“It is impossible that a man who is false to his friends and neighbours should be true to the public.”
--Bishop Berkeley, 1750
 
What a sad, repulsive, classless, no character man is Donald Trump. The man-baby in the White House cannot accept that the American people resoundingly rejected him at the polls in a free, fair and honest election marred only by massive Republican voter suppression of minority voters nationwide. Every time one thinks Trump cannot go lower, a new bottom calls out to him like a mythological siren. For Trump there is no bottom.
 
His final repellant acts as president violate the oath he took as well as common decency, honor and humanity. Having abandoned any pretense of performing his presidential duties, he stages coups d’état at the Defense and Homeland Security Departments, installing unqualified bootlickers in place of the people he fired by tweet. He spouts wild, unsubstantiated conspiracy theories and alleges a stolen election rampant with nonexistent voter fraud—laughable given that the alleged wrongdoing only affected him and no other Republicans down-ballot. Some conspiracy! He launches clown car election lawsuits, unsupported by any evidence, that get laughed out of court.
 
The worst elements of this awful man’s scorched-earth approach to his final days are:

1. his disinterest in and lack of any action whatsoever to tackle a pandemic raging out of control in the country he swore to protect. Despite the number of cases, hospitalizations and deaths surging, all he cares about is wreaking vengeance and havoc on his government and his people. It falls to the President-elect to behave responsibly while the lame-duck incumbent wallows in self-pity and false accusations. His execrable conduct will be rightly condemned by history, but that is small recompense for the millions of Americans suffering now because of his behavior;
2. the threat to national security of Trump’s refusal to allow a transition to the new administration. The 9/11 Commission noted that the 2000 transition delay contributed to the delayed intelligence that might have helped us obtain an early warning of Al Qaeda’s plans to attack us. Trump’s advisers had to talk him down from launching a military attack on Iran. His decision to pull troops out of Afghanistan opens up that country to becoming a terrorist haven once again;
3. his wholesale adoption of two Nazi tactics that aroused the German public and paved their way to power and dictatorship: the “stab in the back,” i.e. that corrupt politicians were guilty of sabotaging the army in the field at the end of World War I, turning a sure victory into defeat. Trump has adapted that to his rigged election falsehood; and “the Big Lie,” a Joseph Goebbels invention that in its Trumpian manifestation asserts that the election was rigged and Trump really won. Both, of course, are total twaddle. The problem is that Trump’s followers believe this poppycock to the detriment of our fragile democracy and the rule of law. His contamination of our democracy is not something we will easily correct; and
4. his all-out assault on democracy represented by his effort, after all else (lies, conspiracy theories, distortion, disinformation) failed, to overturn the election through subversion, namely attempts to persuade Republican state legislatures to pick their own slate of electors in defiance of the popular will. The incalculable damage this sabotage does to America will long outlast Trump.

 
Trump has four goals in mind with his indecent conduct: (1) to delegitimize a legitimate election. Sadly and inexplicably, his supporters actually believe this nonsense; (2) to make President-elect Biden’s job more difficult; (3) to desperately cling to office because come January 20, 2021, he loses his protection against the 10 criminal and civil investigations and cases awaiting him; and (4) to bring the country down in flames with him if he doesn’t get his way.
 
Equally vulgar is the way senior Republicans have once again fallen in line behind this reprehensible man masquerading as a president. Lindsey Graham, Ted Cruz, Kevin McCarthy and Mitch McConnell, stooges all who have bought into Trump’s con/coup, deserve the condemnation of all Americans and of history for their disgraceful conduct. They dishonor the oath they took to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution, and they run roughshod over the rule of law and democratic ideals for which so many Americans have fought and died. Of course these patsies know better, but they cower in fear of being tweeted against by the autocrat they chose to follow and his loyal base. They are beneath contempt.
 
I supported President Ford’s blanket pardon of Richard Nixon. I believed the country had been through enough and did not need to countenance the prospect of more Nixonian anguish. This time, however, is different. Trump and his enablers need to face justice for their criminal and treasonous conduct. A reckoning must be had. Accountability is as American as apple pie.
 
