So Many Dangerous Sycophantic Trump Nuts And So Little Time To Stop Them
With a nod to Rodney Dangerfield, take Rep. Claudia Tenney, R-N.Y., please. Tenney wants President Joe Biden to be declared incompetent and removed from office under the 25th amendment. And last month, she ludicrously nominated trump for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Trump, who was impeached but not convicted twice while in office, said Biden should be impeached for “weaponizing” the Justice Department. And last week, Tenney demanded that Attorney General Merrick Garland invoke the 25th Amendment to remove Biden from office because the president has a bad memory.
She filed her request after special counsel Robert Hur concluded that Biden should not be prosecuted for mishandling classified documents. In his report, Hur said the president’s practices had presented “serious risks to national security” but that a jury would likely not convict “an elderly man with poor memory.” Tenney said she had “grave concerns” about Hur’s decision against prosecuting Biden.
“President Biden needs to be charged, or he needs to be removed. There is no middle ground,” Tenney wrote. She added that it was “incumbent” upon Garland to begin proceedings to remove the Biden using the 25th Amendment. The amendment provides the procedure for replacing the president in the event of death, removal, resignation or incapacitation. It allows the vice president and majority of either the Cabinet “or such other body as Congress may by law provide” with a mechanism to transfer power from the president.
Another voice bellowing against Biden was House Republican Caucus Chairwoman Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., who said that the president’s “deteriorating mental state” left him “mentally unfit” to serve. Stefanik has devolved into one of trump’s strongest lemmings and has been mentioned as a possible vice-presidential running mate with trump. Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., said that “a man too incapable of being held accountable for mishandling classified information is certainly unfit for the Oval Office.” And Rep. Ronny Jackson, R-Texas, formerly trump’s White House physician, said Biden should submit to a “cognitive test.”
Trump has boasted how well he scored when taking a cognitive test, which experts said is used to gauge if a person may be suffering from dementia.
Jackson attended the “Stop the Steal” rally at the White House Ellipse, held hours before the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol by trump supporters. During the attack, Jackson was inside the Capitol when members of the Oath Keepers militia allegedly exchanged text messages about protecting Jackson who had “critical data.”
Later, during the certification of the 2020 election, Jackson objected to certifying Arizona’s and Pennsylvania’s electoral votes and in May voted against forming a commission to investigate the storming of the Capitol.
The Twenty-fifth Amendment clarifies that the vice president becomes president if the president dies, resigns, or is removed from office through impeachment, and establishes how a vacancy in the office of the vice president can be filled.
It also provides for the temporary transfer of the president’s powers and duties to the vice president, either on the initiative of the president alone or on the initiative of the vice president together with a majority of the president’s cabinet. In either case, the vice president becomes acting president until the presidential powers and duties are returned to the president.
A number of presidents have been temporarily incapacitated with the vice president taking over. President Dwight Eisenhower suffered a heart attack in September 1955 and intestinal problems requiring emergency surgery in July 1956. Each time, until Eisenhower was able to resume his duties, Vice President Richard Nixon presided over Cabinet meetings and, along with Eisenhower aides, kept the executive branch functioning and assured the public the situation was under control.
On Dec. 22, 1978, President Jimmy Carter considered invoking Section 3 in advance of hemorrhoid surgery. Since then, presidents Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump also contemplated invoking Section 3 at various times without doing so.
Trump claimed to have had a colonoscopy without anesthesia in November 2019, in order to avoid having to invoke Section 3 and naming Vice President Mike Pence as temporary leader.[38]
On June 29, 2002, President George W. Bush invoked Section 3 in temporarily transferring his powers to Vice President Dick Cheney before undergoing a colonoscopy. On July 21, 2007, Bush again invoked Section 3 before another colonoscopy.
On Nov. 19, 2021, Biden temporarily transferred his powers and duties to Vice President Kamala Harris before undergoing a colonoscopy, making her acting president from 10:10 a.m. until 11:35 a.m., the first woman to hold the powers and duties of the presidency.
