SHUT UP AND WAIT

Trump has been indicted.

None of us know specifically what is in that indictment.

We will presumably discover what is in it this coming Tuesday, when the former president will reportedly surrender to the authorities in New York City and be arraigned.  At that time, the indictment will become public

In the meantime, what should all of us do and how should all of us react?

Here's my answer in three words.

Shut up and wait.

No one, however, is following that advice.  

As far as I can tell, no one is even giving it.  

Instead, on the right, the left and in the center, everyone is sallying forth with their respective opinions on what is merely the latest piece of unique news to be attached to an American president who literally has raised the notion of uniqueness to an art form.  In truth, he has been so unique so outrageously and so often that we have lost count. He has exhausted our ability to attend to his acts, to notice them, to calmly evaluate them.

He has even exhausted our ability . . .

To wait.

Why is this?

Is it all about him?

Or is it about us?

For as long as I can remember, I have been confronted -- attacked really -- by the notion that perception is reality. 

I don't know whether it took root in my collegiate studies of philosophy, or in a now fifty-plus-years devotion to American politics, or in the complexities of interpersonal relationships that have both failed and succeeded.  

But it has always been thus.  

Efforts to embrace or argue from reality were subject to the rejoinder that people simply did not see it that way.  

The critics were astounded by my supposed naivete.

Perception is reality, they would say.

Reality is reality too, I'd retort.

Not in the real world, they'd reply.

This is the sort of conversation college kids (or at least the ones I hung with) have over late-night drinks in dark bars.  It is also the kind of conversations therapists have with patients.  The problem, I think, is that absent analytic rigor, accepting perception as reality or awarding it too much credence is very dangerous.  Perceptions can be wrong. They can also be manipulated. At worst, they can be lies.

For the past eight years, that sort of contest has been played out in the world of all things Trump. He creates his own reality and by doing so makes the perceptions he creates in others their reality.  People then act on those perceptions, often in ways that are unexpected and dangerous.  

The January 6 attack on the US Capitol was the worst example of this. 

Having created the false perception among millions that he had won an election he clearly lost, thousands who lived in that perceptual vacuum stormed the Capitol, stopped an electoral count, assaulted the police and threatened to kill the Vice President and the Speaker of the House.

Trump's election in 2016 was another one.  

The economically depressed rural and ex-urban voters in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin who made Trump president in 2016, like the ones who made JD Vance Ohio's Senator last year, embraced the notion that they were the victims of woke elites and illegal immigrants while ignoring the reality of tax cuts for the rich, de-regulation, right to work anti-unionism and outsourced manufacturing, all of which are the real reasons they are struggling. 

Fast forward to today.

Trump and his acolytes are at it again.

Weeks before the indictment was even announced, the former president warned of "potential death and destruction" were he charged.  And once it was announced, right wing commentators and virtually every elected official from the Republican Party immediately condemned it as an un-American assault on the rule of law. Mark Levin called the indictment an act of "tyranny", a "grotesque, Stalinist, Maoist-type action".  Mike Pence called it "outrageous".  Kevin McCarthy said it was an "injustice" and "an unprecedented abuse of power". Governor DeSantis said he'd refuse to obey the law if he was asked to extradite Trump to New York, and Tucker Carlson suggested it might not be a good time for anyone to get rid of their AR-15s.

None of them have seen the indictment.

But all of them have condemned it.

The now announced case of People of the State of New York v. Donald J. Trump is going to be a long slog.  After the indictment is made public on Tuesday, it will take at least a year and a half for the case to conclude.  The former president is represented by competent counsel (full disclosure: one of his attorneys is my friend).  There will be motions to test the sufficiency of the indictment, a period of discovery in which the DA will be required to disclose all of his evidence (both the good and the bad for his case), jury selection, a trial at which Trump and his lawyers will get to cross examine the state's witnesses, jury deliberation, a verdict and possible appeals.  Between the beginning and the end, the case may change.  In fact, some or all of it may end long before any trial.  

Far from evidencing an assault on the rule of law, the whole process will be testimony to its continued existence.

The rest of us should stifle any advice to react on cue and let that happen.

In other words . . .

Shut up and wait.

OUR DAY

In the more than fifteen years I have been writing Discovery, Democracy and Devotion, I've only mentioned or written about St. Patrick's Day  twice.  The first time was in 2016.  On the actual day that year, I gave a lecture at Mt. Aloysius College in Pennsylvania entitled Voices of Immigration - Old and New.  Two weeks later, a version of that lecture appeared here under the title A Terrible Beauty. 

