Category: Trump effect

September 6, 2018

 

Not since we were ruled by a late stage syphilitic monarch from across the ocean have we had a ruler so manifestly unfit for office and so single mindedly dedicated to rapaciously plundering our coffers for his own selfish gain.  The one-two punch of the release of Bob Woodward’s “Fear,” and the publication of the anonymous Op-Ed written by a cowardly conservative cowering in The West Wing, have confirmed beyond cavil that Trump is exactly as he appears—amoral, cruel, impulsive, ignorant and blisteringly stupid.

 

The question is, what are we to do in the face of this confirmation of our worst fears?  Should we be mollified that Trump’s dangerous impulses are allegedly being restrained by shadowy, unnamed officials, whose most fervent hope is to execute his tax-cutting, nativist agenda more competently?  The answer is a resounding “No!”

 

The fact is that the Constitution provides not one, but two, routes out of this crisis.  The most obvious one, suggested by the anonymous Op-Ed writer, is to invoke the 25th Amendment.  Section 4 of the Amendment provides that, “[w]henever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the office of Acting President.”  Anonymous claims that this option was considered and rejected for fear that it would “precipitate a Constitutional crisis,” a self-serving statement that ignores that we are already in one.

The other obvious mechanism for resolving this crisis is through impeachment.  Article II, Section 4 states that the “President, Vice President and all civil officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.”  Although we know that impeachment is a political question and that Mueller has yet to complete his investigation, Trump has committed enough acts in plain sight for Congress to at least consider the question.  From nakedly profiting from the office of the Presidency, to violating the Emoluments Clause, to admitting to obstruction of justice on the evening news, to the numerous convictions and guilty pleas of his campaign chair, National Security Advisor and personal lawyer, the mountain of evidence that Trump is guilty of impeachable offenses is harder to ignore than a ten car pileup on the 405.

 

Despite that, outside of the faint murmurs of disapproval from lame duck Senators, Congressional Republicans have been stunningly silent.  The reason is obvious — as long as Trump has a functioning right hand with which to sign executive orders and legislation unleashing unchecked corporate power, they will prop him up.  The sham hearing being conducted to confirm a baby-faced sociopath lacking in empathy to the Supreme Court is just the latest evidence of the Republicans’ bad faith lust for absolute power at any cost.  They know that the majority of Americans detest their agenda, so they aim to lock in a Second Redemption Court that will secure the reign of a white supremacist patriarchal minority for a generation. To a person, the Republican vision for this country is a demented mash-up of “Cry the Beloved Country,” and “The Handmaid’s Tale.”  They have forfeited every shred of legitimacy. We must never forget that they are the authors of this nightmare. If our democracy still has a pulse after November, never let a single one of them near elected office again.

#25thAmendment

#KavaNAH

#VOTE

September 4, 2018

 

If we had any doubt that the lazy days of summer end the Tuesday after Labor Day, regardless of what the calendar says, today snapped us out of that torpor with a vengeance.  The Republicans were “damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead,” in their determination to push pedigreed toady, Brett Kavanaugh, onto the Supreme Court, despite the fact that only 4% of his records had been made available to the Senate, as of the start of hearings this morning (Source:  “The fight over the release of Kavanaugh documents as hearing gets underway, explained,” by Li Zhou, Kay Steiger and Andrew Prokop, Vox.com, 9/4/18).  That is a level of secrecy unprecedented in the history of Supreme Court confirmation hearings.

It is even more alarming, because what we do know about Kavanaugh suggests that he is an affable extremist.  In a 2009 law review article, Kavanaugh opined that sitting presidents should be provided with “a temporary deferral of civil suits and of criminal prosecutions and investigations,”(emphasis added), (Source:  “Separation of Powers During the Forty-Fourth Presidency and Beyond,” by Brett M. Kavanaugh, Minnesota Law Review.org, 2009).  There is little doubt that this expansive view of executive power was the most salient part of Kavanaugh’s record, as far as Trump was concerned.  Make no mistake, Kavanaugh’s ascension to the Supreme Court will profoundly endanger the bedrock principle that no person, including the President of the United States, is above the law.

