I find this to be the scariest proof of all that democracy no longer exists in Germany. If the court truly rules against this procedure, one that other parties have gladly followed for decades, then it speaks to how little the main parties respect the peoples will. In fact, it’s a blatant show of paternalism and in my opinion, it’s clear that the opposition parties are the ones actually behaving like fascists.
Someone needs to make a catchy graphic meme that says constitutional laws for me if I win, but not for thee if you win.
It no longer exists in the US, neither. We are seeing quite graphically how our "Justice" Dept. keeps in its freezer for future defrosting as necessary dirt on anyone who gets out of line. I'm no fan of Eric Adams of NY but I am a fan of the analyses of serious men like Jonathan Turley and Alan Dershowitz and they ain't so impressed by these charges.
Adjourning was AfD blinking. Blinking is the surest sign of weakness. And the surest way for "courts" - if that's what they still call them - to take power. The move by Treutler to accommodate the usurpers of power concedes and submits the democratically elected parliamentary body to the rules of the anti-democratic, unelected judiciary's superior authority. Co-equal branches means co-equal. Unless one branch agrees to be subjugated by the other. Which is what Treutler has done by adjourning so that an unelected body hostile to the will of the people can dictate who speaks for the people and how they speak for them.
Treutler blinked. AfD blinked. Perhaps thinking the optics would be bad if they didn't. Hint: Their anti-democratic opponents will make sure anything Treutler and AfD does to stand up for the people who elected them has bad optics. Why choose the option that guarantees they not only look bad, but have no power either? Possession is 9/10 of the law, especially of the law of public opinion. They gave up possession. Fools. Or complicit side show act, illusion of opposition. That's what Treutler now looks like to this observer and analyst of such things. Just like the GOP in the US.
Thing is, Trump failed this test, as well. Early in his presidency he saw the propaganda media taking control of his press secretary's briefings, hostile, breaking decorum, etc. He tried to oust the ones who were the worst offenders. They sued. The courts ruled he had to let the propagandists in the briefings, he didn't have the authority to say who would/could cover them. The White House controls press credentials, their discretion. Many conservative alt media would love to have some of those precious few spots. But the courts ruled he had to give them to the propagandists opposed to his administration and making a mockery of the the briefings.
This was a fight for control that he could've and should've won. The courts overstepped their authority, weakened the office of the presidency, dictated internal procedures to it. They have no constitutional authority to do so. Anymore than the Congress can deictate to the Supreme Court its internal procedures, like about declaring ethics conflicts, what media they should give access to, etc. SCOTUS overstepped their authority. Trump had every right to assert his Executive privilege and reject the Court's ruling as the interference it was. By not asserting it he weakened the office, made it inferior, not coequal.
This was a pattern of his administration. He allowed his presidential authority to be weakened. It continued when he gave a Lt. Colonel the power to veto his Constitutionally-recognized authority to be the nation's foreign policy decider. Ukrainian intelligence operative Vindman, embedded in the Pentagon, "whistleblew" that Trump went against the foreign policy decided by prior administration and current agency heads. Neither have the power to supersede a president's explicit authority. Trump had the right, the obligation to fire that man, even throw him in Ft. Leavenworth.
Instead he got hung up in an impeachment trial that distracted from his governance and ability to get full and complete information from all of his advisers about the "Wuhan Flu" as it was called in November, 2019. Fighting off the impeachment prevented a more thorough investigation of all that was going on, the best response for it. It changed the course of history. Had Trump held onto his constitutional authority he probably would've been president the past four years. And a stronger one. And the nation would've been better off for it.
But he blinked. His opponents wanted it more than he did. By refusing to assert his authority they were able to walk all over him. He appeased. He didn't prosper. The nation didn't prosper.
He failed the test spectacularly. He blinked like he had a sequoia in his eye.
That's what comes of picking pragmatism over principles. Rational principles are immutable and universal. They're what make moral courage possible, but they have to be discovered ahead of time, before the crisis that demands their application. And they require more than just randomly absorbing the latest cultural trends.
Hold his ground. Reject the heckler's veto. Proceed with normal and ordinary business. Make everyone stay until it was resolved under the existing rules. No breaks. No gavel out for the day. In a battle of wills one must possess the strongest will.
How could he proceed with any 'ordinary' business if the parliament was descending into chaos? Yes, it appears that the AFD did not have a plan about what to do if they were challenged but I don't know how much experience the members have of the system and how to play it.
Let it descend into chaos!! The people voted for chaos when the largest bloc went for AfD! It's called turning over the tables in a rigged game. There WILL be chaos! There MUST be chaos. Order is what got us all under the boot of tyranny in the first place!
What did Jesus Christ do about the money changers in the temple? Did he politely ask them to leave? Did he beg of the elders they evict the money changers? He TURNED OVER THE TABLES! Chaos! The voters understood this. Like Trump voters, he is an agent of Chaos! The only solution to a rigged, corrupt system that is the sole beneficiary of "order." Of course they wish to preserve *their* orderly system.
But it takes Will. As you correctly identify, it doesn't seem like there was a plan. Foolish? Or Complicit? Which is why I offered that AfD is an *illusion* of opposition. Another player in that rigged, corrupt system?
Perhaps electing the president here is similar to electing the speaker in other parliaments. This is the person who keeps order so without one who is in charge?
I love when bloggers take another blogger's case to the ultimate conclusion, especially when only a conundrum is offered. "Yes, sir—what would you do then to help?"
You are right. Bill Clinton did the same things as Adams is being accused of and his campaign paid a small fine. Adams speaking out about illegal immigration doomed him to his party's lawfare.
