Maybe This Time?

New York magazine contributor Alex Carp asked Frank Rich if American democracy is at a crossroads. Frank responded with another question: "Before the murder of George Floyd, the nation’s prevailing political question was, Can Trump be beaten in November? It has now been supplanted by an existential question: Can this country even hold itself together and limp through a long hot summer to Election Day?

But you could also say that likening this year to any other is to miss the larger point about the perilous state of the American experiment. The intractable issue of race in this country has been a festering cancer each and every year of its existence, even when it seems to go into remission-- whether the “victory” over America’s original sin be marked by the Emancipation Proclamation, the legislative triumphs of the Civil Rights Movement, or the election of the first African-American president. It’s only human to want to believe that history moves forward in our own lifetimes, and that we can cite milestones we’ve witnessed with our own eyes to measure that progress. But history is bigger than all of us, and from the perspective of its wide lens, America is still a young country, perennially stuck in a nightmarish Groundhog Day since its birth.

Take a small example from 1967. After urban riots left 43 dead in Detroit and 26 in Newark. Lyndon Johnson, the president who fought tirelessly to redress the nation’s racial and economic inequities, created a National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders to investigate what had happened. The Kerner Commission, named after the Illinois governor who chaired it, produced a voluminous report that was published and promptly ignored as the country melted-down in 1968. Its 600-plus pages in my old paperback edition can be reduced to a single finding on page eight: The No. 1 cause of the unrest was “Police Practices,” which resulted in “a widespread belief among Negroes in the existence of police brutality and in a ‘double standard’ of justice and protection – one for Negroes and one for whites.”

It was late in 1967, as the Kerner commission was reaching this conclusion, that the police chief of Miami, Walter Headley, responded to his city’s unrest by declaring “war” on criminals, vowing to go after them with shotguns and dogs, killing them if need be: “I’ve let the word filter down that when the looting starts, the shooting starts,” he said. The coinage was echoed by the white supremacist third party candidate of 1968, the Alabama governor George Wallace, who would win five Southern states and come close to throwing the tight presidential election into the House of Representatives.

It was, of course, Headley’s message that Trump revived in his tweet last weekend-- though in Trump’s case, it turned out that he was willing to inflict violent punishment even on those who are not looting. He and his attorney general Bill Barr unleashed rubber bullets and gas on peaceful protestors, including clergy, to clear the stage for the photo op in which he held up an upside-down Bible that had been carried to St. John’s Church by his daughter in a $1,540 Max Mara handbag. This religious tableau was carried out by the President with an all-white cadre that included the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joints Chief of Staff. Soon the internet was flooded with photoshopped images of Hitler staging a similar Bible-toting photo op, and within 48 hours even Jim Mattis, the esteemed retired General and former Trump Secretary of Defense, released a statement likening his former boss’s divisive rhetoric to the Fuhrer’s.

Most Vichy Republicans in Washington are remaining silent even so-- unless you count the Arkansas senator Tom Cotton, who did his part to uphold Walter Headley’s legacy by calling for American troops to go to war against their own citizens to restore order. Unlike Trump, he took the trouble to pretty up Headley’s words a bit by fashioning them into an Op-Ed piece that The Times saw fit to publish-- on grounds redolent of Facebook-- despite its bloodthirsty tenor and its inclusion of a discredited Antifa conspiracy theory to justify its call for martial law.

No one should be surprised that the latest public lynching of a black American by the police-- and almost literally a lynching, with a cop’s knee substituting for the rope-- led to this conflagration. We’ve been there too many times before. Feckless liberals who did little or nothing as police abuses piled up on their watch, whether Amy Klobuchar in Minnesota or Bill de Blasio in New York, have zero excuse.

The legions of Republicans in public office who stand idly by as Trump and his MAGA claque of racists occupy the White House are indistinguishable from their forebears-- whether Democrats of the Jim Crow era, or their successors, the Republicans who took up the segregationist mantle from the Dixiecrats once Barry Goldwater ran for president in opposition to the Civil Rights Act in 1964. They can’t pretend now that they didn’t know Trump’s intentions from the start. Barely a month after his Inaugural address decrying “American carnage,” his attorney general, Alabama’s Jeff Sessions, started to dismantle Justice department programs monitoring rogue police departments. “We’re going to try to pull back on this, and I don’t think it’s wrong or mean or insensitive to civil rights or human rights,” he said in February 2017. Just five months later Trump gave an address to uniformed police in Long Island in which he asked that they “please don’t be too nice” when manhandling criminal suspects.

