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I have always found the Christian notion of original sin more than a little obnoxious as a religious principle because it suggests that “God” burdened human beings with a stain that could never be washed away. It posits the human life as a constant struggle to overcome the stain by constant, disciplined, resolute practice to rise above the lowly position it puts us in at birth. But, the notion of original sin can work as a powerful metaphor, in the same way that a “Faustian Bargain” does. One does not make a deal with a real “devil” in a Faustian bargain, but one aligns oneself with dark and destructive forces in order to advance ones own self interest–a bargain that can have very negative consequences when the devil comes back to get his due in payment for the benefit bestowed.

I have been struggling to come to terms with the Trump phenomena, and it occurred to me that our nation was founded both with an original sin (committed by those who drafted the Constitution, not imposed by a “God”) and was, in a powerful sense a pact with the “devil” in that, in order to advance the interests of those who birthed the United States, the Founders crafted a nation that intended to advance the causes of human freedom and dignity, they had to include slavery in the pact–an “original sin”, or “bargain with the devil” that has indelibly stained the nation and curses it to this day.

There are dark places in the human Soul. Brutish competitiveness, violence, aggression, exploitation of others, and on and on. The struggle for all people is to exert the Will to overcoming and diminish the power of those basic, primitive instincts in order to live in some degree of peace and harmonious community with others. Institutions are created in order to reward and strengthen those “better angels of our nature” when they are properly crafted. “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.” (James Madison)

It is this scar that was carved into the body of the new Republic that today still cripples our national existence. It seems that a curse was inextricably woven into the very fabric of our being when the Founders embodied slavery into our Republic. An evil was seeded in the birth of our nation that we cannot escape nor completely erase, and that time after time raises its ugly head and threatens our very existence. The darker forces in our national character have their place firmly established given that the curse that gives them power is so central to our very nature as a Nation.

During the antebellum period in the US, there were two basic groups who came to blows over and over again around the issue of the place of slavery in our Republic. There is absolutely no doubt that even the Founders who owned slaves knew that it was a stain on the nation’s character. One only need to read Thomas Jefferson’s musings on the evils of the institution of slavery in his Notes on Virginia. [There must doubtless be an unhappy influence on the manners of our people produced by the existence of slavery among us. the whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other. Our children see this, and learn to imitate it; for man is an imitative animal. This quality is the germ of all education in him. From his cradle to his grave he is learning to do what he sees others do. If a parent could find no motive either in his philanthropy or his self-love, for restraining the intemperance of passion towards his slave, it should always be a sufficient one that his child is present. But generally it is not sufficient. The parent storms, the child looks on, catches the lineaments of wrath, puts on the same airs in the circle of smaller slaves, gives a loose to his worst of passions, and thus nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by it with odious peculiarities. The man must be a prodigy who can retain his manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances.] The hypocrisy was so great that they dared not use the term “slavery” anywhere in the Constitution. Where it was addressed it was done so euphemistically. The 3/5 Compromise and Fugitive Slave provision termed slaves as “…those bound to a service  for a term of years”  and as “…a person held to a service or labor.” They provided for a ban on the importation of slaves 20 years after the Constitution came into effect, an obvious nod to the hope that in time, the institution would wither and die of its own inherently contradictory nature in a Democratic Republic.

But here is the problem–and I am wondering if the seed of our destruction as our nation is foretold in this basic institutional hypocrisy. The darkness and evil inherent in American slavery was written into its Founding document: The Constitution of the United States. We ceased to be a unified nation from 1861-1865 when the Southern States went to war to defend their right to their “peculiar institution.” And the greatest argument that they had was the “Virginia Dynasty”: 4 of the first 5 Presidents were all slave holding Virginians and Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence. If slavery was good enough for them despite their occasional verbal and written critiques, it was good enough for the Republic expanding into new lands and the future. It is of critical importance to remember that the high dudgeon that the Southern slave states were in from the end of the Mexican-American War to secession in 1861 was over the fact that 2 of 3 soldiers who fought in the Mexican-American war were from Southern states, and after the war was won the North tried to prevent the South from expanding slavery into the Mexican Cession territory, depriving them of the spoils of what that they overwhelmingly fought for. And it is not hard to see that they had a pretty strong argument that that was patently unfair.

One very compelling way of looking at the Civil War, and it is my favored interpretation is that the war was the “devil coming back to get his due” over the Faustian Bargain of constructing a new nation dedicated to advancing the principles of human dignity and expanding the circle of human freedom with slavery woven into the compact. Perhaps that was the greatest reckoning for that hypocrisy; the earthquake followed by aftershocks. Lynchings, beatings, Separate but Equal, and the incalculable evil of sending generations of Black Americans to their graves unable to fully express their humanity and rise to the level commensurate to their merit as full human beings. And now Donald Trump–a despicable human being  who embodies so much of what is dark and primitive in the human spirit at the helm of our country, giving voice to the dark underbelly that trace their origins to our original sin.

And this is what I ponder today: Does the fact that the foundation upon which our National Experiment was built was created with defective material doom us to ultimate failure? The Founders were very aware of the fact that Democracies through history had never proven sustainable–and did their fairly egregious hypocrisy determine for us that ours too would be short lived? Could it be that this Faustian Bargain created a nation whose life like that of the Replicants in BladeRunner were programmed with a fixed time to live?

In a letter to his good friend Joshua Speed in 1855 Abraham Lincoln wrote the following:

As a nation, we began by declaring that “all men are created equal.” We now practically read it “all men are created equal, except negroes”When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read “all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics.” When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty — to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocracy [sic].

There is only one health care plan that makes economic sense. The plan would look like this: Every person is covered from cradle to grave and everyone pays into the insurance plan. Period.

The principle that is the bedrock of any insurance plan is this: Risk is spread so that everyone gets the potential benefit of the insurance should they need it. Most people probably never have to use their car insurance, so it could be argued that for most people car insurance is pointless: Why should I, who most likely will never have a catastrophic accident pay into a system that will cover someone else who might? An individual could save hundreds of thousands of dollars over a lifetime by not paying for car insurance. Drive carefully and limit even more the chance that you will ever have an accident. And for those who do. well they can find a way to pay the tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars out of their OWN pocket if they do. Or if the accident causes serious injury, it could cost millions. That would be  THEIR problem, not “ours.” Shoot, let’s take the argument even further: NOT having insurance would probably force more people to drive even more carefully since they would know that a catastrophic accident could ruin them financially. So it could be argued to be strongly favoring not carrying auto insurance.

I pay about $3000 per year to have car and motorcycle insurance. Over 10 years that is $30,000; over 60 years $180,000. Just imagine what I could do with that money if government didn’t force me to have auto insurance! It doesn’t take a math wizard to figure out that for me, this would probably be a good bet. I’ll drive carefully, stay off the roads in bad weather and pocket the money I would save on car insurance to buy things I really want. Dictatorial governments should not be able to tell me how I spend my own money or try to legislate indemnifying me against bad behavior. But heck, how about the government allow me to have a car insurance savings account: i put that $2000 a year into a CISA and get a tax credit for doing so. And if I have an accident, I use THAT money to pay for my OWN misfortune. And again, anticipating the argument, the chance that I will be hit by one of the irresponsible people who drive irresponsibly is fairly minuscule, and if that happens, I’ll have my CISA to cover my misfortune. That means I TOOK CARE OF MYSELF, and the oppressive government didn’t make me do something I didn’t want to do. And also, poor people are probably poor because they lack the motivation or energy to make more money. Why should I reward their lack of initiative?

Now a brief comparison between car and health insurance: Of course only people who actually drive vehicles on public roads would need to make the choice to purchase a CISA. What about health insurance? It is not arguable that at some point in every person’s life they will need health care. For a brief illness, for allergies, for a fall, for a wrenched ankle or broken wrist. Or of course, for a long, debilitating illness: cancer, diabetes, autoimmune disease, etc. So health care is a universal need. But again, why should I be forced to pay into a system that protects OTHER people from the vagaries of poor health? Why shouldn’t I be able to just sock money away and take care of my own health care issues–like, let’s say an HSA (Health Savings Account). Making me pay for someone else’s potential health care needs–which could well be caused by poor choices: smoking, risky behavior, alcohol or drug abuse, etc., which actually RAISES the cost of insurance I have to pay for while living a more risk averse life. And most of all, why should the government have the power for FORCE me to buy something that I do not want?

