tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-204453212024-03-06T20:14:10.319-08:00Zenger's Newsmagazinemgconlanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09328563476025164608noreply@blogger.comBlogger928125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20445321.post-2924955951972075172024-02-29T18:13:00.000-08:002024-03-06T00:43:27.621-08:00Is a Second Donald Trump Presidency Inevitable?<br><b>by Mark Gabrish Conlan</b> • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for <i>Zenger’s Newsmagazine</i> • All rights reserved
<br><br>My feelings about the 2024 Presidential election were summed up by Joy-Ann Reid, MS-NBC host and biographer of the late civil-rights martyr Medgar Evers and his widow Myrlie, when she appeared to promote her book on the February 6 episode of <i>The Late Show with Stephen Colbert</i> (<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWnUgSvwVXo" target="_blank">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWnUgSvwVXo</a>). She described her feelings about the 2020 Presidential election between Joe Biden and Donald Trump as “confident” that Biden would win and a state of normality would return to America’s body politic. This year, she said, she’s “terrified” of a Trump victory and return to the White House.
<br><br>So am I. Just as Trump eked out a victory in the Electoral College in 2016 and launched his tumultuous four years as President, he appears poised to carry the day in 2024 as well. In 2016 Trump had the good fortune to be running against Hillary Clinton, one of the most reviled figures in American political history and the target of a decades-long political smear campaign. In 2024 Trump is running against Joe Biden, whom the Republican propaganda machine has been able to depict as a doddering old man barely capable of tying his shoes in the morning, much less delivering a speech or leading the country.
<br><br>Democratic strategists watch helplessly as Trump himself and his minions in politics and the Right-wing media project an image of Trump (who is only three years younger than Biden, remember?) as a man of youth and vigor, an energetic crusader for “Making America Great Again.” Though Biden has a record of accomplishment to draw on, including a bipartisan infrastructure bill and an economy that is recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic faster and stronger than any other in the world, he gets almost no public credit for any of it.
<br><br>Two major opinion polls released in early February 2024 showed just how much of an uphill battle Biden faces if he wants to be re-elected. One was from NBC News (<a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/poll-biden-trump-economy-presidential-race-rcna136834" target="_blank">https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/poll-biden-trump-economy-presidential-race-rcna136834</a>) and one was from National Public Radio (<a href="https://www.npr.org/2024/02/07/1229500337/poll-2024-election-biden-trump-immigration-democracy" target="_blank">https://www.npr.org/2024/02/07/1229500337/poll-2024-election-biden-trump-immigration-democracy</a>). According to Mark Murray of NBC News, “Biden trails GOP presidential front-runner Donald Trump on major policy and personal comparisons, including by more than 20 points on which candidate would better handle the economy. And Biden’s deficit versus Trump on handling immigration and the border is greater than 30 points.”
<br><br>In a recently released Monmouth University poll (<a href="https://www.newsweek.com/americans-poll-donald-trump-border-wall-1873707" target="_blank">https://www.newsweek.com/americans-poll-donald-trump-border-wall-1873707</a>), 53 percent of American respondents now favor Trump’s proposal to build a wall across the entire U.S.-Mexico border, and 46 percent oppose it. During Trump’s actual Presidency, 56 percent of respondents opposed the border wall and only 42 percent supported it. It’s an indication of how much Americans’ attitude towards immigration in general and the U.S.-Mexico border in particular have shifted in a hard-line direction. According to the NPR poll, 41 percent of respondents want increased border security and only 28 percent would prioritize creating a pathway to U.S. citizenship for the so-called “Dreamers,” people brought to the U.S. as children by their undocumented immigrant parents.
<br><br>NBC News’s poll, as reported by Mark Murray in the above-cited article, has still more troubling news for Biden and the Democrats. “Trump has the edge on securing the border and controlling immigration (35 points over Biden), on having the necessary mental and physical health to be president (+23), on dealing with crime and violence (+21), on being competent and effective (+16), and on improving America’s standing in the world (+11),” Murray wrote. And, despite Biden’s attempts to make protecting American democracy a major theme of his campaign – while Trump is promising to be “a dictator on day one” of his second term – the two men are essentially tied on the issue of protecting democracy, with 43% of voters picking Biden and 41% preferring Trump.
<br><br>Biden’s overall job approval rating remains low – 38 percent in the NBC poll and 40 percent in NPR’s – while Trump’s is 49 percent, ironically higher than he ever got while he was President. Just 29 percent of respondents in the NPR poll gave Biden positive marks for handling immigration and border issues, which explains why Republicans in both houses of Congress tanked a border security deal that would have given the President sweeping new powers to enforce immigration laws. And they were quite honest about why they were doing this. As Congressmember Troy Nehls (R-Texas) said, “I'm not willing to do too damn much right now to help a Democrat and to help Joe Biden's approval rating. … Why would I?”
<br><br><b>Biden’s Coalition Is Disintegrating</b>
<br><br>Joe Biden beat Donald Trump by narrow margins in six key “battleground states” – Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Arizona and Georgia – that, in America’s cockamamie way of electing its national leader, play an outsized role in determining the next President. Trump is currently leading in all six, as well as winning the nationwide popular vote – something he didn’t do either in 2016 or 2020. Starting in the 1968 election and continuing through Ronald Reagan’s wins in 1980 and 1984, the Republicans were able to capture most of the white working-class vote (particularly its men) by emphasizing racial and cultural issues, and now they’re making inroads over groups the Democrats have historically counted on as well.
<br><br>According to a February 27 report by Mark Murray on the NBC News site (<a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/union-households-favor-biden-closer-margin-2020-poll-finds-rcna140569#:~:text=The%20combined%20NBC%20News%20polling,approve%2C%2059%25%20disapprove" target="_blank">https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/union-households-favor-biden-closer-margin-2020-poll-finds-rcna140569#:~:text=The%20combined%20NBC%20News%20polling,approve%2C%2059%25%20disapprove</a>), in 2020 Biden carried 56 percent of voters from households headed by a member of a labor union, to 40 percent for Trump. This year, polls show Biden still leading Trump among union households, but by a much narrower margin: 50 percent for Biden to 41 percent for Trump. In the same polls, Trump leads among all voters, 47 to 43 percent in NPR’s poll and 47 to 42 percent in NBC’s.
<br><br>Astonishingly, Trump is also making inroads against Biden among people of color. Democrats have for decades counted on heavily winning communities of color, especially African-Americans and Latinos, to make up for having long since lost much of the white male vote to Republicans. But Trump’s share of the African-American vote actually increased from 8 percent in 2016 to 12 percent in 2020. And according to an NBC News dispatch from November 21, 2023 (<a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/meetthepressblog/eyes-2024-black-voters-sour-biden-rcna126124" target="_blank">https://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/meetthepressblog/eyes-2024-black-voters-sour-biden-rcna126124</a>), “Biden’s net-approval rating among Black voters has dropped nearly 20 points over the course of this year, from plus-46 points throughout the year to plus-27 points this month. The latest survey finds 61% of Black voters approve of Biden, versus 34% who say they disapprove of the president.”
<br><br>Even more amazingly, Latino voters have so strongly soured on Biden that Trump actually leads among them in polls, according to <i>USA Today</i> and the British newspaper <i>The Guardian</i> (<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/jan/01/trump-biden-latino-voters-poll" target="_blank">https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/jan/01/trump-biden-latino-voters-poll</a>). According to a poll by <i>USA Today</i> and Suffolk University, Trump led Biden 39 to 35 percent among Latinos in a survey taken at the end of 2023. A similar poll from CNBC (<a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2023/12/19/trump-wipes-out-bidens-lead-with-latino-voters-in-2024-cnbc-survey-.html" target="_blank">https://www.cnbc.com/2023/12/19/trump-wipes-out-bidens-lead-with-latino-voters-in-2024-cnbc-survey-.html</a>) showed that between October and December 2023, Latino voters swung from a five-point lead for Biden to a seven-point lead for Trump.
<br><br>Part of the reason may be economic. I remember a warning I got from a Mexican-American friend of mine who told me in 2016 that a lot of Latino U.S. citizens were going to vote for Trump because they were worried that undocumented immigrants were taking jobs that would otherwise have gone to <i>them</i>. Part of it also may be due to a long-term strategy by Republican activists who seek to win over voters of color, especially Latinos and African-Americans, with the same racist, sexist and homophobic cultural appeals they used successfully to pull the white working class away from the Democrats in the 1970’s and 1980’s. Whatever the strategy is, it seems at this stage to be working in the Republicans’ favor.
<br><br>Biden is also hemorrhaging support among voters under 34, a key demographic in his 2020 election victory. In 2020, Biden carried young voters by 24 points; today, according to the <i>USA Today</i>/Suffolk University poll, Trump leads among young voters by four points. And he’s also losing support among Arab-American voters, at least partly due to his overall backing of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s genocidal campaign against the Palestinians in Gaza. In the Michigan Presidential primary on February 27, 2024, more than 100,000 Democratic voters marked their ballots as “uncommitted” instead of voting for Biden, responding to an insurgent campaign by Palestinian-American activists to call on Biden to support a permanent cease-fire in the Israel-Gaza war.
<br><br>In a dispatch from the BBC (<a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-68427304" target="_blank">https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-68427304</a>), Sarah Smith reported that Michigan “is home to America's largest Arab-American population, most of whom are deeply upset by the devastation they see in Gaza. President Biden can't afford to ignore their demands that he call for a permanent cease-fire in Gaza – rather than the temporary one that the White House has been pushing for. He did not mention the war or the protest vote in his statement following his victory, but his campaign team will have surely heard the message loud and clear.” Biden has publicly, though mildly, warned Netanyahu that some of his actions – including targeting the Nasser hospital in Gaza and threatening a ground invasion of Rafah, the southern Gaza city to which the Israeli government earlier urged Gazans to move to on the promise that they’d be safe – are “over the top,” but that hasn’t been enough to discourage Arab-Americans from opposing Biden for his efforts to win Congressional funding for Israel’s war machine.
<br><br>Leyla Elabed, one of the organizers of the “uncommitted” protest vote, angrily disagreed with Sarah Smith’s comment that her campaign might only help Trump. “If Biden doesn't act now, and listen to the 80 percent of Democrats and the 66 percent of Americans that want a permanent cease-fire right now, it is going to be Biden, his administration and the Democratic Party that are going to be accountable for handing the White House to Trump in November,” Elabed told Smith.
<br><br>Smith also reported that some of the young people she interviewed had other concerns about Biden besides his tacit support of Israel’s genocide against Gaza. “Each of these students said they wished Mr. Biden had stood aside and allowed another candidate to get the Democratic nomination this year,” Smith said. “They think that at 81, he is too old to understand the concerns of their generation, and that he hasn't been aggressive enough on climate change or on forgiving student loan debt.” Biden has actually done quite a lot to reduce student loan debt – as much as he could given his defeat at the U.S. Supreme Court and the reluctance of Congress to act on the issue – but it’s not enough for students who are facing crippling long-term student loan debts their entire lives.
<br><br>Smith also reported on “the concerns I tend to hear from undecided voters who are considering backing Donald Trump. Those moderate voters – whom I've met in the wine bars of Atlanta, the sandwich shops of Philadelphia and the rural outposts of Iowa – often help decide who wins the White House. They've told me they felt much better off when Donald Trump was in office. And they're not convinced yet by the Biden administration's attempts to persuade Americans the economy is improving.”
<br><br>It’s occurred to me that at least part of that might be due to nostalgia for the pre-COVID era; the economy may have looked better because COVID-19 hadn’t hit yet. It’s also possible that a lot of American voters have overall memories of the first Trump Presidency that are a lot more rose-colored than they thought at the time; that could be why Trump’s approval ratings are higher now than they were at any time during his term. Some pundits have coined the term “vibeonomics” to deal with the frustrating fact, if you’re a Democrat supporting Biden, that though the economic statistics right now look good (especially low unemployment and a slowly but steadily declining rate of inflation), people aren’t giving Biden credit for the parts of the economy that are working and are blaming him for the parts that aren’t, including stubbornly high grocery prices.
<br><br>Biden won the Presidency in the first place by putting together a broad coalition of voters, and now he’s alienating many of the groups that were crucial to his victory. In the 1920’s Will Rogers famously joked, “I belong to no organized political party. I’m a Democrat.” Recently MS-NBC hosts and guests have suggested that actually applies to modern-day Republicans, especially given the open civil war between various factions of the Michigan Republican Party over who is entitled to lead it. But as we move closer to November 5, 2024 (the nominal election day, though given the multiplicity of vote-by-mail and absentee-voting options that’s more of a deadline than an actual date), it’s the Republicans that (with only a handful of exceptions) are solidly behind Trump while the Democrats are fragmenting.
<br><br>Indeed, the 2024 Presidential election is looking more and more like a repeat of 1980. The Republicans are going in with an impressive degree of unity around a controversial but highly charismatic apostle of the Right, while the Democrats are splitting and some of them are flirting either with not voting at all or voting for an alternative-party or independent candidate – which under America’s system of winner-take-all elections amounts to the same thing. Either Donald Trump or Joe Biden will be the U.S. President from 2025 to 2029 – and unless you vote for Joe Biden, you’ll be helping Donald Trump win. It’s that simple.
<br><br><b>The Modern Antaeus: Trump’s Superpower</b>
<br><br>During Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign I posted an article at <a href="https://zengersmag.blogspot.com/2016/08/trump-modern-antaeus.html" target="_blank">https://zengersmag.blogspot.com/2016/08/trump-modern-antaeus.html</a> comparing Trump to Antaeus, the giant in Greek mythology. Antaeus was the son of the sea god Poseidon and the earth goddess Gaia, and he could not be defeated in ordinary combat because every time an enemy knocked him down, Gaia would replenish his strength and he would get up again and vanquish his foe. Antaeus was finally killed by the hero Herakles – though you probably know him by his Roman name, Hercules – who used one arm to stab Antaeus to death while his other arm held the giant up and kept him from reconnecting with his earth mother and regaining his strength.
<br><br>In that article, and in a further blog post called “mmm … peach … mint” (<a href="https://zengersmag.blogspot.com/2019/12/mmm-peach-mint.html" target="_blank">https://zengersmag.blogspot.com/2019/12/mmm-peach-mint.html</a>) published on the eve of President Trump’s first impeachment (for attempting to extort derogatory information on then-candidate Biden and his son Hunter from Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky), I detailed the multiple ways Trump had screwed up and escaped accountability in a way denied to lesser mortals. As I wrote in 2019, “He did it in 1991, when the banks who had loaned him money to build casinos in Atlantic City were about to foreclose on him and force him into bankruptcy — until they realized that the casinos would be worth more with Trump’s name on them than without it. So they cut a deal by which he could keep his name on the casinos and collect a royalty from [them], but without having anything to do with running them. The deal energized Trump’s businesses; realizing he could make money merely by leasing his name without the bother of actually building or owning anything, he did many more such deals and raked in huge amounts of money for doing absolutely nothing.
<br><br>“Trump snatched victory from the jaws of defeat again in 2016, when the release of his conversation with Billy Bush on the set of <i>Access Hollywood</i> — with Trump’s proud boast that he could have his way with any woman he wanted because ‘when you’re a star, they’ll let you do anything’ — one month before the election caused panic within the Republican Party. Veteran GOP professionals and strategists panicked, thinking there was no way the American people would elect a President who had openly and proudly boasted of committing rape on national TV. There was even talk of taking Trump off the ticket and putting up his running mate, Mike Pence, for President. Instead, Trump stayed on the ticket and ultimately won the presidency in the Electoral College despite getting three million fewer votes than his principal opponent.”
<br><br>And Trump’s extraordinary streak of good fortune has continued even after he lost the 2020 election. So far he’s been able to escape responsibility for his attempt to overthrow his electoral defeat through force and violence by summoning a mob of his supporters to Washington, D.C. on January 6, 2021 and exhorting them to storm the Capitol because, as he said, “[Y]ou’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong.” (<a href="https://www.npr.org/2021/02/10/966396848/read-trumps-jan-6-speech-a-key-part-of-impeachment-trial" target="_blank">https://www.npr.org/2021/02/10/966396848/read-trumps-jan-6-speech-a-key-part-of-impeachment-trial</a>.) Initially Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell and Republican House leader Kevin McCarthy objected and called out Trump for the violence that ensued that day, but they quickly returned to slavish devotion to him. Today McCarthy is out of electoral politics and McConnell has announced he’s stepping down from his leadership post after November.
<br><br>Trump’s conduct before, during and after his Presidency has led to four separate jurisdictions – the feds in Washington, D.C. and Florida and state prosecutors in New York and Georgia – filing indictments against him on 91 felony counts. But, again, what would be a career-ender for any other politician actually boosted Trump. He was able to convince the party faithful that the indictments against him were part of a political hit job from Joe Biden and his administration to savage him and render him unelectable. They gave him the leverage to destroy every other Republican who wanted to run against him for the 2024 nomination and add them to the many heads on his trophy wall of Republicans who tried to defy him, including former Senators and Congressmembers like Mitt Romney, Bob Corker, Jeff Flake, Justin Amash, Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger. Either they fell victim to Trump-endorsed primary challengers, or they realized that would happen so they retired.
<br><br>Democrats and vaguely Left-of-center media pundits have taken a false sense of optimism from polls that allegedly show up to 35 percent of people who voted against Trump in Republican primaries won’t vote for him in November if he’s the nominee. They also believe the polls that show many Republicans and Trump-leaning independents won’t vote for Trump if he’s actually convicted of a crime before the November election. But Trump and his attorneys have worked industriously to make sure that none of his cases come to trial before the election. Of the four, only one has a currently scheduled trial date early enough to finish before the election – and it’s the least significant of them: the New York state case alleging “falsification of business records” to conceal his hush-money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels so she wouldn’t go public in 2016 with her allegations of a one-night stand with Trump.
<br><br>Don’t believe a word of those polls. Most Republicans live in a so-called “media bubble” in which the only news they get is from Right-wing propaganda sources like AM talk radio, Fox News and the various Web sites (Newsmax, One America News and the like) which built up audiences disgusted with Fox for accurately reporting the 2020 election results in Arizona. They’ve heard the line about the “Biden crime family” bringing “socialism” to America so often there’s no way they won’t vote for Trump, even if they come to see him as the lesser of two evils. It’s true that this works in the other direction as well – a lot of Democrats currently unhappy with Biden for many reasons, including his support of Israel’s genocide against Gaza, will probably come around and vote for him anyway – but I suspect that more Democratic voters will defect from Biden than Republicans will from Trump.
<br><br>As for the other three cases against Trump, they’re all in ruins right now. Special prosecutor Jack Smith – who in an unconscionable delay wasn’t even appointed until two years after January 6, 2021, mainly because neither President Biden nor his attorney general, Merrick Garland, really <i>wanted</i> to prosecute Trump unless they absolutely had to – has had to put the big case against Trump for inciting the January 6, 2021 insurrection on hold pending resolution by the U.S. Supreme Court of Trump’s claim of absolute Presidential immunity from prosecution for any crimes he may have committed in office. Smith’s case in Florida accusing Trump of illegally retaining classified documents after he left the White House has been slow-walked by a blatantly pro-Trump judge, Aileen Cannon.
<br><br>And the case against him in Georgia – potentially the most dangerous one because it’s a state case and therefore he can’t just order it dismissed the way he can with the federal cases if and when he becomes President again – has been sandbagged by exposure of the affair between Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis and her special prosecutor, Nathan Wade. Willis and Wade both declared that their sexual relationship didn’t start until 2021, after Willis hired Wade to work on the case, but at least two witnesses have come forward and testified it began as early as 2019. Since both Willis and Wade made their statements in legal filings under penalty of perjury, if it turns out they were lying about the affair, not only will Willis be removed from the Trump prosecution but she could find herself in prison for perjury.
<br><br>So the likelihood that Donald Trump will be tried and convicted on a major charge before the 2024 election is virtually nil. And the odds of that happening became even smaller on February 27, when the U.S. Supreme Court announced that they would hear Trump’s appeal on the doctrine of absolute Presidential immunity. What’s more, instead of fast-tracking the case the way they did with the Colorado Supreme Court decision ruling Trump off that state’s primary ballot under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment for having incited the January 6, 2021 insurrection, the Court didn’t set oral argument until late April and will likely not issue a final decision until late June, when their current term ends. Even if the Court doesn’t rule in favor of Trump’s claim of absolute immunity, that still probably won’t allow for the trial to finish before the election.
<br><br>What’s more, Trump has openly declared that it’s heads he wins, tails Biden loses. Either the Supreme Court says Presidents have lifetime immunity from criminal prosecution, in which case the charges against Trump in all jurisdictions magically go away; or it doesn’t, in which case Trump will undoubtedly order his attorney general to prosecute Biden for anything they can cook up against him. Trump already tried that in October 2020, when he ordered then-Attorney General Bill Barr to indict Biden, former President Barack Obama and former Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. Barr tried to explain to Trump that he wouldn’t just willy-nilly indict people absent probable cause to believe they’d committed a crime, but his refusal to cook up cases against Trump’s political rivals at Trump’s behest led to a falling-out that only worsened after the 2020 election, when Barr announced that he’d investigated Trump’s claim of “massive election fraud” and bluntly said they were “bullshit.”
<br><br>If Trump wins the 2024 election – as seems more certain day after day – we may see the spectacle of Biden looking around the world for a country willing to give him asylum and risk alienating President Trump to do so!
<br><br><b>And Now for the (Maybe) Good News</b>
<br><br>As dire as the above reports make prospects for Biden and the Democrats look, there are a couple of confounding factors that might just allow Biden to squeak through to a narrow re-election. One is the ways people have actually been voting – not answering pollsters’ questions, but casting real ballots – in the last three years. Voters re-elected a popular Democratic governor in Kentucky and flipped both houses of the legislature in Virginia. In every single state that has voted on access to abortions since the U.S. Supreme Court’s despicable reversal of <i>Roe</i> v. <i>Wade</i> in June 2022, the pro-choice position has won.
<br><br>And the so-called “red tsunami” that a lot of people (including me) predicted for the 2022 midterms turned out to be more of a red ripple. The Republicans gained a razor-thin majority in the House of Representatives instead of the 40-, 50- or 60-seat sweep they were banking on (though, ironically, that just strengthened the hand of the radical Right wing of the party), but the Democrats actually gained a seat in the U.S. Senate. More recently, special elections in 2023 and 2024 have pretty much gone the Democrats’ way, including Democrat Tom Suozzi’s victory in the February 2024 election in Long Island and Queens to replace disgraced and expelled Republican Congressmember George Santos (<a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-local-correspondents/migrant-crisis-fear-mongering-wasnt-enough-to-hold-george-santoss-old-seat" target="_blank">https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-local-correspondents/migrant-crisis-fear-mongering-wasnt-enough-to-hold-george-santoss-old-seat</a>).
<br><br>The other thing that just might save the Democrats in 2024 is that, however strong the hand the Republicans are holding, they may well be overplaying it. The immigration bill is a good case in point. Joe Biden was willing to go along with a highly punitive border bill in exchange for what he really wanted from Congress – more military aid for Ukraine in its existential war with Russia – and he signed on to a proposal that did nothing to improve immigrants’ rights. It didn’t contain a pathway to citizenship, or even long-term legal status, for the “Dreamers.” Instead, it made it considerably harder for people allegedly fleeing persecution in their home countries to seek asylum, and it dramatically expanded funding for Border Patrol agents at a time when the Border Patrol was already the largest police force in the U.S.
<br><br>Had the Republicans taken the deal Biden was offering, they could have almost certainly sunk Biden’s already slim re-election chances then and there. A lot of progressive Latinos and others would have hated the bill and excoriated Biden for pushing it through. Instead, at the behest of <i>Führer</i> Donald Trump, they trashed their own bill as “open-border legislation” (which it decidedly wasn’t) and refused to schedule it for a vote. One way Tom Suozzi was able to finesse the immigration issue to win the Long Island/Queens special election was to say that if <i>he’d</i> been in Congress when that bill came to the floor for a vote, he’d have supported it. He was thus able not only to neutralize the typical Republican propaganda denouncing him as “Open-Border Suozzi” but condemn the Republicans as hypocrites for killing a bill that gave them 90 percent of what they’d said they wanted on immigration policy.
<br><br>Another issue on which the Republicans have overextended themselves is reproductive rights in general and abortion in particular. The Alabama Supreme Court added to the Republicans’ woes on this topic by issuing a ruling declaring frozen embryos created through <i>in vitro</i> fertilization (IVF) to be “children” under the law and thereby protected by the state’s Wrongful Death Act. This led to a horrified reaction from some Republicans, including Trump, who rushed to assure voters that he wouldn’t allow a ban on IVF to become law.
<br><br>After all, IVF is an elaborate technology used mostly by affluent white couples to have children when they can’t conceive or bring a pregnancy to term on their own, and rich white people are among the Republicans’ core constituencies. But when Democratic Senators tried to pass a bill to protect IVF, Republicans pulled together to keep the Senate from voting on it. States with strong anti-abortion laws like Georgia and Florida have had to contend with anti-choice activists filing their own lawsuits against IVF and citing the Alabama decision as precedent.
<br><br>What’s worse, the Alabama Supreme Court not only made a decision that effectively bans IVF, they based their opinion largely on theological grounds. As Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Tom Parker wrote in a concurring opinion, “[E]ven before birth, all human beings bear the image of God, and their lives cannot be destroyed without effacing His glory.” This just adds to the fear that a second Trump Presidency will bring an attempt to impose so-called “Christian nationalism” – a belief that American law should be based on a strict interpretation of the Bible as read by anti-choice, anti-Queer, anti-science ultra-Right-wing “Christians” – on the U.S.
<br><br>It’s the very unpopularity of their overall politics, not only on women’s reproductive rights but on social acceptance of Queer people and steps to avoid or minimize human-caused climate change, that have led many Republicans not only to embrace Trump but to deny democracy and call for a dictatorial takeover of the U.S. One chilling set of interviews on YouTube of people attending a Trump rally showed just how strong the authoritarian mind-set is among Trump supporters. A middle-aged man in the audience summed it up when he was asked if he would prefer dictator Trump to small-d democrat Biden, and he said yes because “America needs a spanking.”
<br><br>Those are chilling words for me because I’m well aware that I’m one of the Americans these people believe deserve to be spanked (or worse). I’m an openly Gay man married to another man. I’m a socialist. I’m also one-quarter Jewish, and I take a perverse sort of pride in the fact that any one of those three things would have made me a target of the Nazi Holocaust. Donald Trump’s likely return to the White House puts me squarely in the cross-hairs of his supporters – I meant that metaphorically, but from the moment I put those words down I realized that some of Trump’s nuttier supporters could take them literally as well.
<br><br>If Donald Trump wins the 2024 election, it will likely be the last free and fair election the United States of America ever has. If Trump wins, the U.S. will be remodeled into a hard, mean dictatorship the way countries like Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Turkey, Narendra Modi’s India and others already have been. There will be huge concentration camps for immigrants and mass deportations of millions, thereby decimating the U.S. economy. And there will be an end to even the most feeble attempts to deal with human-caused climate change.
<br><br>Trump and his supporters will run roughshod over the judicial system, the media and any other agency in the country that could get in his way or offer any criticism of him. Trump will take complete control of the Department of Justice and use it as an instrument of personal revenge against any of the myriad “enemies” he feels have slighted him. Under Trump, the U.S.’s 250-year experiment in being a self-governing republic will come to a thudding end, and the so-called “immigration crisis” will also come to an end because people around the world will see the U.S. as a cesspool they want no part of, <i>not</i> a haven for civil rights and economic freedom. <i>That</i> is the kind of country Donald Trump is offering his supporters, and that is the kind his return to the Presidency will give him the chance to create.
mgconlanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09328563476025164608noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20445321.post-42884261261466384182024-01-31T18:12:00.000-08:002024-02-03T12:14:59.139-08:00PBS's "Frontline" Documentary "Democracy on Trial" Raises Issue of Who Is a True "Conservative"<br><b>by Mark Gabrish Conlan</b> • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
<br><br>Last night (Tuesday, January 30) PBS ran a 2 ½-hour episode of their long-running documentary series <i>Frontline</i> called “Democracy on Trial,” directed by Michael Kirk and co-written by him and Mike Wiser. It purported to be the whole story of the indictments against former President Donald J. Trump but it was pretty much a rehash of the hearings last summer of the House Select Committee on January 6, 2021. Most of the archival film clips were from the committee’s televised hearings, and a lot of the interviewees were participants in the hearings, including former Congressmember Adam Kinzinger and former Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers. Bowers was voted out of office by the voters in his legislative district and Kinzinger voluntarily chose not to run for re-election because he realized it wasn’t worth the bother – two more heads on Donald Trump’s trophy wall of Republicans who disagreed with him and tried to hold him accountable. One of the people I felt sorriest for in the show was Robert Ray, a former Trump attorney, who tried to present the case for Trump’s defense in a calm, reasonable and relatively emotionless fashion – which may explain why Ray is a <i>former</i> Trump attorney. Last Monday, when Rachel Maddow interviewed E. Jean Carroll (whom Trump sexually assaulted in the mid-1990’s and who sued him for defamation and won two judgments against him – the first for over $5 million and the second for a whopping $83.3 million) and her two attorneys, Roberta Kaplan and Shawn Crowley, one of the attorneys mentioned that Trump’s principal counsel in the case, Alina Habba, behaved very differently whether or not Trump was in the courtroom. When he wasn’t, she was a professional, reliable attorney who avoided histrionics; when he was, she went off the deep end with him and, among other things, insulted the judge to his face.
<br><br>Though the show didn’t mention it, Fox News chose not to cover the House hearings on January 6 and, when asked why, the people in charge of Rubert Murdoch’s “news” network said bluntly that it was because their audiences weren’t interested in seeing it. It’s yet more evidence that the late New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan was wrong when he said, “Every man is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own set of facts.” America’s media landscape has become so fragmented that people are entitled to their own sets of facts, since the modern age of multiple TV networks and Web sites allows them to absorb only information that agrees with their preconceived notions of what is “true.” It’s been said that had Fox News existed during Watergate, Richard Nixon would have survived politically and served out his full Presidential term. One development since the House committee hearings on January 6 that the show mentioned was Trump’s (and his attorneys’) attempt to get the whole case against him thrown out on the idea that a former President is absolutely immune from any criminal charges against him for things he allegedly did while in office unless he was first impeached by the House of Representatives and convicted and removed from office by the Senate for the same offenses. In this, as in so much else, Trump is following the precedent set by Richard Nixon, who in 1977 matter-of-factly told interviewer David Frost, “When the President does it, that means it is not illegal.”
<br><br>Nixon was effectively arguing for an American version of the <i>Führerprinzip</i> (“Leader Principle”), the Nazi doctrine that the will of the leader was the ultimate law and he could make anything he wanted to do legal just on his own say-so. Trump is also very much of this mind-set; early on in his Presidency he fired FBI director James Comey when Comey refused to pledge “loyalty” – “loyalty” not to the United States Constitution and the laws he was pledged to enforce, but personal loyalty to Donald Trump. And it was Nixon’s hand-picked successor, Gerald Ford, who established the precedent that former Presidents cannot be prosecuted for things they did in office when he gave Nixon a blanket pardon for everything he did as President just one month after Nixon resigned the Presidency. Every time I hear how unprecedented it is to indict a former President for crimes allegedly committed while in office – including on this show, in which narrator Will Lyman said, “For the first time in American history, a president [was] charged with crimes in office” – I once again curse Gerald Ford and hope he is rotting in hell for the Nixon pardon.
<br><br>One of the most interesting aspects of this <i>Frontline</i> episode, at least to me, was the sheer number of people who were identified as “conservative” in the chyrons announcing who they were as they made statements critical of Trump: David French, Bill Kristol (once an iconic figure on the American Right), Mona Charen, Gabriel Sterling (the Florida elections official who first warned that Trump’s statements about the 2020 election were going to trigger violence), Charlie Sykes, and perhaps Trump’s most significant critic on the Right: retired judge J. Michael Luttig. It was Luttig, along with former Vice-President Dan Quayle, who convinced Trump’s Vice-President, Mike Pence, that he did not have the loony-tunes “power” Trump and his attorneys, notably John Eastman, said he had to reverse the outcome of the Presidential electors by throwing out slates of electors who’d voted for Joe Biden and replacing them with electors pledged to Trump. In her 1974 book <i>The Mask of State: Watergate Portraits</i>, Mary McCarthy said that among other things, Watergate had been a test to determine who is truly “conservative” – “conservative” in the Edmund Burke sense of believing in the rule of law and in social traditions that should not be reversed lightly or arbitrarily based on the idea that we could do better by radically changing course – and who isn’t. As I’ve read in these pages before, the current six-member majority on the United States Supreme Court is not “conservative”; the six justices, three of them appointed by Donald Trump, are Right-wing revolutionaries committed to making radical social changes in American society (most of which, above all the overturning of <i>Roe</i> v. <i>Wade</i>, are not supported by majorities of the American people).
<br><br>It’s become obvious that most Americans, especially most Republicans, are not “conservative” in the Burkean sense either; they are committed to a radical restructuring of American society aimed at reversing the liberal gains of the 20th century (the 1930’s and 1960’s in particular) and remaking America into a Christian-nationalist dictatorship. Among the voices of true conservatism on this program was Bill Kristol’s analysis of the dilemma Mike Pence faced on the eve of January 6, 2021: “Pence had just a clear conflict between what Trump wanted him to do and what the Constitution and the rule of law required him to do. I think he'd managed to navigate those conflicts in various ways over four years. Not always, in my view, the right way. But this was such a blatant transgression.” Another voice for true conservatism on this show came from Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger – one of the few Republican politicians who has defied Trump and got away with it, repelling the primary opponent Trump put up against him and being renominated and re-elected – who explained his reaction to the phone call he got from Trump on January 2, 2021 pleading with him to “find” the 11,780 votes that would have “flipped” Georgia from Biden to Trump. “What I knew is that we didn’t have any votes to find,” Raffensperger recalled. “We had continued to look. We investigated. I could have shared the numbers with you. There were no votes to find.”
<br><br>Former Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers also spoke for true conservatism against the cult of Trump when he said, after Trump appealed to him in on the basis of party loyalty, “For someone to ask me to deny my oath and just let the courts figure it out, or punt it to someone else, is not something I will do. … We choose to follow the outcome of the will of the people. It’s my oath.” And Gabriel Sterling, who recalled that he had been a Republican since age 9 during Ronald Reagan’s re-election campaign in 1984, said, “I’ll go to my deathbed knowing that they knowingly lied. They looked in the state senators' eyes, the people of Georgia, the people of America, and lied to them about this, and knew they were lying, to try to keep this charade going on that there was fraud in Georgia.” But given the thug-like behavior of the Trump cultists and the fact that <i>anyone</i>, no matter how low on the totem pole – like Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss, who were personally called out by President Trump and his then-attorney, former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani on ridiculous charges that they altered the Georgia election results – gets not only vituperative insults but out-and-out death threats, it takes real personal courage to stand up to the Trump thugocracy, and that kind of courage is in tragically short supply in today’s Republican Party.mgconlanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09328563476025164608noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20445321.post-16396124553286626642024-01-02T23:03:00.000-08:002024-01-02T23:05:13.845-08:00Doug Porter: GOP Flaunts Racism as Election Strategy <i>I've posted e-mails from Doug Porter at Words & Deeds before, but here's a good one regarding Nikki Haley's bizarre (to say the least) response to a question about why the U.S. Civil War (the one from 1861 to 1865) happened. If you've seen the clip on TV, you can sense the gears going around in Haley's brain as she tries to figure out what's the "right" response. The plain truth is that the U.S. Civil War happened because some white people in the seceding states wanted to make sure they kept having the "right" to own Black people as slaves. Everything else is just B.S., and it's fascinating to hear Haley saying the Civil War was a battle over "individual freedom" without specifying just which side was for "individual freedom" and which side was against it. – Mark Gabrish Conlan, January 2, 2024</i>
<br><br><b>GOP Flaunts Racism as Election Strategy</b>
<br><br><i>It's as American as apple pie.</i>
<br><br><b>by DOUG PORTER</b>
<br><br>JANUARY 2, 2024
<br><br>A GOP Presidential wannabe, Nikki Haley, is getting noticed in the media because she danced around a citizen’s questions concerning the civil war and slavery.
<br><br>Get this: a brown-skinned person who presents as white pandered to the racists in the electorate who would harm her if given the opportunity. I suppose nothing is surprising in a political world shaped by lies and conspiracies.
<br><br>Haley is trying to represent herself as a “reasonable” candidate to lead her party into the 2024 elections… wink, wink.
<br><br>Here’s columnist Thom Hartmann, who also has a lot to say about the economic conditions prior to the Civil War:
<br><br>When she was called out on it by the questioner, who said he was “astonished” that her answer didn’t mention slavery, she tried to be glib, asking rhetorically, “What do you want me to say about slavery?”
<br><br>When the gaffe went viral, Haley tried to clean it up by saying that “of course” slavery was a cause of the Civil War, and, later, blaming the “gotcha” question on a “Democratic plant” who’d sneakily inserted himself into her town hall.
<br><br>The simple reality is that the pro-slavery South is still very much with us, and is still—after 163 years—trying to make the case that democracy should be replaced with a strongman white supremacist oligarchy.
<br><br>“Freedom” is the word of choice by modern day apologists, used to paper over past events connected to an economic and cultural system based on the belief that their supreme being created a hierarchy determined by sex and skin color.
<br><br>Having fostered the perception that the white population in this country is threatened by granting rights or eliminating barriers to other racial groups, GOP politicians are openly supporting causes and actions designed to protect its imagined majority of citizens. Individuals considered extremists are now accepted as part of their coalition by party leaders.
<br><br>Since they can’t use the words “n***er lovers” any more, GOP politicians have adopted the term “cultural Marxism” to dismiss criticism of their political actions and portray those opposing them as dangerous. We’ve reached the point where the concept of a nation built around advantages for certain classes is considered normal
<br><br>Books and curriculum inclusive of or featuring those considered to be outside the white, male nexus are being suppressed. Companies with diversity programs are coming under fire. And cultural events with non mainstream leading characters are boycotted and disparaged.
<br><br>Jumping back into US history, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation wasn’t accepted by his opposition or much of the populace as a great moral statement. As Heather Cox Richardson enumerates, Lincoln’s party lost bigly in the 1862 midterm elections, losing 25 seats in the House of Representatives and control of governance in Ohio, Illinois, and Indiana.
<br><br>The sausage-making of the Emancipation Proclamation had long-term repercussions. The redefinition of Black Americans as superhuman workers undercut later attempts to support formerly enslaved people as they transitioned to a free economy, and the road to equality was not at all as smooth as the Republicans hoped. But that such a foundational change in our history emerged from such messy give and take, necessary in order to preserve our democratic system, seems a useful thing to remember in 2024.
The well of racism in this country runs deep. The shockwave after H. Rap Brown declared that “racism is as American as apple pie” eventually led to processes of nation self-examination and some realization that so much of our society was built upon the assumption of white supremacy.
<br><br>The process came up short when it came to understand racism’s role in our national wealth and its shaping of the economy. Thus, the door to Make America Great Again was left open. The foundation of racism renewal is economic, of course, a building block in the quest of a few to destroy democracy and pave the way for an authoritarian oligarchy.
<br><br>Instead of a civilization reaching for the stars of equality and empathy, these are advocates for a future existing in the sewers of ignorance and hatred; where violence and cruelty are currency.
<br><br>An indication of the weakness in our democracy is that there won’t be anti-racism advocacy involved in the vast majority of voting choices we get to make this year. In fact, such advocacy is actively portrayed as a call for chaos by those who would use this imagined chaos as a stepping stool for power.
<br><br>Simply saying the phrase Black Lives Matter is portrayed as a call for anarchy and destruction. In vetting the profiles of users at Threads**, a would-be successor for Xitter, I’ve noticed the preponderance of ordinary people who use the BLM initials as a statement of beliefs.
<br><br>Politicians, on the other hand, rarely use the phrase. If you wanna push back against the book banners and denialists, let’s make that phrase mainstream for good. It’s just a word choice, but symbolism is a powerful political motivator.
<br><br>*****
<br><br>I am currently signed up with a half-dozen social media platforms with formats and intentions similar to those of the company that Elon Musk has destroyed. Sometime this spring I’ll publish an accounting of my perceptions and experiences. One thing I can already tell you, is that the days of social media serving as news feed are long gone.
<br><br>***
<br><br><b>Tuesday’s News Shorts</b>
<br><br>***
<br><br><i>Nebraska Legislative Preview - The Definition of Insanity Via <b>Daily Kos</b></i>
<br><br>Erin Porterfield, executive director of nonprofit Heartland Workforce Solutions investigated why blue collar workers are now leaving Nebraska. Among reasons cited are that negative experiences with racism “contribute to feeling unsafe” and to reduced employment and social opportunities. “Feeling like Nebraska isn’t for everyone,” was another refrain, along with increased limits “on rights for people of diverse identities, including transgender care.”
How are the Nebraska Republicans responding to this crisis? If you guessed more tax cuts for the rich, you would be right! Surprise! Surprise! They are consistent.
Pillen has pledged to cut property taxes “significantly” in the next legislative session. The Nebraska Governor promised to reduce property taxes by $2 billion or 40%. Pillen would fund these massive tax cuts by cutting state spending by 6% and placing draconian spending caps on county and local governments. That would most likely include cuts to public school funding.
<br><br>***
<br><br><i>Playbook PM: Biden’s big election-year choice Via <b>Politico</b></i>
<br><br>And in a handful of swing-state counties that have backed the last four presidential victors, WSJ’s Ken Thomas, Catherine Lucey, Eliza Collins and Paul Overberg find a familiar refrain: Voters aren’t enthused about either frontrunner. In these areas, often removed from big cities and home to aging populations, there’s “a broader frustration with America’s trajectory and a desire to break the logjams that impede progress on the country’s economic and social problems.”
Behind closed doors, an uncorked Biden often gets more candid, or assertive, at campaign fundraisers. That can create headaches for aides who have to clean up his gaffes or inconvenient truths, but several donors tell Reuters’ Steve Holland, Nandita Bose and Trevor Hunnicutt that his campaign “could actually use more of this type of aggressive language, especially pushing back on Republican attacks.”
Meanwhile, Trump is laying big plans: He tells Breitbart’s Matthew Boyle and Alexander Marlow that he’ll make a “heavy play” for Minnesota, New Jersey, New York (!), New Mexico and Virginia in the general election. And he floats the possibility of a rally at Madison Square Garden.
<br><br>***
<br><br><i>Shawn Fain’s New Year’s Resolution Is to Lay the Ground for a National Strike Via <b>The Nation</b></i>
<br><br>Fain’s May Day throwdown takes aim at capital’s divide-and-conquer legal regime. But to be successful in 2028, the labor movement will need millions of workers to join in: those now in unions, who should begin to line up contracts for that decisive date, and many more who are not yet in unions but are beginning to organize.
<br><br>This vision is what makes the new surge of auto worker organizing the UAW is currently embarking on particularly momentous.
