#46: Donald Trump Could Shoot Fido

This is the next of our series of missives on our unfinished work to restore the promise of our country and its government. Each will focus on a single element of the many opportunities and challenges that lie ahead. Each will provide three steps we can all take to build upon our huge victories winning back the House in 2018 and the Presidency in 2020. 

If you are not already receiving these messages by email, please click here to be added to our list. You can also follow me on Facebook where you can read and share these messages. The more people we can reach, the more we contribute to this growing movement. We share these posts on our blog, Our Unfinished Work, every three to four weeks.

Throughout the MAGA world, there is outrage that South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem shot her 14-month-old puppy and her goat. Apparently, both had behaved inappropriately. This disclosure and her false claim that she had scolded North Korea’s Kim Jong-Un have now disqualified Noem from being selected as Donald Trump’s vice-presidential candidate. This rejection is based either on her doing these things, or on her getting caught doing these things. Noem’s spokesperson blamed her ghostwriter, but Noem must have read the book because she narrated the audio version.

Two ironies emerge. First, Donald Trump’s delay of aid to Ukraine led to the death of hundreds of Ukrainian soldiers, thus epically overshadowing Noem’s own callousness. If Donald Trump figured he needed to shoot Fido, he would do it in a flash.

Second, Noem obviously didn’t get Trump’s memo on what to do once citizen dismay grows and political damage looms. If she had been paying attention, this is what she would have said:

• I never met that dog. I wouldn’t recognize that dog if he was here barking at me right now.
• As you should know, he is not in any way my favorite type of dog. Who even has this kind of dog?
• This is an obvious hoax.
• Nancy Pelosi/ Nikki Haley shot the dog. Stop telling me they aren’t the same person.
• Joe Biden/ Barack Obama ordered a protesting Secret Service agent to shoot the dog. Then he bragged about it at Thanksgiving dinner, all the while refusing to call it Thanksgiving.
• I have immunity. As Justice Alito said, we can’t be having prosecutors filing random dog-shooting charges.

The disqualification of Kristi Noem says as much about MAGA and Donald Trump as it does about Kristi Noem. Independent voters, if you like what Donald Trump did to reproductive freedom, thank him and support him! If you don’t like it, understand that he was just supporting states’ rights! His strategy is never, ever admit to anything. The January 6 insurrection was tourists visiting the Capitol. People jailed for assaulting police officers are hostages. Denial is everything. After the emergence of the Access Hollywood tape, Trump said “No one has more respect for women.” A man of belief, always consulting Two Corinthians!

Can a con lose its power over time? There is nothing like a court of law to disqualify made up stories. Even now in Manhattan District Court, oath taking witnesses including former aide Hope Hicks are taking apart Trump’s hush money denials. And there is so much more to come. There was no blanket declassification of sensitive documents, no evidence of any rigged election, no standing or justification for Trump certifying false electors.

The law doesn’t catch up with everyone, but it is catching up to Donald Trump. Rather than being a minor case, Alvin Bragg’s hush money charges are a guided tour through a world of sleaze. Trump’s federal court appeal of the E. Jean Carroll defamation award has already been dismissed, and Trump will pay as much as $80 million in damages. Likewise, even though Manhattan Judge Arthur Engoron’s $350 million plus interest fine could be reduced, it isn’t going away.

And on come two major federal criminal cases, whose timing depends on the Supreme Court’s upcoming ruling on immunity. The worry is that Supreme Court justices will slow justice’s wheels. That is why Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s line of questioning on the nature of claimed presidential immunity is so significant. Other conservative judges seem to be ignoring their self-declared textualism and appear bent on creating immunity for official duties that our founders never contemplated. Coney Barrett’s questioning of Trump’s lawyer secured the concession that several of Special Prosecutor Jack Smith’s charges against Trump were based upon his personal, non-official acts.

This opens the real possibility that rather than simply remanding the entire case to the appellate court for further explication of immunity protection, the Court will permit Federal District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan to proceed with the election fraud trial this late summer or fall. The bulk of the charges and anticipated testimony are focused on actions Trump took outside of his official duties. It is not out of the question that the classified document trial will proceed this year as well.

