January 2021 Archives

Dear America,

President Biden--typing that was like rinsing my mouth after eating a rotten egg--has the opportunity to be the most profoundly influential president in modern history.  He can use his moral authority...his "bully pulpit"...to change the way that American politics proceeds, and all it will take is a rejection of the legislative technique of "logrolling."  Logrolling is the practice of trading one piece of legislation for another despite the lack of agreement between the proponents of each.  It is the legislative equivalent of the phrase "quid pro quo," which became an indictment during the Trump administration.  And though it could be the rudiment of a cooperative environment in congress, it has become the poison that has led our political process away from true democracy into something equivalent to oligarchy, or, rule by the few, in this case, the political class.  The essence of that oligarchy--the means by which politicians stay in power--is logrolling, along with the filibuster.  What both achieve for legislators is anonymity, by virtue of which they don't have to answer to voters, at least not with regard to their votes on issues.

The quintessence of logrolling is the "omnibus bill."  In such a bill, several separate issues get conjoined for action by congress as a package.  So, if one party or faction wants aid to municipalities to help them cope with the costs of the pandemic and the other wants aid for businesses to help owners maintain their wealth while keeping employees on the payroll at a loss, the parties agree to package both things in one bill so that they can tell their respective constituents that they had to vote for one in order to get the other.  In that fashion, they can evade responsibility for their overall policies and take credit for the little good they do in the eyes of their voters while doing just the opposite at the same time.  Put another way, they can evade responsibility for the votes they cast that are contrary to what they profess to believe.  Preferable, I would argue, would be to detach issues from one another in proposed legislation so that each proposed measure was voted on separately.  In that way, voters could assess their representatives and senators on their overall performance instead of deciding for whom to vote based on party affiliation, since they don't know what the congress people would do if they were voting on particular issues that the voters are interested in.  The effect of omnibus bills is to insulate members of congress from scrutiny and to force voters to subscribe to party lines and hence to identify themselves by party rather than principle, and what we get is what we have now: good guys and bad guys; acrimony; hostility; recrimination rather than good faith adherence to principles alongside acceptance of the democratic necessity of tolerance for diversity of opinion.  And then there is the filibuster.

It's really a misnomer as it was originally the practice of taking to the podium and speaking endlessly to prevent a bill from coming to a vote.  Now, in an act euphemistically, and for that matter hypocritically, described as a function of the gentility of The Senate rather than as a political convenience that enables senators to work a three day, stress-free week, The Senate as a body has acquiesced in the expedient and self-serving fiction that requiring 60 votes in favor of closing debate over a bill is tantamount to filibustering.  Without that 60 votes, no bill goes to the floor of The Senate for a vote by virtue of a flagrantly disingenuous mechanism called "cloture," or the closing of debate.  In one sense, it is the same thing as the dubious tactic of orating for hours, or even days to prevent the vote, but without the necessity of doing anything.  The Senate might refer to the practice as a "gentlemen's agreement," but I would refer to it as evasion of the democratic responsibility to cast votes for ones constituents as their surrogate.  Filibuster and cloture are just that: evasion of responsibility, but it is masked as civility.  And I guarantee you that if equating cloture votes with filibustering and omnibus bills were barred by senate rules...if Senators had to vote publicly on bills that addressed the issues of the day, we would see true democracy working instead of oligarchy functioning as a perquisite of politicizing the two party system to make it serve as a path to a long term, lucrative job.

So President Biden, if you are reading this, please consider the simple and direct path to greatness of reining in our elected politicians by making them admit their votes to the voters. Take to the bully pulpit and chasten them. Partisanship will cease to be the raison d'être for casting a vote, and good faith with the voters will prevail...to the benefit of our entire nation.    

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

Not having any Trump atrocities to complain about or tweets to refute is such an odd feeling.  After four years of living out the Mad Hatter's tea party, I barely know how to relax.  I've awakened each day of Trump's presidency in fear of what folly was to play itself out that day, and now, lack of potential for a Trump debacle seems fantastical.  Thank goodness, we still have the Republicans to dread, although even Mitch McConnell seems to be coming around in that he is almost amenable to convicting Trump at his impeachment trial.  And now, Oklahoma Republican senator James Langford, who supported the fraudulent fraudulent-election conspiracy has published a qualified letter of apology to Tulsa's black community, disavowing the aspects of the Trump election conspiracy theory that focused on black voting districts in major cities, which was just about the entirety of the Trumpers' rationale.  What's happening is that Republicans are finally recognizing that Trumpism was just a bad dream, and that the country has now woken up.  There is still that lunatic fringe out there, which will probably never leave never-never land, but even if the Republican Party comprised no one but them, they would only represent about 80% of 27% of the electorate.  So, if a Republican candidate gets that 21.6% of the votes in any future election, he or she still needs to come up with another 28.4% of the electorate to be elected even to the local sewer commission.  That's 28.4% of an electorate that is presumably rational enough to recognize a candidate who is pandering to lunatics as a lunatic himself.

