​Fascism-- a political philosophy, movement, or regime that exalts nation and often race…and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader,…and forcible suppression of opposition.
--Merriam-Webster Dictionary
 
With the exception of blips like the Bull Moose (1912) and Reform Party (1992) insurgencies, American democracy has enjoyed stable two-party competition for most of its history. For the past 164 years, that meant Democrats and Republicans, both of which respected timeless norms such as democracy, the rule of law, and the Constitution.
 
No more. This two-party constancy has now been shattered, upended by the divide in the former Republican Party, now split into what little remains of traditional conservative Republicanism and the much larger Trump cult that has veered off into unrepentant autocratic Fascism.
 
With Trump at least partially losing his dominance of the news cycle and some diminution of his relevance to the public discourse, it is possible that a handful of his cowardly congressional disciples will rediscover their spines and once again walk and talk like the pre-Trump GOP, concerned about deficits and debt, the size of government, limits on executive power and the nefarious activities of traditional enemies like Russia. The bolder among them may even experience an epiphany and resume working across the aisle with their Democratic colleagues to actually get things done.
 
I don’t expect that a return to democratic norms will be embraced by a majority of what we used to label “Republicans.” I suspect that the bulk of its congressional membership will continue to adhere to and spout the Trump lines and lies, fearful of being “primaried” in future years by even more committed Trump toadies, or of being tweeted against by Trump. American soldiers risk their lives to defend us in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria while crypto-Republicans are terrified of a tweet!
 
We can expect this Fascist Party faithful to continue to obstruct everything President Biden tries to do. They will do everything in their power to make life difficult for him and thus for American progress. As evidence of that, we can point to the large majority of purportedly House Republicans (126 out of 196) who signed onto the disgraceful amicus brief submitted in support of the outrageous Texas attempt to overturn the results of the presidential election. Fortunately, the U.S. Supreme Court swatted away that seditious assault on our democracy and sacred rule of law with appropriate dripping contempt.
 
The Trump Fascist Party (“TFP”) in Congress will disrupt, disinform, deny and deflect as vigorously as their champion did during his destructive four years at their helm. You can also expect that their state legislative colleagues will do all they can to suppress the vote so that, although a dwindling minority, they can continue to hold power and usurp the will of the majority. They are already busily at work doing that in many states where they control the legislative branches—making it more difficult to vote by mail; restricting early voting; and adapting other Jim Crow era tactics to the present circumstances.
 
While they will dishonestly cling to the Republican label as long as they can in order to camouflage their Fascist inclinations, make no mistake. They are Fascist to the bone.
 
The media owes it to the public to daily remind its readers, viewers and listeners that these are dangerous Fascists out to destroy the America that has served us so well for two-and-a-half centuries. Then, in 2022, we must begin the process of returning them to civilian life.
 
Dick Hermann
December 18, 2020

​“Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”
--Lord Krishna from the Bhagavad-Gita
 
This famous quotation came to worldwide attention after it was uttered by J. Robert Oppenheimer, scientific director of the Manhattan Project, in the early morning of July 16, 1945 upon witnessing the detonation of Trinity, the world’s first atomic bomb, in New Mexico’s high desert. His resort to this Hindu declaration was a warning to humanity about the implications of what he and his 2,000 physicists working on the project had unleashed.
 
These words seem particularly appropriate again today when contemplating our current world destroyer as he annihilates every remaining norm he has not already shattered in his four years of behaving like a presidential wrecking ball. His attempt to destroy American democracy is every bit as world-altering and consequential as the advent of the nuclear age. His attempted coup d’état may not succeed in keeping him in office, but it may upend what we have come to realize is the fragile democratic basis of our government.
 
The alternate universe in which Trump’s base resides is unfortunately impervious to facts. This is a huge problem for the incoming Biden administration and for the country’s future, given the base’s delusional belief that Biden is an illegitimate president. I don’t know how or if this Big Lie can be surmounted, but I am convinced that the ability to turn this country around and bring it back to a semblance of normalcy depends upon Biden being able to do just that.
 
If the economy can bounce back strongly, I don’t think it will be necessary to convince all 74 million Trump voters that facts matter and that President Biden was duly elected. It might be possible to persuade a substantial cohort of them who currently persist in occupying a dream world divorced from reality, notwithstanding that their dreamscape will be daily fueled by the lunatic fringe media intent on continually feeding their delusions.
 
A robust economy hinges on the execution of four transformative policies that will help them in tangible ways positively affecting their pocketbooks, all four of which were beyond Trump’s attention span or capabilities: (1) Managing the pandemic responsibly and moving past it toward economic restoration. (2) Successfully tackling the opioid epidemic. (3) Creating good paying jobs in exurban and rural areas through extensive infrastructure and retraining initiatives. (4) Focusing on the job-generation that intelligent climate change policies can effect. In short, demonstrating that they are no longer being left behind and will clearly be better off than they were during Trump’s destructive, do-nothing tenure.
 
