President Xi Jinping has made it clear that China’s conquest of the island nation Taiwan is “unstoppable” and has instructed his military to be ready to invade three years from now. He intends the annexation of Taiwan to be his legacy.
President Joe Biden has dropped our deliberately vague “strategic ambiguity” policy and has four times said the U.S. will “defend” — not just assist, as with supplying weapons — but defend Taiwan. He may soon be replaced, but we don’t know what Donald Trump would do.
Dark clouds loom on the horizon, and yet, as in the title of Part I — “Focused on Ukraine and Israel, the U.S. Neglects the China Threat” — far too little attention is being paid to a cataclysmic storm approaching just three years out — or possibly less.
We’d better wake up.
Is Taiwan Prepared?
Part I compared the assets the U.S. and China could bring to the fight. What about Taiwan?
Since 2017, the Taipei government has been raising its defense budget by meager 5% a year to arrive at only 2.5% of GDP currently. With a budget less than a tenth of China’s ($19 billion versus $231 billion), Taiwan’s military prefers to buy big-ticket conventional hardware — airplanes, tanks, submarines. Frustrated American advisers see that China can readily bomb the island’s runways, rendering expensive jet fighters useless. Nevertheless, Taiwan will have more than 200 F-16 fighter jets by 2026, including almost 70 of the newest Block 70 aircraft at $63 million apiece.
In contrast, American strategists wish for Taiwan’s emphasis to be preventing the PLA (People’s Liberation Army) from getting ashore in the first place. This is the so-called “porcupine strategy” by which Taiwan bristles with asymmetrical weapons to fend off the invader, weapons such as:
U.S. Switchblade drones that would terrify Chinese troops on landing crafts.
Inexpensive sea mines strewn in the limited landing zones of the rocky island.
Shoulder-mounted Stinger missile launchers to take down Chinese aircraft at a cost of $120,000 to $150,000 apiece.
Turkey’s Bayraktar drones, which have been so effective in Ukraine, and at $2 million are far more affordable than F-16s.
U.S. Harpoon missiles with 500-pound warhead and 70-mile range for sinking Chinese ships trying to cross the Taiwan Strait.
Unlike Ukraine, where weapons can be delivered from neighboring countries, Taiwan will be unreachable once the war starts. The time for arming the island is ticking away.
The U.S. has been exasperated over the years by Taiwan’s inexplicable aversion to facing the probability of war in the face of mainland China’s threats. The increased harassment by Chinese jets over the past year has perhaps jostled that complacency. Not until this year did Taiwan extend compulsory military service, and to only one year; it had until now been just four months. Conscripts barely get enough ammunition for training. An account of one recruit said that boot camp was more like summer camp, that in physical training such as jogging the pace is set to that of the slowest man, that long hours were spent on drill and ceremony, and that as a half-marathon runner he had finished his four months thirteen pounds heavier “in the worst shape of my life”.
It should be inconceivable for U.S. troops to have any role defending a Taiwan that has so little interest in defending itself. In a letter to the Wall Street Journal a year and a half ago, longtime military strategist Edward Luttwak called out the the “persistent fecklessness” of the Taiwan government’s defense policy “whose bottom line is that the island should be defended by others while Taiwan’s youth can continue to play video games.”
to besiege the island fortress…
Threats against Taiwan have been intensifying. Chinese warplanes regularly violate Taiwan’s Air Defense Identification Zone. Warships menacingly circle the island. Beijing warns the new president, Lai Ching-te, who just pledged to defend the sovereignty of Taiwan, to back away from any notion of independence. An incident could trigger war. Biden would be called upon to honor his ill-considered bombast.
Taiwan presents a daunting challenge to a China considering invasion, though. Troop ships having to cross the hundred mile strait from the mainland are denied any possibility of surprise. China would have to shift its military assets to its eastern coast which will easily be detected. Beijing would be undertaking one of history’s biggest amphibious landings, faced with traversing the choppy waters of the hundred-mile wide Taiwan Strait. An invasion’s timing will be constrained by two annual monsoons and other seasonal weather events.
Before any invasion, China would likely launch days to weeks of all-out bombardment by its air and naval forces and by rocketry fired from both sea and mainland to inflict maximum harm on the population and infrastructure. Even before that, to keep the United States and allies at bay, China might launch a preemptive strike, its missiles aimed to take out key American bases in Japan, and any U.S. ships in the region.
There are few beaches on the edges of the island that offer good prospect for amphibious landings. The eastern side is mostly lined by cliffs or gradients that are too steep, and are immediately hemmed in by a mountain range that runs almost the length of the 245-mile long island, with peaks reaching over twelve thousand feet.
On the western coastline are uniformly shallow waters that mean 
Taiwan has few beaches (highlights) that
could support an amphibious landing.
troop ships would have to anchor a mile or so offshore, with landing craft ferrying troops to the strand highly vulnerable to Taiwan’s onshore defenses. That leaves few suitable stretches for the PLA to come ashore, as the graphic shows.
