It’s Not “Boeing’s Fatal Flaw” – It’s Capitalism’s

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

On September 14, 2021, after the British racial documentary 400 Years: Taking the Knee, KPBS showed an episode of the long-running documentary series Frontline called “Boeing’s Fatal Flaw,” written and directed by Thomas Jennings and featuring several New Yorkn Times journalists who worked on stories exposing the Boeing 737 Max airliner’s design and equipment flaws that led to two dire plane crashes that killed almost 350 people between them in 2018 and 2019. The first took place in October 2018 in Jakarta, Indonesia and involved a plane, fully loaded with passengers, that suddenly started diving to earth shortly after takeoff. According to the so-called “black box” flight recorder (something of a misnomer because we got to see footage of it and it was not black, but red), the plane had suddenly started diving and the pilots had tried to pull it back up, but the plane’s controls refused to let them. Indonesian aircraft analyst Gerry Soejatman told Frontline, “The plane went up to about 2,000 feet, just over a minute after takeoff, and the plane had a bit of a dive. And then the plane climbed to about 5,000 feet. But then, at 5,000 feet, the plane was fluctuating up and down. And then the plane just started diving. It just didn’t make sense. You don't see planes diving on departure. I was baffled. Why did it go down?”

In March 2019 a Boeing 737 Max being flown out of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia on a routine flight to Nairobi, Kenya did the same thing: as its pilots were trying to get it airborne the plane suddenly started diving to earth and nothing the flight crew tried to do could stop it. Joe Jacobsen, aviation safety engineer with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) – the agency that is supposed to regulate the aircraft industry and ensure that planes are safe – said that when he looked at the black box recordings from that crash, “It didn't take long — just a couple of minutes — to see that there was rapid movement of the horizontal stabilizer. … [T]he fastest way to kill yourself in an airplane is to have the stabilizer malfunction.” If you know what a plane looks lille, you’ll be aware that in addition to the big wings midway down the fuselage (the main body of the aircraft), which has flaps (called “ailerons”) that control the plane’s direction and allow it to turn, there’s a big tail at the back end and two little wings under it. Those are the horizontal stabilizers, and their purpose is to control the plane’s vertical motion and make it go up, go down or stay horizontal as the flight plan specifies and the pilots direct. If it doesn’t do that – especially if it goes down while the pilots are trying to get the plane to go up – the result is often a catastrophic crash.

New York Times reporter James Glanz saw the reports on the black-box data from both 737 crashes and decided there was a story in it. “The plane continually tried to push the nose down, and the pilots were trying over and over again to stop the plane. And in the end, they lose that battle,” he told Frontline. Boeing officials blamed the crashes on pilot error and they sent an advisory to the airlines that were using the 737 Max and the pilots that were actually flying it, but their advisory was incomplete and didn’t let the pilots know what they were up against. What they were up against was a new piece of computer software called Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, or MACS for short. MACS had originally been designed for use in military fighter planes that cruise at high altitudes and frequently are flown in high-risk maneuvers to fight off or elude enemy planes. Its purpose was to take over the controls automatically if the plane stalled in mid-air and threatened to fall out of the sky and crash. The New York Times reporters on the 737 story – James Glanz, Natalie Kitroeff, David Gelles and Jack Nicas – identified MACS as the problem with the 737 and the likely cause of both crashes after examining the radar records of both flights that had crashed, and finding them eerily similar. They learned that after an early test flight of the 737 Max had been unusually bumpy and the pilots complained that the plane hadn’t handled smoothly, Boeing management decided to extend the MACS system so it would work not only in high-altitude flight but at low altitudes, including take-offs and landings. Doug Pasternak, a staff member for a Congressional investigation into the 737 Max crashes, found a tell-tale document of a pilot who had “flown” in a test simulator of the 737 Max’s controls in November 2012 and had had the same problem the real-life pilots did six and seven years later: he lost control and, had he been flying for real, the plane would likely have crashed and killed everyone aboard.

But instead of either modifying MACS or eliminating it altogether, Boeing management decided on a “don’t ask, don’t tell” strategy: they simply omitted any reference to MACS from the manual given to 737 Max pilots. The reason was that Boeing was in a fierce competition with the European company Airbus, the world’s only other major supplier of large aircraft to airlines, and they wanted the 737 Max out not only as soon as possible but as cheaply as possible. At least one customer, Southwest Airlines – which had ordered 200 737 Max’s – demanded a rebate from Boeing if their pilots had to be retrained to handle the new aircraft. So Boeing simply didn’t tell anyone – the airlines, the pilots, or the government agency supposedly regulating them – that there were fundamental differences between the way the 737 Max handled in the air and the way previous Boeing 737’s had. What made it even worse was that on the 737 Max, the MACS was set to trigger in case there was an anomalous reading from one of the so-called “Angle of Attack” (AOA) sensors on either side of the back end of the plane. AOA readings from a single sensor are notoriously inaccurate; that’s why planes have two of them. Boeing eventually modified the MACS so it wouldn’t turn on unless both AOA sensors were reading deviations from the correct flight path, but it was too late for the victims of the Indonesian and Ethiopian crashes.

The FAA missed the possibility of a MACS failure with catastrophic consequences because for decades it and other government agencies supposedly in business to regulate private industry no longer do so. Instead they do something called “delegation,” which basically means outsourcing the task of regulating giant corporations to … the corporations themselves. Michael Huerta, former FAA executive, defended this process to Frontline. “There are those that believe it is the fox guarding the henhouse. Here is why it’s not,” he said in a masterpiece of Orwellian doublethink. “The company has an organization whose responsibility is to ensure that it is in compliance with the standards that are set by the FAA, and it has a level of independence from the entities that they’re overseeing.” Various countries – first China, then several other countries, then finally the United States – grounded the Boeing 737 Max in the wake of the Indonesian and Ethiopian crashes. Boeing CEO Dennis Mullenburg lost his job and was replaced by another clueless middle-aged white guy, David Calhoun. Boeing eventually modified MACS so it would only be triggered if both AOA sensors reported anomalies, and it also offered pilots more instruction on how to handle the situation if the MACS sensors kicked in and sent the plane downwards regardless of what the pilots wanted it to do. They were told to handle it as if the plane’s stabilizers had malfunctioned normally and grab a little wheel in the cockpit to turn the stabilizers manually. If you can imagine driving your car when the power steering suddenly goes out and you have to steer the car manually, imagine trying to do that in a huge airplane in which the part you suddenly have to move by your own muscle power is a huge piece of metal weighing several hundred pounds.

When the Boeing 737 Max crashes first occurred, I thought they were an object lesson in how we’ve become too dependent on computers and how we’ve incorporated them into our lives whether they really help make things more convenient or not, especially in systems like the 737 Max’s MACS where we’ve given the human controllers little or no way to fight back when the computer reacts to faulty data and makes a mistake. This Frontline presentation shows that the 737 Max crisis had a lot to do with the fundamental evil of capitalism and the futility of any attempt to regulate it. From the initial development of the 737 Max to the deliberate concealment of the MACS system from the pilots expected to fly the plane, “Boeing’s Fatal Flaw” is an indictment of capitalism itself and also the decisions by government regulators to cozy up to industry and basically let giant businesses like Boeing regulate themselves – which (sorry, Michael Huerta) is putting the fox in charge of the henhouse. Maybe I was a bit more sensitive to it after having watched 400 Years: Taking the Knee, but there seemed to me to be more than a bit of racism in Boeing’s attitude, blaming the crashes on pilots of color (Pacific Islanders in the Indonesian crash and Blacks in the Ethiopian one) and suggesting that fine, upstanding white American boys could have avoided the crashes and kept the planes safely under control. Frontline’s reporters directly asked Boeing CEO David Calhoun that very question, and he said, “We made a decision in December [2019] to recommend simulator training everywhere in the world because of the regulators and the pilots in the developing world. Not because the U.S. airlines needed it. They probably don’t.” When they pressed him on whether he thought American pilots could have bypassed the MACS and avoided the fatal crashes, Calhoun demanded that his answer not be filmed or recorded – and when Frontline refused to go along, Calhoun cut short the interview. (An American pilot interviewed on the program reviewed the radar data from the Ethiopian crash and told Frontline the Ethiopian pilots did everything he would have done in the same situation.) Today the Boeing 737 Max is once again in the air, flying passengers all around the world. Maybe additional pilot training and the minor modifications Boeing made to the MACS are enough to keep the plane’s passengers safe and give the pilots the tools they need to avoid another catastrophe like the ones in Indonesia and Ethiopia. Maybe they aren’t.

Dr. Huxtable and Mr. Hyde

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

The news that broke June 30 that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court had decided to set Bill Cosby free and reverse his conviction of drugging and raping Andrea Constand, an athetic director at Cosby’s alma mater, Temple University, in 2003 was shocking. A bare 4-3 majority of the Court’s seven justices seemed to deal a body blow to the whole idea that rich, powerful and/or famous men can ever be held accountable for their shabby (to say the least) treatment of women.

It wasn’t like there was really much room for doubt about Cosby’s guilt. This wasn’t a case like R. Kelly’s, in which a cable TV network put him on trial and found him guilty before the legal system has even had a chance to indict him, much less try him. It wasn’t like Michael Jackson’s case, in which he was actually acquitted in court – through the mechanism we have as a society to settle these things – only to have two people who testified for him come out of the rocks they were hiding under and claim they lied under oath to protect him … after he was dead and, conveniently, after the statute of limitations for perjury had expired so they couldn’t be punished for lying under oath.

It’s not like the case of Woody Allen, who’s been accused of unspeakable crimes by a vengeful ex-partner and the children of whom she’s the legal guardian and who was there when the kids were interrogated. Maybe he did exactly what his accusers said he did, but I take it with a grain of salt given that the accusers’ adoptive mother was there while they were being interrogated (as is required by law when the police question a minor) and the kids knew exactly what she wanted them to say.

