The High Court ignores the Constitution and the 24th Amendment

This week the Supreme Court ratified Florida's poll tax on former felons, completely ignoring both the spirit and letter of the 24th Amendment!

The 24th Amendment clearly states:

“The right of citizens of the United States to vote in any primary or other election for President or Vice President, for electors for President or Vice President, or for Senator or Representative in Congress, shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any State by reason of failure to pay any poll tax or other tax.”

Florida had barred felons who had served their time from voting. The state recently passed a constitional amendment stating:

“all terms of their sentence including parole or probation.”

Naturally the legislature passed a law “that required residents who have been convicted of a felony to pay all court costs, fees and fines before they can become eligible to vote.”

Since the court system doesn't seem to have any obligation to present a final bill to prisoners when they've done their time, this amounted to a poll tax, since there is no requirement that the courts not pile on additional fees (that amount to taxes) and in usual style, can turn a felon into a debt slave for years after they have done their time. Voting rights advocates sued, the first time on the grounds it discriminated against the poor, and the second time because such gratuitous fees and levies amount to a poll tax aimed at preventing the poor from voting. The district court noted these thingsf and also concluded:

“that because it could take years for the state to figure out how much residents with past convictions must pay to be eligible to vote, the law will discourage voters from registering at all, because they will be afraid that they will be charged with fraud if they make a mistake.”

So being mistaken about whether one has paid the taxes or not would lead to further incarceration!

Scotus Blog

This was appealed on 24th amendment grounds and also matters of justice. The appeal was denied with no grounds cited. Obviously to prevent the constitutional amendment from actually helping most citizens it applies to by the 6/3 Republican Majority.

Sonya Sotomayor notes:

“This Court’s order prevents thousands of otherwise eligible voters from participating in Florida’s primary election simply because they are poor,”

And

“And it allows the Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit to disrupt Florida’s election process just days before the July 20 voter-registration deadline for the August primary, even though a preliminary injunction had been in place for nearly a year and a Federal District Court had found the State’s pay-to-vote scheme unconstitutional.”

This is another example of how the Conservative Judges interpret "due process" meaning "following the forms" and don't really care if either the spirit or the substance of the constitution is applied.

Sources and Further Reading

https://lawandcrime.com/2020-election/sotomayor-blasts-supreme-court-for-upholding-florida-poll-tax-that-excludes-voters-simply-because-they-are-poor/

Just as Bad:

Barr Vs Lee

Reforms needed to Stop cheating

There is a reason that Trump wanted his operative Roger Stone out of jail this fall.  The GOP WILL try to cheat this year, both by a firehose of dishonest but emotional propaganda and by direct election fraud. People like Karl Rove & Roger Stone are critical to the effort.

Election security exper Jennifer Conn gives advice on stopping them:

https://thedailyedge.substack.com/p/hacking-our-democracy

The threat:

1. Cyberattack, or insider, efforts to alter election rolls to impede voting.

2. Cyberattack, or insider, efforts to actually, change recorded votes or flip them.

3. Intentional or negligent handling of mail in ballots to impede casting votes.

4. Breakdowns of voting machines or equipment inadequate to handle voter volume.

Vulnerabilities

1. Mail in Ballots, delay or destruction are the main concern. Fraud is less an issue with them.

2. E voting. Electronic voting can be programmed to record different votes from what voters thought they cast.

3. E pollbooks, are as dangerous as e voting, can be hacked, fail or misbehave for other reasons.

4. Encoded activation cards & bar codes can be used to disguise deliberate flipping of votes as it happens.

5. Machines break down or are supplied in insufficient numbers.

6. Polling sites closed, located abusively and/or underresourced in material & personnel.

7.  Bar codes are useful for numbering ballots but otherwise are a vulnerability.

8. Any scanner, modem or electronic tabulating device can be hacked if attached to the networked or tampered with by nefarious insiders.

9. Centralized tabulating is notorious for being vulnerable to nefarious insiders.

Remedies

1. Paper ballots are needed to memorialize voting for verification & validation.

2. Paper polling records are also needed for the same reason.

3.  Records should be eye readable, hand countable and preserved for auditing, verification & validation.

4. Election judges should act like judges.

5.  All parties involved should be present to monitor recording, tabulating & verification activities.

6. Partisan officials should not touch anything without witnesses present.

7. All election documentation should be preserved.

8. Elections should be validated and audited by default.

9. Criminal penalties should attach to official vote fraud.

10. Ballots should never be trashed. Spoiled ballots should be be documented [for why they were spoiled] and available in case their invalidation was wrong.

