CHRISTMAS 2022 -- CHURCHILL RETURNS, TRUMP DISSOLVES, GOP IMPLODES

Four score and a year ago today, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill arrived in the United States.  

Over the previous fortnight, America had declared war on Japan and Germany and Churchill had come to visit his partner. For more than a year, he had led Great Britain in a solitary fight against Nazi Germany.  The European continent had been overrun and London bore the scars and almost daily trauma of German bombs.  Only his leadership, his countrymen's resolve, and the RAF had stood between them and defeat. 

Yesterday, Churchill returned.

This time in the person of Volodymyr Zelensky, the President of Ukraine.

It is impossible to overstate the role Zelensky and Ukraine have played in stemming the tide of today's incipient fascism and preserving the rules-based  world order bequeathed to us by Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt in the wake of World War II.  Since February, Ukraine -- a country of roughly 44 million -- has fended off invasion and destruction by Russia -- a nuclear power of 143 million now run by a paranoid authoritarian in love with war crimes.  Critically assisted by western money and arms, and a NATO rebuilt by Joe Biden, it has done what everyone thought impossible last winter.  It has . . .

Survived. 

Yesterday,  like Churchill before him, the president of that small nation spoke before a joint session of the US Congress. And like Churchill before him, he laid out what was at stake, not just for his country but for America and the world as well.  "The battle," he said, "is not only for life, freedom and security of Ukrainians."  Rather, "[i]t will" determine "whether [there] will be democracy . . . for all."  It "cannot be postponed or frozen."  On it depends "the restoration of [our] international legal order."

He thanked America for the military and financial assistance it has already provided.

Profusely.

He also asked for more.

Predictably.

He made it clear, however, that our "money is not charity."

Critically.

"It's an investment in . . . global security and democracy".

When Churchill addressed Congress in 1941, he measured reality alongside the potential inherent in his cemented partnership with the United States.  "It is not given to us to peer into the mysteries of the future," he admitted, "[Y]et in the day to come, the British and American people will, for their own safety and for the good of all, walk together in majesty, in justice and in peace."  When Volodymyr Zelensky addressed Congress yesterday, he did much the same.  "I know," he said, "that everything depends on us".  "Yet,"  he continued, "so much depends on the world." And "so much in the world depends on you." 

In the current war in Ukraine, America has already provided over $48 billion in military and financial assistance and is on track to provide another $45 billion in the omnibus spending bill the Senate passed today and sent to the House.  The EU as a whole has contributed $30 billion and others have contributed substantial albeit lesser sums. In the wake of the Cold War back in the '90s, when Madeleine Albright and others took to calling America the "indispensable nation", contributions like this are what they had in mind.  The fight in Ukraine is against this century's version of authoritarian fascism. For rights-based democracy and a rules-based world order to win that fight, nothing could be more indispensable.

Fascism, of course, is not just a foreign problem.

We have our own version here.

In the person of Donald Trump. 

And on that front, the January 6 Committee completed its own indispensable work earlier in the week.

On Monday, it held its last public hearing and announced that it was referring criminal charges against the  former president to the Department of Justice.  

The charges being referred  are for aiding and abetting the January 6 insurrection, obstruction of  the official electoral count taking place that day, conspiracy to defraud the United States and conspiracy in making false statements. They were supported by seventeen specific findings.  These included findings that Trump "oversaw an effort to obtain and transmit false electoral certificates to Congress", "unlawfully pressured State officials . . . to change the results of the elections in their States", "purposely disseminated false allegations of fraud" in connection with the presidential election,  "summoned tens of thousands" of his supporters to Washington based on those fraudulent claims, and then refused repeated requests to tell those supporters to disperse after knowing they had violently overrun the Capitol.

The vote to refer was unanimous but represented a compromise. According to Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), the choices at the extremes were to do nothing on the theory that the committee's report as a whole lays out all the evidence (and constitutes more or less a de facto referral) or to make scores of referrals covering both the four sent and all the other process crimes (perjury, subornation of perjury, witness tampering) for which there is evidence.   Even though Raskin himself hopes and expects those process crimes to be prosecuted, he said that the committee as a whole decided to "focus on the central actors with the major offenses."

This capped off  what has been a bad two months for Trump.  

His candidates lost in the mid-terms last November; his company was found guilty of criminal tax evasion in New York earlier this month; he entertained two antisemites, one of whom is also a white supremacist, the week before that; his poll numbers are declining among GOP primary voters;  his presidential campaign had to lock people into the room in which he announced he was running; the DOJ is already investigating him in connection with both the January 6 insurrection and the illegal removal of presidential papers to Mar el Lago . . .

And now this.

The process of accountability in America can be slow.

But it also can be ineluctable.

For Trump,  disaster is a habit and attention a drug. This is a combination  that would destroy most people, never mind preclude them from becoming president, and though the Donald has been violating the law of averages for most of his  life, sooner or later the averages catch-up. And it now looks like . . .

Later has arrived.

Later, however, is not something House Republicans are negotiating particularly well these days.

Although they narrowly won control of  the House in the mid-terms, they remain frozen in their inability to make California's Rep. Kevin McCarthy the next Speaker.  

McCarthy as Speaker would be the expected outcome in any other year given his current position as Minority Leader. Standing in his way, however, is  a gaggle of far-right conservatives asserting their undying opposition to him and the GOP's underwhelming performance last November leaving him with no room to ignore them.  The GOP will have 222 seats in the next House.  McCarthy's opponents, however, have thus far made it impossible for him  to corral the 218 votes he needs to wield the Speaker's gavel.

The likely result here is that McCarthy will prevail.  

It is likely for two reasons.  

First, no other GOP member with any heft has emerged as a credible alternative, so much so that McCarthy's  supporters have created campaign-style buttons with the slogan "O.K." 

Meaning . . .

"Only Kevin". 

The "O.K."  buttons are a response to "Never Kevin" buttons sported by McCarthy's small but ardent opposition. The theory is that McCarthy is the only realistic choice.  The button, however, makes him sound like an all-that- is left consolation prize at the county fair.  Or, as pundit Molly Jong-Fast put it, his supporters chose O.K."because 'meh' was already taken."

Second, assuming ballots are taken in which McCarthy continues to fall short of a majority, the alternative would then be to look for a Speaker outside the House.  The problem here, however, is that most of those respectable enough to hold the job (e.g., Rob Portman, who by then will be a former Senator from Ohio) will never take it and those who would take it (e.g., Liz Cheney) will not be offered it.

So, O.K. may be it.

Which may not be all that ok at all.

To whittle his way to the top, McCarthy has had to make a series of unseemly compromises with extremists in his caucus.  He has already had to promise Marjorie Taylor Greene -- currently stripped of any committee assignments for basically advocating the assassination of Democrats -- that she will get assignments come January 3, and Greene herself is gunning for a spot on the powerful Oversight and Reform committee.  Though a steering committee of GOP members will pick who serves there, McCarthy is part of that committee and will probably agree to her request.  If so, Taylor-Greene will join other MAGA denialists and grenade-throwers (think Jim Jordan) and spend the next two years "investigating" the January 6 committee,  hyping spurious claims for impeachment against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, or assailing Hunter Biden for having traded on his last name.

McCarthy's other possible "give" is to agree to demands that he reinstate the rule that allowed the GOP caucus to force former Speaker John Boehner to retire in 2015.  Called a "motion to vacate", the rule permitted the caucus to vote on removal of the Speaker at any point in his two-year term.  In 2015, Boehner chose resignation suspecting he would lose that vote, and thus far McCarthy has refused to agree to reinstating the rule given the leverage it would provide his caucus opponents.  

Whether McCarthy will stand firm is unclear.  

In 2015, after Boehner quit, McCarthy wanted to be Speaker but stood down when it became clear he couldn't get the needed majority.  This allowed Paul Ryan to emerge as a consensus choice. Ryan, however, was pilloried by the same extremists who bedeviled Boehner and decided to leave once his term ended in 2018. McCarthy then became Minority Leader when the Democrats re-took Congress and has been salivating for the top job ever since.

Effective Speakers control their caucus.  They do this via some combination of hardball and honey.  They understand what each member in their caucus wants but also what cannot be given.  They know how to count.  And they are tough. Pelosi had to negotiate to get to 218 when she took the gavel for the second time in 2019 and she did so without compromising her ability to be effective.  

McCarthy, however, may be negotiating away his effectiveness.

And almost certainly will have done so if he resurrects the Boehner-era motion to vacate.

This is something none of us should encourage.

On Tuesday, McCarthy was forced to agree to a threat the Freedom Caucus advanced against Senate Republicans who planned to vote  for the omnibus spending bill that passed today.

The extremists want to use the need to raise the debt ceiling to force cuts in Democratic programs and are willing to shut down the government to do so. This tack has been tried and failed many times in the past, and most of the GOP has no desire to run a play that has blown up in their faces before.  

Not, however, the extremists.

They are now threatening any Republican Senator who accepted the omnibus with no cooperation on any of their future proposals.  One Republican Senator, North Dakota's Kevin Cramer, reacted to this latest act of petulance as follows: "Statements like that [are] the very reason that some Senate Republicans feel they should probably spare [House Republicans] from the burden of having to govern."

