Picking Up The Pieces

PICKING UP THE PIECES

How Republicans Enabled Trump To Fragment American Democracy

by Paul Covell

Copyright 2020 by Paul Covell

Chapter 1 Know-Nothing Hucksters Hijack The G.O.P.

Chapter 2 Life Without A Peoples' Attorney General.

Chapter 3 The Demagogue Who Would Be Our King.

Chapter 4 Let's See What Happens, Is Not A Plan.

Chapter 5 Trump Paused His Covid-19 Daily Rant.

Chapter 6 Did Trump Ask Russia To Help Win In 2016?

Chapter 7 Trump Sees Only Electoral-Vote-Reasons To Act.

Chapter 8 The Supreme Court May Save The Republic.

Chapter 9 Trump & Barr Want To Re-Write The History Of 2016.

Chapter 10 Remaking FBI Headquarters to Suit Trump & Barr.

Chapter 11 The Propaganda War Raging Across The U. S.

Chapter 12 A Clear And Present Danger To Democracy.

Chapter 13 Sadists Crave Control, Not To Inflict Suffering.

Chapter 14 Attack a Peaceful Crowd To Stage A Photo-OP.

Chapter 15 The Last Word In Trump's On The Job Training.

Chapter 16 DACA & Black Lives Matter Await Reform.

Chapter 17 Trump Seized Voice of America on June 17, 2020.

Chapter 18 Matt Schlapp & First Amendment Try To Save Trump.

Chapter 19 Let No One Dare Say Trump Has No Path To Victory.

Chapter 20 The Last Monument The American People Must Topple.

Foreword

Our Nation is torn, not only by a highly-contagious, death-threatening virus and Spring Riots of 2020. Democracy is under siege by a Demagogue, supported by a renegade U. S. Senate. Federalist Society hacks and a zombie Republican Senate led by a mindless automaton continue to pack the Supreme Court, Courts of Appeal, and District Courts with carbon copy judges, cloned in the image of former Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, and Justices Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito, who generally support expansion of government power and the rights of corporations and wealthy individuals, at the expense of liberty and the civil rights of ordinary citizens. The struggle plays out in ways large and small in a concerted effort by the Right Wing to maintain power by throttling democracy in the nursery of the voting franchise.

A beleaguered President, with the ambitions of a Dictator, in April 2020, wanted the Republican Chief Justice of the Wisconsin Supreme Court re-elected without delay. Wisconsin could be the decisive Battleground State on November 3, 2020, to determine the Nation's leader for the next four years, and whether our democratic Republic would survive. The Wisconsin Supreme Court overruled the Democratic Governor's Stay At Home Order. The Election could not be delayed.

The President desperately campaigned every day since Inauguration to hold on to power. His narcissistic and deeply cratered ego could not accept the Outlier label that overhangs his presidency. Nor could he risk defeat and indictment for federal and New York State offenses relating to his 2016 Campaign for President. The Wisconsin Governor, a Democrat, proposed a bill to allow absentee voting by mail, with a cutoff date of May 26, 2020, due to the pandemic sweeping the country. Republicans in the Legislature rejected the proposal. Republicans in the Wisconsin Supreme Court supported the Republican Legislature. Republicans controlling the U. S. Supreme Court upheld the Republican controlled Wisconsin Supreme Court. The die was cast. G.O.P. versus democracy.

Republicans would not allow an extension of time for voters to use absentee mail-in ballots to avoid the infectious virus. Wisconsin Voters had to stand in long lines during a pandemic in April 2020 to exercise their most fundamental right. Republicans in the Wisconsin Legislature made sure that Milwaukee's voting precincts were limited to keep Democrats waiting up to three hours for the right to vote. The People were not fooled by the President, the Legislature, the Wisconsin Supreme Court, or the U. S. Supreme Court. A Majority of the People of Wisconsin replaced the Republican Chief Justice of Wisconsin with a Democrat from the State Trial Court. The struggle now moves on to November 3d for Wisconsin and the entire Nation.

Attorney General Barr betrayed the trust of the American People by effectively quashing the Mueller Report on the connivance of the Trump Campaign with Russia's interference in the 2016 election, and by giving a veneer of legitimacy to the President's Assault on the Citadel of Justice. Trump's impulse toward abuse of power partially withered under Attorney General Jeff Sessions' recusal from the Russia Investigation. Without an Attorney General willing to intervene on his behalf, the President temporarily lost control of the Justice Department. William Pelham Barr delivered for Trump, just as he did for George H. Bush in 1991.