We’ve got American carnage now, all right. What happens next? In some ways, 2020 looks more like 1868 than 1968. That was the year when the racist president Andrew Johnson, who’d inherited the White House after Lincoln’s assassination, narrowly escaped conviction at his Impeachment trial. In the ensuing presidential race, the Republican party cleansed itself by nominating Ulysses Grant. The racial animus of the Democrats’ ticket was defined by the vice presidential candidate, Francis Blair. As the historian Richard White writes in The Republic for Which It Stands, he “promised to use the army to restore ‘white people’ to power in the South” by nulling the new state governments controlled by what he called the “semi-barbarous race of blacks” who had been empowered by the Reconstruction Act of a year earlier.

“The election of 1868 in the South was one of the most violent in American history,” White writes, a “reign of terror” targeting black voters. In Florida, for instance, bands of white men armed with guns kept blacks from voting. It was “the last presidential contest to center on white supremacy,” wrote the historian Eric Foner in his definitive account of the period, Reconstruction. The Democrats’ incendiary campaign raised “the specter of a second Civil War.”

Grant triumphed. America was spared that second Civil War, albeit without eradicating the systemic toxins that have deprived black citizens of their lives, their rights, and economic equality ever since. Now we have another election that is centered on white supremacy, with a president and a major political party, abetted by the John Roberts Supreme Court, determined to do anything possible to block what Trump calls “the black people” from access to the one peaceful method for going forward, the ballot box.

“There is no such thing as rock bottom,” wrote George Will this week. “So, assume the worst is yet to come.” What form will that take? We know by now that 40 percent of the public and, George Will notwithstanding, 99 percent of Republican leaders and financial backers will remain loyal to Trump no matter what. We know that none of them complained when their voters, who define “liberty” as their right to spread new lethal waves of COVID-19 with impunity, carried assault weapons into state capitols. We know that Trump pointedly vowed yet again to “protect the rights of law-abiding Americans, including your Second Amendment rights” in his brief Rose Garden address ostensibly deploring George Floyd’s murder before marching to St. John’s church on Monday.

You don’t need to be woke, only awake, to see what’s going on here and to ask once again, more desperately than ever, why Trump’s toadies in Washington continue to do nothing as our country teeters toward the abyss.

Robin Wilt is the progressive Democrat running for Congress in the Rochester, NY district. This morning, she told me that there has been " widespread unrest in Rochester and Monroe County as protesters take to the streets to assert that Black Lives Matter and protest the unjust slaying of George Floyd, and so many before him, at the hands of police. A local author made the connection between the most recent protests and the 1964 rebellion in Rochester to assert the civil rights of African Americans, driving through the same neighborhoods in which the ’64 unrest occurred and noting that poverty still plagues the area. Unfortunately, the disparities for which the ’64 freedom fighters sought redress persist, with the area ranking among the most impoverished in the nation, and the Congressional District ranking the second-worst place to live for Black Americans in the nation. Of note, it was in these blighted neighborhoods that police disproportionately focused their attention during the curfew and State of Emergency imposed by the Mayor and County Executive. Although racial segregation and generational systemic bias continue to produce disparate outcomes in the region, the tenor of the latest protests is decidedly different from the 1964 protests. The cry for change is multicultural and involves people from across the entirety of the district unified in the clamor for justice. The COVID-19 pandemic has illustrated for our communities in stark terms that we are only as strong as the most vulnerable among us. The silence of our leaders, like my opponent, is evidence of his complicity with the status quo, and this time, he cannot hide. Our movement for substantive change is taking over."




In her Slate column this week, Why This Time Is Different, Dahlia Lithwick noted that what's happening in the streets now might actually accomplish something. "It’s probably not a coincidence," she wrote, "that the legal words spiraling through the ether today are either in Latin or just plain archaic: posse comitatus, Insurrection Act, 'no quarter' orders. This is not the nomenclature of the Trump era, which has tended to coalesce around such concepts as 'Stupid Watergate' or 'Cheeto in Chief.' This is the language of the founding era, of the Civil War, of revolution and wartime. And that’s because, as much as President Donald Trump may believe that people have taken to the streets-- in the midst of a lethal pandemic-- to protest him and his policies, the very opposite is true. These protests we are seeing are not specific to Donald Trump. Yes, they are complicated and multifaceted, seeded in some cases with white supremacist agitators and gratuitous police violence that is enabled and cheered by Donald Trump. But these protests are at bottom about the original sin of slavery, inequality, and police powers used in their service.

For years now I have been asking what it would take to have Americans on the streets under Trump, and for years I have attended well-meaning marches, with ironic signs amid well-meaning, mostly white liberals, that received little attention and changed nothing. Those marches were important, they served as warnings and democratic markers, and they kept many of us sane. But I now see that I was wrong about why people take to the streets, because those were Trump protests, and Trump doesn’t matter.

