TWO PARTIES, TWO YEARS, TWO PROBLEMS

TWO PARTIES, TWO YEARS, TWO PROBLEMS

Someone --  maybe Mark Twain but probably not -- once said that history doesn't repeat itself . . .

But often rhymes.

We're in the summer of rhymes.

George Orwell wrote 1984 in 1947 and 1948 and published it in 1949.  In the wake of World War II, the cold war had begun and Orwell imagined a world less than forty years hence with a superstate called Oceania --  basically North and South America, Australia, southern Africa and Great Britain --locked in perpetual cold combat with its two enemies, Eurasia and East Asia, superstates as well.

In fictional Oceania, a so-called Ministry of Truth regularly revises history so that the past conforms to its dictator's (Big Brother's)  present; dissent is "vaporized" as opponents are not just killed but -- in a kind of anti-birtherism --  removed from history as well; and relationships are transactional (sex to reproduce and spawn additional  Party servants is the working pre-nup).  To support the project, science does not exist and a new language -- an ungrammatical amalgam with few words that limits both thought and self-expression -- is invented.

The glue holding this superstate together is propaganda.  

And the foundation for that propaganda is Big Brother's and his apparatchiks' doublethink.

Or as Orwell defined it:

"To know and to not know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, . . . to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself." 

Though Orwell himself was always a struggling writer, often starved for publishers given an integrity he refused to relinquish for any amount, and though 1984 was critically acclaimed when it was published, it has only recently become a best seller.

Thanks to Donald Trump.

In 1928, New York Governor Al Smith became the first Catholic ever nominated for President by an American political party.  In November of that year, he lost in a landslide to Herbert Hoover.  Republican Hoover won forty-one states (to Smith's mere seven, which did not even include his home state of New York).  The electoral vote count was 444 for Hoover, 87 for Smith.  

During the campaign, the anti-Catholic vitriol was palpable.  Opposition to Smith from Methodist and Baptist ministers on account of his religion was nearly universal; of 8,500 Southern Methodist ministers polled prior to the election, only four supported Smith.  This, moreover, in the south (where six of Smith's winning states were located in an age when the south still despised the party of Lincoln).  The charge was that Smith as a Catholic owed allegiance to a foreign power, the Vatican; the joke upon his defeat was that he sent a one word telegram to the Pope -- "Unpack".

In the thirty-two years that followed, the notion that a Catholic could ever be President or should ever be nominated was considered ludicrous.  So ludicrous that, in 1960, John F. Kennedy literally had to run the table by winning every primary contest he entered, including the primary in overwhelmingly Protestant West Virgina, to get the Democratic Party nomination.  And even then, JFK had to go to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association during the general election campaign in an effort to finally put the so-called religious issue to rest.  He barely succeeded, winning by one of the smallest margins in American political history.

Today, the GOP has a 1984  problem and the Democrats have a version of what was -- until Kennedy -- their 1928 problem.

Trump is an Orwellian nightmare.

His penchant for claiming 2 + 2 = 5 is now legion.  (The proposition itself, which Orwell lampoons to great effect in 1984, was invented by Stalin as he tried to convince the Soviet Union that he could accomplish the government's second five year plan in four.) Whether he's libeling Mexicans as "rapists" or Central American refugees as "terrorists"; illegally imprisoning asylum seekers and their children in inhumane (and separate) lock-ups; lying to claim that loss of the popular vote was on account of millions of illegals having voted; falsely claiming to having had the largest crowds at any Inauguration; finding "good people" in a scrum of racists and neo-Nazis; mocking Russian interference in the 2016 election; praising dictators and their wanna-be's the world over (Russian's Putin, North Korea's Kim Jung Un, Hungary's Orban, the Philippine's Duterte); claiming vindication Robert Mueller specifically and expressly withheld; touting an economy he inherited as one he created; or turning July 4th's celebration of "We the People" into a militaristic promotion of "me, the President", truth is more than beside the point with Trump.  

It's his first casualty.

And has been his entire life.

The sound of 1984 is also echoed in the administration's treatment of the media.  Abroad, he turns a blind eye to state sponsored killers of journalists in Russia (Putin) and Saudi Arabia (Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman).  At home, he routinely charges  "fake news" on anything remotely opposed to his lies and supplements that with fascist claims that the free press is the "enemy of the people" or that "what you're seeing and what you're reading is not what's happening".  His sycophants then pile on, with Kellyanne Conway's "alternative facts" or  Rudy Giuliani's "truth isn't truth" explaining or excusing  His Hairnesses latest fantasy. 

Marching in lock step with Trump  is the larger GOP.

You can count on one hand, and only when it doesn't matter, the number of GOP House members or GOP Senators who confront Trump or call him out, and now, even the supposedly independent Supreme Court has issued at least one recent decision that should scare us all, shielding as an absolute matter extreme partisan gerrymandering from any form of judicial review or oversight.  

The gerrymandering case is instructive.  The practice of drawing district lines to favor one's party is not new.  What is new, however,  are the computer-based data analytics that can predict votes down to the household and that result in a type of extreme gerrymandering never previously possible.

In the North Carolina case decided this past week, data analytics allowed the party that won less than 50% of the votes to nevertheless  get 76% of the seats.  That's not democracy. It's also not equal protection of the law or one person one vote and renders the free speech exercised in political campaigns more or less superfluous.  

Finally, relying on those who got the seats to solve the problem -- which is the remedy Chief Justice Roberts and the four other GOP appointed justices  suggest -- is the equivalent of asking Jesse James to guard the bank. 

Ain't gonna happen.

(Mitch McConnell, of course,  praised the decision as precisely the sort of hands off role the Court should play, but he's also the guy who stiffed Obama's nomination of Merrick Garland in 2016 and therefore put the current GOP court majority in place. Meanwhile, in a moment that brought Orwell's doublethink to life in the Senate, McConnell also said his party would confirm any Supreme Court nominee proposed by Trump in 2020 even though it had refused to do so for Obama in 2016.)

For their part the Democrats have now started the process of selecting the candidate who will oppose Trump in 2020 and toward that end, the crowded field was split into two debates within the last week, showcasing twenty of their twenty-four hopefuls.  In post debate polls, viewers agreed that Sen. Warren and Sen. Harris fared best in their respective debates.  Former Vice President Biden was a bit shaky but certainly held his own and will only improve as his lines and responses become more crisp; in any case, oratorical discipline has never been his hallmark and won't necessarily be expected in this go round.  Others who had a good day were Mayor Pete Buttigieg and former HUD secretary Julian Castro

Almost immediately, however, polls also showed substantial numbers of Democrats concerned that a woman, were she to be nominated, could not beat Trump in 2020.  Typically, the result came in the form of concerns about whether other voters were ready for that first (an Ipsos poll had three-quarters comfortable with a woman president but only a third believing their neighbors would be) and so-called "magic wand" questions where a quarter of those who picked a male candidate said they'd pick a female if they had a "magic wand" and could ordain the result they really wanted.