As if to hammer home the point that petulance is the House GOP's only policy, two from the Freedom Caucus, Matt Gaetz and Lauren Boebert, sat on the hands throughout Zelensky's speech to Congress. And earlier in the day, Don, Jr. -- proving once again that Putin must have something on his father --  called Zelensky "an ungrateful international welfare queen".

A House controlled by the GOP's Freedom Caucus would clearly be good for the Democrats. 

But not for the country.  

Or the world. 

The saving grace is that there are more of us than them.

And that there are still people in the world willing to stand up to bullies no matter the cost.

They exist in large numbers in Ukraine. . . 

Where one of them is president.

Merry Christmas.

SEASONS GREETINGS

It will be a Merry Christmas for Brittney Griner.

But not for Paul Whelan.

Which has driven American politics into its usual false corners.

This past week President Biden struck a deal with the world's worst reigning fascist, Russia's Vladimir Putin.  The Russians freed Brittney Griner, the WNBA basketball star they grabbed ten months ago and then sent to a penal colony for nine years because some hashish oil was found in her vape cartridges when she was departing the country last March. Griner, like many underpaid WNBAers, was moonlighting in her off-season for a team in Russia and had a medical prescription for the oil.  Putin -- who runs a country whose only exports are oil, gas and cyber-crime -- was in the process of beginning to get his ass whipped in Ukraine and thought he'd acquired some leverage -- or at least would "own the liberals" -- when his cops arrested a black lesbian American basketball star.

Once she was arrested and show-tried, the American State Department went into overdrive in an effort to get her out.  For his part, Putin wanted Viktor Bout, the Russian arms dealer who was two-thirds through a 25-year sentence for arms trafficking in connection with attempts to murder Americans.  Over objections from the "we don't negotiate with terrorists" crowd, Biden was initially willing to trade Bout for Griner so long as Russia released Paul Whelan as well.  

Whelan is an American businessman who the Russians imprisoned for espionage following his arrest in 2018.  

The Whelan arrest was a classic set up.  In Moscow, which he entered on his US passport (he is a multi-national with US, British and Irish citizenship) in order to attend the wedding of a service buddy, Whelan met a Russian friend (who was also a Russian Federal Security Service or FSB agent) beforehand and was arrested after the "friend" passed him a classified list of FSB employees.  The notion, however, that Whelan is a spy was (and remains) laughable.  For one thing, he was given a bad conduct discharge from the Marines in 2008 after being court-martialed and convicted of larceny, and that alone would have made spy craft impossible.  For another, when the CIA sends in agents, it uses diplomatic cover, which Whelan never had.

At the time of Whelan's arrest, American jails were stocked with high-value Russian prisoners (a high-value Russian prisoner is a prisoner either obsequiously loyal to Putin himself, a former KGBer/spy, or  a hacker/cybersleuth).  These included Bout (spy), Maria Butina (spy and obsequious),  Roman Seleznev (cybersleuth) and Alex Vinnick (hacker). When the US proposed that Griner and Whelan be swapped for Gout, the Russians insisted that Vadim Krasikov also be included in the deal.  Krasikov, however, is a Russian spy imprisoned in Germany . . .

By the Germans . . .

For the Putin-sanctioned murder in Berlin of an ethnic-Chechen in 2019.

At the end of the day, a double-swap was not possible.  

The Russians would not include Whelan with Griner  in any deal for Bout nor would they trade Bout for Whelan alone.  And the Germans would not agree to  release Krasikov. Biden therefore had to choose between bringing Brittney home alone or leaving both her and Whelan there for the foreseeable future.

He chose to bring her home.

And continue to negotiate for Whelan's release.

Since then, the reaction from America's various quarters has been sad but typical. 

It has also been anomalous.  

First, the anomaly.

The people with the biggest stake in Whelan's release, namely, his family, were told beforehand that Putin would not exchange him along with Griner for Bout, or him for Bout alone, and they wholeheartedly approved of going forward with the exchange to free Griner alone.  As Whelan's brother, David, noted to CNN, "Any time an American comes home is wonderful news. I'm so glad for Brittney and Cherelle.  It's a wonderful day."  In a later statement, he continued "As the family member of a Russian hostage, I can literally only imagine the joy she will have, being reunited with her loved ones, and in time for the holidays."

Talk about class.

The Whelans have it in spades.

The same, however, cannot be said for so many others.

Donald Trump called the exchange "a stupid and unpatriotic embarrassment" and wondered "why . . . Paul Whelan wasn't included in this entirely one-sided transaction". Marjorie Taylor Greene said Biden should be impeached for "trad[ing] a Russian terrorist . . . for a basketball player" while leaving "a US marine in [a] Russian jail".  Kevin McCarthy said the deal "made Putin stronger . . . and . . .  America more vulnerable."  Donald Trump Jr. snarked that the Biden administration "was apparently worried that their DEI score would go down if they freed an American Marine."  DEI is the corporate acronym for "diversity, equity and inclusion" and Tucker Carlson removed any subtlety. Griner, he said,  was brought home, "because she is a lesbian woman of color".   Whelan, he claimed,  "is a Trump voter and he made the mistake of saying so on social media,  and he's paying the price for that now".

This is all performative nonsense.  

Biden never had the option of trading Whelan for Gout or Whelan and Griner for Gout.  If Gout, who with good time had served two-thirds of his sentence, had to be locked up for the duration lest his release imperil national security (Kevin McCarthy's claim; and John Bolton's as well), neither Griner nor Whelan were ever getting out.  The Russians are only willing to trade Whelan for a spy and want what Germany will not give them -- Krasikov.  

So the choice here was not whether to leave Whelan in a Russian jail.

It was whether to leave both Whelan and Griner in one when only Griner could have been freed.

Putin is in the business of hostage taking because he thinks he has to be.  Krasikov basically committed a (Russian) state-sanctioned murder and will stay in jail for life unless Putin gets him out.   Bout was an ex-KGBer serving a 25-year sentence. Seleznev and Vinnick are cyber-criminals and thus particularly valuable in today's Russia.  

Trump (or the Trumps) and Greene and McCarthy's beef is not really with exchange as a matter of principle. Indeed, while he was president, Trump routinely made them.  In 2019, he traded three senior Taliban leaders for two Americans held by the Taliban in Afghanistan. Earlier, he dealt an Iranian scientist for an American student held in Teheran. 

Truth be told, on the hostages issue, Trump more or less gutted the "no concessions" policy embraced by all previous administrations, Republican and Democrat.  He did that as only he could.  He made the issue personal in order to be able to claim credit. Once a president makes hostage release personal, however, the price for hostages (and their value to people like Putin) increases.

The reality is that Biden lives in this post-Trump world.  

In that world, no American family will accept anything less than full presidential commitment (and involvement) when it comes to trying to release Americans unjustly imprisoned abroad.

So the Trumps and Greene and Carlson are taking a different tack.

They are de-valuing Griner. 

A black, lesbian basketball player who avoids the national anthem as part of a BLM protest is not equal to an ex-Marine . . .

Especially one who was a Trump voter.  

She's just a DEI score. 

She doesn't get to leave. 

Even if the Marine wasn't being released in any case.

Wow!

These people make Scrooge look good.

The bottom line here is that Griner and Whelan are equal.  Griner's BLM protest no more disqualifies her than does Whelan's bad conduct discharge. Their respective and ostensibly different politics, sexual orientations and races are also irrelevant.  Neither one of them belonged in a Russian jail.  

Both of them should have been released.

One was. 

To their undying credit, the Whelans are celebrating that.

We should too.

THANKSGIVING 2022 -- ON WEDDINGS, WAVES AND ONE GREAT WOMAN

It's that time again.

Thanksgiving.

And this year, I have a lot of thank-yous on my plate.

My daughter Courtney got married last month.  About 150 of our family and closest friends nestled ourselves along the Delaware River at the historic Glen Foerd mansion in north Philadelphia to watch the beaming bride and groom author their own vows.  Dad stifled a few tears even as he managed to get through the obligatory toast. The happy couple partied long into the night.  The Moms (step and groom's) were radiant.

The old (cynical) saw is that weddings are a triumph of hope over experience.  This is supposedly a concession to our data driven world in which half the marriages dissolve.  My own view, however, is that the cynics are really the boomers assuming their past is their children's prologue.

Even if it isn't.

My first thank you this year is that my kids are smarter than me.  

They know that dysfunction can be generational.

But does not have to be.

Choice . . .

And therapy . . .

Can break any pathology. 

Which gets me to my second thank you.

As I danced along the Delaware this October, America's background noise was forecasting a depressing November.  Pathological even. Depending on where you looked, the country's mid-term election -- its first since Trump's attempted coup on January 6, 2021 -- was about to deposit anywhere from 20 to 60 newly elected Republicans in the House of Representative, 5-7 newly elected Republicans in the Senate, half a dozen election-denying GOPers as Secretaries of State, and two nut-jobs (Kari Lake , or what Trump would be if he were trans, and Doug Mastriano) as Governors in Arizona and Pennsylvania, respectively.

