THE HUBRIS AND HYPOCRISY OF PRO-LIFE PRELATES

I am in California.

Tomorrow, I'll attend my niece's graduation from high school.

She is a Catholic and is graduating from a Catholic high school.  Her school is located in the Diocese of San Jose, which is just southeast of the Diocese of San Francisco, whose Archbishop, Salvatore Cordileone, has been in the news lately.

On May 20, Cordileone sent a letter to Nancy Pelosi, a Catholic and  the Speaker of the US House of Representatives whose home is San Francisco. In it, and in violation of Pope Francis' and the Vatican's own views on the matter (among his many hypocrisies, the Archbishop refuses to accept instruction even as he proclaims his right to give it), Cordileone told Pelosi that she is "not to present [herself] for Holy Communion and, should [she] do so [she is] not to be admitted to Holy Communion, until such time as [she]  publicly repudiates [her] advocacy for the legitimacy of abortion and confes[es] and receive[s] absolution for the grave sin in the sacrament of Penance."

The Catholic Church thinks abortion is murder.  It teachers that life begins at conception, the moment a sperm joins an egg to create embryonic cells.  There are a number of problems with this position. Morally, it claims to be based on natural reason, but the architect of natural reason, Thomas Aquinas, rejected the view that embryos are people and did not consider abortion to be the murder of a human person until much later in the pregnancy.  Theologically, it rejects both Aquinas's and Augustine's view of ensoulment, which was organic and also did not occur until well beyond conception. And politically, it rejects President Kennedy's belief "in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute -- where no Catholic prelate would tell the President (should he be Catholic) how to act [and] no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the Pope, the National Council of Churches or any other ecclesiastical source".

JFK expressed these views in a famous speech he gave in September 1960 to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association in the heat of that year's presidential campaign.  Kennedy was only the second Catholic ever to have been nominated by a major party as its candidate for President and the first -- Al Smith -- had been defeated in a landslide thirty-two years earlier owing in large part to the fact that he was Catholic. Kennedy confronted  that prejudice head on in Houston, challenging America to eschew "religious intolerance" but also making it absolutely clear that the "statements of Catholic church leaders" were not "binding upon [his] public acts."

Without saying so, Cordileone rejects all of this.  His letter to Pelosi, which he made public the day he sent it, is not at all subtle.  In no uncertain terms, he is telling Pelosi "how to act" and refusing her communion (and directing the eighty-eight parishes under his control to do so as well) in order to force her to "publicly repudiate" her pro-choice position on abortion.  Were Pelosi to do so, she would, in Kennedy's words, be "accept[ing] instructions on public policy" from a "church leader" and making Cordileone's statements "binding" on her "public acts".

In his speech to the Houston ministers, Kennedy realized that there might come a time when his "conscience" interfered with his "oath of office."  In that event, he promised to resign.  Critically, however, he did not give any Catholic hierarchs a veto over that conscience or the right to tell him how to exercise it.

Pelosi should not do so either.

And she isn't.

In fact, she and other Catholic office holders are fighting back.

In the days following Cordileone's assault, Pelosi made it clear that she is not willing to impose her beliefs as a Catholic on the populace a whole.  At the same time, however, she also underscored how hypocritical Cordileone's position is.  The Catholic church, as she noted, claims it is pro-life.  But on numerous "pro-life" issues other than abortion, both it and Archbishop Cordileone refuse to impose any requirements on any public officials. They have not, for example, required any politician to vote against the death penalty, which the church categorically opposes, or threatened to withhold communion from Catholic politicians who support it. Indeed, as California's Governor Gavin Newsom pointed out yesterday, there are a host of pro-life issues -- from immigration to war and peace to climate change to gun control -- where those who oppose abortion are not pro-life at all.

Newsom -- like Pelosi and many other baptized Catholics (in fact, more than half of us) -- is pro-choice on abortion.

But, as far as he is concerned, he's pro-life too.

"There’s  a lot of folks out there that are pro-conception to birth,” Newsom explains, “but they fall wholly short of being pro-life." "Pro-life," he continues, means "you'd support pre-natal care.  You'd support infant health, you'd support child care and preschool. If you're pro-life, you believe in science, if you're pro-life you believe in climate change. But in every single one of these cases -- universally -- the same folks that claim or hold claim to this pro-life [stance] are cutting those programs [or] opposing expansion".

Three days ago, an eighteen-year old with an assault rifle walked into an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas and shot and killed seventeen fourth graders and two of their teachers.  In 2013, the Senate refused to pass a bi-partisan bill sponsored by Joe Manchin and Pat Toomey expanding background checks on gun sales.  Of the handful of Catholics who opposed that modest measure, none were criticized by any Catholic prelates even though all had, by their votes, made it easier to purchase assault weapons and thus made the carnage visited upon Uvalde more likely.  And as California Democratic strategist Dan Newman put it on Wednesday,  "Every damn day there's another reminder on how ridiculous it is for the party that wants more guns for everyone to call themselves pro-life".

America is unique in the number of gun-related deaths and in the number of mass homicides.  The rate of gun-related deaths is three to four times higher here than in other developed countries.  We also have more mass shootings than any other country. Despite the claims of the NRA and anti-gun control advocates, the reason for this reality is not that the United States has higher rates of mental illness.

It doesn't.

What it has is more guns. 

In fact,  though we have slightly less than 5% of the world's people, we possess  over 40% of the world's guns.

But on all those pro-gun votes by Republicans that have killed any form of gun-control in utero as it were, those votes that have made it impossible for us to stop our schools from becoming killing fields, San Francisco's ostensibly pro-life Archbishop and self-appointed enforcer of Catholic morality has been . . .

Silent.

And I don't have a problem with that.  

Although I disagree with their views, I also do not have a problem with Catholic bishops telling Catholics that they think abortion is wrong or with those same bishops exercising their Constitutional right to speak on the issue.  

When, however, they decide to tell public officials how to vote and try to leverage those officials into voting their way by withholding communion, they cross a line.

America is a pluralist republic. 

It has no established church and imposes no religiously generated litmus test on either its citizens or its government officials and elected representatives.  

For Catholics, that has been a blessing. 

Two -- JFK and Joe Biden -- have been elected president. Six now sit on the Supreme Court. Scores hold seats in Congress and in legislatures in all fifty states. We are free to practice our faith, or not, and no one assumes our public duties and obligations must or necessarily will conform to the dictates of our church’s hierarchy.  

Or at least no  one assumes that  . . .

Yet.

Cordileone’s attack on Pelosi upends this established assumption, undoes all that President Kennedy accomplished in 1960, and resurrects the possibility of inherent disqualification based on religion.

If it becomes the new norm, Catholics will discover what Governor Smith discovered in 1928.

He didn't lose that presidential election on election day.

He lost it the day he was . . .

Baptized.

