Some Broken Hearts Never Mend, Some Memories Never End

Let’s talk about a guy’s memory. 

We’ve been hearing and seeing a lot about Brett Kavanaugh’s memory, and the memories—sometimes supporting, sometimes countervailing—of his male and female associates, friends, and former classmates. Is it reasonable to agree that memories of high school events from 35-36 years ago (or a bit more recent—as in college, at Yale), can be sketchy, hazy, incomplete, subject to interpretation, even wildly at odds with reality, etc.? Yes, it’s possible. 

It’s possible when the events of the time are common, recurring, and banal, as when you walk across campus every day, or eat at the student union, or spend hours in the library, or participate in three or four classes a day for weeks on end. Picking some of those moments out of the fast-passing railcars of memories and declaring with absolute certainty that none of those moments was memorable is, I think we can all agree, reasonable.

But then there are those moments that simply cannot be “un-memorized or un-remembered,” their ever-tolling bells cannot be un-rung, their toothpaste-like texture impossible to push back into the far-reaches of the brain from which they ooze. This is true for women and for men. But I can only speak to what it is like to be a man with certain memories that will be forever memories, that will always be ringing, that will always extrude from the tube of my life’s events.

I’ve got a few years on Brett Kavanaugh…my high school and college days precede his by almost 20 years. My elementary school days happened in the 1950s and early 60s, long before Kavanaugh entered Georgetown Prep. And yet…and yet I have memories of events—some traumatic, some dumb-ass rites of passage, some just plain boneheaded, boorish, and stupid, and some which were hurtful to others—that I can pull out of the vast warehouse of file cabinets of my experiences as if they happened this morning.

I can describe the first time and place a girl kissed me—an innocent moment of heartfelt glee and childish innocence that was memorable for its spontaneity and honesty. I was nine. She was nine. It was 1958. We were playing in my room; she liked plastic model airplanes and I was building them. I had invited her by to see my work table in my room. Her name was Judy. I used to look at her from the front window of my school bus following her school bus, where she sat in the back and waved at me. Because I was an officer’s child, and she was not, she was disciplined for crossing a social line, and we rarely saw each other again. You don’t forget the unfair things that adults put on your life. And you don’t forget that soft kiss on your cheek, wrapped up in giggles and scented with model airplane glue.

You don’t forget when, at a boy’s school in Tennessee in 1961, you were held down by four upperclassmen, your shirt pulled up, water dripped on your stomach that was covered in sharp-edged grass, and then the boys took turns slapping your stomach until you bled from the grass cuts. You remember you were 12. You remember the helplessness and looking at the sky and the clouds, and trying hard to run out of your brain.

You remember playing in a rock band in 1967, in Georgetown, where beer flowed freely, and you got so drunk after one gig that your bandmates loaded you into a taxi which took you home to Arlington, after the taxi driver dug out your wallet to find your address. Buy you do remember that it happened, even though the details are 50-years old.

And you remember your freshman year in college in 1968, in a party-university on the Front Range of the Rockies, that your roommate was one of the biggest drug dealers on campus, and the dorm was filled with football players and other jocks who targeted a young girl named Mina because she was vulnerable and small. You remember with absolute clarity the sound and touch and smell in the late-night when your dorm room door opened and a shy but terrified Mina, without a word, slipped into your bed and fell fast asleep against you because, as she said before dropping off, “I know you won’t hurt me.”

I am a huge fan of the late Don Williams—a country singer whose heartfelt songs of love and loss and growing up and growing old cause the strings of my life to vibrate in bittersweet sympathy. The stanza of his song, “Some Broken Hearts Never Mend,” goes like this:

“Some broken hearts never mend
Some memories never end
Some tears will never dry”

Some memories never end. Some voices and smells and nature’s caresses are imprinted—burnished into the brain. The details you sometimes wish you could remember—or details you wish you could forget—rise and fall with life’s tide, like aging boats lashed to a pier of time. But the memories are always there, like the pilings supporting the pier itself, as it juts out into your past. Its planks may be slowly falling away while the boats become older and more weathered, but the memories of the journeys you took on those boats will remain after the last piling crumbles.