11. Voters should have an automatic right and the infrastructure to report

What we can do

1 support efforts to reform our process.

2. Fill out requests to vote by mail early.

3. If can't vote by mail, fill out your sample ballot in advance to speed voting.

4. Insist on paper ballots.

5. Volunteer as a poll worker or poll watcher if possible, but wear PPE if you do it this year!

6. Get informed!

Of course there is more. You can volunteer with protect our votes & similar below.

Additional info

https://www.protectourvotes.com/

https://www.scrutineerscommunity.org/feed

https://democracycounts.org/

Reforms Needed to save our Federal Republic

In an article titled: Post-Roger Stone: Ten ideas for repairing Trump’s justice system By Jennifer Rubin, She writes:

“President Trump granting clemency to his crony Roger Stone, who served as the go-between for the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks, on practically the eve of Stone’s incarceration for multiple crimes attendant to his coverup on behalf of the president, is grotesquely corrupt but unsurprising.”

She recounts the latest Cassus Belli of Trump's perfidy

She notes that “Stone virtually confessed to a quid pro quo,” (To me he was boasting), telling Howard Fineman,

“He [Trump] knows I was under enormous pressure to turn on him. It would have eased my situation considerably. But I didn’t.”

I don't think anyone with integrity doesn't feel that this wasn't a high crime and a misdemeanor.Rubin writes:

“Silence for clemency. A separate system of justice for the president’s henchmen. This is the very definition of corruption.”

Former Candidate Romney put it baldly in a tweet:

"Unprecedented, historic corruption: an American president commutes the sentence of a person convicted by a jury of lying to shield that very president." Link to Tweet

She reports:

“By this action, President Trump abused the powers of his office in an apparent effort to reward Roger Stone for his refusal to cooperate with investigators examining the President’s own conduct,”

She also reports how House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) and Oversight and Reform Committee Chairwoman Carolyn B. Maloney (D-N.Y.) said in a written statement released Friday:

“No other president has exercised the clemency power for such a patently personal and self-serving purpose.”

Actually, her hero George Herbert Walker Bush, exercised his clemency and pardon powers in 1992 for just such a patently corrupt and self serving cause when he pardoned the perps in the Iran Contra scandal. But what counts with Republicans is what they are doing now, so I can forgive past crimes as long as folks have seen the light. This post is about her suggestions for fixing the problems. I'm endeavering to analyze the problem by critiquing her suggestions. Most of them are obvious or things that were taken out of the law due to misuse or to protect the wrong people. Any reforms made should be based on firm Constitutional Grounds. And if that is not adequate, it might take a Constitutional Amendment.

Related Posts

Iran Contra and Bill Barr

Trump Got His Chaika

Impeachment As Regulation

Clarify Impeachment

Nancy Pelosi was asked about President Trump's plan to commute Roger Stone's sentance and replied that she is looking into legislation that would forbid the President using his pardon power that way.  This is exactly the scenario I forsaw 2 years + ago.  

Simplistic legislation would probably fail a constitutional test. But there is a way to proceed that might succeed. There are two basis for this.

The house has "Sole Power of Impeachment"

That means not only does the house have the power to impeach executive & Judiciary members, but it has the power to write the rules of impeachment.  That means they can define the officers and offices involved, procedures, entry points and when and how a case should go to the Senate for trial.

Except In Cases of Impeachment

As I noted before, the President:

“shall have Power to Grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offenses against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment."

Thus the power to pardon is limited by impeachment.  So the House should be able to stop the President using his pardon power? But how.

Simply forbidding him won't work. He is not impeached at the moment because the case went to the Senate and they acquitted him.  SCOTUS would laugh such a law out the door.

Define the rules of impeachment

What congress needs to do is the opposite of what they have done in the past. The house needs to make impeachment part of its regular order, defining what can be impeached and setting up administrative bodies combining the powers of special prosecutors and Inspector Generals to police those infractions.

