Repairing Our Democracy and a Return to ‘Republican Virtue’

If men were angels, no government would be necessary. — James Madison, “Federalist No. 51”

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As those who have followed the debate about health care will remember, Supreme Court Justice John Roberts sided with four liberal judges in issuing a majority opinion that the individual mandate behind Obamacare, the key component of a bill that compelled uninsured people to become insured, was constitutional if it was viewed as a congressional tax. This critical moment punctuated decades of failure with regard to health care legislation and positioned Roberts as one of the more moderate, fair-minded judges on the bench in an age when partisanship and compromise were becoming a lost art form in politics. In essence, amid political rancor, when his fellow conservatives were fighting tooth and nail to obstruct Obama and his programs at every turn indeed, the Democrats rammed through Obamacare without a single Republican vote Roberts saved the legislation. Although the law was far from perfect, those with a forward-thinking vision realized that health care reform was desperately needed because of runaway costs and the fact that profit-minded, not patient-minded, insurance and pharmaceutical companies had acted with near impunity for half a century.

Life on the Fringe

Now that Senate Republicans have shirked their responsibility and voted to acquit President Donald Trump, despite most of them being in agreement that he committed impeachable offenses, to hold the man accountable and drive home the fact that no one is above the law, now that we have seen three years of the president of the United States attacking the press, attacking free speech, denigrating women and almost every ethnic group in the nation, suggesting that we shoot migrants and laughing about it, courting the support of white supremacists and further ginning up racial tensions across the country, not to mention the sustained threats to the constitutional rights of all Americans, perhaps now it is our democracy that needs saving. While I certainly don’t agree with Roberts on a lot of issues, repairing what has been damaged by Trump and the GOP will take people like him, conservatives and liberals, stepping up and doing the right thing for the betterment of the nation. We have had scant little of that kind of bipartisan action the last 10-plus years.

One could argue that while the political divisiveness has always been a prominent feature of government in America, it really picked up steam in the mid- to late-2000s with the advent of the Tea Party and the populist, know-nothing movement that began to take over the Republican Party and slowly move it away from the center under people like Ronald Reagan and George Bush Sr., to the fringe under newly christened stars of the GOP, an “every man” blue collar worker nicknamed Joe the Plumber and Sarah Palin. Almost in lockstep, as the Republican Party turned away from the center, the far left did the same thing.

One really had a feeling that after Palin and presidential candidate John McCain lost the election and with the lofty “hope and change” message of unity and solidarity that Obama brought to his pre-election and presidential speeches, the passage of the Affordable Care Act and the Supreme Court decision to legalize gay marriage in all 50 states, it seemed that the nation may have turned a corner. But what actually happened is that Obama, either because of his liberal values, the color of his skin or some combination of those two, precipitated a kind of conservative backlash, made even more heated and insidious by the 24/7 Republican news cycle that piped in commentary that catered, and still caters, to the lowest common denominator of white, blue-collar fear. (The late John McCain, by the way, whiffed on picking Palin to run with him, but he was another example of a Republican leader with courage and integrity who could have worked to turn the nation more toward the center had he won the election. Before he died, of course, McCain also did not escape Trump’s ire, and Trump could not resist insulting the veteran even in death.)

In any case, the idea that we, as a nation, had turned a corner was an illusion, and when Donald Trump entered the national discourse prior to the 2016 election, the stage was already set. Existing quietly under the surface of all the progressive fervor during the Obama years lurked the prejudiced, anti-immigrant, anti-gay demons of our past. The populist right from the mid-2000s never went away, and in 2016, they found a new hero in Trump, despite having virtually nothing in common with the billionaire real estate mogul and reality TV star.

The Republican Party has fallen even further into the mire. As if failing to impeach a guilty president wasn’t enough, the current GOP and their president have attacked the country’s constitutional principles and core values at nearly every turn, from tripping over themselves to nominate Trump’s now-multiple picks after illegally refusing to provide so much as a hearing for Obama’s Supreme Court selection, to kowtowing to the president and letting him lie and make outlandish claims without censure, rebuke or recourse, and attempting to roll back protections in the First Amendment and using it as a tool to loosen regulations and increase discrimination.

Ironically enough, shortly before the Senate impeachment trial was about to commence and thus, shortly before Republicans in Congress were about to embarrass themselves again and take another turn away from justice, it was Roberts who offered some instructive words in what has been, by all accounts, a deeply troubling presidential term.

‘Debate and compromise’

In his annual report about the work of the federal courts, Roberts told a “sadly ironic” story about how John Jay, one of the co-authors of “The Federalist Papers,” along with Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, was attacked by an angry mob in New York and because of his injuries, was apparently unable to continue contributing to the series of essays, which were written as a vigorous defense of the Constitution and the democratic principles of our republic.

Roberts wrote:

… We have come to take democracy for granted, and civic education has fallen by the wayside. In our age, when social media can instantly spread rumor and false information on a grand scale, the public’s need to understand our government, and the protections it provides, is ever more vital.

As Adam J. White, with the American Enterprise Institute, wrote about what Roberts had to say, the United States needed to display “self-restraint, goodwill, and moderation” in order to get back to a place of republican virtue,” which, according to the late Irving Kristol, means:

… curbing one’s passions and moderating one’s opinions in order to achieve a large consensus that will ensure domestic tranquility. We think of public-spiritedness as a form of self-expression, an exercise in self-righteousness. The Founders thought of it as a form of self-control, an exercise in self-government.

And this also includes

probity, truthfulness, self-reliance, diligence, prudence, and a disinterested concern for the welfare of the republic.

Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsch, one of Trump’s nominees, added to these ideas when he said that we should

… talk to one another respectfully; debate and compromise; and strive to live together tolerantly. … (The) essential goodness of the American people is a profound reservoir of strength … cannot be taken for granted (and) … need(s) constant tending. … (We have) the duty of having to listen to and tolerate other points of view … (and) democracy depends on our willingness, each one of us, to hear and respect even those with whom we disagree.

These values have been all but lost in the current political climate, and by quoting conservative sources, I am, as a progressive, attempting to demonstrate that compromise, civility, the sharing of good ideas, no matter where they come from, and, yes, even, virtue, should transcend party allegiance if we are to return to a place where integrity in politics matters.

A Better Way

Integrity in politics matters to Mitt Romney, another Republican who gives me hope that politics in America isn’t a lost cause. Romney, who stood alone among the GOP in his public admission that Trump was guilty, made a stunning speech today outlining why the evidence compelled him to vote to remove the president from office, noting Trump committed “an appalling abuse of the public’s trust.”

If Romney’s actions were just an anomaly and integrity doesn’t actually matter anymore, if decorum and virtue don’t matter anymore, if American politics is just destined to become a vast, wild-west frontier of insults, flame wars and misinformation, then, by all means, we can continue on a path of intellectual dishonesty, tribalism and identity politics, where the national discourse gets more fragmented and where winning an argument for your team is more important than moving the nation forward in an ethical way that benefits everyone.

But if virtue in politics and government does still matter, as I hope it does, then it seems that both our elected officials and the electorate need to walk it back and ask: If this approach isn’t working and it’s not what can we do differently and how can we be better, individually and collectively? How can we compromise and work together to change the spirit of the conversation and make it more positive? Conservatives are not the enemy, and liberals are not the enemy. Partisanship and a failure to compromise. Cynicism and apathy. Cowardice. Dishonesty. Hypocrisy. And intolerance. These are the real enemies that haunt our republic.

[Cover image: “Checks and Balances” by DeviantArt user RednBlackSalamander.]

Reclaiming the Dream

Being a product of white America in the South, lacking historical perspective and maybe even some early prejudice, I’m ashamed to say that I did not grow up with a lot of admiration for Martin Luther King Jr. Each February when Black History Month rolled around, and usually at no other time throughout the year, I heard about King’s dream for a more equitable society, one in which, even in the Deep South, black children and white children could play together in harmony and mutual admiration and respect. I heard about his call for equality at the ballot box, in the workplace and in retail stores and restaurants throughout the nation. I heard the high rhetoric and remember actually saying, probably simply parroting the opinion of an adult, that, sure, King dreamed big, but what did he actually do to make the nation better?