Hundreds of thousands of troops would be needed to confront an island of 23 million people. The crossing takes hours, with ships vulnerable to Taiwan’s fleet of F-16 jet fighters, and U.S.-provided weaponry such as Harpoon anti-ship missiles. That vulnerability continues in the weeks and months of fighting, because China’s invading forces will need to be entirely resupplied by sea.
If they can gain a foothold, China’s troops would then contend mostly with urban combat owing to the island’s densely-packed population. Beijing’s ultimate objective is political, the primary mission the control of the capital city Taipei. But Taipei is located at the northern tip of the island, in a bowl, surrounded by mountains, and accessible only through passes easily blocked by Taiwan defensive forces.
…or to strangle it from a distance?
It should be evident by now that invading Taiwan could be a costly mistake. A country ruled by a dictator is subject to his whims and an ego that may be persuaded of invincibility. So it could happen.
Far more sensible is a blockade. As an island, Taiwan is almost entirely reliant on imports. With the largest navy in the world, China is better positioned to interdict all shipments of food, oil, and essentials. Hundreds of its warships as well as planes could ring the island preventing cargo from reaching Taiwan ports. Ships and submarines facing outward from the ring would be arrayed to block intervention by the U.S. and its allies hoping to aid the embattled island. In fact, our navy would have to hold itself in considerable remove from a mainland bristling with missiles that can destroy our ships even hundreds of miles distant as Part I enumerated. Our navy would have to attack the blockade from afar, by its own missiles and by flights of attack planes.
A blockade would be difficult to defeat at such long range. Hoping to supply Taiwan, as has been possible with Ukraine, presents an insuperable problem. Ships would need somehow to evade the blockade to arrive at Taiwan ports, only to be bombed while trying to unload.
Without energy, heat (if in winter), cooking appliances, lighting, phones, internet, all rendered inoperable — “In two weeks, Taiwan would start to go dark,” Richard Chen, Taiwan’s former deputy defense minister, told The New Yorker, “and people would start to go hungry.” Taiwan could be brought to heel from the internal rebellion of empty stomachs.
the U.S. disadvantage
Whether to confront an invasion or a blockade, U.S. forces — ships, submarines, fighter jets, bomber aircraft — are mostly thousands of miles of ocean away, and once in theater must be re-supplied from great distances. The PLA’s navy and China’s militarized coast guard are right at home.
China has seeded its coastline and the artificial-island bases it has built up in the South China Sea with a formidable array of anti-ship and anti-aircraft missile installations. Stealth guided missile destroyers, coupled with air defense networks, present a shield against our fighters and bombers from breaking through mainland defenses. Drone swarms launched from the mainland would harass and cripple intruding ships. Long range missiles known as “carrier killers” are capable of targeting our ships at distances of up to 2,000 miles, China claims.
These assets will likely inflict heavy cost on any attempts by the U.S. to knock out those defenses. Our carriers and warships will be forced to stay well out at sea.
Our attack aircraft are still the world’s best but other than carrier decks there are only two air bases within a radius centered on Taiwan that would not require re-fuelling. Both are in Japan. China has 39 air bases within 500 miles of Taiwan. Allied sorties would operate at long range, needing mid-air re-fueling from tanker planes for the round trip.
Our submarine fleet is superior to China’s and would likely be our strongest weapon, sinking ships on the picket line of a blockade, or transport ships supplying an invasion. China’s growing fleet of nuclear-powered attack submarines would be in the hunt for our aircraft carriers.
All the while China can be expected to deploy cyberattacks and possibly space weaponry to disable or destroy satellites that U.S. forces rely on for inter-ship and aircraft communication, and geographic positioning
We might be forced to adopt an indirect approach to overcome our inability to get in close — something of a blockade of our own. China is overwhelmingly reliant on imports of fuel, food to feed its 1.4 billion people, and the raw materials that feed its industry. Our navy out in the Pacific or west of the South China Sea could sit in the shipping lanes at key points such as the Malacca Strait between the Malay Peninsula and Sumatra to block commercial vessels on their way to Chinese ports. The Chinese Communist Party is afraid of rebellion more than any external foe and hunger could trigger uprisings. The hazard of this strategy is that it might induce a panicked Beijing to use nuclear weapons.
we’re not what we used to be.
In a world suddenly aflame in wars and threats of more, the U.S. is unable to keep up. Supplying Ukraine and now Israel with munitions has drawn down supplies. American defense contractors, fewer in this new century owing to consolidation, have not been able to quickly boost production. “We are doing all we can to help ramp up industrial capacity, speed up production and reduce long lead times,” State Department official Mira Resnick said in September at a congressional hearing about Taiwan. But we don’t hear President Biden expediting output under the Defense Production Act.
Our few shipyards struggle to provide the surface warships and submarines the Navy needs to counter China’s superiority in numbers. And we no longer build ships for the merchant marine fleet, the U.S. having virtually done away with its own merchant marine. To resupply a war against China from materiel depots at U.S ports, we would need to contract for foreign-flagged ships of doubtful willingness to run the gauntlet of Chinese subs. China looks on and takes note of U.S. vulnerability.
