1. Toward a More Just Electoral System

Americans are so used to politicians falsely promising to get elected and then reneging that they don’t seem to consider there is an alternative: The promise and the vote are, in effect, a contract made between two parties and if one side does not fulfill the contract, the other can sue for fraud or breach of contract or the like. If not, why not?

Arguably, the system really should be something like this: Politician Smith promises under the following categories to pass various laws or to implement policies using, e.g., an Executive Order:

1. Absolutely guaranteed because it is within Smith’s power (for instance, an Executive Order in the case of a President or Governor);

2. Partially guaranteed because legislatures need to draft and approve a proposed law;

3. No guarantee whatsoever — “best try.”

C is clearly worthless and anyone voting for Smith because (s)he says something under C should probably not complain if Smith gets elected (unless Smith does not even try).

B, of course, depends on the legislatures too, and if Smith as, say, governor tries to implement a policy and the legislatures do not approve, it is not his fault. However, at least voters can now vote the legislators out in the next election. However, B at least requires Smith to have reasonably tried to get legislatures to draft the relevant law, and, if Smith is a legislator, to have drafted a law consistent with the earlier promises during the election.

A, though, is clear. If Smith promises a policy under A and then does not follow through after being elected, any citizen who voted for “him” can sue. Whether Smith, then, is removed from office through impeachment or other means needs to be determined, but obviously, if we want a just system, some very meaningful punishment has to occur so that (s)he or other politicians in the future do not fraudulently promise what they cannot, or won’t, deliver. The better system, then, is that politicians produce a detailed contract-draft of their commitments, whether under A, B, or C far enough in advance of election day so that voters know whom they can trust.

You wouldn’t replace your windows or roof without a contract, would you? Why would you put someone in power over many facets of your life without equal or proportional protection?

--Submitted May 11, 2025, by Anonymous

2. Why Trump is still an Illegitimate President, Corrupt Justices on the Supreme Court, and How to Restore True American Justice

Taking into account the facts presented during the litigation, the Colorado Supreme Court in 2024 ruled in Trump v. Anderson that Donald Trump should not be, or have been, on the primary Presidential ballot, per Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. One reason was that he provided aid and comfort to the insurrectionists of January 6, 2021, if only by promising to pardon them. Of course, he fulfilled his promised after being sworn in, even pardoning those who had been adjudicated guilty and sentenced to jail. Surely, the promised pardon was providing aid or comfort and there was much other evidence that he had helped lead the insurrection that had been well documented and that had been taken into account by the Colorado court.

The Supreme Court (“SCOTUS”) then ruled that states cannot enforce the clause against federal officeholders, concluding that this power rests with Congress. The ruling kept Trump on the ballot in Colorado and other states.

However, the 14th Amendment Section 3 requires that for Trump to hold office again after providing aid and comfort, a different matter from being on ballots, he needs 2/3 vote of Congress to remove his “disability," the exact term of the Amendment. Democrat Chuck Schumer, at the time the head of the Senate, had the power to put forward a motion to allow Trump the chance to remove the disability and to be in effect forgiven. This would have allowed, and would allow, Trump to take the presidency legitimately, presumably ensuring a less partisan nation. Schumer, though, in what must be one of the most cowardly and horrific lack of actions ever taken or not taken in American legislation, did nothing to give Trump the chance to remove the disability. (Is it because he has received $1,727,974 from American Israel Public Affairs Committee, AIPAC, as of the date of this composition, according to https://www.trackaipac.com, and because Trump has been very useful to Israel?). We all know that 2/3 of the Senate would not have voted to absolve Trump, with the Democrats controlling 51 votes and probably some Republicans also optionally voting with an eye on their historical reputation to deny Trump anything remotely approaching the 2/3 vote. Had Schumer acted to allow Trump the chance to acquire legitimacy, if only as a pretext, Trump would have been shown publicly, legally and shamefully to be still in violation of the 14th Amendment.

It would not have mattered afterwards what the House of Representatives did, despite them being controlled by Republicans, who had been subservient for years to Trump, since his first term from 2016-2020, and who would never have introduced a motion even for the purpose of allowing him to clear his name, predicting full well a similar outcome as the Senate's. The House would be irrelevant after a Senate vote, considering that the Constitution requires a 2/3 vote of the whole Congress.

One might, and some will surely, say that Trump gained the electoral votes in the election in Nov 2024, but this consideration is meaningless. If he gained only 55% of the electoral votes, how does that outweigh the 2/3 requirement of Congress according to the Constitution? Even if he had gained 80% of the electoral votes, there is still nothing in the Constitution that allows a new public vote to outweigh the 2/3 requirement of Congress. Naturally, if 80% voted for him, 2/3 of Congress might be persuaded by their constituents to forgive Trump. Yet, that is a completely different issue, and the fact remains that there is no American legal mechanism to outweigh, or put to one side, the 2/3 requirement enshrined in the 14th Amendment.