That’s what Trump opponents are hoping for, anyway. Either way Trump’s days in court are a key part of the narrative of this election. Whatever the Supreme Court does, Stormy Daniels has delivered her testimony. The media continues to downplay the political consequences of Trump’s trials, even though 50% of independent voters and 25% of Republicans tell pollsters that they would find a felony verdict significant in their own decision making. This signals that Trump’s legal troubles still could equal or even surpass abortion rights as a problem for him in November.

These are essential matters and should be spoken of frequently. As we know from experience, there is also the central matter of how we are participating in this election. We are all carrying out an ongoing investigation about how to weigh in, including the best place to send money. Readers know this missive is not shy on this matter, favoring efforts in swing states that organize, help people to register, and gets them to vote. There are a lot of good places to boost, but none better than this one. This time we have just one proposed action step.

1) Strengthen Mi Familia Vota
	Two years ago, Mi Familia Vota was selected as Bootstrap Field Campaign of the Year. Hard work at the local level is their hallmark. They work in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, Florida, Colorado, California, Texas and now North Carolina, where the Latino population has increased by over a million people in the last two decades. The votes that Mi Familia Vota and other organizers found in Georgia, Arizona and Nevada were instrumental to the 2020 outcome, and will be in 2024. Now that Mi Familia Vota is targeting North Carolina (which Biden lost by 1% in 2020) we can win that state. That outcome and these votes are not to be taken for granted. In previous years, readers of this blog banded together to make timely investments in Mi Familia Vota’s organizing in Arizona and Nevada. Can we come up with $10,000 for the new North Carolina effort in the next week? It would mean a lot.

If we watch what the courts do, work hard, and keep our dogs close to the house, this could all work out well.

David Harrison
Bainbridge Island, Washington

#45: The World Is Not On Fire

This is the next of our series of missives on our unfinished work to restore the promise of our country and its government. Each will focus on a single element of the many opportunities and challenges that lie ahead. Each will provide three steps we can all take to build upon our huge victories winning back the House in 2018 and the Presidency in 2020. 

If you are not already receiving these messagesby email, please click here to be added to our list. You can also follow me on Facebook where you can read and share these messages. The more people we can reach, the more we contribute to this growing movement. We share these posts on our blog, Our Unfinished Work, every three to four weeks.

1861, when the Union unraveled. 2020, when over 3 million people around the world died in an all-new pandemic. 1939, when the most destructive of all wars became inevitable. In those years, perhaps our world was on fire. But it isn’t on fire now, and believing it is keeps us from focusing upon what we must do to defeat the persistent forces of autocracy. 

Every year since our inception as a nation has been a battle to protect against our unraveling. We have proved ourselves capable of indescribable evils, enslaving an entire race, and crushing indigenous people. But, however dimmed we have permitted our beacon to become, we still attend to it. Our biggest idea, the Bill of Rights, has yet to be equaled by any other nation in its scope and longevity. It provided barriers every day the last time an autocrat became President.

We have become overwhelmed by the new instruments of communication, and the concomitant decline of means of sorting the truth. This has fueled our malaise. We have conflated the ever present and overwhelming daily noise of American life with a swelling of American support for this insurrectionist, but the evidence of the latter is absent. We have not been able to get over our disbelief that he is still out there, and that anyone at all supports him.

Advocates are determined that announcing a nearly inevitable cataclysm is the way to get us to understand that the dangers of climate change require immense efforts on our part. Since thus far our huge new efforts are insufficient, their description of the plight threatens to disarm us, rather than propel us.

These are today’s big battles, all hanging the future in the balance. Notably, they are the worrisome big battles of last year, and the year before. Despair is a personal emotion, and one can have as much of it as one lets in. But it is not off base in 2024 to remind that too much of it is not a good thing. We don’t have the luxury of dispiritedness. We need unimpaired activism for the next six months.

We can get our energy from recent events:

• Joe Biden has had an uptick since the State of the Union.

• The House will take up Ukraine funding after they return from recess. Ukraine will finally get the money it desperately needs, as Hakeem Jeffries provides beleaguered Speaker Mike Johnson the votes. Meanwhile, the Republican majority will continue to aggressively disqualify itself from future leadership.

