Since the public has neither the time nor patience to parse the differences between the Trump, Biden and Pence classified document situations, here they are:

• It does not appear that Biden or Pence intentionally took classified documents from the White House when their Vice Presidential terms ended. It looks very much like whichever staffers boxed up their papers bundled the lot of them into boxes without examining them one-by-one.
  
  ​Trump, in contrast, intentionally made off with more than 300 classified documents, many of which were Top Secret/SCI, the highest classification there is, and may include some of the most super-sensitive material extant. They were found among a boatload of other documents that, by law, should have been turned over to the National Archives and Records Administration. The very volume of documents he took with him (11,000+) and his subsequent behavior regarding turning them over strongly implies that he intended to take them.

 

• Thus far, it does not appear that Biden or Pence removed any classified  documents from their cover sheets or did anything untoward with the contents.
  
  The cover sheets of numerous Trump classified documents appear to have been removed from their contents, raising questions about what happened to these materials. Could they now be in Russia and/or Saudi Arabia.
  
  
• Biden and Pence understand that they cannot keep these documents. As soon as they were discovered, they were turned over to the Archives and the Department of Justice.
  
  Trump asserts ownership over his classified documents despite the clear language of the law stating that he does not own them. He refers to them as “cool keepsakes.”
  
  
• Trump also asserts that he declassified everything he absconded with, by merely thinking it. That is not the way declassification works.
  
  Neither Biden nor Pence make such a fanciful claim. Trump, FYI, is wrong in asserting that only the President can declassify documents. The Vice President, among others, also has such authority but again, it cannot be a case of simply “make it so.
  
  
• It was the National Archives that discovered that Trump made off with a massive haul of documents, and then made multiple requests that they be returned. After many months, Trump grudgingly returned 15 boxes, but refused to return the rest.
  
  Biden and Pence returned the documents to the Archives immediately upon their discovery.
  
  
• After getting no cooperation from Trump regarding the rest of the documents in his possession, the Archives asked the Justice Department to intervene. Trump then refused to comply with Justice’s subpoena, thus forcing the FBI to execute a search warrant for Mar a Lago following 18 months of Trump’s obstructionism.
  
  Biden and Pence are fully cooperating with the Archives and Justice Department. They both invited the FBI to search their houses.
  
  
• Trump lied to the Archives and Justice Department about having turned over all the documents he stole, falsely certifying that they had all been turned over.
  
  Biden and Pence complied fully with the law regarding return of the documents.
  
  
• Trump was observed tearing up documents while President and flushing some down White House toilets. Moreover, some Trump documents had been mutilated.
  
  To our knowledge, no Biden White House toilets have been clogged with classified documents requiring the services of a plumber. None of the returned Biden and Pence documents have been mutilated.
  
  
• It does not appear that Biden or Pence are going to be prosecuted for any illegal activity surrounding the discovery of classified documents in their possession, as there are not likely to be any findings of intent.
  
  Trump unambiguously violated a number of criminal laws with respect to his classified document cache beyond illegally keeping them. While he merits prosecution, the Biden and Pence discoveries may make it more difficult politically to go after him.

 
This is not to say that Joe Biden and Mike Pence are somehow absolved of blame and condemnation for their sloppiness. Any lower-level federal employee who took classified documents home would probably be quickly indicted, convicted and jailed for so doing. So much for the well-worn assertion (that should be permanently retired) that “no man is above the law.”
 
Despite that, the public’s limited capacity for nuance (intentionality vs. inadvertence) means that it is highly probable that a false equivalency will be made regarding the Trump, Biden and Pence classified documents cases. While the differences in legal exposure are dramatic, the political consequences are not likely to be.
 
Dick Hermann
January 29, 2023

​“Stupid is as stupid does.”
--Forrest Gump
 
Neighboring states New York and Pennsylvania experienced two very different midterm election outcome disappointments. In both cases, the blame for the terrible results for New York Democrats and Pennsylvania Republicans is squarely on the parties’ themselves.
 
Republicans blew a golden opportunity to take back the governorship of swing-state Pennsylvania while also retaining its Senate seat. New York, the bluest of blue states, saw Democrats botch their huge advantage and contribute more than any other state to turn the U.S. House of Representatives Republican.
 
