Journal of the Plague Years

December 23, 2020

      With a mere 28 days remaining in Trump’s miserable reign, we can expect the next four weeks to be a concentrated version of the last four years, marked by criminality, cruelty and chaos.  Since November 3, Trump has focused all of his attention on maintaining the presidency, and none on the actual job of President.   After multiple federal agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security, suffered a massive Russian cyberattack that was the worst security breach in history, Trump downplayed it and did nothing, (Source:  “What we know-and still don’t- about the worst-ever US government cyberattack,” by Kari Paul and Lois Beckett, theguardian.com, 12/19/20).  

     On Friday, Trump convened an Oval Office meeting to plot to prevent the inauguration of the duly elected President and Vice President.  Criminal former NSA head Mike Flynn and Sidney Powell, the Trump lawyer who has trafficked in bizarre conspiracy theories featuring long dead Venezuelan dictator, Hugo Chavez, were in attendance.  Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Guiliani, attended by phone, as did White House Counsel, Pat Cipollone and Chief of Staff Mark Meadows.  This convocation of kooks and fabulists discussed Guiliani’s recommendation that DHS impound voting machines in battleground states to look for “irregularities,”  as well as Flynn’s recommendation that Trump impose martial law and “rerun the election.”  Lastly, Trump floated appointing Powell as Special Counsel to investigate alleged election fraud, (Source:  “Trump Weighed Naming Election Conspiracy Theorist As Special Counsel,” by Maggie Hoberman and Zoltan Kenno-Youngs, The New York Times, 12/19/20).

     It fell to Pat Cipollone and Ken Cuccinelli, hardened ideologues who have supported Trump’s noxious agenda at every turn, to push back on these dangerous schemes.  If all that stands between us and the imposition of martial law are a corrupt lawyer who led an impassioned defense of Trump in his impeachment and an immigration hardliner determined to end DACA, we are in deep trouble.

     While Trump was busy using the people’s house as home base for his criminal conspiracy, the number of coronavirus infections soared to dizzying heights, with no end in sight, a direct result of Trump’s genocidal combination of malevolence, depraved indifference and stupidity.  As The Washington Post details in this deeply reported story, Trump’s monomaniacal obsession with challenging the election results instead of doing his actual job has resulted in more than 300,000 American deaths and a continuing daily death toll that has risen to 3000 deaths per day!  At every turn, Trump, Pence and Chief of Staff Mark Meadows failed to do the simple things that would have saved lives- advocating for mask wearing and implementing a robust testing program.  After a spring spent politicizing normal public health measures and promoting quack miracle cures, Trump, like the addle-brained toddler he is, has grown bored with COVID and abandoned any effort to mount a coordinated federal response, (Source:”’The general was missing in action,’” by Yasmeen Abutaleb, Ashley Parker, Josh Dawsey and Philip Rucker, The Washington Post, 12/19/20).

     Yesterday, Trump added chaos and cruelty to the mix by threatening to veto the 900 billion COVID relief bill hammered out by Congress, and in a revealing move that exemplifies the depraved immorality of this administration, pardoned a rogues’ gallery of the corrupt and murderous, all of whom were white,(Source:  “Trump Pardons Two Russia Inquiry Figures and Blackwater Guards,” by Maggie Haberman and Michael S. Schmidt, The New York Times, 12/23/20).  This stands in stark contrast to the rush to execute thirteen federal inmates since July, 6 of whom are Black and one is Indigenous.

        Taken together, Trump’s actions toggle back and forth between the gleefully racist and the chillingly cruel.  In the face of such stunning criminality, it is cold comfort to remind ourselves that Biden will take office in four weeks.  Trump is clearly determined to show us just how much havoc he can wreak for each of the next 28 days.  We can say that Trump is an aberration, but if we want to make sure of it, starting January 21st, we’d better make him pay.