Barr shut down the Iran Contra Investigation by having George H. Bush pardon Reagan officials, including Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger. Trump could pardon Paul Manafort and Lt. Gen. (Ret.) Mike Flynn when convenient. The D. C. Court of Appeals ordered Judge Emmet Sullivan to grant Barr's Motion to Dismiss all charges against Flynn. Fired, former Trump Attorney, Michael Cohen, and former Trump Campaign Manager, Paul Manafort, each, released from prison in May 2020, and were to serve the balance of their sentences at Home Confinement, in view of Covid-19 risks to prisoners. With Barr's connivance, Trump is re-writing the History of 2016 to erase his Russia connections. Barr sent Cohen back to prison to silence him the same day Trump commuted Roger Stone's prison sentence.

Will Republicans be able to hold power by continuing to gerrymander election districts and by suppressing votes of Democrats? The U. S. Supreme Court and Chief Justice John Glover Roberts, Jr refused to remedy gerrymandering in North Carolina, calling the issue a political question for the State Republican Legislature to address or ignore. Elbridge Gerry had an illustrious career. He was one of three Delegates, who refused to sign the Constitution because the Original Document lacked a Bill of Rights. He was Governor of Massachusetts 1810-1812, and Vice President to James Madison 1813-1814, his term shortened by his death. Every legislator knows him as the namesake of the gerrymander, after the serpentine election district the Legislature fashioned from the coastal towns north of Boston while Gerry was Governor.

Covid-19 may take 500,000 thousand residents from us, and will leave the economy limping along for months or years. Our democratic Republic can survive the ravages of the virus. It cannot survive vote suppression and gerrymandering of election districts. In North Carolina, there are thirteen districts for the U. S. House of Representatives. Through gerrymandering, Republicans controlled nine districts, despite the vote divided more or less evenly between Democrats and Republicans. The same holds true for districts to elect N. C. State Legislators. A political party can hold power without majority ballot vote by creating election districts that allow the party in power to win more districts by a safe plurality or small majority, and, through analysis of ZIP Code criteria, position the party out of power to win fewer districts by greater majorities.

Republicans are experts in three areas. First and foremost is the G.O.P. expertise in Disinformation, Propaganda, and Smear. For fifty years, Republicans attacked liberal as a dirty word, leaving the word conservative as the all-American, suggested, preferred, default, political position. Republicans spent seven years of smears and investigations taking down President Bill Clinton in the 1990s. Independent Counsel Ken Starr billed $50 million for his team's six years in office, looking with no success for fraud in the Clinton's ownership of a small parcel in the White Water Development in Arkansas. Starr redid the inquiry into the death of Clinton aide, Vince Foster, and searched in vain for a smoking gun in Filegate, and the Clinton White House Travel Office, but sniffed out only a totally unrelated blue dress besmirched with Republican's lust for power and thirst for revenge against the Clintons.

Republicans, starting in 2013, spent three years falsely accusing Hillary Clinton of causing the death of U. S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other American patriots killed in a terrorist assault on the U. S. Mission in Benghazi, Libya, in 2012. After Mad Dog, Trey Gowdy (R-SC), Chair, House Select Committee on Benghazi, and a former State and federal prosecutor, failed to nail Hillary Clinton during a three-year investigation at a cost of $8 million dollars, Republicans continued the smear by using the State Department Inspector General, and, ultimately, the FBI, to help Republicans blow smoke about the overblown threat to National Security allegedly caused by Clinton's casual mix of personal and government emails sent without encryption while she was Secretary of State 2009-2013. FBI Director James B. Comey added to the confusion by announcing there would be no prosecution, but gratuitously and unlawfully asserting that Clinton was sloppy and grossly negligent in her email procedures, then re-opening the inquiry eleven days before the election to look at newly found emails, and, finally, closing the case three days later.

Trump fired Comey on 5/9/2017 on the pretext of missteps in the Clinton email investigation, but in reality for not easing up on the Russia Investigation, which threatened Trump and his National Security Adviser, Lt. Gen. (Ret.) Michael T. Flynn The other areas of Republican expertise are Cartography and Demographics. Republicans are skilled map makers, who know how to draw boundaries of election districts to keep themselves in power in the face of declining Voter support. Republicans know their support from voters is declining because the waves of immigrants, documented and undocumented, since the 1980s, do not trust the G.O.P. Democrats defend the rights of little people, so immigrants flock to the Democrats when they become citizens.

Since 1980, the Republican Party chose to be the champion of White People, so Blacks and Hispanics favor Democrats as well. Republicans mindlessly fought the rising tide of adverse demographics and Republican policy failures with Vote Suppression, Voter Intimidation, and by election of a racist President. The Apprentice in the White House failed at On The Job Training, a victim of his own narcissism, intolerance, and missteps. Ironically, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) now worries about his support for the Apprentice, because polls show that Trump's leaden weight on the ballot on November 3, 2020, may lose the Senate as well as the White House. Senate Republicans willingly put the Nation in peril in 2016 by coalescing around a candidate they knew was not qualified or likely to learn to Lead the Nation. They fear making the same mistake in 2020.

