Labor Secretary Walsh is the ‘designated survivor’ at the State of the Union address
By Maegan Vazquez and Matt Stiles, CNN
Updated 9:06 PM EST, Tue February 7, 2023

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Avlon: These are the key things Biden needs to address in State of the Union
02:25 - Source: CNN
CNN
—
Labor Secretary Marty Walsh is the “designated survivor” during President Joe Biden’s second State of the Union address on Tuesday night.

The selection comes the same day CNN reported that Walsh is expected to depart the Biden administration soon – marking the first Cabinet secretary departure of Biden’s presidency.

Biden’s address is taking place in the House chamber, where he’s speaking in front of nearly every influential federal official in Washington – including members of Congress, top military brass, US Supreme Court justices and senior officials within his administration.

Walsh, a key member of Biden’s economic team, becomes the first Labor secretary in American history publicly known to have participated in the obscure ritual in order to maintain the line of presidential succession in the rare case that disaster strikes.

Last year, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo was the designated survivor for Biden’s first State of the Union address, staying away from the Capitol in an undisclosed and secure location during the president’s prime time remarks.

According to the National Constitution Center, the tradition of a designated survivor during the State of the Union speech began in the 1950s as a result of fears of a nuclear attack during the Cold War. But the federal government did not publicly name the designated survivor until 1981, when President Ronald Reagan’s Education Secretary Terrel Bell assumed the designation for an address to a joint session of Congress.

The presidential line of succession is outlined in the Presidential Succession Act of 1792, which was updated during the Truman administration in the Presidential Succession Act of 1947. The updated line of succession was spurred by President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s death in 1945, which led to Harry Truman’s assumption to the highest office.

After the vice president, the speaker of the House, the Senate president pro tempore, and the secretaries of State, Treasury and Defense are next in the line of succession. Data analyzed by CNN shows that the attorney general, seventh in the line of succession, has been the highest-ranking Cabinet member known to have been appointed to be designated survivor. A Justice Department head has been selected for the role three times. //

Who has been the ‘designated survivor’?
One member of the president's Cabinet is chosen to remain absent from the State of the Union address to ensure continuity of government in the case of a mass-casualty event. The vice president and both houses of Congress are typically in attendance, so the designee is chosen from further down the presidential line of succession. Since the 1980s, the selection has been made public.

Note: There was no designated survivor in 2021. Attendance was limited due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Washington Free Beacon @FreeBeacon
·
Q: “Judge, tell me what article V of the Constitution does?”

Biden judicial nominee: “Article V is not coming to mind at the moment.”

“How about article II?”

Nominee: “Neither is Article II”

11:05 AM · Jan 26, 2023 //

Igor Bobic @igorbobic
·
Durbin says he’s confident that Charnelle Bjelkengren, Biden nominee who was stumped by Kennedy over the Constitution, will be confirmed.

“The honest answer is, there aren’t many members of the Judiciary committee who can answer all those questions,” he said
12:38 PM · Jan 31, 2023 //

Sen. John Kennedy shamed the Democrats again when he said in response, “If you want to be an auto mechanic, you gotta know what a spark plug is.”

As two courts of appeals have now concluded, the federal contractor mandate is unprecedented and unlawful. It would allow the government to use its purchasing power to mandate individual health decisions for one-fifth of the nation’s workforce. This sort of policymaking decision must be made by Congress, not an agency that is unaccountable to the American public.

If leftists can rig elections, they certainly can rig a constitutional convention. That would be a major disaster. //

Article V says Congress shall call a convention requested by two-thirds of the states. It’s unclear what the role of all 50 states would be, but they are of course blue as well as red. This means that liberal activists will have full access to any constitutional convention.

So if the Con-Con process started tomorrow, who would Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer select as delegates? Pelosi could exclude Republican choices, as with her January 6 committee, or trade her speaker’s gavel for the Con-Con chairmanship.

Conservative Con-Con promoters will not control who attends, what issues are discussed, or what constitutional amendments ultimately are approved. The convention will make all decisions and conservatives will not be able to guarantee the outcome. //

Conservatives who blithely assume that only conservatives would be empowered to participate in a Con-Con, and that ratification procedures would block unwanted results, should read Mollie Hemingway’s book, “Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections.” //

Most leaders of the Article V Con-Con movement have no personal experience with the dynamics of political conventions, much less contested conventions. Key decisions are made months before a national convention begins, and decisive motions often are passed without warning with a gavel crack on a voice vote.

