If you’re a fan of Donald Trump, you’re probably disappointed with the “Kraken,” the supposedly game-changing election lawsuit filed by Sydney Powell last week. But if you’re a fan of unintentional humour, like me, Christmas came early.
Mike Dunford, at The Bulwark, took one for the team and read the whole thing. May God have mercy on his soul.
Powell had been threatening to release the Kraken for the last week, which she spent “practicing law on her own” after being unpersoned by the Trump legal team following a press conference in which she spouted conspiracy theories so insane that even Giuliani’s hair dye was trying to get out of the room. It wasn’t clear what the Kraken was until it was released and we learned that it had taken the form of matching his-and-hers lawsuits in Georgia and Michigan. Lawsuits that have redefined rock bottom.
You don’t need to read far to see how truly awful these lawsuits are. Start with the simplest and most eye-catchingly obvious: Complaints in federal lawsuits have set formatting—at the top of the first page are the words “IN THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE ____ DISTRICT OF ____.” It’s a ritual formula, it’s hard to mess up, and every lawyer I know who practices in federal courts uses a fill-in-the-blanks template. Every lawyer except Sidney Powell, I guess—because between the two filings she managed to spell the word “district” four different ways, batting .250 on accuracy.
And things only got worse from there. Much worse.
[…]
…as specious the legal arguments are and as incomprehensible as the copy is, the craziest thing about the case is the substance. This complaint reads like it was drafted at the afterparty for a three-day QAnon convention. And it might have been, given that one of Powell’s more absurd “witnesses” is Ronald Watkins who, alongside his father, runs the imageboard where “Q” drops his messages. Hmmmm. The reason Watkins is part of this case is unclear. Powell is claiming him as an expert in Dominion’s voting software, but you would hope that she could find someone better—like I don’t know, someone who has worked with it maybe?
The basis of Watkins’s alleged expertise is the fact that he claims to have read the manual. This may come as a surprise but reading a software manual does not qualify you to testify as an expert witness in a federal courtroom.
This excerpt doesn’t even scratch the surface. Neither does this screenshot Durnford posted:
Thisismyfavoritestoryofanotherwisemiserableyear.
The thing is, I actually want Trump’s legal team to file crazy pointless lawsuits like this. Far from bringing the justice system into disrepute and undermining democracy, as many other lawyers have argued, I think this actually makes America’s legal and political systems stronger.
I’m dead serious. Donald Trump is trying to do exactly what many people feared in the event of an election loss: try to get the results thrown out and have himself declared the Supreme Ruler. He’s riled up his most cultish supporters, and gotten them to open their wallets, by promising a fight to the death that will save America from hardcore, frothing, avowed Communist (checks notes) Joe Biden.
And what has he given us? This nonsense, which has been laughed out of court by judges appointed by Donald Trump himself. Tyrants are most powerful when everyone is afraid of them. When everyone is laughing at them, it’s all over.
In four years, Trump has hammered away at the guardrails that protect American democracy, and it may take years - decades - for them to be repaired and reinforced. But they weren’t breached.
In more serious legal news: last week the Supreme Court of the United States ruled, in a contentious 5-4 decision, in favor of some Christian and Jewish groups who challenged COVID-related restrictions on religious services imposed by New York Governor Andrew Cuomo. The internet responded with the substantive, measured, good-faith discussion of legal issues we’ve come to expect:
Describing the Court's emergency injunction in Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn v. Cuomo as "the first major decision from the Trump-packed court," New York Times columnist Paul Krugman warned that "it will kill people." He added: "The bad logic is obvious. Suppose I adhere to a religion whose rituals include dumping neurotoxins into public reservoirs. Does the principle of religious freedom give me the right to do that?"
Krugman gonna Krugman.
Liel Leibovitz of Tablet praises the decision, and from his description, it sounds like a case where the majority looked at whether the state’s infringement on freedom of religion was as narrowly tailored as possible and found it wanting. Honestly, that sounds downright Canadian.
First, and briefly, the victors. The five majority justices—Clarence Thomas, Samuel A. Alito, Neil M. Gorsuch, Brett M. Kavanaugh, and new member Amy Coney Barrett—dispensed with the notion that the observant Jews and Catholics who petitioned the court were somehow insufficiently zealous in guarding their communities against the pandemic or responsible somehow for its spread. “Not only is there no evidence that the applicants have contributed to the spread of COVID–19,” they wrote, “but there are many other less restrictive rules that could be adopted to minimize the risk to those attending religious services.”
