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

A judge in my neighborhood has ruled that a man who can’t stop lying about his weight (and almost anything else you can think of) did indeed incite, and engage in, an insurrection against the United States while he was its president, and ought to be given a chance to do it again.

Though the ruling is being appealed, it means I get yet another chance to vote against Donald Trump, so I’m pretty happy about that.

It’s a mite peculiar, though, that she hung her judge’s robe on a determination that the orange blob was never an officer of the United States, and so under the Fourteenth Amendment isn’t qualified to be disqualified from holding office again. Perhaps she meant, never was qualified to hold office in the first place.

The Supreme Court said, in Nixon v. Fitzgerald, 457 U.S. 731 (1982): “Article II, § 1, of the Constitution provides that ‘[t]he executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States. . . .’ This grant of authority establishes the President as the chief constitutional officer of the Executive Branch.”

Also, in February 2020, The United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, in K&D LLC v. Trump Old Post Office, LLC, 951 F. 3d 503, concluded, at President Trump’s request, that the U.S. President is a federal officer, when they wrote: “President Trump removed the suit to federal court under the federal officer removal statute, 28 U.S.C. § 1442(a)(1).” The former big guy doesn’t remember that, of course.

“Commander-in-Chief” sure sounds like some kind of officer.

The legal dictionary I use says a federal officer is anyone elected or appointed to an office in the federal government. I’m pretty sure they mean the government of the United States.

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

It’s a sort of national disgrace that a code of conduct for the highest court in the United States should have fewer teeth than even its lowest courts. And by fewer, I mean, none.

The canons devised by the Supreme Court are a little akin to a visit to a dentist for a cleaning but when you come home you have nothing left with which to chew your food.

It took two hundred thirty-four years for the Court to devise any ethics code at all, and the result of all those years of contemplation was essentially to steal the existing code of conduct for all other United States judges, with the exception of one word: “shall.”

Wherever that word is used in the lower courts code, the Supremes substitute a wiggle word: “should.”

So for example where a lower court judge “shall disqualify himself or herself in a proceeding in which the judge’s impartiality might reasonably be questioned,” a Supreme Court justice “should” do that, but doesn’t have to.

Where the less exalted judge must disqualify for personal bias or prejudice, the Supreme Court justice doesn’t have to.

Where the ordinary judge’s spouse, or minor child still living at home, has an interest in a matter before the court, that judge must recuse from the case, but not the Supreme Court Justice.

The new high court ethics code grandfathers, or grandmothers, or grandparents in any Justice who has already embarrassed the Court with any unseemly conduct, but with no “have-to’s” involved it doesn’t really matter.

So undisclosed expensive gifts from billionaires with business before the court may remain embarrassments, but no cause for concern.

The whole need for a Supreme Court code of conduct, the Justices maintain in a Statement of the Court at the very beginning of their wiggly fifteen-page document, is “the misunderstanding that the Justices of this Court, unlike all other jurists in this country, regard themselves as unrestricted by any ethics rules.”

And so it’s all a misunderstanding. Right.

Before any sense of renewed respect for one of America’s highest institutions can be restored, the Justices are gonna need to work on something else.

Authentic self-respect.

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

Just in time for Halloween, the United States House of Representatives has elected a real monster to lead it. Not very many decent people there wanted the job. You get what you vote for.

The generic Mike Johnson is the new Spectre…excuse me…Speaker of the House.

One of his first acts was to declare that a mass shooting in Maine involving a military-grade weapon is not the time to think about gun safety. Let’s talk about it some other time. We’re just not praying hard enough, and anyway I gotta cash my NRA check first.

These are his qualifications:

• About five people in the United States had ever heard of him before; four of them call him “Papa” and the fifth, according to MJ during his acceptance speech, spends a lot of time on her knees, doing…something.
• First in line to pretend 2020 voters actually reëlected Donald Duck.
• Industrial-strength homophobia. So afraid of any marriage that isn’t between a red-blooded American man and a handmaid woman that he would deny federal funds to any college that dares talk about sexual orientation or gender identity.
• Vow to jail any doctor who aborts a future able-bodied worker just to save the mother’s life.
• Climate change — what climate change?
• Wants to restore Christian prayer to public schools so more people grow up to be like him.
• Believes those same public schools are to blame for mass shootings because they teach evolution rather than that God got the job done in six days.

And this, this is the fella separated from the Presidency of the United States of America by two beating hearts.

This may or may not be a House divided, but I for one can’t stand it.

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

How can you cut the head from a child and then dance by its corpse?

In America, we already know how you can do that. In this land that most of us still wish to be the light of the world, in the state where Abraham Lincoln practiced law, we know.

Thirty-seven miles southwest of Chicago, a man took revenge on Hamas murders by sticking a knife into another child twenty-six times. Did it because the boy was a Muslim, though it’s hard to tell how committed to his religion was someone barely a week past his sixth birthday. The boy’s mother, a Palestinian emigrant, was old enough to know better, so the man stabbed her, too; he failed to kill her.

To the end of her days, she’ll know the quality of fanatic Christian mercy is no different from the quality of fanatic Muslim mercy.

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

Author Sam Harris didn’t exactly send this letter, linked below, specifically to me. He sent it to a lot of people, people who were stunned at the Hamas military invasion to kill and kidnap hundreds of Israeli civilians, people stunned at the thousands of Palestinian civilians killed, and still being killed, in the Israeli response to destroy Hamas.

Some of these stunned people are — openly, guardedly, perhaps only subconsciously — anti-Palestinian.

Some are — openly, guardedly, perhaps only subconsciously — antisemitic.

Some see no difference between military action that targets civilians, and military action that results in civilian deaths and injuries.

Sam, whose education is in neuroscience and philosophy, appears to see some difference. Maybe you will too, here.