Shouldn’t the principle of freedoms, enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution allow me the option to live the life I want and pay for it myself, prevent the government from forcing me to have insurance of any kind?

And doesn’t having insurance actually incentivize people to behave badly? If I have car insurance that will cover me no matter what happens, wouldn’t that make people engage in much riskier behavior? If I am insured and drive recklessly, my insurance will cover me if I cause an accident no matter why it happened. I may have to pay a ticket and higher insurance rates, but still, an accident that potentially causes hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars won’t break me. Same for health insurance: If I have full coverage health insurance I can smoke, drink, engage in risky behavior with no fear of having my choices ruin me. Sure I might get cancer or get injured, but it won’t ruin me financially. So, insurance creates a false sense of security and encourages people to live riskier lives. Right?

Is there a fatal fallacy that undermines this entire line of reasoning?

When nations form, they establish communities unified by a set of articulated or forced principles (in the case of dictatorial regimes). The systems we are born into establish to varying degrees a set of expectations as to how we are expected to behave. Were we born into a jungle the rules would be rigid and unchangeable–you live in whatever manner you have to in order to survive. But civilizations are built upon more “civil” and rational principles. Communities have expectations that limit the rights of individuals in order to create order and a measure of stability. Communities and rampant individualism are antithetical to each other. To some degree we are all expected to give up some individual freedom in order to serve the interests of the larger community. And we gain benefits from being a member of the community. There is order based upon a set of clearly stated and enforced rules. And we are protected from the brutal reality of living in an environment that creates constant anxiety about the most basic struggle for survival. If we are the strongest individual in the jungle, though we may survive longer than most, we also have to fight unendingly to maintain our dominance.

So what does insurance of any kind have to do with this? If we drive a car in America or get sick in America, insurance provides everyone a basic level of protection against or mitigation of catastrophes of either our own or others’ ill fortune or bad choices. Every single person who drives a car in America has a chance of being involved in some kind of catastrophic event of our own or others’ making that could destroy us financially.  A small chance, yes, but nonetheless a chance.  If we get ill in America, universal insurance means everyone pays something in order to do one of two things: Either protect us from financial ruination or other members of our community from the same eventuality. It is peace of mind that we are purchasing. And there is also an economic benefit that accrues if it is done properly: Everyone paying into a system that everyone will use spreads the cost and the risk for everyone. Failing that, the wealthy purchase the very best care for themselves from their vast resources: they do not need health insurance because their wealth gives them insurance. For the middle class, their own health insurance will be much more costly because the pool of payees will be smaller, made even more so by the fact that the poor cannot be able to afford insurance so they will get care the most expensive way possible-by not getting preventative  care, allowing illness to advance to more critical levels, and then resorting  to using the Emergency Room, which taxpayers or hospitals have to support. And though the most Social-Darwinist among us would say that we should just allow the poorest and most vulnerable among us to die if they get sick and cannot afford care, that is simply not an option in a “civilized” society.

The “mandate” of purchasing health care in Massachusetts under Romneycare (put forth by the Heritage Institute and implemented by the Republican Governor, Mitt Romney) was designed as a market-based government policy by a Conservative think-tank. It acknowledged the unarguable reality that everyone will use health care so everyone should pay something for it (and, or course, in a civilized society the poor would be subsidized by everyone else). When that became the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, suddenly Conservatives hated it for reasons that need another blog to explain. Obamacare established that each year, penalties for not purchasing health care would increase to the point that the last holdouts would eventually find it easier to purchase health insurance rather than pay the penalty. And of course, in order to make any insurance system work, those least likely to need health care–the young and the healthy MUST pay into it in order to provide the indemnification for the older and sicker that the insurance system provides for in principle. It does not take a rocket scientist to figure out that any system that fails to include a mandate (and to control costs) will ultimately fail to do exactly what insurance is designed to do.

So, what does Trumpcare, as drafted by Paul Ryan–claimed to be one of the best thinkers and most principled members of the GOP leadership–do first and foremost?

It eliminates the mandate to purchase insurance (the government should not be allowed to force people to purchase insurance). And it keeps many of the elements of the ACA in place that increase insurance costs.

In other words, it defeats the most fundamental principle undergirding insurance policy–that of spreading risk by including all potential consumers of insurance as payers into the system. And it does so because Paul Ryan does not believe that people who have money should be forced to support those who do not, beyond a cruelly minimum level of care. Remember–one of Paul Ryan’s “bibles” is Ayn Rand’s book, “Atlas Shrugged,” which he used to purchase for all of his staffers and require that they read. It is an overlong screed by a militant Atheist who immigrated to America from Communist Russia with an irrational hatred for any conversation that involves discussion of “community”, and enshrines rampant, selfish individualism as its highest principle.

This nation either believes one thing or it believes another on health care: Decent, affordable health care is either a birthright, or it is not. If it is, then we as a nation demand that our politicians work together to provide for a financially sound, basic program to provide health care coverage to every citizen of the nation. And if it is not–if we believe that people who cannot afford to pay for their own basic health care coverage do not deserve it, then we plant the seeds for the eventual dissolution and fragmentation of our nation. Communities are nurtured by people who are committed to providing a certain level of civility and selflessness in order to advance principles beyond our own selfish needs and desires. Rampant individualism like that advanced by the the leaders of the current Republican party is the cancer that will kill our nation.

On that, History is clear.

At the great junctures in history, Nations are challenged to redefine themselves and to create a new synthesis between Conservative forces of preservation and stability vs Liberal forces of change and adaptation to new realities. It could be said that at those critical moments in history a nation seeks to redefine itself without destroying its Soul. America’s most dramatic moment was, of course, the Civil War, when we had to fracture into two warring nations before we could come back together, unfortunately at the end of a gun barrel to try and forge a new identity that assimilated the changes won on the battlefield. It was not easy, nor are the racial battles of the Civil War yet fully resolved. But, though not fully healed, we are different and better for having transcended that moment. Like the echoes of the Big Bang that still reverberate through the Universe, the energy of that conflict still resonates through the nation’s consciousness. And it is a reminder of where we once were and how far we have yet to go. The Soul of the Nation survived.

We are at another critical juncture in our History. The Republican Administration elected in 2016 has calculatingly torn the fabric of our national identity along weaknesses in its seams. And this rift is of greater import than the usual change of administrations that occur every 4 years. The current administration is, at base, reactionary. Beyond the impulsivity of the current President, if his administration is seen as having taken the drivers seat of the National Vehicle, he represents a slamming on of the brakes and a jamming of the transmission in reverse.

Since the mid-1950’s the United States have seen dramatic, almost unprecedented changes. The Civil Rights movement; Women’s Liberation Movement; Gay Rights (LGBTQ) movement; Significant changes in immigrant demographics. We have just had our first Black President, and almost had our first Woman President. And perhaps the most significant change, in terms of the rapidity of cultural shifts was the dramatic, seemingly overnight change in public acceptance of gay marriage, which not only represented a  shift in terms of public acceptance, but was also, surprisingly,  ratified by a divided but Conservative-dominated Supreme Court. For Liberals, this period is seen as an era of progress towards advancing fundamental American values with a dramatic expansion of  the circle of freedom and equality for formerly marginalized citizens. For many Conservatives, it is seen as a period of vital loss, that chipped away at the national character, with the  decline in important “timeless” values and the retreat from an original vision of what the nation was supposed to be. We are now, though not threatened with conflict on an actual battlefield, about as close to warfare as can be without taking up arms. We are, a nation divided. (Though in a nation that has over 300,000,000 firearms in civilian hands, a spontaneous explosion into violence is certainly a possibility)

In a dialogue from the movie, Inherit the Wind, characters Clarence Drummond and Matthew Harrison Brady, in a fictional recounting of the Scopes Monkey Trial, involving in 1920’s Tennessee the challenge to the teaching of evolution in public schools,  (Clarence Darrow vs. William Jennings Bryan) were having a conversation in which Brady wonders aloud how once good friends had drifted so far apart. Drummond responded by saying that sometimes distance is created when one person is moving and another one stands still. This is the fundamental dynamic between political conservatism and political liberalism. Conservatives try to “conserve” or preserve the extant system vs Liberals who want to change the system to adapt to new realities. It is the inherent dynamic of all life at all levels: organisms, people and systems are in a constant state of dynamic tension defined as “stasis”: The equilibrium point brought about by the equal and opposite forces in temporary balance. When one side of the dynamic begins to shift, it throws the stasis into disequilibrium and out of struggle a new synthesis results. Like biological systems, any system that fails to adapt, dies.

