THE FURTHER CORRESPONDENCES OF MARC SUSSELMAN PART 35
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7 October 2025
MS said:
Can Trump really win a Nobel Peace Prize? Yes. Here’s how
"CNN..."
My world is collapsing.
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MS said:
Trump debates using the Insurrection Act if courts keep blocking troop deployments
This is very serious. Upon first reading the headline, I scoffed at the idea that a President could invoke the Insurrection Act in order to avoid decisions by federal courts.
I was wrong.
Purpose and content
The Act empowers the U.S. president to call into service the U.S. Armed Forces and the National Guard:
when requested by a state's legislature, or governor if the legislature cannot be convened, to address an insurrection against that state (§ 251),
to address an insurrection, in any state, which makes it impracticable to enforce the law (§ 252), or
to address an insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination or conspiracy, in any state, which results in the deprivation of constitutionally secured rights, and where the state is unable, fails, or refuses to protect said rights (§ 253).
It would appear to be obvious that the above conditions are not satisfied by residents of Portland or Chicago protesting against actions by ICE, and that the President cannot override a federal court’s decision that the conditions have not been satisfied. However, there is only one Supreme Court decision on the issue, Martin v. Mott, 25 U.S. 19 (1827), and the Supreme Court ruled in that case that the President is the final arbiter of whether the conditions under the Insurrection Act had been satisfied.
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8 October 2025
MS said:
The Free Press
"FPcom..."
Greta Thunberg and Sweden’s Lost Children
My response:
This article is right-wing propagandist rubbish. I, too, am Jewish, but to state that the diminishing of religious faith in Europe is the cause of its alleged decline is nonsense. Was Europe so great when the Spanish Inquisition was torturing and burning Jews at the stake? Was it great when Catholics and Protestants fought a 30 Years War to determine which religion was the more legitimate?
The author decries the efforts to keep religion and state separate and contends that that Greta Thunberg, and her followers, without faith, fail “to stand for anything, and therefore fall[] for everything, time and time again.” Advocating for addressing the destructive effects of climate change caused by human conduct is a failure to stand for anything? It absolutely does stand for something, it is just not something that the author believes is worth standing for. The author is given to facile quips without any substance, stating, “Where there once was faith and purpose, there is now only posturing and projection.” Really? What purpose did faith instill, as Pope Pius XII bent a knee to Nazi aggression and turned a blind eye to the slaughter of millions of Jews?
Then the author turns her attention to Israel, and accuses Thunberg of being anti-Semitic by virtue of her opposition to Isarael’s aggression in Gaza. I have been a life-long supporter of Israel, but to disregard Israel’s crimes against humanity in recent months in Gaza, a desecration of Torah and of sacred Jewish values, and to accuse those who voice such views, as anti-Semitic is itself right-wing demagogy.
This is a result of Beri Weiss taking over the helm at CBS and the Free Press. It marks a decline in legitimate, honest journalism, and replacing it with right-wing conservative propaganda.
Marc Susselman, JD, MPH
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9 October 2025
MS said:
Letitia James, the New York attorney general who defeated Trump in court, indicted by Justice Department
Trump’s Reign of Terror has intensified.
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10 October 2025
MS said:
I was watching an interview of Secretaries Hillary Clinton and Condoleeza Rice regarding the 20-point plan which the Trump administration is pursuing in Gaza, and was impressed by their knowledge and clear-headedness. At one point, Clinton quoted Max Weber about the difficulty in diplomacy of “boring hard boards.” I was not familiar with the quote, so I looked it up. Here it is:
“Politics is a strong and slow boring of hard boards. It takes both passion and perspective. Certainly all historical experience confirms the truth - that man would not have attained the possible unless time and again he had reached out for the impossible. But to do that a man must be a leader, and not only a leader but a hero as well, in a very sober sense of the word. And even those who are neither leaders nor heroes must arm themselves with that steadfastness of heart which can brave even the crumbling of all hopes. This is necessary right now, or else men will not be able to attain even that which is possible today.”
―Max Weber
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11 October 2025
MS said:
I know virtually nothing about computer programming, or how my computer works. But I do know this. The invention of the atomic and hydrogen bombs could not result in an atomic or hydrogen bomb building another atomic or hydrogen bomb and launching it on the United States or Russia.
But it seems to me to be inevitable that creating a computer language to think like a human being, but exponentially faster than any human being, is eventually going to result in the AI technology teaching AI technology to other AI entities, and then asserting mastery over their human creators. It is inevitable.
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15 October 2025
MS said:
A Lesson in Defiance From Nazi Germany
"NYTimes..."
