Dem Wants to Revive Star Chamber Court

By John Semmens — Semi-News — A Satirical Look at Recent NewsFrustrated with the unsatisfactory results of the Mueller Report, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif) wants to initiate Congressional trials for members of the Trump Administration “who defy our demands for documents and testimony.”Schiff characterized these prosecutions as “mini-trials that could be conducted without the presence of the accused. They would be tasked with a simple decision: has the accused complied with our demands or not. The House would render judgment and determine whether the accused would be jailed, fined, or both. With fines running up to $25,000 per day of continued disobedience, not to mention the legal fees involved in hiring defense attorneys, could quickly become financially ruinous. I think this would tend to inspire cooperation.”He likened this approach to “the financial pressure Mueller applied to General Flynn, which, as we all saw, induced his cooperation. Or in the case of Michael Cohen resulted in a plea of guilty to a non-existent crime. It is time we ran with the baton that has been passed to us by Special Counsel Mueller for the next leg of our effort to rid the nation of Trump and his henchmen.”Schiff ally, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler (D-NY), who vigorously denounced the GOP in 2012 for holding former Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt for his many refusals to respond to Republican subpoenas during the “Fast and Furious” gun running operation carried out by the Obama Administration, rejected any comparison. “First and foremost, President Obama was a Nobel Prize winner,” Nadler pointed out. “That alone should put anything he did above reproach. Second, the claimed ill-effects of Fast and Furious were insignificant compared to the widely acknowledged threat to world civilization presented by President Trump.”House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif), though, offered a word of caution, pointing out that “over 60 million deplorables voted for Trump. Our prisons are apt to become quickly overloaded if we have to start jailing all those disloyal to the long term consensus between the Washington Republicans and Democrats who have cooperatively and convivially shared power since the 1930s.”In related news, Democrats in New York State have introduced a “bill of attainder” that would authorize the state's tax commissioner to hand over the confidential income tax returns of any New York resident to Congress. As Gov Andrew Cuomo explained, “we need to be able to breach the wall of privacy in order to assist Congress in its efforts to rid the country of dangerous persons like Donald Trump.”Sanders Brandishes Progressive CredentialsIrked by rival contender for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination former Vice-President Joe Biden's claim to be the most progressive candidate in the race, Sen. Bernie Sanders (S-Vt) advised voters to “look at our comparative actions. Claims should be backed up by deeds.”“I have been advocating for socialism for decades,” Sanders boasted. “Meanwhile, Joe has been groping and sniffing every female he can get close to. I ask: which of these behaviors is the more progressive?”For his part, Biden pointed out that “free love has long been an integral part of progressive doctrine. By taking the initiative to show my love for those humans within my reach I am in step with this doctrine. I am not ashamed of this and I urge voters to compare my style of progressivism with Bernie's insistence that murderers and rapists in prison be given the right to vote.”Sanders characterized Biden's view as “self-serving and exploitive. My love for all of humanity, even those who stray from moral norms is more Christ-like than anything Joe has done in his entire life. Not only do I think that felons should be able to vote for who shall govern America, I have also hired one as a senior campaign adviser.” The felon hired by Sanders is Charles Rocha, was convicted for embezzling money from the United Steelworkers Union. Rocha used the money to buy to buy hockey tickets and golf trips, expenses he asserted were necessary for his “mental well-being.”In related news, Biden asserts that the US “has a moral obligation to provide health care for everyone who needs it—including those in the country illegally. I know Republicans will claim that this is fiscally beyond ours means, but they lie. America is the richest nation in the world. Our citizens spend a lot of their money on non-necessities. They could easily get by with a lot less. What I am suggesting is that we repeal the Trump tax cuts and take people's excess income and use it for the nobler purpose of healing the sick regardless of where they came from or how they got here.”Kerry Defends Undermining Trump's Iran PolicyFormer Secretary of State and failed 2004 presidential candidate John Kerry brushed off President Trump's charges that he is illegally undermining the Administration's policy toward Iran. According to various media reports, Kerry has been secretly advising the Iranian dictatorship and its European allies to ignore Trump and stick with the deal he and former President Obama made.Kerry asserts that he is “representing the true consensus of opinion on the proper relationship between the United States and Iran—one based on mutual trust and