The Erickson Report, Page 4: Outrage of the Year
Moving to the Outrage of the Year, we had multiple possibilities.
We had the
on-going attacks on LGBTQ rights and protections, we had the embracing of white supremacy, we had Hillay "Not My Fault" Clinton
calling Tulsi Gabbard and Jill Stein "Russian assets" and suggesting any third party candidacy on the left would be run to advance the interests of a foreign government, whoever the candidate might be.
We had the proposal of a vast expansion of
who could be denied a green card on the grounds that they might be a “public charge,” no longer to mean someone essentially dependent on government but someone who
might at some point in the future need government help such as Food Stamps or housing vouchers or subsidized health insurance, even including using the Affordable Care Act’s subsidies when buying insurance on an exchange. That change would bar an estimated 375,000 immigrants, 2/3 of total legal immigration.
We talked about
hunger in schools, about the good deeds of people paying off the school lunch debts of classmates or even
whole school systems, regarding that as an outrage because why should they have to? Why should it be necessary? Why should any family be so poor that they can't afford a school lunch for their child?
We also talked about the stresses those parents face, including from one school system in northeast Pennsylvania that
threatened to take the kids away if the parents didn't pay up.
All this especially cruel at a time when even as 36 million Americans rely on the SNAP program, nee Food Stamps, the gang of misanthropes swearing fealty to His High Orangeness pursue their dream of
destroying the SNAP program, having introduced three proposals which together would
toss 3.7 million out of the program and to the wolves of hunger.
But we settled on these three for the top spots for Outrage of the Year.
Our second runner-up would have placed higher but for the fact that it has gotten some fair amount of attention and we prefer to focus more on those less noticed.
It is Tweetie-pie's tendency, drive, urge, whatever you care to call it, towards extreme authoritarian, one-person rule.
His notion of his powers as president and, to put if mildly, expansive: He has at least twice -
once in June and
once in July - claimed that Article II of the Constitution, which lays out the role of the president, gives him extreme power, or as he put it, "rights at a level that nobody has ever seen before."
But his personal desire, his desire to go beyond even "rights at a level that nobody has ever seen before" has long been abundantly clear.
Indeed, in July CNN recounted
15 times he praised authoritarians or dictators, including North Korea's Kim Jong Un, Turkey's Recep Tayyip Erdogan, China's Xi Jinping, and of course Russia's Vladimir Putin.
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| Donald "Tweetie-pie" Trump |
That thinking is reflected in his attitude towards any laws that restrict him. For example, in April he told border agents that they should
ignore the law and ignore judicial orders and refuse to admit asylum seekers, even advising the agents to simply lie to the courts.
In July, in the face of a Supreme Court decision barring the inclusion of a question about citizenship in the 2020 census,
he considered simply ignoring it - as well as the Constitution, which which specifically assigns the job of overseeing the census to Congress - considered ignoring the Constitution and the Supreme Court and ordering the Commerce Department to include it.
Apparently he was talked out of that but it was part of a pattern of defying Congress, denying its Constitutional authority over declaring war, denying its right to exercise any sort of oversight whatsoever, openly avowing that Congress can only know what he chooses to tell them, even in the course of criminal, special prosecutor, or impeachment investigations.
He even defies the idea of leaving office, because apparently those constitutional limits don't or at least shouldn't apply to him any more than any other ones do.
Consider that in March 2018, Trump
praised Chinese President Xi Jinping for abolishing term limits and making himself president for life, saying "I think it's great. Maybe we'll have to give that a shot someday."
In April of this year, he said during a White House event for the Wounded Warrior Project that he would remain in the Oval Office "at least for 10 or 14 years."
In May, at one of his revival meetings, after predicting he would be re-elected, he said "
we'll do a three" - that is, have a third term - "and a four and a five." The same month, he retweeted Jerry Falwell Jr.'s tweet that "Trump should have 2 yrs added to his 1st term as pay back for" the Mueller investigation.
In June he said in a series of tweets that his supporters "would demand that [he] stay longer" than 2024, which is when he would leave office if he won the 2020 presidential election.
As recently as at his rally on December 11, he suggested
America will collapse if he is not re-elected. "At stake in our present battle," he said, "is the survival of the American nation itself."
He also "joked" about being in office for up to another 25 years to the increasing cheers of the crowd and said "Should we give it a shot? Maybe we will." He then insisted he was "kidding" but his history says otherwise.
You may want to say "it's all just a joke, just something to trigger the libs." Sorry, when you go to the same well at least five times, that's not a joke. That's something you're thinking about.
Our first runner-up is the on-going outrage of the death penalty, that remnant of barbarity which despite the lack of any evidence that it reduces the murder rate, despite the demonstrated racist bias in its imposition, despite the execution of innocent people, despite dropping crime and dropping support, it itself refuses to die.
