Journal of the Plague Years

July 10, 2018

One can smile and smile and be a villain. Bear that in mind as you consider the nomination of D.C. Circuit Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the U. S. Supreme Court. As soon as his nomination was announced, pundits could be heard praising his “performance,” devoting airtime to how relaxed and at ease Kavanaugh appeared during his remarks. Much is being made of Kavanaugh’s two degrees from Yale and his dozen years on the D.C. Circuit, arguably the most influential appellate court in the country. It is proof of how conditioned we have become to Trump’s practice of appointing incompetent ideologues, that we are relieved when a nominee is conventionally qualified. Continue reading “Do not go gentle into that good night”

July 7, 2018

On Thursday, the steady drumbeat of stories of Scott Pruitt’s epic corruption finally forced the EPA head to resign. Over the last several months, there have been news stories on an almost daily basis, which detailed Pruitt’s narcissism, vindictiveness, avarice and dishonesty. Our glee over Pruitt’s downfall, however, must be tempered by the knowledge that his replacement, former coal lobbyist, Andrew Wheeler, will pursue the same environment-destroying policies, but with a veneer of professionalism. Continue reading “How to stop ethnic cleansing”

July 4, 2018

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among those are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,—That whenever any form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the People to alter or abolish it….” (Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776). Continue reading “Declaration of Independence”

July 2, 2018

It is a challenge to feel hopeful after what feels like the worst week of the ongoing clusterf__k that is the Trump administration.  Five journalists were gunned down in Annapolis, Maryland by a violent misogynist.  2000 immigrant kids remain separated from their parents and  Trump’s Executive Order  traded family separation for family detention, substituting one viciously inhumane practice for another.  Justice Kennedy announced his retirement, paving the way for Trump to assemble a hard right majority on the court that will strip women of their bodily autonomy and myriad other hard won rights from people of color and working people.   Continue reading “Our last, best hope”

June 28, 2018

Yesterday we received the devastating news that Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy will retire on July 31, 2018, handing Trump an opportunity to lock in a hard right majority on the highest court in the land for another 40 years.  Although Kennedy was a conservative justice, he was critical in establishing LGBT civil rights as the law of the land.  Kennedy authored the opinions in Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 558 (S.Ct. 2003) (holding that laws criminalizing consensual sex between LGBT adults were an unconstitutional deprivation of their rights under the 14th Amendment); U.S. v. Windsor, 570 U.S. 744 (S.Ct. 2013) (striking down the Defense of Marriage Act as unconstitutional); and finally, Obergefell v. Hodges, 576 U.S. ___ (S.Ct. 2015), (holding that same sex couples had a fundamental right to marry under the 14th Amendment).  In addition, Kennedy was a key swing vote who delivered majorities on important decisions upholding abortion rights and affirmative action.

Despite this track record as a moderating force protecting “discrete and insular minorities ” from the worst excesses of the majority, Kennedy’s parting gift to America was to cast the deciding vote in a dispiriting trifecta of cases.  First, in Trump v. Hawaii on Monday, Kennedy voted to  uphold the travel ban as an appropriate exercise of presidential power that did not violate the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment (Source: “The Supreme Court Travel Ban Ruling:  A Summary,” by Hilary Hurd, Yishai Schwartz,  Lawfare.com, 6/26/18).  In NIFLA v. Becerra, 585 U.S. ____ (2018), the Supreme Court gave crisis pregnancy centers the right to dupe desperate women by holding that a law requiring them to tell the truth about the availability of free and low cost health services, including abortion, violated their First Amendment rights. Lastly, in Janus v. AFSCME, the conservative majority dealt a blow to public sector unions by eliminating required fair share payments from non-members.

These decisions, combined with their decisions allowing Ohio’s voter purges, and their willingness to leave Wisconsin’s and North Carolina’s gerrymandered districts undisturbed, expose the Supreme Court as nothing more than the judicial branch of the extremist cult that is the current Republican Party.  By providing the legal justification for the denial of voting rights to people of color; bodily autonomy for women; civil rights for LGBT people and organizing tools for working people, they are paving the way for the Republican Party’s plan to transform our country from a flawed representative democracy to a white supremacist patriarchy.

Although we focus much of our anger on Trump, we should never forget for a moment that the true architect of this disaster is Mitch McConnell.  Through his theft of Merrick Garland’s Supreme Court seat and his traitorous insistence that Russia’s interference in our election not be revealed prior to the election, McConnell laid the foundation for our headlong rush into authoritarianism.  Make no mistake, McConnell and his spineless House counterpart, Paul Ryan, are committed to establishing a corrupt oligarchy and have found in Trump a useful idiot who absorbs all of our ire, draining and distracting us.