#Accountabilityforallenablers

#protectdemocracy.org

December 11, 2020

With 40 days remaining until President-elect Biden takes the oath of office, following the news can give one whiplash. On the one hand, we have the Biden team’s methodical rollout of Cabinet picks. The selections reflect the country’s diversity— from the first woman for Treasury Secretary to the first Latino immigrant for Homeland Security Secretary to the first Black person for Secretary of Defense. Biden’s picks are reassuring and almost boring, because the resumes scream competence and probity, a welcome departure from the homogeneous cast of grifters and Marvel villains that have occupied the Trump Cabinet.

      At the same time, Trump has continued his dangerous crusade to overturn the results of a free and fair election by relentlessly attacking the legitimacy of Black votes in battleground states. Despite a record of 1-55 in the courts,  Trump continues to allege unnamed fraud in his superspreader rallies. His plague spreading posse of incompetent, unethical attorneys remain undaunted, filing court papers riddled with factual errors and completely devoid of evidence, (Source:  “Trump And The GOP Have Now Lost 50 Post-Election Lawsuits,” by Alison Durkee, Forbes.com, 12/8/20).  Yet, Trump’s baseless bleating has convinced more than 60% of Republicans that the election was rigged.  Trump has so thoroughly captured the Republican Party that only 27 of 249 Republicans acknowledge that Joe Biden won the election, (Source:  “Just 27 Congressional Republicans acknowledge Biden’s win, Washington Post survey finds” by Paul Kane and Scott Clement, WashingtonPost.com, 12/5/20).

     There is a twisted logic to the refusal of Republicans to acknowledge Biden’s win, given what has happened to Republican Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger.  Raffensberger is hardly some RINO.  He has enthusiastically continued his predecessor Brian Kemp’s vote suppressing tactics, improperly purging 200,000 voters from the rolls on the mistaken impression that they had moved.  Yet, because Raffensperger presided over an election where an accurate vote count resulted in Biden’s victory, he has been subjected to pressure and criticism from Trump and his toady, Lindsey Graham and a torrent of death threats, (Source:  “Georgia Secretary of State says fellow Republicans are pressuring him to find ways to exclude ballots,” by Amy Gardner, WashingtonPost.com, 11/16/20).

By now we have all seen the viral clip of Georgia’s bespectacled Republican functionary, Gabriel Sterling, expressing shock and anger that the vitriol normally reserved for Black people and Democrats was now being directed at Trump-voting civil servants, (Source: “‘It Has To Stop’: Georgia Election Official Lashes Trump,” by Richard Fausset, The New York Times, 12/1/20). Although Sterling’s righteous rant was hailed as a Joseph Welch moment, the Republican fever did not break. By Monday, Raffensperger was desperately trying to get Trump to back off by engaging in false equivalence- equating Stacey Abrams’ fight against voter suppression to Trump’s full frontal assault on democracy, (Source: “Trump Runs The Stacey Abrams Playbook,” by Brad Raffensperger, The Wall Street Journal, 12/6/20).

      We may laugh at the loopy antics of  Mellisa Carone, Guilani’s star witness in Michigan, but State Rep. Cynthia Johnson, who was threatened with lynching after sharply questioning Giuliani at the hearing,and then disciplined for her response (!) isn’t laughing, (Source:  “Michigan GOP Sidelines Democrat For Her ‘Unacceptable’ Response To Lynching Threats,” by Rick Pluta, NPR.org, 12/9/20).  Secretary of State, Jocelyn Benson wasn’t laughing when armed Trump supporters showed up outside of her home as she was decorating her Christmas tree with her 4 year old son.

       We may mock the slapdash, bad faith lawyering that has resulted in a 1-55 record in court, but on Wednesday, corrupt Texas State Attorney General, joined by Republican Attorneys General in seventeen states, sued to invalidate the votes in the four battleground states of Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.  100 of 196 Congressional Republicans signed an amicus brief in support of the suit, (Source:  “More than half of House Republicans support Texas lawsuit challenging election results,” by Felicia Sonmez, The Washington Post, 12/10/20).  These efforts to attack democracy by deeming Black votes illegitimate per se, are supported not only by state and federal elected Republicans, but by the 74 million people who voted for Trump and have contributed more than $207 million dollars to him since the election.  We may be eager to turn the page, but we’re still in the same book.