Thus, on the "can a woman be President" question , many Democrats are stuck in 1928.  In this time warp, Hillary lost because she was a woman or because the country is not yet ready for a woman. So no other woman can win or should try.

Too bad.

For many reasons.

One of which is that it's not true.

There are two things one needs to say about Hillary and the 2016 election.  

The first is that the election was very close and that more than a dozen things -- most of which were unexpected -- had to go wrong to keep her from winning.  Imagine what the result would have been without James Comey's 11th hour histrionics, or Russia's interference, or the political malpractice by the twenty-somethings at Team Hillary in Brooklyn who should have been polling in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan in the last month rather than thinking Arizona and Texas were in play.

The second is that, prior to January 20, 2017, Trump's bluster could persuade rust belters who hadn't received a raise in more than thirty years that, perhaps, a loud mouth businessman could improve their lives.  That hope, however, is now lost.  The bluster is still overt and over the top but there are no results to match it. Inequality is still a problem, coal mines are still closing, and opioid addiction continues apace.  Given the negatives that attach to him as a matter of course, and the fact that he has not really grown his base by any amount, the notion that Trump can run the same inside straight he drew in 2016 is at best dubious and at worst delusional.

What Democrats need is a candidate with the fortitude to confront and remove Trump without any of the adhesion that might allow his negative campaign (and that is all it will be) to stick.  If Biden is the nominee, he can't be "sleepy" or "creepy".  If it's Warren, she can't be Hillary 2.0.

None of this means the nominee cannot be a woman or a gay guy or Obama's former Vice President.  Sen. Harris at this point appears more than capable of taking Trump on and disarming whatever ad hominems come her way. So does Buttigieg. And Biden is ahead in the polls not just because of name recognition and the Obama connection; he's also a moderate in this field and that may be what the voters want.

The Democrats need to stop acting like it's 1928 . . .

So the country can stop acting like its 1984.

MEMORIES

MEMORIES

It's Memorial Day, 2019.

Time to remember the vets.

Here's one I remember.

It was the summer of 1979.  I had just finished my first year of law school and had a summer internship working for the U.S. Attorney's office in Newark, New Jersey.  There were about twenty interns and we were each assigned to an Assistant U.S. Attorney (AUSA), one of the hundred or so line prosecutors in the office. 

I was assigned to AUSA Ted Lackland.

Columbia Law grad.  Ex-associate at a Wall Street law firm with a Masters in Philosophy from  Howard University. Grew  up in Chicago, where he went to college and married his girlfriend.  And . . .

Ex-Captain in the US Army, graduate of Ranger school, and Vietnam combat veteran.

I learned a lot that summer -- how to try a case, do an investigation, cross- examine a witness, joust with a judge and persuade a jury.  

But mostly, that summer, I learned a lot about the Vietnam War and about one guy who served there, came home, made a life and career for himself,  and . . .

Was never bitter.  

Even though he had a right to be.

The Vietnam War Ted Lackland described was not the one I had read about in the newspapers.  He had left for Southeast Asia  from Oakland on June 6, 1968, the day Bobby Kennedy died.  He told me he thought he might be going to a safer place given the turmoil and riots which by then had become that era's domestic imprint. He must have been quickly disabused of that notion once he arrived in South Vietnam, however, because he also told me he thought he was going to die there -- from the first day he arrived 'til the last day he left.

Which, for me, was lesson one in the life of a combat vet. 

You live in constant fear.  It's a mental tension that never goes away.  We all now know about post traumatic stress  disorder. This is pre-traumatic stress disorder.

When he got to Vietnam, Capt. Ted Lackland  was supposed to command a mechanized battalion, for which he had been trained. But there either weren't any there then, or weren't enough of them. So the higher-ups made him run an infantry battalion. They said he was a Ranger and that Rangers could do anything.  The fact that they said this tells you a lot about how bureaucracies cover their butts. 

The fact that Ted did it tells you a lot about him.

As the summer continued, so did my education.  The first thing Ted did when he got his battalion was blow up the liquor bunker.  In Vietnam, even if every day seemed to be your last, drunkeness did not increase the chance that you might be wrong and live to worry tomorrow.

The next thing he did was enforce order.  No back talk.  In fact, no conversation.  This was war, not a debating society, and survival, not feelings, was what counted.  He fined anyone who was not wearing their flak jacket properly.  The troops complained.  In Vietnam it was 120 F and humid on the best of days. "It's too hot to wear," one GI bitched about the flak jacket order. "It's supposed to be," remarked the Captain, "It stops bullets."

Others were fined for walking on the dykes in the rice paddies. The dykes were booby-trapped.  The  chest deep water in the paddies was  rat infested and snake riven.  But it wouldn't kill you.

Then there was the racism.  

Some guys were constantly drawing perimeter patrol duty, which materially increased the chances of coming home in a box. Lackland regularized that duty so that everyone had to take his turn.  One black private came up to him, their black Captain,  and said, "I know I'm gonna get fined for this, but I just wanted to tell you that the black guys in this outfit hate you.  Which is OK. 'Cause the white guys in this outfit hate you just as much."  Lackland looked at him and said, "You're right.  Fifty dollars."

When he collected the money, he sent it to the private's account.

Which is what he did with all the fines.

In June 1968, Gen. Creighton Abrams replaced Gen. Westmoreland as the head of the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV). Within the year, Abrams noticed this Captain from Chicago and asked him to make a career of the Army. Ted, however, had other plans.   They included law school and . . .

Dorothy.

Who he married soon after he returned.

After graduating from Columbia, Ted was an associate for three years at Dewey Ballantine Bushby Palmer & Wood.  (That's the old Dewey Ballantine of Gov. Dewey and, before him, Elihu Root, not the ad hoc version that greed recently ran into the ground.)  He then served as an Assistant US Attorney for three years before moving to Atlanta,  where he still practices law.   

There are lots of guys alive today because of Ted Lackland.

And at least one law student who learned about a lot more than law in the summer of '79.

Thanks, Ted.

SWIMMING IN POLLUTED WATERS

SWIMMING IN POLLUTED WATERS

In June 1970, as I was about to graduate from elementary school,  a group of us boys and girls hopped on a bus in Brooklyn and took it to Jamaica Bay.  When we arrived, a big sign at the shoreline told us that swimming was prohibited because the water was too dirty.