I believe Dr. Cynthia Blasey Ford remembers something that happened to her and that her memory is not a random thought or a willful political act that places Brett Kavanaugh in it. I believe Judge Kavanaugh is related to Dr. Ford’s memory; I believe he knows he is related to it, that he is an intimate and frightful part of it, but that, nonetheless, he is reluctant to walk out onto the pier that will force him to confront his own memory.

The now-underway FBI investigation is going to walk Judge Kavanaugh along the pier of his younger life, and whether he likes it or not—whether it tells us anything more than we saw and heard in Thursday’s hearing—it will cause him to examine a heretofore willfully-unexamined life and the lives he affected forever by his recklessness, ruthlessness, arrogance, and his total disdain for at least one young girl’s vulnerability.

The Ford-Kavanaugh Hearing: "It Is Not Only Not Right; It Is Not Even Wrong.”

Of the many insults leveled at Dr. Christine Blasey Ford over the past few days, four stand out as exemplars of how cluelessly-low so many white men of political and economic privilege have fallen—Stygian depths they may actually enjoy while shaming women of all ages and socio-economic status. 

"Hi Cindy. Will you be my girlfriend? yes no. Love Bret" from Donald Trump, Jr.

Donald Trump Jr.’s elementary-school-graphics attempt at humor on Instagram was typical of Jr.’s tiny little brain’s inability to perceive the world around it in anything other than doo-doo and caa-caa jokes. That the son of a sitting president would act with such shameless arrogance, nose-thumbing impunity, and overblown sense of entitlement must send shivers down the spines of every former-president’s daughters and sons.

Then South Carolina freshman Representative, Republican Ralph Norman, in a stand-up routine that would have had him tossed from every comedy club between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, said, "Did you hear about this? Ruth Bader Ginsburg came out saying she was groped by Abraham Lincoln." This is the same idiot who, during a meeting with gun-control activists, placed a loaded gun on a table and said, “Guns don’t shoot people; people shoot guns… I’m not going to be a Gabby Gifford.”

Shortly after Rep. Norman tried to throw shade at Dr. Ford and the Notorious RBG, that sterling example of piety, Utah’s Orrin Hatch, said he had “some question” whether Ford is “mixed up” and confusing Kavanaugh with someone else.

And then, there is, of course, the president himself who has been oh so slow to get off his Twitter block, seemingly exercising Herculean strength of resolve not to demean, diminish, or defame Dr. Ford. Ah, yes…that resolve crumbled last night after the president was briefed by his favorite brown-nosed colon suppository of infinite knowledge, Sean Hannity. Beginning with a rally in Las Vegas in which DJT said he wondered why the FBI wasn’t asked to investigate Dr. Ford’s claim 36 years ago, he doubled down Friday morning with this gem of a tweet: 

“I have no doubt that, if the attack on Dr. Ford was as bad as she says, charges would have been immediately filed with local Law Enforcement Authorities by either her or her loving parents. I ask that she bring those filings forward so that we can learn date, time, and place!”

Theoretical physicist Wolfgang Pauli is often credited with a wonderful phrase leveled at those who exhibit careless or incorrect thinking: “That is not only not right; it is not even wrong.” So true, Dr. Pauli. So true. Such is the state of careless and incorrect thinking in the White House and on Capitol Hill. They are not only not right, they are not even wrong.

In these four examples, and in dozens of others sinking to the level of dishonorable mentions, the common threads are the continued cluelessness, misogyny, disrespect, and willful obliviousness to the plight of sexual victims across the spectrum of American life. There is no sign of humanity in any of these men’s actions or lives to date. There is nothing about them remotely redeemable if they hold fast to their knuckle-dragging anti-woman, anti-victim, anti-empathy, anti-fairness world views. They, and their equally-clueless cohorts and enablers (silent colleagues, wives, sons, daughters), do such deleterious disservice to the search for truth and justice.