As reported in “Rigged,” courts are useless when fast-moving political events override internal organizational rules and even established law. Several book chapters end with regret, with statements like, “Republicans later learned…” and “The court ruled in Trump’s favor, but it was too late.” //

Federal spending is unrestrained, but our Constitution is not the problem. It would make more sense for state lawmakers to return federal subsidies to the U.S. Treasury than to bet the Constitution in a reckless gamble they are likely to lose. ///

Article V Convention is the "get rich quick" scheme of lazy conservatives who don't want too do the hard work or wait for the results of hard work of transforming the culture.

Those who favor civil asset forfeiture argue that it helps law enforcement fight crime by depriving criminals of the resources used to perpetrate crimes. But, critics argue, that it is nothing more than a revenue-generating scheme. Many have criticized policing for profit, including Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

In the case of Leonard v. Texas, he laid out his case when writing his opinion. He noted that “unlike a criminal case in which a prosecutor must prove a defendant’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, in a civil forfeiture case, the prosecutor only needs to establish the basis for the forfeiture by a preponderance of the evidence.” //

State governments have raked in tons of cash from civil asset forfeiture. In 2017, Texas’ law enforcement took in about $50 million, which included people who were not charged or convicted of a crime. Since the state’s attorney general does not distinguish between the two when calculating the numbers, it is not known exactly how many were never charged. Since 2000, state and federal governments have taken at least $68.8 billion, according to the Institute for Justice. //

According to the Institute for Justice, the clearance rates for violent crimes tends to drop as the amount of forfeiture revenue increases. This Is largely due to the fact that when police are hunting for cash drug offenders, they are not as focused on addressing violent criminals. Moreover, the practice has not led to a decline in drug use in communities in which it is used. //

C. S. P. Schofield
6 hours ago
“ The rationale behind this practice is the notion that property can be charged with an offense, even if the person who owns it has not been charged or even convicted. Proponents argue that this ability is critical to the efforts of law enforcement to crack down on crime.”

This is the inevitable consequence of the “we gotta get them goddamned drug dealers” mentality that has driven the War On Drugs my whole life. RICO, Asset Forfeiture, no-knock raids, and so on are all justified to ‘get’ drug dealers…and gradually crept into general use on the population.

I like cops, as a rule. I have only had one bad interaction with a policeman (rent-a-cops are another matter), and his own department was trying like hell to get rid of him (thank you, civil service rules). But the War On Drugs has made a LEO culture that has much broken about it.

I don’t think street drugs are a good thing. I’ve known junkies, and they were mostly sad, broken people, and often seriously untrustworthy. But the fallout of the War On Drugs seems to me to be worse than the drugs themselves.

The spurious case against an Alaska lawmaker’s eligibility to hold elected office represents a threat to free speech and free elections.

I've been banging this drum a while now. Prognosis still negative..

The First Amendment isn’t dying because state actors and a political party colluded with giant tech platforms and media outlets to censor speech and sabotage elections. All of that is just a byproduct of a corrosive trend. It’s clear to me that many Americans have stopped idealizing free expression. They don’t view it as a neutral value or societal good. Not even a platitude. They definitely don’t believe in counterspeech doctrine. Some people, in fact, are fine with compelling their fellow citizens to say things. //

The First Amendment doesn’t work because guys in powdered wigs wrote down words — as Scalia once said, every “banana republic in the world has a bill of rights” — but because society embraces its underlying values, as they did due process or property rights. The spirit of the thing matters. //

The illiberal ideologues being churned out by j-schools these days aren’t nervous about consumer blowback. I suspect reporters and producers at ABC, CBS, and NBC are not refusing to cover the “Twitter Files” because they’re trying to hide the truth, but because they can’t comprehend why social media colluding with the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and the White House to quash stories in the preservation of “democracy” is newsworthy to begin with. //

Throughout history, authoritarians have claimed that liberty must be subdued because of some perilous historical moment. That moment is now every time Democrats don’t get their way. If these people have no problem with the state and corporations that control the public square working together to dictate appropriate speech, how long is it before the idea of curbing “dangerous” “disinformation” through legislation is normalized?