I always like to hear both sides of an issue. Adams claims he is out to remove the rot from City Politics. If he is right then it sounds like he is a good guy. His opponents claim he embezzled election funds. Did he? The truth might take some time to come out but Trump is right, lawfare will ruin the US.
It's actually quite a wonderful clash they've set up with the old generation of civil rights knackers standing with Adams and the Ocasio-Cortez darlings screaming at him to resign (so they can get their guy in). May they eat each other's' kishkes, amen.
As a New Yorker, I can safely state Adams is absolute trash, and should be removed from office via the simple garbage can his administration wasted copious amounts of taxpayer dollars to “research.”
> At one particularly embarrassing point, Andreas Bühl, from the CDU, shouted at Treutler that “what you’re doing here amounts to a seizure of power!” The word he used – “Machtergreifung” – alludes directly to the National Socialist seizure of power in 1933, because nothing smells quite so powerfully of Nazism as rigorously adhering to stuffy decades-old rules that are, again, legally mandated and that no court has yet overturned.
It's always the same with these scum. They accuse their opposition of what they themselves are doing. How can it be considered anything *but* a "seizure of power" to insist that *the Parliament itself* violate the established law in order to cater the losers' desires? And Treutler should have told Bühl precisely that, before he told him to sit the fuck down and shut the fuck up.
It's always been a farce. Whenever it happened to work for the interests of the Germans it was incidental and not functioning as intended. Parliamentarianism, from its conception, was designed to displace prior authority while putting the least qualified and most easy to puppet people in positions of apparent authority. Democracy is purely an extension of this deception of legitimacy.
I find the parallels between German and U.S. politics to be quite entertaining. It seems that for the Leftoids, the constitutionality of any act depends on the actor.
Here in the U.S., Donald Trump is constantly accused of having packed the Supreme Court with conservative justices, when all he did was fill vacancies on the court as they arose, following the established procedures for doing so. Mind you, the people accusing Trump of unconstitutionally packing the court are the same people advocating for adding more justices to the court (it now has nine) so that the Biden administration can fill the newly created vacancies with people more to their liking. This gambit was tried once before by Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s and it nearly cost him the 1936 election.
Note however, Trump filling vacancies on the Supreme Court using the normal procedures equals an unconstitutional abuse of power. Leftoids adding seats to the court so that they can create an instant liberal majority equals defending democracy. If these people weren't so dangerous, this would be comical.
The beauty of this was that the heroic and selfless Ruth B.G. felt she was so indespensibable in her fight for social justice that she stuck around with all of her demented ramblings until after Obama had left office, inconveniently dying during Trump's presidency and giving him the ability to appoint another conservative.
in her defense, she was a spry 87 years young and had only been dealing with cancer for somewhere around a decade. why should she relinquish power when she still had her best years ahead of her and everyone knew the first female president was a lock to win?
Trump's appointments were McConnell's appointments. We have the court that Mitch McConnell, RINO Fascist/Oligarch extraordinaire chose. Maybe it was the best he could've hoped to get through the McConnell senate. But make no mistake, the majority of the court is Uniparty approved. And why they refuse to take up election theft cases, unconstitutional censorship cases, cruel and unusual J6 punishment cases, sexual predation and deviance in schools cases, open borders cases, etc. All of the injustices and offenses that are repugnant to the US Constitution that go unchecked by a judiciary that is busy rewriting it to Orwellian Newspeak, "Ignorance is Strength, War is Peace and Freedom is Slavery."
Even the Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, ACB soap opera confirmation hearings were scripted drama, got R's to dig in and support "their" guy/gal from the contrived attacks of "them" D's. Completely oblivious that "their" R guy/gal was little better than "them" D's guy/gal's. It's all a sick psychological warfare game.
I don't agree. If it were really totally uniparty, as you said, we would have been living in more of a $heisholz than what we have now. At least our National Sin of slaughtering the most innocent in society isn't on the books anymore, or under that curse. That would never have happened if not for Trump speaking from the Bully Pulpit during his appointments. Americans have a habit of overlooking the Bully Pulpit. Teddy Roosevelt is one of Trump's main models.
Just taking stock of what it is. Not a pessimism overdose. But we must dispel any notions that the courts will be saving us. Our predicament is remedied only by our actions and God, Almighty's.
The High Priests in black robes serve a dark, fallen angel, cast from the Kingdom of Heaven, who's siren song appeals to those among us - especially politicians, judges and doctors - who also believe they are gods unto themselves.
Yes, I am just stating a fact about balance, and not allowing the Perfect to be the enemy of the Good. I hope you are also not saying that each party is equivalent. That would be tantamount to saying, "Hey, all you good guys—forget about voting—they re all the same". This, BTW, has been uncovered as a major strategy of the Democrat trolls and Soros. I don't think you want to identify with them, I really don't. Nice job, if you are.
Hopium is also the enemy of the Good. Nobody is coming to save us. Will some tyrants be worse than others? Perhaps. Both are tyranny. "I prefer my tyrants be of the slightly nicer variety." Not Good.
Voting is important insomuch as it's a poll of the people that the tyrants in both parties are mindful of. Of course they will veto the voice of the people. They have no choice, they are tyrants. But voting lets tyrants know the limits on their tyranny the people will accept. Which forces them to pull back a bit, hold out an open hand, or double-down and show their fists, clenching weapons.
Until the people realize that even the open hand they hope to see is still the hand of a tyrant the tyranny will continue. It's going to take more than voting to overthrow them. It's also a major strategy of Democrat and Republican trolls, and Soros, Rockefeller, etc. to make people believe voting alone solves it.
