This week we have crossed the Rubicon. Trump’s continued presence in The Oval Office no longer simply risks the continued existence of the United States as a democracy, but risks the lives of 50 million South Koreans ( plus the 28,500 American troops stationed there), 25 million North Koreans and the 162, 742 American citizens of Guam, at a bare minimum. Every day, Trump emerges from his lair in Bedminster and barks some bellicose gibberish that ratchets up the chaos. When his beleaguered Secretary of State tries to reassure Americans that we can sleep at night unworried by the threat of imminent nuclear war, faux adjutant and real Nazi, Sebastian Gorka, contemptuously suggests that it is foolish to think that Tillerson can speak on military matters. It begs the question, how is it reasonable to listen instead to the opinion of a white supremacist with a chest full of fake medals? Continue reading “Dr. Strangelove”
Playtime is over
August 8, 2017
On a daily basis, we see mounting evidence that, not only is Trump intellectually and temperamentally unfit to be president, not only is he zealously pursuing policies to reverse the societal progress this country has made towards equality in the last seventy years, but that his continued tenure as president risks our permanent transformation from a deeply flawed representative democracy to a tin pot autocracy ruled by a vulgar, vengeful, pathologically insecure bigot.
The Washington Post’s story yesterday about how the Trump Hotel in D.C. has become a hub for conservative and international influence peddling reads like a scene from a dinner theater version of “Casablanca.” The Post described a lobby bar peopled by the boldface names in Trumpworld, like Lewandowski, Spicer and Giuliani, with a calendar full of events sponsored by organizations and groups seeking to curry favor with Trump. In a nod to compliance with the emoluments clause, the hotel says it maintains a separate ledger of payments from foreign nationals, but no one has verified the existence of such a ledger or has knowledge of the amount that foreign interests have paid to the hotel since Trump’s inauguration in January. The most shocking example of influence peddling that The Post reported was that the Saudi government paid the six figure hotel bill of a veterans’ group that came to Washington to lobby against a bill that would have allowed the families of the victims of 9/11 to sue the Saudi government!
Trump meanwhile, is busily tweeting sycophancy, insults and classified information from his Bedminster hideaway. Over the weekend he retweeted praise from a purported Black woman supporter named “Nicole Mincey,” who turned out to be either a Russian bot or a scammer selling MAGA merchandise. Yesterday, Trump unleashed a bewildering tweetstorm against stolid Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal, excoriating him for an ancient incident in which he exaggerated his service record. Clearly, the decidedly unflashy Blumenthal has gotten under Trump’s skin with his insistence on pursuing the Russian investigation wherever it leads and his willingness to eschew equivocation and raise the prospect of impeachment.
While the press focuses on Trump’s idiotic tweets and his naked avarice, momentous and dangerous events are ignored. The press has barely mentioned Trump’s failure to condemn the terroristic bombing of the Dar Al Farooq Mosque in Bloomington, Minnesota. Trump has spent no time developing a strategy to deal with North Korea’s threats to retaliate against the U.N. sanction vote (other than to tweet classified information in statements which conflict with those of his U.N. Ambassador, Nikki Haley). Today, his Justice Department, led by serial perjurer and committed racist, Jeff Sessions, reversed course in a major voting rights case and backed Ohio’s massive “use it or lose it” purge of infrequent voters.
The fact is that, although the particulars of Trump’s unique danger to our body politic may differ from day to day, the fundamental aspects have not changed – corruption and greed on an epic scale, policy animated by pernicious hatred of anyone who is not a straight, white Christian man, led by an impetuous, petulant bully. The danger we are in cannot be overstated. We cannot afford to equivocate, sit on the sidelines or get caught up in intra-party squabbles between the center left and far left. It will take each of us using everything we’ve got to defeat the menace that Trump, Pence and their enablers constitute to our liberty, safety and security. It may be August, but playtime is over.
What time is it?
August 5, 2017
As we watch the noose tightening around Trump’s administration from a steady drumbeat of leaks revealing just how profoundly ignorant and weak he is, combined with the strategic disclosure that Special Counsel Mueller has empaneled a second grand jury in Washington, D.C., profoundly troubling developments have emerged. On the right, Trump and his supporters have stepped up their attacks on their perceived enemies – people of color, Democrats and the Free Press. Continue reading “What time is it?”
A level playing field?
Yesterday’s report that the Justice Department was set to launch an investigation of “discrimination” against white students in colleges and universities, together with the introduction of the RAISE Act, which would replace current immigration law, which favors uniting families, with a “merit” based points system purportedly favoring skilled workers, makes it clear that this administration is doubling down on policy driven by white supremacy. We should not fool ourselves, though, that these two proposals represent anything new. In fact, both represent a return to the status quo circa 1950, before a series of cases culminating in Brown v. Board of Education began to force open the doors of educational opportunity for African Americans and before the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965 eliminated quotas based on national origin. Continue reading “A level playing field?”
Dangerous Distraction
The sigh of relief was audible yesterday when new White House Chief of Staff, John Kelly, made the predictable move of firing Anthony Scaramucci. The Monday afternoon massacre provided fodder for pundits who praised Kelly, opining that this was a harbinger of a newly disciplined White House. On the other hand, progressives among us were buoyed by new reporting from The Washington Post that Trump had personally dictated his son’s misleading statement about the nature of his meeting with several Russians with Kremlin connections. While these are indeed welcome developments, we must remain vigilant because, away from the spotlight, Trump’s toxic agenda is proceeding apace.