<br><br>In the wake of the UAW’s breakthrough strike and contract settlements at Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis, workers at the industry’s growing non-union plants—Toyota, Honda, Subaru, Hyundai, BMW, VW, Tesla, and more—are beginning to organize on a scale not seen in generations. Thousands of workers have signed union cards in the last few weeks. The UAW has dispatched organizers to non-union plants and launched a splashy national media campaign along with social media organizing tools.mgconlanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09328563476025164608noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20445321.post-67587543195004523332023-12-31T03:16:00.000-08:002024-02-02T21:04:49.694-08:00Ruy Texeira on How the Democratic Party Lost the American Working Class: CNN "Inside Politics" with Dana Bash, December 30, 2023<i>One of the most important trends in American politics over the last three decades has been the ongoing alienation and disenchantment of working-class (non-college-educated) voters from the Democratic Party and their move to the Republican Party. This trend began well before Donald Trump emerged as an unlikely but surprisingly credible spokesperson for working-class voters' interests and concerns. The Democrats long ago lost the support of a majority of white working-class voters, and now, by using the same strategy by which they won the white working class – appeals to cultural conservatism and often outright racism – Republicans are beginning to peel away support among working-class voters of color as well. This is yet another factor complicating the Democrats' chances in 2024 and Joe Biden's ability to remain President in the face of an aggressive, no-holds-barred challenge from Donald Trump. Political scientist and analyst Ruy Texeira appeared on CNN's <b>Inside Politics</b> program with host Dana Bash to discuss this on December 30, 2023.</i>
<br><br><b>Ruy Texeira on Democrats’ Losing the Working Class, CNN, December 30, 2023</b>
<br><br><b>Dana Bash:</b> More than 20 years ago, two political scholars [John Judis and Ruy Texeira] argued that the Democratic Party’s coalition would control politics. And for a little while, it looked like they might be right. A left-of-center party with a diverse base elected Barack Obama as the first Black president in 2008 and won control of the House and Senate. But then the election of President Donald Trump upended some of those early-2000’s theories. So the question is, what changed? What went wrong with the Democrats with those predictions. And one of the experts and co-authors of a new book, <i>Where Have All the Democrats Gone?</i>, Ruy Texeira, joins us now.
<br><br>Thank you very much for coming in. So you point to two factions in the Democratic Party, what you call the “shadow party” of activists, and then the Silicon Valley and the Wall Street types. Can you explain these two factions, and how you think that they are actually problems for the Democratic Party?
<br><br><b>Ruy Texeira:</b> Sure. The way I think about it, Dana, is the Democratic Party in the broad sweep of the last 50 years has said a kind of a long goodbye to the working class. There’s a great divide that’s opened up economically and culturally between the working class and the college-educated in the last part of the 20th century. And like we saw the white working class move away from the Democrats in a big way. And then in the 21st century, we saw increased movement of the white working class away from the Democrats, and a sort of cultural identification of the Democrats with basically the sort of college-educated liberal-ish, and in many ways almost radical views on race, gender, crime, immigration and so on.
<br><br>So the result of this is a movement of the working class <i>en masse</i> away from the Democrats. Now in 2016 Democrats thought, “Well, O.K., the white working class bailed out on us. But why did they do that? Because Trump is a racist, and we can’t reach these voters anyway, so who cares?” basically. But then the thing that happened – O.K., they lost the Presidency – but in 2020 we see non-white, especially Hispanic, working-class voters moving away from the Democrats. We still see that today in all the polling.
<br><br>So in fact, if you really count the noses of who supports whom in this country, the Republicans are now the party of the working class. They get more working-class votes than the Democrats do. And if you look at any given poll, the Democrats will be up by about 10 to 15 points among college-educated voters and down 10 to 15 points among working-class voters. That’s a huge change, and it represents a party that is more dominated by these college-educated voters, elites. Silicon Valley, Wall Street, Hollywood.
<br><br>I mean, there’s a whole identification of the Democratic Party with a group of institutions – activists, foundations, academia, you name it – that all push the Democrats in a direction that’s away from the priorities and the culture of working-class voters. And that now shows in the polls.
<br><br><b>Dana Bash:</b> You also write about immigration.
<br><br><b>Ruy Texeira:</b> Right.
<br><br><b>Dana Bash:</b> You and your colleague John Judis wrote in the <i>Wall Street Journal</i> last month, “While Republicans would eventually make opposition to illegal immigration their signature issue, Democrats went in the opposite direction – supported, surprisingly, by labor unions. The AFL-CIO’s abandonment of employer verification and sanctions undercut any attempt by the Democratic Party to stop illegal immigration, and soon Democratic activists became unwilling even to debate the issue.”
<br><br><b>Ruy Texeira:</b> That’s right. I mean, most Democrats don’t know this anymore, or if they knew it they’ve forgotten it. But Democrats were once the party that stood for controlling immigration. The Jordan Commission in the 1980’s basically was oriented to trying to damp down the level of immigration and having an E-Verify system so employers couldn’t employ illegal immigrants. And there was a sense that high levels of immigration basically constrict and constrain the low-wage labor market and undercut unionization.
<br><br>But that really disappeared in the late 1990’s, and now in the 21st century you see Democrats identified, not exactly with open borders, but pretty porous borders and a lack of concern, as it were, with border security. And we see this in the Biden administration’s campaign, and we also see it – and this is very important, politically, right now – the Republicans and the Democrats are trying to cut a deal on tightening up border security –
<br><br><b>Dana Bash:</b> Yes.
<br><br><b>Ruy Texeira:</b> – versus Israel and Ukraine funding. They’ve had an incredible amount of difficulty doing this because Democrats – there’s a big faction of the party that does not want to compromise in any way on border security, because they feel border security is kind of like racism.
<br><br><b>Dana Bash:</b> Well –
<br><br><b>Ruy Texeira:</b> And that’s a problem.
<br><br><b>Dana Bash:</b> Yeah. I mean, the other issue is it’s not just border security. They’re trying to significantly overhaul some of the key asylum laws.
<br><br><b>Ruy Texeira:</b> Right. Well, that’s how you can tighten it up. By – because the asylum system is huge, in terms of the immigration problem.
<br><br><b>Dana Bash:</b> I just want to show our viewers some data –
<br><br><b>Ruy Texeira:</b> O.K.
<br><br><b>Dana Bash:</b> <i>[Showed graph that displayed the percentage of white voters without college degrees that went for various Democratic Presidential candidates since 1992:
<br><br>Bill Clinton, 1992: 39 percent
<br>Bill Clinton, 1996: 44 percent
<br>Al Gore, 2000: 40 percent
<br>John Kerry, 2004: 38 percent
<br>Barack Obama, 2008: 40 percent
<br>Barack Obama, 2012: 36 percent
<br>Hillary Clinton, 2016: 29 percent
<br>Joe Biden, 2020: 32 percent]</i>
<br><br> – of how white voters went starting in 1992 through 2020. And the voters we’re talking about here are the ones that you write about: non-college-educated white voters. If you look at the data, in 1992 Bill Clinton, 39 percent. It makes your point that it was already a majority for Republicans. It hasn’t changed that much. Probably the low mark was iin 2016, when Hillary Clinton was running against Donald Trump, and it was up slightly in 2020. So it hasn’t – when you look at the coalition in and around Barack Obama, it hasn’t changed <i>that</i> dramatically since then, except around the margins.
<br><br><b>Ruy Texeira:</b> Well, one thing to note about the [Bill] Clinton vote is he actually carried the white working-class vote, because there were so many votes for [independent candidate H. Ross] Perot. So he actually carried the working class –
<br><br><b>Dana Bash:</b> <i>Bill</i> Clinton.
<br><br><b>Ruy Texeira:</b> He carried the white working-class vote in 1992 and 1996 by a point or two. So in a way, one way to think about what’s happened is that the heavily working-class Perot vote, on the Presidential level, which was for a third-party candidate, moved over time into the Republican camp <i>en masse</i>. And that’s not just at the Presidential level, but also a lot of Congressional seats and particularly a lot of Senate seats, where the Democrats are no longer competitive in a lot of these states. So that’s a lot about what happened to the Democratic coalition between the 1990’s and today.
<br><br>And again, as I’m pointing out, in 2020 and now we see this movement of the non-white working class away from the Democrats as well. So you do see this coalition shifting, again, where Republicans are more of a working-class party than the Democrats. And that’s such a change from the historic image and practice of the Democratic Party in terms of politics today, I think.
<br><br><b>Dana Bash:</b> Yes, it’s definitely not FDR’s Democratic Party.
<br><br><b>Ruy Texeira:</b> It’s not his party anymore, and it’s not your father’s Democratic Party. It’s different. The question is, how competitive is it? Can the Democrats get where they want to go with this coalition?
<br><br><b>Dana Bash:</b> We’ve got to end this show now. We appreciate your coming – come back and we’ll discuss what the solutions are for the Democratic Party.
<br><br><b>Ruy Texeira:</b> I’d love to.
mgconlanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09328563476025164608noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20445321.post-11317344642020674112023-11-30T18:16:00.000-08:002023-12-31T08:25:06.566-08:00Voting for Republicans Is Voting Against Democracy<br><b>by Mark Gabrish Conlan</b> • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for <i>Zenger’s Newsmagazine</i> • All rights reserved
<br><br>Voting for a Republican – <i>any</i> Republican, from the lowliest city council or special-district seat to the Presidency – in 2024 means voting against democracy; I’ll say that again: <i>voting for a Republican means voting against democracy</i>. The modern-day Republican Party has not only given up on democracy, it has repudiated it at all levels. It intends to govern, once it retakes control of the Presidency, the Senate and state governments it does not already control, as an authoritarian force, jamming its ideas and ideologies down the throats of Americans even when most of the country disagrees with them.
<br><br>Republicans in power gave two vivid demonstrations of their hostility towards democracy on April 6 and 7, 2023. On Thursday, April 6, the two-thirds majority in the Tennessee General Assembly voted along party lines to expel two young African-American members, Justin Jones and Justin Pearson, for the “crime” of having stood up on the floor of the Assembly and joined protesters in calling for safe, rational gun laws in the wake of the March 27 mass shooting at a private Christian school in Nashville, the state’s capital.
<br><br>One day later, on Friday, April 7, Matthew Kacsmaryk, a federal district judge in Amarillo,Texas, issued a ruling in a case brought by a private anti-abortion group invalidating the U.S.Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) 2000 approval of mifepristone, a drug used in non-surgical abortions and also to treat women who’ve miscarried. Kacsmaryk said his ruling would apply nationwide, in states that have explicitly protected a woman’s right to choose to end her pregnancy as well as in states that haven’t.
<br><br>Neither of these decisions went into full effect immediately. The local governments in Nashville and Memphis, which under Tennessee’s constitution have the power to fill legislative vacancies, both voted unanimously to reappoint Jones and Pearson as their own interim replacements pending a special election, and they re-won their seats when those elections occurred. And the mifeprestone decision was put on hold, first by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals and then by Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito – author of the majority opinion in <i>Dobbs</i> v. <i>Jackson Women’s Health Organization</i>, the case that overturned <i>Roe</i> v. <i>Wade</i> after 49 years, who set Wednesday, April 19 as the date for a Supreme Court hearing on the case. On April 22 the Supreme Court issued an indefinite “stay” (delay) of Kacsmaryk’s ruling, so mifeprestone remained available until the Court has a chance to rule on the “merits” of the case.
<br><br>Overall the modern-day Republican Party has shown not only a rejection of democracy but a visceral contempt for it. Time and time again, today’s Republicans are embracing positions overwhelmingly rejected by large majorities of Americans. Though abortion is an issue notoriously difficult to poll on – a lot depends on how the questions are worded – 62 percent of American poll respondents say they want abortion legal in “all or most cases.” A majority of Americans want to see assault weapons like the AR-15, used in virtually all mass shootings these days, banned (as they were in the U.S. from 1994 to 2004), and up to 90 percent want universal background checks for gun buyers.
<br><br><b>Violating the Constitution to “Save” It</b>
<br><br>Ordinarily, a political party in a representative democracy that goes so far out of line with the majority opinion of its country’s people would be dooming itself to political oblivion. But that doesn’t worry today’s Republicans. Driven by a fanatical belief that <i>they</i> know what the country really needs, whether the people who live here want it or not, the Republicans have cleverly used the anti-democratic features of the U.S. political system – some of them written into the Constitution itself, some developed through centuries of custom – that serve to keep Republicans in power regardless of what the people want or how they vote.
<br><br>At least some of these compromises were made at the 1787 Constitutional Convention so there could be a United States at all. To guarantee small states that their interests wouldn't be swallowed up by larger, more populous states, the Framers of the Constitution created a two-house legislature and guaranteed each state the same number of Senators regardless of its population. This has become more undemocratic over time as the population gap between the largest and the smallest states has steadily grown. In 1787 the largest state, Virginia, had nine times as many people as the smallest, Rhode Island. Today the largest state, California, has 80 times the population of the smallest, Wyoming.
<br><br>The Framers also created the Electoral College, which over time has also taken on the role of boosting the political power of smaller, more ethnically homogeneous states. Since 1992 there have been eight Presidential elections, of which the Democratic nominee has won five and the Republican has won three – but only once, in 2004, did the Republican actually win the popular vote for President. George W. Bush became President in 2000, and Donald Trump in 2016, through carrying enough smaller, more homogeneous states to win majorities in the Electoral College despite losing the popular vote.
<br><br>In 2020 several political commentators noted that Trump’s re-election campaign and the Republicans in general had given up on winning the popular vote and concentrated on gaining the all-important electoral majority. It’s an historical oddity that in all four Presidential elections since the modern two-party system emerged during and after the Civil War in which the popular and electoral vote diverged – Rutherford Hayes vs. Samuel Tilden in 1876, Benjamin Harrison vs. Grover Cleveland in 1888, George W. Bush vs. Al Gore in 2000, and Donald Trump vs. Hillary Clinton in 2016 – it’s always been the Democrat who won the popular vote and the Republican who won the Electoral College and hence the Presidency, never the other way around.
<br><br>One other thing the Framers did that has been ruinous for American democracy in recent years was to give state legislatures virtually absolute control over national, state and local elections. State legislatures determine what districts would-be Congressmembers and state legislators will run in, and also regulate the time, place and manner of conducting elections. If you read the great Constitutional amendments which expanded the franchise – the 15th, which (at least theoretically) guaranteed the voting rights of people of color; the 19th, which guaranteed them to women; the 24th, which abolished poll taxes; and the 27th, which lowered the voting age to 18 – all of them are framed as specific limitations on the otherwise absolute power of state legislatures to regulate who may vote, where and when.
<br><br>One of the most starkly repressive and anti-democratic features of American politics is legislative gerrymandering. The term comes from Elbridge Gerry, a delegate to the U.S. Constitutional Convention, who as governor of Massachusetts in the first decade of the 19th century produced a legislative map designed to keep his party, the Democratic-Republicans, in power permanently. Opponents joked that one of the districts looked like a salamander, and they called it the “Gerrymander.” The term stuck, and since the development of computers and their use in drawing legislative district lines, gerrymandering has become more and more precise.
<br><br>Current political scientists have estimated that only about 10 percent of the 435 House of Representatives districts are truly competitive between the two major parties. In all the others, voter registration margins are so lopsided that most House members are more likely to lose their seats by being “primaried” – usually by someone more extreme in their politics – than losing a general election to the other major party’s candidate. Republicans have generally pushed more extreme gerrymanders than Democrats, so when Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia) says she’s taking extreme-Right positions because they reflect “the will of my voters,” she’s absolutely right – only the “voters” she’s representing are a cadre of extreme Republicans with the same views as hers.
<br><br>To see how effective modern-day gerrymandering is, one need only look at two states that sit side-by-side, Michigan and Wisconsin. In Michigan, a citizens’ initiative took the power to draw legislative districts away from politicians and gave it to an independent commission; in Wisconsin, the state legislature still draws the lines. Besides being right next to each other on the map, Michigan and Wisconsin are both more or less evenly divided between the two major parties and they’re both on the list of six so-called “swing” or “battleground” states that determine Presidential elections.
<br><br>Yet in Michigan, Democrats in 2022 not only re-elected their Democratic governor but gained control of both houses of the state legislature – while in Wisconsin, Democrats only narrowly (by one seat in one house) avoided having two-thirds Republican supermajorities in both houses that would have effectively nullified the power of their re-elected Democratic Governor, Tony Evers. In 2018 65 percent of Wisconsin’s voters chose a Democrat to represent them in the state legislature – but the Republicans had done such a good job of gerrymandering that Democrats got just 45 percent of the legislative seats.
<br><br>In April 2023, Wisconsin voters elected a liberal Democrat, Janet Protasiewicz, to their state’s Supreme Court in May, largely in the hope she’d reverse Wisconsin’s gerrymandered districts and protect women’s choice against a 1931 “zombie law” banning nearly all abortions that became effective once the U.S. Supreme Court reversed <i>Roe</i> v. <i>Wade</i> (<a href="https://apnews.com/article/wisconsin-supreme-court-election-abortion-0d188b5c6f841546f98436c1ab8180fa" target="_blank">https://apnews.com/article/wisconsin-supreme-court-election-abortion-0d188b5c6f841546f98436c1ab8180fa</a>). Legislative Republicans responded by blocking her from taking office for four months by threatening to impeach her.
<br><br>Legislative gerrymandering is only one tool by which Republicans, once they seize control of a state through an election, make sure they never have to give it up. Another tool is voter suppression; instead of trying to convince or persuade voters, modern-day Republicans seek to shrink the electorate so people unlikely to vote for them aren’t able to vote at all. John Roberts, the current Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, has led the Court in a series of decisions that have effectively gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and made it harder for people of color either to vote or to have effective representation in Congress and state legislatures.
<br><br>The latest of these is a November 20, 2023 ruling by the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals – just one rung below the Supreme Court – that would take away the ability of private citizens and advocacy groups to bring lawsuits challenging state laws as discriminatory against voters of color (<a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2023/11/20/federal-court-deals-devastating-blow-to-voting-rights-act-00128069" target="_blank">https://www.politico.com/news/2023/11/20/federal-court-deals-devastating-blow-to-voting-rights-act-00128069</a>). Under this opinion, only the federal government, through the Department of Justice, could bring such suits – which, if the Republicans regain the Presidency in 2024 or thereafter, would mean the effective elimination of any enforcement of the Voting Rights Act.
<br><br><b>The Supreme Court vs. the People and the Constitution</b>
<br><br>The transformation of the United States Supreme Court over the last several decades of Republican Presidents has in itself been a major attack on democracy. What many people don’t realize is that the U.S. Constitution does not specifically grant the Supreme Court the power to invalidate laws by declaring them unconstitutional. That is a power the Court proclaimed itself in 1803, in a case called <i>Marbury</i> v. <i>Madison</i>, in which then-Chief Justice John Marshall said, “It is the duty of the judicial department to decide what the law is.”
<br><br>Since then, the Supreme Court has usually been a Right-wing force in American politics. It reached its height in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when in a series of utterly dreadful rulings it declared minimum-wage laws unconstitutional, effectively banned labor unions, exalted corporations as “people” with the same political and legal rights as actual humans, and ruled that racial segregation was constitutional as long as the facilities for whites and Blacks were “equal” – which, not surprisingly, they never were. In the 1930’s there was a bitter clash between President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the hard-line Right-wing court majority who were throwing out New Deal legislation as fast as Congress could pass it – and when Roosevelt tried to respond by expanding the number of justices on the Court, his critics called it “court-packing” and successfully mobilized to stop him.
<br><br>Things gradually changed because Roosevelt was able to reshape the court through sheer attrition. Because Roosevelt’s presidency lasted over 12 years – longer than any before or since, especially after the 22nd Amendment (passed in 1947, two years after Roosevelt’s death) limited the Presidency to two terms – he and his successors (including Republican Dwight Eisenhower, who appointed two of the most liberal justices in U.S. history, Earl Warren and William Brennan) reshaped the court in a more liberal direction.
<br><br>Even after Warren’s retirement in 1969, the Court for a few more years kept trending liberal, and the justices didn’t always fall on major cases the way you’d expect them to based on the partisan affiliations of the Presidents who appointed them. It’s hard to believe given how the whole concept of women’s bodily autonomy in general and her right to abortion in particular has become one more issue dividing the two major parties, but the majority opinion in <i>Roe</i> v. <i>Wade</i> (1973), which for the next 49 years guaranteed a woman’s right to choose whether to carry a pregnancy to term, was written by Harry Blackmun, appointed by Republican Richard Nixon – and the dissent was written by Byron White, appointed by Democrat John F. Kennedy.
<br><br>Republican leaders saw this as a major problem. A young Right-wing activist named Leonard Leo formed a group called the Federalist Society that would identify law students with solidly Right-wing politics and mentor them as they rose through the legal profession. Leo regarded such relatively liberal or moderate Republican Supreme Court appointees as Warren, Brennan, Blackmun, John Paul Stevens and David Souter as mistakes, and one major mission of his organization was to make sure future Republican Presidents appointed only hard-core Right-wingers not only to the Supreme Court but the federal judiciary as a whole. Today it’s virtually impossible to get a federal judicial appointment from a Republican President unless you’re either a Federalist Society member or have their <i>imprimatur</i>.
<br><br>In previous posts I’ve referred to Leonard Leo as “the most important American you’ve never heard of,” and his role in hand-picking much of America’s judiciary is only part of his matchmaking skill. He’s also become the point of contact between judges, including Supreme Court justices like Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, and super-rich people who want to offer them bribes, including sweetheart loans and expensive trips, to build goodwill at the Court. Even before some of the major scandals involving favors wealthy individuals have done for sitting Supreme Court justices – including lavish vacations and flights on private planes, private-school tuitions and free housing for their relatives, and the like – on May 3, 2023 <i>Financial Times</i> columnist Edward Luce wrote an article called “America’s Anything-Goes Supreme Court” (<a href="https://www.ft.com/content/f2a34faa-9ef7-4e11-9ea1-ef65e6c1d4ae" target="_blank">https://www.ft.com/content/f2a34faa-9ef7-4e11-9ea1-ef65e6c1d4ae</a>) in which he discussed three reasons why the Supreme Court has fallen to its lowest level of approval in the history of public polling on the subject.
<br><br>“The first was the manner in which this court has been filled,” Luce wrote. “After the death of Antonin Scalia in 2016, the Republican Senate kept a vacancy open for the final ten months of Barack Obama’s term on the unheard-of grounds that the next president should decide. Donald Trump then filled the slot with a ‘conservative’ justice, Neil Gorsuch. When the liberal justice, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, died six weeks before the 2020 election, Republicans wrapped up the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett, Trump’s highly ‘conservative’ nominee, in near-record time. The new umpires were only too willing to profit from a politics that rewrote the rules as it went along. As a result, the court now has an unassailable 6-3 ‘conservative’ majority which seems likely to last at least the next two decades.” (I’m putting quotes around the word “conservative” because the current court majority is a group of Right-wing revolutionaries and there’s nothing truly “conservative” about them.)
<br><br>“The second,” Luce added, “is the unpopularity of this court’s decisions — most notably last year’s overturning of <i>Roe</i> v. <i>Wade</i>, the 1973 ruling that enshrined the right to abortion. In addition to flying in the face of public opinion, their move overturned the principle of ‘settled law’ to which each of the justices had attested in their hearings. Last year the court also gave the green light to partisan gerrymandering, which feeds heavily into America’s disaffection with politics. Ditto for another ruling that allows gun owners to carry concealed weapons in public.
<br><br>“The third cause of the court’s plummeting standing,” Luce continued, “is the fact that the justices are not bound by even the flimsiest of ethical codes. Last month, ProPublica, a non-profit investigative group, revealed that Clarence Thomas, the most ‘conservative’ justice, had taken millions of dollars in hospitality from Harlan Crow, a Texan billionaire. This included numerous private flights, superyacht holidays in Indonesia and New Zealand and annual stays at his palatial New York estate. Crow also purchased Thomas’s mother’s house and paid to renovate it. None of this was disclosed.” Recently Chief Justice John Roberts proclaimed a so-called “code of ethics” for himself and his fellow justices – but without any enforcement mechanism, it will make no difference.
<br><br>At the end of his article, Luce compared the current 6-3 Right-wing majority on the U.S. Supreme Court to the Iranian Council of Guardians, the board of Muslim clerics that essentially rules Iran and has veto power over who gets to run for office in Iran’s nominal democracy as well as everything the electeds try to do. “Iran’s Council of Guardians is unelected, regulates women’s bodies, cannot be removed and is impervious to public opinion,” Luce wrote. “They answer to a higher power. The more America’s Supreme Court resembles a theocratic body, the more it imperils itself.” And just as Iran’s Governing Council sees its mission as imposing a theocratic agenda on Iran’s people and stamping out <i>anything</i> that goes contrary to the “will of Allah” as <i>they</i> define it, U.S. Republican judges in general and the U.S. Supreme Court in particular see their mission as advancing the cause of so-called “Christian nationalism” and gradually whittling away at the separation of church and state.
<br><br><b>Republicans’ Determination to Control Women’s Bodies</b>
<br><br>One of the most revealing comments in Edward Luce’s commentary on the current U.S. Supreme Court is his point that the Court, like Iran’s Council of Guardians, “regulates women’s bodies.” Regulating women’s bodies, and in particular re-enslaving them to their wombs so they can’t have sex without the risk of becoming pregnant, is one of the main priorities of both the Republican Party and America’s radical Right in general.
<br><br>And they’re pursuing this goal despite overwhelming evidence that almost 60 percent of Americans are pro-choice. This is borne out not only by opinion polls but actual election results. In 2022 abortion rights were directly on the ballot in six states – California, Michigan, Vermont, Kentucky, Montana and Kansas – and in all six the pro-choice position won. California, Michigan and Vermont voters amended their states’ constitutions to guarantee abortion rights. Kentucky and Kansas voters rejected attempts by anti-abortion activists to write language in their states’ constitutions to ban abortion. Montana voters rejected a measure that would have called for prosecuting doctors and nurses who failed to provide care for a fetus that survived a late-term abortion.
<br><br>With current polls showing Donald Trump leading Joe Biden in five of the six so-called “battleground states” – Arizona, Nevada, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia – that will effectively determine the next Presidential election, Democrats are panicking and working to put abortion rights on the ballot in those states in hopes of driving voter turnout for their party. But a recent attempt to do that in Nevada was just thrown out by judge James T. Russell before they could even collect signatures to get it on the ballot (<a href="https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/4325295-judge-rejects-nevada-attempt-enshrine-abortion-ballot/" target="_blank">https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/4325295-judge-rejects-nevada-attempt-enshrine-abortion-ballot/</a>).
<br><br>The lengths to which Republicans will go to pursue their anti-choice agenda in spite of the clear will of the American people were amply displayed this year in Ohio. In order to keep pro-choice activists from writing reproductive choice protections into the Ohio constitution, the Republican-controlled Ohio legislature first put on the ballot in August a measure to change the threshold for amending the state constitution from a simple majority to 60 percent – not coincidentally, just above the 55 to 57 percent of Ohio voters that were supporting it in polls. The legislature put this on the ballot despite their previous vote to get rid of midsummer special elections in odd-numbered years because so few people vote in them. Ohio’s pro-choice activists mobilized voters in that state to reject that amendment, which they did by a 14-percent margin (<a href="https://ohiocapitaljournal.com/2023/08/08/ohios-issue-1-goes-down-to-defeat/" target="_blank">https://ohiocapitaljournal.com/2023/08/08/ohios-issue-1-goes-down-to-defeat/</a>).
<br><br>In November 2023 Ohio voters went on to pass the measure protecting abortion rights in the state constitution by a similarly lopsided margin, with 56.62 percent voting yes and 43.38 percent voting no (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/November_2023_Ohio_Issue_1_" target="_blank">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/November_2023_Ohio_Issue_1_</a>). This vote came despite lots of misleading campaigning against it, including ballot language from the Ohio Secretary of State’s office that described what the measure would do in highly partisan and propagandistic terms – Secretary Frank LaRose said it “would always allow an unborn child to be aborted at any stage of pregnancy regardless of viability,” which it wouldn’t – and campaign arguments from the anti-choice side saying it would allow for “abortions after birth,” which don’t exist.
<br><br>But losing twice at the ballot box didn’t stop the Ohio legislature from looking for ways to ban abortion in the state despite the public vote (<a href="https://ohiocapitaljournal.com/2023/11/13/some-ohio-gop-lawmakers-attempting-to-undermine-democratic-process-after-voters-protect-abortion/" target="_blank">https://ohiocapitaljournal.com/2023/11/13/some-ohio-gop-lawmakers-attempting-to-undermine-democratic-process-after-voters-protect-abortion/</a>). A quartet of Right-wing extremists in the Ohio legislature – Jennifer Gross (R-West Chester), Bill Dean (R-Xenia), Melanie Miller (R-Ashland) and Beth Lear (R-Galena) – are pushing a bill to strip Ohio’s state courts of the ability to enforce the pro-choice constitutional amendment. “The Ohio General Assembly shall have the exclusive authority over implementing Ohio Issue 1 [the pro-choice amendment],” the draft legislation says. “All jurisdiction is hereby withdrawn from and denied to the Courts of Common Pleas and all other courts of the State of Ohio.” The bill also threatens impeachment against any judge who tries to enforce Issue 1. The four authors explained in a press release on the official Ohio Republican legislators’ Web site that the bill was needed to block “mischief by pro-abortion courts.”
<br><br>Legal experts in Ohio argue that what Gross, Dean, Miller and Lear are trying to do is itself unconstitutional. “Whatever authority the legislature might have to tinker with the jurisdiction of the state courts, it cannot eviscerate a rights-granting provision of the state constitution,” said Case Western Reserve University law professor Jonathan Entin. Constitutional law expert Steven Steinglas called the bill “ridiculous,” and added, “I know we’re talking respectfully about the Ohio General Assembly, but saner minds will, I am sure, prevail.” But even if the bill never gets to be law, it’s still a vivid illustration of the visceral contempt modern-day Republicans have for the rule of law and the democratic principle.
<br><br><b>Donald Trump and His Fascist Re-Election Agenda</b>
<br><br>The campaign for the 2024 Republican Presidential nomination has been totally dominated by former President Donald Trump. The latest polls show him with over 60 percent support from Republican voters, and ironically his various legal troubles – including four indictments in three jurisdictions charging him with a total of 91 felonies – have only boosted his support in his own party. What’s more, legislative fatigue, distrust and a general sense that the 81-year-old Joe Biden is too old for the Presidency (even though Trump is just three years younger!) have kept the general-election polling between Biden and Trump dead even, with Trump (as mentioned above) leading in five of the six “battleground states” that will probably determine who the next President is.
<br><br>During the 2016 campaign I compared Donald Trump to Antaeus, the giant in Greek mythology. Antaeus was the son of the sea god Poseidon and the earth goddess Gaia, and he could not be defeated in battle because every time an attacker knocked him down, Gaia would replenish his strength and he would get up again stronger than before. Antaeus was finally defeated and killed by Herakles – or, to use his more famous Roman name, Hercules – who, on the advice of the goddess Athena, lifted Antaeus in the air with one hand while knifing him with the other to make sure Antaeus couldn’t touch the earth and thereby regain the strength to fight off and kill Herakles.
<br><br>Throughout his career as a businessperson and a politician, Trump has similarly withstood all sorts of scandals that would have been career-ending for any other public figure. He survived in 1991, when the people who’d lent him money to build his failing Atlantic City casinos were about to force him into bankruptcy when they realized the casinos would do better with Trump’s name on them than without it. They cut a deal with him whereby the casinos would still bear the Trump brand but he wouldn’t be allowed to have any role in running them – and this revolutionized Trump’s business model because he realized he could make developers pay through the nose to license Trump’s name and he could make money off their projects without the bothersome necessity of actually building or running anything.
<br><br>During his 2016 campaign he called the media “enemies of the people,” mocked a disabled reporter who covered him on the campaign trail, called on his rally audiences to beat up hecklers (and said he’d pay for their legal defense if they were arrested), said Fox News reporter Megyn Kelly “had blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever” when she asked him a tough question about his abusive comments about women, mocked U.S. Senator John McCain (R-Arizona) and said, “He wasn’t a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.” All these incidents led to Trump <i>rising</i> in the polls, and even the October 2016 revelation that in a taped conversation with <i>Access Hollywood</i> host Billy Bush that he could sexually assault women and “they let you do it, because when you’re a star, you can do anything” didn’t stop Trump’s seemingly unstoppable win in November.
<br><br>Trump’s next Antaeus-like comeback from seeming defeat happened when he lost his 2020 re-election bid to Joe Biden – or at least that’s what the reality-based world said happened. Trump immediately responded with a series of press conferences claiming that he had really won the election and it had been “stollen” from him (that spelling, with two “l”’s, is the one he routinely uses on his own “Truth Social” media site) – and in the classic manner of Naxi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels and his philosophy of the “Big Lie,” repeated it over and over until nearly all U.S. Republican voters believed it.
<br><br>Trump not only urged his followers to come to Washington on January 6, 2021 – the date on which the U.S. Congress was supposed to meet and perform the “ministerial” (government-speak for actions with a predetermined outcome) function of certifying Biden’s victory – he called them to a rally on the Ellipse in D.C. and urged them to march on the Capitol to stop the certification of Biden’s win. Trump said he would join the march personally – I’ve long suspected he had Benito Mussolini’s 1922 March on Rome as his model – and though he didn’t because the U.S. Secret Service said it would be too risky and wouldn’t let him, the riot he arguably provoked with his incendiary speech lasted three hours (during which Trump refused the requests of his own staff, including his adult children, to do something to stop it) and led to the deaths of five people.
<br><br>Later evidence developed by the House of Representatives select committee appointed to investigate the riot, and the special prosecutor U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland picked to handle an official Justice Department probe, made it clear that Trump intended to foment a <i>coup d’état</i> to stay in office illegally despite his election defeat. And most of his party sided with him: 151 Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives – three-fourths of the party’s delegation – voted with Trump and refused to certify the election. Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy, Republican leaders in the Senate and House, respectively, initially attacked Trump for sparking the riot but quickly changed their tunes once they learned that Republican base voters were with Trump no matter what. Three weeks after the riot, McCarthy went to Trump’s golf resort at Mar-a-Lago, Florida and went through a self-abasing ceremony many people compared to the “taking the knee” ritual in the TV miniseries <i>Game of Thrones</i>.
<br><br>Since then, Trump has not only declared his candidacy to retake the Presidency in 2024 but has staked out a frankly authoritarian and anti-democratic platform. Variously called “Agenda47” (<a href="https://www.donaldjtrump.com/agenda47" target="_blank">https://www.donaldjtrump.com/agenda47</a>) and “Project 2025” (<a href="https://apnews.com/article/election-2024-conservatives-trump-heritage-857eb794e505f1c6710eb03fd5b58981" target="_blank">https://apnews.com/article/election-2024-conservatives-trump-heritage-857eb794e505f1c6710eb03fd5b58981</a>), the essence of the plan is to replace all career civil servants who won’t toe Trump’s line with so-called “loyalists” loyal only to Donald Trump. Adolf Hitler and the Nazis had the same idea; they called it the “<i>Führerprinzip</i>” (“leader principle”). The idea both Hitler and Trump had was that their will would be the ultimate legal authority. As I noted when Trump fired FBI director James Comey in 2017 after Comey refused to pledge “loyalty” to Trump, the American soldiers who fought in World War II had sworn an oath to preserve and protect the U.S. Constitution. The Germans they were fighting against had sworn a personal oath to Hitler.
<br><br>Trump already started this process during his first term when in October 2020 he issued an executive order with the seemingly innocuous title “Schedule F.” As Jonathan Swan reported on Axios.com July 22, 2022 (<a href="https://www.axios.com/2022/07/22/trump-2025-radical-plan-second-term?fbclid=IwAR0H-mDvYLnxMAb5N2zIQkU2zg87EsaGSE1nnMxiSs06Uj_4fWLSwiTwuL8" target="_blank">https://www.axios.com/2022/07/22/trump-2025-radical-plan-second-term?fbclid=IwAR0H-mDvYLnxMAb5N2zIQkU2zg87EsaGSE1nnMxiSs06Uj_4fWLSwiTwuL8</a>), “Tens of thousands of civil servants who serve in roles deemed to have some influence over policy would be reassigned as ‘Schedule F’ employees. Upon reassignment, they would lose their employment protections. … An initial estimate by the Trump official who came up with Schedule F found it could apply to as many as 50,000 federal workers — a fraction of a workforce of more than 2 million, but a segment with a profound role in shaping American life. Trump, in theory, could fire tens of thousands of career government officials with no recourse for appeals. He could replace them with people he believes are more loyal to him and to his ‘America First’ agenda.”
<br><br>“Schedule F” fell through the media cracks when the election and Trump’s increasingly bizarre contesting of the results dominated news coverage during late 2022. Joe Biden rescinded the “Schedule F” executive order just two days after taking office, but Trump has made it clear that if he becomes President again in 2025 he will immediately reinstitute it and start clearing out the civil-service bureaucrats whom he believes obstructed his agenda the first time around.
<br><br>Trump has also made no secret of his plan to weaponize the U.S. Department of Justice and use it as a tool to prosecute his political “enemies” whether they’ve done anything criminal or not. He’s claimed this is revenge against Biden for having allegedly weaponized the Justice Department against him, but there’s plenty of evidence that Trump has always believed U.S. Presidents should have the power to order the prosecution of political opponents and anyone else they don’t like. He said so himself in a remarkable interview with Right-wing talk radio host Larry O’Connor on WMAL-FM November 2, 2017:
<br><br><i>“[T]he saddest thing is, because I’m the President of the United States, I am not supposed to be involved with the Justice Department. I’m not supposed to be involved with the FBI. I’m not supposed to be doing the kinds of things I would love to be doing. And I am very frustrated by it. … [A]s a President, you are not supposed to be involved in that process. But hopefully they are doing something, and at some point maybe we’re going to all have it out.”</i>
<br><br>Indeed, Trump and his last Senate-confirmed Attorney General, William Barr, had a falling-out over precisely this question. In October 2020 Trump called Barr into his office and demanded that Barr get indictments against Joe Biden, former President Barack Obama and his 2016 general election opponent, Hillary Clinton. Trump seemed to think that just indicting these people on the eve of the 2020 election would be such a blow to the Democratic Party that he would be guaranteed to win re-election. Barr tried to explain to Trump that the Justice Department can’t just go ahead and indict people without probable cause that they’ve committed actual crimes. Trump was unpersuaded, and within a month he’d ordered Barr to “resign.”
<br><br>Robert Kagan just published an op-ed in the <i>Washington Post</i> stating flat-out that Trump has already pledged to pursue a dictatorial agenda if he’s returned to the Presidency in 2024. Trump has promised, Kagan wrote, “to use the powers of his office to persecute anyone who dares challenge him.” The battlefield of American politics is already littered with the scalps of Republican elected officials who dared to take on Trump and try to hold him to account, including Justin Amash, Bob Corker, Jeff Flake, Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger and, most recently, Mitt Romney. With the aid of a fanatically devoted base, Trump has essentially taken over the Republican Party and turned it into a cult of personality.
<br><br>And a recent YouTube video from the British newspaper <i>The Guardian</i> (<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hY68idKVKx0" target="_blank">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hY68idKVKx0</a>) shows just how fanatical the Trump base is. It was filmed in South Carolina and showed that, with just a handful of exceptions, the Republican Party in that state is unshakably devoted to Trump. The low point of that YouTube video comes when a Black woman compares Trump to Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela as a political martyr. That video also features Congressmember Marjorie Taylor Greene demanding that all other Republican candidates for the Presidency drop out at once and endorse Trump.
<br><br>Trump’s example has inspired Republicans up and down the ballot to copy his methods and swear fealty to his goals (whatever they are). Just as the Nazis who gained seats in the German legislature before Hitler’s total takeover in January 1933 worked industriously to sabotage any efforts to solve Germany’s economic problems because Hitler and the Nazis knew they did best when the German economy was at its worst, Trump and his colleagues in the Republican clown car currently running the House of Representatives are, I’m sure, consciously aware that the more they can do to make the U.S. government and democracy as a whole look unworkable, the better Trump will do in 2024.
<br><br>U.S. Congressmember Chip Roy (R-Texas), a member of the so-called “House Freedom Caucus,” recently took the floor to complain that the House Republicans have not done anything to convince American voters that they deserve to retain their majority. But the overall context of his remarks made clear that the biggest thing he wants House Republicans to do is shut down the government to force President Biden and the still Democratic-controlled Senate to agree to massive cuts in government spending. These cuts will fulfill the Republicans’ long-term ideological mission to eliminate what’s left of the “social safety net” and take money away from most Americans to give it to the super-rich.
<br><br>The Republicans, under Donald Trump’s leadership, are pursuing an agenda that would never win majority support from the American people in a free and fair election. So they’re rewriting election laws in state after state to make sure we never have one again. Among the major policy goals of the current Republican Party is a nationwide ban on abortion, allowing just about anybody to buy almost any sort of gun they want and carry it with them everywhere they go, ending all programs to fight human-caused climate change, and simultaneously exalt corporate power while targeting corporations that oppose the anti-women, anti-Queer Republican “faith-based” policy agenda.
<br><br>As Trump continues his campaign to win back the Presidency in 2024, his rhetoric and the reality of his proposals are both sounding ever more like Hitler, Mussolini and the other original fascists. At a Veterans’ Day speech in New Hampshire (<a href="https://www.npr.org/2023/11/17/1213746885/trump-vermin-hitler-immigration-authoritarian-republican-primary" target="_blank">https://www.npr.org/2023/11/17/1213746885/trump-vermin-hitler-immigration-authoritarian-republican-primary</a>), Trump said, “We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.” A few brave news commentators noted that the reference to perceived political enemies as “vermin” was also rhetoric Hitler used to attack the Jews and justify his program to exterminate them all.
<br><br>More ominous is Trump’s repeated promises to invoke the Insurrection Act, which allows the President to order the U.S. military to maintain “order” under certain circumstances. The Act reads, “Whenever the President considers that unlawful obstructions, combinations, or assemblages, or rebellion against the authority of the United States, make it impracticable to enforce the laws of the United States in any State by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings, he may call into Federal service such of the militia of any State, and use such of the armed forces, as he considers necessary to enforce those laws or to suppress the rebellion.” Trump wanted to invoke this as part of his illegal plot to stay in power even after he lost the 2020 election, and if returned to the Presidency he would almost certainly use the Insurrection Act to send U.S. soldiers into American cities and towns to suppress demonstrations against him.
<br><br>American democracy is pretty well doomed if Donald Trump regains the Presidency in 2024 and the Republicans take back the Senate and keep the House. Their leadership models are authoritarians like Vladimir Putin in Russia, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, Narendra Modi in India, Giorgia Meloni in Italy, Geert Wilders in The Netherlands and Javier Milei in Argentina. All of them won power by proclaiming themselves as friends of “the people” against unspecified sinister “elites” who were keeping them down – the recipe Trump followed to perfection in his rise to power and the Presidency in the U.S. As Robert Kagan wrote in his <i>Washington Post</i> article, “In just a few years, we have gone from being relatively secure in our democracy to being a few short steps, and a matter of months, away from the possibility of dictatorship.”mgconlanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09328563476025164608noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20445321.post-21727781856142649492023-11-08T17:21:00.001-08:002023-11-08T18:29:45.785-08:00PBS's "Frontline" Re-Runs 2002 Show About Israel and Palestine in Wake of Hamas's Attack and Israel's Genocidal Response<br><b>by Mark Gabrish Conlan</b> • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for <i>Zenger's Newsmagazine</i> • All rights reserved
<br><br>Last night (Tuesday, November 7) the PBS show <i>Frontline</i> re-ran a show about Israel and Palestine from June 27, 2002 called “Shattered Dreams: The Road from Oslo.” Obviously the re-run was occasioned by the current violence between Israelis and Palestinians kicked off by the reprehensible October 7 attacks on Israeli civilians, including the murder of 1,400 Israelis and the kidnapping of 240 as hostages, who were forcibly taken to Gaza and are being held there now, by fighters from the terrorist group Hamas. The show was produced and directed by Dan Setton and Tor Ben Mayor, and featured interviews with the late Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat and Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu – who first won election in 1996, served until 1999 and has been in and out of the prime ministership ever since – along with diplomats on both the Israeli and Palestinian side who desperately tried to negotiate an agreement for peace in historic Palestine. U.S. President Bill Clinton made Middle East peace a major goal of his administration, including sponsoring the Oslo agreements in 1993 that supposedly set up a framework for an ultimate resolution. Key to the Oslo accords was the so-called “two-state solution” in which Israel would agree to the creation of an independent Palestine in the West Bank and Gaza, and the two countries would live together side by side as neighbors. Clinton was frantically leading or hosting negotiations to achieve that end until the end of his presidency in early 2001 at a variety of venues, including Sharm-al-Shaikh, Egypt; Wye, Maryland; and ultimately Stockholm, Sweden.
