Philip Rosmarin

I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…

Your child isn’t as important as my gun.

Your children bleeding out on the school ground are of less consequence than my right to own the weapon that put them there.

If you want to know why, the answer is where most answers lie in American business or political life: follow the money.

President Donald Trump, who won’t back a ban on the sale of these weapons, sold himself to the NRA for about thirty million dollars. He’s one high-class whore.

Another is Florida Senator Marco Rubio, who over his career has danced with the devil for about three million, three hundred thousand dollars. He’s the sixth highest-paid NRA whore still in Congress.

They’ll give you their thoughts and prayers — though to anyone’s best knowledge the only god Donald Trump prostrates to is his gold toilet. He boasts of his own fantasy heroism should he ever find himself in the position of having the opportunity to protect schoolchildren.

Thing is, he’s already had that opportunity, several times over several mass shootings. But he won’t take it. There’s no money in it. In the past twenty years, gun rights advocacy groups outspent gun control advocacy groups by more than seven to one.

So he takes the money, instead. He, and, mostly, the Republicans.

In the 2016 election cycle, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, you have to get past twenty-three United States Senators before you get to the first Democrat on the list of top donees from the gun lobby. Of the forty-six senators who took gun money in our most recent nationwide election, only five were Democrats.

Texas Senator Ted Cruz, the first-most-horrifying possible Republican nominee in 2016 (I believe Mr. Trump was only second-place in that category), got the most blood money among the Senators.

In the House, the reddest-stained was Speaker Paul Ryan, of course. You have to get through sixty Representatives before you find a Democrat who took the money. And he’s a Texan.

Of the two hundred thirty Representatives who took gun money during the 2016 election cycle, a whopping eleven were Democrats.

Republicans control the Presidency, the Senate, and the House of Representatives.

In America today, did I mention that your child isn’t as important as my gun?

I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…

Let the children, survivors of the latest school gun massacre in America (these massacres only happen in America), be heard, in their own, plainly spoken, words:

Here’s a time to talk about gun control: March 24. My message for the people in office is: You’re either with us or against us. We are losing our lives while the adults are playing around.

You are going to be seeing students in every single major city marching and we have our lives on the line here, and at the end of the day, that is going to be what’s bringing us to victory and to making some sort of right out of this tragedy. This is about us begging for our lives.

                                                                       — Cameron Kasky, junior

There are those who say because the NRA gave $30 million to Donald Trump, he really doesn’t hear these words.

But if we know anything about this administration, we know that just isn’t true.

The gun lobby didn’t elect Trump president.

The Russians did.

I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…

Like most people, there are two hundred six bones in Donald Trump’s body. Unlike most people, not a one of them is honest or, it is ever more apparent, even decent.

The President of the United States lies five times a day to the people of his country, to the world. To be fair, he needs to lie so many times, because he lies about so many things. He lies about crimes committed against the United States by members of his campaign and staff and their associates at the Kremlin. He lies about former Presidents and political opponents. He lies about crimes he’s committed himself, and even that others have committed, against women.

He lies about immigrants. He lies about people of color. In his mind, the same thing, and not a good thing.

Those are just the public lies.

Worse, more and more the President is demanding that others around him lie, too. Two Senators of the United States, and the Secretary of Homeland Security, two days ago lied outright about this vulgar man’s vile characterization of major swaths of the world.

White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders? Surely she’s paid by the lie. (That would make her by far the highest-paid Trump staffer, despite the fierce competition.)

Even the President’s doctor lies, with amiable facility, about the state of the President’s health. It is of no importance at all that Trump would instruct his physician to under-report his weight, of all things (it would have taken a meat scale to get an accurate number anyway). There is no weighing the importance of this President’s vanity tipping the scales against truth: a perceived slight to his infantile ego could, incredibly, result in millions of nuclear deaths.

Other Presidents have lied — probably all of them. According to the New York Times, President Obama told eighteen bald-faced lies during his eight years in office. President Trump passed that mark in his third week in office. Not even a year in, and the Washington Post has catalogued more than two thousand lies.

Two thousand.

Two. Thousand.

Many of those are inconsequential. His weight. His I.Q. The size of his dick. Other lies are killing people and endangering millions more.

Our first President was, so the legend goes, someone who could not tell a lie. We’re still waiting for this one to tell a truth.

That’s why, with this President, there’s no telling how many more stories there are to come about his ill effects on the progress of criminal justice and human rights, in my country, and in yours.