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MS said:
The sanctimonious voters who refused to vote for Hillary Clinton in 2016, because they preferred what they regarded as the perfect over the good in their candidate, Bernie Sanders, do not appreciate what a disaster they have wrought, in the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the dismantling of the Voting Rights Act, the destruction of our democracy, and setting the groundwork for the ascendancy of the police state and the empire of Donald J. Trump.
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16 October 2025
MS said:
Today’s NYT has an interesting interview by Ross Douthat of S. Ct. Justice Barrett. It can be found at the link below, and I recommend it. It covers some very interesting topics regarding Constitutional interpretation and stare decisis.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Amy Coney Barrett Is Looking Beyond the Trump Era
There was a very interesting passage in which Justice Barrett answered a question about the meaning of the word “liberty” in the 14th Amendment, which was at the center of the debate over a constitutional right to an abortion, and the reversal of Roe v. Wade. Justice Barrett said the following:
“[T]he Dobbs decision was interpreting the 14th Amendment’s due process clause – which says that no person ‘shall be deprived of life, liberty or property, without due process of law’ – because, to the extent one might argue that there is a right to an abortion in the Constitution, it’s located in that clause. That’s where Roe found it. ‘No person shall be deprived of liberty’ would be the relevant one there.
“And so the courts – the line of cases I known as substantive due process – and what those cases say is: Yes, this phrase, ‘no person shall be deprived of life, liberty or property, without due process of law,’ it sounds like: Well, if I’m going to take away your car, I have to give you fair procedures before doing so. But the court has long recognized that it also has a substantive component that inheres in the word 'liberty.’ So there are some things that a legislature cant’ take away, be it Congress or the 14th Amendment, which applies specifically to the states. …
“So yes, that word, ‘liberty,’ does protect some content above and beyond things that are expressly stated in the Constitution. But you see the problem. I might think a lot of things are in ‘liberty’ that you may not think are in ‘liberty’ that one would disagree with. And there’s a lot of risk – this has been a very contested area of constitutional law for a long time – in making judges the final arbiters of exactly what the content of that word, ‘liberty,’ is. …
“[A]s I said, these are rights that are so widely understood to be fundamental that they go without saying – the test is that, before the court will recognize such a right as an unenumerated constitutional guarantee, it has to be stated at a specific level. Because if you state something at a broad enough level, like ‘right to control one’s body,’ that could include a whole lot of things. Everything from assisted suicide to abortion … . So you have to state it at a specific level of generality, because it’s also only if something is identified precisely that you can really measure what the degree of buy-in among the American public is. And then it has to be deeply rooted in this country’s history and tradition. It can’t be a Johnny-come-lately. … For purposes of this test, it’s not an originalism thing. It’s not just frozen at the moment of the ratification of the 14th Amendment. This is actually looking more deeply at the history and traditions of the American people. And abortion failed that test. The right to an abortion failed that test because it’s been a deeply contested issue. It certainly was in 1973, when Roe was decided, and continued to be contested.” (Emphasis added.)
Dose this explanation of what rights are included within the scope of the word “liberty” make logical sense? One of the recognized main purposes of the 14th Amendment is to protect the rights of minorities segments the American public from infringement by the majority. This includes legislation passed by state legislatures, which, by definition, represent the preference of the majority. According to Justice Barrett’s explanation, the test of whether something qualifies as a right within the scope of the word “liberty,” it must be within the “history and traditions of the American people,” and if it is not, then it is not a liberty. What about the right not to be discriminated against based on race? Was this a right, given the history of slavery in the United States, within the “history and traditions of the American people”?
The test fails to address our notions of basic fairness regarding conduct not mentioned or specified in the Constitution. Consider for example the following hypothetical (hypotheticals are used by the S. Ct. all the time, particularly during oral arguments, and whether the hypothetical is a realistic possibility is irrelevant). Suppose a state enacted a law which stated that everyone has to have blue colored hair in order to vote. There is no provision in the Constitution which states that citizens have a constitutional right to decide what the color of their hair is. Is that a right protected by the concept of “liberty”? It has never come up as an issue in politics, so, is this a right within “the history and tradition of the American people’? One can think of a multitude of such hypotheticals: Suppose a state passes a law which requires that all individuals who drive a car in the state must be wearing red colored attire while driving; a law which states that in order to open a business in the state, the business owner must be at least 5 feet, 9 inches tall.