WHY ROE WAS RIGHT

WHY ROE WAS RIGHT

In ninety-eight pages of attitude, alarm and anger, Samuel Alito has unburdened himself in a back-to-the-future effort to kill Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that forbade states from making all abortions illegal and allowed women and their doctors to make that decision for themselves.

Too bad.

Because . . .

Roe was right.

The United States Constitution was written in 1787 and ratified over the course of the next year plus. By June 1788, nine states had ratified, making the document binding on them according to its terms, and the rest joined at various times thereafter.  On May 29, 1790, Rhode Island became the last state to do so.

Ratification was no mean feat.  The so-called federalists in favor of the Constitution thought a reasonably powerful national government was needed to forestall the economic ruin inherent in a loose union of sovereign republics, each of which got to print their own money, impose tariffs on their own imports, and avoid collective responsibility for any Revolutionary War debts.  Their principal insight was that the liberty so many had fought and died for was in danger of becoming the anarchy of thirteen siblings unable to agree on anything other than the fact that they had removed the British.

For their part, the anti-federalists who opposed the Constitution deemed it an existential  threat to their liberty. They despised national power because in their minds it threatened local control.  They thought small-r republicanism could survive and prosper only  in small geographic units and did not buy James Madison's now-famous claim (in Federalist No. 10) that an extended or large republic would make faction less likely. 

To appease the anti-federalists, supporters in four states that ultimately voted for ratification also sent recommended amendments designed to protect citizens' rights.   In the first Congress,  James Madison proposed twelve of them and ten were adopted and became our Bill of Rights.

The word "privacy" does not appear in the Bill of Rights but there is no way to understand the Bill  without it.  This is especially so in the case of the first six amendments. The First says "Congress shall make no law" establishing religion, prohibiting its free exercise, or abridging  free speech, the press or the right to peaceably assemble and petition the government for redress.  The Second allows individuals to bear arms.  The Third prohibits the quartering of troops in homes without the homeowners' consent.  The Fourth establishes "the right of the people to be secure in their persons" and the Fifth and Sixth preclude arrest and imprisonment absent a grand jury indictment and trial by an impartial jury, the latter of which is preserved in civil cases by the Seventh while criminal penalties are categorically limited (no "excessive" bail or fines and no "cruel and unusual punishment") by the Eighth.  To be clear, the Ninth Amendment tells us that the enumerations in the Bill cannot be used to "deny or disparage other rights retained by the people" and the Tenth reserves unenumerated powers not just "to the States" but also "to the People".

In 1868, the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution was ratified.  It is one of the three Civil War Amendments.  Absent the war, it would not exist.  In fact, had the south not seceded, fought and lost a war, and then been reconstructed at the point of a gun and required to accept these amendments as a cost of re-admission, none of the Civil War Amendments would exist. 

But the south did.

And they do.  

And so the Fourteenth Amendment precludes any state from depriving anyone of liberty absent due process of law.

Given the Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment's due process clause, at least three features of these provisions make privacy -- the right to exercise one's own conscience and control one's own body --  an inherent right.  

First, all of the rights protected by the Bill are individual rights.  In fact, other than in the Second Amendment, none are made subservient to any collective or group goal or thought. Each individual can freely speak,  keep soldiers out of their homes, be secure "in their persons" and remain free absent indictment and jury trial.  And as part of "the people", each individual also retains unspecified rights which the (federal or state) law cannot "deny or disparage".

Second, some of the rights are so specific that they could not exist absent privacy.  The Third makes an owner's home his castle where no troops can live absent his permission.  The Fourth makes individuals secure "in their persons, houses, papers and effects" against unreasonable search and seizure.  And the Ninth literally warns that the list of rights is neither exclusive nor subject to infringement by the state.  They are retained by the people.

Third, the authors of the Constitution, Bill of Rights and Civil War Amendments were common lawyers versed in the language and categories of the common law.  As they understood it, that law evolves.  It is case based, fact specific, judge and jury made and over time accretes.  Had they wanted, both the Framers in 1787 and the authors of the Civil War Amendments in the 1860s could have frozen in time what was specifically protected.  They could have, for example, listed the specific punishments deemed cruel and unusual in the Eighth Amendment or the unwritten rights preserved to the people in the Ninth. They could have specifically defined the "liberty" that could not be deprived absent "due process" in the Fourteenth Amendment or precisely what they meant in guaranteeing every citizen equal protection of the law in that same provision.

They knew how to do all of this.

They did none of it.

In construing the Constitution and Bill of Rights in cases where neither document expressly mentions the claimed right in question, the Supreme Court has recurred over the course of the last eighty years or so to the notion that the Fourteenth Amendment's due process clause substantively protects "values 'implicit in the concept of ordered liberty'". This was the standard that Justice Harlan embraced in his concurring opinion in Griswold v. Connecticut, the 1965 Supreme Court case holding Connecticut's ban on birth control unconstitutional.  

In applying that standard, Justice Harlan said nothing about the history or tradition of birth control, either in the United States or elsewhere.  Instead, he perceived that liberty would be manifestly disordered by enforcing the statute.  As he put it: "Would we allow the police to search the sacred precincts of marital bedrooms for telltale signs of the use of contraceptive? The very idea is repulsive to the notions of privacy surrounding the  marital relationship."

Since Griswold, some version of this concept of ordered liberty has been used by the Supreme Court  to overturn bans on selling or distributing contraception to unmarried adults (Eisenstadt v. Baird), sexual relations between consenting adults (Lawrence v. Kansas), gay and lesbian marriage (Obergefell v. Hodges), and, of course, abortion (Roe and thereafter Planned Parenthood v. Casey).  Each of these cases also involved rights not explicitly set forth in any Constitutional text and in each of them the enforcement schemes were manifestly disordered. Indeed, even before Griswold, the concept had provided at least a partial basis for overturning anti-miscegenation statutes (Loving v. Virginia).

Ten days ago, Politico obtained and published a copy of Justice Alito's proposed draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade. Since then, Chief Justice Roberts has confirmed that the published draft is authentic but warned it is not the final opinion.  Nonetheless, in the days since Roberts' warning, so-called "conservatives close to the court" (three of them, actually) have reportedly told Politico that the majority support for Alito's draft is holding.  

On the right there has been a lot of sturm und drang condemning the leak and claims that opponents of Alito's draft must be the culprits. That, however, appears strained given Politico's latest sourcing. On the left, the suspicion is that conservatives leaked the draft to freeze the majority and inhibit anyone from changing their view and weakening what would be, if the draft holds, both a complete repudiation of Roe (and  Casey too) and complete deference to any state ban on abortion at any stage of pregnancy.  Indeed, it is at this stage difficult to imagine a more complete victory for abortion's opponents than Alito's draft opinion.

The flaws in Alito's draft are too numerous to catalogue in one place.

But here are three.

First, Alito got his law wrong.  

