The Progressive wing of the Democratic Party is doing a lot of wailing over the debt ceiling agreement President Biden negotiated with House speakeasy manager, Kevin McCarthy. They—and the mainstream media lemmings parroting their rage—need to back off. Instead of castigating Biden, they should applaud him for masterfully ending a hostage crisis. Despite enormous odds, he came away from the negotiation with what amounts to a nation and world-saving triumph.
 
When the formerly responsible Republican Party decided to behave like a suicide bomber, threatening the global economy with catastrophe if Biden didn’t agree with at least some of their demands for spending cuts, he had to come to terms with the terrorists. If he didn’t, here is the scenario that would have played out:

• The United States would have defaulted on its debt for the first time in history.
• Millions of jobs would have been in jeopardy.
• Inflation would have ramped up.
• Stock markets would have tanked.
• Benefits earned by Social Security, Medicare and Veteran recipients would have stopped.
• Financial institutions would have failed.
• The U.S. would have gone into recession.
• It would have cost the government much more to borrow because foreign investors would have demanded higher rates of return, given the higher risks they would have incurred.
• Etc.

 
While I would have preferred that Biden invoke Section 4 of the 14th Amendment, which states that “the debts of the United States shall not be questioned,” he came to the conclusion that, despite the unambiguous wording of Section 4, applying that would be too risky given a reactionary Supreme Court majority only too eager to add fuel to the neo-fascist fire Republicans are fanning. Moreover, he perhaps correctly foresaw that the interregnum between invoking Section 4 and its interpretation by the Supreme Court would lead to worried markets, banks and employers who might not wait to throw the country and planet into economic turmoil regardless.
 
Republicans quite rightly calculated that come November 2024, the voting public would blame the sitting president for the economic ills it had suffered due to a debt default. Suicide bombers have nothing to lose once they commit their lives to their task.
 
While we can gnash our teeth over this latest shameful outrage perpetrated by McCarthy and his band of political incendiaries, it is both wrong and deeply insulting to accuse Biden of succumbing to “Stockholm Syndrome,” a victim who identifies with and empathizes with their captor and their goals. He managed an untenable situation as well as it could possibly be managed. For that, he deserves a great deal of credit. It is not a stretch to say that he saved the country and the planet.
 
The one criticism of Biden that is warranted is that his communications team once again did a face plant. While McCarthy was out demagoguing to the media umpteen times a day during the negotiations, the president’s team took a vow of silence, thus allowing the Republicans’ misleading messaging to receive top billing.
 
This is a pattern with the Biden comms team. I asked several generally well-informed and politically aware individuals to tell me what they knew about the landmark legislation Biden had gotten through Congress: the American Rescue Plan; the CHIPS Act, the Infrastructure and Jobs Act; and the Inflation Reduction Act. Their responses to the most successful legislative initiatives in 60 years were along the following lines: “Something to do with fixing bridges?” If even these voters are uninformed about Biden’s remarkable accomplishments, you can understand why his poll numbers are feeble. People simply don’t know what he has achieved. That’s on his communications team.
 
There is still time to fix this. Biden needs a communications course correction ASAP.
Absent such an overhaul, he—and we—will risk a very ominous outcome in November 2024.
 
Dick Hermann
June 2, 2023

​Today’s Republican attack on education is nothing new. It dates back to the late 1940s when conservative gadfly, William F. Buckley, began his assault on higher education that eventuated a few years later in his book, God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of “Academic Freedom.” The book rocked academia and catapulted Buckley into becoming the principal voice for the rightward shift of the Republican Party. His National Review soon became the newspaper of record of American conservatism. Since Buckley’s era, there has also always been something of a theological bent to Republican skepticism about education.
 
An irony of Buckley’s prominent position as town crier for the hard right is that he was a highly educated paragon of the Eastern establishment elite and the very definition of an intellectual. Despite that, his adherents adopted anti-intellectualism and skepticism of knowledge in general and science in particular. These characteristics resonate even more strongly among today’s Republicans.
 