As I write this, the negotiations between Dr. Ford and the Judiciary Committee seem to be converging on some form of hearing next week in which Dr. Ford and judge Kavanaugh will have opportunities to state their cases and, maybe, defend their positions. I seriously doubt Dr. Ford will, in fact, garner any kind of justice from the hearing, and I give her high marks just for screwing her courage to the sticking point and flying from California smack into the headwinds of a sad political theater, the final act of which has been predetermined.

There is no doubt in my mind that the cards have been stacked against Dr. Ford for some time now—and my doubt is not informed by any certainty that her account of the assault more than three decades ago is accurate. I don’t know Dr. Ford, and I don’t know Brett Kavanaugh. My doubt is informed by my career-based knowledge of what a murderous and duplicitous hell-hole Capitol Hill has become, and by my own experiences with private schools (as a student, and as the parent of three private-school students). Both worlds are known for their toxicity when it comes to fair treatment of vulnerable students or adults. 

Reports of excessive drinking and sexual assault are not new to either the Hill or to private schools; the rites of passage for some students, and many lawmakers, seem to be pulled from the same playbook of power: if you are privileged, you get a pass on your behavior…for life. If you are a target, you stay a target…for life. So far, what I see is one person of privilege who may or may not have done what has been alleged, and one target who is certain something happened to her and is seeking redress through a fair hearing. But how fair can that be?

I hope (against hope) that when next Thursday (Sep. 27) has come and gone, and the Senate has confirmed Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, that people will remember that day as the day when yet another woman was fed into the meat grinder of petty partisanship. What is happening to professor Ford was totally predictable and just as predictably abhorrent.

I am weary and drained by the inhumane, unjust, unfair, cold-blooded, poisonous treatment of women, and minorities (religious, ethnic, physically-disabled, gender-shamed, etc.) who only seek justice, kindness, and understanding.

What effort would it have taken judge Kavanaugh--if he is blameless--to say to the media, "I want Dr. Ford to tell her story, and she must be allowed to do so without shame and fear?" If he has any sense of decency and judicial vision, he would want Dr. Ford to be able to speak in the public forum. To be a judge is to be open to all sides of a case. But...I have been in this town far too long to try to raise a crop of fairness when the only soil available is drenched in acid.

Dr. Ford is in a lose-lose position, as are so many women who live with demons created by thoughtless, selfish men. What is so laughable about this strain of thoughtlessness and selfishness is that the Republicans--among whose ranks are women, it must be said--are willing to lose the House in order to gain the Supreme Court. How sad for the Republic.

I want to add one more point to my earlier comment about Dr. Ford and Brett Kavanaugh. My wife raised a very reasonable question about Kavanaugh, and that is, wouldn't it be the right thing for the judge to do to call on the media--journalists and social posters alike--to back off on the attacks against Dr. Ford? To state publicly his distaste for those who have appropriated Dr. Ford's identity, who have caused her to leave her home, who have leveled epithets and baseless claims against her? If he is a person of character, truly blameless in this matter, would it not be right for him, as a jurist and as a fellow human being, to at least call on Dr. Ford's tormentors to cease and desist? He loses nothing by calling for calm and reason; he gains nothing of moral value by allowing the pillorying to continue.

He has an army of advisers to help him prep for his moment before the Judiciary Committee; Dr. Ford has no experience coping with the maelstrom that awaits her. It seems to us that the decent thing for Kavanaugh to do, at the very least, is to try to assuage Dr. Ford's fears by calling for a cease-fire until she is ready to face what is going to be a brutal assault.

I'm going to say this again and again until my bone-headed male brethren realize I'm serious and they are wrong: Professor Ford's allegation is not about party, about timing, about derailing Kavanaugh for someone else's dark purpose. Her coming forward--at any time her courage allows, even 35 years later--is about trying to right a wrong, about stating truth to overwhelming power, about standing up to bullies no matter what suit or robe the bullies wear or club they belong to or cadre of enablers they can assemble.

