Trump's 14th Amendment Nonsense Made Fool of Gov Scott Walker in 2015

Brown people are invading and the Jews are helping.
So say Trump, Scott Walker and the whole bunch of
mass-murdering, anti-Semitic whacks, (Twitter).

Madison, Wisconsin — In 2015 Donald Trump was scoring points with white supremacists voicing his intentions to somehow halt the 14th Amendment citizenship guarantee.

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) said, me too, making a fool out of himself in the process, (Mal Contends).

Jenna Johnson of the Washington Post had fun at Walker's expense, reporting the Wisconsin governor's multiple interpretations of the14th Amendment, weeks before Walker ended his campaign for the Republican Party nomination for president amid God's calls for Walker to quit the race.

Reports Johnson:

Walker said Monday that he supports ending birthright citizenship, then said later in the day that the problem could be addressed by enforcing other laws. On Tuesday, a prominent donor confronted Walker on the topic and walked away satisfied that the candidate wouldn't do away with birthright citizenship. On Friday, Walker said he didn't have a position on the issue. Then Sunday, Walker said he does not want to alter the 14th Amendment.

And writes CNN's Eric Bradner at the time:

The Wisconsin governor and Republican presidential candidate was asked on ABC's 'This Week' whether he backs Trump's push to end the 14th Amendment's mandate that all children born in the United States are automatically granted citizenship.

'Well, I said the law is there. And we need to enforce the laws, including those that are in the Constitution,' Walker said

Laws in the Constitution?
 ---
Now, Trump is hoping to excite Republican Party racists for the midterm elections by claiming the power to change citizenship law and the 14th Amendment through executive order.

Trump and Walker are racists.

While this Trump stunt may seem a distraction to some, there is a fight to be had as events the last week make abundantly clear.

It's the fight Trump and Walker want. So be it.

Opposing Trump is a civic duty and moral responsibility.

And these people are racist lunatics.

Trump wants to unconstitutionally end birthright citizenship but add a discriminatory question about US citizenship to the 2020 census. That tells you everything you need to know

— Ari Berman (@AriBerman) October 30, 2018

Fascism Today

Hundreds marched for peace and children in Madison,
Wisconsin on August 26 2017. Marchers led by youth
questioned the necessity of police and criminals
shooting them, saying, "I want to live."
Photo by Paul McMahon, (Heartland Images)

Madison, Wisconsin — At some future point in American intellectual life, racism will be recognized as a deranged condition, indexed in psychopathology and the political annals of lunacy.

Putting aside the inherent problems in the psychiatric field working by metaphor and abstraction, a belief in race is delusional and is a dangerous pathology.

The abiding belief in race and the anti-human behavior this delusion causes is not dysfunctional in American society.

The resurgence of American racism led by Donald Trump today builds upon the ideological ground on which America was founded: Genocide, social dominance, enslavement and terror. Trump is in a sense the logical inheritor of American racism.

It behooves the reader to consider the foundational aspects of deadly and torturous racism when one reads the daily ravings emitted from the White House, because oppression and control of ethnic minorities is as American as the military-industrial state.

On the up side, Paul Krugman has his swing back for some time now.

His piece in today's New York Times is a joy:

As sheriff of Maricopa County, Ariz., Joe Arpaio engaged in blatant racial discrimination. His officers systematically targeted Latinos, often arresting them on spurious charges and at least sometimes beating them up when they questioned those charges. Read the report from the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, and prepare to be horrified.

Once Latinos were arrested, bad things happened to them. Many were sent to Tent City, which Arpaio himself proudly called a 'concentration camp,' where they lived under brutal conditions, with temperatures inside the tents sometimes rising to 145 degrees.

And when he received court orders to stop these practices, he simply ignored them, which led to his eventual conviction — after decades in office — for contempt of court. But he had friends in high places, indeed in the highest of places. We now know that Donald Trump tried to get the Justice Department to drop the case against Arpaio, a clear case of attempted obstruction of justice. And when that ploy failed, Trump, who had already suggested that Arpaio was 'convicted for doing his job,' pardoned him.

By the way, about 'doing his job,' it turns out that Arpaio’s officers were too busy rounding up brown-skinned people and investigating President Barack Obama’s birth certificate to do other things, like investigate cases of sexually abused children. Priorities!

Let’s call things by their proper names here. Arpaio is, of course, a white supremacist. But he’s more than that. There’s a word for political regimes that round up members of minority groups and send them to concentration camps, while rejecting the rule of law: What Arpaio brought to Maricopa, and what the president of the United States has just endorsed, was fascism, American style.

Fascism has been here for some time.

Trump just targeted elite sectors of American society positioned and inclined to fight back.

Trump and Republican Threat to Democracy Is Grave and Growing

Milwaukee, Racine and Kenosha counties lead voter
decrease in Wisconsin, 2016, (Charles Franklin)

The verdict explaining why Hillary Clinton lost to Donald Trump is in: Many Democratic-leaning voters didn't vote (538.com), (Charles Franklin).