When Bill Cosby was first charged – in the nick of time because the 12-year statute of limitations was about to expire in Constand’s case and had already run out for all his other victims – the Los Angeles Times and other publications quoted him as speaking in his own defense. The moment I read the bizarre tale he told – that he had got Constand’s consent to engage her in a weird sort of necking in which he claimed he brought her to orgasm without climaxing himself – the story was so preposterous and so outrageous I read it and thought, “He’s guilty as hell.”

It’s not that we hadn’t had clues before that. One magazine published a cover photo of Cosby on one side and the 60 women who had accused him of drugging and raping them on the other. The headline read, “He said … they said.” Women’s advocates often complain that police and other legal authorities don’t take complaints against rapists seriously if there’s only one complaining victim. That’s a bad thing, but the good thing (assuming you can call anything to do with sexual assault “a good thing”) is that this isn’t a crime most people who do it commit just once. Almost always there are other victims, and it should be the job of law enforcement to find them and bring justice to everyone the perpetrator attacked and abused.

I do remember thinking it seemed all too typical of American racism that the first celebrity charged and actually put on trial for sexual crimes in the #MeToo era was an African-American. Though I was convinced Cosby was guilty, it also smacked of the racist stereotype that all Black men have uncontrollable sex drives and will literally put their dicks into anyone or anything just to get off. Ironically Cosby himself had dropped a big hint of what he was up to all those years in a late-1960’s comedy album called It’s True! It’s True! which featured a routine called “Spanish Fly.” I had to ask my mother what that was. She said it was a (hopefully) mythical aphrodisiac men could slip to women and give them so uncontrollable an urge for sex that they would sit on a car’s gearshift lever and insert it into themselves just to have something up there.

On the album, Cosby expresses his sheer delight at the prospect of his TV show I Spy, in which he and Robert Culp played globetrotting secret agents disguised as tennis bums, was going to film an episode in Spain. He literally played a man who couldn’t contain his excitement over being in the land of this all-powerful sex drug. “This is the land of Spanish Fly, Spanish Fly, Spanish Fly,” Cosby said over and over again as part of his routine. Not that we took it seriously; he was a comedian, after all, and when that album came out it seemed at worst just a blip in the carefully constructed image of wholesomeness and child-like innocence Cosby had carefully built up for himself.

America has long had an odd love-hate relationship towards celebrities. “You Americans! You build up idols just for the fun of tearing them down!” a legendary celebrity once complained. His name was Rudolph Valentino, and he said it in 1923. For someone like Bill Cosby who’s been around as long as he has, we follow the ups and downs of his life as if he was part of our own family. We buy into the image he presents to us – and that only magnifies our sense of betrayal when he doesn’t live up to what he said, and got us to believe, he was.

A number of people who’ve been long-term fans of celebrities accused of sexual abuse of women – or men (quite a few of the most controversial allegations against people like Michael Jackson, Kevin Spacey and X-Men director Bryan Singer, have involved male victims) – have responded with a palpable sense of personal injury. “I played R. Kelly at my wedding!” one person complained to the media. Another wrote a weird mea culpa to the Los Angeles Times letters page questioning whether they should still listen to Michael Jackson, and ultimately deciding that they’d put aside his other songs but “Billie Jean” had been too much a part of their life to give up.

For me the celebrity whose #MeToo-inspired downfall was the most traumatic was Bill Cosby. During my own adolescence in the 1960’s my mother, my brother and I owned all of Cosby’s albums and played them over and over again. We responded to the down-home wit with which he retold the Biblical story of Noah and the Flood, and the silliness of his comments about Seattle – where, he said, people went out for “rain tans” and when the sun came up, they asked, “What did we do?” Mostly, though, we cherished the stories Cosby told of his own childhood in the mean but ultimately benign streets of Philadelphia, the “Buck Buck” games and the rivals that gave up when the huge “Fat Albert” was about to jump on them – a character so many people identified with and found lovable he spawned a children’s animated TV show called Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids.

This was the Bill Cosby I remembered, took to my heart and cherished. This was the Bill Cosby I saw perform live in 1965, when I was just 11. I saw him under unusual circumstances: he was coming to San Francisco to perform a benefit for the civil-rights organization SNCC (the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee) and my mom, a heavy-duty civil-rights activist until SNCC was taken over by “Black Power” leaders who didn’t want white allies as part of their movement, was involved in organizing it. I remember the jazz singer Carmen McRae and the SNCC Freedom Singers – whose album we owned – were also part of the program. Cosby performed his “Noah” bit and was every bit as lovable as he seemed on his records.

When the news that Cosby regularly drugged and raped women first broke in 2018, I remember one of his victims published an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times in which she said she resented that Cosby was portraying himself as an early supporter of the Black civil-rights movement and a personal friend of Martin Luther King, Jr. But Cosby was an early supporter of the civil-rights movement and a personal friend of King, and he put his career at risk giving money to civil-rights groups and performing benefits for them.

It’s occurred to me that the very entertainment industry in which Cosby made his fortune and achieved fame is responsible for this peculiar way of looking at humans and their behavior. We’ve been conditioned by the stories we’re told in movies and on TV to divide the human race into heroes and villains. The idea that a person can be a hero in some parts of their life and a villain in others is hard for our entertainment-conditioned minds to swallow. Bill Cosby was honorable and courageous in his early support for equal rights for African-Americans – and totally despicable in the way he treated women. But we’ve become so intolerant of moral complexity that when a story like this breaks we simply want to move Cosby from “hero” to “villain” in our moral lists.

I started losing interest in Bill Cosby in 1969, when he left Warner Bros. Records and started his own label, Tetragrammaton. I heard a local avant-garde radio station broadcast one of the four sides of his first LP for his own label, 8:15 12:15. The gimmick was that he had recorded it live in Lake Tahoe and had done two sets of shows, a family-friendly one at 8:15 p.m. and a considerably raunchier one at 12:15 a.m. The side I heard was from the 12:15 show and contained an interminable and highly unfunny skit ridiculing Gay men – and though this was well before I confronted my own sexuality, it still sounded insulting and not at all what I expected from the man whose tales of his childhood had been such an important part of my own. An Amazon.com reviewer named “Michael” wrote that this album was “out of touch with the warm, inoffensive quality that his later work is known for” and suggested that was why it was never reissued on CD.

Evidently Cosby himself wanted to retreat from the heavy-duty sexual content of this record, for in the 1970’s he did a 180° turnaround on his image. He starred in a number of TV situation comedies, most notably the sensationally successful The Cosby Show (1984-1992), in which he played Dr. Heathcliff “Cliff” Huxtable, upper-middle-class family man with a wife (Phylicia Rashad) and kids at a time when it was a novelty to see well-to-do African-Americans in any entertainment medium. When he wasn’t starring on The Cosby Show or indulging his well-known love of jazz by having great musicians like Dizzy Gillespie as guest stars (about the only reason I ever watched The Cosby Show), he was making public statements urging young Black people to stay in school, get good grades, avoid drugs and the “gangsta” lifestyle, and not listen to rap music.

That was fine by me – I can’t stand rap in general and “gangsta rap” in particular, and I can’t imagine why anyone would want to listen to it except the general rule that each new generation has to come up with a sound that pisses off the previous one. What I didn’t know, of course, is that Cosby’s pattern of drugging women and raping them would ultimately be documented stretching as far back as 1974. Neither I nor the rest of America knew that in his private life Cosby was a sex-hungry scumbag who was leaving a trail of women victims behind him: get him alone with a woman (whom he usually lured with the promise of some sort of favor the rich, well-connected can grant) and Dr. Huxtable turned into Mr. Hyde.

And now, though he served three years in prison on his original conviction, he’s got away with it at long last. Progressive activists sometimes say America has two systems of justice, but as the late Senator Eugene McCarthy said, we really have four: the one we learn about it in American civics classes, the one enforced against people of color and others official American society deems “less than human,” the one that protects police officers and the others who execute street justice (and sometimes literally “execute” it by killing them) against the people of color and other victims of system number two; and what McCarthy said was the worst of all, military justice.

African-Americans don’t usually get to be the beneficiaries of that third system of justice – the one that protects the rich and powerful from answering to their misdeeds. Usually they’re on the receiving end of system two – like Michael Brown of Ferguson, Missouri, Eric Garner and Amadou Diallo of New York, and George Floyd of Minneapolis, all executed by police (or, in the case of Trayvon Martin in Florida, a Neighborhood Watch activist and police wanna-be) who are usually protected by white judges and juries. (The actual conviction of Floyd’s principal killer, Derek Chauvin, was a genuine surprise despite the nationwide protest movement Floyd’s murder sparked – and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Chauvin’s conviction is reversed on appeal because in the U.S. cops usually don’t get punished for killing Black people.)

But sometimes it happens that a Black American reaches the stratified heights of wealth and celebrity that enable them to avoid suffering for their crimes. O. J. Simpson amassed enough money to hire the greatest defense lawyers in America – there were so many high-powered attorneys working for him they became known as the “Dream Team” – that he escaped conviction for two murders he almost certainly committed. Likewise Bill Cosby could afford the attorneys who managed to persuade the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, against all considerations of right and justice, that he should be released because a former Philadelphia district attorney had promised not to prosecute him for his assault on Constand and the current D.A. was bound by that, like a blood oath.

The initial coverage of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court decision freeing Cosby seems like a pathetic parody of legalese that turned justice on its head to free a well-to-do, well-connected defendant with enough money to hire lawyers to think up this sort of bullshit on his behalf. According to Justice David Wecht (a name which should live in infamy), who wrote the court’s opinion, “an affront to fundamental fairness, particularly when it results in a criminal prosecution that was foregone for more than a decade.” It said justice and “fair play and decency” required that district attorney Kevin Steele, who brought the case against Cosby for assaulting Constand, stand by the decision of the previous district attorney (Bruce Castor, whose other contribution to criminal justice in the U.S. was representing former President Donald Trump in his second impeachment trial) not to prosecute.

