Two nights ago, my tech friend Bob and I did a sometimes deeply personal and other times flamethrower White Christian Nationalist Party for Trump diatribe at the new Not Sweet Home Alabama Podcast.
Dreams, Soul, & Self Know Our Body Best &
Other Beatings Will Continue Until Morale Improves
An Alabama lawyer friend told me two days ago about Joyce Vance’s Civil Discourse Substack Newsletter.
WikipediaJoyce VanceJoyce Alene Vance born July 22, 1960, is an American lawyer who served as the United States attorney for the Northern District of Alabama from 2009 to 2017. She was one of the first five U.S. attorneys, and the first female U.S. attorney, nominated by President Barack Obama.Early life and careerJoyce Alene White was born on July 22, 1960, in St. George, Utah. She was raised by a divorced mother in the middle-class Los Angeles suburb of Monterey Park, California.She received a Bachelor of Arts magna cum laude from Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, in 1982 and a Juris Doctor from the University of Virginia School of Law in 1985.Vance was a litigator in private practice at Bradley Arant Boult Cummings LLP in Washington, DC, before joining the United States Attorney's Office in the Northern District of Alabama in 1991. She spent ten years in the Criminal Division, working on investigations including that of Eric Robert Rudolph, who bombed a Birmingham abortion clinic and killed a police officer and set a string of church fires in the district. She successfully prosecuted five Boaz, Alabama, police officers charged with Conspiracy to Violate Civil Rights. She moved to the Appellate Division in 2002 and became the Chief of that Division in 2005.
My Alabama lawyer friend forwarded me a recent post from Joyce Vance, and I subscribed to Vance's Newsletter and commented under the article.
Civil Discoursewith Joyce VanceDoes "Conservative" Have Any Meaning Today?JOYCE VANCEAUG 02, 2024Last night I had the pleasure of being on a Zoom panel with California Congressman Jared Huffman (our guest for “Five Questions With” on July 4), and Maryland Congressman Jamie Raskin. Our topic was a deep dive into Project 2025.You might think now that Trump has disavowed his connection to the project and its leader has stepped down that interest might be waning. But last night proved that not to be the case. The crowd was at full capacity.It makes sense that there is still a lot of interest in understanding Project 2025. When has Donald Trump ever lied to the public? If his claim that he has no connection to Project 2025 is true, then it’s pretty amazing that he was able to force Paul Dans, who was running the Project at the Heritage Foundation, to step down and end the Project. Dans was the Chief of Staff at the Office of Personnel Management during the Trump Administration. There is still good reason for the public to pay attention to Project 2025.In any event, we had a fascinating conversation last night that you can watch on YouTube in its entirety if you missed it.But I wanted to share with you one part of our conversation that I think was especially important. Congressman Raskin stalked out this territory: it’s no longer appropriate to refer to Trump Republicans and to the faction of the Supreme Court appointed by Republican presidents as “conservatives.” That old-timey word implies a legitimacy that the unprincipled members of the cult of personality don’t deserve. This is something I’ve been thinking about and having conversations with colleagues about for the last couple of weeks.As someone who believes in the rule of law and believes it’s critical to the health of our democracy, it’s painful to acknowledge that what’s happening at the Supreme Court isn’t business as usual—judges deciding close cases on the basis of legitimate differences of opinion over how to apply guiding principles. But it would be even worse to fail to acknowledge it.Precedent is dead at the Court, at least insofar as sidestepping it is necessary to protect Donald Trump. Whether it’s the 14th Amendment case that ignored the plain language of the Constitution, or the presidential immunity case where the Court created a safe harbor from criminal prosecution for Donald Trump that the Constitution doesn’t give voice to, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the Court is behaving like an unelected political body. The Court itself hasn’t given us reason to. As an institution, it has refused to address clear abuses by Justices Thomas and Alito, adopting a nonbinding ethics code but not using it to rectify what is wrong. Its decisions have split along ideological lines where Trump’s interests are concerned.So much for the notion that there is a “conservative wing” of the Court. As columnist and founding editor of the National Review Online Jonah Goldberg wrote in 2020, “For most Americans, conservatism basically means the stuff Republicans are for, and liberalism means whatever Democrats are for. I don’t mean this as a criticism, just a statement of fact.” Today, the “stuff” Republicans are for is Trump.It’s important that we use more precise language to convey that the decisions made by the MAGA faction on the Supreme Court are unprincipled and the people who make them have abandoned the rule of law and the Constitution in the service of Donald