The ridiculous arrogance and ignorance of that question became apparent to me when, a little later in life, I began to learn about MLK in college and on my own time thereafter. Consequently, I studied Civil War history, and to whatever extent it is related, Civil Rights Era history at Clemson University in northwestern, South Carolina. Clemson can’t escape its checkered past. It has for one of its founders a racist firebrand by the name of “Pitchfork” Ben Tillman, along with a hall named in his honor.

The college is home to the Strom Thurmond Institute for Government and Public Policy, which is named for one of the staunchest pro-segregation, anti-civil rights politicians of the 20th century and a true enemy of progress. And for some good, old-fashioned, southern-fried symbolism, as it was pointed out to me by a professor of mine when I was a student there, the sidewalk design near the library that proceeds to run above the Strom Thurmond center, which is underground, is in the shape of the Confederate battle flag’s stars and bars.

And so, as a student, I was aware of the debate surrounding how educators and students, past and present, reconcile what many consider to be the age of the New South — not abandoning the past, but learning from it and fostering a more progressive, inclusive track record on race and culture — in short, how to honor the past but move forward from it into a new era.

After college, I began working at a newspaper about an hour north of Clemson in a quaint town called Clayton, Ga. Here was an interesting mix of wealthy, white Republicans and Democrats, a smattering of black folks, including the chief of police at the time, and a not insignificant Hispanic population. In spite of that eclectic mix of people, the county was mostly populated by local white, low- to middle-class residents, who valued school, church and community. Essentially, this was an even more conservative place than Clemson, but it was here, ironically, that I went even deeper into my research on the Civil War and the push for equality.

I also fully abandoned conservatism because, as I saw throughout American history, it was conservatism that fostered an atmosphere of secession in the 19th century — my home state being the first to leave the union and the last to rejoin after the Confederacy lost the war — it was conservatism that largely led to the failure of Reconstruction, the Black Codes and Jim Crow after the Civil War, and it was conservatism in the early- to mid-20th century which spoke out so vehemently, and sometimes punctuated by violence, against equal rights and equal protection under the law for women, blacks and other historically marginalized groups. I don’t think conservatism alone is a problem, but I think conservatism created the atmosphere, and is still creating the atmosphere, by which some of the most pernicious ideologies in American history could flourish, much to the detriment of our national character and collective conscience.

I had read W.E.B. Dubois’ lyrical work, “The Souls of Black Folk” while at Clemson, but it was here in Clayton that I picked up Dubois’ much longer and detailed book, “Black Reconstruction in America,” which outlined, in painful detail, the part that black people played, as the subtitle suggests, “in the attempt to reconstruct Democracy in America.” I read books and information on people like white abolitionist John Brown, who, terrorist though he was, fought alongside his black brothers for their freedom, which he saw as a right consecrated from on high. I read about white abolitionist newspaperman, William Lloyd Garrison, who wrote vigorously and tirelessly, often at risk to his personal safety, on the importance of racial equality and ending the “peculiar institution.” I read about the lives of slaves and about slave religion and how, just as many slaves found comfort in the story of the Pharaoh’s enslavement of Israel and their subsequent freedom and the story of Jesus, plantation owners and supporters of slavery used the same scripture as justification to keep their property in shackles, since the Bible both condones slavery and offers no rebuke to chattel slavery. I read books on the sometimes tense, but working relationship, between Lyndon Baines Johnson and Martin Luther King Jr. in the run-up to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and LBJ’s “Great Society” programs that were designed to address issues in education, urban development and housing, transportation, employment and other areas.

And finally, with all of this as context, I come to MLK himself. So, what did he do, to answer my own question from 25 years ago, that specifically warrants honoring him year after year, to rewatch or reread his speeches, to shed new tears over the high-minded, courageous path that few people on earth ever walk?

First, this adoration for the man is not in the least an obligatory gesture, and I would say that if we are only thinking of MLK one day out of the year, or at most, for one month — the shortest month at that — we are doing the man, his legacy and what he stood for a grave disservice. Indeed, given the current environment of prejudice in the highest office in the land and the sustained bigoted remarks that began when Trump was a candidate and has continued to this day, the institutional racism that pervades the justice system and the overarching hostile position our nation has taken against legal and illegal immigrants the last few years, the need to remember what King stood for, how he remained above the fray and elevated a nation and what he accomplished in life and death, the need to recommit ourselves individually and as a nation to reclaiming his dream is as important now as it’s ever been.

The following is a short list of reasons why we honor King today and throughout the year.

Nonviolent resistance

King brought the idea of nonviolent protests to the forefront of America’s conscience in the tradition of Mahatma Gandi. Whereas some justifiably angry black and white activists thought the best way to enact change was through a strong-arm approach, King and his nonviolent protesters appealed to and pricked America’s collective conscience with what he called “soul force.”

We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protests to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again, we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force. The marvelous new militancy which has engulfed the Negro community must not lead us to distrust all white people, for many of our white brothers, as evidenced by their presence here today, have come to realize that their destiny is tied up with our destiny.

Cynthia Tucker, a black columnist working at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution at the same time as when I got my start at the newspaper, has argued that Black History Month is a relic and we should not just remember the accomplishments of black leaders during one month out of the year, and she argues, echoing King, that the history of black folks in America is inextricably linked to American history writ large.

In short, black history is our history.

First president of the SLCC

It feels kind of silly pointing out the more obvious parts of King’s life and legacy, but as the first president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, King was instrumental in helping to start the political action organization after the Montgomery bus boycott of the mid-1950s to begin a series of other nonviolent protests across the South to facilitate and support desegregation of public spaces and numerous freedom movements across the nation.

Before the March on Washington, the organization perhaps saw its biggest win come in Birmingham with its goal of desegregating the downtown area. This series of nonviolent sit-ins of businesses that previously denied access and service to black residents was met with a disturbing level of violence by local police under the leadership of Birmingham Commissioner of Public Safety Theophilus “Bull” Connor, who, through his virulent opposition to equality and commitment to segregation, came out looking like a true villain, attempting to squash protests with violence and intimidation. In his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” King writes to local clergy about why that was a time for action in Birmingham:

One of the basic points in your statement is that the action that I and my associates have taken in Birmingham is untimely. … Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct-action campaign that was “well timed” in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word “Wait!” It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This “Wait” has almost always meant “Never.” We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that “justice too long delayed is justice denied.” We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God-given rights.

The march

The full name of the famous event, March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, drew somewhere between 200,000-300,000 people and apparently went off without a hitch and without violence or skirmishes. It was organized by King, James Farmer Jr., with the Congress of Racial Equality, Roy Wilkins, with the NAACP, John Lewis, with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and others as a push toward desegregation nationwide and more equality in the workplace and in culture. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech was brilliant for the way in which it positioned America’s highest ideals in, not just religious terms, to which many Americans, then and now, understand and relate, but in foundational terms. It explained that the nation has yet to fully grasp the full measure of Thomas Jefferson’s famous line from the Declaration of Independence, that “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”

I have a dream today. … I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low. The rough places will be made plain and the crooked places will be made straight. And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together. This is our hope. This is the faith that I go back to the South with. With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith, we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.

This will be the day when all of God’s children will be able to sing with new meaning, “My country, ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrim’s pride, from every mountain side, let. freedom ring.” And if America is to be a great nation, this must become true.

King then ended his speech with some of the most stirring lines ever uttered in American history that thundered back through time and continue to reverberate to the present.

So let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire. Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York. Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania. Let freedom ring from the snowcapped Rockies of Colorado. Let freedom ring from the curvaeeous slopes of California.

But not only that. Let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia. Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee. Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi, from every mountain side. Let
freedom ring …

When we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every city and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual,”Free at last, free at last, great God almighty, we are free at last!