• Donald Trump will spend a month in Manhattan District Court starting April 15, at last facing felony charges of falsifying business records to pay hush money to Stormy Daniels. Unlike in his recent civil losses and in various pre-trial hearings, his daily presence is required.

• The Supreme Court will hear Trump’s claim of absolute immunity on April 25. Even if they pare back the appellate ruling that fully rejected that claim, there is no chance at all that special prosecutor Jack Smith will be blocked from proceeding on charges related to trying to steal the election. Federal District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan is still anticipating an August trial. The polls are clear that being convicted of a felony in any of the four criminal cases would seriously impair Trump’s support. 

What to do with our energy, after freeing it from entropy? After sending fifteen recommendations last month on where to go, what to do and where to send money, this missive received four separate strong recommendations from multiple readers. 

 As always, we have been fortunate to gain support for grassroots organizer Mi Familia Vota and field mobilizer Common Power. We’ve been pleased to hear more about these organizations deserving our immediate support:

1. Focus for Democracy doesn’t want your money. What they want is you to be guided by their rigorous analytical approach regarding which organizations’ work is most cost-effective. They use their metrics to make your giving the most powerful it can be. Sign up and they will invite you to their zoom sessions recommending a number of strong organizations and offer other tools so you can get some very useful guidance.
   
   
2. Movement Voter Project does want you to give money to their Political Action Committee, and they will put it to very good use. Like Focus for Democracy, they are bent on finding effective local organizers. After finding them, they support them financially, staying with them beyond single election cycles. They have a special interest in youth, BIPOC and immigrants. 
   
   
3. Walk the Walk is run entirely by volunteers. All the resources they gather go to 13 organizations in 11 targeted states. All the organizations they have selected are run by people of color and all have a proven record of registering people and getting them out to vote.
   
   
4. The Rural Youth Voter Project is even more tightly targeted. A project of Clean and Prosperous America and the Movement Voter Project, they are raising a minimum of $10 million to register and turn out young voters in rural areas. They are especially focused on people of color, who make up 24% of rural populations in their targeted states.
   
   
5. Sara Longwell and her Republican Voters Against Trump have a better shot of turning Republican votes away from Trump than does the Lincoln Project. Longwell is a former Republican operative whose site features voters who have turned away. They field anti-Trump political ads (featuring reformed Republicans) through their Republican Accountability PAC.

We are not that far away. We can win the Presidency, flip the House, and defend the Senate. For six months, we can be on fire.

David Harrison
Bainbridge Island, Washington

#44: Do These NineThings to Win the Election in November

This is the next of our series of missives on our unfinished work to restore the promise of our country and its government. Each will focus on a single element of the many opportunities and challenges that lie ahead. Each will provide three steps we can all take to build upon our huge victories winning back the House in 2018 and the Presidency in 2020. 

If you are not already receiving these messages by email, please click here to be added to our list. You can also follow me on Facebook where you can read and share these messages. The more people we can reach, the more we contribute to this growing movement. We share these posts on our blog, Our Unfinished Work, every three to four weeks.

It is far from an ideal situation. 75% of American voters think Joe Biden is too old to run for President, simply because Joe Biden IS too old to run for President. Complain all you want about the inappropriate statement of special counsel Robert Hur, or the absence of a similar age concern being applied to Donald Trump. The simplest truth is Joe Biden always wanted to be President, and accordingly does not want to stop being President. It was good fortune for us that he got his wish in 2020. His performance has been strong. Because he cannot repeal the laws of aging, it is bad news for us that he is insisting on running again. 

Late last year David Brooks argued otherwise. He said that asking Joe Biden to retire after one term was the bigger risk for Democrats, given that the alternative risk is introducing voters to candidates with whom they are not familiar. As Americans watch Biden slow way down, this critical equation has changed.

It is still possible that neither Joe Biden nor Donald Trump will be on the ballot. If Jack Smith is questioning Mark Meadows in Federal District Court in April, Donald Trump could be a convicted felon by June. As many as 70 percent of Americans say they will not vote for a candidate convicted of a felony. On the Democratic side, it is possible that someone or some event will talk Joe out of it.