#Gasenate.com

November 28, 2020

      If the past four years have taught us anything, it is that clinging to the myths we were raised on can be deadly.  In four years we have learned just how stubbornly resilient the myth of white supremacy is, and just how much it permeates every facet of our society, from the consequential to the quotidian.  To our credit, a thunderingly large number of us repudiated white supremacy at the ballot box, delivering a resounding defeat to Trump, which has been repeatedly validated in the courts.  For this, we should be truly thankful.

     We must resist the temptation, though, to see the election of Biden/Harris as the end of our work, rather than the beginning.  Doing so glosses over the Herculean effort it took to overcome the barriers embedded in a system that enshrines minority rule.  It is time we took a long hard look at the structure of the American “democracy” that we have long lionized as proof of our “exceptionalism.”

     Too many of us treat the Constitution like scripture and the Founding Fathers like deities.  That deification ignores the contradiction inherent in declaring that “all men are created equal,” while simultaneously designing a system to allow human beings to own and profit from the unpaid labor of other human beings.  It ignores the abhorrent dehumanization of Black people required to sustain such a system and how it required the doctrine of white supremacy to be threaded through all of our foundational systems, from the Electoral College to the anti-majoritarian design of the U.S. Senate.  Lastly, and most significantly, treating our founding documents and their authors this way induces paralysis, robbing us of the agency required to build a democracy fit for a 21st century multicultural reality, in which women are full citizens, and civil rights are not dependent on property ownership.

     Despite knowing this, many of us are eager to simply “turn the page,” and return to “normal.”  Such selfish desires ignore the fact that our “normal” was untenable for a wide swath of Americans. Accepting a “normal” that erased the history and very existence of Indigenous Americans and treated the state sponsored murder and suffering of Black and Brown people as acceptable collateral damage is how we elected Trump.

      Trump was far from a singular danger. This is evident in the response by those in authority to the surging pandemic, which ignores the disproportionate effect of the pandemic on communities of color.  It is evident in the actions of Trump acolyte governors like South Dakota’s Kristi Noem, who is heedless of the devastating impact of the coronavirus on her state’s Indigenous population and is actively fighting the efforts of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe to protect itself, (Source:  “As South Dakota takes hands-off approach to coronavirus, Native Americans feel vulnerable,” by Erik Ortiz, NBCnews.com, 11/25/20).

     It is evident in the 5-4 decision issued by the Supreme Court in Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn v. Cuomo, which overturned the narrowly tailored restriction on in person religious services as violative of the First Amendment’s free exercise clause.  In his concurring opinion, Justice Gorsuch glibly contrasts the ability of bike shops and liquor stores to remain open, ignoring the fact unlike bike shops and liquor stores, in person religious services present the precise conditions known by medical experts to facilitate the spread of the virus—“large groups of people, gathering, speaking and singing in close proximity indoors for extended periods of time,” (Source:  Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn v. Cuomo, 592 U.S. ___ (2020) dissenting opinion of Sotomayor, J.).

       This decision, which directly contradicts two decisions from earlier this year, reflects the replacement of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, with religious ideologue, Amy Coney Barrett.  This new majority is signaling that, in the name of protecting the ”free exercise of religion,”  it will elevate the parochial concerns of religious groups over the rights of the broader public, paving the way for the erosion of  legal protections afforded to LGBTQ people, women and people of color.  Justice Alito and Justice Thomas have already explicitly asked that marriage equality be reconsidered, a point that Justice Alito reiterated in his speech to The Federalist Society earlier this month.

We must reject our uniquely American mythology, or we will find ourselves four years from now fighting off a smoother, smarter, Trump. Hard as it may be, we must reject a return to “normal.” Tell Justices Alito, Coney Barrett, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Thomas that it was Jesus Christ who said, “You shall know the truth and it shall set you free.” It’s time to live in the truth.

