Now this is a place I didn’t see finding myself as I was growing up and growing old.
I’ve never been one for sticking to all the rules and clenching my jaw when others stray.
I’m a scofflaw, however, but not a criminal. I carry generations of Catholic and Jewish guilt like thorns on my chromosomes. I never ski out of bounds. I don’t cheat on my taxes. I shovel my walk right away every time it snows.
If, however, I can do 85 mph on I-70 across Kansas, I will — until I see what looks like it might be a cop in the bar pit. Those fancy antibiotics you’re supposed to take at the exact same time every day? I’m good through maybe Day 2, then I try to fit them in whenever.
I’m an unapologetic liberal kind of guy, though. I find it really easy, and rewarding, to forgive people. I would much rather like someone than not, and with very few exceptions, I pretty much find something to like in everyone.
So it’s bizarre to me that I, and people like me, are suddenly hoisted into a position to be the voice of law, order, rule and reason.
The guy who was duly elected to run the country, in just three short weeks has broken a drawer full of laws, and he’s pissed as hell because he’s being held accountable.
President Donald Trump unilaterally, and outside the Constitution and rule of law, nuked a variety of government agencies and programs, funded by Republicans and Democrats in Congress. The U.S. Impoundment Act, which he violated, controlling how the president gets to cut congressionally approved programs, is Supreme Court-tested and true.
As president — when playing by the rules, is supposed to park and step aside from his financial interests to avoid even the appearance of impropriety, let alone risks of committing fraud or treason — Trump said he wants to buy land in Gaza and open a golf resort.
Trump and his bro-boss Elon Musk broke into secure government computer systems in several parts of the government in an effort to glean personal and government information to use in other illegal efforts to usurp the power of Congress. Does “separate but equal” not ring even a faint bell with any of these people?
The list of lawlessness is as long as the stack of papers Trump signed with his Sharpie to skirt the Constitution.
After victims of Trump’s antics went to the courts and were granted orders to make the Trump administration stop violating the law, his team pulled a Richard Nixon and hinted that they would do what they damn well please, because, “who’s gonna stop me?”
It’s as if a herd of people elected to and appointed to run the country not only never took a high-school civics class, but they are unaware that there is such a thing as constitutional law, and how that is how we run the country.
After federal courts told Musk to stop violating the law by breaking into government computer systems and pretending to fire all kinds of federal employees, he and Vice President JD Vance had public temper tantrums, which appears to be the Gen-X alternative to lawyering up.
“If a judge tried to tell a general how to conduct a military operation, that would be illegal,” Vance huffed on his social media post Sunday. “If a judge tried to command the attorney general in how to use her discretion as a prosecutor, that’s also illegal. Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.”
This guy is a Yale law grad. Clearly, he never tried or won a case. He certainly won’t win this one.
Musk is not a lawyer, but he is an expert at having tantrums over anything to do with ethics, transparency, accountability, reality or honesty.
“A corrupt judge protecting corruption,” Musk howled with smarting knuckles. “He needs to be impeached NOW!”
Musk is a modern incarnation of Marie Antoinette channeling her inner Queen of Hearts in a nation that’s been turned into a Lewis Carroll nightmare. Some day, when this is all over, the musical version will be called “Trumperwocky.”
This very anti-conservative, lawless, dishonest duo of Tweedle Don and Twaddle Scree are just part of the nightmare.
As Team Trumpster made good on threats last week to send in the ICE brigade and demand “papers, please” from anyone they encountered in Aurora apartments with brown skin and Latino accents, their D.C. bosses had whiny melt-downs when forced to follow the law.
Border bros Tom Homan and Michael Banks told the Fox News TV people following them around across Denver and Aurora that they were shocked, shocked and dismayed that they were unable to make good on Trump’s promise to fill buses with immigrants and drive them straight to Guantanamo Bay, or someplace.
Banks blamed media leakers for tipping off immigrants and their supporters about the raid Trump and the Trumpettes have been talking about in detail every day since he was elected.
They walked away with one unnamed person who supposedly is a gang member. Nobody from ICE, the DEA, the ATF or the White House Press Office has released the identities of the handful of other people whisked away, violating all kinds of Constitutional laws and court precedents precluding the United States from becoming one of the banana republics that so many legal refugees risked their lives to escape from.
Trump won the election, not a crown and scepter. Sure, the way this works is that he gets to do whatever he wants now, within the confines of the law and Constitution.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve smiled politely at the herds of political conservatives who have unloaded long and detailed lectures to me about our “Constitutional Republic” and the critical foundation of “the rule of law.”
America needs those conservatives more now than in its entire history.
Follow @EditorDavePerry on BlueSky, Threads, Mastodon, Twitter and Facebook or reach him at 303-750-7555 or dperry@SentinelColorado.com
The Trump revolution that the majority of Americans voted for is proceeding as expected. It was anticipated that all of his actions would be challenged in court, which seems to be the way politics proceeds today. Finding a liberal judge to strike down each executive order is easy enough to do. But as these decisions are appealed and work their way through the courts, we will find that some decisions stand, while others are reversed. It is premature for the Aurora Sentinal staff to be celebrating and preaching about the rule of law just yet.
Dave is really upset that his syndicalist allies got their jobs and glowops slashed, and that his imported revolutionary vanguard is being deported.
Dave also expects that his side gets to do what it wants with impunity, while demanding that his political enemies adhere to every single rule. That’s why he’s pining for his heckin’ valid True and Honest Conservatives that let his side have half of what it wanted now, and the other half later on, rather than one that actually resisted him and fellow rad-left theocrats.
Donald Trump is a profoundly ignorant human being. He knows nothing of the Constitution, or the law (even when he’s breaking it), and the courts are working on their last nerve putting up with his idiocy.
I might remind the two defenders above by pointing out that Elon Musk, that spoiled child, has no official authority to write a parking ticket, let alone range through federal agencies as if he’s Regent to the Infant King. The administration has barely begun and already Trump is planning on seizing foreign land, Gaza, as his personal playground for profit. (And that’s setting aside for the moment his demand that he have Canada, too.) If someone wrote this in a novel, it would be rejected by every publishing house in the country as impossible.
Thousands of people who toil in the federal government are being threatened with being canned for no reason, as Trump (who, again, knows nothing about government) tries his damnedest to force the government to serve as his personal cash cow. What might be our only hope is that he’s so stupid and obvious that he screws this up like everything else he’s touched.
Maybe electing a grasping convicted felon who has never read the Constitution to the presidency wasn’t such a great idea. Even Al Capone wasn’t this much of a thug.
Jeffy-poo chimes in to defend his fellow syndicalists and gold-brickers with another sad marxist attempt at claiming oppression where none exists. Absolutely nothing he nor anyone else on his side claims needs to be taken at face value.
It’s time for the Thermidorean Reaction, Jeff.
Great post, Jeff Ryan! I can’t add anything!
No, it was post of hilariously flailing rhetorical smokescreens by a commie who’s upset that his side’s graft machine got its funding pipeline shut down.
You probably shouldn’t add anything, considering you’d parrot that same stupid shibboleths.
Thank you, Jeff Ryan!
And a plug for Dave Perry’s editorial: Word of the day: “Trumperwocky”.