Who's To Blame When Parties Get Out Of Hand? Is Republican Virtue Dead And Buried?

"Who's to blame when situations degenerate?" That what's the B-52s wanted to know in 1979, sometime between the adoption of the U.S. Constitution and the Trump "acquittal" yesterday. Adam White, a resident scholar at the right-wing American Enterprise Institute and member of the Federalist Society, teaches at George Mason University's Antonin Scalia Law School. Yesterday at dawn, The Atlantic published an historical essay, A Republic, If We Can Keep It, he wrote as Trump was preparing for his acquittal and his State of the Union address. And while many might not find White's essay as incisive as the B-52's song, it is worth reading... after listening to the song. He begins by tying the end of the Trumpanzee impeachment trial to a little known-- other than by law students-- factoid about Founding Father John Jay, a governor of New York and the first Chief Justice of the United States.

In the days leading up to the Senate’s impeachment trial, some people hoped that Chief Justice John Roberts, presiding over the trial, would use his position to send a strong message to the senators on what the Constitution requires of them. He had, in fact, already sent such a message, just weeks earlier, on what the Constitution requires of all Americans. On December 31, in a letter accompanying his annual report on the work of the federal courts, Roberts called on federal judges-- and everyone else-- to invest themselves in the preservation of constitutional democracy.

“Each generation,” he wrote, “has an obligation to pass on to the next, not only a fully functioning government responsive to the needs of the people, but the tools to understand and improve it.” For Roberts, this requires civic education-- and something more fundamental than that, too.

He illustrated his point with a founding-era episode involving the nation’s first chief justice, John Jay. After Jay committed to joining Alexander Hamilton and James Madison in writing essays in defense of the proposed constitution, Jay was seriously wounded by a mob of New Yorkers who had been whipped into a frenzy by rumors of grave robberies. Jay’s wounds derailed his involvement in our nation’s greatest work of political philosophy, The Federalist Papers. “It is sadly ironic,” Roberts wrote, “that John Jay’s efforts to educate his fellow citizens about the Framers’ plan of government fell victim to a rock thrown by a rioter motivated by a rumor.”

The connection between Jay’s day and ours is clear: “In our age,” Roberts wrote, “when social media can instantly spread rumor and false information on a grand scale,” there is even greater danger that political passions can turn us against one another, or against constitutional government itself. He emphasized judges’ particular role as “a key source of national unity and stability,” but his deeper point was that those values are needed among more than just judges.

His letter invoked Jay, Hamilton, Madison, and John Marshall, but his ideas called to mind another Founding Father: Benjamin Franklin, who, on leaving the constitutional convention of 1787, supposedly told a curious passerby that the Framers had produced “a republic, if you can keep it.”

What does it take to “keep a republic”? Nearly two and a half centuries into this experiment in self-governance, Americans tend to think that they keep their republic by relying on constitutional structure: separated powers, federalism, checks and balances. But constitutional structure, like any structure, does not maintain itself. Each generation has to maintain its institutions and repair any damage that its predecessors inflicted or allowed. This task begins with civic education, so that Americans know how their government works, and thus what to expect from their constitutional institutions.

Yet civic education alone, though necessary, is not sufficient. For civic education to take root and produce its desired fruit, the people themselves must have certain qualities of self-restraint, goodwill, and moderation. Because those virtues are necessary for the functioning of a constitutional republic, they are often called civic virtue, or republican virtue. This is not morality writ large, but something more limited and practical. As the late Irving Kristol argued in an essay 45 years ago, republican virtue is fundamentally the virtue of public-spiritedness as the Founding Fathers knew it:

It 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.

Kristol further described this in terms of “probity, truthfulness, self-reliance, diligence, prudence, and a disinterested concern for the welfare of the republic.” A cofounder of the policy journal the Public Interest, he understood that in a republic there is such a thing as the public interest apart from-- and perhaps at odds with-- one’s own personal interests, and thus it requires citizens to restrain themselves in the slow, deliberative workings of constitutional and civic institutions, and even in their interactions with one another, as Roberts emphasized in his letter.

...These are themes that the Constitution’s framers knew well. Madison, for example, understood how much of his constitutional vision depended on republican virtue, and he wrote about it. But those writings have been overshadowed by his more famous quotes, on the need for constitutional structure to guard against mankind’s vices. “If men were angels,” he observed in “Federalist No. 51,” “no government would be necessary.” For people who aren’t angels, republican government relies on constitutional checks and balances, which redirect certain vices toward the public benefit: “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition,” he argued, and liberty is safer when one ambitious branch of government counteracts another.

But to say that constitutional government does not need people to be angels is not to say that constitutional government requires no virtue at all. Madison himself warned against assuming otherwise. In “Federalist No. 55,” facing critics’ predictions of corruption in Congress, he observed that while “there is a degree of depravity in mankind which requires a certain degree of circumspection and distrust,” there are also “other qualities in human nature which justify a certain portion of esteem and confidence.” But then, setting optimism aside, he warned:

Republican government presupposes the existence of these qualities in a higher degree than any other form. Were the pictures which have been drawn by the political jealousy of some among us faithful likenesses of the human character, the inference would be, that there is not sufficient virtue among men for self-government; and that nothing less than the chains of despotism can restrain them from destroying and devouring one another.

This was blunt. Madison knew that the Constitution could not be sustained if the country did not first sustain certain virtues of self-restraint among those who administer the government, and among the people who choose them.

...The necessity of virtue and self-restraint comes through even more clearly with regard to the presidency. The Constitution contains express provisions for presidential self-restraint: The president swears an oath to “faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States,” and he bears a constitutional duty to “take Care that the laws be faithfully executed.” By these vows the president is bound to enforce not just the statutes that he likes but also the inherited statutes that he dislikes, so long as the statute is constitutional.

Defenders of presidential power-- recently Attorney General William Barr, in his address to the Federalist Society-- often quote Hamilton’s discussion, in “Federalist No. 70,” of the Constitution’s need for “energy in the executive.” But advocates for presidential energy should focus on both the president’s powers and on the president’s duties, and the ends to which presidential power is supposed to be directed. Hamilton championed energy in the executive not for its own sake but for “the steady administration of the laws” and “the security of liberty against the enterprises and assaults of ambition, of faction, and of anarchy.” Rooted in the right republican virtues, a president’s energy reinforces our constitutional system; unmoored from those virtues, a president’s energy destabilizes it-- or worse.

Hamilton made these points even more bluntly elsewhere. In “Federalist No. 68,” he argued for choosing the president through an electoral college, rather than by parliamentary election or direct democracy, in order to maximize the odds of electing presidents with “the requisite qualifications”-- not men with “talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity,” but “characters pre-eminent for ability and virtue.”

Oops! Time to try something else, perhaps?

Perhaps Hamilton’s subtlest argument for republican virtue in the presidency is found in his famous essay on the judiciary, “Federalist No. 78.” Here, in his discussion of the judicial branch’s relative weakness, Hamilton observed that the courts “must ultimately depend upon the aid of the executive arm even for the efficacy of its judgments.” That is, the Constitution gives presidents at least some legitimate authority not to enforce judicial decisions with which they disagree, if only when necessary for presidents to carry out their constitutional duty to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” But Hamilton’s balance of judicial and presidential power is sustainable only if presidents restrain themselves from disregarding judicial decisions whenever they feel like it; presidents’ power can coexist with the Constitution’s judicial power and independence only if they use their non-enforcement power sparingly, if at all.

