That One Word Uttered By Trump, So Horrible, Calls For Bravery

“So yeah, this is a lynching in every sense,” Graham said at the Capitol. “This is un-American.

Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey, a black Democrat currently seeking his party’s presidential nomination, said on Twitter, “Lynching is an act of terror used to uphold white supremacy. Try again.”

And the list of those who were horrified, sickened, and outraged by the president’s “lynching” comment--and Lindsey Graham’s head-nodding and Jim Jordan’s dismissal--goes on and on. And it should.

My own reaction when I heard the president was to consider drawing a picture of the president, in a white hood, holding a rope with a noose around the Constitution. But then the coffee and reason kicked in, and I realized that it would probably be a very, very bad idea for a cartoon.

To be clear though, I, like many of my generation, grew up with the words “lynching” or “lynched” bandied about with either glee or snarls by certain members of our communities (my community at the time was northern Louisiana, not far from the scene of multiple crimes involving whippings, shootings, bombings, and lynchings).

The very word lynching brings an ache to my heart and a troubling vibration in my brain—a vertigo caused by the locked file cabinets of my memories being pried open by Trump and Graham and seeing, once again, the terrible photographs and graphic news stories of white-on-black atrocities spilling out.

Trump used that awful word less than a week after the death of Representative Elijah Cummings—a sharecropper’s son who rose from poverty and dedicated his life and congressional standing to heal and help the nation rise above the ever-present brutalities of racism in America.

What troubles me even more than the president’s use of the word lynching is the continued spinelessness of the men and women of the Republican party in the United States Senate—the “deliberative” body—of Congress. What in god’s name can a sad, sick, bitter, uneducated, dangerous failure of a human being like the president have that he can hold it over the heads of his party’s members and cow them all into silence?

Is the need to be re-elected so great, so personally empowering, such a Faustian bargain that not one Senator of leadership standing can say out loud, “This is wrong!”? I worked on the Hill for 14 years—in the House and the Senate, and I saw weakness in many offices, but I saw a lot of courage, too. That, clearly, was a time now lost in the coal-black mists of another age. Shame does not describe the feelings the silent lambs of Capitol Hill should be feeling. Shame is not enough.

As my always more thoughtful wife suggested, what is needed now are loudspeakers positioned in every corner of the Capitol building, and in the Congressional office buildings, and from those speakers, at maximum volume, should come the words of songwriters Jack Antonoff and singer/songwriter Sara Bareilles, from “Brave”:

“Innocence, your history of silence

Won't do you any good

Did you think it would?

Let your words be anything but empty

Why don't you tell them the truth?

Say what you wanna say

And let the words fall out

Honestly I wanna see you be brave

With what you want to say

And let the words fall out

Honestly I wanna see you be brave”

Be especially brave when you hear the word lynching…be brave and rid us of our foul-mouthed national nightmare.

Trump Was What The Founders Feared: Federalist No. 65 Shows Why

Alexander  Hamilton, Author of The Federalist No. 65

In many of my blogs and Huffington Post columns, most often in those concerning The Federalist Papers, my goal has always to enlighten my readers by simplifying the lessons, visions, and admonitions of The Papers’ principle authors, John Jay, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton. Of the three, Hamilton was the most prolific (Jay fell ill and produced only five of the 85 papers, while Madison authored 29, and Hamilton crafted 51), and, arguably, his contributions were among the most influential in illuminating the underpinnings of the Constitution under consideration by the people. Writing in Federalist No. 1, Hamilton hoped the series of papers would "…endeavor to give a satisfactory answer to all the objections which shall have made their appearance, that may seem to have any claim to your attention."