This explanation is not a tautology.

Republicans spent a lot of time and effort on blocking voters and it paid off, especially among those "urban" voters at whom Paul "I-cannot-and- will-not give-up-my-family-time" Ryan likes to cast aspersions in southeastern Wisconsin where most of the urban types live. Statewide, the 2016 vote is down 3 percent from 2012 (Charles Franklin).

Note the Wisconsin counties map at right and the deep-purple and light-purple counties at lower-right in the image. Those counties in southeastern Wisconsin are Milwaukee, Racine and Kenosha counties, and the 2016 vote dropped off precipitously in this region.

Wouldn't it be a bad idea to work for more Democratic-leaning voters casting votes? But in Wisconsin, the Democratic Party does not employ the best and brightest.

This Friday night, Matt Rothschild, will be offering a talk in Oregon, Wisconsin, about the "risks Trump poses to our democracy."

Firefly Cafe in Oregon, Wisconsin
Friday, Jan 6, 6:00 p.m. - 8:00 p.m.

We should be listening to Rothschild. The 3-percent voter suppression in Wisconsin is coming to the nation as a whole.

On Voting

"People should not leave without casting a ballot," said Wendy Weiser, head of the democracy program at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU's School of Law. "If you are an eligible voter, you should be able to have your vote counted no matter what anyone is saying," (Cassidy, AP).

On Election Day, follow this advice: "I will be voting today," (Mal Contends).

Voter Obstruction Is Local

Wisconsin Republicans creating a hostile and obstructive voting regime at Wisconsin's 3,500 polling places is a scheme the GOP hopes bears fruit next month.

After-all, Republicans seek to turn every lever of state and municipal government into de facto sub-units of Republican government. So, screening poll workers for hostility to voting rights and in the process taking over the voting place are naturals for voting-averse Republicans.

Antagonistic-to-voters polling workers are pervasive, but compiling reports of their misconduct is difficult for non-profits. (It takes a major social-scientific investigation to quantify the phenomenon of voter obstruction.)

Instead we see warnings about election observers and voter obstruction laws omitting the misconduct of municipal and contract election officials stationed at the point of voting and working, (unlawfully), to suppress the vote.

All of this is carried out under the rubric of voter fraud, a lie, and hostility to civil liberties, a disgrace.

Concludes a New York Times editorial in September: "The scary thing is how many Americans have bought into this charade [about voter fraud]. It shouldn’t be surprising that the Republican Party’s standard-bearer, Donald Trump, has elevated the lie about voting fraud and 'rigged elections' to a centerpiece of his campaign."

It shouldn't be surprising. Alex Wagner has a compelling report out about the dangers Donald Trump poses to voting.

The rotten fruit of the now Trumped-up danger of voter fraud is right at your local polling place, abetted by observers, polling workers and municipal bureaucrats.

Stay vigilant, especially if you are brown or black.

Voting Fraud Lie Lives On

See Debunking the Voter Fraud Myth, (Sept 2016)
Brennan Center for Justice

Republican power-grabs continue

If you have encountered a white Wisconsin election observer or poll worker, you may have encountered a Republican fighting the holy war against voting fraud.

A New York Times editorial sets the record straight on voting fraud:

How does a lie come to be widely taken as the truth?

The answer is disturbingly simple: Repeat it over and over again. When faced with facts that contradict the lie, repeat it louder.

This, in a nutshell, is the story of claims of voting fraud in America — and particularly of voter impersonation fraud, the only kind that voter ID laws can possibly prevent. ...

Credit for this mass deception goes to Republican lawmakers, who have for years pushed a fake story about voter fraud, and thus the necessity of voter ID laws, in an effort to reduce voting among specific groups of Democratic-leaning voters. Those groups — mainly minorities, the poor and students — are less likely to have the required forms of identification.

Behind closed doors, some Republicans freely admit that stoking false fears of electoral fraud is part of their political strategy. In a recently disclosed email from 2011, a Republican lobbyist in Wisconsin wrote to colleagues about a very close election [featuring David Prosser] for a seat on the State Supreme Court. 'Do we need to start messaging ‘widespread reports of election fraud’ so we are positively set up for the recount regardless of the final number?' he wrote. 'I obviously think we should.' ...

The ploy works. 

Yes, the ploy works.

The holy warriors, the overwhelmingly white Republican grassroots extending to the Alt Right, are taking the lie to ever more absurd lengths at the point of voting: The polling place on Election Day.

The objective is to frustrate, aggravate, and obstruct as many minority, young and disabled voters as possible in an effort to suppress the total vote in favor of the Republican Party. If Republicans can demean and dehumanize X number of the wrong kind of voters, Y number of voters won't come back soon.

