Category American Values

After Such Violence, the Center Must Hold

Pat Ryan Leave a comment

New York Times opinion writer David French had these thoughts soon after the apparent assassination attempt against Donald Trump on Saturday evening. I hope we can all share his sentiments as we go forward.

“Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.” William Butler Yeats wrote these words in his poem “The Second Coming” in a different time of violence and fear. The year was 1919, Europe was still reeling from World War I, a deadly influenza pandemic was sweeping through the world, and the Irish war of independence was underway. Yeats was writing from the heart of a storm, a storm that would grow indescribably worse in 20 short years.

I think of Yeats’s words often. By “center,” he’s referring not to some kind of moderate political middle but rather to the moral center of civilization. When the moral center gives way, nations fall.

I thought of those words again when I saw the blood on Donald Trump’s ear on Saturday. Now is the time for America’s moral center to rise up and declare — with one voice, neither red nor blue — “Enough.” We either recover our sense of decency and basic respect for the humanity of our opponents, or we will see, in Yeats’s words, the “blood-dimmed tide” loosed in our land.

The cultural conditions for chaos are created by a lack of courage and character. Yeats lamented that the “best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” And already, we’ve seen the passionate intensity of the worst on display. Members of one extreme faction have claimed the shooting was an elaborate ploy to generate sympathy for Trump. At the same time, members of the opposing extreme faction have attempted to claim that President Biden is responsible for the attack.

How does the center hold? Democrats and independents must stand in solidarity with Republicans, grieving for the dead, praying for the wounded and giving thanks that Trump survived with only a minor wound. Virtually every leading Democrat has condemned the violence with a loud voice, and Biden has both condemned the violence and spoken to Trump directly.

All of this is good and necessary, but it is not sufficient. Each of us has our own role to play, in our own circles of influence, either big or small. There has rarely been a better time to love our enemies, to pray for our nation and to remember — during one of the most fraught political campaigns in generations — that each and every one of us is a human being, created in the image of God.

This is not your Founding Fathers’ America

Pat Ryan Leave a comment

When we feel our treatment by our rulers has become so intolerable, so unjust – so inhumane – that we must declare our independence among the peoples and nations of the world, it just makes sense that we should explain to the rest of the world why we are doing it.  Here goes.

–Pat’s paraphrase of the preamble to the Declaration of Independence

The Founding Fathers then laid out the Declaration of Independence of the 13 “united States of America” which included the self-evident truths of the “unalienable” rights that they believed are the birthright of all humans.  Point by point, they laid out their grievances against George III and insisted they had made every good faith effort to resolve differences peacefully.  They explained that they had appealed to the goodness and mercy of “our British brethren” to end the mistreatment from which they suffered, but found them unresponsive.  And in light of those facts, they declared to the world that they and their fellow Americans were going into business for themselves.  The war that had begun the previous year was concluded by treaty in 1783; by 1787 a new Constitution of the United States was approved on behalf of the people of the new nation “in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity…”.

That legal framework set out principles to guide our development and our lives, including the principle that no man is above the law.  That idea had a pretty run there, right up until last Monday when the Supreme Court of the United States decided that presidents and former presidents of this great country were effectively kings or queens.  And despots, if they choose to be.

Immunity from prosecution.  The Justice Department has a policy that no sitting president can be prosecuted while in office, but there was no law that said that, and nothing explicit in the Constitution says a former president is immune from prosecution for officials acts taken while in office.  The high-minded concept was that a president was a person given certain powers to exercise – temporarily – on behalf of his country and in its best interests, and who would then return to his life as a regular citizen.  Would President Gerald Ford have granted Richard Nixon a pardon after his resignation over Watergate crimes if anyone had thought that the former president was immune from prosecution?  No one before has ever had the temerity to claim he had immunity from prosecution…or quite frankly, the need for immunity…before you know who.

