A Not-So-Burning Issue

President-elect Donald Trump is surely quite busy these days, what with all those cabinet positions to fill and all those businesses around the world he’s still running, but he still finds time to “tweet.” On Tuesday he took to Twitter to express his opinion that “Nobody should be allowed to burn the American flag — if they do, there must be consequences — perhaps loss of citizenship or a year in jail.”

Which strikes us as a pretty peculiar thing for a president-elect to write. In addition to the poor punctuation, and the strange notion that a loss of citizenship or a year in jail are roughly equivalent, it seems apropos of nothing in particular, woefully ignorant of the law, and a damned waste of time.

Some idiot or another is always burning an American flag somewhere, for some fool reason or another, but even in the aftermath of Trump’s election the problem doesn’t seem have reached a point that it’s likely to cause any flag shortages or other pressing problems. We quite agree that burning the American flag is one of those things that people ought not to do, but there are so many of those things it would be quite impractical to ban them all. The Supreme Court long ago ruled that burning the American flag is just one of those obnoxious things that the public will have to put up with to ensure the freedom of speech that makes the flag worth respecting, so Trump is going to need to get three fourths of states to ratify the first but probably not last constitutional amendment to restrict the First Amendment, and he’ll need go through all that rigmarole again if he wants to start stripping citizenship away from Americans, which seems more trouble than it would be worth just to jail a few easily-ignored jackasses.

It hardly seems worth “tweeting” about, given all the other chores Trump has to deal with, but we suppose he has his reasons. Over at The Washington Post the scribes are supposing that it’s because Trump is continuing to rile up his base of rural and small town supporters, noting that he’ll also soon be continuing his campaign rallies with them during an upcoming “thank you tour,” but they don’t offer any reason why he would need to do that with the election already won. Perhaps it’s because Trump just can stop playing to the adoring crowds, or wants them riled up enough to support all sorts of limits on free speech, or maybe he just didn’t have anything else to “tweet” about.

He wound up giving us and those scribes at The Washington Post something to write about instead of the questionable matter of a president-elect appointing government officials while running a world-wide business or the fact that Goldman Sachs has provided yet another Treasury Secretary, so we guess that “tweet” wasn’t a complete waste of Trump’s time.

— Bud Norman

Calling a Bluff on a Trump Card

Donald J. Trump, the bullying billionaire real-estate-and-gambling-and-professional-wrestling-and-reality-television-show mogul who is somehow the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, has long had a habit of frequently threatening and oftentimes even filing frivolous lawsuits against anyone who gets in his way. This time he’s making the threats against Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who is suddenly challenging Trump’s front-runner status, but Cruz seems an unpromising target for such slip-and-fall-lawyer legal tactics.

There’s a reason, after all, that Cruz’s many Democratic detractors prefer to portray him as evil rather than stupid. Cruz is a graduate of almighty Harvard’s oh-so prestigious law school, where even such leftist professors as Alan Dershowitz and Laurence Tribe acknowledged his brilliance. Only the most brilliant law students find work as Supreme Court clerks, and Cruz stood out among them as a trusted clerk of the great Chief Justice William Rehnquist. During a brief exile from politics Cruz earned millions as an associate at one of the country’s most prestigious firms, which by Trump’s bottom-line standards suggest some legal acumen. Upon his voluntary pay-cut return to public service as the state of Texas’ Solicitor General, he was mostly victorious in his nine arguments before the Supreme Court, and even in defeat earned a reputation as a formidable lawyer that is now begrudgingly acknowledged by the likes of Politico and The New York Times.

Cruz also relishes the same politically-incorrect and anti-establishment tough guy reputation that has somehow propelled a bullying billionaire real-estate-and-gambling-and-professional-wrestling-and-reality-television-show mogul such as Trump to front-runner status, so he would seem especially unlikely to cower in the face of some frivolous threat. Sure enough, Cruz’s Wednesday press conference could be aptly summed up by Clint Eastwood’s pithier “Go ahead, punk, make my day.“

In response to one of those cease-and-desist letters that well-lawyered people are always sending out to easily-bullied types these days, Cruz defiantly insisted he would not cease nor desist from airing a campaign commercial that showed some old footage of Trump telling one of his constant interviewers that he had “New York values” about a wide range of social issues, up to and including late-term and even partial-birth abortion, which is to say values that are in many cases in conflict values of the electorate in the upcoming South Carolina primary. Trump’s claim is that the commercial is slanderous, and try as we might we can’t quite surmise his argument why. The closest we ever got to an argument before the highest court in the land was running briefs between offices during a delightful teenaged summer as Supreme Court messengers, but even we know that the truth is always an absolute defense against a slander charge, and we spent enough time in the newspaper business to know that the thank-God-for-it Sullivan decision sets an extraordinarily high standard of proof for slander against any public figure, which allows us even from our humble internet porch to poke unremitting fun at the likes of the thin-and-orange-skinned and ridiculously coiffed Donald J. Trump, so we expect that the more knowledgeable-about-these-things Cruz will quickly prevail in the courts.