What Bill Buckley launched was reinforced over the years by a series of Republican luminaries such as Dan Quayle, George W. Bush, Sarah Palin, the Tea Party movement, most powerfully by Donald Trump, and currently by the House Republican Freedom Caucus and Florida Governor (and Yale and Harvard educated) Ron DeSantis.
 
The disastrous Kansas experiment of the early 2000s should give these folks pause if they truly care about their own children’s education. When religious conservatives took control of the Kansas State Board of Education in 2005, they directed that creationism (Intelligent Design) be taught in the state’s public schools as a science. While not completely eliminating evolution from the curriculum, the Board directed that it be presented it as a greatly challenged and disputed theory. One consequence was that Kansas high school students experienced great difficulty getting accepted into many colleges and universities across the country, including Kansas. Some who were admitted found themselves taking required remedial courses in biology, chemistry, or physics. This, plus a tsunami of criticism from both parents, students and state and national scientific and other organizations, prompted the Board to withdraw its edict several years later.
 
Governor DeSantis’s continuing offensive against the teaching of anything the hard right finds disagreeable or uncomfortable is not only adversely affecting both K-12 and college education in Florida, but is also prompting students and their parents to reconsider where they want to live and attend school. New College of Florida students last week held an alternative graduation ceremony in protest against the official ceremony and its keynoter, a DeSantis flunky. The University of Florida is viewed by an increasing number of Floridians and other Americans as the University of Floriduh.
 
Other red state governors and legislatures are taking a page from DeSantis’s “Book of No” and adopting his anti-education stance for their bailiwicks. Like DeSantis, they are also promoting the banning of books that conservative extremists find offensive because they talk about topics such as race, gender, LGBTQ matters, and even the Holocaust. Because these issues make them uncomfortable, they want to prohibit everyone reading them.
 
DeSantis’s enabling of parents objecting to certain books has found its reductio ad absurdum in in a Miami-Dade County school library restricting access to Amanda Gorman’s inauguration poem, The Hill We Climb, because one parent objected to it.  She alleged it contains “indirect hate messages.” This particular mother (a) admits that she has not read the poem in its entirety, (b) wrongly identified Oprah Winfrey as the “author/publisher,” and (c) posted an image of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a bogus 19th century screed dripping with fanatical anti-Semitism, on Facebook.
 
Political control through nefarious schemes such as voter suppression and extreme gerrymandering are apparently not enough. Now Republicans also want to exert mind control. This is unfondly reminiscent of the tactics employed by the German Nazis and Soviet Communists in the last century. They started with history and the social sciences, then moved on to the sciences. The Nazis even banned the teaching of quantum physics as “Jewish physics” which, along with terminating Jewish physicists (30 percent of the German physics community) from their jobs, plunged Hitler’s atomic bomb development program into the toilet. The USSR banned Mendelian genetics in favor of the perverted “science” of Stalin's favorite, Trofim Lysenko, whose nutty ideas were applied to Soviet agriculture with disastrous consequences.
 
Promoting ignorance is a major goal of the current Republican Party. Their political success depends on it. Dumbing down the population is now a conscious Republican electoral strategy. Keep the people uneducated so that they will vote Republican against their own self-interest.
 
Set aside Republican accusations that Democrats are advocates of the “nanny state.” What red state leaders are doing is instituting the nanny state writ large.
 
If you want your kids to be educated, keep them away from red states.
 
P.S. There is, however, one exception to my diatribe against book banning: consider boycotting James Comey’s new mystery, “Central Park West.” The man who did more than any other American to afflict the world with Donald Trump should not be rewarded for his arrogance and perfidy.
 
Dick Hermann
May 26, 2023

​The barrage of criticism raining down on CNN for hosting a Donald Trump Town Hall in New Hampshire is well-deserved, but only to a point. The notion that it gave the petulant child of 30,000+ lies a national forum is not the issue. The twice-impeached insurrectionist president is, after all, the current runaway leader for the 2024 Republican nomination. Even without letting him rant, rave and rage before a TV audience of 3 million, he sucks up all the media oxygen anyway and on a daily basis. So planting his portly physique on live TV is no big deal.
 
