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

Supposedly that’s the advice Louisiana Senator John Kennedy gave Texas Senator Ted Cruz when asked how best metaphorically to kiss the ring of disgraced President Donald Trump.

Louisiana does things differently. It’s the only state in the union that bases its civil code on French law instead of English common law. Now it’s the only state in the union to require that every public classroom display the Ten Commandments. Not just one classroom, or a few, in every state elementary school, middle school, high school, charter school, college and university. Every classroom.

Governor Napoleon Landry signed the new legislation into law, declaring “If you want to respect the rule of law, you’ve got to start from the original law giver, which was Charlton Heston.” (I may have mangled the quote slightly.) It wasn’t immediately clear if people like the former president would still be welcome in the state.

“I can’t wait to be sued,” the governor crowed. He had to wait but five days.

Though Landry wasn’t personally sued (no stupidity statute in Napoleonic Code), the ACLU obliged with a lawsuit filed today.

No one who has ever been to law school, and almost everyone who hasn’t been, believes a law that elevates one Protestant faith above all other faiths, above all other believers and nonbelievers, is anything but an insult to the founding document of the United States of America.

Meanwhile, no word yet on whether all Louisiana public school cafeterias will have to likewise display the commandments, with an eleventh locational proviso:

“Thou Shalt Not Start Food Fights.”

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

I’m not sure, because I may have been thinking about other things during elementary history class, but this may be the first presidential campaign in the United States where the candidates suggest they might just assassinate each other.

And when I say candidates, I mean candidate.

Donald Trump says Joe Biden already ordered the FBI to kill him if he ever got off the toilet long enough to try to stop them from taking back the national secrets he stole and stored next to the gold throne at Mar-a-Lago for handy reading. [Editor’s Note: I originally wrote “for easy reading” there, but for him no reading is easy.]

The once and horribly possible future president [Editor’s Note: he’d prefer the usual word “king” there] says Biden bungled the job because he forgot that Trump wouldn’t actually be there that day. If true, he might finally have solid proof of Biden’s cognitive decline.

Proof of his own decline may be that Trump apparently forgot he’s argued that when you’re president it’s okay to assassinate your political opponents, because when you’re president…it’s okay! If it wasn’t, every president would be afraid to leave office for fear of criminal indictment (take it from someone who knows) and would just have to declare themself dictator on Day One.

You have to admit that’s a solid argument.

Two or three Supreme Court justices admitted it (they might have just been kidding) during argument before the full Court. As of today they haven’t decided whether a president is immune from criminal prosecution for ordering the assassination of a political opponent. I hope they’ve screwed their thinking caps on right, because I never thought any American would ever live to write a sentence like that last one that wasn’t in a work of fiction.

Donald Trump should hope that, if this Supreme Court is so stupid or politically deranged that they agree with him, they don’t announce their agreement until after the next presidential inauguration.

Because if Donald Trump wins reëlection, and Joe Biden isn’t as cognitively impaired as Donald pretends he is, Joe might remember that until around noon 20 January he’s still the president, and still Commander in Chief of the Army, Marine Corps, Navy, and Air Force.

The Coast Guard would have a ball at Mar-a-Lago. Maybe even score a gold toilet.

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

Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these: at least two of my country’s Supreme Court justices have betrayed their sworn allegiance to the Constitution they also swore to support and defend.

Justice Clarence Thomas and Justice Sam Alito both have chosen their wives, if they are to be believed, over our founding document.

Both refuse to recuse themselves over matters before the Court relating to the January 6 insurrection and other attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election. That, despite Ginni Thomas helping to lead the fact-free “Stop the Steal” campaign in part by urging Republican state legislators to overturn their citizens’ votes, and Martha-Ann Alito flying daft upside-down flags associated with that campaign on the family front lawn.

Both claim that neither of their sweet sweet ladies have the slightest influence on them.

I’m not sure anyone who’s ever been married can say that, not without the slightest dent in their straight face.

I can’t honestly be too hard on the robed rascals, though.

I too can’t say I would choose a piece of parchment, however sacred, over the woman I love.

Guess that qualifies me to be a member of the Supreme Court, right there.

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

Donald Trump has been found in contempt of court — in just his current criminal trial — ten times now.

Of course he has: contempt is his go-to, perhaps his only, real emotion.

