Hot Off The Trail: The Senate is slipping away from the Democrats and you'll never guess why!

By Political Editor David Bloviator with reports from Texas Correspondent Jacy Farrow, Florida Correspondent Jenny Herk, and Montana Correspondent Chet Huntley

While Democrats are focused on the Presidential race, perhaps because the Republican candidate is a dangerous degenerate Russian-owned disloyal demented criminal, there's almost equally alarming news coming out of the various Senate races.

Democrats face the prospect of losing control of the Senate.  Should this happen, even if Harris wins, we can expect total and adamant Republican opposition to everything she tries to accomplish, including legislation, judicial appointments, and even normal government operations like passing a budget, raising the debt ceiling, and confirming Executive officers.

Montana: where men are men and sheep are...

We know this will happen because it has been the Republican playbook since 1992, when Bill Clinton had the effrontery to win a Presidential election, after Republicans had held the job for 20 of the previous 24 years.  This led Republicans to view any Democratic President as a dangerous usurper who had to be thwarted at all costs.

This behavior, however bad for democracy, had three beneficial effects for Republicans: (1) it prevented any forward progress in America, (2) it cemented reactionary Republican control over a bent Supreme Court, and (3) because it stopped government from solving problems, it allowed Republicans to argue that Democrats (and government itself) couldn't get anything done.

Today there are 51 nominally Democratic votes in the Senate, although this includes two useless clowns: Krysten Sinema in Arizona and Maserati Joe Manchin in West Virginia.  The good news is that their constituents lost interest in their pained-centrist performances and send them packing.

The bad news: Manchin's Senate seat is likely to be filled by a corrupt hypocritical self-proclaimed Republican “billionaire” Jim Justice, who promises to do nothing that would help hard-pressed West Virginia white voters, and has been rewarded with their staunch support.

That takes Democrats down to 50.  They are defending Democratic seats in swing or red states, including Montana, Ohio, Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Nevada.

Montana, a heavily white Republican gun-toting Marlboro-smoking state, makes Democrats especially nervous:

The former senators also consider the political emphasis on divisive social issues — exacerbated by the explosion of social media and the success of Republicans at exploiting the culture wars — as a major driver of the turn toward the G.O.P.

Divisive social issues? What's covered by that euphemism?

OK girls, line up for genitalia check

Let's look at the ads the Republicans are running in Montana. One accuses Sen. Tester of supposedly discriminating against white farmers because he voted for remedial aid to Black farmers harmed by a century of racist allocation of government aid to farmers.   Despite this terrible discrimination, the white farmers of Montana pocketed a mere a $450,000,000 in government subsidies last year.  (Um, why do they get a f***in' dime of taxpayer money?)

Another huge issue confronting the beleaguered sheep-f**kers of Montana: the dreaded specter of, well, let The New York Times explain it:

In Ohio since the start of September, every ad about Senator Sherrod Brown from the leading Senate Republican super PAC has touched on transgender topics, such as accusing him of “allowing transgender biological males in girls’ sports.” Mr. Brown is one of the nation’s most vulnerable Democratic incumbents.

In Montana, five ads have deployed similar lines about transgender women in sports and bathrooms as Republicans press the case that Senator Jon Tester, another endangered Democrat up for re-election, is too liberal for the heavily Republican state. 

Yep, in a country that lost 1,100,000 lives thanks to the Tangerine-Faced Felon's pandemic lies, that has been devastated by hurricanes fueled by global warming, and where women bleed out in hospital parking lots because doctors are terrified by abortion bans, the greatest actual threat is – a trans woman who wants to play field hockey.

The story is the same in Texas, where Cancun Ted Cruz, facing a real challenge this year after doing exactly zilch for Texas over the past 12 years, unless you consider trying to overturn the 2020 election a win for Longhorns:

Nobel laureates poisoning our blood

For weeks now, Texans watching television, including during prime time football games, have seen ads from the re-election campaign of Senator Ted Cruz declaring: “Boys in girls sports, that’s not right.”

The Cruz campaign, like others supporting Republican candidates across the nation, has been pouring resources into attack ads that focus on transgender participation in youth sports.  

It's remarkable that the panic over trans kids playing sports doesn't come from the athletes themselves, who don't seem to have a problem.  It comes from hideous white men trying to milk ignorance and bigotry.  

But Republican attack ads aren't just focusing on vital issues like unearned white resentment and trans girls who want to play soccer. 

There's also the invasion of the dog eaters.

Republicans have dropped $25,000,000 into ads in Ohio falsely accusing incumbent Democrat Sherrod Brown of voting to permit undocumented immigrants to obtain government benefits.  There's no truth to it, according to well-known radical left mouthpiece Channel 13 Action News in Toledo.

In sum, with democracy hanging by a thread, Republicans are seeking control of the Senate by pandering to white voters' worst instincts: racism, bigotry and xenophobia.

The polling evidence suggests the appeals are effective: Tester is under water and many of the other embattled Democrats like Brown are barely holding their own.

