Monday, December 30, 2019

The Bullying of Mitch McCONnell

Mitch McCONnell, the Senate Majority Leader, is a bully.  And, like all bullies, he's fond of soft targets.

He found one in Barack Obama, who thought he could find a middle path between Democrat and Republican extremes to form a bipartisan consensus on dealing with critical national issues.  In other words, Obama tried to act like a President, or, at least, like the type of President polls are always telling us is the type of President we want to have.

But McCONnell knew better.  To paraphrase James Baldwin, he didn't believe in what polls said people wanted, because he saw how people voted.  Or, rather, he saw how people were willing to vote with the underhanded aid of a little manipulation of the truth, funded by some well-heeled supporters with a vested interest in manipulating the truth.

So when the hinge of fate (thank you, Sir Winston Churchill) swung in Obama's direction early in the final year of his Presidency, and allowed him to nominate a replacement for the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, McCONnell was more than prepared to swing back.  With the assistance of a typically unartful speech by then-Senator Joe Biden, he invented a brand-new Senate rule to the effect that nominations to fill a Supreme Court vacancy, if made in the final year of the President's term, would be ignored by the Senate, thus giving the voters in the next presidential election a chance to "weigh in" on how the vacancy should be filled.

And it worked, from a purely partisan perspective.  McCONnell got a Republican President out of the 2016 election and, with a little manipulation of Senate rules, got a filibuster-free confirmation of a Republican nominee to fill the Scalia vacancy.  After that, when polls suggested that a rising wave of Democratic voters might actually threaten his Senate majority, lo and behold, another vacancy magically appeared (and you can see me about this bridge I own if you think that was merely a lucky coincidence).  And when the President's nominee to fill that vacancy arrived at the Senate Judiciary Committee with more baggage than a train-full of Pullman cars, McCONnell magically made all of the baggage disappear (or most of it, anyway).

So it's hardly surprising that he would attempt similar political magic now that his partner in constitutional crime, D***** T****, has gotten himself into a legal pickle that not even Rudy Giuliani can get him out of, in part because Rudy appears to be hip-deep inside the same pickle:  using military aid to bribe a foreign country into playing dirty tricks on T****'s behalf.  The House of Representatives has examined witnesses, given T**** and his attorneys a chance to respond, drawn up and passed articles of impeachment in the absence of a response, and is now ready to refer those articles to the Senate for a trail..

Or will they?  Should they?  Or, at least, should they do so right away?

In answer to the latter question, there's a powerful argument for not doing so.  No one, even T****, benefits from a trial that has so little substance to it that it cannot even be said to be all form.  The point is often made that a trial by a court of impeachment (which is what the Senate becomes for such a trial) is more political than judicial in nature.  And there's a significant amount of truth to support that point.  The charges in the articles are more of a constitutional rather than criminal in nature, such as the second article in the T**** case, which charges him with obstruction of Congress.  The prospective punishment is losing his office, and/or the right to hold a similar public office.

In between the articles and the verdict, however, an impeachment trial is very much meant to resemble a criminal or civil style in two very important respects:  the right of each side to present and examine evidence to support or rebut the charges in the articles, and the obligation of the jurors (i.e., the members of the Senate) to examine that evidence and render a verdict on it in a fair and impartial manner.

Is that going to happen here.  Well, if McCONnell's public statements on the matter are to be believed, he's apparently determined to try running true to form, if not to his official obligations.

In fact, he has publicly stated that he will coordinate his Republican caucus with the White House defense lawyers in order to not merely declare T**** to be found not guilty of the impeachment charges, but also completely innocent of them.  This action would not only be completely illegal if it occurred during a civil or criminal trial, but is in fact a violation of the specific oath that Senators must take in order to perform their duties at an impeachment trial.

It's impossible to overstate how brazenly unethical McCONnell's behavior in all of this is.  I heard him state on television his plans to coordinate with the White House, and I found myself wondering if he knew that the microphone was on.  But I had and have no real doubt that what he was doing was purposeful on his part.  In any case, it illustrates the extent to which his success with Supreme Court nominations has enabled what seems to be a serious G-d complex, one that puts him in direct competition with T**** himself for the honor of displacing the King of the Universe.  Both of them are now in the position of attempting to get away with murder on Fifth Avenue.  I doubt that's something that McCONnell is going to be able to coordinate with the White House.

But where does that leave Nancy Pelosi, and House Democrats?