His opinion claims that no right to abortion can be found in the Constitution because the text says nothing about abortion and there is nothing in either our history or tradition that would require such a right.  He then claims that all the other cases affirming and enforcing a right to privacy (Griswold, Eisenstadt, Obergefell, Lawrence) are not in jeopardy because abortion is a special case.  But it isn't.  The reason those other cases apply is because in them, as in the case of abortion, there was no express textual reference to the claimed right but the Court nevertheless announced the right and forbade states from infringing it. There is no way those other cases survive Alito's draft if it becomes the actual law.

Alito's attempt to distinguish abortion from the other cases is also disingenuous in view of what he himself said in those other cases. In Obergefell and Lawrence he dissented and thus would have allowed states to ban gay and lesbian marriage and gay sex.  The basis for his dissents was that the Constitution did not expressly mention and could not be read to protect the asserted right.  He has run the same exact play in his draft overturning Roe.

Second, Alito got his history wrong.  

In his draft he claimed that "At common law, abortion . . . was regarded as unlawful . . . at all stages" of pregnancy.  This is false.  Until the 20th century, Americans did not even recognize abortions as occurring early in pregnancy, principally because they did not recognize pregnancy as a fact until quickening.  Moreover, the "history" that informed opposition to abortion after that point was largely misogynistic.  Indeed, the very expert Alito cites for his historic claim was a jurist, Matthew Hale, who burned witches and allowed husbands to rape their wives.  

Alito even distorted contemporary history. His draft states that, in 2018 when the Mississippi statute at issue passed, only six countries besides the United States "permitted non-therapeutic abortions upon demand after the 20th week of gestation". In fact, however, thirty-seven European countries allow abortions until at least 22 weeks upon request on broad grounds or based on the health of the mother.

Third, Alito got his politics wrong.

At two levels.

On the one hand, he claimed that the return of abortion to the states was no big deal because pregnancy is not the burden it once was.  As he put it, "leave for pregnancy and childbirth are now guaranteed by law in many cases" and "the costs of medical care associated with pregnancy are covered by insurance or government assistance".  In fact, however, less than a quarter of workers were eligible for paid family leave in 2021 and out-of-pocket costs for maternity care still average about $3,000 for those covered by employer-sponsored insurance.

On the other, he claimed that he was simply returning the decision on abortion to the people, to their elected representatives,  and removing it from unelected judges and therefore undemocratic courts.

This has been a standard conservative attack on Roe since 1973.

And it has been wrong since then.

To begin, the people, or at least the vast majority of them, support abortion rights. A year ago, Gallup reported that 80% of those asked said abortion should be legal in all or most cases.  This is not surprising. More than 90% of abortions are performed during the first trimester and there is no substantial opposition to that practice on a nationwide basis.  If anything, Roe is consistent with that consensus and Alito's draft is not.

Alito's flaw, and the flaw inherent in the claim of most abortion opponents on this point, is in assuming that state legislatures reflect the will of the people.  They do not.  They at best reflect the will of localized majorities on any specific issue and at worst reflect that localized view through whatever  distorted structures exist where any particular legislature operates.   Indeed, many if not most of the very states that will ban or restrict abortion  once Alito's draft is the law are also states that have recently passed laws suppressing turnout among Democratic (and likely pro-choice) voters and thus can hardly be deemed laboratories of democracy.

Alito was appointed by George W. Bush.  And of the four other Justices who appear to create the majority that supports his draft, three of them -- Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Coney-Barrett -- were appointed by Donald Trump.

Bush II lost his first presidential election in 2000  by 500,000 votes.  And Trump lost his in 2016 by 2.6 million. Four of the five Justices about to overturn Roe  and deny the vast majority of Americans a right they have held for almost fifty years would not have gotten anywhere near the Supreme Court had Al Gore or Hillary Clinton been president.

The problem with abortion is not unelected judges.

It is unelected presidents.

SPEECH AND THE FREE MUSK-A-TEER

SPEECH AND THE FREE MUSK-A-TEER

On July 4, 1994, I was almost arrested.

Seriously.

I was running for Congress as a Democrat in what was then New York's 19th Congressional district.  It covered the northern half of Westchester County and then ran north into Putnam and Dutchess counties while crossing the Hudson to embrace four towns in Orange County.  

On that July 4, I was in Leonard Park in Mt. Kisco, ready to meet and greet the large numbers of voters who had come to the park that day to celebrate the Fourth.  

After I left my car and starting walking toward groups of voters to hand them campaign literature, a cop stopped me and told me I couldn't do that.  I asked why and he said that a local ordinance prohibited solicitation in the park.  I explained (I am a lawyer) that whatever the ordinance said, it could not really be meant to forbid political speech given the First Amendment.  He, however, was not remotely interested in any lessons in Constitutional law and told me that either I could  stop politicking  or he would march me out of the park in cuffs.

This presented a problem.

Leonard Park was only my first of many planned stops that day and our campaign was low on cash and thus very high on my ability to meet and convince as many voters as possible before the September primary.  If  arrested, I would have to spend the better part of the day in jail (or court), waiting for the Constitution to be vindicated in the leafy precincts of northern Westchester County, while my opponents (all of whom, I later learned, had meekly submitted to the no politics ban when they showed up at the park that day) went about their task of meeting voters.

So, I decided not to get arrested.

I did not, however, meekly submit to the town's ludicrous attack on free speech.

Instead, I made a small detour to the Mt. Kisco Police Department and filed a complaint against the police.  

My complaint was not well received.  

The desk officer made a point of reiterating that there was a no solicitation rule that applied to the park, that those celebrating the Fourth did not want to be bothered by people like me, and that -- in case I had any doubt -- he would never vote for me anyway.  He explained that the town had acquired the park from a private owner and that the deed specifically included a "no solicitation" restrictive covenant.  I thanked him for the information but explained that, while the restriction no doubt precluded salesmen for hawking vacuums to joggers, dog-walkers and the tennis crowd, it could not Constitutionally preclude candidates from distributing political literature on the Fourth of July.

As is sometime the case after people are through being angry but realize the source of their anger is still standing in front of them, he thought about this for a  bit and then allowed that I "might have a point".

Done there, I then went about the day's events.

All of this became local news over the course of the next few days.  

As noted, all of my opponents had agreed to leave the park and in their comments made a point of noting how politely they had submitted to the town's restriction.  The owner of a weekly newspaper published an editorial in which he argued that it was not too much to ask that a "politics free zone" be enforced in "bucolic" Leonard Park.  This prompted a concerned citizen to wonder whether that owner would have taken the same position if the town had set up a "reporter free zone" in the park.  That same citizen also wondered why I was the only candidate running for Congress who actually understood the Constitution.  

And was willing to fight for it.

Meanwhile, the town itself was having second thoughts. 

Its manager announced in the days following my near-arrest that it was reviewing its policy,  and later that fall the City Council actually voted to repeal the restrictive covenant.  

So . . .

I didn't go to jail.

And the First Amendment was, if not saved, at least not repudiated.

Yesterday, Twitter announced that it was accepting Elon Musk's $44 billion bid to acquire the company and take it private. 

