The walls keep closing in on Trump

Yesterday, Emily Murphy, the administrator of the General Services Administration who has to write a letter to authorize the president-elect’s transition team access to resources to co-ordinate and work with the existing people in government to ensure a smooth transition, finally issued the letter. It appears that she had the power to do this without getting prior approval from Trump and her not doing so for three weeks after the election was over when it was clear that Joe Biden had won had resulted in much criticism. She finally issued a letter that was somewhat whiny and self-serving, saying that she had decided on her own to issue the letter and that she had not been pressured by Trump to not do so before nor to do so now.
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Four theories to try and explain Trump’s behavior

I have been trying to think about what the possible motivations could be for Trump’s bizarre behavior in continuing his futile quest to remain in office and have come up with four possibilities, presented here in no particular order.

1. The scorched Earth theory

This theory says that Trump knows he has lost and must leave the White House and what he wants to do, out of sheer spite, is make life as hard as possible for the new administration by refusing to allow the transition team the normal access to information, firing people left and right, filing lawsuits and raging against the integrity of the elections to sow doubt among his supporters as to the legitimacy of the Biden presidency, and possibly even bombing Iran.

The idea is not unlike that during wars when the retreating population burns their crops and homes so that the invading armies cannot use them. In this case, he wants to leave an administration in a shambles. Even if it results in the pandemic raging out of control and needlessly causing excess deaths in the order of tens of thousands, he does not care if he can gloat from the sidelines that things have gone to hell since he left.

He must be smarting from the fact that the stock market has gone up since the election despite his warnings that a Biden win would tank it, and that new vaccines seem to be appearing by the. day. He of course thinks that the vaccine companies conspired to not release this news until after the election because they too are working against him
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Trump’s Pennsylvania case also thrown out

In what is being seen as the biggest setback to Trump’s futile quest to cling on to power. the lawsuit argued by Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell (described by one of Trump’s legal advisors as “an elite strike force team”) before a federal judge in Pennsylvania has been thrown out. The suit alleged such widespread fraud in the election that they were asking the judge to invalidate the results and declare Trump the winner in the state. In what has been described as a blistering opinion, the judge was brutal in his assessment of the case presented by this allegedly elite strike force team, describing it as a “Frankenstein’s Monster, [that] has been haphazardly stitched together from two distinct theories in an attempt to avoid controlling precedent.”
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Trump is really going bonkers

In the latest move during the current purge of people in Trump’s administration, he has fired the person who said that the recent election was the most secure in US history. (I wrote about the official expecting to be fired two days days ago.)

Trump fired Christopher Krebs, who served as the director of the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (Cisa), in a tweet on Tuesday, saying Krebs “has been terminated” and that his recent statement defending the security of the election was “highly inaccurate”.

The firing of Krebs, a Trump appointee, comes as Trump is refusing to recognize the victory of the president-elect, Joe Biden, and removing high-level officials seen as insufficiently loyal. He fired Mark Esper, the defense secretary, on 9 November part of a broader shake-up that put Trump loyalists in senior Pentagon positions.

Krebs had indicated he expected to be fired. Last week, his agency released a statement refuting claims of widespread voter fraud. “The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history,” the statement read. “There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.”

Krebs, a former Microsoft executive, ran the agency, known as Cisa, from its creation in the wake of Russian interference with the 2016 election through the November election. He won bipartisan praise as Cisa coordinated federal state and local efforts to defend electoral systems from foreign or domestic interference.

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The ultimate Hail Mary by Trump supporters

Trump and his fans are trying their best to convince themselves that he has not lost the election. But time is running out for them. The claims of fraud that have been filed in state and federal courts across the country are being tossed out one after another and prestigious law firms are withdrawing from some cases because bringing frivolous lawsuits damages your reputation and can result in judges slapping you down, and the easy money these cases bring in may not be enough to compensate for the ignominy. Clown lawyers like Rudy Giuliani have no reputation to protect and thus can make the most outlandish claims inside and outside the courtroom, which is probably why Trump likes him so much. Lawyers like him are the only only ones really benefiting from these lawsuits and are enriching themselves off the deluded dreams of the members of the Trump cult who are donating to the ‘legal defense fund’, although the fine print says that up to 60% of that money will actually go towards retiring the campaign debt.
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The Supreme Court hears arguments on the future of Obamacare

Trump has waged war against the decade-old Affordable Care Act aka Obamacare. Part of it is because he wants to overturn every aspect of Obama’s legacy. But another is that Republicans have long fought bitterly against the law because it helps poor people and is thus, by definition, ‘socialism’. Trump promised to overturn the law but failed repeatedly so naturally, since he can never see himself as a loser, he claimed that he actually won because he got rid of that part of the law known as the individual mandate.

Insurance works by spreading the risks and the larger the pool of insured people, the better the system works. The mandate was the fine that was imposed on people who did not sign up for insurance. Trump did not actually get rid of the individual mandate. What happened was that an earlier Supreme Court decision said that while such a mandate exceeded congress’s power and was unconstitutional, in a narrow 5-4 ruling by chief justice John Roberts, they also said that it could be considered a tax and thus was within congressional taxing powers.
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The legal state of play after the election

As was to be expected, Trump is doing everything that he can to raise suspicions about the election process in an effort to reverse the results in those states that he has lost and those he fears he might further lose. The chief weapon in his arsenal is the legal process and already new lawsuits have been filed to add to those that were filed even before election day.

Post-election litigation is normal. Lawsuits are always filed on election day and the days after in response to issues such as equipment malfunctions, printing errors and polls not opening on time.

Usually, they receive little attention. This year, they are under more intense scrutiny because the president has spent the year making frequent, baseless claims about election fraud.

For one of these routine cases to affect the outcome of the election, the ballots being contested would need to be both (a) big enough in number to determine the state’s result (for example, a suit which concerns 50,000 votes in a state a candidate won by 30,000 votes) and (b) in a state decisive for the election result.

As of Wednesday evening, election law experts said none of the lawsuits filed appeared to meet both these qualifications. “These case don’t seem to be very strong, they also don’t seem to be significant as a matter of votes,” said Paul Smith, vice-president for litigation and strategy at the Campaign Legal Center.

That could change as counting continues.

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The Sacklers get off easy

The Sackler family has made billions of dollars by pushing doctors to aggressively prescribe the opioids produced by their company Purdue Pharmaceuticals to patients, thus helping cause the passive prescription drug addiction problem that has ranged so many families and communities. They then donated money to universities and other cultural institution that put their name on buildings to enable them to pose as philanthropists.
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Radiolab on jury nullification

I have written many times about jury nullification, the little known right of juries to acquit defendants even if the defendant has clearly violated the law, if the jury feels that the law used to convict them is unjust.

We are all familiar with the process by which laws are created. We, the citizens, vote legislators into office. These legislators propose and debate bills. Once passed by the legislature and signed by the elected executive, these bills become laws and that, we think, is the end of the story unless courts rule the law to be unconstitutional. We are now obliged to follow the laws. If we do not like a law, the only option is to get the legislature to change it.
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