesses. The young and healthy, with low paying jobs if any as the economy slowly crawled out of the Great Recession, hated the penalty as well as the expensive insurance plans required by the Act.

The right to penalize the non-compliant survived a challenge in National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius in 2012 when Chief Justice John Roberts joined the liberal wing in a 5-to-4 decision, writing in his opinion that the penalty was in reality a tax that Congress has the power to impose under the 16th Amendment. Congress counteracted by zeroing the tax starting in 2018.

TRUMP CARD

The Trump administration at first supported stripping out only some parts of the law, but then changed to the conservatives’ position — and that of the Texas court — that Obamacare should be done away with altogether. The Justice Department took the extraordinary position of refusing to defend a U.S. law from the Republican states’ challenge and instead sided with them.

In September, Ruth Bader Ginsburg died after repeated health incidents, giving the president his third chance to name a Supreme Court Justice. With unseemly haste, and the complicity of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, the Trump administration pressed that the very conservative Amy Coney Barrett be accepted onto the court by the Senate before Election Day. To pressure the Senate, Trump even called a halt to negotiations for trillions in pandemic stimulus relief, causing financial hardship for millions and risking a severe depression. The objective was for Judge Barrett to be on the court in time for the November 10th hearing. Trump got his wish.

In 2017, Ms Barrett wrote an article for the Notre Dame law journal that disagreed with Chief Justice Roberts’ reason for upholding Obamacare in 2012. She also signed a petition that year protesting the law’s requirement that employers offer insurance plans that pay for contraception. Republicans and the Trump administration are confident that her addition will supply the insurmountable five votes against possible apostate Roberts, should he be tempted once again to vote to keep Obamacare alive. He might be reluctant to see history remember his court as the one that obliterated the one attempt to install a healthcare system in place of the chaos that went before.

DAMAGED GOODS

Obamacare has many flaws. It was an invention, after all, with intricate interlocking parts, yet launched with no trial runs. It resulted in insurance policies that are overly comprehensive and therefore too costly. Age groups found they were paying for benefits irrelevant to their age bracket, such as the old paying for pediatric care. The young and healthy chose to pay penalties rather than buy into the insurance pool with resultant funding shortfalls causing premiums to more than double by 2017. It was thought that Congress would raise this and lower that as the public fed back what worked and what didn’t, the typical practice with complex legislation.But Republicans wanted the ACA to fail and blocked any repairs.

Most insurance companies suffered heavy losses at the outset — $1 billion for United Healthcare in 2016, for example. They could only guess at rates to charge to an unknown number of sign-ups with an unknown mix of medical conditions. Some of the biggest insurers dropped out. There were instances of “bare” counties where all insurers had withdrawn.

That has reversed, though, beginning a few years ago as companies developed the actuarial data for profitable pricing. And 36 states enrolled in the federal Medicaid expansion program which most states pay insurance companies to run. “The individual market remains profitable and stable,” concludes the Kaiser Family Foundation in a recent analysis.

But the biggest headache for participants is high deductibles, which can run to a bit over $8,000 for individuals and just over $16,000 for families. The subsidies help those with lower incomes to pay the premiums but they and those over the subsidy threshold find themselves paying for both medical costs and premiums, with the upshot that the popularity index for Obamacare has dropped below 50%. “We obviously made a huge mistake”, health policy adviser to the Obama White House, Ezekiel Emanuel, told The New York Times last March. “We were under a lot of pressure to keep the price under a trillion dollars. That was constraining everything we did, from the size of the subsidies to what type of care could have no co-pay.”

Of course, the root cause of high premiums and deductibles are the uncontrolled healthcare costs that in the U.S. run about twice those of other developed nations.

A POSSIBLE OUT

The severability principle has a qualifier. It says that when a court (or presumably Congress) excises one provision of a statute, it should leave the rest of the law in place unless Congress explicitly stated that the statute could not survive without that provision. When defending Obamacare before the New Orleans appeals court in July of last year, the lawyers from the Democrat-governed states cited statements from members of Congress that they wanted the rest of the law to remain intact. In December, upon the appellate court’s 2-to-1 agreement with the Texas court, Senator Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn) said in a statement, “I am not aware of a single senator who said they were voting to repeal Obamacare when they voted to eliminate the individual mandate penalty” as part of the 2017 tax overhaul. Will the Court take notice of that?

IF THE COURT OVERTURNS

But if the Supreme Court, with its cohort of six conservative justices, three of them having already voted in the 2012 case to put an end to the ACA, decides to clean the slate and take down the entire law, what takes its place? The answer is: nothing.