A man made famous as much for his over-use and abuse of the legal system as for his dubious business skills that necessitated all the suing and threats of suing had nothing to lose and everything to gain (and no shame) by making an unsupported legal claim that had the desired effect of delaying his trial on felony charges of trying to overturn the legitimate results of the 2020 election.  The trial court judge hearing this case rejected the claim of immunity, so did a unanimous panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals.  The Supreme Court…well, the Supremes (1) surprised many when they agreed to hear the case at all, causing a delay until (2) they heard oral arguments April 24 and then (3) “deliberated” the rest of April, all of May and all of June – more than nine weeks – before issuing the ruling.  Guess it takes a while to create a whole new right not found in the Constitution, especially when you had said yourself, under oath, that such a right did not exist:

https://twitter.com/AccountableGOP/status/1808191057236000975
https://twitter.com/AccountableGOP/status/1807835389865951253
https://twitter.com/AccountableGOP/status/1807855254006124944

Hmmm…same folks who said Roe v. Wade was settled precedent. Interesting…

The idea proposed by Trump lawyers in oral arguments was that immunity is needed to protect former presidents from being corruptly prosecuted by their successors; whether or not that is true, there was no such right in the Constitution until this court created it with this ruling.  When was the last time you saw a former president pursued in the legal system by a previous president?  (If you said Biden is doing it to Trump right now, that is the wrong answer; he’s not.)  You haven’t seen it before: not even the lawless Trump went after Barack Obama or his other predecessors!  The assertion that this is a real and dangerous prospect is based on nothing in law or custom or history; it is a projection from Trump’s narcissistic personality disorder wherein he knows what he wants to do to Joe Biden and to every other perceived enemy, and his fevered brain assumes that’s how everyone else operates, too.

Not only did the court create a right that wasn’t there (don’t you just hate those activist judges that Republicans have been warning us about?) but, as argued by Thomas Wolf of the Brennan Center for Justice, “The Court has created an elaborate system of ambiguous rules that will not only ratchet up the complexity of the case against Trump but also erode the checks on presidential illegality. It is both a roadblock to prosecution and an encouragement to more insurrection.”

The procedures the Court has crafted to go with [the new rule] are pitched in Trump’s favor. Whenever the case returns to Judge Tanya Chutkan’s trial court, Trump will be presumed immune by default; the burden will be on the prosecution to establish that he isn’t. The Court’s definition of “official acts” cuts extremely broadly, stretching to “the outer perimeter of [Trump’s] official responsibility.” (The Court refused to say exactly where that perimeter ends.) The prosecution must show that prosecuting Trump for those official acts “would pose no dangers of intrusion on the authority and functions” of the presidency (emphasis added). The prosecution won’t be able to claim an official act was “unofficial” because of the president’s motives for doing it. (emphasis added) And Trump can seek another round of appellate review if the trial court doesn’t rule him immune. Should the government clear these hurdles, it won’t be able to use the “testimony or private records of [Trump] or his advisors” about official acts to prove his guilt. (emphasis added)

The Court justifies all this new complexity as necessary to protect imaginary future presidents from imaginary future prosecutions. It does not, critically, justify it as a response to the acts of the real and credibly accused former president in the case before it. Just as members of the Court’s conservative supermajority consistently steered the conversation at oral argument away from Trump’s charges, they do not even try to grapple with the bigger implications of applying their new rule to the case in front of them or the consequences if their rule ultimately lets Trump skate. Instead, the Court bows out of the case with the tidy but myopic claim that it “cannot afford to fixate exclusively, or even primarily, on present exigencies,” lest “transient results” threaten “the future of our Republic.”

The Court doesn’t engage with the ramifications of its opinion, because it can’t — at least not without exposing the fundamental bankruptcy of the whole edifice it has just built. The majority’s ruling cannot possibly be the rule for any functioning democracy. Trump has been charged with attempting to overthrow the election that threw him out of office. Any rule that would grant a president immunity for that crime would remove the principal check on presidential abuses of authority in our democratic system: the vote. And it would encourage other losing candidates to try the same in future elections. (emphasis added)  It is in this sense that the Court’s opinion is truly lawless. It does not merely invent constitutional rules that are antithetical to our founding commitments or enduring values. It threatens to free presidents from the constraints of law and democracy. And it paves the way for future presidents to try to make good on the most antidemocratic of all propositions: might makes right.