November 23, 2020

      Although nearly three weeks have passed since Election Day, the malignant narcissist squatter in The White House shows no sign of relinquishing his death grip on presidential power or the national spotlight that accompanies it.  In the immediate aftermath of the election being called for Biden, Trump fired Defense Secretary Mark Esper by tweet, which was followed by the departure of four senior Defense Department officials in charge of policy and intelligence.  Trump replaced them with a disgraced conspiracy theorist who had called President Obama a terrorist, and loyalist flunkies like Kash Patel, a former aide to Rep. Devin Nunes, and Ezra Cohen-Watnick, who provided sensitive information about the Russia investigation, (Source:  “Trump administration removes senior defense officials and installs loyalists, triggering alarm at Pentagon,” by Barbara Starr, Zachary Cohen and Ryan Browne, CNN.com, 11/13/20).

    The coronavirus pandemic continues to rage, with cases and deaths growing at a truly alarming rate, pushing our healthcare system to the verge of collapse and increasing suffering for untold numbers of Americans.  Yet neither Trump, nor the Republican-led Senate are lifting a pinky to help, preferring to use their time to ram through unqualified federal judges or to mount an unprecedented attack on the bedrock of our democracy, free and fair elections.  Trump’s initial salvo was to fire Chris Krebs, the federal official who dared to debunk his dangerous lies about election fraud, (Source:  “Trump Fires Christopher Krebs, Official Who Disputed Election Fraud Claims,” by David E. Sanger and Nicole Perlroth, The New York Times, 11/17/20). Continue reading “Black voters matter”

November 15, 2020

     It has now been more than a week since the major networks called the presidential election for Joe Biden.  Eight days since we danced in the streets, heaving a collective sigh of relief that the burden of waking up every day knowing that your own government was actively working to harm you was going to be lifted.  In the eight days since, Arizona and Georgia have been called by all of the networks, Georgia’s hand recount notwithstanding.  Although Trump has steadfastly refused to concede and has blocked Biden from access to information necessary for an orderly transition, the victory feels definitive and decisive enough that Democrats have already begun infighting.  Democrats are busy scolding one another for losses in the House, blaming everything from activists’ calls to defund the police to insufficient digital strategy for the losses.  The circular firing squad from the one remaining political party that actually believes in democracy misses the forest for the trees.

     Anyone looking to understand how we managed to lose the Senate majority and seats in the House, while winning the presidency needs to look beyond headline-grabbing glib answers and examine the structural rot at the heart of our republic.  As Ezra Klein details here, America’s problem is not “too much polarization,” but “too little democracy.  The combination of the Electoral College and gerrymandered districts create incentives for Republicans to cater to an extreme base, because they can win elections and maintain power without winning over a majority of voters,(Source:  “The crisis isn’t too much polarization.  It’s too little democracy,” by Ezra Klein, Vox.com, 11/12/20). Continue reading “It’s not over”

November 9, 2020

      What a week!  In the past seven days, we have cycled through fear, enervation and elation.  On Tuesday night, when we once again lost Texas and Florida, we experienced PTSD from 2016.  Many of us took to our beds, dreading what news the morning would bring.  Even though we knew that the artificially engineered delay in counting absentee ballots would create a “red mirage,” we failed to anticipate just how awful it would feel.

      As the week wore on and the vote count for Biden inched up, closing the gap in Pennsylvania and widening it in Nevada, networks’ failure to call certain states created a space for Trump’s baseless conspiracy theories.  Their caution began to seem more like coddling, as Trump and his toadies trafficked in lies and armies of polo-shirted vigilantes descended on Detroit’s Cobo Hall and Philadelphia’s Convention Center in an effort to intimidate election workers counting ballots.  They chanted “stop the count,” where Trump was leading and “count that vote,” in states where Trump was behind.  Trump’s followers were unbothered by the complete lack of evidence for their accusations or by their embarrassing 0-10 record in their sanction-worthy lawsuits alleging voting irregularities. Continue reading “We Won!!”

