GOP Says Lying to Congress Is a Crime If You Didn’t Already Do It to Become a Supreme Court Justice

June 6: GOP seeks (more) investigation of Biden sons … GOP request riddled with BS … Alito neighbor turns upside-down flag story right-side up … UN chief calls for ban on Big Oil ads …

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Then-Pres. George W. Bush introduces Judge Samuel Alito on Oct. 31, 2005, as his nominee for a Supreme Court seat he got to steal because the Supreme Court stole the presidency for him. (White House photo / Paul Morse.)

House Republicans yesterday asked the Justice Department to more-investigate Hunter Biden, and throw in a pinch of James Biden just for good measure and an extra dash of Bideniness. The Biden crime family is accused of lying to Congress in order to cover up the vast array of non-crimes that were not committed by the Biden crime family.

The accusation came from three experts in the field: Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan (R-OH), Oversight and Accountability Chair James Comer (R-KY), and Ways and Means Chair Jason Smith (R-MO). It’s kind of impressive they managed to restrain themselves from accusing Pres. Joe Biden’s late son Beau of lying in peace.

The Republican accusers include veterans of past GOP legal triumphs such as jailing the perpetrators behind Benghazi, Pizzagate, Antifa, and Biden’s theft of the 2020 presidential election.¹ They also successfully removed Homeland Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas from office for high crimes and misdemeanors.²

The brother and surviving son of President Biden are accused of lying to cover up legal business shit that may or may not have involved Biden when he was president vice president a guy.

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) made a passionate appeal to the Justice Department yesterday to investigate the criminal gang, known as The Biden Boys, that has terrorized the nation. Johnson said this will prove the department’s independence and save democracy by demonstrating that no one is above the law except some people.

Like Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito!

We’ll get to the Biden crime cartel in a moment, but there was big news about Alito yesterday, too.

You may recall that Alito last week wrote to Congress to explain that an upside-down American flag flying at his house didn’t justify his recusal from cases involving DCC3FRFP³ Donald Trump’s attempted presidency-stealing even though the upside-down flag is the logo for Trump’s accomplices. Turns out Alito lied. To Congress!

How do we know? Because last night the neighbor he lied about went on CNN and called Alito a lying stinky-face poophead (paraphrasing).

“At best, he’s mistaken, but at worst, he’s just outright lying,” said Emily Baden — now Alito’s former neighbor because who wants to live next to the Addams Family of the right-wing judicial world.

The specific lies:

• Lie #1: Alito’s wife flew the flag due to being called the c-word (not “conservative” or “Christian.”)

• Lie #2: It was a male neighbor who called Martha-Ann Alito the c-word .

• Lie #3: A sign on the street attacked her personally.

Re: Lie #1, the flag was flying as of Jan. 17, 2021, but the c-word didn’t fly until Feb. 15, 2021. Re: Lie #2, Baden said it was she, not a man, who called Martha-Ann Alito the c-word (and if you want to argue that women are allowed to use that word, I won’t argue with you, but I’m still not cool with it. NB: I still haven’t figured out how I feel about its usage in the U.K.)

Amusingly, conservative Catholic grown-ass man Alito witnessed the exchange, but chose not to intervene, which is something right-wing justices usually only do when innocent people of color are about to be executed.

After Baden dropped the c-bomb on his wife, Baden says, Alito, standing right there, “didn’t do anything.” Baden says “He just kept walking … and basically disappeared.”

Re: Lie #3, Baden says none of the signs were directed personally at Alito’s wife. “You are complicit,” read one, which would apply personally to Alito’s wife only if she were complicit. So I guess Alito just confessed she’s complicit?

And Biden didn’t even cover all the other Alito lies (A-lie-tos™). Here are some more from his letter to Congress:

• Lie #4: There were no steps Alito could take to take down the flag.

• Lie #5: Alito’s wife has made many sacrifices “to accommodate my service on the Supreme Court.”

• Lie #6: Those sacrifices include the “insult” of protests at their home.

Re: Lie #4, Alito literally could have taken down the flag himself. You unsecure the lanyard or rope or whatever the hell it is and you lower the fucking flag. Alito also literally could have simply flipped the flag into the proper position.

Re: Lie #5 & 6, the “sacrifices” Alito’s wife has made were not to accommodate his service on the court, they resulted from what he did on the court, from his disservice to the court and the country, from the fact that he is using his position on the court to advance his own personal religious beliefs and political grievances rather than administer justice in accordance with settled law and precedent.

It’s Alito’s willingness to misuse the court that the missus has made sacrifices for. And whatever sacrifices the Alitos have made are arguably more than made up for by the bounty of payola that’s come their way courtesy of their right-wing billionaire patrons.

But all of this is theater.

