2020 Elections - Trump FIRED

[ggait]

Senate moved pretty fast to confirm acb.

[Typical Lax Dad]

Nine days police in DC arrested more people than they did during the Capitol siege

[holmes435]

Senate moved pretty fast to confirm acb.

8 days, breaking Mitch McConnell's word. Who knew turtles were faster than hares.

[old salt]

Nine days police in DC arrested more people than they did during the Capitol siege

That's what can be done when there's advance planning & enough police so that they're not fighting for their life, retreating, & giving up the territory they are supposed to protect. They have to have sufficient numbers to make arrests then transport & hold the suspects.

[old salt]

The fact that she got out after 14 years might be a tell. At 15 years, if promoted, she should have qualified for a reduced pension, & at 20 years for a 50% of base pay pension. Maybe she failed to promote or was asked to leave for other reasons.

Yup, 14 and out is a very odd move, doesn't make much sense.

I've seen reports of her total time in service varying from 11 to 14 years. The first 4 on active duty, then 2 yrs AF reserve, then her last 6 yrs in the DC ANG when she lived in SoMd then Annapolis & worked at Calvert Cliffs nuc plant until 2018 or '19. She then appeared to go (further) off the rails, hooked up with a married guy (now her husband) in SoMd, where she had an alleged road rage ramming incident with his ex. They moved to SD & bought a pool cleaning company. She left an interesting trail on social media (lots of hottie selfies) & in legal filings. In all that service time, she only advanced to Senior Airman (0-4). She served as a USAF security guard with some law enforcement training. Described by a fellow airman friend as a "boisterous firecracker". I bet her deployments were interesting. You could see this coming.

https://www.baltimoresun.com/maryland/b ... story.html
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/articl ... ds-ex.html
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/articl ... pitol.html
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/articl ... sheet.html

Figured that "high level" security was BS (pretty sure you mean E4).
Guess the patriot got what she wanted, died a real hero (or phukin
idiot, depending on how you look at it).

Good catch DMac = E4. I bet she was busted to that at NJP.

Yep. She was demoted at least once. Amazing what she got away with. (or maybe not so amazing, given her selfies)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va ... ump-qanon/
After a long but undistinguished military career and years of personal travails, Babbitt — a 35-year-old Air Force veteran from Southern California ... believed she had found a cause that gave her life purpose. Within hours, that cause would bring her life to a violent end.

Babbitt’s journey — illuminated through her extensive social media activity, court and military records, and interviews with some who knew her — was one of paranoid devotion and enthusiasm that only increased as Trump’s fortunes waned.

Long before she embraced those ideas, Babbitt was on a rocky path. She was loyal but rebellious, devoted to her country but often unable to get along with those who shared it. A believer in American pluck and free enterprise, she struggled in her attempts to run a small pool-service company outside San Diego.

She served more than a decade in the armed forces but chafed under the military hierarchy. Six of those years were spent in an Air National Guard unit whose mandate is to defend the Washington region and respond to civil unrest. Its nickname: the Capital Guardians.

‘Absolutely unafraid’
She was fed up with her executive officer. It was 2014, and Babbitt — along with much of her Air National Guard unit, then stationed at the Al Dhafra Air Base in the United Arab Emirates — detested him, according to a former staff sergeant in the unit who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he fears backlash online.

But despite her reputation for being outspoken, she kept herself in check. Then one day, the executive officer slipped new papers into a briefing binder shortly before quizzing service members on its contents.

Babbitt asked for permission to speak freely, the former staff sergeant said, and the executive officer granted it — “which was a huge mistake for that captain.”

For the next several minutes, she “let him have it,” the former staff sergeant said. He and other members of the unit watched, riveted, as Babbitt shouted and gesticulated, warning that the officer — who far outranked her — was sapping morale. Another former airman who served with Babbitt said he also witnessed the interaction.

“She was like a dog with a bone,” the former staff sergeant said. “She could never let go of whatever her attention was on, and she was absolutely unafraid of anything.”

Babbitt, who grew up in a small town in the foothills of Southern California’s Cuyamaca Mountains, left similarly strong impressions on others who crossed her path. She was a fast talker, whipping through sentences “like a chinchilla that had just done a line of cocaine,” the staff sergeant said. She escaped punishment for confronting the officer in 2014, according to the airmen who served with her, but it was not the only time that her personality put her at odds with the culture and rules of the military.

She deployed at least seven times, an Air Force journalist wrote in 2014, and relished the opportunity to mentor newer airmen. But discipline issues and insubordination stunted her career, said two former airmen who served with her. She was demoted at least once, they said.