I am not fully prepared to express something very deep and troubling that happened to me not 20, not 30, not even 50...but 60 years ago at the hands of two women and a young girl who thought preying on a little boy was nothing more than sport. No, it was not the worst that some of you may fear, but it was a forever moment in a young boy's life that cannot be erased. But that experience, as old as it may seem to be to (mostly male) skeptics, is sometimes as clear as the monitor these words flow across, as clear as my bird pictures, as clear as dawn in the desert. There is no doubt in my mind, none, that Dr. Ford needs to speak her truth, and she must be heard by compassionate ears, not railroaded or meat-grindered by forces eager to see her fail and fail publicly.

Consider that judge Kavanaugh has now completed four days of briefings and preparation sessions, going over all the possible questions the Senate panel may have, fine-tuning his statement with the help of White House staff and probably Senate committee staff as well. By the time Monday rolls around, he will be on his best game (and he lives locally...no transcontinental plane flight for him). In the meantime, Dr. Ford, pulled from obscurity by her own conscience, can never, ever be as prepared as Kavanaugh.

Dr. Ford may have some intellectual vision of what a Senate hearing looks like, sounds like...but she is woefully underprepared for the shock and brutality that will descend upon her from the Republican side of the panel. Ask me, ask anyone who has staffed up a Senate panel that is bent on making fools of innocents, and we'll all tell you that Dr. Ford will be walking into a den better than half of which is filled with bitter old white men who want only to see their guy sit on the Supreme Court. Truth means nothing to them; if it did, they would not be in such a rush to condemn and move on, leaving one more female body in the dark ditch of pre-determinism.

To those who say this is just a DNC plan to delay and obfuscate, you couldn't be more wrong, and if you are a man, you should be ashamed to lay your poorly-educated prejudice on a woman you've never met, whose life has been inverted, whose whole purpose has been flagrantly defiled by haters. Your thinking is not only not right; it is not even wrong.

To Save The World From Trump: A Number 2 Pencil

Is a pencil mightier than a nuke? 

With all the mounting concern about president Trump’s mental instability (or the likelihood thereof, wink wink), it’s time to review the national command authority’s (NCA) protocol for authorizing the use of nuclear weapons. In most cases, the NCA consists of the president and the Secretary of Defense (SECDEF), both of whom must agree on the need to launch nuclear missiles (land- and sea-based), and the airborne nuclear strike forces.

We all know (okay, a bunch of us know) that the codes required to confirm launch authority are kept nearby the president in a fancy, secured, satchel (also known as the football), held at all times by a military officer. The president has in his pocket a plastic card (sometimes referred to as the “biscuit”, or, in Trump’s case, the “cheeseburger”…oh, wait, that’s a real cheeseburger in one pocket, the biscuit is in the other pocket). Various codes needed to verify the launch order’s authenticity are on the biscuit, and the SECDEF must also sign off on the order. So, theoretically, DJT can’t just pick up the phone, or hit a red button (note: the red button on his desk is so he can order a new can of Coke) and send a flurry of nukes into the Failing New York Times, CNN’s studios, or into Robert Mueller III’s and Rod Rosenstein’s houses.

Now, I don’t know what codes are on the "biscuit,” or what exactly the challenge-and-response protocols are, but I do think it’s important to make absolutely sure Trump cannot possibly—ever, in fact—be successful in launching the nation’s nukes. So, I’ve come up with a very simple challenge-and-respond protocol to assure the American people that should the current president go even more wackadoodle than he already is, he will never be able to send a hydrogen bomb into the Washington Post building or, perhaps, onto that pesky island territory we know as Puerto Rico, but which president Trump refers to as “that SAD place surrounded by lots and lots of water where sometimes people die of old age.”

Here’s how the new challenge-and-response scenario would play out should the president call for the nuclear football.

DJT: “Hey, you with that football thing, get into my office.”

Military officer enters the Oval Office

DJT: “I want to nuke NATO.”

Officer: “Sir, they are our allies!” (gets on his phone, calls Secretary Mattis)

DJT: “I don’t give a s...t. They are not paying their bills, and it’s time to send them a little message, like we used to do to reluctant contractors in New York, but instead of breaking their knees, we’ll take out a few of their cities.”