The Washington Post is reporting that the US Customs and Border Protection agency is seizing and copying cell phone, tablet, and computer data from “as many as” 10,000 phones per year, including an unspecified number of American citizens. This is done without a warrant, because “…courts have long granted an exception to border authorities, allowing them to search people’s devices without a warrant or suspicion of a crime.”

CBP’s inspection of people’s phones, laptops, tablets and other electronic devices as they enter the country has long been a controversial practice that the agency has defended as a low-impact way to pursue possible security threats and determine an individual’s “intentions upon entry” into the U.S. But the revelation that thousands of agents have access to a searchable database without public oversight is a new development in what privacy advocates and some lawmakers warn could be an infringement of Americans’ Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable searches and seizures.

Frustrated by a slew of conservative legal victories, Democrats introduced the TERM Act, which would establish 18-year term limits for Supreme Court justices, after which they would “assume senior status,” a quasi-retirement that drastically reduces their caseload and corresponding influence. To fill these vacancies, the president would appoint a new justice during the first and third years of his term. Cast as “an effort to restore legitimacy and independence to the nation’s highest court,” the TERM Act would ironically undermine both, transforming the court from an institution of law to a panel of politicians. //

Our Founding Fathers created the judiciary to be the “bulwark” of a limited government. Judges were to keep the federal government and its constituent parts in their proper spheres of authority and safeguard political minorities against the depredations of the governing class. To do either, however, the framers understood that the judiciary must be independent of Congress and the president. Otherwise, warned James Madison, “the stronger faction c[ould] readily unite and oppress the weaker,” rendering the Constitution’s guarantees an empty promise.

Life tenure completely severs “all sense of dependence” between the judiciary and the politicians responsible for their commission, empowering judges to check government excess without fear for their livelihoods. If enacted, the TERM Act would spell the demise of judicial independence. Justices would no longer decide cases in accordance with the letter and spirit of the law. Instead, concern for future employment would sway reason and undermine the legitimacy of the Supreme Court as an impartial arbiter of the law. //

the TERM Act endangers our constitutional design and the individual liberty it secures.

But beyond the textual argument, which the federal court will likely consider in the next week or so on an expedited time frame, the underlying rationale for the Speech or Debate Clause should provide a stark warning to Democrats that what Willis is doing is destructive to our democratic republic and should be denounced.

As Graham’s attorneys stressed in his motion, the framers believed the Speech or Debate Clause was “‘indispensably necessary’ for the independence of the legislature, and ultimately for the ‘rights of the people.’” Only by protecting members of Congress from being questioned about their legislative activity could the integrity of the legislative process be assured. “By ‘enabling these representatives to execute the functions of their office without fear’ of interference from prosecutors, grand juries, or courts, the Framers understood that the ‘rights of the people’ would, in turn, be protected.”

But here, we don’t truly have a “prosecutor” or a “grand jury”; we have an inquisitor and her trial of Republicans by publicity. And the Fulton County court seems but a rubber stamp for the subpoenas Willis seeks.

And Willis is but one county D.A. Imagine the mischief if every prosecutor with political ambitions followed her lead.

“The Government presenting a person asserting their Fifth Amendment privilege in order to imply to the public that the person is ‘guilty’ of some crime is a McCarthy-esque tactic that offends the Constitution and is unworthy of the United States Congress,” 1st Amendment Praetorian’s lawyer wrote. Given the Committee’s past actions, McAdoo Gordon noted in her Thursday letter that she is “forced to anticipate that the Committee will use the same totalitarian tactic to improperly smear 1AP.” //

Quoting from the Supreme Court, McAdoo Gordon then reminded the committee that the high court has described the Fifth Amendment privilege thusly:

[W]e have emphasized that one of the Fifth Amendment’s “basic functions . . . is to protect innocent men . . . `who otherwise might be ensnared by ambiguous circumstances.'”

