The Equal Protection Of The Laws

From day one, the Trump administration has made its disregard for the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment and its deep-seated racism too clear to ignore. Just a few examples will suffice: the recently-announced intent to limit the number of refugees the country will accept to 7500, while giving priority to White South Africans; directing ICE to stop and harass people based on nothing but skin color; the constant and ferocious attacks on DEI; the ongoing efforts to disenfranchise Black voters…the list goes on. And on. 

The best response to MAGA protests that the racist label is unfair was in a recent headline from The Hill. It read “If MAGA doesn’t want to be labeled racist, it should stop elevating racists.”

Memo to President Trump’s backers: If you want people to stop calling you racist, stop saying and doing racist things. And stop excusing racist posts and rants by leading voices in the MAGA media.

When Nick Fuentes and Tucker Carlson recently ranked among the top five on Spotify’s list of top trending podcasts, it screamed out that racism and antisemitism are not a problem for their MAGA-world fan base.

None of this, of course, surprises those of us who have understood since 2016 where Trump’s support lies. MAGA’s racism has been too glaringly obvious to ignore. But more recently, it seems that MAGA’s animus goes beyond race, gender and religion; the administration is evidently determined to undermine the very concept of Equal Protection–the belief that all citizens are entitled to the equal application of the laws. (For that matter, Trump clearly wants the effective repeal of the entire 14th Amendment–beginning with birthright citizenship, but definitely not ending there.)

The Washington Post has reported on the administration’s most recent assault on the very concept of Equal Protection of the Laws. The administration now wants to deny people who hold different political beliefs a benefit to which they are legally entitled.

Employees of nonprofit organizations that work with undocumented immigrants, provide gender transition care for minors or engage in public protests will have a hard time getting their federal student loans forgiven under regulations advanced Thursday by the Education Department.

The 185-page rule revises eligibility requirements for Public Service Loan Forgiveness, which cancels the education debt of government and nonprofit employees after 10 years of service and 120 monthly loan payments. It will allow the education secretary to disqualify employers — not individuals — who engage in activities the department deems to have a “substantial illegal purpose” on or after July 1 — when the rule takes effect

Current law makes those holding student loans eligible for a federal program offering loan forgiveness if they focus on areas that serve the public good. The law has defined those categories as including careers in education, public health or public interest law. The proposed rule would dramatically change a program that has offered debt relief “to more than 1 million student loan borrowers across more than 20 sectors of the economy.”

The proposed rule was prompted by a Trump Executive Order that designated disfavored nonprofits that should no longer be eligible for government benefits. 

A partial list of those the administration wants to deem ineligible is telling:

Aiding and abetting violations of federal immigration laws.
Supporting terrorism or engaging in violence for the purpose of obstructing or influencing federal government policy.
Engaging in the chemical and surgical castration or mutilation of children in violation of federal or state law.
Engaging in a pattern of aiding and abetting illegal discrimination.

The subjectivity is obvious–and the point. We’ve seen how ICE defines the obstruction of government “policy.” We’ve seen what the administration considers “aiding and abetting” (i.e. offering opinions that are protected free speech). The administration defines medical treatment of transgender children to be “mutilation.”

And of course, the administration takes the position that any effort to level the playing field for minorities amounts to “illegal discrimination” against White Christians.

You can almost hear the mob boss. “Want your student loan forgiven, so you can afford a house or a new car? It would be a shame if all those payments you’ve already made didn’t count…maybe you should change jobs.” 

I doubt that Trump can spell, pronounce or define “arbitrary and capricious” but those terms describe what would result from his efforts to ignore the clear meaning of the 14th Amendment–and for that matter, the rest of the Bill of Rights.  Citizens would no longer have an automatic right to equal treatment–their access to government programs would depend upon the degree to which they are willing to bend the knee.

Like it works in a monarchy…..
 

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My Mother Was Right

I was the product of a mixed marriage. My mother was a Republican and my father a Democrat–although they did hammer out their differences before most election days, in order to avoid, as my mother put it, “cancelling each other out.” 

My mother’s identification with the GOP was based almost entirely on her fiscal conservatism, and she frequently expressed concern about what was then the “crazy fringe” of the party, which she accurately saw as racist and anti-Semitic. She worried about what would happen if the fringe became more powerful, more a part of the party’s mainstream.

She was right to worry.

The party with which my mother and I once identified is long gone, subsumed into that angry and hate-filled fringe. And now, as the saying goes, the chickens are coming home to roost. Republicans who still retain the ability to understand that blatant bigotry isn’t a good look are reacting to the public anti-Semitism of some of the MAGA movement’s most prominent members.

