Another, Real, Reason to Celebrate June 14th

"I have in my possession numerous affidavits establishing the fact that people are being unlawfully arrested, thrown into jail, held incommunicado for days, only to be eventually discharged without ever having been taken into court, because they have committed no crime. Private residences are being invaded, loyal citizens of undoubted integrity and probity arrested, cross-examined, and the most sacred constitutional rights guaranteed to every American citizen are being violated. It appears to be the purpose of those conducting this campaign to throw the country into a state of terror, to coerce public opinion, to stifle criticism, and suppress discussion of the great issues involved in this war." -Senator Robert M. La Follette, October 1917

    Right wingers were celebrating yesterday for the same reason neo Nazis celebrate every April 20- It gave them a chance to fly their subversive flags while celebrating the birth of a Nazi.

    But a truly great political figure from our history was also born on June 14th- Sen. Robert M. La Follette of Wisconsin. La Follette was perhaps the most liberal senator to come out of Wisconsin until Russ Feingold and was a member of the Republican Party until a few years before they turned into the rabid pack of upholstered jackals and 5th columnists that they remain today.

    The paragraph quoted above almost sounds as if it could've been written last summer, when the entire nation was convulsed with racial inequality protests in the first weeks after George Floyd's murder in Minneapolis. 

   What La Follette was bitterly opposing in this October 1917 speech was the debate around the Sedition Act of 1917, some of the most Nativist and paranoid legislation to ever come out of Congress since the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. And the tactics that La Follette describes are, to the last detail, the exact same ones used against the protesters in Portland, Oregon.

   Esquire's Charlie Pierce, the wonderfully grumpy old curmudgeon who'd inspired this article, mentioned La Follette in his usual salty way in describing the Wisconsin senator's bitter opposition to the very existence of the Sedition Act that put whistleblower Reality Winner behind bars four years ago.

    Winner was just sprung from Carswell today and transferred to a halfway house to serve out the last six months of her sentence for proving the Russians did hack the 2016 election, after all.

    Now, there's a small groundswell that seeks to get the Biden administration to commute the remainder of her sentence or, better yet, pardon her entirely. But that's exactly something the Biden administration has no stomach for, especially in the DOJ.

    We've seen some strangeness from the DOJ since right after Garland took it over. From defending Bill Barr by appealing, literally in the last hour, Amy Berman Jackson's ruling to release the Barr memo that led to his whitewash of the Mueller Report to continuing to defend Trump from his defamation lawsuit with E. Jean Carroll to being close-mouthed about the DOJ's involvement in the twilight of Trump's 4th Reich with spying on congressmen, their staff and even their families.

     Practically from Inauguration Day, Biden has been the Toby of the minority Republican Party, still bending over backwards counting on Senate collegiality that never truly existed to get things done, despite the Republican Party's obstinate obstructionism on virtually very front from the stimulus bill to the infrastructure bill to the abolition of the filibuster to the John Lewis Voting Rights Act to the formation of the January 6th bill to torpedoing Biden's first SCOTUS pick in case God forbid the GOP regains the Senate, they have shown in countless ways the "loyal but principled opposition" has shown to be neither and is bound and determined to act in bad faith as long as there's a Democrat in the WH.

     So, naturally, Joe Biden is afraid to give the GOP an actual weapon they can use against him, like Reality Winner's pardon.

     Forgotten will be Roger Stone's pardon for being Wikileaks' conduit for the Russian-hacked Clinton and DNC emails. Consigned to the Memory Hole will be Trump's pardon of convicted war criminal Eddie Gallagher. And going unremarked will be the active and continued sedition on the part of most Republicans in Congress and the part they played in the January 6th riots and challenging the electoral college results just hours later.

     Because, heavens to Betsy, we wouldn't want to give the GOP a reason to be displeased with Democrats aside from their very physical existence.