I guess you are sincere. As God said, "Come, and let us reason together". (Isa 1:18). Carry on, Foxy Loxy! (And the sky maybe really IS falling, isn't it?)
Does it matter? They rarely seem to be punished for their overweening hubris and its downright criminal manifestations, and the natural order doesn't seem to be returning any time soon, so what to do? We grumble here and in similar places and keep bending over and taking their reaming.
Your last paragraph sums it up quite neatly. What continues to amaze me is the sheer numbers of sheeple who believe the leftoid blather about abuse of democracy.
And the parallels between that movement, and the German Left keeping the laws that they expected to benefit from after an election they ended up losing, are significant. Can you imagine what would happen if the American left expanded the Supreme Court by six seats just in time to lose the government to Trump and allow him to fill them?
Usually when the federal constitutional court strikes down a law as unconstitutional, they declare that said law has indeed been unconstitutional for years to decades, and gives the government another 2 or more parliamentary terms to sort it out*. Property/land taxes are a great recent example. In the meantime the unconstitutional law is in full force and you will be carted off to jail and your house will be sold out from under you to pay the taxes, if you argue against paying taxes determined by an illegal law.
So naturally the state constitutional court of Thüringen (which I imagine hears about one case every 3 years but doubtless maintains a full-time staff of several loyal and honourable judges) will be as generous with this challenge to the constitutionality of a law.
*: The government does of course have far more pressing matters, like implementing European directives on bottle caps, and deciding how often one may declare ones gender to have changed.
Help us understand how the process works. the largest party can propose a candidate for president - this would be the AFD but the whole parliament would vote on it - so if all the other parties joined together they vote down the candidate of choice, correct?
yes, the other parties could vote against the president proposed by AfD. but, existing procedure is unclear about whether other parties can propose their own candidates at all. imho, a fair reading of the procedures suggests that only the AfD has the right to propose presidential candidates.
AFAIK, the largest Party proposes the presidential candidate, the other Parties propose the deputy presidential candidates. It's not as if they would've been deprived of a piece of that particular cake ...
Thanks for the clarification. I was wondering what's the problem? Because all the other parties would be able to choose whoever they want after the first day.
Hilariously written, as ever, but wow, this is very chilling indeed. Not just the refusal of the other parties to play by the rules (that they made when they controlled the Parliament) but the "reporting", which is surely "disinformation" nein? As most of the public will not read any direct account of events, but only the filtered accounts in the press, the distortions are poison to any meaningful democracy.
It’s funny, I know I don’t live in Germany and probably don’t understand the political process there, but couldn’t CDU and the other parties offered policies that more voters liked and preempted all this?
That's the same thing many of us in other countries are also wondering.
For example, in the US, rather than doing all kinds of anti-democratic shit and lawfare, why can't the Democrats just, I don't know, do stuff people want?
Because they are run by a mixture of oligarchs and head girls who despise most normal people. Think of how fancy people in the US talk of rednecks or "white trash" with abandon. This is their fundamental view of "the people," from whom they always exclude themselves. The painful piece, at least in part, concerns their utter hypocrisy--they THINK they are genuinely FOR democracy; at least the aristocrats of old were genuinely learned and openly spoke of the need for hierarchical order. These newer elites are delusional.
For one thing, the Democrats live in their own sick, utopian bubble. Anyone outside that bubble effectively does not exist for them. They believe they don't have to answer to anyone about anything they do...not even on Election Day. Electioneering has come down to disseminating blatant lies to placate the voters, and then they're done thinking about their constituents until the next election.
I think a lot of people who are busy running their businesses and raising their families have to some degree been succeesfully muted and immobilised by the endless gaslighting about equity, women's rights, racism, homophobia etc. But with Biden a line has been crossed and a lot of people are saying "Hell no - I have had enough!". They will still try to rig it but hopeflly this time it will be "too big to rig".
Perhaps because they are doing the bidding of those who want things like UN Pact for the Future, WHO Pandemic Entitlement, etc?
Transforming humanity at a global scale is not an easy task.
It requires a carefully crafted climate emergency narrative, putting the right persons in the right positions, and burying the people in a distracting nightmare of climate and gendering activists that will attract their attention until they become "victims of hate speech", etc.
That would violate 2 sacred commandments of the modern managerial "progressive" class:
1) admitting they were wrong and that some smelly fascist-adjacent Deplorable was right; and
2) actually governing on behalf of their countries and people, instead of "making change" and "saving the planet" and waking up every day seeing a world-historical actor and moral saint in the mirror (and on Instagram).
As they can never and will never do these things, the next best option is bullying, cheating and various media-generated tantrums about the Nazis over the next hill. This wouldn't be the first cult who'd rather burn down the whole house than admit their god had failed.
"If necessary, we must destroy democracy itself, to save the Thuringian parliament from the spectre of a democratically elected AfD president."
Flashback! This puts me in mind of a combat after-action report from the Vietnam War, wherein an airstrike on a South Vietnamese village suspected of harboring Viet Cong insurgents was justified with the statement: "We destroyed the village in order to save it." Logic like this has pervaded wars since time immemorial... And now it's justifying political action!
For what it's worth, the actual comment of "We destroyed the village in order to save it" was made up by the press, erroneously or more likely, deliberately. In fact, it was a South Vietnamese military base and not a village that was being overrun during the Tet Offensive. The base was not destroyed, only partially damaged, and the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong were repelled.
