We now know the president asked America’s No. 1 geopolitical rival to “investigate” Joe Biden and his family. CNN reported the news on the same day Donald Trump said on the White House lawn in front of TV cameras that China ought to “look into” the Bidens. To me, it seems quite plausible that he knew his June 18 call would leak at some point. So he got out in front of it to make his crimes appear all too normal.

They are not normal, of course. They are crimes whether in diplomacy with President Xi and in nationally broadcast remarks at home. They are crimes whether we see them or not, because it is criminal to harness the government to frame one’s enemies for serial crimes one is committing.  The president is banking on his great gift for limitless lying so we no longer believe the evidence of our eyes. He’s turning “unreality,” to use Jason Stanley’s term,” into reality, turning himself into the only source of truth. He believes he can break the law in front of us, and we won’t notice.

But I think we overlook something if we remain focused on the bits and pieces of criminality that are now coming out. We must try, as much as we can, to compose a larger picture of what’s happening. We must contend with the possibility — actually, the likelihood — that this president has been seeking favors from international friends and adversaries for a lot longer than he’s been president. In the process of putting this picture together, I hope we understand that what we are seeing now illuminates what we could not see in the recent past but that was nevertheless unfolding in plain sight.

Here’s what I mean.

With Ukraine, Australia and now China, the president is colluding (or trying to) with international powers in an effort to defraud the American people. That’s what’s happening. But let’s be honest with ourselves. This is probably not the first time.

We know it isn’t. On July 27, 2016, during a press conference, then candidate Donald Trump said on national television: “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing.” He was referring to the scandal of the time involving Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while secretary of state.

That same day Russian agents hacked into email accounts associated with Clinton’s personal office. Ultimately, this was one of many fronts in which the Kremlin prosecuted a secret years-long cyberwar against the US in the run-up to the 2016 election. Along with distributing stolen Democratic National Committee files, defrauding users of Facebook and Twitter, and reaching out to Trump campaign staffers, Vladimir Putin, in the words of Nikita Khrushchev’s great-granddaughter, “fulfilled the dream of every Soviet leader — to stick it to the United States.”

It doesn’t take collusion per se to be found guilty of conspiracy to commit fraud. It takes merely accepting something you should not accept. In Trump’s case, he welcomed Russian sabotage, as it was, according to the special counsel’s report, entirely bent on undercutting Hillary Clinton’s White House bid. Trump was the sole beneficiary of Putin’s putsch, but he has denied to this day that he’s ever been any such thing.

He has denied it, but he knows it’s true. According to a report last Friday in the Washington Post, the president told Russian emissaries during a 2017 meeting in the Oval Office he was not concerned about the Kremlin’s interference in 2016. Trump said that the US “did the same in other countries, an assertion that prompted alarmed White House officials to limit access to the remarks to an unusually small number of people, according to three former officials with knowledge of the matter.”

The report goes on to explain the context of his remarks — FBI Director James Comey’s firing, for one thing — as well as Trump’s nihilism. Unsaid, however, is that in saying that all countries meddle, the president acknowledged, tacitly, that the Russians did, too. Knowing the Kremlin helped him defeat Clinton, it seems unlikely that he would not seek aid and assistance from other countries, friend or foe, to win again in 2020.

Put this all together, and you have a picture of a president who cheated to win and is preparing to cheat again, because he must. None of us quite had the courage three years ago to see the evidence of our own eyes. We couldn’t quite bring ourselves to believe anyone would ask Russia for help to win. But now, the idea that Trump would cheat isn’t strange. In a sense, it’s normal, something we expect the president to do.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2019 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 04 October 2019
Word Count: 780
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I have no doubt there are Americans out there thinking that impeachment sounds pretty abnormal. They are, of course, right. It’s out of the ordinary — and should be. Our leaders can’t use the constitution to sabotage the people’s will. They can’t, anyway, without electoral punishment. But I think there’s a better way to think about it.

Impeachment is a constitutional tool designed for times of extraordinary abnormality — say, for instance, when a president presides over an obscenely lawless administration. That’s certainly what we are seeing. Time and again, the House Democrats have issued lawful subpoenas to gain access to people and resources in their constitutional duty of conducting executive oversight. Time and again, they have been blocked by a president refusing to recognize their co-equal authority. If the Congress can’t conduct oversight, the executive functions absent accountability. If the executive functions absent accountability, our belief in equal justice before the law is an empty gesture.

Impeachment is, indeed, highly unusual in and of itself. But it should not be understood outside of its context, which, in our current case, is one of extraordinary presidential lawlessness to the point of collusion with an enemy government seeking to injure our republic. So we should see what the House Democrats are doing for what it is. They are not, as the president alleged last night, fomenting a coup d’etat. They are not meeting abnormal politics with more and greater abnormal politics. The House Democrats are instead seeking a constitutional solution to a constitutional crisis.

They are, in other words, trying to bring politics back to normal.

In slinging the word “coup” around, the president is betting that most Americans don’t know what impeachment is. Given the decline of civics education and ubiquity of indifference to citizen responsibility, that’s a good bet. So it’s crucially important to remember that impeachment does not mean firing Trump. It does not mean voiding an election. It does not mean Hillary Clinton gets to be president. It does not mean any of the conspiracy theories, falsehoods and lies Trump and his defenders are telling in order to discredit and undermine the attempt to bring politics back to normal.

