ON PSALMS AND SONNETS -- BIDEN'S DAY 146

It's Day 146 in the Biden Administration.

There is nothing particularly special about this day.  

No historian ever praised FDR for what he accomplished in the first 146 days of his administration.  There are no 146-day wars. Or diets.  The number itself is not featured in any song.  Or poem. Nor is the number  devilishly transcendental (like 666).  

At the same time, the number is not meaningless.  

Far from it.

Two of the world's most famous authors used it to identify some of their work.  One was Shakespeare.  He wrote Sonnet 146. The other was the Biblical psalmist with his (or her) Psalm 146. 

The Bible's 146 is one of the five "praise psalms" that end the Book of Psalms.  It tells us not to "put [our] trust in princes, in human beings, who cannot save."  The sonnet is equally forbidding, lamenting the soul's bodily imprisonment.  In the end, both advocate escape.  To "the Lord" in the psalmist's case, He who feeds the hungry, gives sight to the blind, "frustrates the ways of the wicked" and "upholds the cause of the oppressed". To "Death once dead" in Shakespeare's, where the body's end can become the soul's immortal beginning.

The Bible and Shakespeare are enigmatic. 

Even when they pretend not to be.  

The psalm and the sonnet capture their enigmas almost too perfectly.  It's easy to read the psalm as a pox on politics ("Do not put your trust in princes"), on a world that cannot be saved by us in our time.  It's also easy to read the sonnet as a call to ascetic withdrawal ("Poor soul, the centre of [our] sinful earth, [Feeding] these rebel powers that thee array").  Neither view, however, works. The psalm embraces God in the here and now to "frustrate" the wicked, feed the hungry and vindicate the oppressed.  And the sonnet's "rebel powers" embrace passions and affections (like love) that can enliven far more than they ever imprison.

If we let them.

So, on Day 146 . . .

Is Biden letting them?

The administration is receiving and deserves high marks for its thorough and completely competent response to the pandemic.  It organized and delivered vaccines to America in record time. As of this writing, 65%  of those 18 or older have received at least one dose and  55% are fully vaccinated. Among those 65 or older, more than 80% have received at least one shot.  All this has made an enormous difference.  The number of daily deaths from Covid has declined by more than 90% since January, and the rate of death among those 75 or older has been cut in half.   

Biden wants 70% of all adults at least partially vaccinated by July 4 and is pulling out the stops to get there.  If we don't make it, vaccine hesitancy will be the cause.  The rate of vaccinations has slowed measurably since April, and the infection and death rates that still exist are being driven largely by the unvaccinated population. Thirty states are unlikely to reach Biden's July 4 goal even if the nation as a whole does.  And a handful of states are projected to fall anywhere from six months to a year short.

Pandemic policy is not supposed to be political and with Biden it has not been.  That was not the case, however, with Trump, and his effects linger.  Vaccine hesitancy has been more pronounced in Trump states and among Trump voters.  And while it is important not to over-generalize here (hesitancy is also more pronounced among Black Americans and they are not Trump voters), as late as April, 40% of identifying Republicans said they would not get a shot.

Biden, however, believes in government and knows that progress is incremental. 

On the pandemic and vaccinations, he will not give up.

On other fronts, however, he is being stymied.  

After passage of the $1.9 trillion pandemic relief bill,  the administration's biggest legislative priorities -- its infrastructure plan and its voting rights bills -- have not been passed.  They haven't even been voted on.  On voting rights, the Republicans have made it clear that they will not support the bills and will filibuster any attempt to bring them to a vote. This is critical because, in the first five months of this year, fourteen states have already enacted restrictive voting laws designed to put statewide offices out of reach for Democrats.  These include Georgia, Florida, Ohio, Arkansas, Texas and Arizona.  In Texas, that state's attorney general even admitted that Biden would have won there had the GOP not succeeded in stopping Harris County (home to Houston) from sending out absentee ballot forms to all registered voters.

To make sure nothing like that happens, Republicans are creating regimes that suppress turnout among Democrats in future elections.  Two-thirds of registered Republicans have swallowed Trump's lie that the 2020 election was stolen and that Biden is not a legitimate president, and GOP elites and elected officials have for the most part either embraced that lie or silently allowed it to fester.  In both instances, they have also used the lie to justify the new voting restrictions, claiming the new laws are needed to restore confidence in the integrity of our elections,  the lack of which was generated by the lie in the first place.

Orwell is turning in his grave.

Meanwhile, the GOP is playing rope a dope on the infrastructure bill.  After Biden shut down talks with the GOP on infrastructure, a bipartisan group of Senators (five Democrats and five Republicans) emerged to claim they had agreed on a bill that approaches the numbers Biden himself has indicated might be acceptable to him in any final package.  Those numbers are way short of the President's initial $2 trillion proposal but also far north of the Republican's original counter-offer. The problem, however, is that this group has not said it can deliver enough votes to avoid a filibuster by the rest of the GOP caucus and unless it can, there is no reason Biden should compromise when he can just go ahead and pass his original bill (or something close to it) via reconciliation.

Biden, however, desperately wants a bipartisan package.  He wants this for two reason.  First, he still believes Congress can work and wants to deliver on the promise he made during his campaign to lower the temperature and create at least some semblance of unity in the wake of Trump's civil wars.  Second, he (and the Democrats) have what can charitably be called a Joe Manchin problem.

Manchin is West Virginia's lone statewide Democratic office holder.  Trump won the state with almost 70% of the vote last year, and in 2018 Manchin himself saw his statewide margin decline to around 3%.  He has steadfastly refused to even think about ending the filibuster (which means it is here to stay) and has also refused to vote for the Democrats' federal voting reform bill (designed to counter the GOP's state-based restrictions), claiming it is too partisan. 

On infrastructure, Manchin is part of the so-called group of ten claiming to have found a bipartisan alternative. But he also has not said it can avoid a filibuster.  Earlier in the year, when legislation to create a bipartisan commission to investigate the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol was coming up for a vote, he seemed pretty confident that there were "ten good solid patriots within [[the GOP] conference" who would vote to end debate and send the bill to the floor of the Senate for an up or down vote.  When they didn't, Manchin said the GOP's actions were "unconscionable".

Not, however, unconscionable enough to get Manchin to kill the filibuster.

Or even vote for S1-- the voting reform bill.

Democrats can argue with Manchin until they are blue in the face.  It will be useless. He represents a massively Trump state.  He has always been more conservative than his Democratic colleagues, especially on social issues.  He voted to confirm Gorsuch and Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court and would have voted to confirm Coney Barrett but for the fact that her nomination was made only weeks before the election. 

So, he is not changing.

What should Biden do?

Three things.

1. Pass the infrastructure bill.  If the group of ten can deliver a filibuster free bill, pass it.  Otherwise, pass anything under reconciliation that Joe Manchin will vote for.  I said above that he is more conservative than his Democratic colleagues on social issues.  But he likes infrastructure and his state thrives on it.  His mentor, Robert Byrd, more or less turned West Virginia into a federal office park, and no matter how many Trump voters it produces, the state would die without the massive amounts of federal spending that annually flow into it.  Manchin will vote for something. And that something will be a lot of what Joe Biden is now demanding.

So, as the Nike people say, just do it.  

2. Litigate on voting rights.  If S1 can't be passed -- and it can't be -- the only solution is to take the GOP's restrictive voting bills to the courts.  The bills are designed to thwart Democratic turnout and disproportionately burden minorities.  Make the Supreme Court decide whether that is OK.  When John Roberts overturned the pre-clearance provisions of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, he did so  on the ground that the country "has changed".  The 350 plus voting restriction bills now passed or coursing through the nation's various Republican led legislatures refute that claim. 

Tell him. 

It's a lot harder to pretend things have changed if you start looking like Roger Taney and your decisions start sounding like Plessy v. Ferguson.

3.  Keep governing. And keep doing it calmly.

It is impossible to over-estimate the relief America wakes up to every day knowing that the current President of the United States will not be burning the house -- or the world --  down.  Drama is a fact of life in politics, especially in  the polarized politics of this era.  Trump made that worse.  He was all drama all the time, a pathological liar,  and pretty much nothing else.  On his best days, he was exhausting; on his worst, dangerous and frightening.  That is over, at least for now.  As I write, President Biden is in Europe revitalizing alliances and resurrecting dialogue. They're less exhausted too.

In the days ahead, there will be more drama.  

