​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

“We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight…in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall never surrender.”
--Winston S. Churchill
 
“[The pandemic] is a Democratic hoax.” “It’s going to disappear. One day it’s like a miracle—it will disappear.” And so on.
--Donald J. Trump
 
In May 1940, Great Britain faced the greatest existential threat in its long history. French forces were collapsing before the German juggernaut. The Germans were preparing to invade Britain, soon to be the last holdout against Nazi oppression. On May 10, Winston Churchill became Prime Minister and immediately painted a grim verbal picture of what Britain faced. He didn’t pull punches. He understood that his people needed to know the truth in order to prepare for and manage what lay ahead. Inspired by his unmatched, soaring rhetoric—“I have nothing to offer but blood, tears, toil and sweat. We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind… many, many long months of struggle and of suffering. You ask, what is our policy? I can say: It is to wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us; to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, ….”—his people rallied around him, defiantly endured the Blitz, prevailed against unbelievable odds in the Battle of Britain, and ultimately, with the assistance of its Soviet and American allies, buried Nazism and won the war.
 
May 1940 was arguably the finest month any leader in history has ever had. It was marked by telling the unvarnished truth to the British people. In return, they responded with patriotic zeal, an absence of panic and a fierce resolve to survive and triumph.
 
Contrast Donald Trump’s approach to the greatest existential threat to the United States since the Civil War, as starkly revealed in Bob Woodward’s new book, Rage. Trump, in 18 taped interviews, told Woodward that he played down the Covid-19 threat because he “did not want to panic” the American people. He knew how dangerous the coronavirus was as early as January, then frittered away months before reacting. His half-baked Chinese travel ban (43,000 travelers from China entered the U.S. after the travel ban) was the only timid step he took early on to try to contain the virus. At the same time, he consistently lied about the danger. He pushed dubious cures and suggested injecting bleach, among other insane notions. He held six rallies following his January briefings about the seriousness of the situation, during which he disdained basic safety measures like wearing masks and socially distancing, a reckless advocacy he still espouses today. He went ahead with these rallies knowing full well that not taking the most elementary safety precautions spreads the virus and risks severe illness, suffering and death. Politicizing safety and health while knowing the danger is a crime against humanity. He puts his own supporters’ lives on the line for political gain.
 
Other countries' leaders told their people the truth and no one panicked. Instead, their honesty triggered a determination to contain and mitigate the virus so they could get their lives and economies back on a normal footing. Look where they are today while America flounders, saddled with the worst coronavirus record in the world under this sorry excuse for a leader.
 
Donald Trump is no Churchill. By lying to his people about the virus and playing games with his government’s response, he is responsible for tens of thousands of deaths. This is without doubt the greatest crime in the history of the presidency.
 
Sadly, I doubt that Woodward’s condemnatory revelations will change a single November vote. Trump supporters, for reasons inexplicable after all the damage and carnage he has wrought, are baked into their unworthy candidate. When I read the polls, I am blown away by the fact that Trump still retains any support. He deserves none.
 
Dick Hermann
September 11, 2020

The “law-and-order” theme Donald Trump has invoked in hopes it will win him re-election appears to be based on the 1988 edition used so effectively by George H.W. Bush rather than Richard Nixon’s and George Wallace’s first use of this fictional leitmotif back in 1968.
 
Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis emerged from the 1988 Democratic National Convention with a huge 17-point advantage over Bush. That lead, however, evaporated quickly once Bush went all “law-and-order” on Dukakis. The centerpiece of his wildly successful effort to paint his opponent as “soft on crime” was the infamous Willie Horton ad that flooded the airwaves for more than two months up to election day.
 
Horton was a convict from Massachusetts (where Dukakis was governor) serving time for murder. While out of prison on a temporary furlough, he committed robbery, rape, and assault. The Bush campaign effectively exploited Horton to stoke fear and racial anxiety among white voters.
 
