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Rant 606: America Can’t Afford an Apprentice Anymore

10/29/2020

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It’s crunch time. The day is finally arriving when we can put this 4-year nightmare of naked cruelty, 25,000+ lies (you can look it up), dangerous incompetence, and reckless disregard for the laws and soul of America behind us. 

The greatest leadership collapse in American history, resulting in the avoidable deaths of hundreds of thousands of his fellow citizens. A ravaged healthcare system strained to the breaking point. Abominable, boorish  behavior degenerating into childish name-calling. An expected role model whose every TV appearance requires hustling the children out of the room. Institutions fundamental to democracy and the rule of law in peril. Disengagement from the world at the very time that a multilateral approach to transborder issues demands engagement. Allies made into enemies; enemies made into allies. Promoting crazy conspiracy theories drowning out fact and truth. Hostility to science and experts. Self-dealing of mythic proportions, manipulating government for personal enrichment. Corruption on a scale that takes your breath away. His list of abuses is endless.
Examine any aspect of what made America great and he has trashed it:
  • Repealing more than 100 environmental regulations designed to protect health and save lives. Their repeal will kill more Americans than Covid-19, but not as many as his denying and doing nothing about climate change, the greatest threat to human existence in this century.
  • Decimating legal immigration in a nation built and sustained by immigrants. We have benefited immeasurably by the steady influx of fresh blood eager to contribute to economic growth. Instead, he has gone in the other direction to the point where the best and brightest foreigners no longer view the U.S. as the land of opportunity. Hundreds of thousands of foreign students who flocked here now go to Canada, China, Australia and elsewhere. 
  • Ripping babies from their mothers’ arms, caging them in squalid conditions and disdaining any effort to reunite them with their parents.
  • Going to court to take emergency food aid away from the neediest Americans.
  • Expressing contempt for our armed forces, labeling soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines as “suckers” and “losers” while calling military leaders “idiots.” This from a draft dodger.
  • Inciting violence by white supremacists at the same time that he declares war on peaceful protesters.
  • Perverting the instruments of justice and law to serve his own ends rather than those of the country, abetted by a sycophantic attorney general who has abandoned all pretense of serving the nation.
  • Diverting funds appropriated for essential needs--military base housing, for example--to a vanity project border wall that contributes nothing to deterring illegal immigration.
  • Calling the essential Fourth Estate--the media--”the enemy of the people”--language coined by Joseph Stalin.
  • Appointing abject mediocrities to a cabinet that is an embarrassment even when compared to the Harding administration’s rogues’ gallery.
  • Displaying a sociopathic absence of empathy, rendering him unable to understand or mourn the hundreds of thousands of deaths for which he is responsible or even to express concern for a state governor whose life was endangered by his militia supporters.\Slashing research and development funds that have a lengthy track record of contributing to the creation of new industries and millions of good-paying jobs.
  • Opening up public lands to commercial use.
His inability to put on the shoes of a competent national leader hardly needs any further elaboration. The indictment is drawn. The bill of particulars is documented. All that now remains is to rid us of this stain on the nation. On to November 3.

Dick Hermann
October 29, 2020


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Rant 605: A Tale of Two Autocrats and the Post Office

10/23/2020

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Amid the frenzy of the most contentious and dismaying presidential re-election campaign in our long history, we should not overlook the mission of the U.S. Postal Service, which is central to ensuring a fair ballot count. This role has become critical in this election. However, 200 years ago a president realized that the post office could also play a political role when he directed it to take on the job of stopping an aspiring autocrat. 

In 1804, Vice President Aaron Burr was still stewing over the denial of his attempted 1800 election coup d’etat (thanks to a constitutional flaw rectified in 1804 by the 12th Amendment). While Burr was still Vice President, he met with the British Minister to the United States, proposing that the British assist him with guns and money in an expedition he would lead to sever Louisiana and the Southwest from the U.S. He asked for $500,000 dollars and a British fleet in the Gulf of Mexico. The British Minister gave him $1,500 and was soon recalled when Britain opted out of the scheme. 

Undeterred, Burr headed west in an attempt to set up an empire with himself as emperor. He was stymied in his effort at secession by Gideon Granger, our longest-serving (13 years) and most successful Postmaster General--he actually turned a profit--other than Benjamin Franklin, the first Postmaster General during the Continental Congress era. Unfortunately, Granger’s reputation is tarnished by his refusal to employ African-Americans. President Thomas Jefferson urged Granger to build what became known as post roads to serve two purposes: (1) to make mail delivery more efficient; and (2) to enable Granger’s local postmasters and mail deliverers to keep tabs on where Burr was heading and what he was up to. The effort was hugely successful on both counts. In 1807, Jefferson had Burr arrested and tried for treason (he was acquitted, but his political career was ruined).

Contrast the success of the mail service then with it’s status today, when another American would-be autocrat is using the Post Office to stymie mail delivery, especially absentee ballots, and to illegally aid his re-election. Trump’s Postmaster General, Louis DeJoy, is an eager participant in this 2020 coup d’etat. Hands down, history will judge him the worst Postmaster General in American history. He has earned a hallowed place in the pantheon of Trump D-list appointees who have been willing abettors of the president’s criminal corruption.

The repercussion of Trump’s usurpation of the Postal Service is record turnout in the states and the District of Columbia that permit early voting. At this writing, a record number of Americans have endured day-long lines at early voting sites in order to avoid having to trust a Postmaster General to do the job he took an oath to perform honestly. Once again, a Trump attempt to subvert a process and run riot over norms, democracy and the law is backfiring “bigly” and jeopardizing his diminishing chances at continuing in office. 

After Trump, we will have to re-examine the Postal Service and figure out how to reform it to meet 21st century needs. The United States is the only country whose narrow-minded politicians want every government function to be run like a business. Other nations realize that there are some goods and services that the private sector cannot provide. They also understand that not every government entity has to make a profit, and they accept those that run a deficit. These are considered “public goods,” such as highways, bridges, water and waste systems, railroads, other infrastructure and the postal service. The most successful economies in the world combine a mix of private and public goods and services. America would benefit from understanding this.

Dick Hermann
October 23, 2020

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Rant 604: Benching Barrett...and the Antidote

10/16/2020

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​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

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Rant 603: The Chickens Come Home to Roost

10/9/2020

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​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

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Rant 602: Florida is Almost Everything

10/2/2020

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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

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    Author

    Richard Hermann is the author of thirteen books, including Encounters: Ten Appointments with History and, most recently, Mother's Century: A Survivor, Her People and Her Times. Soon to be released is his upcoming Close Encounters with the Cold War, a personal reflection on growing up in the nuclear age. He is a former law professor and entrepreneur, and the founder and president of Federal Reports, Inc., a legal information and consulting firm that was sold in 2007. He has degrees from Yale University, the New School University, Cornell Law School and the U.S. Army Judge Advocate General’s School. He lives with his wife, Anne, and extraordinary dog, Barkley, in Arlington, Virginia and Canandaigua, New York.

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