This week, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB)  may decide that the church should not give Joe Biden communion on account of his political views on abortion.  The Pope has advised against this but the USCCB has many within its ranks who like neither Francis nor Biden. So who knows.  The church whose members could not become president before 1960 because the rest of the country feared they'd take orders from its Princes may be on the verge of excommunicating the second Catholic president because . . .

He refuses to take orders from its Princes.

Biden is a devout Catholic.  In many respects, he is more devout than JFK (whose wife thought it would be a shame if he lost the presidency on account of being a Catholic, principally because, as she put it, he wasn't a particularly good one). If Biden is excommunicated or refused communion, he will suffer.  

But he will not change.

And he shouldn't.  

Pro-choice Catholicism is more than defensible at a number of levels.  Embryos aren't people. They are cells. The church itself has been all over the map on why abortion is wrong, and two of its guiding lights -- Augustine and Thomas Aquinas -- never thought embryos were ensouled or that killing them was murder; they thought abortion was a form of birth control and any likely sin venial.  Apart from all that, the notion that prelates can establish binding moral rules is dangerous.  They are human and can be wrong. 

Morality is too important to be left simply or only to priests. If the right or wrong of abortion is a moral matter, the Catholic Church is not necessarily an expert on matters moral; individual conscience still matters. And if it is a theological matter,  no one who respects the Establishment Clause should be legislating anything.

The psalmist was right.

"Do not put your trust in princes."

Not even those who wear red hats.

CADDIE SHACK, 2021 -- PHIL FOR THE AGES

His mother was trying to get a message to him.  His sister told her she'd try to contact his brother. They both thought the brother was the only one he would  listen to. 

But they were wrong.

He was way beyond all that.  

By the time he hit the back nine, he was listening to himself.

And maybe God. 

On Sunday, May 23, 2021, on a spit of land off South Carolina's coast, Philip Alfred Mickelson was making history.  Only weeks short of his fifty-first birthday, he was winning the PGA Championship, one of golf's four majors. In so doing, he became the oldest golfer ever to win a major.  Older than Jack Nicklaus, who pulled a rabbit out of the hat at Augusta in 1986 to win the Masters at 46.  Older  than Old Tom Morris, one of golf's legends, who won The Open (the British one to us unschooled Americans) in 1867 to became the oldest winner of that tournament, also at the age of 46.  Older than even journeyman Julius Boros, who won the 1968 PGA Championship at the age of 48. 

It would be Mickelson's sixth major, his second PGA Championship victory, and . . . 

His umpteenth or so miracle.

Phil Mickelson is golf's everyman.  In a sport that penalizes both daring and  courage, counsels patience, and routinely frustrates out-of-shape middle aged codgers who wail away every weekend, he is one of us.  Nicklaus, with 18 victories at majors, and Tiger Woods, with 15,  are golf's perfectionists,  logicians who always knew the percentage shot and  never let the field catch them by acting otherwise.  

Mickelson?

He never met a lead he did not threaten to give away.

Or a ball knee deep in fescue, surrounded by canopied trees,  that he'd take a drop on.

Phil just always had to give it a go.

Hence, the miracles.

On Sunday, per usual, he toyed with the weak hearts of golf's middle kingdom, those of us north of fifty and beyond who were glued to our couches and television sets (we still call them that, smart or otherwise) waiting for something to go wrong.  

And, of course, it did.

Even his mother was worried.

As he made the turn, that message she was trying to get to "Philip" (that's his proper name; you know, the one she used when he was a kid to let him know she really meant business) was simple.  Just shoot par.  No need to be spectacular.  Or, as she put it, "activate [the] calves." 

Good luck with that.

On the thirteenth hole, Phil let his  approach shot leak into the meandering ocean inlet to the right of the green. And on the par 3, 238-yard fourteenth, his six iron couldn't climb the fairway front and promptly fell back twenty yards from the green.  Two holes, two bogeys.

And just like that, a five shot lead was down to three.  

A birdie at fifteen paired with a bogey at seventeen (on this 223-yard par three, his tee shot raced through the green to long back rough)  reduced the lead to two when his pursuers -- Koepka and Oosthuizen -- each picked up a shot with their own birdies at fifteen.

So there was Phil. 

Standing on the teebox at 18 with a two shot lead.  

No one my age was anything less than very nervous.  

In 2006 at the US Open at Winged Foot, Mickelson had a two stroke lead with three to play and stood on the 18th with a one shot lead, only needing par to win.  (I was at the 18th green that day, waiting with the multitudes, ready to crown our king.)  He then drove his tee shot into a corporate tent.  (The  multitudes groaned in unison.) He should have pitched out with his second, which would have allowed him to get to the green on his third with a putt for victory and two for a tie.   But Phil, being Phil, had to go for the green, which basically required anywhere from a 30-to-40 degree slice around trees and a two hundred yard carry. 

The shot hit the trees.  (The multitudes groaned some more.)

And Mickelson double bogied his way  into a three way tie for second place.  (The multitudes  cried.)

So, at Kiawah Island on the 18th in 2021, it could have been "deja vu all over again".

But it wasn't.

Why not?

Because the other thing Phil proved on Sunday is that you can teach an old dog new tricks.  

The Phil playing these days is a plant-based shell of his former self.  Gone are the diet soft drinks, extra helpings  and extra pounds.  He'll wax eloquent on the anti-oxidant effects of his special blend of coffee. Channeling Arnold Palmer, golf's first everyman, he still responds to the crowd with a ubiquitous thumbs-up. And there's no absence of the old magic.  On five, just to remind us, he holed his bunker shot, and on 15, he outdrove the field.  But he was otherwise zen-like as he moved from shot to shot, sun-glassed and studious as he and his caddie, brother Tim, planned the next offering. 

From the left rough on 18, his second shot, a nine iron  from 150 or so yards out, landed sixteen feet from the hole.

At which point his biggest problem was escaping the post-Covid crowd that could not contain itself.

In 1980, Caddie Shack used golf as a comedic window on life's theatre of the absurd.  On Sunday at Kiawah Island, however, what was once thought to be absurd was turned into something real.

Age was just a number.  

Maybe.

When it was all over, a reporter asked him to identify the biggest sacrifice he had made on his way to Sunday's rendezvous with destiny.

"Food," said Phil.

At home, those for whom age is not just a number heard that . . . 

And  popped another beer.

MOTHER'S DAY 2021 — LISTENING TO LIZ

Sunday is Mother's Day.

At least it is here in the United States.

Norway had its celebration in February.  

Argentina won't celebrate until October.

Georgia (the country, not the state) had its in March.  

So did Ireland.  

Sometimes the Irish Mother's Day is in April.  For them, it occurs on whatever Sunday happens to be the Fourth Sunday in Lent.  

Five other countries, including the United Kingdom, do the same thing. And for this group, it's not called Mother's Day.  It's called Mothering Sunday and its origins are medieval.  Christians in the middle ages visited the church in which they were baptised, or their "mother church", on Laetare (Latin for "rejoicing") Sunday. 

This occurred around the middle of Lent and was a respite from a season that otherwise involved fasting and penance.  The epistle for the day was from St. Paul's letter to the Galatians in which he celebrates the church's birth in Jerusalem, the "mother of us all".  This was twinned with the Gospel narrative of Jesus turning the loaves and fishes into enough to feed five thousand hungry followers.  

So, on Mothering Sunday, medieval Mass goers took to their church in the morning and a feast in the afternoon.  

On Monday, it was back to Lenten penance and fasting.

Which was no fun in the Middle Ages.

In the United States, the creation of Mother's Day was actually a political act.  In 1870, Julia Ward Howe, a suffragette and peace activist, issued her so-called Mother's Day Proclamation.  It called upon mothers throughout the world to promote the "amicable settlement of international questions" and "the great and general interest of peace."  In 1872, she asked that June 2 be set aside as a "Mother's Day for Peace". 

In 1907, Anna Jarvis, the daughter of Julia's friend and fellow peace (and "Mother's Day for Peace") activist, Ann Reeves Jarvis, held a memorial for her mother at a Methodist church in West Virginia. This caught on, and by 1911 all U.S. states were observing Mother's Day.  In 1912, Jarvis herself trademarked the phrase "Second Sunday in May, Mother's Day, Anna Jarvis, Founder", and in 1914, President Wilson declared the day a national holiday. 

