FALLEN LEAVES

This morning was chilly. 

And even as the sun burned away the clouds, it is still a bit cold.  

So, maybe fall has finally come to my home town in New York. 

But maybe not.

For the past three weeks, it's been unseasonably warm during the day but comfortably cool at night. We retired the  air conditioner for the year but the heat, though on deck , has not yet had to bat.  In New England, the colors have already turned and the "peaks" have begun to move south.  But they are not here yet.  The leaves are still fighting. Though some are down, others resist what is inevitable.  They know they all have to die someday. But not necessarily this day.

In this season at war with itself, politics finds a companion. 

It is now a schizoid mix of the normal and the existentially threatening.

As to the former, Biden is trying to hammer the Democrats into some unified approach to the infrastructure and Build Back Better bills.  The first enjoys bipartisan support; the second the support of all Democrats but two and no Republicans.  Hence those two Democrats, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema,  are more or less the ball game on that second bill.  As are the progressives who will not vote for the first unless some version of the second moves as well.  Since neither can have it all, both will have to compromise.  In the meantime, each is wondering when the other will blink.

In this realm of "normal" politics, Biden's GOP opponents are claiming he is Jimmy Carter, the  one-term Democrat who fell in 1980 amidst the twin peaks of roaring inflation and the Iran hostage crisis.  Though neither exists today, Republicans have had to make due with some pandemic created supply chain bottlenecks that have temporarily increased prices and a messy departure from Afghanistan that they now lament but did nothing to avert.  

In their world, we are back in the '70s.

Even though we aren't.

Inflation is running at about 5% annaually, not the 13.5% that helped put Reagan in the White House in 1980. It  also has not been at that rate for any length of time, again contrary to the experience of the 1970s.  Though the data on core (important) versus volatile (less so) inflation can be read to signal trouble, the pandemic radically changed buying patterns (from services to stuff) and created supply chain problems in today's world of just-in-time inventories that did not exist in the 1970s.  Both the consumers (you and I)  and the suppliers (all those tankers in the Los Angeles Harbor waiting to off-load their containers) will presumably revert to the norm, as will prices, once the pandemic abates.  Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve has its eyes on the data, as does the European Central Bank.  Both are poised to tighten credit if they must.

And . . .

There are no hostages in Afghanistan.

Then, however, there is the existentially threatening.

The House select committee investigating the January 6 insurrection just recommended that the entire House refer Trump henchman Steve Bannon to prosecutors for criminal contempt in view of his refusal to honor the committee's subpoena for relevant documents and testimony.  The report accompanying the recommendation quotes extensively from insurrection participants specifically linking their attack to Trump's false election fraud claims.  It also quotes from Bannon's own social media posts on the eve of the attack telling would be revolutionaries to be in DC the next day.   "[W]e're on the point of attack tomorrow," he said, and joined others that night -- including Trump lawyers Giuliani and John Eastman, campaign spokesman Jason Miller and felony convict Roger Stone -- in meetings at the Willard Hotel.

Eastman has clearly usurped Giuliani  as Trump's most dangerous -- and dangerously insane -- lawyer.  Thanks to the Washington Post's super duo --  the aging but intrepid Bob Woodward and his young and never-exhausted sidekick Robert Costa -- we now know that Eastman wrote a memo literally laying out the coup Trump planned and attempted to implement this past January just as Congress was to meet to certify Biden's victory.  

Step One was to declare that there were competing slates of electors in seven states, thus rendering uncertain the results in those states.  Step Two involved either declaring Trump the winner based on the electoral vote count in the remaining states (where Trump would have won a Constitutional "majority of electors appointed") or sending the election to the House (where Trump would have won because each state delegation would cast one vote and twenty-six of those delegations were controlled by Republicans) on the theory that neither Biden nor Trump had won the required 270 electoral vote majority.   

As Woodward and Costa recount in Peril, the plan was an absolute lie.  

There were no competing slates. Just as there had been no election fraud.

Even then, however, neither Eastman nor Trump relented. 

In an evening meeting on January 4, in Trump's presence and with his full support, Eastman told Vice President Pence that he, Pence, could unilaterally declare the results uncertain so that Republican legislatures could then hold special sessions and send alternate slates of electors to Washington.