The U.S. has for decades designed and built ever more sophisticated and costly jet fighter aircraft, culminating in the troubled F-35 which, at a bleed-out $80 million a copy, has left the Air Force with the oldest fleet in its history. So, build a multitude of less costly fighters. Rather, the plan is to buy still more F-35s. According to a General Accountability Office report of last September, the Department of Defense plans to add 2,500 more F-35s to the 450 produced to date, at a life-cycle cost of $1.7 trillion. That means the life-cycle use of each F-35 comes to $680 million.
The U.S. now has the B-21 stealth bomber but it only flew for the first time last November and building the minimum fleet of 100, at about $700 million each, that the Air Force says it needs to prevail against China, will take years beyond Mr. Xi’s intimated date for attacking Taiwan. That leaves the Air Force instead with its 70-plus B-52s that are on average 63 years old. Even its 45 or so B-1s are 37 years old on average.
The Air Force has bought onto the idea of drone swarms as a way to overwhelm an enemy and plans to buy 1,000 to 2,000 for as little as $3 million apiece, a tenth of the cost of the basic F-16. But the vagueness of 1,000 or 2,000 — which is it? — says it’s just a plan and, as our earlier report took note of, there is no evidence of any U.S. industry currently building drones.
Former U.S. Indo-Pacific commander Harry Harris has said America is building a military force for the 2030s when the acute challenge is in the 2020s.
This series will wrap up in Part III.
May 31 2024 | Posted in
China |
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The protests on America’s college campuses, at first laudatory for speaking out for the benighted and butchered civilian populace in Gaza, quickly devolved into extremes that told us how little students at even the élite schools know or choose to. Critical thinking, the ability to sort through complexity, is no longer taught apparently. Instead of staying with protests against Israel for its military policy, student factions took up support for Hamas, eliding its barbarian attack of murder and rape of innocent Israeli citizens and the cowardly taking of hostages to bargain with their lives.
Unseen and unreported, their generation had developed an ethos of anti-colonialism in which everyone is either the oppressed or the oppressors. The only Israel they know is its over half a century of occupation of the West Bank, the “open air prison” of Gaza, the progressing annexation of the West Bank, the increasing attacks of Palestinians by settlers there who sought to drive them out. That, for them, justified the Hamas atrocities.
Students as George Washington University in D.C.
The students lost the public chanting “from the river to the sea”, many seemingly not knowing that means the elimination of Israel. In a memorable interview, a student could not name which river and which sea. Just one student does not a student body make, but one had to think that geographical ignorance was widespread.
From there, the worst possible broke out: antisemitism, with Jewish students afraid to walk their schools’ campuses. History’s most senseless hatred has lain relatively dormant except for white supremacists and other hate groups, but one had to wonder where was this coming from among the nation’s supposedly brightest? Who instilled that?
liberal media coverage
Liberal media reported all of this. Reporting was sympathetic to the protests, immediately alarmed at the block-busting bombing and the horrific death toll. There was no ducking the student excesses, but — as you’d expect — opprobrium when college administrations called in the police, even to clear occupied and vandalized buildings.
There was at first distrust of Israel’s claims that Hamas was using hospitals and schools as headquarters with tunneled access, until that proved true. Editorial opinion lobbied for pauses and cease fire as one after another town within Gaza was obliterated. The outrage grew as Israel’s constriction of humanitarian aid grew to the point that a United Nations agency rated the threat of starvation in northern Gaza the worst anywhere in the world.
Biden’s withholding of 2,000 pound bombs to prevent the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) from resuming destruction of buildings without regard for civilian life was cheered as the right move in the liberal media, especially in retaliation for Netanyahu’s repeatedly ignoring the U.S. entreaties to maximally avoid human casualties. Why is Israel offended by interrupted delivery if it does not intend to drop them on Rafah?
the conservative viewpoint
Like Joe Biden, before he realized he had a problem with the youth vote and world opinion, conservative media has given Israel the “rock solid and unwavering” support that Biden pledged.
Whether cable news shows or the opinion pages of publications such as The Wall Street Journal, the Washington Examiner, or National Review, support for Israel is unqualified. Like Senate Republicans, where all save Rand Paul voted for South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham’s measure to condemn the administration’s halting weapons deliveries to Israel, they have been unyieldingly pro-Israel with hardly a mention of the civilian death toll and the humanitarian crisis. Conservative media is virulently opposed to Biden’s withholding of weapons with headlines such as “Biden tries to save Hamas” and reproofs such as “We shouldn’t tell Israel how to fight its war”. Except we should. We are accomplices, supplying the weapons. We are already on the edge of violating the Arms Trade Treaty, which proscribes supplying weapons to those who will use them to commit human rights violations, crimes against humanity, or war crimes.