None of this happened.

So . . .

Thank you,  America.

For the wave that wasn't.

But please do not become complacent or over-confident.

Arrogance has destroyed many a political party.  And it still may be in the process of destroying the Republican Party.  The pundits -- or at least Rupert Murdoch -- are all agog over the supposed end of Donald Trump as the GOP's anointed leader.  Trump, however, hasn't read the memo.  He announced last week that he was running for President yet again, and shortly thereafter told every Republican to get behind him "ASAP" or suffer the consequences. The week before, he threatened Murdoch's current favorite, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. If DeSantis runs, bellows Trump, the Donald will have a lot to say "about him that won't be very flattering".

This is Trump's standard mob-boss m.o.

But no one knows that it won't work.

The best analysis  on the issue so far has come from John Ellis, nephew and cousin to the President Bushes, former journalist and current venture capitalist.  

According to Ellis, Trump’s ability to survive is contingent on his ability to generate ratings for Fox. "Whoever is the Fox News candidate for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination will have an enormous advantage over his or her competition," says Ellis, "Republican primary voters and caucus attendees are the core of the Fox news audience".   In 2015, he continues, Murdoch discounted Trump until it became clear that Fox's ratings doubled when Trump was on.  Thereafter, Fox had to "either become the Trump channel or watch another network become the Trump channel." 

In this cycle, if Ron DeSantis can do for Fox what Trump did four years ago, Ellis thinks Murdoch will dump Trump.  If, however, DeSantis over time is either a ratings flop or ratings fade and Fox viewers return to their "first love", Murdoch will have no choice but to drive the Trump train once again.

Rupert Murdoch probably has some data suggesting that the Trump of today is not the Trump of yesteryear.  The owner of Fox, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post  has not made a world-wide media-based fortune misunderstanding his audience and we should not assume he is doing so now. For his part, however, Trump has weathered the squalls of declining popularity before, even in the aftermath of January 6 when his core support started to dissipate, only to emerge phoenix-like from the ashes.  There is no guarantee he will not do so again.

Trump's other advantage is that the Republican Party today is a grievance party, not a governing one. It's base lives off anger, and its new (but slight) majority in the House of Representatives will be stoking that anger non-stop for the next two years. They have already announced that they plan to investigate Hunter Biden, Dr. Fauci and the FBI.  In each case, the pre-determined outcome of these efforts will enable Trump's lesser lies (that Hunter compromised Joe; that Fauci destroyed the economy; that the FBI planted evidence at Mar El Lago) while giving him the space to repeat his greatest one (that the 2020 election was stolen).

In these circumstances, DeSantis's ratings could easily fade.

Unlike Trump, he has a day job.

He is a Governor.

Which the GOP base finds boring.

My best guess is that, until the boil is lanced and Trump is forever gone, the GOP has no real chance of creating an electoral majority based on any coherent governing plan or policy.  

Stoking anger has made the Republican Party competitive.  

It has not made it successful.

What would?

If one were to generate a list of vilified politicians over the past thirty years, Trump would clearly be at the top. So, however, would Nancy Pelosi. In fact, in 2010,  toward the end of her first period as Speaker, her favorability rating was under 30% .  Trump's never got that low.  Even after January 6, 38% of America still gave him their thumbs up.  Nevertheless,  Pelosi is loved by her people, all of them, and Trump is merely tolerated (and in many cases silently despised) by a sizeable portion of his.

Why?

The reasons are too numerous to count.

But this Thanksgiving, here is another one.

Nancy Pelosi is the Speaker of the House of Representatives.  It is a job she held from 2007 through early 2011 and one she has held again from 2019 until now.  She will leave the job on January 3, 2023.  Though she will continue to serve in Congress as a Representative from California's 12th Congressional District in San Francisco, she will no longer be the leader of her party in the House.  Other than for her time as Speaker, she has led the Democrats in the House for the past nineteen years.

On Thursday, she gave her valedictory speech as Speaker in the well of the House.

It was a speech for the ages.

As a practical matter, she is a child of the House.  At birth her father was a Congressman from Baltimore and as a six-year-old she went there for the first time with her brothers to see him sworn in for his fifth term.  Forty years later, she returned on her own as a California Congresswoman.

When she stood with her father in 1947, she watched "as he took a sacred oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic".  It is the oath, she noted, that "all . . . who have served in [the] House" have taken, "the oath that stitches us together in a long and storied heritage".

"Colleagues who served before us are all our colleagues."

Lincoln, Webster, Chisolm, Lewis.

"In this room," she said, "our colleagues across history have abolished slavery, granted women the right to vote, established Social Security and Medicare, offered a hand to the weak, care to the sick, education to the young and hope to the many."

As a child of history, she has a devotion to it.

"American democracy is majestic," she explained, "But it is fragile."

"Many of us have witnessed its fragility firsthand," she intoned, "tragically in this chamber."

"So," she warned, "Democracy must be forever defended from the forces that wish it harm."

"Last week," she concluded, "the American people spoke.  And their voices were raised in defense of liberty, of the rule of law and of Democracy itself.  With these elections, people stood in the breach and repelled the assault on Democracy.  They resoundingly rejected violence and insurrection. And in so doing 'gave proof through the night that out flag was still there.'"

The week before  Francis Scott Key first wrote those last words in 1814, he had watched the British bombard Fort McHenry all night and marveled that the flag was still standing as morning broke.

In 2022, America's electorate was able to give its own “proof through the night" because, on January 6, 2021, the nation's first female Speaker calmly marshalled the forces that took back the House, ended an attempted coup, completed an electoral count, and saved the nation she loved from the pretender who would have destroyed it.

That is why Nancy Pelosi is loved.

Thank you, Madame Speaker.

FEWS-MAKERS 

There appear, these days, to be two  types of news.

There is the type that reports what has happened or is currently happening. And there is the type that reports what will happen. The second is not really news.  It has not occurred. At best, it is a sort of future news. It is, however, increasingly occupying space on our front pages. So much so, in fact, that we now need new word for it.

Here’s mine.

"Fews".

Pronounced fewz or fuze.

Short for “future news”.

As with its parent, this neologism will have many offspring.  

Fews-papers. 

Fews-casts. 

And, of course, fews-makers.

The biggest fews-makers these days are pollsters. 

It is a disturbing reality that most or at least a very large part of the reporting on this year’s midterm elections is about polls predicting what will happen less than two weeks from now. This is disturbing mostly because it upends the notion, central to America's founding, that a free press would be the best way to generate the informed electorate needed to create a representative but functional government. Polls do not tell us anything particularly relevant about the here and now of the actual candidates — what they believe or how and why they came to believe it. Even worse, the cynics among us, and there are many,  view polls as the (only) reason for that how and why. In their world, candidates do not espouse considered positions. Instead, they mindlessly regurgitate whatever “polls well”.

Unfortunately, there is a lot of truth in that cynicism.

Since Donald Trump, the Republican Party has embraced its own version of poll-tested mindlessness.  

In 2020, for the first time ever, the GOP did not publish any party platform. In Trump’s narcissistic “l’etat c’est moi” world, policy was irrelevant because he was the only one who mattered. 

Without him, however, not much has changed.  

In late September, Rep. Kevin McCarthy, the GOP’s putative Speaker-in-waiting, published his party’s so-called  “Commitment to America”. The document fit on a pocket card and was basically just a list of wishes (“We want an economy that’s strong” and “a nation that’s safe”). Devoid of actual policy, its attempts to be specific (“expand US manufacturing” or “lower costs”) were empty.

The same type of mindlessness attaches to the GOP's candidates. 

Half of them deny that Trump lost the 2020 presidential election,  including three of their most prominent standard bearers --  Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania, Kari Lake in Arizona, and Herschel Walker in Georgia. In a world where policy is irrelevant, any experience forming or creating it is useless. So,  instead of the old GOP, the one Daniel Patrick Moynihan in 1980 said had become "a party of ideas", there is this  new one headlined by election deniers who are TV personalities (Lake and Oz) or  erstwhile fullbacks (Walker).  

It is, of course, not the case that talking heads and professional athletes are inherently idea-less. Ronald Reagan was an actor with ideas, and Jack Kemp and Bill Bradley were athletes with them. Lake, Oz and Walker, however, are not even pale imitations.

For their part, the Democrats are running these days on policy.

The fews-makers, however, are getting in their way.

Though you would not know it from the front pages, over the course of the twenty-one months that have been the Biden administration, Democrats have produced.  And they did so on all the hot button issues, the ones the fews-makers say voters really care about.  

Depending on the week, and how fewsy any newsie wants to be, the order of that hot-button list changes. 

But,  regardless, here's the Democrats' report card on it.

On inflation, Biden and the Democrats  put shots in the arms of the entire country to help bring Covid under control, empowered Medicare for the first time to negotiate drug prices, and closed the coverage gap in Obamacare that was increasing health care costs by 20% for those who just missed qualifying for subsidies. Given that a large part of the current inflation was caused by supply chains broken by Covid, and that roughly 8% of every American family's annual budget goes to health care,  these legislative gains saved us . . . 

