​Brexit, the UK’s irrational departure from the European Union, has been an unmitigated disaster for the former empire over which, for several hundred years, the sun never set. These are dark days indeed for Britain, and they are likely to get even darker before any light appears at the Dover end of the Chunnel.
 
Former Prime Minister David Cameron’s gamble of a referendum to determine if Britain should “stay” or “leave” the EU was beyond reckless. Now, six years after deciding by a slim margin to divorce from Europe, Britain has plummeted into Third World territory. Following the hapless Cameron, the country has been afflicted with three mediocre Prime Ministers–Theresa May, Boris Johnson, and here-today, gone-tomorrow Liz Truss–proof positive that the Peter Principle is alive and well in un-merry old England. It is stunning to think that these three minnows occupied the same office that previously hosted giants like William Pitt the Younger, Castlereagh, Disraeli, Gladstone, Salisbury, Lloyd George and Churchill. The jury is still out on Truss’s replacement, Rishi Sunak. The signs, however, are not good. Sunak continues to insist that Brexit was a good idea.
 
Britain’s standard of living is declining and accelerating downward at a dizzying rate. The nation is in recession and headed for depression. Its 11 percent inflation is the highest among G-7 countries. Incomes are plummeting while energy costs skyrocket. There are no good economic policy alternatives available to a government that less than a third of Britons still support.
 
Trade has been disrupted because the price of an open border between Northern Ireland (part of the UK) and the Irish Republic (a member of the European Union) is border checks when goods travel between Northern Ireland and Great Britain. Trade between the UK and EU is down by 20 percent. The pound sterling is not so sterling anymore. The weak pound has increased the costs of imports, leaving UK households poorer. Wage growth has stagnated while the cost of everything rises. Britain’s labor supply has crashed due to a massive outflow of EU workers. Investment is down by 14 percent. British companies are voting with their feet, leaving for the continent. All in all, Brexit has been a catastrophe for Britain. Prospects moving forward are dismal.
 
Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland’s First Minister, believes that the time has arrived to move forward with another referendum on Scottish independence. Why would Scotland want to continue to be dragged down by affiliation with the governmental chaos and disastrous economic policies foisted upon the nation by Westminster? The courts have stalled an independence referendum for now, but if Scotland succeeds in saying goodbye, can Northern Ireland and Wales be far behind? London may soon find itself governing a tiny, no longer relevant rump state like Austria after World War I.
 
U.S. Republicans should heed what the markets told Truss after she proposed tax cuts for wealthy Britons and large corporations without paying for them other than by printing money and fueling even more of the double-digit inflation that torments the country today. It was stunning to listen to her argument, identical to the Republicans’ failed playbook, that the benefits would trickle down to the masses and that tax revenues would subsequently rise. That this specious thesis discredited multiple times in the U.S. over the past 40 years could seamlessly cross the pond and find favor in the mother country is proof beyond any doubt that Truss and her now-deposed cronies were in way over their heads. We on this side of the Atlantic can only wonder why the markets give a pass to this absurd Republican notion every time the GOP goes down this potholed path. Maybe now that they slapped down Truss, the markets will react similarly the next time the GOP promotes it.
 
UK polls reveal that almost two-thirds of Britons have buyer’s remorse regarding Brexit. It may be too late for the only solution to bedraggled Britain’s self-induced dive into the rabbit hole of economic penury: going hat-in-hand to Brussels and begging to be let back into the EU. They can only hope the continentals don’t respond with: you can’t have your crow and eat it too.
 
