Author Archives: Sheila

Losing My Faith

I used to have faith in the good will and common sense of my fellow citizens. Over the past several years, I’ve lost that faith.

Good will?? The MAGA zealots who have taken over a previously normal political party routinely engage in outlandish accusations and escalating calls for violence. As David Frum recently wrote,

When a madman hammered nearly to death the husband of then–House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Donald Trump jeered and mocked. One of Trump’s sons and other close Trump supporters avidly promoted false claims that Paul Pelosi had somehow brought the onslaught upon himself through a sexual misadventure.

After authorities apprehended a right-wing-extremist plot to abduct Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, Trump belittled the threat at a rally. He disparaged Whitmer as a political enemy. His supporters chanted “Lock her up.” Trump laughed and replied, “Lock them all up.”

Fascism feasts on violence. In the years since his own supporters attacked the Capitol to overturn the 2020 election—many of them threatening harm to Speaker Pelosi and Vice President Mike Pence—Trump has championed the invaders, would-be kidnappers, and would-be murderers as martyrs and hostages. He has vowed to pardon them if returned to office. His own staffers have testified to the glee with which Trump watched the mayhem on television…


Common sense??? Chris Lamb is a journalist professor at IU-Indianapolis who has documented (at length) the ridiculous “facts” that Republicans have to believe in order to cling to their insistence that the 2020 election was stolen. 

Lamb began by referencing the Washington Post’s compendium of Trump’s lies–over 30 thousand of them– during his four-year presidency, and linked to the newspaper’s accessible data base of those lies. And as he reminds us, that figure was restricted to public statements.

There is no point fact-checking Trump because he uses no facts.

There is as much evidence that Donald Trump led American troops on D-Day as there is evidence that he won the 2020 Presidential Election.

And yet, as he points out, two-thirds of Republicans say Biden’s win of that election was illegitimate. In a post replete with links to sources of his evidence, Lamb deconstructs that claim, and enumerates the multiple ridiculous assertions that must be accepted as true in order to believe it.

The post points out what should be obvious: for one thing, that the massive award against Fox News for defamation could not have been won had there been any probative evidence of election fraud. (As he writes, “It’s worth noting that the truth is an absolute defense in libel suits. If  news sites – and I use that word loosely – told the truth they would have been immune from defamation lawsuits”). He also points out that a significant number of the sixty-plus cases dismissed for lack of any evidence were heard–and dismissed–by judges Trump appointed.

Lamb’s post provides a meticulous and documented list of the claims MAGA folks have embraced, and copious evidence of their falsity. I won’t recite that whole list–which I encourage you to click through and read–but to say it is discouraging is an understatement.

The unanswered question, of course, is: what percentage of the American population actually believes these things? How many of my fellow Americans have listened to both Biden and Trump, to Democratic and Republican political figures, and actually concluded that Democratic rhetoric has stoked violence? What percentage of American voters truly thinks the 2020 election was stolen, despite a total and complete absence of any corroborating evidence?

And what is wrong with that cohort? Why do they cling to beliefs that are so clearly unsupported by reality?

So yes, until relatively recently, I was confident that most people in this country were people of good will and common sense. Yes, we have always had fringe elements–the bigots of the far Right and far Left, the discontented, fearful and well-armed “Second Amendment” contingent, the scary theocrats like Beckwith and Banks– but I used to believe those people constituted a relatively small part of our body politic.

In the age of MAGA, It’s harder and harder to believe that.

I tell myself that these deluded souls really are a minority; that it is only because they are so loud and “in our faces” that they seem so numerous, but it gets harder and harder to convince myself that the sort of people with whom I regularly interact (on this site and in “real life”)–people who are, by and large, normal, measured and evidence-based –are the real majority.

If they aren’t–if the hordes of angry MAGA Christian Nationalists return Trump to power–the rest of us will lose more than faith in our fellow Americans. We will lose America.

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The Prosecutor And The Felon

Yesterday, Joe Biden dropped out of the Presidential race and endorsed Kamala Harris.