Officer: “Sir, I don’t think…..”

DJT: “You’re not paid to think! That’s for me and Sanders and Giuliani, and they agree with me on this.”

(Secretary of Defense Mattis rushes into the Oval Office)

SECDEF Mattis: “Mr. President, what the hell are you doing?”

DJT: “Listen, Mattis, I want to send a few nukes into London, Brussels, Berlin, Paris, and whatever the hell the capital of Canada is. We’ve got to make that bunch of pussies pay up…and then I can use the money for my wall.”

Mattis: “Mr. President, you can’t send missiles and bombers to blow up NATO!”

DJT: “Oh yes I can, and I’ve got the codes right here (pulls out the cheeseburger…realizes his mistake, takes a bite, and then pulls out the biscuit).

(Military officer with the football is sweating profusely)

Mattis: “Mr. President, you realize that there is a new challenge-and-response protocol in place now? You’re going to have to be able to respond to certain questions that are in the satchel before you can get the proper launch codes.”

DJT: “What! Who the hell made that change?”

Mattis: “Well, it was Melania’s idea at first, but Pence, Sessions, McConnell, Ryan, Schumer and Pelosi all signed off on it. After that, we got upvotes from CIA, NSA, DIA, and all the rest pretty quickly. I believe Ivanka is onboard too.”

DJT: (speechless, seething, and growing redder by the second)

Mattis: “Anyway, sir, if you want to start firing off nukes, you’re going to have to use the new protocol.”

DJT (to officer with the satchel): “Open the damn thing up!”

Officer (fingers trembling) unlocks the satchel, pulls out 12 manila folders, each one numbered on the cover, and each one containing several pages of paper, and hands them to Mattis.

Mattis spreads the folders out on the Resolute Desk, and ushers the president to his chair, and then hands him a Number 2 pencil.

DJT: “What the f… is this, Mattis?” Where are the damn codes?”

Mattis: “Mr. President, before you are a dozen numbered folders. On your biscuit, are four numbers, chosen at random every morning. Using the numbers on the biscuit, you select the same numbered folders.”

DJT: “Are you f…ing kidding me, Mattis?”

Mattis: “Most certainly not, Mr. President. Launching nuclear weapons is serious business. We just need to be sure your access to the final codes reflects your mental fitness to give the order. Please tell me what's on the biscuit."

DJT (resigned, looks at his biscuit): “Okay, okay…the numbers are 2, 5, 8 and 11.”

Mattis shuffles through the folders, and pulls out folders 2, 5, 8, and 11, and gives them to the president

Mattis: “Mr. President, please look at the tabs on each folder.”

DJT (looking at the tabs): “What the…..!”

Mattis: “Mr. President, please read what appears on each tab.”

DJT: “Mattis, this is insane!”

Mattis: “Mr. President, please read the tabs.”

DJT: “History, Earth Sciences, Geometry, Essay.”

Mattis (looking at his watch: “Excellent, Mr. President. You now have 20 minutes to correctly answer the 25 questions in history, earth sciences, and geometry, and then 10 more minutes to write a 250-word essay on the Bill of Rights, using words of more than two syllables and correctly spelling all of them. You must score 100-percent on the questions, and an A+ on the essay to receive the launch codes. By the way, your essay will be scored by Bob Woodward. Using only your Number 2 pencil, you may begin.”

Anonymous Op-Ed Is Not The Path To Travel

5 U.S. Code § 3331 - Oath of Office

“I, Clifford James Moore, do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.”

During my 35-year career as a federal employee, I took the above oath of office on at least a dozen occasions as I moved through the legislative and executive branches of government. Several times as a Congressional employee (House and Senate), as political appointee under two presidents (Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush), and as a career federal employee in one agency (Action, the federal volunteer agency) and four cabinet departments (Transportation, Education--where I served under two Secretaries—Defense, and Veterans Affairs—where I served under four Secretaries).

