Whereof One Can Speak 🇺🇦

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Category Archives: History

Any Republican President Would Have Been Dangerous

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Probably not as dangerous as T____, because that representative of that party was eager to become a dictator. But anyone who was bad enough to win the Republican nomination would have followed Federalist Society recommendations and chosen Supreme Court ideologues just as dangerous as the ones T____ picked. Consider what Alito, Thomas and sometimes Roberts have been able to accomplish in company with Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Coney Barrett.

They allowed states to force pregnant women to give birth, while at the same time denying that Americans have a right to privacy, thus setting the stage to overturn other precedents, including the right to use contraception and the right to marry who we want.

They decided states don’t have the right to regulate guns, making it easier for gun fetishists to stroll around our neighborhoods with dangerous weapons more easily than residents of Wild West towns like Deadwood and Tombstone could do 150 years ago.

They weakened Miranda rights, decided tribal lands aren’t truly sovereign, allowed public school teachers to lead their students in prayer and decreed that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration couldn’t protect workers from COVID-19.

This morning they announced that the Environmental Protection Agency is limited in its ability to follow the Clean Air Act and regulate greenhouse gases, which will probably lead to other Executive Branch agencies not being able to do their jobs.

They’ve allowed Republican legislatures to devise congressional districts that will insure Republicans are elected and have decided to hear a case later this year that may give state legislatures absolute control over elections, to the point where legislators, not voters, can decide won an election, ignoring state constitutions that allow judges to review their decisions.

This is what we get for electing Republicans to high office. Any Republican president would have given us a Supreme Court majority just as bad.

Today, President Biden said he supports changing the Senate’s filibuster rule to reinstate the Roe v. Wade decision that prohibited forced birth. Senators don’t need his permission to fix or abandon the filibuster. They don’t need his permission to protect voting rights and exercise reasonable control over a renegade Supreme Court.

If Democrats fail to add senators or lose the House of Representatives in the next election, the Court will remain free to remake America. Those are the stakes in November.

We Should Criticize the Home Team When They Deserve It

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Two articles today have a common, negative theme:

Why Are Democrats Letting Republicans Steamroll Them? (Politico)

The Fall of Roe Is the Culmination of the Democratic Establishment’s Failures (The Washington Post)

The Politico article says the two parties have very different approaches to national politics:

The simplest way to summarize the situation is that Democrats value democratic norms over policy achievements, and Republicans feel the opposite….

This is a pattern we’ve seen repeated ever since. Republicans attempt some unprecedented and shocking move; horrified Democrats respond by trying to be the adults in the room; and then the Democrats go unrewarded for it.

To be sure, a country is probably better off with one responsible party than with zero. But in important ways, this kind of asymmetry can be dangerous, making the government less and less representative of its people….

We’re seeing this dynamic again in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. This ruling, while opposed by most Americans, was a longstanding goal of Republicans … And Democratic leaders had, thanks to [the] bombshell disclosure of the draft opinion, ample warning that it was coming. And in response, they have done … virtually nothing.

There are actions Congress could take (although with likely opposition from the two “Democratic” roadblocks, Manchin and Sinema); or the House could take by itself; or the president could take. Some of these might be considered norm-breaking and deemed too aggressive by Very Serious People. But as the Politico author points out, game theory tells us that the best way to deal with an uncooperative opponent is to stop cooperating. Otherwise you’ll be  taken advantage of over and over.

The Washington Post article by Perry Bacon, Jr., says Democratic leaders are simply too damn old:

The overturning of Roe v. Wade, and the underwhelming reaction from senior Democratic leaders to that huge defeat, make the case even clearer that the party’s too-long-in-power leaders — including President Biden — need to move aside. On their watch, a radicalized Republican Party has gained so much power that it’s on the verge of ending American democracy as we know it.

It’s a gerontocracy. Biden is 79; Nancy Pelosi is 82; her second-in-command, Steny Hoyer is 83; the House’s third-ranking Democrat, James Clyburn is 81; Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is only 71, but his second-in-command, Dick Durbin, is 77. (I’m slightly younger than all of them but understand it’s too easy for politicians to overstay their welcome.)