We cannot fault CNN interrogator Kaitlin Collins. She did a credible job, exhausting herself calling out every one of Trump’s 70-minute torrent of lies. CNN might even have done us a mitzvah (Yiddish for good deed) by showing Trump in all his inglorious bastardy. His delusions, ignorance and mindless stupidity was on display for all to see and process. Collins actually did us a service by not only allowing us to foresee the increased chaos Trump would bring with him to a second term, but shrewdly honing in on the cruelty of his policy proposals: he is all for defaulting on our debts; he wants to reprise separating migrant families; he would abandon Ukraine to his pal, Putin; he would pardon the January 6 traitors; and much more from this would-be autocrat’s chamber of horrors. The nation got to see exactly what it would get in the disastrous event Trump returned to the Oval Office.
 
Chris Licht, CNN’s new head honcho, deserves full-throated criticism, however, in having invited only Republicans, including strong representation from New Hampshire’s MAGAverse, to comprise most of the studio audience. Even there, CNN might have done the electorate a favor: seeing and hearing the huzzahs, applause and raucous laughter that accompanied Trump’s lies and doubling down on his extreme misogyny. This might prompt every lucid voter to distance him or herself from these delusional fanatics and their hero. Nevertheless, future forums might want to seat a more balanced studio audience.
 
Moreover, upcoming Trump town halls—and debate stages—should have readily available audio and video clips that refute Trump’s lies. When, for example, he claimed “I never asked for anything” during his infamous phone call to Georgia’s Secretary of State, CNN should have run the tape where he asked Brad Raffensberger to “find 11,780 votes….” Instant, irrefutable fact-checking in the form of the Trump’s own words would be devastating.
 
The mainstream media must not allow itself to be exploited and run roughshod over by an anti-democratic villain who labels the Fourth Estate “the enemy of the people.” It has to learn to fight back against this existential threat while sticking within the parameters of responsible journalism.
 
Dick Hermann
May 19, 2023

​The mainstream media, rightly focusing on the cesspool of corruption infecting our Supreme Court, has, perhaps through ignorance of just how legal headhunting works, let the saga of Jane Roberts drift away. They have dismissed Jane’s story as a nothingburger in contrast to the grift mill in which Justices Thomas and, to a lesser extent some of his colleagues, ply their judicial wares.
 
Jane’s work, though, may not necessarily be as pure as the disinterested media believes.
 
Thanks to wife Jane, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts does not have to rely solely on his piddling $298,500 salary. Jane, a legal headhunter (recruiter) hauled in more than $10 million in eight years matching attorneys with law firms. Nice work if you can get it. Few can.
 
The legal headhunting business is one of the most unforgiving occupations going. It is brutally competitive. Losers outnumber winners by several orders of magnitude. The annual headhunter turnover rate is way more than 100 percent. Very few succeed. Among them, their average annual compensation is $109,000, less than one-tenth what Jane Roberts makes. The likelihood of success in the headhunting business is infinitesimal. Here’s why:
 
The vast majority of headhunter legal searches are “contingent,” meaning that whichever headhunter presents a successful candidate to the firm first earns the fee. In many instances, a multitude of headhunters present the same candidate. The first past the post wins. All the others lose, their hard work identifying, vetting and presenting the candidate going for naught.
 
A much smaller number of searches are either “exclusive” or “retained.” An exclusive search is one where the firm engages only one headhunter. A retained search is one where the firm pays only one headhunter a fee (usually up-front) to find it a suitable employee.
 
Given her million-dollar-plus annual compensation, I suspect that most of Jane Roberts’ job orders are either exclusive or retained. That’s pretty rarified air in which to practice headhunting.
 
Do you think Jane’s success is solely because of her extraordinary headhunting competence? Maybe, but it is more likely due to the singular advantage she has over the competition: her husband.
 