In reaching to resolve future imagined cases of presidential criminality while downplaying the actual criminality before it, the Court has imperiled accountability for Trump’s wrongs. It has done severe violence to our law. And it has left our democracy exposed.

Look at what Trump did while president – I mean, just the things we know he did – when there was no presumption of immunity from later prosecution; just what the hell do you think he’ll do next time if given the chance?   What about his calls for televised military tribunals of Liz Cheney and other enemies?  Immunity!  What about all the assaults on our system being planned by his supporters behind Project 2025?  Immunity!

And what about this threat from the president of the Heritage Foundation that “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”?  Uh, do what we want and you won’t be hurt?  Really?

And this whole depressing development comes on the heels of a televised “debate” in which we saw one candidate for president lie his ass off for 90 minutes and the other look like an elderly deer caught in the headlights; Biden is now telling Democratic governors he’s fine but needs to stop working by 8 p.m.  I got the feeling this is going to get even weirder.

The center holds, for now

Pat Ryan Leave a comment

The more things change – a U.S. president convicted of a felony offense for the first time ever – the more they stay the same – Donald “Trump calls trial a ‘scam,’ vows to appeal historic verdict.” 

The verdict in New York yesterday was historic: not only for being the first time an American president or former president was found guilty of having committed a felony, but for the American system of justice demonstrating that any American citizen can be held to account before a jury of his or her peers.  In spite of that citizen’s rank in society, or his attempts to undermine the system itself by waging “an all-out war against the judicial system before the verdict came in, hoping to blunt the political damage and position him[self] as a martyr.”

But amid the relentless offensive by Trump and his allies on the legal infrastructure holding him accountable, the trial came with a substantial cost, according to those who study democracy, with the ultimate impact likely to be measured in November.

(snip)

“The judicial system has taken a body blow from Trump’s assaults,” said Kim Lane Scheppele, a professor of sociology at Princeton University who studies the rise and fall of constitutional government. Forcing him to sit through the trial, follow orders and listen to evidence against himself meant that “his rage at being controlled by others is going to be directed at trying to bring the whole judicial system down with him.”

(snip)

But there was something different about Trump’s repeated complaints about this first criminal jury trial that made them even more potent, experts say. Whenever a politician is brought up on charges, “every single time that leader will scream up and down that this is a politicized process and his political enemies are out to get him,” said Steven Levitsky, a professor of government at Harvard University. “What’s notable here,” said Levitsky, co-author of the book “Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point,” “is that the entire Republican Party is marching in lockstep, along with right-wing media, claiming that the legal process has been weaponized, and therefore eroding public trust in a really vital institution.”

(snip)

“The problem is that not even the best institutions in the world can function well in the context of extreme polarization, particularly when one party has turned against democratic institutions. And so extreme polarization and extreme radicalization will undermine and destroy even the best of institutions. And that’s what we’re seeing in the United States.” But even if Trump damaged the judicial system’s reputation through his complaints about the trial, to not prosecute “when there’s a strong sense that wrongdoing happened,” Levitsky said, would be more damaging. “That would hold the judicial system and the political system hostage to say that to prosecute will bring more blowback than benefit. If you give in to that, you have no rule of law.”

Did this trial and all the sideshows related to it diminish the American judicial process?  We can each answer that for ourselves.  I think not, and I don’t think it has for the many many millions of Americans who don’t take every childish taunt out of Trump’s mouth as gospel truth.  He was obviously trying to pre-rouse his supporters to doubt and reject any verdict against him, in the same way he tries to get them to believe that any election he loses had to have been rigged; the unfortunate thing is that it appears to work for many many millions of other Americans.  He promised a “news conference” this morning, and it was filled with more of the same lies as came before.  And, he took no questions…which to my mind makes this a campaign speech rather than a news conference.  Trump is not famous for engaging in a vigorous exchange of viewpoints.