<br><br>When I was still publishing the print edition of <i>Zenger’s Newsmagazine</i> I riffed off the phrase “the heckler’s veto” – the ability of organized (or not-so-organized) mobs to silence speakers they don’t like by disrupting their events – and coined the phrase “the terrorists’ veto” to indicate the ability of terror groups in highly fraught situations like the ongoing hostility between Israel and Palestine to sabotage attempts at a peaceful resolution by staging well-timed attacks to sow mistrust on the other side. Time and time again, both Israelis and Palestinians have used “the terrorists’ veto” to stoke the fires of the conflict and keep any peaceful solution from even being negotiated, much less implemented. The downward spiral began, at least according to this program, when Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli prime minister who had helped negotiate the Oslo accords, was killed by a Right-wing Jew in 1995, two years after the agreement. Rabin’s funeral drew leaders of the Arab world, some of whom had never set foot in Israel until then. King Hussein of Jordan said of Rabin, “You lived as a soldier, you died as a soldier for peace. And I believe it is time for all of us to come out openly and to speak our piece.” President Clinton said, “Your prime minister was a martyr for peace, but he was a victim of hate.” Palestinian Authority President Yasir Arafat didn’t attend Rabin’s funeral – he stayed home and watched it on TV for what he said were “security reasons” – but he told <i>Frontline</i>, “It was very, very difficult and painful for me personally. But the most important thing for the Palestinians and for the Israelis and for the whole Middle East area is to return back to protect the peace of the brave which I had signed with my partner, Rabin, and to live together as we had decided.” But the negotiations faced opposition from both hard-line Jews in Israel and Palestinian militants in organizations like Hezbollah in the north (on Israel’s border with Lebanon) and Hamas in the south (on Israel’s border with Egypt).
<br><br>According to this documentary, written by Setton and Mayor and narrated by long-term <i>Frontline</i> commentator Will Lyman, Hamas had “gained power among Palestinians by controlling the mosques and providing food and education to the poor.” The show featured a chilling clip of a Hamas leader haranguing a crowd and saying, “We will invade Palestine and drive out the Zionists, the oppressors, the rapists. And the only way is the way of the gun! This is the only way! This is the only way!” As called for in the Oslo agreements, Israel gradually withdrew from the largest population centers in the West Bank, and on August 15, 2005 – three years after this documentary premiered – Israel totally pulled out of Gaza. Unfortunately for the Palestinians, Israel maintained a security infrastructure on their border with Gaza and controlled Gazans’ access to food and energy – and they used that power arbitrarily, periodically cutting off Gazans’ ability to obtain the necessities of life. Gaza has since been described as “the world’s largest open-air prison,” and the Israeli jailers have been relentless in their pressure on the territory. Ironically, the Israeli government’s policy to wall off Gaza and keep its citizens from having reliable access to basic needs and also the education they would need to better themselves uncannily resembles the way European governments from the Middle Ages to the end of the 19th century generally oppressed their Jewish populations. It’s amazing, given the deep-seated mistrust of both Israelis and Palestinians for each other, that they came as close as they did to an agreement despite the ins and outs of politics in both Israel and Palestine. In 1996 Israeli secret agents blew up Yehiya Ayash, Hamas’s chief bomb-maker, and triggered a visceral response among Palestinians who saw Ayash as a shaheed – a holy martyr – and vowed revenge. Three weeks later, at least three suicide bombers from Hamas launched attacks inside Jerusalem, killing 46 and wounding hundreds more, followed by another attack in Tel Aviv that killed 17 people, all 17 years old or younger. This led to a nosedive in popularity for Rabin’s successor as Israeli prime minister, Shimon Peres, just as he was facing a new election. “They called me traitor,” Peres told <i>Frontline</i>. “They called me killer or murderer.”
<br><br>In retaliation, Israel orders a counterattack that mistakenly targets a United Nations compound. Israeli Arabs, who made up 20 percent of Israel’s voting population at the time, call for a boycott of the upcoming election – and Netanyahu beats Peres, albeit barely. Netanyahu’s political “brand” is opposition to the peace process he is now obliged to carry out. He told <i>Frontline</i>, “I thought it was important to lay down the ground rules so Arafat would know exactly where I was coming from. Two-thirds of the public supported Oslo at the time. The international community supported it. They really thought that Arafat meant peace. I didn't think that he meant peace. And I said I would honor it under two conditions: One, that Arafat honor it. The second was that I would reduce the dangers in Oslo, reduce the withdrawals, reduce the price that Israel would have to pay.” Among the issues on which Netanyahu took a harder line than Rabin or Peres was the building of new Jewish settlements in the West Bank – thereby eating up more and more of the land that was supposed to constitute the eventual Palestinian state – and the “right of return” by which Palestinian families demanded to be re-admitted to the territories within Israel they’d been forced out of by the Nakba, the driving out of Palestinian Arabs at gunpoint in the late 1940’s when the state of Israel was created in the first place. The “right of return” is a big non-starter for most Jewish Israelis because it would mean the end of Israel’s status as a “Jewish state” if millions of Arabs were permitted to return there, where they could conceivably vote the Jews out of power the way Black South Africans did to whites after the fall of <i>apartheid</i>. Since 2002 the political rhetoric inside Israel about what to do with the Palestinians has become even more uncompromising.
<br><br>In a recent post to the <i>New Yorker</i>’s Web site (<a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-human-rights/inside-the-israeli-crackdown-on-speech" target="_blank">https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-human-rights/inside-the-israeli-crackdown-on-speech</a>) journalist Masha Gessen tells stories about Israeli Jews who have faced violence or the threat of violence from fellow Jews for allegedly not being militant enough in their attitudes towards Hamas. Jewish Israeli journalist Israel Frey told Gessen he was nearly lynched by a mob outside his home a week after Hamas’s October 7 attacks, and though he called the police, the cops who came clearly indicated that their sympathies lay with his attackers. “The police protected my life only in the sense that they prevented people from entering the building, and escorted me out,” Frey said. “I don’t know when I’ll be able to go home, if I can go home at all.” Israeli officials in 2023 denounced United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres when he said at a U.N. Security Council meeting, “It is important to also recognize the attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum. The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation. They have seen their land steadily devoured by settlements and plagued by violence; their economy stifled; their people displaced and their homes demolished. Their hopes for a political solution to their plight have been vanishing,” Israeli officials canceled their scheduled meetings with Guterres and called for his resignation. “On October 17th, Kobi Shabtai, the head of Israeli police, announced that he would not allow any demonstrations against the war,” Gessen reported. She quoted Shabtai as saying, “Anyone who wishes to identify with Gaza, is welcome to — I will put him on the buses that are heading there now.”
<br><br>It’s become clear over the last month that Israel has launched a genocidal assault on the entire population of Gaza – and is using the Hamas attacks as a pretext. Mutual trust and peace between Israelis and Palestinians seems farther away than ever – which adds poignance to the sad commentary of Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat at the end of the 2002 <i>Frontline</i> show: “I know Palestinians and Israelis can make peace. If it's not next year, if it's not in 10 years, the day will come when Palestinians and Israelis will build on what I, my colleagues and the Israelis achieved in the negotiations of permanent status. I don't think they will ever re-invent the wheel. And the difference between this moment until the moment of reaching an agreement will be how many names — Palestinians and Israelis — will be added to the lists of death and agony. At the end of the day, there will be peace.”mgconlanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09328563476025164608noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20445321.post-44949664584580409492023-11-01T16:42:00.004-07:002023-11-01T16:50:04.173-07:00PBS "Frontline" Show Explores Mitch McConnell's Legacy in Remaking America's Courts in His Right-Wing Image<br><b>by Mark Gabrish Conlan</b> • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for <i>Zenger's Newsmagazine</i> • All rights reserved
<br><br>Last night (Tuesday, October 31) I watched a PBS <i>Frontline</i> show called “McConnell, the G.O.P. and the Courts,” dealing with U.S. Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) and his successful fight to remake the U.S. judiciary – not just the Supreme Court but the whole ball of wax, from the lowliest district courts on up to the Supremes – in a direction writers Michael Kirk (who also directed) and Mike Wiser persisted in calling “conservative” even though it’s nothing of the sort. It’s actually a movement of Right-wing revolutionaries bound and determined to remake America in their own image, at once shrinking government when it comes to regulating the economy in general and corporations in particular and vastly <i>increasing</i> the size and scope of government in terms of its power over individual’s private lives, especially how they can have sex, with whom, under what circumstances and how they may deal with the consequences therefrom, both good and bad. Kirk and Wiser portrayed McConnell as a man deeply shaped by a childhood disability; he contracted polio at 2 and spent the next few years almost completely confined to his bedroom, with his mom as his caregiver. When he finally emerged from his medical cocoon and started going to school like the other kids, McConnell soon gravitated to student politics, running for campus president in his high school – since his dad was an Army officer, the family moved a lot and it wasn’t until his freshman year in high school that the McConnells settled in Louisville, Kentucky – and winning after he put together a list of endorsers that included the most popular people on campus. Much of the show is narrated by McConnell himself via excerpts from his autobiography, <i>The Long Game</i> (itself a good description of his political strategy!), and the audiobook version of it he read himself. In it he described the exhilaration he felt on his election as high-school student council president and how he decided from that point he would make electoral politics his life’s work. After a stint in President Gerald Ford’s Department of Justice, where he served alongside such leading lights of the Right-wing judicial movement as Antonin Scalia and Robert Bork, McConnell returned home and mounted his first campaign for professional elective office when he ran for judge/executive of Jefferson County, Kentucky (which contains Louisville), the top leadership position in county government.
<br><br>At the time McConnell was still seen as a moderate Republican – in 1964 he’d co-authored an op-ed in the <i>Louisville Courier-Journal</i> endorsing the proposed Civil Rights Act and criticizing fellow Republicans who opposed it, including Barry Goldwater, the GOP’s 1964 Presidential nominee, who as a Senator from Arizona had voted against it. He got the <i>Courier-Journal</i>’s endorsement at a time when the paper almost never endorsed Republicans. According to Keith Runyon, who was then on the <i>Courier-Journal</i>’s editorial board, “He came into the editorial board room at the <i>Courier-Journal</i>, where I worked, for his endorsement interview, and he sat down and he answered our questions. He came off as being enlightened, thoroughly honest. And he did a very, very good job in his interview.” After two terms as judge/executive, McConnell decided to run for U.S. Senate in 1984 against two-term Democratic incumbent Dee Huddleston. McConnell brought in Roger Ailes, already legendary for having run Richard Nixon’s TV campaign for U.S. President in 1968 and ultimately the founding news director of Fox News, to run his campaign. Ailes demanded that McConnell authorize a scorched-earth negative campaign against Huddleson, including a famous TV commercial showing a bloodhound allegedly trying to track down Huddleston for doing paid speaking engagements instead of showing up at the Senate for key votes. McConnell squeaked through by 5,000 votes in a year in which Ronald Reagan won 49 states in his re-election bid and carried Kentucky by 300,000 votes. After his Senate campaign, McConnell had breakfast with his old friend Keith Runyon from the <i>Louisville Courier-Journal</i> and, according to Runyon, “[H]e said, ‘Keith, I don’t know that you all will ever endorse me again.’ And I said, ‘Well, why is that?’ He said, ‘Because I’m going to have to become much more conservative to be re-elected, much more conservative than you all are.’ And so he became.”
<br><br>The next key step in McConnell’s political devolution came in 1987, when Reagan nominated McConnell’s old Justice Department colleague Robert Bork to an open seat on the U.S. Supreme Court. Bork had accumulated a long record of stating openly his opposition to abortion, women’s rights in general, and Queer rights. As an appeals court justice he’d written an opinion upholding the constitutionality of anti-Queer sodomy laws that the U.S. Supreme Court later upheld. Liberal and progressive groups mounted a full-court press, lobbying people to call their Senators and demand that Bork not be confirmed to the Supreme Court, and the tactic worked – Bork’s confirmation was voted down 42 to 58. But McConnell left the controversy over Bork literally vowing revenge and saying the Democrats’ victory over Bork would come back to haunt them. It did. The documentary shows footage of McConnell declaiming about the Bork defeat, “And so to Robert Bork, you happen to be the one who set the new Senate standard that will be applied, in my judgement, by a majority of the Senate prospectively. Unfortunately, it got set over your dead body, so to speak, politically. … We’re going to do it when we want to. And when we want to is going to be when the president, whoever he may be, sends up somebody we don’t like.” McConnell got his revenge when Antonin Scalia, yet another former colleague of his from Gerald Ford’s Justice Department, died suddenly in February 2016. Almost immediately, McConnell, then the Senate’s majority leader, announced that he would personally block any attempt by Democratic President Barack Obama to appoint a successor to Scalia, on the ground that there would be a Presidential election in nine months and the voters should therefore get to decide who would get to fill that vacancy on the Court. <i>New York Times</i> reporter Peter Baker recalled, “Mitch McConnell doesn’t even wait for the day to end after Antonin Scalia dies to put out a statement saying, in effect, we’re not going to let President Obama replace him. That it’s an election year, we’re going to wait for the next president to nominate somebody.”
<br><br>In late March, Obama went ahead and nominated then-Appeals Court judge Merrick Garland to fill Scalia’s seat – but McConnell was able to make sure the Senate, with a Republican majority, wouldn’t even meet with Garland, much less consider him. McConnell said bluntly, “The right-of-center world, it does not want this vacancy filled by this president. … [W]e're not giving a lifetime appointment to this president on the way out the door to change the Supreme Court for the next 25 or 30 years.” According to PBS Supreme Court reporter Nina Totenberg, when one Republican Senator – Jerry Moran (R-Kansas) – threatened to break ranks and meet with Garland, McConnell immediately said if he did, McConnell would personally recruit an opponent to run against Moran in the Republican primary. Moran caved. “It was outrageous at the time, and it’s still outrageous,” said <i>Washington Post</i> columnist Eugene Robinson. “They kept the seat open for nearly a year, refusing to give Merrick Garland even a hearing, even the courtesy of being rejected. But he did it. He had the power to do it, and so he did.” When Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton in the 2016 Presidential election, McConnell got his Right-wing replacement for Scalia – Neil Gorsuch, son of President Reagan’s controversial appointee to head the Environmental Protection Agency, Anne Gorsuch. Trump would go on to make two more Supreme Court appointments – Brett Kavanugh, who replaced Anthony Kennedy (the judge Reagan had appointed after the Bork defeat, who was mostly a solid Right-wing vote but differed with the Right on two major issues, juvenile justice and Queer rights: it was Kennedy who wrote the opinions invalidating sodomy laws and bans on same-sex marriage); and Amy Coney Barrett, who replaced liberal icon Ruth Bader Ginsburg when she died of cancer less than two months before the 2020 election. McConnell used his power as Senate leader to rush through Barrett’s confirmation – and when he was confronted about his obvious hypocrisy in denying a Democratic President in his last year in office the chance to replace a Republican Justice, while rushing through a Republican appointee just two months before a Presidential election, McConnell said, “I can only repeat that we have an obligation under the Constitution, should we choose to take advantage of it, to fill the vacancy, and I assure you that’s very likely to happen.” According to former McConnell chief of staff Josh Holmes, McConnell not only told Trump to rush through an appointment to replace Ginsburg, he said to Trump that Barrett – a long-standing anti-abortion, anti-choice activist – should be the nominee. Barrett was confirmed as Senate Democrats watched helplessly while McConnell steamrollered the nomination.
<br><br>The <i>Frontline</i> show also detailed McConnell’s other compromises to stay in Trump’s good graces, including going along with Trump’s racist comments about Mexican and Muslim immigrants and his statement that there were “very good people – on both sides” in the 2017 demonstrations in Charlottesville, Virginia, in which neo-Nazi protesters and anti-racist counter-protesters clashed in the streets, violence ensued and one person was deliberately run over by a racist driving a Dodge Challenger (an iconic vehicle for the racist Right since the TV show <i>The Dukes of Hazzard,</i> whose central characters drove a Dodge Challenger painted to look like the Confederate flag). According to Kirk and Wiser, McConnell never believed in President Trump’s claims that the 2020 election had been “stolen” from him (or “stollen,” as Trump has been spelling it in his recent Truth Social posts), and he was aghast at the attack on the Capitol by Trump supporters on January 6, 2021. The night of January 6, with the official Congressional certification of Joe Biden’s victory over Trump delayed for several hours by the mob’s onslaught, McConnell said, “We’re not going to let these people keep us from finishing our business, so we need you to get the building cleared, give us the O.K. so we can go back in session and finish up the people’s business as soon as possible.” McConnell’s original reaction to the second impeachment of President Trump over his role in allegedly inciting the January 6, 2021 riot was supposedly to tell two advisors that if what Trump had done wasn’t an impeachable offense, he didn’t know what was. But when push came to shove he voted to acquit Trump, and though there were 57 Senate votes to convict Trump, the Constitution requires a two-thirds vote to convict, and they were 10 short. “He is not the idealistic young man he had been back at home,” Right-wing columnist Mona Charen told <i>Frontline</i>. “Being in power had changed him. He had become too in love with power, and so he was willing to make too many compromises in the name of holding onto power.”
<br><br>The <i>Frontline</i> documentary began and ended with clips of the two recent press appearances in which McConnell literally froze up and found himself unable to talk, and the second one came – ironically enough – in a press conference just as McConnell was being asked whether he would run for re-election to an eighth term in 2026. This led me to ponder the bizarre gerontocracy American government has become; I remember joking that for all the talk about the 2020 Democratic Presidential field having an unprecedented range of people of all ages, genders and colors, the final choice was between two seventy-something white men, Donald Trump and Joe Biden (three if you count Bernie Sanders, Biden’s last-standing opponent for the nomination). I remember thinking when Barack Obama won the 2008 Presidential election that I had passed an important generational milestone – finally there was a President younger than me – but there hasn’t been one since: Trump broke Ronald Reagan’s record as the oldest President ever and now Biden has broken Trump’s. McConnell has said that reshaping the federal courts – not just the Supreme Court but the entire U.S. judiciary – in a Right-wing direction has become his legacy accomplishment, and it’s hard to deny that. Under McConnell and Trump, the Supreme Court has a solid and seemingly impregnable 6-3 Right-wing majority that has thrown its weight around, most notably in reversing <i>Roe</i> v. <i>Wade</i> and destroying the whole idea that the Constitution guarantees women autonomy over their own bodies. It’s also vastly expanded the reach of the Second Amendment, including throwing out a century-old New York law restricting the concealed carrying of weapons (you see what I mean when I say that whatever these people are, they are not “conservative” by any stretch of the imagination), invalidating President Biden’s attempts to forgive student-loan debts and block the spread of COVID-19, and severely restricting the right of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to do its job of protecting the environment.
<br><br>McConnell’s legacy will be an America in which women have no right to say no to pregnancy and forced birth, Queers once again are illegal and same-sex marriage is a distant memory, people have no right to be protected against crazies among them who stage mass shootings, and corporations have the right to pollute as much as they damned well please and work their employees, including children, to death – but <i>not</i> the right to speak out against politicians enacting an “anti-woke” agenda, as the Walt Disney Corporation found out to its cost when it dared oppose Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s so-called “Don’t Say Gay” bill. As Edward Luce wrote in the May 3, 2023 <i>Financial Times</i> (<a href="https://www.ft.com/content/f2a34faa-9ef7-4e11-9ea1-ef65e6c1d4ae" target="_blank">https://www.ft.com/content/f2a34faa-9ef7-4e11-9ea1-ef65e6c1d4ae</a>), the closest analogue anywhere in the world to the U.S. Supreme Court Trump and McConnell have created “sits in Tehran. Iran’s Council of Guardians is unelected, regulates women’s bodies, cannot be removed and is impervious to public opinion. They answer to a higher power. The more America’s Supreme Court resembles a theocratic body, the more it imperils itself.”mgconlanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09328563476025164608noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20445321.post-76623895411304305172023-09-27T16:52:00.001-07:002023-09-27T16:52:36.164-07:00“The world has fallen out of love with democracy"<br><i>Chilling new documentary on Russian dissident journalist Dmitri Muratov exposes the worldwide threats to democracy and media freedom.</i>
<br><br><b>by Mark Gabrish Conlan</b> • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for <i>Zenger's Newsmagazine</i> • All rights reserved
<br><br>On Tuesday, September 26 PBS showed a documentary on their <i>Frontline</i> series called “Putin vs. the Press,” though it’s not a story of Russian president Vladimir Putin’s attack on all independent media outlets but one newspaper, and one individual, in particular. The newspaper is <i>Novaya Gazeta</i> (“New Gazette”) and the individual is its editor/publisher, Dmitry Muratov. Muratov co-won the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize with Maria Ressa, a journalist from the Philippines who likewise defied a dictatorial and corrupt government to report the truth about it to her readers. In his acceptance speech, Muratov said these depressing words: “The world has fallen out of love with democracy. The world has begun to turn toward dictatorship. In my country, and not only there, it is popular to think that politicians who avoid bloodshed are weak, while threatening the world with war is the duty of true patriots.” Even the United States, long considered the world’s bastion of republican government, is undergoing a long-term embrace of dictatorship; the Republican Party has virtually abandoned democracy as a long-term goal or a short-term practice. Donald Trump’s 2024 Presidential campaign is on a major roll, not despite but because of its openly dictatorial character, It seems like nothing will break his hold on the overwhelming majority of his party, and as he himself has boasted, every new criminal indictment against him just strengthens his hand politically and reinforces his absolute rule over his party.
<br><br><i>Novaya Gazeta</i> was founded in 1993 with seed money from the Nobel Prize scholarship awarded to former Soviet Union president Mikhail Gorbachev, who tried and ultimately failed to break Russia’s long-time record of authoritarianism. Gorbachev wanted a mixed economy for the Soviet Union and an end to the forcible repression of political dissent. He saw a free press as crucial to the latter and he backed Muratov’s enterprise as one way to ensure that future Russian governments would face legitimate criticism from an independent media. Muratov recalled during the show that he had got interested in journalism in particular after two star players on a Russian hockey team had brusquely refused his request for autographs. His mom complained to the local state-owned newspaper and they ran a story that resulted in Dmitry receiving signed photos of the two hockey players in the mail. Unfortunately, Vladimir Putin took over as Russia’s president at the end of 1999 and immediately declared war on the free press, punishing newspapers and other media outlets that dared criticize him with threats, denials of licenses needed to publish, and worse. During the show Muratov notes he’s been to the funerals of at least six of his best reporters, all assassinated – he thinks – by Russian goon squads associated with Putin and in some cases directly working for him. “Igor Domnikov was the first,” Muratov said on the program. “He was a brilliant guy. He was killed by bandits for his series of investigations. Yuri Shchekochikhin, my closest friend and an outstanding journalist. He was poisoned. Anna Politkovskaya. She made it to Chechnya, disobeying all orders. And I was on vacation at the time. Of course, I blame myself terribly for this. I should also mention Nastya Baburova and Stas Markelov. Natasha Estemirova, who was Anya Politkovskaya’s main collaborator on Chechnya. Their portraits hang on the walls right above the table where we meet and I see them many times a day. I’m ashamed of myself, but not the newspaper.”
<br><br>Things got even worse for Muratov in 2022 when Russia launched its invasion of and war against Ukraine. If I were in Russia I could be arrested and sentenced to 15 years in prison for writing the above sentence because Putin and his puppet legislature, the Duma, has <i>literally</i> made it a crime to call Russia’s attack on Ukraine a “war” or an “invasion” instead of the Russian government’s preferred euphemism, a “special military operation.” For years Muratov had gone up to the limits of Putin’s censorship without actually crossing the line – there’s footage of him asking Putin about his designations of certain individuals, including journalists, as “foreign agents” without any due process or right to appeal. Muratov once even asked Putin at one of the president’s press conferences, “I still have a question about ‘foreign agents.’ This law has no judgment. There is no court there. You are declared a ‘foreign agent.’ There is no evidence. There is no sentence. You are just branded a criminal. Let me remind you of our favorite childhood book. This is exactly what happened to Milady in <i>The Three Musketeers</i>. But when Milady was beheaded at dawn, she was at least finally read the sentence.” Putin replied, “First of all, I would like to congratulate you on being awarded the Nobel Prize. So, your concern about ‘foreign agents.’ I’m not going to beat around the bush. You said there was no verdict. You’re right, there really isn’t one. Milady was sentenced and her head was cut off. But no one is cutting anything off here.” Muratov also lost a key protector when Mikhail Gorbachev died of natural causes in August 2022 at age 91, cutting off one of the few remaining disincentives for Putin to mess with him directly.
<br><br>During the early 2020’s Muratov was more or less freely allowed to travel outside Russia – a privilege the Russian state in its various authoritarian regimes (the Tsarist Empire, the Soviet Union, now) hasn’t always allowed its citizens.. In this documentary he’s shown in Oslo, in Riga (the capital of Latvia, one of the Baltic republics Joseph Stalin forcibly annexed to Russia in 1940 and whose departure in the 1980’s started the chain of events that led ultimately to the Soviet Union’s disintegration) and even in New York, where he went to witness the auctioning off of his Nobel Prize medal to benefit Ukrainian refugees. His trip to Riga was particularly consequential because he was there ostensibly to be a judge at a documentary film festival, but really to supervise the evacuation of many <i>Novaya Gazeta</i> staff members, including young journalist Roman Anin, to Riga to publish an edition in exile there. Muratov took great pains to maintain the idea that the version published in Riga had no connection to his old one from Moscow, but after the film festival was over he returned to Moscow despite the warnings from Anin and others in his circle that this wasn’t a good idea. “I came to <i>Novaya Gazeta</i> in 2006 when I was 19 years old,” Anin said in this documentary. “He’s like my second father. People think that his job is to be the chief editor, but his job is to save people, and he has always been like that. I’m afraid that something might happen to him. I wouldn’t go [back to Russia] … [b]ecause I know that they most likely will arrest me. I know that nobody survives Russian prison, or at least there is a very small chance that you can survive Russian prison. And he knows all of that, and despite that he goes back.” When Muratov went back he got red paint laced with acetone, which burned his eyes and nearly blinded him, thrown at him in his train car. The Russian authorities identified his assailant but, all too predictably, did nothing. Muratov’s own reporters were able not only to identify him but document his connections to the Russian secret police.
<br><br>Ultimately, on September 1, 2023, Muratov was officially declared a “foreign agent” by the Putin government for “promoting anti-Russian views.” It’s not clear just what the consequences of being declared a “foreign agent” are – whether it’s like the <i>apartheid</i> South African government’s practice of “banning” certain individuals, including forbidding them to be named or mentioned in the media, or it goes farther than that. But it’s certain that Putin has an ultra-low threshold of tolerance for dissent, including sending out hit people to assassinate those he considers “enemies of Russia” even in other countries. Muratov himself equated being declared a “foreign agent” with being called an “enemy of the people.” No sooner had Muratov returned to Russia that two of his reporters, Elena Milashina and Sasha Nemov, were seized by agents of the pro-Russian government in Chechnya. “They were severely injured, beaten,” he said. “Sasha Nemov and Elena Milashina were taken right after the flight <i>[from Russia to Chechnya. Attackers]</i> threw the driver out, put them in a car, took them to be tortured. <i>[They had liquid iodine thrown on them and were repeatedly beaten with hard plastic sticks.]</i> The people who did this, it was an armed group of 10-12 people. They knew what plane, on what flight, at night by Utair they would arrive in Grozny. This means that these people had access to the passenger flight booking system. To me, this shows that these people represent the authorities of the Chechen Republic.” “Putin vs. the Press” is an inspiring tale of resistance but also an extremely depressing program that shows how easily the virus of authoritarianism can infect even a country like our own which has traditionally taken its status as a republic for granted. Given the current state of American political affairs – with Donald Trump dominating the Republican polls and running neck-and-neck with Joe Biden in the 2024 Presidential election, and radical-Right House Republicans threatening to shut down the U.S. government and demanding an end to U.S. military aid to Ukraine as part of their price for keeping it open – Russia’s present could well be America’s future.mgconlanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09328563476025164608noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20445321.post-10775476388690786732023-08-03T12:18:00.009-07:002023-08-04T10:16:57.145-07:00Doug Porter. Endorses Monica Montgomery-Steppe for Supervisor – and So Do My Husband and I<i>For the last few weeks I have been inundated with mailers and hit pieces in the special election to replace Nathan Fletcher as Fourth District San Diego County Supervisor. I have long admired San Diego City Councilmember Monica Montgomery-Steppe and have regretted the fact that I didn't have the chance to vote for her … until now. The mailers for Montgomery-Steppe in the current campaign have been positive, extolling her virtues and the things she's done for the people of San Diego. The mailers against her have been filled with veiled racist innuendi; the subliminal message, especially from the San Diego Police Officers' Association, is, "Monica Montgomery-Steppe is Black, and we all know <b>all</b> Black people want to 'defund the police.'" I didn't know who Janessa Goldbeck was before this campaign started, but even though the Police Officers' Association's campaign for her is nominally "independent," by refusing to disavow it she's essentially endorsing a racist attack on her African-American opponent, and she and her supporters (including the San Diego Democrats for Equality) should be ashamed of themselves. I just got this e-mail this morning from Doug Porter at Words & Deeds and he makes the case far better than I could about why Monica Montgomery-Steppe is the ONLY progressive choice in this election.</i>
<br><br><b>I Voted for Monica Montgomery-Steppe for Supervisor and You Should, Too
<br><br>by Doug Porter</b> • August 3, 2023
<br><br>August 15 is the final date for the ongoing election to replace Nathan Fletcher on the San Diego County Board of Supervisors. If you live in District 4 (and most San Diego city residents do), consider it a moral imperative to mail, drop off, or vote in person for Council member Monica Montgomery-Steppe in the next two weeks.
<br><br>This special election really is something special. Over the decades, we’ve seen plenty of candidates for local office disappoint when it comes to voting on issues that make a difference.
<br><br>It’s funny - not funny - when issues of importance come up for consideration and those who ran for office spouting the bravado of being “for the people” cast their vote for causes supported by forces whose agenda includes “otherizing” much of the local citizenry.
<br><br>When it comes to law and order, San Diego politicians are mostly weak in the knees in the face of any suggestion that might be interpreted as not being supportive enough of the law enforcement industrial complex.
<br><br>For those of you unfamiliar with the inner workings of city government it may come as a surprise to learn that our police department, whose budget has never been cut, and whose officers got away with defying a common sense mandate for COVID vaccines, is in my opinion, on a “slow strike.”
<br><br>While homeless encampments in all kinds of places are dismantled, the SDPD couldn’t take on an “unauthorized” rave under a freeway bridge recently. A phalanx of thirty or so officers showed up at city hall this week to support street cameras and license plate readers. And, in what has to be the ultimate middle finger waved at the public, the Chief of Police was photographed with a disfigured US flag in the background (banned by the LAPD) known to be used as a battle flag displayed by extremists like the ones who marched in Charlottesville in 2017.
<br><br>Their ineffectiveness has been attributed to a shortage of personnel. That’s an excuse, and excuses are for losers. The best spin anybody can put on what’s happening is that officers are disillusioned by what wannabe authoritarians in politics call wokeness.
<br><br>A few watered-down reforms have been enacted at the state government level. The policy of more prisons equals less crime is no longer in vogue. And pesky reporters keep finding things like bias, jail deaths, and the use of excessive force to share with the public.
<br><br>Lest you think I’m making things up, today’s <i>Union-Tribune</i> editorial speaks to the shameful steamrolling of the Privacy Advisory Board as the city considered installing 500-ish street light surveillance cameras and license plate readers.
<br><br>A year ago, the City Council unanimously approved establishing a new Privacy Advisory Board to assess the use and community impact of 300-plus city surveillance technologies, especially those used by police. The impetus for the board’s creation was the shock and anger that greeted the 2019 revelation that the network of about 3,000 cameras on streetlights the city had installed three years earlier — supposedly to monitor traffic and parking patterns — were actually sophisticated surveillance tools with cameras and microphones
<br><br>So the cops lied by omission before, and dared anybody to oppose, monitor, or regulate a more robust technology. I know the arguments about surveillance technology and even agree on its value in disrupting the actions of street criminals. I also know the SDPD’s history, and think that anybody who trusts them on these sorts of issues is naive.
<br><br>As a City Council member, Montgomery-Steppe has survived the subterfuge of those who think their sworn status obligates them to oppose or weaken changes and/or reforms that would make them accountable for their actions.
<br><br>She’s played by the rules, been unfailingly polite, and open to dialogue. Montgomery-Steppe has persisted in seeking a better way to keep San Diegans safe and secure. She passed on an opportunity to go negative on the snails pace roll out of Prop B’s citizen police oversight in a recent interview.
<br><br>"This is what changing a system looks like. This is what community governance looks like. Sometimes we have good community partners who are willing to help us move things along, sometimes we don't .... I am not thinking about my personal instant gratification and what the media's going to say about me. I'm thinking about 10 and 15 years from now, how can we stand up this board and give it a foundation upon which it can build?"
<br><br>Now it’s payback time. Not that she did anything wrong. It’s just that reformers are a danger to the established order and must be vanquished. It is, of course, their First Amendment right to engage in the political process. And, as we have learned with the most recent indictment of the former president, their right to lie is also protected.
<br><br>That constitutional protection doesn’t make what local gendarmes and prosecutors are doing right or ethical. But we should already know from past experience, those topics are of little concern to those types.
Various law enforcement related Independent Expenditure Committees have spent more than $100,000 to oppose Montgomery-Steppe with misleading and malicious propaganda. They’ve spent tens of thousands of dollars in support of the other Democrat in the contest, who they believe will bend to their will.
<br><br>Three pages prior to today’s <i>U-T</i> editorial on SD technology adoption, see the headline: Richard Fischer, disgraced sheriff’s deputy jailed for sexual misconduct, released months early.
<br><br>This is the same offender –after being sentenced to 44 months in jail– who was released ‘accidentally’ after serving only 5 months. Now he’s out again, proving that, when it comes to rapists, some cops are more equal than your ordinary sex offender,
<br><br>So it’s not just the SDPD playing games with justice, it’s also the County Sheriffs. With Montgomery-Steppe as supervisor, we can all feel better knowing there’s somebody keeping watch on county cops.
<br><br>We San Diegans have the opportunity to put a person of integrity on the County Board of Supervisors, whose power of the purse can dictate a better life for all San Diegans.
<br><br>I voted. Have you?
<br><br>***
<br><br><b>Short Snips About the Candidates… </b>Although Supervisor elections are technically non-partisan, they’re not.
<br><br>The Democrats who have declared their candidacy are:
<br><br>San Diego City Council Member Monica Montgomery-Steppe–
<br><br>Website - Facebook
<br><br>Two quick facts you need to know about Montgomery-Steppe.
<br><br>She is a progressive and pragmatic Black woman who beat the local establishment’s choice, then-incumbent Council person Myrtle Cole in 2018.
<br><br>The police unions in San Diego are scared to death about her desire for oversight and ability to wade through the copaganda to see the bigger picture about law and order.
<br><br>Montgomery-Steppe: “Violence is not biological. It has not been solved with over-policing, and it has not been solved with more funding, and until we address the root causes of violence and crime, we will continue seeing the exact same issues in our city and in our systems.”
<br><br>***
<br><br>Vet Voice Foundation CEO Janessa Goldbeck
<br><br>Website - Facebook
<br><br>She’s an out and proud Ex-Marine who served during the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” era. Her first venture into electoral politics was a losing effort to replace Congresswoman Susan Davis.
<br><br>Her candidacy is supported by a passel of big name Democrats, like Rep. Scott Peters. Unfortunately, she’s also going to be the beneficiary of a smear campaign funded by the law enforcement establishment. Will they (as an independent entity) say her Democratic opponent is supported by a global Jewish conspiracy (code word: George Soros)? Who knows? They’ve dipped their toes in that water before. Her claims of innocence (the Independent Expenditure excuse) ring hollow.
<br><br>***
<br><br>There are also two Republicans vying for D4 Supervisor.
<br><br>Re-Open San Diego founder Amy Reichert
<br><br>Website - Facebook
<br><br>Reichert was soundly defeated (64.6% to 25.4%) by Nathan Fletcher in 2022. Her claim to fame was/is the assertion that voters supported her “common sense” approach to changing the direction of San Diego.
<br><br>The fact that TV station KUSI has a crush on her should tell voters all they need to know about her stances.
<br><br>***
<br><br>Medically retired Marine veteran Paul McQuigg
<br><br>Website & Facebook Not Available
<br><br>He works for the Census bureau, collecting economic data. He thinks we are already in a recession, despite declining unemployment and inflation and an ascending stock market. (Reference: <i>Dude, Where’s My Recession?</i> by Paul Krugman)
<br><br>His first suggestion in a <i>Union-Tribune</i> interview is a 500-bed inpatient psychiatric/drug abuse hospital dedicated to the homeless population in the county. Great stuff. Except what are those homeless humans supposed to do for the three to six years it takes to build a facility?mgconlanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09328563476025164608noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20445321.post-51599422229719215612023-07-22T21:16:00.003-07:002023-07-22T21:16:49.374-07:00NBC News Documentary on J. Robert Oppenheimer Timed to Promote the Feature Film About Him – But It's Well Worth Seeing Anyway<br><b>by Mark Gabrish Conlan</b> • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
<br><br>Last night (Friday, July 21) at 10 MS-NBC showed a new documentary on J. Robert Oppenheimer and the making of the first atomic bomb, called <i>To End All War</i> – reflecting Oppenheimer’s optimistic and forlorn hope that the use of nuclear weapons would render war so frightening that it would become obsolete. The appearance of this documentary was an example of synergistic marketing at its most blatant: it premiered on the same day as Christopher Nolan’s dramatic film <i>Oppenheimer</i> (starring Cillian Murphy as Oppenheimer and Emily Blunt as his wife Kitty) opened in theatres. It was brought to us by a news network of NBC, which is part of Comcast – as is Universal, the studio that produced the Nolan film. There have been innumerable documentaries, as well as fiction films, about J. Robert Oppenheimer and his work on the first atomic bomb – as well as his controversial refusal to work on the hydrogen bomb and the jihad against him in the early 1950’s led by Dr. Edward Teller, who took on the H-bomb project and denounced Oppenheimer as a Communist and a traitor for having opposed the H-bomb program. In fact, the first documentary on the Manhattan Engineering District (the code-name for the A-bomb program, though it colloquially entered American history as the “Manhattan Project”) was a <i>March of Time</i> episode from 1946, just a year after the first A-bomb test at Alamogordo, New Mexico, which Oppenheimer in one of his many references to religion and spirituality called “Trinity” after a poem by John Donne mentioning the Holy Trinity of Christianity (odd since Oppenheimer was Jewish, at least by ancestry), which reproduced that test and featured Oppenheimer playing himself. Quite a few films were made about the Manhattan Project while Oppenheimer was still alive (he died in 1967 of cancer of the esophagus, the same disease that had killed Humphrey Bogart a decade earlier, and like Bogart, Oppenheimer almost certainly got it from his constant tobacco use), as well as more than one dramatic feature (including the 1989 film <i>Fat Man and Little Boy</i>, which starred Dwight Schultz as Oppenheimer and Paul Newman as General Leslie Groves, the man the Army put in charge as overall administrator of the Manhattan Project; the title came from the two different bombs made at Alamogordo, the smaller one used on Hiroshima and the larger one dropped on Nagasaki). There have also been a number of other movies called <i>The Manhattan Project</i>, ranging from a 1986 teen comedy with Christopher Collet and John Lithgow in which a teenage scientific prodigy builds a working A-bomb and then has to figure out how to disarm it to a 2022 “inspirational” movie about a man dying of terminal cancer who wants to kill himself before nature takes its course.
<br><br>As presented here, J. Robert Oppenheimer lived a pretty tortured life, in which his “Rosebud” moment appears to have been being literally locked in a giant ice chest by bullies at summer camp in his boyhood. He grew up to be a physics student but did poorly at experimental science; when he discovered <i>theoretical</i> physics, he found his calling because then he could just think and work out equations all day without getting into the messy grind of actually having to make things work. So when word got around the physics community that Oppenheimer had been chosen as the Manhattan Project’s scientific director, his colleagues joked, “He couldn’t run a hot-dog stand.” Oppenheimer is also shown as a man who wasn’t especially political until the Great Depression hit when he was a junior physics professor at Berkeley in 1929, when he was 25 years old. He was shocked at the effect the Depression was having on his students, including one who literally had to live on cat food because that was all he could afford. (This was actually more common than a lot of people realize: in the 1960’s the U.S. Department of Agriculture passed a regulation requiring pet-food companies to make their products fit for human consumption because in the days before food stamps, a lot of people were feeding themselves pet food to survive.) This inspired Oppenheimer to become decidedly Left-wing in his politics; though there’s no evidence that he actually joined the Communist Party, U.S.A. (and if there were, surely the U.S. government investigators leading the postwar witch hunt against him would have found it and publicized it to justify what they did to him!), his brother was a CPUSA member and so was his girlfriend, Jean Tatlock, whom he dated in the late 1930’s and visited at least once during the early 1940’s, when he was working on the Manhattan Project and married to Kitty Puening Harrison, who was already on her third husband when she and Oppenheimer started a sexual relationship and conceived their first child, Peter. (She got a quickie divorce from Mexico and married Oppenheimer six months before Peter’s birth.) This two-hour documentary devotes as much running time to Oppenheimer’s post-war activities, including his forlorn hopes for the international control of atomic energy and his opposition to the congealing Cold War consensus that the Soviet Union was as implacable an enemy and as clear and present a danger to the peace of the world as Nazi Germany had been.
<br><br>Like many of the other scientists involved in the Manhattan Project, Oppenheimer had rationalized his research and development of a weapon of mass destruction on the basis that Hitler and his scientists were almost certainly working on one – after all, the basic research documenting atomic fission had all been done in Germany – and the U.S. and its allies needed to build the bomb and do it first before the Nazis could. Ironically, the main reason (at least in my reading of the historical evidence) the Nazis didn’t get the bomb was that Werner Heisenberg, the physicist in charge of the Nazis’ bomb program, made a huge scientific error; his calculation of the amount of fissile material which would be needed to set off a chain reaction and an atomic explosion was about 1,000 times greater than the true amount, and on that basis Heisenberg reported to Hitler and his Nazi colleagues that a nuclear weapon would be too big to be practical. It also didn’t help that the Nazis had driven out many of the top German physicists and other scientists because so many of them were Jews, and Hitler and his colleagues had publicly denounced atomic research as “Jewish physics” and essentially ordered it, if not banned, at least heavily restricted. I love the fact that the Nazis’ racism helped keep them from developing the atomic bomb! Oddly, Oppenheimer didn’t share the reluctance of some of his Manhattan Project colleagues about using the bomb against Japan once the Nazis were definitively defeated in May 1945; he argued not only for using it but for using it against cities instead of doing a demonstration blast over a relatively uninhabited area of Japan, and apparently his thinking was that he wanted to demonstrate the sheer awfulness of the A-bomb to make sure that its first two uses would also be the last. (That’s been true so far, but who knows how much longer? Already Vladimir Putin has threatened to use nuclear weapons in his war against Ukraine, especially if the U.S. and its NATO allies send in active-duty forces to fight Russians in Ukraine or cross another of Putin’s ambiguous and frequently changing “red lines.”)
<br><br>At the same time the show described a contentious meeting between Oppenheimer and President Harry Truman at the White House in October 1945, at which Truman asked Oppenheimer how soon the Soviet Union would have the bomb. Oppenheimer was noncommittal but said it would be within a few years, and Truman said, “Never!” (In fact, the Soviets did have the A-bomb in 1949, sparking yet another witch hunt throughout the U.S. government to look for the spies that allegedly “stole” it for them – when more sober-minded critics, including most of the nuclear scientists themselves, said that the Soviets would have discovered the bomb anyway because the only “secret” was whether or not it would work, and the U.S. had already demonstrated that. Ironically enough, the head of the Soviet bomb program would also run afoul of his country’s political police and become a dissident: Andrei Sakharov.) Then Oppenheimer told Truman, “I have blood on my hands,” and what Oppenheimer apparently intended as a statement of humility just enraged the President; he abruptly ended the meeting and told a staff member, “Get that crybaby scientist out of my office and don’t let me see him again.” The last 40 minutes or so of the Oppenheimer documentary deal with the bizarre proceeding by which the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), then in charge of both nuclear weapons and nuclear power (the highly-touted, overhyped program by which scientists who’d felt guilty over developing the worst, most potentially destructive weapon of all time tried to atone by figuring out a way to use nuclear technology for humanity’s benefit – though I remain as committed an opponent of nuclear power as I am of nuclear war because the technology is just too damned unforgiving of the inevitable natural accidents or human errors, as demonstrated at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima, etc.), stripped Oppenheimer of his security clearance.
