​The Canadian government is shelling out billions of dollars in reparations to the survivors and families for the multiple abuses visited on First Nation children by assimilationist boarding schools run largely by the Catholic Church. Thousands of First Nation children perished at those schools, which were intended to “cleanse” students of their native heritage and turn them into good little Canadian Christians. Meanwhile, the Catholic Church and the U.S. government, which ran similar schools, remain unaccountable.
 
It only took the Vatican 150 years, in the person of Pope Francis I, to issue an apology, albeit perfunctory, during a recent visit to Canada. His words were unaccompanied by any pledge of reparations for the Church’s gross misconduct. No surprises there. The Church has spent years denying and covering up the planet-wide sexual abuse scandals perpetrated by officials all the way from parish priests to cardinals and has often had to be dragged through the courts before reluctantly paying damages to victims.
 
A visit to the Vatican Library in Rome leaves the typical tourist with one overriding impression: the immense wealth the Church has amassed over two thousand years. Tens of thousands of priceless manuscripts, paintings, sculptures and assorted other objets d’art dazzle the visitor. The aggregate value of these collectibles is larger than the gross domestic product of most of the nations of the world.
 
Yet the Church balks at paying reparations to the families of the children that were horribly abused and sometimes murdered through neglect or more active measures at these boarding schools. All it would have to do would be to sell a tiny handful of pieces from the Vatican Library and dole out the proceeds to the grief-stricken families of the lost children. The sale items would hardly be missed among the hundreds of thousands of enormously valuable library holdings.
 
A similar accusation can be leveled against the U.S. government, which inspired the Canadians to follow suit. The rationale for the boarding school model was the work of Army General Richard Henry Pratt, who in 1879 summed up his ethnic cleansing of children philosophy as follows: “kill the Indian in him, and save the man.” In 1891, Congress made attendance at such schools compulsory for Indigenous children, and punished non-complying families by withholding food and other provisions. Children as young as four were forcibly removed thousands of miles from their homes, often never to see their families again. The government funded more than 300 off-reservation boarding schools over the next several decades.
 
In total, tens of thousands of Native American and First Nation children died at these schools of disease due to overcrowding and unsanitary conditions, malnutrition, sexual violence and beatings. Many are buried in unmarked graves. Many others ran away or died by suicide. Some schools offered bounties for the capture of runaways.
 
The schools essentially eradicated Indian culture, forbidding students from speaking their languages, forcing them to take new names, and coercing them to convert to Christianity. Tuberculosis, influenza and smallpox were rampant. Students were often required to build their classmates’ coffins.
 
In 2009, Congress passed a joint resolution of apology to Native Americans, but stopped short of authorizing reparations. Congress, typically fearful of its own shadow, worried that payments for the nation’s aboriginal sin would establish a dangerous precedent that could be invoked by the descendants of slavery, oft deemed America’s original sin.
 
Native American families should not have to wait any longer for justice to prevail.
 
Dick Hermann
September 30, 2022

I don’t need to go into detail on the continuing calamity that is the U.S. immigration “system.” Its deficiencies are well-known, have been around for decades and are getting worse. The performative stunts by Republican governors Abbott (Texas), DeSantis (Florida) and Ducey (Arizona) are only the most recent low-lights to shine upon this mess. Rounding up immigrants and shipping them off to blue state sanctuaries (New York City, Washington, DC, Chicago, Martha’s Vineyard, MA) makes their bases feel good because once again they are “owning the libs,” but does nothing to solve our seemingly intractable immigration problems.
 
However, these gubernatorial shenanigans make two important points: (1) The entire country should share the burden of managing the massive influx of immigrants flooding our country; and (2) Where the hell is the federal government?
 
Although presidents have tried for years to reform our immigration laws, these attempts have mostly been half-hearted at best and quickly abandoned when they did not succeed. Congress hasn’t done much more, and Republicans don’t really want the issue to go away because they believe they benefit politically from it.
 