The paradox of the Trump presidency is and has always been that Trump is tiny, far too tiny to matter, and also that he is at the epicenter of everything. The central koan of the Trump era was always How did someone so small come to matter so much? And because “don’t pay attention” doesn’t work when the guy you’re meant to be ignoring has the nuclear codes, it was a loop from which we couldn’t extricate ourselves. So long as we believed that Trump was the cause of the problem, we were doomed to our civil outings around Foley Square, as the police stood mildly by, and guys sold quirky anti-Trump buttons from pushcarts.

But Trump was never the cause of the problem; he is the result of the problem. As Bryan Stevenson explains (for the thousandth time), there is not one single thing about the death of George Floyd that is remarkable or new. Not the killing in plain sight, not the complicity of the officers on site, and not the fact that it was captured on video. “Everything we are seeing is a symptom of a larger disease,” Stevenson says. “We have never honestly addressed all the damage that was done during the two and a half centuries that we enslaved black people. The great evil of American slavery wasn’t the involuntary servitude; it was the fiction that black people aren’t as good as white people, and aren’t the equals of white people, and are less evolved, less human, less capable, less worthy, less deserving than white people.” The killings of George Floyd or Breonna Taylor or Ahmaud Arbery all could have happened in the Obama administration. Killings did happen then. The fact that the current president has praised Nazis and given succor to white supremacists didn’t cause this week’s mass protests; it merely coincides with them.

Because Donald Trump is so laugh-out-loud absurd, so vain and fussy and so lacking in substance, protesting him was never quite serious. It was important, yes, and the policies he has enacted do real harm to real people, harm that should be loudly denounced. But these protests always had a bit of a street festival quality to them: Look at the silly carnival barker and laugh at his bad spelling and his bad hair and his poor captive wife. Even as he was stealing migrant children from their parents and locking them in iceboxes, the fundamental stupidity of the president was still center stage. But even these protests, often featuring tens of thousands of protesters, didn’t break through precisely because the predominantly white people in them could fist-bump the cops as we politely and whimsically strolled by.

Most Americans intuitively understand that Donald Trump, with his failures of cognition or compassion and his incomplete theory of mind, was a symptom and not a cause of America’s original, founding sin. Protesting a symptom occupied us for a while. But protesting the sin itself is what has finally brought people to the streets, in a sustained and combustible way. Why bother protesting a reality show when reality itself is a daily nightmare? Long before the advent of the Donald Trump presidency, Chief Justice John Roberts and his colleagues declared America “over” its racism problem. Long before the advent of the Trump presidency, police departments were hiding evidence of wrongdoing and exonerating and protecting the worst malefactors.

Now, law enforcement is armed with military weapons, military leaders are parading around D.C. in uniform, the free press is being punched, and protesters are being tear-gassed and pepper-sprayed by state actors who insist there was no tear gas or pepper spray. Just as the coronavirus again instructed us all on how America’s racism savages black lives and black livelihoods disproportionally, these protests are a master class in the same. The brokenness is centuries in the making.

Things are very bad, and they will get worse. They will get worse because Donald Trump’s weakness and vanity have made space for authoritarianism to creep in all around him, at a politicized Justice Department, and with a complicit GOP. The nation is shuddering to a crisis because Trump has enabled and allowed every single element of authoritarian rule to flower around him, and because even if you just play a strongman on TV, a compliant police state can happily comply to make it reality. This too was invisible to many of us, amid the preening and the clowning, but it has certainly happened.

Do you remember William Perry? Not "The Refrigerator-- the Pentagon guy who worked for Carter, Reagan and-- as Secretary of Defense-- Clinton. Today he teaches at Stanford and is a member in good standing of the U.S. Military Industrial Complex. This was, in part, his statement on Thursday about Trump's attempted coup this week:

I support the right of protesters to demonstrate peacefully, and deplore the suggestion that our military should be used to suppress them. The U.S. military is a powerful force that has served our nation well, in war and in peace. But it was never intended to be used against American citizens, and it was never intended to be used for partisan political purposes.

It is both wrong and dangerous to threaten to deploy American soldiers against American citizens unless there is a complete breakdown of law and order in a state and the governor requests that assistance. And yet President Trump has repeatedly threatened to do just that against demonstrators, the vast majority of whom are peacefully exercising their constitutional rights for the redress of very real grievances. Worse, his defense secretary has suggested that our troops, in carrying out this threat, would “dominate the battlespace.” America is not a “battlespace.” And the people he threatens to dominate are American citizens, not enemy combatants.

When I was Secretary of Defense I made it a priority to avoid any suggestion of support for partisan political actions, and I assured that the president did not use any military facilities to support his political ends. But on Monday Secretary Esper walked with the president to St. John’s Church in an implicit show of support, after peaceful demonstrators in Lafayette Park had been forcibly subdued and dispersed with tear gas under the orders of Attorney General Barr. With a Bible conspicuously in his hand, the president sought to establish himself as the “law and order” president in the upcoming political campaign.