Dick Hermann
November 21, 2020

The 2020 election is not only the most consequential since at least 1860, but is also the one generating the most reverberating observations:

• The most stunning outcome of the 2020 election is that almost 50 percent of Americans, despite observing four years of criminality, lives lost, children torn from parents, a disregard for the rule of law, the attempted destruction of our delicate democracy and abysmal behavior, still voted for Donald Trump. The takeaway? While Trump may be gone, Trumpism is not and will continue to be a powerful voice of unreason on the right. Unless a way around it is found, it will be extremely difficult to govern, given a divided Congress and a Senate whose Republican members will continue to be dependent on conspiracy-obsessed constituents for re-election and thus disinclined to reach across the aisle to get productive things done.
• Mitch McConnell will not change his spots just because Donald Trump is history. He will be just as obstructionist as ever. Dems, however, do have a strategy they can pursue: cultivate the handful of GOP Senators who pass for “moderate:” Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Mitt Romney and perhaps Ben Sasse. If they can persuade two or three of them, then aspirational policies like tackling climate change, infrastructure and immigration reform might have a shot.
• Trump’s ridiculous claims of a vast Democratic conspiracy to steal the election is belied by the party’s failure to flip the Senate and its loss of seats in the House. In one sense, Trump is just about the only Republican who lost.
• Biden had no coattails. In fact, he had negative coattails resulting in a potentially hostile Senate, a reduced House majority and antediluvian state legislatures that will continue to dominate redistricting for the next decade.
• The polls could not have been more off the mark.
• The pundits whose superficial analyses demonstrated a depth of cluelessness should be consigned to history’s also-rans.
• Voting overhaul. There is no excuse for long lines. There is no logic in disallowing the counting of mail-in and early-voted ballots until election day. Counts need to begin earlier so that results don’t have to wait ad nauseum. The need for a reinvigorated Voting Rights Act is acute. It should reinstitute and expand Justice Department pre-clearance reviews of any proposed registration and voting changes by any state.
• Disinformation is formidable. Republicans used it with great effectiveness in Miami-Dade County, Florida and it made the difference in carrying the state. Democrats had no answer to the hysteria Republicans raised about socialism coming to America if Joe Biden were elected. The appeal to anti-Castro Cubans, anti-Maduro Venezuelans and anti-Ortega Nicaraguans who came to these shores to escape socialist oppression was powerful.
• Social Media needs some controls. It was used to great effect by Republicans hawking conspiracy theories and lies.
• Playing by the rules disadvantages Democrats and incentivizes Republicans to continue to lie, cheat and steal elections and court seats. I am not advocating that Dems sully themselves by stooping to play in the GOP moshpit, but some strategic rethinking of how to counter this vileness needs to occur.
• Russia should not go unpunished after it once again attempted, this time with far less success, to intervene and interfere in our democratic process. This is war and we have unilaterally disarmed. That has to change. We need to go on offense.
• Kudos to the federal and state agencies tasked with election security. They did a terrific job. The lessons of 2016 really resonated. And a pat on the head to state and local election administrators and volunteers who performed a thankless task under extreme duress magnificently.
• The U.S. Postal Service slow-walked ballots to many counting locations. It needs to be depoliticized. Never again should a president and postmaster general be allowed to subvert it in an attempt to steal an election. A bipartisan commission should select the postmaster general. “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night [nor Louis DeJoy] should stay these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds."

 
Dick Hermann
November 6, 2020

​By the time you read this, Amy Coney Barrett will likely be well on her way to a Supreme Court appointment that will alter your lives and those of your children and grandchildren, and not necessarily for the better.

Barrett, like her mentor, the late Justice Antonin Scalia for whom she clerked, claims to be an “originalist” and “textualist” with respect to her interpretation of the U.S. Constitution and laws in arriving at judicial decisions. Derived from that philosophy is that these folks purport never to allow their personal ideology or politics to influence their decisions.

If you buy that, I have a bridge spanning New York City’s East River I’m eager to sell you. 

Originalists claim they go by the language of the Constitution, but in applying their philosophy, they tend to go beyond the language of the Constitution to consider intent, as evidenced by the history of the text and the Founding Fathers’ writings on the subject.