A pocketful of cash would be a powerful antidote to fear, anger, resentment and fantasy.
 
Dick Hermann
December 11, 2020

“Just an old sweet song
Keeps Georgia on my mind.”
--Hoagy Charmichael & Stuart Gorrell
 
The second most important election of the last four years will take place on January 5th in Georgia, the state that provided the most surprising result on November 3rd when it went Democratic for the first time in a generation.
 
There are two formidable Democratic Senate candidates, Rev. Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff. Warnock, the head pastor at Atlanta’s iconic Ebenezer Baptist Church, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s pulpit, is pitted against Republican Sen. Kelly Loeffler. Ossoff, a 33-year old entrepreneur, is up against Republican Incumbent David Perdue.
 
Here’s what Loeffler and Purdue have in common:

1. Both are credibly alleged to have used inside information to profit from the Covid-19 pandemic.
2. Both are outspoken racists. At an October rally, Perdue mockingly mispronounced Vice-President-elect Kamala Harris’s first name despite having served with her in the Senate for the last four years. His campaign also put out a doctored photograph of Ossoff, who is Jewish, altering the size of his nose, a classic Nazi trope. Both despicable outrages were naked appeals to the racist and anti-Semitic components of the Trump base. Loeffler, who owns the Women’s National Basketball Association’s Atlanta Dream, criticized her team for wearing uniforms that said “Black Lives Matter” in line with all the other WNBA teams. Her own players are actively working against her re-election.
3. Both supported Trump’s most disgraceful policies—ripping babies from their mother’s arms and putting them in cages; attempting to take away healthcare from 23 million Americans; remaining silent whenever Trump encourages white supremacists and QAnon conspiracy theories about Democrats eating children and similar nonsense.
4. Both want to terminate the Affordable Care Act in the middle of an out-of-control pandemic and relieve insurers from the Act’s prohibition against denying insurance on the basis of pre-existing conditions.
5. Both are avid proponents of the Jim Crow voter suppression tactics that cropped up in Georgia and around the country during the presidential election: closing down voting locations in minority areas; putting minority voters through ringers if they wanted to cast ballots; etc.
6. Both demanded the resignation of fellow Republican, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, in spite of his running a clean and fair election that Joe Biden won in the state that was the poster child for suppressing the vote in 2018. They want to replace him with someone who will return Georgia to the good old days of rampant voter suppression and stolen GOP victories.
7. Both are spineless followers of Mitch McConnell’s blanket obstructionism that refuses to allow the Senate to get anything constructive done for the American people.
8. Both spew the Trump line about fraud and rigged elections absent any evidence, and lie about Ossoff and Warnock, both centrists, being socialists.
9. Both are complicit in Trump’s petulant attempts to trash democracy and bring down the nation in revenge for his electoral loss; his allowing Covid-19 to run rampant, spreading disease, hospitalizations  and deaths at record rates; and his decimation of our national security leadership that puts the nation at risk.
10. Both support the president’s efforts at impeding the Biden presidency by issuing a barrage of executive orders and regulations designed to make life difficult for the incoming administration. These two sorry excuses for Senators have no intention of working across the aisle.

 
In sum, these two Senate mediocrities are a terrible reflection on their state and the nation. If this despicable duo wins, Mitch McConnell will continue to control the Senate and roadblock everything the Biden administration wants to do to move the country forward out of the pandemic and the chaos and catastrophes of the Trump Era and back to a strong economy. Georgia surely can do better.
 
Ossoff and Warnock, in contrast, are both ethically grounded and have achieved success through hard work. They have the best interests of Georgians and the country in their hearts and minds. They both have records of good behavior, decency, humanity and empathy, in stark contrast to their sleazy opponents. Character counts.
 
Dick Hermann
December 4, 2020

Just because Donald Trump, only the fourth president in 100 years to lose his re-election bid, is devoting his limited energy and attention span to subverting our democracy doesn’t mean his minions aren’t busy elevating his and their customary cruelty to a new level. Trump’s stooges are feverishly at work screwing the most vulnerable among us. Here’s just a few of the malevolent things they are doing on their way out the door into a well-deserved oblivion:
 
Continuing the Immigration Assault
 
For four years, the Trump administration has vandalized immigration. They have made getting into this country legally almost impossible. Their guiding principles have been malice, racism, lies and contempt for international law and human decency.  They don’t even try to hide it. Now they are at it again in a last ditch attempt to destroy the few human lives their viciousness has not yet touched.
 