I would like to submit four suggestions that could go a long way toward getting a handle on certain aspects of our broken immigration system:

1. Hire more Immigration Judges and Hearing Officers. As the case backload approaches two million, administration and congressional inaction is inexcusable. Moreover, Immigration Judges are a less-than-stellar group compared to federal Administrative Law Judges (ALJs), who must navigate a rigorous hiring process that results in the hiring of exceptionally well-qualified judges. The ALJ hiring procedures should be applied to the hiring of Immigration Judges. Additional Hearing Officers positioned at the border would be able to expedite basic asylum determinations without delay.
2. Grant full citizenship to Dreamers. The House passed the Dream Act last year with some bipartisan support (9 Republicans joined the Democrats), but it has since languished in the Senate and is an afterthought for the uninvolved Biden administration. It would provide a path to citizenship for the estimated 1 million-plus “Dreamers,” individuals brought here as children by their undocumented immigrant parents. Withholding citizenship from these innocents is plain wrong.
3. Provide a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. It is impractical to identify, round up and deport an estimated 12 million people who came here illegally, many of whom have lived in the U.S. for many years as productive taxpayers. The best way to manage the problem is to provide them with a rigorous path to citizenship that contains at least some token financial or other punishment for violating our laws.
4. Launch a “Marshall Plan” for Central America’s Northern Triangle. Our failed approach to illegal immigration is unfortunately similar to our terribly misguided, hugely expensive and failed supply interdiction approach to the drug problem. A demand-side solution, targeted at reducing the stream of immigrants heading our way would be a far more effective strategy. Bettering the lives of residents of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras by investing in these countries’ public works and social infrastructures will be much less expensive and far more likely to succeed than our current “supply-side” approach, which is guaranteed to continue to miscarry. Investments should include both macro- and micro-finance.

 
While these four proposals are nowhere near a complete answer to the immigration crisis, they are a start toward resolving the matter and would provide some breathing space for a more comprehensive congressional overhaul of our immigration laws when the day arrives when an administration and Congress begin taking immigration seriously. I naively believed that that day had come when, early in his term President Biden tasked Vice President Harris with the immigration/border security portfolio. Disappointingly, her only contribution was to visit the Northern Triangle and tell its residents: “Don’t come.”
 
Dick Hermann
September 23, 2022

Hypocrisy is now synonymous with the Democratic Party. This is quite a giant step down from the  exalted position Democrats enjoyed, by default, following the Republican descent into the dark depths of anti-democratic (small “d”) depravity wherein Donald Trump resides.
 
The Democrats’ midterm primary elections strategy of spending tens of millions of dollars to boost the candidacies of MAGA election liars demonstrates a crass contempt for the political process heretofore associated with Republicans’ efforts to position themselves to steal future elections. Democrats have not yet acquired the adeptness that Republicans display in cloaking their nefarious efforts under artful phraseology such as “election integrity.” Perhaps if they continue to perfect their plunge into previously putrid pits that were the preserve of the GOP, they too will devise words and phrases that belie their true intentions.
 
Now, as the primary season ends, we find ourselves with a bevy of dangerous MAGA Republican Senate and House candidates on the November ballot, greatly assisted in arriving there by Democratic money. The theory advanced by the cynical Democrats behind this risky strategy is that these right-wing extremists will be easier to defeat than more mainstream Republicans. We can only pray that this is what will actually happen, but there are no guarantees.
 