The text of the Constitution does not specify a specific timetable for turning over the articles of impeachment to the Senate.  To the extent that there's a governing principle for doing so, it lies in the area of tradition and common practice.  There have only been two impeachment processes with regard to Presidents that resulted in a trial but, in both of those cases, the articles were transmitted without delay.  Then again, in neither of those cases did the leader of the Senate effectively attempt to announce the outcome in advance, or prevent the House managers from presenting evidence.  So there's an obvious limit to which history can serve as an effective guide.

In fact, McCONnell's gambit quickly led many in and outside of Congress to suggest delaying the transmission of the articles until assurances that can be relied upon are made that the trial will be conducted in a fair and impartial manner, as contemplated by both the Constitution's authors and as previously practiced.  Again, such a delay is not specifically authorized by the text of the Constitution.  On the other hand, the text does not forbid it, either.  And to assume that the House should transmit articles of impeachment to a Senate that has declared its intention to act unfaithfully is an assumption utterly unsupported by the Constitution, the record of the Constitutional Convention, or the Federalist Papers published in support of the Constitution's adoption.

For the forgoing reasons, and after a certain amount of internal debate on my part, I came to the conclusion fairly quickly that a delay in transmitting the articles for the purpose of assuring the integrity of a Senate trial is not merely the right thing to do, but the essential thing to do if the purpose of the trial in the first instance is to honor our system of constitutional government.

In fact, one of the reasons that makes such a delay essential is T****'s own propensity for serving up evidence that demands a verdict, and could in fact lead to more impeachment articles, or at least buttress the case for the existing ones.  Since the articles were approved by the House, such evidence has already emerged.  It is continuing to emerge, in a big way.  And the House Democratic counsel has already argued for the possibility of additional articles.

Putting it simply, McCONnell, the master bully, is by all accounts being out-bullied by Pelosi.  But that's not the only way he's being out-bullied.

For one thing, he's being out-bullied by T**** himself.  As it turns out, he wants a full-scale trial as well, and is pressuring McCONnell to cave in to Democratic demands for one.  He is, unsurprisingly, deluded enough to think that a real trial will produce a real acquittal.  Naturally, he's the only person who feels this way.  But, for my part, I've always believed that everyone's entitled to their own fantasies, so long as they don't necessarily inflict them on others.  And this is one instance where I would be willing to give T**** exactly what he wants.  See?  Bipartisanship!

Then too, there's the Republican Senate caucus, which, after years of marching in lockstep with their leader, seems to be showing some signs of finally cracking.  Could it be in part because of news stories like this one?

Yes, when it comes to the court of public opinion, and the question of impeaching T****, the proverbial dam finally seems to be bursting.  Even in Kentucky, where voters have continually sent McCONnell back to Washington on their behalf time and time again, even though polls have continually shown that they hate him, his time just may be up at last.

Four bullies.  Pelosi.  T****.  The Senate Republican caucus.  And the American people.  A confederation of bullies that not even McCONnell may not be able to withstand.

*****
That wraps up TRH not merely for the year, but for the decade.  It's been tumultuous on both fronts.  I would not dream at this point of speculating what the future has in store.  I pray for all of us, and especially for all of you reading this.  May you have a New Year filled with nothing but the very best of everything.

Sunday, December 29, 2019

In Praise Of Bureaucrats

I've spent a fair amount of my professional life as a bureaucrat, at both the state and Federal level.  For my father, whose study of bureaucracies was his occupation, and whose Depression-era childhood led him to prize stable employment, this was his dream occupation for me.  I did not prize stability quite as much as he and my mother did (see my previous post), but the work that I did in government gave me an appreciation for how much important work is done by bureaucrats behind the proverbial scenes, away from politics and media exposure. 

If anything, I think that one of the reasons Americans value government so little is because the media tends to focus its coverage on the political circus, which is both easier to understand and more entertaining, and thus easier to ultimately translate into profits.  It's harder to get a handle on the inner workings of many government agencies, and describe the workings of those agencies in a way that makes people think that their tax dollars are working, sometimes in ways they've never appreciated.  I'd like to take a few moments, and several lines, to try to do my part in correcting that imbalance.

Paul Volcker, who died earlier this month, played two major roles in the 20th and 21st centuries.  As chair of the Federal Reserve in the Carter and Reagan Administrations, he played perhaps the most important role in bringing inflation under control by tightening access to money to an extent that was painful for Americans across the board, and led to what was accurately described as a "double-dip" recession.  The pain can't and shouldn't be minimized; those of us who lived through it remember it very well, and those who didn't can learn all about it from pieces like this one.  But it brought inflation under control for nearly four decades, and did much more than the Reagan tax cuts to set the stage for economic growth in the '80s.  Two decades later, when those tax cuts and later ones brought the nation to the brink of another Depression, he worked with Barack Obama to pull the the economy back from that brink, and to re-regulate the financial players that almost pushed all of us over it.