Babbitt left the military in 2016 as a senior airman — a relatively low rank for someone who spent more than a decade in uniform.

The same year, Babbitt spotted her husband Aaron Babbitt’s ex, Celeste Norris, pulling out of a shopping center parking lot in southern Maryland, according to a court petition for a protective order Norris later filed. Babbitt spun her white SUV in a U-turn and began chasing Norris, according to the petition, eventually rear-ending the other woman’s car three times and forcing her to stop.

Babbitt then exited her own car “screaming at me and verbally threatening me,” wrote Norris. Norris filed a second protective order petition in early 2017, saying Babbitt had followed her home from work and called her “all hours of day and night.”

Some who served with Babbitt kept in touch with her, remembering how fiercely she defended people she cared for. At one point in her life, that meant other service members.

Babbitt would eventually share more than 8,600 tweets, offering a vivid account of her descent into a world of conspiracy theories and delusion...

On July 1, 2019, a judge issued a $71,000 judgment against her pool business because she had apparently failed to repay a loan.

It is unclear exactly how and when Babbitt entered the Capitol. She undoubtedly understood law enforcement could use deadly force in response to the breach. Airmen in the role Babbitt once occupied in the D.C. Air National Guard’s 113th Air Wing receive riot-control training, and her former unit was mobilized to protect the Capitol on Wednesday.

[Kismet]

An alternative:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions ... etter-way/

"House Democrats’ plans to rush through an impeachment of President Trump won’t work, for a simple reason: The Constitution envisions impeachment only as a tool for proceeding against a president while he remains in office. Impeachment is meant to protect the country, not punish the offender. But that needn’t be the end of efforts to prevent Trump from again holding federal office. There is another, little-known constitutional provision that can achieve precisely that without distorting the Constitution’s meaning.

Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, passed in the aftermath of the Civil War, bars Trump from holding another federal office if he is found to have “engaged in insurrection or rebellion against” the Constitution of the United States.

The finding could be accomplished by a simple majority vote of both houses, in contrast to the requirement in impeachment proceedings that the Senate vote to convict by a two-thirds majority. Congress would simply need to declare that Trump engaged in an act of “insurrection or rebellion” by encouraging the attack on the Capitol. Under the 14th Amendment, Trump could run for the White House again only if he were able to persuade a future Congress to, “by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.”

Section 3 was enacted to bar any “civil or military” officer who had served the United States before the Civil War from regaining a position of authority if he betrayed his country by supporting the Confederacy. During the height of Reconstruction, a number of former Confederates were, in fact, barred from holding office. It was only in 1872 that Congress once again allowed these men to serve the United States by passing an Amnesty Act with the requisite two-thirds majorities.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) seems to believe that the only way to disqualify Trump from running for a second term is to gain House support for a second impeachment while he is still in office, even though the Senate trial can’t begin until Jan. 20 or 21. Since impeachment is designed to remove officials from office, the constitutionality of such a trial is problematic. But even if it were legitimate, the trial would come with heavy costs to the country and to the incoming Biden administration.

First, the trial could well lead to Trump’s acquittal if most Republican senators decide that a vote to convict would damage their reelection chances by alienating their right-wing base. What message would that send? Second, having the Senate’s time consumed in holding a trial would delay President-elect Joe Biden’s efforts to secure confirmation of his Cabinet and other nominees and divert attention from other initiatives of the new administration. Third, it would further divide the country at precisely the time Biden is seeking to bring America together.

Of course, this being a litigious country, Trump could appeal to the courts to declare that Congress’s determination that he had engaged in an “insurrection or rebellion” was not justified by the facts. But this would be risky, since Trump would be required to testify under oath in response to detailed questioning by the government’s lawyers about his precise conduct during the attack.

Moreover, if the judiciary finally upheld the congressional determination, its judgment would undermine claims by the extreme right that Trump is a victim of a partisan vendetta.

Even more fundamentally, the law is the law. Not only is it in the political interest of the protagonists to heed the express instructions of the 14th Amendment; it is even more important to demonstrate to all Americans that their representatives in Washington take the Constitution seriously.

Now is the time to take a step back, call a halt to the House’s rush toward a last-minute impeachment — and deploy the constitutional means to the important end of making sure Trump is out of office for good."

It does not appear to be as much of a slam dunk - If it were that easy why wouldn't they pursue it as you suggest?