The Pennsylvania GOP is conducting a completely pointless post-mortem, paying over $1 million to outside political strategists to determine what happened and to propose solutions to prevent it happening again. It does not take a team of political pundits to understand what happened. Simply put, don’t nominate election-denying, Trump-loving candidates like extremist Doug Mastriano for governor and a TV snake oil promoter from out-of-state, Mehmet Oz, for senator. Instead, put up mainstream candidates that don’t offend the large and increasing number of voters disgusted by Trump’s chaos and indecency. If Pennsylvania Republicans behaved like a normal political party, it would cost them nothing.
 
The New York case is more complicated. Without diving too much into the weeds, here is what happened: Democrats’ death wish first manifested itself when the party clearly overreached. Rejecting the so-called independent redistricting commission’s maps, their legislative super-majorities redrew the redistricting maps, despite both court decisions and numerous warnings that, in attempting essentially to clear the map of Republicans, they went too far. When the courts shot down the maps and substituted their own, New York was left with perhaps the most competitive congressional districts in the nation. Republicans, consequently, flipped four seats and took the House.
 
In New York, it helped immensely that Democrats also ran lackluster campaigns, the worst of which was in the Third District where Republican George Santos (assuming that’s his real name) won a contest he should have lost by double digits. There was no excuse for bungling this race, especially given that Democrats had two shots at uncovering Santos’s voluminous lies since this was his second attempt at running for Congress. They would not even have had to exert themselves to discover that Santos is a total fraud of Trumpian proportions, had they only paid any attention to a local newspaper that did the work for them.
 
New York Democrats are now stuck with a terrible redistricting hand for the remainder of the decade. They could, however, divest themselves of the monumentally incompetent party functionaries that led them down the rabbit hole to electoral ruin. And they could vastly improve the quality of their opposition research, assuming that they bothered to perform such analysis in the first place.
 
Now both Pennsylvania Republicans and New York Democrats must live with the consequences of their arrogance and hubris. Sadly, in the New York case, the impact of the Democrats’ mess-up is nationwide.
 
Dick Hermann
January 20, 2023

There is a lot to unpack from the farcical and at the same time scary Republican exertions to produce a House Speaker. However, the most surprising impression to come out of the 15-ballot clown show that finally elected Kevin McCarthy was that he still retained any traces of a soul left to sell. This is the much diminished fellow who, after quite properly condemning Donald Trump for his treasonous attempted coup d’état two years ago quickly reversed himself and scurried down to Mar a Lago to kiss Trump’s ring…or whatever.
 
Anyone with even a smidgen of self-respect would have done the honorable thing and given up trying so desperately to become Speaker after a couple of rejections, but not Kevin. He had to realize his life’s dream regardless of any demands made on him by the neo-fascist wing of the Republican Party, the self-styled Freedom Caucus. This gaggle of election-denying, authoritarian-craving performance artists have zero interest in policy and are in Congress only to tear down the institution and get themselves on TV courtesy of Carlson, Ingraham and Hannity, Fox News’s stooge triumvirate.
 
McCarthy’s surrender to the Freedumbers’ outrageous demands was, like Germany’s and Japan’s at the end of World War II, absolute and unconditional. By relinquishing his power and authority to these disrupters, he—and we—can look forward to two years of likely congressional chaos, assuming against the odds that he lasts that long wielding the Speaker’s now Dali-esque gavel. It is the will of this minority that will prevail when McCarthy even hints at doing anything they don’t condone.
 
But not to worry. Kevin’s history of servile subservience indicates that he won’t come close to crossing the Clown-and-Kook Caucus. It’s nowhere near his nature to take a bold, much less principled, stand regardless of the damage to his rapidly shrinking stature. He is now their shameless tool to do with whatever they want. His only objective is to be Speaker, not to do anything constructive with the office.
 