You can, of course, debate whether his Fed policies could have been less severe, or whether he should have been tougher on Wall Street when he worked for Obama, as the Nation article to which I've linked does  My own view does not go quite as far as the Nation does in taking Volcker to task on both fronts, but there's something to be said for its perspective.  It fails to take into account, however, of how inflation was eating the economic life out of America in the two decades before Volcker came on the scene, or Volcker's own willingness to concede, in his later work, that business excess needed to be reined in.  What is indisputable, at least in my opinion, is that Volcker's work overall has had an impact equal to, if not greater than, the impact of the Presidents for whom he worked.

The same may yet be said of the six witnesses from the T**** Administration who testified before the House Intelligence Committee and who uniformly established the fact that T**** put a political price tag on military aid to a crucial ally.  Some were political appointees--T**** appointees, for that matter--but others were career bureaucrats who saw themselves as working for the interests of the nation as a whole.  They put themselves in some degree of peril for reprisals from a political party that lives on reprisals, but they did it anyway.  They proved that the label "bureaucrat" can be shared with the label "patriot."

Then too, we all might not be here sharing our views electronically and/or otherwise if it weren't for the work of George Kennan, whose development of the policy of "containment" with respect to the Soviet Union and its expansionist tendencies may very well have prevented both nations from launching a war that neither one could win.  You can read more about Kennan and his work here.

If all of this feels a bit like a ramble, I apologize.  It leads, in any case, to a simple point.

We hear and read a lot these days about the "Deep State," or "the Swamp," an alleged invisible empire of sinister, intractable forces within the national government, supposedly self-interested to the point of leading the rest of us inevitably down the path to our destruction.  This empire is never described in detail, of course, and that's in no small part because the real swamp is not in our government but around it--the pollsters, the lobbyists, the various trade associations, the law firms, and even certain media outlets.  All of which have a vested interest in getting something out of government, and all of which can do so far more easily by getting the rest of us to hate government with all our hearts.  And, because all of these swamp creatures are skilled in the art and science of persuasion, they've had decades of success in generating that hatred.

Well, I am here to tell you that bureaucrats are not necessarily members of the swamp.  Or, for that matter, nothing more than bureaucrats.  They are people.  They are patriots.  They see themselves as public servants, often with far more conviction and clarity than many of the politicians who make it their business to deprecate bureaucrats.  They work hard.  They are willing to take risks, even personal ones.  And sometimes (and nowadays more frequently than is desirable) they are the last line of defense between democracy and kleptocracy.

I'm not writing this simply to defend my own experience in working within government, or to get you to think that government is always here to help you.  I am asking you--in fact, I am literally begging you--to remember that bureaucrats are an indispensable part of a government of, by, and for the people, that government can't function without them, and that they are people with lives, families, priorities, and concerns, just like you.  Probably like someone you know.  And, in any case, like me.

Think about that very carefully, the next time someone comes along in an election and tells you that they, and only they, can solve all of our troubles.

They're telling you that because they don't want to be watched, or thwarted, by the people who have the most knowledge and experience when it comes to solving them.  Because they don't want to solve our problems, or your problems.  Just theirs.

They'll tell you that bureaucrats are the enemy.  Because it makes it easier for them to conceal who the real enemy is.

Saturday, December 14, 2019

Lillian Rourke, 1923-2019

I've written and published this blog over the past 11 years for a variety of reasons.  To express my views on politics, and the arts.  To develop my skills as a writer, which has offered me the best combination of personal fulfillment and financial success in my life.  And, mainly and more fundamentally, to make a difference.  Great or small, I didn't care.  So long as it was a good one.

At times, it has felt like a somewhat solitary and futile pursuit, as I have not gotten a lot of direct feedback from readers.  My blog stats and Twitter feed (to which TRH is linked) tell me that I have a readership, and I'm grateful for that.  It's not easy to generate Internet traffic if you're committed to doing it in ways that don't involve setting your hair on fire (which at my age, is not much of an option in any case).  But I am committed to doing it the hard way.  Yes, I promote some of my posts.  But no buying of followers.  Anybody who follows me does so because they want to.