That municipal bureaucracies treat disfavored voters differently and with animosity is not permissible under the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments is a barrier to overcome, in the rightist view. Republicans wager: We don't know what we can get away with if we don't try.

Concludes the Times: "The scary thing is how many Americans have bought into this charade. It shouldn’t be surprising that the Republican Party’s standard-bearer, Donald Trump, has elevated the lie about voting fraud and 'rigged elections' to a centerpiece of his campaign."

It should not be surprising.

In Wisconsin, from school boards to municipalities to all levers of state government in all branches and in all bureaucracies, Republicans are engaged in a concerted effort to transform Wisconsin into a red state where civil liberties such as voting rights are a defect to be overcome.

Scott Walker Was the Rick Perry of the 2016 Campaign

Scott Walker's SuperPac running
today on Google ads -
Unintimidated

Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel columnist, Dan Bice, wrote in April 2013 that Scott Walker is not an "ideas guy," suggesting someone as error-prone as Walker who can't think on his feet "could earn him the distinction of being the Gov. Perry of the 2016 campaign." (Daniel Bice chat transcript on Thursday, April 18, 2013) (Mal Contends)

Ooops.

Bice turned out to be right. Hope the Journal-Sentinel doesn't fire the guy.

Walker's attempt to answer (and mostly avoid) fundamental public policy questions doomed his campaign making Walker's bosses, the moneyed special interests from whom Walker takes orders, nervous they backed the wrong sock puppet.

For fun reading before the Noon games today:

• Juan Cole's Top Cringe Worthy Foreign Policy Moments in GOP Debate
• Mike Allen and Alex Isenstadt's 'It's a f---ing bitch, man,'  
• Frank Bruni's Scott Walker’s Cocktail of Ignorance

An Ooops moment, Scott Walker's whole campaign is a Ooops moment.

Scott Walker Now Refuses to Take "Position" on 14th Amendment Citizenship Clause

Scott Walker heard Donald Trump's reading of the citizenship-birthright clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution and had to get in on this toxic appeal to nativism and bigotry—Walker's political wheelhouse.

"Shortly after Donald Trump released his immigration policy proposal on Monday, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker assured reporters that he agreed with Trump's opposition to 'birthright citizenship,'" reported Phillip Bump in the Washington Post. "Absolutely," we should end "birthright citizenship," Walker said to NBC's Kasie Hunt.

On Friday, Scott Walker changed his mind and told CNBC's John Harwood that "I’m not taking a position on it one way or the other." (CNBC - Scott Walker talks birthright citizenship)

How can a candidate for the presidency not take a position on this pillar of American citizenship enshrined in Section One of the Fourteenth Amendment?

Scott Walker can because Walker does not have the slightest conception of common law, constitutional law and judicial policymaking.

Walker did explain in a Tweet Friday that he earlier agreed with Trump's position on the Fourteenth Amendment because he was "tired." (Blue Cheddar) (ThinkProgress) (CognitiveDissidence)

What?

Don't look for a detailed position paper outlining Walker's Constitutional analysis: 'It's August-hot in Iowa and I'm tired, enough of Section One of the Fourteenth Amendment.'

Walker did hint at his Constitutional acumen in 2013. In determining the First Amendment's guarantee of freedom of expression does not apply to speech that is critical of Walker, Walker's administration ordered 100s arrested and fined.

U.S. District Court Judge William M. Conley and state courts disagreed with Walker and ordered restoration of the First Amendment at the Wisconsin Capitol, as well as civil recovery of attorneys' fees and other costs. (Mal Contends)

This is why Scott Walker avoids townhall-style listening sessions and unscripted sit-down interviews. He doesn't know anything, ala Sarah Palin. (Mal Contends)

No one expects a presidential candidate to be a Laurence Tribe or a Richard Posner, but being a student of the United States Constitution is critical to serving as POTUS.

This has been a bad month for the candidate of the Koch brothers, the Milwaukee-based Bradley Foundation and the corporate bill mill, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).

As Walker is forced into discussing public policy, it is becoming readily apparent that Walker is in over his head.

This ignorance is dangerous, as seen when Walker pushed for more secrecy in Walker's aborted scheme to gut Wisconsin's Open Records law.

Walker is a lightweight who takes orders from billionaires and other donors funding his campaign.

Can you imagine Scott Walker as president?

Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel columnist, Dan Bice, wrote in April 2013 that Scott Walker is not an "ideas guy," suggesting someone as error-prone as Walker who can't think on his feet "could earn him the distinction of being the Gov. Perry of the 2016 campaign." (Daniel Bice chat transcript on Thursday, April 18, 2013) (Mal Contends)

We're there.

Five weeks-plus into his campaign after his July 13 announcement for the presidency, Scott Walker has earned the distinction of being the candidate who does not, like, know anything, to borrow from Juan Cole.