The next year . . .

I took on the day itself. . .

On the day itself.

On this St Patrick's Day, I wonder  if either  has stood the test of time.  

So I dusted them off to find out.

And here they are.

Saint Patrick's Day from March 17, 2017.  

Followed by A Terrible Beauty from March 30, 2016.

                                       *    *    *    *    

SAINT PATRICK'S DAY

Today is St. Patrick's Day.

This means the Irish diaspora across the world will parade, drink and . . .

Talk.

All the parade go-ers -- and watchers -- will be festooned in sweaters, hats and shamrocks  that form  a sea of kelly green. Whether fueled by grain or grape, or by their own unquenchable desire to share, many will be loud.  A large number will sport buttons that read "Kiss Me, I'm Irish." 

Pay those buttoneers no heed.  They don't mean it.  What they're really saying is . . .

"Listen to me, I'm Irish."

Talk -- I have discovered --  is the activity that most closely captures the Irish soul.  It's an escaping soul.  You cannot be the product of organized famine, or suffer the pain of separation its survival ordained, without an almost genetic need to run away.  

So, we Irish have been running away.  

For centuries.    

From the land and language of our birth. And from the arms and British nation that enslaved and impoverished us.

But you cannot run from memories.  You cannot escape them.  

So ours is also a becoming soul.  We tell the stories of our history. We invent and regale.  We massage our past so that it does not poison our future.  We . . .

Talk.

At home, I am known as a storyteller.  This is not always a compliment . . .

Essentially because I tell the same stories . . .

Again and again. 

Sometimes the stories change.  Actually, they change in some respect, minor or major, all of the time. That's because stories are as much about what is happening now as they are about the facts recounted from some far away (or near-away) . . .

Then.

My father once told me that you "should never let the facts f**k up a good story."  At the time, I found this bit of advice either incongruous . . . or the product of the martini he was then drinking. Later, however, and long after he gave up the martinis, he soberly repeated the injunction.  The oddity is that he was a journalist.  He made his money getting the facts right. 

So . . .

Why this disdain for facts, for the very bread and butter of his (and my) life?

I figured that out today, St. Patrick's Day.

Fact must be respected.  They cannot be ignored.  

But neither can they be allowed to enslave.  

They have to empower us, not paralyze us.

In a weird way, the current President of the United States gets this. That may be the reason Irish Catholics voted for him in substantial numbers last November.  He never lets the facts get in his way. 

But we Irish need to be very careful here.  Trump isn't engaged in Irish story telling. To the contrary, he is massaging the past in a way that will poison the future.  In grossly distorting Obamacare, defaming immigrants, insulting his opponents (all of them), belittling the intelligence services, demonizing Muslims, and falsely accusing his predecessor of felonious wire-tapping, he is inventing a past that did not exist and was not tragic in order to create a future that will be.  

And we Irish cannot afford to aid and abet him in this effort. 

Because . . .

Between hope and history, the former is always the better choice when the latter is a tragic one.

But only then.

Happy St. Patrick's Day.

                                         *    *    *    *    

A TERRIBLE BEAUTY

Here's the weird part.

I may have to thank Donald Trump.

Who got me thinking about immigration.

I am Irish and proud of it.  My full (and formal) name -- Cornelius Patrick McCarthy -- shouts Irish from the rafters.  I will regale any who listen with tales of great grandparents and grand uncles and aunts from Cork who came and manned the mills in Lawrence, Massachusetts and the precincts of New York City.

Of course, I am not  actually Irish.  I am American.

And though Americans whose grand parents were born in Ireland  can become dual nationals, I am not one of them either.  All my grandparents were born here.  In fact, that fourth paragraph is a bit of a stretch.  

Because, truth be told, three quarters of my great grandparents were born here as well.

So, is this whole Irish thing a big put on?  Am I just one of those white-haired, fair-skinned, unmistakably celtic-looking pretenders who wears green,  eats corned beef (which the Irish themselves do not eat),  and dodges drunks  on Paddy's Day?

Or am I the real thing?

In fact, what is the real thing?

And that's where The Donald comes in.

