No Kings Act

 

In August of 2024, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer introduced legislation Thursday reaffirming that presidents do not have immunity for criminal actions, an attempt to reverse the Supreme Court’s landmark decision the month before.

Schumer’s No Kings Act would attempt to invalidate the decision by declaring that presidents are not immune from criminal law and clarifying that Congress, not the Supreme Court, determines to whom federal criminal law is applied.

The court’s conservative majority decided July 1 that presidents have broad immunity from criminal prosecution for actions taken within their official duties — 

a decision that threw into doubt the Justice Department’s case against Republican former President Donald Trump for his efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss.

(As a reminder, Auschwitz was within the official duties of Nazi leaders.)

Schumer, of New York, said that Congress has an obligation and the constitutional authority to check the Supreme Court on its decision.

”Given the dangerous and consequential implications of the court’s ruling, legislation would be the fastest and most efficient method to correcting the grave precedent the Trump ruling presented,” he said.

The Senate bill, which has more than two dozen Democratic cosponsors, comes after Democratic President Joe Biden called on lawmakers earlier this week to ratify a constitutional amendment limiting presidential immunity, along with establishing term limits and an enforceable ethics code for the court’s nine justices. Rep. Joseph Morelle, D-N.Y., recently proposed a constitutional amendment in the House.

The Supreme Court’s immunity decision stunned Washington and drew a sharp dissent from the court’s liberal justices warning of the perils to democracy, particularly as Trump seeks a return to the White House.

Trump celebrated the decision as a “BIG WIN” on his social media platform, and Republicans in Congress rallied around him. Without GOP support, Schumer’s bill has little chance of passing in the narrowly divided chamber.

Speaking about Biden’s proposal, Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell said that Biden’s proposal would “shred the Constitution.”

A constitutional amendment would be even more difficult to pass. Such a resolution takes a two-thirds vote in both the House and the Senate, which is highly unlikely at this time of divided government, and ratification by three-fourths of the states. That process could take several years.

Still, Democrats see the proposals as a warning to the court and an effort that will rally their voting base ahead of the presidential election.

Vice President Kamala Harris, who is running against Trump in the November election, said earlier this week the reforms are needed because “there is a clear crisis of confidence facing the Supreme Court.”

The title of Schumer’s bill harkens back to Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent in the case, in which she said that “in every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law.”

The decision “makes a mockery of the principle, foundational to our Constitution and system of government, that no man is above the law,” Sotomayor said.

 https://apnews.com/article/supreme-court-schumer-immunity-senate-king-149763b93d62599eac7d0a7c77ff4d4a

Even though the COP now has the slimmest House majority in decades, there is still little chance that the bill would pass today – but the 2026 mid-terms could change that.

By now, it’s obvious that Donald Trump has no respect for the law.

When a federal judge put his spending freeze on hold, he said that the law really does not apply to him.

The appeal came as Trump, key members of his administration and billionaire ally Elon Musk have been criticizing judges who have blocked major pieces of the president's agenda, in some cases arguing that judges have no power to intrude on the president's authority.

Trump is apparently not aware that there are three branches of the government, so he needs to be stopped wherever possible.

President Donald Trump on Saturday posted on social media a single sentence that appears to encapsulate his attitude as he tests the nation’s legal and constitutional boundaries in the process of upending the federal government and punishing his perceived enemies.

“He who saves his Country does not violate any Law,” Trump wrote, first on his social media platform Truth Social, then on social platform X.

By late afternoon, Trump had pinned the statement to the top of his Truth Social feed, making it clear it was not a passing thought but one he wanted people to absorb. The official White House account on X posted his message in the evening.

The quote is a variation of one sometimes attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte, although its origin is unclear.

Nonetheless, the sentiment was familiar: Trump, through his words and actions, has repeatedly suggested that surviving two assassination attempts is evidence that he has divine backing to enforce his will.

He has brought a far more aggressive attitude toward his use of power to the White House in his second term than he did at the start of his first. The powers of the presidency that he returned to were bolstered by last year’s Supreme Court ruling that he is presumptively immune from prosecution for any crimes he may commit using his official powers.

During his first weeks in office, Trump has signed numerous executive orders that pushed at the generally understood limits of presidential power, fired numerous officials and dismantled an agency in clear violation of statutory limits, and frozen spending authorized by Congress without clear authority. Many of his policy moves have been at least temporarily frozen by judges.