We went in anyway.

Years later, after Congress passed  the National Environmental Protection Act and President Nixon signed it -- bipartisanship was possible back then -- the government started to clean up Jamaica Bay.  It eventually became part of the Gateway National Recreation Area that rings the southeastern edge of New York City in Brooklyn and Queens and then extends down through the Jersey Shore. Today, the blue fish are back in the Bay as bikers, birders and boaters flock to its shore.

There are two mottoes to this story.  

The first is never swim in polluted waters.  They are unpleasantly pungent and their toxic residue leaves the water with and on you.  Put simply, you can get pretty sick.  The second, however, is that they need not remain polluted forever. Movements can start, laws can change, progress can be made.

About two weeks ago, Attorney General William Barr released the now infamous Mueller report and last week he testified about it before the Senate Judiciary Committee.  The report itself consists of 381 pages in two volumes and includes four appendices. Of the two volumes, the first reports the evidence Special Counsel Mueller assembled demonstrating Russian interference in the 2016 Presidential election and the contacts and communications between  various Trump campaign personages -- officials, volunteers, associates, hangers on -- and the Russians.  The second  reports the evidence Mueller assembled on Trump's efforts to influence, derail or stop the investigation.  

The top line conclusions in both volumes are now well-known.  

As to the first, Mueller concluded that neither the President nor anyone in his campaign had violated federal law by conspiring with Russia's computer hacking and dissemination operation or its social media campaign against Clinton.  In so doing, Mueller applied standard Justice Department protocols that govern decisions on whether to prosecute or decline to prosecute in any specific case. These protocols require that the attorneys believe they can prove any charge beyond a reasonable doubt and sustain any conviction on appeal.  In this case, therefore, Mueller's conclusion was that the evidence did not establish the federal crime of conspiracy beyond a reasonable doubt.

This does not mean there were no contacts between Trump's campaign and the Russians, or that the campaign did not encourage the Russians, utilize what they had hacked, or fully embrace their anti-Clinton  social media campaign.  

The campaign did all three.  

In one instance, that of Trump Jr. agreeing to meet with Russians who promised dirt on Clinton, they also appeared more than willing to cross the criminal line and did not do so only because the promise was not backed by substance.  Ditto in another, when two named Trump campaign officials (Michael Flynn and Sam Clovis) sought Clinton emails they knew were stolen property from an individual who claimed to be able to (but ultimately could not)  get the material from the Russians; indeed, on the Trump campaign's search for Clinton emails, there is a whole section of smoke where a rogue's gallery of actors (Papadopoulos, Miller and Clovis) do not deny but cannot recall ever hearing that the Russians had the emails or the campaign could get them, even though this is more or less what the Australians reported Papadopoulos had told them (and the reason the FBI investigation started in the first place) . Then, of course, there were Paul Manfort's regular contacts (which included months long sharing of internal campaign polling data) with pro-Russian Ukrainians bent on legitimizing Russia's seizure of Crimea.

On all of these contacts and communications, Trump himself has now been blessed by a remarkable inability to recall.  

Appendix C to the report is a copy of Trump's written answers under oath to the Special Counsel's questions on Russia's hacking and social media campaign.  In those answers, Trump states that he had "no recollection" of Trump Jr.'s meeting at the time it occurred or of anyone informing him at any time during the campaign that Russia wanted to assist the campaign.  He also states that he did not "remember being aware of" any contacts between Manfort and the Ukrainians or about the sharing of any polling data with them.  In his own evaluation of the President's answers, Mueller himself calls them "inadequate," noting that on thirty occasions the President did not recall or remember any of the information called for in the question; other responses are called "incomplete or imprecise".

Things get worse in Volume II.

In it, Mueller lays out ten instances in which Trump himself may have obstructed justice.  The word "may" in that last sentence is generous.  To begin, Mueller decided at the outset that, since he could not indict the President for any crime given existing Justice Department policy, it would not be fair to accuse the President of a crime in the event Mueller concluded one had been committed.  Instead, Mueller decided to lay out all the evidence on the issue and then warn us that, while he wasn't accusing the President of obstruction of justice, he wasn't exonerating the President on this issue either.

In the trade, for lack of a better term, this is what is known as a cluster f**k.

On the one hand, the evidence that Trump obstructed justice is pretty compelling.  After trying to exact a loyalty pledge in one  meeting, and more or less telling him to go easy on former NSA Michael Flynn (who had lied to the FBI when he denied discussing sanctions with Russia's ambassador to the United States in the period before Trump was inaugurated but during which sanctions had been imposed by President Obama) in another, Trump fired FBI Director Comey. He publicly denied Comey's accounts of both meetings.  He also tried to promote the false story that he was firing Comey based solely on Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein's criticism of Comey's handling of the Clinton email matter during the election. The Special Counsel found that Comey's accounts of his meetings with the President were accurate and the  President's public denials were not.  The Special Counsel also reported Trump's public admissions that he, Trump,  had fired Comey on account of the Russian investigation.  

In June 2017, the President directed White House counsel Don McGahn to have the Special Counsel fired for conflicts of interest. When McGahn told him there were none and then did not comply with the order, Trump twice asked a former campaign aide, Corey Lewandowski,  to tell Attorney General Sessions to curtail the Mueller investigation by restricting it to future elections (meanwhile, Trump was repeatedly telling Sessions to "unrecuse" himself and take over supervision of the Special Counsel's investigation).  Lewandowski, hardly a profile in courage, passed the request onto Rick Dearborn, but Dearborn thought it "definitely raised an eyebrow" and wouldn't pass it on to Sessions.  

Later that summer, Trump told aides not to disclose emails relating to Trump Jr.'s 2016 "dirt on Clinton" meeting with Russians and then edited a press release to lie about the purpose of the meeting.  

In early 2018, Trump told McGahn to publicly deny that he, Trump, had told McGahn to have the Special Counsel fired. McGahn refused. 

And throughout 2018, the President repeatedly suggested that a pardon of Paul Manfort was possible while openly claiming that the Special Counsel was not treating Manafort fairly.  Manafort, of course, was later found guilty of multiple felonies and then pled to others.  