This was wrong on so many levels, but the one I personally relate to is the blatant use of the Secretary of Defense as an implicit supporter of this reprehensible political act. Secretary Esper has said that he was not aware of what the president was about to do. But he was shamelessly exploited and his office degraded. He should speak out forthrightly that he will not support using the office of the Secretary of Defense to promote partisan political actions. President Trump demands that members of his administration swear their loyalty to him, and those who demur do not stay long. But in the United States, those who serve in the government and the military swear an oath to support the Constitution, not any individual. That is what makes our nation great.

What If Trump Loses And Refuses To Leave? Would America Want A Satwant Singh and Beant Singh To Step Up To The Plate?

I've been a Biden watcher since the 1970s and, although my disdain for him has ebbed and flowed, my opinion of him has never gotten as high as "tolerable"-- and most of the time it was far lower. He has never been someone I would have ever considered voting for-- and still isn't. The lesser of two evils is still evil... and Joe Biden is not some minor evil, not by a long shot. I don't need any excuses to sit out a Trump-Biden contest (God forbid) but one would be my absolute certainty-- as a 4 decades Biden follower-- is that he would quickly pardon Trump and his family to, you know, unite the country. Did you hear Eric Holder getting people ready for it yesterday on CNN? He agreed with Ford's decision to pardon Nixon and told David Axelrod that the costs to the nation of putting Trump on trial might be too great. "I think there is a potential cost to the nation by putting on trial a former president, and that ought to at least be a part of the calculus that goes into the determination that has to be made by the next attorney general. I think we all should understand what a trial of a former president would do to the nation."

In a discussion with national security expert Josh Geltzer, Dahlia Lithwick tacked an even more disturbing question: What Happens if Trump Won’t Step Down? Trump is, in all likelihood, going to be defeated a year from now. He'll be squealing like a stuck pig and accusing everyone and everything on cheating him out of his second term. Geltzer, former senior director for counterterrorism at the National Security Council wrote that Trump "has repeatedly shown a willingness to overstep his constitutional authority" and wouldn't be surprised if he just flat out refuses to step down. Recall Michael Cohen testifying that "given my experience working for Mr. Trump, I fear that if he loses the election in 2020 there will never be a peaceful transition of power?"

Lithwick: When did you actually start thinking about the possibility that Trump might simply reject the 2020 election results?

Geltzer: July 24, 2018. Let me tell you why it’s that exact date. By then, I’d pretty much forgotten Trump’s comment from the October 2016 debate amidst everything else. But his answer snapped back in my mind on July 24, 2018. The midterm elections were approaching, and President Trump tweeted that he was “very concerned that Russia will be fighting very hard to have an impact on the upcoming Election,” adding that the Russians “will be pushing very hard for the Democrats.”

That tweet just didn’t make sense. It was, of course, the assessment of the U.S. intelligence community that Russia had intervened in the 2016 election specifically to help Trump against the Democratic candidate, among other goals. And there had been nothing-- no intelligence community public statements, no scholarly analysis, no media reporting-- suggesting that the Russians were poised to push for the Democrats in the 2018 elections. So what was Trump talking about?

That’s when I began to wonder if he was using the tweet as he seems to use many tweets: to test out new lines and see if he can get away with them. And this notion that there might be foreign election interference in favor of the Democrats seemed to test Trump’s ability to call into question election results he didn’t like. So, if the Dems won big in a way that embarrassed Trump, he might say the results were inflated-- and, at least conceivably, even contest them.

And that’s when I remembered his earlier refusal to commit to honoring the 2016 election results. It made me worry a bit about 2018, but after all, Trump himself wasn’t on the ballot then. The real thing to worry about seemed to be 2020, which would once again be, for Trump, personal. And let me be very clear what the worry is: It’s about Trump not honoring valid election results if he in fact loses. If he wins, he wins! But if he loses, he needs, well, to lose.

...[T]here’s been another development: change in intelligence community leadership. Think about the departure of Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats. Coats more or less stood up for the intelligence community-- publicly-- at some key moments, such as when Trump rejected its views in favor of Putin’s at Helsinki. I think it’s important to inspect whoever Trump nominates as DNI (there’s currently an acting) to make sure he or she will tell Congress and the American people whether there’s really been foreign election interference that casts doubt on the accuracy of election results in 2020, or whether Trump’s just claiming as much...

Lithwick: When you wrote about this last winter you suggested that there were four powerful checks on this possibility: the Electoral College, Congress, state governors, and the Defense Department. I wonder if you are more or less sanguine about each of them, seven months later?