Musk, an eccentric muti-billionaire who funded and became the CEO of the  electric car company Tesla and then created SpaceX so that (rich) people (like him) could "slip the surly bonds of earth", calls himself a First Amendment absolutist.  He claims that Twitter is the 21st century's "digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated."  He also claims that he "want[s] to make Twitter better than ever by enhancing the product with new features, making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating the spam bots, and authenticating all humans."

In truth, no one knows exactly what Musk will do with Twitter once he takes it private.

He has been called "polarizing", "reckless" and "capricious".  He has exhibited a Trumpy affinity for personal insult and sexist jokes, and while Trump himself says he doesn't want back on the site, his wing of the GOP favors the acquisition, which may be good news for them but bad news for the rest of us.  For their part, Democrats are wary.  

Both of Musk personally and of the notion that any one billionaire should own a platform as powerful as Twitter.

For the First Amendment to function properly, it requires a forum, reasonable access, and actual speech.  You can be absolutist on the First Amendment but if you are absolutist on any one of those three pre-requisites, the likely result will be anything ranging from the anarchy of Babel to the monopoly of censorship. Neither, of course,  was the Amendment's intended result.  

If everyone gets access at once, there is Babel. If no one is given access at all, there is monopoly and censorship.   If no grammar or architecture is required, there may be sounds or signs but there is no speech.  Speech communicates.  It is not and can never be a one-way street.  The First Amendment does not exist to preserve our ability to talk to ourselves.  It exists to preserve our ability to talk to each other.  

What to do?

My (very) modest proposal is to return to Leonard Park in the mid-'90s.

In 1994, Mt. Kisco wasn't wrong in stopping the Fuller Brush man from setting up shop and hawking his wares on Leonard Park's tennis courts. It was wrong in stopping a citizen on the Fourth of July from discussing why he should be that district's Congressman with anyone in Leonard Park who wanted to have that discussion. In creating a "politics free zone", however much that move might have been welcomed in an age when politics and politicians are so despised, the town  killed core speech the First Amendment protects. Worse, it did so in one of the few remaining public venues where that speech would have been person-to-person.

The biggest problems with social media today -- with Facebook and Twitter and their countless imitators -- are the algorithms that determine access and therefore govern the speech conveyed.  I mean this literally.  Those algorithms govern the speakers and the speakers' messages because they effectively determine to whom those messages are delivered.  The architecture of "shares" and "likes" drives speakers into silos of the like-minded and highly motivated.  Often, the people who occupy those silos are very angry.  At the same time, the potential for domination by bots can drive a message that the actual marketplace of ideas, the one with real people in it, rejects. 

So . . .

At the end of the day, these platforms do not enhance free speech. Rather, they enhance loud or extreme speech . . .  

Or . . .

In a word . . .

Noise.

I do not know what Elon Musk intends for Twitter and am not sure he knows either.  

Musk is of the generation that fashions itself as disrupters.  And, to his enormous financial success,  he has made a habit of it.  

With Tesla, SpaceX, AI and even tunnels.  

So, with Twitter he will disrupt.  Maybe the platform's architecture will improve.  Maybe he will be true to his word and eliminate the bots.  Or maybe the Trumps of the world will find a new home and Twitter will become noisier and less communicative than ever.

As I said, I do not know.

What I do know is that I'd feel a lot better about Musk if I thought his view of the First Amendment was grounded.  

To do that, he need not take a trip to outer space.

Leonard Park will do.

EASTER 2022 -- THE ESSENCE OF JOE BIDEN

EASTER 2022 -- THE ESSENCE OF JOE BIDEN

It's very hard to be an optimist these days.

Inflation is as high as it's been in forty years.  Political opportunists in the Republican party are embracing that fact and sending it into battle in an effort to rid Congress of Democrats and the White House of Joe Biden.  

The media -- ever wary of being tagged as liberals and therefore ever-vigilant in making sure that GOP talking points get more than their fair share of time -- remind us of all of  this every day.  If we liberals push back, they point out that the contrary voices are being published.  

And they are . . .

Sort of.

But it's not front-page headline news.

You have to look.

For those willing to leave the front page for the distant recesses of the op-eds, Paul Krugman argues that the current inflation is more pandemic and supply-related and therefore more like the rising prices just after World War II than the endemic price hikes of  the 1970s.  The message is this is not transitory but it isn't endless either.  

For those willing to read The American Prospect, Robert Kuttner will point out the corporate profiteering helping to drive  the price side of the equation and the absence of the kind of social policies (child care, principally) needed to help combat a tight labor market. Yes, Virginia, available day care for the kids and health care for grandma will put a lot of people back to work and -- get ready for this -- increase the supply of workers, increase the supply of goods, and drive down prices.  

For those willing to subscribe to Heather Cox Richardson's substack-based Letters From an American, she'll recite the stupendous job growth over the last fifteen months, the fact that Americans survived the pandemic with more money in their bank accounts thanks to the government, and the reality that Covid could have been a personal economic catastrophe for more of us.  

The worst thing that can happen with Covid is that you die.

The second is that you get sick.

But bad as it was, second place could have been a lot worse.

Winding up sick is bad.  

Winding up sick and broke is . . .

As the toddlers say . . .

More bad.

We didn't.

And we have jobs.

Thank you Joe Biden.

Can I get an Amen for the guy?  Or a Hallelujah?  Or even some grudging respect?

Alas . . .

No.

The American memory is short.  And when its media eco-system is plagued with fact-free actors whose self-interest is advanced by forgetfulness, it becomes even shorter.  There's no sane world in which Donald Trump should beat Joe Biden in any 2024 re-match.  But in today's polls, they're even and some have Trump ahead.  So . . . 30,000 lies, "fine people" among neo-Nazis, ingesting bleach, pussy grabbing, the imminent destruction of privacy, reproductive and gay marriage rights by his three appointees to the Supreme Court, and an attempted coup on January 6 have been . . .

What?

Forgotten.

Well, that's how you get a Joe Biden stuck with an average approval rating of 41% for the past two months, notwithstanding a booming economy with the lowest unemployment rate since 1969, NATO resurrected from the prior administration's not too subtle attempt to kill it, and a war in Ukraine where the good guys are holding their own and may even beat the KGB autocrat who runs Russia and who Trump never had a bad word for.

Spare me the chorus of GOP naysayers who claim Biden didn't do enough early enough to arm Ukraine or sanction Putin and his cronies.  

Their guy froze $400 million in military aid in an effort to bribe Ukraine into investigating Hunter Biden, and regularly threatened to have the United States withdraw from NATO  and thus eliminate the only real threat restricting Putin's appetite for reconstructing present-day Russia in the model of his beloved USSR.  If Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania remain free, it will only be because they are now members of NATO.  And if Ukraine beats Russia, it will in part be because the western world united to provide the arms needed to do so.

I think it's way too premature to count Biden or the Democrats out.

In either the mid-terms or 2024.

