Tag History.com

The real RINOs

Pat Ryan Leave a comment

Today’s Republican Party claims to be the only truly patriotic, fully America-loving and God-fearing political party in the country, the one that will protect regular America-loving and God-fearing citizens from the perfidies of big gummint and make the country, well, you-know-what again.  So, how are they doing with that today?

Well, as I write this we are just hours away from the gummint shutting down much of its operations because Congress cannot pass the legislation needed to pay the bills.  But not because the Congress and the president haven’t been able to come to a compromise: this past May President Biden and House Speaker McCarthy did agree on total spending levels through 2024.  It’s that some Republicans in the House refuse to accept the deal.  If there is no agreement by the deadline we can all look forward to enjoying life with only “essential services” from Washington.  If you are a government worker (as I was) who is deemed essential (as I was not), you get to keep working but not be paid for it; non-essential workers just get furloughed.

So much for Republicans looking out for the average, America-loving, God-fearing citizen.

What Republicans are doing instead of keeping the government running smoothly is kicking off an impeachment inquiry into President Biden.  Against whom they have no evidence – zero – of his commission of an impeachable offense.  Who brought witnesses who say they don’t see it, either:  Jonathan Turley, George Washington University law professor and Fox News contributor, said “In fact, I do not believe that the current evidence would support articles of impeachment.”  The same Republicans who screeched that Democrats were weaponizing impeachment against the former guy (who was as innocent as the day is long during his presidency, they insisted, and who is just being victimized by 91 criminal and civil indictments (so far) in his post-presidency) are only doing the Lord’s work in rooting out corruption in government.

The weird thing is, the same Republicans who are trying to use the mechanisms of government to impeach a president of the other party (albeit one who faces no substantiated allegations of any wrongdoing) are the same ones who by obstinately refusing to compromise on a spending plan will force much of that same government to close up shop for an indefinite period.  (Although, not Congress or their investigation.)  This is not, historically, what the Republican Party has been about.

The Grand Old Party was organized in the early 1850s as a coalition opposed to the expansion of slavery into new states and territories, and after the Civil War its majority in Congress –- the Radical Republicans -– passed laws to, among other things, protect the rights of freed slaves.  While Democrats in the South worked to chip away at the Reconstruction reforms, Republicans became more and more associated with the interests of business; some also supported (gasp!) progressive efforts for social reforms.

The growth of the federal government through the New Deal period and World War II encouraged more and more Southern Democrats who opposed civil rights for blacks (and other non-whites) and most expanded government programs to move to the Republican Party, where they joined up with conservative Christians stirred to action by opposition to “culture issues” that they were persuaded were threatening the “Christian nation” that God had intended America to be.  These elements came to control the party…or at least they did until they handed over the keys to a circus clown from New York.

Today those Republicans who are part of “MAGA nation” – polls say they are less than 25% of the nation as a whole — seem ever so pleased with themselves any time they get the opportunity to act-out as childish name-callers; one of their favorites is to brand a fellow Republican with whom they have some disagreement on a point of policy, no matter how trivial, as being a Republican In Name Only.  (How clever.)  But they are the real RINOs, who have succeeded in taking control of a once-respected political organization and philosophy and turned it into a vehicle (a clown car?) for instituting their warped social views into law.  It’d be a lot funnier if they weren’t so successful.

Court rejects race-based solution for race-based unfairness…hopes for the best

Pat Ryan Leave a comment

It’s no easy trick to find a way for a society to accept responsibility for the wrongs of the past that will satisfy everyone as being fair and effective.  In today’s America, we can’t even agree that “we” have such a responsibility, much less concur on how we can make a good faith effort to address the injustices suffered by the generations of Black Americans since the early 17th century.

Three generations ago America made an effort when Congress passed the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act.  But many felt more was needed, and as Jerome Karabel explains in today’s New York Times, “In a historic commencement address at Howard University on June 4, 1965, President Lyndon Johnson laid out the intellectual and moral basis for affirmative action.”

Speaking less than a year after the passage of the Civil Rights Act and two months before the passage of the Voting Rights Act, he invoked a metaphor that remains resonant 50 years later: “You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, ‘You are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.”