The problem was that after Castor chose not to prosecute Cosby for assaulting Constant, but before Steele reopened the case, Constand had sued Cosby in civil court. Under oath, Cosby had given a deposition containing that weird and frankly unbelievable account of their interaction that, when I read about it in the media, convinced me he was guilty. The four (out of seven) Pennsylvania Supreme Court justices who backed Cosby argued that if he had thought he still might be criminally prosecuted, he could have taken the Fifth Amendment and avoided giving that testimony. The Court said that overturning the conviction and barring any further prosecution “is the only remedy that comports with society’s reasonable expectations of its elected prosecutors and our criminal justice system.”

Never mind the “fair play and decency” Cosby should have shown towards Andrea Constand and all the other women he drugged and had his way with while they were helpless to resist. (My understanding of how date-rape drugs like Rohypnol work is they keep you conscious but incapacitate you, so you know what is being done to you but you’re powerless to stop it.) Aside from the sheer sickness of the crime – raping a drugged partner, like raping a child, is so far from my ken I can’t imagine why anyone would want to do it – and its Mr. Hyde-like opposition to everything Bill Cosby had told us he was and used his powerful gifts as an entertainer to make us believe it, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s decision to free him on the ground of “fair play and decency” is an insult to any person who has been sexually assaulted and gone to the police in the vain hope that justice would result.

In the past I’ve been critical of certain aspects of the #MeToo movement. I’ve questioned the temptation to believe that mere allegations constitute proof, and I’ve been even more critical of how people have been effectively blacklisted on the basis of unproven accusations. I was appalled when people who thought they were being politically progressive started campaigns like “#Mute R. Kelly” that aimed to take his songs off streaming services. It should be your decision – not that of a corporation or of political groups pressuring a corporation to censor him – whether you still want to listen to R. Kelly or not based on the charges against him. He should have a fair trial, and if he’s convicted he should be punished like anyone else, but organizing pressure groups to take away his livelihood smacks too much of the 1950’s Hollywood blacklist, in which liberals and Leftists were tarred with the brush of “Communism,” became unemployable and had their names taken off films they’d written.

But Bill Cosby had his fair trial. Indeed, as a rich man he had more of a chance to prove his innocence than most Black men accused of crime in America. He was duly tried and sentenced – and then his attorneys figured out a way they could persuade the Pennsylvania Supreme Court to let him off the hook. They earned whatever Cosby paid them, but justice suffered. And so did the overall task of holding powerful people accountable for their sexual abuse and exploitation of non-powerful people.I can’t help but wonder if Harvey Weinstein and the other #MeToo targets will also be able to weasel out of accountability for exploiting people and using them as animate sex dolls – just as I can’t help but wonder if an appeals court will let Derek Chauvin off the hook after his righteous conviction for killing George Floyd.

Sometimes appeals courts are necessary protections against judicial abuses. Other times, as in the Cosby case, they are second bites of the apple given to rich, powerful and influential defendants even after trial courts and juries have proven their guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Erwin Chermerinsky, legal columnist for the Los Angeles Times whose writings I generally admire, took Cosby’s side in a June 30 column (https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2021-06-30/bill-cosby-case-overturned-fifth-amendment-court) that read, “The Pennsylvania court’s ruling is disturbing in allowing Cosby to go free notwithstanding his sexual assault convictions, but it is correct in applying a crucial constitutional right.” I couldn’t disagree more: just because a previous Pennsylvania district attorney decided not to prosecute him, that shouldn’t have given a rapist a perpetual get-out-of-jail-free card.

“Frontline” Exposes Cruelty of Religiously Motivated Leaders in Afghanistan, India

by Mark Gabrish Conlan

Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

This post was originally intended for my movie and TV blog, https://moviemagg.blogspot.com, but it dealt with so many serious political and social issues – especially in terms of how we treat women and people of different ethnic and religious backgrounds – that I felt it belonged here in my more serious Zenger’s Newsmagazine blog as well. – M.G.C.

Last night at 10 p.m. I watched a fascinating, if also incredibly depressing, documentary on the PBS series Frontline about two grim stories in the Asian region of Afghanistan and India. The two stories they combined into the program were “Leaving Afghanistan,” about the chaos the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan is leaving behind and the likelihood that Afghanistan will either fall under the total control of the Talban (incidentally the word “Taliban” just means “religious students” – it’s as if the U.S. were taken over in a violent revolution led by a guerrilla army called “The Seminarians”) or the sort of civil war that afflicted the place in the 1990’s among various factions that led to many Afghans regarding the Taliban’s takeover with a sense of relief. Anyone even remotely aware of the news from the late 1990’s knows what Taliban rule will be like for the Afghan people – women draped in blankets and denied education, health care, employment or even the right to go outside; destruction of priceless historical landmarks because they pre-dated the existence of Islam; a ban on all public entertainments except for mass executions in Kabul’s former soccer stadium which Afghans will be forced to watch; and the littering of Afghanistan’s streets, mountain paths and landscapes with people killed arbitrarily on the Taliban’s orders because they weren’t considered sufficiently “Islamic” – including the Hazara, a minority tribe of Shi’a Muslims whom the Taliban have marked for genocidal extermination because they don’t consider Shi’a Muslims to be real Muslims.

“Leaving Afghanistan” had very little to do with the politics surrounding the U.S.’s unilateral withdrawal from what’s become America’s longest war – when he announced the pull-out President Biden said he was the fourth President to preside over the U.S. involvement in Afghanistan and he was going to make sure there wouldn’t be a fifth – or the big issue the U.S. media have been covering, which is the likely fate of the Afghan interpreters and others who served the U.S. presence and have immediately become marked for death by the Taliban now that American forces are no longer around to protect them. Instead the reporter, Najibullah Quarishi, focused on the likely outcome of the U.S. pullout for Afghans themselves, including the increasing involvement of Iran in Afghan politics. According to Quarishi, the Iranian government is pulling their militia force, the Fatemiyoun, out of Syria (where they were organized to fight in support of the Bashir al-Assad regime against the attempted revolution the U.S. was kinda-sorta backing), and infiltrating them into Afghanistan, ostensibly to protect the Hazara from extermination at the hands of the Taliban. Quarishi managed to get an interview with the Taliban warlord Mullah Abdul Manan Niazi, with whom he got “cred” in a fascinating way. After passing through 12 checkpoints to get to Niazi’s camp 500 miles west of Kabul, Afghanistan’s (nominal) capital, going through a 90-minute mountain hike and getting placed in a holding cell under a flag reading, “Welcome to the Taliban Court,” he heard the muezzin call the Taliban faithful to prayer – and joined in, thereby establishing that he was a faithful Muslim and therefore someone Mullah Niazi could trust.

Quarishi said that in person Mullah Niazi was quite personable and charming (so were Hitler and Stalin, according to people who met them and lived to tell the tale), and after making the obligatory statement that America “should go back where it came from: (an ironic parallel to the cry of anti-immigration Americans that one part or another of our polyglot population should “go back where they came from”), he told Quarishi of the Iranian Fatemiyoun, whom he said the Taliban were killing almost as fast as Iran could send them but still constituted a threat. Niazi claimed – and showed footage on his cell phone to prove it – that his Taliban forces had ambushed a Fatemiyoun detachment and killed 150 of the estimated 700 fighters Iran was trying to infiltrate. Quarishi also got an interview with a Fatemiyoun member who said, “Right now, I know that 5,000 men have already been placed inside Afghanistan, in every military division. Even inside the government there are Fatemiyoun. Five thousand are inside. Three thousand are in the police. Another thousand like me are in regular jobs.” Much of the reporting about the U.S. exit from Afghanistan has focused on how quickly the Taliban are sweeping through Afghanistan – they claim to be in charge of 80 percent of the country already, though other estimates say they have 55 percent, and much of the U.S. media have portrayed the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan as similar to the speed with which the North Viet Namese army and Viet Cong guerrillas overran the supposedly sovereign government of South Viet Nam once the U.S. was no longer around to protect it, and the resulting scenes of people hanging on to helicopters in a last-ditch attempt to flee what they imagined would be Communist retribution. Actually, the Viet Namese went through a relatively peaceful reunification and the United States lost the Viet Nam War but won the peace (just as the Confederacy lost the U.S. Civil War but won the peace – within 12 years after the end of the war they were able to get the federal troops out of the South, restore white supremacist governments to power, take away African-Americans’ voting rights and civil rights, and reduce America’s Black population to the penury and permanent servitude Southern whites – and a lot of Northern whites as well – thought was their proper “place”), Afghanistan has little or nothing to offer the Western world other than its strategic importance as the so-called “Gateway to Asia.”

So there is little reason for the advanced world to do much of anything for the country or its people except let them stew in their own juices and strike back only when they pose a threat to some person or country outside their borders, as they did when they gave safe harbor to Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda to (among other things) plan and stage the September 11, 2001 attacks. The supposed “Afghan government” is a pipe dream – when Biden said he thought they had enough soldiers and equipment to hold out against a Taliban attack once we withdrew he was being uncharacteristically naïve and idiotic. I suspect most of those people in the so-called “Afghan army” are there to get their hands on American training and equipment so they can desert and fight for one warlord or faction or another – just as America’s carefully trained and painstakingly built “Iraqi army” largely deserted en masse and took their American-trained skills and American equipment to ISIS. A brutal and long-running civil war with the rest of the world deciding we’ve already invested too much money and energy in Afghanistan is one of the few things for the country that would be even worse than a total Taliban takeover; for all the horrors of their rule, at least the Taliban brought stability and order out of the chaos of civil war that followed the Soviet Union’s withdrawal in 1989. Ironically, just weeks after Quarishi interviewed Mullah Niazi, he was killed in an ambush and his son took over his force – and the son seemed more cosmopolitan (I briefly got the impression he was speaking English; his dad didn’t seem to know any Western language but was fluent in both Pashto and Dari, the common languages of southern and northern Afghanistan, respectively) but equally dedicated to the Taliban’s cause.