There are reports that Trump is considering replacing John Kelly at Homeland Security with the virulently anti-immigrant Kris Kobach. Under Kelly, ICE has already stepped up the pace of deportations by 40% (Source: “Democracy Now” 5/18/17) and shifted the focus from undocumented immigrants with criminal records to all undocumented persons. It is a frightening prospect to imagine anti-terrorism, border security, and immigration under the control of Kobach, author of the racist SB 1070 statute (the “papers please” law declared unconstitutional by The Supreme Court in 2012) and current head of the Trump administration’s engine of voter suppression, the Election Integrity Commission.
Secondly, while significant attention has rightly been focused on Trump’s bizarre Twitter transgender ban, less attention has been paid the Department of Justice’s submission of an amicus brief in Zarda v. Altitude Express to argue that Title VII does not prohibit discrimination against LGBT people. This move is a clear signal that diminutive bigot, Jeff Sessions, intends to use the power of the Justice Department to aggressively roll back civil rights for LGBT Americans. The Justice Department, which was not a party to the case, advanced an argument that was not only counter to Obama administration DOJ policy, but contradicted the EEOC position in the same case and flew in the face of 15 years of Title VII jurisprudence.
Lastly, we must consider the impact of Trump’s reprehensible speech on Friday, in which he actively encouraged police brutality. His remarks were met with laughter and applause from many of the police officers in attendance. The Suffolk County Police Department was forced to walk back the response of their officers over the weekend and yesterday, Trump spokeswoman, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, offered the lame excuse that Trump was “joking.” We can be sure that the families of Freddie Gray, Michael Brown and Eric Garner did not find it funny. Trump knows that his comments embolden cops who are predisposed to mete out harsh and often fatally violent attacks on Black people. Trump’s winking remarks signal that police officers no longer need to worry about being brought up on civil rights charges by Trump’s Justice Department. As an example, even my own bucolic suburb of South Orange/Maplewood is not immune from the scourge of police brutality. In footage just released after a year of pressure from community activists, we see Maplewood police officers, who we pay with OUR tax dollars, handcuffing, punching and berating CHILDREN and trying to herd them into the neighboring predominantly Black neighboring town of Irvington. Resentful of the our hard won material comfort, these cops tried to turn this into a 21st Century sundown town. This is the impact of having a toxic bully with a bully pulpit.
The inconvenient truth is that the tabloid ready distractions of the fall of “The Mooch,” or even the latest development in the consequential Russian investigation divert our attention from the ways in which Trump is actively hurting the most marginalized among us — immigrants, LGBT people and Black people. Aided by a racist base, somnambulant Congress and rogue cops, Trump is erecting a new infrastructure of oppression. That is where our work is.
Day of reckoning
July 29, 2017
Friday was a day of reckoning. Any sentient being who watched the events of the last 24 hours unfold can no longer delude themselves. The current occupant of The White House is a vengeful, petulant toddler with armies and the nuclear launch codes at his disposal. Trump, enraged that Congressional Republicans were unable to ram through an ill-considered, hastily written tax cut for the wealthy masquerading as health care reform, lashed out and fired White House Chief of Staff, Reince Preibus. Further evidencing his ignorance of, and disregard for, how a competent White House is supposed to function, Trump plucked John Kelly from the Department of Homeland Security as his new Chief of Staff. Trump is heedless of the fact that the Chief of Staff’s job is to work with Congress to effectuate the President’s policy agenda. We can only surmise that Trump believes that Kelly, a former General, can “order” Congressional Republicans to be compliant with his whims.
Oleaginous sycophant Anthony Scaramucci presaged Reince’s fate in his foul-mouthed rant to Ryan Lizza. The fact that Trump picked this Gordon Gekko wannabe with absolutely no qualifications for, or understanding of, the job of White House Communications Director is further proof that Trump wants to act like the British in the War of 1812 and burn The White House down.
To add insult to the injury of Trump’s transgender ban by tweet, yesterday Trump addressed Long Island police officers and gleefully encouraged them to brutally assault those suspected of crimes. Given the fact that a Black person has been killed by the police every 28 hours in the first seven months of this year (Source: www.mappingpoliceviolence.org), it is not as if the cops need further encouragement to act as judge, jury and executioner where Black and Brown people are concerned.
At this juncture, it is beyond cavil that Trump is a viciously bigoted sadist, hell-bent on using the power of his office to inflict pain and misery on marginalized groups. It is also no secret that this is the source of his appeal for many of our fellow citizens. If we are being honest, we know that Trump is simply the apotheosis of forty years of the Republican politics of racial resentment. Although the language has been coded, a clear-eyed look at Republican domestic policies reveals that they are all rooted in this. We can go down the list. De-funding public education is federalized resistance to mandated school integration. Cutting the safety net is about starving Black and Brown people whose disproportionate reliance on these programs is the legacy of 150 years of state sanctioned discrimination and economic apartheid.
The day of reckoning is upon us. For Congressional Republicans, the question is whether they will finally assert their Congressional authority to serve as a check on Trump’s abuse of power or whether they will join his nihilistic quest to remake America as a white country through deportation, incarceration and extra-judicial murder? For the rest of us who are not people of color, women, or LGBT, the question is whether we are willing to face the history that has brought our republic to the brink? For those of you, the question is simple, “Do you hate us more than you love yourself?”
Pledge of Allegiance
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”
Power to the People
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”
High crimes and misdemeanors
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.
Fighting for Democracy
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”