The executive branch’s need for republican virtue is not limited to the president alone. It extends throughout the administration that he oversees. In “Federalist No. 76,” remarking on the Senate’s role in the appointment of officers, Hamilton observed that to give the president unfettered powers of appointment would free him to staff his administration not from merit in the public interest but “from family connection, from personal attachment, or from a view to popularity.”

Constitutional government, by contrast, requires an administration staffed by the nation’s best servants, not by a president’s favorite friends. The steady administration of the laws requires an executive branch filled with officers who follow the president’s lawful orders but not before providing the constructive feedback that the president needs. Or, as Hamilton put it, constitutional administration requires officers who offer more than just the “pliancy to render them the obsequious instruments of [the president’s] pleasure.” Instead, constitutional administration depends on officers with both courage and fortitude, but also with the moderation and self-restraint necessary to follow lawful presidential orders with which they personally disagree.

Finally, the Constitution needs republican virtue not just in the three branches of government but also in the people whom the government serves and is accountable to. Long before Roberts wrote his year-end letter, Hamilton and Madison filled The Federalist Papers with warnings about “passions” that inflame public opinion and prevent reasoned deliberation. Hamilton introduced this theme at the very outset, in “Federalist No. 1,” presenting the Constitution’s ratification debates as an opportunity to see “whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice,” and to decide the debates not as a competition of narrow interests but with a view to “patriotism, to heighten the solicitude which all considerate and good men must feel for the event.”

Madison emphasized it, too. Recognizing that the public will always be impassioned by politics, he observed in “Federalist No. 49” that the process and structure of our federal government will help to transform the public’s passions into a less impassioned public reason, so the public’s “reason, alone” would “control and regulate the government,” while the government would control the people’s passions. But this approach presumes that an impassioned public is willing to be controlled. If the public persists in its impassioned state, it will eventually have the opportunity to overcome whatever limits the government tries to put on the impassioned majority. Only with the virtues of self-restraint urged by Madison and Hamilton in their time, Irving Kristol four decades ago, and Roberts and Gorsuch today, can the country avoid the national self-immolation that the Founding Fathers feared.

The justices can do much to advance these themes in public, by writing or speaking about them and by modeling them in their own work: in the way they conduct themselves at oral argument, and in the tone and style of their judicial opinions. But on this, as in all things, judges can do only so much to save the country from itself. For the country to relearn republican virtue will require heroic efforts by parents, teachers, clergy, coaches, and statesmen. Benjamin Franklin did not promise “a republic, if your judges can keep it.” He promised something far more challenging: “a republic, if you can keep it.”

Who Will Vote With Trump Today To Shred The Constitution?

On Wednesday, Pelosi indicated that Joaquin Castro's Joint Resolution of Disapproval will be debated and, presumably, voted on, today. [I was just told the vote will probably be Tuesday, not today.] The resolution is short and sweet:

Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That, pursuant to section 202 of the National Emergencies Act (50 U.S.C. 1622), the national emergency declared by the finding of the President on February 15, 2019, in Proclamation 9844 (84 Fed. Reg. 4949) is hereby terminated. 


Pelosi: "I write to invite all Members of Congress to cosponsor Congressman Joaquin Castro’s privileged resolution to terminate this emergency declaration... The President’s decision to go outside the bounds of the law to try to get what he failed to achieve in the constitutional legislative process violates the Constitution and must be terminated." The first co-sponsor was Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and there were already 100 co-sponsors by the time Pelosi's "Dear Colleague" letter circulated to all Democrats and Republicans. There was some question whether even Republicans who agree with the Constitution that Trump is shredding the separation of powers with the implications of his fake state of emergency would even vote for Castro's resolution, let alone co-sponsor it.

Jamie Raskin (D-MD) is a member of the Judiciary Committee and this is exactly the kind of powerful and crucial moment in history he takes more seriously than almost anyone. Yesterday he told us that "It may be tempting to dismiss Donald Trump’s declaration of a state of emergency as a laughable attempt to distract everyone from his failure to get either Mexico or the United States Congress to pay for his $35 billion medieval  fantasy border Wall, but the stakes are actually enormous. The hallmark of a Banana Republic is that the Executive unilaterally declares national security and military emergencies and spends the people’s money on his pet projects without legislative consent. If Trump gets away with overriding the clear will of Congress by spending federal money that we have explicitly refused to spend, he puts America squarely in the Banana Republic camp. The House of Representatives must act forcefully to reject this plain violation of the separation of powers and usurpation of our power to appropriate federal funds. It’s a big test to see whether there are any Republicans left who really believe in the Constitution."

Long Island Congressman Tom Suozzi comes to a similar conclusion. "This is not about Donald Trump, the border wall or any other topic of the day," he just told us. "This is about the United States of America, the Constitution, the separate branches of government, and our system of checks and balances. Any Republican who is not concerned about this, should be concerned about a future Democratic President who would potentially try and use this precedent to use executive power to overrule an unwilling Congress. Everyone should wake up."

Republican columnist George Will seems to be blowing a gasket over their reticence. On Wednesday he wrote that Republicans who back Trump on this "should be expelled." It's more likely that the Republicans who refuse to back Trump would be the ones facing expulsion. He is worried that "a majority of congressional Republicans seem poised to support Trump’s evisceration of the Constitution’s architecture of checks and balances. By opposing a binding resolution disapproving the president’s declaration of an emergency, they would approve Congress’ acquiescence in the loss of its core power, that of controlling spending. These Republicans raise two questions: Why is there a Congress? And why are such Republicans receiving salaries? Every Republican who supports the president in this trashing of the Constitution, whose creation began here, thereby violates his or her sworn oath to defend it and to 'bear true faith and allegiance' to it. Voters should expel all of them from public life."

GOP leadership, predictably, is sticking with Trump. How many Republican members will break with them and cross the aisle? Will be a tiny handful-- say Justin Amash (MI), Tom Massie (KY), Brian Fitzpatrick (NY) and a couple for random "gypsy moths?" Or will there be significant numbers of Republicans who take this as an opportunity to stand up for democracy? And among Democrats... can Pelosi, Hoyer and Clyburn hold onto the Blue Dogs whose instincts are to keep their heads down and vote with Trump on something this controversial, especially the real cowardly career types like Jeff Van Drew (NJ), Joe Cunningham (SC), Josh Gottheimer (NJ), Elaine Luria (VA), Kendra Horn (OK), Ben McAdams (UT), Max Rose and Tom O'Halleran (AZ) who are always more into the calculus of how to preserve their jobs than to do their jobs.

Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) looks forward to debating Trump one-on-one after the primaries. For now, she told me last night that his "action declaring a 'national emergency' is unconstitutional and usurps Congressional authority to authorize and appropriate funds to serve the needs of the American people. This blatant power grab sets a dangerous precedent that threatens our democracy. Both Democrats and Republicans alike must put our country and our constitution first and take action to terminate this emergency declaration immediately."

Shahid Buttar is a constitutional attorney who has written about this very topic for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, where he's the director of grassroots outreach. You may remember him from the 2018 campaign when he made a courageous run against Pelosi in his San Francisco district. (Many people are trying to persuade him to try again in 2020.) Yesterday I asked him about Castro's joint resolution and he told me that Trump's "assertion of emergency powers lacks any basis either in statute or the constitution. In fact, our constitutional system of checks and balances is gravely threatened by baseless claims of emergency powers, which Congress and the courts must resist to restrain the executive branch. Given the right wing’s success at co-opting our federal courts, Congress must be especially assertive here not only to avoid the misappropriation of federal funds, but also to prevent executive power from expanding beyond its already untenable inflation."