Pence wouldn't do it.

And because he wouldn't, Trump's rioters threatened to hang him on January 6.

In the run-up to Biden's election and inauguration, and as also reported in Peril, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley, thought Trump "crazy" and twice reached out to his Chinese counterpart to assure him that the United States was stable and, contrary to their belief that the US was secretly planning to attack them, would not initiate any kinetic action. The first call was made four days before the election and the second two days after the January 6 insurrection.  After the insurrection, which he characterized as an attempted coup, Milley also summoned senior officers from the National Military Command Center to remind them of the procedures in place should Trump order a nuclear strike and literally exacted an oath from each of them that they understood they were required to and would report any such order to Milley, to the Secretary of Defense and to a set of attorneys before it could be carried out.

Trump doesn't care about any of this. He is still lying about the election.  And he is demanding that all other Republicans lie with him.  Last week, he announced that Republican voters should not vote in 2022 or 2024 unless his fictitious "fraud" claim is resolved in his favor.  Roughly half the Republican voters believe his claims and even those that do not are willing to suppress Democratic turnout with new laws that limit mail-in, early and drop-box voting.  Meanwhile, in Congress, voting rights legislation that would counter the GOP's suppression efforts is being held hostage to the filibuster.

This is how you lose a country.  

Yeats said it best:

    Turning and turning in the widening gyre

    The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

    Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

    Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

    The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

    The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

    The best lack all conviction, while the worst

    Are full of passionate intensity.

Gen. Colin Powell died this week.

The cause of death was complications from Covid-19.

But that wasn't the real cause.

The real cause was that . . .

Someone else refused to get a shot.

The worst. 

Full of passionate intensity.

HERE'S THE DEAL -- BRIDGES FOR BALLOTS

What's wrong with the Democrats? 

Biden's numbers are underwater by about three points.  Moderates and progressives in the party are engaged in a stand-off over the two (one small and bipartisan; the other large and not) infrastructure bills. Neither bill at this point has been passed. 

To right the ship, Biden spent most of yesterday huddled in meetings with Congressional Democrats.  According to media reports, the meetings were cordial.  "We're calm, and everybody's good, and our work's almost done," said Nancy Pelosi, trying to sound upbeat.  But Biden's press secretary, Jen Psaki,  struck a more ominous note.  Biden, she said, recognizes "there needs to be deeper engagement" by him; he "sees his role as . . .  working to bring together people over common agreement and on a path forward."

In other words, they aren't there yet.

The problem is thorny.  

Stated simply, the Democrats are divided.  Progressives want the second infrastructure bill voted on and passed at the same time as the first.  Moderates want the second bill scaled back appreciably and some would even agree to pass the bipartisan package first and then deal with the second later. Progressives know that if they agree  to that, there either won't be a second bill or the bill will be a shadow of its former self.

Although the competing factions are all Democrats, it's not clear that they trust each other.  The moderate with the most muscle,  conservative Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, has made it clear that he will not vote for the second bill if the price tag is anywhere near the $3.5 trillion it now carries.  Manchin -- whose vote is needed to move the bill through the reconciliation procedure that avoids a Senate filibuster -- has intimated that he may support a bill priced at $1-1.5 trillion but no more. 

To progressives, however, Manchin sounds like a Republican.  

His argument against the big bill is that it will be inflationary and add to the nation's debt. 

Progressives think both claims are bogus. 

For at least two reasons.  

One is that Republicans do not give a damn about debt when they vote for deficit-financed tax cuts or massive (and always bigger) defense budgets. 

The other is that the bill spreads its spending over ten years and that the actual projects -- roads, bridges, airports, broad ban, alternative energy, pre-K, community college, child care and elder care -- will increase productivity and therefore reduce inflation. Though conservatives claim that the tax increases included to finance the bill reduce private investment, the alternatives (principally user fees and hiking the gas tax) are more regressive and therefore exacerbate the inequality that our second Gilded Age has itself turned into a massive problem.

There is no solution here other than . . .

Compromise.  

So . . .

Here's mine.

Progressives should agree to swallow hard and reduce the price tag on the second infrastructure bill.  If necessary, they should agree to a $1.5 - 2 trillion bill in exchange for Manchin's vote.  In exchange, however, Manchin will have to agree to modify the filibuster and allow the Senate to pass either the voting rights bill sent to it  by the House or the different but acceptable bill Manchin wrote but cannot get any Republicans to support. 