Dick Hermann
November 27, 2022

Before the celebrations about democracy triumphing become too raucous and take root as the lesson coming out of the midterms, some more sober reflection is in order. We should defer sighing in relief for four reasons:

1. Although it appears that every election denier who ran for statewide office in a swing state lost, many came dangerously close to winning. Certainly, it is terrific that so many election deniers who, if elected, could have thwarted the will of the voters in future elections, went down to defeat, some by huge margins. Also great that all the candidates for Secretary of State in swing states, who as a group had publicly pledged to make certain that Donald Trump or some other Trumpy candidate would prevail in 2024 despite the will of the voters, lost their bids to become fifth columnists. And that the Pennsylvania governor’s race went to Democrat Josh Shapiro by double digits, critical because the governor appoints the Secretary of State. Had radical right extremist Doug Mastriano won, a critical swing state would be in the clutches of election deniers come 2024. Even so, a great many voters preferred these election deniers over their democracy defender rivals. In those races, democracy only won by a hair.  Close to 50 percent of swing state voters aren’t at all interested in preserving our democracy.
2. More than 100 election deniers won congressional, statewide and state legislative races, primarily in red states. Around 25 percent of House Republicans are members of the extreme right House Freedom Caucus. They are the most ardent Trump supporters/election deniers in Congress. Two newly-elected members of Congress were at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. All could be in position to threaten democracy come 2024.
3. Donald Trump hasn’t gone away. In fact, he is once again running for President. There is little evidence yet that the MAGA movement will abandon its cult leader anytime soon. Despite being under a very dark legal cloud, he will use the next two years to hammer away at both his potential GOP rivals and Joe Biden, employing the fact-free universe in which he resides to rile up the MAGAverse and whack at the underpinnings of democracy.
4. Finally, a threat that has thus far been under the radar. Saudi Arabia’s Sovereign Wealth Fund, which is controlled by Saudi dictator Muhammed Bin Salman (MBS), owns 17 percent of Twitter, making it the second largest shareholder after Elon Musk. Assuming Twitter survives Musk’s mayhem, this is perhaps the Saudis’ most dangerous infiltration of American business to date. Given Musk’s authoritarian propensities, Saudi intentions to possibly exploit Twitter to influence U.S. public opinion and lawmakers in directions aligned with its repressive policies and interfere in U.S. elections to the detriment of democracy mesh very well with Musk’s own despotic desires for his new toy. Together with Musk, the social media giant they jointly control is in position to suppress speech Saudi Arabia doesn’t like and to sway the American electorate in its direction.

 
There is, however, a vaccine available that can defeat the Saudi virus: The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), a small obscure Treasury Department agency, has the authority to review and bar the Saudi investment for reasons of national security. Those reasons clearly apply in this case. So far, however, CFIUS has not acted. This is likely the result of President Biden’s about-face regarding Saudi Arabia. Despite his campaign pledge to make the kingdom the pariah that it is, he went begging the desert monarchy in a futile attempt to induce it to produce more oil and thus lower gas prices. Worse, he just rewarded MBS with immunity from civil liability for the murder of Jamal Khashoggi. Even the Saudi-servile Trump administration didn’t do that.
 
No one should assume that the enemies of democracy have been routed. While they may be tending their wounds right now, it is highly likely that they will be back and just as dangerous as ever.
 
Dick Hermann
November 18, 2022

The attack on Paul Pelosi by a murderous, hard right fanatic is the direct result of almost seven years of Donald Trump’s advocating violence, encouraging crazy conspiracy theories, and making ad hominem attacks on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, whom he could not abide because she stood up to him and would not surrender to his lies and blowups.
 
The attempted murder of a political opponent’s family member moves us into extremely dangerous territory. The First Amendment does not enable Trump or his villainous acolytes to inflame their followers to commit violent acts. This behavior is nowhere close to protected speech.
 
The time is past for allowing Trump to get away with incendiary rhetoric. His encouraging of a march on the Capitol on January 6, 2021 resulted in multiple deaths and many serious injuries, mostly inflicted on the law enforcement officers that he claims to love so much. What happened then has not deterred him from continuing to encourage violence against his enemies.
 