Since before he took office in 2017, President Trump has promised a Republican healthcare plan to take the place of Obamacare, with tweets such as “FAR BETTER AND MUCH LESS EXPENSIVE”. At the time, he told The Washington Post he was nearly done with his plan, but almost four years later, he has never put forth any ideas of how it would work, and no plan is in evidence. Mr. Trump has repeated his assurance — said some one hundred times by one count — that insurance availability for those with pre-existing conditions will be preserved. “We will always and very strongly protect patients with pre-existing conditions. And that is a pledge from the entire Republican Party”, he said in his nomination acceptance speech in August. Trump tweeted himself as “the person who saved pre-existing conditions”, while at the same time bidding the Supreme Court to terminate the very law that protects those with pre-existing conditions.

As far back as December 2018, Trump said he might sign an executive order requiring insurers to accept applicants with health conditions, saying it “has never been done before”, as if unaware that this is one of the ACA’s premier features. In something of a panic he only went through with signing a toothless order, lacking the force of legislation, weeks before the election.

The Kaiser Family Foundation estimated last year that 54 million people have conditions (e.g., high blood pressure, asthma, even acne) that, according to guidelines that insurers followed to screen applicants in the years before Obamacare, would disqualify them from obtaining insurance. Add to that pool the seven million, so far, who have tested positive for COVID-19 — the newest pre-existing condition.

Along with the shambolic handling of the pandemic leading to its horrific death toll, Trump’s failed promise to do anything about healthcare other than negatively attempt to destroy Obama’s legacy will probably be judged the reasons he lost the election.

IF IT’S BROKE, FIX IT

Although his progressive wing dreams of Medicare for All, Joe Biden wants instead to repair and shore up Obamacare. He wants to add what is called the public option, a federally-operated exchange to provide competition to commercial insurers that was dropped from the original ACA negotiations. Democrats also want to increase the subsidies that help people pay for insurance as well make the program available to families earning more than 400% of the poverty level, which is the limit now. In June, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced a bill that would expand subsidies so that no family would pay more than 8.5% of its income on health insurance; would do away with the George W. Bush-era restriction that disallows Medicare to negotiate drug prices; and would offer further incentives to the 14 states that still have not opted for Medicaid expansion even though the government pays 100% for the first four years and 90% thereafter.

Biden’s and Pelosi’s plans stand no chance of passage or even consideration if Republicans retain control of the Senate with Mitch McConnell again elected majority leader. He will block all Democratic legislation as he did when Barack Obama was president. Nothing will go forward. If the Supreme Court ends or eviscerates Obamacare, we will again have no health care “system” at all, but anarchy, where the public will be at the mercy of an insurance industry that enrolls only the healthy and the pharmaceutical industry is free to set prices that the sick cannot afford.

Days Before Election, Biden’s Involvement in Son’s Dealings Surfaces

Ron Johnson, Republican senator from Wisconsin, had made no secret of the objective of his committee’s year-long investigation of the Biden family. It would make clear Joe Biden’s “unfitness for office”, he said. In a radio interview in mid-September he predicted his soon to be released report…

“would certainly help Donald Trump win reelection and certainly be pretty good, I would say, evidence about not voting for Vice President Biden…What our investigations are uncovering, I think, will reveal this is not somebody we should be electing president of the United States.”

But the report, a joint product of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs committee and Chuck Grassley’s (R-Iowa) Committee on Finance, fell well short of that when it was released a week later.

It tells us of the State Department’s George Kent, working in Ukraine to stamp out corruption, voicing his objections in 2015 and 2016 that the alleged $50,000 a month paid to Hunter Biden for serving on the board of the Ukraine gas company, Burisma Holdings, made it “very awkward for all U.S. officials pushing an anticorruption agenda in Ukraine.” The State Department views both Burisma and its its owner, Mykola Zlochevsky, as corrupt.

Much of the report is unrelated to the Bidens; 18 of the report’s 87 pages are given over to images of text messages between an official at the Ukrainian embassy in Washington and the Obama administration arranging meetings for coffee or beer, with no idea what the meetings were about.

There are tables suggesting how costly Hunter Biden has been, with trips to some two dozen countries detailed, because, as Joe’s son at risk of kidnap and ransom, he is a secret service “protectee” while traveling around the world for his business dealings.

What is ultimately compelling is the final quarter of the report that lists a byzantine labyrinth of substantial movements of money between a myriad of companies formed by Hunter and his associates on one side and Chinese companies on the other. To make any sense of the text calls out for diagramming, as in a Hollywood espionage thriller where all the suspects’ photos are taped to a wall and connected by pushpins and strings. If we can assume accuracy, the report does a remarkable job tracing chains of ownership of the Chinese counterparts to state-owned companies and the ruling Chinese Communist Party. It goes no further, however, so we are left to wonder what all these specially created companies do and what these tributaries of money flows are for. The report flags a number of the transactions “for potential financial criminal activity” (and, indeed, Hunter’s long-time business associate Devon Archer, and five others — Hunter not among them — were arrested and criminally charged in a scheme to defraud investors with sentencing in January).