After the insults, adolescent narcissism and misogyny,  Trump's signature move in this presidential season has been his stand on immigration.  There are three parts to his dance. First, there is "the Wall."  "A nation without borders is not a nation," says Trump; what he really means, however,  is that "a nation which can't keep out illegals is not a nation."  So Trump will build a wall across the 1,954 mile border between the US and Mexico, and every time Mexico complains, the wall will get bigger.  

Second, there is the racist xenophobia.  At the announcement of his candidacy, Mexican immigrants became "rapists" and "criminals" -- who were "not you" -- being sent north by a country off-loading its undesirables.  

Finally, xenophobia and nativism on immigration is side-carred with religious bigotry as a tool in the fight against terrorism. In this phase of Trumpism, the need for better intel and -- in Europe -- interstate coordination and information sharing is either jettisoned (or put on hold) as the principal approach in exchange for a wholesale ban on non-citizen Muslim entrants into the country until the government "can figure out what is going on."  It is apparently irrelevant that the government has already "figured out" that the vast  majority (99.99%) of Muslims are not terrorists.  

Or that most terrorist acts since 1985 have been committed by non-Muslims.

It's very easy to chalk all this up to Trump's inherent flaws.  He is a clown, a charlatan and a con-man. He has no respect for truth or facts.  He is immature in ways that are both clinical and scary.

Nevertheless, his views on immigration are shared by a large group of Americans who share none of these flaws.  Which begs the ultimate question.

Which is . . . 

Why?

Here is my answer.

Trump is plowing very fertile ground.

At least three myths define the story of immigration in America.  The first is the myth of the melting pot and its first cousin -- assimilation.This is a myth about history. It claims that, in our nation of immigrants, everyone who came somehow morphed into an androgynous American whole.  The second is the southern border myth; this is the one Trump highlights with impunity in  his "a nation without borders is not a nation" mantra; it treats the line between Mexico and the US as inherent (and sacred) when in fact it was accidental (and utterly profane).  The third is the illegality myth, the notion that the number of illegal or undocumented aliens is increasing and reeking economic havoc, principally in the form of wage suppression.

These are myths because none of these claims are factually correct. As a general rule, immigrants historically have learned English and integrated into the American economy. They have not, however, assimilated, at least not in the sense set forth in the dictionary, which defines the word to mean one who conforms to or resembles the group. In fact, to the contrary, immigrant groups stuck together and still do.  Each group brought its distinctive cultures, foods, and prayers to these shores. They may have acquired a new identity, but they did not lose their old one.

The southern border myth is equally mistaken.  There was nothing pre-ordained about our southern border,  and it certainly cannot be used to define the nation.  The border itself was the product of a war -- the Mexican-American War of 1846 -- fought largely as a consequence of a linguistic dispute over which river properly constituted the Rio Grande separating the two countries.  Texans thought it was the southern Rio Grande and Mexicans thought it was the northern one, which Texans called the Nuesces.  Today that dispute would be arbitrated.  In 1846, however,  it became the pretext for a show of force designed to provoke an attack that would allow the US the seize the greater part of what was then northern Mexico (and is now our southwest plus California).

It did.

And then the US did.

One of the ironies is that the Mexican-American War was itself rooted in the earlier war between Texas and Mexico, an earlier war caused by Mexico outlawing slavery in 1829 and making American immigration into Texas (then a Mexican province)  illegal.  This, however, did not stop the Americans, who entered illegally anyway and then later fought for and won their independence. (Remember the Alamo!)

The irony, of course, is that Americans were illegal immigrants into Mexico long before any Mexicans violated "our" southern border. Another irony is that, once the US prevailed in the war, the largest part of the new southwestern US and California was composed of hitherto Mexican citizens and was marked by an Hispanic culture that left its imprint on law, architecture, and names.  Today, the oldest capital city in the US is not located in New England or Virginia.  It is located in Santa Fe, New Mexico.  And the coast of California is not dotted with cities and towns named for dukes or English shires. The names are largely those of Catholic saints provided by Spanish missionaries.

In any case, so much for the sanctity of the southern border.  It definitely established a boundary.  It did not, however,  define a culture or a nation.

Then there is the illegality myth, the myth that more illegals are entering than leaving and that they are doing some kind of permanent damage to our economy.  It is false on both counts.  On the one hand, the population of undocumenteds or illegals has declined significantly over the last nine years and more are now leaving than coming.  On the other, economic studies have shown that immigration -- including the work of undocumented immigrants -- is a huge plus for both the economy as a whole and even for low income workers.  In fact, President Bush's own Council of Economic Advisers estimated in 2008 that American workers actually make $30 billion annually in wage gains as a result of immigration.

