Lawbreaking in Their Sunday Best
Ideology without a moral center sows the seeds of its own ruin –Cory Doctorow
Against all odds, a partisan crime wave –where guilt or innocence is determined by allegiance to Donald Trump– has come to the fore in Texas with the impeachment of State Attorney General Ken Paxton.
It took eight years and a plethora of evidence for consequences for the Republican official to be held to account. What got Paxton in trouble was asking the legislature for $3.3 million to pay off whistleblowers who’d turned him in for crimes they witnessed in the Attorney General office.
The four employees in question were fired after reporting “acts of criminal bribery, tampering with government records, harassment, obstruction of justice, and abuse of office” to the FBI. These allegations of law-breaking concerned Austin businessman and campaign donor Nate Paul, and allegedly a woman with whom, according to media reports, Paxton carried on a lengthy extramarital affair.
FBI agents executed search warrants on Paul’s home and office in August 2019. According to the New York Times:
His appeal to Mr. Paxton for help on that matter is one of the key elements of the impeachment case against the attorney general.
Mr. Paxton not only arranged a meeting between Mr. Paul and the local district attorney’s office, he also appointed a special prosecutor to look into Mr. Paul’s allegations about law enforcement, according to investigators who testified before a Texas House committee.
A federal investigation was impeded when Paxton ordered search warrants for:
The federal magistrate who issued the warrants
FBI agents who executed the searches
The federal prosecutors who obtained the warrants
A federal bankruptcy judge overseeing matters involving Paul’s properties
An Austin charity involved in litigation with Paul
There’s more to Paxton’s actions, including accepting help from Paul in the form of a $20,000 granite counter during a remodel of the Attorney General’s home.
Attorney General Paxton is suspended from his job pending a trial in the Texas Senate.
During the impeachment vote, Republican Rep. Charlie Geren stood up and claimed Paxton was threatening several members of the Texas House of Representatives. According to several members, Paxton made phone calls warning them of political retribution if they voted to impeach him.
This claim may have led to the decision of a majority of House Republicans to vote as a bloc.
MAGA-world, including dear leader, has gone into high name-calling gear. Texas Republicans with long records as bible thumping ‘real Americans’ have found themselves tarred with the “far-left” liberal brush.
Paxton set the tone, attacking legislators by saying:
“The RINOs in the Texas Legislature are now on the same side as Joe Biden, Alejandro Mayorkas, and Chuck Schumer, collaborating to tie our hands and render Texas less powerful and effective in the fight for the nation’s future.”
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On a national level, House Republicans inserted language into the debt ceiling/budget deal clawing back on the eighty million previously allocated to improve the Internal Revenue Service.
Despite language by MAGAts accusing the IRS as a repressive entity attacking conservatives, the real reason might have something to do with the U.S. losing out on $1,000,000,000,000 (one trillion dollars) yearly in unpaid taxes mostly due to tax evasion by the wealthy and corporations.
The Biden administration has decided to take on another form of corporate ripoffs. From the Daily Prospect:
Bracketed by Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan and Consumer Financial Protection Bureau director Rohit Chopra, President Biden took aim at “junk fees,” the vague and mysterious surcharges that show up on bank and credit card statements, airfares, cable bills, concert tickets, hotel bookings, gym memberships, and scores of other consumer purchases. They are “surprise charges that companies sneak into bills because they can,” Biden said. “They benefit big corporations, not consumers, not working families.”
Every single Republican on the Senate Banking Committee condemned the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau for cracking down on junk fees, using the talking point that it would restrict access to credit. In other words, people shouldn’t object to this sort of corporate behavior because they’re being ripped off for their own good.
Forgetting for a moment about the crime wave otherwise described as the Trump administration, this cavalier attitude about thieving includes the January 6 defendants, most of whom have public defenders.
From the Associated Press:
Less than two months after he pleaded guilty to storming the U.S. Capitol, Texas resident Daniel Goodwyn appeared on Tucker Carlson's then-Fox News show and promoted a website where supporters could donate money to Goodwyn and other rioters whom the site called “political prisoners.”
