O Pioneers! (With Apologies To Willa Cather)

2020 can now be measured in hours, and those hours can't be counted down fast enough for me.  I vividly recall New Year's Day a year ago, the lion's share of which was spent in an emergency veterinary hospital in a sadly futile effort to save the life of our diabetic cat.  Moral of that story:  when G-d gives you a big hint on New Year's Day of what kind of year lies ahead, believe Him.

I've spent a good deal of time today thinking about what I should say to sum up the year, to point us toward the future in a positive way.  I know there's no way to sugar-coat what we've all been through, nor would I even attempt such an effort.  I do, however, think that I can talk about the way forward in a positive manner.  But caveat lector:  I didn't, and will not, say anything about it being easy.

Among the many losses of beloved public figures in 2020, the loss of David Dinkins, the first African American mayor of New York City, looms large in my mind for a number of reasons.  In part, that's because, in a year that highlighted the country's structural racism to an extent that cannot be reversed, he is a reminder of what can be accomplished when people are willing to fight that racism, as is Barack Obama.  Much as the unprecedented level of voter turnout, in a year of pandemic and poverty, is a reminder of what can be accomplished when the majority of Americans refuse to take democracy for granted.

Dinkins, and Obama, were pioneers in a nation built on the work of generations of pioneers.  We tend to romanticize what it means to be a pioneer.  Our culture depicts our forbearers in highly sanitized ways, making it seem not much different than a road trip or a camp-out.  But make no mistake:  being a pioneer has always meant being willing to sacrifice one's comfort and even one's safety in the service of a larger goal.  Those who can before us endured disease and death, over years and decades, and often did not live to see the fruits of their sacrifices.  But they were willing to look beyond themselves, believe in a world that did not exist, and give everything they could to make it real.  And they succeeded.

Dinkins was reviled by conservative (translation:  white) forces, especially by the Rupert Murdoch-owned New York Post, and was denounced as a failure by those forces when he was replaced after a single term by the current President's mouthpiece, Rudy Giuliani.  Yet, in hindsight, it's clear that he laid the groundwork for much of the changes in the city that Giuliani subsequently took enormous and substantially undeserved credit for accomplishing.  You can read about Dinkins' work here.  In the end, even the Post lionized Dinkins in reporting his death.

My point?

Being a pioneer is hard work.  But being a pioneer is necessary work.  And the need for pioneer work never ends.  And, in a country with our history, we owe it to those who have gone before us, and those who will follow us, to be willing to make sacrifices as well, especially since we have received so much from those who have gone before.  In the relay race of life, our primary job is to hand off the baton in good shape, hopefully in even better shape, to the runners in the next generation.

And, while I hate to say this, I have no choice:  Donald Trump, and the suicidal hatred of government off of which he feeds, aren't going to go away in 2021.  There truly is no rest for the weary.  There is going to be a runoff election in Georgia next week that will determine not just whether we can make progress in addressing our long term problems, but whether we will even get past the short-term (hopefully, pu! pu! pu!) problem of the pandemic.  If you want to make a difference in that election, and especially if you have not done so already, please click here and here.  (Yes, both of them.)

And, above all, no matter what happens in the runoff, stay involved.  Take nothing for granted.  Being a citizen in a democracy is always a full-time job.  I'm hoping that we've learned that this year to a degree that has never been reached before.

Don't be afraid of the price of being a pioneer.  Be afraid of the cost of not being one.

That's how to make the New Year, and those that follow, worth celebrating.

I wish all of you who have stopped by over the past 13 years to read TRH, and those who have not, the happiest and healthiest 2021 possible.  I am grateful to all of you.  I look forward to what all of us will achieve together.

Dum spiro spero.

The Real "Border Crisis"

We are rapidly, but not rapidly enough, approaching the end of a year whose departure will dismay no one, as well as the beginning of a year which we hope will be a deliverance from the nightmare called 2020.  So it's time to feel a bit retrospective, to once again try to look at the last twelve months and ask ourselves where we are, and where we are going.  

It's unfortunately hard to do that, because events at this time of year normally slow down enough to permit a period of reflection.  But when the President of the United States is still Donald Trump, and the dumpster fire of his time in office is coming to an end, his rage at the unraveling of his life of deception is so great that he is finding new and increasingly troubling ways to add fuel to the dumpster.  Four weeks before he's exposed to the absence of immunity from (at least) State prosecutions, and the deceptive tweets, the destructive pardons, and the distracting attempts to meddle in the work of legislative grown-ups are multiplying at a pace that makes the thought of keeping up almost impossible, even as it increasingly becomes more and more necessary.

But, with G-d's grace, and a certain amount of luck, Trump will be gone soon.  And it will be time to take stock of the damage that has been done to us, and to our democracy.  And that damage will take years to repair.  Maybe decades.  And there's the question of whether all of it can be repaired.  So we might as well avert our eyes and our attention from the long con of the Donald for a little bit, and take some stock.

I'm taking the Rachel Maddow approach with this, in which I start light-years away from Earth, ultimately land on a specific spot, and thereby hope to connect the big picture with the moment at hand.  So here we go.  

I've spent much of the fifty or so years in which I've discussed politics preaching that economics is never a simple capitalism-versus-socialism frame of analysis.  Economics requires the perspective and initiative of individuals, but no less requires cooperative efforts as well that channel those characteristics into productive channels, and help to avert them from producing destructive results.  So, some mix of private and public enterprise needed in order to make things work.  And there's no perfect "middle ground" in calibrating their respective roles, either.  Sometimes, we need more of one; sometimes, we need more of the other.  And one of the trickiest calculations a political leader can make is deciding where the emphasis needs to be placed, as well as when and how it needs to be changed.

In that sense, economics is no different from any other aspect of our experience.  Human history is a story defined and propelled by different forms of conflict.  Between faith and reason.  Between conquest and settlement.  Between construction and destruction.  Between two fundamental choices:  the betterment of humanity, or the advancement of venality.  It's why, for a number of years, I used to make a point at about this time of year of watching "Things to Come," a 1936 science-fiction epic based on a screenplay by H.G. Wells, which endeavored to depict the next hundred years of human progress.  Wells based it on his understanding of history as a struggle between those who advocated those fundamental choices.  Despite the film's flaws, including one scene reflective of Wells' anti-Semitism, it's worth watching at least once.  I think Wells' fundamental analysis of how human history works is sound, and applicable to an analysis of our present circumstances.

We are where we are, in the middle of a deadly pandemic with no clear end in sight, despite the recent emergence (thankfully) of vaccines that may help to build a path to a new normal.  That pandemic has led to the biggest economic collapse since the Great Depression, and exposed beyond any doubt the existence of structural racism that perverts our supposed founding values and virtues.  All of this--all of it--demands action on a national level, a coordinated plan and program carried out by the federal government that reflects the size and scale of the crisis as well as the solution to it.  This fact has been screamingly obvious to the majority of Americans, to Democrats and Republicans, which s why we are now counting down the days until Joe Biden's inauguration.

So why didn't we get it?  And, even worse, why is there still a sizable possibility that we still may not get it, going forward?

Because of the border crisis.

No, I'm not talking about the border crisis as reflexively covered by our woefully inadequate, co-opted media.  I'm not talking about what Trump calls "hordes" of people of color ready to stampede across the Rio Grande to take jobs away from white people.  The world isn't being threated by immigration; if anything, the right to travel is one of the oldest, most recognized, most fundamental human rights on Earth, one that has continually reshaped the world and always for the better.  Yet now, more than ever, that right has been restricted to the point, even prior to the pandemic, that people could only move around the world at the speed of sludge.

But money is a very different story.  Money has an unquestioned right to move around the world that makes light look like a slowpoke.  That's been true for at least half a century, and probably longer, ever since the rise of the modern multinational corporation.  However, since the end of the Cold War, and with the subsequent creation of international trade agreements that facilitated the existence and growth of the global economy, money has assumed an unprecedented role in its control of our lives.  And that's because global companies, and the global investors that control them, feel no need to be constrained by the decisions of government.  An international consensus had emerged that government was less essential to the affairs of humanity than the needs and concerns of the marketplace--a marketplace that covered the entire globe.

That consensus, and the extent to which our national government has attempted to adhere to it over the past several decades, has dragged our standard of living and even our level of civility down to the lowest international common denominators.  On both of these fronts, this nation used to lead by example.  Now, its "example" is one that many of its long-standing friends openly shun.  Instead of organizing the world into a noble crusade for the benefit of humankind, as we did during the period from the end of the Second World War to the close of the first Gulf War, we are now allowing ourselves to be stripped for parts and auctioned off to the highest bidder.