You have to understand that at the time the Constitution was being considered, there was quite a bit of pushback from anti-Constitutionalists. The anti-Constitutionalists were fearful of a strong federal government; they worried that the rights of states and of individuals would be trammeled or usurped by a zealous federal power center. Their supporting documents, known as the Anti-Federalist Papers, included support for a Bill of Rights, which Hamilton, in Federalist No. 84, opposed. Hamilton was concerned that such an addition to the Constitution would weaken, rather than strengthen, what he believed were rights already enshrined in the Constitution itself. He wrote:

“I go further, and affirm that bills of rights, in the sense and in the extent in which they are contended for, are not only unnecessary in the proposed constitution, but would even be dangerous. They would contain various exceptions to powers which are not granted; and on this very account, would afford a colorable pretext to claim more than were granted. For why declare that things shall not be done which there is no power to do? Why for instance, should it be said, that the liberty of the press shall not be restrained, when no power is given by which restrictions may be imposed? I will not contend that such a provision would confer a regulating power; but it is evident that it would furnish, to men disposed to usurp, a plausible pretense for claiming that power.”

In short, Hamilton believed all the necessary rights of America’s citizens were clearly defined and defended in the body of the Constitution, and that no tacked-on “Bill of Rights” would improve upon the Constitution itself.

In what I see as one of the teachable examples of political compromise, if not grace in the face of loss, Hamilton’s argument did not win out, and Madison, who was a proponent of a Bill of Rights (more, in fact, than were eventually adopted), offered them up for inclusion in June, 1789.

But this essay is not about the Bill of Rights—that debate only illustrates the hard work, often contentious but ultimately affirmed, taken on by the Founders. This essay is about the fears of the Founders that unscrupulous office-holders, or candidates for office, if left unchecked by a strong Constitution and an independent Judiciary, would eventually anoint themselves unchallenged dictators, if not God-blessed sovereigns, by an ignorant public’s acclaim.

One of Hamilton’s premier biographers, Ron Chernow, published an essay titled, “Hamilton pushed for impeachment powers. Trump is what he had in mind” in the October 18 edition of The Washington Post (available in Sunday’s Outlook), in which he makes an eloquent, if not sobering, case for Hamilton’s vision for our current state of political affairs.

Chernow writes, “So haunted was Hamilton by this specter that he conjured it up in “The Federalist” No. 1, warning that “a dangerous ambition more often lurks behind the specious mask of zeal for the rights of the people than under the forbidden appearance of zeal for the firmness and efficiency of government. History will teach us that . . . of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people; commencing demagogues, and ending tyrants.”

Chernow continues, “Throughout history, despots have tended to be silent, crafty and secretive. Hamilton was more concerned with noisy, flamboyant figures, who would throw dust in voters’ eyes and veil their sinister designs behind it. These connoisseurs of chaos would employ a constant barrage of verbiage to cloud issues and blur moral lines. Such hobgoblins of Hamilton’s imagination bear an eerie resemblance to the current occupant of the White House, with his tweets, double talk and inflammatory rhetoric at rallies.”

And of course Chernow is right, just as the Founders were right. Here is Chernow’s Clarion call:

“While under siege from opponents as treasury secretary, Hamilton sketched out the type of charlatan who would most threaten the republic: “When a man unprincipled in private life[,] desperate in his fortune, bold in his temper . . . despotic in his ordinary demeanour — known to have scoffed in private at the principles of liberty — when such a man is seen to mount the hobby horse of popularity — to join in the cry of danger to liberty — to take every opportunity of embarrassing the General Government & bringing it under suspicion — to flatter and fall in with all the non sense of the zealots of the day — It may justly be suspected that his object is to throw things into confusion that he may ‘ride the storm and direct the whirlwind.’ ”

Chernow concludes, “Given the way Trump has broadcast suspicions about the CIA, the FBI, the diplomatic corps, senior civil servants and the “deep state,” Hamilton’s warning about those who would seek to discredit the government as prelude to a possible autocracy seems prophetic.”

In a series of The Federalist Papers essays I wrote in the Huffington Post in 2017, I directed my columns to the Trump presidency, with warnings (never heeded) that his mindless course of action, via the rat-infested sewer pipes of deceit, hubris, and disdain for the rule of law and public opinion would run him afoul of every positive tenet of good government, citizen trust, and international comity enshrined in the words of the Founders.

I have posted recently, and several times in the past, essays and comments about my fear for the future of America. I have stated, without court-worthy evidence but with clearly-tuned emotion based on seven decades of life in our homeland and 35 years of service in the federal government, that our ship of state is, at the present time, steaming toward the edge of the rational map of public discourse and responsible actions where once the uncharted western world was labeled, “Here there be dragons.”