Affirmative action – race-based preferences in education, hiring and more – have been an attempt to correct historic race-based mistreatment.  Karabel says “After a brief honeymoon of public support, affirmative action was met with a powerful backlash, and the policy has been under attack ever since. Decades of lawsuits and legislation have chipped away at the use of racial preferences. And now, in a 6-to-3 decision, the Supreme Court has consigned them to the grave.”

From the Washington Post:

The Supreme Court on Thursday held that admissions programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina that relied in part on racial considerations violate the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection, a historic ruling that will force a dramatic change in how the nation’s private and public universities select their students.

The votes split along ideological grounds, with Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. writing for the conservative members in the majority, and the liberals dissenting. While the ruling involved race-conscious programs at Harvard and UNC, it will affect virtually every college and university in the United States.

“The student must be treated based on his or her experiences as an individual — not on the basis of race,” Roberts wrote, joined by Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel A. Alito Jr., Neil M. Gorsuch, Brett M. Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. “Many universities have for too long done just the opposite. And in doing so, they have concluded, wrongly, that the touchstone of an individual’s identity is not challenges bested, skills built, or lessons learned but the color of their skin. Our constitutional history does not tolerate that choice.”

Roberts said the admissions programs at Harvard and UNC “lack sufficiently focused and measurable objectives warranting the use of race, unavoidably employ race in a negative manner, involve racial stereotyping, and lack meaningful end points.”

But he added that “nothing in this opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise.”

(snip)

In a lengthy dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the court’s lone Latina justice, wrote that it is “a disturbing feature of today’s decision that the Court does not even attempt to make the extraordinary showing required” to reverse precedent [of previous court rulings supporting affirmative action].

Sotomayor, who has said her own life is an example of how affirmative action programs can work, spoke at length from the bench on Thursday, a tactic justices use to mark their profound disagreement with a decision.

“Equal educational opportunity is a prerequisite to achieving racial equality in our Nation,” she wrote, joined by [Justice Ketanji Brown] Jackson and Justice Elena Kagan.

“Today, this Court stands in the way and rolls back decades of precedent and momentous progress. It holds that race can no longer be used in a limited way in college admissions to achieve such critical benefits,” Sotomayor’s dissent said. “In so holding, the Court cements a superficial rule of colorblindness as a constitutional principle in an endemically segregated society where race has always mattered and continues to matter.”

As Jackson put it, “With let-them-eat-cake obliviousness, today, the majority pulls the ripcord and announces ‘colorblindness for all’ by legal fiat.  But deeming race irrelevant in law does not make it so in life.”

If it can find that race can’t be a factor in college admissions, it should only a matter of time before the court expands that reasoning to include private business, and to say that considerations of race – in the form of diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives – are also unconstitutional.

More from Karabel:

While race-conscious affirmative action is no longer permissible, it is worth noting that the Supreme Court ruling leaves intact many other forms of affirmative action — preferences for the children of alumni, preferences for the children of donors and preferences for student athletes, including for such boutique sports as sailing, fencing and squash. The consequences of this change are not entirely predictable, but based on what happened at the University of Michigan and the University of California, Berkeley, after they were barred from pursuing race-conscious admission policies, a sharp decline in Black and perhaps Hispanic enrollments at highly selective colleges and professional schools seems almost certain. To offset the loss, many colleges are likely to switch to a policy of affirmative action based on economic class. Such a policy would attenuate, although by no means eliminate, the racial impact of the Supreme Court’s ruling.

Affirmative action based on economic class is likely to enjoy broader public support than race-conscious affirmative action; according to a recent Washington Post poll, 62 percent of Americans believe that students from low-income families have an unfair disadvantage in getting into a good college. [David Brooks discusses this idea in the New York Times today.]  But affirmative action on its own, whether based on race or economic class, is far too limited a tool to realize the dream of the great civil rights movement of the 1960s for full racial equality. As we confront a world without race-conscious affirmative action, we would do well to remember the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s admonition that to produce real equality, “the movement must address itself to the question of restructuring the whole of American society.”