The problem with journalism during the Vietnam War was that most of the journalists rarely went out with the troops and spent most of their time in the Caravelle Hotel in Saigon and in the Tu Do Street red light district, and they got most of their "information" from each other and not from direct observation. In Vietnam as a platoon sergeant, my husband's experience with an embedded film crew was more than frustrating. As their unit landed in a chopper in a hot landing zone, he turned to urge the film crew to follow him quickly and they refused to get out of the chopper. A minute later they few off with the other ten choppers, never having stepped foot on the ground. Yet they may have gone back and written some kind of story about their big war "experience". The journalists had a strong anti-military bias at that time.
Thanks for the very informative comment. I was never sure whether "We destroyed the village ..." was some kind of satire or if it was passed off as the real thing - now I know.
Jürgen Treutler lookin’ sharp there with an impressive neckbeard
Nice to see AfD keeps to the old ways in this matter: the reign of the cleanshaven focus-grouped politico comes grudgingly to an end, the day of the mid-Victorian era beardo is at hand!
Laugh out loud stuff again from Eugyppius who has single-handedly ignited in me a prurient, addictive interest in German politics. Not a thing I would ever have deemed possible.
This is satire of the kind that I thought had died out with Alexander Pope. We have some great, sceptical commentators on British politics like Peter Hitchens, but if only we could cultivate some more brutal satirists in the 'strangely dying' (as per Douglas Murray) countries of western Europe we might have more of a chance of overturning the palpable madness.
As a Brit holidaying in (strangely dying) south western France last week I was heartened to see the number of village name signs turned upside down. Without investigation I worked out what this meant. 'France profonde' was signifying its rejection of a world 'turned upside down' by its elites who put the welfare of anyone else on the planet before their own electorate.
Brilliant eugyppius. I know it's a serious subject but you completely skewered them and showed them up for the frightening and stupid authoritarians that they really are while making me laugh out loud. Thank you.
eugyppius, thank you for another brilliant exposition of the hypocrisy of the champions of democracy.
That said, I have a question for you that is not completely related to today's Substack post but which was sparked by your post: while I believe that the fear-mongering around AfD is 100% pure self-serving B.S., I'm not sure that this party is the one I'd vote for if I were a German citizen. A voter who supports free markets, civil liberties, and an assertive foreign policy -- is there a party in Germany (even if a small one) that they could unreservedly vote for? Or is it a matter, as so often happens, of having to decide which party's program is the least unacceptable?
If there was one, you couldn't unreservedly vote for it, for it would become the target of the establishment's media.
No. You're supposed to live in a state of fear, -from the Nazis, not other things-, and therefore fall for the establishment.
While I agree that the FDP is supposed to be one of those parties, the problem is, no one can tell one party from another and this is what these events show. There are de facto only two political parties right now: the AfD and everyone else.
No matter that the tarnished Communists (BSW) and the CDU have diametral different goals, in particular on the question of support for the war in Ukraine, the BSW claims to have the position that the AfD has.
By the way, the FDP supports the escalation of the war like no other party. It has become their one and only aspect.
If they were at all intelligent, they would let the AfD enjoy the full prerogatives, and take on all the responsibilities. Let them govern. Let them handle the horrible mess previous governments have made. And if they can't, that'll be the most effective way to discredit them.
Thank you for this entertainingly informative piece. The hysterical members of the Swiss media (ie. most of them) had portrayed this story very differently -- mostly that the AfD was deliberately causing chaos and sowing hatred.
I am not so sure that the Constitutional Court will rule against the AfD. Certainly, they are biased, but the text of the existing law seems to be very clear.
At any rate, this farce is probably illustrative of what we can expect in the next years: many further heroic stances to save Ourdemocracy which will become more and more obviously ridiculous.
This will be good for the AfD. The coming years will see a sharp decline of Germany's economical fortunes, and many of use will suffer. The more the AfD is excluded from parliamentary politics, the more it will be clear that only the currently reigning parties are to blame.
Another bear signal for this farce is that Cicero, a magazine generally very mindful of center- to center-right consensus wisdom (and generally of rather careful throat clearing, tie adjusting criticism – although they were stating the obvious on migration rather early) ran this, co-authored by an SPD(!) politician to boot:
I find this to be the scariest proof of all that democracy no longer exists in Germany. If the court truly rules against this procedure, one that other parties have gladly followed for decades, then it speaks to how little the main parties respect the peoples will. In fact, it’s a blatant show of paternalism and in my opinion, it’s clear that the opposition parties are the ones actually behaving like fascists.
Someone needs to make a catchy graphic meme that says constitutional laws for me if I win, but not for thee if you win.
It no longer exists in the US, neither. We are seeing quite graphically how our "Justice" Dept. keeps in its freezer for future defrosting as necessary dirt on anyone who gets out of line. I'm no fan of Eric Adams of NY but I am a fan of the analyses of serious men like Jonathan Turley and Alan Dershowitz and they ain't so impressed by these charges.
Adjourning was AfD blinking. Blinking is the surest sign of weakness. And the surest way for "courts" - if that's what they still call them - to take power. The move by Treutler to accommodate the usurpers of power concedes and submits the democratically elected parliamentary body to the rules of the anti-democratic, unelected judiciary's superior authority. Co-equal branches means co-equal. Unless one branch agrees to be subjugated by the other. Which is what Treutler has done by adjourning so that an unelected body hostile to the will of the people can dictate who speaks for the people and how they speak for them.
Treutler blinked. AfD blinked. Perhaps thinking the optics would be bad if they didn't. Hint: Their anti-democratic opponents will make sure anything Treutler and AfD does to stand up for the people who elected them has bad optics. Why choose the option that guarantees they not only look bad, but have no power either? Possession is 9/10 of the law, especially of the law of public opinion. They gave up possession. Fools. Or complicit side show act, illusion of opposition. That's what Treutler now looks like to this observer and analyst of such things. Just like the GOP in the US.
