Louisiana Voice

A few notable quotables to start the day:

“Based on the sentiment I’ve perceived in the Senate and on the evidence from the House impeachment articles, if we voted on (impeachment) now, it’d be as dead as a fried chicken.”

–Sen. John (Kornpone) Kennedy, Oct. 18, 2019.

Here’s what Louisiana’s congressmen said about Trump’s impeachment (thenewsstar.com)

“The vote today was nothing more than a proxy vote on President Trump. It was a partisan impeachment in both houses. Our founders did not intend impeachment to be used this way. I believe Speaker Pelosi’s attempt to normalize impeachment and to turn it into a routine political weapon was a mistake. In fact, it was reckless. A country as great as ours deserves better, and so do her people.”

–Sen. John (Kornpone) Kennedy, Feb. 5, 2020

https://www.kennedy.senate.gov/public/2020/2/sen-kennedy-statement-on-senate-impeachment-vote

“Many Democrats, some Republicans, a lot of members of the media, have their bowels in an uproar because the president refuses to concede and he’s gone to court,” he said. “Everybody’s entitled to their opinion. This is America. The president has every right to offer his opinion about the election. Number two, he has every right to go to court and contest the results of the election, and you have every right to disagree. But that doesn’t degrade democracy. It elevates it.”

–Sen. John (Kornpone) Kennedy, Dec. 4, 2020.

Kennedy: Democrats, some Republicans ‘have their bowels in an uproar’ over Trump not conceding | Fox News

Perhaps I appear to be picking on our junior senator in pulling up these three quotes, but they do conjure up fond memories of the time that Earl Long, in his final campaign, said of his opponent, U.S. Rep. Harold McSween way back in 1960, “He’s the only person I know who can talk out of both sides of his mouth and whistle at the same time.”

Kennedy, who seems bent on becoming a hybrid version of folksy Uncle Earl and the Rhodes Scholar that he is, serves as something of an example of how the Republicans in Congress can twist logic completely out of shape to fit their agenda – which seems to be “anything Donald Trump wants.”

But to be fair to Kennedy, here’s another Republican’s quote

“When all is said and done, when the history of this impeachment is written, it will be said that my Washington Democrat friends couldn’t bring themselves to work with Donald Trump, so they consoled themselves instead by silencing the will of those who did, the American people.”

–Then U.S. Rep. (now White House Chief of Staff) Mark Meadows, of North Carolina.

And another:

“They’re here to perpetrate the most massive interference in an election in American history. And we can’t allow that to happen.”

–White House counsel Pat Cipollone, defending Trump in the impeachment trial, Jan. 25, 2020.

https://apnews.com/article/21791704b5434669225117a0638b7a1a

So, just how did we get to such a point in the history of this country? How is it that Republicans in the House and Senate who were so strident in protesting the Trump impeachment, claiming that Democrats wanted to undo the will of the people who elected him? How could they ignore the fact that he lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by 3 million votes (so his election wasn’t exactly a mandate of a majority of the people) even though the very procedure of impeachment is designed for just that purpose – overturning bad decisions?

Yet now, four years later, those same Republicans and at least 18 state attorneys general want to overturn the will of the people who defeated trump by 7 million votes. – and by the very same electoral vote that Trump won by four years ago. That could be called a mandate. Kennedy, though, is by no means alone among those Republicans who insist on wearing blinders and ear plugs.

Take, for example Louisiana’s Attorney General Jeff Landry, the man who probably knows more about losing in a court of law than just about any attorney in the state. He’s neither folksy nor particularly smart; he’s just your ordinary, run-of-the-mill political hack trying to ride the tide of (red state Louisiana) public opinion into the governor’s office.

It’s of little consequence that he can’t win a court case – not even for TONY SPELL, despite a U.S. Supreme Court decision that appeared to back Landry and Spell on the freedom to attend religious services during a pandemic that has killed nearly 300,000 Americans. (Landry wasn’t the legal counsel for Spell in the controversy over limiting attendance at Spell’s Life Tabernacle Church in Central, but he offered considerable vocal support for the pastor.)

