Tag Archives: Constitution

The Big Picture

Every day, we Americans awake to another assault on the foundations of our governing system. As we attend to each day’s news, each day’s effort to deconstruct constitutional government, we are in danger of losing the big picture, the scope of the losses we’re suffering.

I don’t know whether this “firehose” approach is a conscious strategy; Trump’s already substandard intellect and mental health are declining at such a rapid rate that restraints on his impulsiveness–never strong–are similarly declining. Intentional or not, however, it’s working to distract us.

We simply cannot allow the rapidity with which MAGA is dismantling American government to obscure the big picture, the overall damage. Recently, Heather Cox Richardson included that overview in one of her essential “Letters,” and her description is worth citing:

Six months into the second Trump administration, on the sixtieth anniversary of the law that symbolized the modern American state by establishing Medicare and Medicaid, it’s clear we are indeed in a revolution designed to destroy the government we have known in favor of the radical right-wing government envisioned by those who wrote Project 2025.

From the beginning, the administration declared war on the words that protected equal rights for all Americans, fired women and racial minorities from leadership positions, and attacked transgender Americans. It worked to replace civil servants with loyalists who embraced the tenets of Project 2025, putting people like former Fox News host Pete Hegseth at the head of government agencies. Yesterday Greg Jaffe and Maggie Haberman of the New York Times reported that in a break with past practices, Hegseth, now secretary of defense, is requiring nominees for four-star general positions in the U.S. military to meet personally with Trump.

It worked to dismantle the government by refusing to release the money Congress had appropriated to fund the existing government. Thanks to billionaire Elon Musk at the “Department of Government Efficiency” and Russell Vought—another author of Project 2025—at the Office of Management and Budget, the administration illegally impounded funds, slashing through funding for foreign aid, cancer research, veterans’ benefits, air traffic control staffing, and so on, claiming to be eliminating “waste, fraud, and abuse.” That fight is ongoing.

Richardson proceeded to enumerate the extent to which MAGA is implementing Project 2025–shrinking or abolishing  government programs that serve ordinary people while further enriching the wealthy. The party of “limited government” is dramatically expanding government’s power.

The administration set out to purge the country of what extremists claimed was “leftist” influence in law firms, media, and universities. It illegally blocked lawyers from law firms that represented Democrats from access to federal buildings, making it impossible for them to represent their clients. It sued media outlets for alleged bias, and it withheld congressionally appropriated funds for universities.

There’s much more, as we all know– that daily firehose of assaults on the government of We the People, assaults aimed at replacing the America we thought we knew. substituting cronies for civil servants so that “royal court” can invite bribery and engage in open corruption with impunity.

We the People need to keep that big picture in mind. We need to ignore the self-engrossed pundits mucking around in the weeds, criticising various Democrats and focusing on perceived past errors. We have one job. ONE JOB. We need to take Congress back from the GOP invertebrates who will go down in history either as complicit fascists or disgraceful quislings.

ONE JOB. Saving America.

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Texas Again

Texas really should serve as the primo example of a thoroughly UnAmerican state, a first-place spot that has been occupied until now by Florida. Granted, Florida won’t give up its win without a fight, and DeSantis’ success in turning Florida into a quasi-fascist state is impressive in a horrifying sort of way. But Texas is a worthy competitor.

We’ve all seen the death and destruction that accompanied the recent floods, and while Trump’s inept administration contributed significantly to the tragedy, the refusal to provide adequate warning mechanisms was a state and local decision. That bit of bad governance shouldn’t have come as a surprise; the administration of Governor Abbott–an administration that includes the state’s slimy Attorney General Ken Paxton and a GOP-dominated legislature–has diligently followed the MAGA (and Florida) playbook.

A few examples:

As enthusiastic participants in MAGA’s war on education, Texas has passed laws restricting expressive conduct on public campuses—banning protests and reassigning governance authority from faculty to politically appointed boards.

In its zealous war on immigration, Operation Lone Star has used razor wire and troop deployments, and engaged in mass busing of migrants to so-called “sanctuary cities.” The state also created state-level crimes for illegal entry and empower state judges to deport migrants–measures even the very conservative Fifth Circuit ruled unconstitutional.

Texas has enthusiastically fought the culture war: banning abortion, banning gender-affirming treatment for minors, and threatening medical professionals with license revocation.

Texas Republicans have eliminated Diversity, Equity & Inclusion efforts wherever possible, and removed such offices from public universities.

The state passed a law restricting content moderation on social media (an effort that has been temporarily blocked).

Because cities have a tendency to vote Blue, Texas passed what has been dubbed a “Death Star” law, restricting the powers of municipal governments to pass progressive policies. (A Travis County judge struck it down as unconstitutional interference in local self-governance.)