In the meantime, we can celebrate that Donald Trump has appointed himself Joe Biden’s campaign manager. What a lucky break! What an appropriate time for Trump and his closest cronies to continue their bromance with the Ukraine-attacking, Navalny-killing, nuclear arms in space-promoting Russian leader. Donald Trump remains smitten with Putin and wants to remind us about it. 

Trump remains key to Democratic salvation. Mar-A-Lago is the basilica of the Church of Himself, and Rudy Giuliani is the cardinal no longer permitted to be an officiant. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz lift the hem of Trump’s robes lest they touch the ground, and Tucker Carlson offers liturgical guidance. 

All of which means it isn’t the worst thing in the world to work with what we’ve got. We can and must win whether or not Joe Biden is on the ballot. We hate every day that Trump is in the news, but we are probably stuck with him. Nikki Haley is no moderate and she would be the more formidable opponent, recognizing every day the existence of NATO, the Constitution, and other people beside her supplicants.

Since 2016, we have built more organizations, written more postcards, completed more calls, registered more voters, visited more residences, and donated more money than ever before. As early as 2018, we used the ballot box to prevent most but not all the worst that Trump had to offer. Many of us know where we want to go and what we want we want to do, but there are still things to remember,

• If we are involved in any kind of campaigning the quality of our sponsoring organization is critical. Postcards to Voters is time tested as is Vote Forward There isn’t a better organization in the country to train you and get your boots on the ground (always with a local sponsoring organization) than Common Power 
• There is no mystery regarding when to get going on campaigning or donating. The time is now. On the donations side, this is going to take more money than you had planned to give. It will give you democracy-protecting rewards.
• Donate where it matters the most. Swing states deserve enormous emphasis. Swing Left does an excellent job of identifying targeted Congressional and Senate races. Unless you know about a candidate in a blue or red state who deserves special attention (Senators Jon Tester in Montana and Sherrod Brown in Ohio, and Representatives Marie Gluesenkamp Perez and Kim Schrier in Washington). sticking to swing states is not a bad idea. In those places your support for local or statewide candidates will help our presidential candidate as well. Swing Left’s swing states for the presidential race are Arizona, Nevada, North Carolina, New Hampshire, Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.
• Swing Left is also very conscious of the 14 Congressional seats held by Republicans in districts that voted for Joe Biden. They are especially vulnerable because of the disastrous performance of the House Republican Caucus on virtually every issue that has come before them.
• Don’t get so focused on individual candidates that you forget about organizations that register voters and make certain they vote. That’s often where the biggest bang for the buck is. In 2020, swing states like Nevada and Arizona would have been lost without the efforts of Latino-registering organizations like Mi Familia Vota We would not have won Georgia without Stacey Abrams’s organizing efforts. 

We have been presented with nine distinct favorable issues and approaches if we work to make it so. These are the issues and approaches, and some of the organizations who need to be supported in getting this work done,

1) Advancing the Right to Choose

The power of pro-choice campaigning has been demonstrated in every single election since Roe v Wade was overturned, including in epic statewide votes in Kansas and Ohio. Even in places where initiatives are not on the ballot, appealing to voters on choice can give Democratic candidates an additional advantage in the range of 3 percent, and can be a major factor in increasing the number of young people voting.

The states most likely to have initiatives on the ballot supporting this fundamental right are Nevada, Arizona, Maryland, New York, and Colorado. There are more tenuous efforts in play in Florida, South Dakota, Missouri, and Nebraska. NARAL Pro-Choice America is a leader in this battle. They have renamed themselves Reproductive Freedom for All.

2) Getting Younger Voters to the Polls

Democratic candidates have a greater advantage among young people than any other demographic. Around 70 percent of voters aged 18-34 voted for Joe Biden in 2020. However, this age group represents a smaller percentage of the population as America ages, and their electoral participation is not to be taken for granted. This is all about registration and signing up for mail in ballots. There will be ten million youth voters in 2024 who were not eligible in 2020. Local efforts in swing states are there to be found. The premier national organization going way beyond Taylor Swift’s ongoing commitment to voter registration is Rock the Vote. 

3) Recognizing Economic Success

Polling on voters and the economy has been misleading because Republican voters have proven allergic to Joe Biden’s success. Their disapproval levels of Biden are historically consistent with the approval ratings of presidents facing a 12% unemployment rate. Under Biden, the unemployment rate is 3.7%. With independent voters, we can still take advantage of the fact that the United States is the world’s post Covid economic success story. Much of the responsibility for making that “sale” falls to the Biden campaign itself. The Center for American Progress is an organization that articulates these truths, which should be self-evident.