In a similar vein, Trump sought to assure witnesses like Flynn and Michael Cohen of his support, praising them in general or congratulating them on their fortitude as others conveyed messages behind the scenes that the President admired them or had their back.  In Cohen's case, as the report also notes, support turned to vitriol the moment Cohen turned on Trump

Mueller carefully sets out all of this evidence (and more)  and then follows each factual section with an analysis of how those facts fit into the three elements of obstruction.  In reading these analyses, it's pretty clear that a case of obstruction either exists or can easily be brought.  On the bases of what is recounted above, it is apparent that Trump regularly sought to impede or derail the investigation by leaning on investigators and supervisors to act in his personal interest, by trolling witnesses with praise and suggested pardons, and by infecting any would be jury pool (which, in this case, is the electorate at large) with false public accounts.  He also asked people to lie, openly in the case of McGahn, implicitly in the case of Manafort and Cohen.  

Mueller, however,  was hamstrung by the Justice Department's policy precluding the indictment of a sitting President.

So, he never pulled the trigger.  

For reasons which have never really been explained, Attorney General William Barr did not think himself similarly constrained.  Within days of receiving Mueller's report, and without having looked at the underlying evidence, Barr decided Trump had not obstructed justice and said so in a four page "summary" of the report.   This, in turn, elicited a scathing rebuke from Mueller himself, who wrote that Barr's summary "did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance" of Mueller's "work and conclusions."  Instead, said Mueller, Barr created "public confusion about critical aspects of the results of [the] investigation" that "threaten[ed] to undermine [its] central purpose . . . to assure public confidence in [its] outcome."

No kidding.

In fact, the litany of confusion is mind-bending.

First, the President is obviously confused.  The report, notwithstanding Trump's repeated tweets to the contrary, did not find "No Collusion, No Obstruction".  Rather, on the federal crime of conspiracy (there is no crime known as collusion), the report found only that there was not sufficient evidence to prove that crime beyond a reasonable doubt; and on the federal crime of obstruction of justice, it offered up a bevy of facts on which such a crime could be prosecuted were indictment of a sitting President not barred by Justice Department policy.

Second, the President's lawyers are confused.  This week, one of them, Emmet Flood, claimed that once Mueller had declined to prosecute Trump for obstruction, he should have said no more.  The basis for this claim is that prosecutors, in routinely declining to prosecute cases, never discuss the evidence underlying the case. That, of course, ignores the unique  reason Mueller had  for not prosecuting in this case -- it was not because he thought Trump had not committed the crime, it was because the Justice Department policy precludes indictment of a sitting President as an initial matter. It's hard under this circumstance to understand precisely what Flood thinks Mueller should have done.  But presumably, once Mueller determined that no indictment of Trump was possible, Flood thinks he should have reported as much and closed shop.  No doubt Trump would have liked that outcome.  It, however, is not what the Special Counsel statute requires.

Third, the public is confused.  Significant numbers now believe that, because Mueller did not establish that Trump committed the crime of conspiracy specifically in connection with Russia's interference in the 2016 election, Trump should not be impeached for any reason and the matter should simply die.  This is also the almost universal opinion of the Republican party.

It is also wrong.  

Impeachment does not require, nor is it limited to, criminal conduct.  "High crimes" justify it but so do "high" "misdemeanors".  And what is meant by the latter is not lower level criminal conduct.  Rather, when the founders inserted the clause, which they borrowed from English common law, they were referring to any misbehavior by the chief magistrate so severe as to justify his or her removal.  They then left the specific definition of that severe misbehavior to the actual participants in any later impeachment drama.

So, should Trump be impeached?

The answer is maybe.

Russia's interference in the 2016 election is no small matter.  To the contrary, protecting against it (or, for that matter, against electoral interference by any foreign actor) is central to preserving the republic and the institutions that allow democracy to survive and thrive.  Once elections can be rigged or manipulated,  and especially once they can be rigged or manipulated by hostile foreign actors, this experiment we began in 1776 simply ends.  Something remains.  People will work and deal and finance and fight.   But democracy will be a thing of the past.

Trump, however, gets none of this.  

He openly discounts -- in fact, more or less denies -- any Russian interference in the 2016 election despite a mountain of indisputable evidence to the contrary.  He does so because he fears that, in the close call that was his rise to the Presidency, any hint of Russian subterfuge carries with it the possibility that it, and not he himself, was the reason for his rise.  So petrified, his fear has now metastasized into virulent and almost always false attacks on the free press, the judiciary, career attorneys in the Department of Justice, and political opponents of whatever stripe, Republicans included. In turn, this has created an executive branch in which sycophants thrive and anyone not so inclined struggles.  There is a reason Rex Tillerson, James Mattis, Reince Priebus, Don McGahn, John Kelly and Jeff Sessions have departed  -- they could no longer stomach the required ass kissing. That is also the reason Trump has been left with a growing posse of wanna be's and has-beens.  I mean, all kidding aside, does anyone really believe anything Sarah Huckabee Sanders says these days on anything that matters?

I do not know whether Trump committed a high crime or misdemeanor in connection with Russia's 2016 interference in the Presidential election .  But I also do not know that he did not and, at this point, I do not care whether the reasonable doubt standard can be met.  I do care, however, that he cares more about himself and his own success in 2016 than he does about the integrity of our elections.  I do care that he has repeatedly tried to subvert, demean and derail an investigation that was about the integrity of our elections.  And I very much care that I now have a President who cannot remember whether he was told the Russians had dirt on his opponent, or her emails,  or wanted to help him win in 2016.  

These are not the sorts of things anyone forgets.  

The House Judicary Committee should begin an impeachment inquiry.  It should be thorough and methodical and should answer all the questions that remain.  If it's done before the 2020 election, fine.  If it's not done before the 2020 election and Trump loses, that's fine too.  We can end it there.  And if it's not done before the 2020 election and Trump wins, that too is fine.  We can continue and finish it thereafter.

We are swimming in polluted waters here.

We have to clean them up.

But the first thing we have to do, one way or the other, is . . . 

Get out of the water.

RELEASE ME

RELEASE ME

For two years, Donald Trump has been vilifying Robert Mueller.

Using the presidential bully pulpit in ways never imagined by its creator, Theodore Roosevelt, the mouth from Manhattan called Mueller's investigation a "witch hunt",  a "hoax", "rigged" and "bullshit".  He asserted that Mueller's team -- which the ex-Marine, ex-head of the FBI, and ex-head of DOJ's Criminal Division personally selected --   were "angry" and "hardened Democrats" with "some big Crooked Hillary supporters" and  "Zero Republicans".  He said that some members of the team were themselves guilty of "fraudulent acts".