And now, Landry continues tilting at windmills by joining 16 other state attorneys general in supporting the lawsuit of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton that asks the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn the election results in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia and Wisconsin.

One news outlet, The New York Times, hinted that Paxton has his own legal problems (he is under indictment in a securities fraud case and facing separate accusations in another case of abusing his office) and may be fishing for a preemptory presidential pardon for himself.

The Quixotic effort by the eight Republican attorneys general would be laughable were the effort not so transparently and blatantly partisan – and ridiculous, prompting a University of Washington law professor to describe Paxton’s brief as “legally incoherent, factually untethered and based on theories of remedy that fundamentally misunderstand the electoral process.”

And it is being litigated by the highest elective legal officers of 18 states, none of which are from the actual states where the results are being challenged – which raises the immediate question of whether they even have standing to bring the suit.

All of which rings rather hollow against earlier claims of “the most massive interference in an election in American history.”

There’s another Earl Long quote about former Attorney General Jack P.F. Gremillion that could just as easily be said about Landry:

“If you want to hide something from (him), put it in a law book.”

I have never in all my 77-plus years seen anyone as despicable as Donald Trump.

And I know writing this will generate the usual comments from the Trump devotees who can see no wrong in anything their champion does. Whether it’s RIDICULING a physically handicapped reporter or bragging about groping women, it’s okay because he’s “gon’ make Amurica grate agin.”

A decent person would never do that. If I had made fun of a less fortunate person while growing up, my grandfather would have slapped me three ways from Sunday. And he would’ve been justified. If you can defend mocking a physically handicapped person, you can rationalize defending just about anything – and it makes you less of a human being.

I have a news flash for you: Trump is no more interested in “making America great again” than he is in understanding his daily intelligence briefings. He is interested in one thing and one thing only: siphoning off millions of dollars for Donald J. Trump.

And he’s doing that right now in spades and his followers are too blind to see it. Those 20-30 emails per day he is sending out daily in the names of himself and his family members and political allies, ostensibly to raise funds to fight the legal battle for the presidency (that he, incidentally, has already lost) are actually to benefit DJT, affectionately known here as President Tweet Thang.

Since the election (which again, he LOST), he has already raised a figure north of $200 million, of which his special PAC gets 60 percent or more. And get this: there are no restrictions on how he can spend that money. It will go to pay him a nice seven-figure salary as well as paying his deadbeat kids.

This is money in large part from people who can ill-afford to lay out cash for some pseudo-televangelist-like huckster who has no more concern for working American than he has for those children he’s locked in cages.

Yesterday, at his rally in Georgia, he boasted that he has worked harder in the past three weeks than ever before in his life. That’s probably true, but has he been working for Americans or to overcome the pandemic? Hell, no.

• He’s been working to overturn a constitutionally legal election that he lost by more than 7 million votes.
• He’s been working to give his kids, political allies (and possibly himself) preemptive pardons, raising the obvious question of why do they need pardons if they’ve done nothing illegal?
• He’s been busy attempting to speed up federal executions so he those he hasn’t killed by ignoring the coronavirus threat he can pick up via firing squad.
• He’s been busy attempting to strip environmental protections for air, water and wildlife to the benefit of corporate donors.
• And when he wasn’t doing all that, he was playing golf at his own resorts, forcing US taxpayers to pick up the tab for millions of dollars for housing and feeding (water at Mar a Lago: $5 a glass) Secret Service details, hangers-on and family members. Meanwhile, First Lady Melania (“Let them eat cake”) Antoinette blithefully announced a new White House tennis pavilion – in the midst of a pandemic and an economic recession. That should ease the pain of losing your job, your health insurance and perhaps your home.

It’s not like he didn’t have the opportunity to do more. Earlier this year, PFIZER offered to sell the US another 100 million doses of its coronavirus vaccine in addition to the 100 million initially ordered, but Trump passed on the offer. That could cause delays in distribution in this country. The 100 million doses first ordered are sufficient for only 50 million Americans and now the US is going to have to wait until Pfizer has supplied other countries before it gets additional doses.

How bone-headed is that to not order as many doses as possible to stem the pandemic in this country?