4) Taking Advantage of Mail- In Ballots

Donald Trump continues to associate mail-in ballots with voter fraud, which depresses the number of his voters that seek them and thus the eventual turnout. The further good news is that it has become far easier to vote at home, and voting at home produces the higher turnout that traditionally is good for Democrats. In the last four years, the percentage of American voters who can request the automatic provision of a mail-in ballot for each election has grown from 19.7% to 30%, It is the National Vote at Home Institute that continues to lead this charge. 

5) Boosting the Latino Vote

Over time, the Democratic share of the Latino vote in a general election has receded, but it remains above 60%. Moreover, there are swing states where the number of Latino voters has grown dramatically. This is true of North Carolina, where the Latino population has grown to over a million people, up from 200,000 in 1990. Mi Familia Vota has started a new campaign in North Carolina to take advantage of this shift, even more important because the presidential race in North Carolina could well be decided by 20,000 votes. 

6) Keeping Donald Trump in the News

Donald Trump got under 47% of the vote in both 2016 and 2020. The strategy he has employed to try to secure his base has proven to be anathema to independent voters, so he should keep it up. Plus, the upcoming criminal trials in Manhattan and Washington DC will keep the media locked into the dominant felonious side of his personality.

It's not wrong to help make sure he has Republican opposition. Primary Pivot is an organization that outlines in which states independents or even Democrats can cross over in the primary, and what you might want to do if you live in that state.

7) Preserving NATO and Defending Ukraine

Trump’s unbelievable utterances regarding Vladimir Putin will draw more attention during the upcoming months than they have to date. That’s because the focus on the killing of Alexei Navalny isn’t going away. This will abundantly reveal Trump as the dupe he has been for years. The majority position among voters is that Putin is an autocrat. His interest in nuclear weapons in space underscores that Russia remains a significant threat to American security. Trump’s opposition to funding for Ukraine will be unfavorably viewed by independents.

In response to Trump’s attacks on NATO, Congress added an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act severely limiting a President’s ability to withdraw from NATO. It isn’t enough because the wrong President could wound NATO severely even without withdrawing. Outside of the aging Mitch McConnell, the best defense is with pro-NATO and pro-Ukraine Republican House committee chairs, like Foreign Affairs Chair Mike McCaul. Call him at 225-2401 to ask him to continue to protect NATO and Ukraine. Then make sure the votes are there in the future by helping to take back the House.

8) Supporting Redistricting Reform

This is a year where the results of the back-and-forth redistricting battles will fall slightly in the favor of Democrats. That is because Justice Brett Kavanagh joined John Roberts and the three Supreme Court liberals is protecting the Voting Rights Act from additional evisceration. That means further protection of black voters in Georgia, Alabama, and Louisiana which will produce as many as three more Democratic House seats. The Brennan Center for Justice at New York University is to be commended and supported for this outcome and for their longer-term goal of taking redistricting away from parties and putting it back into the hands of the citizenry. 

9) Pick a Swing State

In this hugely consequential year, there is no better strategy than picking one or two swing states and sticking with them. As previously noted, Swing Left is targeting Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. They are adding Senate races in non-swing Montana and Ohio and races to win back the House. Many of these are in California and New York, which underperformed in 2022, helping us to lose the House by 6,500 votes.

The trick in picking swing states is determining how to invest time and money beyond the support of individual candidates, primarily by strengthening organizations that are registering voters and making certain they vote, Personal research is valuable, and one could email any number of sources for further information, including this missive.

These six organizations each have a proven record:

Mission for Arizona (Arizona)

You Can Vote (North Carolina)

Seed the Vote (Arizona, Pennsylvania, Georgia)

Fair Fight (Georgia)

When We All Vote (national, founded by Michelle Obama)

Common Power (several states)

And, or course, the League of Women Voters continues to do important voter registration work throughout the country. 

It has been said before and can be said again. Let’s not wake up on November 6 and wish we had done more. We already know what we must do, and we know we can get it done.

