Sunday Standard - December 18
Here are the top stories from this week that I think you will want to read.
And after you read my Sunday Standard, please leave me a comment.
Sincerely,
Mike Huckabee
Sit down; I guarantee this Supreme Court story is real
The Supreme Court has agreed to a hearing for a case that could conceivably --- PLEASE consider this the longest of long shots --- overturn the election of 2020, throw out all the legislators who voted to certify the results and leave them ineligible to run for office ever again, even for town dogcatcher.
The case has been added to the docket for, appropriately, January 6, 2023.
There’s essentially no media attention being given to this case; most news outlets find it much too hot to touch. But the heat doesn’t faze us; we keep a pair of oven mitts close by for times like this.
As Joshua Philipp reported in a podcast for EPOCH TV, the case Brunson v. Alma Adams, et. al., alleges that members of Congress who voted against the proposed 10-day audit of the 2020 elections and certifying those results --- with no investigation after being “properly warned” of a credible threat from enemies of the Constitution --- were violating their oath of office to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution from enemies both foreign and domestic.” It says that “this action unilaterally violated the rights of every citizen of the U.S.A. and perhaps the rights of every person living, and all courts of law.”
If SCOTUS ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, the remedy would conceivably involve removing the sitting President and Vice President and all those representatives and empower the Court to authorize the swearing-in of the rightful President and Vice President. Not kidding; that’s the remedy the plaintiffs are asking for.
The Brunson brothers are an interesting group –- literally a band of brothers, as they play in a trumpet band. Here they are, with their summary of the suit, which was reportedly written by just themselves, without legal counsel (!).
https://ralandbrunson.com
Note: Philipp’s report was made before SCOTUS agreed to hear the case, and he said then he would be “very surprised” if they did. So I guess he’s very surprised right now. Actually, I am, too, considering the way the Court refused to look into those very allegations in the weeks after the election, when they were brought by President Trump. (Of course, now we know much more about the lengths to which Trump’s enemies went to interfere with the outcome. Maybe enough Justices are feeling some guilt right now about calling the issue “moot.”)
Philipp also pointed out that this segment of his show, “Crossroads,” would not be allowed on YouTube. (Good news, though: he can now post the link on Twitter!) We’ll include the EPOCH TV link here…
The argument in this case is that by not looking into serious allegations of election fraud, those who voted to confirm the results of the 2020 election broke their oath of office and are ineligible to run for any elected office again. To give you an idea of the scope of the potential fallout, Kamala Harris is in that group, and so is Mike Pence.
This started as two separate lawsuits brought by four brothers in Utah, but only one of them is advancing to the Supreme Court. To get it there, the brothers bypassed the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals, where it was stalled, by saying in a cover letter that this suit was a matter of national security. The Court was apparently so interested in this case that they received a personal call from the Court clerk asking how soon they could get their documents together. The brothers got it all to them in one week.
The suit names President Biden, VP Harris, former VP Pence, and 385 members of Congress, and, no, that is not a typo. Those are all the members who voted against a proposition for them to investigate claims that “enemies of the Constitution rigged the 2020 election.” So, this case is NOT about whether or not election fraud occurred. It’s about whether or not these people violated their oath by failing to investigate credible allegations of election rigging by enemies of the Constitution –- allegations that had been made by over a hundred of their own colleagues.
In their words: “Is this about a rigged election? No, it’s about the members of Congress who voted AGAINST the investigation, thereby thwarting the investigation. Was this a clear violation of their oath? YES.” The suit says this violation is an act of treason and fraud. “A successfully rigged election has the same effect as an act of war: to place into power whom the victor wants, which in this case is Biden, who, if not stopped immediately, will continue to destroy the fundamental freedoms of Brunson and all U.S. Citizens and courts of law.”
“When the allegations of a rigged election came forward, the Respondents had a duty under law to investigate it or be removed from office.”
According to Philipp, a finding for the plaintiffs would “also restore Trump to office because he would have been the legitimate candidate.” We’re not yet sure how that part of the argument works but are researching. Even if a majority of the Justices found merit in this case, would they be willing to do something this huge? They would be keeping in mind the potential consequences and, of course, possible effects on the balance of power. If this happened, it would be the wildest things ever to happen within our government --- a purge, really, which, I have to admit, sounds pretty great with the state our country is currently in. But you know the saying, if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
Here are some thoughts on the case from Timothy Canova, a professor of constitutional law at the Nova Southeastern University Shepard Broad College of Law.
Tim Canova: Supreme Court Considers Case Seeking to Overturn 2020 Presidential Election
A terrible day for Republicans, Trump and America
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but there’s no other way to put it: Tuesday was a terrible day for Republicans, for former President Trump, and for America in general in the long run.