None of this was true, either because it was patently false (the claim the investigation was a "witch hunt", a "hoax", "bullshit" or manned by fraud) or because the adjectives attached to what was true (namely, that some of Mueller's team supported Clinton or were Democrats) were themselves false or, as Mueller undoubtedly knew, irrelevant to the Special Counsel's mission.  Indeed, if Democrats or Hillary supporters -- "hardened" or otherwise -- cannot serve as professional prosecutors, it is difficult to see how Republicans or "hardened" conservatives like Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Alito or Thomas could professionally serve as Justices of the Supreme Court.

But, of course, they do.

In truth, Donald Trump never deserved Robert Mueller.

Mueller is everything Trump is not. 

Honest, forthright, fair, taciturn, careful, professional and hard working. 

There is a classiness in his buttoned-down, white shirt absence of bravado. 

In the two years of Mueller's investigation, there was not a single leak from his office, which must be a first in the history of Washington, D.C.  During that same period, while Trump worked the refs in his nightly twitter feed, brainwashing his base into believing the investigation should never have started despite a mountain of probable cause, neither Mueller nor any of his team responded to Trump's lies. 

They just did their job.

Which is now over.

Ours, however, isn't.

Twenty years ago, Kenneth Starr, a court-appointed Independent Counsel, completed his investigation of Bill Clinton.  He then messengered his multi-volume report to Capitol Hill, where it was immediately disclosed.  In it were all of the  numbing but prurient details of the then-President's liaison with a White House intern.

Armed with that report, the House impeached the President, essentially for lying about sex.  The Senate, however, refused to convict, deciding this did not remotely amount to a high crime and misdemeanor.  And, Kenneth Starr and his office having behaved nothing like Robert Mueller and his, everyone in Washington decided that (i) Independent Counsels were not such a good idea after all and (ii) the law authorizing them should lapse.  That law was then replaced by a statute allowing Attorneys General to appoint Special Counsels in the event a subsequent President had to be investigated.  Under that statute, the Special Counsel sends his final report to the Attorney General, who then decides whether to make it public.

Which is why we are . . .  where we are . . .  now.

Robert Mueller has completed his report.  The Department of Justice has admitted that the report is over 300 pages in length.  

But we do not have it.

Instead we have William Barr's four page letter purporting to summarize it.

For a number of reasons, the letter is a bit . . . 

Strange

Though Trump and his supporters are now claiming the report completely exonerates the President and his campaign of any collusion with the Russians, the letter itself creates confusion in reporting Mueller's conclusion on that subject. 

Barr asserts that "The Special Counsel's investigation did not find that the Trump campaign or anyone associated with it conspired or coordinated with Russia in its efforts to influence" the election. He then quotes the actual Mueller report as stating: "[T]he investigation did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities."  There is a critical difference, however,  between a finding of coordination, which is a factual matter, and establishing a conspiracy, which is a legal one, and Barr's letter at best elides it.  In addition, the actual quotation from the Mueller report, which Barr begins with a bracketed capital T, is necessarily preceded by language that has been omitted by Barr.

I have no idea what Mueller actually concluded or what is in the part of the quoted sentence that is omitted.  The actual quotation from the report suggests Mueller  concluded only that he could not establish a conspiracy beyond a reasonable doubt; the quotation could be consistent with the absence of any factual findings relevant to this issue, but it also could be consistent with the existence of such findings, albeit at level Mueller deemed insufficient to make out a legal case, and either of these possibilities could be informed by what has been omitted.  Or by any of the other material in the 300 plus page report. 

Barr's letter also states that Mueller "determined . . . there were two main efforts to influence the 2016 election." According to Barr, the first was the social media and disinformation campaign conducted by Russia's Internet Research Agency and the second was Russia's "computer hacking operations designed to gather and disseminate information to influence the election".  As to each, Barr repeats that Mueller "did not find" that Trump or anyone in his campaign coordinated or conspired with the Russians. 

It is unclear, however, whether these "two main efforts" were the only efforts in which Mueller  thought Trump might have conspired, or whether other secondary efforts by the Russians either did not attract Trump's attention or were too small to matter (either to Mueller or, more likely, Barr). If the first, that might  explain how Trump, Jr., Kushner and Manaforte's June 2016 meeting with Vesilnitskaya (and theirs and Trump's lies about that meeting), or the GOP's change in its Ukrainian platform at the later party convention, could be deemed  irrelevant by Mueller, as neither related specifically to either Russia's computer hacking or the social media disinformation campaign per se.  If the second, which is more likely, we still need to know what Mueller investigated and what he found in those specific instances.  This is particularly important in connection with then NSA Director-designate Michael Flynn's secret conversations with Russian ambassador Kislyak on relaxing Obama's sanctions for Russia's seizure of Crimea.

One highlight of Barr's letter is its report that Mueller decided not to make a recommendation either way on whether Trump had obstructed justice.  In this section of his letter, however, Barr is also careful to quote the Mueller report's statement  that "while the report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him."  

In an op-ed piece in yesterday's Washington Post, George Conway noted that this was "a stunning thing for a prosecutor to say", especially one unwilling to make a recommendation on the ultimate legal issue. Conway explains: "If [Mueller's] report doesn't exonerate the president, there must be something pretty damning in it about him, even if it might not suffice to prove a crime beyond a reasonable doubt." 

Finally, and most oddly, faced with the fact that Mueller decided not to recommend or decline prosecution on obstruction , Barr's letter reports that he decided to make the call in consultation with the Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein (the latter of whom has also been vilified by Trump over the last two years; at one point, Trump even said Rosenstein should "be jailed" for having appointed Mueller).  And Barr's decision is that the evidence in the report was not sufficient to "establish that the President committed an obstruction-of-justice offense."

Barr's letter on this point takes on the character of a legal brief.   He begins by saying that Mueller's "decision to describe the facts of his obstruction investigation without reaching a legal conclusion leaves it to the Attorney General to determine whether the conduct described in the report constitutes a crime."  Really?  Who says?  The job was Mueller's; that he did not do it, or declined to do it, does not make it Barr's.  In fact, the whole purpose of the Special Counsel statute was to insulate such a decision from political bias by taking it away from a political appointee of the President.  Barr is such an appointee and his decision on obstruction  is thus at odds with the insularity created by the statute.  

In his letter, Barr explains that obstruction generally requires that the government prove beyond a reasonable doubt that "a person, acting with corrupt intent, engaged in obstructive conduct with a sufficient nexus to a pending or contemplated proceeding."  He also asserts that the "absence of  . . . evidence" on collusion bore "upon the President's intent."  Finally he concludes that the Mueller report "identified no actions" that satisfied the legal requirement.

This is baffling.  