Cruz also seem undaunted by Trump’s threat to challenge his eligibility to serve as President of the United States unless some groveling apology for all disagreements was forthcoming. Although Cruz was admittedly born in Canada, as well as he can recall, and although his father was a naturalized citizen who had fled a dictatorship in Cuba, his mother was a natural born citizen who had lived the requisite number of years in the country, and that’s good enough for the Illinois election board, and we expect that most Americans will also be satisfied. We note that Trump hasn’t yet filed suit, whatever standing he might have, or whatever lawyers he might hire to find some, and further note that he’s willing to let this matter of constitutional law drop if he gets an honor-satisfying apology.

There’s also the problem that Trump would be deposed on video after filing suit, and that Cruz has indicated interest in doing the honors himself, and that it wouldn’t go according to World Wrestling Entertainment rules.

Perhaps this will be prove another one of those brilliant maneuvers that Trump has made on his way to front-runner status. Trump does have considerable legal experience of his own, after all, after two divorces and one post-divorce lawsuit regarding a decree that the party of the second part never say anything bad about him, as well as at least 169 federal lawsuits that he brought against others or were brought against him, including one suit against two fellows named Trump for doing business in their family name, which alleged that Trump’s Trump trumped all other Trumps’ Trump, even though the defendants’ family had been using the name longer than Trump’s family, and there was the successful lawsuit brought by the Justice Department for anti-trust violations, and the ongoing lawsuits by the New York State Attorney General and a lot of disgruntled students over the scam Trump University, as well as all the nuisance suits that billionaires attract, so maybe he knows what he’s doing. If  so, we’ll be intrigued how it plays out. Trump can make good on his threat to have an opponent’s political advertisement banned by the government, and it will cost Cruz some campaign funds to deal with it and fringe media that openly support Trump will be gleeful about, but the case will be quickly laughed out of court and pilloried in the press and laughed at on all the late night comedy shows, and for one brief news-and-joke cycle Cruz won’t be the butt of the jokes. Trump’s “birther” bit has about as much chance of knocking Cruz out of the race as it did of knocking Barack Obama out of the presidency, and we notice that he hasn’t filed that suit yet.

Trump could back off his threats, with some blustery explanation about how he won again, because he always wins, and so he couldn’t have lost, and perhaps that will satisfy his fans. We’ve witnessed these sorts of confrontations between tough guys before, though, and we’ve never seen anyone pick a fight and back off a winner.

— Bud Norman

As the Primaries Turn

The latest episodes in the competing mini-series about the election of the next president have lately taken some interesting twists. Over in the Democrats’ show there is suddenly speculation whether the front-runner will soon be indicted on federal charges of endangering the national security, while on the Republican channel the front-runner is openly speculating if his most troublesome rival is legally eligible to be in the running. Both plot twists might yet prove red herrings, but at least they provide an amusing distraction from all that boring talk of stock market meltdowns and North Korean bomb tests and the usual unpleasantness in the Middle East.

There has long been a tantalizing possibility that former First Lady and Senator and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton might be in legal jeopardy for using a personal and unsecured e-mail account to conduct her official State Department business, and to many it seemed all the more tantalizingly possible after former United States Attorney and current cable news pundit Joseph DiGenova went on a popular conservative talk radio show and confidently predicted that the combined outrage of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the government’s broader intelligence community would force Attorney General Loretta Lynch to bring charges. DiGenova’s predictions have often proved prescient, he’s known for having reliable sources in the FBI and the intelligence community, and Clinton’s e-mails sure do look like a clear violation of the law, and her claims that there were no classified documents on the “home-brew” server she kept in a shady company’s bathroom have already been revealed as blatant lies, so it’s at least plausible. The counter arguments from the more skeptical pundits that President Barack Obama’s Attorney General is going to bring charges against the Democratic party’s presumptive presidential nominee no matter what evidence some disgruntled executive branch employees might muster are also plausible, though, so at this point we offer no predictions.

Some slight surviving shred of faith in the American government allows us to hold out hope that FBI Director James Comey will live up to his ruggedly independent reputation and his boast to Congress that he “doesn’t give a rip about politics” in the investigation, and we’re by now cynical enough to wish that Obama’s pettiness and self-centeredness will allow him to allow his Attorney General to play some Chicago style politics with his erstwhile rival, but neither lead to any conclusions. We will venture that anything short of an indictment won’t alter the Democratic presidential nomination race, where Clinton’s most troublesome rival has already declared that he’s “sick and tired of hearing about her damned e-mails,” but we would like to think that a full revolt by the FBI and the intelligence making clear how very political a non-indictment is would have some effect on a general election.