All other things being equal, law firms that work with headhunters would be insane not to favor the wife of the Chief Justice of the United States. You never know when you might represent a client in a case before the Supreme Court. Or when your firm might be asked to submit an amicus brief in such a case. Whether any of this would actually influence the Chief’s vote, it is the appearance of a possible ethical compromise that is at play. Julius Caesar, speaking of himself in the third person (as was his inclination), pronounced that his wife (at the time), Pompeia, “must be above suspicion.” Apparently, what was true 2,000 years ago might no longer be.
 
Parlaying one’s family member’s exalted position or name for financial gain is as old as pre-recorded history. Hunter Biden is a classic example. Jane Roberts’ relationship may open doors that are closed tight to the rest of the headhunting world.
 
It may pass the smell test, but perhaps not the sniff test.
 
Dick Hermann
May 13, 2023

House Republicans are once more holding the United States and global economy hostage, willing to burn the entire edifice down if their draconian spending cut demands are not met. No matter that during the Trump administration, debt ceiling increases passed Congress three times without a peep from Republican members about spending cuts.
 
The party for whom lying has become a core principal has done it once again. This time the topic is what is actually in the toxic bill that narrowly passed the House of Representatives in late April that links support for a debt ceiling increase to draconian spending cuts. The Sunday talk shows are overflowing with Republican House members spouting blatant untruths about the bill they are advancing in an attempt to undermine the U.S. and global economies and destroy millions of lives.
 
Failing to raise the debt ceiling means that the U.S. will default on its obligations to pay for goods and services it has already received. The Full Faith and Credit of the U.S., the linchpin of the global economy for more than a century, will go down the toilet. The practical effects of this titanic Republican recklessness will be:

• The government will not have the money to meet its financial obligations.
• The government won’t be able to borrow in order to pay for entitlement programs such as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, as well as all domestic discretionary spending programs, including those that fund veterans programs, law enforcement and border security, all of which Republicans claim they strongly support.
• The bill rescinds nearly $71 billion that Congress is providing the IRS to upgrade its technology and boost hiring in order to increase tax revenues (and thus decrease the deficit). The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office says such a rescission would actually increase deficits by $120 billion.
• It repeals clean energy tax breaks while leaving those directed at fossil fuels in place.
• Interest rates will rise, adding to inflation and accelerating the slowdown currently affecting the economy. Mortgage rates and borrowing costs for government, businesses and individuals will go up.
• It expands work requirements for federal cash and food assistance recipients, which would result in several million families in need being thrown off Medicaid and food stamps.
• The stock market will likely plummet, wiping out millions of retirement accounts and savings.
• As bond values decline, more banks will be in trouble, further exacerbating market panics and volatility.
• The possibility of recession will become a reality.
• Millions of Americans will lose their jobs.

 
This is not a complete litany of the disasters to come if the debt ceiling is not raised.
 
Hypocritically, the bill exempts defense spending from any cuts despite the fact that the U.S. spends more on defense than the next ten biggest defense spending countries combined. We spend more than four times what our major adversary no. 1, China, spends for defense, and more than 20 times what our major adversary no. 2, Russia, spends. Leaving defense spending out of the mix demonstrates the unseriousness of the Republican approach. It is nothing more than yet another bit of performance art brought to you by the extremist right wingnuts who have taken over the party.
 
The Republicans would suspend the debt limit only through March 31, 2024 or by $1.5 trillion, whichever comes first, at which time we will be right back where this insanity all began. Another debt ceiling fight is guaranteed.
 
The U.S. and Denmark are the only countries in the world that have a debt ceiling. Given the lunacy that has consumed the Republican Party, the best medicine would be for Congress to eliminate the debt ceiling altogether. Of course, this would require that the 2024 elections punish Republicans for their rash behavior so that the only sane party left can get something like this passed.
 
