Author Archives: Sheila

The Rhyming Of History

So much of what Trump and the GOP are doing right now defies logic, although it’s probably consistent with their twisted version of what would make America “great”–a country filled with people who are White, fundamentalist, and receptive to propaganda. The list of insanities is long, but today I just want to focus on the administration’s war on higher education. (Not that today’s Republicans don’t have contempt for education at all levels; they clearly do.)

In the decades following WWII, the best universities in the United States have been considered the best in the world, and that reputation, that prominence, has generated a wide array of economic, cultural, scientific, and geopolitical benefits.

For one thing, our universities generate a significant share of the world’s basic research. Federal funding supporting that research–funding that Trump has threatened to withhold– has given us everything from the internet to mRNA vaccines.

American universities attract and train a highly-skilled workforce. They anchor local economies. They promote economic growth through partnerships with industry. And universities have played a major role in research supporting military innovation, cybersecurity, and intelligence–something you’d think the GOP, with its military obsessions, would appreciate.

Of course, America’s universities also serve to promulgate “liberal” values like academic freedom, intellectual inquiry, democracy and human rights, so MAGA is willing to dispense with the other benefits in order to minimize the chances of creating an informed and thinking citizenry.

This assault on academia isn’t as obvious or remarked-upon as the other–frighteningly numerous– parallels to Germany in the 1930s, but those parallels are there. My friend Morton Marcus recently sent me a copy of an article titled How Universities Die. It began with a history that feels chillingly similar to the Trumpian effort to turn America’s universities into obedient organs of an autocratic, White Christian state.

In 1910, German universities were the envy of the world. They were the world’s center of scientific research, not only in the natural sciences but also in the study of history, politics, philosophy, and literature. Our modern scholarly disciplines were all first defined in Germany. The University of Berlin, founded a century earlier, was the Harvard of its day. Every serious American university, from Hopkins to Chicago, to Harvard and Berkeley, was made or reformed according to the “Berlin model.” Why else is Stanford’s motto (“Die Luft der Freiheit weht” — “The winds of freedom are blowing”) in German? Original research was prized over the mere transmission of knowledge from one generation to the next. Faculty and students would learn together in seminars and laboratories. Professors would have “Lehrfreiheit,” or the freedom to teach, while students would enjoy “Lernfreiheit,” the freedom to learn, across multiple disciplines. Although supported entirely by the state, universities themselves would decide who would teach and what would be taught. If university rankings had existed in 1910, eight of the top 10 in the world probably would have been German — with only Oxford and Cambridge joining them in that elite circle.

As late as 1932, the University of Berlin remained the most famous of the world’s universities. By 1934, it had been destroyed from without and within.

Germany’s descent from a nation of “poets and thinkers” (“Dichter und Denker”) to one of “judges and hangmen” (“Richter und Henker”) ended its leadership in higher education.

When the Nazi regime came into power, it purged universities of non-Aryan students, faculty and political dissidents. Trump is trying to prevent foreign students from enrolling at Harvard, and ejecting foreign students enrolled elsewhere who dare to speak or write in support of Palestinians. International students have noticed; between March 2024 to March 2025, U.S. international student counts declined 11.3%.

The article tells us that leading scholars left Berlin in large numbers, beginning what would be a historic migration of brilliant thinkers to the United States and elsewhere. German universities were divested of capacity for self-government. Scholarship in search of truth was replaced by scholarship in service of the “Volk.” Faculties were purged of non-compliant members. (In Florida, Governor DeSantis has dutifully followed the Nazi model, and Florida has seen a similar migration of professors.)

German universities never regained their status or importance.

The Trump administration is intent upon destroying one of the few fields– higher education– in which this country is still the global leader. The intensifying assault on immigrants had already reduced applications from international students. Coupled with the escalating attacks on universities and DEI, the administration is crippling America’s capacity to recruit talent from all shores. We will decline.

History tells us that when universities die, nations decay.

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Sauce For The Goose…None For The Gander

Remember Leona Helmsley, and her infamous statement that “the rules are for the little people”? The Trump administration clearly follows her philosophy, crafting rules that are intended to apply only to “those” people.

The Guardian has reported on a June 11th Justice Department directive that would allow authorities to strip naturalized Americans of their citizenship for certain “criminal offenses.” And what are those criminal offenses? Murder? Theft? Arson? Probably not. According to the memo, attorneys in the department can institute proceedings to revoke someone’s United States citizenship if it can be demonstrated that the individual “illegally procured” naturalization, or procured naturalization by “concealment of a material fact or by willful misrepresentation.”