Much of the populist energy that became wind in Trump's sails was based on their anger at a neo-liberal consensus that had led to gross inequality.  The Democrats are the only party at least trying to mitigate some of that.  The GOP is good at allowing Fox & Friends to stoke anti-Biden sentiment with the latest faux outrage over non-problems -- kindergartners aren't being groomed to change their sex and Ketanji Brown Jackson didn't go easy on pedophiles.

But that's all they have.

They can't confront inequality because they actually . . .

Are for it.

Nor has Biden exhausted his appeal.

He wasn't supposed to be a Senator in 1972 or a President in 2020.  He's stared death in the face and suffered personal tragedies that would have rendered most of us unwilling or unable to carry on.  But he did. In the words of his beloved Pope Francis spoken just this past Palm Sunday, he knows "things are never over . . . [W]e can always come back to life."  

When he spoke these words, the Pope was talking about forgiveness and redemption and preaching the faith that  his resurrected God (and mine) "can bridge every distance, and turn all mourning into dancing."

He certainly did not have Biden's political survival in mind.

But he could have.

For Biden has repeatedly come off the canvas, counted out only to return and be counted on.  

And  he is doing it again.

With NATO and Ukraine in a diplomatic coup de theatre that just might save western democracy from both the autocrats' whip and its own ennui.

And  with an economic plan that might ameliorate some of the inequality neo-liberalism created and wean its populist victims from Trump and the right wing's phony culture wars.

In their rush to judgment, the critics constantly miss the  essence of Biden:

There's always been a little Easter in him.

LOOKING FOR THE WATER'S EDGE

LOOKING FOR THE WATER'S EDGE

In June 1948, the United States Senate passed the Vandenberg Resolution.

Named for isolationist-turned-internationalist Republican Senator Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan, the resolution supported "Progressive development of regional and other collective arrangements for individual and collective self-defense in accordance with the purposes, principles, and provisions of the [United Nations] Charter" and "Association of the United States, by constitutional process, with such regional and other collective arrangements as are based on continuous and effective self-help and mutual aid, and as affect its national security."

At the time, Vandenburg was Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and his party controlled Congress. Vandenberg had also run for President in 1940 and would again be a candidate in 1948.  Though he lost that race to New York's then-Governor Thomas Dewey, it was widely expected that the GOP would win the White House in the November election and retain control of Congress.  That, of course, did not happen.  Nevertheless, and in keeping with his Resolution, Vandenberg and like-minded Republicans supported the North Atlantic Treaty signed in April 1949 and the establishment of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to implement it two years later.

Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty provides that "The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in the exercise of their right of individual and collective self-defence recognized by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area."

At its birth, NATO had twelve member states.  These were the US, Canada and Iceland in North America, the United Kngdom, and eight other members from continental Europe. The continental members were Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, France, Portugal and Italy. Since then, and at various times, eighteen additional states have joined.  Greece and Turkey became members in 1952.  West Germany was permitted to join in 1955.  France left in 1966 but returned in 2009.  After Franco died, a democratic Spain  joined in 1982. And after the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the break-up on the Soviet Union in 1991,  Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic joined in 1999, followed by Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia in 2004, Albania and Croatia in 2009, Montenegro in 2017 and North Macedonia in 2020.

Though NATO was created largely in response to the threat posed by the Soviet Union in the late 1940s, the relationship between it and Russia was initially cordial and sometimes even supportive in the two decades following the Soviet break-up in 1991. Even prior to that break-up, there were informal talks between Soviet and NATO military leaders. Formal contacts between Russia and NATO were begun in 1991, and these ultimately led in 1997 to the Founding Act on Mutual Relations, Cooperation and Security and creation of the NATO/Russia Permanent Joint Council.  During the '90s, NATO's European members reduced their defense spending and massive amounts of conventional armaments were removed. For their part, the CIS countries (former members of the Commonwealth of Independent States that briefly existed after the Soviet Union disintegrated) joined NATO's so-called Partnership for Peace, which provided a forum for regular coordination and consultation between them and the NATO member states. And in 2011, NATO and Russian even conducted joint military exercises.

In 2014, when Russia illegally invaded and annexed Crimea, that period of good will ended.  

Since then, Russia has insisted that NATO is a threat to it, especially given the existence of member states on its border.  For their part, and especially in the wake of the annexation, the eastern European member states view Russia, not NATO,  as a threat and favor the presence of NATO forces on their land.  For its part, Russia contends it was given informal assurances in 1990 that NATO would not expand east at the time East Germany was reunited with the West and became part of NATO, and while there are memoranda of private conversations between western leaders and Mikhail Gorbachev to that effect, the formal treaty on German resettlement contained no such provision.

On February 24, Russia illegally invaded Ukraine.  

In the run-up to the invasion, Russia's President, Vladimir Putin, claimed that Ukraine was being run by Nazis, was not a real nation, and could never be allowed to join either the European Union or NATO because doing so would pose an existential threat to Russia. None of this is true, the first bizarrely so in view of the fact that Ukraine's Jewish president is the grandnephew of Holocaust victims and the son of a man who fought the Nazis in World War II.  

Putin is a clear and present danger to a world order that has existed since the close of World War II.  

It is rules-based and therefore liberal in the classical sense of that term.  

It has also avoided a repeat of any world war and, most importantly, of a nuclear exchange for more than seventy-five years.

Following his ascension to the presidency in 2000, Putin  has effectively made himself Russia's president for life. He has silenced any opposition via means both fair and foul, the latter of which includes assassinating would be challengers. He coopted Russia's oligarchs and other kleptocrats and seized enough of the booty created in the post-Soviet privatization of Russia's economy to become one of the world's wealthiest (perhaps the wealthiest if some intelligence assessments are believed) individuals.  He reportedly sees himself as a latter-day Peter the Great destined to restore Russia as a respected world power and save civilization from western decadence. He lists gay marriage as one of the results of that decadence. And though he was a  trained KGB  spook for the atheist Soviets, he has also recast himself as a paragon of the Russian Orthodox church.

Russia's illegal invasion of Ukraine, however, has not gone at all according to plan.  

Both Putin and the west expected the war to be short and Ukraine to be overrun by Russia's clearly enormous and ostensibly superior military.  Instead, as the war moves toward the end of its third week,  the Russian army -- which is neither nimble nor all that mobile in the face of supply chain issues, or motivated given the low morale of troops, many of whom never expected to be fighting their Slavic brothers -- has faced stiff resistance from Ukraine's military and the country's now-armed citizenry and suffered significant losses.  Ukraine's president, Volodymyr Zelensky, personifies courage as he openly defies Putin, unifies the country's  parties and marshals its resistance, all from the besieged capital of Kyiv, which he has not left. And Putin, deprived of any quick victory, is bombing civilians (a war crime), threatening the use of nuclear weapons, and warning NATO to stay put.