Gerard Baker, formerly the Journal‘s editor-in-chief, now a columnist, a Brit recently a naturalized American citizen, says about Israel,
“In a hostile region, it is also the sole standard-bearer of individual freedom, tolerant pluralism and self-rule”
and that
“We should give thanks every day for the sacrifices Israelis make at the fragile frontier of freedom.”
He goes so far to say in the title of one column “Western Democracy’s Future Depends on Israel’s Victory” and in the text says, “Every Islamist terrorist Israel kills is one fewer threat to the rest of us.” His thesis is that, If we allow moral outrage to triumph over Israel, that same morality will hobble America’s ability to defend itself.
The editor-in-chief of Washington Examiner, Hugo Gurdon, says “There is no occupation, by the way, and indeed, no Palestine”. From the sea to the river?
From a journalistic standpoint, we’d take issue with three topics that right-wing media (and left-wing media somewhat) accepts unchallenged:
1. human shields
Hamas, not Israel, has wrought this suffering, said the Journal in an editorial. We hear the same from others such as Sen. J.D. Vance, who asks,
“Why are Palestinian civilian casualties so high?’ It’s because Hamas started the war and now, they hide behind Palestinian civilians.”
Hamas strategy is to “place civilians in maximum danger” and let Israel take the blame. The Journal says, “Hamas, whose strategy of hiding behind civilian deaths is the real source of Gaza’s humanitarian tragedy.”
That Hamas uses its own people as human shields is a ubiquitous and thinly examined trope that needs two caveats: One, there have been no reports we’ve seen of a Hamas militant holding a civilian in front of him to inhibit Israeli fire, the literal meaning of human shield. Second, even if you expand that definition, and this cannot help sound like a Hamas apology, however unintended, their fighters are fenced into Gaza, into a sliver of land 25 miles long and just over five miles wide on average, unallowed to leave, and therefore intermixed inextricably with 2.1 million people. When Israel drives over a million into Rafah, a town of 170,000 in 2017, it is Israel that packing in a human shield. Incidentally, a NATO study of the human shield question goes no further than to say:
“Hamas has launched rockets, positioned military-related infrastructure-hubs and routes, and engaged the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) from, or in proximity to, residential and commercial areas.”
So when the press on the right (and the left) says Hamas’s goal is to maximize the number of deaths of their own people, has Hamas said so, or is that made up? “Every ounce of civilian suffering in Gaza is a public relations victory for Hamas and a public relations loss for Israel”. Hamas is depraved, evil, but should we be so quick to believe that?
2. utmost care
Media on the right gives unquestioning credulity to Israel’s claims of the precautions it takes to avoid killing civilians. In Washington Examiner in February, we read, “One key Israeli tactic is to maintain humanitarian corridors that allow Gazans to flee battle zones”. With the populations uprooted and sent from one town to another, from Deir al-Balah to Khan Younis, from Khan Younis to Rafah, and now routed from Rafah, when has that been true? That publication contends…
“Israel has gone to extreme efforts to minimize civilian casualties. It has done a remarkably good job.
We are given the casual explanation that,
“There will be civilian casualties as there are in all wars, although there are notably fewer in this one than is usual, due to the IDF’s great care to avoid them.”
How to explain no end of photos of entire housing blocks flattened, with people inside crushed in the rubble, because there was believed a Hamas higher-up was in one of the buildings? Were there warnings, risking scaring off the target? We just don’t know. It is bad journalism to assume.
3. death counts
Both sides of the media cite the death count provided by the Gazan Health Ministry, currently over 34,000. The left is too accepting; the right, with a desire to minimize the carnage Israel has caused, challenges the ministry’s count as unproven and too high.
But conservative media do not challenge Israel’s count of 14,000 Hamas militia members killed, according to Natanyahu in a May 13 interview. Other than those killed shooting at them, how does the IDF know? The Journal‘s editorial board writes on an earlier date,
“To condemn Israel, Mr. Biden trots out the Hamas figure of more than 30,000 casualties in Gaza. Why doesn’t he mention that Israel says more than 13,000 of them were Hamas fighters? “
You can see that Israel has an incentive to inflate the number of militants killed; the higher the number subtracted from the ministry’s death count, the lower the count of civilians killed.
a trifecta
The Washington Examiner falls for all the fallacies we’re citing — human shields, Hamas maximizing deaths of human shields, Israel taking maximum precautions, acceptance of IDF counts of militants killed — all in a single paragraph back in February.
“Hamas claims that 29,000 Gazans have died…Israel says 12,000 of those deaths are Hamas fighters. If one takes both sides’ numbers as accurate, that would be near a historic low in the ratio of combatants killed to civilians. Israel’s success in minimizing civilian deaths is all the more impressive when considering that it is Hamas’s goal to maximize them.”
Shouldn’t so low a ratio have raised the suspicion that something is off?
Rafah
Also accepted is that the remnants of Hamas are in Rafah, four battalions out of an original twelve all cite unquestioningly, and that they will accommodate the IDF by remaining in place rather than drift away with the fleeing civilians so as to reconstitute and fight another day — as they have in northern Gaza, with firefights having resumed in areas the IDF thought they had cleared. It is postulated that Netanyahu prolongs the war to stay in power, indefinitely postpone inquiries into his failings and of his governing coaltion, and to avoid prison for corruption.