Here is a list of mostly destructive concessions and promises McCarthy made to the Freedumbers to win the gavel:

• Any member can call for a motion to vacate (i.e., a no confidence vote) the speaker’s chair. Translated, any member of the House can initiate the process of bringing Kevin down. He will do whatever is necessary to keep the job regardless of the damage this might cause.
• Kevin pledged to allow House votes on key right-wing bills, most of which are less legislation and more performance art for the MAGA folks back home.
• When the infernal debt ceiling bill looms (sometime this summer), efforts to raise it must be paired with spending cuts. Democrat-favored programs would be targeted. If the debt ceiling bill runs into trouble, causing the U.S. to default on its debt payments, say goodbye to the global economy.
• Freedumb Caucus representation on key committees, including the powerful House Rules Committee. Look for the worst of the worst reactionaries from the Gaetz-Boebert-Greene wing of the GOP cult to be appointed to these committees.
• Give members the ability to offer more amendments on the House floor and thus, drag out debate ad infinitum.
• Make it easier to pass tax cuts (yes, Republicans are still in thrall to the often-debunked trickle-down theory) and harder to pass spending bills.
• Restore the rule that allows Congress to reduce the salary of government officials (to be used to threaten or punish Feds [including civil servants] that the Freedumb Caucus doesn’t like).
• Create an investigative committee to probe the “weaponization” of the federal government, whatever that means (probably more “deep state” fantasies). Two of their announced targets: the January 6 Committee and the Justice Department, which means that the investigated will investigate the investigators investigating them!

 
There are likely a bunch of additional, secret agreements that, like the 1939 Nazi-Soviet Pact, are even more toxic and disruptive than the ones we know about.
 
These concessions render McCarthy a cipher, the weakest Speaker in the history of the office. That’s fine with Kevin, as long as he can wallow in the glory of being called “Mr. Speaker.”
 
Dick Hermann
January 13, 2023

​The 2024 presidential election campaign will begin in earnest all too soon. With this in mind, we need to contemplate the most important attribute a president must bring to the most powerful office on the planet.
 
The Constitution imposes only three qualifications that a president must meet: being (1) a natural-born U.S. citizen, (2) a resident of the U.S. for 14 years, and (3) at least 35 years of age. In addition, there is one unwritten requirement that voters need to put at the top of their list. Could you trust this person to decide on directing the use of nuclear weapons?
 
America was fortunate for most of its Cold War history to have selected presidents who took this awesome power and responsibility deadly seriously. Harry Truman, the only man who ever actually approved the use of nuclear weapons, did so because he believed that bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki would save lives. His only alternative, he believed, was an invasion of the Japanese home islands, an action his military advisors told him would cost at least 500,000 American lives plus millions of Japanese lives. Dwight Eisenhower resisted the temptation to use nukes in response to China’s threats against Taiwan, and advocated the use of nuclear technology for peaceful purposes (“Atoms for Peace”). Despite his military background, he was our most anti-war post-World War II president. Jack Kennedy eschewed a nuclear response to the Soviet deployment of nuclear weapons and delivery systems 90 miles away in Cuba, overruling the unanimous opinion of his entire group of military and civilian advisors. Lyndon Johnson vetoed the use of tactical nukes in Vietnam to stop Hanoi from supplying the Viet Cong. Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter (who knew more about nuclear weapons than anyone who ever occupied the Oval Office) vigorously sought nuclear arms reduction agreements with the Soviets. Upon assuming office, Ronald Reagan wrote that he was overwhelmed by the realization that he had the sole authority to go to DefCon One (global thermonuclear war). Both Bushes, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama were acutely aware of the awesome power and the vital restraints that come with the presidency.
 
And then there was Donald Trump. His erratic, impulsive nature combined with his ignorance regarding both nuclear weapons (he wanted to use them against hurricanes!) and their history terrified both congressional leaders and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. They worried with good reason that, in the interregnum between the November 2020 elections and the inauguration of a new president, Trump was dangerously unhinged to the extent that he could not be trusted to refrain from blowing up the planet.
 
The lesson from this is that we cannot allow a Trump-like, reckless individual anywhere near the nuclear button. Unfortunately, our candidate selection process does not weed out madmen. And it is clear from both the 2016 and 2020 elections that tens of millions of voters either don’t understand the dangers associated with putting an oblivious lunatic in power or, perhaps unbelievably, don’t care.
 
There is no way, aside from the remote possibility of amending the Constitution, to impose additional qualifications for presidential office to guarantee that a sane, sober, mature individual will always be the one to make such a world-altering decision. The responsible media must fill this void by picking apart the character, intellect and life experience of prospective candidates and report their findings to voters. And voters owe it to themselves and the nation to discount media that promote unfit candidates.
 
Dick Hermann
January 6, 2023