Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) may be the one Janus-faced member of congress who is both a villain and (considerably less of) a potential hero at the same time. His political career has been noteworthy for straddling the line between coming across convincingly as a good guy with a heart while deep down being an opportunistic, self-aggrandizing wretch. While governor, he did next to nothing for his desperately impoverished state aside from milking it for all it was worth to advantage his coal waste business and maneuvering millions of dollars into his family’s pockets. He could be the poster child for income and wealth inequality. At the same time, when out on the campaign stump, he brings to mind Conrad Birdie’s anthem, You Gotta Be Sincere. He oozes an empathy his colleagues can only dream about.
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As a senator, his greatest achievements have been to consign his Mountain State even deeper at the bottom of the litany of state rankings. West Virginia ranks:

• 50th in public health,
• 50th in disconnected youth - non-high school grads not in school and not working,
• 50th in higher education attainment,
• 50th in foster care,
• 50th in hunger and food insecurity,
• 50th in the lowest percentage of adults with a college degree,
• 50th in infrastructure,
• 49th in life expectancy,
• 49th in poverty,
• 48th in median household income,
• 48th in overall economy,
• 47th in health care,
• 47th in unemployment,
• 45th in education,
• 44th in child poverty, and
• Near the top in dirty air and water.

There are a lot of programs in the president’s Build Back Better Act that would dramatically improve the lives of Manchin’s long-suffering constituents. But, as he told Fox News, he cannot support the bill–it is dangerously inflationary. 

That’s risible in the extreme, given that he just voted for a bloated defense budget that will cost at least five times the cost of the BBB proposal while contributing next to nothing to West Virginia’s or the nation’s security. One man’s reckless inflation is another man’s fiscal responsibility.

Then again, perhaps Manchin’s blowing up the most economically transformative piece of legislation in more than half-a-century will force Democrats to take a more studied second look at the $1.75 trillion BBB bill. The best parts of this omnibus bill are the child care tax credit, which will move and keep millions of children out of poverty, universal pre-K, and the healthcare provisions that will bring us closer to healthcare for all at lower insurance premiums. If the bill were pared down to these three provisions and they were made permanent, perhaps even the Manchin family scion might support them. Moreover, it would make sense to cut off the child care credit at something less than $400,000 annual income for a two-parent family.

West Virginia’s economy has depended so heavily on coal that declining production is killing the state. Today, mine safety and ecological concerns are major challenges to West Virginia. Even the much put-upon United Mine Workers Union sees the logic of the bill and is begging Manchin to support it.
 
“Coal Slurry” Joe’s vote is desperately needed to bring BBB over the finish line. It is a given that not a single Republican senator will vote for anything supported by the Democrats even if it would actually improve American lives.

“The perfect,” to quote that trite, hackneyed, cliche-ish and overused saying, “must never be allowed to become the enemy of the good.” 

Dick Hermann
December 24, 2021

​How does one explain that Donald Trump and his band of treasonous insurrectionists are allowed to run around free? Apparently the attempted overthrow of the U.S. government does not rise to the level of a criminal offense.
 
The Constitution’s language concerning treason is as follows: Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.
 
This narrow definition does make prosecution for treason extremely difficult. In the one case that comes closest to what Trump and his collaborators attempted on January 6, 2021—that of Aaron Burr 200 years ago—the defendant was acquitted. However, the current case involving Trump is distinguishable from the Burr case.
 
In secret correspondence with a U.S. general who subsequently turned against him and revealed the plot, Burr outlined his design for carving a new nation with him at its helm out of what was then Western U.S. territory. To render that a prosecutable conspiracy required an affirmative act. While a rag-tag army was being raised on an island in the Ohio River, Burr was not present and there was no evidence that he actually called for the marshaling of a military force to execute his plan. Consequently, the court acquitted him, finding that he did not levy war against the U.S.
 
Trump’s conspiracy, on the other hand, went much farther and was far more overt than Burr’s. In addition to plotting with Steve Bannon, Alex Jones, Mark Meadows, Bernard Kerik, John Eastman, Jeffrey Clark, Rudy Giuliani and others, Trump on January 6 appeared in front of his “army” and directed them to march on the Capitol. In his harangue to his “troops,” he employed incendiary language that they reasonably interpreted as a call to arms and action against the sitting U.S. government. Unlike the Burr conspiracy, which never got off the ground, Trump’s did levy war against the U.S.
 
There is even more ammunition at the Justice Department’s disposal than the distinguishing characteristics of the Trump conspiracy. In Ex parte Bollman and Swartwout, a habeus corpus case involving two Burr associates, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall interpreted the Constitution’s Treason Clause: To be a traitor, Marshall said, an individual did not have to appear “in arms against his country. On the contrary, if war be actually levied, that is, if a body of men be actually assembled for the purpose of effecting by force, a treasonable purpose, all those who perform any part, however minute or however remote from the scene of action, and who are actually leagued in the general conspiracy, are to be considered as traitors.”
 