So, where to from here?  

Trump is only the latest xenophobe.

There is, however,  no way we can even hope to make him the last unless we eliminate the myths.

And tell a new -- and more accurate -- story about our "nation of immigrants." 

In that new narrative, America is not a melting pot.  It is a mosaic.  It is stitched together to be and remain whole.  But its parts are distinct -- multi-colored and multi-textured.  Each of us who claims immigrant heritage (and, since most of us must, even those who blindly ignore it) is a hyphenated American.  (Or, as Will Ferrell put it in a recent SNL skit, "Unless your name is Running Bear, we are all anchor babies.").  What makes me American are the values enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution, not the the line drawn between me and Canada or me and Mexico. 

And what makes me Irish are my ancestors and (therefore) my genes. There is nothing phony about it.

The poet William Butler Yeats once wrote: 

                                Now and in time to be,
                                Wherever green is worn,
                                Are changed, changed utterly:
                                A terrible beauty is born.

Though he  was speaking of the Irish Rising of  1916, his words are as apt for the Irish immigrants who peopled these shores by the millions in the 19th century.  In art, literature, music, politics and sport, those immigrants changed the face of America.

Which today basks in the "terrible beauty" they -- and all their immigrant neighbors -- created.

PS --  A larger version of this essay was presented as the Spring Honors Lecture at Mt. Aloysius College in Cresson, Pennsylvania on St. Patrick's Day.  For any who are interested, the link to that lecture is available here

                                       *    *    *    *    

In the 2017 piece, I said we like to talk.

We like to write too.

Happy St. Patrick's Day.

THE SCHIZOPHRENIC STATE OF OUR UNION

In 1963, President Kennedy sent a general and a State Department official to South Vietnam to report on conditions there. When they returned, the general reported that the American-backed government in Saigon was widely supported, the Viet Cong were disrespected and  South Vietnam was winning the war.  He advocated that America stay the course. The State Department official said that the Saigon government was corrupt, the Viet Cong were gaining respect and South Vietnam was losing. He said disaster was imminent.

After listening to them, Kennedy asked a question.

"You two did visit the same country, didn't you?"

On Tuesday night, President Biden delivered his state of the union address to Congress and the American people and Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders followed that with the GOP's response.

For close to an hour and a half, President Biden told us the state of the union was  pretty good.

Unemployment is at fifty year low.  Inflation is coming down.  Manufacturing jobs are returning. Democracy has been rescued.

Sarah Huckabee Sanders, however, was having none of that.

According to her, the state of the union is . . .

Old 

("At 40, I'm the youngest governor in the country.  At 80 [Biden] is the oldest president in American history.") 

Confused 

("I'm the first woman to lead my state," she said, "and he's the first man to surrender his presidency to a woke mob that can't even tell you what a woman is.")

And crazy 

("The dividing line in America is no longer between right or left. The choice is between normal or crazy.")

All of which, sixty years later,  raises JFK's question anew . . .

You two did visit the same country, didn't you?

Unfortunately, the answer is no.

For the past forty years, the yin and yang of American politics has fluctuated between Republican presidencies and Congresses committed to winner take-all economics and cultural conservatism on the one hand and Democratic presidencies and Congresses that have had to either reverse economic slumps or clean up economic disasters while defending old civil rights and fighting for new ones on the other.  

Twelve years of Reagan and Bush I were answered by eight years of Clinton. Eight years of Bush II were answered by eight years of Obama.  And four years of Donald Trump are now being answered by Biden.  

During that same period, fourteen years of Democratic Congresses in the Reagan/Bush and first two years of the Clinton era were replaced by twelve years of Gingrich's (and Hastert's) Republicans, who in turn were replaced by Pelosi's Democrats (four years), Boehner's and Ryan's Republicans (four years), Pelosi's Democrats again (four years) and now Kevin McCarthy's Republicans.

Over this time frame, the arguments of both parties have changed.

And to understand the real state of the American union circa 2023, it's important, I think, to understand those arguments and those changes.

Start with the Democrats.

