A Party Named Sue
It’s become clear that one of the new tactics of “Mump regime” (tm Timothy Snyder), which has to stem from the sense of hubris thinking that a 1.4% victory margin, while losing a seat in the House translate to a “landslide mandate”, is to threaten lawsuits against all their perceived “enemies,” which is basically anyone who didn’t vote for them. Which is literally more than half the country. Some of this, no doubt, is also based on revenge had Trump getting indicted so many times. What gets missed in their cries, though, is that -- as I've been yammering on social media for months, waiting for the news media to make the same blatantly obvious point, which sadly isn't as newsworthy as threats of a lawsuit -- to just get an indictment (not to mention get all even a single guilty verdict) is that you need actual evidence. And, interestingly enough, “I don’t like them” is not considered actual evidence.
Many of the threats have come from Trump himself, of course, though not all. And a lot of the hubris likely comes from ABC bizarrely settling a Trump lawsuit that he had no chance of winning. But in settling it seems to have – not unexpectedly – opened the door to a sense of puffery that anyone can be sued now.
(Of course, the reality is that, in fact, anyone can be sued. Having the lawsuit not thrown out of court before even being court is another matter entirely. As is winning.)
Threatening lawsuits against members of the Special Select January 6 Committee members is only one of the many ludicrous efforts. These are all elected officials, after all, who were doing their sworn duty to investigate. Further, they had no power to indict anyone, but just issued a report. (Not to mention that most of their witnesses were Republicans.) There have been threats of suing elected officials in California over their stated positions of sticking with their state obligations that are contrary to MAGOP proposals against immigrants. Just this morning I received an email from the progressive Meidas Touch group about a recent discussion on a TwiXter forum (where one of the main participants appears possibly to have been Elon Musk under a pseudonym), and the main topic was going after Meidas Touch. And we’ve had stories about whether certain members of Congress should or might ask for pardons from President Biden to protect themselves against threats to sue them by Trump – a bizarre situation since accepting a pardon is considered an admission of guilty, despite not having done anything even remotely illegal.
The problem with all this is not the fear or likelihood of any of these people being ever found guilty. You not only have to have done something illegal, there has to be literal evidence of illegal acts, and enough to prove to juries that you’re guilty of anything. The problem is that defending yourself even against non-existence charges is expensive. And a harrowing experience when those who might be trying to indict you for doing nothing wrong is the federal government.
Still, though, for all my yammering about this on social media for the past months, it was good to see conservative lawyer George Conway say it far more eloquently, especially from the legal perspective of knowing what he's talking about, as he explained how utterly ludicrous this all is, even with it being a hellish burden to go through. Though making the point that it being a hellish burden is part of the point.
And it all came up in regards to the most idiotic threat of a lawsuit by Trump – when he said that he was considering he might sue a highly-respected pollster in Iowa for supposed “election interference,” as a result being wrong…in a state that he actually won (!)– meaning he has absolutely no damages, even if he had a case. Which he doesn’t.
Among the things Conway said when talking to an MSNBC weekend panel was --
“It's the laws. You have to have laws that are violated to bring these actions whether they be brought in his personal capacity or by the government. This is all nonsense."
"Especially suing the pollster?" he continued. " There is no claim for suing a pollster, putting out a poll that doesn't predict the right result. And think about this: he is saying they lied about a poll. There is no person on this planet who has lied more about polls than Donald Trump. I mean, he is always saying he is ahead, he is never behind in the polls.”
And later, Conway got to the point behind it all. 'It's all gaslighting and it's all intimidation and bullying, that's what narcissists do. And some people are being bullied and he is trying to make everybody afraid of him. But what's going to happen is he is going to overreach in some of these lawsuit, like this Des Moines Register lawsuit; the lawyers may be sanctioned. These lawsuits are going to go nowhere and he is going to have egg on his face and look like the fool that he is."
Here's the whole 10-minute segment.
And what the heck, we might as well go out on this. (And yes, I did consider Shel Silverstein's song recorded by Johnny Cash, "A Boy Named Sue", but instead this won out. It seemed more directly fitting...) --
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