Appeasers never prosper.
I'd like to tattoo that onto a few American politicians foreheads
Thing is, Trump failed this test, as well. Early in his presidency he saw the propaganda media taking control of his press secretary's briefings, hostile, breaking decorum, etc. He tried to oust the ones who were the worst offenders. They sued. The courts ruled he had to let the propagandists in the briefings, he didn't have the authority to say who would/could cover them. The White House controls press credentials, their discretion. Many conservative alt media would love to have some of those precious few spots. But the courts ruled he had to give them to the propagandists opposed to his administration and making a mockery of the the briefings.
This was a fight for control that he could've and should've won. The courts overstepped their authority, weakened the office of the presidency, dictated internal procedures to it. They have no constitutional authority to do so. Anymore than the Congress can deictate to the Supreme Court its internal procedures, like about declaring ethics conflicts, what media they should give access to, etc. SCOTUS overstepped their authority. Trump had every right to assert his Executive privilege and reject the Court's ruling as the interference it was. By not asserting it he weakened the office, made it inferior, not coequal.
This was a pattern of his administration. He allowed his presidential authority to be weakened. It continued when he gave a Lt. Colonel the power to veto his Constitutionally-recognized authority to be the nation's foreign policy decider. Ukrainian intelligence operative Vindman, embedded in the Pentagon, "whistleblew" that Trump went against the foreign policy decided by prior administration and current agency heads. Neither have the power to supersede a president's explicit authority. Trump had the right, the obligation to fire that man, even throw him in Ft. Leavenworth.
Instead he got hung up in an impeachment trial that distracted from his governance and ability to get full and complete information from all of his advisers about the "Wuhan Flu" as it was called in November, 2019. Fighting off the impeachment prevented a more thorough investigation of all that was going on, the best response for it. It changed the course of history. Had Trump held onto his constitutional authority he probably would've been president the past four years. And a stronger one. And the nation would've been better off for it.
But he blinked. His opponents wanted it more than he did. By refusing to assert his authority they were able to walk all over him. He appeased. He didn't prosper. The nation didn't prosper.
He failed the test spectacularly. He blinked like he had a sequoia in his eye.
That's what comes of picking pragmatism over principles. Rational principles are immutable and universal. They're what make moral courage possible, but they have to be discovered ahead of time, before the crisis that demands their application. And they require more than just randomly absorbing the latest cultural trends.
What do you think he should have done?
Hold his ground. Reject the heckler's veto. Proceed with normal and ordinary business. Make everyone stay until it was resolved under the existing rules. No breaks. No gavel out for the day. In a battle of wills one must possess the strongest will.
How could he proceed with any 'ordinary' business if the parliament was descending into chaos? Yes, it appears that the AFD did not have a plan about what to do if they were challenged but I don't know how much experience the members have of the system and how to play it.
Let it descend into chaos!! The people voted for chaos when the largest bloc went for AfD! It's called turning over the tables in a rigged game. There WILL be chaos! There MUST be chaos. Order is what got us all under the boot of tyranny in the first place!
What did Jesus Christ do about the money changers in the temple? Did he politely ask them to leave? Did he beg of the elders they evict the money changers? He TURNED OVER THE TABLES! Chaos! The voters understood this. Like Trump voters, he is an agent of Chaos! The only solution to a rigged, corrupt system that is the sole beneficiary of "order." Of course they wish to preserve *their* orderly system.
But it takes Will. As you correctly identify, it doesn't seem like there was a plan. Foolish? Or Complicit? Which is why I offered that AfD is an *illusion* of opposition. Another player in that rigged, corrupt system?
They are going to have to learn fast.
It's a very corrupt venal pit that they are in.
And then just gave away the gavel...the one and only time he will ever hold it. They'll make sure of that.
Are the parliamentary systems in Germany so neutered that they have no provision for ejecting the unruly, or confining them for contempt?
Perhaps electing the president here is similar to electing the speaker in other parliaments. This is the person who keeps order so without one who is in charge?
I love when bloggers take another blogger's case to the ultimate conclusion, especially when only a conundrum is offered. "Yes, sir—what would you do then to help?"
You are right. Bill Clinton did the same things as Adams is being accused of and his campaign paid a small fine. Adams speaking out about illegal immigration doomed him to his party's lawfare.
When Adams spoke out and was critical of Biden's illegal immigration policies, Trump correctly predicted lawfare would be waged against Adams.
I always like to hear both sides of an issue. Adams claims he is out to remove the rot from City Politics. If he is right then it sounds like he is a good guy. His opponents claim he embezzled election funds. Did he? The truth might take some time to come out but Trump is right, lawfare will ruin the US.
Bad/corrupt guys can be victims of lawfare too.
I think they were hoping that Mayor Adams would resign, but they forgot the rules. Democrats never resign. And black Democrats never, EVER resign.
It's actually quite a wonderful clash they've set up with the old generation of civil rights knackers standing with Adams and the Ocasio-Cortez darlings screaming at him to resign (so they can get their guy in). May they eat each other's' kishkes, amen.
As a New Yorker, I can safely state Adams is absolute trash, and should be removed from office via the simple garbage can his administration wasted copious amounts of taxpayer dollars to “research.”
But his replacement is infinitely worse
Governor Hochul is already infinitely worse. They are all infinitely worse. A cabal of infinitely worse, warped and evil humans
agreed. I always thought it was not a coincidence that the second Adams stepped out of line, people's homes were being searched.
Whilst in the UK, one in five voters voting for Labour has given them the right to completely destroy the country it seems.
https://dailysceptic.org/2024/09/25/the-state-will-take-back-control-of-peoples-lives-says-starmer/
Bureaucrats everywhere got that taste of the pleasures of the whip hand and now they can't shake the addiction.