Someday his time will run out and there will be the “day after” the war, but that is another subject.
May 18 2024 | Posted in
Media |
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Last year’s word of the year for Merriam-Webster was “gaslighting”. It is still going full force in this year’s election season. Politicians and their parties are working to persuade us
to doubt ourselves and come to believe the opposite of what we had supposed to be true.
Mail from The Conservative Caucus asks us to sign and mail back a card thanking former President Trump for saving the Constitution. It reads in part:
“Dear President [sic] Trump
…As a patriotic American I’m appalled and angered by the phony indictments against you. Our Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution based upon the principle of equal justice under the law, not a two-tiered justice system: one for arrogant liberal elites and another for patriotic conservatives.”
The Caucus knows that Americans have only short term memory and figures that by now we have forgotten that Mr. Trump tried to subvert, not save, the Constitution when he instigated an attack on the Capitol in his attempted coup to stay in power.
Moreover, claiming the 2020 election stolen, he posted on Truth Social:
“A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.”
For Trump, the Constitution is an obstacle.
It’s a two-tiered justice system says the card, but it is Trump who has been given extravagant deference by the justice system. Any other citizen who had intimidated court staff, witnesses, or jurists just once, much less Trump’s ten offenses; anyone who refused to return classified documents to the government, and for a year and a half; anyone other than Trump would have been behind bars long ago.
Another mailed fund-raiser says “the integrity of our election process is being gutted”, that (in all-caps) “only American citizens should be allowed to vote in U.S. elections.” Right-wingers steadily gaslight their flock into believing that non-citizens can vote. “I have every reason to believe that significant numbers of non-citizens and other ineligible people are voting illegally in U.S. elections”, says the promotion letter, which goes on for six pages with not a word to substantiate any of the writer’s “every reason to believe”.
the dark side
We have a booming economy with consistently low unemployment, wage gains, a stock market flirting with record highs, but a discouraged populace that is not benefiting. Most don’t have extra funds to invest in stocks, inflation takes away their wage gains, steep mortgage rates prevent them from buying a home, rents are unaffordable. True, all is not well.
Trump, though, mines a much darker vein. He works to convince the public to believe much more sinister forces are at play — a QAnon world of conspiracies. “I will stop the killing”, he says about the floodtide of immigrants, which are “poisoning the blood of our country”. A single killing is a “bloodbath” and is magnified to characterize all migrants. He paints an imaginary world
“I will stop the bloodshed. I will end the agony of our people, the plunder of our cities, the sacking of our towns, the violation of our citizens and the conquest of our country. They’re conquering our country.
He tells us of…
“Marxists, fascists and the radical-left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country, that lie and steal and cheat on elections and will do anything possible — they’ll do anything, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America and to destroy the American dream.”
He tells his supporters,
“Our cities are choking to death. Our states are dying. And frankly, our country is dying …our country is going to be destroyed.”
The false truth works. Polls show that this deep pessimism prevails among Republicans. We have a society in which close to half of us have been gaslighted into believing in a country ruled by a menacing “deep state” without ever stopping to question just who are they?
did nothing wrong
Right-wing media knows that the truth is hazardous. The lesson of Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propagandist, has been well learned: “If you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it, and you will even come to believe it yourself.” Media outlets tell their audiences that the four court cases are politically motivated, are deliberate election interference, that Trump is being persecuted for doing nothing wrong. All are Democratic lawfare — meaning, use of the legal system to destroy an opponent — because as gaslighting must have convinced you by now, there were no real crimes.
Fox News, Newsmax, OAN — they don’t report on the major case — the multiple plots to overturn the certification of the 2020 election. Their audiences are left in the dark, thinking that nothing all that bad happened on January 6, 2021. The story became that the attack on the Capitol was no more than a protest that got out of hand. Video of the mob battling the Capitol Police was shown so little on conservative cable that Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-Ga) could say — and be believed by Trump followers — that the crowd gawking in selfies and staying within the rope lines in Statuary Hall looked like a “tourist visit”. Trump has turned the insurrection on its head. “It was a beautiful day”. The mobs were “unbelievable patriots” wrongfully imprisoned as “hostages” whom he will pardon.
Right-wing media generally leaves its audiences in the dark. Just days ago The Washington Post broke he story of rank corruption: Trump had held a dinner at Mar-a-Lago where he proposed to his oil executive guests that if they raised $1 billion for his campaign, he would reverse Biden’s climate regulations. They’d be getting a “deal” from the “taxation and regulation they would avoid thanks to him.” Media Matters, an organization that monitors the news channels, said that there was no mention on the right-wing programming across the four following days. Only left-wing MSNBC covered the story.
litmus tests
You will need to agree if you hope to be Donald Trump’s vice president. Belief in the stolen election is required. Even applicants for jobs at the Republican National Committee are asked if they thought the 2020 election was stolen, The Washington Post reported.