The sum of it is that young Biden has been involved in a welter of curious business activities that go well beyond what one would think from media reports so far was only his overpaid board position at Burisma. He and his partners have been in a number of questionable relationships with China, a country increasingly hostile to the United States. Transactions show Hunter receiving receiving millions of dollars from foreign entities in this tangle of business connections woven while his father was vice president of the United States and after. No connection at all is made to Joe Biden in these dealings, but if he becomes president, all this should be hastily ended.

(There is one irony that so many of the report’s footnote citations rely on mainstream media sources such as The New York Times and The Washington Post, reporting that Donald Trump calls “fake news”.)

someone’s lying

Joe Biden went to Ukraine to lead the purge of the country’s notorious corruption that blocked the U.S. from funding the Ukraine military’s fight against Russian aggression. The Obama administration needed assurance that the money wouldn’t fall into the wrong hands. One must was to get rid of the country’s chief prosecutor, Viktor Shokin. In 2010 to 2012 the country’s prosecutor general had conducted an investigation of Ukraine’s gas company, Burisma Holdings, and its owner, Mykola Zlochevsky, over allegations of money laundering, tax evasion, and corruption. But that came to an end when in 2015 Shokin became the prosecutor general. Indeed, beyond taking no investigative action, Shokin was suspected of soliciting bribes from Zlochevsky to make the matter go away. European diplomats, the International Monetary Fund, other international organizations — all wanted him gone.

Biden got that done and crowed about it. During a December 2015 trip to Kyiv the then-vice president threatened Ukraine’s president and its prime minister that he would have a $1 billion U.S. loan guarantee withheld. “I looked at them and said: I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money”, Biden inappropriately bragged to the Council on Foreign Relations in 2018. “Well, son of a bitch. He got fired.”

Republicans prefer their version. The Johnson/Grassley report makes no mention of the international call for Shokin’s removal for inactivity and alleged corruption. It baldy states the opposite, that “In 2016, Ukraine’s top prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, had an active and ongoing investigation into Burisma and its owner, Mykola Zlochevsky”. Biden had Shokin fired because he was actively investigating the company that was paying extravagant sums for his son’s highly questionable expertise in matters of natural gas. But even Shokin refutes that he was “actively investigating”. At the time of his firing, in March 2016, Shokin said he’d made “specific plans” to investigate.

enter Giuliani stage right

Three weeks after the Johnson/Grassley’s report release — October 14th — The New York Post upstaged the report with a “smoking gun” story — those words were in its headline — maintaining that Joe Biden had met with an official of Burisma where son Hunter was a director. If true, that would turn Biden père’s claim that he’d “never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings” into a lie. Biden’s staff says that his calendar shows no such meeting.

Rudy Giuliani had been given one of three laptops that had been dropped off by Hunter Biden in April 2019 at a Delaware repair shop. Biden had never picked them up. The store owner poked into their contents and found disquieting material. He turned the machine over to the FBI, but made a copy of the drive. As a Trump supporter he had somehow sought out Giuliani. Given that America’s mayor had been in Ukraine willing to speak with anyone and everyone in his search for dirt on Hunter Biden, he was an especially soft target, a “useful idiot” in the Russian phrase for taking in disinformation. He had used unencrypted phone calls with Trump during the earlier Ukraine imbroglio and, thinking he was to be interviewed about Trump and COVID-19, hadn’t he instead encountered a woman in the hotel room who enticed him into the bedroom? It was a prank by Sacha Baron Cohen for his latest movie but not before Rudy had asked for her phone number and address.

So, given the Giuliani provenance, the writer of the Post story found the story suspect and even refused a byline; two others who hadn’t written the piece were listed instead. In an atmosphere thick with expectations of Russian election disinformation, the story was immediately dismissed as such by other media, and by Joe Biden himself in his debate with President Trump a week later, who called it “a Russian plant”. “You mean the laptop is now another Russia, Russia, Russia hoax? You got to be kidding me,” President Trump shot back.