My thoughts–in no particular order:

I love Joe Biden. He has been a transformational President– an incredibly consequential one. Much as I admired and supported Barack Obama, Biden–calling on a long career of public service, and political savvy deepened by experience–accomplished far more. His legacy will be both an important and a sterling one.

That said, he is old (younger than I am…but let’s not go there…) and his decline was becoming obvious. His continued campaigning allowed the MAGA cultists to focus public attention on that decline, rather than on the existential threat to America presented by Trump and his racist cult. They will now be deprived of that tactic.

One of the constant complaints I’ve heard about the Democratic campaign the past weeks has been that the party has failed to hammer home the multiple, significant accomplishments of the Biden administration. One consequence of yesterday’s announcement has been that it has introduced the ability of the pundits and Democratic officeholder to engage in a hagiography of sorts: people commenting on Biden’s decision have used his announcement that he is backing out as a cue to celebrate a Presidential term that has been truly transformational–and to remind the American public of the multiple accomplishments of that term.

That’s all to the good. But going forward–and assuming Kamala Harris will be the nominee–what I think we will see is, in a very real sense, a fascinating, contemporary replay of the Civil War. (Hopefully, with less bloodshed, although with MAGA, one never knows.)

Kamala Harris will pledge a continuation of Biden’s policies, and those policies are infinitely more popular than those of Project 2025, which–as someone has noted–poll like Ebola. But what MAGA will find intolerable is that Harris is female and Black, and–worse still–has a Jewish husband.

Let’s be honest: absolutely no one looks at Donald Trump, a self-engrossed ignoramus who knows nothing about government and cares about nothing but himself, and sees someone competent to occupy the Oval Office. What they see–and what the research amply confirms–is someone who gives them permission to hate out loud. MAGA is a racist cult. It is today’s Confederacy, today’s war on Black people. The only difference between the original Civil War and the one taking place today (aside from the lack of muskets and powder-horns or whatever the arms of the day looked like) is that brown people, gay people, Muslims, Jews–anyone who isn’t a fundamentalist White Christian–is now part of those “Others” that MAGA folks insist cannot be “real Americans.”

The replay of the Civil War will be a nod to the past. But Kamala Harris has been a prosecutor, and what will be a far more contemporary facet of the upcoming campaign will be the face-off between a Prosecutor and a convicted felon.

Prosecutors are charged with upholding and applying the rule of law. Those of us who are lawyers of any kind have been appalled by a series of rogue decisions by a Supreme Court dominated by justices appointed by Trump. That Court has discarded any pretense of following precedent, and for lawyers serving in government jobs–prosecutors and public defenders, counselors to government officials–the destructive effects of Trump’s judges on the legal system have been incredibly painful. The prospect of electing a convicted felon to the highest position in American government is unthinkable to anyone who understands the importance of equal justice under the law. As a former longtime prosecutor, Harris is in a position to emphasize just how unthinkable that prospect ought to be.

So–here we are. Democrats now will have a youthful, dynamic and highly intelligent candidate, versed in the law, who will represent a successful administration that has passed important and popular domestic legislation and internationally has secured worldwide respect. The Republican cult will remain in thrall to an elderly candidate who is an increasingly incoherent convicted felon who consistently reinforces his lack of both civility and sanity, and whose potential victory terrifies leaders of the world’s democracies.

Joe Biden may have saved America. He deserves our gratitude and undying respect.

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Why And How Women MUST Vote In November

As some Indiana readers of this blog probably know, one of my volunteer activities is with a relatively new organization, Women 4 Change Indiana. The organization was founded in the wake of the 2016 election that put a mentally-ill, racist misogynist in the Oval Office. It works to improve Hoosier governance, opposing gerrymandering, engaging in a variety of civic education efforts, and–in the weeks and days leading up to elections–to get out the vote.

Recently, I was tasked with producing brief–but hopefully compelling–messages about the importance of women’s votes. Women 4 Change highlights those reasons on its website, and (in case you’ve missed them) I’ve compiled them below.