The letter continued:

“The circumstances in which an innocent citizen finds himself faced with an out-of-control prosecutor, or a mistaken theory of criminality, or an overzealous legislative inquiry — which is the situation 1AP finds itself in — is precisely when the citizen most needs the protection of the Fifth Amendment. For the Congress to attempt to turn that protection into a weapon against a citizen, or a group of citizens, is repellant. I urge the Committee not to engage in such un-American behaviors. Unfortunately, I have little faith that the Committee will heed my appeal. This leaves me with no choice but to pre-emptively speak publicly about these issues before the Committee engages in wholesale defamation of 1AP from its powerful national platform.” //

“And now Congressman Raskin is telling the Times he plans to ‘explore the connection between those groups and the people in Mr. Trump’s orbit.’”

That is precisely what the First Amendment protects Americans from: being investigated because of the individuals with whom they associate. But not only does the Jan. 6 Committee not care, neither does the legacy media. The question remains whether Americans will, or whether they have lost their sense of decency.

The film, Created Equal: Clarence Thomas In His Own Words was released in 2020, and offered a unique glimpse into Justice Clarence Thomas’ life and judicial philosophy. Since his 1991 confirmation hearings, the legacy media has delighted in poisoning the well with lies, smears, and racist tropes about the Justice. With the assistance of documentary filmmaker Michael Pack, Mark Paoletta decided to dig a new well, one that allowed people to draw their conclusions from Justice Thomas’ own life, words, and writings.

Pack spent 25 hours filming Justice Thomas, and six additional hours with his wife Ginni — a voluminous amount of discourse that was reduced to a two-hour documentary. Sadly, this left a prodigious amount of information on who the Justice is as a person, as well as his writings and viewpoints, unexplored. So, Paoletta decided that a book of the same name was in order. //

I sat down with Paoletta for an hour, and he stated that he is making it his life’s mission to present a true, candid, and unadorned portrait of this consequential jurist.

It’s a fascinating conversation that gives a glimpse not only into Clarence Thomas the United States Supreme Court Justice, but into Clarence Thomas the man and the humanitarian.

The same points keep getting made in the debate on abortion. Here are the many reasons the usual points in favor of abortion are wrong. //

Abortion is a deeply divisive issue, and about half of Americans consider themselves pro-life and half call themselves pro-choice. Overturning Roe will not end abortion rights but return the issue to the states, allowing for a more democratic process — the debate will continue, but the truth remains the same.

The Supreme Court’s decision in Roe was as shameful as its decision in Dred Scott — and for the same reason. //

The end of Roe v. Wade is perhaps the greatest political and cultural event in a generation. It will change American politics forever, and — what’s more important — it will save the lives of countless unborn children. The Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs is a great victory for the U.S. Constitution, for the American people, and for justice and truth and the common good.

It is also a turning point. We should now expect Democrats and the left to call more explicitly for violence, initially against places like crisis pregnancy centers and Catholic churches, as we have already seen, and eventually against ordinary people who disagree with them. We should expect not just calls for physical attacks against the justices in the Dobbs majority, but, as we have also already seen, attempts to carry out such attacks.

This violence will likely be accompanied by rhetoric that more explicitly posits abortion not just as a positive good — “shout your abortion” — but a necessary one for women to enjoy their full rights as citizens under the Constitution. The argument, already gaining steam in public discourse, is that without a constitutional right to kill the unborn, women are relegated to a kind of second-class status, stripped of their full humanity. This rhetoric will be used in part as a justification for violence, but it also reflects the actual views of Democrats and the left on abortion. //

Southern Democrats believed the denial of all rights to black people — and indeed the denial of their personhood — was integral to what they understood to be their constitutionally protected rights, without which they would cease to be citizens with equal rights as their northern counterparts.

The exact same thing can be said of today’s pro-abortion Democrats. They believe that the denial of all rights to the unborn is integral to what they understand to be women’s constitutionally protected rights, without which they will cease to be citizens with equal rights as their male counterparts. If women are not allowed to kill their unborn babies, they will be stripped of their full humanity, just as stripping slavery from southern whites meant, to them, stripping full humanity from white people.

The Dobbs decision and the end of Roe have exposed the Democrat view of the Constitution for what it is: not, as Frederick Douglass called it, “a glorious liberty document,” but a slave Constitution that relies for its operation on the total subjugation, indeed the extermination, of an entire class of people whose very humanity must be denied for the rights of women to be vindicated.