NATO member states in general, and the United States in particular, have made it clear that they do not intend to fight the Russians in Ukraine and risk a World War III.  Ukraine is not a member of NATO and Russia's invasion did not trigger any Article 5 obligation. President Biden, however, has succeeded in uniting the west behind the most severe set of economic sanctions ever imposed and those sanctions are bringing Russia to its economic knees.  He has also made it clear that, if Putin escalates to attack a NATO state, the US and all the other members will honor Article 5. Though Ukraine has asked NATO and the US to impose a no-fly zone on the country's air space, that too has been rejected on the ground that to do so would amount to going to war with Russia.

Support for Biden's war policy has been bipartisan.  Congressional Republicans and Democrats have supported Ukraine and public support has been overwhelming.  There  have, however, been naysayers.  Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney refers to these as the "Putin wing of the Republican Party".  In it are Fox's Tucker Carlson, North Carolina Rep. Madison Cawthorn and Donald Trump.  Tulsi Gabbard, though a Democrat and former Representative from Hawaii, is also a member.  

At the outset of the invasion, Carlson called it "a border dispute" and openly wondered why anyone "would hate Putin".  Last week, a video surfaced in which Cawthorn called Ukraine's president "a thug" and "corrupt" and Gabbard appeared to echo the false Russian claim that there were US bio-weapons labs in Ukraine. Trump himself has careened from calling Putin "smart" and "savvy" to asserting the invasion never would have happened were he president, apparently because Putin would have understood that Trump was unhinged enough to threaten the same nuclear response that Putin himself has hinted at.  Predictably,  Trump has also called Biden "dumb" and "weak".  

None of this was or is accurate.  Biden has performed the yeoman's work of putting NATO and the transatlantic alliance back together and allowing it to emerge whole and effective. This comes after four years of Trump working to kill NATO and embolden Putin's authoritarianism, both of which were the central causes of Putin's assault.  Put simply, Putin never thought the west could re-unite after Trump. And were Trump president, it would not have. As for  Zelensky, he is standing his ground in Kyiv ready to take a bullet for his country, a character trait rare among corrupt thugs (who, generally speaking, make sure others are in any line of fire that they themselves always avoid).  And Putin, whatever his innate intelligence, was clearly not smart or savvy enough to predict Ukraine's response or its effectiveness.

In February 1949, just as the North Atlantic Treaty was being considered for ratification by the Senate, Arthur Vandenberg recommitted himself and (he hoped) America to the bipartisanship and internationalism he had embraced in 1941.  "The form of things, to be sure, has changed," he said, “and responsibilities and initiatives have shifted.  But the basic need remains.”

He then spoke words that have become iconic:

"It will be a sad day for the Republic if we ever desert the fundamental concept that politics shall stop at the water's edge.  It will be a triumphant day for those who would divide and conquer us if  we abandon the quest for a united voice when America demands peace with honor in the world.  In my view nothing has happened to absolve either Democrats or Republicans from continuing to put their country first. Those who don't will save neither their country nor their party nor themselves."

So . . .

Memo to the Putin Republicans and Rep. Gabbard:

You're swimming.

CELEBRATING . . . SOMEBODY

CELEBRATING . . . SOMEBODY

It's February 21, 2022.

Presidents Day.

Or President's Day.

Or Presidents' Day.

Never has the presence, absence or position of an apostrophe mattered so much.

In ten states, it's Presidents' Day. Call these the "s-pos" states.  In eight states, it's President's Day.  Call these the "pos-s" states.  And in three states, its Presidents Day.  Call these the "no-pos, just s" states. Together, and for reasons that will become clear later, call that triumvirate of choices the "s-trilogy".

This whole mess started in 1971 when the federal govenment passed the Uniform Monday Holiday Act.  Beforehand, the country universally celebrated Washington's birthday on February 22.  The Act, however, moved that celebration to the third Monday in February, which means the holiday can occur anywhere from February 15 to February 21.  For most federal holidays, this creates no more than a convenient fiction.  Instead of celebrating on the actual day something happened, it gets moved to a Monday and everyone enjoys a three-day weekend.  

With the alteration on Washington's birthday, however, additional complications were introduced.  These were largely owing to the fact that Abraham Lincoln had also been born in February (on the 12th) and numerous states (though not the federal government) had proclaimed his birthday a holiday as well.  When the Uniform Monday Holiday Act passed, these states decided that they too would seize the third Monday in February to celebrate Lincoln as well.

Which has led to a veritable . . .

Linguistic Mess.

The pos-s states have just followed the federal government in treating the holiday (or at least referring to it)  as a celebration of Washington's birthday.  The s-pos states have apparently decided to honor Washington and Lincoln or Washington, Lincoln and all of their forty-four colleagues.  And the no-pos, just s states have punted on any precision at all.

Sharp minds will note that, when you add the s-pos, pos-s and no-pos, just s  states together, all you get is twenty-one. This means that thirty states have decided to forego any of these designations.  Even sharper minds will wonder how thirty states declined to embrace the s-trilogy in one form of another, when there are only fifty states and 21 plus 30 equals 51.

Not to worry.

Puerto Rico is not a state.

But it is an s-poser.

Anyway, back to those thirty others.

Among them, a host of alternatives has emerged.

Montana, Ohio, Utah, Colrado and Minnesota each embrace the holiday as a celebration of Washington and Lincoln's birthdays but avoid any catastrophic apostrophe problem by naming it after them specifically.  So it's "Lincoln's and Washington's Birthday" in Montana, "Washington and Lincoln's Birthday" in Minnesota and "Washington-Lincoln" or "Washington's and Lincoln's" "Day" in Colorado, Ohio and Utah, the latter of which abjures the hyphen. Maine goes for a compromise in favor of Washington. There it's "Washington's Birthday/President's Day". But Arizona goes the other way, with "Lincoln/Washington/Presidents' Day".

There are, however, purists.

States which are steadfast for Washington.

In Virginia, it's "George Washington Day".  In Illinois, Iowa, Massachusetts, Michigan, Louisiana and New York, it's "Washington's Birthday".  In Connecticut, Missouri and Illinois, it's a celebration of Washington's Birthday alone; each also celebrates Lincoln, but on the 12th.  And California celebrates it as Washington's Birthday but doesn't name it.

Then there are the real outliers.

Alabama celebrates the "George Washington/Thomas Jefferson Birthday".  Arkansas calls it the "George Washington's Birthday and Daisy Bates Day". And Indiana, Georgia and New Mexico celebrate in entirely different months.

At least one state appears exhausted by it all.

That would be Delaware.

Which doesn't observe the holiday.

For the five which remain  (for those of you still counting) . . .

Who knows.

I do not.

It is perhaps fitting that confusion should now be the order of this day. 

The country is polarized in the extreme.  As regular readers know, my own view is that there was nothing to celebrate in our forty-fifth president. And while I am convinced that this remains the case, especially given the events of January 6 and "the former guy's"  unyielding propagation of the outright lie that he won an election he clearly lost, I am equally baffled (and disturbed) by the fact that millions are still enthralled by him and that he either controls or at least has outsized influence in one of America's major political parties.