You already know Ted Lieu, although do keep in mind that, like Jamie Raskin, he's one of the most activist members of the Judiciary Committee. Here's what he told us last night (and sent along the accompanying cool video): "Republicans had complete control of government for two years and they didn't fund Trump's vanity wall. So now the President is trying to circumvent Congress and our Constitutional system of government to fulfill a nonsensical campaign promise. Putting aside for a moment that there is a mountain of objective evidence showing there is no crisis on our southern border; putting aside that Trump's wall is a stupid idea to begin with; and putting aside that he promised Mexico would pay for it-- Trump's national emergency declaration is a dangerous power grab by the Executive Branch. For decades consecutive congresses have ceded the war-making power, which has had disastrous results for our national security. With this emergency declaration, Trump threatens to do the same with the power of the purse. Congressional Republicans must stand with Democrats against this blatant unconstitutional power grab."

Why Is Thomas Frank Puzzled?

A Bernie Sanders event in Madison, Wisconsin during the 2016 Democratic Party primary (click to enlarge)

by Gaius Publius

“I wouldn’t want to win on an old-fashioned leftist platform. Even if I thought it was the route to victory, I wouldn’t take it.”

–Tony Blair

I want to take just a few minutes to reflect on Thomas Frank's bepuzzlement, as expressed in his recent exit piece in the Guardian. (Frank is off to write "a few books" and will return in a few years to "see how things have gone." Those will be interesting years.)

His problem is this: "[U]nderstanding the perversity of rightwing populism only brought me to another mystery: the continuing failure of liberals to defeat this thing ... My brain twirls to think that rightwing populism is still running strong in 2018 ... that the invective and the journalism and the TV shows and all the mournful books about the decline of the middle class have amounted, basically, to nothing."

He lays that failure, correctly, at the feet of the Democratic Party, which had the perfect opportunity in 2008 to reverse course, and didn't. Which left the "task of capturing public anger" to Donald Trump.

"We're going to pay for that failure for a long time," he says, then professes not to know why it happened:

For all their cunning, Republicans are a known quantity. Democrats, however, remain a mystery. We watch them hesitate at crucial moments, betray the movements that support them, and even try to suppress the leaders and ideas that generate any kind of populist electricity. Not only do they seem uninterested in doing their duty toward the middle class, but sometimes we suspect they don’t even want to win.

As evidence of his suspicion, he quotes Tony Blair (see the top of this piece). Then instead of saying why all this happened, why the Democrats betrayed their roots, historical and grass, he turns instead to a plea: "Beating the right cannot simply be a matter of waiting for a dolt in the Oval Office to screw things up. There has to be a plan for actively challenging and reversing it".

And there he ends. Which leads me to ask, why is he puzzled? He already knows the answer.

Tony Blair would rather lose to conservatives than to progressives in his own party. It's the same in this country, where 2016 Democratic leaders, in their wisdom and hubris, were more determined to throw the dice with Clinton, who could not fill a gymnasium, than pick the candidate their voting base packed stadiums to see.

We are indeed a nation in crisis (again). That crisis, that revolutionary discussion about the shape of our next constitution, our next agreement between government and the people, is not resolved. The radical right is in ascendance and will soon take complete and lasting control of the Supreme Court unless Democrats block their candidate and stop them.

Will a completion of the radical rightwing agenda resolve this crisis and create a government most of us can live under? Of course not. The truly radical right — a small handful of people — is vastly outnumbered by those opposed to its ideas. No one, not even Republican voters, will live under the government this minority is determined to create.

Will a return to neoliberal rule, to Obamism and Clintonism, create a stable order? Again, no. It's precisely that order that people in both parties rose to resist. The rebellion against that order, unheeded by Democratic Party leaders, created the opening the radical right just exploited.

Even a Sanders-style government, supported by the masses as FDR's government was, will face a counter-rebellion, this time by the dethroned rich — and I strongly suspect the Obamists and Clintonists in the Democratic Party would join that "resistance" as eagerly as they join the present one.

So what is Thomas Frank puzzled about? Isn't he really asking, why do the forces of money hate the people?

Because if he had asked that question, he wouldn't be puzzled at all. His book provides all the answers anyone need.

GP
 

No, The Founding Fathers Weren't "Ordinary Men," Not In The Way Scott Walker Means It

Trump's knowledge of American history is as thorough as his knowledge of everything other than grifting. That's why so many morons love him so much; they see themselves in him. I guess there's nothing we can do about that. Even when Max Boot speculated in his Post column yesterday that "If Trump announced he were going to spit-roast immigrant kids and eat them on national TV (apologies to Jonathan Swift), most Republicans probably would approve of that too," he was right on target. Anyone-- including Boot-- who thinks there is anything Robert Mueller could find that will that will shatter his hold on the affections of his moron followers is just whistling Dixie. "Imagine," wrote Boot, "what would happen if special counsel Robert S. Mueller III finds clear evidence of criminality or if Trump’s trade wars tank the economy... if it does, it might-- just might-- shake the 88 percent GOP support that Trump currently enjoys. That, in turn, could open the way for a credible primary challenge... To use one of Boot's own metaphor sources, Wrong 'Em Boyo.



Remember when the idiot talked about what a great future he saw for Frederick Douglass? That's his knowledge of history. I don't want to say that the whole party don't know much about history... but... scholar's they don't tend to be these days. Another genius, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, getting his voters ready for some unconstitutional activities, has been a big proponent of spreading the idea that the founding fathers were "ordinary people."

Well, is some ways Scott Walker was correct. Here's half a dozen:

• each one had a nose from which he breathed
• each one ate food through a mouth
• each one got tired and slept
• each one had feet to walk with
• each one was born of a mother
• each one was, in Walker's own words, a patriot who risked his life for the freedoms we hold dear today

There are reasons their collective endeavor-- the founding of our country including the war for independence and then the Constitution-- has held up, had something to do with just how extraordinary these men were. PolitiFact Wisconsin though, decided that instead of contradicting Walker, they would give him and other Republicans a little history lesson about who the Founding Fathers' fathers were.

After consulting several scholars and other sources, we found that-- with some exceptions-- central figures in the nation’s founding generally came from privileged backgrounds, attended college at a time when very few people did and, by 1776, were prominent and wealthy.

"They weren't ordinary," said Brown University emeritus history professor Gordon Wood, author of Creation of the American Republic, Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different and other books. "They were the elite of the day, involved in highest levels of the society."

Paul Finkelman, a scholar-in-residence at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, was among the historians who agreed with that assessment. But noting that Benjamin Franklin’s formal education ended when he was 10, Finkelman added, "the notion that some of the founding fathers were self-made is true."

While there is no set group of founding fathers, lists of the major ones usually include the following six, as listed by the National Archives’ Founders Online.

Here’s a look at their early years, as well as where they were by 1776:

John Adams

Adams was born into a "comfortable, but not wealthy, Massachusetts farming family," according to the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, which specializes in political history. His father earned a living as a farmer and shoemaker. His early education was strong enough that he entered Harvard College at the age of 15.