<br><br>The proceeding was full of dirty tricks on the part of the government, including bugging the offices of Oppenheimer’s attorneys so the prosecution knew what the defense was going to say before they said it. According to this documentary, the attack on Oppenheimer had the desired “chilling effect” on other scientists, including any who might have otherwise been tempted to speak out against the H-bomb itself or the nuclear tests that dominated the news in the early 1960’s and spewed huge amounts of dangerously radioactive material in their wake until President John F. Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev had a mutual attack of good sense and negotiated a limited test-ban treaty in 1963. Ironically, Oppenheimer’s security clearance was restored, but not until 2022 – 55 years after his death and far too late to do either him or the cause of rational debate about nuclear energy any good. Oppenheimer remains a fascinating historical figure precisely due to his contradictions: as one of the few scientists (along with Isaac Newton, René Descartes and Blaise Pascal) who took religion seriously, he seems to have been obsessed not only with the effects of his actions (good and bad) on humanity but their meaning in the broader cosmos, and he never won the Nobel Prize for physics even though as early as the 1930’s he was propounding scientific ideas, including the positron and the black hole, that would later be taken up by other theoretical physicists, many of whom <i>did</i> win the Nobel. Christopher Nolan’s movie was based on a biography of Oppenheimer called <i>American Prometheus</i> – one of whose authors, Kai Bird, was interviewed for this documentary – and of course that couldn’t help but make me think of a classic novel whose author also referred to her central character as “the modern Prometheus” – Mary Shelley’s <i>Frankenstein</i>.mgconlanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09328563476025164608noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20445321.post-34502817467913901632023-07-08T14:35:00.001-07:002023-07-08T14:35:23.161-07:00Richard Engel's New Documentary on the Wagner Group and Its Threat to the World<br><b>by Mark Gabrish Conlan</b> • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
<br><br>Last night (Friday, July 7) at 10 MS-NBC showed an intriguing documentary on Yevgeny Prigozhin and the Wagner Group, the paramilitary organization he assembled in Russia with the support of Vladimir Putin and built up over the years into a huge private army with its own income streams, mainly from taking over gold and precious-gem mines in the Central African Republic and other African countries. The show was called <i>Revolt from Within: The Rise of Wagner</i>, and though this wasn’t mentioned here other sources I’ve read said that “Wagner” was indeed named for the German composer Richard Wagner. Wagner the composer was a musical genius; he was also an anti-Semite who wrote a bizarre essay called “Judaism in Music” in 1850 and was Hitler’s favorite composer. Apparently Hitler’s admiration for him was what led Prigozhin and Wagner’s original founder, Dmitri Utkin, to name their private army after him, whereas those of us who love Wagner’s music but loathe his racism have either to accept or forgive that about him the way Thomas Jefferson is one of my favorite figures in American history even though he owned 300 slaves. According to the Wikipedia page on Wagner, it started in 2014 by Utkin and Prigozhin, but <i>Revolt from Within</i> host and NBC foreign correspondent Richard Engel traced their origins farther back than that, to the slow disintegration of the Soviet Union in the 1980’s. According to Engel, by the 1980’s Russian organized crime had essentially taken over St. Petersburg (or, as it was then still called, “Leningrad”), and Prigozhin rose from petty thievery to become an official in the so-called “Russian Mafia.” He also attracted the attention of Vladimir Putin, then a minor official in the Russian intelligence service assigned to his native St. Petersburg.
<br><br>When the Soviet Union finally collapsed in 1991 Putin rose to mayor of St. Petersburg and then to the presidency of the Russian Federation, and Prigozhin formed a catering company that serviced Putin’s official dinners – an indication of the high level of trust Putin had in Prigozhin that he would eat what Prigozhin and his staff prepared without having it tasted first. This led to Prigozhin acquiring the nickname “Putin’s Chef.” As president of Russia, Putin found the Wagner Group useful, first in carrying out his intervention in the civil war in Syria (2015-2018), where Putin wanted to keep dictator Bashir al-Assad in power (which he did) and he sent Wagner forces to avoid the potential political consequences of using actual Russian military people. Putin’s next assignment for Wagner was the Central African Republic, where they provided security for president Faustin-Archange Touadéra and other top C.A.R. officials. They also took over a flourishing gold mine and drove out or killed the indigenous workers, and Engel interviewed one woman whose husband, along with seven other miners, was killed by Wagner people and buried in a mass grave. Taking over that gold mine and other mining operations in the C.A.R. gave Wagner an independent funding stream, from which they raked in billions of dollars, besides the subsidies they were getting from Putin’s government. When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022 and their advance bogged down in the face of unexpectedly fierce Ukrainian resistance, Putin called in Wagner – which had already fought in Ukraine on Russia’s side in Crimea and the separatist Donbas region in the east – and Wagner agreed. Wagner launched a campaign to capture the eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut in late September 2022.
<br><br>According to the Wagner Wikipedia page, before that it had sent in commandos to assassinate Ukrainian president Volodomyr Zelensky and decapitate Ukraine’s leadership, but Zelensky and the other targets survived. Engel said Wagner targeted Bakhmut despite its lack of strategic importance because obliterating it would be a powerful marketing tool for Wagner to ally itself with authoritarian governments around the world. They succeeded in reducing Bakhmut to rubble – the images of the almost totally destroyed Bakhmut, with the dead bodies of children, other innocent civilians and soldiers littering the streets, are some of the most powerful moments in this film – but Prigozhin later claimed that his enemies in the official Russian Ministry of Defense, including Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Valery Gerasimov, overall commander of Russia’s so-called “special military operation” in Ukraine, were deliberately sabotaging Wagner’s forces and getting them killed by refusing to supply them enough ammunition. Prigozhin made this claim on June 23, 2023 and then marched his forces into Russia, taking over the city of Rostov-on-Don where Russia’s general staff is headquartered and from which Russia’s war against Ukraine is being commanded. He then marched his forces towards Moscow, only just days after Prigozhin’s attempted rebellion started, it ended abruptly. The official word was that Alexander Lukashenko, president of neighboring Belarus (formerly Byelorussia) and a hard-core Putin ally, had brokered a deal by which Prigozhin would be given asylum in Belarus and Wagner soldiers would be invited to join the regular Russian military.
<br><br>At this point no one outside Russia knows just where Prigozhin is, whether Putin is living up to whatever promises were made to Prigozhin to get him to stand down, or whether Prigozhin’s mutiny, coup attempt, rebellion or whatever it was is still going on. Given what we know about how Vladimir Putin treats his real or perceived enemies – including sending assassins to target them wherever they are in the world (he had a dissident scientist fatally poisoned with plutonium after he and his daughter had fled to presumed safety in Britain) – it’s hard to imagine that Prigozhin is long for this world, if indeed he’s still alive as of this writing. But Prigozhin’s brief success at directly challenging Putin has shaken the perception of invincibility on which his power, like that of most dictators, rests. As Russian émigré Masha Gessen wrote in the June 26 <i>New Yorker</i> (<a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/prigozhin-showed-russians-that-they-have-a-choice" target="_blank">https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/prigozhin-showed-russians-that-they-have-a-choice</a>), “Some things that shocked Western observers, such as Prigozhin’s statement that the war in Ukraine was started under false pretenses, will probably easily vanish from consciousness. The specifics of what he said matter little. What’s important is that he tapped into a reservoir of bitter suspicion: Russians always suspect that they are being lied to, yet they have no choice but to support those who lie to them. Prigozhin gave them a choice, by driving tanks through the streets of Rostov.” The good news is that Prigozhin’s bizarre temper tantrum might actually start the unraveling of Putin’s regime; the bad news is it might lead to something even more authoritarian and brutal, either Prigozhin himself (or someone like him) assuming control of Russia and running an even nastier dictatorship than Putin’s, or the entire country degenerating into chaos and civil war, leading to the grim possibility of a nuclear-armed nation with various factions having access to the nukes and threatening to use them.mgconlanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09328563476025164608noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20445321.post-25326817562403438172023-06-05T18:36:00.002-07:002023-07-08T14:50:25.060-07:00The Debt Ceiling: Republicans Get 90 Percent of What They Want<br><b>by Mark Gabrish Conlan</b> • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for <i>Zenger’s Newsmagazine</i> • All rights reserved
<br><br><i>“Leverage is the key. When I have something you want, and you feel like you need to have it, then you can’t get it anywhere else.”
<br>– U.S. Congressmember Andy Biggs (R-Arizona), <a href="https://apnews.com/article/zooey-zephyr-freedom-caucus-republicans-fc3de20bb1f4ea4deba6d33bd20cdf31" target="_blank">https://apnews.com/article/zooey-zephyr-freedom-caucus-republicans-fc3de20bb1f4ea4deba6d33bd20cdf31</a>
<br><br>“I understand the different leverage points that you would have under Article II of the Constitution. I studied that a lot becoming Governor about Florida’s Constitution, and you’ve got to know how to use your leverage to advance what you’re trying to accomplish.”
<br>– Governor and Presidential candidate Ron DeSantis (R-Florida), <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VqTp1Ob46n0" target="_blank">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VqTp1Ob46n0</a></i>
<br><br>“Leverage” is a big word among Republican politicians these days. The modern-day Republican Party is pushing an agenda far out of tune with what the majority of Americans actually want, including heavy-duty restrictions on abortion, virtually no restrictions on gun ownership, draconian measures against Queer Americans in general and Trans Americans in particular, keeping Donald Trump’s huge tax giveaways to the rich in place, and eviscerating what there is of a social safety net in this country. Rather than push these policies in normal political ways, Republicans are actively looking for loopholes in America’s nominal “democracy” so they can impose their will on people whether the people want what they have to offer or not.
<br><br>The recent manufactured “crisis” over America’s debt ceiling, which ended May 31 and June 1 when both houses of Congress passed a so-called “compromise” that gave Republicans about 90 percent of what they wanted, is a case in point. The debt ceiling itself is a disgusting relic of a bygone era (it was originally instituted in 1917 over concerns that the U.S. would run up a budget deficit fighting World War I) that periodically requires the Congress and the President to have another vote on whether to pay back debt the government has already incurred, rung up and spent in the normal budget process. Its weaponization is a phenomenon of the modern-day Republican Party’s refusal to trust its priorities to the normal budget process (if there is such a thing anymore, since as some Republican Congressmembers pointed out it’s been decades since the U.S. actually passed a formal budget instead of funding the government through so-called “continuing resolutions”) and instead quite literally to hold the U.S. and world economies hostage to make demands they couldn’t get through under regular Congressional order.
<br><br>The final phase of the negotiations over the U.S. debt ceiling started on April 26, when House Speaker Kevin McCarthy pushed through his caucus a bill he called the “Limit, Save, Grow Act” (<a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2023/04/27/white-house-regroups-mccarthy-debt-ceiling-success-00094273" target="_blank">https://www.politico.com/news/2023/04/27/white-house-regroups-mccarthy-debt-ceiling-success-00094273</a>). As U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) said in a commentary in the British newspaper <i>Guardian</i> on why he voted against the final “compromise” (<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jun/02/bernie-sanders-debt-ceiling-bill" target="_blank">https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jun/02/bernie-sanders-debt-ceiling-bill</a>), “The original debt ceiling legislation that Republicans passed in the House would have, over a 10-year period, decimated the already inadequate social safety net of our country and made savage cuts to programs that working families, the children, the sick, the elderly and the poor desperately needed.”
<br><br>A more moderate member of the Senate Democratic Caucus, Bob Casey (D-Pennsylvania), told the Politico Web site after “Limit, Save, Grow” passed, “Most Americans want Republicans to take action to avoid default. They don’t want the price of that to be throwing a million people off Meals on Wheels.” Like President Joe Biden, Casey called on the House of Representatives to pass a “clean” debt ceiling bill instead of holding the full faith and credit of the American government hostage. “After that’s done, on a bill that should be about [the debt ceiling] and nothing else, you can have lots of discussions about appropriations level,” Casey said.
<br><br>But throughout the process, McCarthy insisted that as House Speaker he would not allow the House to vote on a “clean” debt ceiling bill – and he had the power to make sure of it. House Democrats circulated a so-called “discharge petition” to force a vote on a “clean” bill, but in addition to the 213 House Democrats they would have needed at least five Republicans – and McCarthy’s hold on his own caucus was so strong that that was five more Republicans than the Democrats actually got.
<br><br>Underestimated by Democrats because of the arduous process by which he got elected Speaker in the first place – it took 15 ballots over four days and McCarthy had to make substantial compromises with the farthest Right-wingers in his caucus to get the votes – McCarthy actually outplayed Biden at every turn. He made it clear that he wouldn’t allow the House to vote on a “clean” debt ceiling, and he did just that. McCarthy was able to keep the final negotiations on the so-called “compromise” just between himself and Biden. Biden had wanted House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries and Senate leaders Chuck Schumer and Mitch McConnell to be at the table, but McCarthy said no – it would be just McCarthy, Biden and people on their staffs – and he won.
<br><br>What’s more, McCarthy was able to set the terms of the narrative on Republican-friendly domain. By being maddeningly vague as to just <i>what</i> Republicans wanted to cut to bring down total government spending, McCarthy was able to keep the debate focused on, “Does the federal government spend too much?” – an issue on which Republicans have a huge advantage in popular support – rather than on specific programs people actually want, need and favor, where Democrats tend to have the advantage. McCarthy protested throughout the process that Biden didn’t meet with him for 97 days after February 1, when the two had a preliminary confab at the White House, and after a while he sounded like a teenage girl whining that the Big Man on Campus wouldn’t ask her to the prom – but ultimately he got his prom date with Biden.
<br><br>As for the final “compromise” bill, H.R. 3746 – known, in a typical piece of Orwellian Newspeak and “doublethink” from today’s Republicans, as the “Fiscal Responsibility Act” (when it was pushed through by some of the most blatant fiscal <i>irresponsibilities</i> of all time) – the best thing that can be said about it is it could have been a lot worse. As <i>New Yorker</i> columnist John Cassidy wrote on May 30 (<a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/the-debt-ceiling-deal-could-be-a-lot-worse" target="_blank">https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/the-debt-ceiling-deal-could-be-a-lot-worse</a>), “At the G.O.P. side’s insistence, the agreement will introduce work requirements for needy adults in their fifties who receive federal food assistance, and it will stiffen existing work requirements for needy families who receive cash assistance. Republicans claim that these provisions will save the country money, but the sums involved are relatively trivial in a 6.3-trillion-dollar budget, and the effect on the lives of some of the neediest Americans could be devastating. The deal also claws back some twenty billion dollars in funding that Congress had previously allotted to the Internal Revenue Service for a crackdown on tax evasion, particularly by the wealthy.”
<br><br>But Cassidy added that the “compromise” at least avoids some of the truly horrendous provisions of “Limit, Save, Grow.” “House Republicans were also demanding work requirements for Medicaid, the federal health-care program for poor individuals and families, and the debt-ceiling bill that they passed in April would have rescinded all eighty billion dollars of additional I.R.S. funding from last year’s Inflation Reduction Act,” Cassidy wrote. “The White House fended off these demands, but the fact remains that it reached an agreement that targets spending programs for poor people but doesn’t ask anything of the rich – and, by the way, also exempts the vast Pentagon budget from any cuts. Evidently, the White House decided that, in order to secure a deal, it had to give McCarthy some red meat for his MAGA-heavy caucus. … In today’s G.O.P., making life harder for poor people is something to celebrate, whereas going after rich tax evaders is simply unacceptable.”
<br><br>In addition, the final deal contains something blandly referred to as “permitting reform” that will spell the virtual death of any effective environmental regulation in the U.S. It vastly restricts the ability of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the federal courts to block various projects for mining coal, drilling oil and tapping other environmentally destructive sources of energy. The “Fiscal Responsibility Act” even contains a specific go-ahead for one particular project, the Mountain Valley Pipeline, which will cut through West Virginia and into Virginia. President Biden agreed to push this particular energy project in exchange for Senator Joe Manchin’s (D-West Virginia) vote last year for his so-called “Inflation Reduction Act,” the big bill passed over unanimous Republican opposition that embodied most of Biden’s domestic agenda, or at least the part of it he could get through a divided Congress hamstrung by divisions within his own party.
<br><br>The pipeline is supported by both of West Virginia’s Senators, Manchin and Republican Shelly Moore Capito, but no one bothered to run it by Virginia Senator Tim Kaine, a Democrat who was Hillary Clinton’s running mate in 2016. Kaine complained not only that the pipeline was an environmental disaster, it would also dispossess thousands of farmers in Appalachian Virginia whose families have worked these lands for generations. And he questioned the precedent this sets that any well-heeled energy company can lobby Congress for a blanket exemption to all environmental reviews for a specific project and make a mockery of the EPA by doing so. Kaine said he would make a motion on the Senate floor to strip the blanket approval of Mountain Valley from the bill, but his amendment – like those of U.S. Senator Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) and others pushing a so-called “conservative alternative” to an already pretty Right-wing bill – ran afoul of the fast-track process Senate leaders Schumer and McConnell had agreed on to make sure the bill passed the Senate in identical form to the House version.
<br><br>Progressive economist James K. Galbraith published a commentary on the deal on <i>The Nation</i>’s Web site May 30 that discussed what a sweeping triumph the deal was for Republicans (<a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/economy/debt-ceiling-deal/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Daily%205.30.2023&utm_term=daily" target="_blank">https://www.thenation.com/article/economy/debt-ceiling-deal/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Daily%205.30.2023&utm_term=daily</a>): “It spares the military, veterans, Social Security, and Medicare, focusing cuts and caps on non-defense, discretionary spending – which, as the Center for American Progress has explained, includes many of the most ‘essential programs.’ Those cuts accumulate, and – as population grows and prices rise – they will be steep. True, the spending caps apply for only two years, but then the debt ceiling will come up again, and they will likely be renewed. The precedent has been set. Speaker McCarthy is right: the cuts are historic. The deal means austerity for the long term. It is a huge Republican win.”
<br><br><b>We Didn’t Need to Be Here</b>
<br><br>The debate over the debt ceiling was replete with missed opportunities for the Democrats to avoid the confrontation altogether. As a May 24 <i>New York Post</i> editorial (<a href="https://nypost.com/2023/05/24/on-debt-ceiling-its-not-biden-vs-the-gop-but-biden-vs-the-voters/" target="_blank">https://nypost.com/2023/05/24/on-debt-ceiling-its-not-biden-vs-the-gop-but-biden-vs-the-voters/</a>) stated, “Democrats could’ve moved to pass a no-strings ceiling-lifter last year, while they still controlled Congress: They knew the issue was coming.” Instead they chose to use their political capital to pass the so-called “Respect for Marriage Act” to protect the rights of married same-sex couples against potential attack by the U.S. Supreme Court. As one-half of a married same-sex couple, I’m grateful that they did that – but quite frankly I would rather they had either eliminated the debt ceiling altogether or did what the only other country in the world that does this to itself, Denmark, did and raised it so high it would never be reached. Instead President Biden stupidly rejected this and said it would be “irresponsible” to get rid of the debt limit altogether.
<br><br>Another alternative might have been to cite the provision of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, passed in 1868 after the U.S. Civil War, effectively to declare the debt limit unconstitutional. The relevant clause reads, “The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.” The clause was put into the Constitution to prevent the Southern states, once they were readmitted to the Union, from refusing to allow payment of the war debt incurred by the Union in suppressing their rebellion.
<br><br>But Biden’s chance to invoke the Fourteenth Amendment to pay America’s debts anyway despite the hostage-taking by House Republicans would have taken much longer-term planning than it got. It would almost certainly have been delayed, and probably reversed, by the Right-wing judges who, thanks to Donald Trump’s and Mitch McConnell’s success in packing the Federal judiciary in general and the U.S. Supreme Court in particular, hold the balance of power in determining American constitutional law. Besides, the person who would have had actually to pay America’s bills in case the debt ceiling <i>hadn’t</i> been raised and America had been in default, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, publicly questioned whether she’d have had the right to do that under the Fourteenth Amendment.
<br><br>James K. Galbraith’s <i>Nation</i> column offered more alternatives a truly imaginative President could have used to defuse the debt ceiling crisis and take the House Republicans’ leverage away. “It could have issued the platinum coin,” he wrote. “The claim that the Supreme Court might have blocked it has been rebutted by Phillip Diehl, a former director of the Mint, who drafted the enabling legislation. He said as head of the Mint, ‘The fact that it can have a trillion-dollar denomination on it was absolutely part of the intent.’ Or Treasury could have issued perpetual bonds, called ‘consols,’ not covered by the ceiling because they have no principal to repay. It could (probably) have issued premium bonds. It could have asked the Federal Reserve to clear Treasury checks with a zero-interest, unsecured line of credit. It could, finally, have let some checks bounce, if it came to that, and relied on the big bankers, not to mention the outraged public, to whip Congress into line. There was no chance that a default ‘crisis’ would fail to resolve in a few hours, at most.”
<br><br>The Democrats could have seized on other opportunities afforded them by Kevin McCarthy’s craven desire to become House Speaker, whatever the cost. A few moderate Democrats could have crossed over and voted for him in January 2023, sparing him the horrible deals he had to make with the likes of Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia), Matt Gaetz (R-Florida) and other far-Right Republicans to become Speaker. Instead the House Democrats remained resolutely united behind their own leader, Hakeem Jeffries, and every time they went on TV and boasted that <i>their</i> caucus was united, I yelled at the TV, “WRONG! WRONG! WRONG!” A Speaker McCarthy elected with bipartisan votes would also have not had to give in to the terrible “motion to vacate” rule by which only one House member can force a vote on whether he can remain Speaker – and it would just take a majority vote to remove him.
<br><br>But this never happened because of the bizarre, stupid, hidebound “traditions” by which the House governs itself that give virtually absolute power to the majority party, whichever one it is. This nearly threatened to short-circuit the ultimate “compromise” even before it could get to the House floor when Democrats voted <i>en masse</i> against the so-called “rule” under which it would be considered, debated and voted on. With a number of Republican representatives also voting against the rule, it squeaked through only after 52 House Democrats changed their votes from “no” to “yes” to allow the rule to pass. The final vote in the House to pass the bill was 314 in favor, 117 opposed – but 164 of the “yes” votes were Democrats and only 149 were Republicans. In the Senate the vote was even more lopsided: 63 to 36 in all, with 46 Democrats and only 17 Republicans voting "yes" while 31 Republicans, four Democrats and Bernie Sanders (a nominal independent who caucuses with the Democrats) voting "no." So this bill full of Republican priorities relied on the votes of Democrats to pass!
<br><br><b>The “Bipartisan” Traditionalist</b>
<br><br>President Biden said and did none of the things that could have short-circuited the debt ceiling crisis because he’s a profoundly unimaginative man, bound by the rules of decency and decorum as he learned them in his 36 years in the Senate (1973 to 2009) and his subsequent eight years as Barack Obama’s Vice-President. Early on in the Biden Presidency I wrote that there seemed to be two Joe Bidens, the progressive tribune anxious to use the full powers of his office to address the growing inequalities in wealth and income, safeguard the environment and in particular take on human-caused climate change; and the moderate anxious to get along with everybody and preserve his “bipartisan” image.
<br><br>As long as Democrats controlled both houses of Congress – however barely and hamstrung as they were by the loathsome 60-vote threshold for the Senate to do almost <i>anything</i> – progressive Biden had at least a fighting chance against moderate Biden. Once the Republicans gained control of the House in the 2022 midterms and served notice that they were going to hold raising the debt ceiling hostage for a sweeping attack on Biden’s agenda, moderate Biden took over and negotiated a truly ghastly deal whose only saving grace was that, as John Cassidy said, it could have been even worse.
<br><br>As <i>New York Times</i> White House correspondent Peter Baker said on the June 2 episode of the PBS series <i>Washington Week</i> (<a href="https://www.pbs.org/video/washington-week-full-episode-june-2-2023-z55tvb/" target="_blank">https://www.pbs.org/video/washington-week-full-episode-june-2-2023-z55tvb/</a>), “I think what <i>[the final deal]</i> tells us is that President Biden, of course, has now been able to burnish his reputation for bipartisanship. This is important to him. It’s part of his identity, his political identity. It’s part of his case for re-election next year. I’m the adult in the room at a time of lots of fractious fighting among the parties. It doesn’t necessarily match the desires and priorities of his own party. A lot of his House Democrats would have preferred he’d be more of a fighter, less of a compromiser. But for him, you saw him tonight give that speech in which he made clear that his priority is being seen as somebody who rises above the partisanship in the nation’s interest.”
<br><br>That’s just the problem with Biden, wrote James K. Galbraith: “The president did not want to fight. He did not want to defend any principle. He did not want to use the powers he had to protect and defend the American people. He did not want to stand with Democrats in Congress or his constituents in the Democratic Party. He wanted to be seen sitting, side by side, with the Republican Speaker of the House. He wanted to get the plaudits of the pundit class for ‘compromise’ and for reaching a ‘bipartisan’ deal. Well, the President has what he wants. The Speaker has what he wants. Let them defend the consequences.”
<br><br>The speech Peter Baker was referring to was Biden’s conciliatory message from the Oval Office on June 2 in which he paid tribute to Speaker McCarthy and presented the deal as one fair to both sides. McCarthy had sung a quite different tune in his own speech just after the House passed the final bill May 31. McCarthy was full of truculence and insistence that the “Fiscal Responsibility Act” was just the first step. Republicans, he said, were quite proud of the fact that for the first time in decades, the federal government would spend less this year than it did the year before. And he and his colleagues in the House Republican leadership who were standing with him on the podium announced their determination to pursue further cutbacks in American government spending, no matter what the cost to people’s lives and livelihoods.
<br><br>Among the specific issues McCarthy pledged to keep pursuing is ending the Biden administration’s attempts to boost Internal Revenue Service funding, further gutting the nation’s environmental laws, and more cutbacks in social services in general, including imposing work requirements for Medicaid recipients. If the same political alignment of today remains after the 2024 election – Biden wins a second term but the Republicans keep control of the House – you can bet there will be a repeat of this year’s economic brinksmanship as soon as the deal’s suspension of the debt ceiling expires in January 2025. Republicans have found that holding the U.S. and world economies hostage in exchange for dramatic cutbacks in social-service spending and sweeping policy changes in other areas works.
<br><br>As Jonathan Chait wrote in <i>New York</i> magazine (<a href="https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/05/debt-ceiling-deal-who-won-biden-mccarthy-republicans-hostage-extortion.html" target="_blank">https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/05/debt-ceiling-deal-who-won-biden-mccarthy-republicans-hostage-extortion.html</a>), “What will happen the next time a Democratic president needs a Republican House to lift the debt ceiling? There is no reason the ransom demand will be small. … The next round of demands will likely cut deeper into anti-poverty programs that were spared this time. Or possibly, Republicans will creatively demand concessions on immigration, abortion, or any other social issue that has seized their imagination at the moment.”
<br><br>If the Democrats once again gain control of both houses of Congress, one of their first and strongest priorities should be simply to abolish the debt ceiling so they can no longer be victimized by this sort of blackmail. Until then, Republicans’ success in humiliating Biden and forcing him to negotiate with them despite Biden’s initial refusal to do so (his ultimate course reminded me of the way Ronald Reagan used to insist, “We do not negotiate with terrorists,” while he and his administration were negotiating with terrorists) will wreak untold havoc on the U.S. – and the world – for generations to come. As Jonathan Chait wrote in the above-cited article, “When you are holding a gun to the head of the global economy, and both sides understand the president has no option but to pay off the hostage-takers, there’s no natural limit to the size of the ransom.”mgconlanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09328563476025164608noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20445321.post-56157554846584365082023-04-25T21:31:00.004-07:002023-05-02T13:27:06.300-07:00The Debt Ceiling: House Republicans Hold the World's Economy Hostage<br><b>by Mark Gabrish Conlan</b> • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for <i>Zenger’s Newsmagazine</i> • All rights reserved
<br><br>On April 17, 2023, Kevin McCarthy, Speaker of the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, served notice on the American people of just what he and his House Republican colleagues will demand in exchange for raising America’s debt ceiling. Until 1994, when the Republicans gained their first House majority in 40 years, raising the debt ceiling as needed was a strictly mechanical exercise. Most people didn’t know the debt ceiling – a resolution the U.S. obliges itself to extend periodically to pay for money it’s already spent – even existed. But over the last 30 years, whenever Republicans have held control of one or both houses of Congress while the President was a Democrat, it’s become a highly controversial and contentious issue.
<br><br>Contrary to popular misconceptions, raising the debt ceiling does not put the U.S. further into debt. It merely gives the U.S. Treasury Department permission to pay the bills for debt we’ve already incurred. Not raising the debt ceiling would be like you unilaterally deciding you aren’t going to pay your credit-card bills. Banks and other financial institutions don’t take kindly to that sort of thing, and neither would the U.S.’s creditors. (In most discussions about the national debt very few people mention whom and what we owe the debt to, but it’s basic economics that every time there is a debtor, there is a creditor.)
<br><br>The U.S. is in a particularly powerful position to sink the world’s economy if it decides to stop paying its bills, because the U.S. dollar is the world’s reserve currency. That means that anything which causes creditors and other nations to doubt the soundness of the U.S. dollar will hurt the world’s economy more than it would if the European Union, Britain, Japan or another country did it. But the United States and the world economy are both being held hostage by a group of about 20 or so radical-Right Republicans with deep Libertarian ideological roots who are threatening to refuse to raise the debt ceiling unless the Democrats who still control the Presidency and the Senate agree to deep cuts in domestic spending.
<br><br>Not that there’s a lot of room to cut the federal budget, particularly in the major ways the Republican Right wants to. Given the posture of both major parties towards the U.S. military – even though, according to the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, a conservative group of deficit hawks, the U.S. spends 40 percent of the total world’s defense budget, more than that of the next 10 nations combined (<a href="https://www.pgpf.org/blog/2023/04/the-united-states-spends-more-on-defense-than-the-next-10-countries-combined#:~:text=April%2024%2C%202023-,The%20United%20States%20Spends%20More%20on%20Defense%20than%20the%20Next,Peace%20Research%20Institute%20%28SIPRI%29." target="_blank">https://www.pgpf.org/blog/2023/04/the-united-states-spends-more-on-defense-than-the-next-10-countries-combined#:~:text=April%2024%2C%202023-,The%20United%20States%20Spends%20More%20on%20Defense%20than%20the%20Next,Peace%20Research%20Institute%20(SIPRI).</a>) – America’s bloated defense budget is off limits. And, despite the long-standing desire of many Congressional Republicans either drastically to cut Social Security and Medicare or eliminate them altogether, President Joe Biden artfully tricked them during last February’s State of the Union address into a public pledge to keep those programs intact, at least for now.
<br><br>So, with the three biggest expenditures the U.S. government has off the table, Republicans are wracking their little pea-brains looking for other things to cut. Among their suggestions are cutting the administrative budgets for Social Security and Medicare, as well as the Internal Revenue Service – even though the 2023 tax season went far smoother than usual because President Biden and a Democratic Congress raised the number of IRS agents, thereby cutting wait times on the phone from half an hour to five minutes. The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has warned that defunding the IRS would actually increase the budget deficit, because it would enable more people who underpay their taxes, accidentally or deliberately, to get away with it.
<br><br>The Republican plan to raise the debt ceiling – which McCarthy grandly calls the “Limit, Save, Grow Act of 2023” (H.R. 2811) – aims to roll back discretionary government spending to 2022 levels. It would prevent President Biden from rolling back student loan debt (an executive order currently tied up in court after a number of Republican state attorneys general filed suit to stop it) and it would impose work requirements on recipients of food stamps, Medicaid and the so-called “Temporary Assistance to Needy Families” (TANF) program enacted by Democratic President Bill Clinton and a Republican Congress in 1996.
<br><br>It would also repeal most of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) passed last year by President Biden and a Democratic Congress, and would specifically eliminate unspent COVID-19 relief funds and anything to do with fighting human-caused climate change. And it would vastly restrict the administration’s ability to block oil drilling or coal mining on federal lands. What’s more, the debt ceiling extension would last for only one year – so the two major parties would have to fight this out all over again just as the 2024 Presidential election campaign, for which Biden has already announced his candidacy for re-election, is heating up.
<br><br><b>Too “Draconian” – Or Not Draconian Enough?</b>
<br><br>President Biden and other Democrats have, predictably, already denounced H.,R. 2811 and its precursor, a budget plan introduced in March 2023 by the ultra-Right House Freedom Caucus. In a statement released on March 20 (<a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2023/03/20/five-alarm-fire-the-house-freedom-caucus-extreme-budget-proposal-endangers-public-safety/" target="_blank">https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2023/03/20/five-alarm-fire-the-house-freedom-caucus-extreme-budget-proposal-endangers-public-safety/</a>), the White House called the Republican budget plan a ‘FIVE-ALARM FIRE” (in all caps). They said it would slash public safety programs and make life worse for working-class and middle-class poeple while funding big tax breaks for the rich. “In fact, their tax cuts would be so expensive that their deep and harmful cuts would not reduce the deficit,” the White House’s “FIVE-ALARM FIRE” statement said.. White House officials have called the Republican budget proposals “draconian” and have argued that in order to meet the Republicans’ goals to reduce federal spending without cutting the military, Social Security or Medicare, they would have to get rid of the entire rest of the federal budget.
<br><br>But while Biden and the Democrats are calling the GOP budget planks “draconian,” Kevin McCarthy is having problems from Congressmembers of his own party who don’t think they’re draconian enough. In a frightening dispatch released by Reuters April 18 (<a href="https://www.axios.com/2023/04/18/republicans-mccarthy-debt-ceiling-deal" target="_blank">https://www.axios.com/2023/04/18/republicans-mccarthy-debt-ceiling-deal</a>), various Republican House members questioned McCarthy’s plan and called for more extreme measures. One unnamed Republican Congressmember told Reuters reporters Andrew Solender and Juliegrace Brufke that the threat of a national default was “the single biggest point of leverage that will exist in these two years."
<br><br>Other Republican House members were willing to allow the Reuters reporters to use their names, but said things equally outrageous. “I think that they should go further. ... I am in favor of very aggressive cuts," said Right-wing Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL).
<br><br>Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ), who unsuccessfully challenged McCarthy in the election for Speaker, said McCarthy's proposal to keep non-discretionary,, non-defense spending at 2022 levels is a "long ways away" from what he wants, which is to bring it down to 2020 levels before the COVID-19 pandemic. "I’m not at the table,” Biggs told Reuters. “And I get it, McCarthy’s pissed that I ran against him, so I don’t get invited to any of these deals. But I think it’s unfortunate that he doesn’t want to hear from everybody.”
<br><br>House Republicans like Reps. Tim Burchett (R-TN) and Eric Burlison (R-MO) are skeptical of raising the debt ceiling on principle. "I just didn't run for Congress to raise the debt ceiling," Burlison told Reuters..”It’s not something I’m excited about. … I really want to see some real restraints and fiscal cuts, not just promises.”
<br><br>President Biden met with McCarthy one time in February but since then has refused to negotiate with the Republican House leader. Biden’s position is that the House should do its job and pass a “clean” bill to lift the debt ceiling, without any preconditions, and then negotiate spending issues later as part of the normal budget process. But McCarthy has already declared that a non-starter. In his April 17 speech before the New York Stock Exchange – a significant locale because it’s the business home of the investors and financiers who would be among the biggest losers if the U.S. actually defaults on its debts – he said, “A no-strings-attached debt limit increase will not pass.”
<br><br><b>What Are the Republicans After?</b>
<br><br>Ask most Republican politicians, especially those on the far Right of their party, what book has most influenced their political outlooks and beliefs, and they will generally tell you the Bible. Ask them what book besides the Bible has most influenced them, and most will say the 1957 novel <i>Atlas Shrugged</i> by Ayn Rand. <i>Atlas Shrugged</i> is a long book with an apocalyptic plot line in which the world’s biggest and most powerful capitalists withdraw from the global economy and form a secret state of their own. Without them, the world’s economy collapses and their leader, John Galt, serves notice on the population, “If you want an industrial society, you will have to have it on our terms.”
<br><br>The last time Republicans in Congress threatened to force the U.S. to default on its debts, I wrote that they basically seemed to be trying to replicate the ending of <i>Atlas Shrugged</i> in real life. Rand’s immensely popular novel gave rise to Libertarianism, a political philosophy that holds that there are only three proper functions of government: a military, to protect the nation and its property owners from foreign threats; law enforcement, to protect people with property from the attempts of people without it to take it; and a court system, to adjudicate disputes between people with property as well as to punish criminals, who in Libertarian ideology are defined as anyone who relies in whole or in part on government for their survival.
<br><br>It’s not clear just how many of the radical-Right House Republicans are hard-core Libertarian ideologues who hope that their refusal to raise the U.S. debt ceiling will bring about a global economic apocalypse and therefore end all those pesky social programs they don’t believe should exist. It’s not even clear that most of them have thought out the consequences of the U.S. failing to pay off its debts at all. But we’ve seen far-Right Congressmembers like Marlorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Lauren Boebert of Colorado repeat over and over, like meditation students clinging to their mantras, that as Boebert told Fox News host Sean Hannity during the epic struggle over Kevin McCarthy’s effort to become Speaker of the House, “We’ve got to stop spending money we don’t have,” with a ferocity and grim determination that even put off a sympathetic interviewer like Hannity.
<br><br><b>How We Got Here: The Failure of the “Red Tsunami”</b>
<br><br>One reason we are facing the potential of a worldwide economic crisis is that, contrary to the predictions of virtually every U.S. political analyst (including me), the widely expected “Red Tsunami” – a pro-Republican avalanche of such devastating proportions the Democrats would barely be left with a foothold in Congress – didn’t happen. The Democrats actually picked up a seat in the U.S. Senate and lost their House majority by only six seats. In a country whose political system was more rational than ours, that might have led both major parties to move to the center and avoid potentially world-shattering economic cataclysms.
<br><br>Unfortunately, the United States has neither a parliamentary system, proportional representation nor any of the other fail-safe mechanisms other countries have. The combination of single-member legislative districts, the two-party duopoly that creates, and the House of Representatives’ tradition of absolute majority control ensures that the safety valves electorates have in most of the world’s democracies don’t exist here. Once the people have voted a party in, they don’t have any recourse for at least the next two years. Even the recall, a highly controversial process by which voters in certain U.S. states to get rid of a public official and replace them with someone at least theoretically better able to represent them, doesn’t exist at the federal level.
<br><br>This has led to the absurd spectacle of George Santos, one of the four New York Republicans who unseated Democrats in key upstate districts President Joe Biden had easily won in 2020, clinging to office even as the web of lies he told about himself has unraveled completely. There’s something weird and pathetic about the spectacle of Santos essentially giving the finger to the growing number of people – including the Republican party leaders of Nassau County, where he’s from – who want him to resign. As long as Kevin McCarthy needs Santos’s vote – which he does – McCarthy will protect him and there won’t be any way the people in Santos’s district can get rid of him until 2024.
<br><br>One grim irony of the Democrats doing so much better than they were expected to in the 2022 midterm elections is the small size of McCarthy’s majority actually gave the farthest-Right crazies in his party more power. Though the Constitution specifies that the House Speaker is elected by the entire membership, in practice the majority party selects the Speaker without any input from the minority. In normal Speaker elections the majority party caucuses behind closed doors and selects the new Speaker privately before taking the floor and electing them in public. Not this time: for the first time in exactly 100 years this year’s Speaker election went past a single ballot. In fact, it took 15 ballots before Kevin McCarthy got the votes he needed – and he only got them because a few bitter-enders like Boebert agreed to vote “present” on the last ballot and thereby reduced the number of votes McCarthy needed to 215 – three votes short of an actual majority.
<br><br>In exchange for the votes he needed to become Speaker, McCarthy had basically to subcontract the entire governance of the U.S. to the far-Right crazies in his party. Among the more bizarre things he needed to give in on was the so-called “motion to vacate,” which as CNN reported on December 13, 2022 – less than a month before McCarthy’s election after four harrowing days and 15 ballots (<a href="https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/13/politics/house-speaker-gop-motion-to-vacate/index.html" target="_blank">https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/13/politics/house-speaker-gop-motion-to-vacate/index.html</a>) – means that just one House Republican (or Democrat) can move at any time to remove him from the job. McCarthy is undoubtedly well aware that even without the “motion to vacate” rule in place, the last House Speaker who negotiated a deal with the Democrats over raising the debt ceiling, John Boehner, was driven from office by Right-wing Freedom Caucus members who hadn’t thought his deal did enough to bring down government spending.
<br><br>As Representative Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) told CNN last December, “There’s a reason [the motion to vacate] already got debated. You can’t govern with a gun to your head, and that is what they are asking for. It makes us highly unstable, and it lays out the potential too for Democrats to take advantage of this and create absolute chaos.” Advocates for the ”motion to vacate” compared it to the ability of a corporate board of directors to fire a chief executive officer (CEO) – but CEO’s generally have contractual protections. A corporate board that wants to fire a CEO before their contract is up generally has to spend millions of dollars to buy them out. The “motion to vacate” carries with it no comparable penalties.
<br><br>The radical Right of the Republican House Caucus got far more out of McCarthy than just the “motion to vacate.” They got seats on hugely important House committees. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who had been removed from all committee assignments in the last Democratically-controlled House for physically threatening other members and calling for the execution of certain prominent Democrats, now serves on the Homeland Security Committee. Paul Gosar (R-AZ), who’s so demented virtually his entire family endorsed against him when he first ran for Congress in 2020, was put back on the Natural Resources Committee.
<br><br>Since I wrote the first draft of this article last January, the dimensions of the deal McCarthy cut with the craziest members of the House Republican Caucus to become Speaker have become even more apparent. McCarthy not only appointed Jim Jordan (R-OH) chair of the House Judiciary Committee, he gave Jordan a subcommittee to investigate the so-called “weaponization” of the federal government against Republicans and conservatives in general, and former President Donald Trump in particular. Jordan organized a rare “field trip” of the House Judiciary Committee to New York City, ostensibly to investigate the rising crime rate (which is actually declining; one MS-NBC host noted that there are five cities in Jordan’s home state of Ohio, including Mansfield in his own district, which have higher murder rates <i>per capita</i> than New York) but really to embarrass Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg for having sought and received an indictment against Trump.
<br><br>McCarthy also unilaterally gave thousands of hours of House surveillance footage of the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol to then-Fox News prime time host Tucker Carlson – much to the disgust of the U.S. Capitol Police, who worried the airing of such footage would reveal the plans they have to evacuate Congressmembers and their staffs in case there’s another attack on the Capitol. McCarthy’s apparent intention in giving this footage to Carlson was so Carlson would produce a series of videos claiming that the January 6, 2021 riot was no big deal – but Carlson’s tenure at Fox ended ignominiously on April 24 after he’d done just one five-minute segment based on this footage.
<br><br><b>Ultimately, Biden Will Have to Cave</b>
<br><br>In refusing so far to negotiate with Kevin McCarthy and the House Republicans – including the ultra-Right crazies he depends on to keep him in power – President Biden has morality and principle on his side. Biden has said it is the responsibility of Congress to raise the debt ceiling periodically as necessitated by the amount of federal spending they have already approved in the budget. He has argued passionately that it’s irresponsible for either major party to hold the U.S. and world economies hostage for a few transitory political gains. And he’s right about the probable outcomes of the deep budget cuts the Republicans want – worse times for ordinary Americans, huge tax breaks for the already super-rich, fewer resources to ensure public safety, and an accelerating global environmental crisis that within 100 to 200 years is likely to make Earth uninhabitable for humans.