The second segment of last night’s Frontline was just as chilling, albeit in a different way: it had to do with the ruling party of India, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), whom the New Yorker ran a story about a couple of years ago and described as a Hindu fundamentalist party seemingly determined to make India Muslimrein the way Adolf Hitler and his Nazi associates were determined to make first Germany, then Europe and finally the whole world Judenrein. One of the particular evils of authoritarians in general and warriors in particular is that they regard rape as one of the privileges of conquest, and they enlist people into their causes with promises of all the money they can steal, all the enemies they can kill, and all the women (and, if they’re interested in that, boys) they can force themselves on and abuse to their heart’s content. The story told by correspondent Ramita Navai deals with two cases of rape in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, which she describes as “the most populous state in India and the most electorally significant. It also holds a less impressive statistic: It has the second-highest reported number of rapes in the whole country.” One of the victims she profiled was an incredibly courageous woman Navai agreed to call by the alias “Jaya” because she’s still in danger of retribution and therefore can’t allow her real name to be used. Jaya was personally attacked at the home of a leading BJP politician in the state, Kuldeep Singh Sengar, whom Navai describes as “then a powerful politician in India’s ruling BJP party. He’s now in prison for Jaya’s rape but still has a loyal following. … Even though Sengar's in prison, he and his family still control the area,” which Navai explained made villagers in Jaya’s town unwilling to talk to her because she’s a foreign journalist and word might get back to Sengar’s friends. In June 2017 Jaya, only 16 years old, went to Sengar’s home, ostensibly for a job interview.

“The door opened,” she testified in his trial. “We reached the courtyard. Sengar caught me by my hand and dragged me to his room. He stripped me of my clothes. He closed the door and subjected me to a sexual assault. When I opposed, he said, ‘If you raise a voice, I will murder you.’” Though she initially reported the rape only to her aunt, word must have got out because within s few days of being raped by Sengar, Jaya was kidnapped, taken to another village, locked in a house and regularly gang-raped for a week. “The men took turns to rape me,” she told an Indian journalist. “I recognized two of them as Sengar’s men. They kept me on sedatives. Once I even tried to flee, but I was caught and sedated again.” When the police finally found her abandoned in the house after eight days in captivity, they took down the names of the people who had gang-raped her but refused to register her rape allegation against Sengar. What followed for Jaya was a Kafka-esque ordeal as she tried to report her rape to the state government of Uttar Pradesh – only the state’s chief minister, Yoga Adityanath, whom Navai described as “a senior member of the ruling BJP party and often touted as a future Indian prime minister.” Within a year of taking office as essentially the governor of Uttar Pradesh, he dismissed thousands of criminal cases pending against BJP politicians – many of whom had been accused of rape or other forms of violence against women. Jaya continued her allegations despite the retribution not only against her but her family; in April 2018 her father, Surendra, was attacked by a gang whose leader he recognized as Sengar’s brother. Jaya was so desperate that she publicly soaked herself in kerosene, intending to commit suicide by immolation.

Fortunately, not only was she rescued, the publicity surrounding her attempt to kill herself led to a reopening of her case and a transfer of Sengar’s trial from Uttar Pradesh to New Delhi, India’s capital. India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi – the leader of the BJP and a key player in their attacks on India’s Muslim population – proclaimed “zero tolerance” for rape and ordered Sengar to turn himself in. But Jaya’s ordeal wasn’t over; a month before she was scheduled to testify against Sengar in court, the police detail that was supposed to protect her was suddenly withdrawn. She was traveling in a car with her lawyer and two aunts to a meeting. A truck rammed the car and the other three passengers were all killed. Ultimately Sengar was convicted of rape and manslaughter and sentenced to life in prison. The men charged with kidnapping and gang-raping her are still awaiting trial. In September 2020, another rape scandal broke in the Hathras region of Uttar Pradesh. Navai spotted tweets on her Twitter feed alleging that a 19-year-old woman, Manisha Valmiki, had been gang-raped by four neighbors and injured so severely in the attack she was left paralyzed. “When we got there, there was zero press,” said Indian journalist Nidhi Suresh. “Her mother and her aunt walked us to the crime scene. … It was just a small clearing — which, by the way, the police had not sealed. It was open completely. [The victim’s mother] just kept saying, ‘Something bad happened to my daughter, something bad happened to my daughter,’ and she spoke about how she found her without any clothes.”

According to Navai, one reason the rapists thought they could get away with assaulting Manisha and leaving her for dead was the continuing power of India’s caste system, its highly regimented and brutally enforced class divisions that have brutally been enforced for thousands of years. She explained that Manisha and her family are from a lower caste. “The men she said raped her are Thakurs, an influential high caste who own the majority of land here and include many police officers and politicians like the chief minister, Yogi Adityanath,” Navai explained. The accused rapists’ families defended them by saying Manisha’s own family had beaten her for having consensual sex with one of the men. The police refused to register the rape allegations or do a rape kit on Manesha, so crucial evidence was lost. Eight days later – thanks to the involvement of the Bhim Army, an organization that advocates for equal rights for lower-caste Indians, and its leader, Chandrashekhar Azad Ravan – Indian media finally took notice. “Our local team went to the village and realized that the police were not taking action because of pressure by local politicians and the government,” Ravan explained. When Ravan went to see Manisha in the hospital, he recalled, “The police had blocked the whole area. I reached the hospital by motorcycle. I had to fight my way through and I demanded to see the girl.” When he finally got to see her, she could barely speak, her oxygen and blood pressure levels were fluctuating, and it was clear to Ravan that she didn’t have long left to live. Her family had her make a videotaped statement so there would be a record of her allegation after she died. When she finally passed away on April 29, 2021, Manisha’s mother, Rama Valdiki, was appalled that the authorities insisted on cremating her almost immediately instead of turning her body over to her family for the prescribed burial rites under the Hindu religion. “I want to take my daughter home,” Rama said. “I want to respect our Hindu traditions by performing her last rites. I want to apply turmeric on her before the cremation. I want to do this one last thing. She will never come back.”

Later senior officials in the BJP state government, including at least one senior police leader, denied that Manisha had ever been raped, and a district magistrate visited Manisha’s family and tried to pressure them to withdraw the rape allegation. According to Navai, Manisha’s deathbed video “went viral and fueled more unrest around the case. Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath blamed the outrage on opposition parties and an international conspiracy to undermine him. The trial of the four men Manisha accused has been delayed by COVID. Their lawyer claims Manisha’s video statements about the rape were fabricated. There have been allegations that the Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath's office has been trying to cover up this gang rape and has been trying to protect the accused. … Cases like Manisha’s and Jaya's continue to polarize India, pitting politics against families’ search for justice. One of India’s most respected and senior legal figures told me these cases should be a wake-up call for more accountability when it comes to violence against women.” The official she was referring to was former Indian Supreme Court Justice Madan Lokur, who told Navai, “It's completely inexplicable. Why should anybody—not only the prime minister, or not only the chief minister — why should anybody remain silent when something like this happens? They should speak out. It doesn't matter who the perpetrator is. The government, the state, the police machinery, everybody should come out in the open and say that this is wrong.” But the way India’s authorities treat allegations of rape and other forms of sexual assault – and the good old boys’ network that forms around highly placed perpetrators and protects them – should be a warning to us Americans not to be too complacent. The more power people, including religious fundamentalists, and others who deny the basic humanity and equality of women – whether it’s by condoning and protecting rapists (as the U.S. military has been accused of doing routinely when servicewomen are raped by higher-raking servicemen) or enacting laws threatening women with prison if they make the “wrong” choices concerning their bodies and how to deal with sex and pregnancy – achieve, the harder they will work to enslave women to men’s lusts and their own wombs.

America’s Three Presidents

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

I started writing this article with the intent of calling it “America’s Two Presidents” – a reference to Joe Biden, who holds the formal title and powers of the U.S. Presidency due to his victory in the November 2020 election; and Donald Trump, who has not only mounted a continuing challenge to the election result that removed him from office but got a majority of his party’s members to believe it. From his redoubt at Mar-a-Lago, Florida, Trump has set up what amounts to a government in exile, effectively giving marching orders to Republicans still in political office and receiving them to “bend the knee” (the gesture of fealty in the medievalist fantasy Game of Thrones) and swear seemingly eternal loyalty to him.

But after I watched the film clips of President Biden’s Memorial Day address at Arlington National Cemetery, it became clear that America right now does not have two Presidents, but three. One of them is named Donald Trump; the other two are both named Joe Biden. They inhabit the same 78-year-old body (ironically Biden, who in 1972 became the youngest person ever elected to the U.S. Senate, in 2020 became the oldest person ever elected U.S. President) but they’re clearly at war with each other. There’s Bipartisan Biden, who promised during his campaign to work with Republicans and come up with moderate solutions to America’s problems; and Progressive Biden, who is fed up with obstructionism not only from Republicans but Right-wing Democrats like Senators Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Arizona) as he pushes a far-reaching agenda that would fundamentally reshape Americans’ relationship to their government.