A huge chunk 'o change.

And it didn't end there.  

Everyone's yelling about crime. I can't turn on the TV these days without being told that my sub and ex-urban Congressman has authorized a district wide crime spree, even though no such spree has sprung.  It was more like a noticeable leak.   Unlike the GOP, however, the Democrats actually did something about it.  Fact: Biden has put more cops on the streets and taken more guns off of them than anything the GOP did when it last ran the country. 

Then, of course, there's the real elephant in the GOP's room otherwise empty of policy.

That would be . . .

Abortion.

In his Senate debate this week against John Fetterman in Pennsylvania, Dr. Oz said that abortion should be between "women, their doctors and local political actors".

Uh-oh.

Bad move.

Even in Pennsylvania.

I have been in and around politics, candidates and campaigns for the better part of the last forty plus years.  I have met scores of "local political actors".  I can say with near certainty that, as a class, they are the last group of people who should be weighing in on anyone's decision regarding abortion. 

Don't get me wrong.  

Many local political actors do God's work . . . 

When God's work is about paving streets, fixing pot-holes, granting zoning variances and cleaning parks.  

If you include members of school boards, it gets dicey. Some clearly do God's work by empowering educators.  Others --  the book burners and trans haters --  are more in league with the Devil.  

None, however, should be telling any woman what to do with her uterus.

The mid-terms should not be a contest. Crazy is on the ballot and crazy should lose.

But, say the fews-makers, they won't

Or that it will be close.

I have no idea.

I read today that Dan Pfeiffer, a big-foot who once had the ear of President Obama, just wrote that "all polls should be ignored".   He said they "serve no purpose. None. Zero. Zilch." He called them "mood-altering statistical drugs."

He's right.

No one knows what is going to happen on November 8.  

That's why it's called . . .

Fews.

THIS MID-TERM'S CONUNDRUM

The mid-terms are upon us. 

These would be our biennial elections for members of the House of Representatives and the Senate that take place in the middle of the incumbent president's term.

For reasons that are no doubt a window on the deep state of America's psychology, these elections tend to go badly for the party that controls the presidency.   The conventional explanation for this trend is that they usually amount to report cards on -- and repudiations of -- the incumbent president.

Which raises a number of issues.

First, if true, it suggests that Americans are perpetually schizophrenic.  

I mean . . .

Why is it that a mere two years after winning the White House, often by dramatic margins, the incumbent's party takes a beating? 

In 1980, for example, Ronald Reagan won the White House with 489 electoral votes representing victory in 44 states. Two years later, his party lost 26 seats in the House, which basically amounted to a give-back of the 34 House seats it had won in the Reagan landslide.  Similarly, in 1964, Lyndon Johnson won 486 electoral votes in 44 states and two years after that his party lost 47 seats in the House, which completely eliminated their 37-seat gain in1964.

This is buyers' remorse on a grand scale.

Second, it also suggests that Americans are  . . .

Well . . .

Lazy.

Because hiding behind these numbers is another statistical reality.  

That reality is about turnout, the number of eligible voters who actually go to the polls.  

In a presidential year, turnout is usually much higher than in a mid-term year.  In fact, as a general rule, turnout in mid-term elections is anywhere from 10-20 points lower than in presidential elections. It's as if those who wrestled the White House from their opponents sit out the battle two years later on the undercard.

Critically, however, this is not always the case.

And, more importantly, this has not been the case recently.

In 2018, for example, turnout in the mid-term elections went up . . . dramatically.  54% of eligible voters showed up, which was basically the same number who showed up in 2016 and thirteen points higher than the turnout in the previous mid-term in 2014.  

In that 2018 mid-term, moreover, another piece of conventional wisdom was upended.  One would have expected a presidential year turnout to result in a presidential year type of result.  But that didn't happen.  To the contrary,  Donald Trump's Republicans lost 40 House seats in 2018.  And that loss occurred in a world where the electoral lines had been drawn by Republican legislatures to protect Republican incumbents. 

What happened?

The answer is simple.  

Trump happened.

And America rejected him.

Decisively.

In 2020, that rejection continued and was even greater.  Because in that year, turnout was astronomical. Over 62% of America went to the polls and voted. 

For the last two election cycles, therefore, Americans have been anything but lazy and anything but schizophrenic, at least by historic standards.  

Confronted by the unique dangers Donald Trump posed to democracy and our republican form of government, the citizenry rose up in great numbers and rejected him.  Critically, in 2020, even a large number of his own voters rejected him.

What will happen this year?

If you listen to Republican talking heads, the GOP is about to win a substantial victory.  People like Chris Christie think Republicans will gain north of 20 seats to take control of the House and also win back the now 50/50 Senate where only Vice President Harris gives Democrats their tie-breaking majority.  If you read the polls, these suggest a narrower Republican margin but a Republican margin nevertheless.  According to them, inflation and the economy are now the number one issues and are driving voters to the GOP.

I beg to differ.

For a number of reasons.

First, and foremost, Donald Trump has not gone away.  In fact, he is as powerful as ever.  He orchestrated the January 6 attempted coup in the waning days of his administration and has preached the lie that he won the 2020 election every day thereafter.  As a result, more than half the Republicans running for office this year are election deniers themselves, and the loudest are willing to steal any elections Trump loses in the future.  This is a ticket to fascism, pure and simple.  

So . . .

If you want to know what America will look like in 2023 if the GOP runs things with Trump as their titular head and would-be nominee heading into 2024 . . .

Just read the history of Italy in the 1920s . . .

Or Germany in the early 1930s . . .

Or Hungary today.

Second, always remember that the underside of fascism historically has been a complacent and rich corporate class willing to look the other way as minorities are vilified to justify whatever incompetence there is in government and whatever economic pain there is in either inflation, depression or just plain Gilded-age inequality.  

America's current GOP has two sets of elites today: (1)  Trump and his band of deniers hell-bent on returning him and his pathological narcissism to power (and this time wiser to the institutional realities that stood in his way last time and will be avoided next) and (2) the corporatists on K-Street who control campaign contributions and thus own a tax-cutting (for the rich) and rights-cutting (in the Senate and therefore now on the Supreme Court) cadre of office holders in Congress and the state legislators and gubernatorial mansions who regularly do their bidding.

Third, Trump's daily dishonesty, along with  the Big Lie of election denialism, has made other lies more tell-able and (probably) more tolerable as well.  We now live in a political world where incompetents like Herschel Walker can lie about paying for abortions while pretending to be pro-life, and where slogans now replace policy platforms.  

The result is that inflation, a world-wide problem today that neither Joe Biden nor the Democrats in Congress caused and that both have enacted legislation (e.g., caps on drug prices, and with no votes from the GOP) to bring down, will not go away on any GOP future-watch.  They may be there to enjoy the fruits of Biden's and the Federal Reserve Board's labors, but -- other than cutting spending, which they always promise but rarely deliver -- they won't do anything to abate the problem.  

And the spending they do cut, in Social Security and health care,  will make things worse.

Inflation is bad.  

Because you have to plan and stretch to afford stuff.

But unemployment is worse.

Because you can't afford any stuff.

So, we come to the  conundrum in this year's mid-term election.

Not  . . .

Is past prologue?

But rather . . .

Which past is prologue?

We should all pray it is the most recent one.

LET US NOW PRAISE  FAMOUS . . . WOMEN

"Let us now praise famous men," says Ecclesiastes.

And then divides the group in two.

Between . . . 

"All th[o]se [who] were honored in their generations, and were the glory of their times" 

And . . . 

Those who "have no memorial", "perished, as though they had never been",  but "whose righteousness hath not been forgotten"

The former "have left a name behind them, that their praises might be reported." The latter find "glory" in "their seed", their children, "the people [who] will tell of their wisdom".

So . . . 

When the history of 2022 is written, who will we praise?

Here are two of my candidates.

The Queen

There is only one we remember today and only one we are likely to remember a hundred years from now -- Elizabeth II.  

For most of us, the numeral -- the actual number designating her as the second -- is beside the point.  In fact, that it is beside the point may actually be the point.  Because she succeeded and became famous, and justly so, in spite of her lineage rather than because of it.

There are a number of facts about the just-departed Elizabeth that cannot be contested.

One is that she became queen at a point in world history when monarchy was more or less dead as a form of any real government.  

Like the four British monarchs before her, she had no power.

But unlike them, she also did not pretend to have any.  

In the 19th century, Queen Victoria was empress of a realm on which the sun never set by virtue of the British fleet. In the 18th, George III lost colonies by influencing policy and retaining control over the appointment of his  ministers.  Elizabeth, however, could not realm an empire, appoint a minister, advocate a policy, or even express an opinion.  

Unlike her predecessors, she also strode the altar of monarchy more or less alone.  