We touched on it a couple of times this year, for example in August when
Attorney General William Barbarous ordered the Bureau of Prisons to schedule executions for five inmates now on death row, bringing the grim reaper back to the federal level with a vengeance, as the feds have carried out just three executions since the federal death penalty statute was expanded in 1994 and the last of those was in 2003.
In September we looked at
the case of Larry Swearingen, who on August 21 was legally murdered by the state of Texas. He was convicted of murder in 2000 on thin and entirely circumstantial evidence.
Subsequently, a number of TX pathologists declared that Swearingen could not be guilty because based on the condition of the body when it was found, he was in prison on another matter at the time the murder was committed. Talk about your perfect alibi.
But the courts didn't care. there was no error found in the operation of the machinery of the law, all the i's were dotted and the t's crossed according to formula, and so finally Swearingen was officially killed and the law was satisfied - as an innocent man lay dead.
That was one of the things that lead to our longer look at
the fatal flaw at the heart of our so-called criminal justice system: Once you are convicted, truth is no longer the concern. The often arcane rites of the Holy Temple of the Law are. And as long as they are followed, justice can be ignored.
This does not just apply to the death penalty: We also looked at
the case of Lamar Johnson, in prison for life without parole for a murder which even prosecutors now say he did not commit - despite which, he is still in prison and in August lost an appeal for a new trial strictly because of a technicality in state law regarding such appeals.
And the law grinds on because, as legal scholars will say, the law is not about justice - the law is about the law.
As a footnote, I have to add that this does not mean there are never victories: Thanks to some work by the Innocence Project, just before Christmas authorities in Texas said they are beginning the process of
formally exonerating a man who in 2012 was sentenced to life for a murder for which police
have now arrested someone else.
But moving on to our if you will winner, saving what is probably the worst for last. You have to understand, in the long run, if
any sanity remains in our judicial system, that this will have less actual impact on our people, our society, than either of the other nominees and in fact any of those not nominated did or will.
But I found this so astonishing - not even immoral but amoral, so utterly without redeeming qualities, so utterly without humanity - that it outraged me more than anything else this year.
So here it is: In the summer of 2017, police in Southaven, Mississippi, were searching for a domestic violence suspect. They got the address wrong and went to a house on the other side of the street.
There,
they shot and killed an innocent man, 41-year-old Ismael Lopez.
According to various news reports I found, police first alleged Lopez appeared at the front door with a handgun and then tried to run away. At another point, they claimed they saw a rifle poking though the now only slightly open door. They also said a dog ran out - apparently, from the only slightly open door - which of course they immediately shot at and they then fired through the door - killing Lopez with a shot to the back of his head.
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| Ismael Lopez |
Despite the shifting story, in July 2018, a local grand jury - surprise! - declined to indict the two officers involved in the fatal shooting, after which the prosecutor refused to release either the names of the cops involved or the investigative file, which attorneys for the family had to pry loose.
But that's not why this is here; cops getting away will killing brown and black people is old news. No, this one has an extra twist of the knife.
About a year after the failure of the grand jury, that is, this past summer, the family filed a $20 million wrongful death lawsuit against the city of Southaven, the chief of Southaven police, and the officers involved in Lopez’s death.
In responding to the suit, the city
declared in open court that it is their policy that if you are an undocumented immigrant, which Lopez was, if you have no “legally recognized relationship” with the US, you have no constitutional protections, you have no constitutional rights,
not even the right to not be wrongfully killed.
Quoing attorney Katherine Kerby, arguing for the city,
If he ever had Fourth Amendment or Fourteenth Amendment civil rights they were lost by his own conduct and misconduct. He may have been a person on American soil but he was not one of the "We, the People"
and so lacked all protections.
Murray Wells, an attorney representing Lopez’s family, lambasted the city’s argument as both “chilling” and “insane” and said “We’re stunned that someone put this in writing.”
So am I. It's hard to grasp how totally demented, totally vicious, totally deranged, the city's position is. If accepted, it for any practical purpose would turn all police into a version of the Tonton Macoute, able to abuse and even kill any undocumented person with total impunity.
Happily, it's also total crapola, as the Supreme Court has ruled on multiple occasions that people on US soil are guaranteed certain basic rights, no matter their immigration status, and the cases the city cited in support of its contention are grossly misapplied and have absolutely nothing to do with the case at hand.
As an illustration of how vacuous the city's position is, one case it cited involved courts finding that an undocumented immigrant did not have a Second Amendment right to a firearm - in a ruling that said
in so many words that this did not impact Fourth Amendment rights.
But while that makes the city's attempt grounds for a Clown award, it is much too vile, much too appalling, for that. Even the term Outrage barely contains it.
The City of Southaven, Mississippi: Outrage of the Year 2019.
And now for our regular segment, Two Weeks of Stupid: Clowns and Outrages. And as usual we start with the Clowns.
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