And that is far from all.

Our leading corporations, including ones like Boeing, whose bombers helped to save the world from Hitler, now openly and systematically compromise safety to wring a few extra dollars onto their balance sheets.  And they co-opt the state referendum process to not only defeat proposals that would restrict their ability to oppress workers, but do so in ways that can only be overturned by impossible-to-achieve supermajorities.

Our national legislature has seriously considered and advocated budget provisions that would not only allow corporations the right to systemically endanger the public, but give those corporations the right to sue you if you try to fight back against the danger.  And it has likewise advocating changing the powers of the Federal Reserve so that it will always be there, if needed, to provide socialism for the rich, but not for anyone else.

One of our two leading national parties has, as its primary organizing principle, the systemic restriction of the popular vote by any means necessary, undoubtedly operating under the theory that, if the people vote, the party's donors will go looking for even more supple politicians to do its bidding.  And it goes out of its way to cripple government's ability to fund itself and conduct what even Richard Nixon once called "the people's business."

And the Fourth Estate?  Please.  If only.  That formerly worthy institution is now dominated by, of all ironies, a naturalized immigrant whose systemic willingness to abuse women in print and through the airwaves serves as a demonstration of his confidence that Biden and the incoming Administration does not pose a threat to his ongoing destruction of American journalism.

Pretty bad, huh?  So, you ask, what's to be done?  How can we push capitalism back to the "middle ground"?  Especially now that it operates on a scale larger than any one government can operate?

Wells would have advocated, or at least supported, the creation of a worldwide government to constrain the more destructive aspects of capitalism.  "Things to Come," in fact, implicitly presupposes the existence of such an entity, although its details are not explicitly spelled out.  Rather, they are reduced to glittering generalities, like the slogan "Wings Over The World" (and now you know where Paul McCartney got that from).  That's just as well, perhaps.  An entity that attempted to operate on that scale would almost, by definition, be too cumbersome to effectively respond to the rapid pace of change in the 21st-century world.

I think that what would be better, and what should certainly should be attempted, is something that provided some of the basic ground rules and at least some of the enforcement procedures that a world government might possess, but that relied in a fundamental way on the actions of participating nations to make short-term responses to changing circumstances.  What I would envision, and suggest, is that this should be based on international treaties not unlike the trade agreements that came together in the 1990s, but that addressed concerns typically addressed by national and local governments, such as voting rights, living wages, health care, and environmental issues.  

Obviously, some of these structures already exist.  But what's needed to find a "middle ground" for our times is something that has to function more like a cohesive system of regulation and enforcement, but that still allowed nation-states certain rights of regulation over domestic affairs and unilateral (as well as multilateral) action in international ones.  The closest thing we have right now to something like this is the EU, which is not a particularly encouraging example.  And yet, it is precisely because the EU has thus far limited itself to addressing economic issues that its effectiveness has been thwarted.

And what role can the U.S. play in this?  Our own experience at the domestic level with the type of federalism I am advocating on the international level has, to put it politely, been something of a mixed bag, to say nothing of its willingness--or lack thereof--to date to participate in international agreements.  It would help if there were changes in the elected political class; there are already signs that this may be in the offing.  In turn, it might help if the workers of this country could finally come to understand that unity, and even short-term sacrifice, are the only way to create a climate for fundamental change.  That has always been the case, and it is no less true now.

Beginning in 2021, we all need to come together to move the "middle ground."  We can only do that, however, if we start by recognizing the nature of the border crisis that we actually face, and the increasingly desperate need to address it.

Oh, and Happy Holidays.  I'll be back before the New Year.

Why Georgia Should Be On Everyone's Mind

In last month's post-election post, I discussed the disappointing results in U.S. Senate races for Democrats, relative to the predictions being made in pre-election polls.  I considered the possibility that voters, fed a steady diet of bothsiderism by the MSM, decided at the last minute to declare a plague on the houses of both parties, despite the fact that only one party was clearly responsible for the existence of an actual plague.  I've had a few more weeks to think about it and, somehow, it still seems like the likeliest explanation.  

How else to explain the fact that pandemic politics clearly were decisive in the voters' rejection of Donald Trump (and just to be clear:  they really, truly have rejected him), while still allowing them to vote in Senate races for incumbent (and replacement) Republicans who have done everything possible to enable Trump's worst tendencies?  And not just with regard to the virus, but everything else.  The re-election of Susan Collins in Maine is particularly disturbing.  Collins did everything she could to stand by Trump, and thereby forfeit her well-polished image for independent thinking, and still won re-election by a decisive margin.  

In fairness, it may be the case that the large amounts of out-of-state money flowing into her opponent, Sara Gideon, and other Democratic challengers made it easier for Collins and other Senate Republicans may have made it easier to emphasize their local roots.  Still, if the question is independence from Trump, where is that revealed in her voting record over the last four years?  Where is it revealed in the voting record of any Republican Senator over that period?  Mitt Romney's vote for one article of impeachment?  Commendable, but hardly enough to suggest any real independence in the caucus as a whole.

Even now, flush with enthusiasm from an unexpected victory, Collins is bent on pretending that it has given her some sort of new-found political significance, and is now pushing a compromise pandemic bill with a handful of her Republican colleagues and some Democrats that is supposed to prove that a spirit of kum by yah has descended over Capitol Hill.  Not likely.  Not while Mitch McCONnell is still insisting on approving no more than one-sixth of the amount approved last spring by House Democrats for pandemic relief.  Not while, in addition to that paltry figure, he is insisting on iron-clad immunity for his donors from COVID-related litigation AND the nationalization of legal standards for personal-injury law.  Interesting, don't you think, to insist on nationalizing access to justice, while refusing to do the same for public health and safety?

It's precisely that latter refusal that has made this nation, which formerly set the global standard for public health and safety, an international pariah and an internal menace to everyone living in it.  As I write this, we are now north of 280,000 COVID-related deaths, with no end in sight.  Even if the promised vaccines live up to their potential, we will still have lost over half a million souls before we can say that this is over.

And while the President-elect, and his Democratic colleagues in both houses of Congress are pushing for badly-needed financial aid to Americans in every state, red or blue, what are Republicans actually doing?

Continuing to rubber-stamp Trump's judicial and executive appointments, while making negative noises about their plans for people Joe Biden will nominate.  Those appointments will no doubt live up to the unbelievably low standard being set by his current Supreme Court Justices, who are demonstrating their own unconscionable misunderstanding of how to balance religious interests with those of public safety.

Looking the other way while Trump attempts to use the pardon power of his office to give the criminal apparatus he has installed around himself a series of get-out-of-jail-free cards, including a big fat one for himself.

And otherwise pretending that there is still some level of doubt about the outcome of the presidential election, thereby wasting precious time in addressing the needs of a nation in crisis, while simultaneously enabling Trump's efforts to undermine democracy and push a slow-motion coup that may leave us stuck with him indefinitely, until everything finally comes crashing down on our heads.

If there's one thing we absolutely need to do--and, frankly, there are many--we all need to get one thought all the way through our heads and hearts, and act as though our lives depend on it, which they do:

Both parties are NOT the same.  And there is absolutely NO reason to doubt this.

Not while Trump is throwing crowbars into every aspect of federal machinery for the sole purpose of making life miserable for his successor.

Not when Trump's Bond-villain excuse for a Treasury Secretary is taking nearly half a trillion of federal dollars already approved by Congress for COVID relief, and putting it beyond the reach of the incoming Administration.

Not while the nation as a whole teeters on the brink of a level of economic disaster not seen in just under a century.

And absolutely, positively, not while the former party of Lincoln, and now the party of Trump, is pushing the one philosophy for which it stands:  the systematic suppression of democracy, by any means necessary.

Which, in an admittedly roundabout way, brings me to the matter of Georgia's two runoff races for its Senate seats, the outcomes of which will decide which party controls the Senate, and perhaps the federal government as a whole, for at least the next two years.

If the results of the Senate races on Election Day were in fact a conscious effort at ticket-splitting, the Republicans are trying to make the Georgia races all the more so.  There's already a great deal of right-wing rhetoric, including from Trump himself at a rally last night in the state, about how the GOP needs to take both seats in other to have a firewall against what they call socialism (and what the rest of the world calls SOP).  Right this minute, I could probably turn on my TV, select a news channel, and find some random talking head uttering the words "checks and balances."

You know who really needs checks and balances?