Progressive Biden had his biggest moment in the sun on April 28, when he delivered something called an “Address to a Joint Session of Congress” but which was a state of the union speech in all but name. He proposed a nearly $2 trillion infrastructure bill, which he called the “American Jobs Plan.” It extended far beyond traditional definitions of “infrastructure” – roads, bridges, harbors – to encompass things like expanding broadband Internet access for Americans, countering human-caused climate change and addressing workers’ rights and environmental justice. He also offered an “American Families Plan” to expand opportunities for universal pre-school, paid parental leave, tax credits for families with children and overhauling America’s patchwork education system. And he proposed to pay for it all by reversing most of the giveaways to the rich and corporations in President Trump’s and his Republican Congress’s 2017 tax bill.

Once Progressive Biden had laid out his expansive agenda – a fundamental reshaping of Americans’ relationship to government and a bold statement that government can and will help ordinary Americans cope with economic, environmental and social uncertainty – he went into hibernation and Bipartisan Biden came out again. He launched two months of fruitless negotiations with Republicans like West Virginia Senator Shelly Moore Capito until he realized in early June that they weren’t going to accept anything near the scale of what Progressive Biden thinks the country needs. And he’s continued to hope for bipartisan legislation even after U.S. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has said he will use all his considerable power to block everything Biden tries to do, and publicly said on June 5, “The era of bipartisanship is over.”

Both Progressive Biden and Bipartisan Biden are being held hostage not only by McConnell and a united phalanx of Republican Senators, but also by turncoats in their own ranks like Democratic Senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona. Indeed, in a rare expression of belligerence towards the two, he called them out in his Memorial Day address and said “they vote more often with my Republican friends” than with the Senate Democratic caucus. That’s not true – both Manchin and Sinema voted for the $1.9 trillion “American Rescue Plan” to provide relief from the COVID-19 pandemic – but in a broader sense the positions taken by Manchin and Sinema have essentially made it impossible for Democrats to govern.

The Filibuster

First is the venerable Senate institution of the filibuster. As Jonathan Chait pointed out in a recent article on the New York magazine Web site (https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/fake-history-senate-filibuster-sinema-founders-constitution.html), the filibuster – the power of a minority of Senators to block passage of a bill by essentially debating it to death and preventing it from being voted on at all – isn’t in the Constitution. Nor was it a Senate rules change that was meant to accomplish anything in particular. Quoting another writer, Sarah Binder, Chait wrote, “The filibuster emerged in the 19th century not by any design, but … due to an interpretation of Senate rules which held that they omitted any process for ending debate. The first filibuster did not happen until 1837, and it was the result of exploiting this confusing rules glitch.”

The most famous fictional portrayal of a filibuster is in Frank Capra’s and writer Sidney Buchman’s 1939 film Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, in which neophyte Senator Jefferson Smith (James Stewart) holds the floor to block a piece of graft being pushed by his state’s other Senator and defend himself against charges of impropriety. But the heroic portrayal of the filibuster in this movie is in stark contrast to the way it was usually used in the 20th century, which was to block civil-rights legislation aimed at ending Southern Jim Crow segregation and protecting the rights of African-Americans. The longest filibuster in history was conducted by Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina – who started his career as a Right-wing Democrat, then became an independent and ended as a Republican – in 1957 against a civil-rights bill. He won in the short term – the bill that finally passed was so weak Congress needed to do another one seven years later – but he lost in the long term when Americans got to hear the arguments for segregation … and realize how ridiculous they were.

In 1975 two major changes were made in the filibuster. One was to reduce the number of Senators required for so-called “cloture” – the vote to end a filibuster and allow the Senate to vote on a bill – from two-thirds of the Senate to three-fifths. The other – which was intended as a progressive reform but has actually been one of the worst things American government has ever done to itself – was to create what I call the “virtual filibuster.” No longer would Senators who wanted to kill something with a filibuster actually have to debate it. All they would have to do was send a notice to the Senate’s staff saying that they intended to debate it. Thus Senate minorities got the power to block any bill they don’t like just by invoking the virtual filibuster and thereby requiring 60 Senators to agree to almost anything. It’s created exactly the kind of super-majority requirement Alexander Hamilton argued against in the Federalist Papers, in words that ring true today:

“To give a minority a negative upon the majority is in its tendency to subject the sense of the greater number to that of the lesser number …The necessity of unanimity in public bodies, or of something approaching towards it, has been formed upon a supposition that it would contribute to security. But its real operation is to embarrass the administration, to destroy the energy of government, and to substitute the pleasure, caprice, or artifices of an insignificant, turbulent or corrupt junto, to the regular deliberations and decisions of a respectable majority.”

The only exception to the 60-vote threshold for legislation imposed by the virtual filibuster on the Senate is something called “budget reconciliation,” in which bills having to do with how the government spends money can pass with a simple 51-vote majority. But under normal rules such a bill can be passed only once a year – though the Biden administration and the bare Democratic majority in the Senate get a second bite of that apple since no budget reconciliation bill was passed in 2020 and therefore they get an extra one for 2021. Biden and the Senate Democrats already used one of their reconciliation bills to pass the COVID-19 relief passage against total Republican opposition in both the House and the Senate. Aside from that and one more potential slot, however, Biden and the Democrats will need the votes of 10 Republicans to get anything through the Senate and to Biden’s desk to sign. And, despite the forlorn wishes of both Biden and more moderate Democratic Senators that Republicans get serious about negotiating and cut some compromise deals to get things done, that ain’t gonna happen.

It ain’t gonna happen because not only is Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell’s agenda to do exactly what Alexander Hamilton feared – “to embarrass the administration, to destroy the energy of government, and to substitute the pleasure, caprice, or artifices of an insignificant, turbulent or corrupt junto, to the regular deliberations and decisions of a respectable majority” – he’s actually proud of it. And what’s more, Senator Manchin – who is literally the swing vote in an evenly divided Senate – has announced that he’s not going to vote for the Democrats’ voting-rights laws, the infrastructure plan, or anything else unless it has some Republican support. This essentially means that the Democrats won’t be able to do anything substantive for the American people in the next two years – and the Republicans will be able to campaign in the 2022 midterms and the 2024 Presidential election and say, “They had their chance and they didn’t do anything. Time to put us back in charge.”

One possible “out” for the bind the virtual filibuster and the 60-vote threshold it imposes on legislative action by the Senate would be to repeal it and force would-be filibusterers actually to debate. Joe Manchin has actually hinted he might be in favor of such a change. In early March he told reporters on Fox News Sunday and NBC’s Meet the Press that “the filibuster should be painful, it really should be painful and we've made it more comfortable over the years. … “If you want to make it a little bit more painful, make him stand there and talk” (https://www.politico.com/news/2021/03/07/joe-manchin-filibuster-senate-474197). More recently Manchin said at a private meeting he’d be open not only to eliminating the virtual filibuster but changing the rules so there would need to be 40 votes to continue a filibuster rather than the current requirement of 60 to end one.

Manchin apparently got this idea after the bill to create an independent, bipartisan commission to investigate the January 6 attacks on the U.S. Capitol sank in the Senate with 54 votes in favor and just 35 opposed, with the other Senators either being absent or not voting. He also attempted to negotiate a compromise on the Democrats’ “For the People Act” to restore voting rights – only to have it immediately shot down by Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell, who made it clear that there will be no Republican Senate votes for any federal bill to protect or expand voting rights. McConnell and other leading Senate Republicans not only represent a party that has made voter suppression a key part of its political strategy, they are philosophically opposed to laws that limit the power of state legislators to control who may vote, for which offices and under what circumstances.

The U.S. Is Not a Democracy!

One of the lies we in the U.S.A. like to tell ourselves is that this country is a “democracy.” That is simply not true! America is not, never has been and, unless we scrap the current U.S. Constitution and radically revise the structure of our political system, never will be a democracy. The framers of the Constitution intended this country to be a republic, not a democracy. As James Madison, who probably understood the U.S. Constitution better than anyone else in our history (he was a major participant at the Constitutional Convention, he was its note-taker and he also chaired the Committee on Style, which actually drafted the document), wrote in Federalist #10 (https://billofrightsinstitute.org/founding-documents/primary-source-documents/the-federalist-papers/federalist-papers-no-10/):

“The two great points of difference between a democracy and a republic are: first, the delegation of the government, in the latter, to a small number of citizens elected by the rest; secondly, the greater number of citizens, and greater sphere of country, over which the latter may be extended. The effect of the first difference is, on the one hand, to refine and enlarge the public views, by passing them through the medium of a chosen body of citizens, whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country, and whose patriotism and love of justice will be least likely to sacrifice it to temporary or partial considerations. Under such a regulation, it may well happen that the public voice, pronounced by the representatives of the people, will be more consonant to the public good than if pronounced by the people themselves, convened for the purpose.”

On this principle, the framers created a government with plenty of anti-democratic features – which today’s Republican Party has shrewdly and creatively exploited to maintain a position of political dominance out of all proportion to their numbers. The framers set up a system in which no individual citizen would vote for any office higher than that of their member of the House of Representatives. Under the original Constitution, Senators were elected by state legislators, not by the people (that didn’t change until the 17th Amendment was adopted in 1913). The President would be chosen by an Electoral College consisting of electors chosen by the states in whatever manner their legislatures decided, and state legislators would also have near-absolute power to determine who, how and on what their citizens could vote.

From 1892 to 1996 the U.S. enjoyed a run of 26 consecutive Presidential elections in which the winner of the popular vote for President also won the Electoral College and therefore became President. Since 2000, however, that’s only happened four times out of six. And since the modern two-party system emerged after the U.S. Civil War in 1865, in all four elections in which the President got elected without winning the popular vote (Rutherford Hayes over Samuel Tilden in 1876, Benjamin Harrison over Grover Cleveland in 1888, George W. Bush over Al Gore in 2000 and Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton in 2016), it’s been the Democrat who won the popular vote and the Republican who won the Electoral College – never the other way around.