The biggest story was in Georgia, where once again, Democrat Raphael Warnock won a narrow victory in a Senate run-off election. Only this time, it wasn’t just to give the Democrats a Senate tie but to give them control by 51-49. Any Republicans who didn’t vote (and there were more than enough to change the outcome) should be ashamed. This gives Chuck Schumer full control of Senate Committees, takes away the braking power of Sen. Joe Manchin (the only moderate left in the Democrat Party), and makes it easier for the Senate to change long standing rules and confirm Biden’s radical nominees.
Today’s Democrat leaders having no ethics other than the situational kind, we can expect to hear that the Republicans’ slim 9-vote House majority means they need to share power, compromise and not push their agenda, while the Democrats’ 1-vote Senate majority is a mandate to shove their most radical agenda items and nominees down America’s throat.
I don’t want to say that Herschel Walker was a loser in that race because he deserves respect for being a political novice who ran a good race against overwhelming opposition, lowball attacks and piles of out-of-state money and still lost by less than 2%. But it’s another coat of tarnish for former President Trump. Walker was one of his hand-picked candidates, most of whom won their primaries but cost Republicans seats in the general election. Trump is facing growing concerns that while his popularity is strong with the GOP base, he’s just too radioactive to attract swing voters who are needed to win general elections. In that regard, Ron DeSantis may be as big a winner in that race as Warnock.
Stephen Kruiser at PJ Media offers a different take, arguing that the GOP has much deeper problems that can’t be blamed on Trump.
Trump also suffered a big defeat in a New York courtroom, where a jury found the Trump Corporation and the Trump Payroll Corp, two entities under the Trump Organization umbrella, guilty on 17 counts of tax evasion and liable for a $1.6 million fine. It’s actually not as bad as it sounds: the case was based on testimony from former CFO Allen Weisselberg, who pleaded guilty to charges that he manipulated the company’s books and his own compensation package to illegally reduce his taxes, through things like not declaring the value of some of his benefits as income. You know, the type of thing that countless Wall Street executives do and never get prosecuted for it.
For Trump, it mostly amounts to a PR defeat. Weisselberg took full responsibility and did not implicate Trump or any of his family members (despite what I’m sure was extreme pressure to do so.) Even the New York Times admitted that the companies “largely perform back-office functions, employing and paying top executives, so they do not hold any loans, liquor licenses or other privileges that might slip away in the wake of the conviction.” And $1.6 million sounds like a lot, but to Trump, it’s precisely the amount of his total Presidential salary that this alleged “greedy, selfish crook” donated back to the Treasury. (FYI: Biden keeps his entire salary, but of course, he deserves it. Just look at the results!)
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2022/12/06/breaking-trump-org-n2616820
That link has more details, including Trump’s response. He said he will appeal the verdict, calling it part of the continuing witch hunt against him, and noted that the charges involved no monetary benefit to his companies and were entirely the actions of his ex-employee and his accountants. He also said that despite record high violent crime in New York City, the prosecutors spent all their time and effort on an unprecedented prosecution of his company over "fringe benefits" when no murder cases have come to trial in six years.
I can’t argue with that. But while I don’t want to appear to be trying to excuse cheating on your taxes, I do have to point out that the tax code is so incomprehensible even to the IRS that vindictive prosecutors could probably go after anyone over disagreements on how to interpret something like “contract worker or employee.” The real verdict that Americans should reach from this case is that we need to scrap the tax code and replace it with the Fair Tax, which would eliminate both tax cheating and partisan prosecutions over tax disputes.
Trump will also have to worry about the House January 6th Kangaroo Kommittee’s announcement that it intends to include criminal referrals as part of its report. They didn’t say whom they want to prosecute, but since it’s obvious that they’re as obsessed with “getting Trump'' as Captain Ahab was with Moby Dick, you can bet that they’ll recommend the DOJ prosecute Trump despite them failing to produce evidence that he committed any crimes.
VOTE HERE: Do you agree with President Biden's deal to swap Russian Arms Dealer Viktor Bout for WNBA star Brittney Griner?
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And as Bonchie at Redstate.com points out, this is bad news for Trump because between the Biden DOJ and DC juries, the lack of evidence of any crime will in no way prevent Trump from being prosecuted or convicted. As we saw with the raid on Trump’s home to seize his own Presidential documents, we’re already deep into banana republic territory.
Finally, in the last piece of bad news for Republicans, Trump and America, the Supreme Court rejected without comment a lawsuit alleging that Dominion Voting Machines and Facebook billionaire Mark Zuckerberg had an undue influence over the 2020 election. The plaintiffs argued that the Founders intended elections to be run by the people’s representatives in the states, not by private individuals whose money is used to influence the outcome.
https://www.westernjournal.com/supreme-court-makes-decision-dominion-voting-systems-case/
The lower court threw out the suit not on its merits but on the controversial dodge that the plaintiffs didn’t have “standing” to sue because they couldn’t show that they suffered specific damages worse than every other voter suffered. Seems pretty weasely to shirk the court’s responsibility to ensure we have honest elections just because every American was harmed and not just the ones who brought the case, but that was the court’s excuse.