McCONnell and his Senate partners in crime.

For over a decade, he has done everything he can do stonewall the functioning of the Senate, turning the World's Greatest Deliberative Body into a deathtrap for any proposals that might even hint at being a threat to his monopoly on power.  Or, in other words, anything that might actually make the lives of the American people better.  And, as I've already mentioned, nothing about the results of this election thus far have done anything to change his mind.

Indeed, even if the Democrats take both Georgia seats, effectively making a 50-50 Senate one under Democratic control by virtue of Kamala Harris' tie-breaking vote, there's no guarantee that McCONnell will allow them to be seated.  The Constitution, and related Supreme Court decisions, allow the Senate to have the final say over whether newly-elected Senators will be seated.  And McCONnell, who will be the majority leader prior to the outcome of the elections, will be able to take advantage of any election "irregularities" ginned up by conservatives, and other Trump devotees, to argue that either of the Democratic candidates, if victorious, should still not be seated.  Think that sounds far-fetched?  Think about what McCONnell has done over the past five years with Supreme Court nominations, and then ask yourself if it sounds far-fetched.

And so, once again, as it was on Election Day, it's up to us.  As it always is and should be, in a democracy.  Especially in a democracy as evenly divided as this one.

Here is a quick and easy reference outlining how you can help Jon Ossoff and the Rev. Raphael Warnock check-and-balance Mitch McCONnell and the Republican criminal cabal and give America, for at least two years, a puncher's chance to become America again.

Whatever you can do, for the next month, until January 5th, keep Georgia on your mind, and in your heart.  Your nation, your life, may very well depend on it.

Post-Election Blue And Post-Election Blues

First, an apology.  I had meant to post an election wrap-up piece days ago, but the wrap-up process, like everything else in Trumpland, is continuing to make a bad-faith effort to descend into chaos.  Nevertheless, at this point, there are obviously some big and important things that we know.  So, without further ado ... 

Roughly four years ago, I wrote and published this.  I have often wondered during the awful interval between then and now if I would have to write something similar in the wake of events on Election Day of this year.

Thankfully, the answer is no.  We will have a new President and Vice President as of January 20, 2021.  As a consequence, we've got at least a puncher's chance of returning to an acceptable level of sanity and legality in the executive branch of the federal government.  Equally important--and, in some ways, more so--the glass ceiling we all thought would be broken four years ago was, in fact, broken this time, and in spectacular fashion, with the election of a black, Asian, Indian woman (with a Jewish husband and a step-family) to the office that is the proverbial heartbeat away from the most powerful position on Earth.  Rejoice, progressives:  Kamala Harris will be a truly intersectional Vice President.  And she will be working closely with the most experience President ever to take the office, someone who understands that the job requires serving the people, and not himself.  On top of that, they will both be working with the first woman elected and re-elected Speaker of the House of Representatives, with a shot at legislation that would end the Trump pandemic and begin to advance progressive values.

Perhaps most importantly for the sake of democracy generally, turnout was epic, and the process itself was, despite legitimate and justifiable fears to the contrary, free of fraud and manipulation.  And, I might add, despite volumes of effort by Trump and his cronies, including firing the official who made the assessment of the election's integrity, to convince everyone otherwise.

That's a fair amount of good news, and I wanted to make sure that I began by recapping it as fully as possible.  And it's just as well.  Because there's still a more-than-fair amount of bad news as well.

Despite a strong class of candidates and an epic level of grass-roots fundraising, Democrats did not flip the Senate.  They did pick up two seats in Colorado and Arizona, but lost one in Alabama, and the balance of power in the chamber now rests with the run-off races for the two seats in Georgia, a state where run-off races have not been kind to Democrats.  They lost, as of this writing, a net of seven seats in the House, just barely clinging on to control.  Perhaps worst of all, and relative to the House races, they were unable to flip any state legislatures, which ensures that the 2020 redistricting process, like the 2010 process before it, will be abusively controlled by the Republicans.

Perhaps, for me personally, and for many others, the most revolting, mind-numbing fact is simply this one.  Joe Biden received the most votes of any presidential candidate in history, but Donald Trump received the second-most votes of any presidential candidate in history.  Yes, Biden had a decisive victory, but not the blowout that the polls showed he might have.  And the polls, which also seemed to guarantee the existence of a Democratic-controlled Senate next January, missed public opinion on that front by a large margin as well.

For me, for all of us, we have to face the future of American politics by confronting an ugly reality.  Despite epic levels of public corruption and threats to people of color, combined with a pandemic that has claimed nearly a quarter of a million lives, with no end in sight and the likelihood of an acceleration between now and Inauguration Day, more than 72 million Americans looked at the status quo, went to the polls, and said "steady as she goes."

It's a level of disconnect between reality and reaction that almost defies description as well as belief.

And so, as we the people pick up the cards that this election has dealt us, we need to wrap our hearts and minds around a few realities as well, if we are ever to get back to the point at which our politics actually reflects and responds to our desires and needs.

First, and to borrow a phrase I have heard and read many times, Donald Trump is not a disease, but a symptom.

It has been axiomatic for decades that turnout favored Democratic candidates, that Republican candidates did well when turnout was low.  Given the fact that the Democrats were successful in taking two of the three political levers of national power, and that there gains in the Senate, as of this point, are literally by a two-to-one margin, a case could be made that the epic turnout this year proved that point.  But the more significant point is this:  the gap between the Democrats and Republicans in gains is not nearly as close as previous high-turnout elections.  The presidential outcome this year illustrates this.  Biden was leading in the polls by 8 to 10 points but, as of this writing, it looks like he will win by somewhere between 3 to 4 points.

There is only one way of explaining this.  Trump has brought into the national electorate a large number of people who are extremely conservative, even delusionally so given that Trump is not really anything but a narcissist, who are now wedded to him personally and will do and vote for anyone and anything he endorses or otherwise supports.  These people had stayed home on election day in the past, because they were too far out on the fringe to be moved by conventional conservative appeals.  Trump came along and changed all of that.

This is a movement that, sadly, will almost certainly survive Trump's Presidency.  And so long as he is alive, and even if he is in prison (a topic for another day), they will act out any right-wing fantasy he promotes.  Indeed, the Trump movement seems likely to survive Trump himself; his children could and probably will easily find a way to transfer his popularity to themselves, and there is clearly a large raft of hangers-on in his Administration and in Congress who will try to do so themselves, even if that means trashing any reputation that they had before that.  I'm not alone in this view:  you can find it discussed in detail elsewhere on the Web (with three examples here, here and here).

And no one can afford to think that hiding from these people is any kind of a solution.  When they are confronted in any way, even an unintentional way, they are prone to using or threatening violence to acting out their political fantasies.  And this is true whether the people in question are private actors or public officials. 

This is the end result of a slow-burning fuse in our body politic that was lit many decades ago by Ronald Reagan, who declared his political opposition to be "so far left" it had "left America," and before him by Richard Nixon, who declared every Democrat a Communist if that Democrat stood in his path to power.  And, while Ronald Reagan lit the fuse of our self-destruction, the fuse was already there. Post-World War II prosperity help to turn us into a nation of lotus eaters, thinking that nothing, including mutual sacrifice for the common good, should stand in the way of our individual prosperity. I knew even then, as I know now, that we lost our appetite for doing big things, as well as our faith that we could accomplish them.  We lost them, or rather we forfeited them, because they got in the way of our personal comfort.

Too many Americans use what they see as the government's mistakes as an excuse for accepting anarchy, and otherwise see live as a zero-sum game in which only individual survival matters.  However, that government occasionally makes mistakes, and I concede that it does, is neither an excuse nor a justification for arbitrarily shackling its reach.  That’s why we have elections:  to tell government when it’s gone off track, not to permanently derail the train.  That latter desire comes from citizens who have essentially abandoned the responsibilities of citizenship, who think those responsibilities are a joke for suckers, and that the only purpose of life is to scratch your personal itch.  The millions of Americans who have suffered, sacrificed, and even died for the sake of this country would respectfully beg to differ.

It’s hard for me, after watching this nightmare play out over four decades, over almost my entire adult life, to escape the conclusion that, as a nation, we’re doomed.  At times, in fact, escaping it feels pretty much impossible.  But, as I noted in my last post, each of us owes a debt to the past and the future, And, regardless of how things look on the ground, I still intend to pay my share.

I'm hoping that my fellow Democrats and other progressives share that commitment.  At times, however, I have my doubts.  The failure of the Democratic Party to take a majority in the Senate, or flip state legislatures, combined with losses in its House majority, has already placed prominent party members in a familiar position in sifting through these failures:  that of a circular firing squad.