In most elections, the disequilibrium is manageable within the constraints of the system. We change leaders who tweak policies, but the system is not under threat. Foreign and economic policies shift, social programs advance or are reversed, but we know that in the next election, all changes can be reversed. In 1860 that all changed:

From Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address:

“On the occasion corresponding to this four years ago all thoughts were anxiously directed to an impending civil war. All dreaded it, all sought to avert it. While the inaugural address was being delivered from this place, devoted altogether to saving the Union without war, insurgent agents were in the city seeking to destroy it without war—seeking to dissolve the Union and divide effects by negotiation. Both parties deprecated war, but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish, and the war came.”

The Southern States had lost faith in the system under which they existed. They wanted revolution, not evolution. They wanted to destroy the Federal System of a strong national government and replace it with another Confederacy, or league of friendship between states in which each state was sovereign. In order to protect the “peculiar institution” of slavery, the South resorted to war in defense of a the specious argument that states never intended to give up their sovereignty to a Supreme Central Government when the Constitution was ratified. It was a naked attempt to elevate the conflict by making the war something based on principle (state’s rights) rather than a simple defense of slavery.

Southerners, long fearing that demographics would shrink their national influence and threaten slavery decided to wage a war, to gain on the battlefield what they had failed to gain through political struggle. Lincoln knew that the impending war from the Southern perspective, was about the preservation of slavery; he  had one, very simple goal–to prove that the Union was indivisible; that what the Founding Fathers had created by and through implementation of the Constitution was intended to be greater than any conflict that threatened to divide it. Though the South started the war to protect slavery, Lincoln did not commit the Nation to the war to end slavery–the war triggered by the Southern provocation of firing on Fort Sumter. He wanted slavery to end, and he thought it was inevitable that it would end, but it would end as a result of  demographic, moral and eonomic changes. He wanted the end of slavery to be organic and effected within the constraints of a system that elevated law above human fecklessness.

This is not the space in which to take up the issues that have us so badly divided at this moment in our History. Suffice it to say that there is currently an administration in power that wants to deconstruct much of the gains that have been made in the last half-century. (Steve Bannon said he intends to deconstruct the administrative state) Within 30 days of the administration’s inauguration, we have seen a flurry of Executive Orders rolling back much of what many, and perhaps most of America would see as progress. Water and air pollution standards have been relaxed; Corporate regulations are being rolled back; recent changes regarding the rights of transgendered, school-aged kids have been relegated to the realm of state’s rights issues; the media, generally unpopular by the political establishment have now been declared “enemies of the people;” The President, claiming that he is not subject to conflict of interest laws continues to manage a sprawling international business empire, placing himself in the position of being manipulated by foreign economic interests; and, of course, there is the “Russia problem”: his seeming genuine affection for Global Thug #1, Vladimir Putin, perhaps the most chilling element of his entire agenda.

I end with reference to George Washington in a passage that is definitive to our current situation, from his Farewell Address of 1796: Washington recognized 221 years ago how a political party, unmoored from wisdom, principle or primary loyalty to the nation, would elevate survival of party over all else. And he strongly warns of the dangers of foreign influence in such a critical moment:

“I have already intimated to you the danger of parties in the State… Let me now take a more comprehensive view, and warn you in the most solemn manner against the baneful effects of the spirit of party generally. 

This spirit, unfortunately, is inseparable from our nature, having its root in the strongest passions of the human mind. It exists under different shapes in all governments, more or less stifled, controlled, or repressed; but, in those of the popular form, it is seen in its greatest rankness, and is truly their worst enemy. 

The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries which result gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of public liberty. 

Without looking forward to an extremity of this kind (which nevertheless ought not to be entirely out of sight), the common and continual mischiefs of the spirit of party are sufficient to make it the interest and duty of a wise people to discourage and restrain it. 

It serves always to distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration. It agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection. It opens the door to foreign influence and corruption, which finds a facilitated access to the government itself through the channels of party passions. Thus the policy and the will of one country are subjected to the policy and will of another.” [Boldface emphasis mine]

Once again, despite their occasional glaring shortsightedness on some issues, there is plenty of brilliance and lucidity to be mined from the original work by the Founders of the Nation that are startlingly relevant to our current situation. And we are wise to be aware that this current Republican Administration and the soulless Republican Party in league with him are a danger to the survival of our Republic. They have demonstrated that they will be willing to acquiesce, if not assist in the killing of  the Soul of the nation in order to replace it with a system of their design. Once again:

The disorders and miseries which result gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of public liberty. 

The people who currently run the country want to destroy the system and replace it with one in their preferred image. They do not want to alter the system–they want to wreck it and them build the system they envision as superior. The battle has been joined, and it will be the vigilance of a resisting and uncompromising public in opposing the powers-that-be that will preserve and protect the legacy that we have inherited.

It really is that important. 

To what, ultimately, as citizens of a Republic, do we owe our loyalty to as political agents? Is our first loyalty to the institutions of our Republic or is it to those elected within the system?

Our political system was created, based on principles that were designed to be adaptable to the degree that the reality that the world changes in unpredictable and unknowable ways. No one could know  when the Constitution was crafted that the 4th Amendment protection against unreasonable search and seizure could one day apply to the government getting your DNA from a tossed cigarette butt. Nor could the Founders know that an overwhelmingly rural nation in which we had no standing army and relied on the citizen militia for defense (and that many people used their highly inaccurate weapons to hunt for food) would become an overwhelmingly urban nation and that weapons technology would develop military grade weapons of mass slaughter that would become available to the masses. (AR-15’s etc).

But the adaptability of the system  was supposed to limit changes resulting from elections  within constraints that honored that the fundamental principles of the system would be respected. Freedom of the Press, Speech and Freedom of Assembly establish that, whatever transient  government is constituted through the electoral process, it MUST respect those structurally essential fundamentals.  The Great Britain that we separated ourselves from had MORE freedoms than most other country in the world at the time. Our nation was created partly to enshrine and guarantee more freedoms for more people than Great Britain afforded to its citizens. But our Constitution did not provide all freedoms to all people: it was structured so that as perceptions of Freedom expanded in later generations, those basic guarantees could be extended to more and more people. Our Founders were wise enough to know that they did not know everything. The inclusive circle, greater than that that came before us was set up so that it could expand.

The current Republican Administration is led by a man who is either unwilling or unable to respect the most fundamental principles undergirding our Republic. He is an individual whose personal behavioral inclinations are oriented towards dictatorship. “We are a nation of Laws, not Men.” His Narcissism places his own vaunted sense of his rectitude and his power above the laws designed to constrain just those impulses in a leader. This Republican Administration is a fundamental threat to the existence of our nation.

Now is the time to demand, as rational actors. the reassertion of our belief in the system’s perfectibility. Now is the time to assert firmly that we value the underlying system more than we support the “victor” who is the very antithesis of our Republic’s values and virtues.  He has attacked the electoral process and the press. He refused to say that he would accept the result of the election if he lost the election. He has asserted that the free press is the enemy of the people. He asserted that, if elected, he would try Hillary Clinton and “lock her up.” His chief aide, Steve Bannon has said that this administration’s job is to completely deconstruct the administrative state. He and his administration lie–they lie with alacrity, brazenness and enthusiasm.  And he has irrefutably allied with our greatest and most powerful enemy, Russia, to rig the election and shape his foreign policies going forward. He has expressed his admiration for the leadership qualities of the most powerful thug on the planet, Vladimir Putin. That fact alone should bring pause to every single American citizen.

There are legal and extra-legal options open to us. The fight has to be enjoined within the system, and also on the streets: Civil Disobedience is the option available to people whose righteous indignation demands bringing pressure to bear from outside the system. Every single Black and White person who broke the segregation laws of the Jim Crow era was expressing their “right to stand for right” in defiance of unjust laws. (MLK) Clearly now there are powerful currents within the Press, the Intelligence Community and the Legal System to counter the most destructive actions and behaviors of this Republican Administration and its minions. And there have been powerful and defiant actions in “The Street.”