The reality is that there is no guarantee that the public will blame Republicans for an economic collapse. The GOP calculus is that they won’t because recessions are invariably viewed as the fault of the sitting president. They will say that they passed a debt ceiling bill that Democrats refused to consider. What is actually in that bill will likely not be processed by most voters. In other words, Republicans are perfectly willing to countenance economic disaster in return for an election triumph.
 
Thus far, Biden appears unwilling to invoke Section 4 of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, which states: “The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, …shall not be questioned.” While the language seems to support forging ahead and continuing to pay our debts despite any debt ceiling, Section 4 has never been tested in the courts. This would certainly go to the Supreme Court. Best case: the Court would declare the debt ceiling unconstitutional in contravention of Section 4. Worst case: the Court would uphold the debt ceiling despite Section 4. In the meantime, the U.S. would have avoided an imminent default and resulting economic chaos. The administration has nothing to lose in either case.
 
Dick Hermann
May 5, 2023

​"But if there is any matter upon which civilized countries have agreed—it is the evil of premature and excessive child labor."
-- Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., dissenting in Hammer v. Dagenhart (1918)
 
Today’s Republican Party strongly disagrees with Justice Holmes. Not satisfied with trampling upon the rights of Americans to be safe from gun violence, vote, choose whom to love, read what they wish, learn history as it really was, identify themselves gender-wise, and control their own bodies, the party is now zeroing in on child labor. Both the Washington Post and NBC News have run recent stories uncovering shocking violations of child labor laws, including young teenagers working night shifts cleaning up floors overflowing with blood and gore at meat packing plants, then having to attend school when their shifts ended.
 
Abhorrence of such illegal practices, however, is not part of the Republican playbook. On the contrary, a number of states, assisted by a Florida outfit with the misleading name, “The Foundation for Government Accountability,” are pushing legislation to wipe out child workplace protections.
 
The federal government regulates child labor with respect to businesses operating in interstate commerce. However, for companies that do business only within a state, federal regulations do not apply. Nevertheless, in the 80+ years since the Supreme Court upheld federal authority to regulate child labor, virtually every state has followed suit and promulgated similar, common-sense laws and regulations.
 
Republicans want to roll back these state protections. Arkansas, led by former Trump mouthpiece, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, has a new law that eliminates work permits and age verification for workers younger than 16. Iowa legislators this month voted to allow 14 year-olds to work night shifts and 15 year-olds to work on assembly lines. Missouri, Ohio, Georgia and Minnesota are also considering similar appalling legislation. The Foundation for Government Accountability has found state GOP lawmakers to be a receptive audience for its efforts to turn the clock back to the 19th century and bring back the worst abuses of the Industrial Revolution.
 
I wish I could say that I am shocked by this level of Republican viciousness. But then, this is the same party/cult for which contempt for humanity has become central to its existence. This is an organization that has demonstrated time-and-time again that it values human life only until the moment of birth, after which babies and children must fend for themselves. I would expect nothing more from folks who confirm every day that guns merit higher levels of protection than school children.
 
Moreover, promoting child labor is also consistent with Republican contempt for education and the pursuit of knowledge. They would rather have kids toiling away in dangerous jobs than learning.
 
The U.S. Department of Labor reports a 69 percent increase in minors employed in violation of federal law since 2018. Republicans cheer this statistic.
 
This movement is cloaked in the language of “parental rights” that Republicans have successfully marketed in their quest to cleanse public education, rewrite American history and ban books the hard right deems offensive. They argue that decisions about children working should be ones that parents make, not government.
 
An extremely tight labor market encourages employers to turn to younger, cheaper workers rather than attract experienced workers with wage and other incentives. These child labor bills speak to that yearning. Among child laborers, undocumented minors who come to the U.S. without their parents are most at risk. These bills embolden unscrupulous employers seeking to exploit this extremely vulnerable population. One would think that a party so firmly anti-immigration would be ashamed by the hypocrisy inherent in relaxing child labor restrictions so that more undocumented immigrant children can be oppressed. But shame is not a Republican attribute.
 