From public sources, we know that Trump fired FBI Director Comey after Comey had not complied with his demand to end the Flynn investigation,  that he admitted on national television that he did so thinking the Russian investigation was a big nothing, and that, as former Sen. Gary Hart put it, he has "trolled" the "possibility of pardons across the paths of several White House staff".  We also know that Trump has routinely denied that Russia tried to subvert the 2016 election, has accepted Putin's denials of interference, has regularly cozied-up to the Russian autocrat, and is in hock at some level to Russian oligarchs. In themselves, these facts would seem sufficient to demonstrate corrupt intent and at least one act related to the investigation.  And as to the absence of an underlying crime, obstruction is regularly prosecuted even where the underlying crime has not been deemed established. 

None of this is to say that Barr's letter is ultimately misleading or inaccurate.  Nor is it to say that the underlying evidence won't eliminate some questions that now exist.  It is entirely possible, for example, that the June 2016 meeting with Vesilnitskaya had nothing to do with "dirt on Hillary." The PR hack who set it up says that this was all false hype common in his line of work and was only  designed to get Trump or his people to take a meeting.  With Trump, this certainly makes sense, and  Mueller may well have concluded as much.

We just do not know.

The President and his supporters have been taking victory laps this week in the wake of the Barr letter and this is worse than strange. The best that can be said of the Barr letter (and, as of now, what we know of the actual Mueller report) is that the President cannot be charged with the crime of conspiracy.  This is hardly something to brag about.  Put differently, "unless it's a crime, it's fine" is not the standard to which Presidents should be held accountable.    

Even if this one thinks or acts like it is.

The fact that he does, as with all the many other degradations to which Donald Trump has subject the office of the Presidency, is no longer news.

But what is in those 300 pages almost certainly is.

Bottom line?

Somewhere in Washington, D.C. today, a buttoned-down Robert Mueller is yelling (OK, it's Mueller, so he's saying it softly) . . .

Release me.

JEFFERSON REPRISED -- HOW THE FEW CAN STOP ALIENATING THE MANY AND PERHAPS SAVE THE COUNTRY

JEFFERSON REPRISED -- HOW THE FEW CAN STOP ALIENATING THE MANY AND PERHAPS SAVE THE COUNTRY

"Great innovations should not be forced on slender majorities."

So said Thomas Jefferson in 1808.  

He did so in a letter to General Kosciusko, the Polish-Lithuanian military leader who had joined and then become an engineering hero in the Continental army during the Revolution.  Kosciusko was  responsible for designing American fortifications at Sarotoga, strengthening West Point, and building  the famous swamp boats that allowed America's Southern Army to flee Cornwallis in the years before Yorktown.   All were seminal contributions to the Revolution's  ultimate success.  By 1808, however,  he had returned to Europe.  

In his letter, Jefferson explained that he was delaying the submission to Congress of his own proposal to impose new federal conscription laws on state militias.  Versions of his plan had twice failed to pass given the various states' jealous regard for the longstanding practice of local militia recruitment and control, and though Jefferson thought he could get the measure passed by a small margin, he did not want that. He understood that his proposal was a major undertaking, the acceptance of which required widespread public support.  He knew that such support did not yet exist and that, without it, the plan would either be undermined or seed embittered dissent.  Having become President after the vicious campaign of 1800, he  also knew how embittered dissent could become.

So he pulled the plan and shelved it for another day.

For many reasons too long to list, Donald Trump is no Thomas Jefferson.  One, however, is that he does not follow the "slender majorities" rule.  In fact, he and the current Republican party have replaced it with a more dangerous approach.

Call it their "large pluralities" or "substantial minority" rule.

One of the hallmarks of the last two Republican presidencies is that neither was birthed by a majority vote. George W. Bush received around 500,000 fewer votes than Al Gore in 2000 and Trump received three million fewer votes than Hillary Clinton in 2016.  Under those circumstances, adherents to Jefferson's slender majorities rule would have been circumspect in their use of executive power.  They would not have forced big changes on electorates that had not supported them.

Neither, however,  did so.

For his part, Bush was the lesser villain.  Though his tax cuts and Iraq War lacked majority support and his appointment of Sam Alito put a hardened conservative on the Supreme Court, his education bill was bi-partisan and the Roberts appointment to the Court less extreme than Alito's.  

Trump, however, has thrown Jefferson under the bus.  

From his Cabinet to the assault on Obamacare; from the tax bill to his Court appointments; from killing the climate change convention  to his recent "national emergency" build-the-wall executive order, the Administration has embraced and pursued the agenda of the far right. It is an agenda the majority of the country does not share. In declaring a (false) national emergency at the southern border, he also has flouted the will of Congress and more likely than not violated the Constitution's separation of powers.  

Somewhere between 35 and 42% of America supports him and about 25 to 30% does so enthusiastically.  To retain their loyalty, Trump holds regular campaign-style rallies in which he reprises his in-your-face insults cum mendacity style of persuasion.  In that arena, opponents -- indeed, entire arms of the governmental "deep state" -- are engaged in "witch hunts"; the free press is the "enemy of the people"; "lock her up" is still a bellowed response; and violence often breaks out.  In one of Trump's recent rallies, a reporter was actually assaulted.  In his two hours stream of consciousness appearance at CPAC earlier this month, he called the Mueller investigation "bullshit".  It is a view he has cultivated for two years, sparing no lie or f-bomb.  The people who love him buy it, even though the country as a whole doesn't.

Prior to the second Bush Administration taking office in 2001, Vice-President (then elect) Cheney was worried that any hesitancy, any uncertainty or circumspection in the pursuit of their plans, would create an appearance that the new administration doubted its own legitimacy. He therefore counseled an unapologetic assertion of power in the service of their announced plans.  Bush II, however,  was not always on board.  Somewhere in the recesses of familial lineage, the voice if not of Jefferson than of his father or grandfather counseled moderation; hence, No Child Left Behind and (perhaps) John Roberts.

But Trump is no Bush (pere or fils) either.

He does not court moderates or moderation.  

This is dangerous.

The Constitution makes minority government legal and therefore possible. Five Presidents have failed to win the popular vote, two within the last twenty years.  The regional separation of our political parties is now stark.  Democratic office holders are largely coastal and metropolitan. Republicans win in the south, the plains and in rural areas.  

If this continues, or if Presidencies birthed in popular vote defeats become the new normal, we will face a choice.  

We can either drive Americans further apart in a winner take all exercise of power that ignores the will of the majority.

Or the "winner" can court and accomodate the actual majority.

The last time parties were so polarized and regions so dominated by one or the other was in the first half of the nineteenth century. It took a  Civil War to lance that boil.  And given that the issue then was slavery, on which compromise was never really possible and the end to which was not going to come voluntarily despite the protestations of latter day revisionists, perhaps war was the only possibility.