As Charlie Sykes put it, the MAGA Right sowed dragon’s teeth for years, and is now horrified to discover they have grown an actual dragon.

Sykes was addressing what has been termed a MAGA “civil war” over the increasingly open and vicious right-wing antisemitism of the Trumpian Right. That warfare increased when Kevin Roberts, the current president of the Heritage Foundation, announced that the Foundation was standing by Tucker Carlson, who had just platformed neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes.

As some of us warned a decade ago, the problem of Donald Trump was not merely Trump himself, but the mouth-breathers he was bringing with him — the winking permissions he granted to the movement we once called the Alt-Right. For ten years, he’s brought them into the mainstream; applauded them, encouraged them, dined with and defended them. He shattered the guardrails; dismissed the gatekeepers; and opened the sluices of bigotry.

That reality is what frightened my mother so many years ago, and it’s what makes so much contemporary political debate irrelevant. That irrelevance is especially notable in the constant hand-wringing over whether the Democratic Party should be “centrist” or “progressive.” What that debate ignores is the nature of the center in today’s political world.

A perceptive essay from Lincoln Square honed in on that question.

Where, though, is the center between right-wing authoritarianism and freedom and democracy? As the “Republicans” careen ever farther off the pavement, across the right shoulder, through the guardrail, into the ditch off the right side of the road, the “center,” if that is taken to mean the midpoint, is pulled from the middle of the road ever farther to the extreme right. Should Democrats, then, seek to be in the center by offering “Fascism Lite” as an alternative to full-blown fascism?

The essay quoted Yeats’ famous poem, asserting that “the “rough beast” Yeats envisioned has already been born. “It could not be clearer that “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.”  “Where is the center in such a time?”

Where is the center between the First Amendment and a government that seeks to control speech, assembly, and the media and is filled with Christian nationalists who want to establish a state church? Between the rule of law and a president who asserts, “I have the right to do anything I want to do. I’m the president of the United States”? Between protecting the right of all citizens to vote and seeking to repeal the Voting Rights Act and gerrymander to an absurd degree? Between consumer protection, environmental protection, scientific and medical research, and countless other government functions and maintaining the social safety net created in the 1930s, 1960s, and since and striving to “Take America Back” to the 1920s, the first Gilded Age in the late nineteenth century, or even farther? Between a president ordering the prosecution of anyone he does not like and equal application of the law? Between corruption on a previously unimaginable level and honest government? Between a fact-based examination of our history and making up a past to suit the ruler? Between government of the people, by the people, and for the people and government of the people, by an unchecked leader, and for the billionaires? 

As the essay concluded, the center is not always in the middle. The GOP fringe has been planning the current takeover since the 1970s. And as it has moved the party farther and farther to the right, the center— the midpoint between two ends — moved in the same direction.

Today, to be “progressive” is to be “woke” to that reality–and to refuse to move to that far-right midpoint.

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Courage And Concession

How many of us remember Charles Sumner from our American history courses? (Assuming those courses included information about Sumner and his principled opposition to slavery…)

The author of “Charles Sumner: Conscience of a Nation,” Zaakir Tameez, wrote a recent essay in the Washington Post, reminding us that the violent opposition Sumner faced is still with us.

On May 13, a man who made death threats against Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-Nevada) for her foreign policy views was sentenced to nearly four years in prison. Last month, Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) said she was “afraid” of using her voice to speak about political controversies. A month before that, Sen. Thom Tillis (R-North Carolina) released audio recordings of death threats he received while he was considering how to vote on Pete Hegseth’s nomination as defense secretary.

At least one senator made light of the threats. In April, Markwayne Mullin (R-Oklahoma) joked on X about “bringing back caning to settle political disputes.” It was a reference to the caning of Sen. Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, 169 years ago.

Tameez recounted the attack for readers unaware of that bit of American history.

Sumner had taken two days — May 19 and May 20 in 1856 — to deliver a passionate anti-slavery speech on the Senate floor. Among other things, he accused Southern leaders of undermining democracy. That set off Senator Preston Brooks of South Carolina, who wielded his gold-tipped cane to beat Sumner so badly that the cane shattered. Sumner barely survived.

News of the assault reinvigorated the antislavery movement. Tameez tells us that voters recognized a “parallel between Sumner’s beating and the beatings that those enslaved in the South experienced daily” and In the next election, outraged Northerners elected scores of anti-slavery politicians.

Today, as threats of political violence rise, Tameez counsels us to revisit the caning and to learn “three lessons that most history textbooks overlook.”