Nor do hopefuls dare undercut the groundwork the Trump campaign is already laying to claim fraud if Trump loses the election six months from now. VP wishfuls must equivocate about trusting the election results else risk being excised from Trump’s list. Axios rounded up how half a dozen answered the question of whether they would accept the results:
Sen. J.D. Vance, Ohio: if they’re “fair and free”.
Sen. Tim Scott, South Carolina: repeatedly ducked the question when asked six times by “Meet the Press” host Kristen Welker.
Rep. Elise Stefanik, New York: if “this is a legal and valid election”, but 2020 was not owing to states changing laws.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, South Carolina: if “there’s no massive cheating”.
Rep. Byron Donalds, Florida. Not “if you have state officials who are violating the election law in their states”.
Speaker Mike Johnson, Louisiana: would “adhere to the rule of law” but has a “duty” and “responsibility” to contest the results if there is a question about the process complying with the U.S. Constitution.
That a few states changed laws in 2020, mostly to accommodate mail-in ballots for voters to avoid standing in line at polling places with Covid then nearing a peak, is a favorite Republican dodge for claiming that the election was rigged. But voters were not committing fraud. The Republican complaint effectively says that in those states certain groups of Americans should have been disenfranchised. In fact, no fraud of any substance was found in an election that, because of the claims by Trump that it would be rigged, was the most closely monitored ever.
Nevertheless, with no evidence, 7 in 10 Republicans still think President Biden won in 2020 because of voter fraud, a recent Washington Post-Schar School poll reports.
a great sucking sound
They had come to “overcome this gag order”, said Sen. Tommy Tuberville (Alabama). “A ridiculous and unprecedented gag order on president Trump”, said Johnson, “overriding his constitutional right to defend himself from his harshest critics at the most important time”. They are therefore advocating a reformed justice system wherein intimidating jurors, witnesses, and court staff should be permitted conduct. As for Trump’s “constitutional right to defend himself”, that’s always been available. He can take the stand.
Johnson had demanded days earlier that all Trump prosecutions cease.
“President Trump has done nothing wrong here and he continues to be the target of endless lawfare. It has to stop. And you’re gonna see the United States Congress address this in every possible way… It’s about the people’s faith in our system of justice. And we’re gonna get down to the bottom of it. All these cases need to be dropped, because they are a threat to our system.”
The Speaker of the House has dedicated the Republican caucus to Trump retribution.
Days ago Trump told The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel…
“If everything’s honest, I’ll gladly accept the results. I don’t change on that. If it’s not, you have to fight for the right of the country.”
Trump will of course not say “everything’s honest” if he loses. He never conceded his 2020 loss. In a rally on the beach in New Jersey, Trump said, Biden’s “only good at cheating on elections”. The groundwork again. Remember him saying in 2020 Democrats cannot “win elections without cheating.” How, is never explained. It is distressing to realize there are millions of Americans so dim as to be taken in by this.
In an interview with Time, Trump did not rule out violence; it “always depends on the fairness of the election.” Biden said, “He may not accept the outcome of the election. I promise you he won’t.” With the odds now heavily in Trump’s favor, Biden somehow winning will be met with disbelief, outrage, and outright violent rebellion.
May 17 2024 | Posted in
Politics |
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< prosecutions|203|35|>
The nation is devoting rapt attention to a trial in New York that will likely end in a hung jury and mistrial and come to nothing. A far more serious “trial” took place in D.C. a week ago in a hearing on presidential immunity that has delayed the Justice Department’s four-count criminal indictment against Trump for the attempted overthrow of the 2020 election.
The conservative members of the Supreme Court left no room for doubt that, as in its 2000 Bush v. Gore ruling, they want to decide another election. In 2000 the Court stepped in to halt the Florida vote count, which handed the presidency to George W. Bush. This time they have gone to lengths to make sure it goes to Donald J. Trump.
first, go fast
When the Colorado Supreme Court ruled last December 19th that Trump could be banned from the state’s ballots, the U.S. Supreme Court heard that case only 45 days later, which is a sprint for a court that normally goes by geologic time. It reversed Colorado less than a month after that on March 4th. That’s two-and-a-half months start to finish to make certain Trump would be on the ballot of all 50 states and territories.
then slow walk
March 4th was also the date Special Counsel Jack Smith’s DOJ case against Trump for trying to steal the presidency from Joe Biden was to begin in the D.C. Circuit Court. But Trump and his attorneys asserted that he was entirely immune from prosecution for any action while president, a delaying tactic that paid off handsomely.
When Judge Tanya Chutkan of the D.C. court ruled against, Trump appealed. A three-judge panel of the appellate court unanimously agreed with Chutkan that total immunity was outlandish. The Trump legal team appealed to the Supreme Court.
Unlike Colorado, it would benefit Trump to see the January 6 case go as slowly as possible to insure there would be no trial before the election. The Supreme Court could not have been more obliging. Critics argued that a claim of absolute immunity to end the insurrection case should not have been accepted by the Court at all. But it did, even picking the last day of the term’s oral arguments — April 25th – to stretch the case by two-and-a-half months after the appellate court’s decision on February 6th.