Was ticket-splitting an issue with regard to the Senate and statehouse races?  At least a possibility.  Biden was in a commanding position in the polls for several weeks before the election.  That might have lead some voters to think about choosing the outcome that they have chosen so often in national elections:  divided government.  Some of the movement in the Senate polls during the final pre-election weeks suggest that this might have been happening.  On the other hand, turnout on both sides of the party divide was off the charts, perhaps falling outside of the modeling of the pollsters.  And again, thanks to the Georgia outcome, a Democratic Congress is still not out of the question.

Was messaging a problem?  This is a perennial Democratic headache, reflecting the ying and the yang of the parties progressive and moderate wings.  Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the most prominent member of the former wing, thinks that the party's digital efforts to organize and motivate voters fell short because of the party's unwillingness to use the best digital companies due to their progressive connections.  Moderates, on the other hand, thought that rhetoric about "defunding the police" and a "Green New Deal" may have been a much bigger problem.  Which, in turn, leads to another perennial question: should Democrats try to be more moderate?

One is forced to wonder:  what does it even mean to be a moderate in this political climate?  Where is the middle ground between fighting climate change and denying that it exists?  Where is the middle ground between law enforcement reform and giving the police unquestioned support?  Where is the middle ground between the need in a pandemic to wear face masks in public, and pretending that the pandemic is a hoax?  AOC won a district and won it again that had been held by a powerful, high-ranking moderate, a man once viewed as a potential replacement for Pelosi.  She's made that point herself, in the wake of the election.

And progressive have a point when they say that, when people understand the details of progressive ideas and programs, the objections tend to fall away, leading both to enactment of progressive policies and election of progressive officials.  On the other hand, running away from ideas that are popular, far from being seen as a moderate course of action, is likely to be seen as a cowardly one that costs the support of voters who are essential to moving progressive ideals forward.  

The truth is that moderate Democrats are still Democrats, still concerned about the same issues that concern progressives, but needing the energy and creativity that progressives bring to the political process.  And, in the course of working together, progressives have a way of pushing moderates in a more progressive direction, and making them slightly more progressive while still allowing them room to reach out to more conservative voters.  The bottom line is that both sides need each other, and need to stop carping at each other while spending more time listening to and learning from each other.  That's what happened in this election, and it brought out a record number of voters that elected a Democratic Administration.  

And note that, in the process, moderate Democrats like Chuck Schumer have become less moderate in the process.  That's also true not only of Biden, but the American people as well.  Ten years ago, the ACA and the concept of a "public option" were viewed by Americans and the press as being somewhere to the left of Trotsky; now, both are considered mainstream political ideas, ones that Biden wholeheartedly supports.

And, even without the combination of a Democratic House and Senate, Biden will still be in a position to advance a lot of progressive values and translate those values into results.  It's too much to expect that his personality will lead to Lyndon Johnson levels of persuasion with respect to congressional Republicans, as some have suggested; Mitch McCONnell has proven time and again how resistant he and his Senate Republican colleagues are to such persuasion.  But, through various forms of executive action, Biden can and no doubt will be able to take a great number of highly consequential steps, especially with regard to the economy.

And, again, I cannot stress this enough:  thanks to the outcomes in the Georgia Senate races, we still have a shot at a unified Democratic government.  I encourage all of you, no matter how tapped out you feel financially at this point, to get involved in the two runoff races and make a contribution--hell, make as many contributions as you can--toward making that goal a reality.  If you need a guide to ways by which you can do that, take a look here.

I should add, however, that the situation in Georgia requires a cautionary note:  the Democratic victory there in the presidential election has already led to this.  Yet another reason to take state government, and state government elections more seriously.  To say absolutely nothing about this.

So, stay vigilant, everyone.  Stay strong.  Stay united.

At least for now, there's less reason to curse the darkness.  At least for now, we're still able to light candles, and light the way to a better future.

*************************************

This is the last post for TRH for November.  I'm going to be taking off the rest of the month to celebrate Thanksgiving, and to start getting ready for the holidays.  It's obviously going to be very different this year.  Thanksgiving will just be with my wife and sister-in-law, and Hanukkah will have to be observed not with my entire extended family physically present, but through phone calls and perhaps a Zoom meeting or two.  It's hard, eight months into the pandemic, not to feel a strong sense of isolation and limited mobility.  I know that's something we all wrestle with.  But everyone in my family (pu! pu! pu!) is healthy and safe.  Nothing is more important that that.  Nothing should be more important than that to any of us.  So, in addition to staying vigilant, strong, and united, please stay safe.  Better days are coming, and staying safe now will make those better days all the more rewarding.

"No Great Nation Is Ever Conquered Until It Has Destroyed Itself": Part 2

The quote with which this post is titled refers back to one of my last posts before the 2016 election.  It was, in brief, a warning against our even-then-obvious capacity for self-destruction at the hands of an unchecked Republican Party and its worst supporters.  Sadly, it has aged well.  Better, in fact, than even my worst fears at the time I wrote it.  I didn't have the pandemic on my radar back then.  But, given everything else, why should I be surprised about even that?

Obviously, this will be my last post before the election.  I've spent the last four years doing everything I can to make sure that this time, things will be different.  I voted via a paper ballot I delivered in person to my local board of elections.  I wrote to voters in Texas.  I've donated more money to candidates and get-out-the-vote organizations than I have done previously in my entire life.  And, of course, I've posted here, week after month after year.  And I've spent untold hours--more than I care to admit--on Twitter, and in front of MSNBC, sharing my thoughts and watching like-minded individuals doing all that they can do.

Will it make a difference?

If it's possible for sheer gumption and effort to make a difference, then, in any other election, my answer to that question would be an unqualified "Yes."

But I'm not so sure.

Part of that is the level of chicanery that is possible in a digital age from foreign actors, most notably Vladimir Putin (aka Donald Trump's best friend).  But part of it is the history of the nation itself, and, specifically, the unholy link between bigotry and money.  It was baked into our founding documents, it nearly tore the nation apart in the nineteenth century, it led to a profound turning point in our politics in the twentieth century, and now, it's tearing us apart again.  We have a constitution designed to protect property rights, often at the expense of human rights and, in this moment in America, that fact is being reasserted in our politics with a vengeance.

In fact, it's reasserting itself with a level of violence that can only be described as an inch or two below the level of open civil war.  Four years ago or more, a story like this one would have been a front-page, above-the-fold, banner-headline story.  Now, after four years of epic corruption that rises to the level of national tragedy, it's just another day that ends with the letter y.

At this point, the best thing I can do is pause, suggest you do the same, and ask you to take a time-out from reading this post, and spend several minutes carefully perusing this.  Trump's corruption has been so repeated in frequency, and so widespread in nature, that it's hard to wrap your mind around all of it, so as to be mindful of how urgent it is to remove him from power.  Thankfully, the Times is able to help with this.  For emphasis, I take this opportunity to stress two things:  as a capitalist, Trump is almost a parody of Soviet-style central planners, and, as a sword protector of our most basic rights, Trump sees people as things to be either manipulated or destroyed.

And his followers, inside and outside of the Republican Party, are no better.  If they lose Trump, they will immediately begin the search for a like-minded replacement.  And we have no guarantee that they won't find one.

A party that cares more about your right to own a gun and less about your right to vote is a party to be feared by every decent human being alive, anywhere.  It is a party that cares only about the next fifteen minutes.  It is not a party that cares about the future.

I care very much about the future.  I always have.  Given the fact that none of us live forever, and all of us depend upon the lives of those that came before us, we should all aim to contribute to the future. It's the best way to cherish the contributions of the past.

The past and the future are precious to me in a personal way.  Let me explain why:

This is the obituary of my uncle, who was killed in action in World War II.  Like thousands of other brave young men and women, he did not get to live the life that his sacrifices, and theirs, enabled the rest of us to live.  But that didn't diminish the value of the life he lived, and the death he suffered.  Both of those things, in different ways, are gifts to the rest of us.  They are not to be thrown away.  They are to be honored by doing everything we can in the process of selecting the next leaders of this nation.  And they would have hated to have a president who thought of them as "losers."

And then, there's this:

These are my granddaughters, one of whom was born with  a life-threatening pre-existing condition.  Thankfully, with the help of very brave, devoted parents, and the coverage made possible through the Affordable Care Act, she has made it (pu! pu! pu!) to the age of 8 and third grade.  Hopefully, she will be able to live a life and make her own contributions to the world that is fortunate to have her and her sister.  And the medical professionals who saved her, and who have saved thousands of lives throughout the horrors of this pandemic, are furious at Trump's suggestion that they have done what they've done for money.