David Harrison

Bainbridge Island, Washington

Letter from David Harrison

Dear friends,

Certainly, I would never be the one to tell you to ignore the soul-deadening mean-spirited truth-avoiding statements of the Republican ex-president. You are bound to notice and cringe that he is out there bouncing from court to podium, worshipping at the church of himself and posing a threat to our country.

However, it would be good to underscore that this is the 2018 and 2020 and 2022 failed Republican playbook. Nikki Haley’s New Hampshire supporters were heavily populated with Republican and Independent voters who cannot abide her opponent at all, not loyalists who will close ranks. This turning away is an increasing phenomenon, not a decreasing one, and it is evident across the country.

As we all jump in, the story of 2024 will be a pronounced version of recent Republican political adventures. Their candidate’s special sauce is pleasing his core while scaring and offending and angering and repelling the voters in the middle. And the bonus is that their likely candidate is a get out the vote machine for Democratic voters. We can have those voters, so we will take them, and with them the House as well as the Presidency.

For the voters in the middle, the upcoming appellate ruling matters, there is no such thing as complete presidential immunity. So does the sight of Mark Meadows and others testifying under oath this spring that Trump knew he had lost while he was feloniously deploying fake electors. 

Independent voters were reached in the 2022 election cycle by Joe Biden’s emphasis on Trump’s threats to democracy. Those charges continue to resonate. Trump’s bizarre love for autocrats and antipathy toward Zelenskyy and Ukraine will continue to steer voters to us.

Voters aren’t forgetting the Dobbs decision. It looks like constitutional protections will be on the ballot in several swing states. If every single state, the assault on the right to choose gives us a significant electoral boost.

What to add to these present conditions? Principally, we must add our relentlessness. If you are watching and not acting, watch AND act. If you are looking for something to do at this very moment to reveal your 2024 self, get involved in voter registration, or sign up for postcard writing. If you need a new organization, help the extraordinary Mi Familia Vota register Latino voters in the swing state of North Carolina. Or, do some postcard writing for the powerful team of Swing Left and Vote Forward.

Please look for my missive on ten 2024 election strategies on coming up on February 15.

Best to you all,

David Harrison
Bainbridge Island, Washington

#43: The Way the Court Will Boost Jack Smith's Trial

This is the next of our series of missives on our unfinished work to restore the promise of our country and its government. Each will focus on a single element of the many opportunities and challenges that lie ahead. Each will provide three steps we can all take to build upon our huge victories winning back the House in 2018 and the Presidency in 2020. 

If you are not already receiving these messages by email, please click here to be added to our list. You can also follow me on Facebook where you can read and share these messages. The more people we can reach, the more we contribute to this growing movement. We share these posts on our blog, Our Unfinished Work, every three to four weeks.

It’s a solid bet that Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh is extremely annoyed. Trump lawyer Alina Habba just chronicled how hard the Trump White House worked to get him confirmed, saying she expects Kavanagh will “step up” in the Supreme Court’s decision-making over whether Trump’s insurrectionist behavior could keep him off ballots.

Kavanaugh has voted with the conservatives in the great majority of the cases before the Court. However, he showed some independence. In the spring of 2023, he joined John Roberts and the liberals in protecting the key remaining section of the Voting Rights Act, thus forcing several Southern states to abandon racially discriminatory redistricting maps. 

In February, the Supreme Court will review the 5-4 decision by the Colorado Supreme Court to deny Trump a place on that state’s presidential ballot. The Colorado Court’s finding is that Trump’s role in the January 6, 2021 insurrection disqualifies him for the Presidency under an 1868 amendment to the Constitution.

In 2022, a New Mexico judge removed County Commissioner Cuoy Griffin from office for assaulting the Capitol on January 6. Could Trump face the same fate? Whether or not Brett Kavanaugh despises Trump or has a secret shrine to him in his closet, the answer will be no. This will be even more painful because Trump has warned the Court and nation that there will be “big trouble” if the Court rules against him. By all rights, this alone should disqualify him.

The insurrection of the Civil War involved putting a million Confederate soldiers into battle. The Supreme Court will find a problem in the Colorado case with a lack of definition of insurrection, a temporary shortage in Trump convictions, a lack of an established statutory process to consider the issue, and perhaps with an uncertain definition about whom is an “officer” of the United States under Section 3 of the 14th amendment. They will let the awful man stay on the ballot, perhaps even by more than the typical 6-3 or 5-4 vote.

