Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds rapped Donald Trump in her endorsement of Ron DeSantis, “I believe [Trump] can’t win and I believe that Ron can. And that’s a big reason I got behind him.”

She’s not going for the best candidate. She is going for electability again. Just like McCain was more electable than Ron Paul and Romney was more electable than Newt Gingrich.

Her statement follows the warning back in April from New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu, who wrote in the New York Times, “Winnowing down the field of candidates is the single best chance to stop Mr. Trump. If Mr. Trump is the Republican nominee for president in 2024, Republicans will lose up and down the ballot.”

Reynolds and Sununu don’t get it. Trump supporters no longer care about the party. Why should we? The party hates us and has done everything it can to sabotage us. They ignore our issues to pursue their trivia.

I say this because I finally got fed up last week when the Deseret News reported, “On Wednesday, Rep. Maria Salazar, R-Fla., sponsored a proposal banning the words Latinx and Latin-x in federal paperwork. The proposal is an amendment to one of the House GOP’s 12 appropriations bills made annually. The vote was 222-198 with 215 Republicans and 7 Democrats voting for the amendment.

“Utah Reps. Blake Moore, John Curtis and Burgess Owens voted in favor of the proposal.

“House Democrats who voted in favor of the ban included four members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus: Reps. Henry Cuellar, D-Texas, Yadira Caraveo D-Colo., Vicente Gonzalez D-Texas, and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, D-Wash. The other three were Reps. Jared Golden, D-Maine., Matt Cartwright D-Pa. and Mary Peltola, D-Alaska.”

Wow. MAGA Mike is showing his leadership by taking on words. Wow. Stopping the government from calling Hispanics the wrong name is his top priority.

Phooey. He’s McCarthy Lite. Look for Dylan Mulvaney’s endorsement soon.

Republicans went through 15 votes to find a House speaker in January and then went through a barrage of votes over 22 days in October to find his replacement. And what do Trump supporters get out of their efforts to get a real leader in the House?

Word games.

Nothing quite says out of touch like wringing your hands over what to label 80 million or so Americans. The actual problem is that our government still asks about race and ethnic background is an affront to the constitutional command that we not judge people by race or creed. The Republican answer is to duel with Democrats over what name to call them.

You say Latinx, I say Hispanics — let’s call the whole thing off.

Of course, that was the last straw. Let’s look at the bales beneath it. I will start with the question that sounds like the title of an Ashton Kutcher movie.

Dude, where’s my wall?

In 2016, Trump supporters took a lot of grief for daring to say build the wall. Never mind that a decade earlier, Congress passed a law to construct one, the media and Hillary blasted us as racist, xenophobic and backward for wanting a wall.

After all that grief — after delivering the White House and the 4,000 political appointments that go with it to Republicans — after keeping the majorities we gave them in Congress in 2014 — we never got a wall. Republicans laughed in our faces.

Gym rat Paul Ryan refused to support the party’s presidential nominee because — get this — Trump used the word pussy in a private conversation 11 years earlier.

Instead of punishing Ryan, the party kept him on as House speaker. And after two years of obstructing President Trump, Ryan quit and cashed in — landing a fat paycheck as a member of the Fox board of directors.

Have Republicans punished the FBI for spying on their 2016 presidential nominee? No, they have not. In fact, MAGA Mike just gave the FBI $375 million to build a new headquarters in Maryland. The FBI worked with the Capitol Police to frame Trump supporters as insurrectionists — and House Republicans let them.

But the bottom-most bale of the straws that broke the back of my Camel is still the Tea Party. They did the improbable and gained 63 seats for Republicans, taking back the House. And they also almost brought back the Senate with an incredible 7-seat gain.

Their reward? Ridicule and the continuation of Obamacare. More than a decade later, it fuels medical evil. Transgendered children butchered in 60 sex-surgery clinics suffered most because Obamacare enabled Obama to not only require health insurers to cover birth control, it empowered him to mandate transsexual plastic surgery.

Obamacare enabled the multi-million-dollar business of mutilating children and teens.

Electing Republicans failed to stop this atrocity. We put in Republican majorities and elected a Republican president and instead of delivering us from this evil, they kept Obamacare going.

But hey, they are using their power now to thwart the use of the words Latinx and Latin-X in government documents, aren’t they? Vote Republican. You can keep your federalization of health care but lose one of the 50 ethnic labels the government slaps on Americans.

Then there is abortion. In the aftermath of yet another victory-turned-into-defeat election, the Republican hierarchy blamed conservatives and not the poor management of the RNC. Oh, it is great at raising money but terrible at winning elections. The RNC blamed its failure in 2018, 2020 and 2022 on Donald Trump — the man who saved the nation from Hillary.

This year, RNC and their failed strategists blamed abortion. After decades of squeezing pro-lifers for donations, the RNC is upset that Roe v. Wade was overturned.

John Feehery, a Republican strategist, told Reuters, “It's a wake up call for Republicans to figure out what the right messaging and the right policy is on abortion because whatever they have now is not popular with voters.