As the years flew by, Jarvis soured on her creation.  She thought that confectioners, florists and Hallmark were over-commercializing the day. In 1923, she protested at a candy makers convention in Philadelphia, and in 1925, she was arrested for disturbing the peace at a meeting of the American War Mothers. The war moms were selling carnations, by then a Mother’s Day staple, to raise money.

Jarvis wasn't really against the war moms. She just wanted Americans to take Mother's Day . . . 

Seriously.

And in 2021, she may be getting her wish.

This year, America's most serious Mom is Liz Cheney.  

She is the mother of five, the daughter of a former Vice President, and Wyoming's sole member in the US House of Representatives.  She is also one of the few Republicans telling the truth about Donald Trump and his big election fraud lie that led to the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol.  

It is a lie Trump is still telling and one that two-thirds of self-identifying GOP voters now believe.  It is also a lie that GOP office holders for the most part refuse to confront and excise. Even those like Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy, both of whom condemned Trump loudly on January 6, have gone soft. Cheney, however, will not bend.  She voted to impeach Trump for inciting the insurrection last January and has regularly condemned him since for repeating the false claim that he did not lose last year’s election. She just as regularly has told the GOP it cannot continue to either ignore or endorse Trump’s lie if it is to remain a viable party in a viable democracy.  

For that truth-telling act of political apostasy in what passes for the current Republican Party, Cheney is about to lose her position as Chair of the House Republican Conference.  That is the third-ranking leadership position within the GOP's House caucus. She will probably be ousted next week.

Being a good mother is difficult.  

It requires honesty . . .

Intelligence. . . . 

Love . . .

And the ability to meld all three qualities into a sort of north star capable of responsibly guiding a child from infancy to adulthood and beyond.  

Done well, its dividends multiply and compound.  Good parents, especially good mothers, beget children who become good parents. Either by dint of genes or example, and probably a little of both, they model conduct, the Darwinian results of which cannot be overstated or under-appreciated. They are all positive and they are multi-generational.

Done poorly?

Well, that's what keeps psychologists in business.

Today's Republican Party is a mess.  

It is still being parented by Donald Trump.

When it desperately needs Liz Cheney.  

Trump is neither honest, intelligent nor particularly loveable. He's actually pretty much the exact opposite on all three counts. As the titular head of the Republican Party, he now has his children -- GOP voters -- drinking the kool-aid  that says the 2020 election was stolen.  In turn, those kids are the reason GOP legislatures throughout the country are proposing or enacting so-called election integrity statutes (over 350 at last count) designed to lower turnout in non-Republican precincts and accomplish via voter suppression what the GOP cannot accomplish via legitimate elections.  

This is bad for the GOP and even worse for America.  

The country needs two viable, functional and responsible political parties.  The GOP’s inability to repudiate Trump, however, has turned it into a toxic echo chamber. 

In the 2020 election, record numbers of voters turned out, approximately two-thirds of those eligible, and afterward county boards of election throughout the country counted all the ballots, often under intense oversight. States successfully navigated the pandemic with expanded mail-in voting, early voting, drop boxes and outreach. It turns out that when government makes it easier to vote, more people vote.

We should be singing its praises. 

Instead, Trump and his band of acolytes are pretending that his orders to “find votes” and Rudy Giuliani’s rejected legal claims were proper and should now be turned into the law of the land. In the newly enacted Georgia (the state, not the country) statute, in addition to limiting early, dropbox and absentee voting, Republican state legislators have made themselves the judges in any future disputes over what votes to count and certify. Other Republican redoubts are following suit.

These are the fingerprints of fascism.

In their run-up to ousting Cheney next week, Republican House members are claiming she cannot continue as conference Chair because her anti-Trumpism is stepping on the party’s anti-Biden messaging. They are correct. It is. But that merely unearths the Faustian bargain that is today's GOP. Its ability to oppose Biden and its future electoral success now depends on it holding onto Trump’s fascist wing.

Without them, the party splits.  

With them, however, America dies.

The two necessary conditions for the survival of the American republic are democratic elections and peaceful transitions.  It has always been thus.  Repudiating them in 1860 resulted in a Civil War that killed over 700,000. Repudiating them today will have equally dire consequences. As the American population continues its statistical march toward diversity, a politics that hamstrings these new voters by consciously making it more difficult for them to vote and then not counting their votes when they do is the road to illegitimacy. The winners and whatever policies they enact will be disregarded. In Yeats’s famous formulation, the center will not hold.

Cheney knows this.

She is no liberal. People like me disagree with her on taxes, the war in Iraq, water boarding, abortion, the Supreme Court, her opposition to Biden’s pandemic relief and infrastructure plans, her overwrought attacks on “wokeness”, etc.  In short, we disagree with her on pretty much . . .

Everything.

But not on this Trump-thing.

On this she is dead right.

So Republicans, especially all you evangelicals, on this Mothering Sunday . . .

Listen to one of the few people standing between you and the devil.

Listen to Liz.

  

LOST CAUSES -- THEN AND NOW

One hundred fifty-six years ago almost to the day, Robert E. Lee surrendered his surrounded, starving and thoroughly beaten Army of Northern Virginia to Ulysses S. Grant.  

Shortly thereafter, the Civil War came to an end.

Grant's terms, as historian Ty Seidule points out in his recently published and extraordinary volume, Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner's Reckoning of the Myth of the Lost Cause, were generous: "No humiliation.  No prisoner of war camps. No trials and no hangings . . . Go home under parole and do not take up arms against the U.S. Government."  

Lee should have said thank you and silently retired.  

Instead, and almost immediately, he gave birth to and began the South's decades long adherence to what became known as the myth of the Lost Cause.

Seidule's book is about the cost of that myth.

Principally to black Americans.

But also to himself.

It is also about the courage needed to confront the myth and kill it.

On April 10, 1865, the day after his surrender, Lee issued General Order No. 9. It was his farewell to his troops.  In it he claimed their forces had been "compelled to yield to overwhelming numbers and resources".  In a letter he wrote two days later to Jefferson Davis, Lee said he'd been outnumbered five to one.

Thus began the myth.

Like most myths, this one was hydra-headed.  In fact, the multiplicity of lies and half-truths that form its core account for its staying power.  It pretended to explain everything on the one hand while saving the defeated from humiliation and responsibility on the other.

The myth's first and most immediate claim -- made at the point of surrender -- was, as Seidule points out, "that only numbers and supplies caused Confederate defeat." 

This was not true.

As Seidule explains, Grant did not have the numeric superiority military professionals deem necessary for attacking troops, and though Lee's letter to Davis claimed he had only ten thousand soldiers left at the end, "more than twenty-eight thousand applied for parole in less than a week."  Lee's army had also fought at home within easy reach of food, supplies and a supportive citizenry.  And the Confederacy itself was large -- as Seidule notes, "The United States had to defeat multiple armies over a territory twice the size of modern France and Germany." 

The Confederacy didn't lose because it was outnumbered. It lost, as Seidule concludes, because the US Army "was better" -- the "best-led, hardest-fighting, best-provisioned, and most strategically and tactically proficient combat force [then] on the globe." It also lost because the Confederacy's "cause was so flawed." And because the north's leadership -- in Lincoln, Secretary of War Stanton, and the Quartermaster General Montgomery Meigs, who accomplished the herculean task of supplying troops over a fairly vast sub-continent --  was "unmatched."

The myth's next claim was that the cause of the war had been states' rights.  Southerners asserted they were being fleeced by tariffs that helped northern manufacturers but diminished the value of their exports (principally cotton) and that, in taking up arms, they were merely protecting their land against hostile invaders.

Wrong again.

The cause of the war was slavery. Or more particularly, the fear in the south that Lincoln's Republicans would succeed in limiting the institution in the western territories and that, over time, new non-slave states would combine with existing non-slave states to abolish the institution throughout the nation.  This was a reasonable fear. It was made possible by the Constitution itself, which permits both the creation of new states and amendments to the actual document. It was hardly, however, a foregone conclusion.   In the forty years leading up to the election of 1860, new states had been added and the issue of slavery had been hotly contested as that occurred. 

That Constitutional contest would have continued.

When Abraham Lincoln won the full, fair and free presidential election of 1860, however, the South decided that contest had to end.  Or, as he put it in his Second Inaugural: "Both parties deprecated war but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish."

"And war came."

Following secession, the Confederates wrote an openly racist constitution for themselves.  Unlike its federal counterpart, that constitution  enshrined slavery.  Unlike the Declaration of Independence, it also enshrined white supremacy.  Because it forbade any Confederate state from ever ending slavery, one irony -- as Seidule also notes -- is that it also gave the lie to any notion that states' rights mattered.  On slavery in the new Confederacy, only states that were for it had rights.