We're not here on this earth for personal glory, folks.  We're here for each other.  As I've said before, we're runners in a relay race.  We get the baton of life and opportunity at birth, we run with it for as long as G-d gives us the grace to do so, and, hopefully, we hand it off to the future in as good, if not better, shape than it was when we received it.  L'dor v'dor.  From one generation to the next.  That's the only way a county like this one could come into being.  And it's the only way it can ever be bettered.

There is nothing to be gained by sitting this one out, folks.  Many of us might wish for a better choice of political parties than the one we currently have.  But we don't.  To my fellow progressives, and to everyone, I close here by say that civilization is built one brick at a time, one generation at a time.  And a civilization can destroy itself in many ways, but perhaps the worst one is by doing nothing, especially when it is actively being threatened from with in.  And it is.  The nation of E pluribus unum is now the nation of "GET OFF MY LAWN!"

So, progressives, please heed the advice given here.

And all of you, whether you're progressives or not:  this election may be your last chance to save the best of what we've been, and the best of what we can be.

Don't throw it away.

Donate.  Organize.  Write.  Get others to do all of these things.

And, above all, the day after tomorrow:

VOTE!

To Pack, Or Not To Pack?

The confirmation process is now over.  A Supreme Court Justice who pioneered in the evolution of gender jurisprudence has now been officially replaced on the Court by a "handmaiden" who seems poised to turn back that evolution to a point preceding the Stone Age--if this is any indication, anyway.

A brilliant scholar and thinker has been replaced by someone who, in her confirmation hearings, struggled to give evasive answers to legal questions with obviously transparent answers.

A pillar of nonpartisan, independent integrity has been replaced by a right-wing apparatchik who is fully prepared to help subvert the rule of law to abet the unlawful efforts of Donald Trump to keep a job he never should have had, and does not deserve--but which he is prepared to do anything he can to keep.

Where does that leave the current position of the Court in our constitutional order, and the people's perception of it?  For that, I need only direct you to this op-ed piece in the New York Times, written by two former law clerks of now-retired Justice Anthony Kennedy.  The authors self-identify as "liberals."  But they were employed by a Justice who was appointed to the Court by Ronald Reagan, during an election year, and confirmed by a Democratic-led Senate.  That should tell you how far the institutional integrity of the Court has slid in the past three decades, especially with Mitch McCONnell's foot on the accelerator.

Oh and, by the way, where were the Democrats in the middle of all of this?  Where, all too often, they usually are:  all over the place.  True, some of them asked tough questions, and Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island gets special mention for grease-boarding the sordid history of dark money in conservative Court-packing efforts (a history that is even more sordid than we thought).  On the other hand, we were also treated to this:  proof that the senior Senator from California doesn't understand that true greatness is knowing when to get off.  As if this wasn't bad enough.

True also, they did boycott the Judiciary Committee vote to send the nomination to the Senate floor, in an attempt to stop the vote by creating the absence of a quorum.  But guess what?  The Republicans voted to send the nomination along anyway.  Fighting by the rules means nothing if the other side sheds the rulebook.

Do the Democrats finally get it?  Do they understand that they have been, whether they like it or not, engaged in war by other means, and that their lack of an appetite for combat has made it an asymmetric war, one in which their mounting losses threaten not just them, but all of us?

I wish I could say that the answer is "yes."  But I'm not sure.  And a big chunk of that uncertainly stems from the fact that even I'm not sure what they should do at this point.

The most-discussed potential remedy takes a page out of Franklin D. Roosevelt's playbook:  packing the court with progressive justices to undo the chicanery that McCONnell and his crony colleagues have engaged in over the past four-plus years.  Even moderate Democrats like Chris Coons seem to be sold on the idea.

Me?  I'm kind of agnostic on the idea.  That's at least in part because the idea polls poorly, which is why I think Joe Biden was smart to kick the proverbial can by announcing that he would, if elected President, appoint a commission to study reforming the federal judiciary.  But it's also because I see it becoming a bottomless pit of retaliation, with successive Congresses of each party adding justices until the roster of the Supreme Court has more members than Congress.

Don't get me wrong:  I'm not advocating doing nothing.  Far from it, as you'll see if you'll read further.  But we have to do something that makes sense, in both the short and long run.  The Republicans have made the Court a vehicle for the promotion of raw power.  Our response to that has to be as raw and as powerful as the steps they’ve taken.  Let's start with their favorite subject:  money.

Constitutionally, the Justice's salaries are guaranteed to them.  Fair enough.  But everything else?  Their building?  Their staff?  The various services related to the functioning of the Court?  Well, that's under the control of the political branches.  It might be useful for a Democratic Congress and President to, ahem, remind the constitutionally-salaried Justices of that fact.  It might be prudent for the political branches to ask whether, in a fiscally and pandemically troubled time, whether the Court's work is giving the Constitution, and the general welfare of the people that the Constitution is designed to promote, whether the Court is giving the people the best bang for the buck.  I'm not advocating bribery, but it's completely fair for Congress to use the power of the purse to keep the Court from going too far off the grid of our basic law and the intentions (yes, the original ones) that lie behind it.

Is that too edgy for you?  Well, maybe it is.  I'm not insisting on it, any more than I'm insisting on or forbidding the adding of Justices to the Court.  How about this:  we subject the Justices to the same canons of ethics, including rules on recusals, with which every other judge (and attorney, myself included) must comply.  Right now, whether you can believe it or not, the Court's Justices are not bound by any ethics code.  Liberal or conservative, they all should be.

And any code to which they are bound must not only specifically reference the power of Congress to impeach federal judicial officers, but provide for the power of Congress to enforce changes in the Court's rulings that are flatly wrong as a matter of law or fact.  This would prevent obviously corrupt actors like Brett Kavanaugh, who seems disposed to both sloppy, unfactual reasoning and extra-constitutional results, from doing consequential damage to the rule of law.  And avoid battles between the Court and various third parties such as this.  As things stand now, all three Trump-appointed Justices are in a position to help him stay in office by way of specious, post-election litigation.  Ethics code or now, if they do not recuse themselves from the consideration of such litigation, they should be impeached.  Full stop.

But, maybe, just maybe, this is all premature.  Maybe we can fall back on the old saw that the Supreme Court follows the election returns, and that a big blue wave might throw cold water on many of the current Court's jurisprudential fantasies.  Maybe this is an indication that the potential for that to happen is in fact there.  Maybe we can take comfort from the wisdom of think pieces like this one.

The truth is, I'm not sure what we should do.  I'm only convinced that we need to do something.

And we need to do this above all:

VOTE!

And no, this is not my last pre-election post.  I'll have more to say tomorrow.  Stay tuned, as we used to say in broadcast media.  Or, as Rachel Maddow would say, watch this space.

The Real Third Way In America

Are we poised, nine days out, to make a difference?  Are we ready for truth, justice, and the American way to begin the process of reclaiming the United States of America, and all of the things that it has historically stood for?  If I were answering that question based solely on the polls, I would be strongly inclined to say "yes."

But, sometimes, I wonder.  And coming across a story like this one certainly doesn't help.

I have long grown weary of these so-called essays that show up periodically in mainstream media, the ones in which a reporter goes off in search of the mythological "typical" American small town, far away from the "elite" coasts, where simple people leading ordinary lives, sitting around diners (and, yes, it's almost always diners, or the mall) opine about the state of America, or what they imagine America to be outside of their fifty-mile-radius view of it, or why their formerly idyllic life is no longer idyllic since everyone's move away from it.  

Almost all of the people being interviewed are white.  Almost all of the people doing the interviewing are white.  The results, at least to me, seem to be largely examples of confirmation bias that is designed to support racial bias.  If white people determined to live exclusively among white people are unhappy with the state of the world, than the world surely must be in fact going to hell in the proverbial hand-basket.  And, if a white reporter is doing the listening and the writing, well, who are they to challenge the views of interviewees willing to dump an easy-to-write, easy-to-publish story.

Nowhere in any of these stories will you find any meaningful, critical examination of why these formerly thriving towns are no longer thriving.  The unwillingness to deal with a changing world.  The unwillingness to accept the arrival of people who wear a different complexion, or speak a different language.  The adoption of politics that fail to trickle down prosperity, and instead shovel the fruits of their labors upward to the very "elites" these folks despise so much.  The unwillingness to see the consequences of those politics, and to change them.  And, finally, the unwillingness to see why this causes so many people to move out, to cluster among the coasts (where the money's gone, that is) in search of a better life.