“Republicans have to stop pushing policies that make people believe they are trying to ban abortion. They need to try and find a middle ground right now.”

Middle ground?

Did Republicans seek a middle ground on slavery after losing the 1856 presidential election?

But Republican strategist has become a synonym for Democrat, hasn’t it?

Conservatives have not cost the party a single election since 1964 and the Goldwater debacle. Even then, the Kennedy assassination pretty much locked that race in for Democrats. What has cost Republicans election after election is the moderate wing, which gave us Jerry Ford, George H.W. Bush, John McCain and Mitt Romney.

They were 1-4 in presidential elections. That win was courtesy of Ronald Reagan, whose popularity kept Bush 41 afloat in 1988.

Party loyalty is a joke. Besides rewarding Ryan for not helping the party’s presidential nominee get elected, the party failed to discipline Mitt Romney for being the first senator to vote to convict his party’s president in an impeachment.

He did it again a little over a year later. And lest we forget, House Republicans initially kept Liz Cheney as their No. 3 leader after she helped impeach Trump a second time.

What a ticket Republicans had in 2012: Benedict Romney and Mata Hari Ryan. They have not supported a Republican ticket since because the sad fact is they are imposters who posed as conservatives but worked for Obama, Hillary and now, Biden.

But I am supposed to worry about the Republican ticket down ballot because we must stop Democrats but for decades now, it has been vote Republican, get nothing.

No thank you. I am voting for Trump next year but I may leave the rest of my ballot blank because Republicans are not worthy of my support. It won’t be Donald Trump killing Republicans down ballot; it will be Republican indifference to the electorate that will cost them.

In the past week, the office of Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis finalized “plea agreements” with three significant members of the group of 18 co-defendants indicted in Willis’ rambling Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (“RICO”) case filed this past August against former President Donald Trump and others.

The pleas were with three prominent lawyers in the post-2020 election challenges: Sidney Powell, Kenneth Chesebro, and Jenna Ellis. Each was charged with multiple felonies, including the lead RICO count, carrying potential maximum penalties of many years of incarceration. The indictment purports to allege serious felonies based on serious wrongdoing that supposedly threatened the very fabric of our democracy, but you wouldn’t think so from the actual deals Willis struck.

There is no legitimate prosecutorial reason for Willis to have struck these particular deals.  Rather, these deals are designed to bolster the perceived, but not the real, strength of her case against the key defendants, both now, via the media, and later, by parading a string of “guilty” co-defendants as witnesses before the jury.

Prosecutors Dropped Charges and Jail Time
Powell pleaded guilty to seven misdemeanors and no felonies, and the prosecutors moved to dismiss the seven felonies, including the RICO count they had charged against her. Chesebro pleaded guilty to one felony and the prosecutors moved to dismiss the remaining six felonies they had charged him with in the indictment, including the RICO count. Ellis pleaded guilty to a newly tailored felony count of aiding and abetting another defendant (Rudy Guiliani) in his alleged making of a false statement, and the prosecutors moved to dismiss the two felonies charged against her, including the RICO count.

Thus, none of these three defendants pleaded guilty to the most serious charges against them. Far, far from it. Further, in all three deals, the prosecutors agreed not to oppose “First Offender” treatment for the cases under a Georgia statute that permits a judge to accept guilty pleas from those with no prior criminal records, and then later remove the conviction from their record entirely if they satisfactorily complete conditions of probation.

The prosecutors also agreed to recommend probation-only sentences to the court in all three cases, which the judge duly imposed. None of these three defendants will spend one day in jail or have a conviction on their records for their role in supposedly undermining American democracy itself.

When a prosecutor charges multiple, serious felonies and offers plea deals for significantly less serious charges, carrying no jail time, and the opportunity to have the entire case cleared off the defendant’s record, it is usually a clear sign that the prosecutor has overcharged the case and was not going to be able to prove the charges as alleged if forced to go to trial on them.

Deals Too Sweet to Turn Down
Prosecutors are simply not in the habit of developing serious felony cases and then offering plea deals that amount to a legal “nothingburger” for the defendants involved. Even when trying to “flip” defendants to testify against others in the case, the normal prosecutorial practice is to still require some significant pain in the plea deal with cooperating defendants because if they don’t, then the defense lawyers for the defendants who go to trial can argue to the jury that the deals are so sweet they shouldn’t believe a word the flipped defendants are saying.

That is not what is happening with the plea deals in Trump’s Georgia case, however. These deals with Powell, Chesebro, and Ellis are really, really sweet deals. Deals so sweet that no rational defense lawyer could advise the client to reject them.

The prosecutors even agreed to ask the judge to include language in the sentencing order that said the charges to which they were pleading were not crimes of “moral turpitude,” because such crimes can make it more likely that a defendant who is a lawyer will lose their law license. These prosecutors did everything that could be done to craft these pleas in such a way that the defendants simply could not turn them down.