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/artic ... pitol-riot

"Donald Trump might already be ineligible to serve as president of the United States in the future. That’s true even without an impeachment process that ends with a formal ban from future public office.

The relevant constitutional provision is Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, enacted in the aftermath of the Civil War and mentioned in the article of impeachment proposed before the House today. The provision bars a person from holding any office “under the United States” if the person has sworn an oath of allegiance to the Constitution and then “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” against the government or “given aid to the enemies” of the U.S.

Does this provision to apply to Trump? The first part certainly does: Trump took an oath to uphold the Constitution when he became president.

The trickier question is the second part: Has Trump’s conduct amounted to insurrection? You can be sure that, if Trump runs for office in the future, someone will go to court charging that he is ineligible to become president because of his conduct leading up to, on and following Jan. 6, 2021. Because this is a constitutional question, the courts will have to adjudicate it.

The first question is whether the attack on the Capitol was an insurrection against the government of the United States. In vernacular terms, it certainly was. Republicans like Mitt Romney and Mitch McConnell called it an insurrection right off the bat. The article of impeachment speaks of insurrection. But what we need is the legal definition under the Constitution, not the usage of politicians in the heat of the moment.

The Constitution doesn’t define insurrection. Neither does the Insurrection Act, the federal statute that you might expect to include a definition. Most dictionary definitions of insurrection call it a violent uprising against the government. Not all of the Jan. 6 participants were violent, of course. But some were.

As for the uprising part, again, not all the rioters wanted to bring down the government. But at least some clearly intended to interfere temporarily with the congressional process for declaring Joe Biden to be president. At least some wanted to use force to compel Congress to declare Trump, not Biden, the president-elect. That act would have subverted the democratic process. In some sense, at least, it would have amounted to overturning the U.S. government by force.

The upshot is that, at least with regard to the mob itself, it seems possible that a court could conclude that an insurrection was happening on Jan. 6. It isn’t a slam-dunk case; the authors of the 14th Amendment almost certainly had in mind an insurrection much more like the Civil War. But a court would certainly have enough reason to find that Jan. 6 involved an insurrection for it to be worthwhile for us to go on to the next question.

That question is, assuming the march on the Capitol was an insurrection: Did Trump himself engage in insurrection when he spoke to the crowd and encouraged or incited the march? If a court says yes, Trump isn’t eligible to be president again.

It’s worth noticing that the 14th Amendment does not use the word “sedition,” which is often employed to describe verbal acts that organize or plan an insurrection. That absence could be used by Trump or his lawyers to argue that even if the march on the Capitol was an insurrection, and even if Trump verbally helped bring it about, he was not himself “engaged” in insurrection for purposes of the 14th Amendment ban on holding office.

The counterargument would be that insurrection necessarily requires a level of verbal encouragement and planning — and that inciting a crowd to engage in insurrection is every bit as insurrectionary as rebelling oneself. If this is right, then the question becomes whether Trump actually incited insurrection.

Answering this question in a constitutional way will not be simple. If this were a criminal prosecution, the First Amendment would apply, and the relevant test would be the one drawn from the landmark 1969 case Brandenburg v. Ohio. The case says that the government can’t punish speech advocating force unless the speech is “directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to produce such action.”

Trump’s Jan. 6 speech is close to the line. On the one hand, circumstances could be read to interpret his words as encouraging the crowd to enter the Capitol forcefully, which was a crime. On the other hand, Trump chose his words very carefully. His direct speech did not call for criminal action in any explicit way. And it would be difficult to prove that he intended the crowd to breach the Capitol. Thus it’s possible that Trump’s words might not meet the Brandenburg standard, if it requires explicit words or proof of intent — and it may well require both.

Ah, but Section 3 of the 14th Amendment is not a criminal sanction! And because the provision is in the Constitution, it arguably is not limited by the First Amendment. So a court could still conclude that Trump’s words counted as insurrection for the purposes of the 14th Amendment even if they would not have qualified as incitement under the Brandenburg standard. That means Trump could be barred from holding office for an act that would not get him thrown in jail.

In practice, it’s unlikely that a court would be prepared to disqualify a former president from running for office again. But it’s a close issue — and one the Supreme Court may have to take up if Trump announces a 2024 candidacy."

[seacoaster]

Yes, Trump's presidency has been an interesting little civics lesson. This 14th Amendment argument is finding its way to the surface:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/12/opin ... e=Homepage

"Congress should use its constitutional power to prohibit instigators and perpetrators of last week’s violent siege of the Capitol, including President Trump, from holding public office ever again.