What Manchin and his progressive colleagues have to understand is that they share a problem.  

The problem is that the GOP is working overtime to have all of them removed and has fixed upon voter suppression as the means to that end.  

Early voting, mail-in voting, absentee voting and drop boxes were the keys to increasing the turnout of registered voters to over 60% in 2020 and the record 81 million votes cast for President Biden. In states where they control the legislative and executive branches, however, Republicans are significantly limiting those options in order to suppress Democratic turnout.  If those efforts are not stopped, the GOP will succeed and the Democrats' (bare) majorities in the House and Senate will be lost come the 2022 mid-terms. 

Manchin is not up for re-election in 2022 but is in 2024.  In 2018, his last time on the ballot, his margin of victory was only 3%.  In 2020, Trump won the state with almost 70% of the vote.  If Trump is on the ballot in 2024 and Manchin wants to win, he'll need all the new (and old) voters he can find. 

Suppression will kill him.  

But either the House voting rights bill or his own will probably stop that.  

Both bills guarantee early and absentee voting.  They also increase the locations and require a minimum number of drop  boxes, make Election Day a federal holiday and  make it a felony to limit voter access to the polls.  They require disclosure on dark money and ban the removal of election officials for other than misconduct.  If passed, they will stymie Republican efforts to rig future elections in their favor and give Democrats at least a fighting chance of prevailing in fair contests. 

If they are not passed . . .

Elections will no longer matter.

The GOP is a schizophrenic party.  In the capital, leaders like Mitch McConnell pretend nothing is different and run the same play they ran against Obama.  It's the politics of "No" coupled with the hypocritical claims that spending will return us to the inflation of the '70s and bequeath a crippling debt.  In their world, inequality is a myth and the white, non-college working class has been Trumpified, buyers of a continuing but faux populism that now includes the lie that the last election was stolen.

The greatest problem in the country is still Trump.   

And the only way to eliminate him is to beat him and his enablers at the polls.

So . . .

There's the deal.

Call it bridges for ballots.

A little less of the first for a lot more of the second.

Get it done Democrats.

The country is at stake.

SUMMER HEAT

The New York Mets are a National League baseball team.  

For most of their fifty-nine year history, the team has been star-crossed.  At their birth in 1962, they lost 120 games, a record that stands to this day.  In their first seven seasons, in a then ten-team league, they finished last five times and second to last twice.  After professional baseball divided the leagues into divisions, their miracle in 1969 and another World Series appearance in 1973 were followed by eight years of mediocrity punctuated by the disaster of having given Tom Seaver away in 1977.  

In the mid-'80s they rebounded but never achieved the heights their talent foretold.  They were champions in 1986 and won a hundred games in 1988 (only to be eliminated by the Dodgers in the divisional series). They made the play-offs in 1999 and snuck into the World Series as a wild card in 2000 (which they lost) .  And they made the play-offs again in 2006 and went to the World Series again in 2015 with a solid record (but lost that one as well). Between these intermittent successes, they have basically been a .500 team.  Along the way, they were even one of Bernie Madoff's Ponzi victims.

For a while this year, it looked like things might be better.

A lackluster April was followed by a lights out May, when they went 17-9 (a .604 percentage).  In June and July they held their own.  All told, they were in first place  for ninety days.

And then came August.

They are 6-15 in August. 

They aren't hitting.  Of the thirty teams in the two leagues, their team batting average (.234) puts them in 26th place. So does their slugging percentage.  In runs batted in (RBIs),  they place third to last.

Their two best pitchers are on the injured list (IL).  

One -- Noah Syndergaard -- hasn't played all year and is still recuperating from Tommy John surgery.  The other -- Jacob deGrom -- was putting together a Cy Young season with an unheard of 1.08 ERA but was sidelined with right forearm tightness on July 18 and has been on the IL ever since.  He won't be back at the earliest until mid-September (and there are rumors he won't be back at all this season). On July 18, their starting shortstop, Francisco Lindor, also went on the list and will not be returning until next week.