Between 1980 and today, they have gone through two fundamental changes.  The first began in the 1980s and came to fruition in the Clinton years. The party moved away from its New Deal or Rooseveltian (as in FDR) roots, conceded that globalization was a reality, helped at some level in creating the new architecture of globalism with things like NAFTA and other trade deals, but stood firm in preserving Social Security and Medicare and in continuing to fight to preserve the historic gains of the '60s and '70s on civil rights and woman's rights.  This approach conceded a lot to the so-called free market and actually helped create the enormous gap in wealth between the richest Americans and everyone else.  Labor was weakened and jobs were off-shored. 

The second is occurring now.  

It involves an effort to articulate and pass an economic program that actually is not winner take-all but instead creates opportunity and some security for the middle and lower middle classes and the poor. Think of things like Obamacare, childcare credits, student loan forgiveness, and infrastructure spending and in-country manufacturing that generates well-paying, non-college degreed jobs.  It also involves a continuing effort to preserve woman's rights and minority rights and a willingness to enlarge those  rights to recognize historically marginalized communities (like gays and lesbians), protect new ones (like the trans-gendered), and re-imagine the scope of some old ones (like Me-Too). 

Now to the Republicans.

They too have gone through two fundamental changes in the past forty years.  

Unlike the Democrats, however, their changes have been process more than policy changes.  

They have changed how they campaign for office, how they message, how they target voters and attempt to win.  The change started with Newt Gingrich and reached its zenith under Donald Trump. In a word, they now demonize their opponents.  Democrats became corrupt, unpatriotic, girly-men in the Gingrich years and first decade of this century and then were graduated to baby-killers, radicals, socialists, losers, electoral thieves, anti-white racists and the woke mob as we moved through the first decade of this century to the Tea Party and Trump and today.  The natural consequence of this evolution was the January 6, 2021 insurrection and the attempt by an actual mob to overturn a presidential election.

The other process change is that, over the past forty years, the Republican Party has eschewed traditional norms and exercised raw power to obtain its desired results.   Examples include impeaching President Clinton essentially over lying about sex, refusing to allow President Obama to fill Justice Scalia's Supreme Court seat ostensibly because it became vacant in an election year, voting to advance Justice Coney-Barrett to the Court even though it was an election year, using the filibuster to stop Obama's lower court appointees but abolishing it to put Gorsuch and Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court, and playing chicken with debt ceiling increases anytime a Democrat is in the White House (but not otherwise).

These changes have had electoral consequences for both parties.  

For the Democrats, and even though it has in the new Biden administration started to address the problem, its historic working-class base has eroded, especially among white, non-college educated men living in the mid-west and the south.  Its coalition is now composed of metropolitan and suburban voters and includes women and minorities.  Because its voters are  geographically concentrated, the party has a hard time winning in the south and the rural plains.

As for the other side . . .

Since 1992, the Republican Party has lost the popular vote in every presidential election but one.  It has for the most part been non-competitive in big cities and surrounding suburbs.  It is largely a southern and plains state party. It's ability to win the presidency is a function of the electoral college (which made Bush II president in 2000 and Trump president in 2016).  Its ability to win or even be competitive in the Senate is a function of each state having two senators regardless of size. And its ability to win the House is based entirely on gerrymandering and voter suppression.

The two parties now have little to nothing in common.  

The Democrats attempt to govern the old-fashioned way.  They try to persuade independents and non-affiliated voters in an effort to create governing coalitions and pass laws.  The Republicans do no such thing. They appeal to their narrow base and otherwise divide and incite to get that base to the polls.  Other than supporting tax cuts for the super-wealthy, which they rely on to fund their political operation, and wrapping themselves in the flag that was desecrated on January 6, they invent problems that do not exist (e.g., anti-white racism, or the teaching of so-called Critical Race Theory or gender identity in grammar schools), all in an effort to create anger in and generate and retain the loyalty of working-class voters who get no benefit from their winner take-all economics. 

Some of their biggest personalities (e.g., Donald Trump or Marjorie Taylor Green) are preternaturally rude and regularly incite violence in an effort to get their way or cower their opposition. After 45, a genuine narcissist and pathological liar, it is hard to believe that any of his erstwhile supporters would now attack his successor as a "liar"  or "crazy". But their level of hypocrisy is off the charts, even for politicians. 

So . . .

What is the state of the union?

It is  schizophrenic.