Donald Trump has the blood of more than 282,000 Americans who have died of Covid on his hands. Make no mistake about that. Likewise all those patriotic members of Congress like Sens. Tom Cotton, Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham, Ted Cruz, John Cornyn, Marco Rubio and yes, John N. Kennedy, and Reps. Clay Higgins, Steve Scalise, Mike Johnson, Jim Jordan, Devin Nunes and all the others who have sold their souls and sacrificed their principles at the altar of reelection and campaign contributions while forsaking America.

Yes, I am calling their patriotism into question and if they don’t like it, tough. If they stand by such a person, and look the other way when he says and does the things he has, I don’t consider them patriots.

Don’t believe me when I say to Trump’s frenzied fanatics that your patriotic priorities are misplaced? Well, try chewing on this a while:

For all those people whose misguided sense of patriotism has them thinking he’s so damned good for the country (certain of my family members included), I would offer this little civics test:

• How many amendments are there to the US Constitution?
• How many amendments are there in the Bill of Rights?
• We all know what the First and Second Amendments provide, but what does the Fourth Amendment provide?
• Which amendment did Trump violate when he walked across the street for that photo-op of him holding a Bible upside down in front of that church?
• How many Cabinet positions are there?
• Is the Vice President a member of the Cabinet?
• How many members of Congress (both houses combined) are there?
• How many members are there in the House of Representatives?
• How many senators?
• How many US Representatives does Louisiana have?
• Name four of them.
• How many Senators does Louisiana have?
• Name them.
• How long are the terms of representatives?
• How long are the terms of senators?
• How many justices are there on the US Supreme Court?
• How long are the terms of federal judges?
• Does the President have the line-item veto?
• How many combined members (House and Senate) does the Louisiana Legislature have?
• How many representatives?
• How many senators?
• How many justices sit on the Louisiana Supreme Court?
• How long are the terms of Louisiana Supreme Court justices?
• Name the capitals of at least 20 states.
• Name at least 25 presidents.

If you are unable to get at least 15 of these 25 questions correct, you need to (a) go back to school, (b) cease debating politics altogether, (c) quit watching/listening to Fox News, OAN, Info Wars, and/or QAnon,  (d) turn in your membership card to whatever militia you belong to, (e) all of the above.

When attorneys face off on Monday in Atlanta to argue whether or not an imaginative theory involving some sort of concocted multi-national conspiracy to rig the results of the presidential election in favor of Joe Biden, a Denham Springs native will be the lead attorney defending the integrity of the election against the claims of an odd assortment of plaintiffs.

Amanda Callais, a partner in the Washington, D.C., firm of Perkins Coie, attended Denham Springs High School for two years before completing her secondary education at the Louisiana School for Math, Science and the Arts in Natchitoches.

Callais, 37, is a 2006 summa cum laude graduate of LSU with a B.A. in Political Science and History. She obtained her Juris Doctorate from Tulane Law School where she graduated summa cum laude and was a member of the Order of the Coif, an honor extended to the top ten law school graduates. She clerked from 2012 to 2013 for Judge Carl Barbier, of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana.

Monday’s hearing is one of a string of some 40 legal actions brought by President Donald Trump and his team in efforts to overturn the Nov. 3 election which Trump lost by some 7 million votes. All but one, a minor victory involving a procedural issue, have been rejected by courts in Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.

The latest effort, which has taken on the name of the “Kracken” lawsuit, is so named for the mythological “kraken” sea monster of Scandinavian folklore and sailors’ propensity for telling tall tales. Among the plaintiffs who propose to offer their “expert” testimony is one individual known only as “Spyder.”

A MOTION TO EXCLUDE TESTIMONY filed by Callais and co-counsel Adam M. Sparks claims that the so-called experts of the plaintiffs are either not qualified to address the issue of voter fraud, fail to disclose methods by which they reach their conclusions, offer erroneous information and/or offer only speculation to support their theories.