With that, they turned their attention to Cuomo, whose actions, they found, fell far short of sensible.
“The Governor,” wrote Justice Gorsuch, “has chosen to impose no capacity restrictions on certain businesses he considers ‘essential.’ And it turns out the businesses the Governor considers essential include hardware stores, acupuncturists, and liquor stores. Bicycle repair shops, certain signage companies, accountants, lawyers, and insurance agents are all essential too. So, at least according to the Governor, it may be unsafe to go to church, but it is always fine to pick up another bottle of wine, shop for a new bike, or spend the afternoon exploring your distal points and meridians. Who knew public health would so perfectly align with secular convenience?”
Gorsuch's logic isn't hard to follow: If I am, at the moment, free to amble into the wine shop on the corner, chat amiably with Damien behind the counter about the Mets and the latest shipment of Bandols, and take as much time as I’d like fondling Montsants, I should be able to dive into the comparably sized shtiebl two blocks down and pray Mincha. To argue that I may not, Gorsuch concluded, “is exactly the kind of discrimination the First Amendment forbids.”
I do not take this pandemic lightly - I just wasted much of my Saturday morning arguing with anti-maskers on Facebook, because I make terrible life choices - but if you say all constitutional rights in either Canada or the United States must be suspended in the name of safety, count me out. I think restrictions on Church attendance can certainly be justified, but they cannot be arbitrary or unfair.
Ironically, as Jacob Sullum notes in the Reason story linked above, if you take Krugman’s logic (there’s an oxymoron for you) to its logical extreme, the sainted Andrew Cuomo himself is responsible for killing people by relaxing restrictions on religious service attendance:
After these organizations filed their lawsuits but before the Supreme Court considered their request for an emergency injunction, Cuomo changed the color coding of the neighborhoods where their churches and synagogues are located. "None of the houses of worship identified in the applications is now subject to any fixed numerical restrictions," Chief Justice John Roberts noted in his dissenting opinion. "At these locations, the applicants can hold services with up to 50% of capacity, which is at least as favorable as the relief they currently seek."
In other words, Cuomo suddenly increased the effective occupancy cap for a 1,000- seat church 50-fold in formerly red zones and 20-fold in formerly orange zones. By Krugman's logic, the governor is now allowing behavior as reckless as "dumping neurotoxins into public reservoirs." Yet this is the same man whose judgment on these matters Krugman thinks we should trust without question.
"The scary thing is that 5 members of the court appear to think they're living in the Fox cinematic universe, where actual facts about things like disease transmission don't matter," Krugman says. If so, Cuomo himself seems to have succumbed to the same propaganda, since he concluded that his original rules were far more restrictive than necessary.
But much of the media has created a narrative in which Cuomo has mastered the pandemic instead of overseeing a shambolic response that led to one of the highest COVID-19 death rates in America. It’s not just Trump supporters who are blindly following a short-tempered egomaniac who only made it big in the first place because of his father’s connections and famous name.
Me: “I’m relieved that Donald Trump lost the election, but once Joe Biden takes office I hope the media doesn’t rest on its laurels. Journalists owe it to their audience to hold even politicians they support accountable, and even if Biden’s opponents are worse, the new President shouldn’t get a free pass. The media did its job reporting on Trump’s blunders and corruption, and they should keep up the pressure on Joe Biden.”
The media:
Good column, but when your lede is typos, you shouldn't then write: Me: “I’m relieved that Donald Trump lost the election, but once Joe Biden takes office I HOLE the media doesn’t rest on its laurels. CAPS added.
Trump (and his lawyers) should certainly be given all the same opportunities as anyone else to prove their case.
Even if they can’t spell.
As the psychic story shows, people are gonna be people. Logic is not always high on the list of priorities, and if it even *looks* like Trump is denied a fair hearing in court, it would give him fodder for playing the martyr. On the other hand, letting it all play out in court keeps him in a forum controlled by law, which deals in logic and reason and is therefore out of his depth. Plus, it provides great entertainment to the masses *and*, as it turns out, to those hardcore few who still love and care about good English, myself included.
Panem et circenses, folks. Keep it coming. (I knew those Asterix comics would come in handy someday. ;P )
My dog thinks this is ridiculous and the only good thing about the White House is the desks are taller so that she can get out her ball. (I swear some days she spends more time with her butt sticking out into the narrow passageways of my humble abode, whining and digging for a toy of some sort that’s socializing with the dust bunnies under the antique furniture, than anything else.)