This is not an accident. It reflects the growing urbanization of America, the extent to which people have crowded into large cities in a handful of states, most of them located on either coast, while – thanks to another major anti-democratic feature of the original Constitution, the awarding of two Senators to each state regardless of population – smaller, more rural states continue to enjoy a disproportionate share of power. And this imbalance has only got worse as America’s population has become more consolidated into large-state cities. When the original Constitution was passed in 1787, the largest state, Virginia, had nine times as many people as the smallest state, Rhode Island. Today the largest state, California, has 250 times as many people as the smallest, Wyoming.

Small states have a disproportionate advantage in the Presidential election because the number of electors awarded to each state is their number of Senators plus their number of House members. They have a disproportionate advantage in Congress, too – not only in the Senate but in the House, since the Constitution grants each state at least one House member regardless of their population. That means that Wyoming’s single Congressmember has only one-fifth as many constituents as any one of California’s 53 members (which will shrink to 52 after the next redistricting based on the 2020 census). One report noted that while the current U.S. Senate is evenly split between 50 Democrats and 50 Republicans,the 50 Democrats represent 40 million more people than the 50 Republicans because they tend to come from larger states.

The imbalance in America’s political system that gives small states more political power, relative to their size, than big states is just one of the built-in anti-democratic features the Republicans are exploiting to get and maintain power. Another is something I’ve referred to before in this article: the nearly complete authority the Constitution gives state legislatures to write election rules. The original Constitution gave states the power to decide who was eligible to vote and the rules under which elections would be held. The great amendments that expanded the franchise – the 15th, which at least in theory guaranteed the right to vote to people of color; the 19th, which guaranteed it to women; the 24th, which abolished the poll tax; and the 27th, which set the nationwide voting age at 18 – were all framed as specific exceptions to the otherwise absolute power of state legislatures over elections.

Most Americans think they have a guaranteed right to vote for President – or at least to vote for the electors that actually choose the President. They have neither. The current spate of voter suppression laws being pushed in virtually every state government that Republicans control not only limit voting hours, drastically cut back people’s ability to vote by mail, and allow partisan “poll watchers” new powers to intimidate voters, they also allow state legislatures and judges sweeping powers to nullify the election altogether and install whomever they want as winners. The Constitution gives the power to pick Presidential electors to state governments, and while as of 2020 all 50 states had assigned that power to voters, there’s nothing in the Constitution that says they have to. A state legislature can decide they don’t like the way the election turned out, and can assign their own electors regardless of the ones the people in their states voted – and there’s not a damned thing voters can do about it.

Indeed, that’s precisely what Republicans all over the country are preparing to do in 2024. Let’s assume for the moment that the 2024 Presidential election becomes a rematch of 2020 – Joe Biden vs. Donald Trump. Under the laws being pushed through at warp speed in places like Georgia, Florida and Texas, state legislators can reject the election results and decide for themselves who their state’s electors will be – and, therefore, who the President will be. These new voter suppression laws are being designed at least partly so Republican legislators and partisan “poll watchers” and “auditors” can reverse outcomes they don’t like and, in particular, to assure that Donald Trump can regain the presidency in 2024 if he wants to. (Indeed, had these laws been in effect in 2020 Trump would still be President.)

Republican Full-Spectrum Dominance

But the Republicans’ desire for voter suppression long predates Trump, and they would be pursuing this strategy even if the Orangeman had never descended his gold-plated escalator at Trump Tower to claim the country. In the early days of Barack Obama’s Presidency, Democrats liked to use the phrase, “Demography is destiny.” It meant that, since the parts of the electorate that mostly voted Denocratic – young people, poor people, people of color – were growing, while the parts that mostly voted Republican – old people, rich people, white people (especially white men) – were shrinking, these population shifts would usher in a new age of Democratic control and consign Republicans to political oblivion. A few Republicans actually took this idea seriously and held so-called “post-mortems” after the 2008 and 2012 elections saying the Republican Party needed to adjust its message and work to attract the votes of the growing demographics instead of relying on a shrinking base of whites.

Instead, the Republican Party decided to take a different path. Rather than moderating their message or trying to reframe it, they decided to double down on the messages of hate and fear that had sustained it since Richard Nixon and Strom Thurmond created the “Southern strategy” in 1968 and thereby made Republicans the party of racism and cultural bigotry. Instead of reaching out to new Americans, the Republicans pursued a ferociously anti-immigrant stand and picked Donald Trump largely because he was meaner on immigration than his opponents for the 2016 Republican nomination. And instead of expanding their voter base, Republicans decided to respond to America’s changing demographics by rewriting elections laws so that people who weren’t likely to vote Republican wouldn’t be able to vote at all. As Democrats celebrated their statewide victories in Georgia – not only carrying the state for Biden but electing two Democratic Senators (one of them African-American and the minister at Martin Luther King, Jr.’s old church) – Republicans in that state thought, “This is a mistake that we will fix.”

The Republicans have been proclaiming their attempt to drive the Democratic Party into political oblivion for some time. In 1995, talk-show host Rush Limbaugh said the victorious Republicans would allow some liberals to survive as “living fossils.” During George W. Bush’s Presidency, his political advisor, Karl Rove, boasted of giving the Republicans “full-spectrum dominance” of American politics – a phrase he appropriated from the vocabulary of the generals fighting Bush’s war in Iraq. In 2009, as Obama prepared to take office, Limbaugh responded with just four words: “I hope he fails.” Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell said his goal would be to make Obama a one-term President, and though he failed he managed to keep Obama from passing any major policies after Republicans regained the House in 2010 and the Senate in 2014. When Trump won in 2016 one Republican boasted that they were going to do such a good job undoing Obama’s legacy that “it will be as if he had never lived.” And more recently Senator John Thune (R-South Dakota) has boasted that if the Republicans regain either house of Congress in 2022, they will make Biden not just a one-term President but a “half-term President,” unable to accomplish anything in his last two years in office.

Today’s Republicans are often accused of “standing for nothing,” of not having any set of goals or policy objectives to make America a better place. In fact the Republicans have a long-standing ideological project that’s important enough to them that even Republicans who were initially opposed to or skeptical of Donald Trump went along with him because they saw him as a useful tool to achieving it. Economically, Republicans want to enact a libertarian agenda that will eliminate government as a brake on the powers of private businesses and get rid of virtually all taxes on wealthy individuals or corporations. The essence of libertarianism is that it is rich people who build a country’s economy and civilization – not the workers who actually create the value that makes rich people rich – and therefore they are entitled to virtually all the wealth of society.

Libertarians believe it is not only bad social policy but actually immoral to tax rich people in order to help not-so-rich people. They are committed to destroying America’s already meager social-welfare state, including Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. One reason they were so opposed to Obama’s Affordable Care Act was that by financing vast increases in government funding for health insurance and extending coverage to more people, it was expanding America’s social welfare state at a time when Republicans were determined not only to shrink it but someday to eliminate it completely. Republicans reject any laws to protect workers, consumers or the environment. Their ideal America – the time Trump was referring to when he said, “Make America great again” – was the 1880’s, in which rich people openly bought political office, workers who tried to organize unions and call strikes were met with judicial injunctions and both official militaries and private armies, and the super-rich of the time flaunted their wealth in what economist Thorstein Veblen called “conspicuous consumption.” In the 1880’s Diamond Jim Brady gave his mistress, entertainer Lillian Russell, a diamond-encrusted bicycle; today the world’s richest man, Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, plans to build his own rocket and send himself off into space.

At the same time that Republicans are planning drastically to shrink the size of government in the economic sphere – including passing bills like their 2017 tax cut, designed not only to reward their super-rich supporters with huge tax breaks but to jack up the national debt and thereby make it impossible for the U.S. to keep funding a social welfare state – thanks to the evangelical Christians Ronald Reagan brought in to the Republican coalition, they favor a big government when it comes to people’s private lives. The Republicans want to micro-manage Americans’ sex lives and control whom people can have sex with, under what conditions, whom they can marry or form relationships with, and how they can deal with the consequences – positive and negative – of their sexual activities. Anti-abortion activists in particular pretend to be “pro-life,” but they show their true colors when asked what women should do about unwanted pregnancies: “If you don’t want to get pregnant, don’t have sex.”

Gerrymandering: The Republican Route to Permanent Power

Throughout most of American history, a major political party that pursued an unpopular agenda and either wittingly or unwittingly ignored public opposition got punished. They started losing elections, and ultimately realized they would have to change their appeal to remain competitive. But today’s Republicans have raised rigging elections to both an art and a science, and they’ve had a handmaiden in the current U.S. Supreme Court. On June 5, the Los Angeles Times published an analysis by David Savage (https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2021-06-04/how-supreme-court-tilted-election-law-favor-gop) showing all the ways in which the current Court has biased the election system to favor Republicans.

“Under Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., the Supreme Court threw out the part of the Voting Rights Act requiring states with histories of discriminating against Black voters to clear election rule changes with the U.S. Justice Department,” Savage wrote. “Writing for a 5-4 majority in 2013, Roberts called the section outdated and said it did not fit with ‘current conditions.’ The Constitution, in the view of the Roberts court, also allows lawmakers to draw gerrymandered districts to keep themselves in power, forbids limits on how much wealthy donors and incorporated groups can spend on campaigns, and may even permit state lawmakers, not the voters, to decide who will be the president.”

Gerrymandering is one of those social evils, like bullying and identity theft, that predated the computer era – the term actually comes from 18th century New York Governor Elbridge Gerry, who in his zeal to keep his party in power drew skewed legislative districts, including one his political opponents described as looking like a salamander (hence, “gerrymander”) – but computers have made it considerably easier and more devastating. Republican information technology specialists have distributed software that can salami-slice voters precinct by precinct to create legislative maps that will make it virtually impossible for Democrats ever to regain control of state legislatures or keep the House of Representatives after the 2021 redistricting.