I think most Americans agree that race should not matter, in college admissions or anything else.  (Not all agree, I’m afraid…and you know who you are.)  We wish it were true.  But as we all learned in our youth, wishing a thing doesn’t make it so.  Honest people will acknowledge that while we as a society have made great progress, race does still matter today.  Rulings such as this one seem aimed at making sure that some white Americans are shielded from any responsibility for righting the wrongs of the past.  Or of even acknowledging that there were past wrongs that need addressing.  That’s not a viable strategy for righting the wrongs.

(Jelani Cobb on “The End of Affirmative Action” in The New Yorker: “…almost from the outset, critics of the policy could be seen impatiently tapping their watches, questioning how long (white) society was meant to endure the patent unfairness of these racial considerations.”)

A white unicorn

Pat Ryan 3 Comments

Our weather has been pretty consistently dreary for weeks on end now, long enough so that I don’t know for sure how many weekends it’s been since I was able to go stand in the sun and club the life out of some perfectly innocent golf balls that have never done anything to me.  The forecast is that the weather will start looking better next week, and I hope that comes true.  In the news, there are a lot of predictions about the good possibility that the special counsel’s investigation of Russian interference into the 2016 elections (and related matters) may be very close to ending; that would be even better news.

I want to know what Robert Mueller’s investigators have found about how Russia interfered in the 2016 election, and maybe the 2018 midterms, too.  There isn’t any real doubt that Russia was involved in an organized effort to keep Hillary Clinton from being elected president, and I want all the evidence lined up for us all to see.  Even if the Trump campaign and the Trump family were in no way at all complicit or cooperative with the Russian effort, we need to publicly recognize that our country was attacked by a foreign power and be better prepared to withstand that attack the next time it comes.  (You’d think that a president of the United States would agree with that, and say so; do you wonder why this one doesn’t?)

So what are we going to do when the Mueller Report is submitted and (it if is) released to the public?  Dahlia Lithwick suggests in Slate this week that we shouldn’t expect we can sit idly by and let Robert Mueller lead us to the Promised Land.

There’s a lingering perception that once Mueller delivers his report, the Trump era will end in a cloud of white smoke and glitter. It’s a nice fantasy—the one in which Mueller, armed with Truth and Fact, finishes off the Trump presidency with a ride through the Capitol on a white unicorn, scattering indictments and the seeds of impeachment, in a conclusive and irrefutable wrapup of the two-year probe.

It is also profoundly unlikely to actually happen that way. As one observer after another has reminded us, this is not necessarily Mueller’s call, and it’s not necessarily Mueller’s mandate. It’s also, perhaps most importantly, not necessarily Mueller’s style. At every turn, Mueller has shown us who he is, and that would be the antithesis of the Trump-style reality show protagonist.

(snip)

For those who have been collecting the Mueller memes and the T-shirts and the mugs, and who are waiting breathlessly for his conclusions, there’s a very reasonable chance that major disappointment looms. The Mueller report is unlikely to provide a perfectly binary call to arms. He is amassing facts on a limited series of questions. Some of those facts will make their way to the public, but many will not. Congress will make decisions on how best to proceed. There is going to be a torrent of “no collusion/fake news” out of the White House. What comes next may not be perfectly certain.

Instead of “waiting for Mueller” to take action, we should perhaps realize that we largely know what’s happened: Four people who worked on Trump’s 2016 campaign have either faced conviction or indictment for their involvement with Russian actors, or for lying about it. There’s a case to be made that Jared Kushner or Donald Trump Jr. could face charges. It’s surely true that should any such thing happen, life will grow infinitely more complicated for the Trump administration.

But it’s also true that this administration has thrived in part because too many people have been waiting for Robert Mueller to formally say what we already know to be true: The levels of corruption, conflict of interest, and untruth in this administration are without parallel. What we saw at Helsinki was without parallel, what was done to Jamal Khashoggi and the refusal to address it is without parallel, threats of “retaliation” against the press are without parallel. We don’t need to read this in a report. We live it every day.