<br><br>But as the late, great trial lawyer Louis Nizer once wrote, “When a theory collides with a fact, the result is a disaster.” Biden has the theory on his side, but McCarthy has the facts. With the House firmly under Republican control – albeit by a slender majority – the simple fact is that no extension of the federal debt ceiling can pass the House without McCarthy’s approval. As Speaker, McCarthy controls the House’s agenda, and he has the power to prevent a “clean” debt-ceiling bill from ever going through simply by refusing to allow it to be voted on.
<br><br>The only way around McCarthy’s ironclad control of the House’s agenda is something called a “discharge petition,” in which a majority of House members request a chance to vote on something the Speaker has decided not to let them vote on. But that is a <i>lot</i> easier said than done. MS-NBC host Lawrence O’Donnell, who worked for years on the staff of Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-New York) and therefore knows a lot about the arcana of legislative rules, obtained a copy of the House rules for a discharge petition and said he couldn’t make heads or tails of them.
<br><br>Previous fights over the debt ceiling have ended at least partly because the major Republican donors – the ultra-rich people who would stand to lose the most if the U.S. actually defaulted – have threatened to stop donating campaign money to the party or its members if they jeopardized the U.S.’s credit rating. But this may not be as effective as it once was. For one thing, a lot of big Republican donors have themselves drunk Ayn Rand’s Libertarian Kool-Aid and are looking forward to a sort of <i>Atlas Shrugged</i> apocalypse. They aren’t worried about losing their own money because Rand in her novels frequently had her super-capitalist heroes lose all their money – only to gain it all back, and more, because they were just so overwhelmingly superior to the rest of humanity.
<br><br>Besides, ever since Donald Trump emerged as the Republican favorite for the 2016 Presidential nomination, modern-day Republicans have made a fetish out of attacking so-called “corporate elites” and proclaiming themselves as champions of “the little guy” against anonymous, faceless corporate bureaucracies. Ever since the modern-day political alignment emerged between 1968 and 1980, the Republican Party has been an uneasy but surprisingly durable coalition between Libertarian capitalists who want government to keep out of their own business, and hyper-Right Christian activists who want a huge, interventionist government that actively decides for people whom they can have sex with, how they can deal with the consequences – good and bad – therefrom, what books they may read and whether they can travel.
<br><br>For most of the last 62 years the Libertarian Right had had the upper hand in this coalition. Not anymore. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s holy war against his state’s largest private employer, the Walt Disney Corporation, over their opposition to his “Don’t Say Gay” bill (driven by Queer and Queer-friendly Disney employees who pressured the company to take a stand on the legislation) essentially signaled to the American capitalist elite that they’ve created a monster. Governments in Florida and other Republican-controlled states are moving aggressively to limit the freedom of employers as well as individual employees to live their lives as they want to – and the same Republican true believers who want an intrusive Big Government policing people’s private sex lives may not stop at bringing down the world’s economy just because a few corporate fat-cats tell them not to.
<br><br>So ultimately Biden will cave. He will <i>have</i> to. Maybe he’ll win some tweaks in the GOP’s economic proposals that will somewhat soften the blows. But he knows that ultimately he will have to agree to a Republican budget plan that will eviscerate many of the policies and programs he wanted to be President to create or protect in the first place. The other possibility is that, despite the public statements of both Biden and McCarthy that neither wants to see the U.S. default on its obligations, it may happen anyway. The classic example in history of a destructive event no one really wanted is World War I; the countries that blundered their way into this war either thought it would never happen or expected a quick victory for one side or the other. Instead the war hideously dragged on for over four years and left wanton carnage in its wake.
<br><br>Besides, if the U,S. actually defaults on its debts and sends the global economy crashing, U.S. voters will take it out on Biden and the Democrats. That’s what they did in 1932, when Republican President Herbert Hoover was almost universally blamed for the 1929 stock market crash and the ensuing Great Depression because they occurred on his watch. Even though he had little to do with it – and Hoover actually began the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC) and some of the other big-government programs his successor, Franklin Roosevelt, got credit for – the homeless encampments of the 1930’s were bitterly nicknamed “Hoovervilles.” The result of the economic collapse of the 1930’s was a long period of Democratic control of the country – and the likely result of an economic collapse under Biden’s watch would be a similarly extended period of total dominance by Republicans.
mgconlanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09328563476025164608noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20445321.post-73498593217642590952023-03-15T17:19:00.003-07:002023-06-05T18:49:08.422-07:00PBS "Frontline" Documentary "Age of Easy Money" Shows Perils in Relying On the Federal Reserve to Make Economic Policyr>by Mark Gabrish Conlan</b> • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
<br><br>Last night (March 14) at 9 I watched a PBS <i>Frontline</i> documentary called “Age of Easy Money” on the “streaming” channel, since it was scheduled to begin at 10 p.m. but I wanted to be able to watch it an hour earlier so there’d be nothing in the way of my husband Charles and I watching the Stephen Colbert show once he got back from work at 10:45 p.m. I think “Age of Easy Money” was produced before the recent collapse of Silicon Valley Bank in early March, but they stuck an introductory tag in the program to cover it. The main focus of the program was in the Federal Reserve in general and its chair, Jerome “Jay” Powell – a Donald Trump appointee whom Joe Biden inexplicably reappointed in late 2022 as his term was about to expire – in particular. The Federal Reserve was created in 1913 by an act of Congress and signed into law by then newly elected President Woodrow Wilson. Its main purposes were to stabilize the U.S. currency and maintain economic growth, including both low unemployment and low inflation. Only it was set up in such a way that bankers would be in charge of it, and bankers in general prefer low inflation to low unemployment because they don’t want their loans repaid in dollars that aren’t worth as much as they were when they lent them in the first place. In order to avoid the perception that the Fed (as it’s universally nicknamed) would be a tool of the political branches of government – heaven forfend that the government actually have a hand in running the economy! – the Fed was deliberately insulated from political pressure as much as possible, Though its president would be appointed by the President of the United States, the Fed president’s term was deliberately staggered so it didn’t expire until two years after the presidential election, so the new President couldn’t immediately install his own person as head of the Fed.
<br><br>What’s more, instead of being a part of the U.S. Treasury Department so the Fed’s monetary policies could be coordinated with the rest of the government’s fiscal policies, presenting the quite frequent situation of the administrative branches and the Fed pursuing policies at cross-purposes with each other. The <i>Frontline</i> documentary began with the 2008 economic crisis, though the Fed’s power to undermine the decisions of the political branches of government is an old problem. In the late 1970’s then-Fed chair Paul Volcker ran such a tight ship on monetary policies, making interest rates so high he virtually strangled the U.S. economy. According to Garry Wills, historian and Presidential biographer, Volcker’s tight-money policies made it virtually impossible for Jimmy Carter to win re-election and handed the country over to Ronald Reagan and the extreme Right, with consequences we’ve been suffering ever since. After the 2008 economic collapse, the Fed invented something called “quantitative easing,” in which the Fed would not only buy the mortgage-backed securities whose downfall had tanked the U.S. economy in the first place, they would buy U.S. Treasury bonds and other financial instruments from private banks. The idea was that the Fed would flood the banking system with cheap money, which the banks would then use to make loans that would stimulate economic growth by actually investing in goods and services. Instead the banks used the money to buy more securities, which they then sold back to the Fed, making quick and easy profits without doing anything and without having to take the risks of actually loaning money to invest in economic production. The show begins with the annual conference of world central bankers in Jackson Hole, Wyoming in August, and the 2022 speech by Jerome Powell.
<br><br>It seems that this has become an annual ritual in which, because the U.S. economy is the world’s largest and the U.S. dollar is the world’s reserve currency (a fact that has shielded us from the consequences of our overall economic stupidity for decades), central bankers, government officials and the rest of the world waits with bated breath for what the Fed chair says about his upcoming economic policies. In August 2022 Powell said he was committed to reducing the inflation rate to 2 percent (the Fed’s official target) by continuing to raise interest rates after a decade of historically low ones, no matter how much “pain” – a word he repeatedly used – this caused to the rest of the economy. Since the “pain” would involve throwing millions of people out of work and a long-term dampening of economic growth, quite likely driving both the U.S. and the world economy into a recession (or even, as one particularly pessimistic interviewee on the program suggested, a depression) and doing to President Biden’s re-election chances what Paul Volcker did to Jimmy Carter’s. In between the show focused on the reaction of private investors, especially Wall Street, to any hint from the Fed that they were going to stop the age of easy money by jacking up interest rates. On at least two occasions between 2010 and 2020, hints from the Fed that they were going to hike interest rates and thereby choke off the flow of easy money led to massive drops in stock prices.
<br><br>Just as the Fed had responded in 2008 to the economic crisis by flooding the banks with new capital, only to find that they were using it either to buy more securities to sell to the Fed or just pocketing the money themselves in the form of higher salaries and bonuses for their top executives, so in the late 2010’s corporate leaders took advantage of low interest rates to borrow money not to increase their productive capacity and put more people to work. Rather, they borrowed money to invest in buybacks of their own stock, with the idea of not only consolidating more and more corporate ownership into their own hands but also jacking up the price of their companies’ stock, since according to the law of supply and demand, every time you decrease the supply of something (whether canned goods or stock shares), their price goes up. One of the worst phenomena of late-stage capitalism has been the obsession with stock prices as the measure of how much a company is worth. I remember reading a book on recent financial history in which the disastrous merger of America Online and Time Warner was discussed, and the part that stuck with me was when a Time Warner board member asked why, when his company would be contributing 85 percent of the combined firm’s total revenue, their shareholders would be getting only 45 percent of the combined company’s stock. The answer he got was that AOL’s “market cap” was that much higher than Time Warner’s.
<br><br>“Market cap” – short for “market capitalization” – is a ridiculous measure of a company’s value that has become all the rage in recent decades. It simply means the total number of stock shares in a company multiplied by the price of its stock per share, Reliance on “market cap” as the measure of how well a company is doing means encouraging its managers to do whatever it takes to bid the stock price up, including making highly speculative investments that will cause “bubbles” in the stock price per share. Of course, I couldn’t help but watch “Age of Easy Money” through my life-long anti-capitalist lens, and there was a reference in the program to Aesop’s fable of the frog and the scorpion – the scorpion convinces the frog to take it across the river,the frog is reluctant because he’s afraid the scorpion will bite and kill him, the scorpion says I wouldn’t do that because then we’d both die, then the scorpion takes in the frog’s back, they start across the river and midway over the scorpion stings the frog. The frog asks why the scorpion did that and doomed them both to drown, and the scorpion says, “I couldn’t help it – it’s just my nature!” It’s accordingly in the nature of capitalists to do absolutely stupid short-term things in pursuit of an immediate profit no matter what that does to the economy long-term. The only way to control them is by effective government regulation.
<br><br>In this case, the political branches of government and the Fed should have come together to ensure that loose money would be used in a socially productive fashion. They could have put controls on the cash the Fed flooded the private banks with in 2008 and again in the late 2010’s so it would have been used for the kinds of productive, job-creating investments the Fed wanted to encourage. Instead, with a Republican Party so in thrall to the maxims of <i>laissez-faire</i> capitalism and a Democratic Party that has largely abandoned the working class in pursuit of big-money corporate donors, no solutions that might have actually reined in the power of private businesses to do what’s in their nature were politically possible. “Age of Easy Money” ends with Mohamed El-Erian, president of Queens’ College, Cambridge and chief economic adviser to the hedge fund Allianz, taking the political system to task for not addressing the real problems with the American economy: “The world of easy money went way too far. Way, way too far. Let's do the other stuff that's needed. The stuff that really promotes genuine, durable, inclusive growth and not this stuff that creates artificial growth. We are capable of producing that. None of that is in the hands of the Fed. They don't invest in infrastructure. They can't reform the tax system. They can't help labor retraining. This is a political problem.”
<br><br>The story of the American economic and political system over the last 15 years is replete with missed opportunities, including one specifically mentioned in “Age of Easy Money” – the failure to address America’s crumbling infrastructure during the Trump administration, when interest rates were historically low and the costs of borrowing money to repair it would have been quite cheap. Instead Trump’s repeated declarations of “Infrastructure Week” became a recurring nationwide joke and it was left for President Biden actually to steer an infrastructure bill through Congress. But to me one of the worst missed opportunities was the rise of the Right-wing pseudo-populist “Tea Party” movement in 2010. Instead of a mass anti-capitalist movement we got a revenge-driven campaign of hate for alleged “elites” that handed control of Congress to the anti-labor, openly pro-capitalist Republicans and set the stage for the anger-fueled campaign of Donald Trump and the hatred, mostly directed against women, people of color and Queer people, that has dominated our politics ever since.mgconlanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09328563476025164608noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20445321.post-3349163908245172152023-02-25T15:28:00.001-08:002023-02-25T15:28:12.807-08:00MS-NBC Documentary "Ukraine's Secret Resistance": A Moving Tale of Courage – and Torture<br>by Mark Gabrish Conlan</b> • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for <i>Zenger's Newsmagazine</i> • All rights reserved
<br><br>On February 24 at 7 and 10 p.m., MS-NBC showed a quite remarkable documentary called <i>Ukraine’s Secret Resistance</i>, hosted by NBC News foreign correspondent Richard Engel and featuring profiles of four individuals who became part of the partisan resistance in Kherson, Ukraine’s second-largest city and one of the earliest targets for the Russian invasion of Ukraine (which started one year ago yesterday) because it lies only 25 miles from Ukraine’s border with Russia. The show profiled four resisters: Vladyslav “Vlad” Nebolstup, Nastya Burlak, Mykhailo Kuanov and a 17-year-old identified only as “Sergei.” Their stories of resistance eerily paralleled the ones we’ve heard of people similarly organizing resistance networks against Nazi occupatioin during World War II, though with a few modern features. Vlad was a car-parts salesman, Nastya a bartender, and Mykhailo a cab driver,and the three of them originally became involved in resistance activities when they traveled around Kherson and looked for the Russian encampments. They were specifically interested in where the Russian troops were staying and storing their heavy equipment. The show didn’t come right out and say Vlad and Nastya were a couple, but it certainly hinted at a romantic interest between them; they recalled how she would make him drinks when he came into the bar where she worked. When the Russians captured Kherson, Nastya’s bar became one of their favorite hangouts. They talked a lot and drank a lot, and Nastya picked up information about what they were saying and passed it on to Ukraine’s official intelligence service. Nastya also reported that the Russian soldiers in her bar were nasty and frequently brutal – one waiter even found himself arrested because the Russian soldier he was waiting on didn’t think the service was fast enough. She said the Russians drank all manner of hard liquors, including whiskey (one wonders if they were taking advantage of being in Ukraine to have drinks they couldn’t get back home instead of being stuck with vodka all the time).
<br><br>Eventually Vlad crossed the line from just collecting intelligence to killing a Russian soldier; he recalled the incident as he fingered the knife with which he did the killing. He sneaked up behind the Russian with his knife and grabbed him from behind – the Russian was listening to music on earbuds and so he didn’t hear Vlad coming even though, as Vlad grimly joked, he’s a big man and therefore not all that good at sneaking up behind someone silently. Vlad plunged the knife into the Russian’s back and the Russian felt toe knife go in, he turned to face Vlad, and the two wrestled briefly before the Russian finally succumbed to Vlad’s wounds. Richard Engel asked if Vlad had any guilt feelings about the killing, and Vlad said no: the Russians had invaded their country, they didn’t belong in Ukraine, and therefore he felt justified in killing one of them. (At the same time it occurred to me that the Russian he killed was probably a draftee and didn’t want to be in Ukraine aqny more than the Ukrainians wanted him there.) In some ways Sergei’s story was the saddest: unlike the others,who were in their 20’s, Sergei was only 17 when oe got involved with the resistance, and after a few missions he was captured by the Russians. Sergei was held in a makeshift warehouse the Russians had converted into a prison and torture center, and after a few days of torture he “broke” and gave the Russians the information they wanted, including the names and addresses of fellow resisters. One grim irony is that Sergei himself had been ratted out by another resister whom the Russians had already captured and tortured.
<br><br>Sergei, alone of the four Engel profiled, insisted that his real name not be used and he be shot in shadow so his face couldn’t be recognized. He’s also the only one of the four who isn’t still living in Kherson. While the other three stayed in the city after Ukrainian forces retook Kherson in November 2022, Sergei moved to Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital (which Russians have steadily bombed since the war started but where life is still relatively normal; it’s like the difference between living in London and living in Paris during World War II), and he’s still traumatized by having yielded to torture and giving the Russians the information they wanted – which meant he subjected his friends to the same abuse he suffered himself. Today he’s a “broken” man in more ways than one; he told Engel he doesn’t know how he’s going to pay his rent in Kyiv,, and though he was an aspiring musician before the war started he doesn’t seem to have taken that up again – and it’s possible he can’t, since one of the things the Russians did to him when they held him was break all his fingers. He also said that one reason he moved from Kherson to Kyiv was none of his old friends would speak to him again, and he wanted to be in a place where no one knew him and therefore he wouldn't be hated as a man who broke down and compromised the resistance.
<br><br>One comes away from Engel’s documentary impressed by the sheer courage and commitment of the Ukrainians – it’s the sort of story that makes you wonder whether you’d have had the guts to do what they did – and also the sheer meanness of occupiers everywhere. Among the things the Russians did during the nine months they controlled Kherson was jackhammer emblems of Ukraine from all the public buildings and order that all public schools should teach their students in Russian. It’s been clear from the get-go that Vladimir Putin’s long-term ambition in Ukraine is not only to subjugate the Ukrainian people but obliterate any idea that Ukraine was ever an independent state or anything other than an integral part of Russia. Though Putin’s army has not (at least so far) set up extermination centers the way Hitler’s did, the war against Ukraine (or, as Putin euphemistically calls it, a “special military operation”; his captive legislature has made it a felony, punishable by a 15-year prison sentence, to call the war a “war”) still constitutes a genocide.mgconlanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09328563476025164608noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20445321.post-87125456826414423462023-02-19T20:39:00.002-08:002023-06-05T20:09:21.920-07:00The Interblob (Ten Years Later)<br><b>by Mark Gabrish Conlan</b> • Copyright © 2013, 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for <i>Zenger’s Newsmagazine</i> • All rights reserved
<br><br><i>AUTHOR’S NOTE, 2023: I’m reposting this article from 10 years ago because it seems to me to make an important point about the rise of what I call “the Interblob” – the extent to which the Internet has taken over virtually every cultural or social interaction between people. Since I wrote the initial article 10 years ago things have only gotten worse. The demise of local TV listings in newspapers was partially reversed shortly after I wrote this piece – the <b>Los Angeles Times</b> went back to publishing TV listings but only over half a page of their Calendar section, no longer a full page – only to kill them off completely and definitively when the COVID-19 pandemic hit.
<br><br>Since I wrote the original piece, the availability of music and movies for home use has become even more dependent on the Internet. When I wrote the original article physical CD copies had already largely been replaced by Internet downloads. Now even downloads have themselves been replaced by the evil, vile, contemptible practice of so-called “streaming,” which systematically short-changes creative artists both artistically and financially. Mariah Carey has complained that every time someone streams her song “All I Want for Christmas” she gets only – get this – <b>one-sixteenth of a penny</b> in royalties. She’s lucky enough that she started her career in the age of physical media and therefore made a lot of money before the onset of the “streaming” plague. Now in the “streaming” era, it’s impossible to get rich on record sales alone, and artists have to tour constantly and charge humongous ticket prices to profit off their creativity and their fame.</i>
<br><br>I recently started a new job in downtown San Diego, and that means for the last three weeks I’ve been witnessing the slow death of an old friend. No, I don’t mean a human being. I’m referring to the huge building in front of Horton Plaza that used to house San Diego’s outlet of the long-defunct Planet Hollywood restaurant chain and, more importantly to my point of view, the Sam Goody’s record, video, electronics and entertainment store. It’s being torn down to make way for a so-called “expansion” of Horton Plaza Park that, judging from the artists’ renderings of what it’s supposed to look like, is a typical San Diego public project: spectacularly ugly, offering no continuity with the original park and looking more like an industrial park’s patio than a community gathering center. But that’s another story.
<br><br>No, the topic today is why Sam Goody’s had to die — and as someone who literally spent thousands of dollars there over the years, I feel like I’m entitled to mourn its passing. It’s the same phenomenon that killed Sam Goody’s most direct competitors, Tower Records and Wherehouse. It’s what killed the Borders bookstore chain and has put Barnes and Noble on its last legs — after those operations themselves ran over hundreds of independent bookstore owners and put <i>them</i> out of business. It’s a phenomenon that’s running roughshod over our culture, our economics and our daily lives, driving us apart from each other and forcing us to relate electronically instead of physically.
<br><br>It’s the Internet — or, as I’m increasingly calling this malevolent side of it, the Interblob. This isn’t to say there aren’t a lot of positive aspects to the Internet. For one thing, it’s enabled voices that can’t or won’t find their way in print, on radio or to TV a way to get themselves heard. It’s created outlets for media content, including the ones you’re reading this on, that would otherwise not exist. And purely from a practical point of view, the Internet has been of invaluable help to me as a fact-checker. Details in an article I used to have to spend hours in a library combing through books and periodicals to nail down are now available to me online within minutes. It’s made me a more accurate, and therefore a better, journalist.
<br><br>But, like the Blob in the 1958 sci-fi camp-classic film — a huge piece of protoplasmic jelly from outer space that devoured everything in its path and grew to massive proportions — the Internet has devoured virtually every competing source of information, entertainment or culture. And that’s not all. It’s transformed such basic functions of modern life as the search for a job or the pursuit of a relationship. It’s remolding us all into widgets in an increasingly computerized world in which it’s not altogether clear whether the machines are serving us or we are serving them.
<br><br>Though virtually no science-fiction writer in the pre-Internet era imagined anything like it — if they wrote about computers at all, it was usually about bigger and better mainframes than the ones from the 1950’s and 1960’s — the Interblob is absorbing more and more aspects of human life. Seemingly nothing in its path is safe — not only bookstores and record stores but newspapers, magazines, even the post office.
<br><br>Want to look in the newspaper and see what’s on television tonight? Too bad. A month ago the <i>Los Angeles Times</i> announced that they’re discontinuing their prime-time TV listings and put in one of those all-too-familiar snippy notices saying that from then on that information would only be available — you guessed it — on their Web site.
<br><br>Want to look at a newspaper at all? Too bad. Thanks to the Interblob, newspaper publishers are shrinking their print editions and charging more money for less content. They’re trying to get people to pay for online content but they’re having difficulty finding a way to do that in a manner that’s both fair to consumers and lucrative enough to sustain the expense of news-gathering. Most “news” on the Interblob vampirically sucks the blood out of mainstream media content and merely offers a gloss of opinion or “spin.”
<br><br>Indeed, the Interblob is so extensively remodeling the rules of journalism that within a decade or two it will essentially cease to be a profession. With the demise of big print newspapers and the dumbing-down of broadcast news in the YouTube era, newsrooms around the country are being dismantled. Professional reporters are being replaced by Internet “stringers” who are paid pittances — when they are paid at all — for tiny stories. Reporters are being turned into digital sweatshop workers being given piece rates for how many “posts” they can get up by ever-quicker deadlines.
<br><br>In May 2012, according to an article by Ryan Chittum in the March/April 2013 <i>Columbia Journalism Review</i>, the <i>New Orleans Times-Picayun</i>e cut its frequency from daily to three times a week — making New Orleans the first major U.S. city, but no doubt not the last, not to have a daily paper at all. The paper’s owner, Advance Publications, laid off half the newsroom staff and replaced the fired reporters with “younger digital natives who could be paid much less … They would be told to write search-engine-optimized posts for the Web multiple times a day, and not to worry about print deadlines.” Under the lash of a corporate manager who had decided that print was dying and the Interblob was the future, they pulled this on a paper whose long-form multi-part investigative reports had earned it national acclaim — and in a city where up to one-third of the population is too poor to have Internet access at all.
<br><br>Want to buy books at a bookstore? Tough luck. Want to buy CD’s or LP’s at a record store? Too bad. Want the thrill of browsing and discovering an item you didn’t know existed but absolutely fascinates you when you hold it in your hand, and buying it in that spectacular rush of knowing that your life will no longer be complete until you’ve read or listened to it? Forget it. Under the rule of the Interblob, browsing has been replaced by so-called “customized recommendations,” items Web sites offer you based on predictable patterns from what you’ve bought there before. The opportunity for the unexpected discovery has been replaced by an electromechanical feedback loop that circumscribes your taste and timidly sends you where you’ve already gone before.
<br><br>Indeed, under the Interblob even the opportunity actually to hold a book or a recording in your hand is rapidly vanishing. Audio CD’s are being replaced by “downloads” and books are becoming “e-books” read on that pestilence of devices with cutesy-poo names: Amazon’s Kindle, Barnes and Noble’s Nook, Sony’s Libria (later the Reader) and Apple’s iPad. Amazon’s Web site claims that they now sell more books as Kindle files than they do as actual ink-on-paper books — as if that’s something to be<i> proud</i> of. What’s more, when you “buy” an e-book you don’t actually own it; you merely get a license to use it for as long as the company allows you to. Early Kindle users found that out the hard way when copies of George Orwell’s <i>Animal Farm</i> and <i>1984</i> suddenly disappeared from their devices due to a squabble between Amazon and Orwell’s print publishers. With the usual tone-deafness of modern corporations, nobody at Amazon gave a thought as to how it would look when their faceless authoritarian bureaucracy pulled their customers’ access to two famous books exposing the vicious, arbitrary power of faceless authoritarian bureaucracies.
<br><br>Want to go to the library and read books the old-fashioned way without having to pay for them? Don’t hold your breath. Even though the new San Diego Public Library downtown was sold largely on the promise that thousands of books currently locked away in storage would at last be visible on the shelves and available for checkout, more recently the people running the library have said they’re just going to throw out a lot of those books rather than take the trouble to move them. Why? Once again, the Interblob: people running libraries these says see them primarily as places for people to access the Internet. The Interblob is also destroying the postal service; thanks at least partly due to the shift by corporate marketers from junk paper mail to junk e-mail, their volume has dropped so much that they’re canceling Saturday mail deliveries. Not Saturday <i>package</i> deliveries, though — not when those who still order stuff from Amazon and its competitors in tangible paper form rather than as e-book files are waiting for their deliveries. The United States Postal Service is charging more and more for less and less service — and we’ve all seen how well that worked for the newspaper industry.
<br><br>But the Interblob isn’t stopping its carnivorous activities just on the cultural front. You want a job? Good luck finding one in the old-fashioned ways like state employment development postings and classified ads. Today not only are the job openings themselves advertised online, you need to send your résumé out online as well and hope the computers don’t screen you out even before it’s seen by a human being. You want a date? Bars and social organizations are cutting back or going out of business as that sort of human interaction, too, gets taken over by the Interblob. People can flirt with each other for months or even years online before they actually meet — go “FTF” (face-to-face), in the modern lingo — and because it’s so easy to edit or fake a computer profile, complete with a photo that’s either ancient, someone else’s or heavily Photoshopped, Interblob dating is even riskier than old-fashioned dating in terms of being lied to, ripped off or otherwise used.
<br><br>The Interblob isn’t just killing old-fashioned ideals of journalism and culture; it’s also contributing to the ever-greater social stratification of the U.S. and the world. Many areas of the U.S. don’t have Internet access at all. Others don’t have broadband, which as the Internet progresses technically is virtually essential. Thanks to America’s long tradition of turning new media technologies over to private corporations who exploit their customers for maximum profits from minimal service, the nation which invented the Internet has a lower percentage of its population online than virtually every other developed country in the world. Even South Korea has a higher percentage of broadband users in its population than we do.
<br><br>By now the swollen power of corporations and the super-rich in the U.S. is so great, and so far beyond effective political or social challenge, that virtually every new development in technological or social interaction is going to make the rich even richer and everyone else even poorer. The Interblob is no exception. So much of your ability to access the Internet is dependent on your financial status — whether you have the money for a state-of-the-art connection and a computer to do it justice — that the Interblob is creating a society of information-haves and information-have-nots. If you’re too poor to afford your own computer and broadband connection, once again, tough: you’re relegated to whatever jobs you can find and apply for in your grudgingly doled-out 15 minutes online at a public library.
<br><br>As the Interblob kills professional journalism and replaces it with so-called “citizen bloggers” — volunteers and poorly paid pieceworkers grabbing whatever little tidbits of information they can and lacking either the skills or the budgets to pry information out of the powers that be that don’t want you to know what they’re up to — we’ll become even more socially stratified. Instead of a time when cheap newspapers and free radio and TV enabled even relatively poor citizens to be well informed about what was going on around them, in the future of the Interblob your ability to follow the political, economic and social events that shape your lives will be directly determined by your income. America’s rising trend towards inequality of income and opportunity predates the Internet — real wages have been declining steadily for 40 years — but as the Internet morphs into the Interblob, it’s only going to get worse.
<br><br>And if it’s bad now, it’ll only get worse later on. How will future historians and biographers assess our age? When he did his classic documentary <i>The Civil War</i> Ken Burns had paper letters and photographs to draw on to give his film visual interest and bring the drama of the war home in an incredibly intimate way. A future Ken Burns trying to do a similar reconstruction of the 21st century will literally have nothing. The e-mails, text messages, tweets and blog posts of our time will have long since disappeared into evanescence. So will the digital photos we’re all so industriously shooting with our smartphones. Computerized media are so impermanent that even movie studios, which are increasingly shooting their films with digital equipment, still transfer the final results to film so they can be archived. And the technologies to play computer movies, recordings or books change so rapidly files only two to five years old become useless. The Interblob is destroying the very idea of culture as something permanent. E-products are usable only as long as the corporations that ultimately own them allow you to use them, and when they’re used up they literally vanish, disappearing into digital ether at the stroke of a key — either from you or the corporation that decides you’ve had them long enough.
<br><br>What can you do about the Interblob? About the only thing is personal resistance. Vote with your pocketbook; find that corner bookstore that’s held on through the rise and fall of Barnes and Noble and Borders, or the independent record store that’s survived the decimation of Tower, Wherehouse and Goody’s, and patronize it. You might not be able to get the latest best-sellers but you’ll still find fascinating stuff to read and listen to. Keep and maintain subscriptions to the paper editions of your favorite newspapers and magazines. Socialize with real people in coffeehouses and bars instead of evanescent presences in the digital world. When you encounter one of those hateful “voicemail” systems— whose inventor, I think, deserves to rot in the nastiest and most painful circle of hell — use whatever shrinking options are left to insist on speaking to an actual human being. You’re not going to be able to stop the Interblob, but like the Luddites and the original French saboteurs — workers who threw their wooden shoes (sabots) into the machines to protest the automation that was destroying their jobs — you can at least slow it down a little.
<br><br>As the Sam Goody’s building on Broadway between Third and Fourth becomes an historical memory, I’ll cling to the nostalgia of all the fascinating music I bought there. Things you wouldn’t expect in a mass-market record store, like a long-lost 1953 recording of Verdi’s <i>Aïda</i> with John Barbirolli conducting and Maria Callas in the title role. <i>Love, Gloom, Cash, Love,</i> the last recording of the woefully neglected and underrated jazz pianist Herbie Nichols. Yoko Ono’s album <i>Blueprint for a Sunrise</i>. An overwhelming performance of Wagner’s <i>Götterdämmerung</i> from the 1951 Bayreuth festival. A two-CD collection called <i>From Gershwin’s Time</i> that was exactly what its title said: historical recordings of George Gershwin’s music made when he was still alive. Maybe I would have found these things browsing online, but I didn’t. I bought real, physical, tangible copies and gave the money for them to an in-the-flesh sales clerk I could talk to, often getting surprising insights about what I’d just purchased.
<br><br>As the Interblob consumes all other forms of human interactions, the opportunities for much of what makes life worth living — from the chance to advance yourself career-wise to the experience of unusual or unfamiliar culture — will either shrink or simply disappear. We’re being told that all this is “inevitable,” that it’s the price of technological change and we’ll be better off when we’ve eliminated all those pesky old remnants of pre-Interblob culture like books, CD’s, newspapers and coffeehouses. But permit me to disagree and to long for the days when companies paid people to answer their phones instead of having machines do it, when you could read the news of the day on paper instead of having to log on to a computer and absorb it online, and when a book was a book was a book, and once you knew how to read a book 10, 50, 100, 200 or even 500 years old was as accessible and as permanent as one published yesterday.mgconlanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09328563476025164608noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20445321.post-62668385982595736412023-01-31T21:21:00.000-08:002023-01-31T21:21:09.533-08:00Tyre Nichols: A Black Man Killed by Black Cops in Memphis, Tennessee<br>by Mark Gabrish Conlan</b> • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
<br><br>Like most of the rest of America, I was shocked by what I saw on the news on Friday, January 27. Though the incident they were covering had happened nearly threw weeks before – 29-year-old African-American Tyre (pronounced “Tye-ree”) Nichols was brutally beaten by five Memphis Police Department officers on January 7 and died from his injuries three days later – January 27 was the day the city of Memphis released body-camera and surveillance footage of the savage attack on Nichols.
<br><br>Tyre Nichols was a 29-year-old Black man who worked for FedEx and whose hobbies were nature photography and skateboarding. On the evening of January 7, at about 8:25 p.m., he was pulled over, allegedly for “reckless driving” – an infraction that, as one MS-NBC commentator noted, is entirely subjective. Speeding, running a red light or making an illegal turn are all traffic offenses readily visible and documentable. “Reckless driving” basically means “driving in a way the police officer watching you doesn’t approve of.”
<br><br>Nichols pulled over when the officers approached him, and at first he behaved politely. He didn’t panic; he spoke to the officers in calm, measured tones and attempted to answer their questions as best he could. Something must have set them off, though, because Nichols found himself first being forcibly pulled out of his vehicle and then forced to the ground. Officers gave him contradictory instructions. Put your hands up! Put your hands down! Lie on your stomach! Lie on your back!
<br><br>At one point during the encounter Nichols seems to have realized his life was literally at stake if he stayed there with the police relentlessly abusing him, so he tried to run away. The cops hunted him down and, if anything, his attempt to escape seemed to have riled them up even more. The cops took turns beating Nichols and kicking him, in the words of one person watching the tape, as if he were a football. At times some of the officers held Nichols and sat him up so their brothers in blue could punch him. At least two emergency medical technicians from the Memphis Fire Department watched the later stages of the encounter and did nothing to try to help Nichols.
<br><br><b>The Sting of the SCORPION</b>
<br><br>Nichols’ death was especially shocking because Memphis, Tennessee had tried to do at least some things right. Their current police chief, Cerelyn “C. J.” Davis, is a Black woman, though the city’s mayor, Jim Strickland, is a white man. Memphis has at least attempted to reform the ways its police officers are trained, including so-called “de-escalation” classes on how to defuse street confrontations without violence or anger.
D<br><br>avis has said at least some of the right things since Nichols’ killing. "As we continue to try to build trust with our community, this is a very, very heavy cross to bear -- not just for our department but for departments across the country," she stated. "Building trust is a day-by-day interaction between every traffic stop, every encounter with the community. We all have to be responsible for that and it's going to be difficult in the days to come."
<br><br>But Memphis has also done bad things in its attempts to get a handle on street crime. All five police officers who attacked Nichols were members of the so-called “SCORPION” unit, supposedly an elite force within the police department set up to combat gang activity. Like the USA PATRIOT Act and the radical anti-AIDS organization ACT UP, SCORPION was first given an acronym and only later did they put together a name it would stand for: “Street Crimes Operation to Restore Peace in Our Neighborhoods.”
<br><br>The SCORPION unit was announced in October 2021 and launched a month later. At the time, Memphis assistant police chief Sean Jones told a reporter for a local Memphis TV news program that the unit would focus on drugs, gangs and ahto thefts. "It's important to us that each member of the community feels they can go to the grocery store or live in their house without their house being shot or shooting frequently occurring on the streets and on the roadways," Jones said in November 2021.
<br><br>But the SCORPION unit’s aggressive tactics alienated members of the community they were supposedly protecting and serving. As a former Mmephis police officer told CBS News anonymously on January 28 (<a href="https://www.pbs.org/weta/washingtonweek/video/2023/01/washington-week-full-episode-jan-27-2023" target="_blank">https://www.cbsnews.com/news/tyre-nichols-former-memphis-police-officer-scorpion-unit/</a>), members of SCORPION – including Demetrius Haley, one of the five officers involved in Nichols’ killing, whom the former officer interviewed knew especially well – believed in a “proactive” style of policing in which, if you didn’t confront the alleged “bad guys” aggressively, you weren’t doing your job.
<br><br>"We deal with very bad people,”the officer told CBS..”There are fights and foot chases but we all have an understanding when it's time to stop." Unfortunately for Nichols, his family and the cause of decent law enforcement in general, the five police officers who killed him – Haley, Tadarrius Bean, Emmitt Martin III, Desmond Mills Jr. and Justin Smith – didn’t get the message about knowing when it was time to stop.
<br><br><b>Black-on-Black Police Violence</b>
<br><br>Nichols’ death also scrambles the usual racial script about these incidents because not only was he African-American, so were the five officers who physically attacked and brutalized him, and left him for dead. This wasn’t supposed to happen. Previous generations of would-be police reformers pushed for police dep-artments to hire more officers of color on the theory that this would make the departments more responsive to communities of color.
<br><br>It hasn’t worked out that way. As Wesley Lowery, author of a book on police relations with the Black community called <i>They Can’t Kill Us All</i>, said on the January 27 edition of the PBS-TV program<i> Washington Week</i> (<a href="https://www.pbs.org/weta/washingtonweek/video/2023/01/washington-week-full-episode-jan-27-2023" target="_blank">https://www.pbs.org/weta/washingtonweek/video/2023/01/washington-week-full-episode-jan-27-2023</a>), “I have friends who say this to their kids when they have the talk, right, that when you see a police officer, they are not white or Black, they are blue. And police will often say that themselves, meaning something a little different. But in this case, what we saw here were agents of the state enacting severe violence against a man who, again, from what we can tell, did not seem to be posing much of a threat to them.”
<br><br>The killing of Tyre Nichols is just one of a number of recent incidents that don’t fit neatly into either racist or anti-racist scripts of what “normal” encounters are like. Almost no one who talked about the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis two years ago mentioned that not only was the Minneapolis police chief a Black man, only two of the four officers involved in Floyd’s killing were white. The other two were Asian. And in the recent mass murders of Asian-Americans in Monterey Park and Half Moon Bay, California, not only were the victims Asian, so were the alleged shooters.
<br><br>A number of people have suggested that the Memphis Police Department and Shelby County district attorney Steve Mulroy wouldn’t have moved as quickly against Nichols’ alleged murderers if they’d been white cops instead of Black ones. They’ve already been fired from the department and formally charged with second-degree murder and other crimes. In a January 26 press conference, Mulroy said, "We want justice for Tyre Nichols. … The world is watching us and we need to show the world what lessons we can learn from this tragedy."
<br><br>But the iast time the nation was riveted on a case of police brutality, the killing of George Floyd in 2020, nothing much changed. The George Floyd Justice in Policing Act passed the House of Representatives but died in the Senate, yet another victim of the insane 60-vote threshold of the filibuster. This time, though President Joe Biden has called on Congress to pass it again, it probably won’t even get through the House now that Republicans are back in control after the 2022 midterms.
<br><br>A few local police departments, including Memphis’s, tried to institute “reforms,” but the biggest political result of the furor over Floyd’s murder was negative. Calls to “defund the police” were readily seized on by Right-wing politicians who used them to scare voters to death and lead them to oppose any significant rethought of just how we do policing in the U.S.
<br><br>Indeed, one of the things I found most startling about the debate over American policing in the wake of George Floyd’s murder was the assertion by anti-racist activists that the origin of modern professional policing lay in the patrols organized by Southern state government and plantation owners to hunt down runaway slaves. At first I thought this was just anti-racist hyperbole, but then I did a little more reading and found it was absolutely true.
<br><br>So one of the functions of professional police since the U.S. first started making police work a source of paid employment has been to set and enforce limits on the autonomy of African-Americans. And that has remained true even as more Black police officers have been hired.
<br><br><b>The Toxicity of “Police Culture”</b>
<br><br>One of the most important aspects of Wesley Lowery’s <i>Washington Week</i> comment is that “when you see a police officer, they are not white or Black, they are blue.” It’s a measure of the persistence of what has been called “police culture,” a series of habits and assumptions that have been baked into American law enforcement for decades and that has proven significantly resistant to change.
<br><br>“Police culture” essentially divides the world into two categories: cops and crooks. While it pays lip service to the idea that most people are neither cops nor crooks – just ordinary law-abiding citizens trying to do their jobs, make their livings and use whatever free time they have for legitimate entertainment – all too often police interactions with other people are based on an assumption that you have to “prove” you are law-abiding in order to persuade the cops to leave you alone.
<br><br>Lowery also mentioned “the talk,” the conversation virtually all Black parents, especially middle- and upper-class Black parents, have to tell their children just how they should react when a police officer stops them for any reason, The idea behind “the talk” is if you just act deferentially enough to the officer, show your I.D. when asked to, speak in a soft-spoken manner, avoid doing anything that the officer even remotely might perceive as a threat, he or she will let you go and won’t put you on the “bad ‘N’-word” category deserving of arrest or worse.
<br><br>One of the saddest TV news reports I saw was the one in which a professor nf African-American studies at Princeton University told a host on MS-NBC that what most horrified him about the death of Tyre Nichols was the fact that Nichols had done everything young Blacks are told to do in “the talk.” He was soft-spoken and didn’t challenge the officers who stopped him. The professor on MS-NBC said with profound sadness and regret that nothing he’d told his own son about how to handle an interaction with police would have saved him, any more than it saved Tyre Nichols.
<br><br>One of the biggest mistakes the Memphis Police Department made whent hey set up the SCORPION unit was to staff it largely with police officers who had previously worked as corrections officers in jails or prisons. If you’re a prison guard, it’s all too true that everyone you interact with is either a fellow officer or a criminal. I suspect that locks people into a mindset that reinforces the already toxic aspect of police culture that assumes everybody is either a cop or a crook.
<br><br>People have bemoaned the seeming lack of efficacy of attempts to train police officers to de-escalate the situations and reduce or eliminate the use of force. That’s just another way police culture reinforces and reproduces itself. All too many officers have recalled being teamed up in their first days on the job with older officers who’ve told them, “Forget all that bullshit they taught you in the Academy. Here’s how the world really works.” No matter how much training we give new recruits to the job to “de-escalate” situations, no matter how much we try to educate them in restraint, the old-boy network of police departments everywhere undoes it. So does the military-style ranks with which almost all police departments are organized.
<br><br>One of the people who got interviewed on MS-NBC ini the wake of the Nichols killing was Libertarian author Radley Balko, who in 2914 published a book called <i>Rise of the Warrior Cop</i>. He told the story of how certain progressive police chiefs tried to get rid of the military-style ranks – and had to back down when their officers strongly rebelled. I remember seeing Balko interviewed on MS-NBC in the wake of the George Floyd killing in 2020, and I immediately ordered his book.
<br><br>It was fascinating reading <i>Rise of the Warripor Cop</i> during the 2020 Presidential campaign because one of the biggest villains in his book was Joe Biden. Balko described how Biden pushed many “tough-on-crime” bills through the U.S. Senate and into law,often taking more hard-line positions than Republicans. Balko was especially critical of Biden for championing so-called “no-knock searches” in alleged drug cases, not only calling them a violation of the Fourth Amendment but telling all too many stories of innocent people getting killed, beaten or having their homes destroyed based on “no-knock” searches onflimsy or nonexistent evidence.
<br><br>Ironically in light of more recent events, Biden’s justification at the time was that the Democrats couldn’t afford, politically, to have the Republicans own the “crime” issue and portray themselves as the “law and order” party. Once Biden ran first for vice-president no Barack Obama’s ticket and then for President on his own, he moved left onthe crime issue in order to gain support from Black primary voters – and this nearly cost him the general election and sliced the Democratic House majority from 40 seats to five as Republicans eagerly and gleefully poinced on calls to “defund the police” and made it seem like Democrats wanted to get rid of police forces entirely.