That this current Republican President seems to have the unshakeable and enthusiastic support of around 37% of the country should not deter us. Those who elected him and who now fervently support him were and are a shrinking minority in the country. It should be clear to all people who still have faith in the system, currently under multi-pronged assault, that the country will become either more representative of the values of those currently in power or will revert back, with firmness, resolve and courage, and with essential  correctives, to what it was originally intended to be.

The choice is ours, and remember this:

We are right. They are wrong. Period. 

http://www.al.com/news/index.ssf/2017/02/president_trump_approval_ratin.html

Just over 8 years ago with the election of Barack Obama, the theme of “Not My President” became a fixture of the political right. It was clear from the very beginning that they felt that he existed somewhere outside the established parameters of acceptable Presidential contest winners. He was branded as a possible Kenyan-born Socialist with a fake birth certificate, something the current head of the Republican Administration kept alive for years after it was known to be a canard. Mitch McConnell professed shortly after Obama’s first election victory that Job #1 of the GOP was to make Obama a one-term President. For the first time in my life, the very legitimacy of the duly-elected President was challenged. And this went considerably beyond the anger at the 5 times in our History when the Electoral College elevated a man to the office who had lost the popular vote. There was clearly anger over George W. Bush getting elected after the Supreme Court intervened to shut down a recount in Florida that could have changed the outcome. I was one of those who was disturbed at the highly suspicious intervention by the nation’s highest court, but, George W. Bush won and life went on. And, as history has shown, Obama, our first Black  President was well within the mainstream, though attacks on his legitimacy never really ceased. Many monographs will be written to explain why this happened, but it is the height of absurdity to claim that opposition was all about policy differences and race had nothing to do with it.

There were many things that happened during Obama’s two terms that highlighted the shadow of illegitimacy that the GOP cast upon him. The Republican Member of the U.S. House of Representatives from South Carolina‘s 2nd district, Joe Wilson yelled “You Lie!” during Obama’s State of the Union after President Obama said that illegal immigrants would not be covered under Obamacare (The ACA-Affordable Care Act). And, in an unprecedented public response at another State of the Union speech by Obama, Justice Samuel Alito mouthed “Not True” after Obama criticized the Supreme Court’s decision in the “Citizen’s United” decision.

“Peter G. Verniero, a former justice on the New Jersey Supreme Court, said neither end of the exchange helped the prestige of the United States Supreme Court.

“The court’s legitimacy is derived from the persuasiveness of its opinions and the expectation that those opinions are rendered free of partisan, political influences,” Mr. Verniero said. “The more that individual justices are drawn into public debates, the more the court as an institution will be seen in political terms, which was not the intent of the founders.”

New York Times, Jan 8, 2010

It appeared that normal boundaries of decorum and respect for the office of the President were often breached, a not very subtle expression of the Institutional Republican Party’s contempt for President Obama. It was far less opposition to his policies than opposition to the man that drove the obstructionism of the GOP for his entire 8-year administration.

“TIME just published “The Party of No,” an article adapted from my new book, The New New Deal: The Hidden Story of Change in the Obama Era. It reveals some of my reporting on the Republican plot to obstruct President Obama before he even took office, including secret meetings led by House GOP whip Eric Cantor (in December 2008) and Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (in early January 2009) in which they laid out their daring (though cynical and political) no-honeymoon strategy of all-out resistance to a popular President-elect during an economic emergency. “If he was for it,” former Ohio Senator George Voinovich explained, “we had to be against it.””           They had not only lost–they had lost to someone named Barack Hussein Obama, which constituted an offense against the unspoken rules, thereby granting the party the right to obstruct him–and knowing without a doubt that their constituency would not only expect, but demand that they obstruct.

No one who knows anything of the history of the Presidency and of political parties would suggest that up to Obama’s election politics was nice and it has now become ugly.

Politics, as a practise, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds. Henry Adams

In the recent book, Hamilton, by Ron Chernow, he reveals over and over how campaigns of the early United States often descended to vituperation. Thomas Jefferson, due to his efforts to build the wall of separation between Church and State was accused of being the Anti-Christ. It was fairly routine for otherwise sage leaders of the early nation to anonymously, in party journals, attack the fact that Hamilton was a foreign-born bastard child. Jefferson and Madison ended up hating George Washington because, as a de-facto Federalist he sided with Alexander Hamilton on the policies that emerged from the developing Federalist camp. And, during the early years of our nation there really was no independent press that wasn’t an organ of the nascent political party organizations. Papers were either Federalist or Republican and toed the party line, not infrequently accusing the other side of wanting to destroy the early Republic. Republicans often expressed the view that the Federalists, who wanted to establish a much stronger Central Government with a strong, independent Executive, of being secret Royalists who wanted to make George Washington a King. Politics and hyperbole are frequent bedfellows.

SO, WHAT HAS CHANGED? It is important to remember that when the nation was new and in its formative years, all of the tensions of nationhood were heightened. Because all factions in the early Republic recognized that the nation was fragile, any attempts to move it one way or the other were seen as attacks on the nation’s very survival. Political parties formed around two very different visions of the direction the nation should go and each was passionate about their policy agenda. There was not enough “there” there to feel confident that there was a loyal opposition party arrayed against the party in power. The party out of power was the sworn enemy of the party in power. The Federalist, John Adams, an otherwise brilliant thinker and politician backed the egregious Alien and Sedition acts, a thinly veiled attempt by the Federalist Party to limit the growth of the Republican party by extending the years required to become a citizen and also by criminalizing speech critical of the President. In one legendary incident, a drunken Luther Baldwin said in his outside voice that “I wish they’d fire the cannon through John Adams’ ass!”and went to jail for violating the Sedition Act.

In this most recent election, Donald Trump ran a campaign that could tamely be characterized as a bull running through a china shop. If the china represents everything structured, created,  beautiful and valuable, he ran through, shattering it all, using crude and childish  insults against the field of GOP campaign opponents; threatened to prosecute and jail Hillary Clinton; railed about pulling the US out of NATO; insulted immigrants; lambasted the institutional media as purveyors of  “fake news”; deriding the intelligence community,  foreign nations, foreign leaders etc., with alacrity. Nothing was sacred and he promised to be the restorer of all that he thought good and right about America. And of course we also learned  that he “like[d] to grab women by the pussy” and thanks to Marco Rubio, asserted pride in the no-complaints-size of his male member.  In virtually every regard, Donald Trump was the candidate whose campaign appealed exclusively the very tiny part of the brain known as the amygdala. “The amygdala is involved in the overall appraisal of danger and the emotion of fear, regardless of the sensory input, said Dr. Young… The report appears in the current issue of the journal Nature.”  NY Times, Jan 21, 1997. It was a campaign run from a very small part of the candidate’s brain, and appealed to the very same primitive region of the brain of his rabid supporters, conducted at the verbal level of a 5th grader.

Though it is not uncommon for politicians to play on peoples’ fears in election campaigns, this is the only modern campaign where one candidate has used fear almost exclusively to appeal to voters. George H.W. Bush used the infamous Willy Horton ad to stir up fear among White people of Black criminals released too early from prison by bleeding-heart liberals. Trump’s demagogic inclinations are already, like his very persona, outsized. He unapologetically asserted his love for the “uneducated,” a group within every society most prone to appeals to xenophobia and fear of the “other.” Obama was certainly accused by a relatively small sliver of the far-right of literally wanting to destroy America, but that was not a mainstream opinion.

Not so with Trump. He alleged a vast array of conspiracies that existed within the country that were trying to destroy us: A media establishment that didn’t only lie, but lied all the time to advance a hidden agenda; Two political parties that were corrupt to the core pushing the agendas of the wealthy and powerful while brutally eviscerating the true heroes in America–the uneducated red-state denizens that were committing suicide at alarming rates with opioids because corporate/political America stripped them of their good paying jobs; Foreigners that were taking those jobs, due to the greedy architects of trade policy that cared more about foreigners than their own constituents. Donald Trump crafted himself very embodiment of the perfect storm of outrage, anger, frustration, and sense of victimhood felt by the disenfranchised, dispossessed and cruelly tossed-aside elements in society. And, as such, he became the political singularity that triggered a national discussion about what the responsibility of every citizen is when the ballot box elevated a man to the pinnacle of power who was clearly unfit for the job at so many levels.  The point here? That in my lifetime, he is the only President who has challenged perhaps a majority of citizens to ask the question:

Is he my President?