Of those monarchs who were left by 1952 when she became Queen, only the British pretended to truly exalt theirs. And even that had the ring of hypocrisy to it.  An emotional embrace of symbol was the gauzy lens through which the country hid its obvious decline. Though Churchill, her first of fifteen  prime ministers, had famously said "I have not become the King's first minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire," that is exactly what he did.  In their dreams, only Elizabeth's grandeur allowed the British to pretend otherwise.

Lacking official or legal power, however, Elizabeth still exercised it.  

She did so by squaring many circles.

She believed in duty at a time when the very notion became suspect.  But she did not confuse duty with progress or allow duty to impede it.  Home-schooled in a way she thought stifling and dangerous in its lack of preparedness for the world she would enter and symbolically rule, she made sure her own children were not similarly handicapped.

Prince (now King) Charles graduated with a degree from Cambridge.

Because even symbols should be smart.

Over time, she came to regret having forbidden royal unions in the name of regal ecclesial authority and thus, by example at least, showed that those whose station in life supposedly proceeds from God must nevertheless refrain from confusing the deistic source with its human occupant. In the name of peace in her own home, she allowed her children, and most importantly the one who would succeed her, to divorce and thus pulled the Church she ruled -- and the monarchy she preserved, -- into the 20th century.  

In the name of peace abroad, she shook the hands in 2012 of those who had killed members of her own family. And of those who had wanted to kill her. She knew her gesture would solidify the Irish peace process. In that same vein in 2011, she opened her speech at a state dinner in Dublin Castle by speaking in Irish -- "A Uachtarain, agus a chairde" ("President and friends").  

Mary McAleese, the Irish President sitting at her table, was speechless.

"Wow", she said.

And then repeated it two more times.

Over the centuries, many are the Irish reduced to tears by an English monarch.

None, however, had ever been reduced to silence.

Alla Pugacheva

Alla Pugacheva is a 73-year-old Russian woman.  

According to The New York Times, she is also  "Russia's defining 20th-century pop star".  

She has 3.4 million Instagram followers and this past Sunday she told them that Putin's war in Ukraine had turned Russia into a "pariah" state resulting in the "deaths of our boys for illusory goals".  Her husband is a comedian who was previously added to Russia's  foreign agents register because he too had criticized Putin's war. In her Instagram post, she called him a true patriot and challenged Putin to add her to that register as well.

Pugacheva is a big deal in Russia. 

She burst onto the Russian pop scene a half century ago and has been honored by both Putin and his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin.  In 2014, Putin awarded her an Order for Merit to the Fatherland, and in 2019, Russia's Channel 1 provided wall-to-wall coverage of her 70th birthday. 

Though other public figures have criticized Putin's war, she has by far the biggest following. She has sold over 250 million records.  And her fan base includes older Russians who as a group  have been more or less silent on Putin and his war but now may wake up.

This is also not her first brush with dissent.  

When Mikhail Gorbachev died recently, she praised him for allowing freedom and rejecting violence as communism evaporated in the late '80s.  Inasmuch as Putin has decried the break-up of the Soviet Union as "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century" and "a genuine tragedy", these undoubtedly were the characteristics in the last Soviet president most detested by the current Russian one.

With Pugacheva, Putin is flummoxed

She is too big to arrest.

But too big to ignore.

Earlier this month, a Kremlin spokesman said that Pugacheva was still on Russia's side even though her husband had criticized the war.  On Sunday, however, a senior lawmaker took to social media to claim that she "had lost touch with reality."  "She will no longer find support among decent Russian people," said the lawmaker, "We will win without her songs."

With 250 million records in the hands of Russians across the country's eleven time-zones, however, that may not be an option.

Three days after Pugacheva's revolt, and in recognition of the failure of his policy thus far, Putin called for a "partial mobilization" that would press an additional 300,000 men into military service.  In response, there were immediate protests throughout the country, with over 1,200 arrests in 38 cities.  There has also been a surge in requests for one-way flights out of Russia, almost certainly in order to flee any mobilization order.  Meanwhile, at the UN, President Biden gave no quarter.  "A permanent member of the United Nations Security Council invaded its neighbor," said Biden . Though Putin's "war is about extinguishing Ukraine's right to exist," Biden was adamant on 60 Minutes only days before.  Putin, he said, "is not gonna succeed."

Pugacheva is  Russia's version of Liz Cheney.  

Cheney is risking it all on the bet that the United States cannot survive Donald Trump's version of fascism, and Pugacheva is risking it all on the bet that her country cannot survive the type of fascism Putin is practicing.  

Putin's is no doubt worse.

But not because Donald is a better person than Vladimir. 

Trump is hamstrung by American institutions.  Here, the Congress, the Courts, and the free press still function.  Trump, of course, is hell-bent on making those institutions dysfunctional, and his chosen tactic is to brainwash enough Americans into believing his lies so that they themselves  accept his putsch and render those institutions powerless to remove or restrain him if he re-gains the White House.

For us, therefore, Putin is a cautionary tale.  He already operates in a state without limits on his power.  There is no free speech or free press. He has jailed or killed any political opponents. The Duma and the courts have rubber-stamped his presidency for life and his war policy. 

Pugacheva knows it has happened there.

And Cheney knows it can happen here.

So, with a nod to -- and perhaps a correction of -- Ecclesiastes . . .

Let us now praise famous . . .

Women.

Britain's last monarch.

The hushed but effective courage of . . .

Few words.

And Russia's Liz Cheney.

The loud but dangerous courage of . . .

Many.

CHOICES: A DAUGHTER'S DILEMMA . . . AND OURS

We do not live in a world where there are two sides to any story. 

We have never lived in that world.  

Reality is multifaceted.  

There are probably a dozen sides to any one story, conflict or argument.  

When I was in college in the mid to late '70s and very interested in journalism, I wrote a senior thesis entitled "Routines and Objectivity in the News Media -- A Functional Perspective".  I argued that the professional journalistic canon in favor of objectivity in fact just described a set of practices designed to get work done in a limited amount of time.  There was an edition to publish, a newscast to broadcast.  Reporters, instead of recounting all sides to a story, a task probably impossible in any world and absolutely impossible in the one they actually lived in with deadlines, decided the "sides" had to be reduced.

So, abjuring the impossible task of reporting all sides . . .

They decided to report both sides.

In other words . . .

Two.

Republicans attacked this claim.  

For the wrong reason.

By then, the GOP had internalized former Vice President Spiro Agnew's broadside in 1969 against both the Nixon administration's critics at large -- the public and the  Congressional Democrats who opposed his Vietnam War policy -- and the media.  Weaponizing speech writer William Safire's alliterative attacks, Agnew characterized Nixon's war critics as "nattering nabobs of negativism" who "formed their own 4-H club -- the hopeless, hysterical hypochondriacs of history". As for the media reporting that criticism, they were a "tiny and closed fraternity of privileged men" in New York's television studios exercising "a profound influence over public opinion" with their "vast" unchecked "power".  In his and Nixon's view, their "side" of the story was not being told.

I thought Agnew's critique wrong.

Even "profoundly" wrong.

As in radically unempirical.

I had worked as a reporter-intern for National Public Radio in the spring of 1976.  I had  read scores of academic studies, insider accounts and personal biographies  on the media and its critical actors.  I also came from a family of journalists.  My father and grandfather had collectively worked for decades at New York's Daily News, and following the 114-day New York City newspaper strike in the winter of 1962-63, my father began a twenty-five year career as an editor and producer at NBC News.  The many reporters I knew and met were not political partisans or advocates.  At worst, they were cynics; at best, harried narrators attempting to print or broadcast the who, what, when, where and how of life on a daily deadline.  

The problem with journalism was not its inherent bias against any one political party.

The problem was its love affair with the number two.

In the twenty years beginning in 1990, technology wrought revolutionary changes in the media's structural universe. Initially, multiple cable news outlets joined the fray to compete with the three networks (NBC, ABC and CBS),  public television and radio, and thereafter, with the growth of the internet in the first decade of this century, that universe expanded by orders of magnitude to include social media platforms, blogs, podcasts and all manner of alternative outlets for the dissemination of information over the digital air waves.

Unfortunately, however, technology made things worse.  

Instead of using it to open the aperture and capture more than just two sides, conservatives turned it into a megaphone.  Put differently, their half-century reaction to Agnew's false claim was to create a false solution.  They embraced technology to ensure the networks no longer had a monopoly but then used that technology merely to make their side louder. The result is today's media eco-system: a mainstream media still hell-bent on reporting "both sides" alongside a conservative media -- FOX, Newsmax, OAN, Breitbart and a host of their print compatriots -- reporting the conservative side on steroids.  

In this environment, the liberals (MSNBC) and centrists (CNN) have tried to play catch-up.  In doing so, however, they have been hamstrung. Unlike the far right, the center and moderate left still believe in facts and analysis.  This does not mean they do not have a point of view.   They do.   They want to tackle climate change without immediately putting the oil and gas industry (or West Virginia and Wyoming) entirely out of business; hold police Constitutionally accountable without defunding police departments; support democracy (in Ukraine for example) but not engage in fruitless, military-based exercises in nation-building (in Iraq or Afghanistan, for example); and redistribute some wealth without overtaxing the middle class. They also want to count votes and peacefully transfer power once the count is done.