While the situation is quite different in 2020, the Trump campaign’s goal in invoking law-and-order is the same as that in 1988. However, the circumstances today are more complex:

• The chaos, violence and dystopia are all happening on Trump’s watch. He is the responsible party. He is, after all, the incumbent.
• Trump’s own lawlessness renders his law-and-order mantra a sick joke.
• Trump’s June assault on peaceful protestors in Washington, DC in order to clear them from Lafayette Park so he could have a photo-op holding a bible (upside down) in front of a church is not exactly consistent with a concern for law-and-order.
• Trump’s promotion of violence by armed right-wing, white supremacist  zealots who have attacked and killed protesters shows that he is only interested in selective law-and-order.

 
Nevertheless, Trump’s attempt to scare the daylights out of the electorate is a serious threat to the Biden campaign. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris must continue to address it forthrightly every day. In order to neutralize Trump’s smears, they must condemn every instance of looting and violence by whoever is perpetrating this illegal behavior. They must also hammer home the fundamental truth that this is happening on Trump’s watch and that he—and he alone—owns it.
 
Biden/Harris must also set forth their plan to deal with violence while drawing the contrast with Trump, whose only “plan,” such as it is, is to foment as much violence, disorder and mayhem as he can, believing it to be his prescription for election victory (along, of course, with extreme voter suppression and social media trolling and election administration hacking help from his mentor, Vladimir Putin).
 
Every single time Trump and his minions lie about Biden’s position on any issue, Democrats need to respond immediately, loudly and unambiguously with the truth. Trump cannot be permitted to get away with electoral murder.
 
Finally, Biden must continue to bring the conversation back to Trump’s complete and utter inability to manage the pandemic and its devastating economic consequences. He needs to point out in detail the many points along the road to this unprecedented disaster where Trump botched this test of leadership, rendered America the worst in the world, and crashed the economy.
 
Democratic vigilance must also go beyond Trump’s attempts to deflect, deny, delay and divert from his colossal incompetence and be able to respond rapidly to the lies and manipulations perpetrated by Trump’s congressional and White House enablers.
 
Trump is running the dirtiest campaign in American history. Cleanup crews must be right behind him.
 
Dick Hermann
September 4, 2020

Set aside for a moment (1) the alternate reality and fan fiction perpetrated by the platform-poor Republican National Convention, a.k.a., the hagiographic veneration of Donald Trump, and (2) the shameful, death-inducing White House pressure on the Food and Drug Administration to approve an untested treatment and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to reduce Covid testing. While the lies and insults emanating from the forked tongues at the GOP convention podium were dominating the airwaves, there was something even more ominous going on.
 
Marjorie Taylor Greene, an openly racist, anti-Semitic, QAnon conspiracy monger and professional hater won a Republican congressional primary in Georgia and earned President Trump’s high praise. Another candidate who openly hates Muslims and people of color prevailed in Palm Beach County, Florida, home to Mar-a-Lago, and Trump was once again all in for her. In all, 21 Republican congressional nominees who have secured a place on the November ballot have publicly supported or defended the QAnon conspiracy theory movement and its preposterous tenets, e.g., that the government is rife with Satanic cannibals who run a child-sex ring when they aren’t eating the children they have enslaved, and that Trump is the champion battling against them. At least 20 Republicans running for state legislative seats have also bought into these dark QAnon fantasies.
 
By the time the primaries are past, it is likely that more of these fascist fearmongers may find a way onto general election ballots this year. At least four additional Republican House and two Senate candidates are still in the running.  No fewer than 50 QAnon followers competed unsuccessfully for congressional nominations. Welcome to the new Republican Party, a formerly respectable organization that has now gone off the deep end of the political spectrum into Nazi-like paroxysms.
 
Because a number of these fanatics are running in deep red districts, they are likely to win and be seated in the next Congress. And what do Mitch McConnell and the other sorry excuses for Republican leaders do in the face of this lunatic fringe takeover of their party? Nothing. These fiends are the logical, albeit alarming outcome of almost half-a-century of Republican efforts to trample on the less fortunate while undermining government and rendering it helpless to function.
 
The FBI says QAnon is a domestic terrorist threat. Trump, however, has retweeted QAnon baloney at least 251 times at this writing and recently said: “I understand they like me very much. I heard that these are people that love our country.” In response to a reporter who asked: “QAnon believes you are secretly saving the world from this cult of pedophiles and cannibals. Are you behind that? Trump responded: “Is that supposed to be a bad thing? We are actually. We are saving the world.”
 