What actions can we, as passengers on this tempest-tossed, wildly careening, insanely-captained vessel of democracy take before we are driven onto the rocks of Constitutional destruction, thence to be devoured by our hungry domestic and foreign enemies? The obvious answer is “take back the helm,” but I will tell you, as a non-sailor who barely knows the difference between a scupper and a sheet, removing only the captain is not the solution—In this day of political hyperfactionalism, it is not even the problem.

In Federalist No. 65, Hamilton wrestled with the concept of impeachment by the House and removal by the Senate. He considered the fallibility of men—the ever-present temptations of self-promotion, undue enrichment, bribed biases, and ethical estrangement from faithfulness to a higher cause. He offered this conundrum (italics mine):

“The delicacy and magnitude of a trust which so deeply concerns the political reputation and existence of every man engaged in the administration of public affairs, speak for themselves. The difficulty of placing it rightly, in a government resting entirely on the basis of periodical elections, will as readily be perceived, when it is considered that the most conspicuous characters in it will, from that circumstance, be too often the leaders or the tools of the most cunning or the most numerous faction, and on this account, can hardly be expected to possess the requisite neutrality towards those whose conduct may be the subject of scrutiny.”

“The convention, it appears, thought the Senate the most fit depositary of this important trust. Those who can best discern the intrinsic difficulty of the thing, will be least hasty in condemning that opinion, and will be most inclined to allow due weight to the arguments which may be supposed to have produced it.”

"Where else than in the Senate could have been found a tribunal sufficiently dignified, or sufficiently independent? What other body would be likely to feel CONFIDENCE ENOUGH IN ITS OWN SITUATION, to preserve, unawed and uninfluenced, the necessary impartiality between an INDIVIDUAL accused, and the REPRESENTATIVES OF THE PEOPLE, HIS ACCUSERS?”

Here Hamilton was describing the possibility that popularly elected officials (at the time, Members of the House of Representatives) could, over time, yield to improper influences that would shade their objectivity and cause them to be biased judges during an impeachment session. He also considered that a large majority of impeachment pre-disposed representatives (tools of the most cunning or the most numerous faction) would skew the fairness curve and thus ignore or disregard a defendant’s appeals for a fair hearing. So Hamilton untangled this Gordian knot and explained to the readers of The Federalist No. 65 the reason for adding the Senate to the other side of the impeachment rope:

But here is where Hamilton, the Constitution, and I diverge, though I have no legal standing to opine with any legitimacy: In 1788, when both the proposed House and Senate were small—as was the nation itself—and the complexity of the machine of government was manageable by a few leaders, the idea of a Senate capable of unbiased judgement (those who can best discern the intrinsic difficulty of the thing) is quaint and almost laughable compared to the factionalism and Rubik’s Cube contortions of today’s upper chamber. But he goes on to proclaim the purest merits of the Senate as an impeachment jury:

“What, it may be asked, is the true spirit of the institution itself? Is it not designed as a method of NATIONAL INQUEST [sic] into the conduct of public men? If this be the design of it, who can so properly be the inquisitors for the nation as the representatives of the nation themselves? It is not disputed that the power of originating the inquiry, or, in other words, of preferring the impeachment, ought to be lodged in the hands of one branch of the legislative body. Will not the reasons which indicate the propriety of this arrangement strongly plead for an admission of the other branch of that body to a share of the inquiry? 

Hamilton’s explanation of the best of two roughly irreconcilable legislative worlds tell us how hard it was for the Founders to find an equitable path to impeachment…but how important it was that such a path be forged to bring down a man such as Donald Trump.

Of course, the Constitution as approved by the people enshrined in Article I the powers of the House and the Senate to prosecute a president impeachment, but I am not convinced that the Senate Hamilton and the Constitutional signers envisioned is anywhere close to “a tribunal sufficiently dignified, or sufficiently independent.” 