In taking these positions, they eschew false claims or "alternative" facts.

They make arguments.

In contrast, the Trumpists in the Republican Party and his media echo chamber are allergic to facts.  They either deny them, make you afraid of them, or invent them.  About 80% of the primary candidates Trump has endorsed have actually won and will be on the ballot in November.  They are all election deniers, preaching the lie that Trump won in 2020.  Of late, they have also preached the lie that the Justice Department's effort to retrieve classified and other top-secret documents illegally taken to Mar El Lago was a political hit rather than an effort to enforce the law.  And as with their 2020 election claims, they have either endorsed or winked at violence as a proper response.

These are not arguments.

They are attacks on the Constitutional order and the rule of law.

And the call to or wink at violence is right out of the fascist playbook from the 1920s,30s and 40s.

Last week, Liz Cheney lost her primary election in Wyoming and will no longer be a Congresswoman come next January.  As she pointed out in her concession, she won that same primary two years ago with over 70% of the vote and could have easily done so again.  All she had to do was ignore Trump's attempted coup on January 6,  2021, play along with his election lie, and imitate the dozens of fellow Republican office holders more than willing to do so in order to retain their positions.  This, however, is precisley what she would not do.

Over the past year, Cheney has been praised by people like me for her courage.  The JFK Presidential Library even gave her its Profile in Courage award.  She understands that Trump and his attempted coup on January 6 is a line America cannot cross if it is to retain its character as a democratic republic.  She also understands that there is a difference between truth and lies and that too many among her party's elected officials and actual members have embraced the latter. She stands alongside only a few similarly principled fellow Republicans -- her nine fellow House Republicans and seven Republican Senators who voted to impeach and convict Trump in 2021. 

She deserves all this praise and then some.

Some, however, are pushing back.

Dana Milbank of the Washington Post has just published a book entitled The Destructionists: The Twenty-Five-Year Crack-Up of the Republican Party.  In it, Milbank argues that Donald Trump is just a symptom of  that crack-up, and that one of its central participants was Liz Cheney's dad.  Milbank's argument is compelling.  From claims that the Clintons murdered Vince Foster to weapons of mass destruction in Iraq to birtherism and Obama, the GOP has routinely embraced fact-free claims and outright lies in an effort to plug the holes in its increasingly leaky electoral boat. It literally has lost the popular vote for president in every election but one since 1992 and its Congressional majorities have been narrow and, by historic standards, short-lived and map dependent. And, because of its allergy to truth, those majorities have also been peopled with more than a smattering of the unhinged -- Gingrich and Delay and Dan Burton (who wouldn't eat soup in a restaurant for fear of catching AIDS)  early on; Taylor Greene and Boebert and Graetz today. 

From back then until now, there are many straight lines. The right-wing donor, Richard Mellon Scaife, and journalist, Christopher Ruddy,  who together funded and broadcast the Foster murder myth in the '90s, formed Newsmax and later helped fund and broadcast Trump's lies.  The right-wing and foul-mouthed Rush Limbaugh, who called Barney Frank  "Barney Fag" in the '90s, was given a presidential Medal of Freedom by Trump in 2020.  In his post-Watergate, post-prison gig as a talk radio host, G. Gordon Liddy told those angry at the ATF in 1994 to "kill the sons of bitches",  and twenty-six years later GOP insurrectionists stormed the Capitol  yelling "Hang Mike Pence".  

From Timothy McVeigh to January 6, apocalypse then has just become apocalypse now.

So, should Liz Cheney be sidelined for the sins of her father, which were considerable?

I think not.

Dick Cheney, as Vice-President, was instrumental in getting America into a war on the basis of half-truths that had the potential for becoming full-truths but never made it.  Saddam previously had WMD and wanted nukes but possessed neither in 2003 and was not likely to get the latter anytime soon.  Al-Qaeda personnel had been to Iraq but had no operational capacity there.  Milbank calls Cheney a "master prevaricator" and given the stakes at the time  -- the possibility of dead soldiers in an endless war -- this is fair.

But the daughter is not the father.

In fact, the difference is instructive.  

The vast majority of Republican officials who have survived Trump while disliking (or even despising) him have done so via recourse to the kind of obfuscation Dick Cheney embraced in 2003.  He exaggerrated potential threats and pretended what was possible was in fact actual.  Those who wink and nod at Trump while refusing to take him on discount election denial by pretending it is just a complaint about early voting or drop boxes.  Or they discount January 6 by falsely turning the Black Lives Matter protests into liberalism's version of the same. Armed with this jiu jitsu, they silently root for Trump's GOP critics while remaining public cowards.

If Liz were Dick, she could be doing  the same.

But she isn't.

On Trump . . .  and January 6 . . . and election denialism . . .

She is about choices.

Right versus wrong.

Fact versus  fiction.

Truth versus lies.

Her father should be proud . . .

And embarrassed.

RANDOM THOUGHTS THIS SUMMER

If America survives Trump, it will have Liz Cheney to thank.

If it doesn't, careerism is to blame.

The cowards still outnumber the courageous.

If the Democrats survive the mid-terms and maintain control of Congress, I will send a thank you note to Justice Alito.

If they increase their margin in the Senate and render Joe Manchin irrelevant, I will send notes to the other five as well. 

And a bouquet to Clarence and Ginni Thomas.

If the right to contraception or sexual privacy or gay marriage survives Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, I will applaud the hypocrisy of Justices Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Coney Barrett.

Because that will be the only reason it did so.

The Catholic Church will come around on gay marriage long before it comes around on abortion.

Because many priests are gay.

But none are women.

If Nancy Pelosi goes to Taiwan, I will question her judgment.

But not if she goes to Communion.

If you're American, you're sweating right now.

But not just because it's Summer.

If climate change does not kill the world, I will thank God.

Because politicians will have had nothing to do with it.

If Congress fails to pass the Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors (CHIPS) Act subsidizing the domestic production of semi-conductors necessary for our national defense, I will think them insane.

But not for the first time.

If Beto O'Rourke beats Greg Abbott in this year's election, I will reconsider my view of Texas.

Seriously.

If Liz Cheney survives her primary challenge next month, I will reconsider my view of Wyoming.

Even more seriously.

If gas prices continue to decline, I will thank Joe Biden.

If they don't, I will thank him anyway.

Because Joe Biden is not the cause of inflation.

If Ukraine beats Russia, I will applaud the Ukrainian people.

And the rest of Europe.

Because both will have sacrificed for freedom.

If Phil Mickelson renounces Saudi sport-washing, I will ask Jesus if it is still "easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God."

Because incentives should matter.

If you think only the good die young and nice guys finish last, Gil Hodges' induction into the Hall of Fame supports the first claim.

But refutes the second.

If you realize that the Barclays Center in Brooklyn is at the exact spot where Walter O'Malley wanted to build and pay for a ball park for the Dodgers in the 1950s, you know that Robert Moses is the reason they left.

Not Walter O'Malley.

And if the Mets win the World Series this year, I will stop hating George Steinbrenner.

But wonder why they did not get their own billionaire-owner sooner.

TRAGIC CHOICES

I am told that, if you want to be a writer, it is best to write about what you know.

Yesterday, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, its 1973 decision that held, by a 7-2 majority, that women in the United States had a constitutional right to terminate any unwanted pregnancies up to the point of fetal viability and that thereafter the state could regulate the exercise of that right to various degrees which increased as the fetus matured.

This is what I know.

I am a 66-year-old male.  I am a baptized Catholic.  I attended and graduated from a Catholic parochial school -- Our Lady Help of Christians -- in the Midwood section of Brooklyn, New York in 1970 and thereafter attended and graduated from a Catholic high school run by the Jesuits -- Xavier High School -- in Manhattan in 1974.

I am a lawyer.  I have practiced law since 1983.  I graduated from Yale Law School in January 1982 and clerked for a conservative Reagan appointee from then until May 1983.  I passed the bar in California and was an associate there from 1983 to 1986 and an Assistant United States Attorney in New Hampshire in 1986 and 1987.  I then returned to New York, passed another bar exam, and have practiced here ever since.

In 1992, I ran for Congress as a Democrat and won a primary to be the Democratic party nominee in what was then the 19th Congressional district.  I beat a woman who was pro-life.  In the general election, however, I lost to an incumbent who was also pro-life.

I am pro-choice.

I was then and am to this day.

During the 1992 campaign, I pasted a large yellow pro-choice sticker on my suit jacket's left lapel.  No one I met could have failed to see it, not the thousands whose hands I shook at train stations, shopping centers, in towns and at debates, not the local media (from both the suburbs that comprised the district and New York City) who covered the race, and in particular not all the Catholics who lived in the district.

About a week before the general election, the largest local paper in the district, the Gannet-owned Journal News,  ran a large editorial endorsing the incumbent in the race. Criticizing me, the paper wrote that, since I "couldn't label" my opponent, I "labeled" myself, and then proceeded to claim that my yellow-sticker apparently made me a pro-choice zealot to the exclusion of all else. They appeared to think this might  be a shame inasmuch as they noted I had "serious positions" on a whole host of other issues. 