And if answered in the negative, what are my responsibilities not just as a citizen, but as a moral agent in confronting this very dangerous and destabilizing force?

I was asked this question just yesterday by a friend from high school in the early 1970’s, with whom I have reconnected after many years through Facebook. He is of the ‘I love Jesus and guns, and voted for Trump and am still praying for him, though I am not without some concerns.’ Yes, he is an unlikely friend, but one who, after more than one unfriending on Facebook we have both decided that, despite the Grand Canyon-wide chasm between us have to keep our dialogue going.

Here was my answer: He was elected President in what I regard as a highly compromised election due to Russian and Wikileaks hacking, highly questionable behavior by James Comey,  Head of the FBI and a rogue, Clinton hating NY division of the FBI. He has also refused to separate himself in any meaningful way from his business interests that can potentially severely compromise his role as President. So he is the President, but he is not my President. I do regard him as an illegitimate President and I will work hard to advance any and all investigations to uncover the information that I need to know to render my definitive judgment. At this point, I consider that he is compromised seriously enough to be impeached and tried. When a President is being denied important top secret intelligence because of doubts as to his ability to handle it in a way that respects its importance, we have a serious problem in the White House.

All political systems are creations of human beings. During the long epoch of the Divine Right of Kings, it was believed that the authority of Kings came directly from God, and it followed that the rule of the Monarch was unquestionable by mere mortals. In a radical reorientation of that long-established principle, Thomas Jefferson articulated a view of political authority that was its absolute antithesis. Basic human rights (life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness) Jefferson asserted, were derived by the people from nature, and those rights preceded the establishment of governments. People thus aggregated, and then established governments whose job it was to protect and defend those rights. Government did not grant rights, it was established to protect rights derived from Nature–in other words, those rights were birthrights. “That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

So, the “consent of the Governed” is required for the proper exercise of governmental authority. We are born with Natural Rights; We coalesce into communities and establish governments; and then the government continues to operate only as long as it maintains the “consent of the governed.” The creation and continued existence of government requires our consent. And this is the point on which the question above–Is he my President–hinges.

“Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”

Tens of millions of us are in a quasi-revolutionary frame of mind. The assaults of this current Republican administration on the media, on the rights of minorities and immigrants; the reprehensible attacks on the legitimacy of the entire Judicial branch of the nation; the positing of himself as the strongman with the only and unquestioned authority to “right” the nation; the incessant distorting and rejection of observable and provable facts; the almost daily assertion of overt falsehoods; the claims that truth and veracity derive ONLY from him; the labelling as enemies those who dare to criticize him; these are fast becoming “insufferable evils”  emerging from an “absolute Despotism.“

These are not normal times…

Our institutional revolutions known as elections, held every two years to elect the full House of Representatives, 1/3 of the Senate, and every 4 years, President of the United States have failed in this past election to produce a leader that has a basic respect for the laws that create the institutions that he both leads and operates alongside. The three branches of government are intended to be systemically oppositional to each other, checking and balancing the tendencies of people and groups within the system to ignore or stretch their constitutionally granted powers. We now have a Republican President with designs to twist the system into his own image at the cost of all legal, ethical and moral constraints.

Both houses of Congress are now led by the same party as the President and those “leaders” are woefully lacking in the ability to recognize respect for law and principle over Party loyalty. And the Supreme Court, short a 9th Justice, snatched from Obama’s legitimate and Constitutional right to appoint judges to vacant court seats is paralyzed in a 4-4 ideological split, allowing the President to appoint a young,  out-of-the-ideological- mainstream Justice to the court thus tipping it in his perceived favor. And the precedent set by the Supreme Court (supposedly the best and brightest men in our system) in 1896’s decision of Plessy v. Ferguson–that it was right, proper and legal to segregate Black citizens from White citizens by laws drawn up exclusively by White people, and was not therefore a violation of the Equal Protection of the Laws clause of the 14th Amendment.  Point being, that though we like to elevate the Justices as men above politics, guided only by the objective hand of law and justice, they are inherently political animals that cannot necessarily be trusted to side with the transcendent principles enshrined in our Constitution.

This current Republican Administration, Republican-dominated Congress and ideologically split Supreme Court are a threat to the survival of our political system. There is a disturbing tendency within the system right now to preserve the political power of one party in flagrant defiance of established Constitutional law and principle. A Democratic Senator was silenced and removed from the Senate chamber by Mitch McConnell using an arcane and rarely used Senatorial procedure because she dared to read the speech of a Civil Rights leader in criticizing the questionable devotion to civil rights of a Trump nominee to be the new Attorney General. When rebuked by judges and courts for a troubling Executive Order banning Muslims immigrants from 7 countries, none of which has produced a single act of terror in the United States, Trump insulted the judge and castigated another 3 judge panel of a circuit court for daring to challenge him. He has declared the media the “enemies of the people” and picks and chooses the media outlets allowed into his press briefings. And these are all actions taken within the first 3 weeks of his administration.

We do not owe this President our loyalty. We have to accept this result only to the degree that it is the product of a system allowed to degrade to the point that it produced an execrable result. But the system can be returned to it’s legal basis, and this administration can and will be held accountable for its violations of law.

“We are a system of laws, not men.“

The system allows for, and demands civil disobedience when the system’s perpetuation itself is threatened.  Those Americans who, like myself still believe in the basic integrity of the system we had the good fortune to be born into do not need to either directly appeal to nor try to change the minds of the people whose poor judgment brought us this result. They have bent the system to their will by acting out of fear and anger, and those of us who are now suffering for their bad decisions have no obligation to sit back and allow this misadministration to continue to do damage to the heart and soul of our nation for 4 more years. Protest, resistance, and the legal option of Impeachment are the tools we are now obligated to resort to to show our defiance. We have a right, and an obligation to take our country back.

I was promised by my gun-and-Jesus-loving Republican friend that if he was proved wrong, he would admit it and would buy me a beer. It is a beer I intend to be treated to, and hopefully sooner than later.

During the Presidency of Andrew Jackson, he got in a squabble with the Supreme Court that exposed the Achilles Heel of the 3rd branch-the Judiciary.  (Legislative Branch is created in Article 1, the Executive Branch in Article 2, and the Judiciary Branch in Article 3-a potent reminder that the Architects of our system put the legislative branch first, and had Congress built on a hill-Capitol Hill, to illustrate its supremacy)  Increasingly, states were taking on the regulation of Native Americans within their territories. And, in the case of Worcester v. Georgia, the Supreme Court vacated a Georgia state law dealing with Native Americans within the state’s borders. Chief Justice Marshall ruled that the law was invalid because Native Americas were “nations” and the Constitution stated that only the Federal Government could thus regulate the tribes.

Andrew Jackson was contemptuous of Native Americans, feeling very much in line with the times that they were primitive and child-like and should be dealt with as such. His response thus, to the Supreme Court was: Fine,you issued the ruling, now you enforce it. He said that, fully aware that the court, though the final arbiter of what was or was not Constitutional has no power of enforcement. There is no Supreme Court police force that can force a wayward President or member of Congress to carry out one of its orders. And Jackson also knew that the vast majority of the population agreed with him about Native Americans-they simply wanted their government to get the tribes out of the way of their expansion, treaties be damned. A racist President, Congress and nation had little interest in taking such a legalistic view of the Federalist principle of division of  power between  state and federal governments .

So, the Supreme Court can issue whatever rulings it wants, but absent a President or Congress willing to enforce their rulings, they can achieve little or nothing beyond asserting their interpretation of the law. Were Congress to have had a more sympathetic view of Native Americans, or respect for the institutions of our government, they could have found ways to force Georgia to comply with the ruling of the Court.  But neither of those things happened, because hatred of Natives was greater than respect for the rule or procedures established in law. Andrew Jackson later rounded up members of the Choctaw, Chickasaw, Seminole, Muscogee-Creek and Cherokee nations (The 5 Civilized Tribes) from their ancestral lands and in a military-enforced march, drove them to the Oklahoma Territory in what is referred to as the “Trail of Tears.”