The Mets aren't losing because they are poor. They are a major market team. They have the third largest payroll in baseball, behind only the Dodgers and Yankees.  They are losing because they have had a bad August.

The conventional wisdom is that the Democrats have had a bad August too.  

This is not just a view shared by Republican Trumpers, for whom any month is a bad month for Democrats regardless of facts.  

Even the non-Trumpers are exhaling a bit, confident that an actual factual record may energize their comeback in lieu of the voter suppression they previously depended upon (and which the party itself has no intention of pulling back).

Inflation.

Cuomo.

The California recall.

Afghanistan.

Just as the Democrats were hitting their stride, a bi-partisan infrastructure bill having passed the Senate and budget reconciliation (allowing for a second and larger package) satisfying early procedural votes, the combined effect of which was to paint the party as the adults in the room setting the rusty wheels of government  in motion and getting something done, they ran into . . .

August.

The first thing to say about August is that it requires perspective.  

Inflation at this point is probably a short-term response to supply chain bottlenecks brought on by the pandemic and not a signal that the economy is overheating on account of on-going pandemic relief or stimulus.  The Federal Reserve, moreover, has its eyes on the data and is more than able to hit the brakes if that becomes necessary.  

The California recall effort is a regional issue and the result next month will depend largely if not exclusively on whether Democrats in that state take the possibility of a Larry Elder as Governor seriously enough to create the result -- defeat of the recall -- everyone expected only a short time ago.  Elder is a libertarian radio talk show host who promises to end mask mandates and vaccine requirements. The expected result is now in doubt only because recent polls show energy among  Republicans to approve the recall and boredom among everyone else over the fact that it is even happening.

Memo to California Democrats -- get off your asses and vote.

The two A's -- Andrew (as in Cuomo) and Afghanistan -- were and are more serious.

Cuomo will resign tomorrow.  This follows a report by the state Attorney General's office concluding that he sexually harassed eleven women and otherwise was difficult to work for.  His rebuttal, such as it was, was that he didn't do any of the physical stuff and didn't understand that the verbal stuff crossed any lines (which he claimed had changed over time).  There was no full on trial on any of the claims and the soon to be former Governor argues that the lawyers who conducted the investigation were biased.  

Though the bias claim is difficult to square with the reputations of the actual lawyers, the absence of any ability to confront the charges and cross examine the complainants is a fair criticism.  Be that as it may, however, there is some truth in numbers on the serious physical claims (harassment is generally not a one-off event and there is more than one accuser here),  and the verbal allegations to which he appeared to cop some form of an I-didn't-think-it- crossed-the-line plea reasonably provokes one big "C'mon".  Did he really think it was OK to ask a married aide if she'd cheat on her husband?  Or disclose to twenty-something female employees that he would be fine dating anyone their age? 

Maybe some of that wasn't harassment.

But it was creepy.

Afghanistan is, of course, a tragedy.  Not because we should have stayed.  If the mission was to get Osama bin Laden and degrade Al Qaeda, we did that long ago.  If the mission was to stand-up a western democracy, we probably should have known long ago that we were not succeeding and that throwing additional resources at the region was not going to change the likely outcome.  The ethnic and tribal rivalries in Afghanistan had thwarted the efforts of one empire (the British) and one superpower (the Soviet Union) before we arrived in the wake on 9/11.  And those rivalries were not put on hold once we got there.

This does not mean the initial invasion was wrong. 

Al Qaeda killed more than 3,000 Americans on 9/11 and the Taliban supported them and gave them a base from which the attack was launched.  Taking them and bin Laden out was more than right; any President who refused to do so would have rightly been shown the door.  In retrospect, the problem was staying beyond that point.  The new government was corrupt, and the military incapable or unwilling to fight.  The good that was done, especially in freeing women from the Taliban's inhuman interpretation of Sharia law and allowing a generation of girls to go to school, remains and will be difficult to undo.  More than 60% of the Afghani population is less than 20 years old and has no allegiance to either the Taliban's past or its sexist exclusions.

What remains is the chaos that enveloped our withdrawal and the on-going efforts to retrieve Americans still there and Afghanis who supported us and will now be targeted.  

For the past week or so, the airwaves have been agog with claims that Biden has screwed up, that he had intel predicting the Afghani government/military's imminent collapse, and that in any case he should have planned for a more orderly removal of Americans and those Afghanis who supported us.