In his first speech as President of the United States, he uttered his contempt for the country that elected him, coloring ours a nation in carnage.

He’s shown lifelong contempt for women, verbally and physically abusing them at will. Nominating Supreme Court Justices whose only qualification for him is that they believe women ought not have dominion over their own bodies.

Lifelong contempt for our military, buying his way as a youth out of personally serving with them, and when Commander in Chief calling those who died for their country — your friends and family and mine — suckers and losers.

Contempt for the poor: only the rich qualify to be his vice president — look at the lapdogs he calls to the stage with him, to the courtroom with him.

Contempt for democracy: how else can you describe a president who engineers an insurrection, steals his country’s secrets, would suspend whatever parts of the Constitution that annoy him, and proclaims that if reelected he will be dictator on day one?

Contempt, above all, for the rule of law, his whole adult life spent with middle finger raised to every concept of justice that dare attempt penetrate a brain somehow frozen in development at middle school.

So that Trump can call a judge, who has done everything he can to avoid properly jailing his sorry sorry ass, a railroading highly conflicted crooked and corrupt Trump hater.

And why has this judge done for this person what he would never have done for any other? Not because he thinks Donald Trump the man deserves better treatment — no one who has ever known Donald Trump honestly believes that. But because he has something Donald Trump had four years to find and never found.

Respect for the office of the presidency of the United States.

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

Genocide is a word I rarely use without thinking of the decimation of two-thirds of the Jewish population of Europe, by Nazi Germany. It is a word no one used until after then. It was coined by a Polish lawyer who could find no existing word to describe what had been done to his family, to millions of families like his.

Scholars have since applied that word, under the legal definition of the 1948 United Nations Convention on Genocide, to describe conflicts forward and backward in time, forty-nine times. The scope of conflicts range from as few killed as the forty by the Uruguayan Army in 1831 to eradicate the last of the Charrúa, to as many as the seven million Jews of the Holocaust.

Some would add a fiftieth to the list: the Israeli grandchildren of the Holocaust. Grandchildren of the Holocaust responding to an attack last fall by a Palestinian-elected government whose chartering document calls for extermination of the Jews particularly in Israel but also anywhere in the world.

The Israeli government says the war in Gaza is an existential defense against a Hamas government that vows slaughter inside Israel again and again until every Jew is dead or driven from the land. The Hamas government, and increasingly world opinion, believes that Israel doesn’t care if it has to commit genocide to save itself from genocide.

If the Israelis are intending a genocide of the Palestinians, they are doing a terrible job. John Spencer, chair of urban warfare studies at the Modern War Institute at West Point, believes

“Israel has taken more measures to avoid needless civilian harm than virtually any other nation that’s fought an urban war.

“In fact, as someone who has served two tours in Iraq and studied urban warfare for over a decade, Israel has taken precautionary measures even the United States did not do during its recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

Spencer says Israel first provided days, and then weeks, of warnings before starting its major attacks of urban areas. They called and texted civilians ahead of airstrikes, and began those strikes with a practice called roof-knocking: dropping small munitions on building rooftops so people could get out before the big ones came.

“No military,” Spencer says, “has ever implemented any of these practices in war before.”

Hamas, on the other hand, is doing a much better job at killing Palestinians. Its whole military-industrial complex is set up with the intention that civilians die before they do. They hope to draw fire while hiding behind women, children, and the elderly. They count on it. The more civilians who die while soldiers scurry tunnel to tunnel beneath them (relative safety they deny civilians), the better.

The more children maimed or killed, the better.

And, it seems to be working. Most of the United States and much of the world initially were appalled at the Hamas slaughter, rape, torture, and kidnapping of innocents. But most of the United States and much of the world suffer from ADHD: that was last October’s news. Today’s news is that a thousand Palestinian kids are amputees. We know Hamas won’t stop that: Hamas put those kids in harm’s way.

Americans in particular seem uninterested in the why of this war, more in the what. And what we’ve seen is the one day of Hamas evil, and months of Israeli painstaking response. One day of burned and beheaded babies is very low on the American scale compared to months of having to watch the Palestinian suffering courtesy of Hamas.

So Israel has to stop the war. We somehow have to make them stop the war.

Hamas doesn’t have to win this war they started.

Hamas just has to outlast Israeli resistance to world opinion.

Then they can get back to killing more Jews.