Geltzer: I’m an optimistic guy, but I have to be less sanguine-- because, seven months later, I haven’t seen any of these checks taking seriously this concern. In fairness, some need prompting to do so. For example, it’s the political parties that should require their electors for the Electoral College to pledge that they won’t withhold, delay, or alter their votes based on the claims or protestations of any candidate, including Trump himself. But I don’t see the parties requiring that, or even discussing whether to require it. And others-- such as Congress or state governors-- don’t need prompting at all to make the sort of commitments I urged back in February. Yet they don’t seem to be making those commitments. And remember: This is about ensuring that valid election results are respected, whichever way that cuts. That shouldn’t be controversial.

...The four checks I listed are all actors that, either without prompting or with it, could make commitments right now that, to my mind, would at least mitigate the risk we’re discussing. That’s not true of the courts: They wait until cases or controversies are brought to them and only then get involved, though of course their role at that point can sometimes be the most important of all. So I think there are probably other checks, like the courts, that would, I hope, play their own important roles if this nightmare scenario really played out. But my goal in writing the piece in February wasn’t just to flag a possible problem, but specifically to encourage those who might be able to get ahead of that problem to do so. And that’s why I focused on actors suited to that...

Lithwick: What’s your best advice on what we should be doing to at least prepare for the possibility that at minimum, Trump will dispute the election results and that should he do so, many of his followers will similarly reject them?

Geltzer: We need political leaders-- especially Republicans-- to make clear, both publicly and privately, that for Trump to contest the valid results of an election would be a redline, and that he’d have zero support from them-- indeed, impassioned opposition from them-- should he cross it. We need it sooner rather than later, too.

By the way, after Satwant Singh and Beant Singh assassinated Indira Gandhi in 1984, thousands of their co-religionists were slaughtered in retaliation. Satwant and Beant themselves were tried, found guilty and executed in 1989. This movie of their lives-- and deaths-- was never released:

No Offense To Dahlia Lithwick, But No One Needs Or Wants The Clintons Or Chuck Schumer To Lead Protests Against Trumpism

Dahlia Lithwick's OpEd in yesterday's NY Times Buck Up, Democrats, and Fight Like Republicans bemoans the absence of "top Democrats" in the earliest skirmishes with Trump and his illegitimate presidency. But maybe it isn't the worst thing in the world that the widely despised and completely compromised "top Democrats" are keeping a low profile. Let's face it, Chuck Schumer isn't exactly a figure grassroots Democrats are going to rally behind, especially not as he works with Trump to make things even worse for ordinary Americans. And few want to hear another peep out of the Clinton's and the rotten, corrupt machine that led to Trump's coup. The opposition from Trump so far has come from the grassroots.

"Though he lost the election by nearly three million votes and almost daily generates headlines about new scandals," she wrote, "the Democratic Party is doing little to stop him. If you’ve been asking yourself 'Where are the Democrats?' you’re not alone. Since the election, top Democrats have been almost absent on the national stage. Rather, they have been involved largely in internecine warfare about how much to work with Mr. Trump. The Hillary Clinton campaign, trying to encourage a peaceful transition, has gone almost completely dark, with her most notable appearances coming in selfies with strangers. Nobody deserves downtime more than Mrs. Clinton, but while she is decompressing, the country is moving toward its biggest electoral mistake in history."

Does she really think anyone is going to get behind the far-fetched, completely hopeless schemes being floated by well-meaning crackpots about how to stop Trump (and trigger a civil war)? Grow the fuck up. "Impassioned citizens," she whined, "have been pleading with electors to vote against Mr. Trump; law professors have argued that winner-take-all laws for electoral votes are unconstitutional; a small group, the Hamilton Electors, is attempting to free electors to vote their consciences; and a new theory has arisen that there is legal precedent for courts to give the election to Mrs. Clinton based on Russian interference. All of these efforts, along with the grass-roots protests, boycotts and petitions, have been happening without the Democratic Party. The most we’ve seen is a response to the C.I.A. revelations, but only with Republicans onboard to give Democrats bipartisan cover."

Hey Dahlia, darling-- you want to stop Trumpism? Stop with the damn bullshit about Hamilton electors and reach into your bank account and give 'til it hurts-- not to more damn Schumerites and Clintonites and unelectable DCCC garbage-- give to real progressive candidates running to take back the House in 2018. Not to candidates whop hire consultants to teach them the "right" things to say but to candidates who have the right thing to say in their hearts. That'll block Trumpism. I hate to say it to a smart woman like you, but none of that other bullshit will. It will just take everyone's focus off the ONLY political goal they should have in mind-- winning back the House in 2018. That's it. There is nothing else. Nothing. It will be another year before someone like Rachel Maddow figures that out chasing chimeras like the utter nonsense of a Foster Campbell "victory" in Louisiana is destructive, not even neutral.