Enabling employers to hire children for dangerous jobs is immoral and should be illegal. Sadly, this latest example of Republican callousness is par for the course for a political party that has completely lost its way along with any regard for decency and humanity.
 
Dick Hermann
April 28, 2023

Twenty-one-year old Airman Jack Douglas Teixeira was arrested, handcuffed and whisked away to jail for alleged “unauthorized removal and retention of classified documents” and “unauthorized retention and transmission of national defense information.” He is being held without bail and has already been arraigned. If convicted, he likely faces decades in prison.
 
The first charge alone, “unauthorized removal and retention…,” carries a prison term of up to 10 years - as well as fines - for anyone who "copies, takes, makes or obtains or attempts to copy, take, make or obtain" a variety of government documents.
 
If this sounds familiar, it is. Donald John Trump, who is accused of doing essentially the same thing (we don’t yet know if he also transmitted national defense information—he did that at least once directly from the Oval Office…to Russians!), in contrast gets to run around free, raging and ranting about his imaginary grievances and victimhood. The Mar-a-Lago documents case, which on its face appears to be a slam-dunk, is under what seems like eternal investigation.
 
We should now discard the much hackneyed phrase: “no man is above the law.” Trump clearly occupies an exalted, albeit completely unwarranted, position somewhere in the justice wild blue yonder, far above the law.
 
The Teixeira case also brings to light several troubling features of both the U.S. classification regime and our intelligence system:
 
First, how did Teixeira get past the extensive background checks that are a prerequisite to being granted a Top Secret clearance? When he went through this vetting process in 2019, he already had a history of racist and anti-Semitic utterances on social media.
 
Second, many of the secrets the young airman leaked on social media call into question why they required classification. The revelation, for example, that there is infighting among Russian military and political officials regarding the Ukraine invasion has been widely publicized by many news outlets. Many of his exposés are stuff you can learn simply by reading newspapers and watching the nightly news.
 
Third, why does the Massachusetts Air National Guard need to know this stuff? The vast majority of its members are, after all, merely weekend warriors. A 21-year old equivalent of an Army PFC doesn’t come close to meeting the “need-to-know” threshold.
 
Fourth, why did it take eight months and a New York Times story to discover that the very same website used by the military as a recruiting medium was home to these leaks? What happened on 9/11 should have been more than enough of a wake-up call for our disconnected intelligence community to get its act together.
 
Fifth, do we really need 1.7 million people with Top Secret clearances? That humungous number virtually guarantees that there will be numerous security risks.
 
What all this means is this:

1. Our classification regime is a hot mess and needs to be cleaned up immediately. A government that stamps “confidential,” “secret” or “top secret” on too many documents loses sight of the information that really needs to be kept secret. That means declassifying a ton of information that is not worthy of classification, drastically reducing the number of people cleared to see classified information, and instituting a monitoring system that can quickly identify security breaches.
   ​
2. If it is this clear-cut to quickly arrest Airman Jack, then Special Counsel Jack Smith should stop dithering around with the Mar-a-Lago documents investigation and bring Donald Trump to justice without any additional delay.

 
Dick Hermann
April 23, 2023

​“I prefer the RV parks. I prefer the Walmart parking lots to the beaches and things like that.”
--Justice Clarence Thomas
 
Kudos to the stellar investigative reporters at Pro Publica who uncovered Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s unseemly relationship with billionaire Harlan Crow. Crow is the Justice’s personal angel, lavishing him and his wife, Ginni, with private jet travel to extravagant, luxury vacations in the world’s most exotic locations, cruises on his oligarch-worthy superyacht, tête-à têtes with his reactionary pals at his private Adirondack resort, as well as expensive gifts, to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars. He also overpaid Thomas and his co-owner(s) to purchase Thomas’s mother’s house and several vacant lots on the same street. Crow is a hard right Republican who, among other indulgences, contributes heavily to Ginni Thomas’s extremist causes, including her participation in the January 6 conspiracy to overthrow the government. The mogul also maintains an extensive collection of fascist memorabilia, including a signed copy of Adolf Hitler’s blood-curdling manifesto, Mein Kampf, and garden statuary of Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Lenin and other tyrants.
 