Plaintiff Attorney Sidney Powell, who has since been disavowed by the Trump team, submitted a legal argument fraught with misspellings (she spelled the rather basic word “District” three different ways), errors in geography (she placed a Michigan county in Wisconsin), created a whole new county in Michigan that never existed before, brought the long dead Venezuelan leader Hugo Chávez into her bizarre conspiracy, and managed to claim that machine algorithms “deliberately run by Dominion Voting Systems that generally took more than 2.5% of the vote from Mr. Biden and flipped them to Mr. Trump for more than 5% fraudulent vote increase for Mr. Biden.” (Okay, somebody’s gonna have to explain that unique mathematical equation to me. I mean, how do you take votes from Candidate A and give them to Candidate B while AND create a greater number of votes for Candidate A in so doing?)

A brief in support of the motion to dismiss plaintiffs’ motion took aim at the plaintiffs’ motives and their efforts to upset a legal election:

“Plaintiffs, a group of disappointed Republican presidential electors, filed a Complaint alleging widespread fraud in the November general election in Georgia, weaving an unsupported tale of ‘ballot stuffing,’ the switching of votes by an ‘algorithm’ uploaded to the state’s electronic voting equipment that switched votes from President Trump to Joe Biden, hacking by foreign actors from Iran and China, and other nefarious acts by unnamed actors. Plaintiffs did not bring this election challenge in state court as provided by Georgia’s Election Code.

“Instead, they ask this (federal district) Court to change the election outcome by judicial fiat and order the Governor, the Secretary, and the State Election Board to ‘de-certify’ the results of the election and replace the presidential electors for Joe Biden (who were selected by a majority of Georgia voters by popular vote as provided by state law) with presidential electors for President Trump.

“Their claims would be extraordinary if true, but they are not. Much like the mythological ‘kraken’ monster after which Plaintiffs have named this lawsuit, their claims of election fraud and malfeasance belong more to the kraken’s realm of mythos than they do to reality.”

The Perkins Coie WEB PAGE notes that Callais “focuses her practice on political litigation. She represents voters, campaigns, political committees and activists at the state and federal level in actions related to elections, including redistricting and voting rights, as well as cases implicating important matters of First Amendment speech and association.

“In particular, (she) has considerable experience successfully challenging repressive voting measures, including voter identification and registration laws, as well as other restrictions that make it more difficult for eligible voters to participate in their representative democracy. Amanda regularly achieves favorable outcomes in high-profile, complex cases, from the trial through appellate levels.”

She is the daughter of Al and Lori Callais. Her mother is a retired Denham Springs High School teacher and was a candidate for the Louisiana House of Representatives in 2019.

A practice that has existed in Louisiana for more than 175 years has come to the attention of the U.S. Justice Department with the announcement that it has opened a statewide investigation into the state’s prisoner work release practices.

Originally known as CONVICT LEASING, the practice actually pre-dates the Civil War in Louisiana, but its popularity mushroomed following the loss of slave labor after the war as southern politicians saw it is as a thinly disguised successor to the real thing. It was no coincidence that the vast majority of “leased” convicts were African-American.

Private concerns profiteered off prisoners and they still do, even if in methods that are a little subtler. And the practice is sanctioned, encouraged even, by the political establishment.

And just to make sure the skids continued to be greased, lawmakers from the halls of Congress to state legislatures annually pile on more and more bills calling for stricter and stricter sentences for even non-violent offenders, thus ensuring the beds in those privately-run prisons and sheriff-run parish jails will stay full. This in turn guarantees that the payments from the feds and the state will keep rolling in and those prisoners can be farmed out to private companies.

In reality, it is a system that feeds on itself.

Convict leasing, simply defined, is a method of control and distribution of convict labor practiced mainly in the southern states, including Louisiana. Contractors would pay the state a bargain basement price to take control of a given number of prisoners. Some of these private concerns, desperate for labor, included planters and manufacturers. Some contractors used the convict labor in their businesses while others were nothing more than labor brokers, or middle men, who sublet the prisoners to other concerns.

Unlike other southern states, convict leasing in Louisiana continued almost non-stop from 1844 to 1901.

It wasn’t until 1892 that efforts began in earnest to abolish the practice. Gov. Murphy J. Foster (does that name sound familiar?) supported those opposed to the leasing practice. The Louisiana Constitution of 1898, passed during his administration, abolished both convict leasing and the Louisiana lottery, which had become a notorious source of corruption. The last lease for convict labor expired in 1901 and the state took over operations of what is now the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola.