As long as both House and Senate are composed of nearly unbeatable majorities of disparate parties and factions, each with its own view of independence, fairness, equity, and due process, any impeachment of this, or any president, is guaranteed to fail in removal of a president whose party holds the Senate majority.

In my world, the House and the Senate would consist of men and women of great character, unblemished by outside factions, money, influence, and they would be chosen from equitably-adjusted districts (no Gerrymandering). Men like Mitch McConnell would never have so much power as to become anointed bullies, and the House would be devoid of special-interest caucuses capable of threatening leadership with unreasonable demands at the peril of legislative defeat. 

My vote in 2020 will be for the man or woman I believe has the best chance of rising to the challenge of my impossible formula, and for state legislators who will fight the good fight against Gerrymandering. Only when factional corruption is checked and balance is achieved will the Constitutional processes envisioned by the Founders regain control of a ship that is headed ever closer to the dragons.

Hamilton, in reply to my blue-sky dreams would say again (as he wrote in 1788):

“If mankind were to resolve to agree in no institution of government, until every part of it had been adjusted to the most exact standard of perfection, society would soon become a general scene of anarchy, and the world a desert. Where is the standard of perfection to be found? Who will undertake to unite the discordant opinions of a whole community, in the same judgment of it; and to prevail upon one conceited projector to renounce his INFALLIBLE criterion for the FALLIBLE criterion of his more CONCEITED NEIGHBOR?”

I believe we can find such people to undertake the job of changing our course, and I believe we can overcome the conceited projectors--the false captains--who threaten the future of our our children and our nation. 

No, I'm Not That Hopeless: An Explanation

Ad Astra...Our Aspirations, Through Work,  Will Take us to the Stars

Earlier in the week, I posted, on Facebook, six predictions covering the current impeachment furor, the unelectability of the current crop of Democratic candidates, the likelihood that Trump will be re-elected in 2020, the continuing fall from grace of the American form of democracy, and my belief that the United States, already on the skids of international disrespect, will be relegated to a third- or fourth-place status economically, politically, militarily, and by most, if not all, humanitarian and environmental standards. I noted, “The few goodhearted citizens who try to right the ship will be marginalized and ridiculed.” In addition, I predicted that the trend toward oligarchy as the operating system of U.S. domestic governance will increase and, eventually dominate.

The responses to that post were predictable, particularly those from people who have followed my posts and blogs for several years, and who have assumed I am imbued with a relatively sunny, positive, and proactive sort of nature.

Some quotes:

“C'mon Jim. Please. Snap out of it. Progress begins with hope, and only ends with our common despair. I believe strongly that many of us would lay down their lives before your predictions come to pass.”

“Jim- this makes me very sad. My kids will only be in their 20s in 2030, just starting their adult lives. Your grandkids will be almost adults. There are too many good people who won’t let this happen. If Ukraine, if Hong Kong, etc., can do it, surely the USA can as well.” (honestly, the references to Ukraine and Hong Kong baffled me)

“I don’t buy it. Things will change for the good. That’s why I’m working so hard for the party.”

“Jim, look at the blue wave we had in the house last year. It’s possible. And from all the tiny voices, a giant roar!!!!” (Shades of Katy Perry)

“I'm surprised to read this from you, Jim. However I am reading the same all through my feed. The toxic landscape of DC is mostly confusing the country. So therefore rather than listen to the in-fighting ad nauseum, they may just stay with the status quo. Imagine if that's true, the Democratic party will be analyzing what they did wrong for years to come. The country is tired. The devil they know is better than the one they don't know...or something like that.”

“Jim, I pray you”re wrong.”

“I pray you are wrong Jim. As I told another. I will vote for a same sex president, a female president, etc. before i vote for a man even Harding would be shocked by.”

“I hope you are not correct ... I'm not giving in to them... never...”