It should be obvious that the right to have whatever color hair one wants; the right to wear whatever colored attire in public one wants; the right to open a business in a state regardless how tall one is – should all be within our concept of “liberty” and be protected by substantive due process under the 14th Amendment. Yet, according to Justice Barrett’s test they would all fail, and there would be nothing the Supreme Court could do to prohibit a state from enacting such restrictive laws, like laws restricting the right to an abortion.
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19 October 2025
MS said:
"CNN..."
The President of the United States thinks it is humorous to depict himself dropping feces and sewerage on American citizens exercising their First Amendment freedom of speech. Never in our history has the Executive displayed such a degree of contempt for the American people. How do his supporters continue to justify their support of this despot?
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21 October 2025
MS said:
This President’s chutzpah knows no bounds. He has filed a notice of claim against the Justice Department for its investigation of his role in the Jan. 6 insurrection. As Michael Cohen points out in the link below, he has a legal right to do so, but as the sitting President, he controls the department he is suing. Totally unprecedented.
"CNN..."
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22 October 2025
MS said:
Senator delivers marathon overnight speech
"CNN..."
Bravo!
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23 October 2025
MS said:
After practicing law for now 46 years, I have come to the following realization: The judicial appointment process favors individuals who are willing to make decisive, but superficial, decisions, over individuals who make contemplative thoughtful decisions. That’s why so many legal decisions are ####.
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25 October 2025
MS said:
$130M donation from anonymous Trump 'friend' to fund military
He’s privatizing the U.S. military.
The majority of the American electorate have no one to blame but themselves. They voted for this person.
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2 November 2025
MS said:
I’m an Israeli who lives in New York. Here’s why I’m voting for Mamdani
He’s shown up for my Jewish community in profoundly meaningful ways
"ZohraMamdani..."
“[D]espite what the right-wing Israeli government and media want us to believe, we — Jews, Israelis, people who still believe in equality — are not in danger from Zohran Mamdani because he is critical of Israel. We’re endangered, instead by the machinery of fear that tries to convince us that justice is a threat, that empathy is betrayal, that solidarity is naïve. …
“For me, as an Israeli-American who is committed enough to Israel to fight endlessly for it to be just and equal, that’s not frightening — it’s hopeful. Having mayors and public leaders who refuse to give Kahanists or corrupt war criminals a free pass is good for us. That’s our struggle too. …
“Mamdani isn’t anti-Israeli or anti-Jewish. He’s pro-justice. He’s a New Yorker who believes, as I do, that no one’s safety should come at the expense of someone else’s. His campaign has pledged a large increase in anti-hate crime programming — the opposite of neglecting our safety.”
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3 November 2025
MS said:
"CNN..."
Your thoughts regarding Fetterman’s criticism of the Democrats’ shutdown strategy.
Regarding Mamdani, is he confusing Communism with Socialism? If he is, isn’t that surprising, given that he has a post-graduate degree (public policy) from Harvard?
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4 November 2025
MS said:
"CNN2..."
When they go low, we can also go low.
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5 November 2025
MS said:
"CNN..."
Great speech.
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9 November 2025
MS said:
Below is a story that was on the CBS Sunday morning show, about a very impressive little girl.
An inspirational story about an amazingly precocious little girl.
"CBS..."
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MS said:
I am starting to wonder, judging from the quality of the writing and analysis – and lack thereof - whether some judges and attorneys are using AI to write their decisions and legal briefs.
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11 November 2025
MS said:
"YouTube..."
These are not the words of an anti-Semite, as some Jews claim.
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12 November 2025
MS said:
There is a new movie titled “Hamnet” which purports to be about the death of a son of Shakespeare and his wife, Anne Hathaway, named Hamnet. It has gotten excellent reviews.
I thought that the story and the name must be apocryphal, and just cinematic conceit. But it turns out to be largely true:
Shakespeare’s Children
Here are some key facts about Shakespeare’s children:
William Shakespeare had three children with his wife, Anne (Hathaway).
The couple’s first child was Susanna, born in May 1583, just six months after William and Anne got married. Susanna was christened on 26 May 1583.
William and Anne then had twins – named Hamnet and Judith in January 1585. The twins were baptized on 2 February 1585 named after two very close friends of William: the Stratford baker, Hamnet Sadler, and his wife, Judith Sadler.
Tragically, William’s only son, Hamnet Shakespeare, died of an unknown cause in August 1596, when he was just eleven years old.
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13 November 2025
MS said:
Yesterday, the British Booker Prize was awarded to David Szalay for his novel “Flesh.” On PBS Newshour, they had an interview with the author and discussed the book. He described the book, which I have not read, as a series of vignettes in the life of a Hungarian who lives in various places in Europe. The interviewer quoted from a literary critic who stated that the book was impressive for the manner in which the author uses the white spaces on the page. This was explained as meaning that the book encourages the reader to contribute to the narrative and the characters by using the reader’s own imagination. The author agreed that this was his intent.