Every time I took the oath, whether it was in some small administrative office off a basement corridor in a 1930s-era bland brown building in downtown Washington, or just steps away from the gleaming U.S. Capitol, something deep down caused me to stand a bit taller, to focus keenly on the oath being administered, and to speak those words with a strong and affirming voice. No matter the venue, the words never changed, the object of the oath never changed: “I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States.” It was never “I will support and defend the House of Representatives, or the Senate, or the Department of Defense, or the Department of Veterans Affairs.” Always it was, and remains, “The Constitution of the United States.”

The person, or persons, who wrote the anonymous “Resistance” op-ed that appeared in the New York Times on Wednesday, September 5, also took that same oath. He or she (or they), did not swear (or affirm) allegiance to Donald J. Trump, or to the White House, or to the Executive Branch. They swore to support and defend the Constitution of the United States. I cannot say that enough. Their loyalty, to my way of thinking, was to the founding first-principles document that enumerates and vouchsafes every law under which our country operates, and all the liberties and rights therein. It cannot be made more clear. That is what the oath is all about.

When I read the op-ed, my first inclination, to be honest, was “Good for you! It’s about time we heard from a senior insider who sees through the fog and smokescreens of the ongoing bizzaro-war within the walls of the White House, and who is taking up arms, manning the barricade, and making a noble stand. Vive la Anonymous!”

But, after sleeping on the story, and re-reading the op-ed several times in the light of a new day, I began to doubt, question, and, finally, reverse my initial fist-pump rationale. The op-ed is not a commentary about what’s wrong at the White House. It is about the author’s (s’) loss of faith in the bigger picture of national service, and the writer’s (s’) unwillingness to let the Constitutional system of separation of powers do what it is supposed to do.

I get why the author(s) feel like that. Twice during my federal career—once on the Hill, once in the executive branch, at VA—I ran into leaders whose operating principles so differed from my vision of what they were either elected or appointed to do, I submitted my resignations and walked away. In one instance, I simply left the Representative for whom I was working and accepted a new job in the Senate. In the other instance, I resigned from the civil service five years earlier than I’d planned, and, once back in civilian life, began writing signed editorials and blogs that reflected my concerns for the department and leadership I’d left behind.

Now, it would be folly for me to suggest that my home-based editorial contribution to the larger national dialogue about my former department and its secretary moved the needle of importance in any meaningful way. But those editorials had what the New York Times op-ed did not: my name, my accountability, my ownership of each and every word. My decision to put my name on the columns I wrote was made with the Constitution and my oath in mind; I could not shoot at my boss or the department from behind bushes of anonymity while I was in service to the Constitution, and, thereby, to the country. But I could exercise my First Amendment right to speak freely about my concerns once I was no longer bound by my Constitutional oath.

There is the argument that what the “Resistance” author(s) are up against is of far greater import and immediate danger than my microscopic problem at one federal agency. After all, there can be no question among reasonable people that president Trump’s White House is, in fact, “off the rails,” and careening toward a real and present danger of Constitutional, if not existential proportions. I understand that. And I understand how a person, or perhaps a network of people, who genuinely fears for the country’s stability, safety, and security at home and abroad, would find irresistible the temptation to try to either fix what is becoming more broken every day, or at least memorialize in an op-ed the spreading miasma of events in the hopes that the American people and their elected representatives in the legislative branch would rise to a call to action.

The problem is, our system does not work that way, and it was never intended to. A thorough reading of Article II of the Constitution and all of the Federalist Papers will not uncover any permission for a federal employee—no matter how highly ranked (save the Vice President)—to assume the role of president-in-parallel.

The oath any president takes is not the same as the oath civil servants take:

"I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States,(so help me God)”

vs. 

“I do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.”

The Presidential Oath is spelled out in the Constitution in Article II, Section One, Clause 8. That clause, and that clause alone, contains the words, “…faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States…” Those words—Office of the President—don’t appear in the civil servant’s oath; the oath-bound duty of a civil servant is to “…bear true faith and allegiance to the same [the Constitution], and it is to that allegiance the writer or writers of the Anonymous Op-Ed must turn.