As America moved through the 19th century and well into the 20th, part of the myth of the Lost Cause was that slavery would have died a natural death.  This too, however, is a claim impossible to square with the actual facts.  In mid-19th century America, slavery was actually expanding. The cotton gin had made the south's plantation economy extraordinarily wealthy and the number of slaves, particularly in the deep south, was growing.  In fact, between 1840 and 1860, the number of slaves had almost doubled. 

Another part of the myth was that slavery was actually good for the slaves. 

That it civilized them.  

That Margaret Mitchell's "happy slave" in Gone With the Wind was real.

When in fact it was just another lie.  

Slaves were property.  Slaveholders whipped and beat them.  Black slave women were regularly raped by them.  Their mulatto children became slaves themselves.  Their own fathers denied them. And after the war and the brief period of Reconstruction, the United Daughters of the Confederacy, Jim Crow, the Ku Klux Klan, segregation and monument mania took over.  Collectively, and well into the 20th century, they terrorized blacks, stopped them from voting, lynched those who talked back (or dated whites), rigorously enforced segregation and racial apartheid, and pretended the Confederacy had been a noble cause defending a traditional society that benefited all its inhabitants.

Seidule is a professional historian and a retired brigadier general in the Army.  He grew up in Virginia and Georgia, got his bachelor's degree from Washington and Lee University and his masters and  PhD from Ohio State, served in the Army for over thirty years and taught at West Point for seventeen of them.  

His book is unsparing in its account of how the Lost Cause permeated all of those places and institutions -- how public schools were closed and private academies financed  to avoid desegregation in Virginia and Georgia; how the South in general and his college in particular turned Lee into a secular saint,  whitewashing his slaveholding past with false claims of opposition or gentility and erecting hundreds of monuments to an individual who was a traitor; how the Army named dozens of bases after slaveholders and secessionist soldiers, allowed its own hallowed burial ground at Arlington to honor them, for a time endorsed openly racist views of black "fecundity", and  resisted integration even after President Truman ordered it; and how West Point initially condemned those of its alumni who violated their oaths in fighting for the Confederacy, only to later erect memorials to them.

Today, a large part of the South along with other "red" or Republican states or legislatures are re-enacting their own version of the Lost Cause in passing so-called election reform laws.  

At last count, more than 250 of those laws had been proposed or passed.  Typically, they increase voter- identification requirements, shorten early voting periods, reduce the number of drop boxes in which voters can deposit their ballots, make absentee voting more difficult, and limit the ability to correct minor errors (like failing to put one's address on the envelope in which an absentee ballot is returned to be counted) or extend voting hours (a not uncommon occurrence in large metropolitan -- and therefore Democratic -- districts).  Though these changes disproportionately burden minorities, that is their point.  In the last election, Democrats and minority-voters used these mechanisms in much higher numbers than Republicans.

The genesis of these faux reforms is, like the genesis of the myth of the Lost Cause, the Big Lie.  

In the post-Civil War era and beyond, it was the lie that slavery was benign and irrelevant and that the Confederacy was outnumbered in its legitimate efforts to repel invaders and preserve its traditional society and economy.  

Today, it is Trump's lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen and that he in fact won.  Republican state officials knew Trump's claim was false and therefore refused, in spite of his demands,  to "find votes" or throw out those that had been legitimately cast. Because, however, Trump has persisted in repeating -- ad nauseum -- this Big Lie and 60% or so of self-identifying Republicans now believe it, Republican office holders face a dilemma.  Having failed to do Trump's bidding in 2020, either they can vote for these phony reforms and avoid again angering him and those he has brainwashed, the latter of whom vote in large numbers in Republican primaries . . . 

Or they can be honest, vote against them, and risk losing.

Guess what they have decided to do.

Just kidding.

If all of these so-called "reforms" become law, a large part of America in the 21st century will resemble the post-Civil War America of the late 19th and early to mid-20th.  Instead of voters getting to  choose their representatives, the representatives will get to choose their voters. This, of course, is exactly what happened in the post-bellum South.  By disenfranchising blacks en masse, erstwhile Confederates were able to ensure that white officials were elected and re-elected for more than a hundred years. In so doing, they were able to . . . 

Preserve segregation.

And flibuster anti-lynching and civil rights laws.

Even when the country made progress in the New Deal, FDR's program had to exclude blacks in order to garner the southern votes needed to secure its passage.

The supporters of today's proposed changes cry foul when anyone compares those proposals to what happened after the Civil War.  They argue that the right to vote doesn't include the right to vote on Sunday or the right to vote during a three week early voting period or the right to be called in to correct address mistakes on an absentee ballot or the right to have special pandemic-related rules turned into the norm.  

But why not?  

Even if the right to vote cannot preclude all sorts of administrative regulations, it is certainly inconsistent with regulations that disproportionately burden or exclude minorities.  In the old days, the South used poll taxes and literacy tests to kill the franchise for blacks.  Today, Republicans are removing mechanisms that facilitate minority voting but do not have any impact on the base Republican vote.  

To justify these new exclusions, the GOP is claiming that the reforms are needed to combat perceived  election fraud.  There is, however, no such fraud, certainly none at a level beyond the present system's ability to discover or cure.  Indeed, when ballot harvesting -- the collection by third parties of absentee ballots that the third parties then deliver to election officials -- has resulted in fraudulent votes being cast, it has been easily discovered and prosecuted.  And even those cases are rare.  In fact, I know of only one.  

It is true, of course, that the "perception" of election fraud is widespread among Republicans.  

But that is because a former President of the United States has been telling them this lie for more than five years.

The dirty secret is that Republicans do not want everyone to vote.  And to whitewash that desire, some of them are even arguing that everyone should not be able to vote, that the "quality" of the vote is as important as its "quantity."  

It is unclear precisely what the GOP means by this.  Is it that some people are not smart enough to vote?  Or that low-information voters, those who do not study the issues to any real degree or take much time deciding, are to be weeded out?  Or that voting will be undertaken more thoughtfully to the extent it is not made any easier?

I do not know.

What I do know is that it is not meant to exclude those who rallied to Trump on January 6 and then invaded and trashed the Capitol.

All of whom seem to have swallowed Trump's Big Lie . . .

Becoming, if not low-information voters, then at the very least bad-information voters. 

And many of whom, given the choices they made that day, can hardly count as particularly smart.

Intelligence, however, was never a feature of the post-bellum myth of the Lost Cause.

Nor is it a feature of . . . 

Today's.

BETTIN' ON BIDEN

"You are a lost generation."

In the original French: "Vous etes une generation perdue", attributed to Gertrude Stein during the inter-war years, who got it from an auto-mechanic in Lyon, France.  It was then popularized by Ernest Hemingway, who made it the epigraph in 1926 to The Sun Also Rises.

The auto-mechanic was not trying to be profound.  He was just frustrated that a young employee wasn't fixing Stein's car fast enough. 

Not enough focus.  

When Stein returned to Paris, however, she had something deeper in mind. The carnage of World War I had both destroyed a young generation and disillusioned its survivors.  Old values like patriotism or courage seemed pointless because they had been. Ennui took over, an aimlessness born of the notion that nothing really mattered, and decadence often followed.  It's easy to live in a bottle, or a loveless hook-up, when there is no future.  

The problem was that, Stein's young mechanic and passel of young writers having been sidelined by psychological torpor, the fools who created the initial crisis lived on, free to create the next one. 

Which they did.

You do not get Hitler's fascism without the draconian peace imposed under the Versailles Treaty that ended World War I.  The treaty itself was never accepted by Germans, who thought the "war guilt clause" an utterly unfair re-writing of history and for whom the treaty's required reparation payments were among the principal causes of the hyper-inflation in the 1920s that destroyed what little was left of the German economy and helped pave the way to Nazism. 

French conservatives, however, were hell-bent on insuring against the re-emergence of a powerful Germany, and American conservatives were hell-bent on killing the League of Nations, where diplomatic efforts backed by America might have empowered the more progressive views of Keynes and others who knew that austerity for Germany (or anyone else for that matter) could only end badly.

In the wake of the war, each nation's old guard -- Clemenceau in France and Robert LaFollette in the United States -- soldiered on, having learned the wrong lesson in Clemenceau's case (that Germany could or should be returned to a pre-1871 dis-united and dis-empowered state) and having failed to learn the new one in LaFollette's (that the hard and frustrating work of diplomacy was the only path to peace in what would be an increasingly inter-dependent world).