In October 1964, King won the Nobel Peace Prize for his work in racial justice and nonviolent resistance, and the next year, he helped organize perhaps the second most significant march of the civil rights era, the march to Selma en route to Birmingham to protest inequality and advocate for voter rights. This is the march in which John Lewis, and many other nonviolent protesters, got hosed and beaten by members of the Alabama state police. The incident became a powerful symbol for nonviolent resistance and led to the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Fifty years later on March 7, 2015, Barack Obama, the first black president in United States history, delivered a speech to commemorate the famous march. I was watching the moment on CNN that day, and I can tell you, seeing Obama’s presidential motorcade rumble over the Edmund Pettus Bridge, which was named for a former grand wizard of the KKK, was one of the most powerful and enduring images of racial progress I have ever seen, and it’s something I won’t soon forget.

The legacy

As we know, King was killed April 4, 1968 in Memphis, Tenn., as he was in the process of planning an occupation of Washington, D.C., called the Poor People’s Campaign. On April 3, probably seeing the writing on the wall and seemingly foreseeing his own untimely end, based on the hate that had been generated against him from the conservative right in the South and elsewhere, he delivered his final, “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop,” speech, an extremely powerful affirmation of this nation’s First Amendment rights.

… Somewhere I read of the freedom of assembly. Somewhere I read of the freedom of speech.

Somewhere I read of the freedom of press. Somewhere I read that the greatness of America is the right to protest for right. And so just as I say, we aren’t going to let dogs or water hoses turn us around, we aren’t going to let any injunction turn us around. We are going on.

And then, like a lightbulb going off in his mind, he turned inward and one could see tears welling up in his eyes as he could see the end peering him in the face.

Well, I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn’t matter with me now, because I’ve been to the mountaintop.

And I don’t mind.

Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!

And so I’m happy, tonight.
I’m not worried about anything.
I’m not fearing any man!
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!

And in that moment, he looked completely spent, as if all of his emotional fervor and rhetorical power had all been used up in preparation for the next day’s events. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech has gone down as the most important of his career, but the “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech was the most vulnerable moment of King’s public career in my view.

King was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his work in civil rights, and MLK Day was established in parts of the nation in 1986. Not until 2000 did all 50 states celebrate the holiday.

So, what of his legacy? Despite the almost obsessive efforts of J. Edgar Hoover to discredit King, expose his supposed marital infidelities and paint him as a communist, King was central in putting pressure on LBJ and other leaders in Washington to get the ball rolling on the Great Society programs and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which made discrimination based on sex, gender or race illegal. Shortly after King’s death, the Civil Rights Act of 1968 was passed. It’s hard to underestimate the impact of these programs on American politics and culture. While they weren’t perfect and while racism and discrimination were far from resolved in King’s lifetime — they are still far from resolved now — these were obviously landmark achievements that may not have been possible without King’s persistence, intelligence, courage and unshakable faith in humanity. Working in tandem with his dedication to nonviolence, King was also against the disastrous war in Vietnam.

I have said all of that to say this: I might not have known much about MLK and Civil Rights starting out in high school and the early part of college, but the more I learned, the more convinced I became in adult life that wherever we go as a nation, we must go together as different people unified in mutual respect and understanding and be committed to the idea, even if previous generations were not, that all men, all human beings, are created equal — full stop — without qualifiers and without exception.

We must be committed to the idea, the idea for which King gave his life, that there is no white America or black America. There is only one America. And while in this era of blatant bigotry and hostility to immigrants spearheaded by Trump and his largely white, unlettered supporters, we can’t give in to apathy. We must believe that we will overcome ideologies that attempt to divide us and that we will overcome racial prejudice and injustice and create for ourselves a better tomorrow. Perhaps King’s greatest legacy to us, then, was that he offered more than a dream. He opened a door so that we could begin the long march toward its ultimate realization.

[Cover image: “I Have a Dream” by DeviantArt user Rachel Laughman.]

Walls a-plenty

Trump wants to build a wall in Colorado but not Kansas:

“We’re building a wall on the border of New Mexico, and we’re building a wall in Colorado. We’re building a beautiful wall, a big one that really works, that you can’t get over, you can’t get under. And we’re building a wall in Texas. And we’re not building a wall in Kansas but they get the benefit of the walls that we just mentioned.”

Got it.

I’m sure people in Colorado will appreciate the new wall keeping out all those unwanted New Mexico residents.

Some journalists, apparently trying to give Trump the benefit of the doubt, a courtesy he doesn’t really deserve at this point, have said he probably misspoke. How exactly does one misspeak about a state that is 430 miles away from the United States-Mexico border?

Time to end invocations

If Pennsylvania residents or viewers across the nation watching the recent spectacle that unfolded in Harrisburg were unclear about where freshman Rep. Stephanie Borowicz, R-Clinton County, stands on Jesus — and by implication, where she stands on the First Amendment — the answer reverberated throughout the chamber more than a dozen times.

Apparently meant to serve as a kind of holy buffer and a not-so-subtle plea for forgiveness for what was to come later, Borowicz delivered a two-minute prayer that invoked the name of Jesus no less than 13 times and included a bevy of overtly Christian-based words and phrases one might hear at an old-time religion tent revival.

Near the end of the prayer, Borowicz went into full evangelical preacher mode, saying that “every tongue will confess, Jesus, that you are lord,” which drew an “Objection!” from someone in the room. House Speaker Mike Turzai, who looked uncomfortable and, as far as I can tell, barely closed his eyes the whole time, then tapped Borowicz on the shoulder to wrap it up, which she promptly did, no doubt realizing she had gotten carried away.

The big news of the day wasn’t supposed to be the invocation. In a nation where the separation of church and state is routinely blurred, prayers of this type wouldn’t have raised many eyebrows. But the prayer was particularly problematic because the state’s first female Muslim representative, Movita Johnson-Harrell, of Philadelphia, was set to be sworn in immediately after the opening.

It was an important milestone for more diversity in politics that was overshadowed, probably by design, by Borowicz’s overwrought and potentially illegal appeal to heaven — the Christian heaven, that is — that may have violated the Establishment Clause of the Constitution.

This was a public meeting in a public building in a nation that has established religious freedom as one of its founding principles, not just freedom for some believers, but freedom for all believers and all nonbelievers.

While the U.S. Supreme Court in 2014 ruled that open meetings can include sectarian invocations, meaning that they can invoke the specific god of the speaker, they must be reverential and “invite lawmakers to reflect upon shared ideals and common ends” and cannot “denigrate nonbelievers or religious minorities, threaten damnation, or preach conversion,” according to the court’s 5-4 decision in Town of Greece v. Galloway.

Borowicz careened well over that line.

But beyond the prayer to Jesus, the constitutional issues it raises and the impertinence toward adherents of Islam and to her fellow representative in the House, Borowicz’s breathless support Israel, both as a political entity and a theological mecca that all three Abrahamic religions claim as their own, was both unnecessary and beside the point.

If the goal here was to be incendiary and incite strong negative emotions, the opening succeeded. If the goal was to bring people together in a respectful manner, as invocations should, it failed. I dare say Borowicz was mainly there to preach, honor her religion at the detriment of all others and offer a thinly veiled rebuke of Johnson-Harrell’s swearing-in, no doubt one of the many reasons she asked Jesus for forgiveness.

Notwithstanding the House’s recent flirtation with constitutional impropriety, the chamber has already been taken to court for its policy of only allowing believers to deliver the invocation before meetings. Last year, U.S. Middle District Judge Christopher Conner found that the chamber must give nontheists an opportunity to deliver the opening message. The judge also ruled that the House’s requirement that lawmakers stand during the prayer was unconstitutional.

In short, sectarian prayers are permissible in Pennsylvania, but lawmakers can’t be compelled to participate in them.

I have covered public meetings in which residents have petitioned city and county boards to allow representatives from secular organizations to deliver the invocation as a way to try to get the board to be more inclusive. Believers and nonbelievers alike have quibbled over the sticky issue for years. Trying to appease everyone doesn’t admit to any easy answers.