The Justice Department now wants Goodwyn to give up more than $25,000 he raised — a clawback that is part of a growing effort by the government to prevent rioters from being able to personally profit from participating in the attack that shook the foundations of American democracy.
An Associated Press review of court records shows that prosecutors in the more than 1,000 criminal cases from Jan. 6, 2021, are increasingly asking judges to impose fines on top of prison sentences to offset donations from supporters of the Capitol rioters.
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Characterizing illegal acts as virtuous has created an opening for anonymous threats against institutions deemed as ‘woke’ and ‘lone wolf’ terrorists taking their moral guidance from on-line trolls who see destruction as an end unto itself.
Attempts to protect individuals and groups from these nihilists, lead to accusations aimed at portraying these efforts as attacks on conservatives. I didn’t see Republican rejection of Rep. Lauren Boebert’s comparison of efforts to respond to antisemitism by equating them to totalitarian governance. The silence was deafening.
From the Washington Post:
President Biden on Thursday released the country’s first national strategy for combating antisemitism, a landmark lauded by Jewish and anti-hate groups as progress toward addressing the increasing instances of violence and bias toward Jewish people in the United States.
But Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) saw the effort as an attack on those of her political persuasion. “When they say stuff like this, they mean they want to go after conservatives,” she tweeted. “Their tactics are straight out of the USSR’s playbook.
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I’m not saying all Republicans are criminals. There are people of the conservative persuasion who still believe in the necessity of a law abiding citizenry as a condition of preserving democracy.
The lesson to be drawn here is that crime pays, and the Republican Party (aided by a few bottom feeding Democrats) is okay with thieving as long as the crooks are wearing suits instead of hoodies.
Michael A Cohen (not the former Trump attorney), writing in a column for MSNBC, uses the example of Rep. George Santos for how far Republicans are willing to go in supporting criminals: :
We saw this play out during the Trump years as congressional Republicans made the cynical decision to enable his lies for fear of getting on the wrong side of Trump’s rabid supporters and potentially losing their jobs. With Santos, however, we’ve entered previously uncharted territory. There’s apparently no moral, ethical or civic line that any Republican (even a freshman House member) can cross if acting on it threatens the party’s hold on power.
Santos’ presence in the hallowed halls of Congress is the logical next step in the GOP’s cynical, even nihilistic political machinations and its continued degradation of American democracy. If you’re OK with someone like George Santos in the people’s House, you’re pretty much OK with anything.
News Nibbles for the Holiday
Rampant child sexual abuse is occurring in churches — not at drag shows Via MSNBC
Will there now be a widespread push to bar children from churches given the thousands of reported sexual abuse incidents nationwide? Don’t bet on it.
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Memorial Day - Anthem for Doomed Youth Via Dan Rather’s Steady
War infuses so much of human history that it is understandable that it occupies so much of our discourse. Politics, as we can see, is serious business. And it is true that the decisions politicians make can be matters of life and death. But the gravest choice our political leaders must make is the one sending young men and women — and they are almost all very young — off to battle.
One thing that comes with age in contentious times is that you end up living through many wars. And you are keenly aware of those who were your peers, and then your children’s peers, and then perhaps even your grandchildren’s peers, who went off and didn’t come home.
One gets a sense of the scale of sacrifice when visiting a military cemetery. They are among the calmest places on Earth, which is striking because war is the very opposite of peacefulness. The neat graves lined together in tidy rows contain bodies that were violently torn apart by bullets and bombs. Those whose lives were suddenly cut short now march together toward eternity.
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Donald Trump Marks Memorial Day With Unhinged, All-Caps Rant Via Huffpost.
“But especially to those who gave the ultimate sacrifice for the country they love, and to those in line of a very different, but equally dangerous fire, stopping the threats of the terrorists, misfits and lunatic thugs who are working feverishly from within to overturn and destroy our once great country, which has never been in greater peril than it is right now. We must stop the communists, Marxists and fascist ‘pigs’ at every turn and, Make America Great Again!”
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