It's precisely the isolation from large numbers of people, with a real variety of perspectives and life lessons, that encourage the extreme, and frankly insane, views that then end up spread on the Internet and Fox News.  Isolation breeds ignorance, ignorance breeds rumors, and, the more wild and entertaining the rumors, the more likely they are to be believed by people who, thanks to the decline in our system of education, lack a foundation for challenging them.

And challenging such rumors and fantasies should be one of the most important missions of the media, and is one important reason why there is a First Amendment in the first place.  Once upon a time, media outlets would produce these essays, giving their audiences the unvarnished, often ugly views that many places in the interior of our nation harbor.  But they would challenge those views, and the people who hold them, in a way that no longer happens.  This is in no small part because of decades of screaming by right-wing apparatchiks about "liberal media bias."  As if those doing the screaming were really concerned with what the mandate of the press should be in a democracy:  telling the truth.

But the mainstream media no longer challenges fantasies and rumors.  It goes out of the way to confirm them.  Consider the moment in the Time magazine story linked above when the reporter, challenged by an interviewee about the fact that she was wearing a mask, lowered it to her chin.  To "appease" him.

To appease him?

The purpose of wearing a mask in the current crisis isn't to create an exercise in virtue-signaling.  It's not to identify one's partisan politics.  It's not meant to anger anyone.  It's meant to save lives, regardless of the politics practiced in those lives.  How many times does it have to be said:  the virus can kill you, and can go anywhere to do it, and doesn't care about anybody's politics?  It's a virus.  It has the same imperative to live that anything else does.  And its mission is to kill you, whether you take it seriously or not.

Too many of us on the blue side of our philosophical divide have forgotten how to fight.  Or worse, they have become too afraid to fight.  They view modern life as a negotiation, a process by which one can only run away from danger, or find a way to pargain with it.

Well, there is in fact a third way.

Fight it.  And defeat.

That's what I'm aiming to do on November 3.  And I hope and pray, wherever you are, that you'll join me.

Despair, Or Defiance--And Does It Matter?

Not long ago, I heard a pollster describe Donald Trump as "the ultimate high-floor, low-ceiling candidate."  It was a professional's way of acknowledging a peculiar fact about Trump's support as measured statistically.  At his very best in this regard, his high point was probably on election night 2016, when he gained 46% of the popular vote--or, as I would characterized it, Michael Dukakis territory.  Lately, after four years of deception and malfeasance, including an impeachment trial with an outcome that his party rigged for him, and with a strong opponent in his race for re-election, Trump is doing not much better than 40% when it comes to popular opinion.  Allowing for a typical statistical margin of error around 3%, that suggests that 3% also defines the limits of Trump's ability to manipulate what people think about him.  

On the other hand, to be perfectly fair, it also defines the limits of what Trump's opponents can do to undermine what people think about him.  And this, mind you, despite a trail of nakedly corrupt behavior that one would think would reduce his public support, at the very least, to the level at which Richard Nixon found himself post-resignation:  around 25%.  Yet there he is, only about 6% below his peak.

Why?

I have believed for a long time that the key to his popularity can be found in Trump's own world view, which, despite his rhetorical preference for puffery, prevarication, and flat-out lying when discussing his self-perceived "greatness," is in fact deeply nihilistic.  He's said more than once that life isn't worth living, since it ends in death, and the only thing worth doing with life is to tear it all down as you make your trip to the boneyard.  Whatever else one can say (none of it good) about that point of view, it's certainly reflects the manner and extent to which he's failed to do his job.

And the 46% to 40% of the people who follow him?  I think they're every bit as nihilistic as he is.  They don't like the world as it is, one that is no longer structured to favor white men supporting themselves in union-guaranteed jobs.  They lack the ambition or vision--or both--to imagine the possibility that they have the power to change, to find the possibilities that might (and do) actually exist in the post-industrial world.  They are, the inheritors of the post-war prosperity, frankly too spoiled, despite their poverty, too ignorant and immature to take whatever spare money they have and spend it on something other than build an arsenal worthy of a small army--say, retraining for a new career, or moving someplace where there are jobs that they could do.

Yep.  Why try to make live better, when you've got Trump to tell you that it's better to just blow it all up, and take all of the people you hate with you.  They're going to Hell, and you're going to Heaven.  Right?

It doesn't make sense to me.  But it makes sense to them.

Does this point of view seem harsh to you?  Well, tell that to Virginia Heffernan, formerly of the New York Times, and currently of the Los Angeles Times.  She seems to be on the same page with me.

I have to admit, however, that my wife has a slightly different point of view.  She thinks that Trump supporters are motivated not by despair, but by arrogance.  Whether from whiteness, or from religion, they think that they're bullet-proof, because they think Trump is bullet-proof.  They really think that COVID precautions are for losers.  They not only think that they're not going to die, so long as they blindly follow Trump off of whatever cliff he's leaping on any given day, but that the rest of us won't die if we fail to support them in jumping.

Who's right?

Does it matter?

One way or the other, if we all end up going off the cliff, whether we choose to or are dragged there by the political power Trump is able to extract from his 40%-to-46%, it may not.

And so, once again, with 16 days to go:

VOTE!

No, We're NOT Safe After November 3

When a political party controls the Presidency and at least one house of Congress, the surest sign that it is about to lose the former is when it starts talking primarily about the need to preserve "checks and balances" by telling voters to keep it in charge of the latter.  So, for those of us who are worried about Joe Biden's chances of evicting Donald Trump from the House of Plague, formerly known as the White House, it may supply some real measure of reassurance beyond poll results to know that the money interests that govern the Republican Party (and thus, the rest of us for the past four decades) are beginning to bail on the Orange Iguana in favor of supporting Mitch McMumbles and his Keystone Kops.

But, in this case, we may have one other sure indication that it's over for Trump:  Trump himself, who's had a pretty bad week, culminating in a two hour radio pity-party hosted by Rush Limbaugh.  Limbaugh and his guest of honor spent that time about how, despite their mutually undeserved share of good fortune in life, that life had actually been unfair to both of them, a message that listeners both agreed with and empathized with.  This is not the message of someone who wants to be seen as acting like a winner, anymore than this is.  Or this.  For that matter, this.  And especially this.

Trump, it seems, has given up.

Or has he?

Let's go back to his Limbaugh performance for a minute.

Trump didn't appear on Limbaugh's show by accident.  He's curried favor with the broadcast blowhard for a long time, even before he forever tarnished the Medal of Freedom by awarding it to Limbaugh.  That's because Limbaugh's listeners are partners with Trump (and Limbaugh, for that matter) in grievance.  Not when it comes to a lack of material success.  Rather, when it comes to the one thing that links McCONnell's donors and Limbaugh's audience:  the decline and fall (in slow-motion) of white privilege.

As long as Trump can feed the racist fires of his base, he's got a way of maintaining power, and thereby finding a way out of the post-presidential legal and financial troubles that now seem likely to dog him once he leaves the White House.  But keep in mind:  even if he does lose the election, he will have eleven weeks of access to the powers of the most powerful office in the world.  Who knows if he wouldn't sell state secrets to pay his bills?  Who knows if he wouldn't try to swing a plea bargain by launching a nuclear war?

And who knows if he won't try to hide his complicity in stirring so-called "militias" to the point at which they would deliberately go beyond circumventing constitutional government to almost reach the point of attempted murder?   A tweet (now deleted) on Twitter earlier stated that Trump was attempting to delete his earlier attacks on Gretchen Whitmer.  Whether or not he's succeeded in doing so is not the point.  The fact that Trump has groups like this at his beck and call for is purposes is, because they will be around long after Joe Biden is sitting in the Oval Office.  (And, in any case, can we finally stop pretending these groups are the "well-regulated" fighting forces referred to in the text of the Second Amendment, and use the power of the national government to put them out of business?)

And Trump will still have at his beck and call, for the most part, a Republican Party that has devolved from being a political party to being a crime syndicate.  And, finally, an enemy of democracy.  That's not an exaggeration.  Take Utah's Senator Mike Lee's word for it.

One way or another, even out of office, Trump, his family, and his followers are not going anywhere, his followers in particular.  Over the past four years, they've had a taste of real power that's not leaving their mouths.  And Trump will still be around to feed it, perhaps to the point of launching large-scale violence.  And Trump has, over the past four years, repeatedly shown us something about himself that we fail to believe at our peril:  when it comes to protecting his interests, there are no limits.