As Savage pointed out in his article, in 2018 Republicans kept 63 of the 99 seats in the Wisconsin Assembly even though Democrats won the governorship and Biden carried the state. They also designed a congressional map for North Carolina that ensured Republicans would win 10 of the state’s 13 Congressional districts no matter how the major parties split the statewide vote. Democrats in both Wisconsin and North Carolina sued to have those maps thrown out, but lost at the Supreme Court. “To hold that legislators cannot take partisan interests into account when drawing district lines would essentially countermand the Framers’ decision to entrust districting to political entities,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the Court in the North Carolina case.

The Court’s approval of partisan gerrymandering and its elimination of virtually any restrictions on the power of wealthy individuals and corporations to buy their desired political outcomes with campaign contributions has not only helped the Republican Party as a whole, it’s helped the most radical-Right voices within it. With their districts safely gerrymandered against competition from Democrats, Republican legislators don’t have to worry about losing their seats in a general election. What they do have to worry about is losing them in a primary to a more extreme, more strident Republican. This turns Republican primaries into bizarre ideological contests like the one in 2020 between Republicans Darrell Issa and Carl DeMaio for the San Diego East County seat formerly held by convicted (but pardoned by Trump) corrupt Congressmember Duncan D. Hunter. The ads for both Issa and DeMaio loudly proclaimed their own loyalty to President Trump, and each candidate attacked the other for not being sufficiently pro-Trump. Issa won the primary and easily crushed his Democratic opponent in November.

What’s the Recourse?

The Republicans are mounting a ferocious, intense drive not only to reverse the results of the 2020 election and to regain Congress in 2022 and the White House in 2024, they’re committed to a strategy that will make it impossible for them ever to lose again. And the Democrats have precious little recourse to stop them. The Democrats in the House of Representatives have passed two bills to protect voting rights – one an attempt to rewrite the 1965 Voting Rights Act that the Supreme Court largely invalidated, and one, the “For the People Act,” a sweeping attempt to ban gerrymandering and “dark money” contributions from wealthy individuals and corporations, and also set federal standards on how elections are conducted, including guarantees of early voting and voting by mail.

But it would take at least 10 Senate Republicans to pass either of those bills – and even if by some miracle they made it through the Senate and Biden signed them into law, the current Supreme Court would almost certainly declare them unconstitutional. In a few of the states that have passed the kinds of sweeping voter-suppression laws the Republicans are pushing nationwide (and which the “For the People Act” seeks to nullify), Democrats and people in the communities that would be affected by them – particularly people of color – have mounted guerrilla actions against them, including the walkout of Democratic state senators in Texas to deny the Republicans the legislative quorum they needed to pass them. But it’s hard to see how these campaigns can be sustained in the long run as long as Republicans retain the allegiance of their base and can continue to rig and gerrymander the political system to keep themselves in perpetual power.

Ultimately the Republicans’ aim in all of this is not only active voter suppression but what I call passive voter suppression, in which people simply give up on the political process, voluntarily don’t vote and abandon any idea that political activity could make their lives better. After white Southern Democrats used their power between 1877 and 1896 to block Blacks from voting – often resorting to intimidation, terror and outright murder to accomplish their goals – for decades afterwards most Southern African-Americans simply abandoned any attempt to participate in the political system. The few who stuck their necks out and tried got fired from their jobs and nighttime visits from the local Ku Klux Klan. What modern-day Republicans are hoping for is the same thing: people will just give up on political participation, election turnouts will fall drastically and the Republicans will be allowed to run the country any way they damned well please – which, as in the 1880’s and the 2010’s, will include outright plundering of the public treasury for their own and their friends’ private gain.

Historian Leonard Schapiro called the Russian Bolsheviks, who took over their country in 1917 and set up the Soviet Union and the Communist Party dictatorship that ran it, “a minority determined to rule alone.” Like the Bolsheviks, today’s Republicans are a minority determined to rule alone – and the real reason for their no-holds-barred opposition to everything on President Biden’s agenda is to create fear and hopelessness among non-Republican Americans. Biden won the 2020 election largely due to heroic actions on the part of community organizers, especially in the communities of color, who moved heaven and earth to help voters navigate the increasingly cumbersome process of casting their ballots, made harder by all the creative ways Republicans in state governments have figured out to make it so.

But how long can community organizers and leaders continue to convince their people to vote when not only does the process of voting become ever more difficult, but even when they win elections they don’t get the policy outcomes they want? With a Republican Party united behind an agenda that couldn’t get a majority vote if they were honest about it, decades of expertise in using racial and cultural appeals to get millions of Americans to vote against their economic self-interest, and increasingly creative ways to use the anti-democratic features of U.S. government to frustrate the Democrats’ ability to get anything done, America’s most likely outcome is a return to Republican Congressional majorities in 2022, a Republican President in 2024, and the increasing disillusionment of millions of Americans who realize, even in a so-called “democracy,” how little actual control they have over the way they are governed and how Republicans have stacked the decks so America gets Republican policies and priorities whether they want them or not.

There are things the Democrats and their supporters in the population could be doing to avert this apocalypse. Number one is to eliminate the Senate filibuster – or, failing that, at least to eliminate the virtual filibuster and force Senate Republicans to go on record as explaining why it’s such a do-or-die priority to block everything President Biden and the Democrats want to do. Number two is going to have to come from the grass roots: a full-blown campaign of street activism to challenge the authority of Republicans and turncoat “Democrats” to block the massive public investments President Biden – or at least Progressive Biden – has called for not only to get America out of the pandemic-induced slough but to make our country one that can meet the challenges of the 21st century and serve as an example of republican self-government for the rest of the world.

As I was finishing this article I happened to look up President Franklin Roosevelt’s first Inaugural Address from March 4, 1933 (http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5057/). He’s most famous for having started that speech with the line, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” but few people quote the rest of that line in which Roosevelt described that fear: “nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.” Roosevelt also said these words, which stand as a vivid counter-argument to the libertarian philosophy of Republicans in 1933 or 2021:

“Happiness lies not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort. The joy and moral stimulation of work no longer must be forgotten in the mad chase of evanescent profits. These dark days will be worth all they cost us if they teach us that our true destiny is not to be ministered unto but to minister to ourselves and to our fellow men.”

On April 28, 2021, Progressive Biden outlined a program of massive government spending to create a U.S. economy that can be internationally competitive in the 21st century and can sustain the environment so the earth remains fit for human habitation. Then the Republican Party swooped in to say, in the spirit of another American voice from the early 1930’s, Groucho Marx, “I don’t care what he has to say/It makes no difference anyway/Whatever it is, we’re against it.” Now Bipartisan Biden has let Progressive Biden’s agenda get bogged down in a U.S. Senate that gives the minority an effective veto over the majority (exactly what Alexander Hamilton warned against in the Federalist papers), while Donald Trump waits at Mar-a-Lago to be called back from exile to take back the government as early as this August (one of his more loony-tunes vision). It’s not altogether sure what we should – or even can – do to move Progressive Biden’s agenda and save this country from domination by a sclerotic and increasingly out-of-touch elite of wealth and power, but damnit, we have to do something.

Biden’s Unrepeatable Victory

Why Democrats Need to Eliminate the “Virtual Filibuster” to Get Any More Done

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

It’s been a tumultuous two months since last I posted on this blog. President Joe Biden and Vice-President Kamala Harris finally got to take office on January 20, despite the best efforts of Republican Party activists to deny them the offices to which they were rightfully elected. The Republicans’ efforts to keep Donald Trump in the Presidency and Biden out of it involved both legal and extra-legal means – the legal means included not only bizarre lawsuits even Trump’s own appointees to the judicial bench could not sustain but an attack on the competency of the U.S. Postal Service and a blizzard of laws, which the GOP nationwide is pushing even harder now to make sure Democrats never win a national election again.

The extra-legal means, of course, were on full display on January 6, 2021, two weeks before the scheduled inauguration, when thousands of Republican and Trump supporters massed in Washington, D.C. and staged a physical attack on the Capitol during what was supposed to be the routine counting of the various states’ electoral votes. The mob that stormed the Capitol that day weren’t just calling for the heads of Democrats – among their chants were, “Hang Mike Pence!,” and they were targeting him because some Right-wing author had published on some Web site somewhere an article arguing that Vice-President Pence could personally refuse to certify the election and keep himself and Trump in office despite losing both the popular and the electoral vote. Pence refused to use this alleged “power” and tried to explain to Trump that he really didn’t have it, and Trump’s response was to tell the crowd assembled to storm the Capitol at his direction that if Pence didn’t single-handedly throw him the election, “we’re not going to like him so much anymore.”

Even before January 6, I had planned to write an article in these pages saying flat-out that the U.S. Republican Party has rejected the whole idea of democracy. That’s become even more clear since Biden’s inauguration. The two biggest things Republicans have done since Biden became President are form a united phalanx of opposition against Biden’s COVID-19 relief bill – even though the bill was polling up to 71 percent approval, not a single Republican in either the House or the Senate voted for it – and launch a relentless drive for voter suppression. Over 400 bills to make it harder to vote – and particularly harder for people of color, low-income people, working people, students and others who generally don’t vote Republican – to vote.

Instead of attempting to expand the appeal of their party beyond its existing base of Americans who tend to be older, whiter and more male than the rest of the country, the Republicans are determined to stay in power indefinitely by making sure people who would vote against them won’t be able to vote at all. They have become what Leonard Schapiro, in his book The Russian Revolutions of 1917, called the Russian Bolsheviks: “a minority determined to rule alone.” And having failed in their attempt to overthrow democratic government through a violent revolution, the Republicans are redoubling their efforts to regain and keep power through ostensibly legal Constitutional means. The modern-day Republican Party has no respect for democracy or “the will of the people” unless “the will of the people” coincides with theirs. Their attitude towards election outcomes is “heads we win, tails you lose.”