This is especially disturbing in light of the genesis of today.

Washington and Lincoln, despite their flaws, were giants in the American pantheon.  

The former helped birth a country by assuming a presidency the Founders crafted knowing he would be its first occupant. He then defined the job and thus created a template for future occupants.  His definition, which was non-partisan and faction-less, did not survive in anything resembling the actual form it took while he was president.  But at the very least he bequeathed an office bathed in the notion that the chief executive had to act in the interests of the nation as a whole and that federal unity was superior to state sovereignty.

As to the latter, he redefined the country, forcing it to come to terms with the founding Declaration and decide whether all were created equal in fact and not just in form.  He was willing to fight to see Jefferson's truth turned into reality.  But he also closely respected the representative realities that had to be accommodated in a diverse and widespread republic.  Slavery ended because of the Civil War.  There is no Emancipation Proclamation or Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution without it.  Lincoln knew this and his greatness, therefore,  is as much a testament to his patience as it is to his courage.

Which brings us back to today.

The actual today.

Not the today that is President's Day . . .  or Presidents' Day . . .  or whatever.

Our current President, Joe Biden, must operate on the knife's edge of an almost equally divided Congress where getting things done is next to impossible and a viscerally divided body politic that in many precincts hates any opponents.  

But whether you love him or hate him, the one thing Joe Biden has been in his thirteen months as President is . . . 

Patient.

As I write, he is attempting to cajole Vladimir Putin into foregoing an invasion of Ukraine that will upend the rules based order that has preserved the peace in Europe since 1945.  He is doing this by resurrecting the western alliance that Trump consistenly undermined and, through that alliance and the astute disclosure of real time intelligence, by making it clear to Putin that we know what he is planning as he is planning it and that he will pay dearly if he invades.  In the Trump Administration, Putin could count on either support or chaos, both of which he exploited.  That has ended.

At home Biden is attempting to cajole the stubborn among us who refuse to get vaccinated so that Covid can end and supply chains can recover.  In the best of all worlds, he would  not have to deal with partisans exploiting irrationality in the face of a health crisis.  In past health crises -- AIDS, SARS, etc. -- partisanship has been muted and irrationality avoided.  That, however, is not the world we live in today.  So Biden is working with what he has.

Whatever Joe Biden is, he is not the former guy.  There is a deliberateness and deliberation to the decision-making.  Gone are the petulent outbursts, the reactive tweets, the idiotic suggestions. No aides are rushing to the cable channels talking about alternative facts or walking back unhinged rants.

It may or may not work in the sense that the ultimate outcomes may or may not be preferred.  

As of now, there is no guarantee that Putin will not become a latter-day Nazi and take over some part  or all of an independent European state. There is also no guarantee that inflation will end within the next few months.  

What there is, however, is a steadiness in the White House that was missing for four years.

And on this day, whoever and whatever it honors, that is somebody to . . . 

Celebrate.

 

DEFINING DEVIANCY DOWN

DEFINING DEVIANCY DOWN

"We are getting used to a lot of behaviors that are not good for us."

So said Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan in an article he wrote in early 1993 entitled "Defining Deviancy Down". 

Moynihan's claim back then was that previously condemned (or -- using his adjectives -- "abnormal" or "stigmatized") behaviors of all manner and type were being accepted for one reason or another and that we were kidding ourselves into thinking this a good thing.  The originality of the piece was not in linking acceptance to increase, which seems obvious, but rather in highlighting the tricks we devise to kid ourselves. 

Moynihan isolated three -- altruiism, opportunism and denial. The first redefines erstwhile deviance under the banner of care and concern.  The second accepts it because doing so creates advantages that remedy would remove.  And the third just ignores it. 

Many reading Moynihan's article today might be offended. 

His examples of altruistic and opportunistic redefinition were, respectively, the movement to deinstitutionalize the mentally ill and the explosion of out-of-wedlock births, single-parent households and broken families.  He argued that the former had led to the crisis of homelessness as the mentally ill were sent to the streets, while the latter had permanently disadvantaged a generation of children economically, educationally and socially,  and thus made poverty and violent crime more likely as Dads moved out. 

As I said, we might take offense to these claims today. 

De-institutionalization of the mentally ill was supposed to be accompanied by community care. When it wasn't, the problem became the absence of altruism, not its presence. And divorce was not supposed to create a fatherless America.  

Daddy and Mommy were de-coupling.

Not Daddy and the kids.

Still, much of what Moynihan said made sense.  

Though crime had exploded by the '90s relative to its mid-century levels,  our collective sense of outrage had been overcome by its frequency.  As Moynihan put it, "the vocabulary of crime reporting moved toward the normal".  What, for example,  shocked the nation in 1929 and led to new laws against machine guns  (the St. Valentine's Day Massacre) had been routinized by the 1990s such that  deaths by firearms exceeded those by auto accidents and even simple legislative fixes were avoided.  

At the time, Moynihan noted that the country had a two-century supply of handguns but only a four-year supply of  the ammunition -- .25 and .38 caliber bullets  -- needed to make them lethal.  But his proposal to cap that supply (as he put it, "Guns don't kill people, bullets do") went nowhere.

Generally speaking, denial doesn't get a real footing until altruism and opportunism have plowed the field and made it fertile. And so it was (and remains) on the gun front. Gun lovers treat firearms as means of protection that advance the altruistic goal of individual safety. Politicians view them opportunistically as both a source of votes and campaign contributions. And then the rest of us are forced to live with a new normal . . .

Bearing the names Columbine, Sandy Hook and Aurora.

Given that defining deviancy down has become so widespread, it's a small wonder that we do not seem to care, or for most of us even notice, when it infects other precincts.

Like, for example, politics.

It is late January 2022.  

We witness two anniversaries this month -- the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol and the January 20 inauguration of Joe Biden as the nation's 46th president.  

A normal -- or, if that bothers you, perfectly acceptable -- view of these anniversaries is that the nation a year ago escaped a violent and illegal effort to overturn a completely valid election  helmed by the demonstrably false claims of a psychopath. 

The evidence for this view is overwhelming.  

About sixty courts, numerous recounts,  more than a dozen administrative officials (many of them self-identifying Republicans),  and even a few partisan "audits" have all made it clear that Trump lost and Biden won the 2020 presidential election.  

At the same time, more than 700 people have been criminally charged in connection with the assault on the Capitol, numerous experts have testified to Trump's psychopathologies -- his narcissism, sadism and sociopathic dishonesty -- and the bi-partisan House committee investigating January 6 has published the blueprint he agreed to in his effort to have Vice President Pence reject certified electors that day and either declare Trump the winner or send the election to the House where Trump would have won under the unit state vote rule.

Nevertheless, approximately 30% of America, and anywhere from 50-70% of Republicans depending upon how or when they are asked, do not accept this view as fact.  Unbelievably, the architect of January 6, Trump himself, is the leading (by a substantial margin) candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024. 