Adams became the lawyer with the largest number of clients in highly competitive Boston, said University of West Georgia history professor emeritus John Ferling, the author of 11 books on the American Revolution and its leaders.

In the Continental Congress-- the body of delegates who represented the people of the colony-states that later became the United States of America-- he was the leader of the faction pushing for independence in 1776. He later became vice president and then the nation’s second president.

Benjamin Franklin

Franklin was the son of a man who made soap and candles, which Encyclopedia Britannica terms "one of the lowliest of the artisan crafts" at the time. Franklin learned to read very early and had one year in grammar school and another under a private teacher, but his formal education ended at age 10. At 12, he was apprenticed to one of his brothers as a printer and "taught himself to write effectively." He founded a weekly newspaper at age 16.

Franklin, Finkelman told us, "is the classic self-made American." He eventually became wealthy enough that, at age 42, he became "perhaps the first American we know of to retire," Finkelman said. He was a significant property owner, owned a successful publishing business and was an internationally known scientist. Franklin was a slave owner when he helped draft the Declaration of Independence, but became one of the early abolitionists when, at 81, he was at the Constitutional Convention in 1787, Finkelman said.

Alexander Hamilton

Hamilton was born in the British West Indies, the illegitimate son of a "poor itinerant Scottish merchant of aristocratic descent and an English-French Huguenot mother who was a planter's daughter," according to the National Archives. He received a "basic education" and became an apprentice clerk in a mercantile establishment. The proprietor and others recognized Hamilton’s "ambition and superior intelligence" and raised money to further his education, which included time at what became Columbia University in New York.

Finkelman said that after Hamilton joined the Army, he quickly became George Washington’s aide-de-camp with rank of lieutenant colonel. Hamilton wrote pamphlets and newspaper essays favoring independence in 1774 and 1775. In 1789, he became the nation’s first secretary of the treasury. In 1804, he was mortally wounded in a duel with a political rival, Aaron Burr.

James Madison

Madison’s father inherited and married into substantial wealth, according to the Miller Center. Madison was a "sickly child" who also suffered from psychosomatic, or stress-induced, seizures, similar to epileptic fits, "that plagued him on and off throughout his youth." But by the time he entered what became Princeton University, Madison had mastered Greek and Latin under the direction of private tutors.

Ferling noted that Madison was a leading figure in the Continental Congress and the Constitutional Convention, served as the leader in the First House of Representatives and drafted the Bill of Rights. According to Finkelman, Madison owned at least 100 slaves, inherited wealth and land from his father, and married into wealthy family. He was president from 1809 to 1817.

Thomas Jefferson

Jefferson was born on a slave plantation in central Virginia, according to Monticello.org. His father was a planter and surveyor, and his mother was the daughter of a well-known Virginia family. When Jefferson was 14, his father died and he inherited about 3,000 acres of land and about 30 slaves. Jefferson went to the College of William and Mary, then studied and practiced law.

Jefferson was the primary author of the Declaration of Independence. According to Finkelman, he owned two major plantations and 150 to 200 slaves which, by modern standards, means he was a billionaire. Jefferson followed Washington and Adams as the third president.

George Washington

Washington was a member of Virginia’s gentry, born on his father’s plantation, according to MountVernon.org. Augustine Washington was a leading planter in the area and also served as a justice of the county court.

After Augustine died, when George was 11, "the income from what remained was just sufficient to maintain Mary Washington and her children" and George "undoubtedly helped his mother manage" the plantation where they lived. His formal education ended at age 15, before that of many gentlemen’s sons.

Washington trained as a surveyor before entering the military. Virginia’s governor appointed Washington, at age 22, to command the colony’s army in the French and Indian War, Ferling said. Washington went on to become a wealthy farmer and businessman before being appointed commander of the Continental army in 1775. Finkelman said by this time, Washington owned thousands of acres of land and hundreds of slaves. He served two terms as president.

PolitiFact added that the Founding Fathers "were all far from ordinary in terms of income, wealth, education, and social standing." But, to be fair, I don't think that's what Walker meant. Walker is an ordinary man, a profoundly flawed one. My guess is that he was trying to get across to Wisconsin voters that the Founding Fathers were also flawed-- ordinary like him in that way-- and could make mistakes that had to be corrected. And it is true that there are grievous historical errors in the Constitution, for example, errors that had to be corrected, something foreseen by the Founding Fathers, who included an amendment process, which gave us the Bill of Right, eventually abolished slavery, gave women legal equality, pohibited the denial of the right to vote based on race and then based on gender.

Constitutional Amendments generally gave more rights to people. Conservatives, Republicans, people like Scott Walker and Señor Trumpanzee aren't looking to expand rights; they look to narrow them and take them away.

Now Everyone Knows That Gaius Publius Uses The Pen Name "Thomas Neuburger" When He Writes For Mainstream Media

Earlier this week, Gaius did a an OpEd for the San Francisco Chronicle, hidden behind a paywall. (The paper charges $2.50 a copy, by the way.) His piece is too important to leave it there.


The Next U.S. Constitution Is Forming Now
by Thomas Neuburger

Each year on this day, Americans celebrate our founding principles and the birth of our nation, but in these chaotic and polarized days, it is also important to remember that the United States was born from a crisis of unity and has experienced two more at roughly 70-year intervals-- the Civil War and the Great Depression.

Both nearly tore us apart, yet each sparked a civic rebirth. After each great rupture, the government was restructured; each took the nation closer to its founding ideals; each brought greater liberty, justice and opportunity to expanding groups of Americans; each changed forever and for the better the relationship between government and the people.

We’re now in the midst of a fourth crisis, from which will emerge the next agreement about how and for whom our government operates. Will it produce a constitution that once again advances our founding principles and expands opportunities, or will this be the first American crisis that institutionalizes a stripping of rights, freedom and wealth?

In past crises, the nation found the will and leadership to correct its course. Will we be so blessed again?

More fundamentally, will the structure of our present political process allow us to select the right leader, should she or he emerge? Or will the power brokers of our parties work to eliminate the candidacy of a potential Washington, Lincoln or Roosevelt?

A nation’s constitution is not just contained in a document but includes as well the practices and agreements that determine how government operates and what it’s permitted to do. In that sense we’ve been governed not by one constitution but by three.

The first grew out of armed revolt against the British Crown, but it also sprang from revolt by the emerging manufacturing and merchant classes against colonial status. Americans wanted to compete alongside the British economy and not be forced into the role of mere consumers.

From that revolution came the original U.S. Constitution-- slave-enabling and voter-restricting, yes, but largely democratic-- and from its government came the policies of Alexander Hamilton, which gave American manufacturing its first strong boost.

The second constitutional agreement grew from a mainly nonviolent revolt in the North against slavery, an institution that sustained the Southern economy. This threat to slavery produced a bloody Southern revolt against the national government. The social aspects of that conflict still rip our society, but the constitution that emerged-- that of the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments-- was radically different: It abolished slavery, established equal protection as a fundamental right and greatly expanded the vote.

Each of the first two crises broke into violence-- the Revolutionary War, the Civil War-- before producing constitutional change. The third, the Great Depression, also produced a revolution of our politics and governance, but one in which violence was averted by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s election and bow to the need for a restructured government. This led to vast reforms, citizen-protecting regulation and the economic-opportunity programs known as the New Deal.