This interpretation fits Trump and his insurrectionist army to a T. This raises the question posited at the beginning of this essay: why haven’t Trump and his co-conspirators been indicted for this most monstrous of crimes?
 
There is a reason we have a Department of Justice and an Attorney General. DOJ’s own mission statement reads: “To enforce the law and defend the interests of the United States according to the law; to ensure public safety against threats foreign and domestic; to provide federal leadership in preventing and controlling crime; to seek just punishment for those guilty of unlawful behavior; and to ensure fair and impartial administration of justice for all Americans.”
 
That’s pretty unambiguous. To date, DOJ and Attorney General Garland have fallen down on the job. It is a sad commentary that the Attorney General of the United States hesitates to go after the worst criminal act in our long history, possibly because he fears being branded “political.”
 
If Garland and DOJ are vacillating because they fear that they could lose this case, the next question to them should be: “Why haven’t you gone after Trump for the more than ten instances cited by the Mueller Report in which he obstructed justice, but could not be indicted because of DOJ’s guidelines against indicting a sitting president?” Trump is now a private citizen.
 
There comes a time when all good men must come to the aid of their country. That time, Mr. Garland, is now.
 
Dick Hermann
December 12, 2021

​The oral argument in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization was one of the most revelatory airings of how Supreme Court justices think about arriving at consequential decisions. The questions they asked and the opinions they advanced raised a barrage of issues worth pondering:
 
The legal principle of stare decisis (Latin for “to stand by things decided”), a hifalutin’ way of saying that courts should hesitate before overturning precedents, came up a lot. The conservative justices pointed out that plenty of precedents have been overturned by past Supreme Courts, their prime example being Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark 1954 school desegregation decision that reversed Plessy v. Ferguson, which in 1896 declared that “separate but equal” schools for blacks were just fine. The attorneys arguing against the Mississippi law prohibiting abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy missed an opportunity to point out that Brown and the other precedent-shattering cases the justices mentioned differ from Dobbs in a very important respect: their reversals righted obvious, consensus wrongs. The original decisions later overturned were by all accounts immoral and unethical. In Dobbs, morality and ethics are a much murkier matter.
 
The “stench” that Justice Sotomayor said would adhere to the Court if it overturned Roe ignores that this partisan reek already exists. One has to be living in a cave without access to outside world media to believe that the Court has not already been irreparably harmed by the awful, often political decisions it has handed down in this century, e.g., Bush v. Gore (deciding the 2000 presidential election…by one vote) Citizens United (legalizing bribery in politics…and announcing that corporations are people, too) Shelby County v. Holder (gutting the Voting Rights Act), Rucho v. Common Cause (declaring that courts have no role in gerrymandering cases because these are political questions [whereas Bush v. Gore and Citizens United were not?]), and District of Columbia v. Heller (a tortured misreading of the Second Amendment). In all these decisions, the Court ignored logic, ethics, data and last but not least, the law.
 
Chief Justice Roberts mistakenly claimed that the fetal viability standard was mere “dicta” (i.e., just an aside) and not essential to the decision in Roe. It’s scary when the top U.S. judge doesn’t accurately frame something critical to what he is about to decide.
 
If Roe goes down, then body autonomy, a central rationale for the constitutionality of abortion, will no longer apply to pregnant women. Compare that to conservative justices in lower federal courts who have recently proclaimed that body autonomy justifies bans on vaccine and mask mandates, an opinion I suspect the Supreme Court’s conservatives also hold.
 
If the Court overturns or substantially limits Roe, which I believe is inevitable, it will be confirming the Republican inference that the sanctity of human life ends at birth. After that it is every man and woman for him/herself.
 
Republican legislators rail against abortion while simultaneously opposing any assistance to poor families who strain financially to support their children. They consistently vote against any proposal that would help those families. If conservatives believe that material circumstances prompt women to terminate a pregnancy, they need to do something to ease them. Yet they roadblock universal health insurance coverage, paid family leave, a livable wage and child care tax credits. Hypocrisy, thy name is GOP.
 
Justice Barrett’s solution, offered from the bench: Women could either leave unwanted newborns at the nearest police precinct or fire station, or give them up for adoption!
 
Overturning Roe v. Wade will not result in significantly fewer abortions. Restricting access to the procedure will mean fewer legal, safe abortions. Women of means will simply travel to places where they can safely terminate their pregnancies. Poor women will be forced to return to the back alley and coat hanger era.
 
Dick Hermann
December 3, 2021