You want to stop Trumpism? Make sure Doug Applegates replaces Darrell Issa in 2018. Make sure some careerist charter school EMILY's List vomit is smashed to bits on primary day so that Congress gets populated by real fighters who won't let Trump and his crap pass. Here, pay attention. This is Jimmy Gomez, the California Assemblyman who made Paid Family Leave affordable for people who need it most, who couldn't use it because well-meaning but out of touch upper middle class professionals don't understand the lives of real people:

It's not enough for Democrats to say that "now is the time to fight." That's an empty promise that epitomizes our political failures. What it's time for is a major overhaul of how Democrats think and plan. We must fundamentally ask ourselves "why have our approaches to electoral and legislative strategy failed, and what can we do to reverse that course?" We must invest in understanding how to win back voters who we've clearly lost. This does not mean investing in a fundraising agenda based on quid pro quo politics, but rather a messaging agenda. How do we figure out what voters want from their Government? Then, how do we make their agenda happen? You see, in Sacramento I've worked hard to understand the will of Californians. But it hasn't been enough to stop there. I've studied how to make sure the will of the people is not only heard, but effectively put into law. This in-depth dive into understanding the minutae of government has allowed me to write and pass an effective Paid Family Leave bill. It has allowed me to pass our country's strongest climate change legislation. In Congress we must do a similar project. We must craft progressive policies that speak to the heart of what it is that voters need. This approach will result in much better electoral outcomes in the age of Trump, rather than the approach of saying the all too cliche, "it's time to fight."

Tuesday, Newt Gingrich rallied right-wing assholes at the Heritage Foundation with visions of sugar plum faries setting alight the accomplishments started almost a century ago by progressives, particularly Teddy and Franklin Roosevelt. Gingrich called it "The Principles of Trumpism" and even the National Review interpreted it as "say whatever you can to win popularity, then use whatever power you have to do what you want." There is no reason to not believe Gingrich and the other Republicans that Trump will go along with the Republican desire "to break out of the Franklin Delano Roosevelt model" of government and work with Ryan to gut Social Security and Medicare.

And what is Lithwick suggesting? An army of Democratic lawyers waving papers in judges faces? "Clear pronouncements?" Give me a break. People have had enough of the garbage politicians who have captured the Democratic Party. They're the yin to Trump's yang and they all have to go to hell together. "As Monday’s Electoral College vote approaches," she concluded,"Democrats should be fighting tooth and nail." The leaders' shitty candidates-- foisted on the public-- lost. Pointless appeals to a ridiculous electoral college won't do anything but demoralize the Democratic base. Keep your eye on the ball-- 2018: the House of Representatives. This list will grow. Feed it and forget about the Clintons and Schumers already; they've done enough damage. Are these "the leaders" Lithwick expects to see leading the resistance against Trump?

It's always possible that Judge Sotomayor's opponents will tell the truth about something (anything), but don't hold your breath

"When Frank Ricci testifies against Judge Sotomayor, it will be worth recalling that under any other set of facts he would have looked to his GOP sponsors like the kind of unscrupulous professional litigant Rush Limbaugh lives to savage. Is America's conservative movement really ready for an anti-affirmative action hero who has repeatedly relied on the government to intervene on his behalf to win him -- and help him keep -- a government job?"

-- Dahlia Lithwick, on Slate.com (see below)

by Ken

Tomorrow the Senate Judiciary Committee begins hearings on the nomination of one of the country's most experienced and respected federal Appeals Court judges, Sonia Sotomayor to replace retiring Justice David Souter as an associate justice of the Supreme Court. How strong the opposition will be remains to be seen, but the ugliest, most reactionary and bigoted pustules within the Republican Party are marshaling whatever strength they have behind SJC Ranking Minority Member Jefferson Sessions, a lifelong confirmed racist.

These people are representatives of truly the vilest, most hating, and most hateful people in the country. If they can get away with the assault of ignorance and savagery they have the power to unleash, it's unlikely to derail the Sotomayor nomination, but if they show any serious strength, they will not only defame an impeccably credentialed judge but create a poisonous climate for the next person nominated to the High Court.

As I keep pointing out, these are people with no regard for truth. They are people who appear literally incapable of intellectual or moral honesty or decency, but spend their lives trying to drag the rest of society down to their level of spiritual degradation. It has been obvious from the start that they don't give the tiniest damn about Judge Sotomayor's actual qualifications or even beliefs. They guessed correctly that she isn't another wizard in the white-corporatist-supremacist tradition of Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice "Sammy the Weasel" Alito, who got through their confirmation hearings by lying their heads off under the protection of the the Judiciary Committee's then-majority Republicans.

The Republicans have done nothing but lie ever since. They were never interested in evaluating Judge Sotomayor; they were only interested in a desperate search for "gotchas" in her background. What they came up with is so pathetic that they're lucky they're also incapable of shame.