We should rejoice in the end of Roe, but we should also be realistic about what lies ahead. It took a civil war and three constitutional amendments to correct the Supreme Court’s error in Dred Scott. This time it took 60 million unborn dead before the Supreme Court corrected the error of Roe.

In the coming days and weeks, expect Democrats to sound the same notes of secession their forebears sounded. A constitutional order that vindicates the rights of the unborn is not a constitutional order they want to be a part of. We will hear the same arguments we heard in the 1850s and 60s, but instead of objecting to the emancipation of black Americans they will object to the emancipation of the unborn. Understand what this means. The last time Democrats openly made these kind of arguments, war soon followed.

thidwick markvol
3 years ago edited
" the Bill of Rights was enacted primarily to entice the following territories to join the Union. In other words, Of Course the eighth is incorporated!"
Not actually. Prior to the Fourteenth Amendment, the Bill of Rights was not considered to apply to state action. The Bill of Rights was in fact demanded by most of the states for agreeing to the Constitution as a limit on federal power, because while they recognized the need for a more vigorous and cohesive central government than under the Articles of Confederation, they also wanted to make sure the federal government would be constrained in various critical ways - those they could then enumerate (the first 8) and those they could not just yet (9 and 10). The Fourteenth Amendment imposed equal protection and due process limits on the states. After a few decades, the courts began interpreting the right to due process under the Fourtheenth Amendment as including various parts of the Bill of Rights. That is what 'incorporation' means in this context. Generally, states have not recognized that an amendment applies to them until the federal courts say so. Often they have parallel provisions in their constitutions, so it did not come up all that often. My recollection is that 'excessive fines' had been incorporated, but in the contexts of direct criminal penalties and punitive damages, not asset forfeiture.

But in looking through the Bill of Rights to make this reply, I noticed something I have not heard discussed before. Only the First Amendment says "Congress shall not..." The rest just say the rights of the people as to various things (be armed, not house soldiers, have jury trials for amounts over $20, etc.) shall not be infringed. It seems to me the difference reflects that only the First may have been intended to apply only to the federal government, allowing the states to have their established religions (as several did at the time), or make their own provisions as to press and speech. In any case, Marbury v. Madison (which said it was the courts' job to declare whether an Act was constitutional) was not issued until 1803, a generation after the Bill of Rights was ratified, and the legal establishment of the time may have simply forgotten that only the First was so limited to Congress's acts, and so when issues about state action arose, everyone just accepted that the Bill of Rights did not apply to them. This paragraph is largely speculative.

One of the evils of the criminal justice system that we at RedState have editorialized against over the years is civil asset forfeiture. This Orwellian process involves law enforcement confiscating property they allege to be the product of a crime without the inconvenience of either specifying the crime, charging a criminal, or even showing that a crime happened. This is from Heritage Foundation’s Civil Asset Forfeiture: 7 Things You Should Know:

https://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2014/03/civil-asset-forfeiture-7-things-you-should-know

https://dailycaller.com/2015/01/30/the-7-most-egregious-examples-of-civil-asset-forfeiture/

//

A trial court judge ordered the Land Rover returned as it was clearly bought with proceeds from a life insurance policy and it was excessive. The Indiana Supreme Court ruled that that silly old Eighth Amendment had never been incorporated, that is, made applicable to the states and because of that, the Indiana cops could do as they damned well pleased.

At the Supreme Court arguments, it was pretty clear that Indiana was on very unsteady ground with five justices very skeptical about the state’s arguments. No one knew just how skeptical the Supreme Court was until earlier this morning:

The Supreme Court ruled unanimously Wednesday that states may not impose excessive fines, extending a bedrock constitutional protection but potentially jeopardizing asset-forfeiture programs that help fund police operations with property seized from criminal suspects. //

The court also held that the Eighth Amendment did, indeed, apply to the states. This is the decision.

What the court ruled was that violating the Fifth Amendment is a constitutional violation that will get you into court with a “§1983” claim, but the Miranda warning is not the Fifth Amendment. Furthermore, two separate trial judges admitted Tekoh’s voluntary statement into evidence knowing there was no Miranda warning. That, right there, should tell you that this case is really about expanding the scope of §1983 for litigation and has nothing to do with the Fifth Amendment.

