Monthly Archives: August 2023

And Close To Home…

A reader recently sent me a story from the Brownsburg Sentinel that illustrates the importance of local media–and at the same time, suggests its limitations in an age where so many of us have lost the very concept of  community and citizenship . Evidently, Americans are fixated on national news and/or America’s vicious culture wars, or–in the alternative–are unconcerned about their local governments, or are amusing themselves on social media…

The Sentinel covered two consecutive meetings of the Brownsburg Town Council, the second of which included the Council’s dissolution of the Brownsburg Park Board–a board that had served the residents of Brownsburg since 1959.

Prior to the first of those two meetings, the Council had published an agenda including the dissolution item; the day before the meeting, it eliminated that item from the agenda.

Town Council President Travis Tschaenn also refused questions from a resident on the ownership and modification of the council agenda. He had the resident escorted away from lectern and temporarily removed from the venue by a Brownsburg Police officer.

According to the Sentinel, the Parks board was informed of the impending dissolution late on the Friday prior to the Council meeting. The Sentinel also reported that approximately $368,000 in grant funding, intended for the construction of a local Park, would be jeopardized should the park board be dissolved.

The newspaper also reported on a lack of any evidence that Travis Tschaenn or anyone on the Council had conducted an investigation into the short and long term financial impact of such a dissolution, and that Tschaenn has refused to respond to multiple inquires  or to otherwise explain his conduct in this matter.

In the second of the two Council meetings, with virtually no discussion or fanfare, the Brownsburg Parks Board was dissolved.

Because the story at the link was formatted differently than most online newspapers (it included a number of videos posted to You Tube), I was curious to learn more about the Sentinel. An email exchange with the editor/publisher led to a lunch and fascinating conversation.

It turns out that the Sentinel began publication a couple of years after another local newspaper was discontinued (the publisher of that weekly newspaper died.) It is essentially the “hobby” of its current editor/publisher, David Weyant, and reaches several thousand of the some 50,000 residents in and around Brownsburg.

Weyant said he could only speculate about the motivation for eliminating the local Parks Board.  (The “official” reason–too much unnecessary bureaucracy–didn’t pass the smell test.) An Indianapolis development company is said to have its eye on a well-located parcel currently being used as a park…but there is no confirmatory evidence of that theory.

What isn’t speculative was the lack of public participation in the process, despite the coverage provided by the Sentinel.

Weyant told me that some ten years ago, during a fight over proposed annexation, hundreds of local residents had appeared and participated at public hearings. By the time the Council turned its attention to the Parks Board, most members of the community had stopped showing interest in the only ways that matter–appearing and speaking at public meetings and/or communicating directly with the officials entitled to vote on an issue.

Only three members of the public appeared at the Council meeting at which the Parks Board was dissolved.

Weyant shook his head, opining that local residents seemed to think they were exercising their civic responsibilities by venting on social media. Ten years ago,  he noted, social media was barely a thing–just beginning to emerge.

Needless to say, a diatribe delivered on Facebook or WhatsApp is equivalent to spitting in the wind; it certainly doesn’t constitute civic engagement and absent an avalanche of anger  that prompts actual engagement, it is extremely unlikely to change the minds or behaviors of public officials.

I would have expected more government/citizen interaction in a small community where people know each other and are likely to know their elected officials personally, especially because the community does have a local newspaper, however limited its reach.

Obviously, I was wrong–the information conveyed by a local newspaper is necessary, but evidently not sufficient.

It will be interesting–and probably depressing–to see what the Brownsburg City Council does with the land and funding sources it now directly controls without the “hassle” of an intervening source of checks and balances.

If it turns out that local folks don’t like those subsequent actions, maybe they can blame their diminishing exercise of democratic civic engagement on social media.

Bread and circuses…..

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Okay–Let’s Talk About Free Speech

I haven’t posted about the indictment filed against Donald Trump by Jack Smith, because everyone  else in the universe is contributing to that discussion. But one element of those analyses/debates sets my hair on fire.

Nothing about this prosecution is about Free Speech. Nothing!

I taught my classes in Law and Public Policy through a constitutional lens. I spent the first part of the semester on what I call the “constitutional architecture”–very much including the Bill of Rights. (I was always shocked by the number of students who came to class totally unaware that the First Amendment protects citizens against government censorship–not from other people’s negative responses.)

When we came to freedom of speech, I wanted students to understand the difference between speech–defined as the constitutionally-protected communication of an idea, no matter how wrong or stupid or hurtful–and action, including action effectuated through speech.