The attack on her off-the-cuff comment about policy being made at the Court of Appeals level simply displays their total ignorance of the workings of American government; it has nothing to do with "activist" judging, it's just a fact. (It would be helpful to remember that the "activist" judges today are the rampaging ultra-right-wingers on the Supreme Court: Roberts, Alito, and Justices Nino Scalia and Clarence Thomas.) Her comment about bringing a distinctive perspective to the Court as a Latin woman is again the merest and most obvious statement of fact; every Supreme Court justice brings his/her particular background to bear, which is why we need a diversity of representation. Former Justice Sandra Day O'Connor as well as Justices Thomas and Alito made virtually identical statements.

And then there's the Ricci case, in which the Supreme Court has only just overturned the Circuit Court panel opinion in which Judge Sotomayor sided with the majority, ruling that the city of New Haven was within its legal rights, based on existing law, to abandon the firefighters' promotion exam in which no minorities received a passing grade and plan a future retest.

To Rush Limbaugh the Ricci case is proof that Sonia Sotomayor is a racist, but then, Rush Limbaugh lies for a living, and takes no prisoners. No one of any legal competence has suggested that Judge Sotomayor or the rest of the panel majority were legally wrong. They did their job reading the existing case law.

Now a bit of digging has turned up an interesting wrinkle on the Ricci case. It appears that the intrepid Frank Ricci, to white racists everywhere the hero of this drama of vile discrimination against an oppressed white man, has amazingly selective contempt for anti-discrimination laws.

At this point, I'm going to turn the floor over to Slate.com's veteran Supreme Court correspondent, Dahlia Lithwick (for links click through to the onsite post):

JURISPRUDENCE
Fire Proof
The New Haven firefighter is no stranger to employment disputes.

By Dahlia Lithwick
Posted Friday, July 10, 2009, at 6:50 PM ET

Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee have announced that Frank Ricci, the firefighter who recently prevailed in his "reverse discrimination" lawsuit against the city of New Haven, Conn., will testify at Sonia Sotomayor's confirmation hearings. Ricci has become a sort of folk hero for white men everywhere, having dared to stand up against the evils of affirmative action and race-based employment preferences. Next week, he will be called on to make the point, as David Paul Kuhn put it, that Sotomayor, for all her talk of empathy and the real-world impact of judicial decisions, "demonstrated no empathy for the 'real-world consequences' of affirmative action on Ricci."

Ricci is invariably painted as a reluctant standard-bearer; a hardworking man driven to litigation only when his dreams of promotion were shattered by a system that persecutes white men. This is the narrative we will hear next week, but it somewhat oversimplifies Ricci's actual employment story. For instance, it's not precisely true, as this one account would have it, that Frank Ricci "never once [sought] special treatment for his dyslexia challenge." In point of fact, Ricci sued over it.

According to local newspapers, Ricci filed his first lawsuit against the city of New Haven in 1995, at the ripe old age of 20, for failing to hire him as a firefighter. That January, the Hartford Chronicle reported that Ricci sued, saying "he was not hired because he is dyslexic." The complaint in that suit, filed in federal court, alleged that the city's failure to hire Ricci because of his dyslexia violated the Americans with Disabilities Act. Frank Ricci was one of 795 candidates interviewed for 40 jobs. According to his complaint, the reason he was not hired was that he disclosed his dyslexia in an interview. That case was settled in 1997 with a confidential settlement in which Ricci withdrew his lawsuit in exchange for a job with the fire department and $11,143 in attorney's fees.

In 1998, Ricci was talking about filing lawsuits again, this time over a dispute with his new employer, Middletown's South Fire District -- which had hired him in August of 1997. According to a Hartford Courant report of Aug. 11, 1998, Ricci was dismissed from the Middletown fire department after only eight months. He promptly appealed his dismissal, claiming that fire officials had retaliated against him for conducting an investigation into the department's response to a controversial fire. A story in the Hartford Courant dated Aug. 9, 1997, has Ricci vowing "to pursue this to the fullest extent of the law."

In August of 1998, a state Department of Labor investigation cleared Chief Wayne S. Bartolotta of any wrongdoing in the firing. The Aug. 3, 1998, letter from the state Department of Labor indicated that the case was closed with a finding of no violation. "After a thorough investigation, it was determined that the South Fire District did not discriminate against Mr. Ricci." Ricci's response? According to the Courant, Ricci contended "Their decision was political, it has nothing to do with who was right and who was wrong." He told the paper he would "pursue the matter in civil court."

Ricci also tried to discredit his former boss, Chief Bartolotta, by disparaging his professional credentials. His fight over access to Bartolotta's professional training records was resolved between the two of them a week before the matter was slated to be taken up with the state Freedom of Information Commission, according to a Jan. 13, 1998, report in the Hartford Courant.

Eventually, Ricci made his way back to the New Haven Fire Department, where he famously aced his promotions test, then sued, yet again, in 2004.