<br><br>Only a tiny handful of people who said “defund the police” actually meant eliminating 100 percent of police funding. Most of them were calling to redirect money going to law enforcement and spend it instead on social programs,mental-health counseling and projects aimed at reducing the income gap between whites and people of color. But the Republican fear campaign, which produced TV commercials showing people calling 911 and getting no response at all, carried the day and the U.S. blew its most recent chance to rethink how we do domestic law enforcement.
<br><br><b>The “Duty to Aid”: Not an Option</b>
<br><br>One of the most intriguing criticisms of the Memphis police assault on Tyre Nichols and his resulting death is the people who are saying that the police had a duty to help Nichols once they’d incapacitated him.This seems to have been one of the reasons not only for the Memphis Police Department firing the five officers involved in the attack on Nichols but the Memphis Fire Department letting go the two EMT’s who patiently stood there and didn’t do anything to stop the assault on Nichols. They just waitd until his police assailants were done with him.
<br><br>But those who suggest that police officers and firefighters on the scene could have exercised a “duty to aid” and tried to stop the horrendous attack on Nichols files in the face of how hierarchical organizations and systems work. Faced with a choice between remaining true to the brotherhood (there’s a reason why the U.S.’s largest police union is called “Fraternal Order of Police’) and defying it, just about any police or fire officers will go with the brotherhood every time.
<br><br>The talk about whether the Memphis police and fire officials should have tried to stop what was happening to Nichols reminded me of the stories I’ve read of what happened to Nazi concentration-camp guards who tried to call out their colleagues for the inhumanity of their treatment of prisoners. Squeamish guards who felt guilty and complained about what they were doing to the inmates were often told,”If you don’t like what we’re doing, we can always put you on the other side.” The idea of being tumbled all the way down the racial scale, from Aryan <i>Übermensch</i> to doomed under-class <i>Untermensch</i>, was enough to keep nearly all people in line and on board with the Nazis’ evil.
<br><br>What happened to Tyre Nichols has been called a “lynching,” but in fact it’s worse than that. Lynching meant the wanton murder of (mostly) Black people by private citizens, while official law enforcement looked the other way and quietly condoned it. What happened to Tyre Nichols was the law-enforcement system itself going haywire and enforcing street “justice” on a young Black man who did nothing illegal and posed no threat to anyone.
<br><br>In some respects, America is a giant concentration camp for Black people in particular. Black Americans are constantly being reminded that they have no rights white people, especially whites in positions of authority, are obliged to respect. Their rights to life,liberty and the pursuit of happiness an be snatched away any time the white establishment or its representatives feel like it, and Blacks who are admitted into the “club” of law enforcement face a double pressure to prove they’re “one of us”or face retribution themselves.
<br><br>That’s the real reason for the otherwise inexplicable fact that Tyre Nichols was done in by people who, at least superficially, looked like him. Throughout American history, Blacks who tried to rise above the station white America had decreed for them have been slapped down hard. Ad Blacks who gain a certain degree of power and privilege in the system by becoming police officers or even Presidents (there’s a reason why the Secret Service reported more threats against Barack Obama than any other President, before or since) are constantly being put on notice that it can be snatched away from them at any time.
mgconlanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09328563476025164608noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20445321.post-79982501110168772602022-12-28T20:51:00.003-08:002022-12-28T20:51:22.881-08:00"Word Is Our" 45 Years Later: Not as Dated as You Might Think<br>by Mark Gabrish Conlan</b> • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
<br><br><i>Word Is Out: Stories of Some of Our Lives</i> was a pioneering documentary, filmed over a five-year period and released in 1977 whose imdb.com page describes it as, “Twenty-six diverse Lesbian and Gay people are interviewed about their lives and the challenges they experience in a homophobic culture. A ground-breaking documentary is now an artefact of a different time.” Not as different as we’d like to think; though the overall Queer community (to give it the name I use as an all-inclusive term for Lesbians, Gay men, Bisexuals and Transgender people because I <i>hate</i> the ugly and preposterous acronym “LGBTQ+ people” that has regrettably become standard in most media depictions of us) has won an extent of legal, social and political recognition that few people would have dared imagine in 1977, we still have a long way to go and, as one woman who survived the McCarthy-era witchhunts and the mass discharges of Lesbians from the Women’s Army Corps says in the movie, whatever acceptance we’ve gained is fragile and could just as easily be snatched away. I’ve often cited the example of Germany, which during the Weimar Republic era (1919 to 1933) was the most Queer-accepting country in the Western world, only when the Nazis took power that suddenly reversed itself and Queer people were marked for elimination in the Holocaust along with Jews, Communists, Gypsies and others the Nazis considered scum of the earth.
<br><br>Warning bells about the fragility of our acceptance went off big-time when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned <i>Roe</i> v. <i>Wade</i> in the <i>Dobbs</i> v. <i>Jackson Women’s Health Organizatio</i>n case last June, and Justice Clarence Thomas (one of the most thoroughly evil people who has ever sat on the Supreme Court) published a concurring opinion saying that now that the Court had got rid of <i>Roe</i> v. <i>Wade</i> it was time to re-look at the decisions that had banned anti-Queer sodomy laws and found a constitutional right to same-sex marriage. That sparked the U.S. Congress to pass the “Respecdt for Marriage Act” in the waning days of 2022, but though that protected the right to same-sex marriage as a matter of federal law, it did not (as the Court’s <i>Obergefell</i> v. <i>Hodges</i> decision did) require states to allow same-sex marriages themselves. It just says they legally can’t refuse to recognize a same-sex marriage performed in a state where such marriages are legal.
<br><br>My personal involvement with <i>Word is Out</i> came not from the film itself, which I didn’t see for many years after it was made, but from the accompanying book the so-called “Mariposa Film Collective” (the six people who made it: Peter and Nancy Adair, Andrew Brown, Rob Epstein, Lucy Massie Phenix, and Veronica Selver) published. This was one of the first books I read when I finally decided, as a 30-year-old in late 1982 who’d been involved in a live-in relationship with a woman for nearly five years, that I was going to accept the reality that I was a Gay man. (She and I remain good friends and my husband and I recently spent Christmas having dinner with her and her daughter.) The book was structured differently from the film; whereas the film intercut between the interviews (not always clearly: the filmmakers didn’t use chyrons to tell us who was talking – they just put everybody’s picture in a single title card at the start of each of the three parts of the film, and good lu9ck trying to remember who was who), the book presented each subject in their own chapter and allowed us to get more of a “feel” for each one as an individual. The filmmakers deserve credit for attempting to show the sheer diversity of the Queer community; there are older people, younger people and middle-aged people, and there are Black, Latino/a and Asian people as well as white people. (One of the clearly demonstrably wrong impressions a lot of people have of the Queer community – especially by its political enemies – is that it’s all, or nearly all, white.)
<br><br>However, it pretty much dodges the question of Bisexuality (two of the male interviewees hint that they’re actively Bisexual, but the filmmakers don’t press them on the subject) and includes virtually no Transgender people. The one man in the film who seems Trans when we first meet him explains that, though he likes to present as both male and female, he had eventually decided to self–identify as a Gay man. (I suspect if a similar person came out today they’d identify either as Trans or as “non-binary.”) Yet one of the most progressive aspects of <i>Word Is Out</i> is that, even among the people in the film who say they were “born this way,” a lot of them talked about the major parts of their lives they lived as heterosexuals, including marrying opposite-sex partners and having children with them. One of the saddest moments of the film is when a Southern-born woman who got married, had children and then fell in love with a female partner had all her children taken away from her and given to their father – so while she’s raising her partner’s children as a co-parent, she’s cut off from any contact with her own. It’s also fascinating to me that both the Lesbians and Gay men in the family who have children regard them as an integral part of their lives and don’t at all consider them a burden; in fact, the people in the film who do have kids talk up the experience to their partners or friends who don’t and say how much their children have added to their lives even though they’ve walked away from the world of reproductive sexuality.
<br><br>Another elephant in the room that’s inevitably going to come up is the impact of AIDS on the Queer community; as the “Trivia” section on the film’s imdb.com page notes, “In a special feature of the thirtieth-anniversary DVD of <i>Word Is Out</i>, Rick Stokes discusses the impact of AIDS on the Gay male community in San Francisco. Images of the film's interview subjects who died of AIDS appear on the screen as he speaks: Donald Hackett, Tede Mathews, Michael Mintz, and Stokes' own lover, David Clayton.” The imdb.com page also lists “Deceased Cast & Crew” members, though many of them died not of AIDS comlpications but simply of old age: Pat Bond, John Burnside, Sally M. Gearhart, Elsa Gidlow, Donald Hackett, Harry Hay, Rick Stokes, George Mendenhall, Nadine Armijo, Tede Mathews, Michael Mintz, and co-director Peter Adair. I was especially gratified that Harry Hay was extensively featured – in 1994 I chose him as the cover boy for the first issue of <i>Zenger’s Newsmagazine</i> because he had more to do with starting the Queer liberation than any other individual (in 1950 he founded the Mattachine Society, the beginning of continuous Queer liberation activism in the U.S.) – and the <i>Word Is Out</i> filmmakers co-interviewed him with his partner, John Burnside, for an example of growing old as a Gay male couple my husband Charles and I can use now.
<br><br>It was also interesting to see Rick Stokes as a hero because in the late Randy Shilts’ biography of Harvey Milk, <i>The Mayor of Castro Street</i>, he’s presented as essentially a villain: the Gay member of the San Francisco political establishment who was put up as a candidate against Milk when he ran for the Board of Supervisors of the City and County of San Francisco in 1977. Though Stokes wasn’t t<i>hat</i> conservative – he was still a Democrat, after all – he comes off in the movie asd representative of the sorts of Queers who were repulsed by the more flamboyant participants in the Pride parades, but he still comes across as a multi-dimensional figure and an example of how even a relatively “conservative” man or woman in their personal presentation can identify with the Queer movement and be a part of it.
<br><br><i>Word Is Out</i> is an unexpectedly relevant movie for our own time in that, even though we seem to have reached a plateau of acceptance, there are mass social and political forces in this country who aim to take it all away from us. The same year <i>Word Is Out</i> was released – 1977 – former orange-juice spokesperson Anita Bryant launched the so-called “Save Our Children” campaign against Queer-rights legislation. Bryant argued that “homosexuals cannot reproduce’ therefore, they must recruit,” and she said that we needed laws to repress the Queer community because otherwise we’d recruit so many children the very existence of the human race would be threatened. Bryant’s rhetoric lives on in the governor of her own state, Ron DeSantis of Florida, who’s positioning himself to run for President as a Republican in 2024 largely on a promise to stop the so-called “grooming” of children by unscrupulous Gay men. DeSantis pushed through the Florida legislature the so-called “Don’t Say Gay” bill, which bans discussion of sexual orientation oir gender identity not only in the first three grades of elementary school but throughout the curriculum. Opponents of the bill argued that it could be used to fire a Gay or Lesbian teacher who honestly answered a student’s question about their marital status. One of the film’s interviewees answered the so-called “grooming” charge by saying that as a 12- to 14-year-old he aggressively cruised older Gay men, and <i>he</i> was the sexual aggressor.
<br><br>He also recalled his days as a “regular” at the Black Cat Café in San Francisco, where Imperial Court founder José Saria put on parody operas and led the crowd at closing time with a rewrite of the British national anthem called “God Save Us Nelly Queens,” Black Cat Café “regular” George Mendenhall said in <i>Word Is Out,</i> “It sounds silly, but if you lived at that time and had the oppression coming down from the police department and from society, there was nowhere to turn ... and to be able to put your arms around other Gay men and to be able to stand up and sing 'God Save Us Nelly Queens' ... We were really not saying 'God Save Us Nelly Queens.' We were saying, 'We have our rights, too.” In 1963 Saria became the first openly Queer candidate to run for poiitical office – the San Francisco Board of Supervisors – and despite the fact that police regularly maintained a blacklist of just about everyone who publicly advocated for Queer rights in any way whatsoever, he got enough people tosign his nominating petition and he made it onto the ballot. All in all, <i>Word Is Out</i> 45 years later is an extraordinary document, at once a slice of history of the pre-AIDS Queer community and a reminder that, however much progress we think we’ve made, it could all be snatched away from us pretty easily and we may have to learn from our foremothers and forefathers how to fight these struggles all over again.mgconlanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09328563476025164608noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20445321.post-58906825172300207732022-11-06T02:08:00.006-08:002022-11-07T23:05:18.567-08:00How Do You Tame a Rogue Supreme Court?<br><b>by MARK GABRISH CONLAN</b>
<br><br>Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for <Zenger’s Newsmagazine</i> • All rights reserved
<br><br>How do you tame a rogue Supreme Court?
<br><br>That question has been on the minds of politically aware Americans whose politics are left of Atilla the Hun’s since late last June, when the current six-member radical-Right majority on the Supreme Court issued a trifecta of rulings severely restricting the rights of people, including women seeking control of their own bodies and people concerned about gun violence and the environment.
<br><br>In quick succession, the current Court majority overruled <i>Roe</i> v. <i>Wade</i>, the landmark decision that for nearly 50 years had restricted the federal and state governments from telling women what they could do with their own bodies, including how to deal with an unwanted pregnancy. They also overturned as unconstitutional a century-old law in the state of New York that banned the carrying of concealed weapons in most circumstances. And they severely restricted the power of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to curb emissions from coal-fired power plants.
<br><br>Tne U.S. Supreme Court began its new term on October 3, and the list of cases it has chosen to hear this year indicates that the current Court majority fully intends to continue their ideological Right-wing crusade. Already on October 4 the Court heard arguments on an appeal from the state of Alabama defending a Congressional district map that crowds as many Black voters as possible into a single Congressional district, thus virtually ensuring that six of Alabama’s seven Congressional seats will be held by white people even though more than one-fourth of Alabama’s population is African-American.
<br><br>Such shenanigans were supposed to be illegal under the Voting Rights Act of 1965, one of the two principal achievements the Black civil-rights movement wpn in Congress in the 1960’s. But the Supreme Court has already started rolling back the Voting Rights Act starting in 2013, when in <i>Shelby County</i> v. <i>Holder</i> it struck down the law’s “pre-clearance” requirement that certain states with a history of discriminating against African-Aemricans and other voters of color submit any changes in their election laws to the U.S. Department of Justice before they could take effect.
<br><br>Having already given the green light to states with histories of voter suppression to start doing it again, the Court further weakened the Voting Rights Act in <i>Brnovich</i> v. <i>Democratic National Committee</i> (2021) by declaring that restrictions on mail ballots and other means of early voting did not violate the Act. They also ruled that plaintiffs seeking relief under the Voting Rights Act had to prove not only that the state actions they were challenging had the effect of weakening the political powers of communities of color, but that they were <i>intended</i> to do so.
<br><br>Critics fear that the only reason the Court majority agreed to take the current voting rights case, <i>Merrill</i> v. <i>Milligan</i>, as a vehicle to abolish what’s left of the Voting Rights Act or so severely limit its application that it becomes useless. They already signaled their intention to do that when they granted a stay of the lower court’s decision so Alabama coldc use the racially drawn districts in this year’s midterms – the same sort of signal they sent in September 2021 when they refused toenjoin the Texas anti-abortion law, SB 8, which was clearly in violation of <i>Roe</i> v. <i>Wade</i> – which they already intended to reverse.
<br><br>The Court is also hearing <i>Louisiana</i> v. <i>United States</i> (<a href="https://www.npr.org/2022/10/18/1126287827/redistricting-supreme-court-louisiana-black-african-american" target="_blank">https://www.npr.org/2022/10/18/1126287827/redistricting-supreme-court-louisiana-black-african-american</a>). It’s a voting-rights case in which the state of Louisiana is defending a Congressional redistricting map that leaves Louisiana Blacks with only one majority district out of seven, even though African-Americans are one-third of Louisiana’s population. The state legislature which drew that map sought to evade the Voting Rights Act by rewriting the definition of “Black.” They said that any person who identified on the U.S. Census as both “Black” and another sort of person of color would no longer be considered “Black” fur purposes of the Voting Rights Act. Already, in late June, the Court issued an emergency order allowing the new discriminatory map to be used in the 2022 election, a probable signal that the six-member radical-Right Court majority intends to deal yet another blow to the Voting Rights Act by allowing the Louisiana legislature to get away with their racist shenanigans.
<br><br>And this isn’t the only racially charged case the Court is hearing this year. On October 31 they heard a case that could totally abolish race as a factor in college admissions, an issue an earlier Supreme Court supposedly settled by allowing universities to consider race as one factor in admissions. The Court also is considering a case called <i>Sackett</i> v. <i>Environmental Protection Agency</i> which attempts to do to the Clean Water Act what <i>West Virginia</i> v. <i>EPA</i> did to the Clean Air Act: to block the EPA from using the Clean Water Act to stop or slow down water pollution.
<br><br>And it’s also considering a case brought by Colorado Web designer Lorie Smith, who claims that Colorado’s law protecting Queer people against discrimination in public accommodations violates her right to free speech by preventing her from discriminating against same-sex couples. The court already ruled in 2018 that a Colorado baker called Masterpiece Cakeshop couldn’t be required to bake a wedding cake for a same-sex couple on the ground that doing so would violate their freedom of religion.
<br><br>In Octrober 2020 two Justices, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, went on record as saying the decision of the Court to strike down laws banning same-sex marriage violated the religious freedom of Americans who believe such marriages are immoral (<a href="https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/05/politics/thomas-alito-obergefell-same-sex-marriage-analysis/index.html" target="_blank">https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/05/politics/thomas-alito-obergefell-same-sex-marriage-analysis/index.html</a>). They didn’t explain why they thought the beliefs of people religiously opposed to same-sex marriage shoupd prevail over the beliefs of those <i>in favor</i> of marriage equality.
<br><br>One more case the Supreme Court heard in early October is <i>National Pork Producers Council</i> v. <i>Ross</i> (<a href="https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/pork-industry-takes-fight-over-california-law-us-supreme-court-2022-10-10/" target="_blank">https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/pork-industry-takes-fight-over-california-law-us-supreme-court-2022-10-10/</a> and <a href="https://www.eenews.net/articles/scotus-probes-calif-pork-fights-far-reaching-consequences/" target="_blank">https://www.eenews.net/articles/scotus-probes-calif-pork-fights-far-reaching-consequences/</a>), This is a challenge to Proposition 12, passed by California voters in 2018, which sets standards for raising pigs and chickens and bars the sale in California of meat and eggs from anima;s that aren’t given enough space to move around in according to the law.
<br><br>The National Pork Producers Council, American Farm Bureau Foundation and – interestingly – the Biden administration are saying a state cannot regulate business more stringently than the federal government does under the clause in the Constitution giving Congress the power “to regulate commerce between the states.” A group of 16 U.S. Senators, including Dianne Feinstein and Alex Padilla, filed an amicus curiae brief in defense of the law.
<br><br>According to the 16 Senators’ brief, a ruling for the pork industry "could allow large, multi-state corporations to evade numerous state laws that focus on harms to their constituents, including those addressing wildlife trafficking, climate change, renewable energy, stolen property trafficking and labor abuses."
<br><br><b>“Independent State Legislature” = End to Democracy</b>
<br><br>But by far the most dangerous case the new U.S. Supreme Court majority is considering, <i>Moore</i> v. <i>Harper</i>, involves a North Carolina redistricting case in which the state legislature has invoked something called the “independent state legislature theory.” For years there’s been a pitched battle between the North Carolina legislature, dominated by Republicans, and the state’s courts.
<br><br>The North Carolina legislature keeps drawing district maps designed to keep Republicans in power for the next 10 years or longer. North Carolina’s courts, including the state’s supreme court, keep throwing out those maps on the ground that they violate the state constitution’s anti-discrimination protections.
<br><br>Now the current legislature in North Carolina is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to put their redistricting maps beyond judicial challenge at either the federal or state level. They’re doing this by invoking an arcane idea called the “independent state legislature theory,” which holds that Article I, section 4 of the Constitution – “The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof” – grants state legislatures absolute, unreviewable powers to determine just about everything relating to elections.
<br><br>Now, if there’s one thing that’s pretty consistent throughout the U.S. Constitution, it’s that the people who wrote it weren’t keen on the idea of giving <i>anybody</i> unfettered, unreviewable power. They created an elaborate system of checks and balances precisely because they thought that the way to keep government from being inimical or corrupt was to disperse authority, so that even if one branch of government went off the rails, the other two branches would be able to stop them.
<br><br>This has made it maddeningly difficult for any American government or political party, even when supported by a large majority of the people, to make sweeping changes in the way we are governed. But if the Supreme Court enshrines the “independent state legislature theory” into Constitutional law, the consequences would be so catastrophic it would essentially spell the end of the American republic and its likely replacement by the Republicans as a one-party dictatorship.
<br><br>The Republicans already have gained an outsized importance on American politics by their shrewd manipulation of the anti-democratic features built into the U.S. Constitution. In order to make any law, it has to be passed not only by the House of Representatives but by the Senate, and the Constitution gives each state two Senators regardless of the size of its population. We select the President not by direct popular vote, but by an “Electoral College” composed of electors representing the total number of House and Senate members from each state – which extends the outsized influence of small states in the process. And until 1913, state legislatures, not state voters, chose the Senators.
<br><br>Other anti-democratic features of the U.S. government were added later. The whole business of the U.S. Supreme Court having the power to overturn laws by declaring themselves unconstitutional isn’t in the Constitution. It was unilaterally declared by the second Chief Justice, John Marshall, in an 1803 case called <i>Marbur</i>y v. <i>Madison</i> in which he wrote, “It is the express purpose of the judicial department to say what the law is.”
<br><br>The filibuster that has done so much to hamstring the U.S. government and given the Senate the reputation as “the place good ideas go to die” came about through an historical accident, In 1837, realizing that the people who wrote the Senate rules had failed to include a mechanism for closing debate, a Senator who wanted to kill a bill that had majority support decided to talk it to death. In 1975, a supposed “reform” made the filibuster more deadly by removing the requirement that Senators wishing to filibuster actually had to rise to the floor and debate. Instead, they could jist fill out a form invoking the filibuster – which has led to the insane 60=vote requirement for the Senate to do just about <i>anything.</i>
<br><br>Now the Supreme Court is seriously considering putting the power of state legislatures to regulate elections beyond <i>any</i> review – not by federal courts and not by state courts either. As Ethan Herenstein and Brian Palmer of Politico.com reported on September 16 (<a href="https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/09/15/fraudulent-document-supreme-court-bid-election-law-00056810" target="_blank">https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/09/15/fraudulent-document-supreme-court-bid-election-law-00056810</a>), it was based on a well-known fake document produced in 1818 by Charles Pinckney, a delegate to the Constitutional Convention of 1787 who responded to an appeal for historical records from the Convention by supplying what he claimed was a draft constitution he had submitted to the Convention 31 years earlier,
<br><br>According to Herenstein and Palmer, James Madison – who had more to do with creating the Constitution than any other individual – was around when Pinckney submitted his alleged draft, and he didn’t like it. Madison, according to Herenstein and Paumer, “was ‘perfectly confident’ that it was ‘not the draft originally presented to the convention by Mr. Pinckney.’ Some of Pinckney’s text, Madison observed, was impossibly similar to the final text of the U.S. Constitution, which was painstakingly debated over the course of months. There was no way Pinckney could have anticipated those passages verbatim.
<br><br>“In addition,” Herenstein and Palmer wrote, “Madison was quick to point out, many provisions were diametrically opposed to Pinckney’s well-known views. Most telling, the draft proposed direct election of federal representatives, whereas Pinckney had loudly insisted that state legislatures choose them. Madison included a detailed refutation of Pinckney’s document along with the rest of his copious notes from the Convention. It was the genteel, 19th-century equivalent of calling B.S.”
<br><br>Nonetheless, the North Carolina legislature is relying on this discredited document to make their case that the framers of the Constitution intended to give state legislatures unfettered power over all elections. And if the current Right-wing Supreme Court majority declares the “independent state legislature theory” the law of the land, it would allow Republican-controlled legislatures in key swing states simply to nullify the results of a Presidential election and appoint their own electors regardless of how their voters actually voted – just as Donald Trump and his legal advisors, including Rudy Giuliani and John Eastman, were asking them to do in 2020 after Joe Biden defeated Trump for re-election.
<br><br>In fact,the “independent state legislature theory,” coupled with the current Court majority’s evisceration of the Voting Rights Act, amount to a recipe for future one-party rule in the U.S. Republicans already dominate state governments. According to Ballotpedia (<a href="https://ballotpedia.org/State_government_trifectas" target="_blank">https://ballotpedia.org/State_government_trifectas</a>), there are 23 states where Republicans control the governorship and both houses of the legislature, 13 where Democrats do and 14 which are split – and under the “independent state legislature theory,” a Republican-dominated legislature could determine the outcome of an election even if the state’s governor was a Democrat, since he or she would have no power to stop them.
<br><br>The scenario the “independent state legislature theory” would set up would essentially spell the end of representative democracy in the U.S. A state legislature with a Republican majority would be able to gerrymander its districts to maintain power forever because they would have so diluted the votes of people opposed to them that elections would be meaningless. They would have unlimited power to suppress the votes of communities opposed to them by making sure people not likely to vote Republican couldn’t vote at all. And even if they lost an election, they’d have the power to set aside the results and declare themselves the winners.
<br><br>All these are things Republicans are already doing in states they control, but so far their powers have been limited by the sheer weight of American tradition and what shards of the Voting Rights Act and other laws aimed at protecting the people’s right to vote the current Court majority has allowed to remain in place. But if the Right-wing Supreme Court majority enshrines the “independent state legislature theory” into constitutional law, the result will be a perpetual one-party Republican dictatorship in the U.S.
<br><br>If you want an example of what the “independent state legislature theory” will look like in practice, just take a look at Wisconsin. According to an article Ari Berman posted to the <i>Mother Jones</i> magazine’s Web site October 25 (<a href="https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2022/10/wisconsin-2022-midterms-gerrymandering-redistricting-evers-michels/" target="_blank">https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2022/10/wisconsin-2022-midterms-gerrymandering-redistricting-evers-michels/</a>), Wisconsin’s Republican majority in the state legislature has so totally gerrymandered its districts that the Democrats would have to win the statewide vote by 12 percent just to eke out a bare majority in the Wisconsin Assembly. Wisconsin Republicans are likely to win a two-thirds super-majority in the legislature this year, so even if voters re-elect the state’s Democratic governor, Tony Evers, he will be powerless to stop the Republican legislative agenda.
<br><br>Wisconsin got to this stage at least in part thanks to the U.S. Supreme Court and its current radical-Right majority. According to Berman, the current legislative maps are the product of an ongoing battle between the Wisconsin legislature and Governor Evers over redistricting. Evers won a narrow majority in the Wisconsin Supreme Court for his map, but the U.S. Supreme Court overruled it in an unsigned <i>per curiam</i> opinion last March (<a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/21pdf/21a471_097c.pdf" target="_blank">https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/21pdf/21a471_097c.pdf</a>).
<br><br>The court accused Evers’ map of “embracing just the sort of uncritical majority-minority district maximization that we have expressly rejected.” And Evers’ Republican opponent in the November 8 election, Tim Michels, told a private meeting of donors in late October that if he wins, Republicans “will never lose another election” in the state (<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/nov/02/wisconsin-republican-gubernatorial-candidate-tim-michels" target="_blank">https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/nov/02/wisconsin-republican-gubernatorial-candidate-tim-michels</a>).
<br><br><b>Court’s Current Radical-Right Majority Is Not “Conservative”!</b>
<br><br>One thing that particularly irks me in media coverage of the current U.S. Supreme Court is the repeated descriptions of its radical-Right majority as “conservative.” Whatever these people are, they are not “conservative” by any stretch of the imagination. It is the exact opposite of true conservatism to upend a nearly 50-year-old precedent, as the Court has done in <i>Dobbs</i> v. <i>Jackson Women’s Health Organization</i> – the decision that reversed <i>Roe</i> v. <i>Wade</i> and ended the constitutional right of women to control their own bodies – simply because the current Justices would have decided it differently.
<br><br>It’s even more against any reasonable definition of “conservatism” for the Court to throw out a 100-year-old law from New York state restricting the ability of individuals to carry concealed weapons in public. "Because the State of New York issues public-carry licenses only when an applicant demonstrates a special need for self-defense, we conclude that the State's licensing regime violates the Constitution," Justice Clarence Thomas wrote for the court's 6-3 majority. "Only if a firearm regulation is consistent with this Nation's historical tradition may a court conclude that the individual's conduct falls outside the Second Amendment's unqualified command," Thomas added.
<br><br>The idea that the Second Amendment gives an “unqualified command” to American governments at all levels to do almost nothing to interfere with an individual’s right to own whatever sort of gun he or she wants flies in the face of the Second Amendment itself. The amendment reads, in full, “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” In 1939, in a case called <i>United States</i> v. <i>Miller</i>, the Supreme Court ruled that the U.S. government had every right to regulate guns (in this case, sawed-off shotguns) as long as they couldn’t conceivably be used by “a well regulated Militia.”
<br><br>That was how the American judiciary in general read the Second Amendment until 2008, when in a case called <i>United States</i> v. <i>Heller</i> the Court found for the first time that the Second Amendment conferred on every American the right to own just about any sort of weapon he or she pleased. The majority opinion in <i>Heller</i> was written by the late Justice Antonin Scalia, who did what he was constantly accusing liberal judges of doing: he rewrote the Constitution not in terms of what it actually said but what <i>he,</i> Antonin Scalia, <i>thought</i> it should say.
<br><br>So, based on a 14-year-old case that upended over a century of legal precedent as well as the plain meaning of the Second Amendment itself, Justice Clarence Thomas read the Second Amendment as giving U.S. governments at all levels an “unqualified command” to allow individuals to own almost any sort of firearm and carry it wherever they want. Whatever you call that, it ain’t “conservative.” It’s why I’ve long wanted to write an article which I would call, “America Needs More Conservatives” – with a subheading, “And Fewer Radical-Right Revolutionaries Posing as ‘Conservatives.’”
<br><br>Conservatism as a modern-day political philosophy derives from the writings of late 18th-century British scholar, philosopher and politician Edmund Burke. Burke supported the American Revolution – a gutsy thing to do given that his was the country the Americans were rebelling against – but was totally horrified by the French Revolution. And one of the things that horrified him the most about the French Revolution was how the revolutionaries sought to rewrite the most basic rules of society, down to changing the calendar as well as the system of weights and measures.
<br><br>Burke argued that, even if certain social institutions are not as efficient as they would be if we were deciding them from ground zero, people have grown comfortable with them. They are used to them in ways they won’t be if some supposedly “better” system is imposed upon them, especially by government force. In Burkean terms, the Affordable Care Act – so-called “Obamacare” – was a profoundly conservative program, not only because it was created by a conservative think tank (the Heritage Foundation, which later disowned it) but because it attempted to expand Americans’ access to health care by building on the existing patchwork of private, employer-based insurance and public assistance rather than junking it and starting over with single-payer or another sweeping change.
<br><br>I remember hearing over a decade ago a broadcast by Right-wing talk-show host and former Mayor of San Diego Roger Hedgecock in which he reported the results of a then-recent poll that showed public confidence in virtually all American institutions – the government (at all levels), the media, public education, the church – at all-time lows. Hedgecock was so gleeful at these results he practically seemed to be having an orgasm on the air. My thought was a true Burkean conservative would have been <i>horrified</i> at results like that and seen them as portending a complete moral breakdown and collapse of such a society.
<br><br>The other interesting thing about Thomas’s opinion in the New York gun case is his reference to “this Nation's historical tradition.” This was also a factor in Samuel Alito’s opinion striking down <i>Roe</i> v. <i>Wade</i>, in which he said that the provision of the Ninth Amendment of the Constitution that says, “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people,” applies only to those rights “consistent with our Nation’s history and traditions.”
<br><br>The problem with that is that the current Court manority’s understanding of “our Nation’s history and traditions” seems flash-frozen at the end of the 19th century. This was a time when the Supreme Court had ruled in the 1896 case of <i>Plessy</i> v. <i>Ferguson</i> that racial segregation was legitimate as ong as the facilities for white and Black people were “equal” (which they never were). Women not only had yet won the right to vote but they had no property rights or legal existence outside their families or their husbands. In California it was legal to rape your wife until, get this, <i>1977</i>.
<br><br>Queer people were either ignored or reviled, and people habitually carried guns through the streets and often fired them at random. If you don’t believe me, check out the 1914 movie <i>Tillie’s Punctured Romance</i>, in which Tillie (Marie Dressler) responds to the news that she’s been disinherited by bringing guns to her house party and firing them at her guests – who respond by fleeing but don’t in any way seem shocked that their hostess is shooting at them.
<br><br>Maybe some members of America’s extreme radical Right think of these as the “good old days” to which we should want to return. I don’t, and I don’t think many thoughtful conservatives do, either. The current Supreme Court wants to take us back to a new Dark Age in which, as a previous (1857) Supreme Court declared in <i>Dred Scott</i> v. <i>Sandford</i>, “the Black man has no rights the white man is obliged to respect.” Under the current Court majority’s rules, America would become a cesspool in which every time you left your home, you would be threatened with violence and quite likely not come back alive. And 10-year-old girls victimized by rape would be forced to give birth to their rapist’s child – and without any help from the government once that child was born.
<br><br>That is the radical Right’s agenda for this country, and it’s time to strip the false façade of “conservatism” from the radical-Right revolutionaries who dominate the current U.S. Supreme Court and call them out as the amoral monsters they are.
<br><br><b>The Matrix of <i>Stare Decisis</i></b>
<br><br>The United States Supreme Court has an enormous power to determine what the rest of the government may or may not do, and one of the ways it has held on to that power (which is, as I noted above, <i>not</i> specifically given it by the Constitution) is through a judicial philosophy called <i>stare decisis</i>. The phrase has its roots in the British common law, and its principle is that courts should almost always decide cases based on the way they have decided similar cases before
<br><br><i>Stare decisis</i> is the basis of the law’s obsession with precedents. Individual lawyers arguing a case before virtually any court, from the lowest traffic court to the Supreme Court, will look through their lawbooks for previous cases that support their positions. Often arguments in appellate courts become duels of precedents, as each side tries to cite previous cases in their favor and the other side tries to knock down those arguments and cite other precedents more favorable to them.
<br><br>Through <i>stare decisis</i>, the American courts in general and the Supreme Court in particular have created a comforting illusion. Though the Supreme Court is appointed by elected politicians – its members are nominated by Presidents and approved by the Senate – thanks to stare decisis, the Court creates a comforting illusion that it’s not a political body. It has persuaded millions of Americans in generation after generation that its decisions are based on immutable legal principles, and therefore are not to be questioned by us mere mortals.
<br><br>It’s true that sometimes Supreme Court Justices have chafed against the restrictions of stare decisis. The late Robert Jackson, who was not only a Supreme Court Justice but one of the judges at the Nuremberg trials of the leading Nazis after World War II, said <i>stare decisis</i> turned the common law into “a system of living fossils.” But few Supreme Courts in our history have mounted so wholesale an attack on <i>stare decisis</i> and the principle of precedent as the current one with its six-member radical-Right revolutionary majority.
<br><br><i>Stare decisis</i> can be compared to the Matrix in the Wachowski siblings’ movies. Like the Matrix, <i>stare decisis</i> is a comforting illusion that the courts in general and the Supreme Court in particular maintains to keep us from realizing the truth: that the Supreme Court is a highly political (and politicized) institution, and it is not as walled off from the conflicts between the executive and legislative branches as it likes to pretend to be.
<br><br>Just as the rest of the current Republican Party is running roughshod over the Constitution and its protections of voters’ rights in the name of “defending the Constitution” – up to and including staging a violent coup attempt on January 6, 2021 at the U.S. Capitol to keep Donald Trump in power after he lost his bid for re-election – so the current radical-Right Supreme Court majority is running roughshod over the principle of <i>stare decisis</i> even while pretending to abide by it.
<br><br>This has led to some interesting public clashes between the sitting Justices in speeches to various legal groups this summer, as reported by veteran Supreme Court reporterNina Totenberg on the National Public Radio Web site. <a href="https://www.npr.org/2022/10/03/1126041958/supreme-court-new-term" target="_blank">https://www.npr.org/2022/10/03/1126041958/supreme-court-new-term</a>. "Decisions have always been subject to intense criticism, and that is entirely appropriate," Chief Justice John Roberts told a legal conference in Chicago, "but lately, the criticism is phrased in terms of ... the legitimacy of the court." Roberts called that "a mistake.”
<br><br>Quoting John Marshall’s famous remark that it is the duty of the courts in general and the Supreme Court in particular to say what the law is, Roberts added, "[T]hat role doesn’t change simply because people disagree with this opinion or that opinion. … You don't want the political branches telling you what the law is, and you don't want public opinion to be the guide of what the appropriate decision is."
<br><br>That drew an unusual rebuke from associate justice Elena Kagan, one of the three hapless, impotent “liberal” justices still left on the Court. In appearances at Northwestern and Salve Regina Universities, Kagan said this summer that <i>stare decisi</i>s is a "foundation stone of law," a doctrine of stability that "tells people they can rely on the law." But, Kagan told her Northwestern audience, if "all of a sudden everything is up for grabs, all of a sudden very fundamental principles of law are being overthrown ... then people have a right to say, 'You know, what's going on there? That doesn't seem very law-like.'"
<br><br>At Salve Regina University in Rhode Island: Kagan said, "The court shouldn't be wandering around just inserting itself into every hot-button issue in America, and it especially shouldn't be doing that in a way that reflects one set of political views over another." Unfortunately, that’s exactly what the current radical-Right Supreme Court majority is doing.
<br><br>Seeing themselves as ideological warriors o a crusade to exorcize a broad range of rights that were expanded by previous Courts, especially the Warren Court of the 1950’s and 1960’s and the Burger Court of the 1970’s that handed down <i>Roe</i> v. <i>Wade</i> in the first place. As <i>New Yorker</i> writer Corey Robin explained in a July 9 profile of the Court’s ideological leader, Clarence Thomas (<a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-self-fulfilling-prophecies-of-clarence-thomas" target="_blank">https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-self-fulfilling-prophecies-of-clarence-thomas</a>), the radical-Right super-majority on the current Supreme Court in general and Thomas in particular sees the expansion of civil rights and social equality as a horrendous mistake that has gravely weakened society as a whole.
<br><br>Robin’s article comes as close as anyone else has to explaining the fundamental contradiction that has existed within America’s Right since Ronald Reagan and Jerry Falwell cut their deal for the Moral Majority’s support of Reagan over Jimmy Carter in the 1980 election. This coalition has lasted ever since and won the support of millions of Americans despite its internal inconsistency. It calls for “limited government” when it comes to the economy, opposing any laws aimed at protecting workers,. Consumers and the environment against corporate economic and political power, and at the same time it calls for an expansive “Big Government” to micromanage individuals’ personal lives, especially their sex lives. Robin wrote:
<br><br><i>"In a speech before the Federalist Society and the Manhattan Institute which he gave in his second year on the Court, Thomas linked a broad reading of the due-process clause, with its ever-expanding list of ‘unenumerated’ rights, to a liberal ‘rights revolution’ that has undermined traditional authority and generated a culture of permissiveness and passivity. That revolution, which began with the New Deal and peaked in the nineteen-sixties, established the welfare state, weakened criminal law, and promulgated sexual freedom. The result has been personal dissipation and widespread disorder. Workers lose their incentive to labor. Men abandon wives and children. Criminals roam and rule the streets.
<br><br>“Today, the Left ties itself into knots over whether it should defend sexual minorities, dismantle the carceral state, or fight for social democracy. For Thomas, [opposing] these are three fronts of the same war. To reverse the downward spiral of social decadence and patriarchal decay, conservatives [sic] must undo the liberal culture of rights, starting with the unenumerated rights of substantive due process."
</i>
<br><br><b>So What Can Be Done to Stop the Rogue Court?</b>
<br><br>Not much, I’m afraid. I’m writing this phase of the article just days before November 8, the official date of the 2022 midterm elections. As I wrote in my last <i>Zenger’s</i> blog post, the likely outcome of the midterms is a “red tsunami” that will put the Republican Party in control of both houses of Congress and likely set the stage for a Republican return to the Presidency in 2024 – either via Donald Trump or someone much like him, like governors Ron DeSantis of Florida or Greg Abbott of Texas.
<br><br>With inflation, immigration and crime emerging as the key issues on which Americans are basing their votes – all of which favor Republicans despite precious few indications that they can do any better at managing them than the Democrats – millions of Americans are apparently deciding that reproductive freedom and democracy itself are luxuries they can do without in the hopes of cheaper gas and food prices.
<br><br>Even if the midterms don’t go as badly for the Democrats as seems likely now, there is still precious little ordinary Americans can do to tame a rogue Supreme Court. The Constitution guarantees justices lifetime tenure. The only way they can be removed is through impeachment, and the two-thirds Senate majority needed to convict anyone in an impeachment trial has proved an insuperable bar to remove impeached Presidents, let alone a Supreme Court justice.
<br><br>Clarence Thomas is currently flouting norms of judicial conduct by ruling on cases involving himself and his wife, a Right-wing activist who worked with Donald Trump’s last White House chief of staff to overturn the 2020 election. He can thumb his nose at all criticism, secure that nothing can be done to stop him. And in July 2022 Samuel Alito, author of the <i>Dobbs</i> decision that overturned <i>Roe</i> v. <i>Wade</i>, crowed about it in a speech he gave in Rome, Italy at a religious liberty conference sponsored by the Vatican (<a href="https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/alito-mocks-outrage-over-abortion-decision-religious-freedom-speech-n1297608" target="_blank">https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/alito-mocks-outrage-over-abortion-decision-religious-freedom-speech-n1297608</a>).
<br><br>Alito claimed credit for the end of Boris Johnson’s tenure as prime minister of Great Britain, saying Johnson had “paid the price” for publicly criticizing <i>Dobbs</i>. “I had the honor this term of writing, I think, the only Supreme Court decision in the history of that institution that has been lambasted by a whole string of foreign leaders — who felt perfectly fine commenting on American law,” Alito said, drawing laughs from the crowd. Alito also said that <i>Dobbs</i> “has a very important impact on religious liberty because it’s very hard to convince people that religious liberty is worth defending if they don’t think religion is a good thing that deserves protection.”
<br><br>At least twice before in our history has a U.S. Supreme Court majority run so far afoul of public opinion, and the outcomes haven’t been good. The first time was in the 1850’s, when the Court issued <i>Dred Scott</i> v. <i>Sandford</i>, which essentially made slavery legal nationwide. A Righti-wing Court majority set out to end the national debate on slavery by freezing the South’s “peculiar institution” into Constiutional law forever. Abraham Lincoln was explicitly criticizing the Dred Scott decision when he gave his famous “House Divided” speech kicking off his campaign for the U.S. Senate on June 18, 1858 (<a href="https://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/house.htm" target="_blank">https://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/house.htm</a>).
<br><br>“I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free,” Lincoln said. “I do not expect the Union to be dissolved -- I do not expect the house to fall -- but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new -- North as well as South.” The good news is the <i>Dred Scott</i> decision was ultimately overruled. The bad news was it took the carnage of the Civil War to do it.
<br><br>The other time in U.S. history when the Supreme Court set itself far against public opinion and the popular will was in the 1930’s. President Franklin Roosevelt and huge Democratic majorities in Congress passed fundamental reforms to the American economy and political system aimed at pulling the nation out of the Great Depression – and a radical Right-wing majority on the Supreme Court kept striking them down as unconstitutional.
<br><br>Roosevelt got so disgusted with the antics of the Supreme Court that he used the political capital of his landslide re-election in 1936 to push a bill to expand the Court. The Constitution doesn’t specify the number of Justices, but throughout our entire history it’s been either seven or nine – and the last expansion from seven to nine was made in 1862 by Lincoln and a Republican Congress to dilute the power of the reactionary pro-slavery justices who had handed down the <i>Dred Scott</i> decision.