November 2, 2020

      We have just one day left until the polls close and we find out just what kind of country we’re going to be.  Will our fellow Americans vote to continue being led by a corrupt, sadistic circus clown with the intellectual acuity of a pre-verbal toddler and the emotional maturity of a middle school bully?  Will a majority of Americans vote for a continuation of a campaign of genocide against immigrants, of forced sterilization and forced family separation of non-white asylum seekers?  Will they signal with their votes that Black lives don’t matter, and that the Rule of Law doesn’t either?

     We’re so scarred by the trauma of 2016, that all we see when we look at polls showing Biden with a lead in battleground states is all the ways that they could be wrong. We try to read the tea leaves of the surge in turnout in Texas and Georgia, afraid to dream of flipping these long Republican-held states.

     There are worrying signs that even if we prevail at the polls, right wing forces will reject the will of the people to hold on to power by any means necessary.  In Texas, Republicans rushed into federal court in an effort to invalidate 127,000 votes cast by drive-through voting in heavily Democratic Harris County.  In Alamance County, North Carolina, police pepper-sprayed voters in the midst of a peaceful march to the polls. In Texas, a Trump train convoy tried to run a Biden/Harris campaign bus off the road, and not to be outdone, yesterday Trump train convoys snarled traffic in New York and New Jersey.

     The truth is that the answer to the question of what kind of country we’re going to be can’t be found on 538, or on our Twitter feeds, or even in the back of a pickup truck in a Trump train.  We won’t know the answer even after the polls close, because the answer lies with us.  The answer is in how we respond once all the votes are counted.  If we’ve learned nothing else these past four years, we’ve learned that democracy is not a spectator sport. We will have the America we’re willing to work to build.  It’s up to us.  It always has been.

#VOTE

   

October 27, 2020

      Yesterday, with eight days left until Election Day, after almost 64 million Americans had already voted, in a ruthlessly hypocritical move, Republicans voted to confirm Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court.  Determined not to wait a minute more than necessary, Barrett was then hastily sworn in at The White House, instead of The Supreme Court, by Clarence Thomas, rather than Chief Justice Roberts.  The symbolism was not subtle. It was grotesquely fitting that the self-loathing, sexual harasser who replaced civil rights giant, Thurgood Marshall, administered the oath to the retrograde, repressive handmaid eager to erase all of the gains for women won by her predecessor, the Notorious RBG.  With her installation, the Supreme Court  now has three justices from the Republican legal team in Bush v. Gore, solidifying a supermajority with hostility to voting rights.

      After all, even an 8 member Supreme Court has been working overtime to disenfranchise Americans who aren’t Republican.  Last week, the Supreme Court was only one vote shy of a majority that would have overruled a decision of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court interpreting Pennsylvania state law.  Justices Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Thomas “would have required Pennsylvania to stop accepting absentee ballots when the polls close on November 3rd,” (Source:  “High Court allows 3 day extension for Pennsylvania ballots,” by Mark Sherman and Marc Levy, APnews.com, 10/20/20).  Given the absence of any opinion accompanying their votes, it is impossible to know their rationale. Continue reading “Liberty and justice for all”

October 19, 2020

      With just over two weeks left before Election Day, our collective anxiety is at a fever pitch.  Chastened by the trauma of 2016, we ignore the polls.  Early turnout numbers from Texas and Georgia are encouraging, but the threat has not receded.  Between the twin perils of surging Coronavirus case numbers and Trump’s full-throated embrace of his role as a stochastic terrorist, danger feels omnipresent.

Saturday, at a rally in Michigan, Trump once again attacked Governor Gretchen Whitmer, who was the target of a kidnap and murder plot thwarted by the FBI just last week! Echoing the exact language of far-right domestic terrorists,Trump said Whitmer “wants to be a dictator,” and led his followers in chants of “lock her up,” (Source: “The return of ‘lock her up’: Trump won’t stop attacking Gretchen Whitmer,” by Cameron Peters, Vox.com, 10/18/20). Continue reading “The Long Road Ahead”

      Little of consequence transpired at last night’s Vice Presidential debate.  Vice President Pence didn’t raise his voice or ooze contempt like Trump did last week, but the difference was one of style, not substance.  Like Trump, Pence flouted the rules,  ignoring his time limits to parrot Fox News talking points in a soporific monotone, running roughshod over hapless moderator, Susan Page.  Pence lied constantly and refused to answer Page’s questions, yet imperiously demanded that Senator Kamala Harris answer his! 