There is no equivalent issue today.

But there is a similar, stark division of loyalty.  And there also is a similar resentment of opponents that is growing and that threatens to undermine the whole republican project.  Trump -- our divider in chief -- fuels that resentment with abandon.  His followers love him. His opponents hate his utterly aberrant lack of civility. There are few in the middle.

Prior to the Civil War,  Abraham Lincoln embraced Thomas Jefferson.  In a letter in 1859, Lincoln wrote: "All honor to Jefferson, to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so embalm it there, that today, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and stumbling block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression."  The "document" was the Declaration of Independence.  The abstract principle was that "all men are created equal."

Embracing that principle was the solution to that era's bloody divisions.

So perhaps embracing his less abstract principle -- written thirty-two years, one Revolution, three Presidencies,  and one fraught transition (in 1800) later -- can be today's solution.

For self-government to survive and thrive, those who lose elections must retain the belief that the system is fair and legitimate.  This is especially the case where, as here, electoral victory does not require a majority vote.  In that case,  the "losers" -- who in at least one respect were actually the "winners" --  cannot be ignored. They have to be cultivated.  Insulting them is worse than demeaning.  It is stupid.  Power at some level has to be shared.  The loyal opposition must remain . . .

Loyal.

"Great innovations should not be forced on slender majorities."

And they should not be enforced at all by bare pluralities or substantial minorities.

The alternative is not pretty. 

HOW TO SURVIVE PRESIDENTS' DAY

HOW TO SURVIVE PRESIDENTS' DAY

This coming Monday, February 18, is Presdents' Day, a federal holiday. 

The stock market, banks and all federal offices are closed. 

The holiday was initially a celebration of Washington's birthday and was followed by a celebration later in the month of Lincoln's birthday.  In 1971, however, the Uniform Monday Holiday Act was passed and a single celebratory Monday in February was created to honor both of them.  Meanwhile, some states still wanted  to honor each of them individually and re-established separate holidays.  So now, in order to assuage those recalcitrants, and avoid confusing the rest of us, Presidents' Day has become a holiday celebrating "all U.S. Presidents, past and present" (italics mine).

This year, that creates a problem.

The holiday comes at a time when the current incumbent is disregarding the Constitutional separation of powers.  He is doing so to declare an emergency that doesn't exist . . . to continue a fight he has already lost . . . so he can appease the extremists he listens to during the bulk of his "working" day  . . . which he and his handlers euphemistically call "Executive Time". 

As with all euphemisms, this one is designed to disguise reality.  The reality here is that Donald Trump is lazy, dishonest, not particularly interested in his job . . .

And bad at it.  

So, what's a Presidents' Day celebrant supposed to do?

                       *          *          *          *          *

The Presidency is a job to which no one comes fully prepared.

To be a good President, let alone a great one,  requires energy, knowledge, competence, compassion and curiosity.  It also requires a paradoxical mixture of humility and self-promotion.

None of this, assuming it is possessed, guarantees historical approbation.  On the one hand, events often out run even the best.  On the other, history itself tends to focus on crisis and in the process often neglects the quotidian.  

There have probably been a number of good Presidents -- those who checked off most or all of my boxes -- wrongly consigned to the more forgotten corners of our past.  

Dwight Eisenhower comes to mind.

So does Ulysses Grant.

The former presided over a cold war and a warm economic peace.  He was careful not to upend the latter, stifling the urge of extremists in his own party who would have repealed all of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal.  FDR's program had led to the most widely distributed productivity gains in our economic history, and in so doing had created the modern middle class,  all thanks to the National Labor Relations Act, Social Security, and the GI Bill.

Much to the chagrin of the right-wingers, Ike kept all of it.

At the same time, Eisenhower also confronted the Soviet Union rationally.  The General from D-Day did not have to convince anyone that he knew how to fight a war, or that he would do so if necessary.  So, he ended one in Korea that had become a stalemate and did not start one with the Soviets that would have been a mutual holocaust.

Nevertheless, when Eisenhower left the Presidency in 1961, he was known more for his golf than his stewardship.

For his part, Grant too is among our most historically underrated chief executives.

Until recent biographers began to re-assess his administration, Grant was seen mostly as a great military leader who, as President, became  a lax administrator victimized by corrupt appointees.  The gems ignored in this reading included his championing of the 15th Amendment that provided for black suffrage, his successful fight to abolish the first Ku Klux Klan (the second one emerged in the early 20th century long after he was gone), and his condemnation of America's Indian policy as immoral.

Grant also was the author of a number of foreign policy successes orchestrated by his Secretary of State Hamilton Fish, the latter of whom is himself an unsung hero in the pantheon of American cabinet secretaries. Among their signal successes was negotiation and passage of the Treaty of Washington with Great Britain. The treaty avoided war with Great Britain over the latter's funding of Confederate privateers during the Civil War and required arbitration of damage claims caused by them.  Though the United States was ultimately awarded $15.5 million in arbitration, the treaty's historic effect was to guarantee Anglo-American peace and allow finance capital (of which Britain then had much more) to fully underwrite American industry.  

But when Grant left office in 1877 his accomplishments quickly faded.

The myth of the Confederate lost cause took hold and discounted his commitment to civil rights, a commitment that would not be equalled until the middle of the next century.  And the still extant British Empire allowed evaluations of his diplomacy to be shoe-horned into, if not irrelevance, at least obscurity, the latter of which is often the cruel fate of those toiling for lesser powers.

In any case, the Presidency is not just about the Washingtons, Jeffersons, Lincolns and Roosevelts.  The greats and near greats live in a club that also includes forgotten greats like Eisenhower and Grant. 

And there are many more of the latter than the former.  

Gerald Ford traded a pardon for later electoral defeat in order to save the country from the continued trauma of Watergate.  Bush I traded a tax hike for the same result to help rescue the country from fiscal profligacy.

John Quincy Adams traded the entire office for eighteen later years in the House of Representatives, where he became such a vociferous critic of slavery that Jacksonian Democrats and Southern Whigs passed the notorious gag rule forbidding anti-slavery petitions from being brought before the House.  In 1841, while a sitting Congressman, he appeared before the Supreme Court and won freedom for the slaves on the Spanish ship The Amistad.

His father, John Adams, the first President to lose a bid for re-election, went home after he was defeated, establishing a precedent as important to government of, by and for the people as any other because it made elections, as opposed to insurrections, the only vehicle through which popular discontent could legitimately express itself.

Harry Truman fired a popular General in the middle of a war.

This tanked Truman's poll numbers as two-thirds of those surveyed by Gallup disapproved.