<br><br>Unfortunately, Roosevelt got exactly nowhere with his plan. Republicans and Right-wing Democrats denounced it as “court-packing” and gave FDR his first major political defeat. The crisis passed partly because the swing justice, Owen Roberts, started voting to uphold instead of nullify New Deal legislation – it was referred to in the 1930’s as “the switch in time that saved nine” – and partly because Roosevelt’s presidency lasted so long he was able through sheer attrition to replace the aging cadre of justices with progressives.
<br><br>In a depressing colloquy between MS-NBC host Rachel Maddow and legal scholar Dahlia Lithwick on October 3, the start date of the Supreme Court’s current term, Lithwick said point-blank that addressing the question of a rogue Supreme Court requires major constitutional changes. “The Senate has to be reformed,” Lithwick said. “The Electoral College has to be reformed. We have to think about massive reforms to the Supreme Court.”
<br><br>Alas, the kinds of sweeping changes Lithwick is calling for are made impossible by the Constitution itself and the sheer weight of American tradition. Even when the Democrats had at least nominal control of the Presidency and both houses of Congress – which is almost certain to end after November 8, 2022 – they didn’t take up any of the measures that could have been taken under the Constitution to rein in the power of a rogue Supreme Court.
<br><br>Just as the only way to reform the Senate under the Constitution (aside from abolishing the filibuster, which as I noted above is <i>not</i> provided for ini the Constitution) would be to add more states – which is why Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, in a speech just before the 2020 Republican convention, made a point of declaring his unalterable opposition to making the District of Columbia a state (because it would elect two Democratic Senators) – the only way to undo the successful court-packing by Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell would be to add more justices.
<br><br>And if Franklin Roosevelt wasn’t able to do that, even coming off a landslide re-election victory in 1936 with broad popular support and huge partisan majorities in Congress of which today’s Democratic Presidents can only dream, Joe Biden certainly wasn’t going to be able to do it. Biden took office with just razor-thin majorities in both houses of Congress and two Senate DINO’s (Democrats in name only), Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, who double-handedly sabotaged virtually all of Biden’s agenda by refusing to compromise on scrapping or amending the filibuster.
<br><br>The years 2020 to 2022 are going to go down in American history as the time in which the Democratic Party squandered its last opportunity to remain competitive in an era in which, thanks largely to the radical-Right super-majority on the current Supreme Court and its gradual destruction of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, Republicans will dominate our politics now and for the foreseeable future. America’s future may quite likely be like Russia’s, China’s or Iran’s present: an anti-democratic government suppressing what few attempts at resistance there are by the use of overwhelming force.
mgconlanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09328563476025164608noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20445321.post-26382510198099769862022-10-26T20:23:00.012-07:002022-11-17T09:23:27.328-08:00The 2022 Midterms: Bracing Yourselves for the "Red Tsunami"<b>by MARK GABRISH CONLAN</b>
<br><br>Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for <i>Zenger’s Newsmagazine</i> • All rights reserved
<br><br><i>”Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”
<br>– Benjamin Franklin, November 11, 1755</i>
<br><br>When former White House strategist and long-time Donald Trump confidant Steve Bannon showed up in Washington, D.C. to be sentenced to four months in jail and a $6,500 fine for refusing to testify before the House Select Committee investigating the January 6, 2021 riot at the U.S. Capitol, he couldn’t have been happier. “Remember this November when the Biden administration ends?” Bannon gloated. “Their judgment day is on 8 November.”
<br><br>Bannon is almost certainly right. The midterm elections on November 8, 2022 are looking more and more like not only a pro-Republican “red wave” but a red tsunami. At this writing, less than two weeks before the midterms, the Republicans appear poised for a mega-sweep that will make 1994 and 2010 look like great years for Democrats by comparison. Those of us who hoped that Joe Biden’s victory over Donald Trump in 2020 had meant at least a reprieve from the threats to democracy itself posed by an increasingly authoritarian, autocratic Republican Party are in for a rude awakening. The “red tsunami” will almost certainly make Biden a one-term President and pave the way either for Trump’s return to the White House in 2024 or the election of an equally creepy alternate Republican like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis or Texas Governor Greg Abbott.
<br><br>And what is the reason for this abrupt turn in America’s political direction? In the immortal words of James Carville, who masterminded Bill Clinton’s successful campaign against then-President George H. W. Bush in 1992, “It’s the economy, stupid.” Bush, Sr. had had a huge leap in his popularity at the end of the first U.S.-Iraq war in 1990-91 (though he chose to leave Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein in power because he wanted Iraq to remain a Sunni Muslim-ruled country to balance the Shi’a Muslim-controlled Iran), but a nose-diving recession in the U.S. economy doomed his chances.
<br><br>When Bush campaigned for re-election in New Hampshire in 1992, he was greeted with signs reading, “Saddam Hussein still has a job. Do you?” He was widely ridiculed when video footage revealed he didn’t know how price-scanning machines at grocery stores worked. Carville and the others running Clinton’s campaign were able to portray Bush as an out-of-touch rich elitist with no idea of ordinary Americans or their problems. Coupled with a third-party challenge by self-made entrepreneur H. Ross Perot, which probably took enough votes away from Bush in several key states to hand the election to Clinton, Bush lost his re-election bid and withdrew to a quiet if sometimes cranky ex-Presidency.
<br><br>Today the American economy is beset by relentless inflation, especially in food and gasoline prices. Americans keep getting hit by price increases and are having a harder time making ends meet than they did when Trump was President. Gas prices are especially difficult for an incumbent administration because they’re posted in big numbers outside gas stations, so even if you don’t directly consume gas yourself (as I don’t, since I’ve never had a driver’s license), you’re aware of how astronomically its price has risen.
<br><br>It’s true that President Biden is doing what little he can to lower gas and food prices. He’s released oil from the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve to try to bring costs down by increasing gas supplies. It’s also true that there’s little a President can do to lower food and fuel prices. Those are controlled by private markets – unlike most countries that produce as many petroleum products as we do, the U.S. has no major publicly owned oil company – and, as Biden has explained on many occasions, world oil prices are rising for many reasons, including Russia’s war on Ukraine.
<br><br>Biden also can tout good things that have happened to the American economy on his watch. Unemployment is down to historic lows, and wages are rising as the pandemic phase of COVID-19 draws to a close. And he’s been extolling the features of the Inflation Reduction Act, which he and Congressional Democrats passed with zero Republican support. Among other things, it will fund development of alternative energy sources to give America a badly needed recovery from its addiction to fossil fuels. It will also cap annual prescription co-payments for seniors on Medicare to $2,000 per year and cut the cost of insulin to $35 per dose. All these things will help many Americans pay their bills, and so will Biden’s plan of partial forgiveness of U.S. student loans. But, as James Carville also said, “If you’re explaining, you’re losing.”
<br><br><b>Polls Show Voters Favor Republican Issues</b>
<br><br>U.S. voters don’t feel good about the economy. And they’re reminded of it every time they buy gas or groceries. According to a recent poll conducted by Louis Harris in conjunction with the Center for American Political Studies (CAPS) at Harvard University, reported on TheHill.com, (<a href="https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/3693810-inflation-crime-immigration-top-voter-concerns-ahead-of-midterms-poll/" target="_blank">https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/3693810-inflation-crime-immigration-top-voter-concerns-ahead-of-midterms-poll/</a>) shows that voters’ top concerns ahead of the midterms are the issues Republicans are strongest on: inflation, immigration and crime.
<br><br>According to Julia Manchester’s report on this poll on TheHill.com, “Seventy-four percent of voters surveyed named inflation as ‘very important,’ while 22 percent said it is ‘somewhat important.’ Sixty-eight percent, meanwhile, said crime is a ‘very important’ issue, while 26 percent said it is only ‘somewhat important.’ And 59 percent of voters called immigration a ‘very important’ issue while 31 percent said it is ‘somewhat important.’”
<br><br>As for the issues the Democrats were hoping would save them from a Republican bloodbath on November 8 – the Supreme Court’s reversal of the 1973 <i>Roe</i> v. <i>Wade</i> decision on abortion and women’s rights, and concerns over the fate of American democracy itself as the extent of the Trump administration’s attempt to remain in power no matter what became chear – those issues are simply not resonating with voters the way inflation, immigration and crime are. “Abortion was ranked fourth in the new survey, with 55 percent calling it a ‘very important issue,’ and 29 percent saying it is ‘somewhat important,’” Manchester wrote.
<br><br>A recent <i>New York Times</i>/Siena College poll (<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/17/us/politics/republicans-economy-nyt-siena-poll.html" target="_blank">https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/17/us/politics/republicans-economy-nyt-siena-poll.html</a>) had even gloomier news for Democrats. Only seven percent of the respondents in that poll named abortion as the most important issue facing the country, and only five percent said it was the Republican threat to democracy. A combined 44 percent of the Times respondents rated either “the economy” or “inflation” as their top concerns – and in the current moment those amount to the same thing. That number was up considerably from the 36 percent in the same poll in July.
<br><br>The poll also found that non-party-aligned women have overwhelmingly shifted their support from Democrats to Republicans, largely over concerns about the economy and negative feelings towards President Biden. “In September, they favored Democrats by 14 points,” <i>New York Times</i> reporter Shane Goldmacher reported on October 17. “Now, independent women backed Republicans by 18 points — a striking swing, given the polarization of the American electorate and how intensely Democrats have focused on that group and on the threat Republicans pose to abortion rights.”
<br><br>And it’s not just poll results, either. <i>Washington Post</i> economics reporter Ahba Bhattarai appeared on the October 21 PBS program <i>Washington Week</i> and said, “I spent the week talking with voters around the country. And I was really struck by how many long-time Democratic voters said that they were suddenly having to make these decisions that they never thought they would be making. They're wondering if they should prioritize the economy or abortion rights, gun control, these issues that are all very important to them.
"
<br><br>"But they feel like they have less and less of a choice when they are struggling to pay for groceries and pay for electricity and all these other essentials that have been going up in price. As one woman in Nashville told me yesterday, we can no longer afford to prioritize our principles over inflation. And so they're really rethinking their entire belief system in some cases.” In other words, the kinds of voters Democrats were hoping would at least stanch some of the bleeding in their support – the liberal pro-choice, pro-democracy voters – are deciding that democracy and choice are literally luxuries they can no longer afford.
<br><br>The sweep towards Republicans has been most pronounced in what pollsters call the “generic ballot” – the direct question to respondents about which party they’d like to see control Congress. In just one week, according to MS-NBC political reporter Steve Kornacki, the Republican lead on the generic ballot leaped from 0.8 to 3.1 percent. Other polls have it even higher; the New York Times/Siena College poll has it at 4 percent and the Harris/Harvard poll has the pro-Republican margin at a whopping 6 percent.
<br><br>This is even worse news than it seems at first glance because I’m convinced the generic ballot actually underestimates Republican strength. Due to partisan gerrymandering – which the Republicans have used far more effectively and aggressively in the states they control than the Democrats have – the Republicans are almost certain to do better in the actual House of Representatives races than the results of the generic ballot show.
<br><br><b>Republicans Don’t Need to Offer Solutions</b>
<br><br>What makes the midterm landscape even more frightening for Democrats is that Republicans aren’t saying much of anything about what they would do differently to address the problems of inflation, the economy, immigration and crime. And to the extent they are talking about what they would do differently, it’s about things that would literally take money away from senior citizens (a bedrock Republican constituency) and others. Already House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy has announced that he will hold raising the debt ceiling hostage and demand that Biden and the Democrats agree to massive cuts in Social Security and Medicare.
<br><br>Republicans aren’t offering alternatives, but they really don’t have to, either. As the late political scientist V. O. Key wrote in his last book, <i>The Responsible Electorate</i> (1966), American voters do indeed make decisions on political issues, but “retrospectively and negatively.” That is, they vote on past performance rather than future promises, and they vote <i>against</i> what they <i>don’t</i> want ratner than for what they do want. Given the way food and (especially) gas prices have soared under the watch of Biden and the Democrats, American voters are about to hand control of Congress to the Republicans based on nothing more than the vague hope that at least they can’t make things worse – though they can.
<br><br>Senator Rick Scott (R-Florida), chair of the Republican Senate Campaign Committee, has pledged that a new Republican-controlled Congress will “sunset” the Social Security program. That means it would automatically die unless extended every five years. He’s also promised to make the Trump tax cuts for the richest Americans permanent and impose a minimum income tax on all Americans of $100 for singles and #200 for couples. Scott’s plan would make Social Security benefits taxable and, according to Dan Beyer of the Democrats’ Joint Economic Committee (<a href="https://www.jec.senate.gov/public/_cache/files/008860e7-93bd-47dd-a786-fbfdfee24868/jec---scott-plan-analysis---april-2022---final.pdf" target="_blank">https://www.jec.senate.gov/public/_cache/files/008860e7-93bd-47dd-a786-fbfdfee24868/jec---scott-plan-analysis---april-2022---final.pdf</a>), would raise taxes for 43 percent of Americans and increase the tax burden on middle-class taxpayers by an average of $450 per year.
<br><br>It’s not only on economic issues that Republicans are offering policy proposals that are decidedly unpopular. Senator Lindsay Graham (R-South Carolina) has proposed a nationwide ban on virtually all abortions, despite the vote in Kansas (not exactly a liberal bastion) last August in which a ballot measure to remove abortion protections from the state constitution lost by nearly 20 points. They’re pledging to repeal the Affordable Care Act that guaranteed health coverage to millions of Americans, and they will likely reverse the Democratic legislation to cap the costs of prescription drugs and allow Medicare to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies for lower drug prices.
<br><br>And while Republicans claim to be the party that’s “tough on crime,” they have almost totally blocked any government action to keep guns out of the hands of potential criminals. Instead they’ve locked themselves into the agenda of the National Rifle Association and other even more extreme gun-rights groups. Their current radical-Right revolutionary super-majority on the U.S. Supreme Court seems determined to read the Second Amendment so broadly that even the minimal gun regulation bill that squeaked through the Senate last summer will likely be declared unconstitutional.
<br><br>Indeed, one of the few things that might actually turn back the tide of the “red tsunami” is overconfidence. Instead of pulling back on issue demands that polls show are unpopular with the American people, the Republicans are actively and proudly embracing them. Obviously they are hoping that they can claim a mandate not only for the economic parts of their agenda (which there really aren’t any, aside from cutbacks for everyone else to give tax breaks to the rich) but for everything else as well.
<br><br>This gives the Democrats a potential opening for the last two weeks of the campaign – but only if they’re bold and assertive enough to use it. I think Biden should mention the Republicans’ tax policies, including the “sunsetting” of Social Security, the cuts in Medicare and the “minimum tax” plan that will raise taxes on over 40 percent of Americans in every stump speech he makes between now and the midterms. Instead of talking about reproductive choice or the future of American democracy, he should be saying that Republicans have promised to take money away from senior citizens who have paid into Social Security all their working lives so they can fund huge and unnecessary tax cuts for the super-rich.
<br><br>Biden and the Democrats should also take advantage of the two-month “lame duck” session between November 8 and January 3, 2023, when the new Republican Congress will take power, to get rid of the insanity of the “debt ceiling” altogether. As Eric Lavitz explained in a <i>New York</i> magazine article called “Return of the Hostage Takers” (<a href="https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/10/joe-biden-gop-debt-ceiling.html" target="_blank">https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/10/joe-biden-gop-debt-ceiling.html</a>), under Senate rules they couldn’t abolish the debt ceiling but they could raise it so high it wouldn’t be reached for decades or even centuries.
<br><br>But all this would take a major push from President Biden, and he’s already told reporters that getting rid of the debt ceiling would be “irresponsible.” “In so doing,” Lavitz wrote, “he affirmed the GOP’s fiction about what raising the debt ceiling actually means, while leaving the economy at its mercy. If the Republican Party’s commitment to brinksmanship threatens to upend the global financial system, the president’s nostalgic attachment to congressional conventions threatens to do the same.”
<br><br><b>Republican Control Will Be Permanent</b>
<br><br>And once the Republicans regain control of the U.S. Congress in 2022 and the Presidency in 2024, they have no intention of ever letting themselves be voted out of it again. One reason America’s experiment in republican self-governance has lasted as long as it has – nearly 250 years – is that losing candidates acknowledged their defeat and used the time until the subsequent election to regroup and try to win the next time.
<br><br>But today’s Republicans have no intention of either acknowledging defeat or accepting it. They are mounting a full-court press to make sure that they will never again lose elections, no matter what the will of the people is. They have targeted just about every office that has a role in administering elections, from the lowliest election clerks to state secretaries of state, the officials that actually run elections in each state.
<br><br>I remember as a child being confused about what a state secretary of state actually did. I knew what the U.S. Secretary of State did – he (or, more recently, she) ran America’s relations with other nations. But since U.S. states don’t have foreign policies, it took me years before I realized that, among other things (including registering corporations), state secretaries of state run elections in their states and have broad latitude to determine how people vote and how their votes are counted.
<br><br>This year, Republicans are putting up candidates for secretary of state all over the country – and in at least four critical swing states, Minnesota (Kim Crockett), Arizona (Mark Finchem), Michigan (Kristina Karamo) and Nevada (Jim Marchant), Republicans are either leading in the polls or the results are within the statistical margin of error. Marchant’s program is especially interesting because, among other things, he’s demanding an end to early voting and mail-in ballots, an end to machine counting of ballots, and an insistence that the results on election day are final regardless of how many ballots are still outstanding. If these rules had been in effect in the so-called “swing states” in 2020, Donald Trump would still be President.
<br><br>Republicans are also mounting both public and private efforts to intimidate both voters and election clerks. In Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis formed what he called an “Election Integrity Task Force” to send police to the homes of former felons who were supposed to have had the right to vote restored under a 2018 ballot measure passed by over 60 percent of Floridians. DeSantis made the program so intimidating and scary that even the cops sent out to serve the warrants on people accused of having voted illegally often had no idea what the warrants were about and couldn’t explain them to the people they were targeting. The purpose was clearly to intimidate African-Americans in particular and scare them away from the polls this November.
<br><br>Other intimidation tactics include the private posses being organized by militia groups and individuals in Arizona and elsewhere to park trucks outside election drop boxes. Often the people driving the trucks are wearing military armor and carrying guns. Similar groups are making calls all over the country threatening the lives of election workers for having certified the “wrong” winner – Biden instead of Trump – in 2020. The intimidation has become so serious it’s estimated up to 30 percent of election workers have quit or taken early retirement rather than risk staying on the job under threats to their and their families’ lives And as these people leave, they’re generally being replaced by Republican operatives pledged to do whatever it takes to ensure the “right” election outcome next time.
<br><br>In short, in states Republicans control they’re using the same tactics Southern Democrats used to nullify African-American political participation. Between the end of Reconstruction in 1877 and the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, Blacks were essentially locked out of politics through electoral sabotage, inability to register, being subjected to bizarre tests white voters didn’t have to pass, economic pressure in terms of being threatened with losing their jobs, and when all else failed, night rides by the Ku Klux Klan and other vigilante groups either threatening or actually committing violent assaults against Blacks who dared try to vote.
<br><br>This was something that was supposed to have been part of American history, but beginning in 2013 the U.S. Supreme Court started picking the Voting Rights Act to pieces and ruling major parts of it unconstitutional. With the great reversal of America’s two major political parties in their positions on civil rights in general and Black rights in particular – the Republicans, once the ”party of Lincoln,” took up the mantle of racism and white supremacy, while the Democrats, once the party of slavery, segregation and the Klan, became the party of racial equaility – Republicans are embracing a frankly racist agenda that aims to reduce Blacks and other voters of color to second-class citizenship.
<br><br>Things will get even worse if the U.S. Supreme Court rules for the North Carolina state legislature this year in a case called <i>Moore</i> v. <i>Harper.</i> For over a decade the Republican-dominated legislature in North Carolina has been trying to draw legislative and Congressional districts that will systematically minimize the ability of Black voters to elect Black candidates to those offices. They’ve been stymied by the North Carolina Supreme Court, which has regularly thrown out their maps as violating the North Carolina state constitution and its clauses barring voter discrimination based on race.
<br><br>All that could change if the current radical-Right revolutionary majority (which is routinely called “conservative” but it is anything but that) adopts the so-called “independent state legislature theory” advanced by the Republican North Carolina legislature in <i>Moore</i> v. <i>Harper</i>. This is a radical interpretation of Article I, section 4 of the U.S. Constitution – “The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof” – that holds it gives absolute power to state legislatures to do whatever they want with regard to elections.
<br><br>Under the “independent state legislature theory,” state legislatures could not only create their districts any way they liked, no one – not federal or state courts, and not state governors – would have the power to say them nay. This would also give state legislative majorities the power to set aside election outcomes either before or after the elections actually occurred. In 2020 Donald Trump and his attorneys appealed to legislatures, governors and other officials in states with Republican legislatures which had voted for Joe Biden to reverse these results and declare Trump the winner. In 2024, if the “independent state legislatlre theory” becomes U.S. constitutional law, they would have the power to do precisely that.
<br><br>Until the 2000 election, the first since 1888 in which the outcome of the Electoral College diverged from the popular vote, most Americans assumed that they had a Constitutional right to vote for President, Since then, they’ve assumed that at least they had the right to vote for their state’s representatives to the Electoral College that actually picks the President. Now Presidential elections, if they continue to be held at all – and nothing in the Constitution requires them; Article II, section 1 says merely that Presidential electors shall be appointed “in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct” – would just be popularity polls and the state legislatures could appoint whichever electors they wanted.
<br><br>The result would be a self-perpetuating one-party rule by the Republicans. Thanks to their current advantage in state legislatures, they could form their districts in such a way that they could never be voted out of office again. Republicans have been honest about what they wanted well before Donald Trump. In the early 2000’s Karl Rove, George W. Bush’s political strategist, said his goal was to win what he called “full-spectrum dominance” for the Republican party, after the doctrine of overwhelming military superiority with which the Bush II administration fought the second U.S.-Iraq war. But, as with so many of the negative aspects of American politics, Trump and his minions have turbocharged it.
<br><br><b>Character Doesn’t Matter (If You’re a Republican)</b>
<br><br>One of the odder aspects of the current American political system and the different ways members of the two major parties vote is that, at least if you’re a Republican, issues of personal character have virtually ceased to matter. Despite their claims to be the party of “family values,” Republican voters have shown zero interest in holding their candidates to any standards of accountability in their personal behavior.
<br><br>When Donald Trump’s infamous <i>Access Hollywood</i> tape came out in October 2016, a few old-style Republicans feared that Trump’s boasts of his ability to assault women sexually and get away with it because “when you’re a star, they’ll let you do anything” would sink his candidacy. There were even a few calls for him to withdraw from the race. Instead, if anything, it actually helped him. A lot of voters, especially men, thought it added to Trump’s credentials as a “real guy” to whom they could relate.
<br><br>In 2012 Todd Akin, Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in Missouri, made an infamous statement that the reason he opposed allowing abortions in cases of rape or incest was that such pregnanties were “really rare. He added, “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.” Akin’s opponent, former Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill (who beat Akin but lost the seat in 2018 to an even creepier Republican, Josh Hawley), said recently on MS-NBC that if a Republican made a similar comment today, the party would be giving parades for him.
<br><br>More recently, U.S. Senate candidate Herschel Walker (R-Georgia) has managed to survive bizarre allegations against him with barely a blip in his poll numbers. Not only did he pay for a then-girlfriend to have an abortion despite his current support for a nationwide ban on all abortions, he got her pregnant a second time, again offered her money for an abortion, and broke up with her when she insisted on having his child.
<br><br>While campaigning against “absent fathers” in the Black community – men who’ve got women pregnant and then did nothing to help support their kids – Walker has had four children by four different women, paid only the legal minimum in terms of child support and has almost never visited them. But Georgia’s Republican voters couldn’t care less. To them, Walker is a “good Black man” who will vote the way Donald Trump and Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell tell him to. While continuing to use allegations – founded or not – as political weapons against Democrats, Republicans give their own candidates a free pass.
<br><br>It’s amazing that the party that claims the mantle of “family values” is also the only major party which has elected Presidents who divorced and remarried – the twice-married Ronald Reagan in 1980 and the thrice-married Donald Trump in 2016. Democrats care a lot more than Republicans about the personal lives of their candidates, especially their sex lives and the way they treat women. If Elliot Spitzer, Eric Schneiderman, Anthony Weiner, Andrew Cuomo, Al Franken and Bob Filner had been Republicans, they’d almost certainly still be in political office today.
<br><br><b>What Will Republicans Do with Congressional Majorities?</b>
<br><br>It’s not hard to guess. Republicans have already said they will hold the world economy hostage by threatening not to raise the debt ceiling unless President Biden caves and agrees to deep cuts in Social Security and Medicare benefits. So far Biden has vowed to hold the line against such tactics, but he may not be able to. If it comes to a choice between agreeing to Republican demands to slash Social Security and Medicare and allowing the world’s economy to melt down on his watch, Biden will almost certainly bite the bullet and accept massive cuts in Social Security and Medicare as the lesser of two evils.
<br><br>Indeed, it’s quite likely the Republicans will resort to struggles over the debt ceiling and periodic shutdowns of the U.S. government as leverage again and again to force Biden to make enormous concessions to them. They once again will likely try to repeal the Affordable Care Act (so-called “Obamacare”) and will almost certainly push through a nationwide ban on virtually all abortions. Their motive seems to be not only to force Biden to make concessions but to humiliate him and castrate him politically. They also want to demoralize Democratic voters by ensuring that the country is run by Republicans who serve Republican ideals whether that’s what voters want or not.
<br><br>Previous Republican Congresses eventually backed away from repeated games of political chicken over the debt ceiling because their real constituency – the mega-rich whose huge donations, both to the party itself and to dark-money political action committees (PAC’s) that support it – stood to lose too much money themselves from the total meltdown of the world economy a U.S. default on its debts would create. But the current crop of Republicans may be just crazy enough to do it anyway – and there may be enough radical-Right donors to keep the party in business even if more rational corporate types back off.
<br><br>Democrats didn’t help their cause any by deliberately intervening in Republican primaries to sink more moderate candidates and ensure the real crazies got the Republican nominations in state after state, district after district. I’m old enough to remember how spectacularly that styrategy backfired in 1966, when Californla Governor Pat Brown was preparing to run for a third term and knew it would be an uphill battle. So he sought to neutralize the Republican he was most worried about, moderate San Francisco Mayor George Christopher, and instead secretly helped the faded movie actor whom Christopher was running against in the primary. In so doing, he loosed Ronald Reagan on the political world.
<br><br>So when Biden – who has lamented the increasing nastiness in American politics and looks backwards to the days when he could maintain cross-party friendships with Republicans and Right-wing Democrats like Strom Thurmond and James Eastland despite their political differences – looks for “moderate” Republicans in Congress with whom he can make deals, there won’t be any. The House and Senate Republican caucuses will be filled by all the crazies the Democrats helped elect, thinking they’d be easier to beat in the general election, and they will proudly and unashamedly take the American economy to the brink of disaster again and again to force Biden and the remaining Democrats to bend to their will.
<br><br>And the poison of Republican control of Congress will spread beyond America’s borders. One of the biggest losers if the Republicans retake Congress will be Ukraine. Already Kevin McCarthy, House Republican leader who will almost certainly be the next House Speaker of the Republicans take power, has said there will be “no blank check” on funding Ukraine in its defensive war against Russia – which understandably freaked out Ukrainians, who realize their only defense against total annihilation by Russia is the high-tech weaponry the U.S. and other Western countries are sending them.. Though some Republicans still seem supportive of Ukraine, Donald Trump, the leader of their party in all but name, has made it clear where he stands. When Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 Trump called Russian dictator Vladimir Putin a “genius” for invading Ukraine.
<br><br>Biden has tried to portray the war in Ukraine as a foundational struggle to preserve democracy worldwide, But given how openly Republicans have embraced autocracies and dictatorships both in the U.S. and elsewhere – not only by supporting laws making it harder for U.S. citizens, especially poor and working-class people and people of color, to vote but also by inviting dictators like Victor Orbán of Hungary to the U.S. Constervative Political Action Conference (CPAC) – it’s clear that in the struggle between democracy and autocracy, they’re on the side of the autocrats.
<br><br>Another thing Republicans will do once they take back Congress is launch an endless series of so-called “investigations” of Biden, his scapegrace son Hunter and just about everybody in his administration. Already they’ve talked about calling various administration figures, including Attorney General Merrick Garland and retiring director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease Dr. Anthony Fauci, to testify before House and Senate investigatory committees.
<br><br>Part of this seems to be sheer revenge – the Republicans saying to the Democrats, “You investigated us, and now we’re going to investigate you.” It’s almost certain that a Republican Congress will impeach President Biden to get back at the Democratic House of Representatives for twice impeaching Donald Trump. One dreads the thought of Republicans in Congress calling “witnesses” like MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell to testify at length about his alleged (and phony) “statistics” proving that Trump really won the 2020 election.
<br><br>It’s also virtually certain that once Republicans retake Congress, any attempts to prosecute Donald Trump and his associates for their actions before, during and after the January 6, 2021 riot on the U.S. Capitol will end. It’s likely the Republican Congress will attach a rider to the Justice Department’s budget forbidding it from mounting any prosecutions of Trump or any other people who allegedly committed crimes on January 6, 2021 but were not themselves present at the riot. One of the political imperatives of the current Republican Party is to defend Donald Trump at all costs, and to ensure that he keeps his current immunity from any and all consequences of his political and personal actions.
<br><br>A Republican House will almost certainly impeach Biden, and probably Merrick Garland and anyone else in the government who dares do anything against Donald Trump. So far there have been four Presidential impeachment trials in American history, and I’ve been alive during three of them: the 1999 trial of Bill Clinton for allegedly lying about his affair with Monica Lewinsky and the 2020 and 2021 trials of Trump over his attempt to blackmail the Ukrainian government to give him dirt on Hunter Biden and his role in the January 6, 2021 riot.
<br><br>Like Clinton and Trump, Biden will almost certainly avoid conviction because of the Constitutional requirement that two-thirds of Senators vote to convict a President and remove him from office. Even the shrunken Democratic Party that will survive the “red tsunami” will almost certainly have enough Senators to block Biden’s conviction and removal – but given the power of Congressional Republicans and the media machine they have at their backs to shape the perceptions of their base voters, Biden will be, as U.S. Senator John Thune (R-South Dakota) confidently predicted at the start of the midterm campaign, a “half-term President,” unable to accomplish anything and a political “dead man walking” as he limps along towards a Jimmy Carter-style re-election debacle.
mgconlanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09328563476025164608noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20445321.post-34773081888544498432022-10-19T20:49:00.003-07:002022-10-19T20:57:57.982-07:00Michael Flynn: Influential Right-Wing Leader Seeks an American Theocracy<b>by MARK GABRISH CONLAN</b>
<br><br>Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for <i>Zenger’s Newsmagazine</i> • All rights reserved
<br><br>Alas, just after showing Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s exalting episode of his <i>Making Black America</i> series on October 18, KPGS showed a swary <i>Frontline</i> documentary called “Michael Flynn’s Holy War,” about the fascinating history of retired general Michael Flynn, Sr. Flynn was raised in Rhode Island by a hard-core Roman Catholic family who began as Democrats but switched ideological sides because of the Catholic church’s opposition to abortion and the Democratic Party’s eventual embrace of the pro-choice position. Flynn remembers hos mother running for local office in Rhode Island (unsuccessfully) and drafting him to be part of her campaign – as my mother drafted me in activism at a tender age, albeit on the other ideological side – and the woman who reported and narrated this documentary, Michelle R. Smith of the Associated Press, managed to get at least the semblance of an interview with Flynn himself as well as lengthier conversations with Flynn’s brother Joe, who’s fully on board with Michael’s politics. “When I first saw Michael Flynn speak to an audience, it was hard to reconcile who he once was with who he had become,” Smith said at the outset of the program. “A retired three-star general once hailed as an intelligence genius. Today, he’s touring the country as a leader in a far-right movement trying to put its brand of Christianity at the center of civic life and institutions.”
<br><br>Joe Flynn is quoted in the program as saying, “This country was founded on Judeo-Christian values” though it’s all too clear, especially from their endorsement of extreme Right-wing Christinas’ “end-times” prediction that as soon as Christ returns the remaining Jews will be given the option – either convert immediately to Chritianity or end up doomed for all eternity to Hell – they regard Jews as at best junior partners and at worst the scum of the earth. Joe Flynn continued, “I think [their mother] Helen would be proud of the activities that we're involved in. I think Christians are very involved in the conservative movement. It's no different than it was 30, 40 years ago, especially with Reagan.”
<br><br>Michael Flynn started out as a member of the Army’s elite 82nd Airborne unit of paratroopers giving aid and comfort to the Right-wing contras Reagan funded during the 1980’s in Nicaragua and other countries in Central America and the Caribbean. Then during George W. Bush’s so-called “global war on terrorism,” Flynn becams a commander in Iraq and did intelligence for the the so-called Joint Strategic Operations Command (JSOC), which targeted raids on civilian homes in search of suspected terrorists, The problem was that Flynn insisted on ordering and carrying out the raids so quickly he didn’t stop to vet the intelligence on which they were based – which meant, inevitably, that the raids netted and often killed a lot of innocent civilians.
<br><br>As Flynn got involved in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, so-called “radical Islam” replaced Communism as the all-embracing enemy America faced abroad, while Flynn’s always strong belief in a radical-Right version of Christianity led him to believe that America is full of domestic enemies who need to be fought to the death, if need be, to redeem the U.S. for God and a peculiar interpretation of the Constitution that countenances events like the January 6, 2021 riots which were quite obviously an attempt to disrupt and prevent the peaceful transition of power after a Presidential election. In fact, one of the peculiarities of the modern American Right is the Orwellian doublethink that allows them to pose as defenders of the Constitution while participating in frankly unconstitutional attempts to reverse the outcome of an election because it didn’t turn out the way they wanted it to, and to resort to violence when their efforts politically and judicially met with failure. Michael Flynn doesn’t come right out and say that Democrats are the agents of Satan, but he does say things like, “The enemy of 1984 is 1776!” It’s also clear he and his followers think the Democratic Party, if left in power, will turn America into Venezuela or Nicaragua, a failed state witn an increasingly miserable and impoverished population – which makes it ironic that among the demands the Republican Party’s candidates for the House and Senate are currently making include big cuts to Social Security and Medicare.
<br><br>Michael Flynn’s America would be a Christian theocracy in which secular lawmakers would be ruled by his sort of Right-wing faith, including an end to women’s bodily autonomy (ironically, Iranian women are putting their lives on the line for just this right, while the American Right, which claims to be against Iranian-style “radical Islam,” wants to impose the same sort of faith-based regime on U.S. women!) and, of course, an end to Queer rights as well (even though nothing Flynn himself said in the <i>Frontline</i> documentary mentioned Queer people one way or the other, but being anti-Queer comes with the territory)and mayve even an Iranian-style “morality police” force to punish men who have sex with men, women who have sex with women, and women who seek, let alone get, abortions. While the Black church has its own set of problems – it, too, is anti-Queer and years ago I attended a service at a Black church in which a well-known minister preached against the theory of evolution and said it had destroyed all morality – nonetheless the Black church has been a leading voice of liberation, especially for Black people themselves, while Michael Flynn’s white church is an instrument of authoritarianism and domination.mgconlanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09328563476025164608noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20445321.post-44839388007578362992022-10-18T18:03:00.002-07:002022-10-19T20:33:25.093-07:00Thirteen Senate, Governor and Congress Candidates Who Need Your Help!<br>I've just donated $25 each to the 13 candidates on this list, including nine who are rinning for the U.S. Senate, three who are running for state governor, and one who's running for a House seat in Texas. I'm giving you the lnks to their official candidates' Web sites so you can easily donate to them, too.
<br><br>Raphael Warnock (U.S. Senate, Georgia), <a href="https://warnockforgeorgia.com" target="_blank">https://warnockforgeorgia.com</a>
<br><br>Stacey Abrams (Governor, Georgia). <a href="https://staceyabrams.com" target="_blank">https://staceyabrams.com</a>
<br><br>Mandela Barnes (U.S. Senato, Wisconsin), <a href="https://mandelabarnes.com" target="_blank">https://mandelabarnes.com</a>
<br><br>Maggie Hassan (U.S. Senate, New Hampshire), <a href="https://maggiehassan.com" target="_blank">https://maggiehassan.com</a>
<br><br>Cheri Beasley (U.S. Senate, North Carolina), <a href="https://cheribeaslwy.con" target="_blank">https://cheribeaslwy.con</a>
<br><br>Catherine Cortez-Masto (U.S. Senate, Nevada), <a href="https://catherinecortezmasto.com%20" target="_blank">https://catherinecortezmasto.com </a>
<br><br>Tim Ryan (U.S. Senate, Ohio), <a href="https://timforoh.com" target="_blank">https://timforoh.com</a>
<br><br>Val Demings (U.S. Senate, Florida), <a href="https://valdemings.com" target="_blank">https://valdemings.com</a>
<br><br>John Fetterman (U.S. Senate, Pennsylvania), <a href="https://johnfetterman.com" target="_blank">https://johnfetterman.com</a>
<br><br>Josh Shapiro (Governor, Pennsylvania), <a href="https://joshshapiro.org" target="_blank">https://joshshapiro.org</a>
<br><br>Mark Kelly (U.S. Senate, Arizona), <a href="https://markkelly.com" target="_blank">https://markkelly.com</a>
<br><br>Katie Hobbs (Governor, Arizona), <a href="https://katiehobbs.org" target="_blank">https://katiehobbs.org</a>
<br><br>Michelle Vallejo (U.S. House, District 15, Texas), <a href="https://michellefortx15.com" target="_blank">https://michellefortx15.com</a> mgconlanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09328563476025164608noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20445321.post-29408478224372685202022-09-30T18:59:00.004-07:002022-10-01T10:29:37.193-07:00Donald Trump IS Above the Law!<br><i><b>Frontline</b>’s "Lies, Politics and Democracy" Episode Highlights Trump’s and His Followers’ Ongoing Threat to the American Republic</i>
<br><br><b>by MARK GABRISH CONLAN</b>
<br><br>Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for <i>Zenger’s Newsmagazine</i> • All rights reserved
<br><br>Donald John Trump really IS above the law!
<br><br>He bestrides the world like a colossus, doing whatever he pleases and wrecking everything he touches in his wake. Trump is what Superman would have been if his creators, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, had gone ahead with their original plan to make him a super-<i>villain</i> instead of a superhero. Trump stands firmly for lies, injustice and the un-American way. Those of us who aren’t part of his cult look at him the way a lot of decent Germans in the 1930’s probably looked at Hitler: “Who IS this guy? I thought we were better than this!”
<br><br>By one of the macabre coincidences that have become all too common in the Age of Trump, PBS aired the latest episode in their long-running documentary series <i>Frontline</i> on September 5, the same day a Trump-appointed federal judge in Florida named Aileen Mercedes Cannon (how appropriate that her middle name is the same as Hitler’s favorite brand of car!) gave Trump everything he had asked for in the case of the documents the FBI seized from his personal residence/golf club at Mar-a-Lago, Florida.
<br><br>Judge Cannon not only granted Trump’s request for a so-called “special master” to review all the seized documents, she ruled that he should check the documents not only for possible violations of attorney-client privilege but also for so-called “executive privilege.” She wasn’t fazed by the fact that Donald Trump is no longer President of the United States, and the current President, Joe Biden, specifically waived executive privilege in connection with these documents.
<br><br>Judge Cannon also ruled that Donald Trump has special privileges due to his status as an ex-President, especially an ex-President who because he only served a single term is not barred by the 22nd Amendment from running for the office again. "As a function of Plaintiff's former position as President of the United States, the stigma associated with the subject seizure is in a league of its own," Judge Cannon wrote. "A future indictment, based to any degree on property that ought to be returned, would result in reputational harm of a decidedly different order of magnitude."
<br><br>While Judge Cannon didn’t give Trump everything he had asked for – including a guarantee that any documents not needed by the government for its investigations be returned to him – the ruling was such a major giveaway for Trump that even the judges of the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals drew back from some of it. Even though two of the judges on the three-judge panel that heard the appeal were Trump appointees, they ruled unanimously that Trump had no legal right to own the estimated 100 classified documents seized by the FBI.
<br><br>"It is self-evident that the public has a strong interest in ensuring that the storage of the classified records did not result in 'exceptionally grave damage to the national security,'" the three-judge panel stated in a 20-page opinion. "Ascertaining that necessarily involves reviewing the documents, determining who had access to them and when, and deciding which (if any) sources or methods are compromised."
<br><br>“Sources and methods” are a Holy Grail to the intelligence community. No country in the world that has an intelligence service wants other countries’ officials to know who we are spying on, how, when and with what sources of data – especially human beings who may literally be risking their lives to provide us with information. As the Eleventh Circuit’s three-judge panel wrote in their opinion, “[W]e cannot discern why the Plaintiff [Trump] would have an individual interest in or need for any of the one hundred documents with classification markings,"
<br><br>Things didn’t get any better for Trump when the special master was appointed. Judge Cannon ordered both sides – the government and Trump – to nominate two candidates each for the position. Either side could object to the other side’s nominees, and Trump’s attorneys promptly vetoed both names the government put forward. Of Trump’s nominees, the government vetoed one – a man whose wife sits on the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals, which would hear any of the special master’s rulings – but agreed to the other one, Judge Raymond Dearie. So Dearie got the jub – and proceeded to make mincemeat of the Trump side’s claims.
<br><br>Trump himself had been giving interviews to favorable news outlets like Fox and Newsmax (a hard-Right Web site for people who think Fox is too liberal for them) in which he made sweeping claims that the FBI had planted classified documents and other papers, and that he had personally declassified all the records during his term as President. Judge Dearie told the Trump side, essentially, to put up or shut up. Judge Dearie ashed Trump’s lawyers for a list of the documents they’re alleging the FBI planted, and a list of the ones he supposedly declassified. So far Trump’s attorneys have not come up with any of the lists Judge Dearie asked for.
<br><br>Obviously Trump’s strategy is to delay and stall the proceedings as longas possible. People who have followed Trump’s career from his emergence as a New York real-estate developer to successful Presidential candidate have noted that delay is his principal legal tactic. Trump is waiting and hoping that Republicans will win back control of both houses of Congress in this November’s midterm elections, and a Republican President – either Trump himself oir one of his clones, like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis or Texas Governor Greg Abbott – will win the Presidency in 2924 and appoint an Attorney General who will cancel all the ongoing investigations of Trump and allow him once again to go scot-free from any consequences.
<br><br><b>A Sore Loser and an Even Sorer Winner</b>
<br><br>The September 5 PBS <i>Frontline</i> episode, “Lies, Politics and Democracy,” aired on the same day Judge Cannon gave her Trump-fawning opinion, It began with a montage of film clips of defeated U.S. Presidential candidates conceding the elections and offering congratulations to the winners. From Wendell Willkie in 1940 to Hillary Clinton in 2016, the pattern held. Even candidates who lost close elections based on disputed results from one state, and could therefore have claimed with some legitimacy that the election had been stolen from them – like Richard Nixon in 1960 or Al Gore in 2000 – publicly acknowledged that they had lost.
<br><br>Not Donald Trump. As <i>New York Times</i> reporter Peter Baker, who covered Trump’s Presidency and has since written a book about it, <i>The Divider,</i> told <i>Frontline</i>, “He has done this every step of the way through his career, long before politics. When <i>The Apprentice</i> lost an Emmy to <i>The Amazing Race,</i> he claimed that the Emmy contest was rigged. … Every step along the way, anything he has ever lost is because somebody else has cheated and stolen it from him.”
<br><br>The importance of <i>The Apprentice</i>, the “reality” TV show that cast Trump as the smartest and most successful capitalist of all time – a perception wildly at variance with his actual record as a businessperson – cannot be overstated. It sold millions of Americans – including people who never actually watched it – on the idea that Trump was such a brilliant manager people would literally flock to him and allow him to humiliate them publicly in hopes of learning his secrets to success.