On Monday, House leaders introduced an article of impeachment against the president for “inciting violence against the government of the United States,” an obligatory action, given the gravity of the president’s transgression. But this is not the only route for ensuring accountability. The Constitution has another provision that is tailor-made for the unthinkable, traitorous events of Jan. 6 that goes beyond what impeachment can accomplish.

Emerging from the wreckage of the Civil War, Congress was deeply concerned that former leaders of the Confederacy would take over state and federal offices to once again subvert the constitutional order. To prevent that from happening, Congress passed the 14th Amendment, which in Section 3 bars public officials and certain others who have “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” against the Constitution from serving in public office. Although little known today, Section 3 was used in the post-Civil War era to disqualify former rebels from taking office. And, in the wake of perhaps the boldest domestic attack on our nation’s democracy since the Civil War, Section 3 can once again serve as a critical tool to protect our constitutional order.

The 14th Amendment gives Congress the power to enforce Section 3 through legislation. So Congress can immediately pass a law declaring that any person who has ever sworn to defend the Constitution — from Mr. Trump to others — and who incited, directed, or participated in the Jan. 6 assault “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” and is therefore constitutionally disqualified from holding office in the future.

Congress can also decide how this legislation will be enforced by election officials and the courts, based on all the facts as they come out. The Constitution prohibits Congress from enacting so-called bills of attainder, which single out individuals for guilt. But, in addition to the legislation we suggest, Congress could also pass nonbinding sense-of-Congress resolutions that specify whom they intend to disqualify. This would provide a road map for election officials and judges, should any people named in those resolutions seek to run for or hold public office. And Congress can do this by a simple majority — far less of a hurdle than the two-thirds majority in the Senate that removing the president requires.

We believe legislators of conscience should brandish this option not as a substitute for impeachment but as a complement to it. Senators shouldn’t be allowed to escape or indefinitely delay a vote on Mr. Trump’s conduct simply by running out the clock on his term. (The Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, has suggested no trial will happen before the inauguration.) Republicans should be on notice that whether or not they face a vote on conviction and removal of Mr. Trump, they will at the very least be compelled to vote by a Democratic-controlled Congress on barring Mr. Trump from ever holding public office again.

This option also has power that the impeachment process lacks. As we learn more in the coming months about who is culpable for the siege, the ranks of those disqualified from office will likely swell. The legislation we envision would allow future courts and decision makers to apply the law after the investigations are complete. Eventually, we should have a 9/11 Commission-style report on what led to these events; the facts marshaled there can be deployed under the legislation we propose.

We don’t suggest this course of action lightly. It would not have applied to a peaceful protest on the Capitol grounds — even one made to make lawmakers feel uncomfortable as they attended to their ministerial duties. It still would not have applied if the Jan. 6 protests had culminated only in street violence, as several other pro-Trump gatherings in recent months did. The First Amendment protects unruly dissent.

But this was a unique event in American history: an obstruction by force of a constitutional process, at the very seat of our government. Parading the Confederate battle flag through the halls of Congress, the insurrectionists interrupted the certification of the election results for several hours and cemented this presidential transition as one marked by deadly violence. Washington’s mayor and congressional leaders concluded that it was necessary to call in the National Guard to quell the insurrection. Had a single additional layer of security failed, many elected officials, including the vice president and the speaker of the House — both of whom are constitutional officers — might have been killed. All to the end of preventing the winner of the 2020 election from taking power.

Make no mistake: This was an insurrection. The 14th Amendment disqualifies its instigators from public office, whether the president is convicted in a Senate trial or not."

Deepak Gupta is the founder of the appellate litigation firm Gupta Wessler in Washington and a lecturer at Harvard Law School. Brian Beutler is the editor in chief of Crooked Media, which covers politics and culture. He previously was an editor at The New Republic.

[Typical Lax Dad]

Laurel County Sheriff John Root and Jailer Jamie Mosely held a “burning party” of UK basketball apparel in protest. Root said on a Facebook post that UK may have won the game but lost respect. He criticized coach John Calipari, who joined the team in kneeling, for allowing the event.

[Typical Lax Dad]

https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/12/investin ... index.html

Deutsche bailing on Trump

[Typical Lax Dad]

https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/12/politics ... index.html

This is what it is really about.

[MDlaxfan76]

An alternative:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions ... etter-way/

Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, passed in the aftermath of the Civil War, bars Trump from holding another federal office if he is found to have “engaged in insurrection or rebellion against” the Constitution of the United States.