Each crisis resulted in a constitution that brought us closer to our principles: the original Constitution bound the separate states into one country; through amendment an anti-slavery document replaced the pro-slavery original; and through reinterpretation of the Commerce Clause and other changes, the New Deal constitution overturned the laissez-faire government from which it evolved.

Through each, the nation righted itself. Crucially, success also depended on the emergence of the right political leader-- and by the people’s ability to elect him.

Our nation is once more in the grip of division and change. When we emerge, the United States will be different. Our government and society will once more be restructured and new rules will be decided.

What will the next American constitution look like, given the trajectory of the Trump presidency and the swirl of conflict around it? Like Turkey’s and Hungary’s, with dictatorial government wrapped in old constitutional forms? A naked kleptocracy, where forms and norms are simply ignored?

With the resignation of Justice Anthony Kennedy and Sen. Mitch McConnell’s rush to confirm a Trump appointee-- an opportunity he openly denied the previous president-- we see yet another attempt to turn the constitution on its head.

Impeachment is our formal protection against presidential misadventure, not just a way to address proven violations of the criminal code. Could a lack of impeachment enshrine in our practices continued debasement of our democratic norms and principles? Is impeachment alone sufficient to correct our course?

We are already changed by what led us here, and the political, racial and economic dysfunction that so many rejected with their votes in the 2016 election cycle shows no sign of ending without another restructuring of government. This crisis of unity has brought us to transition, no matter what happens to Donald J. Trump.

The past three times our government was forced to change, we chose leaders up to the task of correcting our national course to the benefit of increasing numbers of Americans.

Will we get that lucky again?

Thomas Neuburger is an essayist, poet and story writer. He has published political analysis under the pen name Gaius Publius since 2010.

A Nation in Crisis, Again

Statue of Abraham Lincoln in Portland, Oregon. Is there one more like him in our future?

by Gaius Publius

What an odd and frightening place we've found ourselves.

Before about a month ago, I'd have agreed with the person who wrote, "The Trump-Russian investigation was a rabbit hole with no rabbit at the bottom." To twist the metaphor, I'd put it this way: The Clinton part of the Democratic Party, in an effort to maintain Party control and advance a "she didn't lose" narrative, kept looking at "Russia did it" angles like Alice looking for a hole deep enough to jump into.

They looked at a lot of holes, but none that seemed to have real evidence in them. Recently, though, information started coming out about Mike Flynn, and potentially Jared Kushner, that made it look like Russia-hunting Democrats had actually found something of substance — actual documentable election collusion with actual Russia, as opposed to "maybe Russia gave emails to WikiLeaks" or "maybe Trump cheered them on a little too loudly," with a strong side of "it had to be Russia somehow, right? because Clinton won the popular vote."

The comparison that comes to mind is Bill Clinton and Whitewater, another investigation in search of a crime, any crime. The Whitewater inquiry, initially about a land deal, eventually turned up Paula Jones, then Monica Lewinsky, then Bill Clinton's perjury (finally, a crime!) — but still, the investigation ended miles from where it started.

Same with this. I now think there's a there there, but it's not the "there" that Russia hunters were chasing when they set out. I believe they've now found something of real substance — the cover-up certainly looks vigorous — but that substance is now miles from where they started looking. As with Whitewater, it seems the investigators got lucky, though I'm glad or our sakes they did.

The Effort to Remove Donald Trump

So where are we now? I'll lay decent odds the administration will appoint no special prosecutor, and if they do, no independent special prosecutor. It would take a revolt from congressional Republicans to prove me wrong. That could happen, but odds that it will? Less than 50-50 as I see it now.

Which means the country stays in its current state, ruled by a man and a party actively perverting the Constitution to enable obvious corruption and — finally, what the Democrats alleged all along on no evidence — apparent collusion by that man with a foreign power to gain domestic power. Whether that collusion was decisive or not in his victory, matters not at all.

(Interestingly, this is the same activity that Reagan and Bush I were accused of, the foreign power in that case being Iran. Neither political party, though, nor the media of that day would allow a complete investigation, and even went so far as to ostracize from mainstream employment a very good investigative reporter, Robert Parry, for pursuing it anyway.)

All of which means that if Trump's Russia doings aren't formally investigated, either by a special investigator or by Congress, elites who want him gone will have to force him out by extra-constitutional means.

Which suggests three questions. One, who wants him to go, since that will determine the shape of the opposition he faces? Two, who wants him to stay in office? And three, what are those means? Others may answer differently, but I'll offer these.

First, those in elites positions who want him to go include:

     • All Democratic officeholders.

     • Many Republican officeholders (those who would much prefer a President Pence).

     • Many of those who work in the bowels of the CIA, FBI, and NSA — highly placed rank-and-file operatives in position to leak information and do other substantial damage. (Note what happened during the election when those in the DC office of the FBI leaked damaging Clinton material because they disagreed with Comey's refusal to recommend an indictment. It's six months later, but the same dynamic.)

     • Others in the national security establishment who don't trust Trump to be warlike enough. This ropes in neocons both in and out of the military.

     • The broader neocon establishment/infrastructure, people who would have supported Clinton's wars and staffed her administration, all of whom hate Trump's statements (true ones in my view) about NATO's irrelevance. Saying goodbye to NATO starts the tearing down of American military-backed hegemony. NATO's sole relevance is to structure that hegemony in Europe.

Note that the list of Trump's elite enemies is likely to grow in number of individuals, if not in number of groups. Note also that the key group is the second, Republican officeholders. If they turn against him in large numbers, even if only in private, Trump won't remain in office. Also, if they support him sufficiently, even if only in private, it will be up to the last three groups, working together, to pressure Trump to leave.

Second, who are Trump's supporters? Who in real power wants him to stay in office? I believe it's a small list:

     • Many in his family.
     • Steve Bannon types (who are, note, anti-NATO).
     • The Rex Tillerson deals-with-Russia crowd.
     • The Scott Pruitt anti-regulation crowd.
     • Some Republican Tea Party officeholders.

As I said, a small list, and I think a shrinking one.

Finally, what are the "extra-constitutional means" of making him leave?

The Constitution provides impeachment by Congress — articles of impeachment voted in the House, a trial in the Senate — as the only structural redress to a "Charles I" problem. (The goal of congressional impeachment is to permit our version of Parliament to "kill the king" without actually killing anyone. Charles I must have been fresh in the founders' minds when they wrote that provision.) That's all the constitutional remedy there is.

If Trump doesn't get the "Nixon treatment," official investigation and trial by Congress, elites who want him to leave have to work outside the Constitution. Options include:

     • Relentless, damaging leaks and innuendo from all quarters aimed at turning public opinion against him.

     • Privately issued threats and rewards — sticks and carrots — to induce him to step down. Remember, intelligence agencies of various stripes likely have almost all the goods on almost all officials who matter to them. Imagine what's hoarded in NSA databases, or what FBI background checks reveal. Imagine what secrets angry CIA field agents might dig up.

If you doubt that issuing private threats like these could happen, do you imagine that agency use of damaging information to influence politics ended with Hoover? No Praetorian Guard, once it grows muscular, reverts back to a simple barracks unit just because new leadership arrives. When groups like that change culture, they rarely change back.

The threats are already coming out. Consider this post-firing report in the Washington Post: "Many [FBI] employees said they were furious about the [Comey] firing ... One intelligence official who works on Russian espionage matters said they were more determined than ever to pursue such cases. Another said Comey’s firing and the subsequent comments from the White House are attacks that won’t soon be forgotten. Trump had 'essentially declared war on a lot of people at the FBI, one official said. 'I think there will be a concerted effort to respond over time in kind.'"

