Blame The Courts

What’s that old saying? The enemy of my enemy is my friend?

 Over at Dispatches from the Culture Wars a few days ago, Ed Brayton actually endorsed a theory offered by Jonah Goldberg.

Both Goldberg’s column and Brayton’s comment on it were offered in the run-up to Trump’s demand that he be given broadcast time to address the nation about the “crisis” at the border. Both predicted that Trump would declare a “national emergency” entitling him to ignore Congress and build his ridiculous wall.

As we now know, during that broadcast Trump simply reiterated his previous, fabricated “reasons” for building the wall. But he has continued to threaten the tactic.

Goldberg noted that such a move would be contrary both to common sense and the rule of law.

Do we really want to establish the precedent that the president can simply declare “It’s an emergency” like some magical incantation and then completely bypass property rights and the will of Congress just so he can fulfill a campaign promise that, if Sam Nunberg is to be believed, began as a consultant’s gimmick to get the candidate Trump to talk about immigration and what a great builder he is?

Moreover, if Trump actually attempted to use the military to seize private land, spending money Congress did not authorize, think of what the news cycle would look like, not from Trump’s perspective but from the perspective of other elected Republicans. Assuming that the Supreme Court or Congress didn’t stop him — a big assumption — would you like to run for office defending hourly images of armed U.S. troops kicking in doors or rolling out concertina wire? Is it beyond imagining that at least one Texas or Arizona rancher would get shot defending his property?

According to Goldberg, the theory then circulating in Washington was that the White House was fully aware that an order of that sort would generate multiple lawsuits and would likely be blocked almost immediately by the courts. That–in their view–would be the best of all possible worlds; it would extricate Trump from a box of his own making. He’d be able to tell his base he’d done everything he could, but his plan for America’s safety had been blocked by those terrible judges.

The reason this scenario seems so plausible is because such a patently illegal declaration would mimic a dishonest and destructive strategy that is pursued with some regularity by legislators at all levels of government. They can pass a bill they know to be unconstitutional, placating the constituents who want it, secure in the knowledge that the courts will bail them out.

I still remember a long-ago conversation with a student in one of my graduate classes, who happened to be a State Representative. He had just voted for a bill requiring schools throughout the state to post the Ten Commandments. I knew he was fully aware that such a law would violate the Establishment Clause, and I asked him why he had voted for something he knew to be unconstitutional. He replied that the “folks back in Mayberry” would be angry if he’d voted no, so he’d decided to “let the courts take the heat.”

There are a number of problems with that strategy. It rewards moral cowardice, and it feeds hostility to the judiciary among people who don’t understand the constitution, the function of the courts, or checks and balances.

And eventually, if Trump and the GOP get their way, pretty soon we won’t have competent, principled judges on the federal bench who are willing to “take the heat” in order to protect the constitution from cynical legislators pandering to constitutionally-illiterate voters.

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Speaking Of Symbolism…

Most sane observers understand that Trump’s wall is entirely symbolic. If built, it clearly wouldn’t prevent the entry of undocumented folks (the majority of whom fly in and overstay their visas) or the successful smuggling of drugs (which tend to come by ship or air).

Even Fox News rebutted the Administration’s claim that 4,000 terrorists had been stopped at the Southern border (the actual number appears to be 6 people on the watch list). I’m told that most of the Saudis responsible for 9/11 entered through Canada.

The obscenely expensive wall Trump wants to build between the U.S. and Mexico is solely intended to send a message: ignore the poem on Lady Liberty. If you are brown, you aren’t welcome.

The government shutdown triggered by his tantrum over the wall provided Trump watchers with another symbol–one more example of how truly corrupt our know-nothing President can be. Not that most of us needed the reminder.