The finding could be accomplished by a simple majority vote of both houses, in contrast to the requirement in impeachment proceedings that the Senate vote to convict by a two-thirds majority. Congress would simply need to declare that Trump engaged in an act of “insurrection or rebellion” by encouraging the attack on the Capitol. Under the 14th Amendment, Trump could run for the White House again only if he were able to persuade a future Congress to, “by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.”

That sounds great. Do it in the House now. I bet you could get 51 Senate votes on Jan 19, sending Trump to St Helena.

That should not preclude prosecution after out of office.

Does it have to be an 'alternative' or can this be a 'yes and' with impeachment process? Perhaps takes some of the urgency out of the Senate trial for impeachment, which would probably suit both sides of the aisle...do that trial process downstream after a heck of a lot more evidence has been developed and the magnitude of how close we came actually sinks in. Then do it with bipartisan support.

It would be the quickest, surest way to keep Trump from ever holding office again.
Then let Biden decide if & when he wants to go forward with impeachment & a Senate trial.

Biden may have a preference about timing, but he should keep his hands off it as much as he can.

His current position is that impeachment and trial in Senate can be done at the same time as moving his Cabinet through and initial legislative priorities. These guys are geared up and ready to go.

But it might nevertheless be wise to delay the Senate portion some heartbeats while the FBI develops more and more evidence of what went down and who was involved and why. I'd like to see this be a strong bi-partisan process when it gets done, send a very, very strong message. McConnell's capable of delivering that now, but I'm not thinking he's 100% ready.

Would you forgo the 14th Amendment solution outlined above in hopes of a subsequent Senate conviction later ?

The sooner Trump is prohibited from holding office again, the sooner he heads toward marginalization & less influence.

Why forego?
I'm fine with doing both.
Belt and suspenders, we really don't need to see Trump's big fat a-- anymore.

[MDlaxfan76]

https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/12/politics ... index.html

This is what it is really about.

Yup, voter suppression...this, too, is what Salty wants.
"voter irregularities" BS.

[MDlaxfan76]

Laurel County Sheriff John Root and Jailer Jamie Mosely held a “burning party” of UK basketball apparel in protest. Root said on a Facebook post that UK may have won the game but lost respect. He criticized coach John Calipari, who joined the team in kneeling, for allowing the event.

another snowflake...

[Typical Lax Dad]

https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/12/politics ... index.html

This is what it is really about.

Yup, voter suppression...this, too, is what Salty wants.
"voter irregularities" BS.

It’s always one side that wants to make it harder to register and harder to vote.

[MDlaxfan76]

https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/12/politics ... index.html

This is what it is really about.

Yup, voter suppression...this, too, is what Salty wants.
"voter irregularities" BS.

It’s always one side that wants to make it harder to register and harder to vote.

Historically it was a different side, but yes, always one side...

[Typical Lax Dad]

https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/12/politics ... index.html

This is what it is really about.

Yup, voter suppression...this, too, is what Salty wants.
"voter irregularities" BS.

It’s always one side that wants to make it harder to register and harder to vote.

Historically it was a different side, but yes, always one side...

Yes. Have the people / demographic that are generally impacted changed?

[MDlaxfan76]

https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/12/politics ... index.html

This is what it is really about.

Yup, voter suppression...this, too, is what Salty wants.
"voter irregularities" BS.

It’s always one side that wants to make it harder to register and harder to vote.

Historically it was a different side, but yes, always one side...

Yes. Have the people / demographic that are generally impacted changed?

Nope, same sorts of folks and/or their kin and kind, different brand.

[Typical Lax Dad]

https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/12/politics ... index.html

This is what it is really about.

Yup, voter suppression...this, too, is what Salty wants.
"voter irregularities" BS.

It’s always one side that wants to make it harder to register and harder to vote.

Historically it was a different side, but yes, always one side...

Yes. Have the people / demographic that are generally impacted changed?

Nope, same sorts of folks and/or their kin and kind, different brand.

Yep.

[RedFromMI]

Gerrymandering Created The Vacuum Trump Needed To Inspire Faux Coup. Here’s How Dems Can Fix It
It’s no coincidence that the vast preponderance of those who incited the insurrection by objecting to the counting of electoral votes were politicians who owed their perpetual re-election to gerrymandering.

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/cafe/gerr ... ems-fix-it

Too many safe districts lead to extremism...

[Andersen]

Can anyone send me clips of Republican leaders urging the terrorists to stand down and not mount another attack on our Capitol or Capitols around the country. Anyone? Hmmm...maybe they should do that before using the unity talking points. - Joe Lockhart