Lesson number one: many pro-slavery politicians rejected America’s founding texts. John Pettit of Indiana belittled the immortal words that Thomas Jefferson wrote into the Declaration of Independence: the phrase “all men are created equal.” A committed White supremacist, Pettit scorned the Jeffersonian ideal of human equality as “a self-evident lie.” (Unfortunately, Pettit’s ideological descendants still populate Red Indiana.)

Brooks, Sumner’s assailant, faced few consequences; he became a celebrity at proslavery rallies across the South, and once declared that “the Constitution of the United States should be torn to fragments.”

Tameez’ second lesson is that such anti-constitutional rhetoric can prompt political violence–not to mention actual election “rigging.”

Only weeks before the caning, David Rice Atchison of Missouri — the former president pro tempore of the Senate — led an armed gang into the territory of Kansas. With bowie knives and guns, Atchison’s men seized polling locations, intimidated voters and stuffed thousands of fraudulent ballots into the voting boxes. Their goal was to ensure that Kansas voted to become a slavery state, even if it required violence and election fraud to make it happen. “If we win,” Atchison told his thugs, “we can carry slavery to the Pacific Ocean.”

Some states simply ignored the constitution. Maryland and Tennessee banned abolitionist newspapers, and Virginia made it a crime to criticize slavery. North Carolina imposed the death penalty on anyone found to have encouraged enslaved people to revolt. In 1860, Southern states outraged by Lincoln’s modestly anti-slavery platform refused to put his name on the ballot.

Nevertheless,

Through grassroots programs, tens of thousands of people gathered in “indignation meetings” to lament Sumner’s assault and strategize political responses. The Republican Party — founded on the idea that slavery should be abolished in federal territories — passed out as many as 3 million copies of the speech that led to the caning. Sumner’s near-martyrdom energized the Northern public so much that it probably contributed to Lincoln’s epic victory in the 1860 presidential election.

Lesson number three is one that fearful senators today would do well to consider. “To galvanize a public that had been asleep to democratic slippage, Sumner believed that politicians like him needed to be brave. If they had to risk their physical safety to speak their conscience, so be it.”

Personal courage is necessary in order to resist assaults on constitutional democracy. Sumner knew that courage, not concession, was the key to defeating autocracy–while stumping for Lincoln, he even quoted Jonathan Swift, who wrote “And know that to be brave is to be wise.”

The GOP cowards who control Congress today are neither brave nor wise, leaving it up to an awakened grassroots to once again save the American Idea.

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Money, Trump And The Media

The longer we suffer the agony of the Trump administration and its assaults on governance, science, logic and basic decency, the more I become convinced that our current information environment is largely responsible. The enormous growth of online propaganda is partially to blame for the fact that 37% of Americans still tell pollsters they approve of Trump.

But the Internet isn’t the only culprit allowing MAGA and MAGA-adjacent folks to escape confrontations with reality. The party that holds the White House has a built-in information advantage, and Trump’s visceral need for attention–and his ability to command it– has made use of that advantage.

That said, I have become more concerned about the decline of what we think of as “mainstream” journalism.

Take the reporting about the administration’s refusal to fund SNAP. On the NBC evening news I watched, the lack of funding was attributed to the shutdown; there was absolutely NO reference to the fact that the administration was refusing to release funds that had been appropriated for precisely this purpose–to ensure ongoing funding of a critical program in cases of government shutdown.

That failure to explain the actual reason for the SNAP crisis is journalistic malpractice. It allows partisans to point fingers and distort the political conversation. In a very real sense, it’s participation in a lie.

NBC isn’t the only network or mainstream source to evade this reality, and the question is: why? Why are major networks and news sources “both siding” multiple reports rather than accurately reflecting the fact that one side is primarily responsible? Why are they normalizing so many aspects of a profoundly abnormal Trump administration?

One recent report from the American Prospect provides a chilling answer to that question.  It involves Trump’s “stage-managing” the business of information.

Warner Bros. Discovery—which owns a movie studio, numerous cable networks (CNN, Discovery, TBS, TNT, HGTV, Cartoon Network, TCM), the pay-TV channel HBO, streaming service HBO Max, DC Comics, part of The CW network, part of Fandango, several gaming studios, some theme park in Madrid, and much more—has publicly announced that it is for sale. Several companies, including Comcast, Netflix, and Amazon, are sniffing around a purchase, but the one that’s clearly amped to acquire WBD is Paramount, fresh off of being acquired itself by David Ellison’s Skydance Media.