Textualists profess to go by the literal language of a law when assessing its constitutionality. The words mean what they say, period, and nothing more. Textualists say that they do not delve into legislative intent. 

Both originalists and textualists call themselves “strict constructionists.” If they really were so pure, then any laws enacted since 1789 that addressed technologies that post-dated the Constitution, such as the telegraph, railroads, telephones, automobiles, airplanes, radio, television, atomic weapons, computers, the Internet and cellphones, to name a few, would have been declared unconstitutional.  Since textualists and originalists haven’t done that, their professed philosophies camouflage  what they are really about.

Barrett also claims that she does not and will not legislate from the bench, a criticism conservatives have battered liberal judges with since the Warren Court. This is a canard easily countered by reading her Court of Appeals’ decisions. The idea that conservative judges refrain from legislating (“judicial activism”) is, like originalism and textualism, unadulterated hogwash. Conservative judges legislate all the time. All you need to know to skewer that falsity is to read some of the Supreme Court’s recent decisions in which the Court’s alleged textualists/originalists prevailed: Citizens United, where the Court overturned congressional legislation (the McCain-Feingold Act) that imposed restraints on the influence of money in political campaigns; or  Shelby County v. Holder, where to its eternal shame, the Court’s majority trashed the section of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that reined in voter suppression, thus opening the door to the flagrant attempts by Donald Trump and Republicans to steal the 2020 election by suppressing the vote.  

Underlying all this hokum about how self-proclaimed judicial purists like Barrett supposedly read and interpret the Constitution and laws is the fact that they emerge from the Federalist Society, a right-wing organization awash in money from the reactionary billionaire class (e.g, the Koch Brothers, the Scaife Foundation and their ilk). Under recent Republican presidents, this extremist group has owned the franchise on selecting candidates for federal judicial appointments. It has an agenda, one that perverts public policy toward the interests of corporations and the super-rich, anti-regulation crew that wants government out of the way so they can do what they please, to hell with the public good. Amy Coney Barrett is a devoted, card-carrying member of the Federalist Society. Bet the mortgage that she will legislate from the bench in pursuit of the Society’s goals. 

The naked power grab represented by the Trump/McConnell hypocrisy is bad enough in itself--denying a nominee a hearing and vote in one presidential election year while hustling another through four years later. What she brings to the Supreme Court and what she will do to America in the next thirty years is far worse, beginning with terminating healthcare for 20 million Americans, an issue about which she has been outspoken, criticizing the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act. Once on the Court, she will hear oral arguments in the Trump administration’s determined attempt to deep-six the Act on November 10.

Access to health insurance will be taken away from 23 million Americans. The ban on denying coverage for pre-existing conditions (like Covid-19) will be gone. Allowing your kids to stay on your health plan to age 26 will disappear. 

Now to the Barrett antidote: “Court packing”--expanding the number of justices--that has aroused much passion in recent days, is not the solution. Even in 1937, when FDR attempted it after winning a huge electoral victory, it got a bad rap. Actually, while he failed to expand the Court, he achieved his goal. The Court was so terrified that it immediately began upholding New Deal legislation it had been striking down before. 

Court-packing would only open the door to more of the same the next time Republicans take power. However, there is another way to neutralize a reactionary Court: by invoking the “jurisdiction-stripping” authority enshrined in the Constitution. Article III, Section 2’s “Exceptions” clause gives Congress the power to define (limit or remove) the Court’s appellate jurisdiction, even in constitutional cases. The Court itself has upheld this power numerous times. This weapon can be wielded without all the political baggage associated with court-packing. While that may not save the Affordable Care Act, it could be a bulwark against many of the rest of the laws and principles that matter so much.  

Dick Hermann
October 16, 2020

​Tone-deafness and continuing reckless behavior regarding an apolitical virus has hit the Trump administration and Republicans hard with a vengeance. Their tunnel vision blinded them to the viral train wreck now decimating their ranks, put their continuation in power in grave jeopardy, and may play a delaying role in their hypocritical rush to confirm a Supreme Court justice on record advocating overturning both the Affordable Care Act and the five-decades old Rowe v. Wade decision.
 