Evidently, failure to completely answer questions (“completely” can be in the eye of the beholder) during the naturalization process is sufficiently criminal to justify revocation of a person’s citizenship. (The article did make me think: if a factual omission is a crime serious enough to strip someone of citizenship, wouldn’t being convicted of, say, 32 felonies also be enough? But I digress.) 

The directive creates a process that significantly lightens the burden on the prosecutor. According to the memo, the proceedings are civil, so it emphasizes that the accused would not be entitled to an attorney. Also, since the proceedings are civil, the government has a lighter burden of proof than it would in criminal cases.

The overblown rhetoric of the proposal says prosecutors will focus on people involved “in the commission of war crimes, extrajudicial killings, or other serious human rights abuses … [and] naturalized criminals, gang members, or, indeed, any individuals convicted of crimes who pose an ongoing threat to the US”. But justice department attorneys are given wide discretion on when to pursue denaturalization; the directive specifically includes instances of lying on immigration forms.

The justice department’s civil rights division has been placed at the forefront of Trump’s policy objectives, including ending diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs within the government as well as ending transgender treatments, among other initiatives.

Well, as long as lying qualifies, let’s look at a couple of high-profile people who should be ripe for denaturalization. For example Vox has identified some questionable aspects of Melania Trump’s immigration process. 

The article reported that Melania broke immigration law when she first came to the U.S. in 1996. She entered the country on a tourist visa and then worked as a professional model–work that violated the terms of that visa. Perhaps she didn’t know better, but–as the Vox article notes–it is also entirely “possible that Melania knowingly committed visa fraud; that, in fact, she lied to US immigration officials when entering the country in August 1996 about her intentions to work while in the US. That’s not just an immigration violation but an outright federal crime.”

Either way, in order for Melania to have gotten a green card and then US citizenship, she would have had to attest that she hadn’t violated immigration law before — something that now appears to be untrue.

And speaking of “ongoing threats to the U.S.,” what about Donald’s no longer-BFF, Elon Musk? According to Forbes,

Long before he became one of Donald Trump’s biggest donors and campaign surrogates, South African-born Elon Musk worked illegally in the United States as he launched his entrepreneurial career after ditching a graduate studies program in California, according to former business associates, court records and company documents obtained by The Washington Post,” reported Maria Sacchetti, Faiz Siddiqui and Nick Miroff.

 The reporters found Musk “did not have the legal right to work” when he founded and attracted investment with his brother Kimbal for a company later named Zip2. Kimbal Musk has long been open about their lack of legal status, even explaining in a video interview that he lied when crossing the U.S.-Canadian border so he could attend a business meeting in Silicon Valley. Immigration attorney Ira Kurzban said, “That’s fraud on entry.” He noted that Elon Musk’s brother could have been permanently barred from the United States. Instead, he became CEO of Musk’s first company.

“(Elon) Musk arrived in Palo Alto in 1995 for a graduate degree program at Stanford University but never enrolled in courses, working instead on his startup,” according to the Washington Post. That means Musk committed at least two immigration violations. First, by failing to take courses, he violated his student status. Second, he did not have authorization to work legally in the United States.

Somehow, I doubt the Justice Department’s new directive will cause trouble for these particular scofflaw’s. After all, they’re White–and the Trump administration is all about selective enforcement of those pesky rules.

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The Constitution And The Court

When Trump first began issuing his blatantly unconstitutional Executive Orders, Women4Change Indiana–recognizing that simply labeling an Order unconstitutional lacked substance– asked me to draft “quick and dirty” explanations of why these Orders deserved that label. I agreed, and proceeded to offer brief explanations I titled “Your Constitutional Minute” which the organization posted to its website.

As we hurtle into even more uncharted waters–as we discover that our rogue Supreme Court is far less interested in protecting our constitutional liberties than either their predecessor or the lower courts–I thought it might be useful to share some of those posts, so that readers might draw their own conclusions about the increasingly dangerous legal territory we inhabit.

Let’s just look at the first of those “Constitutional Minutes.”

Section One of the 14th Amendment reads as follows:                

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Donald Trump’s Executive Order, in pertinent part, reads:               

It is the policy of the United States that no department or agency of the United States government shall issue documents recognizing United States citizenship, or accept documents issued by State, local, or other governments or authorities purporting to recognize United States citizenship, to persons:  (1) when that person’s mother was unlawfully present in the United States and the person’s father was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of said person’s birth, or (2) when that person’s mother’s presence in the United States was lawful but temporary, and the person’s father was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of said person’s birth.

The Law:

A president cannot repeal part of the Constitution by executive order. Congress cannot repeal a Constitutional provision by passing a new law. Amending the Constitution requires a two-thirds vote in both the House and Senate, and subsequent ratification by three-quarters of the states.