It is hard to believe that a president of the United States not only buys into this rubbish, but actually endorses it publicly. Aside from his countless other failings, this one stands out. We the people—and I mean all of the people—cannot allow someone this reprehensible, inept and irresponsible to hold the highest office in the land.
 
The choice this November is simple: the candidate and party of hate, fear and fascism vs. the candidate and party of decency, democracy, dignity and truth. Four more years of sinking into the darkness vs. striving for the light of reason.
 
You decide.
 
Dick Hermann
August 28, 2020

​Now is the time to fight to preserve what remains of our tattered democracy. Donald Trump’s latest assault on the Constitution, the rule of law and the sacred right to vote, his admitted effort to starve the U.S. Postal Service of the means of processing mail-in ballots, is voter suppression, nay prevention, writ large. He and it must be stopped and reversed.
 
The massive national pushback against Trump’s latest (and surely not last) attempt to subvert the election compelled Postmaster General/Political Hack Louis DeJoy to say that he is suspending his anti-post office efforts until after the election. He cannot be trusted, however, to reinstall the 671 sorting machines and thousands of mailboxes he has removed, among other initiatives to slow down the mail (including Social Security checks and life-sustaining medications).
 
The Trump façade camouflaging his anti-democratic war against mail-in voting is that the Postal Service needs to be run like a business, a philosophy that no other nation subscribes to, mindful that delivering the mail is a “public good” that should not be beholden to the profit motive. Moreover, if run like a Trump business it would be guaranteed to fail (six bankruptcies and numerous collapses—see, for example, the Trump Shuttle, the United States Football League, Trump Ice, Trump American Pale Ale, Trump: The Game and many more),.
 
Title 18 U.S. Code § 594, “Intimidation of voters,” makes it a federal crime to interfere with the right of any person to vote. By falsely claiming that mail-in voting is rife with fraud and undermining the Postal Service to aid his re-election, Trump is interfering with the right of millions of Americans to vote in a time when a pandemic makes going to the polls dangerous. Trump is escalating his efforts to steal an election he cannot possibly win fairly and honestly. This is the lowest depth to which a president has ever sunk in our history. His criminality must not be allowed to prevail.
 
The punishment if found guilty is a fine or imprisonment for up to one year or both. While the Justice Department is of the opinion that a sitting president cannot be indicted, this has never been adjudicated. Because a federal crime can generally only be prosecuted in a federal court, a federal grand jury and U.S. Attorney would need to indict the president. The only one in a position to bring such an action is likely Acting U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Audrey Strauss, currently the only non-Trump appointee among the U.S. Attorney population.
 
In addition, virtually every state makes interfering with the right to vote a crime. That means that state attorneys general could also prosecute Trump. At this writing, 20-plus state AGs are considering suing to stop the attack on the Postal Service, but that would fall short of the criminal action that should also be on their priority list.
 
Reliance on the slow-moving engines of justice may not be enough to stymie a corrupt, criminal president. The people need to make their voices heard, loudly, as well. It is shocking that Trump’s felonious attempt to overthrow the process by which we choose who leads us has not generated the level of outrage it warrants. After almost four years of incessant daily scandals, distractions and deflections perpetrated by him and his corrupt cronies, we tend to normalize his sleaze, venality and depravity as par for what we have come to expect from the most unethical person ever elected to national office in our history.
 
Every American should be up in arms about Trump’s decimation of democracy and the rule of law. If there was ever a time to rise up and challenge an abuse of power that exceeds anything we have ever experienced, this is it.
 
The day after Trump’s inauguration, a million women converged on Washington to protest his misogyny and racism (an additional 3.6 million demonstrated across the country), which they rightly feared would mark his tenure in office. Now, with our very system of government under siege and a potentially stolen election staring us in the face, a nationwide protest is needed more than ever. In the absence of any congressional backbone to rein him in, it is up to the people to protest and proclaim that we will not tolerate the theft of the most important civic activity in which we engage: the vote. Trump must know that there is a line in the sand beyond which he cannot tread.
 
Dick Hermann
August 21, 2020