I Learned Something Today

Mike Johnson, speaker of the house, in a press conference yesterday, said that they are hiring staff to blur some faces in the Jan 6 tapes they are releasing to the public. The reason he gives is, “…because we don’t want them to be retaliated against…and to be charged by the DOJ…and to have other concerns and problems…”

The narrative that republicans would have you believe is that the Jan 6 riot at the capital was not an insurrection, but rather a peaceful gathering and that the DOJ is being weaponized by the Biden administration to go after innocent Republicans (including Donald Trump).

I wish I knew some of the folks who work in the Department of Justice. Some of the staffers. Because I’d really like to ask them how they feel about being accused of being puppets of the current administration. Without independence from the White House, DOJ would lose its legitimacy. During the Trump Administration, when the President was pushing to install Jeffery Clark as Acting Attorney General in a plot to overturn the 2020 election results, the entire DOJ leadership team threatened to walk off the job en masse.

DOJ has a manual that provides clear guidelines on how to maintain independence from both Congress and the White House. Here’s a link to the relevant section (title 1-8) that I discovered as I was researching this article. And think about it. It’s not like DOJ is stuffed full of democrats. Law enforcement traditionally attracts conservatives, not liberals. Which once again makes me wonder how these folks would feel about these stories that make them out to be lackeys for the left.

The irony here is that during the Trump administration, republicans encouraged the politicization of the DOJ. When the Trump campaign’s ties with Russia were under investigation, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich argued that “the president of the United States cannot obstruct justice,” because as chief executive officer the President has full power to direct federal prosecutions and fire anyone who does not comply.

DOJ independence isn’t written into law. It’s simply a norm. But this norm has been historically practiced for years, and lawyers that work for DOJ are proud of their independence. In 1973 President Nixon ran into this when he tried to fire special prosecutor Archibald Cox. Both his AG and deputy AG resigned in protest. Nixon had finally convinced the third official in line, Robert Bork, to get the job done, in what was later called the “Saturday Night Massacre”.

Donald Trump regularly makes claims that his federal indictments are political in nature. The prosecution of a former president is very serious. But if it really was a political stunt, I’d expect to see lots of resignations within DOJ. What I’m seeing instead are some very strong cases that appear to be getting stronger every day.

For some historical context on DOJ independence, check out this article in the Alabama Law Review, “Can the President control the Department of Justice?”

Just quote somebody else who lied. It’s as easy as that.

The other night, the newly minted Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, gave us a great example. He tried to fool his audience into believing that the US was founded on a religion. Here’s the quote from a transcript of his speech.

G.K. Chesterton was the famous British philosopher and statesman. He said one time, “America is the only nation in the world that is founded upon a creed.” He said, “It is listed with almost theological lucidity in the Declaration of Independence.” 

Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, in speech to Congress on October 25, 2023

Johnson wants you to believe that the US was founded on a religion. But he’s not gutsy enough to lie to you directly; rather he quotes someone else. This isn’t an accident. Whenever someone uses a quote to make a controversial point, that should raise a red flag for you.

It’s very likely true that some dude named Chesterton made that statement. So Johnson wasn’t telling an outright lie. But Chesterton’s statement was a lie. To learn why, we need to take a look at the Declaration of Independence as well as the US Constitution, so keep reading my next article, “Was the US founded on Christianity?”

After watching Mike Johnson’s speech the other night (the one he gave after being elected Speaker of the House), I did a little bit of research. He made some statements that sure made it sound like the US was founded on a religion.

He first pointed to the motto, “In God we Trust”. Good for him for at least pointing out that the founders didn’t install this motto; rather it was in 1956, when Eisenhower gave in to a popular Christian Nationalist effort, and signed a law making it our official motto.

Speaker Johnson then referred to a well-known phrase, which he lamented that more children in the US haven’t learned by heart,

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Johnson points to the word “Creator”, and makes the leap that yes, our country was indeed founded on a “creed” (a religion, specifically, Johnson’s religion, Christianity). That’s quite a leap. But wait, it gets better.