One might, and some will surely, also say that Chief Justice Roberts swore in Trump as the President, but this consideration, too, is meaningless. This only entails that Roberts is like a few other Justices of SCOTUS —corrupt (and this is another reason many are saying the acronym stands now for the Sleazy Court of the United States). Roberts himself had previously sworn his own oath to "support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” It is impossible that he was unaware of the 14th Amendment and the requirement of a 2/3 vote of Congress, and yet he did not fulfill his duty to exclude an individual whose “disability” had not been removed.

One might, and some will surely, additionally say that SCOTUS had given absolute immunity to Presidents shortly before the election as long as they are engaged in their official scope of duties and that this somehow dissolves the requirement of a 2/3 vote. However, this consideration, too, is meaningless. Attempting a coup to stay in power after losing an election is not an official duty of the POTUS. Moreover, in easily found YouTube videos, Glenn Kirschner, a superb federal prosecutor of 30+ years, spoke in detail about the rulings for taking office or for absolute immunity and he explained how the dicta that often accompanies rulings and that accompanied at least one of the ones for Trump in no way established that Trump could evade the 14th Amendment in holding office (because, to emphasize, the first case was specifically about whether Trump’s name could be on the ballot, a different, if related, matter). As Kirschner explained, the dicta have no binding force, and it is absolutely remarkable, and unforgivable, that the Biden administration, legal scholars in Congress or in the DOJ did not make this irrelevance in the context of Trump legitimately taking office well-known publicly.

In other words, Kirshner explained that the Supreme Court rulings themselves for immunity or for Trump v. Anderson have never decided the precise issue of whether Trump was excluded from having to get the 2/3 vote necessary to remove the disability. SCOTUS to this day has never ruled on that absolutely crucial matter.

Trump therefore is still an illegitimate President, and to remove his disability, even now in November 2025, both houses have to provide a 2/3 vote. Of course, now that the Senate and House are controlled by Republicans, they will never introduce the motion to give him that chance, a chance that is still as likely to succeed as my pet dog becoming Governor of NY. However, if Democrats can take over at least one of the houses in 2026, they can bring the motion to the floor with the honest purpose of giving Trump a chance to remove the disability that will otherwise stick to him forever. Of course, he will probably not receive a 2/3 vote, which, as discussed above, means the other house of Congress is irrelevant. As a result, unless the famous author of The Art of the Deal, who has bankrupted more companies than I can be troubled to list here, even were I able to remember most of them, can negotiate with the Democrats, the public and history will know that he has not been, and cannot be, legitimately in office. He should then be impeached, and Congress can and should also impeach Roberts for egregiously not fulfilling his own duty to the Constitution.

Likewise for the rest of the corrupt Justices of the SCOTUS. Clarence Thomas has taken massive amount of money from Republican donors without reporting it, as required by law; his wife was involved in the insurrection. Samuel Alito flew the flag upside down, demonstrating support for the insurrectionists, amongst other actions. Kavanaugh has been shown to have lied during his Senate confirmation hearing under oath. I could go on, but clearly other members than Roberts of the SCOTUS should be removed. They provided aid and comfort indirectly to insurrectionists because they provided aid and comfort to Trump, who provided the direct aid and comfort. The 14th Amendment does not say the aid and comfort must be direct, and most Justices of SCOTUS in 2024/2025 will go down in our legal annals as agents helping badly damage, if not destroy, the judicial branch of the American Republic.

Will we ever recover and, if so, how? That is, how ideally do we rebuild the system in a non-violent way so that in the future we can trust in American justice, its legal system and especially SCOTUS and not see it as a tool to maintain the power of any single party or powerful group? Pete Buttigieg has already come up with a brilliant solution, which President Biden was too weak-willed to implement, even when his party had control of the Senate: There is nothing in the Constitution that limits SCOTUS to nine justices. In fact originally there were only seven. Buttigieg recommended in effect expanding the court to 13 or 15 justices, with equal amount Democrats and equal amount Republicans, and with one or three Independents to establish as much as possible non-partisanship. In the future, when a Justice leaves, the Senate replaces him or her according to that “equality principle” so that the American public can trust justice is truly blind (as much as humanly possible). SCOTUS also needs reform, which they will obviously not do themselves. This presumably requires an amendment to the Constitution but I leave that topic for another article and for a lawyer or law professor who specializes in the Constitution.