Such moves include trying to unilaterally rewrite the definition of birthright citizenship — a right enshrined in the Constitution’s 14th Amendment — to exclude babies born to mothers living in the country without legal permission, and mass firings of public servants, ignoring civil service protection laws. He has all but shuttered the agency responsible for foreign aid, dismissed prosecutors who investigated him, and fired Senate-confirmed watchdogs without giving proper notice to Congress or justification.

Trump’s team has embraced an expansive version of the so-called unitary executive theory, a legal ideology that says that the Constitution should be understood as forbidding Congress from placing any limits on the president’s control of the executive branch, including by creating independent agencies or restricting the president’s ability to summarily fire any government official at will.

The Trump administration at first did not offer a public legal rationale for blowing through the statutes that provide various kinds of job protections to the officials that Trump has summarily fired, including members of independent agencies like the National Labor Relations Board.

But last week, the administration offered something of an explanation.

Sarah M. Harris, the acting solicitor general at the Justice Department, sent a letter to Congress saying the department would not defend the constitutionality of statutes that limit firing members of independent agencies before their terms were up. Such laws say the president cannot remove such an official at will, but only for a specific cause like misconduct.

While not using the phrase “unitary executive theory,” Harris’ letter echoed its ideological tenet that the Constitution does not allow Congress to enact a law “which prevents the president from adequately supervising principal officers in the executive branch who execute the laws on the president’s behalf” and said the Trump administration will try to get the Supreme Court to overturn a 1935 precedent to the contrary.

That, at least, is a theory under which at least some of what Trump has been doing is lawful: It is not illegal to disregard an unconstitutional statute.

But, taken at face value, Trump’s statement Saturday went much further, suggesting that even if what he is doing unambiguously breaks an otherwise valid law, that would not matter if he says his motive is to save the country.

 https://www.bostonglobe.com/2025/02/15/nation/donald-trump-above-the-law-napoleon-bonaparte/

For now, there is little that any of us can do to reverse the damage that is being done to our country. Although we see evidence of Trump’s stupidity on nearly a daily basis, I try not to get too worked up about things, since all it would do is raise my blood pressure.

It’s OK to shout obscenities at the television, and have an occasional glass of wine, but my advice is to simply take a deep breath, and try to laugh at the absurdity of it all.

 

 

 

 

 

There's a Pulitzer Prize for that?

 

The Pulitzer Prizes are 23 annual awards given by Columbia University in New York for achievements in the United States in "journalism, arts and letters". They were established in 1917 by the will of Joseph Pulitzer, who had made his fortune as a newspaper publisher.

Prizes in 2024 were awarded in these categories, with three finalists named for each:

·         Audio Reporting

·         Biography

·         Breaking News Reporting

·         Breaking News Photography

·         Commentary

·         Criticism

·         Drama

·         Editorial Writing

·         Explanatory Reporting

·         Feature Photography

·         Feature Writing

·         Fiction

·         General Nonfiction

·         History

·         Illustrated Reporting and Commentary

·         International Reporting

·         Investigative Reporting

·         Local Reporting

·         Memoir or Autobiography

·         Music

·         National Reporting

·         Poetry

·         Public Service

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulitzer_Prize

The one we don’t think much about is the Pulitzer for music.

 

The Pulitzer Prize for Music is one of seven Pulitzer Prizes awarded annually in Letters, Drama, and Music. It was first given in 1943. Joseph Pulitzer arranged for a music scholarship to be awarded each year, and this was eventually converted into a prize: "For a distinguished musical composition of significant dimension by an American that has had its first performance in the United States during the year."

Because of the requirement that the composition have its world premiere during the year of its award, the winning work had rarely been recorded and sometimes had received only one performance. In 2004, the terms were modified to read: "For a distinguished musical composition by an American that has had its first performance or recording in the United States during the year.

Pulitzer Prize for Music - Wikipedia

In its first 71 years, the Music Pulitzer was awarded 67 times; it was never split, and no prize was given in 1953, 1964, 1965, or 1981.

 

Six people have won the Pulitzer twice, and seven people have won the award posthumously.

In 2018, rapper Kendrick Lamar won the award for his 2017 hip hop album Damn. The recording was the first musical work not in the jazz or classical genre to win the prize

 

Kendrick Lamar Duckworth (born June 17, 1987) is an American rapper. Lamar is regarded as one of the most influential hip-hop artists of his generation, and one of the greatest rappers of all time.