Ultimately, there are two ways to frame Frank Ricci's penchant for filing employment discrimination complaints: Perhaps he was repeatedly victimized by a cruel cadre of employers, first for his dyslexia, then again for his role as a whistle-blower, and then a third time for just being white. If that is so, we should all be deeply grateful for the robust civil rights laws that protect Americans from unfair discrimination in the workplace. I look forward to hearing Republican Sen. John Cornyn's version of that speech next week.

The other way to look at Frank Ricci is as a serial plaintiff -- one who reacts to professional slights and setbacks by filing suit, threatening to file suit, and more or less complaining his way up the chain of command. That's not the typical GOP heartthrob, but I look forward to hearing Sen. Cornyn's version of that speech next week as well.

When Frank Ricci testifies against Judge Sotomayor, it will be worth recalling that under any other set of facts he would have looked to his GOP sponsors like the kind of unscrupulous professional litigant Rush Limbaugh lives to savage. Is America's conservative movement really ready for an anti-affirmative action hero who has repeatedly relied on the government to intervene on his behalf to win him -- and help him keep -- a government job?

MORE FUNNY BUSINESS IN THE RICCI CASE:
JUSTICE SAMMY BENDS FACTS TO FIT HIS OPINION

Our attention has been called to this interesting report by the New Haven Independent's Paul Bass in the wake of the Ricci ruling:

Was He The Culprit?

by Paul Bass | June 29, 2009 2:45 PM

Three of the Supreme Court justices who voted against New Haven in Monday’s landmark firefighters case ruling zeroed in on one character they saw playing a nefarious role: the Rev. Boise Kimber.

In fact, Kimber’s role as a New Haven politico, felon, and FOJ (Friend of John, Mayor DeStefano) ended up sparking a lively debate between the Supreme Court’s conservative and liberal wings. . . .

Justice Samuel Alito singled out Kimber in a concurring opinion to Ricci v. DeStefano, the case in which a 5-4 majority ruled that New Haven can’t ignore the results of a fire department promotional exam just because no African-Americans scored high enough. . . .

From the start, the New Haven 20 — the one Hispanic and 19 white firefighters who sued to have the exams’ results honored — argued that New Haven’s DeStefano administration scuttled the test because of political pressure. And they specifically mentioned Kimber in their lawsuit. Rev. Kimber, a prominent vote-puller for Mayor DeStefano in past elections, sits on the Board of Fire Commissioners. He played a vocal role at the Civil Service Commission in arguing to have the test results ignored.

Alito, in an opinion also signed by Justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia, noted that “even the District Court” (the lower court that ruled on behalf of the city in this case) “admitted that ‘a jury could rationally infer that city officials worked behind the scenes to sabotage the promotional examinations because they knew that, were the exams certified, the Mayor would incur the wrath of [Rev. Boise] Kimber and other influential leaders of New Haven’s African-American community.”

The opinion proceeds to present a three-paragraph attack bio of the good reverend, going back decades over terrain familiar to Kimber’s New Haven critics. . . .

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who sided with the city in the case, takes on Alito’s Kimber-bashing in a dissenting opinion. She argues that Alito “exaggerates” Kimber’s influence and his role in “engineering” the outcome.

She notes how Alito “recounts at length the alleged machinations of Rev. Boise Kimber (a local political activist), Mayor John DeStefano, and certain members of the mayor’s staff.”

She then points out that neither Kimber nor the mayor’s staff made the call to disregard the exam results. The mayorally appointed Civil Service Board, “an unelected, politically insulated body,” in Ginsburg’s telling, made that decision.

She calls it “striking that Justice Alito’s concurrence says hardly a word about the CSB itself, perhaps because there is scant evidence that its motivation was anything other than to comply with Title VII’s disparate impact provision.”

And, she points out, the firefighters union — another politically influential group — was just as vocal on the opposite side as Kimber.

“The real issue, then, is not whether the mayor and his staff were politically motivated; it is whether their attempt to score political points was legitimate (i.e., non-discriminatory),” Ginsburg writes. “Were they seeking to exclude white firefighters from promotion (unlikely, as a fair test would undoubtedly result in the addition of white firefighters to the officer ranks), or did they realize, at least belatedly, that their tests could be toppled in a disparate-impact suit?”

Yale law professor Drew Days (pictured) said Monday that Ginsburg “got it right.”

Alito et al. made Kimber “the main culprit in the story,” said Days, who argued cases before the Supreme Court as President Bill Clinton’s solicitor general.

But that’s jumping to a unproved conclusion, Days said: “Whatever people in New Haven might think about all this, the political process is rough and tumble. If people don’t like what the city does or is about to do, they make a lot of noise. Is the city trying to make sure its constituents are being heard? Or are they pandering and doing something that is illegal to get political support?"

#