Even the old guard in Britain soldiered on.  When he was Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1924-1929, none other than the later-to-be acclaimed Winston Churchill insisted on yoking Britain to the gold standard of tight money that would ultimately help to unleash the Great Depression.

From this unhealthy stew of nostalgia for a past that could not exist and unwillingness to think anew either economically or politically, fascism was born.

America today is not in the same position as Europe in the inter-war years.

But there are disturbing parallels.

The first is that, as a matter of policy, there are no longer two political parties in America.  On policy, the Republican party has pretty much ceased to exist.  Although you hear occasional bursts of old complaints -- spending too high, deficit too large, border crisis -- the energy in the party is focused elsewhere.  In Congress, it is on preserving the filibuster and voting in block against any legislation proposed by the Democrats or the Biden administration. In the states, thirty of which have Republican controlled legislatures, it is on proposing laws (more than 250 at last count) that would restrict voting among Democratic constituencies.  

Toward that end, Georgia yesterday signed into law a measure reducing early voting from three weeks to one, banning mobile polling places, prohibiting third-parties from collecting absentee ballots, eliminating drop boxes outside early voting locations (and entirely in the four day period before election day), requiring driver’s license or equivalent identification (in lieu of matching signatures), reducing the number of Sundays for early voting, criminalizing the distribution of food or drinks by non-poll workers to those waiting on line to vote, cutting the period by which counties must certify their votes from ten to six days, reducing the period for runoff elections to four weeks, and requiring election workers to count the final vote in one sitting, however long.  

All of these measures disproportionately affect large counties, Democratic voters in those counties and large cities, and minority voters.  Some are ridiculous to the point of absurdity.  For example, one of the purported reasons for the changes was to ensure accuracy but at least two of them -- limiting the certification period and forcing counters to work all night -- make errors more, not less, likely.

As to minorities, "Pews to the Polls" has become a standard in black churches, where congregants were taken to the polls to vote after Sunday services; the days to do that have been reduced.   In majority non-white Fulton County, home to Atlanta, half of the 146,000 submitted ballots in 2020 were deposited in drop boxes. Throughout the state, wait times to vote were six minutes on average in precincts where 90% of the voters were white and 51 minutes in precincts where 90% of the voters were non-white.  In those non-white precincts, organizers often distributed free food and water and voting hours were extended to accommodate the long wait times.

The only provision removed from the legislation before it went to the Governor for his signature was a proposed ban on no-excuse absentee voting.  But that was done because absentee voting is used largely by those over the age of 65, and that group has been trending Republican.

Republican legislators claim the new statutes were needed to combat election fraud.  Though there is no evidence of such fraud on any widespread basis (and very little on even any basis), more than two-thirds of self-identified Republicans now think the 2020 Presidential election was stolen.  They think this, moreover, despite the fact that the claim has been rejected by both the courts which reviewed the election and the state officials -- including Republicans themselves -- who certified it.

The reason they do so is . . . 

Donald Trump.

Trump has been proclaiming and pushing the election fraud lie since the day he started running for the Presidency in 2015.  In the run-up to the 2016 election, he said he could lose only if there was fraud. After he won, he (falsely) claimed he lost the popular vote only because more than 3 million "illegals" voted.  That never happened.  In the run-up to the 2020 election, he recycled his claim that he could lose only by virtue of fraud.  And then when he lost, by seven million popular votes and 303-232 in the electoral college, he spent the entire period from Election to Inauguration Day claiming he had won.  On account of that lie, rioters stormed the US Capitol on January 6, delaying certification of the electoral college vote in Biden's favor, ransacking portions of the building (including the Speaker's offices), and resulting in five deaths.

Trump and the GOP legislators in thrall to his big lie are the closest America has come to actual fascism -- authoritarian diktat cloaked in a statutory garb that gives it faux legitimacy.  Though the party could have been rid of him once he lost, the fact that his lie has taken root within its base has frozen elected GOP officials throughout the country.  

Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy excoriated Trump on the evening of January 6 in the wake of the attack on the US Capitol, but neither of them was willing to impeach him. McCarthy has since visited and praised Trump, and McConnell has said he would again vote for him.  Their not-so-subtle about-faces were the product of fear that Trump's voters would beat them in primaries.  That fear, moreover, is rational.  All ten of the Republicans who voted to impeach Trump after January 6, including Wyoming's Liz Cheney, now have Trumpist primary opponents in their next elections.  For the same reason, GOP state legislators are all-in on the vote fraud lie.

The GOP base did not get this way overnight.  

It did not wake up one morning in the last five or so months, or five or so years, and say "Voila.  It's election fraud causing us all our angst."  The lie took root for the same reason the lost generation led to Hitler.  They did not think they had much else to live for.  And the elites, including those in the Democratic Party, were not convincing them otherwise.  

I remember the '90s.  I ran for Congress twice then, once in 1992 as the Democratic Party nominee in New York's 19th Congressional district and two years later in the Democratic primary when the seat became open.  I lost both times and have one particularly searing memory of the '94 campaign. I ran as an unabashed New Deal Democrat. I believed Clinton needed to be the next FDR and the Democrats had to make life better for the falling-behind middle class.  I did not want "the era of big Government" to be over. Taking it all in, one of my opponents said "You're good on your feet but I'm not hearing any new ideas."

He was right.

I thought the old ideas would work just fine.

Fast forward to 2008.  After a near Depression, America elected Obama and his "audacity of hope", a mind-bending act of racial progress pregnant with unlimited apparent potential. Somewhere between Election and Inauguration Day, however, hope became less audacious.  It wasn't Barack Obama's fault. Ditto for Bill Clinton.  They both wanted to do big things. They both tried.  They were both stymied. 

By mid-term losses.

And the filibuster.

And the holy grail of bi-partisanship.

Meanwhile, the middle class, and especially those in ex-urban and rural areas removed from the computer-productivity growth taking hold in big cities and their suburbs, were either running in place or falling behind. Many if not most of them were one job loss or illness away from foreclosure or worse. And when worse arrived, opioids were not far behind.  

Poverty sucks.  So does forever falling behind.  And worrying about either for your kids sucks even more.  It's easy to get depressed.  I know very few who haven't (one is a cousin, and if his personality could be bottled and marketed, I'd patent and distribute it).  You look for answers.  And are tired enough to accept the bad ones.

So one Reagan, two Bushes, a Clinton, an Obama and a really bad Trump later, it's Joe Biden's time.  

Will it be better?  

Will Biden do what the others wouldn't or couldn't?  

Can he revitalize the middle and lance the fascist boil?

I'm betting on him.  

For two reasons.

One is psychological, the other political.

In the inter-war years of the 20th century, one politician stood out as different from all others.  That politician was Franklin Roosevelt.  In the 1920s, he was different for reasons that had nothing to do with politics. He was different because he was paralyzed, the victim of polio in 1921 at the age of 39. 

In the years that followed, he couldn't walk and could barely work.  The glide path to political power that his name and aristocratic upbringing had greased was suddenly closed.  But he willed himself -- catacombed in steel braces -- to stand up and then carry on, and in doing so, the dispossessed realized -- in the words of that famous worker crying years later as his funeral train passed by -- that he knew them even if they didn't know him.

That's Joe Biden's gift today.  

And accounts for his current purchase on the American soul.  

His father for a time was unemployed.  The family had to live with in laws and in crowded apartments. In the pre-financial aid era, he could only go to schools he could afford. His first wife and one year old daughter were killed in a car accident.  His oldest son died from cancer at 46.  Another is a recovering addict.  For thirty-six years, he commuted to work.  In 1988 he almost died from a brain aneurysm. Every time he is knocked down, he tries to get up.  And if you're down, he doesn't walk by, he picks you up.   

Not since Ronald Reagan has an American president so perfectly mirrored the current American psyche. The two Bushes were keepers of Reagan's flame, even as it sputtered and then burned out.  Clinton felt pain in an America where too many still did not.  Obama was a gift, proof that Jefferson's claims were not just empty rhetoric, and Trump was a tragedy, proof that hopelessness and fear can be turned into organized hate.

More than the others in their time, Biden is one of us in this time.  

He gets it because he's been there.

There literally is not one trial visited today upon America's struggling middle -- whether they are located on the middle of the economic ladder or in the middle of the country -- that he has not personally experienced one way or the other.