The Texas GOP’s Christian Nationalists won passage of a senate bill 10 requiring display of the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms.

Given the fact that many of these efforts have been stymied by courts noting their inconsistency with that pesky constitution, Abbott is emulating Trump; The Houston Chronicle recently accused Abbott of judicial appointments intended to reshape the Texas Supreme Court in his image.

It isn’t just the Texas Supreme Court. The Lever recently published an expose of a new kind of “court packing” in the great state of Texas.

On Sept. 1, Texas is slated to open its new business courts, a brand-new legal system backed by Big Oil — and several of the court’s main judges have in the past represented fossil fuel companies as lawyers, The Lever has found.

The judges were hand-picked over the last two months by Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, a major recipient of oil industry cash — and many can be quickly replaced if they hand down decisions he opposes, a judicial design that he championed.

The courts consist of 11 regional business courts and a new statewide court of appeals to hear appellate litigation, which are expected to have immediate impacts on environmental cases in the state. As Public Health Watch, an independent investigative news organization, reported last month, a suite of cases involving state environmental authorities will now be transferred from a generally liberal appeals court to the state’s new Fifteenth Court of Appeals, created to oversee the business courts.

There, these cases will be decided by a panel of conservative judges historically friendly to industry — particularly oil and gas interests, a powerful force in Texas.

As a leader of the state’s Public Citizen organization put it, Abbot has created a “boutique court for corporations where he, not the voters, gets to pick the judges.” The article goes into some detail about the judges who have been appointed–details unlikely to comfort litigants who might be hoping for dispassionate judicial conduct.

For the past several years, pundits have predicted a revolt by Texas voters sufficient to turn the state purple, if not Blue. Extreme gerrymandering has forestalled that revolt, if indeed it was imminent, and as I posted a few days ago, Abbott has now called for a mid-cycle redistricting–a move urged by Trump as a means to maintain GOP control of the House of Representatives.

Political experts are dubious about the tactic. As Politico has explained,

The thoroughness of Texas’ gerrymander during the last round of redistricting in 2021 leaves no room for Republicans to grow their 25-member majority among the state’s 38 seats in the House of Representatives. Any alteration of the map will only hurt the GOP’s sitting incumbents and comes with a risk of backfiring.

We can only hope.

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Being An American

I recently happened on a post I wrote in the run-up to the 2000 election, addressing a question that had been posed to me during a speaking event. The question was “What does it mean to be an American, and how will the answer to that question matter in the 2020 election?

I argued that being American requires understanding, supporting and protecting what I have frequently referred to as “The American Idea”– the essential elements of our country’s version of liberal democracy: majority rule and the libertarian brake on that majority rule, aka the Bill of Rights. American identity isn’t based upon race or religion or country of origin–it is based upon support of the American Idea.

I also argued that, in order to protect the legitimacy of U.S. government, we needed to address the escalating assaults on majority rule– gerrymandering (the practice whereby legislators choose their voters, rather than the other way around); the growth of vote suppression tactics (everything from voter ID laws to the spread of disinformation); the disproportionate influence of rural voters thanks to the operation of the Electoral College; the growing (mis)use of the filibuster, which now requires a Senate supermajority to pass anything; and the enormous influence of money in politics, especially in the wake of Citizens United.

Those assaults on democratic legitimacy were troubling enough in 2020. They clearly enabled the further assault on American democracy that we are experiencing under a mentally-ill would-be autocrat and his MAGA cult in 2025.

Trump hasn’t limited his efforts to the assault on majority rule. He has also taken Musk’s chainsaw to the individual liberties protected by the Bill of Rights, refusing to recognize–let alone honor– fundamental rights to due process, free speech and (above all) civic equality.

Individual liberty in the United States is protected by the constraints on majority rule required by the Bill of Rights and the 14th Amendment. Those provisions–those protections–mirror the libertarian principle that animated the nation’s Founders: the right of all people to live as they see fit, so long as they do not thereby harm the person or property of others, and so long as they are willing to grant an equal liberty to others. That “live and let live” principle doesn’t just  require limitations on government overreach; it requires that we combat official sanctions of racism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, misogyny, Islamophobia…all of the “isms” that deprive some citizens of equal civic status and that operate to deny them their individual liberties.

It’s one thing to understand Trump himself: he’s obviously damaged– needy, massively ignorant, intellectually limited, declining into dementia. The harder question is, what explains the MAGA cult? What leads millions of presumably sane Americans to cheer on Trump’s defiantly anti-American efforts?

Part of the answer is civic ignorance; understanding and protecting both majority rule and individual rights requires an informed citizenry–something we don’t have, as mountains of data clearly show. When people don’t know how their government is supposed to work, they are less likely to recognize assaults on its governing philosophy. But civic illiteracy doesn’t explain MAGA, although it undoubtedly feeds it.

