Category: Trump effect

July 27, 2017

 

We all recall starting each school day reciting the “Pledge of Allegiance.”  The oath which we mindlessly repeated was originally written in 1892 by Reverend Francis Bellamy.  It was adopted on a widespread basis to address American anxiety about whether the waves of European immigrants were sufficiently loyal to the United States and whether post-Civil War native born Americans were sufficiently loyal to one United States of America. (Source:  “The Strange History Behind the Pledge of Allegiance,” Kelli Marshall, Talking Points Memo, 9/15/15).  The words “under God” were added in 1954, an outgrowth of the paranoid Red Scare of the 1950’s.

 

It is worth reflecting on the nature of that oath, as we consider the events of the last several days.  First, as all sitting presidents have done for the last seventy years, Trump spoke at the Boy Scouts of America Jamboree.  Rather than follow the tradition of presidents going back to FDR and speak to the assembled young men about community service and civic responsibility, Trump made a rambling, inappropriate, ugly speech.  He led the scouts to boo President Obama and held up William Levitt, the developer who mass produced residentially segregated affordable housing in Levittowns throughout the Northeast (look it up) as a role model for the Scouts to emulate.  With the moral blindness typical of Trump, he implied that Levitt was admirable because of his wealth, regardless of the source.  Truly, there is nothing that this man will not debase. Continue reading “Pledge of Allegiance”

July 25, 2017

If we have been wondering why Congressional Republicans would continue to subject the country to the whims of a mercurial, ignorant and profoundly stupid man, the ACA repeal vote scheduled for today provides an answer. While we were distracted by the escalating chaos in The White House, diverted by palace intrigue stories of “Spicey’s” aggrieved resignation and mesmerized by the arrival of “The Mooch,” Mitch McConnell has been busily plotting to deprive 22 million Americans of healthcare and provide more expensive, worse health coverage for 200 million more who don’t have the good fortune to be members of Congress. He has convinced John McCain literally to risk making his head explode by flying from his sick bed in Arizona to Washington, D.C. for today’s vote. The irony of a man with taxpayer funded healthcare rushing to the Capitol to deprive us of ours is lost on no one. The heartlessness of a Majority Leader that would ask a colleague to risk their life in pursuit of such a savage end has been insufficiently noted. For all of their faux piety, McConnell and the Congressional Republicans are on an express elevator to Hell. Continue reading “Power to the People”

     The rush of developments in the widening Trump/Russia scandal are coming so quickly that we have exhausted meteorological metaphors. Words like “torrent,” “blizzard,” and “avalanche” hardly seem sufficient to describe what our national polity is experiencing. Our devices ping with news alerts with alarming frequency. Much of the flurry in the last several days appears to be the direct result of the combination of Trump’s boundless contempt for the rule of law, vast ignorance of the structure and function of our government’s institutions and his abject inability to communicate with discipline or clarity. All of these traits were on vivid display in his disastrous Wednesday interview with Maggie Haberman, Peter Baker and Michael Schmidt of The New York Times.      Trump issued a veiled threat to fire Robert Mueller if Mueller’s investigation strays beyond the scope of what Trump deems acceptable. He denigrated Jeff Sessions for the only decent thing he has ever done, stating that he would never have appointed Sessions had he known that he was going to recuse himself. We awoke this morning to the news that Trump’s team was exploring the scope of Presidential pardon power, including, whether he can pardon himself.

     In light of all of this, now might be a propitious moment to get a clearer understanding of what constitutes an impeachable offense.

    Article II, Section 4 of The Constitution provides that a president may be impeached for “treason, bribery or other high crimes and misdemeanors.” Treason is narrowly defined in Article III of the Constitution as “ levying war against [the United States] or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort.” Given that narrow definition, definitive proof that Trump colluded with Russia will not constitute treason, since we are not at war with Russia.

     An interpretation of bribery will in all likelihood track that of the federal bribery statute (Source: “To Impeach A President: Applying the Authoritative Guide From Charles Black,” Jane Chong, Lawfare Blog, July 20, 2017). While we don’t know what Mueller will uncover, given the difficulty of proving intent in bribery cases, we may need to rely on the category of “high crimes and misdemeanors.”

     In Professor Charles L. Black’s definitive work, “Impeachment: A Handbook” (Yale University Press, 1974), he defines “high crimes and misdemeanors” as “those offenses, and only those, that a reasonable man might anticipate would be abusive and wrong, without reference to partisan politics or policy.” Black provides hypothetical examples to elucidate the premise that while impeachable offenses may also be ordinary crimes, given the immense power of the office, they need not be. He opined that high crimes and misdemeanors are those that “seriously threaten the order of political society as to make pestilent and dangerous the continuance in power of their perpetrator.” Two specific examples Black cites are improper campaign tactics such as the “bugging of their offices, the circulation of known lies about” political opponents and obstruction of justice. Is there any doubt that Trump’s actions fit that definition?

      We all know that it’s not a question of if, but of when, definitive evidence of Trump’s commission of impeachable offenses will emerge. Don’t be distracted by the Gordon Gekko wannabe with the cutesie nickname who is the new White House Communications Director. Don’t get sucked into 90’s nostalgia with news of O.J.’s parole. Knowledge is power. When the time comes, we’d better be ready to use it.