"Attacks that won't soon be forgotten" and "a concerted effort to respond over time in kind." The covert State is at war with the overt State. (Be sure to ask yourself, if you like these comments, if you'd like them if someone else were president.)

     • Threats amounting to blackmail and, if not physical violence, violence to his wealth, business interests, and "brand." ("We will destroy your brand forever, you will never do business again, if you don't get out. Here's how we'll do it. First...")

I'll say at the outset that real physical violence against anyone involved in this is almost certainly off the table. For one thing, if something did happen physically to Trump, his family, or his close advisors — regardless of who did it — everyone in the country would assume Trump's enemies' guilt, and assume it with the same fervor and conviction they now assume his own.

The Next American Constitution

One last thought. This country has had a constitutional crisis every 70 years, after which the government restructured itself. In effect, we have been ruled by three Constitutions, not just one, each producing, in practice, very different governments and societies. We're rapidly producing a crisis that will produce a fourth.

In order, our constitutional crises are:

     • 1789, the Revolutionary War and transition from colony to slave-holding republic.

     • 1865, the Civil War and transition from divided slave-holding nation with two competing economies to united freed-slave state. This change took down the Southern agricultural aristocracy (by depriving it of the nearly free labor it depended on); made the Northern industrial economy nationally ascendant; and put us firmly on the path to first-world industrial powerhouse.

     • 1933, the Great Depression and transition from a light-handed pro-business government to a heavy-handed regulatory state.

     • And now, this.

What will the next American Constitution look like? Turkey's and Hungary's, with their dictators and single-party governments wrapped in the old constitutional forms? A naked kleptocracy, where constitutional forms are simply ignored, like those in many third-world countries? A state in which forms are observed but the hand with real power belongs mainly to the "security" apparatus? In many countries, coups by segments of the elite, blatant or covert, are welcomed as correctives and tacitly approved (another way constitutions are revised without being rewritten).

If Trump is not successfully impeached, and it looks for now like he won't be, our government as practiced will once more dramatically change, as it did when Bush's crimes were not addressed, and Obama's after him (never forget that targeted assassination is an innovation Obama made lawful).

But whatever happens next, whether Trump is impeached or not, I think we've already been changed as a nation forever by what's already led us to this moment. After all, in 2016 the nation wanted someone like Sanders to be president, wanted an agent of change, and look what it got. This is in fact our second failed attempt this century at change that makes our lives better.

I don't think that point's been lost on anyone. We're in transition no matter what happens to Trump. Transition to what, we'll have to find out later.

And something else to consider. The last three times the government fundamentally changed, we got lucky. We found leaders — Washington, Lincoln, Roosevelt — up to the task, in chaotic and troubling times, of steering an altered ship to calmer water and a safer port.

Will we get lucky once more? We can only hope.

GP
 

"If Trump were more rational and more competent, he might have a chance of destroying our democracy" (George Packer)

-- from the Resources for Life blog

by Ken

The question of President Trump's mental fitness for the office dates back at least to some of his wilder ravings during the campaign, and less than a month into his tenure is being discussed more widely. As noted, the above graphic, for example, is filched from a January 28 post of that title by Gregory Johnson on the Resources for Life blog.

Now, in a "Comment" piece in the February 27 New Yorker, "Holding Trump Accountable," George Packer offers a stark portrait of our moment in time, proceeding from the proposition that, a month into his tenure,

Donald Trump has already proved himself unable to discharge his duties. The disability isn’t laziness or inattention. It expresses itself in paranoid rants, non-stop feuds carried out in public, and impulsive acts that can only damage his government and himself. Last week, at a White House press conference, the President behaved like the unhinged leader of an unstable and barely democratic republic.

George gives a graphic portrayal of a White House "isolate[d] in power struggles" and an administration "in nearly open revolt," and foreign leaders looking on either:

• "with disbelieving alarm":

Allies such as Prime Ministers Justin Trudeau, of Canada, and Shinzo Abe, of Japan, flatter the President in order to avoid the fate of Australia’s Malcolm Turnbull, whom Trump first berated and then hung up on during their get-to-know-you phone call."

• or "with calculating interest":

Vladimir Putin is already testing Trump, by sending Russian fighter jets to buzz a U.S. Navy ship. Xi Jinping is positioning China to fill the void in the Pacific Rim which will be left by Trump’s policy of America First. Pragmatists in Iran are trying to judge whether the new American government can be counted on to act rationally—exactly what U.S. officials always wondered about the fractured leadership of the Islamic Republic.

GEORGE BEGAN HIS PIECE OUTLINING A KNOWN
REMEDY: SECTION 4 OF THE 25TH AMENDMENT

As George explains, Section 4 of the 25th Amendment, which has still never been used (though he notes that the new team appointed by Ronald Reagan in 1987, on the advice of the outgoing team, checked it out), "empowers the Vice-President, along with 'a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide,' to declare the President unfit and to install the Vice-President as Acting President."

The blurb atop George's piece reads: "After a month in office, [President Trump] has already proved himself unable to discharge his duties. But the only people with real leverage over him won’t use it." And after setting forth the current situation, George says starkly: "It won’t get better."

The notion that, at some point, Trump would start behaving “Presidential” was always a fantasy that has the truth backward: the pressure of the Presidency is making him worse. He’s insulated by sycophants and by family members, and he can still ride a long way on his popular following. Though the surge of civic opposition, the independence of the courts, and the reinvigoration of the press are heartening, the only real leverage over Trump lies in the hands of Republicans. But Section 4 won’t be invoked. Vice-President Mike Pence is not going to face the truth in the private back room of a Washington restaurant with Secretaries Betsy DeVos, Ben Carson, and Wilbur Ross, or in the offices of Speaker of the House Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. Republican leaders have opted instead for unconstrained power.

They need Trump to pass their agenda of rewriting the tax code in favor of the rich and of gutting regulations that protect the public and the planet—an agenda that a majority of Americans never supported—so they are looking the other way. Even the prospect of Russian influence over our elections and our government leaves these American patriots unmoved. Senator John Cornyn, of Texas, the Republican whip, made it plain: Trump can go on being Trump “as long as we’re able to get things done.” Senator Rand Paul, of Kentucky, explained, “We’ll never even get started with doing the things we need to do, like repealing Obamacare, if we’re spending our whole time having Republicans investigate Republicans.”

The growing Russian scandal will challenge the willingness of the Party to hold the President accountable. So far, the situation is not encouraging. The heads of the key House and Senate committees are partisans who are doing as little as possible to expose corruption and possible treason in the White House. The few critical Republican voices—Senators John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and Susan Collins, and Representative Mark Sanford—are ineffective. Perhaps Party leaders are privately searching their souls; perhaps, as with the old Bolshevik Rubashov, in Arthur Koestler’s “Darkness at Noon,” ideology and power have rendered them incapable of independent moral judgment. Whatever the case, history won’t be kind to them.

An authoritarian and erratic leader, a chaotic Presidency, a supine legislature, a resistant permanent bureaucracy, street demonstrations, fear abroad: this is what illiberal regimes look like. If Trump were more rational and more competent, he might have a chance of destroying our democracy.