This is a war over the very idea of America and nothing less than the freedom of every American who isn’t a straight, white, Christian man is at stake.  So, turn your despair into determination and your rage into resolve. Volunteer every week in swing districts (go to swingleft.org to find the closest one).  Fight voter suppression (sign up with www.letamericavote.org to work in your state).  Contribute to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.  Lawyers, volunteer with the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law (https://lawyerscommittee.org/).  Be ready to fight like hell.  I know I am.

#Fightvotersuppression

#Protectdemocracy

#VOTE

June 25, 2018

For those of us wondering who will have the resolve to resist fascism as it steamrolls over our democracy, we need look no further than the lopsided reactions to two events that occurred over the weekend.  On Friday night, the owner of Lexington, Virginia restaurant, The Red Hen, asked White House spokeswoman and professional liar, Sarah Sanders, to leave the restaurant.  The owner explained that she made the decision out of respect for her staff, many of whom are gay and bristled at the idea of serving an agent of a cruelly homophobic and racist administration.  Never one to be constrained by the facts, Sanders tweeted from her government account, “I always do my best to treat people, including those I disagree with, respectfully and will continue to do so,” (@PressSec; 10:53 a.m. 6/23/18, Twitter).  It’s not clear how Sanders squares that statement with her support for the right of businesses to refuse service to LGBT patrons on religious grounds, but no matter.  This was all it took for concern trolling admonishment to erupt from pundits and consultants across the political spectrum.  Everyone from Ari Fleischer to Jonathan Alter to David Axelrod condemned the Red Hen and those of us supporting their decision, although some, like Jessica Valenti, pointed out what should have been obvious — that shunning people for moral transgressions is NOT equivalent to discrimination against classes of people based on their immutable characteristics. Continue reading “Civility or morality: the choice is yours”

June 22, 2018

Although Trump has signed an Executive Order pausing the forcible separation of immigrant children from their parents at the border, the reality is that this “new” policy is barely better than the one that it replaced. The order provides that families will be detained together, potentially indefinitely, setting it on a collision course with existing federal law which requires that undocumented minors be released from detention after 20 days.  Trump is looking to have that requirement waived by the courts or overruled by statute – to allow indefinite detention of minors.  Distaff Goebbels, Kirstjen Nielsen, privately threatened Congress that family separations would resume if they failed to pass such legislation (Source:  “Schiff:  Nielsen privately said family separations could resume,” by John Bowden, TheHill.com, 6/21/18). Continue reading “The architecture of genocide”

June 19, 2018

There have always been two Americas.  One is the America of the ideals expressed in our Declaration of Independence.  This is the America of the fairy tale we tell ourselves that what brings us together as a nation is a shared commitment to democratic principles like equality for all people and respect for the Rule of Law.  This America imagines itself as a country in which all cultures and colors are subsumed in a glorious melting pot of E Pluribus Unum.

The other America is the one where freedom for some required the enslavement of others.  It is one where the phrase, “all men are created equal,” meant only men, and only white ones.  One where the exclusion of people of color from real citizenship was enforced first at the end of a whip, then at the end of a rope and now at the end of a gun.  In this America, de jure second class citizenship for people of color was only eradicated after a bloody Civil War and an ensuing century of violent terrorism.  It is a country where even the modest victory of being able to sit at the same lunch counter, attend the same school, or vote, was met with a fierce backlash.

Continue reading “American Nightmare”

June 16, 2018

The strongest sign yet that our dying democracy still has a pulse came with Judge Amy Berman Jackson’s decision yesterday to revoke Paul Manafort’s bail and send him to jail. Her decision was precipitated by Manafort’s indictment on witness tampering charges while he was out on bail awaiting trial on multiple charges, including conspiracy, money laundering, tax fraud and making false statements. Judge Jackson rebuffed all of the defense arguments against sending Manafort to jail, acerbically noting, “This is not middle school. I can’t take away his cellphone,” (Source: “Judge Orders Manafort Jailed Before Trial, Citing New Obstruction Charges,” by Sharon LaFraniere, The New York Times, 6/15/18). Continue reading “History will not be kind.”

June 12, 2018

Yesterday, in a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court erected another barrier to participation in democracy by people of color, the elderly and veterans, in its decision legitimating Ohio’s “use it or lose it” voter disenfranchisement scheme.  At issue in Husted v. A. Philip Randolph Institute was an Ohio law which purged voters from the rolls if they failed to vote in two successive elections and neglected to return a postcard confirming their address.  The Court overturned the 6th Circuit’s invalidation of the statute as violative of the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (the “Motor Voter Act”), a law with the express purpose of making it easier for citizens to vote.  The majority reached the opposite result from the Sixth Circuit despite the fact that one of that law’s “key provisions limits the ability of states to remove the voters from the voting rolls ‘by reason of the person’s failure to vote,’” (Source:  “Sonia Sotomayor’s Dissent in the Big Voter Purge Case Points to How the Law Might Still be Struck Down,” by Richard L. Hasen, Slate.com, 6/11/18). Continue reading “Power: use it or lose it”