For women, especially, the upcoming election is about one over-riding issue: what is—and isn’t– government’s business? The Dobbs decision did more than allow legislatures to eliminate women’s reproductive rights; it challenged the longstanding constitutional doctrine that there are certain things individual citizens get to decide for ourselves. That doctrine—called “substantive due process” or “the right to privacy” prevents government from making decisions that should be left up to the individual: what you read, who you marry, whether, when and to whom you pray, what political opinions you hold. In answer to the question “who decides?” the current Supreme Court says “government.”

In the upcoming election, women especially need to vote for candidates who will support the return of America’s traditional, non-partisan judiciary. When ideological or corrupt judges are on the bench, women and minorities suffer, and the public loses respect for the legal system and the rule of law.

Since polling shows that large majorities of Americans—especially women– care about gun violence, women should take care to explore candidates’ positions on guns and gun ownership. What do the candidates say about the “right” to own and carry assault weapons? Do they support “red flag” laws that keep guns out of the hands of dangerous individuals and perpetrators of domestic violence? Do they oppose reasonable background checks?

Americans are already experiencing the effects of a warming planet. Women who worry about the livability of the world we’re leaving to our children and grandchildren need to vote for candidates who support government’s efforts to combat climate change, and need to oppose candidates who are trying to slow the transition from fossil fuels to clean energy.

In order to leave our children and grandchildren a better world, women need to withhold support for candidates giving aid and comfort to racism, anti-Semitism, misogyny, homophobia and all the other “isms”–the bigotries that divide Americans into armies of “us” and “them.” Real Americans understand that people should be evaluated on the basis of their behavior, not on the basis of their gender, religion, sexuality or skin color. (When I sent this particular part of the text to the organization, I suggested additional language to the effect that every group is a mixture of good people and assholes, but for some reason, they didn’t include that language…)

Mothers and fathers both have important stakes in the operation of their public school systems—especially in maintaining and protecting the professionalism of teachers and librarians. Women are disproportionately harmed when religious fundamentalists take control of school boards and libraries, because the books that are censored when that occurs are most often those that portray “non-traditional” families in a positive light, but everyone is harmed when teachers are told what they can and cannot teach, and the entire student body is prevented from accessing library books that may offend some citizens.

Quite obviously, these reasons to vote also apply to men–at least the ones who aren’t terrified of living in a world they have to share with females, gay folks and people of color…

Women4Change is non-partisan, so the organization confines its messaging to pleas to turn out– exhortations to vote for the candidates of one’s choice. This blog  most definitely does not operate under that constraint. Every one of the above reasons is a reason to vote Democratic. The Grand Old Party I once worked for has disappeared, and the cult that has replaced it is wrong on every single one of these issues–and plenty of other issues as well.

I’ve given up trying to understand the people who look at today’s Republican candidates– in thrall to a narcissistic ignoramus and his legions of bigots who want to return us to the 1950s — and say “Yep, those are my guys!” I only know that those of us who haven’t drunk the Kool Aid need to vote–and we need to drag our sane friends and relatives to the polls with us.

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San Diego Shames Supreme Court

I’ve previously posted about a number of recent Supreme Court cases that have ignored long-time precedents, cherry-picked history, or otherwise done violence to the philosophical basis of the Constitution and the rule of law. One that I haven’t previously addressed falls into a somewhat different category: it’s just wrong and mean-spirited.

The case–Grants Pass v. Johnson–involved an Oregon city that had passed ordinances prohibiting people from sleeping outside in public using a blanket, pillow or cardboard sheet to lie on, even if those people have no other option, i.e., are homeless.

Those challenging the ordinances relied upon the earlier case of Robinson v. California, which had held that it is “cruel and unusual”  to criminalize a person’s status, but the majority held that Robinson didn’t apply–that the ordinances penalize behavior rather than status. As a result of that analysis, municipalities can do what Grants Pass did, and subject unhoused people to hundreds of dollars in fines and even jail time for sleeping outside, even when the city admittedly lacks enough shelter beds for them.