The longer Trump is free to spout rabble-rousing rhetoric, the more his appalling behavior metastasizes throughout the MAGA-sphere and prompts Trump-fearing politicians to mouth similar over-the-top calls for violence against their opponents. The disgusting statements right-wing fever swamp residents like Kari Lake and Glenn Youngkin made regarding the Pelosi assault are ominous indicators that Trump’s malevolent rhetoric has spread. These spineless sycophants say terrible things only to curry favor with the Mar-a- Lago monster and his followers.
 
It is long past time to bring the full force of the law down upon Trump’s head and put him out of commission. There is plenty of evidence available to bring this about:

• The Mueller Report contemplated indicting Trump for obstruction of justice (ten incidents of obstruction are detailed in Vol. 2 of the Report), saying how important it was to preserve and document the evidence. The only reason for wording it this way was because, although the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel said that a sitting president cannot be indicted; an ex-president certainly can be.
• The multiple criminal investigations of the horrible things this man has done have gone on long enough. The investigators have accumulated a virtual Everest of evidence of his criminality, whether it be his treasonous attempt to steal an election, his illegal effort to subvert the free and fair vote in Georgia and elsewhere, or his theft of highly classified documents when he grudgingly left office and his subsequent refusal to obey the law and return them to federal custody.

 
If it were true that “no man is above the law,” then Trump would be wallowing in a prison cell and denied bail just like what would have happened to any other person accused of his major crimes.
 
Regardless of how we get there, it is imperative that Trump’s festering evil be stamped out now. The longer it is allowed to spread, the more possibly irreparable damage it will do to the country. The glacial pace of bringing the chief perpetrator of our ills to justice is doing this country in. The law provides the only vaccine available to eradicate this sickness. Invoke it now.
 
Dick Hermann
November 4, 2022

​All polling signs point to a midterm election result that should warm Republican hearts (assuming they still have one) and send Democrats scurrying to download Chopin’s funeral march. A combination of American attention spans, inflation and the inability to mount effective campaigns that counter Republican lies may be doing Democrats in.
 
Anger over the Supreme Court's Dobbs abortion decision that aroused the ire of women has waned since the summer. In the immediate aftermath of that indefensible ruling and follow-up by states that enacted draconian laws restricting abortion, the level of rage was at a fever pitch. GOP candidates were so frightened that they took down pro-abortion statements from their websites and back-tracked their absolutist positions regarding the issue. But rage dissipates quickly, even more so in an era when many citizens have the attention span of a gnat.
 
Ire over Dobbs has receded, the victim of weekly reminders of how much more life’s basic necessities now cost. Although the causes of this inflation are many and complex, Americans invariably look for someone to blame and that makes the President a perfect target. No matter that Republicans don’t have a clue about how to bring down prices and won’t be able to do anything at all to ease inflation’s effects. When, as seems likely, they retake the House of Representatives and replace Speaker Pelosi with the hapless, two-faced Kevin McCarthy, their policy proposals (assuming they have any) are likely to be jokes.
 
And then there is crime, also a hot issue that, for reasons that make absolutely no sense, favors Republicans. Democrats cannot seem to counter the Republican barrage of false claims about crime despite all of the evidence in their favor. There are three obvious responses to the lies Republicans push about crime-ridden Democrat-run cities and high crime rates in blue states. They are there for the taking; only Democrats are not taking them: (1) WalletHub’s 50-metric analysis of the safest and least safe states paint a picture that Democrats should be shouting from the rooftops: Seven of the ten safest states are blue; the other three are purple. ALL TEN OF THE MOST DANGEROUS STATES ARE DEEPLY RED. (2) More guns = more crime, and it is Republicans who want everyone armed to the teeth. What did they think was going to happen when their policies result in millions more guns on the streets? (3) Republicans are so soft on crime that they still back their grand master, who is under investigation for such a long litany of high crimes that there isn’t space available to list them all here.
 