In September we learned that an ICE prison in Georgia was sending immigrant women for unnecessary hysterectomies that the women didn’t consent to or even realize were happening. Congress’s attempt to investigate this criminal outrage is being stymied because those victims who have agreed to testify are suddenly being deported.
 
Similarly, Cameroonian asylum seekers who allege they were physically assaulted, pepper-sprayed and threatened into signing their own deportation orders are being fast-tracked for deportation so that they too cannot be called to testify about what they have suffered at the hands of Trump’s immigration goons.
 
Not to be outdone in vindictiveness by ICE, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services recently announced that it is making it harder to become a naturalized citizen, effective December 1. The new citizenship test has 128 questions vs. 70 on the old one. Many of the new questions are more difficult than the current ones. I challenge members of Congress, especially Republicans, to answer them correctly. As Senator-elect Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) recently stated: “Our government wasn’t set up for one group to have all three branches of government — You know, the House, the Senate, and the executive.” Sheesh!
 
One More Kick in Disabled People’s Teeth
 
It isn’t enough that candidate Trump back in 2016 mocked a disabled reporter for his disability or that millions of coronavirus survivors are likely to have lasting disabilities. The Trump toadies at the Social Security Administration have just issued final rules making it much harder for disabled individuals to receive Social Security Disability Income (SSDI) and Supplemental Security Income (SSI) benefits and to put in jeopardy the SSDI and SSI benefits of people currently receiving them.
 
They are replacing the impartial, independent corps of administrative law judges (ALJs) who decide these cases with internal agency lawyers who are Social Security Administration employees beholden to their bosses’ edicts. Expect the number of needy, deserving people who will be denied these essential benefits to skyrocket.
 
The second rule increases the number and frequency of "continuing disability reviews" (during which beneficiaries must prove they're still disabled). This new rule is intended to make it easier for the government to throw people off the disability rolls.
 
Both rules will go into effect in December.
 
As with everything Trump and his cronies do, the result in all these cases is callous cruelty. The viciousness of these reprobates knows no bounds. Expect more of the same before they’re gone.
 
Dick Hermann
November 27, 2020

“It is impossible that a man who is false to his friends and neighbours should be true to the public.”
--Bishop Berkeley, 1750
 
What a sad, repulsive, classless, no character man is Donald Trump. The man-baby in the White House cannot accept that the American people resoundingly rejected him at the polls in a free, fair and honest election marred only by massive Republican voter suppression of minority voters nationwide. Every time one thinks Trump cannot go lower, a new bottom calls out to him like a mythological siren. For Trump there is no bottom.
 
His final repellant acts as president violate the oath he took as well as common decency, honor and humanity. Having abandoned any pretense of performing his presidential duties, he stages coups d’état at the Defense and Homeland Security Departments, installing unqualified bootlickers in place of the people he fired by tweet. He spouts wild, unsubstantiated conspiracy theories and alleges a stolen election rampant with nonexistent voter fraud—laughable given that the alleged wrongdoing only affected him and no other Republicans down-ballot. Some conspiracy! He launches clown car election lawsuits, unsupported by any evidence, that get laughed out of court.
 
The worst elements of this awful man’s scorched-earth approach to his final days are:

1. his disinterest in and lack of any action whatsoever to tackle a pandemic raging out of control in the country he swore to protect. Despite the number of cases, hospitalizations and deaths surging, all he cares about is wreaking vengeance and havoc on his government and his people. It falls to the President-elect to behave responsibly while the lame-duck incumbent wallows in self-pity and false accusations. His execrable conduct will be rightly condemned by history, but that is small recompense for the millions of Americans suffering now because of his behavior;
2. the threat to national security of Trump’s refusal to allow a transition to the new administration. The 9/11 Commission noted that the 2000 transition delay contributed to the delayed intelligence that might have helped us obtain an early warning of Al Qaeda’s plans to attack us. Trump’s advisers had to talk him down from launching a military attack on Iran. His decision to pull troops out of Afghanistan opens up that country to becoming a terrorist haven once again;
3. his wholesale adoption of two Nazi tactics that aroused the German public and paved their way to power and dictatorship: the “stab in the back,” i.e. that corrupt politicians were guilty of sabotaging the army in the field at the end of World War I, turning a sure victory into defeat. Trump has adapted that to his rigged election falsehood; and “the Big Lie,” a Joseph Goebbels invention that in its Trumpian manifestation asserts that the election was rigged and Trump really won. Both, of course, are total twaddle. The problem is that Trump’s followers believe this poppycock to the detriment of our fragile democracy and the rule of law. His contamination of our democracy is not something we will easily correct; and
4. his all-out assault on democracy represented by his effort, after all else (lies, conspiracy theories, distortion, disinformation) failed, to overturn the election through subversion, namely attempts to persuade Republican state legislatures to pick their own slate of electors in defiance of the popular will. The incalculable damage this sabotage does to America will long outlast Trump.