<br><br>So when <i>The Apprentice</i> repeatedly lost the Emmy for Best Reality TV Series to <i>The Amazing Race</i> – a show that celebrated athleticism over business savvy – it was more than Trump’s fragile ego could handle. He went on his then-favorite social media platform, Twitter, to grouse about the outcome and say the process was rigged: “Amazing Race winning an Emmy again is a total joke. The Emmys have no credibility. The Emmys are all politics, that’s why The Apprentice never won.” In another venue, Trump said, “The public is smart. They know it’s a con game.”
<br><br>When Barack Obama, a man Trump both publicly and privately hated, successfully won re-election against Mitt Romney in 2012, Romney himself conceded – but Trump didn’t. In statements chillingly similar to the way he would react to his own electoral defeat in 2020, Trump tweeted, “This election is a total sham and a travesty. We are not a democracy. More reports of voting machines switching Romney votes to Obama. Let’s fight like hell and stop this great and disgusting injustice! We can't let this happen. We should march on Washington.”
<br><br>During one of the debates between Trump and Hillary Clinton in 2016, Trump was asked point-blank if he would accept the results of the election – and he said, “If I win.” As Daniel Ziblatt, author of a book called <i>Hoe Democracies Die,</i> told <i>Frontline</i>, Trump’s comments about the 2012 and 2016 elections “set off alarm bells. To be a small-’D’ democrat means to know how to lose elections, and a democracy can’t survive if politicians and political parties don’t know how to lose. Sometimes people have even said democracy is for losers; it’s a system that allows losers to come back and fight another day. And so if the losers deny that they’ve lost, the system can’t endure.”
<br><br>What’s more, Trump’s refusal to accept defeat has become a role model for other Republican candidates. Many of the major Republican nominees for governor, U.S. senator and other major offices have already announced that if they don’t win, they will declare that the election was stolen. Doug Mastriano and Judy Hice, Republican gubernatorial candidates in Pennsylvania and Arizona, respectively, have all but promised that they will refuse to certify the 2024 election results if a Democrat wins their state’s vote for President.
<br><br><b>Not Just Trump: Republicans Reject Democracy</b>
<br><br>The <i>Frontline</i> show “Lies, Politics and Democracy” featured many interviews with traditional Right-wingers who feared Trump’s authoritarian tendencies when he first ran for President in 2016 and even earlier. Among them were Bill Kristol, founder of the Right-wing magazine <i>The Weekly Standard</i>, who said, “He had a real feel for people’s anxieties and unhappiness about various things. He was willing to stoke those anxieties and hatreds, in some cases, resentments, in ways that other politicians weren’t willing to. … I was publicly saying that Trump was unacceptable, people shouldn’t support him. They should make clear they couldn’t support him in the general election even. They should band together against him.”
<br><br>Another Right-winger, columnist Mona Charen, told <i>Frontline</i>, “There were many, many signals throughout 2016 that this was not just a showman, but no, somebody who had definite authoritarian sympathies. And there was violence at his rallies that he openly encouraged. I mean, it wasn't a joke.”
<br><br>The <i>Frontline</i> documentary featured clips from Trump himself at his 2016 campaign rallies, mocking people with disabilities and urging his supporters to beat up hecklers in the audience. “Knock the crap out of him, would you?” Trump told the crowd at one such rally. “Just knock the hell.” adding that if anyone in his crowd were arrested for assaulting a heckler, “I promise you I will pay for the legal fees. I promise.” At another rally on February 22, 2016, he said, “I love the old days. You know what they used to do to guys like that when they were in a place like this? They’d be carried out on a stretcher, folks. I’d like to punch him in the face, I’ll tell you. Ah, it’s true.”
<br><br>“The nastier he got, the more excited the crowd got,” Danien Ziblatt told <i>Frontline.</i> “And rather than trying to clamp that down and sort of pull back, he egged on the crowd further. And that dynamic of the angry crowd and the demagogic leader fomenting anger and using violent rhetoric was a sign that this is somebody who had no democratic core, liberal democratic core. And it was not clear what the limits of this style of politics were. So I think that was very frightening.”
<br><br>Once again, it’s not just Donald Trump but most of the Republican Party which has rejected the basic tenet of democracy – the idea that the people, or a majority of them, should be able to decide who will lead them and what the people they elect should do. In a July 2022 speech before the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a Right-wing policy group that writes model bills and gets state legislators to pass them – former Senator Rick Santorum (R-Pennsylvania) openly called for a second constitutional convention to rewrite the U.S. Constitution to enshrine the policy priorities of the American Right.
<br><br>Citing Article V of the existing Constitution, which provides that the votes in a new Constitutional convention shall be one state, one vote – not one delegate, one vote – Samtorum boasted that because the convention would be dominated by the voters of smaller, more Right-wing states, "we have the opportunity … to have a supermajority, even though …we may not even be in an absolute majority when it comes to the people who we agree with." (The speech was reported by <i>Business Insider</i> at <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/constitutional-convention-conservatives-republicans-constitution-supreme-court-2022-7" target="_blank">https://www.businessinsider.com/constitutional-convention-conservatives-republicans-constitution-supreme-court-2022-7</a>.)
<br><br>One of the keys to the Republican Party’s outsized dominance of America’s current political system is their shrewd use of the anti-democratic features of the original Constitution. The framers guaranteed each state, no matter its size, two U.S. Senators – which may have seemed like a livable compromise in 1787, when the largest state, Virginia, had nine times the population of the smallest, Rhode Island. Today the largest state, California, has 80 times the population of the smallest, Wyoming.
<br><br>Under the original Constitution, actual voters would elect no higher office than their member of the House of Representatives. The Senate was chosen by state legislatures, and the President by an Electoral College made up of the total number of House and Senate members – which once again extended the outsized power of small states in the overall design of the U.S. government. Later developments, including the U.S. Supreme Court’s assertion of the right to nullify legislation as unconstitutional ini 1803, and the evolution of the Senate filibuster from 1837 to 1975, added arrows to the modern-day Republican Party’s anti-democratic quiver.
<br><br>Today we have a six-member radical-Right majority on the Supreme Court which – contrary to the usual designation of them as “conservative” – is on an ideological tear, upending a 50-year-old precedent that guaranteed women autonomy over their own buddies and a 100-year-old law in New York that banned the carrying of concealed weapons. And in its upcoming term, the Supreme Court will take up a case brought by North Carolina Republicans who assert that state legislatures have “plenary power” (a phrase we heard a lot in Trump’s unsuccessful attempt to reverse the outcome of the 2020 election) to do whatever they like in setting up their districts, and neither the courts nor anyone else can check them.
<br><br>Meanwhile, the Republicans have essentially given up on the idea of winning the Presidency through the popular vote. Republicans have won three Presidential elections since 1992, but only once did their candidate, George W. Bush in his re-election in 2004, win a plurality of the actual vote. In the other two cases – Bush in 2000 and Trump in 2016 – the Democrats won the popular vote but the Republicans won the Electoral College, and with it the presidency.
<br><br>If the 2024 election turns out the way 2020 did – a Democrat wins the Electoral College by carrying states with Republican legislators and/or governors – and the Supreme Court endorses the “plenary power” of state legislatures, they could do what the Trump team unsuccessfully tried to get them to do in 2020: refuse to accept electors pledged to Biden or anyone else who might be the Democratic nominee, and seat electors pledged to Trump or whoever is running as the Republican candidate.
<br><br><b>A Worldwide Tidal Wave of Authoritarianism</b>
<br><br>And it’s not just the United States of America. In country after country throughout the nominally democratic world, autocrats are coming to power with many of the same principles, strategies and tactics as Trump. Strongmen like Vladimir Putin in Russia, Narendra Modi in India, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Andrzej Sebastian Duda in Poland, Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines have won power based on Trumpian hyper-nationalistic appeals to “make [their countries] great again.” The recipe includes attacks on immigrants, racial and religious minorities, and anyone perceived as a threat to “traditional family values.”
<br><br>And once these people take power, they have no intention of ever relinquishing it again. They systematically go after all other institutions in society that might put a brake on their power, including the courts, the media and ordinary citizens. They also use their power, as Republicans are doing throughout the U.S. states they control, to rewrite the elections laws to make it more difficult for people who would vote against them to be able to vote at all. And their bases of support are consistently among working-class people and others with less education – precisely the sorts of voters who in many of these countries (including the U.S) used to be bulwarks of the Left until they were swayed to the Right by appeals to traditional cultural values.
<br><br>The latest example of a former democracy which has turned to the dark side and become a neo-fascist country is Italy, where the original Fascist movement started exactly 100 years ago next month. In October 1922 Benito Mussolini staged his famous “March on Rome,” in which he organized 30,000 armed militiamen to advance on the nation’s capital and demand – and get – absolute power. Mussolini stayed in office for 23 years until his nation ended up on the wrong side of World War II and he was captured and hanged by anti-fascist Italian partisans in 1945.
<br><br>But Mussolini’s last chief of staff, Giorgio Almirante, was not idle. In 1946 he formed a new political party, the Italian Social Movement (MSI), with the stated goal of keeping Mussolini’s political legacy alive. Barred by the postwar Italian election law from calling his party fascist or using the ancient Roman symbol of authority, the Fasces (a bundle of twigs with axes embedded in them; the Romans had used this as a symbol of power and Mussolini not only copied it but derived the term “Fascism” from its name), Almirante devised a flame-like symbol based on the colors of the Italian flag – red, white and green – that the party, now called <i>Fratelli d’Italia</i> (“Brothers of Italy”) since it was reorganized in 2012, has used ever since.
<br><br>On Sunday, September 25, <i>Fratelli d’Italia</i> and its current leader, Giorgia Meloni, won 26 percent of the vote in Italy’s national elections. Together with two other Right-wing parties in their coalition, Meloni’s neo-fascist forces will control 42 percent of Italy’s next legislature and therefore, under Italy’s constitution, will run its government. Meloni expressed her views on cultural issues during her campaign in a speech to another far-Right party, Vox. In words that might have come from a Trump Republican in the U.S., she said, “Yes to the natural family, no to the LGBT lobby, yes to sexual identity, no to gender ideology ... no to Islamist violence, yes to secure borders, no to mass migration ... no to big international finance ... no to the bureaucrats of Brussels!"
<br><br>Donald Trump was probably overjoyed at the outcome of the Italian election. Not only did a candidate following his recipe for success win control of a major country, it probably held personal resonance for him. One of the members of Meloni's coalition was the party led by former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi. Though Berlusconi, an Italian media tycoon with no previous political experience, was driven out of office in disgrace after he was convicted of tax fraud and sex with underage girls, he is now returning to political influence as a junior member of Meloni’s governing coalition.
<br><br>That sends a powerful message to Donald Trump. As someone who has managed through gutter tactics, street smarts and total ruthlessness to survive and prosper from blows that would have destroyed lesser mortals, Trump no doubt envies Berlusconi’s comeback and sees it as a role model for himself. It sends Trump the message that even if, God forbid, he’s not only indicted but actually <i>convicted</i> of any of the crimes he’s currently being investigated for, he could still have a shot at a political comeback.
<br><br>And make no mistake about it: Trump’s re-election as President, especially if accompanied by a Republican Congress, will mean the end of America’s experiment in republican self-governance. It will lead to massive witchhunts against women, people of color and especially Queers. It will also hasten the extinction of the human race because it will mean an end to any meaningful attempt to stop or slow down the devastating, apocalyptic effects of human-caused climate change. Under a second Trump administration, the Department of Justice will become an instrument to reward Trump’s friends and especially to punish his enemies.
<br><br>Donald Trump already bestrides the world like the proverbial Colossus. Even though he’s no longer President, he still dominates the news cycle day after day, while Joe Biden struggles to get a word in edgewise. It seems to take a super-major news story, like the death of Queen Elizabeth II after 70 years of rule (the longest-serving monarch in British history) or the landfall of Hurricane Ian on the Florida coast, to knock him off the main news slot. Like it or not, we all live in Donald Trump’s America, and he just lets us live in it – or not.
mgconlanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09328563476025164608noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20445321.post-71181645336226349362022-08-18T17:57:00.003-07:002022-08-19T00:40:11.601-07:00FBI Search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Home May Help Him Politically
<br><b>by MARK GABRISH CONLAN</b>
<br><br>Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for <i>Zenger’s Newsmagazine</i> • All rights reserved
<br><br>It’s yet another indication into the topsy-turvy fun house American politics have become in the age of Donald Trump – and let’s face it, even if he no longer (at least for the moment) President we are still living, politically, in the Age of Trump – is that the FBI’s legal execution of a search warrant on Trump’s home and country club, Mar-a-Lago, in south Florida may actually boost his and the Republican Party’s chances of regaining power in the 2022 and 2024 elections.
<br><br>On August 8, 2022 – 48 years to the day after former President Richard Nixon resigned rather than face near-certain impeachment and removal from office due to his role in the Watergate cover-up – agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) searched the home of another former President, Donald Trump. Their search warrant authorized them to look for records, including classified documents, created during Trump’s four-year stint as President of the United States and taken by him and his staff to Mar-a-Lago after the new President, Joe Biden, moved in.
<br><br>Though the news of the Mar-a-Lago search was first broken by blogger Peter Schorsch on his site, Florida Politics, it was soono confirmed by Donald Trump himself. In a statement on his personal social-media outlet, Truth Social, Trump expertly framed the attack on him as a “raid” (a term I used myself in an earlier draft of his article) and accused the Biden administration and the Department of Justice of politicizing the administration of justice just to go after Trump personally.
<br><br>“These are dark times for our Nation, as my beautiful home, Mar-A-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, is currently under siege, raided, and occupied by a large group of FBI agents,” Trump said in his statement. “Nothing like this has ever happened to a President of the United States before. After working and cooperating with the relevant Government agencies, this unannounced raid on my home was not necessary or appropriate. It is prosecutorial misconduct, the weaponization of the Justice System, and an attack by Radical Left Democrats who desperately don’t want me to run for President in 2024.”
<br><br><b>Projection</b>
<br><br>Ironically, Trump’s self-pitying whine about being the victim of an overtly politicized Department of Justice out to destroy a political enemy is also what Trump complained during his Presidency that he was unable to do. In a November 2, 2017 interview with New York Right-wing talk-radio host Larry O’Connor (<a href="https://www.wmal.com/2017/11/03/listen-president-donald-trump-to-larry-oconnor-im-very-unhappy-the-justice-department-isnt-going-after-hillary-clinton/" target="_blank">https://www.wmal.com/2017/11/03/listen-president-donald-trump-to-larry-oconnor-im-very-unhappy-the-justice-department-isnt-going-after-hillary-clinton/</a>), Trump said, “[T]he saddest thing is, because I’m the President of the United States, I am not supposed to be involved with the Justice Department. I’m not supposed to be involved with the FBI. I’m not supposed to be doing the kinds of things I would love to be doing. And I am very frustrated by it. … [A]s a President, you are not supposed to be involved in that process. But hopefully they are doing something, and at some point maybe we’re going to all have it out.”
<br><br>One month before the 2020 election, on October 7, Politico reported that Trump had demanded pre-election indictments of Biden, former President Barack Obama, and Trump’s 2016 general election opponent, Hillary Clinton (<a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2020/10/07/trump-demands-barr-arrest-foes-427389" target="_blank">https://www.politico.com/news/2020/10/07/trump-demands-barr-arrest-foes-427389</a>). In his first 24 hours since being released from Walter Reed Hospital where he’d been treated for COVID-19, Trump issued several dozen increasingly unhinged tweets. One of them read, “Where are all of the arrests? Can you imagine if the roles were reversed? Long term sentences would have started two years ago. Shameful!”
<br><br>As the day wore on, Trump’s tweets became even more insane. In one he wrote in all capital letters, Trump said, “DO SOMETHING ABOUT THIS, THE BIGGEST OF ALL POLITICAL SCANDALS (IN HISTORY)!!! BIDEN, OBAMA AND CROOKED HILLARY LED THIS TREASONOUS PLOT!!! BIDEN SHOULDN’T BE ALLOWED TO RUN – GOT CAUGHT!!!” Later, he wrote, again in all caps, “NOW THAT THE RADICAL LEFT DEMOCRATS GOT COUGHT [sic] COLD IN THE (NON) FRIENDLY TRANSFER OF GOVERNMENT, IN FACT, THEY SPIED ON MY CAMPAIGN AND WENT FOR A COUP, WE ARE ENTITLED TO ASK THE VOTERS FOR FOUR MORE YEARS. PLEASE REMEMBER THIS WHEN YOU VOTE!”
<br><br>Though Trump’s distaste for Attorney General Bill Barr reached a boiling point after the election, when Barr gave a press conference announcing that he had investigated Trump’s claims of “massive voter fraud” in the election and found them all bogus, Trump had already started to lose trust in Barr when he refused to issue the politically charged indictments against Biden, Obama and Hillary Clinton before the election. The spectacular reaction Trump had to Barr’s press conference – according to former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony before the House Select Committee investigating the January 6, 2021 assault on the U.S. Capitol, he literally threw his lunch plate against the White House wall – just added to Trump’s determination to get rid of Barr and install a more complaisant acting Attorney General.
<br><br>Donald Trump is the sort of crook who believes the rest of the world is just as corrupt as he is – if not more so. That’s the explanation for his extraordinary act of projection: calling the Biden Justice Department unfair to him for doing exactly what he wanted to use his own Justice Department to go after Hillary Clinton over her use of a private e-mail server to conduct government business. Throughout his life, Trump has been able to avoid the consequences that would befall other humans – even other rich, privileged humans – who openly flouted law, custom and reason the way he does routinely. Over and over again, the world has told Donald Trump he doesn’t have to play by the rules everyone else does.
<br><br><b>Unsealing the Affidavit: Trump Wins Again!</b>
<br><br>And Trump got fresh confirmation of that message on Thursday,August 18, 10 days after the FBI search of his home, when Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart – the same judge who signed the search warrant in the first place – signaled his intent to grant Trump’s legal team’s motion to unseal the affidavits the government submitted to him to justify the search (<a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/judge-orders-portions-mar-lago-search-affidavit-unsealed-rcna43688" target="_blank">https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/judge-orders-portions-mar-lago-search-affidavit-unsealed-rcna43688</a>). Previously the Justice Department and Attorney General Merrick Garland had agreed not to oppose the release of the actual warrant and the list of items FBI agents removed from Mar-a-Lago. But both Trump’s lawyers and attorneys for the media – whom Trump has called “enemies of the people” – asked for the actual affidavits.
<br><br>The Department of Justice opposed the request. Attorney Jay Bratt, representing the department, told Judge Reinhart that the “very detailed and lengthy" document needed to be kept secret because it contains “substantial grand jury” information in a "unique" case with "national security overtones." He also said the government is "very concerned about the safety of the witnesses” in the case whose identities could become compromised if the affidavit is unsealed. Bratt noted that Trump supporters have denounced the FBI and called for defunding it, and last week a Trump supporter and January 6, 2021 participant armed with an assault rifle and a nail gun attacked a Cincinnati FBI building. Bratt called the case “a volatile situation with respect to this particular search, across the political spectrum, but certainly on one side in particular."
<br><br>But Judge Reinhart said in open court, "I find that on the present record the Government has not met its burden of showing that the entire affidavit should remain sealed. … On my initial careful review ... there are portions of it that can be unsealed.” The judge said he would "give the government a full and fair opportunity” to make cuts – so-called “redactions” – to the document, and ordered them to turn in the cut version next week, along with a legal memo justifying the proposed redactions. He said he would then review the document and either order its release if he agrees with the redactions or hold a closed-door hearing with the government if he disagrees. The judge added that if they can't agree, "obviously I'd win."
<br><br>Once again, Donald Trump has been told he doesn’t have to play by the same rules as everyone else. His all too typical self-pitying whine in his initial confirmation of the search, in which he complained that the FBI “even broke into my safe!” as if that were something unusual instead of the normal treatment law-enforcement officials mete out to suspected criminals, is just one more indication of the sense of entitlement Trump has carried with him throughout his life – along with an equal sense of victimization that the world has been totally unfair to him.
<br><br>When MS-NBC announced Judge Reinhart’s decision on air, the shock among their various panelists – including a defense attorney who’s represented people accused of leaking classified information and a former government prosecutor – that the judge was even considering allowing the release of the affidavits was palpable. The defense attorney said he would love to have that information about the government’s case against one of his clients – and that’s why he’s never received it in any of his cases. But once again, there are the rules everyone else has to abide by – and the special rules for Donald Trump that absolve him of any obligation to law, society or common decency.
<br><br><b>Republicans Rally Behind Trump</b>
<br><br>When MS-NBC’s hosts announced the initial news of the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago August 8, they expressed the forlorn hope that this, at last, might be the event that would break Trump’s seemingly impregnable hold on the Republican Party and its leaders. It didn’t take long for that hope to be disappointed once again. Instead, Republican leaders in Congress and elsewhere raced each other at near-warp speed to plant their tongues firmly up Trump’s bunghole. “I’ve seen enough,” House of Representatives minority leader Kevin McCarthy tweeted just hours after Trump confirmed the search. McCarthy said that after the search of Trump’s home, “the Department of Justice has reached an intolerable state of weaponized politicization.” Threatening to investigate the Justice Department if Republicans retake the House in the 2022 midterm elections, McCarthy warned Attorney General Garland to “preserve your documents and clear your calendar.”
<br><br>Rep. Jim Banks (R-Indiana) said, “Hunter Biden skates free while DOJ executes a political plot to destroy lives of political opponents.” Even more explicitly than McCarthy did, Banks threatened a retributory investigation if the Republicans regain a House majority in the midterms. “This is un-American and [a] Jim_Jordan led Judiciary Committee hearings in January can’t come soon enough!,” Banks said.
Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) tweeted that he wanted to scrutinize the “viability” of federal law enforcement going forward.
<br><br>Congressmember Bob Good (R-VA) wrote on Twitter: “The continued weaponization of the federal government against its citizens and political opponents continues under the Biden/Garland march toward a police state.”
<br><br>Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colorado) said, “If you’re a Republican with any kind of voice, and you’re not speaking up for President Trump tonight, don’t expect any of us to speak up for you when your time comes.”
<br><br>Rep. Peter Meijer (R-Michigan) said, “Last night’s execution of an FBI search warrant at Mar-a-Lago raises grave questions of propriety and politicization.” Meijer’s turnaround is particularly interesting because he was one of 10 Republican Coingressmembers who voted to impeach Trump over the January 6, 2021 Capitol riot, and he’s already lost his re-election bid when GOP voters in his district nominated a Trump-backed challenger in a primary.
<br><br>U.S. Senator Marco Rubio (R-Florida) blamed President Biden personally. His tweet read, “Biden is playing with fire by using a document dispute to get the @TheJusticeDept to persecute a likely future election opponent Because one day what goes around is going to come around And then we become Nicaragua under Ortega.”
<br><br>Matt Rinaldi, chair of the Texas Republican Party, said on Twitter, “Abolish the FBI.” A tweet from the Texas GOP compared the U.S. to a banana republic: “Biden has crossed the Rubicon. If there was any doubt remaining, we are now living in a post-Constitutional America where the Justice Department has been weaponized against political threats to the regime, as it would in a banana republic. It won’t stop with Trump. You are next.”
<br><br><b>Biden the Biggest Political Loser</b>
<br><br>Already President Joe Biden has become the biggest political loser from the FBI’s search of Trump’s home. August was supposed to be the month where Biden could boast that he and his often fractious Democratic Party had actually delivered for the American people big-time. Biden and U.S. Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer had finally cut a deal with DINO (Democrats-in-name-only) Senators Joe Manchin of West Virginla and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona to pass the newly rebranded “Inflation Reduction Act,” a massive investment in combating climate change, improving Americans’ access to health care and ensuring that corporations and individuals making over $1 billion a year pay their faie share in taxes.
<br><br>The Inflation Reduction Act was the capstone of a month of good Congressional news for Biden and the Democrats. They also passed the CHIPS Act to stimulate American production and manufacture of semiconductor chips, and a bill to give veterans access to health care for illnesses suffered from exposure to toxic “burn pits” and other chemicals in and around military bases. The “burn pits” bill passed despite a last-minute Republican attempt to block it out of spite that Democrats had reached a deal to pass the Inflation Reduction Act.
<br><br>And earlier in the summer Congress had come together to pass a reasonable gun-safety bill. Yes, it was decades too late and too watered-down to do much of anything to stop the gun violence and mass-shooting deaths that have become all too routine in the U.S. But any crack in the armor the National Rifle Association and fellow members of the “Gun Lobby” had put up against any sensible legislation to make it even infinitesimally harder for Americans to kill each other with guns is good.
<br><br>With the Democrats holding razor-thin majorities in both houses of Congress and the usual rule that the party holding the White House almost always loses in the midterms. And with Biden’s poll numbers sinking below Trump’s at this point in his term – according to current polls, only 40 percent approve of Biden’s performance and 55 percent disapprove – Democrats were hoping for a big boost from these four big legislative achievements to persuade American voters to keep them in control of both houses of Congress and re-elect Biden in 2024.
<br><br>Instead, they watched helplessly as Donald Trump sucked all the political oxygen out from under them. The cable news channels during the last week and a half – even on MS-NBC,the supposedly “liberal” cable channel – have been all about Trump, all the time. On August 15, virtually all MS-NBC’s coverage was about Trump and the Mar-a-Lago search; the only mention of the Inflation Reduction Act came in a paid commercial put on by the Democratic National Committee.
<br><br>An August 11 post on the Right-wing Townhall Daily Web site (<a href="https://townhall.com/tipsheet/saraharnold/2022/08/11/poll-americans-are-more-motivated-to-vote-in-midterms-after-fbi-raid-on-trump-n2611610" target="_blank">https://townhall.com/tipsheet/saraharnold/2022/08/11/poll-americans-are-more-motivated-to-vote-in-midterms-after-fbi-raid-on-trump-n2611610</a>) cites two polls, one from Politico and Morning Consult and the other from Trafalgar in association with the Convention of States Action, to suggest that the search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate is gonig to motivate voters in the midterms. While at least one of these polls should be read with a grain of salt – the Convention of States Action is a radical-Right group seeking to force the U.S. to hold a new Constitutional convention and write their agenda into our founding document permanently – the message for Democrats is that the Mar-a-Lago search has reinforced the perception of many Republicans and Right-leaning independents that Trump is the victim of ongoing persecution by a sinister “deep state.”
<br><br><b>The Midpoint</b>
<br><br>The news of the Mar-a-Lago search came at the midpoint of a summer largely devoted to speculation about whether Biden’s Attorney General, Merrick Garland, would dare to prosecute Trump. Garland’s clear reticence at taking on the former President over his allegedly illegal activities and conduct since he was voted out of office on November 3, 2020, including his increasingly desperate efforts to reverse the outcome and cling to power despite having lost both the popular and the electoral vote.
<br><br>During June and July 2022, the nine-member House Select Committee on January 6, 2021 held eight nationally televised public hearings on the riot that took place at the U.S. Capitol on that date and led to a successful delay in the certification of Biden’s victory over Trump. Watching the House Select Committee hearings has been a weird nostalgia trip forme because I can remember the similar hearings nearly 50 years ago before what was officially called the “Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities” but became universally known as the Senate Watergate Committee.
<br><br>At the time the Senate Watergate Committee hearings started in May 1973, I was 19 years old and was in the process of moving out of my mother’s place into my father’s, mainly because she was dating a man I couldn’t stand, and I remember watching the hearings in my dad’s guest house while sampling some of the Spanish wines he had there. This time I’m 68 years old and once again I’m not working, this time not because I hadn’t had a job yet but because a health crisis brought on by heart disease forced me to retire at 68, at least two years before I wanted to.
<br><br>It’s been 44 years since I’ve consumed alcohol, and both the country and I are considerably more jaded now. I’ve lived through both Republican and Democratic Presidencies and watched as the country’s governance slowly sank from the level of Richard Nixon – who for all his flaws was genuinely interested in making the country a better place, including signing major legislation to protect the environment and proposing a guaranteed annual income and national health insurance – to Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush to Donald Trump.
<br><br>In 1973 the United States was a considerably more innocent place – “innocent” in the sense of “naïve.” Back then it was still shocking to think that a President could lie with impunity (even though it had been during the rule of Nixon’s immediate predecessor, Lyndon Johnson, that the phrase “credibility gap” took hold as a euphemism for “the President ls lying”) and could green-light a campaign to rig the 1972 election to ensure his continued rule. Today just about any amount of duplicity coming from the Oval Office is considered just business as usual, par for the course.
<br><br>The Republican Party in particular has become an authoritarian cult. They’re aware that their policies don’t have the support of a majority of Americans – in the last eight Presidential elections, Republicans have won the popular vote exactly once (in 2004) – but they’re also aware that they don’t have to. Former U.S. Senator Rick Santorum (R-Pennsylvania) said the quiet part out loud at the recent Coinservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) during a discussion about whether the Republican Party should invoke Article V of the Constitution and hold a new Constitutional Convention – which only takes the voters of 34 state legislatures, 19 of which have already passed resolutions calling for just such a convention.
According to a leaked recording of Santorum’s speech published by Business Inisider (https://www.businessinsider.com/constitutional-convention-conservatives-republicans-constitution-supreme-court-2022-7), the Right would have a huge political advantage at such a convention because the votes would be by states, not by population. As America has become more urbanized, the compromises in the original Constitution and the rules of governance that have evolved have become more and more anti-democratic.
<br><br>Santorum said at CPAC that because the state-by-state rule gives small states more power than large ones, "we have the opportunity … to have a supermajority, even though … we may not even be in an absolute majority when it comes to the people who we agree with." The ultra-Right faction that dominates today’s Republican Party regards democracy as a troublesome impediment to fulfilling their political agenda – as they proved when CPAC invited Viktor Orban, dictatorial prime minister of Hungary, to speak at their convention and offer them a road map for destroying democracy.
<br><br>The current authoritarian streak of the Republican Party long predates Donald Trump. Indeed, Karl Rove, principal strategic advisor to the last Republican President before Trump, George W. Bush, said his goal was to achieve “full-spectrum dominance” so the Republican Party would be the only one that mattered. But one of the things Trump did that endeared him to the Republican base was to express openly the contempt for democracy they had nursed privately for decades. During the 2016 Presidential campaign Trump openly urged supporters to beat up people in the audience who dared to heckle him, and pledged to fund their legal defense if they were arrested for doing so.
<br><br>Once he became President, he started his administration with a flurry of executive orders, all encased in snazzy brown folders and signed with a flourish of his Sharpie, in what Trump advisor Steve Bannon (pardoned by Trump after he ran a scam that fleeced money from Trump supporters, ostensibly to build the border wall with Mexico but really to line Bannon’s pockets) called the “new sheriff in town” strategy. When then-FBI director James Comey – whose handling of Hillary Clinton’s e-mail scandal had done much to get Trump elected – refused Trump’s demand for a pledge of “loyalty” to Trump personally, reminiscent of the “Führer oath” Adolf Hitler similarly demanded of his people, Trump fired him. The next day, in the Oval Office, he boasted to Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, that by canning Comey he had put an end to the Justice Department’s investigation of whether Trump had received illegal help from Russia to get elected.
<br><br>Throughout the Trump administration, he was forever demanding similar pledges of “loyalty” – not to the Constitution or the rule of law, but to Trump personally. He also revived the practice Hitler and the Nazis called Gleichschaltung, meaning appointing people to run key agencies who didn’t believe in what those agencies were supposed to do. (For more information, please visit my July 2020 post on Trhum’s Cleichschaltung, see https://zengersmag.blogspot.com/2020/07/trumps-gleichschaltung-kills-people.html.)
<br><br>In a special report aired on Friday, July 29 – 11 days before the searh at Mar-a-Lago – MS-NBC legal correspondent Ari Melber laid out in detail Trump’s eight-part plan to reverse the outcome of the 2020 election and remain in power despite having lost the popular and the electoral votes. Some were legal, like filing lawsuits in court – even though Trump lost all but one of the lawsuits, and many of the judges threw them out of court because there were lots of conjectures in the pleadings but no real facts or evidence, Some were dubiously legal, like naming alternative slates of “Trump electors” in states Biden won – which would have been O.K. if they were presented as electors who would have voted if the court challenges reversed the outcome.
<br><br>Other parts of the Trump schemes were frankly illegal. He wanted to get either the Department of Defense or the Department of Homeland Security to seize voting machines, ostensibly to study the software that ran them for evidence of electronic “fraud” that had allegedly taken votes away from Trump and given them to Biden. His supporters organized the fake “electors” to cast votes for President and Vice-President in the state capitols, just like the real Biden electors were doing. He sent his roving attorney Rudolph Giuliani, and others to speak before state legislators to get them to reverse the election results and award their votes to Trump, not Biden.
<br><br>And Trump’s campaign went farther than that. He and his legal consultant, John Eastman, tried to persuade Vice-President Mike Pence that he had the constitutional authority to refuse to allow certain states’ electors to be counted. Pence consulted with various authorities, including former federal judge Muchael Luttig and Dan Quayle, George H. W. Bush’s vice-president and the last Republican who had had to certify a Democrat’s win in a Presidential election to succeed him, who told him the Constitution had no such power.
<br><br>When all else failed – when Trump was unable to get the military, the Justice Department, state legislators, Congress or Mike Pence to steal the election for him – Trump sent out the now-infamous tweet on December 19, 2020 urging his supporters to come to the Ellipse on Washington, D.C for a rally, which he promised “will be Wild!” When he got to the Ellipse he found that many of his supporters were being turned away because they were carrying guns, including assault rifles. Trump found out about this and issued an order to the Secret Service to “take the fucking mags away” – “mags” being short for “magnetometers,” the metai detectors used to search people for weapons.
<br><br>It’s standard practice for the Secret Service to not let people with guns in the vicinity of the President. That’s what their “protection details” are supposed to be about. But Trump would have none of it. He told the skeptical people in charge of his Secret Service detail to let people with guns into his event because “they’re not there to hurt me.” At the Ellipse speech he issued a seemingly spontaneous but really carefully planned call for a march on the Capitol, and added, “I’ll be there with you. We’re going to walk down to the Capitol, because you’ll never take back our country with weakness.”
<br><br>Trump didn’t make it to the Capitol that day, and until the January 6 committee hearings I had assumed that he never planned to: that this was just another bit of Trump bravado, making himself seem more courageous than he really is. When the hearings took place, we heard that Trump very much wanted to go to the Capitol that day. He even, according to Cassidy Hutchinson (who admitted she did not personally witness this but had heard about it from someone who’d been there), tried to wrestle the steering wheel of his car away from the Secret Service agent who refused to drive him to the Capitol on the grounds that he wouldn’t be safe there.
<br><br>The moment I heard Cassidy Hutchinson tell that story, my immediate thought was, “March on Rome.” The March on Rome occurred on October 29, 1922 and was Benito Mussolini’s successful coup d’état to end Italy’s government as a British-style constitutional monarchy and establish himself as dictator. It really does seem as if Trump relished the spectacle of himself at the head of an armed mob, holding guns at the heads of Senators and Representatives and demanding to be made dictator of the U.S. And while Mussolini’s coup was bloodless, if Trump had had to get Congress to declare him President for life over the dead bodies of Mike Pence and Nancy Pelosi, he wouldn’t have minded at all. When Trump heard the mob he had summoned to Washington, D.C. was chanting “Hang Mike Pence!,” he told at least one advisor in the White House dining room that because Pence had refused to go along with Trump’s scheme to overturn the 2020 election result, maybe he should be hanged.
<br><br>On his special report, Ari Melber quoted historian and blogger Doug Porter as saying, “If Trump’s coup attempt goes unpunished, it will become a training exercise.” We have already seen inthe hysterical overreaction on the part of the American Right to a legal and routine search of Donald Trump’s home looking for documents he wasn’t supposed to have – including classified documents whose disclosure could threaten the national security – just how deep the authoritarian streak in this country is.
<br><br>And we have seen the bizarre loyalty to Trump many otherwise thoughtful Americans have adopted – including the 11 relatives of retiring Congressmember Adam Kinzinger (R-Illinois) who wrote him in the name of their shared “Christian values” that his opposition to Trump was literally opposition to God – and the death threats officials ranging fron FBI agents and judges to election workers have faced simply for doing their jobs and saying no to the Trump juggernaut. The United States has been a republic for quite a long time – almost 250 years – but it will take a lot of struggle both within and outside the electoral system for us to remain one.
mgconlanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09328563476025164608noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20445321.post-74787978506147229892022-07-20T15:35:00.009-07:002022-07-21T09:25:33.538-07:00What Ted Cruz Actually Said to Liz Wheeler on Same-Sex Marriage July 16<br><i>On Saturday, July 16 – ironically, the same day as San Diego's 2022 Pride Parade – Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas_ gave an interview to podcast host Liz Wheeler which was reported on Queerty.com, <a href="https://www.queerty.com/ted-cruz-says-supreme-court-clearly-wrong-sex-marriage-ruling-20220718" target="_blank">https://www.queerty.com/ted-cruz-says-supreme-court-clearly-wrong-sex-marriage-ruling-20220718</a>. as Cruz saying the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark decision on <b>Obergefell</b> v. <b>Hodges</b>, in which the Court found a constitutionally protected right to same-sex marriage, was wrong and should be overturned.
<br><br>The post was accompanied by a 17-second clip from the full interview, and some commentators pointed out that Cruz's statements had been considerably more nuanced. In the full clip – or at least the six-minute excerpt posted by the Queerty commentator – Cruz tied hmiself into verbal knots trying at once to reassure his political base that he thinks <b>Obergefell</b> was wrong from the get-go while also trying to assure Queer people and their allies that the Court probably won't overturn it any time soon. It's somehow dawned even on Cruz's notoriously think skull that telling hondreds of thousands of Americans involved in same-sex marriages (including yours truly) that their marriages are no longer valid could lead to social chaos. Cruz also said that same-sex marriage is a less "divisive" issue than abortion and therefore the Court may just decide to leave it alone.
<br><br>I'm not at all convinced by Cruz's reasoning. In his concurringi opinion in <b>Dobbs</b> v. <b>Jackson Women's Health Center</b>, the Court opinion overruling <b>Roe</b> v. <b>Wade</b>, Justice Clarence Thomas said that if the Court no longer reads the Constitution as guaranteeing an individual's right to personal privacy, there are a number of other cases the Court should look at and reverse, including <b>Griswold</b> v. <b>Connecticut</b>, which allowed married straight couples to use birth control; <b>Lawrence</b> v. <b>Texas</b>, which established a right for pconseltuing adults of the sane gemder to have sex; and <b>Obergefell</b>. Thomas's concurrence has raised the spectre of a future in which government establishes itself as the ultimate arbiter of what people can do in their bedrooms and how they can deal with the consequences – desirable and not – therefrom.
<br><br>Cruz's attempt to reassure us that the current radical-Right revolutionary majority in the U.S. Supreme Court (which by no means should be called "conservative") likely as not won't rule that states have the option to make same-sex marriage legal or illegal, as they see fit, is especially not reassuring in light of the statement Thomas and fellow Justice Samuel Alito made in October 2020 that thel felt Obergefell violated the Costitutional right to "free exercise" of the religious beliefs of people who belong to religions opposed to same-sex marriage. (This itself begs the question of how and why members of churches who <i>believe</i> in marriage equality should have fewer rights than members of churches that don't.) It's clear that a broad array of individual rights and freedoms are on the current Supreme Court's chopping block.
<br><br>– Mark Gabrish Conlan, July 20, 2022</i>
<br><br>The show’s host, Liz Wheeler, asked Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas), “If you were an advocate and <i>Obergefell</i> was before the Supreme Court again, what would be the argument against this case or the argument for overturning it?”
<br><br>Cruz replied, “So look, <i>O)bergefell</i>, like <i>Roe</i> v. <i>Wade</i>, ignored two centuries of our nation’s history. Marriage was always an issue that was left to the states. We saw states before Obergefell that were moving to allow Gay marriages, moving to allow civil partnerships. There were different standards that were evolving. And had the Court not ruled on <i>Obergefell,</i> the democratic process would have continued to operate,
<br><br>“So if you think that [same-sex] marriage was a good idea, what you have to do to advance that position is to engage your fellow citizens. If you succeeded in convincing your fellow citizens, your state would change its laws to reflect those views. In <i>Obergefell</i>, the Court said we know better than you guys do, and so as of now every state must sanction and perform – and permit – Gay marriage.
<br><br>“I think that decision was clearly wrong when it was decided. It was the Court overreaching. Whether or not the Court will reverse it, I will say, so in <i>Dobbs</i> what the Supreme Court said was Roe is different because it’s the only one of the cases that involves the taking of a human life, and that’s qualitatively different. I agree with that proposition. That is fundamentally different.
<br><br>“I will say on Obergefell that it is also, when a Court is considering overturning a precedent, one of the factors that the Court looks into is reliance interest. Have people relied on the previous precedent, and have they acted accordingly? And in the context of marriage, look, you’ve got a ton of people who have entered into Gay marriages and it would be more than a little chaotic for the court to do something that somehow disrupted those marriages that have been entered into in accordance with the law.
<br><br>“I think that would be a factor that would, would counsel restraint, that the court would be concerned about. But to be honest, I don't think this Court has any appetite for overturning any of these decisions. I think Justice Thomas was being a purist in terms of what the Constitution means, but I don’t think there are other Justices interested in going down that road.”
<br><br>Wheeler said, “No, it doesn’t seem like that, just given the sheer number of times Alito reiterated in his majority opinion that this did not have any bearing on Griswold, Lawrence or Obergefell. So let me ask you: I think that your take is correct. It’s pretty clear that <i>Obergefell</i> is an invented ‘right’ – I say that in quotes, because it is invented by the Court – but how does a Court determine when an issue that could be left to the states, because we embrace this idea of democracy, the states can be a laboratory for democracy, and if they vote one way and you don’t like it, you can move to another state that’s voted another way?
<br><br>“How do they determine when an issue is so enormous that it needs to be decided at a federal level, and Gay marriage might actually be one of those? Some folks argue that, well, if you got married in California but you weren’t married in Texas because California recognized a Gay marriage but Texas didn’t, there has to be some clarity at the federal level here. What is, or what should be, the standards for determining whether an issue should be left to the states, or whether it requires a national policy?”
<br><br>Cruz replied, “Well, the standard should be where the Constitution puts the authority. And with respect to marriage, the Constitution gave the authority to the states. And then that’s – that’s what I think the Court should have done. I think <i>Obergefell</i> was wrongly decided.
<br><br>“At the same time, the standard for overturning a decision – and this is something the court in <i>Dobbs</i> talks about at great length – involves a number of factors, One, if it was egregiously wrong from the start. But two, whether the precedent has proven unworkable; whether it has essentially created more problems. And what the <i>Dobbs</i> majority said is that <i>Roe</i> continued to be unworkable and had enormous problems.
<br><br>“I have not seen anyone marshal arguments that <i>Obergefell</i> has had the same sort of unworkability problems that <i>Roe</i> did. And you haven’t seen the massive ongoing resistance to <i>Obergefell</i> that you saw to <i>Roe.</i> I mean, in <i>Roe – Roe</i> spawned the pro-life movement. It spawned 50 years of deep political division because the people lacked the ability to defend life through the political process.
<br><br>“Gay marriage – there had been a vibrant political movement to protect marriage, to defend traditional marriage as the union of one man and one woman. That was on the ballot many places in the country. It was on the ballot in California, Proposition 8, where a majority of the citizens in California – bright blue, Left-leaning California – voted against Gay marriage when Gay marriage was on the ballot, when they were given the chance to vote on it.
<br><br>“That being said, since Obergefell, there is not a massive political movement seeking to unwind it, in the way there was with <i>Roe</i>; That it hasn’t produced anywhere near the same level of division, which may be one of the reasons why the majority opinion in <i>Dobbs</i> didn’t show any interest in even – “ <i>[Post runs out at this point.]</i>mgconlanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09328563476025164608noreply@blogger.com