There are 399 Republican 2020 election liars (much more accurate than the gentler term, “deniers”) on congressional and statewide ballots this November. However, instead of blasting them for their shameful perfidy at every opportunity, Democrats talk little about this shocking assault on democracy. The message this sends is that this existential threat to America is not that big a deal. Democrats should be saying that Republican lies about stolen elections demonstrate that they hate America and want to replace our two-and-a-half-century democracy with an authoritarian dictatorship.
 
Midterms are almost always brutal for the party in power. In 2010, the racially-fueled Tea Party movement decimated Democratic ranks. In 2018, it was Trumplicans who lost bigly.
 
The remarkable thing about this year’s midterms is that after the unprecedented damage Trump and the party he transformed into a conspiratorial cult have done to this country over the last six years, that this collection of liars, sycophants, white supremacists and fascist-admirers without the hint of a constructive idea or interest in bettering people’s lives can be competitive, much less triumphant. But that is the bizarro world in which we live.
 
Brace yourselves for two years of political stalemate generated by Republican stunts around the debt ceiling, government shut-downs and universal obstructionism that will frustrate any attempts to address the problems afflicting our country. It is staggering to believe that this is what voters really want.
 
Dick Hermann
October 28, 2022

It is difficult in a limited space to document all of the innumerable duplicities that the Republican Party is showering down on the electorate. Here is a small sample:
 
Inflation 1. They blame Joe Biden for rising prices, but defend oil company windfall profits and conveniently ignore the pandemic (aggravated by Trump’s denials and incompetence), supply chain disruptions and Putin’s Ukraine war that created a global inflation epidemic. In Germany and the UK, for example, inflation is running at 10+ percent, higher than the U.S. rate.
 
Inflation 2. They also blame Biden for injecting too much money into the economy via the April 2021 American Rescue Plan, conveniently ignoring their own Tax Relief Act passed with bipartisan support only four months earlier that juiced the economy to the tune of $900 billion.
 
Inflation 3. Republicans’ inflation reduction plan calls for—wait for it—tax cuts for the wealthy without paying for them. Yet again arguing (for the umpteenth time since “Reaganomics” first reared its ugly head) that the trickle-down hooey that has been proven wrong every time would benefit the masses and jack up federal tax revenues. In addition to fitting in with the definition of insanity (doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results) this would, of course, only aggravate inflation. Note: This is the same bonehead proposal that brought down UK Prime Minister Liz Truss after only six weeks at Number 10.
 
Crime 1. Republican candidates on the November ballot have turned to crime as one of the  leading issues with which they are bashing their Democratic opponents. This is rich coming from the party that has beatified the Second Amendment and advocated that every American be encouraged to carry an assault weapon everywhere they go. What did they think would happen if guns were everywhere? Meanwhile, mass shootings continue to rise, killing both Republicans and Democrats without distinction. The Republican position is that guns don’t kill and more guns don’t kill more.
 
Crime 2. Crime-fighting Republicans see no double standard in raging against high crime in Democratic-controlled cities while ignoring the data that show that rural, red state crime is skyrocketing.
 
Crime 3. Republicans see no evil in their completely lawless criminal leader snatching the most highly classified and super-sensitive national security documents extant and spiriting them off to his Florida resort which, for six years now, has been the target of virtually every intelligence service on the planet.
 
Crime 4. 205 House Republicans voted against mental health grants to schools after insisting that mass school shootings happen not because of easy access to guns, but rather because of students with mental health problems.
 
Abortion. They eagerly embraced the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade and lauded states that subsequently embraced a total ban on abortions, only to take to the hills after their take-no-prisoners anti-abortion talk prompted serious voter concern about their extreme positions.
 
Disaster Relief. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis begged President Biden for billions in federal disaster relief after Hurricane Ian laid waste to the Gulf Coast. Yet in 2013, when DeSantis was in Congress, he voted to deny disaster aid to New York and New Jersey following the devastation of Hurricane Sandy.
 
Shameless Louses 1. Despite a straight party line vote against the American Rescue Plan, congressional Republicans are taking credit for the Plan funds flowing into their districts.
 