From the end of the 1980s onwards, Reagan’s political opponents alleged that he showed signs of dementia. White House Chief of Staff Howard Baker intended to meet with Reagan in his first meeting of 1987 to evaluate whether he was “losing his mental grip.” However, the idea was dropped after Reagan “came in stimulated by the press of all these new people and performed splendidly.”
After trump was accused of having incited the Jan. 6 riot, several members of his cabinet were considering invoking the 25th amendment.
Tenney showed her own incompetency to hold office when she foolishly nominated trump for the 2023 Nobel Peace Prize. The prize is presented each year “to the person (or group) who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.”
In making the nomination, Tenney was evidently unaware of trump’s notably unpeaceful role in the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol by his supporters.
The die-hard trump supporter claimed that trump should be honored for his role in the 2020 Abraham Accords treaty, which claimed to have normalized relations between Israel, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain. The agreement was largely negotiated by trump’s son in law, Jared Kushner. After trump left office, Kushner created an investment firm that included a $2 billion investment by the Saudi government. The deal and the possible link with the Abraham Accords is under investigation by the House Oversight Committee.
“Now more than ever, when Joe Biden’s weak leadership on the international stage is threatening our country’s safety and security, we must recognize Trump for his strong leadership and his efforts to achieve world peace. I am honored to nominate former President Donald Trump today and am eager for him to receive the recognition he deserves,” said the largely delusional Tenney.
Trump has claimed the accords achieved peace in the middle east. The strategy obviously has failed, in light of the ongoing wat between Israel and Hamas that has left, at least 20,000 Palestinian residents of the Gaza dead. Critics said the agreement formalized relations that already were in place in backchannel ties. It did not address Israel’s occupation of Palestinian lands and emboldened Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu to continue to refuse to consider creation of a separate Palestinian state.
“The Abraham Accords did not achieve peace in the Middle East or help resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” said Osamah Khalil, a historian of U.S. foreign relations and the modern Middle East at Syracuse University.
Trump’s name doesn’t deserve to be even mentioned in the same breath as last year’s Nobel Peace Prize winner, Narges Mohammadi, who was honored “for her fight against the oppression of women in Iran and her fight to promote human rights and freedom for all. Her brave struggle has come with tremendous personal costs. Altogether, the regime has arrested her 13 times, convicted her five times, and sentenced her to a total of 31 years in prison and 154 lashes.”
To win the peace prize and the $4,31,390 cash award that goes with it, trump is competing against 22 other individuals and 26 organizations. Individuals range from Rolando Alvarez of Nicaragua “in recognition of the defense of religious freedom in Nicaragua” to Chow Hang-tung of Hong Kong “for her tireless fights against the Chinese authorities’ stifling of democracy and freedom of expression in Hong Kong” to Pope Francis “for having consistently promoted a strong message about the necessity for comprehensive peace and reconciliation not only between states but also between people and ethnic groups of different backgrounds.”
Organizations nominated for the prize range from the Palestinian organization Al-Haq “for their invaluable effort in documenting and publicizing human rights violations to which the Palestinians are opposed” to the Belarusian organization “Our House” and the Russian “Movement of Conscientious Objectors” for their “unwavering dedication in advocating for the right to conscientious objection to military service and promoting human rights and peace in their respective countries.”
The winner will be announced on Oct. 11 and Trump has about as much chance of taking home the title and the cash as does Russian President Vladimir Putin.
In other highlights of her time in Congress, Tenney again showed her political acumen in March when she predicted that trump’s indictment over hush money payments to porn actor Stormy Daniels will just “blow over because I don’t see any way that they’re actually going to get Donald Trump to appear in a court for sentencing, or I mean for indictment, or for any type of charge.”
This week, a New York City judge set a trial date of March 25 for trump’s criminal trial on charges of falsifying business records. Trump pleaded not guilty to 34 felony charges of falsifying business records stemming from a $130,000 hush money payment to adult film actress Stormy Daniels in the closing weeks of the 2016 campaign. Trump has been charged in connection with what prosecutors have called “an illegal scheme” to influence the 2016 presidential election by directing his then-personal attorney Michael Cohen to pay $130,000 to Daniels to prevent her from publicizing a long-denied affair with trump. Trump reimbursed Cohen through a series of monthly checks, which prosecutors say caused business records to be falsified to disguise the true purpose of the payments.