But my labeling myself apparently overrode all of that.

Some of my friends, and at least one stalwart Democratic activist in the district, told me they knew why I had stuck the label on my lapel.  "You had to," said the activist. His thought, I think, was that I did not have a choice.

He was wrong.

I could have ditched the label.  I especially could have ditched it in those small conservative towns in Putnam and Dutchess counties with large numbers of Catholic voters.  

And undoubtedly when I ran into the nuns in Garrison.

But I didn't.

Not because I had to.

But because I wanted to.

I wanted fellow Catholics to know that I did not agree with the position of the hierarchs in our Church.  I wanted them to demand I explain my position and listen to the explanation.  I do not think embryonic cells are people.  I think it absolutely clear that the US Constitution protects the right to privacy, a right that gives us bodily autonomy and that, in particular, gives women the right to control their reproductive choices.  I thought Roe was right and  I did not want my fellow Catholics to be confused, to look at me -- my gender, my ethnicity, my grade and high school educations -- and assume  any pro-choice stuff was just a wink and a nod.

So I told the truth.

I didn't disguise it.

Unlike Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch.

The truth is not always pleasant.  

It doesn't always set you free.  

For me, in 1992, the editorialists who decided to insult me for "labeling" were the least of my problems. About two blocks from my campaign headquarters, a group from the local Catholic parish handed out mimeographs saying I was going to hell.  A friend from high school who was trying to raise money for the campaign was assaulted on the phone by the father of another of our classmates, who told him I was a "baby killer" and that he shouldn't be helping me either.  That same friend's wife received over 50 letters pretty much to the same effect.

The truth probably would not have been pleasant for Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch either. 

Before and during their confirmation hearings, each of them told the Senate that they respected precedent and were therefore loathe to overturn it.  Gorsuch noted that he had written a book on the subject.  And Kavanaugh -- an Irish Catholic -- was even more explicit. Here's what he said to Maine Sen. Susan Collins in a two-hour interview prior to his confirmation hearings: "Start with my record, my respect for precedent, my belief that it is rooted in the Constitution . . . Roe is 45 years old, it has been reaffirmed many times, lots of people care about it a great deal . . . I am a don't-rock-the-boat- kind of judge. I believe in stability and in the Team of Nine."

Today, Collins said she was "misled". Sen. Manchin said the same thing and Sen. Blumenthal was more explicit.  In his mind, Gorsuch and Kavanaugh were guilty of "rank deception."

There was a lot of that going on in the Supreme Court last week.

On Friday Justice Alito told us that Roe was "egregiously wrong" from the get go. To believe that, we must now conclude that the seven justices who fashioned it in 1973 and the five who reaffirmed it in 1992 were ignorant, lousy lawyers and even worse judges. To believe that, we must also conclude that the right to privacy that protected contraception in the Griswold and Eisenstadt cases, gay sex in the Lawrence case and gay marriage in the Obergefell case are no longer valid.  As with abortion, each of them proclaimed a right that neither the history nor traditions of America affirmed and that, as a consequence, can no longer be deemed good law. Though Alito claimed none of those precedents were at risk, the analysis and logic of his decision makes plain that this was just another lie. Indeed, Justice Thomas said that quiet part out loud, noting in his concurring opinion that all those other cases should be reversed as well.

The day before Roe  was killed, the Court held New York's ban on concealed handguns unconstitutional and the day before that it did the same to Maine's statute precluding funding of private sectarian schools. In the first, it extended its erroneous ruling that the Second Amendment created an individual right to bear arms and in the second it continued to take down the wall separating church and state.

All of these moves by the Supreme Court, five of whose justices were appointed by presidents who were not popularly elected, either ignored settled precedents or extended prior cases doing so.  At the same time, they enshrined legal positions not remotely shared by the majority of the country. To the contrary, by reading privacy out of the Constitution  (though it makes no sense without it) and assault rifles and religion into it (where the text this Court claims to respect actually precludes it), they have allowed the radical right to veto the wishes of the national majority.

The consequence of these decisions is that women will die from forced pregnancies or botched abortions, cities will continue to be killing fields as guns continue to proliferate without sufficent regulation, and those who believe will be able to force their beliefs on the rest of us.

And there is a label for all of that too.

It's . . .

Tragic.

A TRIAL FOR THIS CENTURY

So, my original idea is that the Department of Justice (DOJ) should prosecute former President Donald Trump for seditious conspiracy.

Actually, that's not my original idea . . .

As in I thought of it first.

Here's my original idea:

Attorney General Merrick Garland should appoint former Judge J. Michael Luttig as a Special Assistant Attorney General and task Judge Luttig with convening a grand jury, presenting evidence, deciding whether to indict Trump for any crimes arising out of the January 6 insurrection and all its antecedent causes, and then trying Trump on any such indictment issued.  DOJ should give Luttig the authority to staff up his team and Luttig should recruit lawyers to fill that staff.  Critically, it should be a requirement for service on Luttig's staff that any such lawyer be a registered Republican. 

The United States criminal code provides that "if two or more persons in any State or Territory, or in any place subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, conspire to overthrow, put down, or to destroy by force the Government of the United States, or to levy war against them, or to oppose by force the authority thereof, or by force to prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United States, or by force to seize, take, or possess any property of the United States contrary to the authority thereof, they shall each be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than twenty years, or both."  (18 USC § 2384) 

As of this morning, four public hearings before the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the US Capitol have been held and additional sessions are scheduled for both this afternoon and next month. 

Colloquially known as the January 6 Hearings, the Select Committee has  provided a mountain of evidence -- via live testimony, video exhibits of the January 6 insurrection itself, and deposition testimony from scores of witnesses -- that (i) Trump's claims that the 2020 election was rigged, stolen or fraudulent were and are completely false; (ii) his Attorney General, White House lawyers, the head of his campaign and others on the White House staff and in Congress told him those claims  were false (and many others, including his daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared, believed they were); (iii) the courts told him those claims were false; and (iv) recounts or audits in the battleground states of Georgia, Michigan and Wisconsin told him those claims were false.

The Select Committee has also laid out evidence that, despite these incontrovertible facts, Trump pressured state officials in Georgia and Arizona to "find" votes and de-certify Biden's victory, and Trump and one of his attorneys, John Eastman, solicited fraudulently created fake slates of Trump electors. Trump and Eastman demanded that these fake slates be recognized or used by Vice President Pence and that Pence then either declare Trump president as Pence presided over the joint session counting the electoral college votes on January 6 or send the election back to selected state legislatures (or to the House of Representatives), either of  which would have thereafter awarded Trump the presidency.  These acts were patently illegal.  In fact, Eastman himself had admitted as much two days earlier in a conversation with Pence's counsel, Greg Jacobs.  Legally,  Pence's only job on January 6 was to count certified electoral votes that had been sent to Congress by the states.  He had no unilateral right to do anything else and certainly no unilateral right to accept fraudulent slates or send the election back to any states or into the House of Representatives.  

On the morning of January 6, in order to force Pence to agree to his illegal demands, Trump repeated to a crowd of thousands of his supporters all of the refuted lies he had been telling them for months (i.e., that thousands of dead people and illegals had voted, that hundreds of thousands of fraudulent absentee ballots had been accepted in Wisconsin, that over twenty thousand votes had been switched from Trump to Biden in Georgia, that Dominion voting machines had a "93.67% error rate",  that there were "more votes than voters" in Detroit, etc.).  He then told the crowd that Pence had the power to award him the presidency and that  they should march to the Capitol and "fight like hell" to secure that result. 

So that is what they did.

Advised along the way that Pence had not accepted Trump's illegal demand, many in the crowd said they were "coming" for Pence and, once inside the Capitol that they proceeded to terrorize and vandalize, threatened to kill the Vice President.  Advised that the Capitol had become the scene of a riot, Trump -- instead of telling his supporters to leave the Capitol -- egged them on. At 2:24 pm he  tweeted that "Mike Pence didn't have the courage to do what should have been done".  The result of this tweet was that the rioters became more violent.  At the White House, staffers who had been urging the President to quell his supporters were aghast.  As one put it in video testimony that was played at last Thursday's session of the Hearings, "It felt like he was pouring gasoline on the fire by tweeting that."

He was.

In my opinion, there is more than enough evidence to indict Trump on the charge of seditious conspiracy.  He and Eastman concocted an illegal plan to "prevent, hinder or delay" the joint Congressional session counting the electoral college votes on January 6.  He did so by advocating that the mob he sent to the Capitol use force ("fight like hell") to get Vice President Pence to unilaterally overturn the certified results sent to Congress by the states.  When advised that the mob was violent and that Pence was in danger, he did not tell his supporters to leave the Capitol.  Instead, he supported the attack, telling them Pence has not done "what he should have done". 

Put simply, his 2:24 pm tweet amounted to a single piece of advice.

He wanted the insurrection to . . .

Continue.