For one thing, you can argue that Alito’s letter doesn’t count legally as lying to Congress because it’s neither a sworn statement nor in-person testimony under oath. But so much more important is the fact that all of this pales in comparison to the original sin of lying to Congress in order to get on the court in the first place.

In the Senate, under oath, Alito — and his unindicted co-conspirators — were asked repeatedly, specifically, directly about their positions on abortion and other shit of intense, personal importance to hundreds of millions of Americans. They all lied. And not even to save their nominations; Republicans would still have put them on the bench. No, they lied to save their Republican benefactors the discomfort of being politically answerable to the American people for what they were doing.

Let’s go to the transcript. On Wednesday, Jan. 11, 2006, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) asked nominee Alito, “Do you believe [Roe v. Wade] is the settled law of the land?”

Alito responded with word salad, the equivalent of telling your teacher when you haven’t done the reading, “War and Peace is an important milestone in Russian literature. Its impact and its meaning have been debated for decades…”

Durbin pushed: “How do you see it?” [Emphasis added to stress the lack of reading War and Peace.]

Alito responded: “I have explained, senator, as best I can how I see it.” A lie. The words of a lying stinky-face poophead. And we know this was a lie, because in 2022, when he was in charge, writing the ruling that killed Roe v. Wade, Alito somehow now was able to explain his belief about it much better:

"Roe was egregiously wrong from the start.”

All that said, the real justification for impeachment, not just for Alito, is the criminal decisions these people have handed down for decades now — step by step undoing the work of generations to create a more perfect union, a more just nation — instead empowering the powerful, enrichinger the enriched and disenfranchising the disenfranchised. To wit:

Stealing the presidency with Bush v. Gore. Stealing voting rights by eviscerating the Voting Rights Act and hogtying the Justice Department’s enforcement capacity and rubber-stamping racist congressional maps. Inviting state officials to set up camp in women’s uteruses and forcing women to let clumps of cells differentiate inside their bodies for nine months. Perpetuating systemic racism by banning programs mitigating it. Polluting our country and enhottening our planet by liberating rich people to profit off of us by shitting into our water and air. Respecting an establishment of religion by, among other things, immunizing criminals whose criminal motive for discriminating against LGBTQ+ people and others involves believing in magic. Add your own examples in the comments!

(I know I’ll get beat up for this, but I’m less sure personally that their rulings on campaign finance were wrong and certainly I’ve been glad to see them recognize some rights for same-sex couples. Good for them, here’s a fuckin’ cookie filled with microplastics to munch on while you evade impeachment but not the judgment of history.)

Bottom line: As Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) has illuminated for years now, it is a bad thing for rich people to create an entire alternate-reality ecosystem of law and politics to cultivate and deploy legions of lawyers and judges and future-judges who adhere to an aberrant and undemocratic set of “principles” ginned up to justify circumventing the law, precedent and social norms all for the primary purpose of de-democratizing our democracy. That is worse than lying about a dumb-ass flag. That is worse even than coquetting with the Senate about your true beliefs at your confirmation hearing.

House GOP Focuses on the Real Threat to America: The Sons of Presidential Anarchy

The letter the House committee chairs sent to the Justice Department yesterday is all about lies. Ostensibly, it’s about lies told by the family of Pres. Joe Biden, but according to the New York Times, the letter also involves GOP lies, lies about The Biden Boys.

Let’s consider them. Hunter Biden is listed as a corporate secretary of something called Rosemont Seneca Bohai, which got millions of dollars from foreign…I wanna say, investors?

Shady? Sure! Illegal? Not! Lying about it? Well…did he?

Hunter Biden was an equity partner, but testified to the House — as did a business associate — that he held no position at the thing called Rosemont Seneca Bohai and didn’t even know that “corporate secretary” was a title, let alone his. In other words, just because the folks at whatever Rosemont Seneca Bohai is decided to call Biden a corporate secretary doesn’t mean he actually was one or that it constituted a real position. And definitely doesn’t establish that he covered it up.

The House GOP also accuses Hunter Biden of lying about texting threats to someone named Henry Zhao. Or maybe it was Raymond Zhao? Biden apparently switched the two names in his testimony…after, as the Times reports, the Republicans themselves got the names wrong in their questioning, the questioning Biden was assuming was correct when he based his answer on it.

The James Biden stuff is similarly flimsy, but the real point is that, under a Trump Justice Department, “flimsy” may become the new not-flimsy. In which case, the Trump Justice Department will have a predicate to open The Case of the Rampant Arguable Duplicity of The Criminal Biden Boys in Sworn Testimony About Trivial Matters.

I’m actually one of the tiny handful who doesn’t think Trump is hankering to prosecute The Biden Boys (so you may yell at me for not believing every terrible thing about Trump), but either way we don’t need a full investigation for this to be a horrific, weighty thing to level against anyone. Even the sons of a rich and powerful politician.