This is the imminent phenomenon that allowed me to wake up smiling today.  Republicans have arrogated moral preeminence to themselves over the past four decades since Reagan was first elected by adopting sanctimony and trickling down as the national creeds.  Since then, they have wallowed in their putative moral superiority, and Americans have drunk that Kool-Aid in buckets until just very recently.  But since the downfall of the Mountebank Trump, America has been forced to wake up, and now questions are being asked.  The vast majority of Americans know that there was absolutely no excuse for acquiescence in the Republicans' voter fraud conspiracy theory.  No evidence supported it, and even if that weren't the case...even if there were no evidence either way...it was absurd on its face, which suggests that Republican rhetoric is absurd ab initio.   Hence, Republicans have some explaining to do, especially the more-than 120 Republican congressmen and seven or eight Republican senators who protested and/or voted against affirmation of the electoral college vote for our president-elect, Joe Biden.  They have shown themselves to be panderers and demagogues who seek nothing but self-promotion to higher office, and now they are going to have to scramble to just keep the offices they have now.  No one is going to vote for someone who has subscribed to fraud in the name of retaining power and political favor...at least no one who isn't a Republican.

So here we are with the Republican political establishment largely in retreat, often groveling on their knees as they go, because they were co-opted by Trump and Trumpists on the election fraud issue, and scrambling to either claim that they know something that no one else knows or that they made an excusable mistake for which they should be forgiven.  Even Republican Kevin McCarthy,  the idiot minority leader of the House of Representatives who claimed to be qualified to be Speaker of the House after Paul Ryan--Ryan declined to run for reelection in the Trump era--is on the run.  His qualification to be Speaker in his mind was that his party, largely under his leadership, had managed to defame Hillary Clinton sufficiently to keep her from winning the 2016 presidential election.   But now he is abandoning his hyper-partisan sycophancy toward Trump in favor of seeking censure for Trump rather than impeachment and conviction in The Senate.  Even the obsequious McCarthy knows that enough Trump is enough.  And trailing right after him will be a parade of contrite Republicans beating their chests and gnashing their teeth as they complain that they were duped in their service to party loyalty, which like McCarthy, they claim to be a qualification to govern.  Even Lou Dobbs, the wacko conservative pontiff of Fox News, is airing repudiations of the conspiracy theory, presumably in an effort to redeem his credibility among someone other than his fellow wackos.

I've heard political commentators say that the Republicans are in a good position to make inroads on the Democratic hegemony in the House and Senate in 2022, but the only way that can happen in my estimation is if no one has learned his lesson from the Trump presidency.  But even if you didn't read the news, you couldn't help but see that our country had dropped into a rabbit hole worthy of a maleficent fairy tale.  The Republican myth of moral superiority is now defunct.  Thus, the only question that will be answered in 2022 is, who wants to stick our collective finger in the fan...again. 

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

All of the attention of the media, and for that matter of the entire American polity, has been focused on January 6th and Donald Trump's roll in the insurrection that occurred on that date, and now on Congress's efforts to separate Trump from power now and forever.  The House is considering another article of impeachment against Trump after importuning Mike Pence in a House resolution to use his power as vice-president to invoke the 25th amendment and relieve Trump of power to govern in consequence of his unfitness to do so.  Of course, all of those who voted in favor of the resolution know from the outset that Goody-Three-Shoes will never do it, craven toady that he is.  And much of the coverage of the events in Congress has been aimed at the prospects of the article of impeachment, though the cognate trial before The Senate requires a two thirds vote in favor of conviction for the impeachment to succeed.  And of course, the fact that half of The Senate is Republican renders that an impossibility, given what Republicans are.  Notably, there were only a few votes in favor of even the resolution, though Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House, proposed that it be passed by unanimous consent via voice acclamation, and very little is being said about that: the roll Republicans are playing in protecting Trump from what seems a more and more apt censure given what appears to be Trump's flagging support in the nation.  So, what about the future of the Republican Party once Trump is gone?