And it was to be just a hearing; decision to follow at a leisurely remove without concern that there’s an election coming, nor consideration that close to half the public might like to know whether they’d be voting for a felon.
case inflation
The Department of Justice case is that Donald Trump, in the weeks leading up to and including January 6, 2021, engaged in a number of fraudulent actions intended to subvert the election of Joe Biden. The phrase is not used, but Trump attempted a coup d’état. The Court chose to review a case that no one had brought: the much wider philosophical question of whether the presidency in general is immune from prosecution no matter what the president does. It was Citizens United redux.
In that case, a conservative nonprofit group challenged campaign finance rules that had prevented it from airing a film about Hillary Clinton, but the Court reached far afield to decree that corporations and other outside groups can spend unlimited money on elections.
Here, the Court piggybacks on Trump’s absurd claim that he is immune from prosecution to instead contemplate cosmic questions of whether all presidents should have full immunity protection covering all their official acts.
Justices made it clear that they desired to avoid the actual case before them. They did not want to deal with Trump or the illegality of his actions in the final months of his presidency. In the entire three-and-a half hour hearing, Trump’s name was heard only three times, once when his lawyer, John Sauer, said, “So, when President Trump was –“, but was interrupted, and twice in mentions of cases with “Trump v….” in the title. There was to be no discussion of this case. Note the exchange between the government’s lawyer Michael Dreeben and Justice Samuel Alito:
MR. DREEBEN: …There’s been
some talk about the statutes that are at issue
in this case. I think they are fairly described
as malum in se statutes, engaging in
conspiracies to defraud the United States with
respect to one of the most important functions,
namely, the certification of the next president.
JUSTICE ALITO: Well, I don’t want to
dispute the particular application of — of
that, of [U.S. Code] 371, conspiracy to defraud the United
States, to the particular facts here, …
Dreeben would try again to bring the argument back to the Justice Department’s indictment:
MR. DREEBEN:…I — I would suggest looking at the charges in this case. They involve —
JUSTICE ALITO: Well, I want to talk
about this in the abstract because what is
before us, of course, does involve this
particular case, which is immensely important,
but whatever we decide is going to apply to all
future presidents…..
And again…
MR. DREEBEN: It’s designed to protect the functions of the United States Government. And it’s difficult to think of a more critical function than the certification of who won the election.
JUSTICE ALITO: Yeah, I’m not — as I said, I’m not discussing the particular facts of this case,…
Justice Brett Kavanaugh made clear that the court was derailing Jack Smith’s efforts to bring Donald Trump to account when he showed that the Court was simply using the case to consider a more monumental question, and in so doing delay the Trump case past the election:
JUSTICE KAVANAUGH: As you’ve indicated, this case has huge implications for the presidency, for the future of the presidency, for the future of the country, in my view…
JUSTICE KAVANAUGH: Okay. Second, like Justice Gorsuch, I’m not focused on the here and now of this case. I’m very concerned about the future…
Justice Neil Gorsuch had shown an interest only in the eternal, not the case at hand. After saying, “And, again, I’m not concerned about this case”, he followed that with…
JUSTICE GORSUCH: I — I — I understand that. I appreciate that, but you also appreciate that we’re —
MR. DREEBEN: Yes.
JUSTICE GORSUCH: — writing a rule for —
MR. DREEBEN: Yes.
JUSTICE GORSUCH: — for the ages.
rule of fear
The conservative justices’ thrust was that if presidents don’t have immunity, they will be vulnerable to prosecution by successor presidents. In that, there’s more than a hint of accusation that President Biden has persecuted Trump rather than Trump having brought all on himself by breaking laws. Justice Kavanaugh envisions a future…
“when former presidents are subject to prosecution …it’s not going to stop. It’s going to — it’s going to cycle back and be used against the current president or the next president or — and the next president and the next president after that.”
Mind you, that’s a Supreme Court justice saying that, out of fear of a hypothetical future of recurring presidential vengeance, not even a president who tried to overthrow an election to keep himself in power should face charges. Better we just let January 6th be forgotten. Justice Alito is of the same mind:
JUSTICE ALITO: All right. Now, if a — an incumbent who loses a very close, hotly contested election knows that a real possibility after leaving office is not that the president is going to be able to go off into a peaceful retirement but that the president may be criminally prosecuted by a bitter political opponent, will that not lead us into a cycle that destabilizes the functioning of our country as a democracy?
Dreeben challenged with:
“I think it would be a sea change to announce a sweeping rule of immunity that no president has had or has needed.”
And he reminded the justices of their newly espoused doctrine that decisions must accord with the nation’s history:
MR. DREEBEN: …I think that we should also consider
the history of this country. As — as members
of the Court have observed, it’s baked into the
Constitution that any president knows that they
are exposed to potential criminal prosecution…
all former presidents have known that they could
be indicted and convicted. And Watergate cemented that
understanding.