Some of the examples I used:

  • I tell you I’ll make you a great deal on a diamond ring. It turns out to be a cubic zirconium. My representations that it was a diamond aren’t protected “speech,” they are fraud–a criminal action.
  • I call you every 15 minutes and scream at you over the phone. You call the police. I protest that I am engaging in freedom of speech. I’m wrong–harassment is an action, and the government has a right to proscribe it.
  • I’m a police officer, and I’m sitting in a restaurant booth. I hear the people in the next booth planning to rob the local bank. One says, “okay, I have the car. You have the gun. I’ve cased the place, and if you are there promptly at two, when the security officers shift, you should be able to get in and out by ten after, and I’ll be waiting.” A conversation of this specificity (unless they are actors rehearsing a scene!) constitutes the initial steps–actions–of the commission of a crime. I need not wait until they are in the middle of that bank robbery–I’m entitled to arrest them now.
  • You are a MAGA fanatic, and you regularly post diatribes to social media about how horrible Joe Biden is, how government and the “deep state” cannot be trusted and how you regularly pray for the painful death of all Democrats. Aside from your social media screeds, you take no action to harm anyone. That’s free speech, and you’re home free–at least, when it comes to the criminal law. (If you accuse specific political foes of being pedophiles or Satanists or whatever, you will risk a civil suit for libel or defamation, but absent credible threats and/or concrete actions to harm someone, you will not face criminal prosecution.)

Bribery, Insider trading. Identity theft and selling state secrets to foreign governments are other examples of crimes committed via speech.

One of the reasons people get confused about what free speech is and what it isn’t is the fact that “speech”–that is, transmission of a message– can be accomplished without words. (The legalese is “symbolic speech.”)

Burning a flag (assuming you own that flag and you aren’t violating a dry weather “no burning” ordinance) is protected by the First Amendment, because the whole purpose of that act is to send a message that the burner disapproves of the country. It’s a message that angers a lot of people, but that doesn’t justify government punishing it.

Nazis marching in Skokie, Illinois or Charlottesville, Virginia are sending an equally clear message, even without the latter’s accompanying chants. We all know what that message is, and–again, absent violence, vandalism or other hooliganism–it’s protected by the First Amendment.

The text of the Trump Indictment acknowledged that his lies were protected speech. Whether he believed them or not is irrelevant–so long as he was only posting his crazed diatribes and screaming about the election being rigged, the First Amendment protected him. Once he took concrete actions to overturn the results of the election and remain in power, however, the Free Speech clause no longer applied.

I’ve read several columns by people who should know better, gravely opining that prosecutors will have to establish whether Trump actually believed the garbage he was spewing, and noting that making such a showing is difficult. Those writers need to re-take  high school civics. As a better-educated pundit noted, I may be genuinely convinced that I am entitled to your car, but stealing it is still a crime.

Trump’s MAGA defenders can scream about the Department of Justice “criminalizing” Free Speech,  but those protestations will only sound plausible to people who slept through their high school government class.

This whole debate proves my point about the deplorable level of Americans’ civic literacy.

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Idiocy And Its Consequences

Most of us know people who ignore what is happening in Washington, D.C., or in their own state’s capitols. During my teaching years, I had several students who simply failed to connect the activities of policymakers to their own lives–governance seemed remote, almost irrelevant, especially when they were overwhelmed with efforts to balance school, jobs and families.

The extent of that civic apathy, alongside the ongoing culture war, goes a long way toward explaining why we have a Congress filled with clowns, self-important ignoramuses and assorted lunatics intent upon preventing, rather than producing, governance and policy.

Government gridlock matters, whether the apathetic crowd understands that or not. The most recent evidence is the downgrading of long-term American debt by Fitch Ratings, one of the three major independent credit rating agencies. Fitch downgraded the nation’s long-term debt from AAA, the highest tier, to AA+ — only the second time in U.S. history that the country’s debt has been downgraded. The first followed a cut by S&P Global Ratings in 2011, prompted by a fight between House Republicans and President Obama over raising the federal borrowing limit. Fitch cited a similar standoff this spring, when House Republicans again refused to raise the debt ceiling for several months.

The agency explained that “The repeated debt limit political standoffs and last-minute resolutions have eroded confidence in fiscal management.” Although it also listed America’s growing debt burden, the agency made it clear that the fact of the debt wasn’t the issue: it was the “erosion of governance” that had created doubts about the nation’s ability to cope with that debt. Fitch highlighted the GOP’s tax cuts, at a time when fiscal prudence called for increasing, rather than decreasing, tax receipts.

 In their announcement of the downgrade, Fitch analysts cited  “erosion of governance” compared to peers that “over the last two decades that has manifested in repeated debt limit standoffs and last-minute resolutions.”