(What he is famous for, among some, is being a TV star, and this morning I discovered an article in the Washington Post with some terrific background about that show.  It cites a recent essay in Slate by one of the producers on that show – who has just been released from a non-disclosure agreement and is free to talk about what he witnessed – and Bill “Pruitt describes choices about scripts and editing and challenges as efforts to present a particular, inaccurate image: the show’s star, Donald Trump, as an omniscient business leader. Looking back across the decades since the first season of the show was filmed, Pruitt clearly regrets having helped foster that perception.”  It’s worth your time to read.)

Trump says he will appeal the verdicts and that is certainly his right, but don’t expect that to bring a conclusion to the legal fight any time soon.  Trump is famously litigious when it comes to civil matters that are at bottom just about money; potential appeals in this case – to the trial judge, two levels of state appeals courts and (yes, possibly) the Supreme Court of the United States could take years to conclude.  Not that it matters, though: Trump, the convicted felon, is still allowed by law to run for president and to serve if he is elected.  And the first reaction to the conviction from among MAGA Nation was to shower him with tens of millions of dollars in campaign contributions!

Does this conviction change the course of the presidential election?  No one knows yet, including the talking heads who are acting like they do know.  It seems plain that those who are brainwashed in the MAGA cult either don’t believe he did anything wrong or don’t care what he did, or think this whole thing is more evidence of the anti-Trump Deep State at work.  Those who were never going to vote for Trump before didn’t need this conviction to sway them.  For the rest, this might be what it finally takes for some Trump supporters to change their minds and some undecideds to choose a side.  It sure seems like it should matter, to everyone.  It wasn’t so long ago, I think, that it would have.

Fingers crossed, hoping for the best

Pat Ryan Leave a comment

A few thoughts while waiting for the New York jury to return a verdict in the business fraud/election interference trial of you know who:

I hate it every time a news report refers to Donald Trump’s “Hush Money Trial.”  Not only is it inaccurate and lazy, but it plays into his overheated claim that he’s being persecuted, that there was no crime committed.

  • It is NOT against the law to have sex with a porn actor.  Of the many things it may be (and you have your own list of the things that it is), “against the law” is not one of them.  I pray we don’t return to an age in this country where it is against the law for consenting adults to engage in some non-hurtful behaviors.
  • It is NOT against the law to pay hush money.  Blackmail is a crime, for the person committing it; it’s not illegal for you to pay money to keep someone from telling a secret about you.
  • It is NOT even a crime to use your private company’s funds to pay that hush money, provided your paper trail does not lie about the use of the money.  Your investors or directors probably won’t like it much and may take action against you, but it’s not business fraud.  (And if Trump is SOOO rich, as he claims, why didn’t he just write a check himself and not get the company money involved?  I know, hindsight is 20/20.)

BUT, if you doctor your company’s books to falsify the record about why the money was spent – like, saying it was “legal fees” when it was really reimbursing an employee for fronting you the hush money to conceal a private matter – that IS a crime.  It is business fraud in New York, and that is the crime the Manhattan district attorney is prosecuting.  It became a major felony when, in this case, the fraud was committed to advance another crime: improperly interfering with the 2016 presidential election by covering up information that could harm Trump’s chances.  (Man, isn’t it hard to get your head around the idea that it was Trump and Republicans who actually were committing the election fraud, not the liberals and the illegals?)

Lately I’ve been running across many clever, funny, and to-the-point posts that take the varnish off of efforts to obscure what Trump has done, and what he promises to do if elected.  On ABC’s This Week George Stephanopoulos had a terrific summary as the current trial began.

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Last week Jennifer Rubin had a good roundup of Trump’s pratfall-filled week leading up to the trial’s closing arguments, including his not-unexpected cop-out when it came to fulfilling his repeated promise to testify in his own defense (something that I know no defense lawyer wants a client with a total lack of self-control and a well-documented history of serial lying to do).