I, personally, found this explanation rather specious. When I read a novel, I take the narrative and the characters as the author portrays them. I do not supplement what I am reading by imagining things that are not already on the page. Is my approach typical, and do any of you find the critic’s praise inauthentic?
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14 November 2025
MS said:
This morning I sent the message below to Jonathan Tobin, the Editor in Chief of the Jewish News Syndicate, regarding his review of the movie “Nuremberg,”
"JNS..."
Shabbat Shalom
Jonathan Tobin
Editor in Chief
Jewish News Syndicate
November 14, 2025
Mr. Tobin:
I am writing in response to your recent article titled, “ ‘Nuremberg’ and the failure of international law,” in which you offer a critique of the recently released movie “Nuremberg,” depicting the prosecution of Hermann Goering and his examination by the army psychiatrist, Lt. Col., Dougals Kelley.
At the outset, I acknowledge that I have not yet seen the movie (but intend to do so tomorrow). I also wish to preface my following remarks by stating that I have vigorously supported Israel my entire life, going on now over 77 years. Further, I fully supported Israel’s right to invade Gaza in response to the Hamas massacre of October 7, which you accurately describe as an “orgy of murder, rape, torture, kidnapping and wanton destruction ….” Further, as an attorney, I have litigated, and continue to litigate, issues relating to the expression of anti-Semitism by judges, including a lawsuit currently pending in federal court in Detroit, Michigan, regarding efforts by the Michigan Attorney Grievance Commission to discipline two Jewish attorneys on claims that they acted unethically in asserting in legal briefs that two judges expressed anti-Semitic views in their rulings in two separate lawsuits.
The following comments take issue with your critique of the movie and your assertion that the movie is a veiled attempt to accuse Israel, without justification, of engaging in war crimes, comparable to that of the Nazis, during its military actions in Gaza, and accusing the International Criminal Court of engaging in an anti-Semitic prosecution for those actions. I note, based on my limited research, that you are not an attorney, and do not possess a law degrees, but, rather, have a Bachelor’s degree from Columbia University, where you were a history major. As a consequence, you do not appreciate the significance of such legal doctrines as judicial jurisdiction, and treat such matters as mere legalistic irrelevant formalities. As an attorney, I find your blither disregard of these matters as journalistic irresponsibility.
You assert in your article that while the ICC has vigorously, and in your opinion unfairly, pursued its prosecution of Israel and the Israeli government for their actions in Gaza, “the international legal establishment has not shown much interest in prosecuting the perpetrators” of the October 7 massacre, thereby accusing the ICC of exhibiting an anti-Semitic double standard. You apparently have not researched the scope of the ICC’s jurisdiction, or, if you have, you do not understand it. The ICC was created by the Rome Statute of July 17, 1998, under which its jurisdiction to prosecute crimes against humanity and war crimes is limited to charges brought by a member state against the government of another member state. Israel is a member state. By contrast, since even Israel disputes that the Palestinian people have a state, Hamas is not the government of a member state. This may strike you as a mere red herring, but I assure you in law such a distinction is significant and determinative. Further, Israel, by appearing before the ICC to dispute the charges submitted itself to the Court’s jurisdiction. No leader of Hamas has appeared before the Court, limiting its jurisdiction. You will abjure that this failure is of course to be expected, and just one more legalistic red herring. But it is not unprecedented. For example, Omar Hassan Ahmad Al Bashir, the President of the Republic of Sudan, who has been committing unspeakable war crimes against the residents of Darfur, is not being prosecuted by the ICC, because the ICC does not have physical custody of him. Not all that you would regard as red herrings are signs of anti-Semitism.
As I have said, immediately after October 7 I fully and vigorously supported Israel’s right to invade Gaza in order to seek justice against Hamas and make an effort to destroy it, to prevent it from every again committing the kind of atrocities which it committed on October 7. I also accepted Israel’s defense that during the invasion, deaths of civilians and the destruction of buildings, including mosques, schools, and hospitals, constituted unavoidable collateral damage caused by Hamas’s policy as using Palestinian civilians as human shields. However, in my opinion, this explanation could only go so far. After the assassination of Hamas leader, and the October 7 mastermind, Yahya Sinwar on October 17, 2024, Israel crossed a moral red line. Hamas had, for all practical purposes, been demolished. But, at this point, Israel began using the restrictions on the distribution of food to the Palestinian civilians, including children, as a military tactic, justified, according to Netanyahu, as a means to bring Hamas to its knees. Then, it proceeded to bomb food distribution points and Palestinian buildings from the air, killing thousands of innocent Palestinian civilians. Israel continued to justify these actions as necessary because Hamas was still using Palestinians as human shields. I have seen videos of the bombings; of the emaciated Palestinian children; of Palestinian children with their limbs blown off. And Israel’s justification is bogus and immoral, by any standard, and particularly by the standards of Judaism and Torah.