Mr. Bacon continues:

Party leaders … spent 2021 downplaying Republican radicalism while emphasizing building roads years from now. No matter what happens this election cycle, their previous defeats, lack of new strategies and open disdain for the party’s activists is too much to allow this group to remain in charge. The Americans who will most suffer from entrenched GOP rule … deserve leaders who will fight as hard and creatively as possible for them, not a leadership class so invested in defending its own power, legacy and political approach….

There is a real ideological divide between the center-left and left in the Democratic Party. But I think an equally and perhaps more important fissure is between the political approach of the Old Guard and those who embrace a modern style of politics [among whom he includes Elizabeth Warren, who’s 73] …  I sense that they understand how politics in 2022 actually works. Unlike Biden and Pelosi, they are not wedded to polls and bipartisanship and do not constantly distance themselves from the party’s activists. They are much more open to new thinking.

I agree with both of them, but I’ll add another factor: money. There is nothing on the left that matches the number of billionaires and less than billionaires who fund right-wing organizations, Fox News being the prime example. But that imbalance doesn’t excuse the failure of Democratic leaders to effectively deal with the Republican menace.

President Biden’s biggest failure has been his inability to get 50 senators (all of whom caucus with the Democrats) to support his agenda, even on matters that don’t require reforming the Senate filibuster. Depending on how things work out, his appointment of the cautious Merrick Garland may be his second biggest failure. If you need a recent example of his perspective on Washington politics, here’s what President Biden said in February regarding duplicitous turtle-face Mitch McConnell, the guy who packed the Supreme Court that’s now running the country:

You’re a man of your word, you’re a man of honor. Thank you for being my friend.

The Reactionary Politics of Resentment

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How did the Republican Party get so extreme? Paul Krugman of The New York Times asks the question and offers an answer — or rather a historical parallel:

… The Republican turn toward extremism began during the 1990s. Many people have forgotten the political craziness of the Clinton years — the witch hunts and wild conspiracy theories (Hillary murdered Vince Foster!), the attempts to blackmail Bill Clinton into policy concessions by shutting down the government, and more. And all of this was happening during what were widely regarded as good years, with most Americans believing that the country was on the right track.

It’s a puzzle. I’ve been spending a lot of time lately looking for historical precursors — cases in which right-wing extremism rose even in the face of peace and prosperity. And I think I’ve found one: the rise of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s.

It’s important to realize that while this organization took the name of the post-Civil War group, it was actually a new movement — a white nationalist movement to be sure, but far more widely accepted, and less of a pure terrorist organization [than the 19th century Klan]. And it reached the height of its power — it effectively controlled several states — amid peace and an economic boom.

What was this new K.K.K. about? I’ve been reading Linda Gordon’s The Second Coming of the K.K.K.: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition, which portrays a “politics of resentment” driven by the backlash of white, rural and small-town Americans against a changing nation. The K.K.K. hated immigrants and “urban elites”; it was characterized by “suspicion of science” and “a larger anti-intellectualism.” Sound familiar?

… Republican extremism clearly draws much of its energy from the same sources.

And because G.O.P. extremism is fed by resentment against the very things that, as I see it, truly make America great — our diversity, our tolerance for difference — it cannot be appeased or compromised with. It can only be defeated.

Adam Serwer of The Atlantic says overturning Roe v. Wade is “just the beginning of the Court’s mission to reshape all of American society according to conservative demands”, taking advantage of their office to address the resentments and supposed grievances of the Republican Party’s most dedicated supporters: 

Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson [announces] that when it comes to rights “not mentioned in the Constitution,” only those “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition” are protected. If you’re asking yourself who decides which rights can be so described, you’re on the right track….

As the three Democratic-appointed justices note in their Dobbs dissent, more constitutional rights now are on the chopping block. “Either the majority does not really believe in its own reasoning. Or if it does, all rights that have no history stretching back to the mid-19th century are insecure,” the dissenters wrote. “Either the mass of the majority’s opinion is hypocrisy, or additional constitutional rights are under threat. It is one or the other.” It seems to be the latter: In his concurrence, Justice Clarence Thomas writes that precedents establishing access to contraception, legalizing same-sex marriage, and striking down anti-sodomy laws should be “reconsidered”….

The Supreme Court has become an institution whose primary role is to force a right-wing vision of American society on the rest of the country. The conservative majority …  takes whatever stances define right-wing cultural and political identity at a given moment and asserts them as essential aspects of American law since the founding, and therefore obligatory…. The dictates of the Constitution retrospectively shift with whatever Fox News happens to be furious about. Legal outcomes preferred by today’s American right conveniently turn out to be what the Founding Fathers wanted all along.