Open Impeachment

Essentially the house needs to have an open impeachment inquiry run by an inspector general under the supervision of a house Impeachment committee and define the terms under which individuals are part of an impeachment inquiry into the President and he cannot pardon them, or they are under the panels protection until it goes to trial in the Senate. It would function like a grand jury except legal products would become parts of censure resolutions & legislation.

Nancy can use Roberts 4 guidelines as input into defining impeachment legislation.

Related Posts

http://holtesthoughts.blogspot.com/2018/12/why-congress-must-impeach-trump.html?m=1

Roberts Denies Powers of Impeachment

In our country some judicial powers are distributed. The executive has the power to bring charges and try cases in a court. Courts are saddled with juries, who represent actual democracy at work, since they are common people stepping up to judge cases.  The Judiciary is not supposed to make law, but through the power of interpretation often over-rides the legislature to make laws at odds with the will of the people. The separations of powers in the constitution are not absolute. Checks and balances require powers be distributed among the branches to put a check on tyranny and usurpation. 

Impeachment and oversight

The Constitution gave the house a judicial role when they gave the HOUSE has "sole power of impeachment." Roberts can't and won't do squat about executive corruption. Neither the executive nor the judiciary can be trusted to investigate themselves.  For that reason the impeachment process was distributed to the legislature.

Necessary and proper to impeachment

The House's sole power of impeachment requires inquiry powers beyond those with a purely legislative purpose.  Impeachment cannot be severed from oversight. Subpoenas are necessary & proper to discovering when impeachment is needed! Without the power to look at records and investigate issues, the impeachment power is denied.

Justice Roberts Denies Impeachment Power

Justice Roberts can't "give powers of oversight" to the house. The constitution gave the house those powers when they gave the house "sole power of impeachment." Nevertheless he sent the case back to the lower courts ordering them to meet 3 criteria!

One; The asserted legislative purpose is to oversee the President in a case where clear wrong doing has already been discovered, and determine whether or not impeachment is justified. Whether the House actually can send additional articles of impeachment to the Senate is immaterial. Whether they are actually impeaching the president yet, is also immaterial. Roberts should have denied certiori on this request because its not his business to rule on a House Constitutional prerogative.

Two; For the same reason, it is up to the house how broad a subpoena is. Impeachment is an administrative & political proceeding since the most Congress can do is remove and bar from office.  The house involves the courts when the executive disputes a subpoena. They are looking at evidence of misconduct.  They may pass laws to close the barn doors afterwards, but they have a natural right to the information.

Third; the courts need to remember the House has a legitimate legislative purpose in examining tax records of executives. This should be a moot point.

Fourth; the President has a duty to respond to subpoenas. The burden is on him complying.

There was no need to remand either case back to the courts. The House had already established a legislative purpose when they issued them, because this is part of their "sole power" of impeachment.

Improving Scrutiny Part II

The Purpose of Checks and Balances

At the heart of any human system maintaining it's function is the realization that we aren't dealing with machines. Machines function as designed, or not. When they don't function as designed they are broken and either need to be fixed, patched or discarded. Humans, at their best, don't always function as designed. The virtue of a machine is that it is a tool that does something. The virtue of humans is that we use tools to do things. The vice of our tool use is that we can use those tools for good or ill, for selfish purposes or as intended. People use drugs recreationally that intended to treat pain. People steal from their businesses. The purpose of checks and balances is to keep ourselves in line. The principles are to prevent abuse and to mitigate its occurrence.

Separation of powers has two purposes:

1. To reduce the temptation to abuse power.
2. To provide a glass barrier that leaves a record when folks break the rules
3. Irregularities must be recorded and audited periodically
4. Infractions must be punished according to set and regular rules
5. Those entrusted with separated powers must not be allowed to defeat the rules.

Staying Alive in a Time of COVID 19

Steps in Contact Tracing

Anyone who's been following the news and government actions, since this Pandemic became a real crisis sometime in March can be excused for being confused, if they were believing the things the President was saying. The virus is everywhere. It is spread by droplets, large and small. The scientists keep learning new things about how dangerous it is. People get it and don't know they got it. Others get severe pneumonia symptoms. Now we find out that it gets into the blood and causes a wide variety of symptoms, organ damage, symptoms similar to myalgia in some people, invisible lung damage in others, and death in too many people.