Miranda rests on a pragmatic judgment about what is needed to stop the violation at trial of the Fifth Amendment right against compelled self-incrimination. That prophylactic purpose is served by the suppression at trial of statements obtained in violation of Miranda and by the application of that decision in other recognized contexts. Allowingthe victim of a Miranda violation to sue a police officer for damages under §1983 would have little additional deterrent value, and permitting such claims would cause many problems.

“We know of no other constitutional right that an individual may exercise only after demonstrating to government officers some special need,” Thomas wrote. “That is not how the First Amendment works when it comes to unpopular speech or the free exercise of religion. It is not how the Sixth Amendment works when it comes to a defendant’s right to confront the witnesses against him. And it is not how the Second Amendment works when it comes to public carry for self-defense.” //

In his concurring opinion, Alito slammed dissenting Justices Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor for bringing up irrelevant statistics to try and justify restricting Americans’ consitutional rights.

“Why, for example, does the dissent think it is relevant to recount the mass shootings that have
occurred in recent years?” Alito asked. “Does the dissent think that laws like New York’s prevent or deter such atrocities? Will a person bent on carrying out a mass shooting be stopped if he knows that it is illegal to carry a handgun outside the home?”

Alito also questioned how the dissenting justices “account for the fact that one of the mass shootings near the top of its list took place in Buffalo?”

“The New York law at issue in this case obviously did not stop that perpetrator,” he noted. //

Alito also noted in his concurring opinion that “The police cannot disarm every person who acquires a gun for use in criminal activity; nor can they provide bodyguard protection for the State’s nearly 20 million residents or the 8.8 million people who live in New York City.”

And since “ordinary citizens frequently use firearms to protect themselves from criminal attack,” they shouldn’t be stopped from carrying a gun for self defense in crime-ridden cities in states such as New York.

“Some of these people reasonably believe that unless they can brandish or, if necessary, use a handgun in the case of attack, they may be murdered, raped, or suffer some other serious injury,” Alito noted. “Today, unfortunately, many Americans have good reason to fear that they will be victimized if they are unable to protect themselves. And today, no less than in 1791, the Second Amendment guarantees their right to do so.”

It’s important to remember that a red flag law is effectively a societal nod to strip someone of their 2nd Amendment right, not because they committed a crime, but because you think they might. More accurately, someone can be stripped of their right to bear arms off of the mere accusation that they intend to cause harm. //

Red flag laws are ripe for abuse and we already have leftists with blue check marks on Twitter openly admitting that they’re ready to take advantage of them just by claiming an innocent man is insane for wanting to defend his children from people who want to take them in order to indoctrinate them with radicalized thought. //

Without the right to gun ownership, the rest of the Bill of Rights is a wishlist. Do we really want to live in a world where someone like Eric Swalwell can wave his hand and strip you of rights given to you by God?

Moving past the areas of possible effective compromise, though, there is no chance Democrats walk away without getting their way on something that directly violates the rights of Americans. In this case, Murphy mentions universal background checks, which again, would not have stopped this shooter like almost every shooter before him. Now, you might be saying to yourself, “we already have background checks,” and you’d be correct. In fact, I can’t think of a single mass shooting (i.e. high-profile, school shootings, etc.) where the gun was purchased privately, ducking an FFL-background check. In almost all cases, shooters either pass a background check or steal their guns from family members.

But the point of universal background checks is really to create a federal gun registry. That way the government knows who has the guns and where. When you recognize that, it’s easy to understand why Democrats love the idea so much despite its obvious ineffectiveness. //

New York has an extremely broad red flag law. It didn’t stop the Buffalo grocery store shooter just a few weeks ago. From my view, it seems like trying to stop an army of ants with a magnifying glass. And while I’ll concede red flag laws might be effective in regards to suicide prevention, that’s not the discussion here, right?

Here’s the thing, though. When whatever red flag laws that get passed fail to stop the next mass shooter, the call to “do something” will only grow louder. And the next “something” will be an even further encroachment. I understand the desire to act in good faith and attempt to take some of the heat off, but Republicans have to understand that the Democrat push for gun confiscation and an “assault weapons” ban will not stop with whatever compromise legislation arises here.

That leaves the obvious question for Republicans: Is it smart to give ground when the end goal of the Democrats is being telegraphed to you? I know my answer.