Democrats in Washington, D.C. are in an odd mood combining ebuillence and frustration. The joy of having got through a $1.9 trillion COVID relief package through both houses in Congress – thanks in large part to popular demand, not so much because people thought it would be good public policy as because it promises most Americans $1,400 in ostensibly “free” money – is tempered by the realization that virtually none of the rest of Biden’s and the Democrats’ agenda is likely to pass in a closely divided Congress, especially since – unlike the Republicans, who are unified behind an agenda to make rich people richer, get rid of regulations on business and use the power of the government to police people’s sex lives – Democrats remain badly split. Long-time progressive demands like raising the minimum wage simply don’t have unanimous support among the Democrats in Congress, as Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema (a former Green Party member and an open Bisexual) demonstrated by duplicating her late predecessor John McCain’s dramatic “thumbs down” vote not to preserve millions of less affluent Americans’ access to health care but to keep the so-called “working poor” mired in that status.

The success of Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell and House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy in whipping their caucuses into a unanimous rejection of the COVID relief bill was a clear shot across the bow of Joe Biden and the Democrats in general. Biden had sold himself during the Presidential campaign largely as a centrist figure, a former U.S. Senator who had good relationships with Congressional Republicans in general and Mitch McConnell in particular. He called McConnell someone he’d always been able to work with despite their political and ideological differences. A lot of more progressive Democrats worried when we heard Biden deliver this sort of “bipartisan” happy talk and wondered if he fully realized how different the modern-day Senate is from the one he left 12 years ago, after having served there nearly half his life, to become Barack Obama’s Vice-President.

He knows now. The unanimous Republican opposition to his COVID relief package was the entire Republican Party in Congress raising their middle finger to the President and saying, “Fuck you!” The Republicans have largely dominated American politics since the crucial realigning elections of 1968 and 1980, and one of their principal weapons has been to use the anti-democratic features built into the U.S. Constitution to frustrate the will of the people whenever it deviates from Republican orthodoxy. Among their most effective tools are the Electoral College (since 2000 the winner of the popular vote for President has won the Electoral College only four times out of six), the equal representation of every state in the Senate regardless of population (many commentators have pointed out that though each major party now has 50 Senators, the 50 Democrats represent 40 million more people than the 50 Republicans) and the near-total control state governments have over who is allowed to vote and how Congressional and state legislative districts are drawn.

It’s clear that the Congressional Republicans are going to do to Biden what they did to Obama before him, and Bill Clinton before him: they’re going to wait him out and count on the usual pattern that the “out” party gains in the first midterm election of a new Presidency to put them back in control of both the House and Senate, just as Clinton lost the House in 1994 and Obama lost it in 2010. And in the modern-day virtual filibuster, they have a near-perfect weapon for seeing to it that the COVID relief bill will be the last major piece of legislation Biden and the Congressional Democrats are able to put through. The bizarre attachment of Senators like Sinema and Joe Manchin of West Virginia – as well as Biden himself, who as I noted above spent most of his adult life as a Senator – will ensure that the Democrats will accomplish nothing else in Biden’s first four years as President, and raise the likelihood that Republicans will take back Congress in 2022 and the Presidency in 2024.

The filibuster is not provided for in the Constitution, but it has become such an entrenched political tradition in the U.S. Senate it might as well have been. Anyone who’s seen the 1939 film Mr. Smith Goes to Washington will know how the filibuster was originally supposed to work: any Senator who could grab the floor and hold it could delay a piece of legislation unless two-thirds of the Senate voted for “cloture,” which meant an end to the debate. The longest and most famous real-life filibuster Senator Strom Thurmond (a thoroughgoing racist who fathered a daughter with a Black woman) mounted against the Civil Rights Act of 1957. He didn’t block the legislation completely, but he managed to get it watered down enough Congress had to pass another Civil Rights Act in 1964 to make sure anti-Black segregation ended. But Thurmond’s filibuster had a positive effect: because he actually had to make the case for Jim Crow to the American people, a lot of American people got to hear how ridiculous it was – and support for civil-rights legislation increased.

As a result of the 1957 and 1964 Civil Rights Acts and the desperate attempts of white Southern racists in the Senate to kill them with the filibuster, the rules got changed in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. First, the magic number of Senators needed to end a filibuster was reduced from two-thirds (67) to three-fifths (60). But along with that good change in the rules, the Senate also enacted a very bad one: Senators no longer had to debate to conduct a filibuster. All they had to do was file a notice with the Senate clerk that they intended to debate a bill for it to come under filibuster and therefore require 60 votes to pass. Occasionally Senators still do full-dress filibusters – notably Senator Ted Cruz’s attempt to shut down the entire government to block continued funding of the Affordable Care Act (which featured him reading Dr. Seuss’s Green Eggs and Ham on the Senate floor as part of “debate,” he said because it was his kids’ favorite book – though I couldn’t escape the irony Cruz was carrying out his closed-minded filibuster against increasing access to health care by reading a parable against closed-mindedness).

But for the most part the modern-day virtual filibuster has created a 60-vote threshold to enact any legislation at all. The only significant exceptions are to confirm new Federal judges (a power Mitch McConnell and former President Trump used to the max to fill up the Federal bench with Right-wing crazies who will be there for the rest of their – and our – lives) and to pass so-called “budget reconciliation” bills. “:Budget reconciliation” was one of the attempts, like the virtual filibuster itself, to smooth the legislative process. The original intent was simply to make sure that the budget resolutions – the basic documents that fund the federal government – would be able to pass quickly and easily without the risk of endless Senate debate. But with the virtual filibuster having locked in a 60-vote supermajority threshold for the Senate to do almost anything – to the point where political pundits routinely declare bills passed by the House “dead on arrival” in the Senate because they can’t muster the 60 votes to close debate – “budget reconciliation” has been perverted beyond its original purpose.

Presidents and Senators of both major parties routinely load up “budget reconciliation” bills with unrelated items as long as they can persuade the Senate parliamentarian that they have something to do with the budget. The Democrats used budget reconciliation to pass the Affordable Care Act in 2010. The Republicans used it to push through President Trump’s enormous tax cut for the wealthiest American individuals and corporations in 2017. Now the Democrats have used it to pass a COVID relief plan whose cost is almost exactly that of the Trump tax cut – $1.9 trillion – which, as the Republicans in Congress have pointed out, has a lot of things in it that have little or nothing to do with the pandemic. Among these were expanding funding for the Affordable Care Act and increasing the child tax credit. Since one of the rules of “budget reconciliation” is that only one such bill can pass each year (though Senate Democrats have argued that they should get to do two in 2021 because no budget reconciliation passed in 2020), progressive Senators like Bernie Sanders – who when the Democrats took over the Senate became chair of the Budget Committee – boasted that they were going to cram as many progressive priorities into the reconciliation bill because they wouldn’t have the chance to pass as normal legislation, subject to the 60-vole threshold.

They even tried to stick an increase in the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour into the COVID relief bill so it could pass under budget reconciliation. They failed only because the Senate parliamentarian ruled that raising the minimum wage didn’t really relate to the Federal budget. Then Senate progressives tried to introduce the minimum wage hike as a separate bill and couldn’t even get all 50 Senate Democrats on board with it. That was what provoked Senator Sinema to her demonstration on the floor that not only was she against raising the minimum wage, she was proud of it and regarded her vote against it as an act of political heroism. (I remember when she was running in 2018 Kyrsten Sinema was one of the Senate candidates for whom I received bludgeoning e-mails demanding that I give her money. I’m glad to say I didn’t.)

Ironically, Joe Manchin has become the first Democratic Senator to embrace the strategy that could pass the Senate rulemaking process and give the Democrats the leverage they need to get things done. On March 7 he went on the interview shows Meet the Press and Fox News Sunday and said, “The filibuster should be painful, it really should be painful and we've made it more comfortable over the years,” he said on Fox News Sunday. “Maybe it has to be more painful. … If you want to make it a little bit more painful, make him stand there and talk. I'm willing to look at any way we can, but I'm not willing to take away the involvement of the minority.”

While that business about being “not willing to take away the involvement of the minority” is ridiculous under current circumstances – with their en masse opposition to the COVID relief bill Republicans in both the House and Senate sent a message, “We’re not interested in negotiating ‘bipartisan’ compromises. It’s our way or the highway” – I think Sen. Manchin is absolutely right. If you can’t (or won’t) get rid of the filibuster, at least get rid of the virtual filibuster. Make Senators who want to debate something to death actually have to debate. Force them to embarrass themselves by bringing the entire business of Congress to a grinding halt while they exorcise their pet peeves in front of the nation.

As little respect as I generally have for Joe Manchin, he’s totally right about this one. Filibusters should be painful for the filibustering Senator or party. The virtual filibuster has made them painless. The defenders of the filibuster say it “promotes bipartisanship,” but if it ever did, it does just the reverse now. It has given a dedicated, anti-democratic and totally nihilistic minority veto power over virtually the entire government. The first point of the bill of particulars against King George III in the Declaration of Independence was, “He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.” This is exactly what Republicans in general, and Senate Republicans in particular, are doing with tools like the virtual filibuster and the 60-vote threshold it creates to pass legislation.

Ideally, the filibuster itself should be ended. It’s an anti-democratic remnant of a foul tradition that was most often and most effectively used by racist Southern Democrats in the 20th century to block legislation to give equality to African-Americans. It’s also wrong on a fundamental democratic level; an elected majority should be able to pass whatever laws it wants, subject only to the limits on what Alexis de Tocqueville called “the tyranny of the majority” inserted in the Constitution. If voters don’t like what the majority does, they should have the right to vote them out so the other major party becomes the majority and has similar power. But if too many Democrats in the Senate have this irrational attachment to the filibuster, we should at least be able to get rid of the virtual filibuster so willful minorities can’t arbitrarily block all legislative action and exercise a tyranny of the minority.