 
Trump has four goals in mind with his indecent conduct: (1) to delegitimize a legitimate election. Sadly and inexplicably, his supporters actually believe this nonsense; (2) to make President-elect Biden’s job more difficult; (3) to desperately cling to office because come January 20, 2021, he loses his protection against the 10 criminal and civil investigations and cases awaiting him; and (4) to bring the country down in flames with him if he doesn’t get his way.
 
Equally vulgar is the way senior Republicans have once again fallen in line behind this reprehensible man masquerading as a president. Lindsey Graham, Ted Cruz, Kevin McCarthy and Mitch McConnell, stooges all who have bought into Trump’s con/coup, deserve the condemnation of all Americans and of history for their disgraceful conduct. They dishonor the oath they took to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution, and they run roughshod over the rule of law and democratic ideals for which so many Americans have fought and died. Of course these patsies know better, but they cower in fear of being tweeted against by the autocrat they chose to follow and his loyal base. They are beneath contempt.
 
I supported President Ford’s blanket pardon of Richard Nixon. I believed the country had been through enough and did not need to countenance the prospect of more Nixonian anguish. This time, however, is different. Trump and his enablers need to face justice for their criminal and treasonous conduct. A reckoning must be had. Accountability is as American as apple pie.
 
Dick Hermann
November 21, 2020

The 2020 election is not only the most consequential since at least 1860, but is also the one generating the most reverberating observations:

• The most stunning outcome of the 2020 election is that almost 50 percent of Americans, despite observing four years of criminality, lives lost, children torn from parents, a disregard for the rule of law, the attempted destruction of our delicate democracy and abysmal behavior, still voted for Donald Trump. The takeaway? While Trump may be gone, Trumpism is not and will continue to be a powerful voice of unreason on the right. Unless a way around it is found, it will be extremely difficult to govern, given a divided Congress and a Senate whose Republican members will continue to be dependent on conspiracy-obsessed constituents for re-election and thus disinclined to reach across the aisle to get productive things done.
• Mitch McConnell will not change his spots just because Donald Trump is history. He will be just as obstructionist as ever. Dems, however, do have a strategy they can pursue: cultivate the handful of GOP Senators who pass for “moderate:” Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Mitt Romney and perhaps Ben Sasse. If they can persuade two or three of them, then aspirational policies like tackling climate change, infrastructure and immigration reform might have a shot.
• Trump’s ridiculous claims of a vast Democratic conspiracy to steal the election is belied by the party’s failure to flip the Senate and its loss of seats in the House. In one sense, Trump is just about the only Republican who lost.
• Biden had no coattails. In fact, he had negative coattails resulting in a potentially hostile Senate, a reduced House majority and antediluvian state legislatures that will continue to dominate redistricting for the next decade.
• The polls could not have been more off the mark.
• The pundits whose superficial analyses demonstrated a depth of cluelessness should be consigned to history’s also-rans.
• Voting overhaul. There is no excuse for long lines. There is no logic in disallowing the counting of mail-in and early-voted ballots until election day. Counts need to begin earlier so that results don’t have to wait ad nauseum. The need for a reinvigorated Voting Rights Act is acute. It should reinstitute and expand Justice Department pre-clearance reviews of any proposed registration and voting changes by any state.
• Disinformation is formidable. Republicans used it with great effectiveness in Miami-Dade County, Florida and it made the difference in carrying the state. Democrats had no answer to the hysteria Republicans raised about socialism coming to America if Joe Biden were elected. The appeal to anti-Castro Cubans, anti-Maduro Venezuelans and anti-Ortega Nicaraguans who came to these shores to escape socialist oppression was powerful.
• Social Media needs some controls. It was used to great effect by Republicans hawking conspiracy theories and lies.
• Playing by the rules disadvantages Democrats and incentivizes Republicans to continue to lie, cheat and steal elections and court seats. I am not advocating that Dems sully themselves by stooping to play in the GOP moshpit, but some strategic rethinking of how to counter this vileness needs to occur.
• Russia should not go unpunished after it once again attempted, this time with far less success, to intervene and interfere in our democratic process. This is war and we have unilaterally disarmed. That has to change. We need to go on offense.
• Kudos to the federal and state agencies tasked with election security. They did a terrific job. The lessons of 2016 really resonated. And a pat on the head to state and local election administrators and volunteers who performed a thankless task under extreme duress magnificently.
• The U.S. Postal Service slow-walked ballots to many counting locations. It needs to be depoliticized. Never again should a president and postmaster general be allowed to subvert it in an attempt to steal an election. A bipartisan commission should select the postmaster general. “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night [nor Louis DeJoy] should stay these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds."

 
Dick Hermann
November 6, 2020

​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