Because I’ve got more than just one bone to pick with him.

I’ve got all two hundred six.

I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…

The Constitution guarantees that the President of the United States is an American. It’s the first and arguably most important qualification for the office. It’s supposed to protect us from foreign influences. The Constitution doesn’t guarantee that the President will be kind, or decent.

The kind and decent woman who cuts my hair is an American who was born in El Salvador. She remembers her birthplace, and the people there, a little differently from how Donald Trump imagines it. My best friend from law school is an African-American. My grandmother on my father’s side fared a little better, I guess: she was from the President’s electoral collaborator’s home country, Russia.

We’re Americans.

Some of us were lucky enough to be born here. Some unlucky enough to be dragged here in chains. Others were ambitious enough, determined enough, to come here. Or their parents were. Or their grandparents. Going back, all of us. All of us came from somewhere else.

Going back not so long ago, the first sight of America for many of us was the Statue of Liberty and, carved upon it, these words: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me.”

Many of us were literally tempest-tossed and homeless, and the American President — who somehow never absorbed the message he might have seen had he looked out from his Tower in New York — wants to toss us back. Toss us back to places without gold plating on the bathroom fixtures, and make sure nobody else tries to come to America from those shitholes. Okay, give the man the benefit of the doubt: maybe they’re only shithouses to him.

Being an American isn’t about gold plating.

It’s about aspiration, who we aspire to be.

We’re all immigrants, immigrating to the better angels of our nature, leaving behind the lesser.

Whether we were born here, or came here to stay from El Salvador, Haiti, The Congo, or Norway, we want to be an American. The best American we can be.

We want our President to be an American, too. The best American he or she can be. We’ve not yet seen the best of our current American President.

At least, we hope so.

I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…

There was good news, and bad news, in the Death Penalty Information Center’s 2017 Year End Report.

The good news was that death sentences and executions in the United States were the second lowest in a quarter century, and public support for the death penalty was at its lowest in forty-five years. The public thirst for vengeance that properly belongeth to the Lord was at near-historic lows.

The bad news was that the leader of the free world felt mighty parched, expressing irritation both privately and publicly that more people aren’t gassed, electrocuted, poisoned, or — in the case of folks with no Norwegian blood in them at all — simply lynched.

The President of the United States’s enthusiasm for the death penalty seems to know no bounds. He’s called for it hundreds of times, over decades of promotional blathering urging “very fast” trials followed by equally fast executions. So far he hasn’t suggested it be the other way around.

In one case he called for a beheading. In many cases he’s called the unconvicted defendants “animals.” Most of them black or brown animals, as was the case with the Central Park Five, teenagers wrongly accused, convicted and imprisoned for the 1989 beating and rape of a white female jogger.

Both as President and, before his election, as a merely private son of a bitch, most of Trump’s public calls for execution have come before the inconvenient niceties of an actual trial and conviction. One gets the strong impression that if he could, he would simply drag defendants into the street and stone them to death.

To the President’s tremendous disappointment, however, things seem to be going the other way. Florida, for example, last year joined the rest of the states in requiring unanimous jury recommendations for death. And Alabama abolished its practice of judicial override, which until then permitted judges like Roy Moore to overrule a jury recommendation for life just because the justice struck out with his latest fourteen-year-old.

There was mourning in Harris County, Texas, which has executed more prisoners than any other county in the nation. In 2017, for the first time since 1974, the county went 0 for 2, neither executing nor even sentencing anyone to death.

Four men were exonerated in 2017, and four others won commutations to life sentences, further upsetting the President. One of the exonerated men was sentenced to death after the white prosecutor told the Louisiana jury, from which he had worked tirelessly to remove all black jurors, that Jesus Christ himself commanded that the black defendant be killed, and later instructed executioners that he should receive “as much physical suffering as it is humanly possible to endure before he dies.”

Now, that’s a prosecutor that only his mother could love — his mother, and President Trump. Trump himself thinks that an execution oughtn’t be canceled, just because the prisoner didn’t do it. The Central Park Five? During his Presidential campaign, Trump said it was “outrageous” that they were exonerated and not executed for the crime they didn’t commit. That sentiment itself seems outrageous, but in all fairness to the President, every one of those defendants was dark-skinned.

Some have found it surprising that the President hasn’t called for the death penalty for his political opponents, like Hillary Clinton.

Not yet.