Obviously if those Republicans George accuses of delinquency were to rouse themselves to action, we would be left in the hardly more attractive clutches of a President Pence. Eventually it may come to that, but at least for now, as George points out, "they need Trump to pass their agenda" -- in their present situation of "unconstrained power." So pick your poison -- heads they win, tails the country loses.

#

Sure, we say it every four years, but isn't THIS the craziest presidential election in memory?

He-e-e-ere's Speaker Louie! DailyKos caption: "Now, doesn't this inspire confidence?" Yeccch! My proposed new Louie Rule: From now on, the only living Louie to be acknowledged publicly will be Louis CK.

"Whoever comes next will have the task of restoring respect for the law and a common adherence to the Constitution -- the heaviest of burdens, even for a candidate prepared by training and disposition to carry it."

-- David Bromwich, in the new (Nov. 10) NYRB

by Ken

I mean, here we are watching the far-right-wing crazies defending -- as only far-right-wing crazies can, viciously and with a strong whiff of impending violence -- their boy the Billion-Dollar Loser, who isn't even a conservative. Unless you count where he sort-of-plays one for totally cynically selfish reasons on the, you know, campaign trail.

Here's Kerry Eleveld at DailyKos:

Step aside Paul Ryan, Hannity has announced your replacement as Speaker: Rep. Louie Gohmert

Fox News host Sean Hannity is all out auditioning to be chief correspondent of the loons once the new Trump-bart debuts. And first on the chopping block after Trump is roundly defeated by overwhelming majorities at the polls: Paul Ryan, whom Hannity called a "saboteur" of Trump's campaign. Allegra Kirkland writes:

Speaking to the Washington Post in the spin room after the final presidential debate, the devoted Donald Trump ally hinted that the intra-party war between far-right conservatives and their more moderate counterparts would continue regardless of who wins the presidential race on November 8.

Hannity told the Post that Ryan, who has offered only tepid support for the Republican nominee during the 2016 race, “needed to be called out and replaced.”

Nice! Ryan, who hasn't even had the guts to disavow Trump, is now responsible for the miserable failure of a campaign Trump has run. Sorry, Paul.

Hannity also had a lot of good ideas about members of the House Crazy Caucus who could unite the party (ahem) upon Ryan’s ouster: Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan (chair of the Crazy Caucus), North Carolina Rep. Mark Meadows (who devised the wildly popular 2013 government shutdown), and Texas Rep. Louie Gohmert! LOL. Gohmert! The wackiest of the wack jobs, who has called Hillary Clinton "mentally impaired." Speaker Gohmert! ROFLOL.

REALLY NOW, WHERE TO BEGIN?

I mean, Sean Hannity threatening to take Paul Ryan down for being insufficiently conservative? PAUL RYAN??? Wouldn't you think that if there's one thing Speaker Paul doesn't have to answer for, it's being insufficiently conservative? Has anyone in our public life done more to drag us back to the 16th century? And I include Sean Hannity, who's all mouth, whereas Speaker Paul is the, er, "brains" of the Far Right politicos, providing a steady stream of actual legislative proposals to do the deed.

In fairness to Shifty Sean, what he lacks in brains -- which sure seems to be quite a lot -- he more than makes up for in savagery, uninhibitedness, dishonesty, and naked self-promotingness. Still, to plug some of the evident gap in ideological awareness, here's some of what David Bromwich has to say in a compendium of ten frequent contributors' thoughts "On the Election" running through the new (Nov. 10) issue of the New York Review of Books:

From the first debates of 2015, Donald Trump stood out because he wasn’t one of the usual suspects. He was the to-hell-with-it candidate. If you dislike politics generally, don’t study or understand them but are sure the country has declined and that the future looks worse than the past, Trump is your man. He doesn’t know politics any better than you do, but he says (reassuringly) that it is a mug’s game, and he ought to know. He comes from money, lives for money, and before he entered the race he was in the business of buying favors from the mugs.

Who better to avow that the system is rigged? Everyone admits that the Clinton Foundation has done good works. But anyone with a nose can tell that it uneasily mixes philanthropy and aggrandizement. Trump took his cue and blew it up and—since Hillary Clinton is known to have met with donors while she was secretary of state—he called the foundation itself a pay-to-play scheme. Trump the insider has the best and biggest nose for such things; and in the mood of perpetual disquiet these last two years in America, the undeniable blots on his character have made people strangely trust him more.

Comparisons with Reagan are misleading. Reagan was intimate with politics and political interests as far back as his presidency of the Screen Actor’s Guild. He tricked his opponents into underrating him, right up to the election of 1980, but the reason wasn’t the lack of a consistent ideology or a coherent personality. Reagan was undeviating in his overall views: the people who supported him knew what they were getting. With Trump, they prefer not to know, and he panders to wishful ignorance by saying that whatever he does in his first days as president, he’ll do it good and do it fast. The vagueness, bloat, and feckless reiteration of the promises (the height of the wall with Mexico, the total ban on Muslim immigration, the vow to “bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding”) go against the grain of a representative government based on checks and self-restraint.

Trump the post-political billionaire can seem refreshingly heterodox only if one performs a drastic curtailment of common judgment. The right-wing anti-imperialist Pat Buchanan thinks that Trump has the mind-set and stamina to extricate the US from our half-dozen wars in the Greater Middle East (Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Somalia). On the evidence, one would guess that Trump indeed has a less hearty appetite for wars than Hillary Clinton, but his solutions often sound like “Bomb them back to the Stone Age” rather than the reasoned noninterventionism this branch of apologists are looking for.

For the record, the other NYRB "On the Election" contributors are: Russell Baker, G.W. Bowersock, Mark Danner, Andrew Delbanco, Elizabeth Drew, Benjamin M. Friedman, Diane Johnson, Nicholas Lemann, Jessica T. Mathews, Darryl Pinckney, Marilynne Robinson, Garry Wills. (Yes, they're presented alphabetcially!) And to be clear, David Bromwich continues with a powerful takedown of Hillary Clinton, including this:

[H]er stated positions and political history leave her unequipped to repel [Trump's] charges against immigration, the American jobs lost through trade deals, and the scenes of disorder in American cities that followed the killing of black men by police and the killing of police by black men. Hillary Clinton is the reverse of a popular politician—she is more like an ideally dutiful chair of a committee—and it has been an odd feature of the campaign to advertise her as “the most qualified person ever to run for president.”

WHILE WE'RE AT IT, WE MIGHT JUMP
AHEAD TO BROMWICH'S CONCLUSION

Which is decidedly mournful:

The domestic state of the nation is so unpropitious in October 2016 that one may pity the winner of this election as much as the loser. We are living in a country under recurrent siege by the actions of crowds. There is the Tea Party crowd with their belief that global climate disruption is a scientific hoax; there is the Black Lives Matter crowd with their ambiguous slogan “No Justice, No Peace”; and there are more ominous developments, such as the acts of serial defiance of the federal government by the Bundy family in Nevada and Oregon. Whoever comes next will have the task of restoring respect for the law and a common adherence to the Constitution—the heaviest of burdens, even for a candidate prepared by training and disposition to carry it.

#

Electing Ben Carson President Would Not Be Consistent With The Constitution Of This Country

"No religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States."

-- the Constitution, Article VI (paragraph 3)

The Founding Fathers wanted to keep the Constitution flexible. They rarely used the word "ever" or "never." They must have thought this section was pretty important to the essence of what they were trying to accomplish. I get the idea that not many Republican politicians grasp that, certainly not Ben Carson.