Almost the entire class of GOP office holders either endorses Trump or at the very least appeases him by refusing to rebut his false election claim or hold him responsible for January 6. And those that don't are now considered apostates.  Some -- like Liz Cheney and Senators Romney, Rounds and Cassidy -- soldier on;  others -- like Pennsylvania's Sen. Pat Toomey or Illinois' Rep. Adam Kinzinger and New York's Rep. John Katko --  are retiring.

Facing this apparently impregnable lie, the Biden Administration has been forced to operate in a political ecosystem  that guarantees its inability to get much of anything passed.  

Critics assert that the  president has moved too far left,  that his messaging has been at best flat-footed, that he now owns the bad news (Afghanistan, Covid, inflation), and that there are bi-partisan "wins" out there were he to simply jettison the moralizing and govern. 

The factual support for this argument, however, is thin to non-existent.  

Everything in the (apparently) now dead Build Back Better and voting rights bills is supported by significant public margins; indeed, the Congressional GOP had told its caucus that their own voters support the voting rights bills and that, consequently, those bills must be killed via a silent filibuster rather than an open debate, the latter of which would hurt them in the mid-terms. 

If the Afghanistan departure was bad (and it was), the fault is certainly bi-partisan; Trump agreed to a drop dead departure date before Biden was even inaugurated and had Biden rescinded that agreement (as it was,  he delayed the departure date by a few months), the country would have had to send significantly more troops than the 3,000 or so there by the end and the commitment would have had to be open ended, neither of which  Americans support.  

As to Covid and inflation, the two go hand in hand.  The former created the supply chain bottlenecks that created the latter and right-wing vaccine deniers allowed variants to emerge.

Where are the putative "wins" critics claim to be available?

The infrastructure bill passed earlier this year was bi-partisan by today's standards.  But three of the GOP Senators who voted for it are retiring and those that  are staying want to avoid primaries if they can (and at least one, Lisa Murkowski, won't; she already has a Trump opponent).  So, despite their popularity, you can't find ten Republicans willing to allow BBB to go forward on an up or down vote, and breaking BBB into individual pieces (early education, climate change, community college) doesn't move the needle. 

On voting rights, there is talk that the GOP might be willing to reform the 1887 Electoral Count Act to remove whatever ambiguities Trump tried to exploit in his run-up to January 6.  But maybes have not turned into actuals in the past, and there is at least one Republican who thinks the ambiguities in the Electoral Count Act are just fine.

That Republican is Donald Trump. 

Even the current fight about the filibuster is anchored in consequences he created.  

The filibuster itself is an anti-democratic charade. It does not preserve debate.  It aborts it.  Historically it was used to protect slavery and then Jim Crow even though it could have been utilized in other contexts as well.  Once the speaking filibuster was functionally eliminated in the 1970s, however,  and all a Senator had to do was place a hold on a bill via a call to the cloakroom, the filibuster became cost free.  

And once it was put in the hands of Mitch McConnell during the Obama Administration, its use metastasized.

One of the highlights of the 1960s was the Voting Rights Act. It was the most important piece of federal voting legislation ever passed and it ushered in a period of bi-partisan agreement that suffrage had to be available to all and color blind. That began to end when the Supreme Court, in 2013, declared the Act's pre-clearance provisions void and states became free to enact voting rules which had previously required Justice Department and (often) court approval.

In the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election and Trump's continuing lie that it had been stolen, nineteen states controlled by the GOP have passed thirty-three laws suppressing Democatic vote by limiting the mechanisms (excuse free absentee voting, early voting, voting by mail and drop boxes) that materially increased turnout that year. Some of these laws also vest the power to count and certify the vote in partisan legislators rather than neutral administrative professionals. 

Not surprisingly, Democrats in Congress have proposed counter-measures designed to preserve the practices that increased turnout and preclude partisans from overruling counts and certifying their own choices, the latter of which is exactly what Trump wanted Georgia, Arizona, Michigan and Wisconsin Republicans to do in 2020.  

In the Senate, the GOP is filibustering this Democratic effort and thus ensuring that the state-based restrictions designed to suppress Democratic vote and, if necessary, count and certify a Trump return are fully enforced. And Trump himself has made his support for these moves more than clear. "We have to be sharper the next time when it comes to counting the vote," he said last Saturday at a rally in Arizona, "Sometimes the vote counter is more important than the candidate."

Somehow, with the GOP, it always comes back to him.  

Why is that?

A resurrected Moynihan would say we have defined political deviancy down.

And he would be right.

In 1974, Richard Nixon resigned in the face of almost certain impeachment and conviction. His crime was that he covered up the burglary of the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee by the committee created to re-elect him.  Once the smoking gun in his taped White House conversations revealed this to be the case, he was gone in a matter of days.  

In 2021, Donald Trump orchestrated a violent attack on the US Capitol in order to force the Vice President to refuse to recognize certified electors so that he could  either illegally declare Trump president or illegally send the election to the House of Representative where Trump would have won.  Compared to Nixon, Trump's crimes were worse by orders of magnitude.  

Nixon broke the law in search of dirt or intelligence on the opposition.  

Trump broke the law in support of a coup.

In the half-century between these two events, however, political rules and norms changed.  

Until the mid-90s, for example, elections for the House of Representatives were relatively tame affairs.  The gloves came off with Newt Gingrich, who decided that the only way he could beat Democrats was by smearing them. The Bushes, father and son, tried to stay above this messy fray. But they were more than willing to get their hands dirty when necessary -- father with his infamous Willie Horton ad and son with henchmen claiming that the "judicious study of discernible reality" is just "not the way the world really works anymore . . .[W]hile you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other realities, which you can study too".

Along the way, the altruistic and opportunistic steered the boat. 

Some regretted it. 

As The Washington Post put it just after he died this past fall, "Colin Powell knew his name would be forever tied to the ill-fated 2003 invasion of Iraq, and that lending his reputation and personal prestige to the faulty intelligence used to justify the ensuing war was an indelible stain."

Some even apologized for it. 

In 1991, shortly before he died, Lee Atwater (Bush Senior's presidential campaign manager) said, "In 1988, fighting Dukakis, I said I 'would strip the bark off the little bastard' and 'make Willie Horton his running mate.' I am sorry for both statements; the first for its naked cruelty, the second because it makes me sound racist, which I am not."

From smears, naked cruelty and created reality as acceptable means to political power, it is not a particularly large step to Donald Trump.

To his profanity-laced calls for physical (or state based, as in "lock her up") violence, his 30,000 lies or Kellyanne Conway's "alternative facts". 

Indeed, the mother of all "alternative facts", the one half or more Republicans accept as their latest "created reality", the one driving their Congressional filibuster and their state suppression machines, is the claim that Trump won in 2020. 

It just doesn't get any more . . .

Alternative.

Or deviant.

Or dangerous.

So, once more . . .

Moynihan into the breach. 

"We are getting used to a lot of behaviors that are not good for us."