Trump had it right. The laptop, retrieved from a Delaware repair shop with a Beau Biden Foundation sticker covering the Apple logo, seemed even beyond the fakery talents of the vaunted Russian GRU, their military intelligence agency. The laptop’s hard drive contained a trove of e-mails which certainly looked authentic, the most notable with the subject line “Expectations”

laying out how the equity in a new company set up to do business with Chinese counterparts might be divided between the Biden family and other principals.

the journal takes a pass

The New York Times reported about a trio of Trump campaign allies, looking for an election clincher, who had introduced a reporter for The Wall Street Journal to a man named Tony Bobulinski, whose revelations they thought would lead to a bombshell story in the newspaper. Bobulinksi, a former Navy officer, had been tapped to be CEO of a company being formed by a Hunter Biden associate, a Brit named James Gilliar, with Biden family members lending their names and prestige in return for an equity stake.

But the Journal article never happened. As reporters were drafting their report from their own interviews with Bobulinski, that’s when the New York Post story broke. The laptop contained a number of the same e-mails Bobulinski had been showing the Journal from his own data.

The Journal was taking its time. And even President Trump couldn’t sell the Biden corruption narrative to CBS News. “This is ‘60 Minutes,’ and we can’t put on things we can’t verify,” Lesley Stahl told the president. So Bobulinski, on a mission as a proud former Navy officer bent on clearing his name, accused by Joe Biden of being an agent of “Russian disinformation”, wound up at Fox News with Tucker Carlson.

watched by a cable tv record of 7.6 million

In a full hour interview October 27th, Tony Bobulinski offered an entirely persuasive narrative to demonstrate that Joe Biden has had some involvement in at least one of his son’s business deals, the one in which he is presumed to be the “big guy” who would get 10% of the equity.

When in Los Angeles in May of 2017 to speak at Michael Milken’s cancer foundation, an arrangement was made for Biden Sr. to meet Bobulinski, who was slated to run the company being formed. What makes Bobulinski’s story convincing is his detailed description. When Carson asks him to “Tell us about the conversation”, Bobulinski answers:

“I got there a little earlier, and I was sitting with Jim Biden [Joe’s brother] and I think Jim Biden was hungry and might have ordered some food, and Hunter Biden and Joe came through the lobby with his security and Hunter basically said, ‘Hey give me a second and I’ll go over and give me ten minutes to brief my dad and read him in on things’ and so then Hunter and his father and security came through the bar and obviously I stood up out of respect to shake his hand and Hunter introduced me as ‘This is Tony, dad, the individual I told you about that’s helping us with the business that we’re working on and the Chinese’.

“So it was clear to you that Joe Biden’s son had told him about this business”, Carlson asked. “Crystal clear”, Bobulinski answered.

Asked by Carlson why did the group “carve out time for Biden to meet Bobulinski”, Tony answers,

“Why would Joe Biden want to meet me in a dark bar in the Beverly Hilton behind a column so people wouldn’t see us? I’m irrelevant in this story. They weren’t raising money from me. There was no other reason for me to be in that bar meeting Joe Biden than to discuss what I was doing with his family’s name and the Chinese CEFC.”

CEFC, the Shanghai-based conglomerate CEFC China Energy Co., has “a direct connection to the Communist government of China”, Carlson said. It was to fund the new company with $20 million.

The following day, Joe Biden asked Bobulinski “to walk with him out to the car…and then he just asked me to sort of keep an eye on his son and his brother”, said Tony, clearly amused. “I think he was conscious of things”.

Carlson: “It sounds like Joe Biden was vetting you to some extent”.

Bobulinksi: “Yes, of course. I didn’t request to meet with Joe. They requested that I meet with Joe…They were putting their entire family legacy on the line. They knew exactly what they were doing. They were dealing with a Chinese-owned enterprise run by Chairman Ye [Jianming], CEFC, that had strong financial support and political support from the Chinese Communist Party. That’s how it was presented to me.”

Carlson: “The former vice president has said he had no knowledge whatsoever of his son’s business dealings and was not involved in them at all.”

Bobulinski: “That’s a blatant lie”.

Tony Bobulinski had become angry with the former vice president because of what Biden had said in the debate with President Trump:

I held a top secret clearance from the NSA and the DOE. I served this country for four years in one of the most elite environments in the world, Naval Nuclear Power Training Command, and to have a congressman out there [Adam Schiff: “This whole smear on Joe Biden comes from the Kremlin”] or Joe Biden at a public debate referencing Russian disinformation when he knows he sat face to face with me, that I had traveled around the world with his son and his brother, to say that and associate that with my name is absolutely disgusting to me”.

Did Joe Biden ever get a piece of the deal? There’s no proof he did. Perhaps the 10% was offered him and he refused. Tony Bobulinski took note that brother Jim Biden’s cut was doubled from 10% to 20%, suggesting that perhaps the former vice president was offered a slice but sensibly declined and — the deal being that the Bidens were to get 40% of the deal with Hunter getting 20% — a second 10% share went to Joe’s brother instead. And it’s uncertain the deal ever got funded. One account says that Chairman Ye vanished.