We're not safe after November 3, no matter what, folks.  If we get a Democratic blowout on that day, rejoice.  You've earned the right to do it.

But keep your power dry.  They surely will.

The Super-Spreader President and Senate

One of the minor problems of blogging in the age of Trump is simply keeping up with his perfidy and all of the manifold ways in which it is unleashed upon the rest of us.  This week has been no exception.  In fact, if you are inclined to think that this week has been the ultimate example of this problem, I'm happy to chime in on your behalf.

As I type this, I am watching MSNBC's coverage of Trump walking slowly and uncertainly from Walter Reed Medical Center into his limousine and the trip back to the White House, having, perhaps, made a successful recovery from infection with the COVID-19 virus.

If, that is, he has truly recovered, and not overruled the best advice from some of the best physicians in the nation.

If, for that matter, he has even needed to recover from an actual infection, rather than needing an elaborate public relations stunt to take public attention away from the most disastrous presidential debate performance in the history of the Republic, a performance that has allowed his Democratic opponent to open up a double-digit lead in the polls.  We are being told that he will still be treated as a patient even while being back in the White House, confined to quarters, and kept apart from a West Wing staff that itself has been decimated by COVID-19.  Those infections, I do not doubt, are real; I understand that at least some staff members are now working remotely, if they are able to work at all.

But Trump himself?  Who knows?

This is the fundamental problem with Donald Trump in the role of a public servant.  He has no sense of obligation to anyone but himself, and therefore no commitment to share 100% of the truth, even the portions of it that might harm his personal interests.  This is absolutely, positively not about my distaste for him as a Republican, or as a conservative.  Cards on the table:  I don't think that, on a fundamental level, Trump is either of those things, or anything except an utterly self-absorbed excuse for a human being.  Such an individual should not even be president of a washroom, let alone of the United States.  When Ronald Reagan, or George W. Bush, were hospitalized and temporarily transferred their powers to their Vice Presidents, I had no doubt that they needed medical treatment, and no reason to doubt that their doctors were telling us what we needed to know.  And, I hasten to add, no reason not to wish them speedy and complete recoveries.

But we're in a totally different universe here, folks, when it comes to reality and the extent to which we can feel we know what we need to know.

This much we do know, starting with a week ago last Saturday:

Many of the people assembled in the Rose Garden for the announcement of Amy Comey Barrett's nomination to the Supreme Court are now COVID-19 positive.

Trump, according to his own doctors, was COVID-19 positive as of the time of that announcement, and attended his Monday debate with Joe Biden unmasked (with an equally unmasked family in the audience), and told no one, including Biden and his family.

Trump then went to a rally in Minnesota, unmasked, with a huge and largely unmasked crowd.  We, the American people who deserve to know everything about the President's health, only learned thereafter that he and the First Lady were COVID-19 positive, but were assured that we had nothing to worry about, despite the fact that we the American people, were the last to know.

Shortly after getting this cherry reassurance, we were told that Trump was on his way to Walter Reed, where he received the very best care by way of what can only be described as socialized medicine, despite the fact that he has been exposed by the New York Times as an epic tax scofflaw, and despite the fact that, if Barrett does make it to the Court, 20 million Americans will lose their health care coverage if she assists the other Republican Justices in destroying the Affordable Care Act.

Oh, and, by the way, about her nomination:  despite the fact that three Republican Senators were infected at that Rose Garden ceremony, and may not be able to participate in the confirmation process (and thus deprive her of votes she will need to be confirmed) and despite the fact that the Senate needs to take up the pandemic relief legislation that the Democratic House has passed (twice), Mitch McCONnell and most of the rest of the corrupt Republican Senate caucus are focused on what they consider the all-important need of turning the 5-4 Republican majority on the Court into a 6-3 majority.  Desperate is the polite word for this conduct; craven and corrupt work much better.

All in all, just another week in the life on the most criminal President in over 200 years of American history, and the Senate that stands behind him, no matter how much the truth betrays the true nature of their character, or lack of it.

Frankly, I've had a very hard time processing all of this, much less writing about it.  Summing it up isn't much easier.  I'll give this a try.

If Donald Trump's doctors are to be believed (and I give them the benefit of the doubt), then Donald Trump is a super-spreader President.  And the majority of the United States Senate are his accomplices.

Let that sink in.  And let it make you fight like hell to stop them.

The Supreme Court and Religion

And so it begins.  Yet another battle over the future of the Supreme Court, the fate of women in America, and, perhaps, the fate of the nation itself.

And, once again, the Republicans and movement conservatism wants to make it all about religion, while saying that their opponents have absolutely no right to bring up the subject of religion.

That they have done this time and time again for decades should be evidence enough of their self-serving hypocrisy.  Let me take a moment to dwell on my own personal experience in this area, as a recovering evangelical Christian.

Theologically speaking, evangelical Christians and Roman Catholics are natural opponents, even though they claim to worship the same God, and claim to honor the centrality of Jesus of Nazareth in that worship.  Evangelicals are, and have been for longer than my life span, obsessed with the issue of personal vice, while Catholicism embraces a somewhat larger view of social and economic justice.  This is why evangelicals, and not a few Catholics, have major problems with papal decrees (especially from the current Pope) that address these questions, while wholeheartedly exalting those views in the area of human behavior where the two religions intersect most neatly--sex.  

It is this intersection that explains why, with the help of evangelical Christianity's political muscle, there is a Catholic majority on the Supreme Court, while also explaining why that majority occasionally produces decisions that grate on the nerves of evangelicals.  For example, and most notably in the current moment, its refusal to strike down the Affordable Care Act.

Which is why it is both appropriate with regard to the question of stare decisis, and otherwise to protecting the health and welfare of the nation suffering through the worst pandemic in a century, to discuss how her views, on the law, religion, or anything else.  This is a job application for a lifetime position on the most consequential court on the county.  It shouldn't be easy for any nominee.  Putting it bluntly, it should be damned hard.  If they're equipped to parry arguments from the toughest, smartest attorneys in the nation, I'm comfortable saying that they should be able to handle a few tough questions from elected officials.  And let me remind everyone:  Brett Kavanaugh couldn't, and didn't, pass that test.  And a combination of timid Senators and corporate media shoehorned him onto the court anyway.

We can't afford political timidity or media corruption getting in the way of an open, robust, confirmation process.  Not when the current President, and his party, have all but confessed that the major goal here is to manipulate the outcome of a national election.

I've told you any number of times to vote, vote, vote, vote, vote, VOTE.  So here I am, doing it again.  It's the most peaceful possible end to our long national nightmare (thank you, Gerald Ford).

But, for those of you inclined to pray, especially on the eve of Yom Kippur, please do so.  We can use all the help we can get.

And g'mar chatima tovah to us all.

The Death Of A Justice--And, Perhaps, Much More

The rate at which politics moves in the Trump era is enough to give anyone whiplash.  Just a bit more than a week ago, I was exhorting all of you not to neglect the impact you could have on Senate races,  And here we are.

Somewhat random, but nevertheless relevant thoughts:

First and foremost, in our political culture's abandonment of decency, and specifically the Republican lust for power above all else, we have largely neglected to do what any decent country would do in the wake of losing someone with the level of human and professional accomplishment achieved by Ruth Bader Ginsburg:  to focus on mourning the loss of her, and on her greatness.  While I am completely confident that the latter will be enshrined in history--indeed, to a great extent, it already has--we have not even taken a full day, or even a few hours, as a nation to come together and honor not just an outstanding public servant, but a wonderful human being with the greatest accomplishment any human being can achieve:  family and friends.  Their loss is greater than ours.  And it has, for the most part, almost entirely overlooked by far too many of us.

For my part, I'll sum it up this way.  She was someone who understood that a denial of freedom to some of us was a denial of freedom to all of us.  She was someone who understood that democracy enabled us to disagree agreeably, and that doing so was the only path to a more perfect Union.  And she was someone whose wisdom and warmth inspired people to embrace her to a degree that seldom happens to those in the legal profession.

Well, sadly, not all people.  If nothing else, this disgusting story allows me to pivot to an unavoidable topic:  the political aftermath to Justice Ginsburg's death.

As of this morning, and even before a specific nominee to replace her has been made, Mitch McCONnell appears to have enough votes to ram that nominee through the Senate successfully, literally weeks and perhaps as little as days before a general election.  It's been said many times already, but it can't be said enough:  this is of course the same Mitch McCONnell who repeatedly declared, a bit over four years ago, that no judicial nomination to the federal bench could be allowed to proceed in an election year, to allow the will of the people to be heard with respect to said nomination.  