Thomas never disclosed any of this massive deluge of gifts as required by law.
 
Fifty-four years ago, Justice Abe Fortas was forced to resign from the U.S. Supreme Court, pressured to do so by several of his Court colleagues, many members of Congress and public opinion. He had accepted a lifetime retainer from someone who was later convicted of insider trading. He had also been paid $15,000 for a number of speeches. His transgressions seem minor compared to what Thomas has been about. Explain why what Fortas did compelled his resignation while what Thomas is doing is perfectly acceptable. This should not stand.
 
Thomas has been a loyal soldier when it comes to his votes on decisions favoring Crow’s extremist ideological bent. Even if outright corruption cannot be proved, the appearance of impropriety is beyond disturbing.
 
Since 1972, Federal court judges, except Supreme Court justices, have been bound by a Code of Judicial Conduct. One of its basic principles requires that a judge not participate in a case with respect to which his/her impartiality might reasonably be questioned. In other words, such a case calls for the judge to recuse him or herself. Thomas never does, even when cases touch on the involvement of his wife in efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. Instead of adhering to an ethics code, each Supreme Court justice self-regulates. It has been clear for a long time that such self-surveillance doesn’t work.
 
Thomas won’t resign, as he should, and impeachment is unlikely given that the House of Representatives is under Republican control. Even as modest a step as expanding the Code of Judicial Conduct to apply to Supreme Court justices appears to be beyond the capacity of both Congress or the Court to mandate.
 
At the risk of adding to “Special Counsel Fatigue,” the Justice Department needs to launch an investigation into the extent of Thomas’s corruption. Who knows what else he has been up to? In addition, both Congress and the Judicial Conference of the U.S. also need to examine Thomas’s sleazy dealings. Scrutiny of the other justices, their contacts and transactions is also warranted.
 
Meanwhile, the Court’s steady loss of public esteem combined with increasing suspicion that it is not exactly a nonpartisan institution will continue, as will its determination to find new bottoms in which to wallow.
 
Dick Hermann
April 16, 2023

​I was stunned the evening following the first of what will likely be at least four well-deserved indictments and arraignments of Donald J. Trump. Many of the TV pundits remarking on the case were highly critical of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg for leading the charge against the disgraced former President with what they labeled a “weak” case.
 
On the contrary, the case against Trump is really quite strong and, if justice is to be served, should result in a criminal conviction and jail time. While falsified business records (even 34!) are only misdemeanors under New York law, the fact that they were in furtherance of a conspiracy to influence the 2016 presidential election is a pretty serious matter. Untested is whether that will hold up as a crime under New York State law.
 
No matter. There is another crime that has been extensively tested under New York law: defrauding state tax authorities. Having falsely labeled as “legal expenses” the hush money Trump ordered paid to Ms. Stormy Daniels, and the “catch-and-kill” money he paid to Ms. Karen McDougal, to buy their silence about their Trump trysts in the run-up to the election Trump then claimed them as a deduction from his 2016 income taxes. Campaign expenses, which these payments actually were, are non-deductible. This is a felony. Al Capone, another notorious crime boss with countless crimes to his name, was finally brought to account for tax law violations.
 
Despite the current stürm und drang over the pros and cons of this particular case, it will soon be put in the rear view mirror by the other indictments coming down the pike. The Fulton County, Georgia case, where Trump was at least twice captured on tape attempting to suborn state election officials to overturn the 2020 election results, may see an indictment as early as May, according to sources. There is no ambiguity there regarding Trump’s criminal actions and intent. The case, which also involves fake electors, is about as close to a slam-dunk as it is possible to get.
 