Trump. They will let us slip into his authoritarian rule if he is reelected, and they may well have some say in the outcome of the presidential race. We cannot gloss over that reality.That means that the language we use is critical. I’m working on exorcising “conservative” from my vocabulary when talking about these Justices or elected politicians. Representative Raskin suggested that we use the term “neo-monarchical” to describe them, which seems precise. My husband, who I shared the conversation with, said his word is “corrupt.” That fits too. How have you been describing it? I’m still trying to decide exactly what words to use, and this feels like the kind of thing we’re good at hashing out together.The conversation with Representative Huffman and Representative Raskin was uplifting despite the dark topic. Two members of Congress took an hour out of their day to talk with not just their own constituents but with people from across the country about a topic of serious importance to all of us. In a time when Americans need examples of good leadership, this is a shining one.At the opposite end of the spectrum, today is the one-year anniversary of Trump’s indictment in the District of Columbia for trying to steal the 2020 election. Although Trump is the only defendant in that case, he obviously did not act alone.DOJ lawyer Jeffrey Bossert Clark, a Trump co-defendant in the Fulton County case, was the acting Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Division who was willing to sacrifice DOJ to support Trump’s fake claims of voter fraud. Clark pressured the leadership at DOJ to get on board with Trump or step aside so he could be appointed acting AG. That culminated in a contentious meeting at the White House with Trump that we heard testimony about during the January 6 committee hearing. Clark was a proponent of the plan to have Republican-controlled legislatures appoint Trump electors in states where President Biden was the winner. If there is anyone who merits prosecution alongside Trump, it’s the lawyer who took an oath to uphold the Constitution but was willing to corrupt the Justice Department to shred it.Like a number of Trump’s other lawyers, Clark is also facing disbarment proceedings. We learned today that the District of Columbia Bar hearing committee assigned to the matter recommended that Clark be suspended from practicing law for two years rather than the recommending disbarment, despite finding that Clark’s conduct threatened to destabilize the country. Disbarment would have been a far more appropriate remedy.
This is not the final decision. The matter now goes to the Bar’s Board of Professional Responsibility, which will make a recommendation to the D.C. Courts after it reviews it, a process that could take another year before it’s complete and discipline is imposed. Meanwhile, Clark is frequently mentioned as a possible Attorney General pick for Trump. And why not? There’s every reason to believe he would continue to do Trump’s bidding. Clark is one of those loose ends that is yet to be tied up almost four years after the insurrection. While his future is uncertain, it is clear he is not a conservative. He is a Trumpist.So, when we’re talking about neo-monarchical Trumpists, I’m working on purging the word “conservative” from my vocabulary. Because that’s not what they are.We’re in this together,JoyceSloan BashinskySloan’s NewsletterYesterday, an Alabama lawyer friend told me about your Civil Discourse and emailed me this article of yours this morning.I practiced law in Birmingham after clerking for U.S. District Judge Clarence W. Allgood, in Birmingham, who presided over every federal prosecution in north Alabama. He was a close friend of your husband’s father, U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Justice Robert Vance, who was very active in keeping George Wallace from taking over Alabama’s national Democratic Party, which Judge Allgood ran behind the scenes. When he practiced law in Birmingham, Judge Vance was very active in helping blacks in Alabama achieve the same civil rights whites had in Alabama. Eventually, Judge Vance was assassinated in his home by a letter bomb that nearly killed his wife, Helen.It looked to me that the most dangerous criminal prosecution for Trump was the Georgia RICO action headed by Fani Willis. But for what I can only call Willis's stupidity, by now Trump and others in league with him would be convicted mob felons in Georgia.I told my lawyer friend this morning that I would try to get you to shift over to calling Trump and his MAGAS, the Project 25 folks, the Opus Dei folks, and Trump’s vice president running mate JD Vance, who wrote the Foreword to the Project 25 book soon to be released, the White Christian Nationalist Party, for which there is plenty of evidence in plain view. Or simply, the RepubliKlan Party.Here’s a link to my “The South has risen again: America’s White Christian Nationalist Party” blog post yesterday. The res ipsa loquitur photos, a picture is worth a thousand words, speak for themselves.The same res ipsa theme plays out in my Amendment 14, Section 3 Law School Exam Question:
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sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com
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