We mourn the deaths of more than 212,000 Americans and grieve over the tragic fact that many of those lost lives could have been saved had our national government taken the obvious steps that other nations’ leaders took to protect their citizens and bring the virus under far better control. Instead, Trump politicized the pandemic. He rashly dismissed the resources at his disposal. He threw away the 100-page playbook on how to deal with a pandemic left him by the Obama administration. He disbanded the government’s pandemic bureaucracy. He pulled out the CDC epidemiologists stationed in China to warn us of potential pandemics. When the virus hit, he could have blanket-invoked the Defense Production Act to bring sufficient personal protective equipment to front-line healthcare professionals, many of whom got sick and died due to their absence. He could have used the presidential pulpit to promote safety and health. He could have avoided super-spreader events and rallies, substituting remote, virtual campaigning in the interests of audience safety and public health. He chose otherwise and now not only his voters and the rest of us, but also he himself, his family, his aides and his political allies are reaping the consequences.
 
To say that the White House contact tracing effort after it became the global infection hot spot (more cases in one day than Vietnam, Taiwan, Yemen or New Zealand!) has been lacking is a gross understatement. This is concerning since the growing number of infected individuals who attended his events have been in contact with thousands of others. The 206 Trump donors who attended a New Jersey fundraiser with the president on September 30, disdaining both masks and physical distancing, as well as the many workers at Trump’s golf club who may have then been exposed, have been left hanging. And so the official policy of down-playing the virus and doing nothing to contain and mitigate it continues notwithstanding that the chief perpetrator of the botched coronavirus response contracted the disease.
 
Trump has been playing with fire. He belittles and sidelines scientists, doctors and public health experts, demands stunts and photo ops despite the dangers involved, and mocks people (including Joe Biden at their debate) for wearing masks. He’s been badly burned.  
 
Transparency is not exactly a Trump administration byword. Had Bloomberg News not discovered and reported presidential aide Hope Hicks’s positive Covid test, one has to wonder if we would ever have found out that Trump was sick. Given the White House’s refusal to say when Trump last tested negative, it is likely that Trump knew he was sick when he went to the debate, his subsequent Minnesota rally and his New Jersey fundraiser. Otherwise, he would be eager to inform us of his test results, as he always has been in the past.
 
Another important point about the lack of transparency: all but one of the physicians who periodically emerged to brief the press and public about the president’s health are U.S. military officers who could be ordered what to say by their commander-in-chief.
 
While we may neutralize Covid-19 sometime in 2021 if we finally take the steps we should have taken nine months ago, we can never make up what we have lost in loved ones, jobs, income, assets, personal security, education, the maladies associated with lengthy isolation, businesses gone forever, shelter, and much more. The best we can do is take heed of the lessons the pandemic has taught us: that we must plan and prepare for existential crises and confront them responsibly as a government and as citizens.
 
It’s time for the anti-science, anti-facts mindset popular among millions of Americans to be shelved in favor of reality. Otherwise, we are destined to repeat this tragic affair and find that we are equally unprepared for the next time calamity strikes. The climate crisis, which is already upon us, cries out for an immediate governmental and global response before it consumes all of us if this attitude persists.
 
Voters have the opportunity to accomplish two essential objectives on November 3rd. (1) Send packing this dreadful crew that foisted much of this misfortune on us; and (2) Vote in a new team that will do what is necessary to get us out of this mess and back to normal.
 
Dick Hermann
October 9, 2020

Donald Trump is frantically trying to steal the presidential election through the most massive voter prevention effort since the heyday of Jim Crow, as well as voter intimidation, lies about voter fraud and by claiming that if he does not win, then the election was rigged. Setting these unprecedented calumnies and barbarities aside for the moment, the mainstream media horror that we won’t know on election night who won and thus the ensuing days and weeks will descend into chaos violence is misplaced. We will have a dependable way to know on November 3d if Joe Biden is highly likely to win the presidency. That’s because Florida, the core battleground state and the poster child for election administration incompetence (see 2000), will report its complete results that evening. Should Biden prevail in Florida, it’s most likely curtains for Trump. The worst president in American history by at least a parsec (think a country mile x 19 trillion) will be toast. Without Florida, Trump has no path to 270 votes in the Electoral College. Zero. Nada. Zilch.
 
