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| Trump -- Newsweek |
CNN’s Data Reporter Harry Enten is depressed. The figures he has been examining show prices for essential goods increasing and real wages decreasing, the result of an inflationary dragon scorching the house with its fiery breath.
Just look at this, Enten noted: “From the first year of a
president’s term to now in a term -- look at this! We’ve actually had negative
growth. We have actually decreased the amount of disposable income we’ve had,
2.7% for the Biden administration. Look at that. The average for the president since
JFK, is plus 4.5 percent. And even in the last few months, the last six months,
the growth that we’ve had — just 0.2 percent. The average six months since 1960
[is] 1.1 percent, so we’re even behind on that metric.
“It is kind of depressing.”
CNN, it should be noted, is not part of the Republican Party’s
anti-democracy plot to return former President Donald Trump to office in 2024.
Political readers should know that the station is just the opposite,
consistently anti-Trump and pro-Biden. President Joe Biden’s flagging spirits –
he has plummeted in reliable polls – should have been lifted by a decision
rendered by the Supreme Court of Colorado that, shortly after Enten’s depression,
sanctioned the removal of Trump from the state’s ballot.
The Associated Press, suppressing its joy at the decision,
noted dryly, “The Colorado Supreme Court on Tuesday, Dec. 19, declared former
President Donald Trump ineligible for the White House under the U.S.
Constitution’s insurrection clause and removed him from the state’s
presidential primary ballot, setting up a likely showdown in the nation’s
highest court to decide whether the front-runner for the GOP nomination can
remain in the race.
The decision from a court whose justices were all appointed
by Democratic governors (emphasis mine) marks the first time in history
that Section 3 of the 14th Amendment has been used to disqualify a presidential
candidate.”
Section 3 of the post-Civil War 14th amendment
reads in full: “No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector
of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under
the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as
a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of
any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to
support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in
insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the
enemies thereof.”
The purpose of the amendment was to deny public office to
public officials in the post-Civil War period who had engaged in a real
secessionist insurrection against the national government of the United States.
Former President Donald Trump had not caused either of the
two states he called home, New York or Florida, to succeed from the Union and, whatever
else Trump may be, he is no Jefferson Davis or General Robert E. Lee.
While it is true that Trump, backed by a slew of lawyers and
political confederates, contested the results of the 2020 national election, he
left office peacefully following the interrupted vote, after which, it has not
been sufficiently noted in news reports, national Democrats unaccountably
sought to abolish the Electoral College that had decided a close election in
their favor. No prominent Democrats were found screaming from the rooftops that
other prominent Democrats, by ridding the nation of its electoral college, were
engaging in political insurrection. Trump had, it is true, contested the
electoral count, but he had not gone so far as to call for its abolition.
We do not know at this point whether the decision of the
Colorado Supreme Court has further depressed CNN’s Data Reporter Harry Enten –
not likely. Possibly the court’s misapplication
of the U.S. Constitution’s 14 amendment in its effort to rid politically
pristine Colorado of a noxious Republican presidential contender has lifted Enten
from his slough of despond.
In the meantime, the “swamp” Trump threatened to drain in
his first term in office has since swamped him with challenging judicial
affronts. Toting up all the judicial offences Trump is facing, many of them
highly unorthodox, Trump will, if Democrat politicians have their way, emerge
from the judicial wrack both poor and a jailbird. In addition, some state supreme
courts, Colorado but not Michigan, have taken measures to
remove Trump from the 2024 presidential elections. Coincidentally, the cry that
Trump is a threat to the democracy of the United States appears to be lost on
Democrats who fail to understand the notion of irony.
So far, Biden, also deeply immersed in multiple corruption
investigations, has attempted to explain his difficulties, both personal and
political, by explaining them away, but even ardent pro-Biden neo-progressives
appear to be jumping ship. Living in his own outworn political cocoon, Biden
truly believes that he may, in words attributed to Lincoln, “fool all the
people some of the time and some of the people all the time…” Lincoln, of
course, added “but you cannot fool all the people all the time.”
It is the lofty ambition of ambitious politicians to prove
Lincoln wrong on this last point.
Time will tell whether they are successful.
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