You can argue that the phrase, “I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter,” as a sort of catch-all phrase that might give a sincerely worried civil servant the idea that he or she has tacit permission to go to extreme measures to fulfill their executive branch duties. That would be a mistake, and it is the mistake made by the Anonymous op-ed author(s). The civil servants’ oath does not confer any extraordinary powers above and beyond their stated duties. It does not give permission to act, even in extremis, in some sort of sub rosa presidential channel.

When the Op-Ed says, “I work for the president, but like-minded colleagues and I have vowed to thwart parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations,” the writer is placing their cherry-picked “vow” of immediacy above their original Constitutional oath. This is not permissible in a nation of laws executed by men and women whose voluntary oaths bend their public actions toward, not away from, the Constitution they are sworn to uphold. In short, civil servants cannot serve two masters—or, in this case, two oaths--simultaneously. It is not, as president Trump barks, in all caps, “TREASON?,” but it is at the very least, unethical to play two sides of the Constitution—an anonymous application of the First Amendment leveraged against a subversion of a Constitutional oath—at the same time.

So what are the remedies available to writers like Anonymous who, in their judgement, perceive threats to national security, public safety, or sound policy development being ignored or subverted by a president they believe is irrational at worst, or simply incapable of sound management of the office of the president? 

If the writer is truly a senior administration official, he or she must first memorialize the president’s transgressions by taking contemporaneous notes, supported by evidence or by being able to point to evidence (and not by removing or withholding evidence); as the evidence accumulates, the official has an obligation as part of the duties of his or her office, to bring their concerns to the attention of superiors, or, if none can be trusted, to legal government counsel (an inspector general, for example, if not White House counsel); and, finally, if the senior official truly feels he or she has run out of options within the White House (or within their department), and they continue to believe the country is being led toward a crisis, they must resign their office and then, and only then, write their op-ed and sign it.

My opinion is informed by my own special lodestar, Sir Thomas More, whose refusal to obey what he believed to be an unlawful and immoral order—to swear, in writing, his allegiance to Henry VIII as head of the church of England—lead to his beheading in 1535. More had been given many opportunities to express his views on the righteousness of Henry’s various schemes to outwit the Catholic church’s edicts against Henry’s marriage to Anne Boleyn. In every case, More, while willing to accept Anne’s legitimacy, and having no problem as an English citizen in pledging loyalty to the Crown, could not extend that oath to acknowledging Henry as the head of a church-of-moral-convenience. In the end, it was what More would not sign that did him in.

In a stirringly dramatized scene in the 1966 movie, A Man For All Seasons, More, played by Paul Scofield, admonishes William Roper for Roper’s advice that the traitorous Richard Rich be arrested. More, the target of Rich’s treachery, does not agree that Rich’s arrest would be lawful, even though More knows full well that Rich is working against him. Roper, furious, accuses More of being too righteous to act against Rich, and in this particular scene in the movie, More makes clear his unyielding affection for the law of the land:

WILLIAM ROPER: So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!

SIR THOMAS MORE: Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?

ROPER: I’d cut down every law in England to do that! 

MORE: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ’round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man’s laws, not God’s! And if you cut them down, and you’re just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake!

The author or authors of the New York Times op-ed have, in my opinion, an obligation to resign from their Constitutionally-pledged office and, if they have the moral and ethical courage, acknowledge their written work. There is no shame in being a dissenter, and, as I learned from my own act of resignation five years ago, there is a certain moral power that fills the void left behind.

It is likely that there is still more of the Devil in the White House than any one man or woman—or network of men and women—can battle behind the scenes. It is also likely that one, two, or even a dozen resignations, will not dissuade Trump from his determined path toward social and political chaos. 

Should the system come crashing down, should all norms crumble, should the nation be catapulted into a crisis deeper than we can currently imagine, I believe the Constitution will hold fast to the center and that the lawful process of corrections—the application of the ballot box against tyranny—must be allowed to play out.