The investigation by the Justice Department will examine the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections’ policies and practices for ensuring the timely release of state prisoners in the custody of the Louisiana Department of Corrections who are incarcerated in state and local correctional facilities, including practices related to prisoners who are eligible for immediate release.

The department has not reached any conclusions regarding the allegations in this matter. The investigation will be conducted under the Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons Act (CRIPA). Under CRIPA, the Department has the authority to investigate violations of prisoners’ constitutional rights that result from a “pattern or practice of resistance to the full enjoyment of such rights.” The department has conducted CRIPA investigations of many correctional systems, and where violations have been found, the resulting settlement agreements have led to important reforms.

The Civil Rights Division’s Special Litigation Section is conducting this investigation jointly with the U.S. Attorney’s Offices for the Eastern, Middle, and Western Districts of Louisiana. Individuals with relevant information are encouraged to contact the department via phone at 1-833-492-0097 or by email at community.louisianadoc@usdoj.gov.

The background for the federal investigation is that a series of lawsuits brought by the Law Office of William Most, Casey Denson Law, Bizer & DeReus, the MacArthur Justice Center, and others have disclosed that thousands of inmates in Louisiana are held past their release dates each year, costing the state millions of dollars in housing costs alone. See Louisiana routinely jails people weeks, months, years after their release dates

Most said, “We welcome the involvement of the Department of Justice, and thank federal agents like AUSA David Sinkman for seeing this injustice for what it is. Louisiana’s government must end its illegal, unjust, and expensive practice of holding thousands of people for weeks or months past the end of their sentence.”

Maya Lau wrote an excellent STORY for The Shreveport Times about one work release inmate in the Caddo Parish Sheriff’s Department’s work release program prior to moving to the Baton Rouge Advocate. Lau, now with the Los Angeles Times, reported that the inmate was paid $7.75 an hour, barely more than minimum wage. Of that amount, the sheriff’s office claimed up to 62 percent right off the top. Multiply that by the number of total hours all prisoners in the program work in fiscal year 2011-12, the latest year data were available for Lau’s Jan. 7, 2015, story and you come up with a cool $500,000 added to the Caddo Sheriff’s Department’s general fund.

That was in addition to the $25 per day the sheriff’s office was paid for housing state inmates and $65 per day per prisoner paid by the Federal Bureau of Prisons for federal inmates, most of whom have committed no greater crime than being illegal aliens.

Moreover, there are those commissaries operated by the private prisons that reach deeper into inmates’ pockets. With literally a captive clientele, private prisons were able to charge $4 for a Honey Bun and $5 for a cold drink. That’s according to Baton Rouge Public Radio reporter Sue Lincoln, who did an outstanding series on THE PRICE OF JUSTICE  in 2017. It’s no wonder, then, that Correct Commissary, LLC, of Ruston approached the Lincoln Parish Police Jury several months ago about constructing a 50,000-square-foot commissary warehouse on the site of the former Ruston Municipal Airport. The company packages snack boxes that it sells to prison inmates, according to An April 2, 2017 article in the Ruston Daily Leader.

Correct Commissary is listed at the same address as LaSalle Corrections of Ruston, according to corporate records on file with the Louisiana Secretary of State.

LaSalle has experienced considerable legal problems, including lawsuits over wrongful deaths and injuries to inmates as well as having been singled out by regulatory agencies for taking shortcuts with training programs and falsifying records attesting that employees had completed training when in fact, they had not.

LaSalle also has come under fire for allegedly performing unwanted hysterectomies on federal detainees at its Georgia facility. It was recently announced that its contract to run a county jail in Texarkana, Texas, would be terminated in January.

After 11 weeks, the prisoner about whom Lau wrote, took home a grand total of $416, or about $37.82 per week.

And what about businesses who employ work release inmates?

Well, besides the low wages, there is the obvious benefit of not having to pay for medical insurance or contribute to retirement funds—or to pay each such employee two weeks’ vacation pay each year. One could make the case that using this cheap prison labor could be knocking non-inmates out of jobs.