I realize it might be a radical idea, but the simple solution is to end invocations altogether, start meetings with a polite greeting and quickly move to the public’s business. Invocations, oftentimes abused more for grandstanding than to be reverential or to espouse “shared ideals and common ends” among diverse people, can produce the opposite effect for which they are intended.

People of all faiths, or no faith at all, have freedom to live as they see fit outside of open meetings. Using public forums to offend the religious sensibilities of others does a disservice to Christianity and to democracy.

[Cover image credit: “Prayer” by fbuk.]

Democracy under assault

Few thinkers, past or present, could match the intellectual and rhetorical power Christopher Hitchens harnessed when he sat down to put pen to paper, excoriating what he saw were the misdeeds of leaders across the cultural and political spectrum, from Joseph Ratzinger, Bill Clinton, Mother Teresa to God himself.

“One of the beginnings of human emancipation is the ability to laugh at authority,” he once said. “It’s indispensable.”

No one is above scrutiny, I believe he would say.

Sadly, we lost this imperishable writer in 2011, but one wonders what he would say today if he could witness the widespread regression taking place in politics and society, at a time when free speech is being threatened on college campuses across the nation, when journalists are demonized as “enemies of the people” and when the nation is being led by one of the most dishonest, borderline autocratic and nationalistic administrations in United States history.

The Washington Post’s motto reads, “Democracy dies in darkness.” While the battle for free speech on college campuses and elsewhere may not appear to be related to President Donald Trump’s administration, the two are actually working in tandem to dim the light of our democracy.

In recent years, dozens of speakers, including evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, libertarian Ben Shapiro, classical liberal and psychologist Jordan Peterson, conservative commentator Ann Coulter, feminist Christina Hoff Sommers and former CIA director John Brennan, of all people, have been either deplatformed or forced to end their talks early amid protests at public events in traditionally progressive centers.

To take one case, Dawkins was blacklisted by Berkeley progressive radio station, KPFA, for what the station described as “abusive speech” against Islam. Readers of Dawkins well know that while he is an unapologetic atheist, he, along with other members of the New Atheist movement, which includes Hitchens, have been careful to criticize the ideas of Islam, not the people who practice it.

Thus, officials at Berkeley and many other liberals toeing the social justice line have confused, and continue to confuse, this distinction, such that many rational liberals and progressives have been compelled to defend conservatives in the interest of free speech and the latter’s inalienable right to speak openly. College campuses and liberal towns are supposed to be bastions of free speech and expression. That is where students go to be intellectually challenged, not to be coddled.

“How have the mighty fallen,” Dawkins said in 2017. “Berkeley, the home of free speech. Now, the home of suppression of free speech.”

Trump’s ongoing attacks on the media — exempting, of course, his friend Sean Hannity and other supporters at Fox News — stick the dagger in even deeper.

To its credit, Fox News scolded Hannity for appearing on stage with Trump during an event in late 2018, but that was too little too late. With even a cursory look at the cable news channel, one must conclude that it stopped pretending to be “fair and balanced” long ago. For Trump’s part, dismissing stories as ”fake news” — fake, not because they aren’t true, but because the president just doesn’t like the reporting — and lambasting journalists who have an important job to do, maybe the most important job to do in this era of misinformation, undermines one of the pillars of our democracy.

For a sitting president to sneer at reporters and childishly complain that he is being treated unfairly, as he has done repeatedly since before the election, is beyond the pale, and even many of his fellow Republicans have found this behavior indefensible.

In August, the GOP-controlled Senate unanimously passed a symbolic resolution declaring that the media is not the “enemy of the people,” and Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., was among those on the right to challenge Trump’s charged rhetoric.

“We can’t go on like this,” Flake said. “We’ve got to reach across the aisle and find common ground. If we don’t, it’s just going to escalate further.”

Compound Trump’s hostility toward the media with overseeing one of the nation’s most secretive, intellectually dishonest administrations potentially one of the most corrupt if special counsel Robert Mueller’s work provides incontrovertible proof of collusion with Russia one could argue, as E.J. Dionne Jr. with The Post did in August, that we as a nation are “slouching toward autocracy.”

While we can laugh, and often do, at Trump’s Twitter meltdowns and the ridiculous speeches — he has the “best words” — what we have here is a prelude to disaster if the nation continues down the road of less transparency and the subversion of free speech and the press.

The First Amendment must be protected at all costs. In the year 2019, this should not be a controversial statement.

[Image credit: “Freedom” by DeviantArt user Bozack.]

Why I’m not celebrating July Fourth

Not to rain on all the parades and fireworks, but I honestly don’t know what it is we’re supposed to be celebrating.

We are being led by the most incompetent, cruelest administration since Andrew Jackson and Co. shipped out the Native Americans. We elected Donald Trump into office via a democratic process after he got finished insulting nearly every voting bloc in the nation, including blacks, Hispanics, women and the disabled.

We are now a nation that treats Hispanics at the border — innocent people who are seeking opportunity and a better life for their families and away from gang violence, drugs and poverty — like common thugs and criminals, although illegal immigration itself is just a misdemeanor.

We are now a nation that castigates grown men for exercising their right to protest police violence against unarmed black people, leading to an asinine decree from the NFL that received gleeful support from the dear leader.

We have, indirectly or otherwise, handed the regressive party, the GOP, the reins to all three branches of government, the same party that illegally refused to consider Barack Obama’s nominee for the Supreme Court — Merrick Garland was a centrist by the way — and now that Mitch McConnell is most likely going to go against his own rule and rush through Donald Trump’s pick, the party is threatening to rollback decades of hard-won progress on equal rights before the next election.

The same party that spent eight whole years, not legislating or leading, of course, but cock-blocking everything Obama tried to do purely out of bitterness and spite. The same party that left thousands of people, mostly black folks, high and dry in New Orleans. The same party that led us to war against Iraq under false pretenses. The same party that married itself to the Moral Majority, corrupt corporations, Big Pharma, the coal industry and the gun lobby.

The same party that is currently doing little to improve life for Americans, and in fact, is making it worse in most sectors, amid ongoing concerns in health care, immigration, the environment, the national debt — the highest its ever been under leadership of the self-proclaimed “fiscally conservative” party or under any other administration — and the general contempt Trump has fostered for us the world over, except, of course, in Russia and North Korea.

Our GOP-led Congress is largely bought and paid for by the NRA. We are a nation that, despite how many children die from loons with guns year after year, does absolutely nothing about the problem, as people cry about their precious Second Amendment rights — no matter that the amendment was written in the fucking 18th century when the founders could not have anticipated the widespread proliferation of machine guns and weapons of war in civil society.

Once claiming to be a man of principle, our House Speaker, Paul Ryan, has suddenly gone silent, as his party runs roughshod over people’s rights, wages war on the media and refuses to criticize Trump for his hundreds of lies, half-truths and bullying tactics.

Trump’s rise to power and charged rhetoric has stirred the base into a frenzy of outright bigotry and nationalism. No longer relegated to some corner of their mother’s basement and shamed into the darkness by the march of progress, these people are now out and proud about their insufferable intolerance. They need to crawl back into the cellar.

As a general statement, the Democrats are weak-kneed, aren’t that much better than the GOP and have their own problems kowtowing to corporations and special interests. The party shamelessly and purposefully derailed Bernie Sanders’ campaign in favor of Hillary, who was too contentious a figure to win anyway, and caused its own rift between mainstream liberals and the progressives, thus paving the way for someone like Trump to pick up the far-right populist mantel of the old Tea Party, although his followers were too duped to realize they were voting against their own vested interests.

The more Trump screws up, the more reasons we have to be optimistic that a new guard will be voted into Congress, but like most things, it will probably get worse before it gets better. This is serious business, and we have little cause for celebration.

I wonder at what point — after we cede more of our rights; dismantle health care; continue the war against the media and free speech; refuse to heed the warnings of scientists about climate change and deny the truth of global warming; erode the wall between church and state; make life harder for blacks, women, Hispanics, and low-income Americans; and keep flirting with nationalism and fascism — will we simply get fed up with the clown running the circus and the know-nothings who enable him?