Born in Compton, California, Lamar began releasing music under the stage name K.Dot while attending high school. He signed with Top Dawg Entertainment (TDE) in 2005, and co-founded the hip hop supergroup Black Hippy there. Following the 2011 release of his alternative rap debut album Section.80, Lamar secured a joint contract with Dr. Dre's Aftermath Entertainment and Interscope Records. He rose to prominence with his gangsta rap-influenced second album Good Kid, M.A.A.D City (2012), which became the longest-charting hip hop studio album in the Billboard 200's chart history; Rolling Stone named it the greatest concept album of all time. In 2015, Lamar scored his first Billboard Hot 100 number-one single, after featuring on the remix of Taylor Swift's "Bad Blood", and released his third album, To Pimp a Butterfly, which infused hip-hop with historical African-American music genres such as jazz, funk, and soul, and became his first of five consecutive number-one albums on the Billboard 200 chart.

Lamar's critical and commercial success continued with his R&B and pop-leaning fourth album Damn (2017), yielding his second Hot 100 number-one single, "Humble". He curated original songs for the soundtrack of the 2018 film Black Panther, earning a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Original Song for the US and UK top-ten single "All the Stars". Lamar's 2022 double album Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers concluded his tenure with TDE and Aftermath. His feud with Drake and subsequent sixth album GNX (2024) spawned the Hot 100 number-ones "Like That" and "Squabble Up", as well as "Not Like Us", which became the most-decorated song in the Grammy Awards history, with five wins, including Song of the Year and Record of the Year.

Lamar has received various accolades throughout his career, including 22 Grammy Awards (the third-most won by a rapper), a Primetime Emmy Award, a Brit Award, four American Music Awards, seven Billboard Music Awards, 11 MTV Video Music Awards (including two Video of the Year wins), and a record 37 BET Hip Hop Awards. Time listed him as one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2016. Two of his concert tours, the Damn Tour (2017–2018) and the Big Steppers Tour (2022–2024), are amongst the highest-grossing rap tours in history. Three of his works were included in Rolling Stone's 2020 revision of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. Outside of music, Lamar co-founded the creative company PGLang and ventured into film with his longtime creative partner, Dave Free.

People that look like me are not fund of rap music. For that reason, we thought that this year’s Superbowl halftime show was terrible. In actuality, it was a brilliant performance, is you look at it from the black perspective.

 

How the “Subversive Genius” of Kendrick Lamar Sent Trump Home a Loser | The Nation

This year’s Super Bowl in New Orleans could have been a fascist Mardi Gras. Over a week ago, state police forced more than 100 unhoused people, under threat of arrest, into a freezing warehouse from which they barred the press. State agencies destroyed homeless encampments, and the operation cost taxpayers $17.5 million. Then, this last week, police, Secret Service members, and the Department of Homeland Security smothered the Superdome and the city. And, of course, Donald Trump would be at the game, the first sitting president—as we’ve been told ad nauseam all week—to go to the biggest spectacle in the country.

 

The scene was set beforehand when Trump got a cozy Fox News interview where, making his frowny face, he again signaled that a judge’s ruling to stop Elon Musk from controlling our financial records doesn’t mean anything to him. He also picked the Kansas City Chiefs to win, citing his affection for Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes’s MAGA wife, Brittany. He also said he was attending the game for the “good for the country.” As if it were not obvious at this point, crypto-coin Trump does nothing for the good of the country. He was there to bask like Caesar in a display of authoritarian power.

Then, the unexpected: In the first half, the Philadelphia Eagles knocked the snot out of Mahomes and the Chiefs. The two-time defending champions looked overmatched—like bullies who withered after being punched in the mouth. But even that trouncing was a pillow fight compared to the halftime show, where hip-hop maestro Kendrick Lamar took center stage. Lamar unleashed an artistic inferno rooted in Black culture, Black poetry, and Black resistance. Trump’s most prominent racist online trolls—I don’t want to link and give them the attention they crave—were already spitting that it was a “DEI halftime show,” which was more pathetic than upsetting. They are pieces of soggy Wonder bread, reduced to attacking brilliance because it exposes their mediocrity. It’s just stupid to think some addled 78-year-old misogynist caked in orange is the peak of masculinity.

 

But many of the people watching Lamar were those who have been deeply shaken by the constant, unaccountable cruelty pummeling us every day. Innumerable people—I’ve been hearing from them all week—were praying that Lamar would say something about Trump or Musk to the tens of millions of viewers. They wanted him to take on all the weight of this moment. It’s an understandable desire, but it’s also unfair: a “save us” burden that always disproportionately falls on the shoulders of Black artists. A popular slogan now is “No one will save us but us.” This plea was more “Save us, Kendrick.” But Lamar, who is more an abstract master of symbology than political rabble-rouser, performed something right in Trump’s face that I think people will be decoding for years. It was a textured, deeply layered, colossal middle finger to the worst of US history, Trump, and anyone who would try to obliterate Black culture in this country.

