Whereof One Can Speak 🇺🇦

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Category Archives: Politics

What Is To Be Done?

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That’s the title of an 1863 novel by Nikolai Chernyshevsky. It’s about a woman who escapes the control of her family and finds economic independence. (Lenin borrowed the title for a pamphlet about a few “burning questions” in 1902.)

It’s the phrase that came to mind in reaction to the Supreme Court Six’s effort to make America fit their reactionary politics.

Here are two aspects of the situation that make it remarkable (there are others).

One is that the six reactionary Republicans are trying to justify their bizarre rulings by referring to made-up legal theories. As right-wing judges have done for years, they cite “originalism” and “textualism”, the ideas that the Court should pay close attention to the Constitution’s precise text and the specific intentions of its authors. It just so happens that the text and the perceived intentions always support whatever justices like Alito and Thomas prefer to do. Justice Kagan pointed this out in her dissent to the EPA case:

The current Court is textualist only when being so suits it. When that method would frustrate broader goals, special canons like the “major questions doctrine” magically appear as get-out-of-text-free cards.

The “major questions doctrine” is a classic conservative invention. Paul Waldman explains that one:

[It] holds that agencies can’t regulate in ways that aren’t explicitly laid out in statutes if what they’re doing is too consequential — into precedent. Yet in practice, everyone knows that the major questions doctrine, being vague and versatile, will be used only to strike down agency regulations the conservatives don’t like; regulations from Republican administrations they find pleasing will be left intact.

Another right-wing invention concerns “independent” state legislatures. Mr. Waldman continues:

Lest anyone think, on the final day of its term, that the court wasn’t champing at the bit to give Republicans even more power, it announced it will be hearing the case of Moore v. Harper. That’s a challenge to the North Carolina Supreme Court’s striking down of an absurdly gerrymandered congressional map on the grounds that it violated the state constitution.

Conservatives are eager to use this case to enshrine the “independent state legislature theory,” which would effectively say that legislatures alone can set rules for how federal elections are carried out, making state constitutions, governors’ vetoes and the decisions of state courts essentially irrelevant.

Why are conservatives attracted to this idea? … The reason is simple: At this moment in history, there are multiple states where Republicans have successfully gerrymandered themselves into control of a state legislature despite the fact that the electorate of that state is closely divided.

In these states — including Wisconsin, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Georgia — … the legislature remains firmly in Republican hands no matter what. So if the legislature alone has the power to write election rules [no matter what the state’s constitution or courts say], they can [help] Republicans win.

The Supreme Court Six’s decision-making is all about the Republican agenda. It’s all about power.

So how did we get here? That brings up another remarkable aspect of our situation. Trump toady and US senator Lindsey Graham is outraged that Senate Democrats might want to do something about this renegade Court (like changing the filibuster rule, which Republicans did in 2017 in order to easily install Supreme Court justices of their choosing). Graham says it took 50 years for Republicans to skew the Court and now Democrats want to clean up the mess in a matter of weeks.

Josh Marshall responded to Graham:

This is true. It took them 50 years. But it’s also the first time in history a party plotted to take over the Courts like this. There were 3 Democratic appointees on the Court when it decided Roe. And one of those was one of the two dissenters. The Roe Court was dominated by Eisenhower and mostly Nixon appointees. Yes, lots of elections [over 50 years]. But the first time in American history any party or movement tried to do such a thing. And when the election thing stopped working, they started stealing seats.

The best you can say about the Republican capture of the Courts is that they stole it fair and square, to paraphrase Theodore Roosevelt. When it wasn’t stealing seats, it was winning elections with the fewest votes, i.e., exploiting the minoritarian quirks of the political system.

… What Graham is complaining about here is that Democrats want to put the whole thing before the peoples representatives with an up or down vote, i.e. majority rule. Graham is saying that’s not fair. The minority gets to say you can’t vote on it….

Having captured the courts through unprecedented political means, Republicans like Graham now want to dive headlong onto the fainting couch when the other side wants to repair the damage by political means. And unlike the crafty efforts to steal seats or exploit the minoritarian quirks of the Constitution, the remedy is the most foundational of democratic remedies, passing laws by majority vote. Whether Democrats will be able to pull this off will come down to the results of the November election.

Republicans like Graham are so deep in the world of partisan scheming and theft that a majority vote looks like the ultimate travesty. The simple reality is that the corrupt Court majority is the fruit of Republican corruption and the answer is majority rule.

But what can be done? I want to blog about that next time.