The issue is where Republicans' loyalty lies.  It is obvious that Republicans vote along party lines, but Democrats often do too.  When it comes to ordinary measures, the parties march in relative lock-step in furtherance of their respective party aggenda.  It's always been that way, and in some ways it should be so, but that is a subject for another time.  It has been so in the last two impeachments as well, and even that degree of party loyalty may be just short of vile.  But in both those cases, personal peccadillo was the central matter: with Clinton it was being a hound dog and a liar, and for Trump it was just using his office to promote his own electoral prospects.  But this time, the issue is commission of treason.  It is suborning the interdiction by force of the process of our democracy.  Trump sent a mob to prevent the congressional certification of the election of the next president because it wasn't him. That isn't a peccadillo; it is an offense against our democracy: our nation.  The problem for the Republicans is that they are choosing party over country, which begs the question--as all party line votes do--what is the Republican Party's platform in this instance.

It would be one thing if Trump's behavior had just been flagrantly self-serving.  That's who he is, and more than 74 million people--all fully aware of Trump's despicable penchant--voted for him, and often with enthusiasm if not zeal.  In fact, a handful of them were in our capitol building last Wednesday when they shouldn't have been, and there's the rub: mindless zeal turned to intentional, and perhaps even plotted, action.  We cannot ignore Trump's exhortation to the mob just because he was in the habit of conspiratorial simpering and whimpering.  He acted to usurp power by sicking a mob on our senators and representatives not because he didn't like the duty they were performing, but because he wanted to prevent them from doing it.  It was sedition plain and simple, and law and our Constitution forbid it.  And so, when Republicans vote to enable Trump out of partisanship, they convey their lack of loyalty to country.  Thus, Republicans face a conundrum.

Much of the Republican base isn't just conservative.  It is aligned with the putatively patriotic proposition, "my country, right or wrong."  I do not personally subscribe to that proposition, but for one who does, and is a Republican in service of that creed, he or she is now a walking oxymoron: a conservative "Republican patriot," a paradox that defies resolution.  From this point hence, Republicans are by definition UN-patriotic in that they put party ahead of what they have always raved was their first priority: country...America.   

So, we'll see in the next federal election whether conservative voters are actually thinkers as well.  Fore it seems to me that there is no way to avoid the conclusion that a politician who votes against constraining Donald Trump during his last few days in office from committing what could potentially be a devastating injury to our nation, America--and it is ours, not that of the rabble that thought themselves bodacious when they entered the capitol wearing horned helmets, waving odious flags and putting their feet up on desks--cannot claim to be a patriot any longer, nor can he or she merit the vote of anyone who is one.

Your friend,

Mike    

Dear America,

Our Constitution was conceived and created in fragments over the course of about two centuries.  As a consequence, like any patchwork, it has seams that allow for interpretation.  So, when a provision was introduced, an Amendment for example, it sometimes left interstices as to issues like how it was to be enforced.  With regard to impeachment, for example, Section 2 of Article 1 gives the power to impeach to the House of Representatives.  Section 3 gives the Senate the sole power to try the person impeached, and says how the trial should proceed in general terms, but it doesn't say anything about the impeachment process in The House, effectively the indictment process, per se.

Section 3 of the 14th Amendment says:

all of which raises the question, does impeachment for a role in an insurrection itself, regardless of any trial that might or might not occur pursuant thereto, bar the impeached from holding office again?

I don't know the text of the articles of impeachment being circulated by Nancy Pelosi, but I would argue that this provision of our Constitution should be specifically referenced by incorporation in the definition of high crimes and misdemeanors with the phrase, "including insurrection or rebellion and giving aid and comfort to the enemies of the United States and our Constitution as specified in Section 3 of the 14th Amendment of our Constitution".  By doing so, the act of impeachment by our House of Representatives would arguably suffice to preclude Donald Trump from ever holding government office again. We may not be able to remove Trump from office now, but we might obviate removal in the future ever becoming an issue again.

I am no expert when it comes to the Constitution, or perhaps when it comes to anything at all.  There may be a provision of the Constitution that limits the significance of impeachment to effectively indicting someone.  It may be that impeachment can only serve as an indictment requiring trial by The Senate.  But whether that is so or not, an impeachment in and of itself, especially if it incorporates the language I suggest, would possibly be a permanent impediment to Trump's re-ascendancy. 

The events of January 6, which Donald Trump specifically suggested be committed and by doing so gave direction and comfort to the perpetrators thereof, should render that invasion of the seat of our legislature the death knell of the Trump threat to our nation's stability, not just now, but in perpetuity.  I don't mean only that such an outcome would be just, but rather, that we are delinquent in our duty as the progenitors of generations of Americans to come if we don't at least make the full effort to prevent the end of democracy in the United States of America as far as possible.  Every word, comma and phrase in any articles of impeachment that our House of Representatives passes will be of profound significance in this effort, and as such, should be weighed and assessed thoroughly, as should be any elision from the text.