The general election will co-star a Republican, though, and at this point it seems likely that he or she will have her or his own problems to deal with. Still ahead in all the national polls is billionaire real estate mogul and reality show star Donald Trump, but he’s lately feeling enough heat from Texas Sen. Ted Cruz that he’s unleashing his famously scathing criticisms on the rival. He’s even suggested that Cruz, born to an American-born mother and Cuban-born but naturalized-American father, might not be eligible for the presidency because Cruz was born in Canada during his parent’s brief career-related stay there. Such birthplace chatter is as old as the presidency of perhaps-Canadian-born Chester A. Arthur, and has persisted through the presidential campaigns of Mexican-born George Romney and Arizona Territory-born Barry Goldwater and Panama Canal Zone-born John McCain right up to the current president, who Trump had previously and unconvincingly claimed was born in Kenya, but it hasn’t yet kept anyone from winning the presidency. Cruz cheekily responded to the speculation, which didn’t quite rise to the level of an outright accusation, with a “tweeted” clip of that infamous “Happy Days” episode where Fonzie jumped over a shark, a sly pop cultural reference that should suffice to put the matter to rest.

We note that Trump has also questioned Cruz on theological grounds, telling an audience of Iowa Republicans in advance of that state’s Christian-dominated primary that “you’ve got to remember, in all fairness, to the best of my knowledge, not too many evangelicals come out of Cuba, okay?” Whether a thrice-married casino magnate can successfully persuade evangelical Iowans that he’s more their type than a once-married Baptist with a perfect pro-life voting record and no ties to the gambling industry and the same anti-communist heritage as beloved sit-com character Ricky Ricardo remains to be seen, but we do have our suspicions how that might turn out. Trump has also proposed a 45 percent tariff on all Chinese goods, which would raise the price of an average shopping trip to Wal-Mart by approximately 45 percent and start a global trade war with little prospects of victory, but that also seems a desperate gambit.

The bomb-throwing and government-shutdown-threatening Cruz is every bit as infuriating to the Republican establishment as Trump, whose rise to the top of the polls has largely been fueled by an understandable anti-establishment sentiment among Republicans, and Cruz is perhaps even more beloved by those bellicose talk radio talkers who have further fueled Trump’s rise, so Trump’s sudden turn against him is not unexpected. We don’t expect it will hurt Cruz in the Republican primaries, but it provides some fodder for a whispering campaign by the Democrats in the general election, even if they aren’t afraid to say it more loudly for fear of reviving the old rumors about Obama’s Kenyan birth or a sense that Democrats just don’t like “the other,” and we’ll nervously watch how it plays out.

If the presidential race turns out to be a match between a convicted felon and a constitutionally-ineligible foreigner, we’ll be rooting for the constitutionally-ineligible foreigner.

— Bud Norman

What the Other 80 Percent Thinks

As much as we prefer the conversation of our fellow right-wing bastards, we habitually seek out the political opinions of a wide variety of people. It’s an odious chore, entailing dreary hours of hearing the most outlandish nonsense from the most uninformed folks, but it helps avoid the kind of cocooned thinking that afflicts our Democrat friends.

They have a different set of priorities, these Democrats. Not just different from us right-wing bastards, who tend to grouse about individual liberty and the national debt and the deteriorating international scene and other things the Democrats never seem the least bit concerned about, but different from those blissfully apolitical people we usually encounter in our daily lives. Most of the regular folk we run into are worried about Obamacare and getting by, more or less in that order, while the local lefties seem mostly worked up about the Koch brothers and efforts to limit voting in American elections to American citizens.

Given all that’s going on in the world these days this things strike us as rather piddling concerns, but the Democrats are clearly convinced that they will make everyone forget about paying for over-priced Obamacare while trying to find a job. Every time they get together to talk about everyone agrees that these are the greatest threats facing the nation, it seems, and except for our occasional intrusions into their conversation they don’t know anyone who isn’t going to vote accordingly. Should they ever bother to strike up a conversation with the lady in front of them in the Dillon’s check-out aisle or the guy at the next barstool in any workingman’s tavern, however, they’d probably be surprised by the perplexed looks these topics provoke.

Perhaps Wichita is an outlier, as Koch Industries is an essential local business that contributes generously to local causes ranging from the Sedgwick County Zoo to that excellent exhibit of buffalo paintings currently on exhibit at the Wichita Art Museum, and our duly-elected Secretary of State is one of the nation’s most stalwart advocates of electoral integrity, but we have reason to suspect that the nation at large has more pressing worries. We have a brother in Colorado who prefers skiing to politics, which strikes us as quite sensible, and he unabashedly admits that he’s never heard of the Koch brothers, while even our most left-leaning bartenders say they’ve checked enough drivers’ licenses that they can’t see why it shouldn’t be required voting, so that seems a representative sampling. The pollsters survey an ever wider group, and they confirm our suspicions.

Sen. Harry Reid has recently taken to bashing the Koch brothers as way to maintain his increasingly tenuous grasp on the Senate Majority Leader post, but the polls show that most Americans dislike him more than both Koch brothers combined. Offered a choice between the Koch brothers’ conspiracy to keep the government out of everyone’s business and Reid’s conspiracy to run everything, we would expect the public to make the same choice. Even here in Kansas the Democrats are likely to run a candidate against Secretary of State Kobach on a platform of making it easier for illegal immigrants to vote, but the latest poll shows that a whopping 78 percent of the country disagrees and we’re sure that the margin is evening whoppinger here.

The Republicans might well find a way to blow the mid-term elections, as they’re very adept at that, but the Democrats will need to start striking up some conversations with people outside their circles for that happen.

— Bud Norman