Here, too, however, perspective is in order.

As well as historic accuracy.

To begin, this is not Saigon in 1975.  The vast majority of Vietnamese refugees did not leave on American planes or helicopters as Saigon was about to fall.  They left in boats over time -- sometimes years later --  and were allowed to enter the US as refugees.  In contrast, and as Matthew Dowd pointed out yesterday on CNN, over 20,000 people were removed from Afghanistan in the last week without one American death.  More will be coming out in the weeks ahead.  Is it the smoothest process?  No.  But is it Saigon 1975, or Dunkirk 1940, two events to which critics have compared it?  Not even close.

Biden owns this problem because he is the sitting President.  Unlike his immediate predecessor, he is not ducking responsibility or shifting blame.  The success of the current evacuation has been and will be his responsibility.  The cause of the implosion, however, cannot be laid at his feet.  Almost uniquely among executive officeholders in the last twenty years, he opposed mission creep.  He wanted us out when he was Vice-President. Trump to his credit wanted us out when  he was President.  

But Trump  wouldn't pull the trigger.

Why not?

Because the generals told him it would be messy and Trump didn't want the bad pictures.

What Biden understood and accepted, and Trump just avoided, is that it was always going to be messy.  There was not going to be a time when the addition of 5,000 troops tasked with evacuating Americans and at-risk Afghanis was going to proceed in an environment where the Afghani government retained control and its military fought effectively.  To the contrary, any evacuation at any time was going to be a signal to those institutions that American support was over and they were on their own, a signal they would almost certainly have taken as a green light to the abandonment they ultimately practiced. 

To forestall chaos or defeat or whatever anyone wishes to call what is now going on would have required troops on a more or less permanent basis and more of them as the Taliban’s control increased.  And those like Liz Cheney who wanted that forever war outcome are a distinct minority in the country at large.

So August has been bad.

For the Mets and the Democrats.

But it has not been fatal.

Largely because both the team and the party have weak opponents. 

In the National League’s Eastern Division, where the Mets sit, their opponents are more or less .500 teams as well. The Mets are seven games behind at this writing. But a May in September could resurrect their hopes. 

As for  the Democrats, they have the Republicans.

The Trump-supporting, insurrection-inciting, COVID-denying, vote-suppressing Republicans . . .

Who refuse to get rid of the sexual harasser-in-chief  in their own ranks. 

August is almost over.

SEARCHING FOR UNITY -- CELEBRATING THE FOURTH ON THE LAKE

It's raining on the Great Sacandaga Lake this 4th of July.

The great lake occupies a little more than forty-one square miles at the southeastern edge of New York's Adirondack Park.  

Both the park and the lake were government projects. In 1885, New York designated publicly owned lands in the Adirondacks and Catskills as "forest preserves" and in 1894 the state mandated that those preserves would be "forever wild". In 1902, roughly 2.8 million acres of that wilderness was then defined as the Adirondack Park, and in the hundred plus years since, it has grown to over six million acres.  For its part, the great lake was created in 1930 following six years of study and construction that damned the Sacandaga River at Conklingville to create what was initially called a reservoir. In the '60s, the name was changed to the Great Sacandaga Lake.

If it seems that very little in the nature of public works has ever gotten done in America without some argument in favor of economic growth, that is because . . .

Very little in the nature of public works has ever gotten done in America without some argument in favor of economic growth.

The park and the lake were no exceptions.  

The former owed its genesis to an incipient tourism industry that took root there in the mid to late 19th century combined with lawyer-engineer Verplanck Colvin's 1875 survey report warning that lumbering was destroying the Adirondack watershed and imperiling the survival of the Erie Canal, then a major source of New York's economic empire. And the latter was basically a flood control project. The Sacandaga River flowed into the Hudson, which in the spring surged and flooded Albany.  Damning the Sacandaga helped to regulate that surge and abate the flooding.