It also saved the principle of civilian control of the military at a point where it arguably most needed saving.  For, had Douglas MacArthur's obdurate opposition-in-uniform succeeded, or even been permitted to exist unchecked, the consequences for civilian control, especially during the cold war when nuclear annihilation was never far from our collective minds, cannot be gainsaid.  There is a reason military leaders who become President are ex-Generals, not serving ones; it stops us from becoming South America. 

                        *          *          *          *          *

Count 'em.

In addition to Washington, Lincoln, the two Roosevelts and Jefferson --  the Mount Rushmore plus FDR quintet of heroes -- there are seven forgotten presidential heroes.  Some were forgotten then, some are forgotten now. Still others have been forgotten both then and now.  As a combined group  they are Democrats and Republicans; early, middle and late republic office holders; more than a quarter of the forty-five we have had.

And they amount to a  veritable bi-partisan smorgasbord of reasons to celebrate.

So, this Presidents' Day,  let's . . .

Remember them . . .

And forget Trump.

THE WALL, THE WIZARD AND THE RAINBOW

THE WALL, THE WIZARD AND THE RAINBOW

"Over the Rainbow" is probably my favorite song.

I have recordings of it by a half dozen artists.  

There's Willie Nelson's earthy version, his rasp turning romance into metaphorical reality.  

There's Israel Kamkawiwo'Ole's phantasmagorical version, original verses jumbled over the backdrop of a tropical ukulele in a way that prevents the message from becoming old.

There's Ariana Grande's raw version, closing for the victims of Manchester's concert bombing, where her tears and tone combined to produce hope.

And then, of course, there's the original version by Judy Garland, sung in the 1939 film,  The Wizard of Oz.

In the movie, the song is one of the bookends of  the film.  It is sung at the beginning, more or less as an introduction to the dreamy adventures that will unfold as a little girl and her dog, with their trio of scarecrow, cowardly lion and heartless tin man, travel the yellow brick road in search of brains, brawn and love on a wizard's promise that they will have all three if only they destroy the wicked witch.

The other bookend is at the end -- the scene where Toto pulls back the curtain  to expose  the faux wizard spewing fear and bloviation, aided and abetted by assorted mechanical extras, as he reneges on his promise, at which point Dorothy and her friends are forced to discover that what they wanted they had all along.  

It was in themselves.

They just hadn't been looking in the right place.

Today in  America, Donald Trump wants a wall. It was the signature and central promise of his presidential campaign.  In rally after rally, he brought angry crowds to their feet with its promise.  Paid for by Mexico. Nothing little or impermanent. Big and long, stretching from Tijuana to Texas. 

And impenetrable.

A bit like Trump himself.

On the merits, this was and remains an utterly harebrained idea.  

There isn't a southern border crisis.  The number of illegals crossing the southern border is in fact at an all time low.  The vast majority of undocumented aliens now in the country came here by air and have over-stayed their visas.  

A wall from  Tijuana to Texas will not stop that.  

Nor do the experts in charge of border security  want a wall, which they consider a waste.  Instead they want more border agents and greater broad band at points of entry, where the majority of those who show up want asylum, where their showing up is entirely legal, and where there is now a backlog brought on by Trump's refusal to allow them into the country pending their asylum hearings.  

Trump argues that asylum seekers come here and then fail to show up at their hearings.  This is false (more than 90% show up). He also claims that those coming across the border are criminals and terrorists, which is also false (in fact, immigrants as a whole are more law-abiding than natural born citizens, and no terrorist has come across the southern border; the 9/11 terrorists came here by plane and from the north).  The American drug problem is of course fueled in part by foreign suppliers.  But they come in by air, sea, tunnel and (at points of entry) truck, none of which the wall will prevent.  Which is why the experts want more agents and broad band at those points of entry, and more funding for the Coast Guard to interdict sea based smuggling.

They also want air conditioned trailers for the drug sniffing dogs.

Who apparently are baking in the southwestern heat.

None of this has changed Trump's view in the slightest.  

Instead, he has now closed down the federal government, extorting Congress to appropriate more than $5 billion to start building his wall.  More than 800,000 federal workers are furloughed or working without pay, many of whom are now showing up at food banks for free meals.  The Democrats are willing to negotiate on border issues but not at the point of a virtual gun; they want the government opened without pre-conditions.  A number of Republicans want this as well.

But Trump doesn't.

The petulant childishness of it all has started to have an effect on Trump's approval ratings, which weren't any good to begin with.  Gallup has him at 37% approval and Five Thirty-Eight's running average has him below 40% for the first time in a long time.

Nevertheless, and through it all, some significant portion of Americans approve of Trump and the wall.  In fact, his base is immovable on the subject.

Why?

That question has, of late,  brought me back to Oz.

Border control is about security and Trump's base, for all its anger and bravado, is insecure.  For some of them, the insecurity takes the form of a grossly unequal share of an economic pie that expanded enormously over the past forty years and a labor market that treats them like expendable parts.  For others, the insecurity is emotional, born of a perception that coastal elites and the college class look down on them and their values, whether those values take the form of opposition to marriage equality and abortion or a love affair with Donald Trump and his wall.

Values are critical.

Were the wall central to any of them, the argument for it would be, if not persuasive, at least defensible.

But Trump's wall is tied to no American value whatsoever.

Or, as Dorothy would put it, "We're not in Kansas anymore, Toto."

The wall won't relieve or in any way even mitigate inequality or project strength.  It won't lower the number of illegals coming into the country.  In fact,  by diverting scarce resources to this whitest elephant of a project, it will probably result in more undocumented or illegal aliens in our midst.

America is not defined by its borders.  It is defined by its foundational ideas and values -- freedom, equal opportunity, the rule of law and equality before the law.  None of the causes of today's economic or cultural insecurity can be solved by closing the government.  We can solve them, however, or at least begin to, by adhering to those values.  Freedom and equal opportunity can provide the back drop and energy for policies that redistribute some of the enormous productivity gains of the last forty years to those who were left out.  And the rule of law and equality before the law can confront the corruption that has made that possible and preserve the liberty that respects differences of opinion, religion and taste.  As one former president remarked not so long ago, "There is nothing wrong with America than cannot be cured with what is right with America."

Trump's base needs to stop paying attention to the man behind the curtain.  

As Dorothy and her friends discovered, he is "a bad wizard."

We can't wish away problems or solve them with closed doors.

But we can embrace America's foundational values.

It's not as easy as clicking one's heels.

But, in the 242 years this American experiment has thrived, it's the only way we've ever gotten . . .

Over the rainbow.