Chapter 1

Know-Nothing Hucksters Hijack The G. O. P.

The quintessential Republican is portrayed as a pragmatic problem-solver, dedicated to making a living unconstrained by government regulations, or, God Forbid, owing allegiance to any international organization or foreign power. She is religious, if there are not too many rules, and a firm believer in the sanctity of life. He is an entrepreneur, who models rugged individualism. This sounds like the ideal paragon for Pastor Rick Warren's purpose-driven life. Upon close analysis, however, the Republican virtuous life turns out to be a Potemkin Village, with a skyline of cardboard cutouts. The theoretical attraction of vaunted Republican ideals that inspire in the abstract cannot survive in the individual example. Money and Power usually get in the way. Who could the Prototypical Conservative be?

Tom DeLay is a model for young Republicans to emulate. House Majority Leader 2003-2005, DeLay represented Texas's 22nd district from 1985 to 2005. He was the Hammer and Deputy Whip, who helped Newt Gingrich (R-GA) orchestrate the Republican Revolution in 1994. After 40 years in the wilderness of the impotent, Republican macho activists seized control of the House. The exultant rebels elected Gingrich Speaker. The Republican Revolution drew inspiration from the Contract With America, a list of legislative things to do, written by Gingrich and Dick Armey (R-TX) (House Majority Leader, 1995-2003), and inspired by Ronald Reagan's 1985 State of the Union Address. Before he enjoyed the glitter of Washington, DeLay owned a down-to-earth Extermination Business.

He likely did not enjoy regulation, or the Environmental Protection Agency. He was a typical, flag waving, rugged individualist, dedicated to small government and small business. He was convicted in 2010 of money laundering and conspiracy to violate campaign finance laws by funneling corporate campaign contributions to to Texas Republican candidates in the 2002 election. In 2013, the Texas Court of Appeals overturned his conviction. Delay stepped down as Majority Leader in 2005. He was never accused of taking money from later-convicted lobbyist Jack Allan Abramoff, or for inspiring the gerrymandering of Texas' Congressional Districts to ensure G.O.P control, as suggested by the Huffington Post. DeLay was last seen in 2009 doing fancy footwork on Dancing With The Stars.

If Ronald Reagan (R-CA) was the patron saint of Republicans, Newt Gingrich was their knight in shining armor. Gingrich fought liberals on the airwaves, in the idea world, on the parapets, and he secured the conservative redoubt from liberals' encroachment. Gingrich was not merely a warrior and brilliant tactician. He was at heart an idea person. He was Assistant Professor at West Georgia College in 1970. He taught American History initially, and moved on to geography. Anyone, who heard Gingrich give one of his inspirational political speeches 1980-2000, could envision Gingrich as President of the Nation. It was not to be. The Republican weakness for power, pleasure, and petty profits brought Galahad down with a crash.

The House rejected Gingrich after the Speaker became involved in a book deal. The real reason may be the failed impeachment of President Clinton, and the mild defeat the Republicans faced at the polls in November 1998. Gingrich instigated polarization in American politics, urging use of pejorative words to describe Democrats and progressives. Newt Gingrich's third wife, Callista Gingrich, is ambassador to the Vatican, appointed by President Trump. She wrote children's best sellers about Ellis the Elephant, and how he met the Nation's past presidents. She is President of Gingrich Productions. She and Newt write books and make productions in support of conservative causes.

William Jefferson Clinton, President 1993-2001, was a nemesis for the Right Wing. He often beat them at their own game by triangulating. Clinton had three strikes against him in the G.O.P. playbook. He, with a major assist from Ross Perot, denied George H. Bush, the last presidential war hero, a second term in 1992. To the consternation of missionary-style Republicans, like retired Appeals Court Judge and fervent Independent Counsel, Kenneth W. Starr, Bill Clinton became more popular with voters as scandals broke around him. The greatest insult was that Bill Clinton seemed to enjoy life far more than some of his dour Republican adversaries. The Clintons made their first strategic mistake in public life by following their friend Jim McDougal, President of Madison Guaranty Savings & Loan Assoc., Little Rock, AR, to invest in a quiet, obscure, land development in the Ozarks.

The land was a parcel owned by Whitewater Development Corp., a Clinton-McDougal company, which secured financing from Madison Guaranty. Madison Guaranty failed in 1989. The Federal