 

Playing off Samuel L. Jackson dressed as Uncle Sam and representing—at least to me—the false promise of assimilation through erasure, Lamar started in a crouching pose. It wasn’t a knee, as in Colin Kaepernick’s protest against police violence, but for someone who is incredibly self-aware of his every physical and verbal metaphor, starting in that posture on a football field was not happenstance. So many people would have cheered a knee—understandably!—but that would have been way too obvious for this man. Then, he started by performing just one bar of a lyric that does not exist in his catalog. He said, “The revolution is about to be televised. You picked the right time, but the wrong guy.”

To me, these 16 words are not a puzzle but a work of art. It’s not literal. It’s something you hear, something you feel, and something you interpret. Like a moving sculpture or tapestry, you need to account for the intentions of the artist but also how those intentions interact with your own perspective and gut emotional response. I take it as him saying—again in Trump’s face—that our mindset needs to be aimed toward revolution, but do not look to him to carry the weight. It’s the “right time,” but I am the “wrong guy,” if that’s your intent. No more martyrs. This is an “all of us” project.

That “all of us” was on stage. Yes, it was Lamar in the spotlight delivering the most 100 percent pure hip-hop show ever shown to so vast an audience. But it was more than the power of one. He had brilliant Black dancers dressed in red, white, and blue, looking like an American flag, and he marched right through them, timing it to the lyric, “40 acres and a mule, this is bigger than the music / They tried to rig the game, but you can’t fake influence.” To my eyes, he was tearing apart the flag with history and truth—saying you can try to shackle Black people, but Black culture is an ineradicable part of this country. It was especially powerful that he did this in New Orleans, a place that has been left for dead time and again but is the cradle of the Black music that is at the heart of this country’s culture. Saying this in the face of the man canceling Black History Month also mattered.

(Trump did not actually cancelled Black History month, but the Pentagon just cancelled “identity holidays”).

At this point, the dancers were all Black men. For a later song, he was framed exclusively by Black women in nearly identical clothing as the men, moving with both power and grace. Then they all came together. In the middle of it all, a male dancer, on his own it is believed, unfurled a Palestinian flag attached to a Sudanese flag. His protest was surrounded by dancers dressed in all black, faces covered, raising their fists. He held the flags high before being tackled by security and detained. Whether planned or not, it connected with the broader themes of resistance, which felt electric, improvisational, and, to those who want to kill hope, dangerous. There is so much more to discuss—the lyrics chosen, SZA’s genius, a very pointed Serena Williams cameo!—but much was also beyond me. I need to read others—like Lamar codebreaker David Dennis Jr. (journalist and son of civil rights legend Dave Dennis), who called Lamar’s performance “subversive genius” and maybe “the biggest rap performance ever.”

 

As for Trump, according to reports, he stood next to his date, Ivanka, during the halftime show and then immediately left. He is our fragile orange flower and couldn’t bear seeing his dream of Black erasure rebuked. He couldn’t bear seeing art that he was unable to appreciate or understand. He couldn’t bear looking like a loser for picking the Chiefs because he likes the quarterback’s wife, so he hightailed it home before the cameras could catch him. After leaving, to make himself feel better, he banned the penny.

As for the game, the Eagles wrecked the Chiefs, before a couple of late garbage Kansas City touchdowns made it a final score of 40–22. Eagles quarterback Jalen Hurts, who was clearly the saltiest about Trump’s presence in the lead-up to the game—when other players were walking on eggshells—was the official MVP. Now, we’ll see if the Eagles, a team that after winning in 2018 boycotted going to the White House, will even get an invite from the King of Petty.

Since he couldn’t stay to congratulate them, I can’t imagine why, if an invitation is offered, they would accept. (If the Chiefs had won, Trump would have preened on the field and chased cameras like a Hollywood ingénue.)

But as great as Hurts was, the real MVPs were the dancers, the choreographers, the costume designers, SZA, and Lamar. They created something collective, and we should understand it as cooperative political art, instead of decrying it because Lamar didn’t stand there reading a lefty pamphlet. The Eagles won, and the Chiefs lost. But I’ll remember this as the night when Kendrick Lamar sent Donald Trump home.