Ellison and his billionaire father have been moving to consolidate ownership of the mass media. Ellison’s Skydance Media has already taken control of CBS through its recent merger with Paramount Global. Reportedly, the Trump administration has vowed to block Comcast, Netflix or Amazon from buying WBD, and to facilitate its acquisition by Paramount. The Ellison family is a longtime Trump ally, while Comcast and Netflix “have angered the president with Saturday Night Live parodies or perceived wokeness; and these grievances are driving the discretionary application of law.”

Trump pays more attention to media mergers than other business combinations, as befits his obsession with how he is portrayed to the public. The Ellisons, who already have their hands on TikTok, would add CNN to CBS News, building out a right-leaning rival to Fox in old and new media. Doing so through a shotgun wedding with implicit (if not explicit) approvals is just deeply corrupt.

This wouldn’t be a slam-dunk: under the Clayton Act and new guidelines written by Biden antitrust officials, such a merger would trigger several structural presumptions of illegality.  State attorneys general can use them and the relevant federal laws to block the merger–assuming the Supreme Court doesn’t put a corrupt thumb on the scale. But the very prospect of yet another merger, another consolidation of ownership of the media, should be a wake-up call.

There has already been far too much consolidation, too much transformation of journalism into just another business, where owners worry more about official reprisals for stepping out of line than providing first-rate reporting.

A study by the University of Chicago found that, in the last ten years, consolidation of America’s TV broadcasting has accelerated–that currently 40 percent of all local TV news stations are controlled by three conglomerates: Gray Television, Nexstar Media Group, and Sinclair Broadcast Group, each of which owns about 100 ABC, CBS, FOX, and NBC stations –and that those stations operate in more than 80 percent of US media markets. The research found “weaker constraints on owners’ interference with editorial decisions, whether for purely economic or for political motives.”

No kidding.

Our would-be King wants to control the information we receive–and with the help of his billionaire friends/courtiers, he’s well on his way.

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Those Election Results

Each morning when I get up, my husband’s first question is: any news? (That comes right after his opening observation that “growing old is not for sissies.”) Yesterday, boy was there news! And for the first time in what seems like forever, that news was ALL good.

As usual, Heather Cox Richardson said it best:

Tonight the results came in. American voters have spoken.

Democrat Abigail Spanberger won the governorship of Virginia by 15 points, becoming Virginia’s first female governor. Every single county in Virginia moved toward the Democrats, who appear to have picked up at least 12 seats in the Virginia House of Delegates. Democrat Mikie Sherrill won the governorship of New Jersey by more than ten points (the vote counts are still coming in as I write this).

Pennsylvania voted to retain three state supreme court justices, preserving a 5–2 liberal majority on the court. Democrats in Georgia flipped two statewide seats for public service commissioners by double digits. Mississippi broke the Republican supermajority in the state senate.

Maine voters rejected an attempt to restrict mail-in voting; Colorado voters chose to raise taxes on households with incomes over $300,000 to pay for meals for public school students.

California voters approved Proposition 50 by a margin of about 2 to 1, making it hard for Trump to maintain the vote was illegitimate.

And in New York City, voters elected Zohran Mamdani mayor.

Tonight, legal scholar John Pfaff wrote: “Every race. It’s basically been every race. Governors. Mayors. Long-held [Republican] dog-catchers. School boards. Water boards. Flipped a dungeon master in a rural Iowa D&D club. State senators. State reps. A janitor in Duluth. State justices. Three [Republican] Uber drivers. Just everything.”

Those of us who care deeply about this country–whose patriotism is rooted in allegiance to the philosophy of the Declaration and fidelity to the Constitution and Bill of Rights, those of us who work to achieve a society reflective of what I’ve called “the American Idea”– turned out in force.

If yesterday’s elections proved anything, they proved that real Americans can do this. We outnumber the haters–the racists, anti-Semites, homophobes and misogynists who are the face (and base) of today’s Republican Party. More importantly, yesterday demonstrated that We the real American People will come out to defend the real America.

Obviously, gratifying as Tuesday’s election turnout and results were, now is not the time to rest on our laurels. Now is the time to redouble our efforts to return this country to the path laid out by its founders–both the original founders and those responsible for the post-Civil War “second founding“–a nation committed to both individual liberty and civic equality.

The enormous turnout for No Kings Day was an indication that Americans were up to the task; yesterday’s blowout victories confirmed it. We aren’t out of the woods by any means, but we are on the way.

There’s an old TV ad that has one person asking another “How do you spell relief?” The answer isn’t “rolaids,” as in the ad. It’s the growing, impressive evidence that resistance is–forgive the Borg reference– anything but futile.

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