Finally, Trump predictably chickened out of testifying. He repeatedly boasted he would testify, but like so many other attempts to look tough, this one fizzled into the ether. The episode underscored his cowardice and fragility. At some level, he likely knew that if he had taken the stand, he would have wound up either perjuring himself, digging his own legal grave or both.

What explains these serial debacles? This is who Trump is. He cozies up to neo-Nazis and white nationalists, so naturally he attracts aides with the mind-set to borrow material from fascists. He has contempt for women and tries to please his white Christian nationalist base at every turn; unsurprisingly, he has no idea where to stop and how far is too far. And he bullies his lawyers, insisting on making dumb arguments and calling witnesses he thinks are swell but who implode under examination. (And because he surrounds himself with disreputable charlatans and yes-men, one can hardly be surprised when they reveal their true character.)

For all Trump’s braggadocio, it may be that he just isn’t all that bright, cannot think strategically beyond the moment and lacks any common sense. Without aides or family members empowered to stop him from colossal missteps, he racks up the blunders. And perhaps like a good many bullies, he really does fear taking a punch.

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Trump’s family, which finally began to trickle in to the courthouse to act like they support him, joined in the family business – lying to our faces – when Eric Trump clearly and cleanly misstated the facts:

And beyond the current trial, the situation has become severe enough to get the historian and documentarian Ken Burns off the political sideline; he had this warning to America during a commencement speech at Brandeis University.

https://twitter.com/Mollyploofkins/status/1794455333764538763

Just a couple more..I can’t resist:

https://twitter.com/AnnieForTruth/status/1795772810520117719
https://twitter.com/TheReelRandom/status/1795769741593714898
https://twitter.com/JoJoFromJerz/status/1795848109752217919

The real majority rules

Pat Ryan Leave a comment

It only lasted a moment.  An instant, perhaps.  But the spark grew into a happy realization: the U.S. House of Representatives can do something constructive after all, despite the mountain of evidence to the contrary it has piled up since January 2023.  The headline on the email that popped in yesterday afternoon was “House approves $95 billion foreign aid bill” and it turns out that the speaker of the Republican-majority House accomplished it by working with Democrats to outvote the extreme MAGA wing of his own party.

It’s the sort of thing that almost never happens anymore.  Dating back to the mid-1990s, Republican speakers have rarely allowed full floor votes on bills that weren’t already supported by a majority of their own party.  Even in cases where a majority of the full House – Republicans and Democrats and independents – supports a proposal, no final vote is permitted; that keeps the opposition party from looking good by passing legislation with the help of a few renegades from the majority party.  In recent years it has also allowed smaller groups of GOP members with extreme views to prevent more moderate members – in concert with the hated Democrats – from passing legislation that the extremists oppose.  That has prevented a full House vote on, among many other things lately, a bill to send more American military assistance to Ukraine to support its war with Russia.

Part of the story here is what happened to change Speaker Mike Johnson’s mind on helping Ukraine.

When the House passed a $40 billion emergency funding bill for Ukraine in May 2022, support for Ukraine was largely still a bipartisan issue. But a little-known conservative congressman from Louisiana was one of the 57 Republicans to oppose it.

Now, just six months after his unlikely elevation to speaker of the House, Mike Johnson (R-La.) has pushed through a $60 billion effort to bolster’s Ukraine arsenal, along with funding for Israel and the Indo-Pacific.

The move marks a major victory and dramatic turnabout for the speaker who is trying to gain control of a bitterly divided Republican conference. The far right is fiercely against Ukraine aid — 112 Republicans, just over half of the conference, opposed it on the House floor Saturday and he had to rely on unanimous Democratic backing — and Johnson’s decision to greenlight a floor vote could come at great political cost. He could very well lose his job as speaker over it.

(snip)

“Look, history judges us for what we do,” said an emotional Johnson, holding back tears and with a quivering lip at a news conference last week in response to a question from The Washington Post. “This is a critical time right now, critical time on the world stage. I could make a selfish decision and do something that’s different, but I’m doing here what I believe to be the right thing.”