Unemployment, insecurity, illness, addiction, death and despair.

He’s seen it all.

So far, he has been pitch-perfect.  

His American Rescue Plan (ARP) has put money in pockets and Covid vaccines in arms. State and local governments will receive needed assistance to regain the revenue lost to the pandemic and schools will have the money to retrofit and re-open.  Obamacare will be enhanced and preserved. By all accounts, child poverty will be cut in half.  

70% of Americans support this.  

All of it.

In a world where, as he said yesterday, "politics is the art of the possible," infrastructure is the next agenda item to be then followed by voting rights.  The infrastructure bill -- which will have a "green" hue as the administration attempts to combat climate change -- is priced at $3 trillion and will have to be paid for in part with some high end and corporate tax increases, and voting rights will inevitably fail unless a Senate filibuster can be avoided (unlikely) or repealed (possible).  Without it, however, the GOP's voter suppression campaign will continue and succeed.  

At the border, humanity has been restored even as challenges remain, and abroad, China and Russia loom large.  The latter is an annoyance, a lifeless, commodified economy whose government consists of a corrupt oligarchy that poisons its opponents.  The former is a growing obstacle.  Both require allied efforts in a world where America cannot go it alone.  

China is a particular problem.  

Its version of capitalism is mercantile and whatever market freedom prevails within its borders will always be subservient to party loyalty.  This means that China will respect neither human rights nor intellectual property rights unless it has to.  This also means that, short of war, a unified western approach will be the only way to change Chinese behavior.  Trump's tariffs got China's attention and his trade czar, Robert Lighthizer, was delivering a consistent message.  But Trump's opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership treaty and his go-it-alone approach with Europe made it impossible for him to apply long-term, non-tariff leverage or even close a short-term deal.  Biden will not be able to change this until our erstwhile allies are back on board. 

And that will take time.

If Biden succeeds domestically, he may get that time, avoiding the fate of lost mid-terms that plagued his predecessors.  If he doesn't, China will still be a problem. 

But not our biggest one.

FDR became president in 1932.  With his New Deal -- a pragmatic amalgam that regulated corrupt stock dealers, offered the aged some semblance of security, and created jobs -- America avoided both fascism and communism.  

In 2021, the challenges are different but as daunting.  

A brewing fascism exists within.  It was seeded by Trump and is now being institutionalized by GOP voter suppression. In the hinterlands, its supporters in the GOP base have grown weary of government that does not work for them.  ARP, however, does. So will a big infrastructure bill.  Together, they can represent real progress delivered to real people by the realist of guys.

That’s why I'm . . .

Bettin' on Biden.   

NORMAL

What is normal?

The dictionaries define it to mean usual, typical or routine. "The expected state or condition," says Oxford.   The word itself derives from the Latin word "normalis" which was classically defined as having been made in accordance with "a carpenter's square", the tool for "establishing right angles."  Bob Vila of This Old House fame calls it the "go to tool for framing, roofing and stair work". It has been around for centuries. 

The precision of the tool, however, hasn't migrated into the current meaning of the word. 

In today's "normal", there is play in the joints.  "Usual" or "typical" is not "always".  Or "precise". In fact, sometimes the messiness of abnormal is repeated so often that it becomes "the new normal", which in truth has to be a bit of an oxymoron.  Repetition takes time and typical requires data from more than one tomorrow.  If the new is routine or typical, maybe the old wasn't.

Maybe there isn't any normal.

Maybe we just create it . . .  

Perpetually turning the repetition perceived in our limited space- time horizon into routines that, from another perspective, are not all that usual after all.

Maybe things just appear normal.

Even though they aren't.

For the past four years, Americans pondered the challenge to normal that was their 45th President.  Many believe the 46th owes his position to the widespread perception that he, unlike his predecessor, is not abnormal.  On this view, an exhausted electorate replaced the narcissistic, self-appointed destroyer of norms with someone who respected them.  

At the end of the day, we tired of all the broken glass -- the absence of any real policy on health care, infrastructure, the environment; the dangerous world of lies where the response to disease was disinformation, where science was side-lined, where aides promoted “alternative facts”; the criminal obtruction and mob-like, omerta-induced pardons of admitted or convicted felons; the predicted (and ultimately deadly) transition abomination where delusion refused to acknowledge defeat; the constant drumbeat of one man's jaundiced ego in 59,553 tweets or re-tweets.

So, we replaced that with . . .

Normal.

And got to take a breath.

We should savor the moment.

Because it will not last.

In the month and a half that has been the incipient Biden presidency, traditional anchors have been laid and the ship of state has been at the very least steadied.  We are back in the Paris climate accord, consulting (rather than dissing) allies, re-peopling the various federal departments with secretaries and undersecretaries qualified to advance their missions,  combating Covid with experts and electeds singing from the same page, and distributing disaster relief with no reference to a state's red or blue political countenance.  

A product of almost a half-century in the political trenches, Biden understands that progress is always slow but can be steady. 

He doesn’t need to be on TV every day praising himself or stabbing opponents.  Other than his Inaugural Address, he has appeared just once, on a CNN Town Hall in mid-February.  On a daily basis, his press secretary talks for the administration.  She is calm and credentialed.  No one has been called fake news, banned from the press room, or had their credentials pulled. 

To his credit, Trump had fast tracked vaccine creation.   He was AWOL, however, on production and delivery.  To that end, and almost immediately upon being inaugurated, Biden used his authority under the Defense Production Act to ensure that the nation will have enough Covid vaccines and created a plan to get them effectively distributed and into the arms of waiting Americans.  

It's the difference between doing . . .

And tweeting.

For a President facing a once-in-a-century pandemic, it is also normal.

The administration's $1.9 trillion Covid relief package has moved through Congress and should be on Biden's desk in a couple of days. It will provide payments of $1,400 for those who earn less than $60,000 annually, extend unemployment benefits through September, and provide the funds states and localities need to retain first responders and open schools. It will also increase tax credits for children, so much so that experts predict the rate of childhood poverty may be cut in half. 

The right and the GOP claim the package is too big, that much of it is unrelated to Covid, and that it belies the President's pledge to be bipartisan.  Biden, however, sat down with a group of Republican senators shortly after being sworn in and made clear that their alternative proposal for less than a third the amount was a non-starter.  Following that meeting, the GOP did not come back with any counter-proposals, House Democrats voted for the bill, House Republicans universally opposed it, and Senate Democrats then amended it.   

They removed the minimum wage hike, reduced the amount of unemployment benefits, stopped states from using any of the funds to pay down public employee pension fund deficits and deleted two mega-transportation projects in New York and California.  

Mitch McConnell, however, still demanded that every Republican Senator vote against it.

Which they all did.

After the Senate Democrats voted for it, however, the amended bill was sent back to the House.

It is expected to pass on Tuesday, again on a party line vote.

In the world before Trump, this was the Republican party's standard modus operandi.  In 2009, in the midst of a financial crisis that threatened to turn into a Depression, no House Republicans voted for the Obama administration’s $787 billion recovery plan and only three GOP Senators crossed the aisle (one of whom, Arlen Specter, later switched parties) to support it.  Later in the administration, when Obamacare was being crafted, Iowa's Republican Senator Charles Grassley -- then the ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee -- proposed a host of changes in negotiations with the Democrats only to admit that, even if they were all accepted, he still would not vote for the bill.  

Twelve years later, the Democrats and President Biden were not willing to be fooled twice.

In the country as a whole, the Covid relief package has bipartisan support.  Over 70% of the voters support it, including more than 50% of self-identified Republican. A number of Republican governors also favor the bill, aware that it provides funding they cannot replace and without which they will be forced to cut critical services.  Bipartisan support evaporates, however, among actual GOP House members and Senators. 

Why?

Two reasons.

First, the Congressional Republican party is not a governing party.   In fact, it hasn’t been for some time.  The party is about opposition and grievance.  Policy for the most part is entirely absent.  In the Trump years, Congressional Republicans did two things.  They passed the 2017 tax bill that lowered rates for corporations and the rich, and they stacked the federal courts with Federalist Society judges. On a whole host of other issues -- health care, climate change, gun safety, voting rights, income inequality -- nothing happened.  

This was intentional.