U.N. Secretary-General Calls for Ban on Fossil Fuel Ads

António Guterres, secretary-general of the United Nations, yesterday called on the world’s nations to ban fossil-fuel ads the way tobacco ads were banned decades ago, back when countries still passed laws restraining companies from doing bad things.

Guterres called out media and public-relations companies — though not naming any, as far as I can tell — telling them to stop creating and running fossil fuel ads.

“I call on these companies to stop acting as enablers to planetary destruction. Stop taking on new fossil-fuel clients from today. And set out plans to drop your existing ones. Fossil fuels are not only poisoning our planet, they’re toxic for your brand,” Guterres said, apparently unaware that the brands of big media companies are already toxic.

Guterres said that big oil companies didn’t just lie about climate change, they’re greenwashing themselves now, “distorting the truth, deceiving the public and sowing doubt.”

Referring to Big Oil companies, Guterres said that “the Godfathers of climate chaos rake in record profits and feast off trillions in taxpayer-funded subsidies.”

And, like actual crime godfathers, Big Oil companies will kill people if it’s profitable. Some island nations will literally vanish if Big Oil isn’t stopped, Guterres said. And oil companies just abetted the heat murder of 33 poll workers in India’s 120°-plus cities and towns.

But here’s the thing, you don’t ban The Godfather from advertising, you hit him with RICO charges and throw his ass in jail and you definitely stop his criming.

Remember (if you are old) how ads for cigarettes were banned because cigarettes destroy your lungs? The same ban should be applied to companies that destroy what goes into your lungs and that destroy the flimsy-ass gaseous shield that protects all Earth life from the bazillion-degree radioactive nuclear fireball just 93 million miles away.

Guterres delivered his remarks at New York’s American Museum of Natural History, beneath the gigundo life-size blue whale which for secular New Yorkers such as myself is the equivalent of the Vatican and Mecca, stealing your breath with the power of natural beauty and instilling you with a spiritual sense of wonder and a reverential awe that can come only from surrendering to the majesty of the universe and the wild joy of life. Look, a whale!

Teeny-tiny Guterres speaking in the world’s awesomest speaking location yesterday. (UN photo / Mark Garten)

Unfortunately for real whales and real humans, the key threshold for irreversible, catastrophic climate change is sustained global temperatures 2.7° above pre-industrial levels. For the past 12 months, Earth has been 2.9° hotter. Any math majors out there?!?

Guterres announced that the World Meteorological Organization now calculates there’s an 80% chance we’ll top that threshold again in the next five years. Possibly this one.

To avoid topping that threshold, the world must cut its carbon emissions by 9% every year. Last year emissions rose by 1%. But just 1%. And there is hope that last year was the peak. Because clean-energy investments are also at record highs, and not peaking.

It’s “still just about possible” to avoid the climate threshold, Guterres said, but it means fighting harder. “Advanced G20 economies should go furthest, fastest,” he said, with the next G7 meeting just one week away.

As for climate activists, Guterres said they’re not helping the cause with their divisive extremism and disruption of daily life. Oh wait, I must’ve been reading a Big Oil press release. Guterres actually said:

“You are on the right side of history. You speak for the majority. Keep it up; don’t lose courage, don’t lose hope…

“Now is the time to mobilize, now is the time to act, now is the time to deliver. This is our moment of truth.”

D-Day Anniversary

Today is the 80th anniversary of the landing at Normandy by the U.S. and allied forces. It was the turning point for the war in Europe and, it turned out, for American militarism. It’s sometimes called the last good war.

I don’t usually do anniversaries, but the calendar and human biology strongly suggest this is the last major D-Day anniversary on which we’ll be able to thank living veterans of World War II. It’s bullshit to call any generation the greatest generation, but it’s bullshit not to recognize that members of this generation did a great thing.

The best way to honor it and them is not with mealy-mouthed platitudes about patriotism and veterans, but to create a world worth their efforts and sacrifice. And they didn’t save millions from Germany’s ovens just for us to let corporations turn the whole world into one. So, we’re on it, veteran geezers! Thank you!

TCB

CORRECTION I’ve revised the stuff about The Biden Boys because in the first iteration I referred to James Biden as the president’s son rather than brother. In my defense, I have consumed too much corporate media to believe anyone in Biden’s family is possibly old enough to be his brother.

NICOLE SANDLER Catch me every Monday with the weekly “The Fucking News” segment on The Nicole Sandler Show, which you can watch/listen to live every Monday at 5pm, or on demand, here.

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Go get ‘em, kids…!

1. They did not.

2. They did also not.

3. DCC3FRFP = Disgraced, criminally convicted, tridicted, fraudster, rapist, former President.