You make an effort to justify Israel’s actions by comparing them to the actions of the Allies in Europe to defeat Nazism and its threatened imposition of fascist totalitarianism on the world. The comparison is totally specious. As despicable as Hamas’s massacre on October 7 was, it could not compare to the world war launched by the Nazis in 1939, which continued for 6 years. Even assuming that the bombing of Dresden was justified, which many historians take issue with, it was not a deliberate bombing of German civilians out in the open; it was collateral damage. The starving of Palestinian children, and the intentional bombing of Palestinians civilians out in the open, has no comparison to what the Allies did in Dresden, or elsewhere, and the fact that you would use such an obviously inapposite comparison to advance your position detracts measurably form your credibility.
You write as if nothing that Israel has done deserves to be questioned. That Israel can do no wrong, and that to suggest otherwise constitutes per se anti-Semitism – that the centuries long persecution of the Jewish people in countries throughout Europe; that the depravity of the Holocaust; and that the rejection by the Arab states of the proposed partition in 1948, immunizes Israel from any criticism whatsoever, and from any prosecution for its commission of war crimes in Gaza. They do not, and your advancement of this argument is itself a betrayal of Judaism, and everything which the Jewish religion is supposed to stand for. You have shown yourself to be nothing more than a conservative propagandist for Israel’s propaganda – and, what is worse, you are poisoning the minds of American Jews who do not know better, with your sophistical rubbish, which you seek to pass off as the scholarly analysis of a Jewish academic.
Marc Susselman, JD, MPH
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16 November 2025
American Daughter of a Rabbi said:
“Judaism has been the lens through which I experience the world, and as Jewish values inform my understanding of self, they also inform my understanding of Israel. As I have tried to find my place in an imperfect and deeply unjust state, I have turned again and again to the Jewish concepts of tikkun olam (repairing the world) and b’tselem elohim (a belief that every human being is created in the image of God). …
“I was not wearing a keffiyeh, I was wearing rings etched with the words of the Shema prayer. It did not seem to matter what I had said in my many interviews that day nor did it matter that I kept Shabbat, could speak nearly fluent Hebrew, and knew where to find the best falafel in Jerusalem. All that seemed to matter is that by showing up as a Jew to aid Palestinians, I was the wrong kind of Jew. …
“My deportation felt like a betrayal. Israel was supposed to be for me, for every Jew. But the settler movement and the current government would like to redefine what it means to be Jewish along political lines.
“In Hebrew, I was taught to love our neighbors and to commit to repairing a broken world. To me, that means that while I may be angry at Israel and critical of its actions and policies, I cannot serve justice by severing my relationship with this land entirely.
“I am not done with Israel, not done with Judaism. I am not giving up, and neither should any leftist American Jew. I believe that if there is hope for Israelis and Palestinians, it’s in the place of struggle. It does not serve us, as those who want a future of shared society, security, and justice in this land, to give up on this land.”
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19 November 2025
MS said:
Last night I watched episode 3 in Ken Burns’ documentary about the American Revolution. He deserves a lot of credit for making it, because he is revealing a lot of facts about the conflict that I, and I assume many others, only knew about rather vaguely, things which are, in fact, quite disturbing.
For example, the patriots who supported breaking from England used the conflict as an opportunity to seize more land from the Native Americans, in particular from the Cherokees. Britain passed legislation making it illegal for the patriots to trespass on, or seize, the property of the Cherokees. The patriots, including George Washington, ignored the restriction. So, it was the British who were protecting the Native Americans from the depredations of the patriots.
As the patriots were complaining about the infringement on their liberties by the British, it was not lost on the enslaved Africans that the patriots were concerned with their own liberty, as they enslaved the Africans. The American Revolution inspired slave revolts in other colonies, particularly in the British colony of Jamaica. Slaves in Jamaica launched a slave revolt, which was brutally suppressed by the British slave owners, with the execution of the revolt’s leaders.
The documentary is leaving a sour taste in my mouth. Kudos to Burns.
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The End.