The 6–3 majority has removed any appetite for caution or restraint, and the justices’ lifetime appointments mean they will never have to face an angry electorate that could deprive them of their power. It has also rendered their approach to the law lazy, clumsy, and malicious…

Many of the Court’s recent decisions, even before Dobbs, have demonstrated this. In the case over the Biden administration’s vaccine mandate for employers, the conservative justices disregarded the explicit text of a federal statute allowing the government to set emergency regulations governing “toxic substances or agents” in the workplace, and employed soft anti-vax arguments that had only become prominent in conservative media since the start of the coronavirus pandemic. As part of its rationale, the majority wrote that “in its half century of existence,” the Occupational Safety and Health Administration “has never before adopted a broad public health regulation of this kind,” which is true, because during that period there had not been a global pandemic that killed more than 1 million Americans.

In their decision earlier this week overturning restrictions on concealed carry of firearms in New York, the right-wing justices ignored historical examples of firearm regulations in order to argue that any such regulations—not just those in New York—were presumptively unconstitutional. The decision was a significant escalation in the Court’s gun-rights jurisprudence from the 2008 Heller decision, which found an individual constitutional right to possess a firearm. In the most recent ruling, Thomas wrote that only those restrictions “consistent with this nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation” are constitutional, but he did so ignoring, as the writer Saul Cornell points out, a centuries-long history of closely regulating arms in densely populated areas. That record is irrelevant. The restrictions deemed consistent with tradition will be whatever the current right-wing consensus happens to be.

Unquote.

Yesterday was more of the same. A federal judge had written a 157-page decision ordering Louisiana’s Republican legislature to change a proposed congressional map that she said violates what’s left of the Voting Rights Act, because, although Louisiana’s population is one-third Black, the map would insure that five out of six congressional districts elect Republicans. Her decision was upheld by an appeals court. Over the objections of the three Democrats on the Supreme Court, and without offering any explanation, the Republican majority overruled the judge and the appeals court. That means the map will be used for November’s elections. The Republican National Committee couldn’t have asked for more.

What He Knew and When He Knew It

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Charles Pierce of Esquire points out a big difference between the Watergate scandal and the attempted coup that led to January 6th:

As it happens, Tuesday was a kind of anniversary. On June 28, 1973, Senator Howard Baker, Jr. (R-Tenn) of the Senate Select Committee On Presidential Campaign Practices —the Watergate committee — began his questioning of former White House counsel John Dean, who had spent several days laying out with bloodless precision what would become known as “the White House horrors”. Baker asked the question that made him famous.

The central question at this point is simply put: What did the President know and when did he know it?

Nobody asked Cassidy Hutchinson that question. It was moot. The answer, as she spent Tuesday telling the committee, was “Everything” and “Immediately”.

I Suppose This Is a Hobby

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I retired almost thirteen years ago and have rarely thought about getting a job, even a part-time job, since. But it appears I’ve settled on a hobby, without really intending to. This blog has been part of it for twelve years. Another part is a philosophical “book” about perspective (or points of view) I’ve been “working on” for almost ten years. The other part is lots and lots of comments I’ve spread around the internet.

Many of these comments have been deposited at an interesting site called Three Quarks Daily. It’s mainly an aggregator. They link to articles of intellectual interest at other sites. They also have a Monday Magazine, which features original content.

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The site is free, although a “one-time donation” or “small monthly payment” makes advertisements disappear. Most of us don’t need more to read on the internet or elsewhere, but I highly recommend 3 Quarks Daily.

What led me to writing this post is that I spent part of last night and most of this afternoon responding to four articles at 3 Quarks (which is more than average output for me).

The first was a response to a Guardian article called “The Federal Reserve Says Its Remedies For Inflation ‘Will Cause Pain’, But To Whom?”. At 3 Quarks, I merely quoted some of Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s recent dialogue with the Fed Chairman, Jerome Powell:

Warren asked Powell if Fed rate increases will lower gas prices, which have hit record highs this month. “I would not think so,” Powell said.

Warren asked if grocery prices will go down because of the Fed’s war on inflation. “I wouldn’t say so, no,” Powell said.