The Washington Post story goes on to explain Johnson’s evolution, which seems to boil down to the fact that he learned more about the situation and the stakes.  Good on him, an extreme conservative and evangelical, for not turning Speaker Johnson (1)his back on real-world, secular evidence that he might have been wrong in May 2022; maybe there’s a bit of accepting the responsibility of being a leader at work here, too.  “One Republican House member recalls: “I’ll never forget Johnson one time said, ‘I’ve gone from representing my district only to representing the entire [House] and the country.’ For someone to go from where he was to where he is now as quickly as he did … is remarkable.”

The other part of the story is the happy realization that brightened my afternoon: the evidence that the MAGA wing can be defeated, that the ignorant and selfish isolationists will not win if the rest of us stand up to them.  When we have leaders who put the best interests of the whole country first, who are serious about supporting America’s role as a leader of the whole world, a rump faction cannot take control.  And I do mean “rump.”

I also take this as an example of what the founders of Axios wrote about recently, the idea that American society and politics are not as irretrievably broken as it seems.

Here’s a wild thought experiment: What if we’ve been deceived into thinking we’re more divided, more dysfunctional and more defeated than we actually are?

Why it matters: Well, there’s compelling evidence we’ve been trapped in a reality distortion bubble — social media, cable TV and tribal political wars — long enough to warp our view of the reality around us.

The big picture: Yes, deep divisions exist on some topics. But on almost every topic of monthly outrage, it’s a fringe view — or example — amplified by the loudest voices on social media and politicians driving it.

  • No, most Christians aren’t white Christian nationalists who see Donald Trump as a God-like figure. Most are ignoring politics and wrestling with their faith.
  • No, most college professors aren’t trying to silence conservatives or turn kids into liberal activists. Most are teaching math, or physics, or biology.
  • No, most kids don’t hate Israel and run around chanting, “From the river to the sea.” On most campuses, most of the time, students are doing what students have always done.
  • No, most Republicans don’t want to ban all abortions starting at conception. No, most Democrats don’t want to allow them until birth.
  • No, immigrants who are here illegally aren’t rushing to vote and commit crimes. Actual data show both rarely happen — even amid a genuine crisis at the border.
  • No, most people aren’t fighting on X. Turns out, the vast majority of Americans never tweet at all.
  • No, most people aren’t cheering insults on Fox News and MSNBC in the evening. Turns out, less than 2 percent of Americans are even watching.

Reality check: But our politics are hopelessly divided, Jim and Mike! You’re naive!

  • Yes, current politics, and particularly the House, seem hopelessly dysfunctional. But this flows in part from majorities so narrow that fringe figures can hijack institutions, again particularly the House, and render them dysfunctional.
  • The actual dysfunction runs much deeper for structural reasons, such as redistricting, low voter turnout in off-year elections and geographic sorting (Democrats in cities, Republicans in rural areas).

(snip)

This new poll by the AP and the NORC Center for Public Affairs Research shows a striking amount of agreement on some very big topics. Roughly 90% or more of Americans — Republicans and Democrats — agree the following rights and freedoms are extremely or very important to a functioning America:

  • Right to vote.
  • Right to equal protection under the law.
  • Right to freedom of religion.
  • Right to freedom of speech.
  • Right to privacy.

Hell, almost 80% think the right to own a gun is important to protect.

The last Republican candidate for president to win a majority of the popular vote was George W. Bush in 2004…barely, at 50.7%.  The last before that was the first George Bush, with more than 53% when he beat Michael Dukakis in 1988.  The guy at the top of the GOP ticket in the last two elections won less than 47% of the popular vote each time; in 2020 one-third of the voting age population didn’t vote at all, and almost 40% blew off the election of 2016.  Which means he was actually voted for by roughly 30% of Americans, at best: less than half of a bit more than half of the country.  Thirty percent is not close to a majority.  The MAGAs are loud and obnoxious, but they are not the voice of America.  It’s time we remember that, and promise to do the thing that they fear the most: vote them out!