As in "Calls to Ukraine are OK when I do them, but treasonous when you do them".
Same in the UK. And the barefaced lies of the wolves in power are so audacious, that the stupid sheeple swallow them.
> At one particularly embarrassing point, Andreas Bühl, from the CDU, shouted at Treutler that “what you’re doing here amounts to a seizure of power!” The word he used – “Machtergreifung” – alludes directly to the National Socialist seizure of power in 1933, because nothing smells quite so powerfully of Nazism as rigorously adhering to stuffy decades-old rules that are, again, legally mandated and that no court has yet overturned.
It's always the same with these scum. They accuse their opposition of what they themselves are doing. How can it be considered anything *but* a "seizure of power" to insist that *the Parliament itself* violate the established law in order to cater the losers' desires? And Treutler should have told Bühl precisely that, before he told him to sit the fuck down and shut the fuck up.
It's always been a farce. Whenever it happened to work for the interests of the Germans it was incidental and not functioning as intended. Parliamentarianism, from its conception, was designed to displace prior authority while putting the least qualified and most easy to puppet people in positions of apparent authority. Democracy is purely an extension of this deception of legitimacy.
It's a self-reinforcing system designed to support the entrenchment of a kakistocracy. And it works.
Same in france with the barnier government.
I find the parallels between German and U.S. politics to be quite entertaining. It seems that for the Leftoids, the constitutionality of any act depends on the actor.
Here in the U.S., Donald Trump is constantly accused of having packed the Supreme Court with conservative justices, when all he did was fill vacancies on the court as they arose, following the established procedures for doing so. Mind you, the people accusing Trump of unconstitutionally packing the court are the same people advocating for adding more justices to the court (it now has nine) so that the Biden administration can fill the newly created vacancies with people more to their liking. This gambit was tried once before by Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s and it nearly cost him the 1936 election.
Note however, Trump filling vacancies on the Supreme Court using the normal procedures equals an unconstitutional abuse of power. Leftoids adding seats to the court so that they can create an instant liberal majority equals defending democracy. If these people weren't so dangerous, this would be comical.
The beauty of this was that the heroic and selfless Ruth B.G. felt she was so indespensibable in her fight for social justice that she stuck around with all of her demented ramblings until after Obama had left office, inconveniently dying during Trump's presidency and giving him the ability to appoint another conservative.
Thank God for huge egos.
in her defense, she was a spry 87 years young and had only been dealing with cancer for somewhere around a decade. why should she relinquish power when she still had her best years ahead of her and everyone knew the first female president was a lock to win?
Democracy dies in decrepitude!
Thank goodness that the doily-ed one is no longer there.
Schadenfreude 🫶🏻
Trump's appointments were McConnell's appointments. We have the court that Mitch McConnell, RINO Fascist/Oligarch extraordinaire chose. Maybe it was the best he could've hoped to get through the McConnell senate. But make no mistake, the majority of the court is Uniparty approved. And why they refuse to take up election theft cases, unconstitutional censorship cases, cruel and unusual J6 punishment cases, sexual predation and deviance in schools cases, open borders cases, etc. All of the injustices and offenses that are repugnant to the US Constitution that go unchecked by a judiciary that is busy rewriting it to Orwellian Newspeak, "Ignorance is Strength, War is Peace and Freedom is Slavery."
Even the Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, ACB soap opera confirmation hearings were scripted drama, got R's to dig in and support "their" guy/gal from the contrived attacks of "them" D's. Completely oblivious that "their" R guy/gal was little better than "them" D's guy/gal's. It's all a sick psychological warfare game.
I don't agree. If it were really totally uniparty, as you said, we would have been living in more of a $heisholz than what we have now. At least our National Sin of slaughtering the most innocent in society isn't on the books anymore, or under that curse. That would never have happened if not for Trump speaking from the Bully Pulpit during his appointments. Americans have a habit of overlooking the Bully Pulpit. Teddy Roosevelt is one of Trump's main models.
Sorry about that. I must have doubled the keystroke because I am old.
Your heart is in the right place—but let me advise not to overdose on pessimism. It becomes a fait accompli!
Just taking stock of what it is. Not a pessimism overdose. But we must dispel any notions that the courts will be saving us. Our predicament is remedied only by our actions and God, Almighty's.
The High Priests in black robes serve a dark, fallen angel, cast from the Kingdom of Heaven, who's siren song appeals to those among us - especially politicians, judges and doctors - who also believe they are gods unto themselves.
Yes, I am just stating a fact about balance, and not allowing the Perfect to be the enemy of the Good. I hope you are also not saying that each party is equivalent. That would be tantamount to saying, "Hey, all you good guys—forget about voting—they re all the same". This, BTW, has been uncovered as a major strategy of the Democrat trolls and Soros. I don't think you want to identify with them, I really don't. Nice job, if you are.
Hopium is also the enemy of the Good. Nobody is coming to save us. Will some tyrants be worse than others? Perhaps. Both are tyranny. "I prefer my tyrants be of the slightly nicer variety." Not Good.
Voting is important insomuch as it's a poll of the people that the tyrants in both parties are mindful of. Of course they will veto the voice of the people. They have no choice, they are tyrants. But voting lets tyrants know the limits on their tyranny the people will accept. Which forces them to pull back a bit, hold out an open hand, or double-down and show their fists, clenching weapons.
Until the people realize that even the open hand they hope to see is still the hand of a tyrant the tyranny will continue. It's going to take more than voting to overthrow them. It's also a major strategy of Democrat and Republican trolls, and Soros, Rockefeller, etc. to make people believe voting alone solves it.