And finally, there was this thoughtful, hopeful, appropriately angry reply from a millennial who is well-educated, very much an activist, and versed in the political world:

“Just because there aren’t any candidates you like doesn’t mean there’s no candidate who can win. You know that I STEEP myself in the political zeitgeist; I’m well aware of how dire things are, and I subscribe to the adage, “If you aren’t angry, you aren’t paying attention.” But this kind of nihilistic diatribe is counterproductive, and deeply disconcerting to someone who’s working hard to salvage a future for herself and for her siblings’ children. People my age are still ready to pull the levers on the guillotines and hold power to account. We’re ready to vote. We’re ready to do what it takes. We’re fired up. We’re in the streets, we’re making calls, we’re doing the work. You have a right to your despair, but, respectfully, your melodramatic alarmism is based in your feelings, not in reality. If you can’t be constructive, if your position is that nothing you do matters and therefore no one should bother to try, then you’re just one more Boomer who’s doomed us.”

A thoughtful reply seems necessary here, and I’ll take the writer’s points on, but not necessarily in order.

There are Democratic candidates I like, presidential and congressional, and to whose campaigns I have donated more than the minimum amount of money. I have, for example, donated to Pete Buttigieg, Valerie Plame, and Amy McGrath, among others. It should be noted that none of the candidates I support live in my home state of Virginia; I simply believe these candidates merit a broader blanket of support, none more so than McGrath. I will, in all likelihood, contribute to the campaign of the final presidential contender from the Democratic party. And, of course, I will vote against Trump. I never sit home on election day.

However, my contributions do not imply that I think, at the presidential level, the candidate of my choice, or any other choice, will win against the Trump machine. Something snapped in America in 2015-16—a torn ACL of national will that finally gave license to a portion of the electorate to rebel in the most egregious way. The candidate and the voters who supported him, despite his most despicable acts--mocking a disabled reporter, mocking a war hero and Gold Star families, using vile language about women, groping his daughter and laughing about dating her, paying off sexual liaisons…the list goes on and on—took advantage of a deep-seated and long-seething anger that was, like the Yellowstone magma dome, a super eruption waiting to happen. And no one of substance, even in his own party, stood against the obvious signs of catastrophe.

And yet it was all predictable, except no one, or no organization, was able to energize the public to such a degree that nationwide mobilization against poverty, racism, failing schools, and general malaise toward social issues would take hold. I was there in the midst of the March for our Lives in 2018, right along with hundreds if not thousands of men and women of my generation. The march was uplifting, but, ultimately, an empty calorie event that did not move the gun control needle one millimeter (or have I imagined the gun slaughters that continued afterward)? My advice to all those young people who have since turned 18: If you don’t vote in November, 2020, your march’s message will become a footnote in history.

It is an irritating meme that the Boomer generation is somehow responsible for the mess we’re in; that men and women born after World War II into a resurgent America where anything was possible are now the targets of the slings and arrows of Millennial anger. Make no mistake about our passion for change: we marched, we pulled the levers, we supported passages of Civil Rights and Education Acts, we stood for environmental changes, we died at Kent State and in Vietnam, our heroes were assassinated, our cities burned, our friends came home in body bags, our president lied, cheated, and stole. We were held hostage by gas-producing nations; our diplomats were held hostage by a terrorist nation.

Don’t begin to lecture us that we did nothing, paid no price, felt no pain. We had great hopes that by the turn of the 21st century the word racism would not even be in the dictionary; we had hopes that men and women of all colors, creeds, and beliefs would, in all cases, stand on equal ground; we believed that politicians would find ways to reach across the aisle and help end the threat of nuclear annihilation, humanitarian oppression, environmental rape, educational and economic disparity. And, before you throw it all back in my face, yes, we had Nixon, we had Iran-Contra, we had bad actors at all levels of politics. But nothing, nothing like what we have now.

Does this current generation think it is the first to open its eyes to the unresolved problems facing humanity…facing America…facing our families? Well, you’d better get past that sense of self-congratulatory hubris because my generation, and generations before, despite all our failings, all our mistakes and horrible decisions, were also trying to look forward to a better place for our children and our children’s children. We tried to help you get though college using borrowed funds (yes, I know you have your own debts); we nearly lost our shirts and homes in the 1987 market crash (a 22% drop on Black Monday, October 22). That one took about a third of all my family had. And then again in the 2008 recession, so many of us fell prey to unscrupulous banking, real-estate lies, and deceit. A lot of Boomer dreams dried up in those times.