Apart from seditious conspiracy, there are other crimes for which Trump could be indicted arising from his conduct on, before and after January 6.  These include obstructing an official proceeding, conspiracy to defraud the United States, and even wire fraud (owing to his fraudulent solicitation of contributions ostensibly for a so-called "Election Defense Fund" which did not exist; most of the money went to Trump's Save America PAC).  Seditious conspiracy, however, is the most serious crime and at base it most accurately describes the level of criminality to which Trump  descended and the continuing danger to democratic and republican government (small d and small r in both cases) the former president represents.

This last point is critical.

Had Trump been convicted by the Senate in either of the two prior impeachment trials, he would have been removed from office and precluded from ever serving again.  That should have happened.  Unfortunately, it didn't.  And because it didn't, Trump remains the odds-on favorite to be the Republican nominee in 2024.  He routinely repeats the claims that the 2020 election was stolen and that Joe Biden is not a legitimate president, and two-thirds to three quarters of Republican voters accept these claims as true.  Many of those voters live in states where the Republican Party controls all three branches of state government, and many of those states have now passed statutes designed to suppress Democratic turnout and allow partisan state officials to overturn electoral outcomes on the basis of the types of false, evidence-free claims Trump spouts. Were he to run and lose in 2024, he would invariably claim that election was fraudulent and again invite a mob to make him president at the point of their guns. Were he to run and win, he would govern as a fascist.

These are threats to republican government. 

They are the types of threats that brought down other republics, most notably Rome's.

And today Trump remains their centerpiece.

The mob that attacked the Capitol on January 6 was not peaceful.  It  did so either at Trump's request or with his permission and encouragement.  It was pregnant with violent, white-nationalist spearheads like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, groups that led the charge and two of whose members have already pleaded guilty to seditious conspiracy themselves.  Their allegiance to Trump's malignant instincts and objectives cannot be underestimated. Nor can their potential links to the former president himself, or to any of his associates (like Roger Stone), be  rejected out of hand. Like Eastman, Stone has taken the Fifth in responding to questions by the Select Committee about his actions that day.

There needs to be a formal criminal process.  Witnesses have to be put under oath, targets flipped, deals struck. In the end, we need  an investigation, an indictment, and a trial. It needs to be full and fair. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. is reported to have once said that in heaven there is no law, and the lion shall lie down with the lamb; in hell there is nothing but law, and due process will be meticulously observed. Trump is our hell. He should receive all the due process we can offer.

Which brings me back to J. Michael Luttig.

Luttig is a former federal appellate judge.  He was nominated by President George H. W. Bush in 1991 to serve on the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals and confirmed shortly thereafter.  At the time, he was 37 and the youngest federal appellate judge.  He got his JD from the University of Virginia Law School in 1981 and clerked for then Judge Scalia on the DC Circuit during the 1982-83 Term and for Chief Justice Burger during the 1983-84 Term. From the end of that clerkship until 1989, he was an associate at David Polk & Wardell, and from 1989 to 1991, he was a lawyer at the Department of Justice.

On the bench, Luttig was compared to Scalia. Both were conservative.  Both were smart. And both were, from time to time, unpredictable. In one of his more famous decisions, he dissented from the majority holding in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld that an American citizen captured in Afghanistan could be detained as an "enemy combatant".  The Supreme Court reversed that decsion, siding with him.

There are many problems that will arise in any effort to hold Donald Trump accountable under the criminal law for his conduct leading up to and on and after  January 6.  The biggest of these, however, can be summed up in one word:

Politics.

There is no way around the fact that, for better or worse, any prosecution of Donald Trump will run head first into claims that the decision was political.  Roughly half the country voted for Trump in 2020 and hates his successor, and roughly a third of the country now believes his false claim that the election was stolen. For those people, no prosecution or investigation by President Biden's DOJ can be anything other than political. Biden knows this, as does  Merrick Garland. In fact, it is the reason Biden has completely deferred to the Department of Justice on any decision to investigate or prosecute and that Garland himself has been more or less silent.

Permanent silence, however, is not an option.  

If Trump skates, if he is not investigated, indicted and tried, the rule of law as we know it dies.  

Don't take that from me. 

Take it from New Jersey's former Governor Chris Christie.

Christie is a Republican who wants to be president but admits that Trump lost in 2020, lied repeatedly about that fact thereafter, and was responsible for the Janiuary 6 insurrection.  He also knows that Trump destroyed a national treasure -- the peaceful transfer of power -- and that there is more than enough probable cause to support an indictment  Nevertheless, for the past month or two in regular appearances as a commentator for ABC News, Christie has argued that Trump must be treated differently from any other potential criminal defendant.  

The Justice Department's manual for prosecutors states that an "attorney for the government should commence or recommend federal prosecution if he/she believes that the person's conduct constitutes a federal offense, and that the admissible evidence will probably be sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction, unless (1) the prosecution would serve no substantial federal interest; (2) the person is subject to effective prosecution in another jurisdiction; or (3) there exists an adequate non-criminal alternative to prosecution."  More particularly, the Comment to that provision expressly states that "Where the law and the facts create a sound, prosecutable case, the likelihood of an acquittal due to unpopularity of some aspect of the prosecution or because of the overwhelming popularity of the defendant or his/her cause is not a factor prohibiting prosecution."

For the reasons noted above, I think a criminal prosecution of Trump easily satisfies DOJ's manual.  I believe Trump is guilty of seditious conspiracy under federal law and that a mountain of evidence already exists to prove that case.  No other jurisdiction can or will indict him for this crime and the national interest is self-evident.  Finally, whatever inveterate Trumpists feel, and notwithstanding the former president's continuing hold on his so-called "base", the manual tells me all that is irrelevant.

None of this is news to Chris Christie.

He is a former US Attorney.

He knows the manual.

But he refuses to follow it. 

"This is where justice is not equal necessarily in our country," says Christie, "It's different . . .  prosecuting a former president of the United States.  If you're a prosecutor looking at this, you cannot swing and miss . . .  It has to be a 99.9% winner because the damage you will do to the country if you swing and miss is incredible.  I think there is a different standard and that standard is going to be applied by institutionalists like Merrick Garland. That is why I think it is unlikely" Trump will be prosecuted.

I disagree with Gov. Christie.  

More to the point, I think his position is dangerous.

I am a former federal prosecutor.  There are no cases that go to trial that are 99.9% winners. Lots can go wrong.  You can get a bad jury or a few bad jurors.  The judge can make a mistake. The lawyers can make a mistake. The facts may not be 100% on your side; in fact, they usually aren't.  So, if you accept Governor Christie's position, no ex-president will ever be subject to a federal criminal trial once he leaves office. And, if you combine that fact with (i) the existing DOJ policy that precludes indicting a sitting president and (ii) the super-majority of self-interested Senators (many of whom will not oppose their constituents) required to convict upon impeachment, both of which were earlier avenues of escape for Trump, you have effectively made the president  above the law.

Sometimes this won't matter.  

It didn't, for example,  in 1974, when the country was less polarized and the president less narcissistic. 

Nixon, however, had the ability to admit guilt and quit.  

Trump never will.

One way or another, therefore, Trump must be held accountable  If the January 6 Hearings end with no accountability, without even an attempt at it,  we will have, in the famous words of Churchill, "decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute", and the rule of law will meet its end.  It will have done so, moreover, not because we failed but rather because we were paralyzed.  In fact, for the past seven years, that has been Donald's trump card, as it were.  He could always count on shocking, insulting or boring us into inaction . . .

Or exhaustion . . .

Or despair.

J. Michael Luttig might be able to break that logjam.

For two reasons.

First, no one will be able to credibly contend that any decision by Luttig was political.  The former judge is a poster child for Republican jurisprudence. He  has spent the better part of his life in service to either GOP presidents or a conservative view of the law.  If he indicts and then obtains a conviction of Trump, the country will know that the law, not the Democrats, brought the former president to his knees.

Second, Luttig is a pro.  He may look at the case, investigate it thoroughly, and then still decide that he does not have enough evidence to obtain a conviction on a charge sufficiently important to warrant the effort.  His long statement to the Select Committee made it clear that he thinks Trump morally culpable and, further, that he thinks only Republicans can lance that boil by rejecting Trump, return the country to the "peace" that was inherent in presidential transitions until Trump destroyed it, and save us from an almost guaranteed  repetition in 2024 if Trump runs again.  What this also means, however, is that Luttig is by no means certain the criminal law can take Trump down and that Luttig will play it straight.

So, should we take the risk?

Contra Christie, I think we should.

If  Judge Luttig declines to prosecute, we will be in no worse position than Governor Christie is now predicting.  But if he indicts Trump, the country will be better off regardless of outcome.  Criminal trials often take on a life larger than themselves, larger than even the defendants or victims involved. Convictions are restorative and acquittals do not always exonerate.  Just ask O.J. Simpson.  One way or another, the country has a desperate need to rid itself of Trump, even if he is around. Senate Republicans refused the Founding Fathers' invitation to let impeachment do that job. And elected Republicans and their base voters continue to refuse to do it themselves.

So now there are no options left.

Other than an apolitial jurist . . . 

And a trial for this century. 

Go for it.