Trump is threatening death and destruction if he is indicted. He posted on “Truth”:
Former president Donald Trump warned early Friday of “potential death & destruction” if he is charged in Manhattan in a criminal case related to alleged hush-money payments to adult-film actress Stormy Daniels to conceal an affair. …
… Trump wrote: “What kind of person can charge another person, in this case a former President of the United States, who got more votes than any sitting President in history, and leading candidate (by far!) for the Republican Party nomination, with a Crime, when it is known by all that NO Crime has been committed, & also known that potential death & destruction in such a false charge could be catastrophic for our Country?”
Sounds to me that he’s bleeping scared. I wonder what set him off? Hmmm … maybe this …
Shortly before 9 a.m., Evan Corcoran strode into the federal courthouse in D.C., where judges had previously ruled he could not use attorney-client privilege to shield his material from investigators.
Corcoran is testifying to Jack Smith’s grand jury, not Alvin Bragg’s, but maybe in Trump’s tiny mind it’s all running together.
I’m not too worried about the “death and destruction,” since Trump’s groupies seem reluctant to put their bodies on the line for him again. However, there could always be the one guy who goes it alone. Like the poor schmuck in Ohio who wanted to shoot FBI agents for Trump and got himself killed instead.
This next item comes under the heading of “when they show you who they are, believe them.” The Oklahoma Supreme Court recently ruled that a woman has the right under the state Constitution to receive an abortion to preserve her life. Note that the vote was 5-4. This means four bleeping judges don’t think a woman should be allowed to have an abortion even if the pregnancy is killing her.
Some news stories are saying the ruling is a “win” for women. I don’t. Even Ruth Marcus was appalled.
A chilling glimpse of life in post-Roe America: The Oklahoma Supreme Court has ruled, just barely, that a pregnant woman has the right to abortion “when necessary to preserve her life.”
For four of the nine justices, even that shred-let of protection was too much. Weighing the life of the mother against the interests of the fetus, they said, was a choice for the legislature, not the province of judges.
The “thorny medical, philosophical, and practical debate of balancing the developing life of the unborn against the life of the mother, and the government’s involvement in those decisions,” Chief Justice John Kane wrote in dissent, “is a necessary and worthy dialogue for the people to commence.” In “some rare and terrible circumstances, people’s rights to life may conflict,” observed Justice Dana Kuehn. “How do we balance that?”
Before viability, if the mother dies the embryo or fetus dies also, so I’m not sure where they need to find a “balance.” Marcus continues,
We should, I suppose, be thankful for the outcome, and for the fact that Republican-appointed Justice James Winchester broke ranks to join with four Democratic-appointed justices to strike down part of the state’s draconian abortion law. After all, Oklahoma could be worse; it could be Texas.
You’ll appreciate this one, too — you might remember that 81-year-old Mitch McConnell was injured in a fall a few days ago and is now recovering at a rehabilitation center. I notice news stories leave out where this rehab center is. Anyway, Sherrilyn Ifill (president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund) writes at Slate that back in 2020, when Mitch was having another health issue, he lobbied the Kentucky legislature to change the law to make sure his seat remained in Republican hands if he checks out, so to speak.
… the Kentucky Republican began a campaign to pressure the GOP-controlled Kentucky Legislature to change that state’s law to remove from the governor—who is a Democrat—the authority to select a candidate to fill the unexpired term of a departing U.S. senator. The ability of the governor to appoint a nominee to fill the unexpired term of a senator without restrictions is the law in 35 states. …
… But McConnell urged, and the Kentucky Legislature took the step of changing that state’s law—overriding the veto of the governor to do so—in a way that assured that Republicans would maintain control of McConnell’s seat should it become vacant.
The new law says that the governor still appoints the person who will serve the remainder of the term, but he can only choose from a list of names “submitted by the state executive committee of the same political party as the Senator who held the vacant seat to be filled.” Mitch will still be looming over us after he dies.
Tom Sullivan writes at Hullabaloo that this is just part of a trend of Republican legislatures taking powers away from elected Democrats.
Examples in the news recently are Republicans stripping elected reform-minded prosecutors of their powers, if not their jobs. “Prosecutors who prosecute or investigate the wrong kind of criminal suspects in the eyes of Republican legislators have also received this treatment,” Ifill notes. She references recent cases in Florida and Missouri.
And, of course, the Georgia state legislature recently voted itself the power to remove Fulton County DA Fani Willis from office if she dates indict Donald Trump. And this is all another way to make voting irrelevant.