On Tuesday night, playing to type, Governor Sanders bathed herself in the patriotism of former President Trump's 2019 Thanksgiving visit to the troops in Afghanistan, reporting that a soldier had yelled "Mr. President, I reenlisted in the military because of you." Left unsaid was that same soldier's reaction a little more than a year later when the president for whom he reenlisted incited an attempted coup to stay in the White House.  Otherwise, she pretended that an anti-white, trans-gendered, gerontocracy was destroying the freedom of millions of Americans by indoctrinating children, mandating vaccines and opening the southern border.  "I'm for freedom," she said, "[President Biden is] is for government control." 

None of this is true.

The border is not open. The notion that schools are teaching kids to be anti-white or change their sex is laughable.  And Covid is well contained, largely as a consequence of the (expired) mandates Sanders so blithely condemned.

In the meantime, unemployment is at an all-time low, inflation is coming down rather rapidly, wages are going up, domestic manufacturing is returning and the government is putting real money in the pockets of the middle classes with infrastructure spending, prescription drug relief, and expansions of Obamacare.

In truth, President Biden and Governor Sanders do not live in the same country.

Fortunately, however, the one Biden lives in . . .

Actually exists.

MASS MURDER

How come it happens here?

That's the question we should all be asking and answering.

Not whether we can better enforce red flag laws? Or child-proof guns so that toddlers can't fire them? Or make background checks universal? Or make it illegal for those on the terrorist watch-list to possess firearms? Or close the gun-show loophole? Or re-instate the ban on assault rifles?

All those other questions ask how we can better deal with the problem.

None of them tell us why we have the problem.

Which means that . . .

None of them will ever solve the problem.

So . . .

How come it happens here?

The answer is simple.

There are more guns here, by orders of magnitude, than anywhere else in the developed world.

According to the most recent statistics, Americans possess, either legally or illegally,  326,474,000 guns. According to those same statistics, America has the highest (120.6) estimated number of guns per 100 people; the next highest is Yemen at 52.8; the vast majority of countries are below 20 and most are in single digits. 

If you want to break it down further, we're still number one.  There are firearms in 42% of America's households.  If you want to assume that number includes hunters and exclude them, one way to do that is to count just the number of handguns.  When you do that, however, we're still tops. 21.9% of  all American households contain handguns.

Maybe you're with the "guns don't kill, people do" crowd and think mass murders happen everywhere and the United States is really no different from other countries. Well, for the twenty-year period ending in 2019, here's the data on that.  There were 121 mass shootings in the United States.  The next highest was Russia at 21. Every other country was in single digits and most of them recorded no more than one.

Thus . . .

It pretty obviously doesn't happen everywhere to the extent it happens here.

Not by a long shot.

So . . . 

How come it happens here?

The answer is simple.

It's the guns, stupid.

And the solution is actually pretty simple too.

If you want to make sure your kids won't get shot in kindergarten, your grandmother won't be offed at a dance hall, your workers won't be taken out at their job, and you won't meet your Maker at a nightclub or concert . . . 

Get rid of the guns.

All of them.

This is a radical idea here in the U S of A.  I will be called a Communist . . . or a Socialist . . . or at the very least a lunatic for advocating it.  Lawyers for the NRA will laugh, smug in the cocoon of gun rights known as the Second Amendment to the Constitution.   If I tell them they have it all wrong, that the right to bear arms was subservient to the need for a well-organized militia, that today's militia (i.e., the National Guard)  by no means requires that 42% of  American households be armed so it can be well-organized . . . 

They will laugh again.

Not according to Antonin Scalia . . .

They will say . . .

Or the current Supreme Court . . .

Rubbing it in.

And though academically wrong, they will be practically right.  

Trump's Supreme Court has made it practically impossible to get the guns off the street.  Just ask New York.  Last July, the Supreme Court struck down its law requiring applicants for a license to carry outside their home to demonstrate proper cause for the license, and this past fall a federal district judge struck down its law barring guns from so-called "sensitive" places -- museums, theaters, stadiums, libraries, places offering services to children, and anyplace serving alcohol -- and then later in the case issued an injunction prohibiting the government from compelling license applicants to disclose their social media accounts or those with whom they lived or from proving their "good moral character". 

The result of decisions like these is that, as a practical matter, America's war against mass murder is hamstrung.  

We can't take the guns away.  

We cannot even keep them away. 

We're in a world where anyone can presumably possess and carry a firearm anywhere and at any time. Some may be subject to background check.  Most won't.  

What to do?

I don't know.