Naturally, this will all only be done soon if Democrats have control of Congress and if they can get 60 votes in the Senate. However, the GOP should be forewarned: While Biden was in office, SCOTUS gave not only Trump but all presidents in effect absolute immunity when they are carrying out their duties of office, including have Seal Team 6 murder a political enemy. Why Joe Biden will go down in history as an utter incompetent is that he therefore had the power and absolute immunity, along with control of the military, to protect the country and he did not even try. He could have immediately jailed and prosecuted Trump and his henchmen, some of whom are still in Congress to this day and who are clearly guilty of helping with the insurrection in their own words (they requested a pardon from Trump before he left office because of their criminal deeds). Moreover, to reiterate but as is shockingly too little discussed anymore, Trump pardoned all the insurrectionists invading the Capitol on 6 Jan 2021, and any Democratic President in the future can attempt a similar coup or suppress an election, use an informal military analogous to the Proud Boys, and then pardon them all, just as Trump continues as of the Nov 2025 to repeatedly pardon criminals who are serving long jail sentences. The USA now has many dark and violent days in store for the future, and I pity the younger generations, — except for the offspring of the corrupt SCOTUS members, coup-attempting members of Congress and Trump enablers. They deserve all the karma and inherited shame that their progenitors created.

Are there other options to restore true American justice? One is to follow the insurrectionist playbook as well as Trump’s adage “Laws don’t count to save the country” (from 2025). This is a nation that revolted against the British, and Trump established the precedent that we can do it against our own homeland. Would it be unjust, given natural justice and given that the arbiters of conventional justice in the USA is the corrupt SCOTUS itself, to not only take up arms but to target all of those who should never have been allowed back in power, along with those giving treasonous support? This option is not ideal of course but still it is a relevant theoretical question with drastic practical consequences, and this site invites contributions on each and every side of that question.

Our own perspective is that Americans demonstrate with mass movements, in the style of the "No King" protests, and also persuade sensible independents and Republicans that the current course could be and will be disastrous for everyone, except Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, who are surely delighted at our internal division and who indeed are responsible for some of it with their internet trolls (and, on this topic, one should not forget Craig Unger's book American Kompromat, which recounts the evidence that Trump has been manipulated, to put it charitably, by Russia since his return from there in 1987, if not before--recall he first ran for President in 1988 and took out a full-page NY Times ad to persuade America to leave NATO!). However, I see SCOTUS continuing to help him and his cronies, the so-called “oligarchs,” and I envision the same in the near future. In that case, I would not be surprised to see 1776 all over again, in the way the insurrectionists of Jan 6 claimed they were following. Arguably, that revolution of 1776 was based on natural law, because it certainly was not based on conventional, British-colonial law of the time.

Perhaps one of the most under-appreciated lessons to be learned from the last decade—that naive views of government and human nature do not protect the USA—has just surfaced in great detail in an enlightening book, Injustice: How Politics and Fear Vanquished America’s Justice Department, by Pulitzer Prize winners’ Carol Leonnig and Aaron C. Davis (Random House) Nov 2025. To develop the same theme if a more general way: Tyrants get into office not only because they are willing to be strong and to run roughshod over laws but because opponents are weak, ineffective and unwilling to take proper action. Kirshner, like Preet Bharara, is one of those very experienced and seemingly unbribable Federal prosecutors that Biden should have appointed to be Attorney General (“AG”) of the United States rather than the inexperienced and timid Merrick Garland, a former judge who should have been appointed instead eventually to the Supreme Court, but who was clearly out of his depth as an AG (Biden tried apparently to compensate for Republican Senate Leader Mitch McConnell destroying past precedence and not allowing Garland, Obama’s nomination for an open SCOTUS seat, to appear before the Senate for confirmation, with McConnell waiting an unbelievable eight months until after the 2016 election before he would allow the vetting process, at which point Trump was in power and installed his own Justice, the notorious Kavanaugh). Biden’s choice of Garland for AG is analogous to an NFL team drafting a top-tennis player just because he did well in the Davis Cup, even though he never went past high school in football and never competed on the gridiron even in college.

The first step of any new Democratic win in Congress and especially in the Executive branch must be to clean house thoroughly and to bring true, pitiless justice to those who have attempted a coup since 2020, including exploring how to prosecute corrupt judges and to prevent future corruption in all three branches of government. If one Justice murdered another Justice or some other individual in cold blood, does their status as part of SCOTUS allow them to walk down Fifth Avenue, always free? How SCOTUS has continued to act in illegitimate ways that are destroying America is explained in part by the Republican and great Constitutional scholar and former judge J. Michael Luttig in various publications and recently at https://youtu.be/fLalHU1SXIE?si=QKryLaw0mhfegOxR, where he also describes, for example, the Court's vicious and unprecedented frequent use of the shadow docket procedure over ten months now to repeatedly help Trump. Otherwise, without prosecuting Justices, the USA will never to go forward effectively as a unified country, and, to reiterate, Putin and Xi will keep laughing and enjoying the spectacle, -- it will be better for them than House of Cards.

-- Editorial (15 Nov 2025)