In other words, as The New York Times observed, the downgrade was yet another sign that those knowledgable about the economy are increasingly worried about the effects of America’s political chaos–and especially about the recurring brinkmanship over the debt limit that is becoming entrenched in Washington–despite the fact that the U.S. economy is currently robust.

The immediate consequence of the Fitch downgrade was a sell-off on Wall Street, where retirement funds and stocks held by many of those apathetic citizens took a bath. And as ABC News reported, when government struggles to address debt issues, triggering such a downgrade, consumers face higher interest rates for loans–  higher costs for borrowing for everything from credit cards to mortgages to cars.

So here we are.

I have drawn two broad conclusions from the country’s current failures of self-government: one, the apathetic Americans who have failed to “connect the dots” between government dysfunction and their own daily lives have facilitated the election of people who are demonstrably  incapable of understanding the policy process. They have done so either by voting mechanically on the basis of partisan identification, or (frequently) by failing to vote at all. Two, far too many Americans cast their votes on the basis of cultural grievances, ignoring–or failing to understand–the actual responsibilities of the political offices to which they have elevated their chosen culture warriors.

For years, Democrats have complained about voters who–as they see it–fail to vote their own interests. What they mean by that is that such voters discount the pocketbook benefits they would receive from the enactment of Democratic policies. What that complaint ignores is the reality that, for most people, “interests” are not necessarily–or even predominantly–financial. The voters who return the Paul Gosars, Jim Jordans, Margery Taylor Green and their ilk to Congress are fighting social change and the perceived diminution of their privileged status as White Christians, males, heterosexuals, etc.

The problem for the rest of us–genuine Conservatives and moderates as well as progressive Democrats–is that this cohort has zero interest in governance and no ability to function as policymakers. Their sole interest is performative. They appear to be totally unaware of the consequences of those performances–one of which, as we’ve just seen, is to convince rating agencies that the United States government is incapable of dealing with the legitimate issues it faces. 

We can only hope that culture warriors and apathetic Americans–aided and abetted by extreme gerrymandering–don’t vote in 2024 to return the clowns to what has become a dysfunctional Congressional circus.

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The Aliens Are Here

Sometimes, you have to laugh or you’ll cry….

Let me begin this post with some confessions: I love science fiction. I’ve read tons of it since I was a child. I’m a huge Star Trek fan, currently fixated on “Strange New Worlds.” My scientific knowledge is admittedly limited, but the odds have convinced me that humans cannot be alone in the universe–it’s really inconceivable that only one planet among billions has generated (semi) intelligent life.

But really, idiot Congress-critters!

Dana Milbank of the Washington Post had the story:

The aliens have landed. And they have a gavel!

That is as plausible a takeaway as any from this week’s House Oversight Committee hearing on unidentified anomalous phenomena, the curiosity formerly known as UFOs. The panel’s national security subcommittee brought in, as its star witness, one David Grusch, a former Defense Department intelligence official who now claims:

That there are “quite a number” of “nonhuman” space vehicles in the possession of the U.S. government.

That one “partially intact vehicle” was retrieved from Italian dictator Benito Mussolini in 1933 by the United States, acting on a tip from Pope Pius XII.

That the aliens have engaged in “malevolent activity” and “malevolent events” on Earth that have harmed or killed humans.

That the U.S. government is also in possession of “dead pilots” from the spaceships.

That a private defense contractor is storing one of the alien ships, which have been as large as a football field.

That the vehicles might be coming “from a higher dimensional physical space that might be co-located right here.”

That the Roswell, N.M., alien landing was real, and the Air Force’s debunking of it was a “total hack job.”

And that the United States has engaged in a nearly century-long “sophisticated disinformation campaign” (apparently including murders to silence people) to hide the truth.

I’d tell you more, but then they would have to kill me.

I actually have a more plausible theory: there are aliens among us, and they are currently serving as Republican Right-wingers in the U.S. House of Representatives. (I mean, really, who thinks that Marjorie Taylor Green and the other loonies currently preventing anything remotely resembling governance are sentient members of the human race? Unlikely, I tell you!! They’re here to effectuate the paralysis of Earth’s governments–and they’re doing a pretty good job of it!)

Although the star witness in this hearing was unable to provide any evidence whatever to support his claims, Milbank noted that several Republicans on the panel greeted those claims with “total credulity, using them as just more evidence that the deep-state U.S. government is lying to the American people, covering up the truth and can never be trusted. Their anti-government vendetta has gone intergalactic.”

I’d almost like to believe that the U.S. has a government capable of pulling off a cover-up of this magnitude. Think about the thousands of people who would have had to be sworn to silence and the fact that their compliance would need to be closely monitored over decades…It’s a theory right up there with Robert N. Kennedy, Jr.’s insistence that the entire medical establishment must be “in on” the “truth” about those nefarious vaccines.