In February 2018, Tenney stormed to trump’s defense when she said that Democrats’ refusal to clap during trump’s State of the Union address was “un-American.” Asked if Republicans were equally resistant to President Barack Obama during his State of the Union speeches, Tenney insisted they were not.
“I saw many more Republicans en masse standing up in President Obama’s State of the Union addresses,” she said incredulously.
Tenney, 63, served in Congress from 2017 to 2019 and from 2021 to the present. In a radio interview shortly after the February 2018 Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Fla., Tenney made the outrageous claim that “so many of these people that commit the mass murders end up being Democrats.”
Tenney also came to the support of former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson in 2018 after it was reported that Carson’s office had spent $31,561 on a set of dining room furniture for the office.
“I know that Ben Carson did not order that table. It has nothing to do with him. He comes from, you know, poverty,” Tenney said.
Tenney was a member of the Climate Solutions Caucus and in 2016, she said the science of climate change is “not determined. It’s not certain.”
The congresswoman shared a video of a Jan. 5, 2021, rally in Georgia where trump falsely claimed the votes in Tenney’s race against Anthony Brindisi were counted fraudulently. At the time, the Tenney-Brindisi race was the only uncalled congressional race in the nation. She was ultimately declared winner.
In May 2021, Tenney joined trump in claiming that the 2020 presidential election might have been “stolen.”
After the brutal 2022 home invasion attack on Paul Pelosi, the husband of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Tenney posted on her Twitter page a baseless claim that the attacker was a male prostitute. Tenney included a doctored photograph of a group of young men holding hammers next to a gay pride flag. Next to the photo, Tenney posted “LOL.”
Not to be forgotten from the latest craziness, Democratic members of Congress are livid that Speaker Johnson named as guest chaplain a Christian nationalist and avowed opponent of the LGBTQ community to deliver the opening prayer for Congress.
Guest chaplains are recommended by congressional members to deliver the session’s opening prayer in place of the House chaplain. Guest chaplains have generally been uncontroversial and have come from many religious groups, including Judaism and Islam although most have been Christian.
On Thursday, 26 House Democrats objected that Johnson had sponsored Pastor Jack Hibbs as the Guest Chaplain of the House on Jan. 30. Hibbs leads the Calvary Chapel Chino Hills, in Chino, Calif., which he started more than 30 years ago. The church website claims 10,000 members and that it reaches millions worldwide on-line.
“Pastor Hibbs is a radical Christian Nationalist who helped fuel the January 6th insurrection and has a long record of spewing hateful vitriol toward non-Christians, immigrants, and members of the LGBTQ community,” the congressmen wrote. “He should never have been granted the right to deliver the House’s opening prayer on Jan. 30, 2024.”
The letter said that Hibbs has preached that “January 6th would go down in history alongside the War of Independence and the War of 1812” and preached that God “had anointed the Trump administration and could still intercede to save Trump’s presidency” on Jan. 6, 2021, the day of the insurrection at the Capitol.
“Hibbs advanced a religious permission structure that led to violence by those who believed any means were justified to carry out what they viewed as God’s plan,” the letter said.
After the riot, Hibbs was a guest on the “Washington Watch” cable show with host Anthony Richard Perkins, the president of the Family Research Council. Remarking about the Capitol riot, Hibbs said, “This is what you get when you eject God from the courts and from the schools” and teach children they are ‘evolutionary byproducts.’”
Hibbs has preached against the LGBTQ community, has called transgender people a “sexually perverted cult,” that same-sex marriage has “crucified God’s word” and has promoted the debunked and damaging practice of conversion therapy to deter homosexuality. Hibbs also has preached that Christians are at “war” against the “death cult” of Islam, which he calls a “vehicle” for “Satan in the Last Days.” He also argued that the Israel-Hamas war is another sign of the “End Times” and that Jewish people “must save themselves by turning to Jesus.”