And nobody was more devoted to following me, whether on my blog, in my acting career, or with respect to anything else, than this lady:


Lillian Irene Randall Rourke.  She was my mother, and the mother of my two sisters, as well as a grandmother to eight and a great-grandmother to another eight.  And, after a long life, she passed away peacefully nine days ago, at the age of 96.

When you see my blog, and read any of my posts, my hope is that you see a lot of things, perhaps without realizing it.  I hope you see dedication.  I hope you see what I hope are high standards, with regard to both are the content and the writing.  I hope you see a deep love of the best things that life has to offer.  And I hope you see a perspective that questions a number of assumptions, and a belief that all of us--this author included--need to be challenged on a regular basis, because all of us have room for improvement, and all of us need to wander around that room as much as we possibly can.

In other words, my hope is that you see Lillian.

Like my late father, with whom she has now been happily re-united, she was a Depression-era baby.  She grew up in Waterloo, Iowa, with her parents, her older sister (with whom she shared the gift of a long life), and her younger brother, who gave his life for his country in Europe along with many other young men of his generation.  Both of those relationships shaped her life, and therefor mine, in profound ways.  

With her sister, Rose Mary, she competed academically all the way through college, each of them trying to get more A's than the other.  This, of course, is another way of saying that both of them were very bright and very accomplished, with both of them pursuing careers at a time in history when doing so was not an option for many women--my aunt, in New York as a journalist with the Associated Press, and my mother as a registered nurse who became an instructor at the Yale Nursing School, where she met my father as a patient (a long story better suited to another post).

The foreshortened life of their brother was something that affected both of them very deeply, especially in the case of my mother.  She and Charlie were very close, and his death in World War II was a profound loss for her, one that shaped her views on war (and therefore on politics) for the rest of her life.

And both of these relationships shaped the way that she parented, and the expectations she had from me.  She wanted me to be a straight-A, Ivy League-bound student.  And she wanted me to live the most risk-adverse life possible.  As an academician and as a survivor of the Depression and the war, my father shared both of those goals for me as well.  And, I must confess that, as a son, I did not always do a great job of living up to those expectations.  Academically, although I managed to land in a good college (Oberlin), I had a very checkered career grade-wise in getting there.  In hindsight, that may have been partly a product of ADD, but it was also a function of being bored if I had a less-than-inspiring teacher.  As for risks--well, like a lot of boomers, I courted my fair share of them.  Taken together, these features of my life led to a lot of difficult moments with both of them.

But neither of them gave up on me.  Every time I needed either or both of them, they were there.  And, although I appreciated that quality in both of them when I was younger, it is only really now, having achieved orphan status at the age of 63, that I fully appreciate how lucky I was to have both of them.  Not every child is that fortunate, especially in an age when looking for a better life for your family can cost you both your freedom and your children.

And, just as I derived my fascination with politics from my father, starting to read "Newsweek" even when I was in elementary school, I derived my fascination with show business in general, and theater in particular, from my mother, who would tell me stories about visiting Rose Mary in New York and going to see shows together, including the original productions of "Death of a Salesman" and "A Streetcar Named Desire."  She and my father took me to see my first show on Broadway, "Butley," at the now-departed Morosco Theater, which helped give me my love of Broadway and its old theaters.  And they always attended the plays I have appeared in; it hurts to think that she can never see another one.

If I have mentioned my father a great deal in paying tribute to my mother, it should not surprise anyone who was privileged to know both of them.  My mother viewed her marriage as the greatest accomplishment of her life, and was as utterly devoted to my father and his best interests.  The love and understanding that the two of them shared for more than 56 years has done more than I can say to bless the lives of everyone with whom they came into contact.  Whatever strengths I have shown as a spouse (and, certainly, as a parent), I owe to their example, and their support of my family.

And, for almost the entire history of TRH, she was its most devoted reader.  Over the past several years, as I would call her and talk to her about various things, including our mutual dislike of the current White House occupant, she always made a point of telling me how much she liked reading it.  I never got tired of hearing her say that, especially during periods when I was wondering whether anyone besides me even knew TRH existed.

Even as I write this, I'm aware of how much more I could say about her.  Even now, I'm painfully aware, especially as I've already grieved for one parent, that I have a long road ahead of me when it comes to processing what Lillian Rourke meant to me, and sharing with others what I've learned as a result of having had her as my mother.  But I'm determined to walk that road as openly and as successfully as possible, and make the most of that experience.

She wouldn't have had it any other way.

Good night, Mom.  Sleep well.  See you again one day.  And don't let the GOP get you down in the meantime.

I love you up to the sky and back.