We are in a similar situation today. We have a 4-4 split in the court that renders it powerless in the case of an ideological divide. Any split defers back to the lower court decision from which the appeal came. So we have a weakened Supreme Court that is almost incapable of rendering decisive opinions on important matters that invoke strong ideological divisions. And, this current Republican Administration has shown its contempt for law and rulings of the court. His first act was in firing Sally Yates, acting Attorney General, for issuing a directive to the Justice Department to not argue in defense of the Muslim ban until the constitutionality of the act could be determined. It was not a defiant act–it simply said that on its face, there was a potential constitutional issue involved that needed to be addressed. Should the courts uphold its constitutionality, the act could and would be defended. And, when subsequent court rulings did not go the Administration’s way the current Republican President expressed his contempt for their power, calling James L. Robart, a George W. Bush appointee a “so called judge” when he issued a temporary stay on the Muslim ban, which was issued by Executive Order. His temporary restraining order on the enforcement of the Muslim ban was then upheld unanimously by a 3-court panel of the 9th Circuit Court. And following that rebuke he tweeted, “see you in Court!”

Absent respect by officeholders for law and the institutions of our government, opposing such a situation becomes much more complicated. One of the reasons of course that the President wants to appoint a very conservative Supreme Court judge in Scalia’s position is to lessen the possibility that he will have decisions go against his own interests. But that situation is up in the air right now because there is some suggestion that Democrats might filibuster his nominee. So, if the court remains divided, and/or the current Republican President continues to buck the courts’ authority, he could simply ignore their decisions or the decisions of lower federal courts,  and with both houses of Congress being majority Republican, there is little to suggest that, other than for a few rogue members, they will hold him to account. With little interest on the part of the Republican Congress to hold the Administration’s feet to the fire for deeply troubling information coming out daily regarding Russian influence in our electoral and governance systems, the potential for serious damage to be done is enormous. We have a President who clearly sees the courts as obstacles to his rule by fiat, and a Republican party willing to ignore his depredations.

What we must remember is this: that laws and rules are only as good as the willingness of those whose job it is to enforce them. After the 1954 Brown vs Board of Education decision ruling that separate schools for Blacks and Whites were inherently unequal and thus unconstitutional, (one of the rare cases where the Supreme Court overturned a former decision: Brown overturned Plessy v. Ferguson, (1896), which upheld the principle behind Jim Crow laws, that establishing “separate but equal” facilities for Blacks and Whites was not unconstitutional) many Southern states simply refused to abide by the Brown ruling; Their resistance led the Supreme Court to issue “Brown II” in late 1955, admonishing that they must integrate their schools “with all deliberate speed.” Some states, Virginia perhaps most prominently, simply ignored the decision and shut down some Public School Systems, granting White citizens vouchers allowing them to send their kids to White-only private schools. Some Black students had no schools to go to for a few years as a result. “The Gray Plan [Virginia] recommended that the General Assembly pass legislation and allow for amendment of the state constitution so as to repeal Virginia’s compulsory school attendance law, to allow the Governor to close schools rather than allow their integration, to establish pupil assignment structures, and finally to provide vouchers to parents who chose to enroll their children in segregated private schools. Virginia voters approved the Gray Plan Amendment on January 9, 1956.”  Wikipedia

There are some hints that the current administration’s contempt for law, resistance and decisions of the court will not stand. Judge Gorsuch, nominated by the President to fill Scalia’s seat spoke out against his demeaning comments against Robart and the 9th Circuit Court. The Democratic Party leadership has protested vehemently against his comments, and even some Republican members of Congress have expressed their distaste, both for his attitude towards Muslim immigrants and the courts opposing his orders. In addition, the “street” has become the locus of lots of protest activity against the excesses of this 3-week old Republican Administration and the lassitude of Congress in holding him accountable. So, unlike Jackson, who had public opinion with him and no significant opposition to what he wanted to do. the current President has alienated and angered many very influential centers of power: The media, the Judiciary, the Intelligence community, and arguably, a majority of the public.

The past is only very imperfectly precedent in looking at our current situation. The contempt for the fundamental principle of divided power by Jackson, his hatred of opposition, his entitled sense of his own power to rule they way he wanted and the feeling that he was the very embodiment of the people’s will are all traits shared by the current Republican in the White House. Jackson was right–the overwhelming majority of Americans shared his racist attitude towards Native Americans which gave him the ability to stretch the limits of his power. Such is not the case with our current President–which may well significantly limit his ability to violate fundamental rules in the practice of our system of government. He was elected by 27% of all eligible voters and, three weeks into his administration he has already sunk to 40% approval and 55% disapproval ratings. But we must be vigilant in our opposition to him to limit the damage that he can do. Our current President is clearly not one to believe bad polls or to willingly tame his own damaged ego in defense of higher principle.

9:14pm: Just found this from an article today in Law.com.

“The deans of Yale Law School and Harvard Law School have joined the growing chorus of lawyers publicly condemning President Donald Trump’s attacks on the judiciary.

In a blistering op-ed in The Boston Globe on Friday, Harvard’s Martha Minow and Yale’s Robert Post wrote that Trump’s Twitter-delivered insults against the federal judges who stayed his controversial travel ban risk making the president “an enemy of the law and the Constitution.”

“By questioning the legitimacy and authority of judges, Trump seems perilously close to characterizing the law as simply one more enemy to be smashed into submission,” the deans wrote. “At risk are the legal practices and protections that guard our freedom and our safety from the mob violence that destroyed democracies in the 1930s.”

Trump called U.S. District Court Judge James Robart, who initially stayed the travel ban, a “so-called judge” on Twitter. He then went after the appellate panel for leaving Robart’s order in place, calling their ruling “disgraceful,” among other comments. Last year, Trump accused the judge hearing a lawsuit over his Trump University of bias due to the jurist’s Mexican heritage.

Post said in an interview Monday that he is generally reluctant to weigh in on matters outside the scope of the law school, but Trump’s hostility to the courts demanded a response. “I felt that what’s going on here was really an attack on the rule of law,” Post said. “It’s the mission of the school to preserve and sustain the rule of law, so it came under my obligation as a steward of the institution.”

Post and Minow aren’t the only lawyers weighing in. The legal profession has been vocal in its criticism of Trump’s repeated disparagement of judges.“

I have seen articles ranging from ‘we should impeach him now’ to ‘it is a pipe dream that Trump will be impeached.’ I believe that the Democratic Party should push hard for impeachment based upon the Emoluments Clause as quickly as possible. I believe this for the following reasons:

#1) Pushing for Articles of Impeachment by the Democrats will force the issue onto the front burner. Of course the Democrats as a minority in both the House and Senate cannot force the Republicans to Impeach the leader of this Republican Administration, but it will force them to deal with in in a way that will generate headlines across the spectrum. What I have learned from years of teaching and posting on Facebook is that the sheer volume of news thrown at people every day makes it very hard to keep a focus. And, repetition is essential to the process of learning. There are daily outrages emanating from this current Republican Administration that make it difficult to focus on the actionable ones. Conway making up the Bowling Green Massacre; the Republican Administration and its press agents continually pushing the utter fabrication that voter fraud is an enormous problem that demands immediate attention and probably cost Trump the popular vote. When they do this they set the agenda since the 24 hour media is headline driven, which keeps the focus off of the more serious issues. By saying they intend to draw up Articles of Impeachment, the Democratic Party will have to clearly articulate the connection between the current Republican Administration’s serious issues with running  businesses that derive profit from policy, both foreign and domestic. And it will force the Republican Party Establishment to address the issue if only to condemn it and try to minimize its importance. With the Democrats pushing the issue, the Republicans resisting it, the media will be given a daily focus for their news that will be primary and will drown out some of the noise coming from the diversionary tactics of the current Republican Administration.

#2) And perhaps #2 should be in 1st place, but in fact, it appears that there are elements of this Republican Administration that appear to be impeachable offenses. The business/political overlap, conflicts over which are being forcefully pushed by the administration’s minions (Conway urging people to buy Ivanka’s lines and criticizing Retailers who are dropping it; Spicer’s comments as Press Secretary critical of retailers’ dropping of Ivanka’s lines). In addition, there now stories that government agencies are planning on possibly renting space in the Trump Tower, and the conflict over Trump’s being  granted  a lease based on highly questionable terms by the GSA in the Old Post Office building in D.C.:

“If elected president, Donald Trump would bring with him to the White House unprecedented conflicts of interest, thanks to his sprawling holdings and various debts, including more than $100 million owed to a foreign bank. But his biggest conflict might be the $200 million hotel project Trump’s company is developing a couple of blocks from the White House in the Old Post Office Building, a historic property owned by the federal government and leased to the Trump Organization for 60 years. It seems likely, if not inevitable, that during a Trump presidency the federal government could find itself negotiating with the commander in chief—or his children—over matters relating to the new Trump International Hotel.”