Back then, the Republican Party ran New York and supported both projects.  And  when he became the nation's 26th President, New York's Republican  former governor, Theodore Roosevelt, championed both the  conservation of the nation's  natural resources -- signing legislation that created five national parks and executive orders that preserved 150 million acres of forest -- and the regulation of its waterways. In 1907, he created the Inland Waterways Commission,  and after World War I highlighted the nation's rail congestion crisis, the work of that commission over time resulted in completion of the Atlantic and Gulf intercoastal waterways projects that created navigational barge channels from Maine to the nation's Mexican border, re-canalization of the Ohio River, and later development of both the Columbia River in the west and the St. Lawrence Seaway in the east.  

All of this was supported for the most part by the Republican Party and, when added to Democratic Party projects like the Tennessee Valley Authority (which electrified the south)  or completing the Hoover dam (which irrigated the southwest), made infrastructure truly bi-partisan.  That unity continued into the 1950s when President Eisenhower inaugurated construction of the interstate highway system and was even preserved into the early '70s when President Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and signed the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), the latter of which required that federal projects be assessed for their environmental impact.

NEPA, however, was as far as the GOP would go.  Two years after it was passed, Nixon vetoed the expanded Clean Water Act, and though his veto was overridden by the Democratic Congress two hours after it was issued, it marked something of a limit for his party.  Since then, the party has been at war with itself on the environment.  On the side of de-regulation and rollback were Reagan and Trump, whose appointed heads of the EPA -- Anne Gorsuch (mother of the current Supreme Court Justice) in Reagan's case  and Scott Pruitt in Trump's -- pushed to weaken the anti-pollution laws.  On the side of accomodation were the two Bushes, both of whom championed so-called market-based solutions to pollution like cap and trade.

Today's America, it now goes without saying, is polarized in the extreme. 

Trump's voters still believe the lie that he did not lose last year and GOP legislatures are turning that lie into statutes designed to suppress Democratic voter turnout in future elections, limiting all the measures (early, mail-in and absentee voting) that significantly increased turnout in 2020.  Meanwhile, at the federal level, the anti-majority rule  filibuster survives and was used to kill the Democrats' voting rights bills that would have mitigated the GOP's state legislative assaults.  On the cable shows, the right wing is all abuzz on critical race theory, pretending it will destroy George Washington's legacy.  And in Texas, Republican Governor Greg Abbott says he'll build Trump's border wall with federal Covid  relief funds . . .

Even though Abbott has no authority to do so. 

If, therefore, you are looking for any signs of governmental or political unity on this 4th of July, the pickings are slim to non-existent.

Except on infrastructure.

Where the are some green shoots.

Earlier in the year, President Biden and the Democrats proposed a $2 trillion infrastructure bill designed to fund the nation's desperate need to re-build its roads, bridges, highways, airports and water and rail systems and extend broadband to the nation's rural and ex-urban precincts.  The proposal, however, also sought to increase spending on electric cars and charging stations, on green energy, on child care and on health care.  These latter efforts were proposed as down payments on the need to combat climate change and in recognition of the fact that things like child care and health care often drive employment decisions.  Put simply, you can't work if the kids have no baby sitter or you are sick without insurance and can't afford care.

The GOP opposed the Democrats' proposal more or less in unison.  It claimed that anything other than traditional infrastructure (the so-called hard stuff like roads, bridges, airports and railroads) was just a  mask for the Democrats' socialism (which is what the GOP calls all measures  that expand health coverage or child care, combat climate change or are advertised as part of the so-called Green New Deal), and that anything increasing taxes was a non-starter.  Into that breach, however, stepped a group of ten Senators (five Democrats and five Republicans) who -- mirabile dictu -- came up with a bi-partisan bill.  That proposal was substantially higher than what the GOP had offered Biden early on but did not include the Democratic proposals on climate change and health and child care.  For those, the Democrats will have to fashion a second package and pass it via the budget reconciliation procedure to avoid a filibuster.  

So there you have it.

As you pledge allegiance to the flag on this 4th of July, the nation -- thanks to the Civil War -- is still indivisible.  

Thanks largely to Trump and his continuing hold on the fact free, however, it is still very much . . 

Divided.

But then there is the Adirondack Park, the Great Sacandaga Lake , and their progeny . . .

Which remind me, even in the rain, that it was  not always thus.

And Joe Biden and Joe Manchin and Mitt Romney and Rob Portman et al's infrastructure compromise.

Which reminds me that even now . . .

It does not have to be.

Happy Birthday America.

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.