But that’s not the only consideration. For every work release inmate employed, the state gives the employer a whopping $2,400 tax credit. That’s not a tax deduction, but a full-blown tax credit, meaning that amount is lopped right off the top of the company’s tax bill. So, a company like the Foster Farms chicken processing plant in Farmerville in Union Parish, which uses up to 200 inmates from work release, gets an instant reduction of up to $480,000 off its state tax bill.

A 2016 AUDIT by the Legislative Auditor’s Office revealed that there were 8,700 prisoners in work release programs across the state. That computes to nearly $21 million in tax credits—and that’s in addition to the $80 million or so the state pays private and parish prisons for housing inmates.

And while the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 may have abolished plantation slavery, it may have unwittingly opened the door to another form of slavery that while flying below the radar, nevertheless remains legal more than a century-and-a-half later, enriching the modern slaveowner, aka private and parish prisons.

So, it is understandable in that context, perhaps, that Caddo Parish Sheriff Steve Prator was so furious at the new Louisiana sentencing and parole laws that went into effect on Nov. 1, 2017. The new law meant the release of about 1400 non-violent offenders. He will, he said at the time, lose some of his best CAR WASHING prisoners.

So, now Trump wants to issue “PREEMPTIVE PARDONS” to Donnie, Jr., Ivanka, Eric and perhaps Jared.

And we learn that RUDY GIULIANI has approached Trump about the possibility of a “preemptive pardon,” even though he has yet to be charged with a crime.

Michael Flynn? Well, we now know that Trump’s PARDON of his former National Security Adviser, who pleaded guilty not once, but twice, to lying to the FBI, was broader than Gerald Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon in that it granted him immunity to “any and all possible offenses” connected to the Mueller investigation.

If that’s not enough for you to chew on, the Justice Department (that would be Bill Barr’s Justice Department) is investigating a possible “PARDON FOR SALE” scheme whereby beaucoup money may have been funneled to the White House or some related political committee in exchange for a presidential pardon.

Admittedly, it’s going to be kind of difficult to narrow the field down since several of Trump associates, including the aforementioned Rudy, are pitching pardons for themselves as President Tweet Thang heads toward the exit.

And while Rudy may well need a pardon for his hands down his pants cameo in the latest Borat movie or for using shoe polish for hair dye which subsequently ran down the side of his face like sweat after a strenuous workout, he most definitely needs one for the shameless way he has comported himself in the myriad legal challenges to the Nov. 3 election.

But the burning question here, the real brain teaser, is this:

If Junior, Eric, Ivanka and Jared have done nothing wrong, why would they need pardons? Does Daddy Trump know something about the four adolescents masquerading as adults that he’s not telling us?

Could Ivanka have possibly been in violation of some law when she negotiated with the Chinese government to grant her those 18 TRADEMARKS linked to her and Daddy back in 2018?

Did Jared breach some law or even profiteer somehow when he directed ventilators and other PERSONAL PROTECTIVE EQUIPMENT (gloves, masks, etc.) to corporate interests for re-sale last spring rather than directly to hospitals that desperately needed them?

Hell, Donnie and Eric need pardons just for being themselves. Remember, they both boldly predicted that the coronavirus would “disappear” on Nov. 4 and we’d never hear about it again. If for nothing else, they need pardons for being dumber than a bag of hair.

Of course, Trump is also considering an attempt to pardon himself – a move that would raise all sorts of questions, assuming someone might know where to even begin asking.

But not to fear. ANDY BOROWITZ, who writes thoughtful if somewhat barbed parodies (well, they wouldn’t really be parodies if they weren’t at least a little pointed, now would they?) for The New Yorker, has saved us a lot of anguish, hand-gnashing and teeth-wringing by figuring the whole thing out for us:

“In an effort to insure an orderly rollout of pardons, the Trump Administration announced that the first recipients would be essential frontline criminals,” including “all White House staffers and Cabinet members who have spent the past four years receiving improper emoluments, destroying evidence, and subverting democracy.”

There you have it.

You can thank me later.