The Second Amendment was passed in the 1780s.  There were no assault weapons or automatic firearms back then. The flintlocks took time to load.  And the militias really did have to be armed by citizen soldiers.  

Though Wyatt Earp could make Tombstone safe by making cowboys check their guns at his sheriff's office in the 19th century, and the federal government could stop more Valentines Day massacres in Chicago by making  submachine guns illegal in the 1930s, those days are long gone.

I do not think the Supreme Court is right about the Second Amendment.

But if they are . . .

It should be repealed.

BROKEN HOUSE

I come from a broken home.

But in navigating the break, those in charge did not kill the future for their children.

Or themselves.

In Washington DC, we are now in week three of divided government. 

Joe Biden is President and his Democratic colleagues control the Senate.  

For their part, the Republicans control the House.

There is, however,  one problem with that last sentence.   

The problem is that . . .

It is not particularly accurate. 

While 222 members of the House of Representatives are registered Republicans who won their seats on that party' s line, only about thirty to fifty of them actually control the place.  This reality was born early in the morning of Saturday, January 7, when California's Kevin McCarthy prostrated himself before the GOP's off-the-charts right wing (OTCRW) in order to be (finally) elected Speaker on the fifteenth ballot. 

To get there, McCarthy promised the OTCRW that they could vote to end his Speakership anytime one of them moved to vacate the office.  Among many other things, he also promised them outsized presence on the powerful Rules committee that first decides what gets to the floor; eliminated the rule which allowed the debt limit to rise without a separate vote; and  agreed to the creation of a select subcommittee to investigate "weaponization of the federal government"

The OTCRW plans to use these powers to launch scores of  investigations and to force Democrats to make massive spending cuts.  They also plan to refuse to increase the nation's debt ceiling unless Congressional Democrats and President Biden go along with their proposed cuts.

The debt limit debate is a classic example of the GOP's endemic hypocrisy.  House Republicans voted to raise the limit without condition three times during the Trump administration, two of which occurred when they controlled both the House and the Senate.  This does not mean that some on the Democratic side have not played politics with the issue from time to time, voting against a raise or to limit the raise when they knew an increase was passing anyway and performance could trump the need for good policy basically because the performance did not matter.  No Democrat, however, has ever actually voted against the limit when doing so would have resulted in default.

That, however, is what the OTCRW is saying it will do now.

This would, of course, amount to economic suicide.  The dollar is the world's reference currency and America's bonds with their guaranteed interest payments are the world's safest and most stable investments.  Upon default, America's credit rating would immediately plummet, as would the value of everyone's retirement accounts. And as cash reserves were spent, default would in short order result in the suspension of Social Security and Medicare payments, government salaries, and all other federal spending (including payments on government bonds) as well.

The OTCRW's rejoinder to this parade of horribles is that it does not want the limit to be reached or America to default but rather is simply insisting the the administration and Congressional Democrats "negotiate" on spending cuts as a condition for the GOP agreeing to raise the limit.  They then spin Biden's "no negotiation" stance as the arrogant muttering of a man who does not understand that his side no longer controls the entire government.  

Were this true, it would be persuasive.

But it isn't.

In point of fact, all the "spending" which is now moving the United States toward the borrowing limit has already been voted on and approved. Or, to put it differently, all of that spending has already been "negotiated".  By the same token,  all future spending will also have to be "negotiated".  Congress will hold hearings, take testimony, and vote.  If Republicans want to limit that spending, cut the deficit, sunset all federal programs (as proposed by Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson), limit military and financial assistance to Ukraine (as suggested by Marjorie Taylor Greene and Ohio's JD Vance),they will have ample opportunity to do so.

In the current debt ceiling debate, therefore, the OTCRW is not asking to negotiate spending.

Instead, it is trying to negotiate . . .

Paying.

Back in the 1960s and '70s when he was a rising GOP star and on his way to the presidency, Ronald Reagan made a repeated point of comparing the federal government to any American family.  The latter, he noted, had to live within its means and so, therefore, should the former.  That advice was sound.  Reagan, however, never said that an American had the right to tell the bank or the dealership that he was refusing to make the payments on the mortgage or car loan he had negotiated and agreed to years before. 

If a family does that, it loses its home or car.

But if America does that, it will lose its shirt.