Racism, White Christian Nationalism and other associated bigotries are at the root of MAGA and Trumpism. America has never been able to overcome the periodic emergence of primal hatreds that motivated the Confederacy and the KKK, despite the fact that those hatreds are contrary to everything that defines Americanism.

Back in that 2020 talk, I said I was convinced that our civic challenge was about America’s structural and systemic distortions—that (assuming a Biden victory) our first order of business should be to confront the misuses of power that make fair and productive political debate about substantive issues impossible–that these failures of American governance needed to be addressed before any of the policymakers we might elect would be able to discuss, let alone pass, rational, evidence-based policies.

The need to address those systemic distortions has become more imperative, as we watch Trump take advantage of them to turn America into a very different country. As I said in 2020, you can’t drive a car if it’s lost its wheels, and you can’t govern if your institutions have lost their legitimacy.

Unless the systems are fair, unless we can rely on obedience to the rule of law by those in office, no minority of any sort–political, religious, racial, economic–is safe.

Assuming we emerge from this lawless and destructive administration more or less intact, we have our work cut out for us.

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Telling It Like It Is

Jay Pritzker, the Democratic governor of Illinois recently made a speech in New Hampshire that has received significant–and merited–attention. Pritzker really “told it like it is.”

Heather Cox Richardson recently quoted from Pritzker’s speech at length, and today, I am going to do the same, because Pritzker’s words deserve widespread distribution.

“It’s wrong to snatch a person off the street and ship them to a foreign gulag with no chance to defend themselves in a court of law.” This is not about immigration, he said, but about the Constitution. “Standing for the idea that the government doesn’t have the right to kidnap you without due process is arguably the MOST EFFECTIVE CAMPAIGN SLOGAN IN HISTORY,” he said. “Today, it’s an immigrant with a tattoo. Tomorrow, it’s a citizen whose Facebook post annoys Trump.”

Pritzker called for “real, sensible immigration reform.”

“Immigration—with all its struggles and its complexities—is part of the secret sauce that makes America great, always. Immigrants strengthen our communities, enrich our neighborhoods, renew our passion for America’s greatness, enliven our music and our culture, enhance understanding of the world. The success of our economy depends upon immigrants. In fact, forty-six percent…of Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants or the children of immigrants.”

Trump’s attacks on immigrants, he said, are likely to make the U.S. economy fail. Indeed, he suggested, making America fail is the point of the Trump administration’s actions.

“We have a Secretary of Education who hates teachers and schools. We have a Secretary of Transportation who hates public transit. We have an Attorney General who hates the Constitution. We have a Secretary of State, the son of naturalized citizens—a family of refugees—on a crusade to expel our country of both.

“We have a head of the Department of Government Efficiency— an immigrant granted the privilege of living and working here, a man who has made hundreds of billions of dollars after the government rescued his business for him—who is looking to destroy the American middle class to fund tax cuts for himself. And we have a President who claims to love America but who hates our military so much that he calls them ‘losers’ and ‘suckers’ and who can’t be bothered to delay his golf game to greet the bodies of four fallen US soldiers. And we have a Grand Old Party, founded by one of our nation’s bravest Presidents, Abraham Lincoln—who today would be a Democrat, I might add—… so afraid of the felon and the fraud that they put in the White House that they would sooner watch him destroy our country than lift a hand to save it.”

 “It’s time to stop wondering if you can trust the nuclear codes to people who don’t know how to organize a group chat. It’s time to stop ignoring the hypocrisy in wearing a big gold cross while announcing the defunding of children’s cancer research. And time to stop thinking we can reason or negotiate with a madman. Time to stop apologizing when we were NOT wrong. Time to stop surrendering, when we need to fight.

“Our small businesses don’t deserve to be bankrupted by unsustainable tariffs. Our retirees don’t deserve to be left destitute by a Social Security Administration decimated by Elon Musk. Our citizens don’t deserve to lose healthcare coverage because Republicans want to hand a tax cut to billionaires. Our federal workers don’t deserve to have, well, a 19-year-old DOGE bro called Big Balls destroy their careers.

“Autistic kids and adults who are loving contributors to our society don’t deserve to be stigmatized by a weird nepo baby who once stashed a dead bear in the backseat of his car.

“Our military servicemembers don’t deserve to be told by a washed up Fox TV commentator, who drank too much and committed sexual assault before being appointed Secretary of Defense, that they can’t serve this country simply because they’re Black or gay or a woman.

“And If it sounds like I’m becoming contemptuous of Donald Trump and the people that he has elevated, it’s because… I am. You should be too. They are an affront to every value this country was founded upon.”