“Rate hikes won’t make Putin turn his tanks around and leave Ukraine,” Warren said, adding that they won’t break up corporate monopolies or stop Covid-19.

“Inflation is like an illness and the medicine needs to be tailored to the specific problem, otherwise you could make things a lot worse,” Warren said. ” … the Fed can slow demand by getting a lot of people fired and making families poorer.”

The Massachusetts Democrat urged Powell to proceed cautiously with further rate hikes.: “You know what’s worse than high inflation and low unemployment? It’s high inflation with a recession and millions of people out of work”.

Next was a response to an article at Aeon called “Armchair science: Thought experiments played a crucial role in the history of science. But do they tell us anything about the real world?”

I disagreed with one of the philosophers quoted in the article, James Robert Brown of the University of Toronto. He said he was extremely impressed with Galileo’s thoughts regarding falling objects. 

Suppose we connect the two objects [a musket-ball and a heavier cannonball] with a short, stiff rod. One could argue that the lighter musket-ball acts as a brake on the heavier cannonball, slowing its fall. Then again, one could also argue that the composite body, whose weight is equal to the sum of the two original bodies, must fall faster than either body alone. This is obviously a contradiction. The only solution, Galileo says, is that all bodies fall at the same rate, independent of their weight.

“I fell out of my chair when I heard it,” Brown said. ‘”It was the most wonderful intellectual experience perhaps of my entire life.” Brown went on to become a leading authority on thought experiments.

At Three Quarks Daily, I expressed skepticism, concluding that Galileo’s thought experiments didn’t prove anything except that it was worth getting empirical evidence on the question (trying it out) before reaching a conclusion.

Number 3 concerned an original article at Three Quarks written by Thomas R. Wells, a “British academic philosopher living in the Netherlands”. He called his article “We Should Fix Climate Change, But We Should Not Regret It”.

Mr. Wells argues that the climate crisis began with the Industrial Revolution, but we shouldn’t regret the Industrial Revolution because of what it’s led to. I’m not sure any sane environmentalists actually regret the Industrial Revolution. I left the fifth comment:

We can agree the Industrial Revolution was a good thing, while also noting that climate change [is] the result of regrettable choices we made along the way, not by starting the Industrial Revolution, but by ignoring our effect on the climate, even though scientists discovered that effect decades ago.

We could have made this a “vastly better world for most people” without making it a vastly worse world for so many other living things. Not exactly coining a phrase, but other living things matter.

Finally, another Three Quarks contributor, Mike Bendzela, who I believe teaches in the English department at the University of South Maine, published an article today called “Abort All Thought That Life Begins”. He argues that there is no such thing as the “beginning of life”. Life has always developed as a gradual process without any particular beginning (its ending isn’t always clear either).

As you might expect, this article has elicited a variety of comments (they’re still landing). I responded to another reader this way:

Justice Blackmun, who wrote the Roe v Wade opinion, shared an internal memo with the other justices before the majority decision was published. He wrote “You will observe that I have concluded that the end of the first trimester is critical. This is arbitrary, but perhaps any other selected point, such as quickening or viability, is equally arbitrary.” [https://en.wikipedia.org/wi…]

… I believe the author … is making the point that any decision regarding a moment when there is “conversion from not human to human” is somewhat (or totally) arbitrary. I’d say the transition from “not human enough” to “human enough” is a matter of convention.

That’s how the five Republicans and two Democrats on the Court ruled in 1973 — they came to a nuanced agreement based on trimesters and viability. It was a reasonable compromise that worked well enough for 50 years, until the Court was corruptly (after Senatorial hypocrisy and lies told to the Judiciary committee) taken over by ideologues.

I see that the person I responded to has now responded to me. Once more unto the breach…

I’ve never read all of Roe v. Wade or the dissents, and I know some lawyers and scholars who oppose forced births (women who get pregnant being compelled by the state to eventually give birth) disagree with the Roe majority’s legal reasoning.

However, as others have pointed out, the 9th Amendment to the Constitution says: “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people”. Even though the Constitution doesn’t mention a right to privacy, or pregnancy or abortion for that matter, I agree with Tim Quick above that we all have certain fundamental rights, including the ones he mentioned that justify women and their doctors sometimes ending a pregnancy without interference from the government.

If topics like these interest you, I recommend Three Quarks Daily. You don’t have to read the comments.