Mother Jones, 10/15/2016

#3) Finally, the Democratic Party must be persistent in demanding a full investigation into the Dossier regarding the possible compromising of #45 by Russian Intelligence. The information regarding the validity is tantalizing, but right now, it can only be claimed to appear to have some validity. The problem is that, unless and until firm evidence links the dossier with Russian involvement in the election (which is no longer in doubt), the most salacious and perhaps least significant information is what gets splashed around, making the left look as silly as the fake-news sites that claimed that Hillary ran a sex ring in a Washington D.C. pizzeria. Whether or not Russia has video of Donald Trump taking “golden showers” in a Russian Hotel room doesn’t really matter as much as the fact that Trump was a regular visitor to Russia and has had a fairly well-established relationship with Putin. And it is certainly not specious to claim that Putin, the Global Master Manipulator, former head of the KGB, had a very large interest in tracking #45’s travels to Russia, using unsecured phones and computers. And finally, if any of this is true, it is of absolutely critical importance to track the information down. The head of this current Republican Administration has proven himself to be a man who could euphemistically be said to have a questionable character. So, his behavior overseas, which as a private citizen was his own business becomes the country’s business if it poses a potential hazard to the survival or security of our nation. That there is potentially impeachable conduct should any or all of the Dossier’s content prove to be true is absolutely beyond question.

Since the impeachment of Andrew Johnson, Abraham Lincoln’s VP, who took office at Lincoln’s assassination, impeachment has only been used twice. Once as a threat that caused Nixon to resign over Watergate, CREEP, etc, and one other time against Clinton, not, for having had a sexual relationship with Lewinsky, but for lying about it. An important note here: Few people understand exactly what Impeachment is: To be impeached means to have charges levied against a President for “high crimes or misdemeanors.” The charges are filed in the House of Representatives, and the Impeachment trial takes place in the Senate. The Senate is actually transformed into a court which tries the charges of impeachment. Very important fact: Only TWO presidents have been impeached, (Johnson and Clinton) and neither was convicted. Johnson’s impeachment failed by one vote and Clinton’s wasn’t even close because it was largely split down party lines. Using the word impeach as a non-political term means to challenge someones character. The accusations against Bob amounted to an impeaching of his integrity. 

Impeach: 1) to accuse a public official before an appropriate tribunal of misconduct in office 2) In law: to challenge the credibility of; to impeach a witness 3) To bring an accusation against 4) to call in question; cast an imputation upon; to impeach someone’s motives 5) to call into account

The fundamental strategy now of resistance to this current Republican Administration will be successful to the degree that it is credible, fact-based and persistent. All else is distraction or for barroom banter. And there is certainly a place for the barroom banter. It helps to distract us from the need to be so rigorous in our efforts in the public sphere and also, as Mel Brooks said about criticism of The Producers: Making fun of tyrants and other bad people helps us to strip them of their power.

But there is a time and a place.

In this last election Donald Trump’s campaign’s symbol could well have been two, very large middle fingers directed at the institutions of America, but mostly, the institution of government. Everything government managed, he claimed,  was broken, compromised, crooked or foolish–in a word, government couldn’t do anything right anymore. And HE himself was the only institution that America could rely on to make it all better. And yes, he was an institution all by himself, and one, he constantly reminded us, that made everything he touched work. The Trump Institution–an institution of one–built buildings and golf courses around the world. The giant “T” was on buildings, steaks, water, a University, helicopters and on and on. And so, if Trump could seemingly make anything work that he devoted his considerable energies to, he could make government work too by bringing his self-professed legendary negotiating and organizing skills to bear on everything from environmental regulations, corporations that sent their jobs overseas, balky foreign countries that constantly used, abused, and cost America money. Trump was the anti-government running to take it over and make it hum like one of his businesses.

As most of us have experienced more than once in our lives, dealing with the government can be a study in frustration and inefficiency and often–perhaps most often, produces results that are far less than satisfying.  Government is the one, singular institution in nation that must balance all of the competing interests competing for attention and results. If we want to drive a car, we have to get a license and have insurance and obey speed limits, and get our exhaust emissions evaluated. If we want to bake and sell cakes, cookies and dougnuts, we have to buy a license from our local government that conforms with state and federal regulations, and be willing to sell to everybody whether or not we agree with the values of the consumer who walks through the door to buy our goods. If we want to build a house, we have to make sure that we don’t build it too close to someone else’s house; that it conforms to the latest lateral-force engineering standards and energy codes; pump our waste into the storm and sewer lines and pay fees to do so, build within a certain number of feet to the property lines, and, and, and… Government’s answer to almost every request is either a, “yes, but”, or a simple; “no, you can’t.” In other words, often, government by its very nature operates in ways that are guaranteed to frustrate.

‘Mankind are disposed to suffer evils while evils are sufferable.’ Thomas Jefferson in the opening paragraph of the Declaration of Independence. Every Government-imposed rebuke or compromise, or even worse, absolute NO to our requests are little evils to citizens who just simply want to get what they want. And, since so much of what we do is regulated by government, those little evils accumulate (“The shed you built in your back yard was done without a permit and exceeds the allowable impermeable surface area and doesn’t channel the roof water into acceptable bio-swales in order for you to keep your roof water on your property and to restore groundwater. Tear it down” or “Yes, I DID hire a laborer for one day to help me do some framing, and I did pay him cash, but I only needed him for one day and it wasn’t worth hiring someone that requires me to register with L&I, pay him on a paycheck, deduct Social Security, income taxes and Unemployment for just 6 hours! Why are you fining me for that?“)  So, Jefferson, later in the paragraph added, “But when a long train of abuses and usurpations…evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government…  This is the principle articulated by the Founding Fathers as the “right to Revolution.” After awhile, most of us, even good Liberals will have suffered a few too many “abuses and usurpations” which can cumulatively inspire a revolutionary  impulse.  And most of us fuss and fume and tell stories of our latest outrage dealing with “bureaucrats” (said best with a snarl and scowl) over our favorite beverages and then get on with our lives. And, as was intended, in a Republic, elections are designed to be ‘little revolutions’ that allow us to throw out the hated tyrants, vent our frustrations, and assuage our anger and tension. Quite literally, the architects of our system crafted a system that allowed us to leverage some control over too-intrusive government by establishing elections every few years in order to keep the frustrations from exploding into paroxysms of  violence and bloodshed. Elections are the pressure valves that keep the steam from blowing up the vessel.

One of the most common things heard by citizens around election time is, “I hate BOTH candidates! Why does it seem I always have to vote for the lesser of two evils?” I have voted in every election since 1976, and I have never voted in an election where I did not hear this. Sometimes the protests are more vociferous, others more muted. But it is a consistent and persistent refrain. Churchill is helpful here: “Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” And this is true. Add to this the simple fact that, as every teacher of World History knows, the study of human history is largely the study of the rise and fall of civilizations, and thus, governing systems. Mankind has been trying for a long time to get it right with very mixed results.

One of the inherent problems in designing political systems is that at best, they can be expected to keep enough people happy enough of the time to keep them from overthrowing the system. As Jeremy Bentham said:. The greatest happiness of the greatest number is the foundation of morals and legislation.  Governments are created by men-in America’s case by men who were more realists than idealists. And they sparked and then managed that very rare Revolution in which most of the Founders and leaders of the Revolution died as old men in their own beds. But we have now come to a juncture in our own history where the inherent conflicts within democratic governance have magnified to the point that has created a crisis of confidence: An elected President who seemingly  represents a threat to the continued existence of our Republic. Such was the election of 2016.