Sunday on Meet the Press Carson stumbled into a political hornets' nest, likely without having thought through the implications of his remarks that American Muslims-- around 1% of the U.S. population, most of whom are native-born African-Americans-- should not ever lead the country. But he couldn't back down, not in the midst of a Republican primary that will be determined by racists, bigots, teabaggers and lo-info voters who are brainwashed by Hate Talk Radio and Fox, and he reiterated his stupidity to Jonathan Easley in an interview at The Hill later in the day.

"I do not believe Sharia is consistent with the Constitution of this country," Carson said. "Muslims feel that their religion is very much a part of your public life and what you do as a public official, and that’s inconsistent with our principles and our Constitution."

Carson said that the only exception he’d make would be if the Muslim running for office "publicly rejected all the tenants of Sharia and lived a life consistent with that."



"Then I wouldn’t have any problem," he said.

However, on several occasions Carson mentioned "Taqiya," a practice in Shia Islam in which a Muslim can mislead nonbelievers about the nature of their faith to avoid persecution.

"Taqiya is a component of Shia that allows, and even encourages you to lie to achieve your goals," Carson said.

Pushing back at the media firestorm over his remarks, Carson sought to frame himself as one of the few candidates running for president willing to tell hard truths.

"We are a different kind of nation," Carson said. "Part of why we rose so quickly is because we wouldn’t allow our values or principles to be supplanted because we were going to be politically correct… part of the problem today is that we’re so busy trying to be politically correct, that we lose all perspective."

Carson told The Hill that the question of a Muslim president is largely "irrelevant" because no Muslims are running in 2016. He said the question, which Todd is posing to all of the Republican presidential hopefuls who go on his show, "may well have been" gotcha journalism meant to trip the candidates up.

However, he acknowledged the question "served a useful purpose by providing the opportunity to talk about what Sharia is and what their goals are."

"So often we get into these irrelevant things, because obviously if a Muslim was running for president, there would be a lot more education about Sharia, about Taqiya," Carson said.

Keep in mind that Carson has bragged that his tax plan is literally based on the Bible while whining that "Muslims feel that their religion is very much a part of your public life and what you do as a public official, and that's not consistent with our principles and our Constitution." In short, Carson is a deranged crackpot, no better than bottom-of-the-barrel bigots and hate-mongers like Huckabee and Santorum.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, in The Atlantic, responded in a way that most normal Americans could probably relate to:

Ben Carson is a Christian-- a fact he shares in common with all our greatest domestic terrorists and self-styled Indian-killers. From slave-holding to ethnic cleansing, Christianity has repeatedly been employed to sanctify our most shameful acts. One might counter that Christianity has also been employed to inspire our most honorable acts. But this is a level of complexity that Carson’s ilk do not grant to Islam. To Carson, Islam is terror and nothing else.

Christians, fully conscious of their own pedigree, need not completely renounce their faith, nor repudiate their scripture. (If a man seeks to plunder you, Dr. Seuss will suffice.) But you would think a wise Christian would be more prudent. But Carson is neither prudent nor wise. Carson is a bigot playing to a base that considers bigotry to be a feature, not a bug.

Reactions from politicians to what Carson had to say have been varied. But even a crackpot bigot like Ted Cruz reminded Carson that "the Constitution specifies there shall be no religious test for public office." And no less of a pathetic also-ran than Bobby Jindal left open the possibility that he might vote for a theoretical Muslim:

If you can find me a Muslim candidate who is a Republican, who will fight hard to protect religious liberty, who will respect the Judeo-Christian heritage of America, who will be committed to destroying ISIS and radical Islam, who will condemn cultures that treat women as second-class citizens and who will place their hand on the Bible and swear to uphold the Constitution, then yes, I will be happy to consider voting for him or her." He added another criteria-- he or she must "respect the Judeo-Christian heritage of America.

Another Republican widely considered a crazed Islamaphobe and bigoted imbecile, Rep. Peter King of Long Island, was on Fox News criticizing Carson-- instead of his usual targets, Muslims. "A Muslim has every right to run for President and be President," he said."It’s wrong to paint this broad brush. We’re isolating the Muslim community when we should be trying to find those elements in the community that want to work with us."

Perhaps King could start by working with Keith Ellison, a Muslim-American congressman from Minneapolis, who issued a statement after Carson's appearance on Meet the Press:

Bernie Sanders, a Jewish-American, led the way among the presidential contenders:

You know, this is the year 2015. You judge candidates for president not on their religion, not on the color of their skin, but on their ideas on what they stand for. … I was very disappointed in Dr. Carson’s statement... For a long, long time in the history of America, there were people saying, 'Oh, we don’t want a Catholic to be president of the United States.' Then John F. Kennedy became president in 1960. And then people said, 'Oh, we don’t want a black guy, an African American, to be president of the United States.' Then finally Barack Obama became president of the United States.

For Republicans disturbed by a campaign thus far dominated by the hysteria and lies of Donald Trump, Carly Fiorina, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio and Scott Walker, there was some hope that Carson's soft-spoken and superficially respectful demeanor might offer a reasonable alternative. But they didn't know Ben Carson. Lawrence Goldstone sought to correct that in The New Republic over the weekend.

"Dr. Ben Carson excels," he wrote, "in addled interpretations of America’s founding principles. In May, the Republican presidential candidate claimed that the president has the power to ignore the Supreme Court’s gay marriage ruling. And last month, when asked by Meet the Press’ Chuck Todd whether the Bible has 'authority' over the Constitution, said, 'That is not a simple question.' He extended this streak of misinterpretation on Sunday."

In the end, the argument is about whether the United States is everyone’s country or just certain people’s country. Dr. Carson once again raises the specter that, despite all evidence and jurisprudence to the contrary, America is a “Christian nation.” Those who take this stance seem to do so only on the basis that most, if not all, of the Founders were Christian, somewhat ironic because overwhelmingly they were, at best, lax in their beliefs. And it is no more accurate to say America is “Christian” because it happens to have a Christian majority than it is to say that America is “white” for the same reason.

“[I]n the view of the Constitution, in the eye of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens,” Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan wrote in his stinging dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). “There is no caste here. Our Constitution is color-blind and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law.” This is also true of religion, as everyone in America-- and especially its political leaders-- should understand by now. If candidates like Carson can’t be bothered to read and understand the 4,500 words that comprise our founding document, they should not be considered fit for the job that requires they defend it.

A week before Carson's latest foray into a netherworld of far right extremism he's all too familiar with, PFAW's Right Wing Watch was warning that "Carson is getting a pass because he doesn’t share Trump’s bombastic tone. While Carson may not use Trumpian rhetoric, that doesn’t make what he says any less absurd. For starters, Carson had told enthusiastic audiences that Obamacare is worse than slavery (and is 'slavery, in a way') and the September 11, 2001 attacks." He's been scaring already paranoid and dumbed-down Fox viewers that Obama might cancel the 2016 election so he could have a third term and that in any case "Obama is driven by Mein Kampf and has ushered in 'a Gestapo age'... So egregious is Obama’s presidency in Carson’s eyes that he has accused the president of committing treason and opening up the country to terrorist infiltration and the dangers of Ebola-tainted urine... And remember, this is the only candidate who has stayed competitive with Trump." Electing Bernie Sanders seems more crucial every day. You can do your part here.