Roberts and Kavanagh and the liberals will craft a way to say something more, underscoring the felony charges before Trump. Besides, as court watchers know, there is a lot more to come:

• E. Jean Carroll’s defamation case is still out there. Trump has already been found to have defamed Carroll over her charges of rape. What will be before the Court is an appellate finding that Trump did not claim on a timely basis that he had immunity from this civil charge. Once the matter is completed and Trump held liable, the Supreme Court will refuse to hear his appeal.

• By June, the Supreme Court will hear the appeal of three January 6 rioters who were convicted of “obstructing an official proceeding”. A federal district court judge dismissed charges, ruling that the law prohibiting such actions requires the obstruction of a document, record or other object, The appellate court reversed that decision in a 2-1 vote, leaving the case ripe for the Supreme Court to choose the narrower interpretation. If that’s what they do, it will eliminate one of special counsel Jack Smith’s four charges against Trump. This is relatively inconsequential, except for the tiresome Trumpian untruths and misrepresentations that would immediately follow. Three hundred of the one thousand rioters faced this as at least one of their charges.

• There are two separate cases in which Capitol police have sued Trump for civil damages related to the injuries suffered during the January 6 insurrection. These cases and Jack Smith’s felony charges reach Trump’s ultimate defense, that he has total civil and criminal immunity for any actions taken during his presidency. The big win before the Supreme Court will be when they find that no such total immunity exists, nor has the court ever implied that it does. Instead, the courts will determine that a President is criminally and civilly liable for actions taken outside of his official duties.

• Jack Smith is counting on this in the most important case of all, now before US District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan in DC in which Trump is charged with plotting to overturn the election. Smith’s actions are shrewd. The reason he wants the ruling on immunity before the trial is that it helps him organize his prosecution. It establishes that a few important former Trump staff members, including Mark Meadows, will testify that they knew, and he knew that he was acting outside of the Presidency.

As this missive is being distributed, a three-judge panel in DC will be hearing Jack Smith’s expedited appeal on presidential immunity. Donald Trump plans to attend. It’s possible the three-judge panel will immediately reject the spurious claim and remand the case back to the federal district court which had sought to begin the long-awaited Trump trial on March 6. It is not out of the question that the Supreme Court will refuse to hear any subsequent appeal on the immunity claim.

What a time it is, no? Why not do some things on our own, rather than just watching the news.

1) Celebrate Ron DeSantis’ Demise
	Perhaps at one point Ron DeSantis met with a campaign aide who counseled him: “Ron, I want you to spend your entire campaign imagining you have a sour lemon in your mouth. Be extremely angry at everyone, even your mom. And if you need to summarize, just say, ‘Florida is the place that woke goes to die.’ That will supercharge the electorate!” Accordingly, the DeSantis campaign is nearly over. In the meantime, as conservative as Nikki Haley is, it would be nice to have a Republican candidate who wants Zelenskyy and Ukraine to live and thrive. We will find out how viable she is in New Hampshire on January 23. In the meantime in “honor” of DeSantis, let’s get back to guaranteeing that Florida is a swing state again. The right to choose may well be on the ballot in November. Help make that so by supporting Floridians Protecting Freedom.
2) Do This to Help Ukraine
	The leading Republican supporter of Ukraine in the House is Michael McCaul of Texas, chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. It is a good thing that he cannot abide walking away from further aid to Zelenskyy. Call his office at 202-225-2401 and tell him now is the time to step forward to make certain his caucus does the right thing.
3) Shore Up State Election Laws
	It’s time to circle around to our state legislators to make certain they are doing due diligence in strengthening election processes. The best guide there is on what legislators should be doing right now on such issues as election certification and dispute resolution is How States Can Prevent Election Subversion in 2024 and Beyond. Get it from the Brennan Center and contact your own legislator.

There would not be a way to overstate the danger to our nation of the swirling, Trump-generated anti-Democratic forces. These are formidable foes, but this is a battle that we will win.

David Harrison
Bainbridge Island, Washington