This extreme and unusual solicitude extended even to sculpting the factual basis for the guilty pleas, another area where prosecutors normally require the defendants to swallow bitter medicine, but did not in these pleas. This had to be done because in order for a plea to be accepted by the court, the defendant has to agree not just to plead guilty in the abstract, but rather that he or she is guilty of a specific crime based on specific facts. And the prosecutors and defense lawyers, (and defendants who are lawyers) cannot outright lie to the court about what the facts are on which the plea is based, or whether those facts constitute the offense to which the person is pleading.

The factual basis that the prosecutors presented to the judge in the plea hearing in each of these cases was clearly massaged to allow the defendants to honestly agree that the stated facts were true, but unusually here those facts did not make out the elements of the charged offense, or they omitted facts which might have caused a judge to question whether the offense was, in fact, established.

In Ellis’ case, this manipulation was taken to a ridiculous level. Her guilty plea was one in name only. She never admitted that she knew that the allegedly false statements were false at the time they were made, which is a fundamental requirement for a criminal false statement. Rather, she said that “if she knew then what she knows now,” she would have acted differently.

Even her assertion that she failed to do “due diligence” at the time is not “reckless disregard for the truth” under the normal legal understanding of that term. It is also extremely unlikely that a merely “reckless” statement would satisfy the Georgia false statements statute, which requires a “knowing and willful” false statement.

Significantly, the prosecutor’s factual basis did not say that the seven statements made by Guiliani were false due to contrary facts. For example, it was determined to not be true that 10,315 or more dead people voted in Georgia. Rather, the factual basis offered to the judge was only that Georgia’s investigations had determined there was no “widespread fraud” that “could have affected the outcome of the 2020 presidential election in Georgia.”

A Transaction, Not a Favor
In reality, Ellis’ plea was a farce. It was a concoction between the prosecutors’ office and her counsel to “find something” she could plead to that they could smuggle past a judge who wouldn’t critically question an agreed plea deal (although that is supposed to be one of the court’s roles in that situation).

The prosecutors in this case went to these extreme lengths for an unusual reason. They aren’t doing it out of the goodness of their hearts. It’s a transaction. They are getting something they can’t otherwise get. And the reason the prosecutor can’t get it from witnesses — without the deal — is that defendants have a 5th Amendment right to be silent at trial.

Prosecutors cannot call any defendant as a witness in trial, even if they only want them to incriminate others, not themselves. The only way prosecutors can get juicy testimony from these witnesses is to do a deal with them: a plea deal if they have been charged, or potentially an immunity deal such as the one that Special Counsel Jack Smith allegedly struck with Mark Meadows last week in Trump’s DC federal case.

But that is not what is going on in the Georgia case. These three defendants will not give the prosecution any testimony or evidence that the prosecutors don’t already have from non-charged witnesses, or the statements, documents, and memos previously authored by all of these defendants, which are admissible at the trial already. The testimony of Powell, Chesebro, and Ellis is extremely unlikely to add anything new to the case. It is highly doubtful any of them will testify that they or Trump or any of the other many lawyers involved said, knew, or believed they were doing something illegal at the time of the events in 2020 and early 2021.

It’s for this reason that Trump and his lawyers this week made only mild statements about these pleas, or pointed out that if the three testified truthfully, as required under their plea deals, it would not hurt Trump and may even help him.

‘Guilty’ Witnesses Don’t Need to Testify
Some might think that the prosecutors could present the fact that these defendants plead guilty to the jury at later trials as proof of the guilt of defendants who go to trial. However, Supreme Court precedent forbids the direct use of the guilty pleas of witnesses to prove that other defendants who go to trial are also guilty. The prosecutors will not tell the jury something like, “Ms. Ellis plead guilty to helping Mr. Guiliani make a false statement and that is evidence that he did make a false statement.” Nor can prosecutors simply introduce the fact of the guilty pleas or documents about the guilty pleas as exhibits in the trials of other defendants.

These practices violate the rights of the defendants going to trial to confront their accusers under the 5th Amendment, but they also do not constitute relevant evidence of the guilt of the person on trial. The fact that one person agrees that their conduct is illegal in a plea deal doesn’t prove that another person is guilty, even in conspiracy or aiding and abetting scenarios, and thus the courts don’t permit prosecutors to prove their cases this way.

So, in short, there is no legal reason for Willis to have entered into these kinds of super-sweet pleas with these defendants in this case. But she did so. And the reason Willis did so is that in practical reality, if/when Trump or Guiliani or Eastman come to trial in this case, she will do covertly what the law doesn’t permit her to do overtly.

The prosecutors won’t argue to the jury that Trump, Guiliani, or Eastman are guilty because Powell, Chesebro, and Ellis, (and potentially others by then) plead guilty. They won’t have to argue that. They will simply parade a line of witnesses who have all pleaded guilty to something in this case before the jury. The jury will get the message.

And thus, the true purpose of these nothing burger pleas is revealed: not to acquire evidence to present, but to create a guilty parade, now, and in the show trial to come.