In addition, despite Kavanaugh’s meaningless recitation of the truism that Roe v. Wade is settled law, his antipathy to a woman’s right to choose is evident in his recent opinions in Garza v. Hargan, 875 F.3d 735 (D.C. Circuit, 2017).  When Kavanaugh wrote the decision for the three judge panel, he had no problem delaying the ability of a 17 year old refugee to get an abortion, despite the fact that she had complied with the already onerous waiting period required under Texas state law.  When that decision was overturned by the full Circuit, sitting en banc, Kavanaugh penned a vehement dissent,accusing the majority of creating a “new right for unlawful immigrant minors in U.S. government detention to obtain immediate abortion on demand.”  He went on to contemptuously denigrate the majority’s opinion as being “in line with dissents…by Justices, Brennan, Marshall and Blackmun,” (Garza v. Hargan, 875 F.3d at 753).

Those two sentences reveal a tremendous amount about Kavanaugh’s point of view.  His emphasis on J.D.’s status as an “unlawful immigrant,” whose “home country does not allow elective abortions,” is evidence that Kavanaugh has greater fealty to patriarchy than to the Constitution, since it is settled law that undocumented immigrants are entitled to equal protection under the 14th Amendment (Plyler v. Doe, 457 U. S. 202 (S.Ct. 1982)).  Secondly, it is telling that the most damning criticism that Kavanaugh can conceive is to liken the majority’s opinion on an abortion issue to opinions written by Justice Harry Blackmun, the author of the opinion in Roe v. Wade, or liberal lions of the Court such as Justices William Brennan and Thurgood Marshall.

The truth is, what we do know about Kavanaugh’s views is repugnant enough.  How much worse is what he’s hiding?

 

#KavaNAH

#VOTE

September 1, 2018

Yesterday’s homegoing service for our beloved Queen of Soul was a glorious celebration that was like the woman herself – regal and unapologetically Black, from the fleet of pink Cadillacs to the gold casket. Aretha Franklin was eulogized and celebrated by an array of luminaries who spoke, sang and preached about her singularity. You cannot divorce Aretha Franklin’s greatness from the context that created it – an otherworldly talent forged in the inextricably linked Black church and Black freedom struggle. It is not surprising that the daughter of legendary preacher and civil rights leader, Reverend C.L. Franklin, would leverage her gifts in service to Black people. The theme that speakers returned to again and again was that, despite Aretha’s once in a millennium talent, global fame and wealth, she never divorced herself from her community or her people. She remained in her native Detroit, a fiercely proud hometown girl. Speakers cited numerous examples of times when Aretha selflessly helped people in large ways and small – from arranging an 11 city tour with Harry Belafonte to bail Dr. King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference out of a financial emergency, to offering to post bond for Angela Davis, to performing a free, impromptu concert (complete with band and backup singers) at a senior citizens’ home. Continue reading “RESPECT”

August 29th, 2018

 

To be black in America is to cycle endlessly through feelings of hope and despair.  No date is more emblematic of that cycle than August 28th.  August 28th, 1963 is justly celebrated every year as the anniversary of the historic March on Washington, famous for Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech.  In that speech, Dr. King spoke of  his hopeful “dream” for an America where people would not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. Those are the words always cited, which most Americans can recite by heart.  People overlook that in that same speech, Dr. King challenged America, stating that “we have come to our nation’s Capitol to cash a check…[because] America has given the Negro people a bad check…, ”  defaulting on the promises inherent in the Declaration of Independence as far as black people were concerned. Continue reading “Account past due”

August 26, 2018

Senator John McCain died yesterday, after battling glioblastoma, the same cancer that killed Beau Biden and Senator Ted Kennedy. The tributes pouring in have been legion, none more fulsome than from many liberal Democrats. The backlash on social media has been critical of how, in our haste to mythologize Senator McCain, his conservatism has been overlooked. If for no other reason than to honor the Senator’s vaunted distaste for b.s., we should be clear eyed and honest in eulogizing him.