Shameless Louses 2. Despite voting against the Infrastructure bill, congressional Republicans are taking credit for infrastructure projects in their states and districts made possible by the bill.
 
GAGA, but not for MAGA. Although Republican officeholders proclaim that they have the interests and values of their MAGA voters at heart, they have done nothing to help those same voters. They are still obsessed with sending seniors to the poorhouse by slashing Social Security and Medicare and defending exorbitant drug prices charged by Big Pharma. They remain pro-corporation and anti-labor. They oppose food stamps for the poor. Any help the MAGA base has received came from Democrats.
 
Immigration. They denounce Democrats for “open borders” while opposing any legislation designed to tackle the immigration problem.
 
Election “Integrity.” They lie claiming a stolen election notwithstanding 62 court decisions that found no evidence of such, and invent solutions for this non-existent problem so that they can lay a foundation for stealing future elections.
 
Democracy. They claim they are defending democracy while planning for an authoritarian future.
 
The list could go on.
 
The Republican Party poses an existential threat to America. This dangerous collection of quislings and charlatans should not be allowed to subvert our democratic republic. The only way to stop them is at the polls. Go vote!
 
Dick Hermann
October 22, 2022

​The 2022-2023 Supreme Court term threatens to be perhaps even more consequential than the prior term, which witnessed the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the weakening of barriers between church and state, the reining in of federal regulatory authority, the denial of climate change, the exaltation of the Second Amendment over public safety, and other appalling decisions that gave a clear indication that the Court’s conservative majority is virtually an arm of the Republican Party.
 
What, asks the majority of Americans, could possibly be worse than that? The answer is a case called Moore v. Harper. At issue is a dubious constitutional argument heretofore relegated to the extreme outlying precincts of the authoritarian wing of the Republican Party. If endorsed by the Supreme Court, this “Independent State Legislature” theory would open the door to dramatically changing our elections, including allowing state legislatures to overturn the popular will and substitute their own slate of presidential electors for those chosen by the people.
 
The Constitution authorizes the states to administer federal elections, subject to Congressional overrule. The question arises as to the meaning of that delegation. The Elections Clause (Article I, §4) states: The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, ….. In addition, the Presidential Electors Clause (Article II, §1, Clause 2, states: Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors….
 
The debate conjured by Trumpian zealots intent on stealing future elections turns on the word “legislature.” Both general understanding and Court precedents going back many years is that it refers to a state’s general lawmaking processes, including not only legislative action, but also whatever a state’s constitution says about subjecting legislation to a governor’s veto, a voter referendum, and state court action to ensure that legislative enactments comply with the state constitution.
 
Would be election thieves argue that these federal constitutional clauses give state legislatures exclusive authority to regulate federal elections, period. In practice, this would mean that state legislatures could not be stopped by whatever the state constitution says about a governor’s veto, a citizen referendum or a state court’s authority to approve or disapprove legislation.
 
If the Independent State Legislature theory had been effective in 2020, Donald Trump would have been able to steal the election and stay in the White House despite having been stomped by Joe Biden in both the popular vote and Electoral College. If the Supreme Court endorses this theory, it would allow Republicans to run roughshod over the will of voters. Should Trump somehow weasel out of his mounting legal challenges, is not yet strung up, is not behind bars, and runs for president in 2024 and loses, no big deal. Republican state legislatures could ignore the popular vote and legitimate electors and legally substitute their own slates of sham electors.
 
Of lesser concern, but still a huge problem, state legislators would have carte blanche to gerrymander and suppress the vote as contemptibly as possible without any opportunity for opponents to challenge their nefarious machinations in court.
 
The fate of our democracy has never before been threatened by any Supreme Court case or decision in our history. Moore v. Harper does that, and has a good chance of establishing this preposterous and dangerous theory that makes a mockery of Checks and Balances and the rule of law. Three current Supreme Court Justices—Alito, Gorsuch and Thomas (of course)--In various dissents and concurrences, have already signed on to the Independent State Legislature hooey. Two more and you can say so long to future free, fair and honest elections, not to mention American democracy.
 