I’m hardly an apologist for the wrongs my generation, and those before mine, committed: Our generation, and those before, were stained and emotionally bruised by the acts of bad, wicked, self-serving leaders—political and corporate and religious. We had McCarthy, the America Firsters, the steel and oil barons, the Tammany Hall gangs, the carpetbaggers, the money-pocketing evangelists, the mobsters, the lynch mobs, the fat-bellied sheriffs, the hucksters and shysters. Yes, we had them all—and they still exist, like cockroaches.

But above all of those evils were good, honest, hard-working people who fought our wars, who built our factories, who worked on cures for diseases, who cared for the sick and not thinking about insurance providers, who plowed the land on farms small and large, who taught our children for the sheer pleasure of passing on knowledge and not teaching to the test, who held on to the notion that ethics and fairness were foundational to the upward movement of family and society. How novel.

But a lot of us believed all that—I still do, and so do many of my Boomer contemporaries. And that was why the progressives of my generation marched, and contributed, and voted. But even though we were far from silent on some issues, we were slow to speak and act on other pressing matters. Did it take us far too long to embrace the LGBTQ community? Yes. Did we turn away from AIDS victims? Yes. Did we welcome, openly, honestly, incoming migrants fleeing oppression? Probably not. But some of us…I like to think quite a few of us…did wake up and leave our old skins and sins behind. And as we did that, we held out hope that if we could learn to move forward, the nation would too.

And that is why some who read my latest posts may wonder why I’m so angry. It’s not that I’m “one more Boomer who’s doomed us,” it’s that I’m one lone, voiceless, individual American who sees, increasingly, frustratingly, maddeningly, sorrowfully, how marginalized the middle and lower economic classes of my generation have become, and how imperiously—without effective pushback or powerful declamation—the current party in power—with fortune-filled war chests and consciousless enablers—has taken matches of denial, hatred and ignorance to the Constitution, the legislature, and the judiciary.

There was a time in America when barn-raising was a thing. Look it up. People gathered to help their neighbor raise a barn, or build a house or, in hard times, help plow a neighbor’s field and harvest a storm-threatened crop. There was a time when a man’s word was his bond, and a handshake was no less binding. There have been times—not often, but often enough to merit a mention—when political courage was more important than political capital.

Now, it is all position-taking, offering “plans” to address problems that will only cause more problems. It is pandering to the latest polls, to the “breaking news” outlets. It is shouting, name calling, character assassination, gaslighting, clawing and grasping up the greasy pole of power, boot heels on the faces and fingers of those struggling below. But most of all, it is lying to the electorate about how hard it is going to be to right the ship that is taking on water faster than we can bail.

Not one Democratic candidate has yet to say, “I’m going to have to raise taxes across the board, and while I’ll try to make it hard on the wealthy, everyone, but the most poor, will have to take a hit. You can’t have all the things you want without pain. Roads, fair housing, airports, health care, education, strong defense, clear water, sustainable agriculture, fair wages…all those important “things” and more have a cost, and a multi-trillion dollar debt is not part of my plan.” Give me that candidate and I’ll start to listen. But that’s not what Americans of any party want to hear. We want a custom-tailored way of life that works for us—the Brits call it “bespoke”--and we want our bespoke life delivered tomorrow. Maybe by Amazon Prime.

This is what we've sunk to, this is what we have visited on ourselves.

Those Americans who voted for Trump in 2016 don’t give a damn about democracy or the rule of law. They, like their president/savior, can't find Ukraine, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Iraq, or Iran on a map, and they certainly have no idea what a Kurd is, nor do they care. It's all about what's in it for them. It’s about hiring an anti-Christ in a stolen blood-soaked flag to do their bidding. That’s how they will justify their vote in 2020. 

Well, my friends, if you want them to reap the wildest whirlwind they have ever seen, then prove me wrong…get out and make it happen. Open your windows and shout it out. And get to the damn polls. Because if you don’t, what you will have, contrary to Ben Franklin, will not be a republic, but something terrible beyond a monarchy.