We have lost the plot, brothers and sisters, and I think we should put down the hot dogs and beer for a few minutes today and take a long, sobering look inward.

[Image credit: “You’re Doing It Wrong” by DeviantArt user pagit.]

When journalism fails

“‘Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.” – George Orwell, “1984”

***

One of the most troubling developments in journalism, probably in my lifetime, with the exception of the overtly polarized media — Fox News, MSNBC and many others on television and online that don’t even pretend to hide their biases anymore — happened last month when Sinclair Broadcast Group, the conservative conglomerate that owns 173 local stations nationwide, forced its anchors to read a canned statement about the company’s supposed integrity in news reporting (including WPGH in Pittsburgh where I live). The company told the public to hold stations accountable for honest news gathering without the slant and invited viewers to contact them if they saw a problem.

On the surface, this sounds like an admirable thing to do. Any news source should be open to critiques and willing to air or publish corrections when they get details wrong. But these weren’t statements from local producers tailored to the communities in which they serve. These were identical talking points handed down from the corporate office, and taken together, are chilling reminders that without free speech and a free press, democracy cannot flourish. In fact, it withers.

[pullquote]
Yeah, nothing says we value independent media like dozens of reporters forced to repeat the same message over and over again like members of a brainwashed cult. — John Oliver, “Last Week Tonight”[/pullquote]

CNN’s Brian Stelter broke the story, but Deadspin spliced together a video of dozens of anchors all saying the same things in lockstep. The full transcript is here.

Glossing over the fact that these statements were delivered with no lead-ins or context whatsoever, which is bizarre by itself, the content sounded like fodder from Fox News and almost precisely echoes President Donald Trump’s breathless cries about supposed “fake news” coming out of The New York Times, CNN, NBC or any other outlets publishing information that doesn’t paint him or his administration in a positive light.

Here is an excerpt:

… We’re concerned about the troubling trend of irresponsible, one sided news stories plaguing our country. The sharing of biased and false news has become all too common on social media.

More alarming, some media outlets publish these same fake stories … stories that just aren’t true, without checking facts first.

Unfortunately, some members of the media use their platforms to push their own personal bias and agenda to control ‘exactly what people think’…This is extremely dangerous to (our) democracy.

The first point should be obvious, but it has to be made: the lion’s share of reporting done at the local level, and especially the halfhearted, show-up-and-leave-in-a-trail-of-dust variety at local TV stations across the country, has little if anything to do with left- or right-wing dynamics. Some local stations add national news to their coverage just to have something to talk about for the full hour, but it’s not their coverage. They are just piggybacking off some other affiliate. And many local elections, like seats on the school board or city council, aren’t partisan in the first place.

This statement was projected onto a building recently in Alameda, Calif.

This statement was projected onto a building recently in Alameda, Calif.

Even for those local elections that are partisan, national Democratic and Republican platforms have little to do with funding school programs, fixing roads or maintenance of community facilities. The demarcation line usually revolves around whether to raise enough tax revenues to pay for continued county or city services or to just let things fall to shit, but aside from that, political affiliation isn’t as much of a variable on the local level as people may think.

The second thing to say is that the script just presents a paper thin, blanket argument, again parroted from Trump’s own mouth, about “fake news” without any corroborating information or specifics, taking great liberties with the word “some” to say the zero-sum of nothing:

Some members of the media [like who?] use their platforms to push their own personal bias [like what?] and agenda [like what?] to control ‘exactly what people think’ … This is extremely dangerous to a democracy.

The irony is that Sinclair is doing exactly the same thing, and it is reminiscent of state-run media in places like Russia and North Korea. As CNN reports, journalists like myself and many others across the nation are “chafing” at this encroachment on the free press. Some of Sinclair’s own employees, of course, are afraid to speak on the record about it for fear of losing their jobs. But many others who aren’t associated with the company have spoken out.

Erik Wemple with The Washington Post provided perhaps the most pointed assessment of the statement:

So: An editorial with no supporting evidence, no data, no argumentative beef. One hundred percent innuendo. No wonder Sinclair employees are freaking out about the thing.

I watched a little CNN yesterday, and commentators were talking about the plight of the individual anchors at these TV stations, who were made to read the statement and would likely face termination if they didn’t, noting that in more cases than not, they couldn’t just walk out of their jobs because they have families to support and mortgages to pay, etc. But journalism is a principled profession. Maybe the anchors can’t afford to walk out immediately, but if they sense that what they were forced to do was wrong, they can, and should, look for work at a more respectable company that actually values journalistic integrity. Consequently, I once worked for a paper owned by a family with friends on the local county council, and every so often, the managing editor and I would receive talking points via email and be expected to compose an editorial based on whatever opinion the owners felt the need to peddle, which was a severe conflict of interest. In addition to the tedious nature of the job itself — I spent most of my time copy editing and laying out pages — I couldn’t in good conscience work in an environment like that, so when the opportunity arose, I got out.

The larger issue is the continued damage Sinclair’s approach does to journalism and the principles of a free society. Freedom of speech and freedom of the press are two of the highest ideals on which our nation was founded, and editors and producers must be allowed to make news decisions independently of government or corporate interests. Outlets like Fox News, MSNBC and others have already embraced a kind of partisan news vacuum that recalls the 19th century era of journalism in which most papers were either pro-slavery or staunchly against the “peculiar institution.” Supporting that kind of divide in the year 2018 not only represents an embarrassing disregard for journalistic integrity on the part of Sinclair, but, to borrow the company’s own phrase, it is an extremely dangerous threat to our democracy.

Sources:

[Cover image credit: “Orwell” by DeviantArt user TavenerScholar.

Our anti-environment EPA head, redux

In my last post, which I realize was over a year ago and I have had much on which to catch up and comment, I looked at the track record of newly nominated Environmental Protection Agency Director Scott Pruitt in his home state of Oklahoma. I made the case that, similar to other cabinet picks by Donald Trump at the time, Pruitt was just another in a long series of people who, at best, had limited or no experience or expertise in the areas for which they were nominated to serve, and at worst, were hostile to the objectives of their respective agencies.

For any rational person who actually cared about having qualified and serious cabinet members help guide the ship in Washington, Pruitt would be at or near the bottom of the list for a post at the EPA. But true to form, given the proverbial gaggle of incompetent or unqualified people nominated to Trump’s cabinet and administration — those who have yet to be fired or resign, that is — he simply doesn’t care how well these people know their subjects or how vigorously they stand up for the principles of their offices.

My implication last year that Pruitt was going to be ill-fit for the job and even deleterious to its mission has come to bear. Over the last year, he micromanaged efforts to remove information about climate change work from the EPA’s website (more here), defended Trump’s decision to pull out of the Paris climate agreement signed by 195 nations, including Syria — a striking embarrassment for the United States in its own right — and last October, started a process to repeal the Clean Power Plan, the country’s only major initiative to curb carbon plant emissions.

To anyone who is paying attention, all of this should come as no surprise. As I said previously, Pruitt made his bones railing against the EPA, with more than a dozen lawsuits against the agency to boot, as attorney general in Oklahoma. And he has openly questioned humanity’s role in contributing to climate change, telling CNBC:

I think that measuring with precision human activity on the climate is something very challenging to do and there’s tremendous disagreement about the degree of impact.

So no, I would not agree that it’s a primary contributor to the global warming that we see. But we don’t know that yet, we need to continue to debate, continue the review and analysis.

Of course, that’s in direct opposition to data from NASA and every credible scientific exploration of the topic on the planet. I would wager that, next to nuclear war, climate change and its potential for long-term, seismic impacts to the environment is the most pressing issue that we are facing as a species. In a 2014 report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change called the environmental trends we are currently seeing “unequivocal”:

Human influence on the climate system is clear, and recent anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases are the highest in history. Recent climate changes have had widespread impacts on human and natural systems.

and

Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, and since the 1950s, many of the observed changes are unprecedented over decades to millennia. The atmosphere and ocean have warmed, the amounts of snow and ice have diminished, and sea level has risen.