In fact, he claimed that this position was a rule of the Senate, enshrined by Joseph Biden back when Biden was still a member of the Senate.  This position is based on an out-of-context quote from Biden back then, and overlooks the fact that, as chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, he oversaw the confirmation of a Supreme Court Justice in the last year of Ronald Reagan's second term--specifically, Anthony Kennedy, the Justice eventually replaced by Brett Kavanaugh (who clerked for Kennedy). 

Now, in response to the bipartisan effort to underscore his hypocrisy, McCONnell is now saying "Oops!  Did I forget to mention that the rule has a subsection that waives it for years when the Republicans hold the White House and the Senate?"  Yes, Mitch you did.  And you forgot to include find a Biden quote to support the "subsection," because no such quote exists.  In fact, should you need further proof of how muddled his "thinking" about the confirmation process is, take a look here, where he describes it as an obligation and a choice.  It's either one or the other, Mitch.  At some point, reality demands that you stop talking out of both sides of your mouth.

Unfortunately, the problem here is not just the fact that, however twisted McCONnell's comments are, there's much more at stake than exposing the self-serving hypocrisy of the Republican Party, and its Senate caucus.  A 6-to-3 conservative majority has the power to upend the Roe ruling, and thus make abortion law either a state-by-state patchwork or, worse, a real-life version of "The Handmaid's Tale."  Indeed, a majority of that size has the power to do what movement conservatives have wanted to do ever since the New Deal:  to dismantle the entire administrative state and leave every one of us to fend for ourselves.  They allegedly want to protect our "liberty," as defined by now-overruled Supreme Court cases such as Lochner v. New York.  This would be, of course, the "liberty" to be oppressed by those who have the power and the need to do so.  It would, effectively, replace the so-called "nanny state" with a Bully state.

And, when confronted with the prospect of a Bully state on the horizon, there is no alternative but to bully right back.  I'm sorry, but the days of reaching across the aisle and putting bipartisanship first are over.  That's precisely why this won't do.

Rather, this will have to do.  I'm not crazy about it, but I'm not about to stick my head into the sand when all of us are about to be swamped, by the Republicans and by their destruction of not only our political system, but also our planet.  Too many people sacrificed everything to carry us this far.

Will Democrats in Washington wake up at last?  Will they stop bringing Robert's Rules of Order to what stopped being a knife fight a long time ago, and has been full-scale carnage ever since?

Maybe.

There's the September 30th deadline for the federal budget.  There's the ability to deny the Senate a quorum.  There's the ability of one or more Senators to take the floor and hold it for as long as they can.  There are probably other aspects of the rules that allow Democratic Senators to delay, IF they have the fortitude to use them.

Personally, years of observation and frustration have made me deeply cynical when it comes to the likelihood of this happening.  But there are glimmers of hope, here and there, like this one.

Do it, Chuck.  Do it, Nancy.

If you don't, it may lead to the death of more than a justice.

And baruch dayan ha'emess, RBG.

Whatever You Do, PLEASE Don't Forget The Senate

We tend to talk about the upcoming election as though it was purely a binary choice.  Elect Biden over Trump, and we've done what we need to do to save the nation and ourselves.  But, while it's got to be done, it's not enough.

No, I am not advocating for some would-be progressive third-party savior to protect us from the corporatocacy.  I have noticed over the past week or two in social media that the Bernie-and-Elizabeth dead-enders are trying to make some last-minute noise about how we all need to withhold our votes from Biden and the Democrats to teach them a lesson that only the purest, most uncompromising progressives can and will save all of us, even attracting votes in red states.  These people are overlooking the fact that Senators Sanders and Warren are both supporting AND working with Biden on progressive concerns  And they also have somehow managed to either forget the last four years entirely, or don't mind overlooking the fact that Reagan-era conservatism has burrowed into our society as deeply as it has due to the fact that Reagan conservatives were willing to play a game of inches, in a system designed to reward those who are willing to play that way.

Which brings me to what I want to write about today.  The United States Senate.

For the past six years, under Mitch McCONnell and his fellow-travellers in perfidy, the Senate has been a graveyard not just for great ideas, or good ones, but for any ideas at all except ideas that benefit the interests of Donald Trump and donors to Republican Senators.  They enacted a tax cut that amounts to welfare for Wall Street, stuffed the federal court systems with unqualified stiffs, and, worst of all, used the impeachment process to give the most openly crooked President in the history of the Republic a free pass to set new records of corruption.

Whatever happens, this craven, criminal version of what was once called the World's Greatest Deliberative Body cannot be allowed to stand, not in its present form.  If it does, and if (G-d forbid) Trump manages to win a second term, even if the Democrats hold on to the House of Representatives, Trump's perverse behavior will be allowed to destroy whatever is left now of constitutional government in our country.  And if it does, and even if Biden does manage to throw Trump out of the White House, his term is liable to be a nightmare of frustration as McCONnell as his partners in crime hold the line on behalf of the autocracy they wish to create.

Political success, like all other kinds, requires money and, thus far, Biden has done surprisingly better than Trump in raising it.  I say "surprisingly" not because I don't doubt that most of us are sick of Trump but because, historically, money in elections (especially national ones) has historically been a Republican advantage.  But I'm not as sure that the same level of financial success applies to Democratic efforts to retake the Senate.  For a time, Democrats attempting to flip Republican Senate seats seemed to be done well enough in the polls that I considered the possibility that not only would the next Senate have a Democratic majority, but that it might even be large enough to make liberal agonizing over the filibuster a thing of the past.

But, as we get closer to Election Day, and as Republican campaign efforts start to ramp up, the polls in a number of Senate races have tightened significantly--so much so that, as I type this, I cannot say for sure that even a bare-minimum Democratic Senate majority is guaranteed.  And it is for this reason, combined with Biden's apparent financial superiority over Trump, that I am for the moment, not only concentrating my political donations to Democratic (or, in races with a Democrat, independent) Senate candidates attempting to flip Republican seats, but making sure that I give something to every candidate attempting to do so, regardless of how "hopeless" their standing in the polls seems to be.

And I urge all of you, as strongly as I possibly can, to do the same thing, to the very best of your ability.  Don't bankrupt yourself, obviously, and, in your donating, don't forget the presidential or House races.  But the Senate needs to be flipped--to borrow a phrase, for the sake of ourselves, and our posterity.

I've divided these candidates into three groups, and am providing links to the campaign websites.

In the first group, I'm including those candidates that, based on polling, seem to have the best chance of actually flipping the seat for which they're running:  Sara Gideon, Cal Cunningham, Mark Kelly, and John Hickenlooper.  Make sure that you give something to them.

In the second group, I'm including those candidates who are deadlocked with their Republican opponent, or close to being so:  Al Gross, Jon Ossoff, Raphael Warnock, Theresa Greenfield, Barbara Bollier, Amy McGrath, Steve Bullock, Jaime Harrison, and MJ Hegar.  I would urge all of you to find a way to give these candidates a significant amount of money, or other forms of support, especially in the case of McGrath, who is waging a courageous battle against McCONnell, a take-no-prisoners politician.  And I would also suggest doing the same for Doug Jones, who is doing everything he can to hold onto a traditionally Republican seat in Alabama.

In the third group, I'm including those candidates who are, statistically speaking based on polling, unlikely to win their races, but who are still worth supporting (especially compared to the alternatives) as good people, and as an exercise in political party-building in severely red states whose citizens need all of the help they can get.  And, as some of these people are progressive, the progressive dead-enders can and should treat those races as opportunities to put their money where their mouths and typing fingers are, and prove that they can make a difference.  In any case, here they are:  Dan Whitfield, Paulette Jordan, Adrian Perkins, Mike Espy, Preston Love, Jr., Abby Broyles, Dan Ahlers, Marquita Bradshaw, Paula Jean Swearengin, and Merav Ben-David.  Whitfield and Love are write-in candidates, but don't let that stop you.

In fact, don't let anything stop you, if you can afford it.  I don't think any of us can afford to do nothing to support these candidates.  Many of them are flying well below the media radar and, while that can be a liability, it can also be an asset; if Republicans and the media ignores these races, it could open up opportunities for Democrats and progressives to create a few election-day surprises.  Perhaps a lot of them.

It's up to you, as it always has been and (G-d willing) always should be.

Do it.