The debt limit as currently set is $31.4 trillion.  It will be reached two days from now but given cash on hand and likely to be received in the near term, default will not occur until sometime this spring.  On its editorial page today, The Wall Street Journal, hardly the mouthpiece of liberalism, warned that "The first rule of negotiation is never take a hostage you're not prepared to shoot."  Setting the table, it noted that "Speaker McCarthy has promised his Members he won't move to raise the limit without spending concessions from President Biden.  But Mr. Biden says he won't negotiate at all over the debt limit."  It then concluded "Something or someone has to give because the debt limit has to be raised."

The Journal anchors itself firmly in the rational side of conservatism.  It doesn't espouse or forgive attempted coups or violent insurrections. Last July, in assaying January 6 and President Trump, it wrote that "the brute facts remain: Mr. Trump took an oath to defend the Constitution, and he had a duty as Commander in Chief to protect the Capitol from a mob attacking in his name . . . Instead he fed the mob's anger and let the riot play out." On the debt limit, however, the boat is a bit unmoored.  "The U.S. has already borrowed and spent the money," it explained, "and debt held by the public is a contract.  Nobody sane in Washington wants to be blamed for triggering a default, and the bond market ructions it would cause, which means it almost certainly won't happen."  

Almost is the operative word in that last sentence.

And it is pregnant with doubt.

Over the course of the next two months, the debt limit dance will proceed.  Biden and the Democrats will correctly insist that no one can negotiate whether America must pay its bills.  If necessary, and as has occurred in the past, they will agree to vote en masse to raise the limit with the assistance of only a handful of Republicans needed to reach 218 and actually pass the measure. This will solve the problem while leaving the OTCRW and its enablers their fig leaf of opposition.  This will only be possible, however, if McCarthy allows  that measure to go to the floor for a vote.

McCarthy has promised not do this.

Even though sanity -- and The Wall Street Journal  -- say he must.

The weirdest part of the GOP's first week, four-day, fifteen vote meltdown over the Speaker's gavel was that it continued even after Kevin McCarthy had given his opponents all they were asking for.  The hostage takers, it turned out,  weren't particularly interested in concessions on rules or in "democratizing" a body where polarization has empowered leadership more or less as a condition of getting anything done.  

They just wanted a scalp.  

Because of his limitless ability to abase himself, McCarthy became Speaker anyway and held off his inevitable execution.  Sooner or later, however, that execution will come. The rules just passed by House Republicans allow it. 

And the current debt ceiling impasse may deliver it.

Because . . .

At some point point in the not too distant future, Kevin McCarthy will either have to renege on his debt ceiling promise and kill himself politically.

Or honor his promise . . .

And kill the country economically.

This is not a choice the country voted for last November.  It is not even a choice the GOP's iconic Ronald Reagan would have advocated.  His American family did not embrace suicide as the solution to its fiscal challenges, and most broken homes survive the break.

Mine did.

But then again . . .

There were adults in charge.

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

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

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

Yesterday, Churchill returned.

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

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

Survived. 

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

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

Profusely.

He also asked for more.

Predictably.

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

Critically.

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

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

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

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

We have our own version here.

In the person of Donald Trump. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

And now this.

The process of accountability in America can be slow.

But it also can be ineluctable.

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

Later has arrived.

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

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

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

The likely result here is that McCarthy will prevail.  

It is likely for two reasons.  

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

Meaning . . .

"Only Kevin". 

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

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

So, O.K. may be it.

Which may not be all that ok at all.

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

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

Whether McCarthy will stand firm is unclear.  

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

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

McCarthy, however, may be negotiating away his effectiveness.

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

This is something none of us should encourage.

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

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

Not, however, the extremists.

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

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

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

But not for the country.  

Or the world. 

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

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

They exist in large numbers in Ukraine. . . 

Where one of them is president.

Merry Christmas.

SEASONS GREETINGS

It will be a Merry Christmas for Brittney Griner.

But not for Paul Whelan.

Which has driven American politics into its usual false corners.

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

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

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

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

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

By the Germans . . .

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

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

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

He chose to bring her home.

And continue to negotiate for Whelan's release.

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

It has also been anomalous.  

First, the anomaly.

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

Talk about class.

The Whelans have it in spades.

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

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

This is all performative nonsense.  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They are de-valuing Griner. 

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

Especially one who was a Trump voter.  

She's just a DEI score. 

She doesn't get to leave. 

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

Wow!

These people make Scrooge look good.

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

Both of them should have been released.

One was. 

To their undying credit, the Whelans are celebrating that.

We should too.