As federal employees tried to figure out how they would pay their mortgages and put food on the table during the shutdown, as landlords threatened to evict tenants dependent upon Section 8 vouchers that stopped coming, as millions of Americans who rely on SNAP (food stamps) faced the likelihood that those benefits wouldn’t be forthcoming…Talking Points Memo reported that the President managed to keep a historic site incorporated in his hotel fully staffed.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Smithsonian museums are closed. There are no federal staffers to answer tourists’ questions at the Lincoln Memorial. And across the United States, national parks are cluttered with trash. Yet despite the federal government shutdown, a historic clock tower at the Trump International Hotel remained open Friday for its handful of visitors, staffed by green-clad National Park Service rangers.

“We’re open!” one National Park Service ranger declared around lunchtime, pushing an elevator button for a lone visitor entering the site through a side entrance to ride to the top of the 315-foot-high, nearly 120-year-old clock tower.

The Trump administration appears to have gone out of its way to keep the attraction in the federally owned building that houses the Trump hotel open and staffed with National Park Service rangers, even as other federal agencies shut all but the most essential services.

A watchdog group has filed a Freedom of Information request over the Trump Hotel’s exemption from a shutdown that furloughed hundreds of thousands of workers and crippled many agencies.

Completed in 1899, the Romanesque-style former post office is on the National Register of Historic Places. The GSA pays for the National Park Service to run the building’s clock tower for visits by the general public. The tower initially closed to the public after the shutdown started. The GSA noticed then that the deal under which the park service staffs the site had expired, and renewed it, and the park service reopened the tower this week, the agency said.

There could hardly be a clearer symbol of Trump’s priorities.

Are more than 800,000 hard-working federal workers desperately trying to make ends meet? Is air travel becoming dangerous as TSA personnel call in sick rather than continue working without pay? Are the national parks overflowing with trash? Well, first things first–we certainly don’t want to inconvenience Trump’s business.

The wall is a symbol of his bigotry; the park rangers tending to the clock tower are a symbol of his self-engrossed avarice.

His presidency is a shameful symbol of national decline.

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“Those People”

A recent, fascinating article in the New York Times focused on the growing divisions between Israeli and American Jews. The differences between them are real, and the implications of those differences for American foreign policy and Middle East peace deserve examination–but I took a somewhat different lesson from the “schism” being scrutinized.

That lesson has two parts: national cultures matter, and stereotypes rest on a profound misunderstanding of the relative influences of biology and culture.

It isn’t only bigots who ascribe certain behaviors to discrete groups of people; even folks who would never impose a quota or paint a swastika on a synagogue wall often stereotype marginalized groups, believing that all Jews–or gays, or blacks, or “Polacks” or other identifiable populations– have particular, inborn characteristics. How many times have you heard someone refer to a minority group as “those people”?

To the extent that minority groups do have observable “markers” of attitude or behavior, those characteristics are almost always the result of history and culture rather than genetic traits. (In an echo of the old nature/nurture debate, it’s hard to disentangle, for example, the emphasis Jews have placed on education from a history that highlighted the value of an asset you could take with you when the powers-that-be confiscated your property and ran you out of the country.)

Marginalized groups develop coping mechanisms that observers often assume are inborn characteristics of “those people.”

Jews who live in Israel, where they are the majority, occupy a very different culture than we American Jews. The threats they face from hostile countries on their borders, the requirement that almost everyone serve in the military, and the theocratic elements of Israel’s governance combine to provide an environment that is dramatically different from the environment experienced by American Jews.

It shouldn’t surprise us that different national cultures shape different perspectives and behaviors, even among people who share a long history. Scholars tell us that the worldviews of the cultures into which we are socialized are enormously consequential.

The truth of the matter is that all groups composed of “those people” are the products of a specific history, time and place. Any group of people who shared that particular history, time and place would be likely to exhibit similar behaviors and attitudes.

Stereotypes are based upon the assumption that certain identifiable groups are monolithic, that all of its members have recognizable, inherited similarities.

The differences that have emerged between Israeli and American Jews should remind us that humans are a mixture of genetics and culture–of nature and nurture–and efforts to cram our differences into silos marked “those people”–or simply “us” and “them”–aren’t simply pernicious.

They’re wildly inaccurate.

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Revising History? Or Ignorance Of It?

A recent article in the Charleston Post and Courier reported on the results of a poll conducted by Winthrop University. It was pretty disheartening.