Most recently, a memo leaked from Pruitt’s office continued to throw shade on the idea that humans are causing climate change and all its disastrous effects. Here is point five:

Human activity impacts our changing climate in some manner. The ability to measure with precision the degree and extent of that impact, and what to do about it, are subject to continuing debate and dialogue.

“In some manner” would be a giant understatement. The memo also said “clear gaps” still existed in our understanding of human’s impact on the climate, even though there was no elaboration. Attempting to argue that there are gaps in our understanding of manmade climate change is a copout, of course, and only serves to delay any significant work in this area with the expressed intent to continue propping up the worst offenders in the carbon and gas industries because Pruitt and his ilk have a financial vested interest in halting or curbing regulations altogether.

Add to that Pruitt’s recent egregious travel expenses and supposedly required security detail in places like Disneyland and the Vatican — I don’t think taking tours to Italy and Disneyland is part of the EPA director’s job description — and you have the top environmental official in the nation clearly not caring about his own carbon footprint, his own excessive use of taxpayer dollars or conflicts of interest related to his job.

But for a president who thinks he can govern from Twitter and insult most everyone on the planet, except for Vladmir Putin, of course, these are the kinds of people we should have expected to lead the charge. And, predictably, they seem to be crashing and burning one by one, much like the administration itself.

Sources:

[Cover image credit: “.:Warming Global:.” by DeviantArt user spotterfire-cat.]

Pruitt as microcosm of the GOP

This post can be read as a follow-up to “Heil to the Drumpf.”

***

Scott Pruitt, like so many other recent nominees to President Donald Trump’s cabinet — easily the most unqualified set of selections in American history — simply isn’t fit to govern in the capacity he has been chosen. Not only is he unfit, he holds views that are antithetical to the EPA’s mission of protecting human well-being by being good stewards of our environmental resources and guarding against pollution and unregulated, potentially hazardous real estate and commercial development.

Lowered expectations

trumps-cabinet

Consider some of his vastly more experienced predecessors likewise nominated by Republican presidents (“acting” administrators not included):

  • Russell Train (1973-77): Train was founder of the Wildlife Leadership Foundation, first vice president of the World Wildlife Fund and president of The Conservation Foundation. Before being named as EPA director under President Richard Nixon’s, and later serving under Gerald Ford when Nixon resigned, he was under secretary of the Department of Interior, and between 1970-73, he headed up the Council on Environmental Quality. According to The New York Times, “Mr. Train developed the idea of establishing the Council on Environmental Quality, a policy office within the White House. He also helped persuade the Nixon administration to create the Environmental Protection Agency, empowered to execute and regulate the nation’s new program of safeguarding natural resources and protecting public health.”
  • William K. Reilly (1989-93): Working on urban beautification earlier in his career, Reilly followed Train as president of The Conservation Foundation, and he was a senior staff member of the Council on Environmental Quality. He was also president of the World Wildlife Fund before assuming his EPA cabinet post under George H.W. Bush.
  • Stephen L. Johnson (2005-09): The first scientist to lead the EPA, Johnson has a bachelor’s degree in biology and a master’s in pathology. Before becoming head of the agency, he worked there for 26 years.

Of course, GOP presidents have also named a handful of people who either had limited or no experience in conservation upon accepting the administration position but still made modest gains or paid lip service to the ultimate goal of protecting the environment. They include:

  • Anne Burford (1981-83), who had a background in law, seems to have mainly been nominated into the agency to work on deregulation and clean up government waste under Ronald Reagan. From an EPA standpoint after taking the post, her greatest claim to fame was passage of the Nuclear Waste Policy Act. She resigned in 1983 over the alleged mismanagement of a $1.6 billion hazardous waste dumping program.
  • William Ruckelshaus (1983-85): Serving under Nixon as the EPA’s first administrator, Ruckelshaus is perhaps best known for his ban on DDT.
  • Christine Todd Whitman (2001-03) didn’t seem to have much experience in the environment or conservation before 2000, but in that year as governor of New Jersey, the state’s standard for air quality went from 45 in 1988 to 4, and New Jersey was honored as having rolled out the most exhaustive beach monitoring program in the nation.
  • Under his leadership in the George W. Bush administration, EPA head Mike Leavitt (2003-05) raised emission standards, and he instituted a plan to address environmental concerns along the Great Lakes.
  • Lee Thomas (1985-89) had a bachelor’s degree in psychology and a master’s in education, of all things. He served as assistant administrator of the EPA’s solid waste and emergency division for a little more than a year, and he was assistant director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency from 1981-83. As head of the EPA, he is most notable for overseeing passage of the Montreal Protocol, a plan to scale back production of ozone-depleting chemicals in the air. Thomas went on to become president and chief operating officer of Georgia Pacific Corporation, a subsidiary of Koch Industries. Starting in 2007, he was chairman and chief executive officer of Rayonier, which buys up land to make paper and timberland-based materials and also uses the land, of course, for commercial and real estate development.

Credit: Stephen Crowley/The New York Times/Scott Pruitt, former Oklahoma attorney general, is President Donald J. Trump’s nominee to lead the Environmental Protection Agency.

Credit: Stephen Crowley/The New York Times/Scott Pruitt, former Oklahoma attorney general, is President Donald J. Trump’s nominee to lead the Environmental Protection Agency.

The difference with most of these people and Pruitt, is that our current administrator not only lacks experience to head the EPA, he does not believe in the imperishable and urgent nature of its mission, and before taking office, he actively fought against environmental protections and regulations as attorney general of Oklahoma.

Dubbed a “lifetime adversary” of the EPA by The Washington Post, Pruitt had assumed an adversarial role against the EPA nearly since the beginning of his election as Oklahoma’s top law enforcement officer in 2010.

The anti-green AG

According to The New York Times and state media sources, Oklahoma had been embroiled in a legal fight against the poultry industry since 2006 stemming from alleged pollution of chicken manure into the Illinois River, but when Pruitt took office, instead of stiffening regulations or pushing for corrective mandates against Tyson, he merely initiated a study to look at the issue, which, in effect, kicked the can down the road, even as he had received $40,000 from the defendants in the case as part of his 2010 campaign.

This, of course, is largely indicative of Pruitt’s track record across the four campaigns of his public career. According to FollowTheMoney.org, he has raised more than $3 million from various industry sectors. The energy and natural resources industry was Pruitt’s third largest contributor. Here’s the breakdown of how much money Pruitt has received from each industry:

Credit: FollowTheMoney.org

Credit: FollowTheMoney.org

Clearly, conflicts of interests abound, but if Pruitt was able to own up to his past transgressions and apologize for failing to hold Tyson accountable for potentially damaging the environment at the expense of his own constituents and at the expense of the environment, perhaps the nation could accept him as halfway sincere and competent, but this isn’t even the worse of it.

As Eric Schaeffer, Environmental Integrity Project executive director, said in a recent op-ed piece, Pruitt essentially made his bones standing as firmly as anyone can against the EPA as attorney general, suing the agency no less than 14 times while in Oklahoma.

Here is how Schaeffer assessed Pruitt’s environmental record before his cabinet confirmation:

(Pruitt) has built his career suing the agency he would oversee to roll back its protection of the nation’s air and water, and challenging the very idea of federal action to control pollution.

At the same time, while Mr. Pruitt preaches the gospel of states’ rights, his record suggests he has been far from aggressive in enforcing environmental laws in his own state. Given his anti-regulatory mind-set, skepticism about global warming and support from the industries he would regulate, the Senate, which is set to begin to consider his nomination on Wednesday, should reject him (It didn’t. My note).

His tenure in Oklahoma is instructive. Mr. Pruitt disbanded the environmental protection unit in the attorney general’s office and created a “federalism unit” to litigate against “overreach by the federal government.” Much of that overreach, in Mr. Pruitt’s view, was by the E.P.A.