However, should Trump win Florida, all bets as to who wins the presidency are off. It will still be an uphill climb for him, but not impossible. He would have to run the table in the rest of the battleground states like he did in 2016 while also holding on to states he won four years ago. It is noteworthy that states like Ohio and Georgia that, by rights, should be firmly in his sagging pockets, are suddenly up for grabs. In fact, Ohio, without which no Republican has ever been elected president, is giving Republicans heartburn now because their internal polls show a Biden lead.
 
Three battleground states other than Florida may also report their results on November 3d: Arizona, North Carolina and Ohio. Thus, by midnight or in the wee hours of November 4th, we should have a pretty good sense of where things stand: either a Biden victory or an uncertain outcome. Should Biden sweep all four of these states, look for a landslide that will blow Trump out of the water.
 
Twenty years after Florida’s election snafu—butterfly ballots, hanging chads, recount chaos, conflicting court decisions, etc., the Sunshine State has a rare opportunity to redeem itself by giving us a new, competent president and a path out of the black hole of Trumpism.
 
Dick Hermann
October 2, 2020

​Until the advent of the 21st century, I believed that the U.S. Supreme Court’s worst-ever rulings were two terrible 19th century decisions--Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) and Plessy v. Ferguson (1896)—and one 20th century pronouncement--Korematsu v. United States (1944). All three cases found the Court firmly on the side of flagrant discrimination.
 
In this century, the Court has outdone itself when it comes to dismal jurisprudence. Bush v. Gore decided a presidential election by a 5-4 vote of justices who ignored the proscription that the Court does not involve itself in political questions (what’s more political than electing a president?). Citizens United opened the floodgates of billionaire and corporate money to buy elections. Shelby County emasculated the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and gave Republicans the go-ahead to engage in unfettered voter suppression designed to steal elections.
 
Now the Court is poised to make even more conscience-shocking decisions by the addition of yet another reactionary judge. Trump and his chief legislative executioner, Mitch McConnell, are once again (see Merrick Garland) pilfering a Supreme Court appointment that will skew the Court even further to the hard right.
 
Forget the naked hypocrisy of such an appointment only a few weeks before a presidential election. McConnell and his partners in crime championed what they labeled a holy writ in 2016 when Justice Antonin Scalia died more than nine months before a presidential election, namely that the voters should decide who should have the right to name a new justice. It would be unseemly, said McConnell and his fellow travelers, to allow a sitting president to make such an appointment in an election year.
 
What was unseemly then is perfectly seemly now, say Mitch and the Mitchspittles. So, it is highly likely that the Court will get its new justice either before November 3 or shortly after an election that may result in a new president-elect and a new U.S. Senate controlled by the other party. And there is nothing the Democrats can do about it. The filibuster no longer applies to Supreme Court nominations. It now appears that only two Republican Senators will join their Democratic colleagues in opposing the nomination. Democratic threats to “pack” the Court and get rid of the Senate filibuster completely are hollow. The Republicans live only for the moment, their sense of history being limited to locking in a right-wing Court majority for decades.
 
At the Constitutional Convention, James Madison, the chief intellectual architect of the Constitution, viewed the legislative branch as a “fence” that would surely restrain a madman, maniacal, authoritarian president from running roughshod over the nation. “Checks and balances” built into the foundational document, he was convinced, would assure that Congress would rein in a corrupt, runaway executive. Unfortunately, Madison failed to consider the possibility of an obsequious Senate Majority Leader who cared not at all for defending Congress’ legislative prerogatives against presidential usurpation and who was willing to be a doormat for an unconstrained president contemptuous of constitutional boundaries.
 
If the new justice is seated in early November, she will take part in oral arguments about the future of the Affordable Care Act on November 10th and will likely vote along with at least four of her right-wing colleagues to deep-six it, including pre-existing condition protections. Don’t believe for a minute that Trump’s recent empty executive order pledging (falsely) to protect this essential benefit is anything but a bogus, panicked attempt to delude voters into believing that he is suddenly on the right side of an issue he has spent his entire presidency opposing.
 