July 19, 2017
At midweek, it is fitting to pause and reflect on the remarkable developments in our political landscape in the last 72 hours. In domestic politics, Mitch McConnell and his band of miscreants suffered stunning back to back defeats in their effort to repeal Obamacare and gut Medicaid. Over the weekend, governors, both Republican and Democratic, refused to be snowed by the avalanche of outright lies peddled by Pence, the dead-eyed Puritan, and his henchwoman, Administrator of Medicaid and Medicare, Seema Varma. Then, Monday evening, Jerry Moran of Kansas and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin announced that they would vote “No” on BCRA, bringing the total to a bill defeating four. Undaunted, at 11:00 p.m. Monday night, McConnell tweeted his plan to bring a straight repeal bill to the floor, but on Tuesday, Shelley Moore Capito joined Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski as a “No” vote on repeal, announcing that she “did not come to Washington to hurt people.” She differs from most of her Republican colleagues in that regard. While we can’t take a victory lap, the defeat of the Republicans’ ignominious goal of erasing the legacy of a Black president while shredding the safety net, provides a roadmap that we should follow going forward to fight this regime’s efforts to roll back democracy. Continue reading “Fighting for Democracy”

With Senator McCain’s absence from the Senate to recuperate from surgery, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has announced a further delay of the vote on the Republicans’ odious tax cut masquerading as health care reform. We should use this delay to continue to put pressure on vulnerable Republican senators to kill this nightmare once and for all.  We should also take the extra time afforded by this delay to fully understand this wolf in sheep’s clothing.  The BRCA is nothing less than a covert attempt to overturn Medicaid, a bedrock of the American health care system since 1965. Continue reading “A wolf in sheep’s clothing”

Plausible deniability. Those of us old enough to remember Watergate, remember this talismanic phrase. Whether a President had it determined whether he could avoid being engulfed in a scandal that ensnared top members of his administration. The answer to the question, “What did he know and when did he know it?” determined whether a presidency survived or ended in disgrace. The lack of plausible deniability brought down Richard Nixon during Watergate. The presence of it saved Ronald Reagan during Iran-Contra. With the revelation that Kushner, Manafort and Donald, Jr. met, not only with Kremlin connected lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, but with Russian lobbyist and “former” counter intelligence officer and hacker, Rinat Akhmetshin, there can be no credible claim that Trump and his campaign did not actively attempt to (and perhaps actually did) collude with the Russian government to impact our election. Continue reading “Plausible deniability”

There is danger in this moment. Over the last four days we have seen the clearest evidence to date that there was an avid appetite to collude with the Russians at the highest levels of the Trump campaign.  The e-mail correspondence which led to the meeting between Kremlin connected lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, and the trio of Trump, Jr., Manafort and Kushner demonstrates an utter lack of concern or surprise on the part of Junior that the information was from a Russian government eager to help elect Donald Trump.  If these were ordinary times, we’d be anticipating a perp walk by the trio.  During the Watergate scandal, Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Mitchell and Dean all did prison time for their roles in the Watergate break-in and cover up and they didn’t have the aid of a hostile foreign power. Continue reading “Danger in this moment”

With Trump’s Sunday tweetstorm announcing that he believed Putin’s denial and the revelation by The New York Times that Donald Trump, Jr., Paul Manafort and Jared Kushner met with Kremlin connected lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, in the hope of obtaining damaging information on Hilary Clinton, we have arrived at that depressing place that Sarah Kendzior and Timothy Snyder presaged in November. When confronted with the imminent publication of details about this meeting by The Times, Donald Jr seemed to express disappointment that Veselnitskya failed to deliver the goods and instead pressed him on the Magnitsky Law, which imposes sanctions on Russian individuals responsible for human rights abuses. Continue reading “Whose America Is This?”

July 8, 2017

 

After Trump’s Warsaw speech on Wednesday and his love-fest with Putin at the G-20 on Friday, there is no shred of doubt remaining about where Trump’s loyalties lie or what his vision for America is. As @JohnJHarwood wrote in his CNBC column, Trump helps those who help him. As Putin clearly directed cyber-attacks aimed at getting Trump elected, Trump is eager to give Putin what he wants. He will ingratiate himself with Putin to ensure that Putin gives him (and the Republicans) the same help in 2018 and 2020. What goal could the Election Integrity Commission have, other than to make hacking easier by providing a central database of American voter information? Continue reading “Five-alarm Fire”

July 6, 2017

 

With every passing day, it is increasingly clear that the Trump administration is engaged in nothing less than an effort to reinstitute Jim Crow on a nationwide basis.  If that sounds hyperbolic, we need only examine its recent efforts to curtail voting rights, starting with its so-called Election Integrity Commission.  By now, 45 of 50 states have refused to comply with the Commission’s onerous demand for extensive personal information on their voters, including names, addresses, party affiliation, ten year voting history and the last four digits of Social Security numbers.  Despite having neither clear authority to request this information nor a demonstrably secure portal through which the information could be sent, the Commission’s letter demanded that states turn over the information within sixteen days.

It is difficult to see what positive aims could be achieved by such a massive data dump of highly sensitive personal information.  Trump cleared up any ambiguity about the Commission’s purpose when he lambasted states’ refusal to provide information to the “voter fraud” commission.  In addition, given that the vice chair is Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, a staunch anti-immigrant zealot who advocates for strict voter i.d. laws, it is clear that this commission is nothing more than an effort to federalize the patchwork of voter suppression laws in various states, in order to deprive Americans of our constitutional rights more efficiently. Continue reading “The return of Jim Crow?”