Much like new U.S. Housing and Urban Development head Ben Carson, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and Mr. Let’s Close the — Department of … Hmm what’s the third one there? I think it starts with an “E” … Department of Entertainment … No. … Ahh, shucks. I can’t (name) the third one. Sorry. Oops. — Rick Perry, Pruitt doesn’t believe in the mission of the agency he has been charged to run. He says it right there on his LinkedIn page:

Scott filed the first lawsuit challenging the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, is a leading advocate against the EPA’s activist agenda, and is leading a multistate lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the Dodd-Frank financial law. Before being elected AG, he served eight years in the Oklahoma State Senate where he was a leading voice for fiscal responsibility, religious freedom and pro-life issues.

See anything in there about a concern for the environment or conservation issues? Me either. Here’s more information on Pruitt’s illustrious body of work in Oklahoma.

Ken Cook, head of the Environmental Working Group, said that in assessing Pruitt’s potential acumen as an EPA director:

It’s a safe assumption that Pruitt could be the most hostile E.P.A. administrator toward clean air and safe drinking water in history.

No debate

Even more stunning than Pruitt’s persistent fights against the EPA in Oklahoma are his views on climate change. They are well-documented by now. The following quote comes from an interview on MSNBC after Pruitt’s nomination:

I think that measuring with precision human activity on the climate is something very challenging to do and there’s tremendous disagreement about the degree of impact, so no, I would not agree that it’s a primary contributor to the global warming that we see. … But we don’t know that yet. We need to continue the debate and continue the review and the analysis.

In one fell swoop, Pruitt, despite the fact that Exxon, to its own chagrin, discovered the realities of climate change four decades ago (!), continues to perpetuate the myth that human activity might not be responsible for lower carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, rising seas, melting icecaps and increased temperatures globally. Much like the evidence for evolution, the evidence for global warming and human-induced climate change is overwhelming (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and so on …) such that there is no debate, and there hasn’t been for a very long time.

Pruitt and his other equally unqualified, motley crew of cabinet members may be capable of shuffling some papers around and telling subordinates what to do, but within the fields they are charged to oversee, with few exceptions, they are ill-informed, conceited and flippant about the important work with which they have been charged.

Indeed, that these people could be directly in the ear of the most powerful person in the world is disconcerting, especially since we are only a couple months into the administration, and that they so easily passed GOP muster via the nominations, despite their own incompetency being laid bare in multiple hearings, represents a deeply reckless, unadulterated clutching at power for power’s sake with no thought about the future of the nation.

Surely only the most cynical view of our republic is keeping these people from crawling into a cave and never being heard from again.

But here they are. I don’t peddle fear-mongering here, as the Republicans do, so just as they have a freedom to say and believe any nonsense they choose, we also have the right to call them out — again and again, for as long as it takes — for their blatant anti-intellectualism and disregard for scientific facts and Enlightenment principles, principles that always have, and always will, move our civil society forward and toward a more perfect union.

[Cover image credit: “Elephant Parade” by DeviantArt user Eredel.]

Heil to the Drumpf

Trump was not elected on a platform of decency, fairness, moderation, compromise, and the rule of law; he was elected, in the main, on a platform of resentment. Fascism is not our future—it cannot be; we cannot allow it to be so— but this is surely the way fascism can begin. — David Remnick, The New Yorker

***

Although some personal travails have kept me away from this site for awhile, call it a lack of inspiration or sheer stunned silence, but the rise of real estate mogul Donald J. Trump (Make Donald Drumpf again) to be leader of the free world was a stultifying and surreal spectacle to witness, such that my own drive to offer any additional insight, outside of some microblogging on Twitter and Facebook has been on the wane the last few months. It all seemed so disappointing. And futile. And worst of all, regressive.

Rage in the machine

Perhaps I did not want to admit the thing that I feared the most: That the Republican Party would fail to eschew the fringe right from its ranks and take a more moderate bent going forward; that the party of Lincoln, whose endgame Civil War policy ultimately broke the back of the South and freed millions of slaves before the conservatives devised new forms of subjugation known as Reconstruction and the Black Codes, would turn in on itself and embolden new legions of racist and bigoted voters to come out from their mother’s basements and their camouflage duck huts and their white-bred, self-loathing lives of grinding discontent to offer up a candidate who made hostility to immigrants, MexicansMuslims and other outgroups; pathological dishonesty (here and here and here and here and here and here and here); childishness; sexismbullying; and unbridled narcissism as American as hot dogs and apple pie.

I have written in newspaper columns the last five or six years about the Republican Party’s flirtation with the precipice and essentially made the case that the centrists or establishment politicians on the right needed to reclaim the center before it was too late for their party and too late for America. The right’s supreme and utter failure after the emergence of the Tea Party to hew the rotting arm to save the rest of the body may have detrimental outcomes for the nation at large, for inner city and low-income Americans and ironically, for many of the GOP’s supporters, who routinely vote against their own vested interests.

As it stands at the moment, the GOP can revel in its victory, having secured both houses of Congress and probably an eventual majority on the Supreme Court, but if Trump proves to be as much of a disaster in the White House as he has been in his multiple abortive business dealings and personal relationships, we should expect the Democratic Party, assuming it takes the advice of Bernie Sanders and presents a platform that is more appealing to working class Americans and gets tough on Wall Street and the health insurance industry, to see a resurgence in the future as Trump’s voters learn the hard way that he is dangerously uninformed, brash and impulsive.

But that’s perhaps two or four years hence. For now, we have to consider the 6-foot-3, 236 pound soon-to-be elephant in the Situation Room and his track record so far.

On the homefront, Trump, and to some degree running mate Mike Pence, coerced Carrier to keep a paltry 1,000 jobs in the U.S., which amounts to 0.01 percent of all manufacturing positions in the nation, at the expense of the government having to shell out $7 million in tax breaks to the company. Far more than 1,000 Americans will be on the hook when that bill comes due.

Credit: FiveThirtyEight, Source: Federal Reserve, Bureau of Labor Statistics

Credit: FiveThirtyEight, Source: Federal Reserve, Bureau of Labor Statistics

In any case, Trump has deluded himself and deluded his followers if he thinks he can do anything to ignite a manufacturing boon in the year 2017. Economic experts agree that the manufacturing sector is not due for a resurgence at all. On the contrary, it’s on the decline, so Trump’s grand showboating after his supposedly grand deal with Carrier amounts to little more than that: a show.

On health care, Trump has vowed to help end Obamacare, which paved the way for an estimated 11.3 million people to get health insurance. The Affordable Care Act also banned insurance companies, which have operated with near impunity for decades, from denying patients coverage for having preexisting conditions. Even more relevant for many of the people who voted for Trump, the president-elect’s plan could have disastrous consequences for Medicare, according to Forbes.

Red scare?

Perhaps the most disturbing thing about Trump’s early actions are his cabinet nominations, some of whom have direct or indirect ties with Russian oligarchs or the Russian government itself, including former Lieutenant General Mike Flynn, ExxonMobile CEO Rex Tillerson and billionaire Wilbur Ross

Trump, when given opportunity after opportunity, has refused to say anything negative about Vladimir Putin, an egomaniacal bully in his own right, and even praised the Russian president for his “great move” in deciding against allowing U.S. diplomats to leave Russia after the U.S. found that Putin’s government was behind a hacking attempt at the Democratic National Committee. The hack was believed to have been carried out in order to sway the presidential election in Trump’s favor.

One could even go so far as to say, as Sam Harris and Garry Kasparov pointed out on a recent podcast, that Trump has roundly insulted nearly every group imaginable inside and outside the United States, yet the one person he will not say a single bad thing about is Putin. This is unprecedented in American politics in the last 60 years, and it’s especially unprecedented for a Republican president-elect.

Compound these issues with the fact that we know little about Trump’s actual assets, since he skirted convention and would not release his most recent tax records. For all we know, Trump could have business ties with the Russian government or those close to Putin, not to mention other foreign powers. Yet, the Republicans have been slow to launch an investigation into Russia’s cyber attack, and few, if any, inside the party seem concerned that Trump has such a seemingly cozy relationship with the Russian dictator. Where is the outrage? Republican idol Ronald Reagan, who fretted over potential Russian trespasses for decades, is no doubt turning cartwheels in his grave.

