Successful billionaire

The New York Times is reporting that they now have 15 years of the nasty guy’s taxes. I haven’t read the Times article, so don’t know how they were able to get these documents, and do so now when there has been a clamor for them for five years. I’m working from a summary from Kos of Daily Kos and I’ll summarize even more. * In both 2016 and 2017 he paid $750 in taxes and no taxes at all in 10 of those 15 years because his businesses lost more money than they made. * Within the next four years more than $300 million in loans come due. Which is why he susceptible to lobbyists and foreign officials waving cash and seeking favors. That means he needs to stay in the Oval Office to keep collecting those bribes. So much for the “successful billionaire.” The nasty guy’s response to the story was predictable, “Fake news.” Turning to the Supreme Court, Jennifer Rubin of The Washington Post, tweeted:

The problem with rolling out a nominee is that if the nominee has a paper trail of extremism every R including swing state R's will have to run on it.

I hope The Ds are very clear in saying this is what this nominee believes and this is what your R senator also believes by supporting her. Mark Sumner of Kos delved into one of those things nominee Amy Coney Barrett believes. She says the 14th Amendment to the Constitution is illegitimate. This is important because the 14th Amendment is the one that says people of color and children of immigrants have equal rights to everyone else. It is the bedrock of all civil rights laws (including LGBTQ rights). About that illegitimate part, Sumner wrote:

For some Republicans, the 14th Amendment was viewed as being only intended to help those who had been directly enslaved, and not applicable to future generations. This view has become common in right-wing media, and sorry as that sounds, it’s not even the most radical view. The even uglier approach has been to outright challenge the validity of 14th Amendment because members of Confederate states were not seated in Congress when the amendment was proposed just after the end of the Civil War. Because of this, say the deniers, the Congress itself was illegitimate, and so anything it recommended—including the 14th and 15th Amendments—are illegitimate. This is not even worthy of being called a “myth.” There is not the least bit of justification under law to support this position. There never has been. However, this claim has become deeply embedded in the whole Lost Cause, South Shall Rise Again, Back to the Cotton Fields culture of conservatives—especially Southern conservatives. And just like Confederate statues, this mythology has found admirers in the modern Republican Party.

This white supremacist mythology (as Sumner put it) dates back to 1957 and the close of the Jim Crow era as Southern states were looking for ways to hold on to it and to segregation. Yeah, it is hard to swear to uphold the Constitution when one is declaring that part of the document is illegitimate and shouldn’t exist. That’s how dangerous she is. That’s what every GOP senator is also saying by supporting her.