In the Senate, McConnell sat on over 400 proposed bills.  He wouldn't allow them to be debated or voted upon.  The GOP couldn't even come up with the infrastructure spending Trump promised in his campaign (and Democrats would have been happy to pass), and their repeated opposition to Obamacare finally died because they never had an alternative. Indeed, if one of the signature Congressional moments in the last administration was John McCain walking into the well of the Senate in the early morning hours to kill repeal of the Affordable Care Act, one of its signature comedies was Trump constantly promising a new health care plan "next week" or "soon" that he never actually delivered.

Second, even though Republicans do not control the House and now no longer (but just barely) control the Senate, the upper chamber’s current rules -- which require 60 votes to end any filibuster and bring a bill to the floor -- institutionalize a minority veto.  To avoid this barrier on Covid relief, Congress used the budget reconciliation procedure. This special rule allows legislation effecting spending, revenues or the federal debt limit to advance without being subject to the filibuster but limits the number of bills proposed annually under the procedure to three and requires that any one of them not trigger reconciliation for the same reason as any of the others.

After the Covid bill, Democrats will have only two more chances this year to pass legislation using reconciliation.  They are now debating which of their promised packages can be saved via that route.  The likeliest is the planned $2 trillion infrastructure bill.  For those that cannot, the Senate filibuster is a gauntlet that will have to be run.

So . . .

What's a governing party to do?

The Democrats have two options.  

The first is to obtain enough Republican support to remove the possibility of filibuster on any particular bill.  

This will take 60 votes, ten more than they now have. In 2022, there will be 20 Republican and 14 Democratic Senate seats on the ballot, and of the 20, those in North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Ohio will be open because Senators Burr, Toomey and Portman are retiring.  It is possible that Portman and Burr might provide additional support now for Democratic legislation on infrastructure.   Toomey is less likely to do so because he is a fiscal hawk.  And none of them are likely to do so on any other Democratic proposals.  Even  if they were, of course, Democrats would still need seven or eight additional Republicans to avoid any filibuster, and after Senators Murkowski (Alaska), Collins (Maine) and Sasse (Nebraska), not even remote possibilities exist on that score.

Nor do the prospects appear much brighter after 2022. Assuming the Democrats pick up those three open seats and hold all of their own (prayers for Georgia Sen. Warnock, please), the only other possible switches are in Florida (Rubio) and Wisconsin (Ron Johnson). So even then, a 55-vote majority would leave the Democrats five short of being filibuster-proof, two short if Murkowski, Collins and Sasse are in play on any particular bill.

The second option is to eliminate the filibuster.  

In his recently published book, The Kill Switch, Adam Jentleson argues for precisely this approach. 

Jentleson was former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's deputy chief of staff and is now a writer. As his book explains, the filibuster was created in the 1840s by John C. Calhoun to protect slavery. It was formally refined and made a part of the Senate's rules in the early 20th century and was then embraced by southern Democrats to insure the survival of Jim Crow.  Indeed, before the 1960s, the only proposed legislation it was used to successfully defeat were civil rights bills. And in the ‘60s, in the wake of Brown, the freedom rides and Selma, the historic civil rights bills overcame it only because (i) the Senate Republican caucus at that time had liberals in it and (ii) President Johnson out- maneuvered his southern Democratic opponents.

Since then, as Jentleson explains, the parties have “sorted” themselves.  The GOP has moved to the (far) right and "negative partisanship" -- the notion that it's more important to beat your opponent than pass an affirmative program -- has taken over.  Today, there is no such thing as a liberal Republican. Though red states comprise a minority of the country’s population, they can always elect at least 40 Republican Senators.   

As this reality increasingly interfered with the Senate's ability to get anything done , moves to end the filibuster gathered strength.  In 2013, the Democrats ended it on any lower court judicial nominees. Their reasoning was sound.  Before 2009, there had been 82 filibusters on all of the judicial nominees proposed by the forty-three previous presidents.  In the five years or so thereafter, however, the GOP filibustered 86 of President Obama's nominees.  

In 2017, the Republicans returned the favor and ended filibusters on Supreme Court nominees.  Having refused to debate or vote on the nomination of Judge Merrick Garland to fill the seat vacated upon Justice Scalia's death, they did so to avoid the inevitable filibuster that would have been mounted once Trump sought to fill that seat with Justice Gorsuch.  

Today, therefore, and apart from judicial nominations, the filibuster lives on.

The procedure was created and defended to preserve the Senate's ability to engage in "unlimited debate".  As practiced early on, this literally meant that filibustering Senators or their allies had to continually speak on the floor.  In a strange way, it required courage. For all their transparent (if not then, certainly now) racism, John C. Calhoun and Richard Russell had to stand up and defend their views at length to their colleagues. Today, however, all a Senator has to do is announce he or she will filibuster and then go silent.  Far from demanding courage, the current practice rewards cowardice.

In 2013, when West Virginia's Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin and Pennsylvania's Republican Sen. Pat Toomey, in the wake of the massacre of Sandy Hook's first graders, proposed the bipartisan and widely supported universal background check on gun purchases, the two of them literally begged the bill's opponents to debate the issue -- to question them and challenge their arguments -- on the floor.   No one bothered.  Instead, in individual interrupted sessions over the course of a week, opponents delivered prepared remarks to a largely empty chamber.  In total, they spoke for two hours and twenty-four minutes.

It was hardly a "debate".

And it certainly wasn't anywhere near "unlimited".  

Can the Democrats kill the filibuster for good?

Right now?

Probably not.

Why not?

Because . . .

There are only 50 Democrats in the Senate today . . .

And Joe Manchin, one of the very legislators stymied by that 2013 filibuster on unlimited background checks, has said he will never vote to repeal it. 

Manchin claims that doing so would turn the Senate into the House.  He argues that repealing the filibuster would end unlimited debate and turn majority rule into minority silence.  His claims, however, are overwrought. For starters, the House these days is far from the lesser body Manchin assumes it to be.  Unlike the Senate under McConnell, it actually votes on bills and gets things done.  The votes are messy and they are close. But there isn't any legislation that won't be debated and voted upon merely because the minority opposes it. 

More importantly, eliminating the filibuster is by no means synonymous with restricting or cutting off debate. As the 2013 background check fiasco demonstrates, the tool is not being used to preserve debate in any meaningful senses; in fact, given that no one has to take to the floor and utter a word, it is actually being used to stymie debate. In truth, when today's Senate avoids filibuster and proceeds by unanimous consent, it has no problem agreeing on the number of total hours each side will have to debate. There is no reason such agreements could not be struck in the future, and barring that, the rules themselves could easily be amended to kill the filibuster while preserving the right to debate within reasonable time limits. No one will be silenced.

It's probably unfair to pick on Sen. Manchin.  

He represents a state that voted overwhelmingly for Trump in the last two presidential elections and sees no need to walk the plank on a procedure the GOP deems critical to its survival, especially if doing so might lead to his defeat and the loss of Democratic control.  He also isn't up for reelection until 2024, and in the meantime, were the Democrats to win additional Senate seats in 2022, a more robust Democratic majority could eliminate the rule without Manchin's vote.  It is even possible that, were such a Democratic majority able to do so, the GOP might wave the white flag of compromise, lowering the threshold for a filibuster to, say, 55 votes, and requiring that filibustering Senators come out of the shadows and . . .

Actually debate.

I'm even willing to bet that this is what the veteran pol now in the White House, a half century of experience his guide, thinks may happen.

It's incremental.

And slow.

And frustrating.

Maybe even . . .

Normal.

AMERICAN WINTER

Victims of violent crimes generally tend to avoid week-long visits to the scenes of the crimes that victimized them.  Especially mere weeks after the crimes have occurred.  The violations are fresh, the post-traumatic stress real.  

The better venue at that point is a therapist's couch.

As opposed to the criminal's stage.

This was not an option in the second impeachment trial of former President Donald Trump.

The scene of the crime -- the US Capitol and its Senate chamber -- was the courtroom.  Victims of the crime -- the Senators themselves -- were the jurors.  Other victims -- the House managers presenting the case for conviction -- were the prosecutors.  And still others -- the working Congressional staffers and US Capitol police there on January 6 -- were spectators.

For all those victims, the trial became a series of reminders.

The Congress was reminded that, on January 6, it was only feet away from a violent mob bent on killing or kidnapping some of them in order to stop all of them. Senators Mitt Romney and Chuck Schumer were reminded that they were actually running into that mob -- and the uncertain fate that awaits the marriage of target with violence -- until Eugene Goodman of the Capitol police intercepted and redirected them.  Speaker Pelosi's staff was reminded that those who invaded the Speaker's offices in the hunt for their boss failed to find and attack them only because the mob couldn't breach the two closed doors behind which they lay hidden under a conference table, whispering into cell phones for police assistance.