Never forget, Rick Perry

Trump’s other cabinet picks include an assortment of firebrands, know-nothings, incompetents, jingoists and outsiders, many of whom know little, if anything, about the positions in which they have been selected to serve.

[pullquote]I will tell you, it is three agencies of government when I get there that are gone. Commerce, Education, and – what’s the third one there? Let’s see. (After prodding) … I can’t. The third one, I can’t. Sorry. Oops.”[/pullquote]

Rick Perry, who was chosen to head up the Department of Energy, represents the epitome, not only of incompetent decision-making on Trump’s part, but incompetence outright. For starters, Perry denies climate change and evolution despite the overwhelming scientific evidence that attests to their reality (climate change and evolution), once charging that scientists have “manipulated data so that they will have dollars rolling into their projects.” He has also called climate change a “contrived phony mess” and a “secular carbon cult.”

On evolution, Perry, as governor of Texas, said he wanted to incorporate bunk intelligent design pseudoscience alongside actual science in textbooks. According to an article in Science magazine:

Perry has earned the opprobrium of science educators for his comments on the importance of balancing evolution with creationist theory in Texas schools. And he’s appointed a series of chairs of the state board of education who embrace that view and also criticized science textbooks that discuss the negative impact of fossil fuels on the environment. Yet science education is a tiny $20 million slice of the department’s $30 billion budget.

Of course, among scientists or those with enough intellectual honesty to look at the world with eyes wide open, the debate about evolution and climate change has been over for a long time. Indeed, there is no debate at all, and anyone who does not accept climate change and evolution and who, in other words, still has a grade school understanding of basic science, is unfit for office.

All of this, of course, is notwithstanding the fact that Perry floated a plan in 2012 to eradicate the Department of Energy, along with two others, and then couldn’t recall the name of the department he has now been picked to lead. I wonder how he would do recalling the three laws of thermodynamics or articulating anything coherent whatsoever about energy as a scientific principle.

Motley crew

I can’t possibly cover all of Trump’s cabinet nominations without spilling tons of virtual ink, but let’s briefly run down a few more.

  • Betsy DeVos, who was tabbed to lead the Department of Education, is a strong charter school advocate and a member of the Family Research Council, an anti-gay — and by extension, anti-science — Christian lobbying group. But other than being a Republican donor and supporter of private schools at the expense of public education, and possibly at the expense of the separation of church and state, she has no qualifications in the classroom and seems to be among the the least qualified candidates ever selected to any cabinet position.
  • Ben Carson is an affluent neuroscientist who knows next to nothing about the Department of Housing and Urban Development nor the experiences of low-income residents who actually live in HUD communities.
  • Twice failed Connecticut Senate candidate Linda McMahon, who was picked to head the Small Business Administration, is the wife of Vince McMahon, chairman and CEO of the WWE, and a former on-screen character as played out in an intrafamily saga with the corporate villain character, Mr. McMahon. Trump, of course, has a close relationship with the McMahons and has himself appeared on WWE programming multiple times. It is true that Linda, who was directly involved with WWE from 1980 to 2009, helped grow the company from a regional outfit in the Northeast to the global entertainment empire that it is today, but outside of her involvement in WWE and Titan Sports, Vince’s company before purchasing Capitol Wrestling (the World Wide Wrestling Federation) in the early 1980s, she has scant “small business” experience. Of course, potential conflicts of interest abound between the Trumps’ and McMahons’ various business ventures and their mutual support over the years, such that the appointment feels more like a favor to the McMahons than anything else. According to this article from the Connecticut Post:

In 2007, WWE paid Trump $1 million to appear with Vince McMahon, during WrestleMania 23, with Trump putting McMahon in a chokehold and shaving McMahon’s head in the “Battle of the Billionaires.” The alliance was further cultivated by Vince McMahon’s $5 million contribution to Trump’s foundation, making the wrestling impresario its top donor. Linda McMahon gave $7.5 million to a pro-Trump super PAC during the presidential campaign.

Some of the couple’s detractors wondered whether Linda McMahon’s newfound clout in Trump’s administration could insulate the WWE from congressional prying over a myriad of issues such as concussions, steroid use and net neutrality, the free access of products and content by all online users.

“I think we can just assume it’s another example of the fox guarding the hen house,” said Irvin Muchnick, who has written several books on the culture of pro wrestling and maintains a blog on the topic.

  • And then there is South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley who, to her credit called for the removal of the Confederate battle flag from the courthouse lawn in Columbia after the tragic church shooting in June 2015 in Charleston. She was nominated as ambassador to the United Nations, and other than her favorable opinion about Israel, she has no foreign policy or diplomatic experience.
  • Trump selected James “Mad Dog” Mattis, a celebrated commander and a student of military engagement and strategy, for the Secretary of Defense position, which was actually one of Trump’s better picks, if not for Mattis’ hostility to President Obama’s nuclear weapons program in Iran, a plan that has the support of the European Union, Germany, France, Great Britain, China and Russia. The program seems to be working, at least in the interim, as Iran had placed 19,000 centrifuges in storage as of this past summer, unloaded 98 percent of its uranium and opened up its facilities to nuclear inspectors.
  • Steve Bannon, who was nominated as Trump’s chief strategist, is perhaps the most troubling pick of the lot. An alt-right firebrand and former chairman of the shrill website Breitbart, Bannon has been criticized for his “nationalist, conspiracy-minded message,” and content at Breitbart has been dubbed “misogynist, xenophobic and racist” by people on both sides of the political aisle. According to The New York Times:

The site refers to “migrant rape gangs” in Europe, and was among the first news outlets to disseminate unsubstantiated rumors that Mrs. Clinton was in ill health. Its writers often vilify the Black Lives Matter movement, emphasizing what they call a scourge of “black-on-black crime,” and described “young Muslims in the West” as the world’s “ticking time bomb.”

During this past election, the site was essentially a mouthpiece for Trump, as it has disseminated some of the same anti-intellectual, anti-immigrant, borderline fascist and bigoted rhetoric that has served to further divide the nation.

Bannon, then, fits right in with a candidate who has quite literally been able to spew any number of personal insults, lies and half-truths in person and on Twitter and has virtually gotten away with every single one of them with a smile on his face. This glorified Internet troll roused the base, roused the riffraff and in doing so, roused the worse angels of our nature.

Of course, numerous factors led to Trump’s victory. Hillary Clinton got too comfortable and didn’t campaign hard enough in key battleground states. Too many of Sanders’ supporters stayed at home. The Electoral Collect failed us yet again.

But the most disappointing demographic in the whole election, perhaps even worse than Trump himself, was the stubbornness and rigid partisanship on display by traditional Republican voters — GOP lifers, if you will — who punch the red card regardless of who gets foisted to the front of the line. Some among the Republican faithful even agreed with the rest of us that Trump was obviously, laughably unqualified to take charge of the White House, yet voted for him anyway because of GOP loyalty or because of their contempt for Clinton.

In any case, rather than showing some modicum of courage and switching allegiances this one time for good of the nation, these hard-line Republicans, like the musicians frozen on the bow of the Titanic as the great ship gives up its ghost to the sea, steadfastly toed the party line and agreed to leave the fate of the nation with a man who has repeatedly exposed himself as a half-cocked, blatantly dishonest buffoon and one who may, when all is said and done, bend the arc of American history more than a few inches toward fascism in his four in office — assuming he lasts that long. An inch in that direction is obviously an inch too far, but this is the peril we now face thanks to a reckless candidate and even more reckless electorate.

I, for one, hope the situation is not as bad as I think it might be and am willing to give Trump a chance because if he fails, the whole nation suffers. But as machinations are already underway to repeal Obamacare, that hope may fall away quickly when dawn sheds new light over the Potomac come Jan. 20.

[Cover photo credit: “The Trump World Tower” by DeviantArt user toko.]