The decision reversed a far more reasonable opinion by the Ninth Circuit; that Court held that punishing unhoused people for sleeping in public when they have no access to shelter violates the Eighth Amendment’s protection against cruel and unusual punishment.

The ACLU submitted a brief on behalf of the challengers, and issued a statement on the decision.

“It is hard to imagine a starker example of excessive punishment than fining and jailing a person for the basic human act of sleeping,” said Scout Katovich, staff attorney in the Trone Center for Justice and Equality. “As Justice Sotomayor’s dissent powerfully acknowledged, sleep is a biological necessity, not a crime. We cannot arrest our way out of homelessness, and we will continue litigating against cities that are emboldened by this decision to treat unhoused people as criminals.”

The American Civil Liberties Union submitted a friend-of-the-court brief arguing that punishing unhoused people for sleeping outside when they lack access to shelter violates the Eighth Amendment protection against cruel and unusual punishment. As the brief highlights, the original intent and meaning of the Eighth Amendment and its application in more than a century of Supreme Court cases make clear that the government cannot impose punishment that is disproportionate to the crime.

There is obviously a great deal more that can be said about this decision, but the practical reality is that it allows local governments to criminalize a social problem. Allowing municipalities to punish homelessness does absolutely nothing to ameliorate the problem. (For that matter, allowing fines to be assessed is asinine; people who cannot afford a bed don’t have resources to pay fines.)

San Diego takes a very different, and far smarter approach to the issue. People who are unsheltered or living in their cars can access parking lots that have been modified to provide more than just a place to stay.

San Diego currently operates four lots where people living in cars or RVs can park overnight, with access to restrooms, services and treatment.

The H Barracks location adds 190 parking spaces, which will nearly double the capacity of the city’s safe parking program.

It’ll be located on five acres between the airport and Liberty Station, and it would serve the large population of people living in oversized vehicles in the Peninsula area.

 The pet-friendly lot will be open overnight — 6pm-7am — with onsite security, as well as bathrooms and showers, according to the report.

The lots provide onsite services for case management, housing, health care, mental and behavioral health, plus substance-abuse treatment resources, and patrons are prohibited from drug and alcohol use. Registered sex offenders are not allowed.

The Supreme Court’s tone-deaf opinion effectively allowing municipalities to criminalize homelessness is a classic example of hitting people when they’re down. As a matter of law, it is fatally flawed; as a matter of policy, it’s clueless.

Calling homelessness a “behavior” rather than a status suggests that it is chosen–that it represents a decision made by an individual to forego habitation. Allowing local officials to punish unhoused people is simply cruel. As numerous critics of the decision have pointed out, governments cannot punish their way out of homelessness and poverty. What is needed is evidence-based solutions.

Officials in San Diego obviously recognize that. It will be interesting to see whether that city’s innovative approach results in a reduction of the number of homeless, and whether it will develop follow-up measures aimed at more permanent solutions.

Meanwhile, We the People really need to do something about our rogue Supreme Court…

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The Company Heritage Keeps…

Because I’ve been on the road, heading for a much-needed vacation (and hopefully, a brief hiatus from my daily contemplation of the various–and frankly terrifying– threats to my country and its Constitution), I’m taking the lazy way out this morning, and posting an eye-opening compendium of the contributors to Project 2025. These are the “think tanks” (note quotation marks) and other far-Right organizations that worked with Heritage to produce that document.

You can find the list here.

Some of these names will be chillingly familiar. I found others to be a mystery. Those I recognized, and a few unknown ones I was able to trace, are all members of a category we might dub “scary.” Or unAmerican–at least if one defines unAmerican as  rejection of the underlying philosophy of the Constitution and Bill of Rights (especially but certainly not exclusively the First and Fourteenth Amendments.)

Click through, take a look at the list, and–as the anti-science folks like to say–do your own research.

I’ll be back to my usual hectoring and too-wordy routine tomorrow.

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