And, sadly, at the end of the day, America was reminded that, even after the horror of January 6, the party of Lincoln is still . . .

The party of Trump. 

The single article of impeachment charged Trump with inciting insurrection. To find him guilty, at least seventeen Republicans would have had to join forty-eight Democrats and two Independents in concluding that he did so.  

That was not a heavy lift.  

In the sixteen hours they took presenting their case, the House managers laid out in meticulous detail how Trump had invited and incited the mob on January 6 to overrun the US Capitol in an effort to stop Congress from counting the Electoral College votes and certifying Joe Biden as the winner of last year's Presidential election. 

The vast majority of the evidence came from Trump's own mouth and tweets.  In the years and months leading up to last November's election, he had repeated on dozens of occasions the lie that he could lose the election only as a consequence of fraud, and in the two-plus months afterward, he repeated those and other false claims that the dead had voted, that Biden ballots had been invented, and that digital scanners had been programmed in favor of his opponent.  None of those claims were remotely credible and all of them had been repeatedly rejected either by courts that heard them or government officials who investigated them.

At the same time, on January 6, Trump urged his followers to "fight like hell" and "stop the steal". He praised Rudy Giuliani, who at the same rally had called for "trial by combat". In the past, he had praised a politician who body-slammed a journalist, rally-goers who physically attacked Trump opponents, and armed militia bent on killing a sitting governor.  In all ways, therefore, he had made it perfectly clear that, in "fighting like hell", violence was acceptable. Equally damning, once the riot started, anywhere from three to six people tried to convince him to immediately intervene and tell his supporters to stop.  He did nothing.  Instead, he enjoyed the carnage.

On January 26, forty-five Republicans voted to dismiss the impeachment case against Trump on the grounds that the Senate lacked jurisdiction because he was no longer President.  That motion was defeated and this should have been the end of the issue. Jurisdiction is a threshold question.  Once you have it, you cannot disclaim it.  In other words, once the full Senate decided it in fact had jurisdiction -- which it did in voting down the motion -- even those who voted for the motion should have decided the case solely on the basis of Trump's guilt or innocence.

That, however, was not good enough for Mitch McConnell.  

After voting to acquit, McConnell gave a speech demonstrating Trump's guilt beyond any doubt but arguing once again that the Constitution itself gave the Senate no right to hold the now ex-President accountable by convicting him on the article of impeachment.  McConnell based his claim on the views of Justice Joseph Story who in 1833 wrote the first treatise on American constitutional law and concluded in it that impeachment in fact was limited to current office holders.  

Story's position has been rejected by most scholars and previously by the Senate itself.  In fact, even Story himself was skeptical, qualifying his opinion by stating that it was subject to review by the Senate and that in any case the Senate's determination would constitute the ultimate authority on the matter.  Since then, the Senate has spoken twice on the issue, once a little less than two weeks ago in Trump's case and earlier in 1876 in the case of the impeachment of then ex-Secretary of War William Belknap.  In both instances, the Senate concluded that it had jurisdiction to try the impeachment of a former official.  In other words, it rejected McConnell's position.  

For good measure, even an ex-President, John Quincy Adams, has weighed-in on the issue.  

In 1846, while serving in the House, Adams told his colleagues that "I hold myself, so long as I have breath of life in my body, amenable to impeachment by this House for everything I did during the time I held any public office."

McConnell's speech was delivered with all the gravitas he generally marshals in the performance of his official duties.  Not the same, however, could be said for many of his confreres. On trial Tuesday, Missouri’s Republican Senator Josh Hawley perched himself in the Senate gallery above the floor where all his comrades were sitting at their desks.  With his feet casually up, Hawley reviewed paperwork as the House managers below presented stark video evidence setting out Trump's months long advance of the big lie, his express instructions to the armed and dangerous mob on January 6 that they march to the Capitol and "Stop the Steal", and the mob's violent and deadly attacks on Capitol police as it overran the building. 

Hawley, who had actually saluted some of the mob on his way into the Capitol that day, was among those who earlier claimed the Senate lacked jurisdiction. As noted, most Constitutional scholars reject this view. Their principal fear is that doing so will give chief executives permission to engage in high crimes and misdemeanors -- pretty much a la Trump and his "Stop the Steal" induced riot -- so long as those high crimes occur at the end of their terms. Hawley didn’t care. With designs on the 2024 GOP nomination, he covets the Trump base. Jurisdiction was one of his political life lines.

The other was sheer idiocy.

Even after the riot on January 6, when Congress returned to complete the work Trump’s riot had interrupted, Hawley still insisted on being one of the Senate sponsors demanding that Congress refuse to count Pennsylvania's electoral votes. That effort raised ignorance of the law to an art form.  The courts had already upheld Pennsylvania's vote, as they had Michigan’s, Wisconsin's, Georgia's and Arizona's, the selected targets of Trump's putsch. Hawley’s opinion to the contrary was nonsense.

As for the rest of the GOP, they were either bored . . . 

Or insane

The bored were variously described as "struggling to stay awake" (Indiana's Sen. Mike Braun), "not paying much attention" (Iowa's Sen. Marsha Blackburn), or "doodling" (Kentucky’s Sen. Rand Paul).  Florida's Sen. Rick Scott was seen examining "what appeared to be a map of Southeast Asia." 

The lunatic fringe was occupied by South Carolina's Lindsey Graham. 

Following the conclusion of Wednesday's session, Sen. Graham lambasted the Capitol police, saying they hadn't used enough deadly force on the mob.  Ashli Babbit, the 35 year old Air Force veteran shot and killed as she climbed through a broken window into the Speaker's lobby, apparently needed company.  Whether that company would have included more police officers -- and not just more mobsters -- went unasked (and unanswered), but this too is the GOP way.  Their favorite fundraiser/lobbyist, the NRA, routinely endorses a bullets uber alles approach to crime, even when that approach is likely to create, as it would have on January 6 (the mobsters had guns too), more dead bodies.  

But that was Graham's take regardless.  

Memo to South Carolina voters -- aren't you tired of being on the wrong side of our (un)civil wars?

After the House managers finished their case on Thursday, Trump's ever-changing cast of attorneys put on his defense. It lasted less than three hours and consisted of three assertions -- (1) that all politicians use the word "fight" without being accused of advocating violence, and Trump hadn't done anything different; (2) that in arguing that the election was flawed, Trump was merely exercising his First Amendment rights; and (3) that those who breached the Capitol on January 6 did so of their own accord and are being criminally prosecuted.  

Sometimes brevity is the soul of wit.  

This time, however, it was just . . .

Witless.

No other President has been like Trump and Trump himself has been like no other President.  

He is sui generis, unique.

 A set of one. 

You can search the speeches of others without finding any examples of Presidents or presidential candidates telling supporters to beat up opponents or equivocating before a crowd in the face of the obvious potential for violence.  No Democrat has ever done this. Trump, however, has either been advocating or winking at violence in the service of his political goals for years.  In the person of Marjorie Taylor Greene,  he has even created elected Republican acolytes. 

You can also search the speeches of other Presidents and presidential candidates without finding any who, in the immediate aftermath of a clear electoral defeat confirmed by election officials, the national media and numerous courts, claimed that he or she won by a landslide, demanded that state officials "find votes" that did not exist, or summoned thousands so that they could march on the Capitol to stop a pro forma count that they claimed, without any evidence whatsoever, constituted theft.  

Finally, you also will never find another President who, when faced with an armed and deadly attack on the US Capitol that threatened to take out other public officials, including the Vice President of the United States and the Speaker of the House, actually stood by, did nothing, and . . . 

Enjoyed it.  

The First Amendment neither sanctions nor excuses any of this conduct.

In the end, seven Republicans -- Senators Collins, Murkowski, Romney, Burr, Sasse, Cassidy and Toomey -- voted to convict Donald Trump.

Forty-three of their party colleagues voted "not guilty".

The seven who voted to convict will become this era's profiles in courage.  

As for the forty-three who didn’t, Chuck Schumer had the last word. Their "failure to convict Donald Trump,” he said, “will live as a vote of infamy in the history of the United States Senate.”

When the impeachment trial ended and Trump was acquited last Saturday, it wasn't the Democrats who lost.  

It was the country.

Now is the winter of our discontent.