respect. Trump's attitude of America first and his publicly expressed suspicion of Iran's motives threatens the gains made during the Obama Administration.”To bolster his case, Kerry cited Trump's moves to curtail the funding mechanism he and Obama contrived to seal the so-called nuclear deal. “These funds are a vital part of Iran's outreach to its allies around the world, “ Kerry said. “Without them Iran's quest to fulfill its religious obligation to spread Islam throughout the world could be crippled. Weapons critical to Hamas' efforts to eliminate the Jewish occupation of Palestine and end the Jewish conspiracy to make soft drinks excessively fizzy in order to make Muslims fart more during Ramadan need these funds. Trump's attempts to try to interdict these funds aggravates global warming.”Comey Calls Deep State Conspiracy “Totally Normal”In a “town hall” on CNN, fired former FBI Director James Comey contended that the “operation” to surveil a presidential candidate is a “totally normal activity for the FBI to undertake. After all, intelligence gathering is an essential tool we use to defend the United States against all enemies—both foreign and domestic. Trump isn't the only candidate who has been a focus of this sort of investigation. He is merely the first to have survived such an effort.”Comey explained that “inserting covert agents into the Trump campaign was standard procedure. Sending our guys—Mifsud and Halper—to tell Papadopoulos that the Russians had 'dirt' on Clinton was crucial to establishing the predicate for later steps taken to obtain FISA permission to wiretap the campaign. Without the implication that there was a direct link between the campaign and the Russian government I doubt the court would've granted the access we wanted. We all knew that the link was bogus, but with national security at stake we felt the ruse was necessary.”Despite the fact that the Special Prosecutor's report on Trump Russia collusion found no evidence to support the accusation, Comey says he remains “optimistic that obstruction of justice charges may still take the President down. When suspects are interviewed numerous times small variations in their testimony can be construed as lying. Lying to federal law officials like the Special Counsel or agents in the FBI is illegal. So, even if there is no actual crime per se, any variations from one account to another can still be prosecuted.”When CNN's Anderson Cooper pointed out that Comey, himself lied to Trump when he assured him he was “not a target of the FBI investigation,” Comey advised Cooper that “the courts have long sanctioned lying by law-enforcement personnel in order to entrap suspects in the act of obstructing the investigation. It's a stacked deck, but it is a court approved bias in the application of laws regarding perjury.”Meanwhile, Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) chided Trump for “unnecessarily embarrassing the hard working government officials who so patriotically strove to remove him from office. There was no need to shame FBI employees like Peter Strzok and Lisa Page for cheating on their spouses, denigrating Trump's deplorable supporters, and misusing government equipment or employees like James Comey for leaking classified information, forgiving Hillary Clinton's technical crimes and lying to the American people. The President's descent into this kind of indecency is just further evidence of his unfitness for office.”Pelosi Demands that Trump “Self-Impeach”Weary of battling with the President, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif) demands that he “self-impeach. Almost everyone in Washington agrees that he is the most despicable person to ever hold public office. Just the other day Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer expressed the same opinion. And behind closed doors, most of our Republican colleagues concur. Surely the hatred of this man has reached critical mass.”Pelosi suggested that “impeaching himself might be the only way to avert the intelligence community from arranging his assassination. He should take a lesson from history. If the CIA could successfully eliminate as beloved a man as President Kennedy, there should be little doubt that they could similarly take out Trump.”“Of course, a possible downside is turning Trump into a martyr and seeing Pence use that to push through legislation that we wouldn't be able to block,” she feared. “But I'm pretty confident that our media friends won't let that happen. After the past three years of endless vilification directed at Trump, I believe promoting a 'sic temper tyrannis' meme is well within our grasp. However, our hope is that our GOP friends can go to Trump and persuade him that life as a private citizen is preferable to a bullet in the head, an unfortunate accident or terrorist attack. In any case and by any means, we cannot accept a second term for Donald Trump.”A Satirical Look at Recent NewsJohn Semmens is a retired economist who has written a weekly political satire for The Arizona Conservative since 2005. He says working on his satires is one of the ways he tries to honor the liberties our Founding Fathers tried to protect.” His work has been cited on the Rush Limbaugh program. This post is also available on Facebook.Please do us a favor. If you use material created by The Arizona Conservative, give us credit and DO NOT change the context. Thank you.