Your answer is noted. As Pogo said, "We have met the enemy and they are us".
I reference that often!
I guess you are sincere. As God said, "Come, and let us reason together". (Isa 1:18). Carry on, Foxy Loxy! (And the sky maybe really IS falling, isn't it?)
Yet they are not smart enough to realize when they go too far over the line!
Hubris blinds them!
Go DJT! Go AfD!
—Büß
Does it matter? They rarely seem to be punished for their overweening hubris and its downright criminal manifestations, and the natural order doesn't seem to be returning any time soon, so what to do? We grumble here and in similar places and keep bending over and taking their reaming.
I and my relatives are armed; But that is frowned upon.
Me too.
"... for the Leftoids, the constitutionality of any act depends on the actor.¨
Goes back to Leo Trotsky's slogan "Who? Whom?" (кто кого? in Russian, pronounced kto kovo.)
Your last paragraph sums it up quite neatly. What continues to amaze me is the sheer numbers of sheeple who believe the leftoid blather about abuse of democracy.
And the parallels between that movement, and the German Left keeping the laws that they expected to benefit from after an election they ended up losing, are significant. Can you imagine what would happen if the American left expanded the Supreme Court by six seats just in time to lose the government to Trump and allow him to fill them?
Usually when the federal constitutional court strikes down a law as unconstitutional, they declare that said law has indeed been unconstitutional for years to decades, and gives the government another 2 or more parliamentary terms to sort it out*. Property/land taxes are a great recent example. In the meantime the unconstitutional law is in full force and you will be carted off to jail and your house will be sold out from under you to pay the taxes, if you argue against paying taxes determined by an illegal law.
So naturally the state constitutional court of Thüringen (which I imagine hears about one case every 3 years but doubtless maintains a full-time staff of several loyal and honourable judges) will be as generous with this challenge to the constitutionality of a law.
*: The government does of course have far more pressing matters, like implementing European directives on bottle caps, and deciding how often one may declare ones gender to have changed.
So that's precedent, but not a law itself? Still a very important point.
It seems very sketchy to insist on changing a law that's in the process of being implemented.
Thanks. Super helpful clarification. But %5(
Help us understand how the process works. the largest party can propose a candidate for president - this would be the AFD but the whole parliament would vote on it - so if all the other parties joined together they vote down the candidate of choice, correct?
yes, the other parties could vote against the president proposed by AfD. but, existing procedure is unclear about whether other parties can propose their own candidates at all. imho, a fair reading of the procedures suggests that only the AfD has the right to propose presidential candidates.
AFAIK, the largest Party proposes the presidential candidate, the other Parties propose the deputy presidential candidates. It's not as if they would've been deprived of a piece of that particular cake ...
Apparently they want the whole cake to themselves.
Don't they always ...
Thanks for the clarification. I was wondering what's the problem? Because all the other parties would be able to choose whoever they want after the first day.
Guess not.
Thanks!
Hilariously written, as ever, but wow, this is very chilling indeed. Not just the refusal of the other parties to play by the rules (that they made when they controlled the Parliament) but the "reporting", which is surely "disinformation" nein? As most of the public will not read any direct account of events, but only the filtered accounts in the press, the distortions are poison to any meaningful democracy.
It’s funny, I know I don’t live in Germany and probably don’t understand the political process there, but couldn’t CDU and the other parties offered policies that more voters liked and preempted all this?
That's the same thing many of us in other countries are also wondering.
For example, in the US, rather than doing all kinds of anti-democratic shit and lawfare, why can't the Democrats just, I don't know, do stuff people want?
Because they are run by a mixture of oligarchs and head girls who despise most normal people. Think of how fancy people in the US talk of rednecks or "white trash" with abandon. This is their fundamental view of "the people," from whom they always exclude themselves. The painful piece, at least in part, concerns their utter hypocrisy--they THINK they are genuinely FOR democracy; at least the aristocrats of old were genuinely learned and openly spoke of the need for hierarchical order. These newer elites are delusional.
To be honest, I'm not sure they think they are for democracy. It has become a useful buzz word for the unwashed masses.
Because they don't live anywhere near reality.
For one thing, the Democrats live in their own sick, utopian bubble. Anyone outside that bubble effectively does not exist for them. They believe they don't have to answer to anyone about anything they do...not even on Election Day. Electioneering has come down to disseminating blatant lies to placate the voters, and then they're done thinking about their constituents until the next election.
I think a lot of people who are busy running their businesses and raising their families have to some degree been succeesfully muted and immobilised by the endless gaslighting about equity, women's rights, racism, homophobia etc. But with Biden a line has been crossed and a lot of people are saying "Hell no - I have had enough!". They will still try to rig it but hopeflly this time it will be "too big to rig".
I want them to GTFO of my life. They're incapable of it.
Perhaps because they are doing the bidding of those who want things like UN Pact for the Future, WHO Pandemic Entitlement, etc?
Transforming humanity at a global scale is not an easy task.
It requires a carefully crafted climate emergency narrative, putting the right persons in the right positions, and burying the people in a distracting nightmare of climate and gendering activists that will attract their attention until they become "victims of hate speech", etc.
That would violate 2 sacred commandments of the modern managerial "progressive" class:
1) admitting they were wrong and that some smelly fascist-adjacent Deplorable was right; and
2) actually governing on behalf of their countries and people, instead of "making change" and "saving the planet" and waking up every day seeing a world-historical actor and moral saint in the mirror (and on Instagram).
As they can never and will never do these things, the next best option is bullying, cheating and various media-generated tantrums about the Nazis over the next hill. This wouldn't be the first cult who'd rather burn down the whole house than admit their god had failed.