Looking at elections as revolutions, this was a particularly nasty one. Over time, certain codes of conduct, certain parameters are established within which candidates operate that could be called norms of political conduct. Political campaigns can certainly be nasty at times, but there are still norms that are, in most cases, respected. Trump was the violator of norms: He called people names; he tore down the press; he challenged the effectiveness of our military and our intelligence services; he mocked a man with disabilities. He established himself as the 800 lb gorilla that rejected all of the normal rules of political discourse that had developed over time which, in his mind, had created and sustained a system that was broken to its core. Whatever his true motivations were are topics for another time. But what is important is that he came into the system as a master at understanding primal human emotions and knowing how to play on those to win support for himself and whatever agenda he was interested in advancing. And he presented himself as the one willing to tear the whole place down.

Donald Trump is a master demagogue: “A person, especially an orator or political leader, who gains power and popularity by arousing the emotions, passions and prejudices of the people.”  Demagogues can only fish in troubled waters–they cannot stir people up who are generally satisfied with their lives. They understand at a visceral level where people are hurting; what their frustrations are; and they know how to play on them, amplify them, stoke them in order to build a constituency grounded in emotion in order to gain their unquestioning support.  And Trump’s demagogy was focused on people who were sick of institutions, professions, establishments–anything and anyone who had served within the system that was, in their own estimation, not working for them anymore. Demagogues do not come to their task as surgeons; they come wielding blunt instruments designed to tear down and then create a new reality based on their own vision of what they believe will work better. And it is the tone of their candidacy that is at least as important as, if not more important than what they are saying.  “Little Marco, Lyin’ Ted, Crooked Hillary.”  Trump railed against the Republican and Democratic parties; he lambasted large corporations that sent their jobs overseas; skewered Hillary for giving speeches to Goldman-Sachs; raged against the mainstream media as the purveyors of lies and distortion; threatened to appoint a special prosecutor and put Hillary in jail. Everything he did was designed to tear down, destroy and degrade, and, as a result, build a loyal constituency that could believe and trust only him. Mainstream journalism and Political Party Establishments were absolutely certain that he could not win, which further served his purposes by proving that the journalistic and political “establishments“, like all other hated institutions were wrong, misguided and corrupt, serving their own needs rather than the interests of “the people” whom Trump was running to champion and represent.

But it is important also to recognize that the outrage that fueled Trump’s rise was aided by corollary trends that were, in their own way, signs of the crumbling of public support for government. The Red State rage, expressed by the less educated , so unceremoniously stripped of their good-paying jobs by cheap foreign labor, who were sinking in alarming numbers into opioid addiction, was perhaps the most monolithic bloc that supported Trump, but there were also White Nationalists who resented the “browning” of our country; the out and out racists that despise Black and Brown people despite, or because of their level of achievement or success; Biblical Fundamentalists, outraged that people of the same sex were demanding marriage in defiance of the Biblically sanctioned, sacred institution of marriage between “one man and one woman.” These were the pro-Trump voters. But he was also elected by center-left people who simply stayed home. The ones whose apathy or certainty about Trump’s loss simply made them not interested enough to go out and cast a vote. And in addition to this were the ones who accepted the false equivalency that both major party candidates were equally corrupt so they would vote their conscience and pull the lever for a third-party candidate. When enough people get complacent, or are caustically cynical about the choices, or simply don’t care enough about the system under which they live to participate in, an enraged, engaged and motivated minority can take over and determine who will lead us. And that is how Trump happened.

So, where are we now? This is an ugly time. But it is not the ugliest time in our history. It is well to remember every 4th of July that it is wrong to say that we have been the United States of America since winning the Revolutionary war and signing the Treaty of Paris in 1781. From 1861-1865 we were the United States of America and the Confederate States of America. Eleven states were so outraged at the perceived Northern assault on Southern institutions, values and traditions that they left the Union. That was a time of overt and undiluted racism, when one section of the nation claimed that one of its fundamental, bedrock principles was the belief that Black human beings were of a lower class destined by God and the Bible to be the slaves of superior White people. “Our new government [The Confederate States of America] is founded upon exactly the opposite idea [that slavery is unjust]; its foundations are laid, its corner- stone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery — subordination to the superior race — is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.” Confederate States of America Vice President Alexander Stephens.

We are now a nation wracked by division, separated into rival factions, but we are still, one nation. We tore apart in 1861 in a conflict so foreordained (The Civil War) that a far-sighted and long-lived betting man could comfortably have wagered a life’s fortune that it would occur and would have been paid handsomely for his wager. Faustian Bargains do not make for stable contracts. No matter how intelligent and far-sighted people can be at times, they are also capable of  staggering blindness and hypocrisy. It is pretty clear to see, in retrospect, that creating a nation dedicated to the principle of universal human freedom with slavery woven into its very fabric would not play out well. Some bargains guarantee terrible outcomes. And there is a thread that is unbroken all the way from the first ship that came into Jamestown with a load of Black slaves in the early 17th century, through the Civil War and up to today’s divisions. The real and ultimately defining war over the status of skin color, that cost 640,000 lives stretched from 1861-1865, and the results, though long ignored, were codified into law, though many of our skirmishes to this day are woven with the same thread. And, it was in the conduct of the Civil War that Abraham Lincoln articulated the fundamental principle that animated him during the Civil War and that should bring us back together today. And it calls us to put our current trials into perspective, that…

Government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth.

Abraham Lincoln

Why Trump should not destroy our faith in our democracy.

Tens of millions of Americans have had to reach deep in order to reestablish their sense of balance and to seek for ways to restore our faith in our country since the election of 2016. I endured the election campaign with a shaken, but still firm sense of faith in our basic institutions. The campaign shook the country to its foundations, but the election result was a challenge to that faith. Up until about 9 pm election night on the West Coast, I was still asserting that he could not win. And when it was clear he would, I was devastated-and it is obvious that that was true for millions, if not a majority of Americans. This just could not happen in America!  This seemed like the result at the ballot box that could actually bring the country down-it felt like the end. For may reasons, we elected a man temperamentally unfit to manage the rigors and complexities of governance of a complex, and diverse body politic. He stands as a fundamental threat to the system that elects and governs our nation of 330,000,000 people who spring from every single corner of the earth. In the system that the wisdom of our Founding Fathers created, a Trump was not supposed to happen. It was a “long train of abuses and usurpations” yet to be fully catalogued that brought us this election result- perhaps closer to the bloody confrontation of open warfare than any other since 1860. There was lots of talk about armed rebellion should Clinton get elected, something that for those of us who cast our ballots for her feared more than a little. There were threats that if the election were to go against Trump, the result would have to have been rigged, and he would not accept the result. All the elections in my lifetime were conducted within a set of boundaries that upheld a basic faith that the nation would survive the outcome of the election. Such was not the case for this last one.

So, what is so great about our Democracy? Here is where Lincoln gives me comfort and solace in the midst of the Trump malaise: Abraham Lincoln committed the nation to a war that he could have avoided. When the 11 states that became the Confederate States of America seceded, he could have decided, as was counseled by Horace Greeley to “let the erring sisters go in peace.” But Lincoln had a vision of the United States as an nation dedicated to transcendent principles. America had to meet this challenge that would destroy us and bring us back together to heal our wounds and recommit to the Founding Principles. If this crisis broke us, what we represented to the world would cease to be. The light of human freedom expressed and advanced through the mechanisms of democratic government would expire. We were more than a nation dedicated to creed, or ethnicity or tribe: We were a nation dedicated to transcendent principles: We were a nation created as an experiment dedicated to the principle that every human being had rights derived from nature that preceded the creation of government and that government was instituted in order to promote and advance . And thus, we had to not only survive, but transcend the racial divisions that tore us in two and be better for having done so. Lincoln believed that the nation we were had to rise to any challenge that divided us. He committed the nation to a war so that “government of the people, by the people and for the people shall not perish from the earth.” Imperfect as our nation’s founding was and as imperfect as we are today as a nation, we must survive. America was, to Lincoln, the torch-bearer for the very  best potential of the human being. Ours was the imperfect but perfectible experiment dedicated to principles that were woven into the very fabric of human existence and that with persistence and commitment would continue to shine as a beacon to the future of humanity.

So, despite all those distracted people who brought us this dismal political result, America can survive if we are committed. We have transcended worse and we can also transcend this. There is already much that is happening only three weeks into this administration that is showing  that most of America knows that we are better than this and that with passion and commitment and tireless effort we can put the nation right again. This moment has reminded of us how far we have strayed and what we must do to right ourselves.

And, after all, what other choice do we have?