Speaking of slam-dunks, the Mar-a-Lago documents case is also looming. Again, no uncertainty about Trump’s criminality here. He took documents with him from the White House that were not his to take. They included a host of highly classified documents, some dealing with nuclear secrets. Following his theft of the documents, he resisted returning them to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) for a year-and-a-half, leaving the government no choice but to have the FBI seize them. Moreover, he appears to have lied to his own attorneys so that they would certify that all the documents had been turned over to NARA. This adds an obstruction of justice count to the rap sheet.
 
That leaves the anchor leg, the biggest Trump crime of them all: his conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election and illegally continue in power after January 20, 2021. This is beyond any doubt the biggest crime ever committed by any American elected leader in our history. In every other country where such a coup d’état has been attempted, the punishment has been prison…or worse.
 
By the time all of these indictments and arraignments have ensued, there won’t be much hand-wringing over what took place in lower Manhattan on April 4.
 
Sadly, the wheels of justice turn slowly. While it is possible that trials in these cases will launch before the 2024 election, they are unlikely to conclude before then. This could lead to a nightmare scenario where Trump is elected and assumes office before verdicts are rendered. That would probably mean one of two terrible outcomes: (1) the 1973 Justice Department Memorandum Opinion stating that a sitting President cannot be indicted or criminally prosecuted would kick in and suspend all such trials; or (2) Trump would simply pardon himself.
 
The need for speed has never been so important.
 
Dick Hermann
April 9, 2023

​The Federal Reserve Board, the nation’s central bank, needs some work. Considerable work at that. Its performance under bank chair Jerome Powell has been mediocre at best.
 
The Fed’s most important responsibility is to monitor inflation and get ahead of it when necessary. Despite 3,000 employees in Washington, DC and many more around the country, a large percentage of whom are tasked with watching the economy for inflationary signals, the Fed missed all the warning signs of the current inflation and has been playing catch-up ever since.
 
Once we were in the throes of the inflation, the Fed compounded its bungling by assuring the public that the inflation would be transitory. Wrong again.
 
Another principal Fed function is bank supervision and regulation. The agency division responsible for this is staffed with a large number of people whose job it is to be alert to early warning signals that a bank, or the banking system, might be in trouble. Despite that, the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, the 15th largest U.S. bank, as well Signature Bank, appears to have come as a complete surprise to the Fed.
 
Chairman Powell was an enthusiastic proponent of Congress’s 2018 rollback of the Dodd-Frank Act provisions put in place only eight years before as a bulwark against the banking abuses that resulted in the Great Recession, the worst economic meltdown in 80 years. This bipartisan fiasco (50 Democrats voted for it along with virtually every Republican Senator and Representative) set the table for the Fed’s lax supervision and the ensuing bank collapse.
 
To say that the Fed fell down on its job is an understatement. If it cannot perform its key functions, the question must be asked: Has the Fed outlived its usefulness after 110 years? After so many years, institutions become sclerotic and distracted from their missions, instead turning much of their attention and brain power to bureaucratic survival. It’s simply the nature of the beast.
 
Congressional oversight of the Fed and the bank supervisory functions of the other government financial sector regulators can also be cited as a contributor to the current mess. However, no one expects much from congressional oversight of anything, given Congress’s track record of grandstanding in lieu of actual oversight (for example, the Tik-Tok hearings).
 
The series of recessions and banking crises of the late 19th and early 20th centuries demonstrated beyond any doubt that the nation needed a central bank. And for most of its history, the Fed did a passable job reining in inflation and promoting full employment (its two primary objectives). It has not done as well with respect to bank supervision and regulation, likely because these are duties it shares with six other federal agencies.
 
What all this indicates is that it might be time for Congress to take a deep dive into how we regulate financial institutions across the board. The system clearly does not work anywhere near as well as it must for the economy to be strong and stable. At a minimum, the current turmoil should prompt Congress to establish a bipartisan commission to study the matter and report back with recommendations for improvement.
 
P.S. to Congress: When constituting such a study commission, please make sure that Larry Summers is one of its members.
 
Dick Hermann
April 3, 2023