No one can accurately predict what the world will look like on November 8, 2022. Seven weeks can be an eternity in politics. Just examine what has happened in the last seven weeks:

• The Department of Justice (DOJ) searched Trump’s not very secure Mar-a-Lago home/club and uncovered a huge cache of fresh evidence of his shocking criminality. 
• DOJ also vastly expanded its investigation into Trump’s desperate criminal attempts to remain in office.
• Trump invoked the Fifth Amendment’s right against self-incrimination hundreds of times during a civil deposition conducted by the New York State Attorney General, notwithstanding his oft-repeated assertion that anyone taking the Fifth must be a criminal.
• The Fulton County (Georgia) grand jury investigating his criminal attempts to steal the Georgia 2020 election moved closer to an indictment.
• President Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act into law, the most important climate change legislation ever, among other landmark achievements.
• Panicked Republican candidates back-pedaled away from draconian state abortion restrictions that have riled up suburban women voters and jeopardized GOP chances in November.
• The ravages of climate change turned Kentucky and California into nightmarish disaster regions.
• Despite daily headlines about the devastation wrought by climate change, Republicans continued to claim that climate change is a hoax.
• Gas prices plummeted, but inflation remained stubbornly high.
• The Federal Reserve raised interest rates again.

 
While much of this is likely good news for Democratic electoral prospects, things can change overnight. A barely averted freight railroad strike would have disrupted supply chains even more (railroads move 40 percent of goods) and would have spiked inflation, stopping Democrats’ midterm momentum in its tracks. Another Fed rate hike could move the country into recession. Republicans would delight in such bad news. It’s possible that some of the uber-reactionary Republican office-seekers whom Democrats cynically helped lift to primary victories might actually win.
 
Democrats rushing in where angels fear to tread should be careful what they wish for.
 
Dick Hermann
September 16, 2022

I was awarded Top Secret security clearances twice during my career. The second clearance contained the designation “SCI,” meaning “Sensitive Compartmented Information.” This was necessary because my team needed access to highly classified documents that we could only read in a “SCIF,” a secure facility designed for that purpose. The penalties for taking classified documents out of the SCIF were made very clear to us daily. Had I or my team done what Donald Trump did with classified material, we would have likely been immediately arrested and incarcerated without the possibility of bail.
 
We have been told countless times during the Trump Era that “no one is above the law.” Now we discover that this is mere word salad. Trump judicial appointee Aileen Cannon, in her opinion supporting her decision to grant Trump’s motion for a Special Master to review all of the documents the FBI removed from Mar-a-Lago on August 8, 2022, indicated quite clearly that the disgraced former president is not subject to the same laws that apply to the rest of us. She bent over backwards not to offend the man who put her on the bench via an astonishing decision that will delay the Justice Department’s criminal investigation of Trump for an indeterminate period. What makes this worse is that the more time passes before DOJ can determine what happened to the contents of the 48 empty folders containing now missing classified documents that the FBI found at Mar a Lago, the less likely that they will be found. They may already be in Moscow, Riyadh and/or somewhere else.
 
Two excerpts from Cannon’s decision make plain that Cannon deems Trump above the law: “As a function of Plaintiff’s former position as President of the United States, the stigma associated with the subject seizure is in a league of its own,” and “A future indictment, based to any degree on property that ought to be returned, would result in reputational harm of a decidedly different order of magnitude.” Clearly, she has put Trump in a class by himself.
 
The Special Master will be tasked with reviewing more than 11,000 government documents for ones potentially subject to executive privilege or attorney-client privilege. This despite the fact that the Justice Department has already conducted such a review and did actually identify a number of documents that might qualify for the attorney-client privilege. During the Special Master’s review, she is enjoining the Justice Department from proceeding with its investigation.
 
There is no precedent for anything like this. Thwarting a criminal investigation because a judge doesn’t want to “offend” has no judicial basis.
 
The government is appealing this seriously flawed ruling. Unfortunately, such an appeal could take months and any decision by the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals could also take months.
 
Cannon, unlike the many Trump-appointed judges who heard and decided Trump’s 60-plus court challenges to the 2020 election results in a fair and impartial manner, demonstrated by this decision that she is nothing but a political hack. That label is backed up by the unusual step she took when the case was initially on her docket: even before hearing oral arguments, she announced publicly that she was inclined to grant Trump’s motion. This kind of judicial behavior is way out of bounds.
 