Dick Hermann
October 14, 2022

President Biden’s student debt forgiveness program prompted raucous celebrations all across America’s 5,000-college landscape.  Not by affected students so much, although there was some of that. The vast majority of the celebrants were likely college administrators, specifically those whose principal concern is revenue.
 
As has often been the case in the past six decades, a well-intentioned, albeit misguided federal college cost-reduction program is licensing colleges to continue raising tuition fees regardless of how they are impacted by costs. Since the early 1980s, tuition has outdistanced the inflation rate by a country mile. Colleges know that this is a great deal for them.  With unlimited loan money available from the federal trough and the likelihood of some periodic government debt forgiveness, they can continue to raise tuition an average of 8 percent a year (for the past 50 years!).  They have no incentive to control costs. 
 
And higher education is nothing if not agile when it comes to drowning students and their families in debt. Especially in a time like the present when the ostensible justification for hiking tuition is being handed to them on a silver platter, namely the highest inflation in 40 years. Life may be a tough challenge for everyone else, but these are salad days for college administrators.
 
For one thing, more money tsunami-ing across college transoms mean that our Institutions of Higher Earning can continue to hire more administrators. They have been doing this at such a feverish pace in the 21st century that administrators now outnumber faculty at the majority of America’s colleges and universities. Over the last 30 years, the number of academic bureaucrats has doubled, vastly outpacing enrollment. Here are some administrative job titles I found in searching university websites. I defer to anyone who can explain what these jobs actually entail:

• Assistant Director of Affinity Group Leadership
• Educational Talent Search Academic Advisor
• Coordinator of Community Standards
• Senior User Experience Analyst
• Office Concierge
• Associate Dean of People
• Director of Disruption
• Nourishment Consultant
• Chief Visionary
• Assistant Director of Retreats and Discernment
• Assistant Director of LoveWorks
• College Mobilizer
• Discipleship Coordinator
• Hall Minister in a University Residence
• Summer Sacristan
• Modality Manager
• Coordinator of Interpretive Teaching

 
These are just some of the positions that parents pay for when they send their offspring off to college. They are also paying for costly buildings in which to house universities’ bloated bureaucracies. When you approach many colleges from afar, the number of campus construction cranes may delude you into believing that these communities have just won the competition for the next Olympics and are building new stadiums and arenas.
 
Moreover, administrators are, to put it mildly, handsomely compensated. Taking my alma mater as representative, annual compensation is as follows (from IRS filings):
 
8 earned more than $1 million.
6 additional administrators earned more than $500,000.
7 additional administrators earned more than $250,000.
An untold number of additional administrators earned more than $100,000.
 
Not bad, unless you happen to be a hard-working parent straining to make tuition payments.
 
If government and society really want to make college affordable, there are many ways to do so. Every public institution and virtually every private college receives tons of taxpayer money every year for research and development, contracts and numerous other campus activities. In addition, the tax benefits these institutions receive are massive, and include not only exemption from income taxes, but also from property taxes. All of this means that the potential for effective carrot-and-stick approaches to college cost reduction is immense.
 
So why do Congress and Presidents look the other way?
 
One very key reason is the proliferation of higher ed lobbying. Hundreds of colleges and universities have opened Washington, DC offices and hired armies of lobbyists to make sure that the powers-that-be in Washington and state capitals make nice. This is in addition to the proliferation of academic trade and professional associations that bring higher ed institutions together to form powerful lobbying organizations. Moreover, according to Open Secrets, individuals associated with academia contributed close to $100 million to 2020 political campaigns (colleges and universities cannot form political action committees).
 
Since Congress is not likely to ban lobbying and public financing of political campaigns is not going to happen anytime soon, it is only parents, students and alumni that can hold universities and politicians’ feet to the fire.
 
Dick Hermann
October 7, 2022

​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