The Winthrop University Poll randomly dialed and questioned 969 residents in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia between Nov. 10-20 and Nov. 26-Dec. 2. Results have an error margin of plus or minus 3.15 percent.

The poll found that half of residents either agree or strongly agree that America was founded as an explicitly Christian nation.

Among white evangelicals, three-fourths agreed or strongly agreed with this belief about how the nation was founded.

The immediate question raised by such results is whether these respondents have chosen to ignore what they (presumably) learned in history class  or whether they are simply uninformed. Whatever the answer, the poll results explain a number of things about Southern political culture.

The poll’s director noted that the belief in a Christian founding is central to Christian Nationalism.

“Research has shown that increases in Christian Nationalist beliefs lead to more exclusionary views on immigration and more negative views of multi-culturalism in America,” Huffmon said. “Those who hold these views care more about whether they have a strong leader who will protect their religious and cultural values than whether a leader is individually pious.”

Forgive me if I suggest that the “cultural value” they want to protect is Christian social dominance.

It is virtually impossible to reconcile this belief in a Christian Nation with American history, or with what we know about the origins of America’s constitution–or for that matter, with the plain language of the Constitution and Bill of Rights. It is one thing for Christian fundamentalists to prefer that the country affirm the superiority of their particular creed; it is another thing entirely to falsify history in order to convince themselves and others that the Founders agreed with them.

If these folks have made a conscious decision to falsify history, that’s reprehensible. But it is far more likely that they are ignorant of history, that they’ve never heard of the Enlightenment, or encountered the (then radical) political philosophy that privileged personal autonomy over religious and political beliefs endorsed and imposed by the state.  The widespread belief in Christian nationhood reflected in the poll results is a stark reminder of Americans’ deficit of civic literacy, and the failure of our schools to teach history and government accurately and adequately.

It’s interesting–and telling– that this particular fantasy about America’s founding is almost exclusively a phenomenon of White Christians who consider themselves the only true Americans.

The Rev. Joseph Darby, first vice president for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in Charleston, disagreed with claims that the country was intended to be explicitly Christian.

Darby, who also pastors Nichols Chapel AME in Charleston, didn’t mince words in describing Christian nationalists and white evangelical denominations with exclusionary views on immigration and multiculturalism.

“It’s called Christian hypocrisy,” Darby said.

Darby added that the country should not be in favor of one particular religion. Rather, he said politicians and voters should “love God and love others as we would be loved.”

“If the laws reflect that, we’d be one nation under all,” he said. “If you have something that’s exclusively Christian, you’re walking a very slippery, nationalist slope. Everyone in America is not Christian.”

I suspect that White Christian Nationalists are more worried about the threat civic equality poses to their cultural hegemony than they are about America’s spiritual prospects.

Policymakers can’t do much about chosen ignorance, but polls like this should be seen as yet another reason to make civic education a national priority.

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Progress Report From Juanita Jean

So much winning…

A few days ago, my favorite Texas blogger summed it all up:

As of this moment, we have no Attorney General, no White House Chief of Staff, no Interior Secretary, no Director of the EPA, the Secretary of Education is a religious nut trying to destroy education, the VP is a religious nut who believes women should be subjugated, the Secretary of State is a political hack helping cover up the murder of a Saudi journalist, the Director of National Security wants to bomb Iran, 18 countries have no US ambassador (including Australia), half of the positions in the State Department remain unfilled, the stock market is down almost 3,000 points, China now owns Pacific rim trade, the US is the only major power to NOT be in the Paris accords, the entire world is either terrified or laughing at us, and the president has shut down the government for the last 10 days over his 5th century solution to a 21st century problem. Notice I didn’t mention anything about everyone convicted, in jail, or on the way to jail, or Trump’s current average of telling over 500 lies per month.

This is great? Are we tired of winning yet?

The answer to her (entirely rhetorical) question is: yes, some 60% of us are very tired of Trump and his version of “winning.

The question that is harder to answer is, what the f**k is wrong with that other 40%?”

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