Further, the media's endless fascination with the horse race obscures what the fans in the grandstand are cheering for: white supremacy, trans phobia, and hatred of immigrants vital to our nation's economic growth. Whitewashing hatred and bigotry as “culture wars” or “social issues” isn't helping either.

Perhaps our reporters and pundits should spend less time wondering who's ahead in Mineral County, Nevada and more time considering the question: what kind of a country would hand over control of the Senate on the basis of angry lies appealing to the electorate's bigotry?

The answer is: yours.

Jack Smith's brief explains why this is not a normal election

By Legal Correspondent Saori Shiroseki with
Meta-Content Generator A.J. Liebling

According to today's New York Times, the Presidential election is a thrilling down-to-the-wire horse race between Whirlaway and Man O' War:

 

According to Special Counsel Jack Smith's pre-trial brief filed in the District Court in Washington, it's something else.  It's a decision on whether to re-install a violent insurrectionist as President and allow him to complete his work of destroying constitutional democracy in the United States.

As Emily Litella would say, “Oh. That's different, then.”

To review the bidding, Smith filed his brief to explain to Judge Chutkan why, despite the best efforts of the bent Republican Supreme Court to exonerate the Tangerine-Faced Felon in the absence of a legal mandate to do so, the conduct charged in the indictment does not constitute immune official acts of a President, whatever that may mean.

Looks official to me: John Roberts '76

First Smith outlines the aspects of the Tangerine-Faced Felon's criminal conduct that cannot be considered to be the official acts of the President (We'll get to other aspects later).  After his frivolous lawsuits challenging election results in seven different states were all laughed out of court, Smith Br. at 14, the TFF and his co-conspirator mouthpieces, including the pathetic Rudy Giuliani and the laughable John Eastman, concocted two new schemes.

The first was to bully state officials into changing the results and not appointing electors who represented the victor (Joe Biden, in case you've forgotten).  Smith Br. at 16ff.  As part of this scheme lunatics like Sydney Powell repeatedly libeled voting machine companies by claiming their machines were defective or hacked.  These are the lies that eventually cost Rupert Murdoch $787 million.  

When that failed, the TFF crime gang tried to appoint fake electors in seven different states, send the resulting fake certifications to the Congress, Smith Br. at 49ff, where shameless integrity-free allies like the pride of Harvard Law School, Cancun Ted Cruz, would object to the certifications and claim falsely there was a controversy requiring further delay.

The crime depended on browbeating an apparently spineless Mike Pence into refusing to accept the state's electoral certifications, which was something he had no power to do.   The TFF must have been shocked when, after years of cringeworthy toadying to every corrupt evil scheme the TFF hatched, Pence said no.

In desperation, as outlined in Smith's filing, the TFF launched an attack on the Capitol to force Congress to abandon the election certification, Smith Br. at 74ff.  When the TFF was told that an armed mob had forced Pence and his Secret Service detail to retreat into a secure space and their lives were in danger, the TFF responded “So what?” Smith Br. at 142.

But even the 185 page account of the TFF's elected-related accounts had to leave out some of the worst of it.  For example, you won't find evidence that the TFF had attempted to corruptly influence the Justice Department to intervene to prevent counting and certification of the vote, by up to and including removing every senior Justice Department officer except the one co-conspirator ready to do his bidding.  Jan 6. Committee Report at 413.

Although this effort to pervert the course of justice was among the most serious criminal acts by the TFF, Smith could no longer pursue it, because according to the six bent Republican Supreme Court Justices (including three appointed by the very same TFF)  a President who obstructs justice by ordering federal law enforcement to intervene without legal warrant in an election has committed no crime.

Or, as Justice Sotomayor put it in dissent:

When he uses his official powers in any way, under the majority’s reasoning, he now will be insulated from criminal prosecution. Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in ex- change for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune.

Which also explains why the efforts of the TFF and his corrupt enablers at the Defense Department is likewise missing.  Although this led to a remarkable order issue on January 4 preventing the deployment of the DC National Guard to protect the Congress, none of can be charged in an indictment because according to the bent Republican Justices, the President commits no crime when he orders the military to stage or support a coup. 

By the way, here's the infamous Defense Department memo.

 

So Jack Smith has heroically presented the criminal case against the TFF as best he could. Keep in mind however that even if Judge Chutkan finds that the conduct alleged is not in fact immune, her ruling will be reviewed by the Republican Party's judicial arm, the Supreme Court.  Since it is no longer possible to predict the outcome of Supreme Court cases based on their legal merits, what will happen is anyone's guess, or to be more precise, whatever Leonard Leo and Harlan Crow decide they want.

The point is that Jack Smith can't save us and can't save the Republic.  If the TFF wins the election, Smith is out, and possibly facing prosecution himself.  If the TFF loses, but Democrats fail to hold the Senate and take the House, the effective control over the nation will be exercised not by the duly elected political branches but by an unelected Republican oligarchy doing business as the Supreme Court.

It's just another reminder of the stakes we face in this election, or at least in the seven states that will decide it.

But of course to our media, it's just another exciting horse-race.  Better enjoy your mint julep while you can.