Every statement in that brief explanation is accurate. Thus far, they all remain accurate. But the Supreme Court just undermined the application of the constitutional language–not by ruling that it doesn’t apply, but by issuing a ruling that will make it more difficult for people to claim its protection.

The Court did not rule on the merits of Trump’s effort to undermine the clear language of the 14th Amendment. Instead, the majority addressed a procedural question: whether lower federal courts have the authority under the Judiciary Act of 1789 to issue nationwide injunctions. Injunctions are judicial orders that block government actions, and nation-wide injunctions block such actions against everyone, not just the plaintiffs. In other words, if a court finds a government action to be unconstitutional, a national injunction prohibits the government from taking that action anywhere–not just in the state or circuit in which the case arose.

By a 6–3 vote, the Court—led by Justice Amy Coney Barrett—held that district courts generally lack the power to grant nationwide injunctions if that relief is broader than necessary to provide “complete relief” to the plaintiffs who brought the case. The Court granted the government’s request for a partial stay of the nationwide injunctions against Trump’s clearly improper birthright-citizenship Executive Order—although “only insofar as the injunctions exceeded the scope” needed to grant relief to the plaintiff in the lawsuit.

Confused? It was intentional.

Basically, the Court declined to agree that Trump could change the clear language of the 14th Amendment. That outcome was predictable, given the clear language of the Amendment and the history of its jurisprudence. So the radical members of the majority helped the autocrat in the White House by undermining the available remedy.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor called the decision out for what it was, in a dissent joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. Saying that “No right is safe in the new legal regime the Court creates,” Sotomayor wrote “Today, the threat is to birthright citizenship. Tomorrow, a different administration may try to seize firearms from law abiding citizens or prevent people of certain faiths from gathering to worship… That holding renders constitutional guarantees meaningful in name only for any individuals who are not parties to a lawsuit.”

In law school, we learn that there is no right without a remedy. 

Welcome to Trump’s America.

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Ignorance And Stupidity

On this 4th of July, America is reeling under the combined threats of official ignorance and pervasive stupidity.

To be human, of course, is to be ignorant. There are all sorts of things that virtually all of us fail to understand. In my house, it tends to be most aspects of the emerging digital universe (I know AI is coming but have absolutely no idea how it works or what it portends, and my ability to understand the various devices my grandchildren grew up with is similarly limited). A depressingly significant portion of the population is ignorant of America’s legal framework and the most basic premises undergirding the Constitution and Bill of Rights. For millions of Americans, it’s ignorance of science and the significant difference between a scientific theory and the common use of the term “theory” as an unsupported guess.

Rather obviously, these knowledge gaps are not mutually exclusive….

Ignorance can be remedied. With proper motivation, most of us can fill in those empty spaces in our understanding. We can learn. Stupidity, however, isn’t amenable to similar correction. It’s defined as a lack of intelligence or understanding–an inability to reason or learn.

We are currently governed by people who exhibit both, elected by voters who–at the very least–were ignorant of both the nature of public service and the damage that predictably ensues when incompetent ideologues are placed in positions of authority.

America has a secretary of health and human services whose conspiratorial approach to reality and inability to understand science has led (among other appalling things) to a major outbreak of measles–a disease once virtually eradicated–and who has suggested that those afflicted take cod liver oil. We have an agriculture secretary whose “solution” to high egg prices is advice that we raise our own chickens. We have a secretary of defense–a dipsomaniac– who accidently included a journalist on an unsecured call in which national security matters were discussed. The list goes on…

The “Big Beautiful Bill” that contains MAGA’s policy priorities won’t just deprive millions of health care in order to line the pockets of our plutocrats– it will destroy this country’s storied educational institutions, and derail America’s scientific and technological progress.

The Trump administration’s fixation on ridding the country of immigrants–not simply those who’ve committed crimes, as candidate Trump promised, but any immigrant who lacks lily-white skin– is perhaps the best example of the profound stupidity that always accompanies racism.

Immigrants have been essential elements of American innovation and economic growth. Research conducted by the Partnership for a New American Economy in 2010 documented their importance. More than 40% of Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants or their children. Collectively, the companies founded by immigrants and their children employed more than 10 million people worldwide; and the revenue they generated was greater than the GDP of every country in the world except the U.S., China and Japan.

The names of those companies are familiar to most of us: Intel, EBay, Google, Tesla, Apple, You Tube, Pay Pal, Yahoo, Nordstrom, Comcast, Proctor and Gamble, Elizabeth Arden, Huffington Post. A 2012 report found that immigrants are more than twice as likely to start a business as native-born Americans. As of 2011, one in ten Americans was employed by an immigrant-run business.

As we are discovering, America’s agriculture and construction industries overwhelmingly rely on immigrants, the majority of whom are undocumented.