He Tried to Pull a Mussolini

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Will Bunch of The Philadelphia Inquirer asks what would have happened if the Cancer on America had made it to the Capitol on January 6th and what’s going to happen next:

The nation’s right wing — swelled by disgruntled military veterans and those with a penchant for violence — had grown increasingly restless that fall, with occasional street clashes between these reactionaries and anti-fascists on the left. Finally, the leader of the right bloc — a big man who strutted on stage, sometimes buffoonishly — massed his followers and urged them to march on the capital and fight for their country, even though in the end he didn’t march with them.

Instead, Benito Mussolini would get in a car and drive to Rome in October 1922, where he again met up with the throng of as many as 60,000 who’d marched there after the future dictator’s speech to them in Naples. This was the-now notorious March on Rome, and the intimidation of Italy’s ruling elites by this large, angry mob and its “strongman” leader worked beyond anyone’s wildest dream. By month’s end, King Victor Emmanuel III had ceded all political power to Mussolini and the fascists, who would not relinquish it for two decades.

Just four months before the 100th anniversary of what is now seen as the lift-off of modern fascism, we have seen in dramatic fashion how the concept and underlying terror tactics of Mussolini’s March on Rome never went away, but lived on to be modernized by a reality-TV star who’d faked his way into the White House and was determined to stay there.

Tuesday’s riveting testimony before the House Jan. 6 Committee by former D___ Trump White House insider Cassidy Hutchinson … revealed just how close T____ came to a true Mussolini moment: His own plan to “march” on the U.S. Capitol.

The now 26-year-old Hutchinson — deputy to T____’s chief of staff Mark Meadows, embedded in the then-president’s inner circle on Jan. 6, 2021 — testified under oath that T____ knew that his supporters were heavily armed when he exhorted them to march from a rally near the White House to the Capitol, where the ceremony to certify President Biden’s win was beginning.

… Hutchison confirmed prior suggestions that the 45th president had demanded to go to the Capitol, where he would have stood among Proud Boys and others launching a violent assault on democracy.

“I’m the effing president — take me up to the Capitol right now,” T____ is said to have bellowed at the head of his security detail, as Hutchinson said was related to her that afternoon by Secret Service-connected deputy chief of staff Tony Ornato in the presence of that security head, Robert Engle. But the president was overruled by aides who insisted his security could not be guaranteed at or near the wild and increasingly violent melee.

To experts on authoritarianism — who’ve been some of the most reliable tour guides during the long, strange trip of America’s last seven years — T___’s scheme was an effort to create a legend, reassert his leadership, and reverse his embarrassment over losing the election to Biden by 7 million votes.

As Hutchinson was testifying, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, the New York University historian who’d specialized in Mussolini and wrote the book Strongmen, tweeted that “of course T____ was trying to get to the Capitol. A coup leader must be there to bless the new order birthed by violence and be acclaimed as savior by the crowd.”

I reached out to Ben-Ghiat to follow up on this. She told me that Jan. 6 was essentially “a cult leader rescue operation,” in which T____ “prepped his followers for months to be outraged at their hero being robbed of what was rightfully his, and then summoned them to the Capitol to save America by saving him.” She had written recently that the moment T____ hoped to achieve — restoring his movement’s warped sense of justice and order — is what is known as “the pronunciamiento.”

June 28, 2022, was a devastating day for T____ … Over just a couple of hours, Hutchinson laid out a compelling case that he and his closest aides knew the potential for violence on Jan. 6 and knew that morning of dangerous weapons, yet still sought mayhem at the Capitol when the votes were to be counted. She showed how T____ not only had no real interest in calling off the insurrectionists but supported their chants to hang Mike Pence. Most aides, she testified, knew what they were doing was against the law, either from their in-house legal advice or the pathetic last-minute begging for pardons….

But … what if the Secret Service and other aides had indeed kowtowed to “the (expletive deleted) president” and driven him to the Capitol? How might that have changed the course of the attempted and ultimately failed coup that was underway?

… T____’s physical presence could have intensified the violence [and] prolonged it…. If that had happened, it might have been unsafe for Vice President Mike Pence and Congress to resume Biden’s certification. T____ might have declared the national emergency that the worst of his advisors had been urging.

Simply put, Hutchinson’s testimony showed how close … the American Experiment came to bursting into flames.

Which is why “what next?” is so important. Just how, exactly, will the slow-moving Justice Department of Attorney General Merrick Garland respond to the increasingly mapped-out-for-them case that T____, his lawyers Rudy Giuliani and John Eastman, and others took part in a criminal conspiracy in fomenting the insurrection?

The Magic 8 Ball is very cloudy…. There are understandable reasons to fear indicting T____, which would surely heighten the partisan divisions in America…  But recent events, from political violence to a rogue Supreme Court that was molded by T____, suggest that unrest is happening, no matter what. The real pressure is not to keep a false calm but to do the right thing, with the future of America on the line. D____ T____ [and his co-conspirators] must be brought to justice.

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.