Moreover, her decision demonstrates that she does not understand executive privilege, which is intended to protect presidential communications with advisors from disclosure to parties outside the executive branch. Surely, she knows that the Justice Department is part of the executive branch. As such, it should not be barred from access to those communications. Confusing the matter even more, Cannon is allowing another executive branch agency, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, to continue to evaluate the risk to national security deriving from Trump’s illegal retention of classified documents in the unsecured (read: open to anyone, including foreign spies) precincts of Mar-a-Lago. It makes no sense to treat two executive branch agencies differently with respect to executive privilege.
 
I should also note that Trump’s motion is part of a civil suit. There is no precedent for a judge in a civil suit prohibiting the government from conducting a criminal investigation. Also, this poor excuse for a judicial opinion failed to find that the Justice Department did anything wrong, which might be expected given the sanctions she has imposed on it. The incoherence of this judge and her decision is mind-boggling.
 
In arriving at her poorly-reasoned decision, Cannon had to contort herself into a judicial pretzel while ignoring Supreme Court decisions from the Nixon Watergate era that unambiguously counter her argument. In addition, the decision makes several leaps of faith far beyond what the Trump lawyers argued or what was established by the evidentiary record.
 
Even Trump Attorney General and Chief Sycophant, William Barr, believes that Cannon’s opinion is preposterous gibberish. Adjectives invoked by legal scholars who have commented on this decision range from “laughable” to “bizarre” to “nonsensical.”
 
This is the kind of monumentally unqualified judge the country gets when it blunders into choosing a president who has nothing but contempt for the rule of law. Both Trump and Cannon believe that laws are only for the little people.
 
Dick Hermann
September 12, 2022

​Every principled newspaper, broadcast and social medium should present a daily debunking of the barrage of lies spewing forth from the extreme right, i.e., Donald Trump, Fox News and its minnow rivals Newsmax and OANN, and the Republican Party. It could be labeled the “Exposé” segment.
 
This calls for adopting the same strategy that the election liars and their congressional mouthpieces employ so effectively. Their approach is to shout their lies loud and long enough so that people who don’t pay much attention to anything beyond their own universes will believe their poppycock. What the rest of us must do to neutralize the liars’ nauseating effect on the voting public is to shout out the truth loud and long enough.
 
Trump’s “Big Lie” about the supposedly “stolen” 2020 election is the prime example of how destructive constant, insidious vomiting of a falsehood can be. Seventy percent of Republicans claim to actually believe this nonsense despite zero evidence that the election was anything but fair. They conveniently ignore that fact that 62 courts found no evidence of election fraud and that even a laughable Arizona recount conducted by bumbling Big Lie devotees also came up empty. The Big Lie is the perfect place to begin countering with the Big Truth.
 
But the Big Lie is not the only domain where mini-Trumpkins like Kevin McCarthy, “Gym” Jordan, Paul Gosar, Teddy Cruz, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert and the rest of the corrupt cult lie to beat the band. Take the recent right-wing phony hysteria over the portion of the Inflation Reduction Act that authorizes the IRS to hire 87,000 new employees over the next decade. The ink had not yet dried on the bill before they began shrieking that 87,000 IRS agents armed with AR-15s were about to descend on Joe and Jane Sixpack in order to audit their taxes. This of course is contemptible claptrap and anyone who could read the bill knows it. Most of these new jobs will be in customer service, i.e., answering the phone when taxpayers call for assistance. This is another bit of right-wing twaddle that cries out for exposure as absolute rubbish. The media needs to shout stuff like this from the rooftops.
 
The Trump Cult is highly adept at spreading lies. When you add the hard right’s finely honed ability to fake frenzy and righteous indignation, the defenders of democracy and the legitimate media face multiple challenges. Kevin McCarthy has a Ph.D. in disingenuousness and his gang of charlatans is well-schooled in amplifying his mendacious messages. The task at hand is not to allow these scurrilous lies to stand unquestioned.
 
Dick Hermann
September 5, 2022