It smacks of melodrama to claim that the interlopers of January 6 were invading my house, but it certainly is the case that they invaded our house.  It is not just symbolism to so suggest in that our laws, and hence justice and freedom in this country spring from there, and any effort to interdict that process is more than technical treason.  It is a genuine existential threat to our liberty as people and as a people.  Let's hope that congress does something...anything...to keep Donald Trump from wreaking his vile, psychotic  megalomania on our country again.  

Your friend,

Mike  

Dear America,

LOCK DISGRACEFUL DONALD UP.

Your Outraged Friend,

Mike

Dear America,

2020 is finally over and we can hope that the pandemic is not far behind it.  But more importantly, we're just about three weeks away from the end of another plague, the Trump presidency.  Unfortunately, Trump is still intent on inflicting himself upon a damaged nation with his lunacy about having won the election of the last year, "by a landslide" he says, despite the fact that there isn't one iota of evidence to support his bizarre, self-serving fantasy.  Regrettably, our nation may never be the same after his tenure ends.

I am keenly aware of how lucky we all are to live in America.  The freedoms and prosperity we enjoy are unmatched anywhere else in the world, and because those freedoms in particular are encoded in a single, seminal document that defines our nation, we can feel secure in what we enjoy as life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness...at least I thought so until the last four years.  Now, my thoughts continually revert to my woe over the fact that, if the behavior and ideas that Trump has illuminated with his incitements of the baser instincts and thoughts of so many of our countrymen are the true nature of American freedom, I do not live in the country that I always thought I did.  The shibboleth "American exceptionalism"  was apparently coined by Joseph Stalin as a criticism of a movement in this country comprising American communists who believed that American communism was an exception in many respects to the paradigms posited by Marx and the communist doctrine of the late twenties.  That people like Newt Gingrich would adopt the same identifying designation, eschewing only the references to communism, is indeed ironic.  And their ipsi dixit pontifications on what they claim to be the objective virtue of the American ethos are the verbal embodiment of the flag in which they wrap themselves so as to avoid any prospect of contradiction or criticism.  That's the way flag waving works; you can't protest without subjecting yourself to being labeled unpatriotic because those who arrogate the flag to their own use and purposes presume to define themselves, and there are enough of them--and they are sufficiently indefatigable in their sanctimony--that one who wishes to inject reason into any conversation allowing for criticism of American philosophy or political demagoguery is open to castigation by them.  That's the way American exceptionalism works.  No matter what conduct would merit condemnation of another nation is by definition proper when we do it.

And so, in an era when the breath of the person standing next to an American might be lethal, it is unacceptable to any of those exceptional Americans to demand of them that they wear facemasks as science has determined we should.  Those exceptional Americans think that it is their right to risk not just their own health, but yours and mine as well.  Their Americanism isn't loyalty to their fellows; it is loyalty to a flag that becomes a mere piece of cloth denoting nothing more than their impious beliefs about national loyalty.  It is the arrogance required to dispense with the real "American Way."  Their concept of exceptionalism is not just the stupidity to ignore science and knowledge at risk to themselves, which they equate with freedom.  It is the prerogative of exposing their fellow Americans to their folly, and to do it proudly.  That's really the core of the problem: pride is a sin unless you are an American.  Here, the God we as a nation supposedly respect above all else has noting to say about it, even though pride has been the first and worst of the sins since long before the common era, which brings me to my point.

In some sense, I always believed in American exceptionalism.  That is, I thought we were a nation of good, compassionate, mostly prudent and mutually considerate people, and that we were an apotheosis of those virtues...perhaps not the only one, but certainly one of the virtuous nations on earth.  But Trump gave a contingent of Americans permission to show the world that such is not the case, at least not  universally.   It certainly is the case that the majority of our people believe in our creed and each other: at least the 80+ million who voted against Trump do.  But the flagrant disregard for their fellow Americans of all those who voted for Trump...their willingness to disavow the obvious truth when it conflicts with their baser beliefs, instincts and unquestioned biases...demonstrates that American exceptionalism, at least what I believed it to be, is not something that the rest of the world should count on.  I can only describe what I feel in this regard as despair, and frankly, shame.

So now we have Joe Biden to lead us.  I am hopeful, at least from the perspective that we no longer have a nihilistic miscreant leading us, though we will have to see what Biden's fiber is over time.  In the interim, I'm glad that the last four years are behind us, so happy new year, America.  Here's to us; the real us.

Your friend,

Mike