(Hey, this could be fun, and cathartic, too: go to the comments and fill in the blank to extend Lithwick’s thought: “The ______ we have seen during the Trump campaign and presidency have been without parallel.”  Keep it clean and I’ll post ’em all.)

Mueller’s job was and is to investigate, not to prosecute or impeach or even to tell the rest of us what to do.  Lithwick again:

We want Mueller to be both the guy who knows everything and the guy who does everything. It obviates anyone else from needing to know what we already know and do what needs doing. But going into the next few fateful days, my sense is that we might want to stop investing too much hope in great men, and superheroes, and saviors. Instead, we should remember that it is our job to insist that we, and our public officials, must be the Muellers we hope to see in the world.

The action that comes next is up to us, and to the people we elected to Congress.  It’s not surprising that Republicans in Congress would want to support a Republican president and his goals and actions, but party political success is not (supposed to be) the primary reason they are there: it’s to represent us and our interests, and the Constitution, even when that means challenging the president.  The Constitution establishes each of the three branches of government to provide checks and balances on the other two.

That’s the major theme of an open letter from Democrat Adam Schiff, published this week in the Washington Post.  The chairman of the House Intelligence Committee reminds his colleagues that the responsibilities of their offices go deeper than just supporting the president, especially when our country is under attack.

For the past two years, we have examined Russia’s interference in the 2016 election and its attempts to influence the 2018 midterms. Moscow’s effort to undermine our democracy was spectacularly successful in inflaming racial, ethnic and other divides in our society and turning American against American.

But the attack on our democracy had its limits. Russian President Vladimir Putin could not lead us to distrust our own intelligence agencies or the FBI. He could not cause us to view our own free press as an enemy of the people. He could not undermine the independence of the Justice Department or denigrate judges. Only we could do that to ourselves. [emphasis added]  Although many forces have contributed to the decline in public confidence in our institutions, one force stands out as an accelerant, like gas on a fire. And try as some of us might to avoid invoking the arsonist’s name, we must say it.

I speak, of course, of our president, Donald Trump.

The president has just declared a national emergency to subvert the will of Congress and appropriate billions of dollars for a border wall that Congress has explicitly refused to fund. Whether you support the border wall or oppose it, you should be deeply troubled by the president’s intent to obtain it through a plainly unconstitutional abuse of power.

To my Republican colleagues: When the president attacked the independence of the Justice Department by intervening in a case in which he is implicated, you did not speak out. When he attacked the press as the enemy of the people, you again were silent. When he targeted the judiciary, labeling judges and decisions he didn’t like as illegitimate, we heard not a word. And now he comes for Congress, the first branch of government, seeking to strip it of its greatest power, that of the purse.

Many of you have acknowledged your deep misgivings about the president in quiet conversations over the past two years. You have bemoaned his lack of decency, character and integrity. You have deplored his fundamental inability to tell the truth. But for reasons that are all too easy to comprehend, you have chosen to keep your misgivings and your rising alarm private.

That must end. The time for silent disagreement is over. You must speak out.

This will require courage. The president is popular among your base, which revels in his vindictive and personal attacks on members of his own party, even giants such as the late senator John McCain. Speaking up risks a primary challenge or accusations of disloyalty. But such acts of independence are the most profound demonstrations of loyalty to country.

Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III may soon conclude his investigation and report. Depending on what is in that report and what we find in our own investigations, our nation may face an even greater challenge. While I am alarmed at what we have already seen and found of the president’s conduct and that of his campaign, I continue to reserve judgment about what consequences should flow from our eventual findings. I ask you to do the same.

If we cannot rise to the defense of our democracy now, in the face of a plainly unconstitutional aggrandizement of presidential power, what hope can we have that we will do so with the far greater decisions that could be yet to come?

Although these times pose unprecedented challenges, we have been through worse. The divisions during the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement were just as grave and far more deadly. The Depression and World War II were far more consequential. And nothing can compare to the searing experience of the Civil War.

If Abraham Lincoln, the father of the Republican Party, could be hopeful that our bonds of affection would be strained but not broken by a war that pitted brother against brother, surely America can come together once more. But as long as we must endure the present trial, history compels us to speak, and act, our conscience, Republicans and Democrats alike.