    Senator Harris walked an admirable tightrope, remaining firm and factual, while avoiding the trap that Pence was trying to set with his mendacious mansplaining of coming across as an “angry Black woman.”  Pence dodged questions about climate change and Trump’s white supremacy, while stubbornly insisting that there was no systemic racism in law enforcement and proudly touting his anti-abortion bona fides. (Source:  “Virus Takes Center Stage as Pence and Harris Skirmish in Debate,” by Alexander Burns and Jonathan Martin, The New York Times, 10/8/20)..

    Back at the Coronavirus cluster in The White House, 34 people at or close to The White House have tested positive and 7 of the 8 members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff are in quarantine after the head of the Coast Guard tested positive.  Meanwhile, our steroid-addled Commander-in-Chief tweets endless streams of nonsense while roaming the narrow hallways of The White House maskless, a one man bioterror threat, and no one invokes the 25th Amendment.

     Yet the recklessness and lunacy on display is distracting us from seeing how partisan judges and faceless bureaucrats are methodically setting the stage to thwart the will of the people, poll margins be damned.  At the state and federal level, Republicans are working feverishly to build the framework for our votes not to be counted and snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.

      A month ago, the 11th Circuit flouted the will of Florida voters, trampling the rights of formerly incarcerated people to hold that they could not regain their right to vote without paying their outstanding legal financial obligations.  The ruling disenfranchised 775,000 Floridians, a decision made more outrageous by the fact that Florida’s haphazard recordkeeping prevents people from even knowing what they owe, (Source:  “Full 11th Circuit Rules Against Florida Felons in Voting Rights Case,” by Alex Pickett, Courthousenews.com, 9/11/20).

      Last week, The Supreme Court sided with South Carolina Republicans and reinstated the prerequisite that absentee ballots be signed by a witness in order to be counted, an onerous requirement during a pandemic. This follows the Court’s July decision upholding a similar law in Alabama, (Source:  “Supreme Court Revives Witness Requirement For South Carolina Absentee Ballots,” by Adam Liptak, The New York Times, 10/5/20).

      Then yesterday we learned that the Justice Department changed a policy that has been in place since 1980 prohibiting prosecutors from not only “making any announcement about ongoing investigations close to an election, but also from taking public steps …before a vote is finalized,”(Source:  “DOJ Frees Federal Prosecutors To Take Steps That Could Interfere With Elections, Weakening Longstanding Policy,” by Robert Faturechi and Justin Eliott, ProPublica.org, 10/7/20).

     This flurry of court decisions and bureaucratic actions make you wonder just what kind of regime they are scrambling to maintain.  The answer was made abundantly clear in truly chilling reporting from The New York Times regarding the Trump administration’s child separation policy.  Although DHS has justifiably borne the brunt of the blame for the horrific practice of ripping children from their parents and putting them in cages, yesterday’s story made clear that “the Justice Department’s top officials were a ‘driving force’ behind the policy,” (Source:  “Border Policy Was Clear: ‘We Need to Take Away Children,’” by Michael D. Shear, Katie Benner and Michael S. Schmidt, The New York Times,10/7/20).   It is hardly surprising to learn that Jeff Sessions, the diminutive martinet and committed racist,  was pushing for Brown children to be callously snatched from their parents. Yet Rod Rosenstein, whose bespectacled appearance and mild manner concealed an odious contempt for human rights, told federal prosecutors that “it did not matter how young the children were,” (ibid).  Never forget that these judges and federal officials who drape themselves in the mantle of respectability wield the law as a cudgel to persecute and disempower the marginalized.  This is what we’re fighting against on November 3rd.  26 days.

#FloridaRightsRestorationCoalition

#JaimeHarrison.com

#BidenHarris (joebiden.com)

#Protectthevote