That is, were there any sort of presidential immunity, President Ford would have seen no need to pardon Nixon.
untouchable
Liberal justices challenged the notion of immunity with hypotheticals.
JUSTICE SONIA SOTOMAYOR: …If the president decides that his rival is a corrupt person and he orders the military or orders someone to assassinate him, is that within his official acts for which he can get immunity?
MR. SAUER: It would depend on the hypothetical. We can see that could well be an official act…
Justice Elena Kagan asked, “How about if a president orders the military to stage a coup?” Mr. Sauer answered that might well be an official act subject to immunity and that…
“as I’ll say in response to all these kinds of hypotheticals, [the president] has to be impeached and convicted before he can be criminally prosecuted.”
That’s the Trump-law claim that causes wonder why the Court is even considering this preposterous immunity appeal: Total immunity from prosecution for illegal acts taken in a president’s official capacity. The one exception: if the Senate surmounts the two-thirds vote hurdle needed for impeachment-conviction that has never been topped in the nation’s history.
And it is clearly a deliberately wrong reading of the Constitution that the Trump camp clings to. The Constitution says that if impeached and convicted, the president is still “liable and subject to Indictment, Trial, Judgment and Punishment, according to Law”, not that impeachment and conviction are a prerequisite.
crime scene
The debate revolved around whether an act was official versus private because “in the absolute immunity world” as Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson compartmentalized the conservative position, “if you determine that it’s an official act, then the principle is that you get immunity. Is that right?” Sauer answered “Yes”. She envisioned the outcome:
JUSTICE JACKSON: If someone with those kinds of powers, the most powerful person in the world with the greatest amount of authority could go into office knowing that there would be no potential penalty for committing crimes, I’m trying to understand what the disincentive is from turning the Oval Office into, you know, the — the — the — the seat of criminal activity in this country… wouldn’t there be a significant risk that future presidents would be emboldened to commit crimes with abandon while they’re in office?”
She cited hypotheticals more likely than assassination that Georgetown Law Professor Martin Lederman listed in an amicus brief. Under immunity,
“A president would not be prohibited by statute from perjuring himself under oath about official matters; from corruptly altering, destroying, or concealing documents to prevent them from being used in an official proceeding; from suborning others to commit perjury; from bribing witnesses or public officials…
and “he goes on and on” said Jackson, “about the things that a president in office with the knowledge that they have no criminal accountability would do.”
PUBLIC V. PRIVATE
Ultimately, the immunity advocates found it important to sort out official versus private acts. Justice Amy Coney Barrett had attorney Sauer admitting that several of the post-2020 election actions by Trump were for his private gain and not of his official duties, which gave the liberal side of the bench some hope that she might side with them.
In a long dialogue with Dreeben, Justice Jackson (outstanding throughout) asked why, If petitioner (Trump) is asking for absolute immunity, is the Court parsing public vs. private, within vs. outside the president’s constitutional Article II “core” powers?
JUSTICE JACKSON: [M]y understanding is that what is being avoided … is the question of whether a former president or, you know, can be held criminally liable for doing the alleged act that is being asserted in [the criminal] statute… So, if we were going to do this kind of analysis, try to figure out what the line is, we should probably wait for a vehicle that actually presents it in a way that allows us to test the different sides of the — the standard that we’d be creating, right?
MR. DREEBEN: I don’t see any need in this case for the Court to embark on that analysis.
She could have bluntly asked: What is the Court doing, why isn’t it dealing only with the case in front of it, the guy charged with conspiracy to defraud the United States and block the transfer of the presidency to the newly elected Mr. Joseph R. Biden Jr.?
and now we wait
The legal pundits expect that the Court will simply remand (return) the case to either the appellate or trial court to sort out what’s private and can be used in a trial so delayed that it likely will never take place. But were they not paying attention to Justices Alito, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh as quoted above? They were promoting immunity. A good bet is that they will pressuring the other conservative justices to go along with a stunning decree that goes well beyond the Constitution and would appall its authors.
The Court will no doubt wait until the very last day of their term at the end of June or the beginning of July to minimize the chance for a pre-election trial.
As recourse, one hope is for Judge Chutkan to hold an evidentiary hearing. All the various players in the coup plot would be subpoenaed to testify, for this would supposedly be a way to get the facts out to the American public, including what further evidence the DOJ unearthed that the House Intelligence Committee hearings two summers ago, lacking subpoena power, could not.
But the right-wing Trump worshippers won’t watch just as they didn’t watch the House hearings, nor will Fox News, Newsmax and AON cover the district court’s hearings.
Half the country refuses to know.
But what we do know is that the Supreme Court has prostituted itself by showing such outright support to Donald Trump no matter what they decide simply by joining Trump’s strategy of delay, knowing that once elected, he will have his Justice Department quash the federal cases. We will have a new precedent: Presidents defeated in an election will no longer be prosecuted for trying to disrupt the transfer of power to a newly-elected president by whatever means, including violence.
May 3 2024 | Posted in
Law |
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