I love science fiction, but I’m getting pretty tired of following the clearly alien MAGA life-forms controlling today’s GOP.

Maybe I should just use my Space Laser to wipe them out…..

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Petty feuds, Outsized egos, and Monumental Ignorance

About a year ago, my sister urged me to subscribe to Robert Hubbell’s Substack newsletter. I did, and have appreciated his lawyerly approach to the issues we wrestle with on this blog. I’ve also appreciated the clarity of his writing–but the other day, that writing hit a new high!

Hubbell was reacting to reports that Kevin McCarthy is “warming” to the idea of impeaching Joe Biden.

I took the headline of this post from his introductory paragraphs:

Speaker Kevin McCarthy is reportedly warming to the idea of an impeachment inquiry against President Joe Biden. Do not waste time fretting over that possibility. Don’t get me wrong; such an inquiry would be an outrage of grotesque proportions. But it would be a counterproductive clown show that will further damage GOP prospects in 2024. And if recent history is a guide, Democrats will run circles around hapless, outclassed Republicans attempting to manufacture a crime out of swamp gas and wishful thinking.

          Like the Wizard of Oz—who created distractions from behind a curtain to conceal his impotence—House Republicans must distract the public’s attention from their inability to legislate. Republicans hold the majority in the chamber of Congress that must originate all spending bills, but the GOP caucus has been rendered impotent, riven by petty feuds, outsized egos, and monumental ignorance. What better way to distract attention from their shortcomings than to chase wild conspiracies that forever recede into the distance like mirages, conveniently disappearing when Democrats demand evidence to support baseless charges?

Hubbell proceeds to analyze the likely consequences of a (further) GOP descent into irrelevance and lunacy: as he notes, the grounds for impeaching President Biden are unclear (to put it mildly–perhaps just being Hunter Biden’s father?), but that really doesn’t matter to the far Right crazies pursing this approach.

Any excuse will do because the point of the exercise is to create soundbites for Fox News that contain the words “Biden” and “impeachment” in the same sentence. The vote on a resolution to initiate an impeachment hearing will further damage Republicans elected in districts Joe Biden won in 2020.

Hubbell references leaked reports coming out of a GOP caucus meeting, in which  vulnerable Republicans argued strenuously that they should not be forced to vote on a resolution to initiate an impeachment inquiry.

Hubbell argues that–given the performance of the GOP pro-impeachment House members– hearings would be disastrous for them. Among other things, Democrats would certainly call on Rudy Giuliani’s co-conspirator, Lev Parnas, who has already offered to testify that the “allegations about Hunter Biden and Burisma were fabricated with Giuliani’s encouragement.” Parnas has promised to testify that “Never, during any of my communications with Ukrainian officials or connections to Burisma, did any of them confirm or provide concrete facts linking the Bidens to illegal activities.”

The truth is that everyone, from Giuliani [to] Devin Nunes and his colleagues, to the people at FOX News, knew that these allegations against the Bidens were false. There has never been any factual evidence, only conspiracy theories spread by people who knew exactly what they were doing.

And about that laptop….Commentators familiar with the GOP’s extensive efforts to “prove” Hunter Biden’s culpability (and by implication, his father’s) have pointed out that Rudy Giuliani and the repair shop owner would inevitably have to testify under oath about Giuliani’s efforts to get Hunter Biden’s laptop from the Russians years before it turned up in the repair shop. (I have no idea where the Russians fit into this recital, but it certainly sounds interesting…at least, if one cares about the problems of pathetic Hunter Biden, who–after all–is not and never has been a government official.)

More interesting, such testimony “would require forensic experts to say that additional folders were created on Hunter Biden’s laptop after Giuliani obtained it, and months after the FBI got a copy.”

Hubbell quotes Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo who summarizes GOP insanity:

Impeach Joe Biden? Go for it. See you at the trial. And good luck with that.

I see nothing wrong with a trial based on transparently nonsensical claims. In fact, every time Freedom Caucus weirdos hold the floor and national spotlight it hurts Republican standing. Public opinion polls and election results leave little doubt about this. Air the whole thing. Remove whatever sting it has left.

Hubbell clearly relishes the prospect of allowing the Democrats’ “skilled lawyer-legislators” like Jamie Raskin, Adam Schiff, and others the ability to torch the “incoherent yammerings of vapid culture warriors whose only strategy is to stamp their feet and shout.”

As he says, in a world where Republicans are willing to mimic those old Soviet show trials, Democrats shouldn’t fear impeachment.

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