So this is where we are today. Republicans will push the Court further rightward, render moot Chief Justice John Roberts’ occasional inclination to cast a swing vote in favor of justice, and enable the stripping away of the remaining laws that protect Americans from the depredations of unchecked reaction. At risk will be Roe v. Wade and a woman’s right to control her own body (Republicans espouse a selective version of “right-to-life” that ends at birth), the right of all eligible Americans to vote, and everything else that the advancing arc of history has accomplished to improve our lives.
 
Dick Hermann
September 25, 2020

​Early on in the pandemic, it appeared that technology was going to be the seamless substitute for in-class learning and the great equalizer that would realize the goal of educational equity. Instead, it has starkly revealed the failures of remote learning. We now know that digital schooling is only as good as a family’s connectivity, equipment and parental ability to help kids as well as each school district’s technological competence. Last spring, the equity gaps widened, particularly among Black, Latino and disabled students. The disconnect between the promise and the reality is profound. The digital divide is a chasm.
 
Schools that recently reopened to on-site learning and then abruptly closed when Covid-19 cases among students and staff spiked were caught flat-footed when they had to fall back on remote learning. This should never have happened. By buying into the Trump and (Education Secretary) Betsy DeVos pressure to reopen to onsite learning and their politicizing of education at the expense of sound and safe policies, schools hung themselves out to dry.
 
Equity gaps and disdain for health and safety are only two of the three problems schools are encountering. Technological complexity is the other. In many jurisdictions, even prosperous ones where education is highly valued and adequately funded, technological failures have been rife. In Arlington, Virginia, one of the nation’s wealthiest communities with one of the top-rated schools systems, students were unable to access their classrooms remotely on the first day of school. There was no excuse for a technology collapse when the school system had months to prepare for the new academic year and ample opportunity to make sure its technology platform was up to speed. The superintendent said the connectivity problem was due to a firewall issue related to the large volume of traffic trying to access Microsoft Teams at the same time. How this was not anticipated bespeaks a failure that should have been foreseen and dealt with long before the beginning of the school year.
 
In neighboring Fairfax County, also a premier educational mecca and the 11th largest school district in the U.S., the first week of school was marred by a ransomware attack that may have compromised the personal information of thousands of students and their families. This was apparently part of a coordinated cyberattack on school systems nationwide. While it is a sad commentary on the world we currently inhabit, this kind of disruption was also predictable and should have been guarded against. The fact that it was not is an indictment of school system technology offices and their leadership. Unless we commit to doing more than paying lip service to the importance of education, we condemn ourselves and our children to a second-rate experience that has no place in an advanced, industrialized country that must compete with the rest of the world.
 
Arlington and Fairfax Counties are just the tip of the technology failure iceberg. Ransomware and malware attacks shut down learning in California, New Jersey, Nevada and Ohio. A number of school districts have had to recall thousands of devices they had distributed to students in order to resolve problems. Preventing stuff like this from happening should be the highest priority at a time when distance learning is the only solution. This requires taking technology seriously and committing sufficient resources to securing both the best state-of-the-art equipment, inexpensive broadband available to all, and the best people to design, implement, coordinate, manage and troubleshoot these systems. In the absence of national planning and support, these responsibilities fall upon state and local governments and school systems.
 
Unpreparedness is only one aspect of the technology problem. The principal technology schools use—virtual teleconferencing—is unable to work with any of the other key components necessary for a viable distance educational experience: content management systems, assignment organization, interactivity, reading comprehension, etc. This requires teachers, students and even parents to become IT experts if they have any hope of student success. Teachers are overwhelmed with the volume of information thrown at them, much of it technical and impossible to follow.
 
The rest of the world’s advanced economies have experienced few problems implementing remote learning. This is yet another core area where the U.S. earns a failing grade to go along with its failures to contain and mitigate the pandemic, revive its depressed economy and provide sufficient relief to the tens of millions of Americans abandoned by our government’s incompetence and ideological cravenness.
 
We needed a national policy framework that school districts could follow for the suggested types of software and the interoperability between them. Once again, Donald Trump was not up to the task. Teachers, students and parents deserve better.
 
Dick Hermann
September 18, 2020