That’s far-right talk. If you were there, you could expect a visit from the Office for the Protection of the Constitution for Thuringia
"If necessary, we must destroy democracy itself, to save the Thuringian parliament from the spectre of a democratically elected AfD president."
Flashback! This puts me in mind of a combat after-action report from the Vietnam War, wherein an airstrike on a South Vietnamese village suspected of harboring Viet Cong insurgents was justified with the statement: "We destroyed the village in order to save it." Logic like this has pervaded wars since time immemorial... And now it's justifying political action!
For what it's worth, the actual comment of "We destroyed the village in order to save it" was made up by the press, erroneously or more likely, deliberately. In fact, it was a South Vietnamese military base and not a village that was being overrun during the Tet Offensive. The base was not destroyed, only partially damaged, and the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong were repelled.
The problem with journalism during the Vietnam War was that most of the journalists rarely went out with the troops and spent most of their time in the Caravelle Hotel in Saigon and in the Tu Do Street red light district, and they got most of their "information" from each other and not from direct observation. In Vietnam as a platoon sergeant, my husband's experience with an embedded film crew was more than frustrating. As their unit landed in a chopper in a hot landing zone, he turned to urge the film crew to follow him quickly and they refused to get out of the chopper. A minute later they few off with the other ten choppers, never having stepped foot on the ground. Yet they may have gone back and written some kind of story about their big war "experience". The journalists had a strong anti-military bias at that time.
Thanks for the very informative comment. I was never sure whether "We destroyed the village ..." was some kind of satire or if it was passed off as the real thing - now I know.
Jürgen Treutler lookin’ sharp there with an impressive neckbeard
Nice to see AfD keeps to the old ways in this matter: the reign of the cleanshaven focus-grouped politico comes grudgingly to an end, the day of the mid-Victorian era beardo is at hand!
Laugh out loud stuff again from Eugyppius who has single-handedly ignited in me a prurient, addictive interest in German politics. Not a thing I would ever have deemed possible.
This is satire of the kind that I thought had died out with Alexander Pope. We have some great, sceptical commentators on British politics like Peter Hitchens, but if only we could cultivate some more brutal satirists in the 'strangely dying' (as per Douglas Murray) countries of western Europe we might have more of a chance of overturning the palpable madness.
As a Brit holidaying in (strangely dying) south western France last week I was heartened to see the number of village name signs turned upside down. Without investigation I worked out what this meant. 'France profonde' was signifying its rejection of a world 'turned upside down' by its elites who put the welfare of anyone else on the planet before their own electorate.
Brilliant eugyppius. I know it's a serious subject but you completely skewered them and showed them up for the frightening and stupid authoritarians that they really are while making me laugh out loud. Thank you.
eugyppius, thank you for another brilliant exposition of the hypocrisy of the champions of democracy.
That said, I have a question for you that is not completely related to today's Substack post but which was sparked by your post: while I believe that the fear-mongering around AfD is 100% pure self-serving B.S., I'm not sure that this party is the one I'd vote for if I were a German citizen. A voter who supports free markets, civil liberties, and an assertive foreign policy -- is there a party in Germany (even if a small one) that they could unreservedly vote for? Or is it a matter, as so often happens, of having to decide which party's program is the least unacceptable?
Isn’t that the FDP? If so, congratulations, you’re in the (federal) government
If there was one, you couldn't unreservedly vote for it, for it would become the target of the establishment's media.
No. You're supposed to live in a state of fear, -from the Nazis, not other things-, and therefore fall for the establishment.
While I agree that the FDP is supposed to be one of those parties, the problem is, no one can tell one party from another and this is what these events show. There are de facto only two political parties right now: the AfD and everyone else.
No matter that the tarnished Communists (BSW) and the CDU have diametral different goals, in particular on the question of support for the war in Ukraine, the BSW claims to have the position that the AfD has.
By the way, the FDP supports the escalation of the war like no other party. It has become their one and only aspect.
If they were at all intelligent, they would let the AfD enjoy the full prerogatives, and take on all the responsibilities. Let them govern. Let them handle the horrible mess previous governments have made. And if they can't, that'll be the most effective way to discredit them.
You are there to steal, not to govern or make anything better.
…and they say Germans don’t understand irony. I love it! Thank you.
Thank you for this entertainingly informative piece. The hysterical members of the Swiss media (ie. most of them) had portrayed this story very differently -- mostly that the AfD was deliberately causing chaos and sowing hatred.
I knew you'd give us the whole picture.
Gawd. These people have no shame whatsoever.
Sounds just like here in the good ol’ USA!
If we can’t beat ‘em by any means necessary, destroy them utterly.
Win-Win!
“OUR Democracy” lives!
Yes, and destroy sometimes means outright kill!
Most certainly. Nothing is beneath these people.
I am not so sure that the Constitutional Court will rule against the AfD. Certainly, they are biased, but the text of the existing law seems to be very clear.
At any rate, this farce is probably illustrative of what we can expect in the next years: many further heroic stances to save Ourdemocracy which will become more and more obviously ridiculous.
This will be good for the AfD. The coming years will see a sharp decline of Germany's economical fortunes, and many of use will suffer. The more the AfD is excluded from parliamentary politics, the more it will be clear that only the currently reigning parties are to blame.
Another bear signal for this farce is that Cicero, a magazine generally very mindful of center- to center-right consensus wisdom (and generally of rather careful throat clearing, tie adjusting criticism – although they were stating the obvious on migration rather early) ran this, co-authored by an SPD(!) politician to boot:
https://archive.is/9bLmj