This phrase is from the Declaration of Independence. It’s not in the US Constitution.

The constitution is our founding document. And nowhere in the constitution is there any mention of a “creator”, or a “god”. Indeed the first and only place that the word “religion” is found is in the first amendment, which begins, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”. This established the US as a country where each person could decide, individually, if and how they choose to worship. If the Bible is your jam, that’s cool. If the Koran is your jam, that’s cool. And if you just don’t like jam, that’s cool too.

So why would the Declaration of Independence be so free wheeling with its language?

Remember that at the time it was written, we were a British colony, and not everyone here wanted to be part of a revolution. The declaration was written to stir up support; to get people angry enough to fight. And boy did it ever make a promise to the thousands of slaves that were building our roads and towns, and producing our food at the time.

It promised Liberty!

Eventually the constitution was adopted, the document that says how we’re going to do things around here in this new experiment in democracy. And guess what? Slaves were given the worth of 3/5 of a person. Apparently not all persons were “created equal”, according to the founders, and “Liberty” for slaves would have to wait for a civil war to be fought.

So Speaker Johnson, don’t go using the Declaration of Independence to say anything about how our country was founded, or how it’s designed to function. Marketing documents just aren’t the same as user manuals.

The United States of America was not founded on any religion.

For further study, check out this video by Seth Andrews.

Here’s a couple of fun facts about the US Senate. Senators have a term of six years (as opposed to the 2-year term for members of the House of Representatives). And each state in the union gets exactly 2 seats in the senate, regardless of the population of that state.

So California, with its almost 40,000,000 residents, has exactly 2 senators. And on the other end of the spectrum, consider Wyoming, with less than 600,000 residents, which also has 2 senators. This means that a voter in Casper, Wyoming has 67x more representation in the senate than a voter in San Fransisco. A voter in Billings, Montana has 17x more representation in the senate than one in Brooklyn, NY.

If you’re wondering why public opinion doesn’t seem to match up with legislative agenda (the vast majority of citizens support female reproductive rights, gun safety, same sex marriage, etc.) this is a big reason why.

The majority leader in the Senate has immense power to stop anything from getting done, by simply not bringing bills to the floor for a vote. So when the opposition owns the Senate, it can completely block a president’s agenda and then make the case that the majority isn’t accomplishing anything. Cute trick, yeah?

Power begets power. If you’re wondering why the Supreme Court is so incredibly out of step with public opinion, consider the power of a single senator:

Did you know that the US House of Representatives has a fixed number of seats (435)? It wasn’t always that way. The number of seats used to vary based on the size of the population, which was measured every 10 years in via the census.

I recently learned that a law was passed back in 1929 that capped the number of seats at 435.

I searched but could not find a chart showing the number of seats over time, so I tediously went through the records of all congresses since the US was founded (there’s been 118 as of this writing, thanks Wikipedia) and plotted the number of house seats. Above is the chart that I came up with. Do you see how it generally rises in steps? Those steps represent the US census that’s taken every 10 years. The only weird period in the data was between congresses 35 and 41, during the civil war, but the rest is pretty consistent, up until the flatline that began at the 62nd congress.

Why was the size of the house capped? Because the 1920 census revealed a shift as large numbers of people moved from rural farms into cities, and rural voters wanted to maintain power. Quite the power grab, eh?

Hello! My name is Keith Sparkjoy and I’ll be posting short and sweet articles that I hope will get you thinking. There’s a lot of misinformation out there and I’m joining the ranks of the folks who are pushing back and publishing well-researched content that can help bring some sanity back to our world.

A wise man once said, “a statement, if it conveys knowledge, predicts future outcomes, with risk of being wrong, and that it fits without failure observations of the past.” Before I trust a new source of information, I spend a lot of time verifying that what they say fits without failure, observations from other sources that I trust. And I watch carefully for predictions that they make to see how often they turn out to be correct.

I’d encourage you to do just that with my content – don’t take it at face value – do your research and verify that what I’m saying is true.