John McCain was a third generation Navy man whose callow youth ended when he was captured during the Vietnam War. He endured five years of torture and solitary confinement as a prisoner of war, famously breaking under pressure and signing a false confession and just as famously, refusing the early release offered because of his father’s stature. Continue reading “R.I.P. Senator John McCain”

August 24, 2018

All of the commentators are saying that the Cohen plea and Manafort conviction on Tuesday mark a watershed moment; that the seismic impact of those twin developments has altered the trajectory of Trump’s presidency. Trump seems to realize it, with his deranged rambling that impeaching him will tank the stock market and his whining that flipping should be “illegal.” Although we’ve long known that Trump was a corrupt racist authoritarian, it was still a shock to hear the current occupant of The White House openly speak like a two-bit mobster. Continue reading “The Turning Point”

August 22, 2018

Even by the standards of those of us who remember our teachers wheeling televisions into our classrooms so that we could watch the Watergate hearings, or the sound of Sam Ervin’s sonorous drawl coming out of boom boxes on beaches everywhere, yesterday was an ASTONISHING day. Paul Manafort, Trump’s campaign chairman, was convicted of 8 felony counts, including “five counts of tax fraud, two counts of bank fraud and one count of failure to disclose a foreign bank account,” (Source: “Paul Manafort, Trump’s Former Campaign Chairman, Guilty of 8 Counts,” by Sharon LaFraniere, The New York Times, 8/21/18).

At virtually the same time, Michael Cohen, Trump’s longtime personal lawyer, stood in a federal courtroom in lower Manhattan and pled guilty to eight felonies, including buying the silence of two women with whom Trump had had an affair “in coordination with and at the direction of a candidate for federal office…for the purpose of influencing the election” in 2016, (Source: “Michael Cohen Says He Arranged Payments at Trump’s Direction,” by William K. Rashbaum, Maggie Haberman, Ben Protess and Jim Rutberg, The New York Times, 8/21/18). Continue reading “Trump’s very bad, no good, day”

August 19, 2018

Each day’s fresh revelations seem to hasten Trump’s descent into full on King Lear- dinner theater edition. There are unhinged Twitter rants directed equally at disloyal confidants and highly esteemed career government lawyers; the capricious revocation of security clearance (or the threat of it) as retaliation against former high-ranking officials with the temerity to criticize the thin-skinned autocrat.

The strongest evidence we have that Trump is unraveling is the escalating number of former sycophants eagerly turning on him to save their own skins. First we had Cohen intimating the existence of damaging tapes, then we had Omarosa one-up Cohen by actually releasing damaging tapes. The most sophisticated gambit, though, came from White House Counsel, Don McGahn, who is skillfully plotting his exculpation through the media. Yesterday’s New York Times featured a detailed story of McGahn’s extensive cooperation with the Special Counsel’s inquiry. McGahn’s actions seem motivated by his fear that Trump is setting him up to take the fall for obstruction of justice, rather than from a patriotic sense of duty to help Robert Mueller get at the truth (Source: “McGahn, White House Counsel, Has Cooperated Extensively in Mueller Inquiry,” by Michael S. Schmidt and Maggie Haberman, The New York Times, 8/18/18). Continue reading “Pledge of allegiance #2”

August 15th, 2018

In a clear case of the student surpassing the teacher, Omarosa has masterfully hijacked the news cycle. In the last several days she has dominated both print media and the airwaves with her accusation that a tape exists of Trump saying the “n” word. She has strategically released tapes of Kelly, Trump and Jared and Ivanka. Being beaten at his own game has enraged Trump and he vented his spleen on Twitter, calling her a “lowlife” and a “dog.” In doing so, Trump accomplished the rare feat of forcing black people to defend a craven, vainglorious, traitorous opportunist from his dehumanizing epithet. Omarosa’s performative shock at the extent of Trump’s racism and misogyny is a bit rich coming from the woman who told us we were going to have to bow down to Trump. Like a real life Captain Renault, Omarosa professes to be shocked that Trump is a thin-skinned racist and misogynistic crackpot. Spare us, Omarosa. You’re still not invited to the cookout. Continue reading “The long game”

August 10, 2018

Our latest proof that God has a wicked sense of humor is evidenced by the fact that the start of storied Howard University’s welcome week for incoming freshmen coincides with the second “Unite the Right” rally in which emboldened Nazis and white supremacists will converge on Washington, D.C. Although the prospect of white people rallying behind the cause of the murder or forceful deportation of Blacks, other people of color and Jews may seem extreme, it is a point of view increasingly being normalized in every corner of our society. Continue reading “Democracy- by any means necessary”