“I understand the tendency to give in to despair right now. But despair is an indulgence that we cannot afford in the times upon which history turns. Never before in my life have I called for mass protests, for mobilization, for disruption. But I am now.

“These Republicans cannot know a moment of peace. They have to understand that we will fight their cruelty with every megaphone and microphone that we have. We must castigate them on the soap box, and then punish them at the ballot box. They must feel in their bones that when we survive this shameful episode of American history with our democracy intact—because we have no alternative but to do just that—that we will relegate their portraits to the museum halls reserved for tyrants and traitors.”

“Cowardice can be contagious. But so too can courage…. Just as the hope that we hold onto in the darkness, shines with its own…special light.

“Tonight, I’m telling you what I’m willing to do…is fight—for our democracy, for our liberty, for the opportunity for all our people to live lives that are meaningful and free. And I see around me tonight a roomful of people who are ready to do the same.”

“So I have one question for all of you. Are you ready for the fight?”

To which I say “yes.” And “amen.”

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It Can Happen Here…

In fact, it’s happening.

I’m old enough to remember learning of the death camps in Nazi Germany, and feeling grateful that I was safe in a good country–a country established on the premise that all men were created equal. Even at that young age I was aware that the United States hadn’t always lived up to its principles, but–like most Americans–I viewed those times as regrettable lapses that we were outgrowing, not as warnings that we, too, harbored many damaged and destructive people intent upon dominating and demeaning those they consider “Other.”

Much as we might wish it, we can no longer pretend that America isn’t in the middle of a coup engineered by oligarchs determined to jettison the Constitution and spit on the rule of law. (Those motives impel the attacks on universities and law firms–they quite correctly see education, law and legal ethics as threats to their ambitions.) Trump and Musk have two main motivations: more rewards for the rich– which requires plundering the nation for the benefit of the “already haves”–and restoring the social and legal dominance of White Christian males.  

The assault on America’s already-inadequate social safety net is intended to move even more wealth to the billionaire class via tax reductions. The effort to restore White “Christian” male supremacy requires a more multi-faceted assault–from demands to rid schools and businesses of DEI and similar demands, none of which the administration has the legal authority to make, to the purging of websites that accurately show contributions made by women and minorities–especially Black people–to efforts to disenfranchise millions of women voters via the Save Act.

As the Center for American Progress has explained,

This legislation would require all Americans to prove their citizenship status by presenting documentation—in person—when registering to vote or updating their voter registration information. Specifically, the legislation would require the vast majority of Americans to rely on a passport or birth certificate to prove their citizenship. While this may sound easy for many Americans, the reality is that more than 140 million American citizens do not possess a passport and as many as 69 million women who have taken their spouse’s name do not have a birth certificate matching their legal name.

Because documentation would need to be presented in person, the legislation would, in practice, prevent Americans from being able to register to vote by mail; end voter registration drives nationwide; and eliminate online voter registration overnight—a service 42 states rely on. Americans would need to appear in person, with original documentation, to even simply update their voter registration information for a change of address or change in party affiliation. These impacts alone would set voter registration sophistication and technology back by decades and would be unworkable for millions of Americans, including more than 60 million people who live in rural areas. Additionally, driver’s licenses—including REAL IDs—as well military or tribal IDs would not be sufficient forms of documentation to prove citizenship under the legislation.

This attempt may be too blatant to pass the Senate, but the mere fact that the MAGA cult is willing to propose so anti-democratic and anti-woman a measure is stunning–and illuminating.

And then there’s the growing Rightwing radicalization of the military.

Following the January 6 insurrection on Capitol Hill, investigations revealed that at least 151 of the insurrectionists had a military background. In response, the Pentagon issued a historic stand-down order and created a working group on extremism.

In December of 2021, that working group released new policies, defining what constitutes extremist activities, and policing how soldiers behave on social media, including affiliations with extremist organizations. This February, the Department of Defense issued a memo halting efforts to to root out white nationalists and other far-right influences. The reason given was that such efforts were “not in line with Donald Trump’s executive orders.”

That would be the same Donald Trump who asserts his authority to arrest and deport immigrants, green card holders, and for that matter, American citizens who oppose him–without due process, and in defiance of court orders. 

I’m quite sure our would-be autocrat knows no history and has never heard of Louis XIV (although he seems to have adopted that monarch’s over-the-top decorating style.) He’s also adopted a sentiment attributed to him– “L’état, c’est moi” (I am the state). Louis XIV saw himself as the embodiment of the French nation, and believed his decisions and desires were the law of the land.

Trump actually has more in common with Louis XVI, who was executed for treason in 1793.

In the absence of a guillotine, I hope to see you all at the protest this Saturday. 

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