MAGA’s anti-immigrant hysteria is part and parcel of its equally ignorant White Christian Nationalism. There has always been a nativist streak in America– Ellis Island was first established to keep “undesirables” from entering the country. “Give me your tired, your poor, your masses yearning to breathe free” was Emma Lazarus’ response to the Chinese Exclusion Act. The Know-Nothing Party was formed largely by people who feared that Irish Catholic immigrants would take jobs from God-fearing Protestant “real Americans.”

The animus isn’t new, but it rests on widespread ignorance. As David Brooks (no bleeding heart liberal) has observed, when you wade into the evidence you find that the case for restricting immigration is pathetically weak. “The only people who have less actual data on their side are the people who deny climate change.”

Trump’s fixation on immigration has consistently been both stupid and ignorant, as well as inhumane. Remember his first term promise to build a “beautiful wall” on our southern border? The vast majority of people who are in the country illegally flew in and overstayed their visas—something a wall would neither address or prevent. (It would, however, focus on those Brown people…)

MAGA’s slogan ought to be: “Owning the libs by cutting off our noses to spite our faces.” Unfortunately, we “libs” live here too…

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Our Pathetic Indiana Government

Today, I’m taking a detour from the depressing state of the nation in order to indulge in a very personal rant about the equally depressing performance of my state’s government.

How many times have we all heard some self-important “Captain of Industry” pontificate about running government like a business? And how often have we responded–calmly and logically–by explaining the multiple and substantial differences between government and business enterprises? When I am engaging in these discussions, however, I routinely add a statement to the effect that we do have a right to expect that government will be businesslike, meaning that government agencies should operate in an efficient and professional manner.

I don’t know what people in other states experience, but in Indiana those in charge of the various services we expect government to provide, services we rely upon, are clearly uninterested in either efficiency or professionalism. Our Governor, Lieutenant governor, Attorney General and legislative super-majority are far too engrossed with rewarding their donors and indulging their culture war obsessions to bother with effective administration of the various agencies with which Hoosiers are required to interact.

Permit me to offer a recent example.

A few weeks ago, someone stole my husband’s IPhone and wallet from his locker while he was working out. Anyone who has lost a wallet or had one stolen will immediately understand the nightmare that ensues–cancelling credit cards and getting replacements, figuring out how to get copies of medical insurance and Medicare cards…(we’re still waiting on the Medicare replacement, which we’re told takes some 30 days.)

And then, of course, there’s replacing the “Real ID” issued by the Bureau of Motor Vehicles. (My husband stopped driving a few years ago, but still needs that “real ID” for travel.)

Welcome to the Indiana’s Bureau of Motor Vehicles web page, which hasn’t been updated in who knows how long, and which is demonstrably, wildly inaccurate. The BMV web page lists the locations of branches and self-service “kiosks” located in other buildings. My husband visited at least two of the listed kiosk locations, only to discover that they not only lacked the promised kiosks, but–according to building personnel–had never housed any such structures or anything similar.

The license branch that we have used over the past several years is still listed, with its operating hours. What the website neglects to mention, however, is that it was closed several months ago, when the BMV shuttered a number of locations.

After a couple of wasted visits, as we prepared to travel considerably farther, to a location that is presumably still in operation, I consulted the website to see what sort of documentation the BMV requires to confirm that my husband is both a citizen and a bona fide resident of the state of Indiana, and I discovered a list that was evidently assembled well before the Internet became pervasive and rather clearly hasn’t been reconsidered since.

He can use his passport to confirm identity and citizenship (which is good because I never heard of several of the other “acceptable” items listed). But the BMV wants a minimum of two “original documents” to demonstrate Hoosier residency. The site lists utility bills, bank statements and/or a variety of other bills and statements that people used to receive via the U.S. mail, but that most Americans now now receive virtually, via email or app. (The language on the site is very definite that only original documents are acceptable, so apparently, a printout of a digital statement or bill would not pass muster.)

In all fairness, once we had traveled 45 minutes to the now-nearest branch, the process was efficient and the employees helpful–much better than we’d expected, given the website and branch closures.

If all those Republicans who think government should be “run like a business” actually ran their businesses like this, they wouldn’t be in business very long.

I guess it’s too much to expect that someone in Indiana government might take a break from what they evidently believe are their primary duties: interfering with women’s reproduction, waging war on education, ferreting out that scandalous DEI, hassling Drag Queens, and keeping trans kids out of sports (I think statewide there are two of them)–and spend some time improving the performance of the agencies they are actually employed to manage.

But hey–this is Indiana, where voters regularly elect these culture warriors. Evidently, Hoosier voters don’t connect the dots between our seriously substandard public services and the Christian Nationalist theocrats they elect.

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