Impeachment is the same thing as indictment, and indictment means nothing other than gathering sufficient, credible and concrete evidence to convince a “grand jury,” in this case the House of Representatives, to send the accused, in this case the president, to “trial.” A “prosecutor,” in this case a House member, then presents the argument to a “trial jury,” in this case 100 Senators. In any case, it takes 67 votes to remove the accused from office, a standard so high that it has never happened to a president in our entire history. And even if that did happen, the man constitutionally positioned to take over is the vice president, who, as you may recall, is Republican Mike Pence.

So … it’s not a coup attempt. Not even close.

And it’s not, as Trump alleged this morning, “winning an election” with impeachment. In the event that the president is indicted, and in the unlikely event that he’s removed, all the Democrats are likely get in the end is what they have — control of the House.

It’s worth noting that the more the Democrats follow the path of bringing politics back to normal, the more this president and his allies follow the path of inflaming politics, which is to say the path of flat-out fascism in some cases. Some of Trump’s authoritarian followers are goading him into declaring some kind of “civil war” if the Democrats press on. It’s worth noting, too, that Trump is in kinship with what was called “brownshirts” in 20th-century parlance but more accurately called “magahats” today. The El Paso massacre clearly illustrated that violence, bloodshed and murder are political options for Americans seeing democracy as a threat to their “way of life.”

The Democrats are not only trying to bring politics back to normal. They are defining what normal is, and what it is not, and in doing so, they are redrawing by way of reaffirming the boundaries of acceptable behavior in a liberal democracy such as America’s. Acceptable behavior does not include stonewalling the Congress in its oversight capacity. It does not include colluding, even tacitly, with foreign entities to win elections. It does not include defrauding the American people. It does not include a range of crimes and outrages we have seen during the Donald Trump presidency.

To be sure, the Democrats risk greater polarization as they attempt to reduce it, but that’s a risk they must take in faith that the rest of the citizenry is behind them.

I think we are. We’d all like to see normalcy return.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2019 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 02 October 2019
Word Count: 785
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Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. There’s a long way to go, and it’s going to feel longer by the time we get to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s soft deadline of year’s end. But last week demonstrated that more Americans are now more aware of Donald Trump’s extraordinary weakness, and that we are approaching a tipping point at which that weakness is going to compound itself exponentially. The weaker this president becomes, the weaker this president will get; the closer we get to the end, whatever and whenever that is, the more Trump’s behavior is going to prove the case against him.

Consider this morning.

Trump accused Adam Schiff of treason on Twitter, even calling for the House Intelligence Committee chairman’s arrest. He also yoked his fate to the threat of a “civil war like fracture,” provoking at least one GOP representative to describe that as “beyond repugnant.” The more Trump demands that Republicans die for his sins, we are going to see, I think, more Republicans say they’d rather not. Don’t get me wrong. Lots and lots of Republicans stand ready to disembowel themselves. But all the republic needs is the right number of Republicans to make the right choice at the right time.

Then there was last week.

A series of public opinion surveys suggested a step-by-step progression of where we are heading. First, it was Democratic voters. After the party unified behind the speaker in moving toward an impeachment inquiry, polls showed approval among Democrats climbing upward. Then it was “independents,” that is, mostly disaffected Republican voters. Polls showed they increasingly approve of impeachment after the White House released a memorandum summarizing the president’s treasonous “shakedown,” as Pelosi calls it, of the new Ukrainian president. Then it was the press.

There are no polls measuring the opinion of members of the Washington press corps, as far as I know, but if press behavior is any indication (and I’m primarily talking here about the cable and broadcast news), the press corps is coming to a conclusion about Trump, perhaps permanently. Chris Wallace at Fox, Scott Pelley at CBS News and even NBC’s Chuck Todd, he of jellied spine, have shown greater intolerance of Republican talking points, propaganda and lies. That’s because the Democrats are united, the citizenry is more focused, and the evidence is immediate, hard and damning. Put all the above factors together, and you have a president who’s acting wildly because he can no longer manipulate the press in ways that mask his extraordinarily weakness.

Again, his weakness was always there.

It was just hard for some to see as long as the press continued to give Trump a never-ending supply of benefit-of-the-doubt. Providing good faith in the face of conspicuous bad faith has resulted, among other things, in ludicrous headlines about his wanting to be impeached in order to turn the tables on the Democrats. This despite that very strategy never—and I mean, not once—working for the president with one major exception: in 2016 when the Russians gave him an assist by sabotaging Hillary Clinton. Otherwise, Trump’s instinct to double down has burned him every single time he’s tangled with Nancy Pelosi. Most of the republic has figured Trump out. In a sense, the coming impeachment inquiry is a kind of waiting for the rest of America to catch up.

Trump’s instinct to double down is hastening the end (whatever and whenever that will be) as well as rendering ridiculous any claim that he’d resign before being removed. Remember Trump’s rationale for voluntarily releasing the smoking gun? It was to “prove” the Democrats had nothing on him. Either a) he didn’t know what was in it, b) he believed he could con you into believing whatever he wanted you to believe, or c) he believed his handpicked goons at the Department of Justice, who told him, yes boss, like you said, nothing in it. As for resigning, that would require immunity of a kind that would confound the Democrats’ case for holding him accountable. In any event, the president, being Donald Trump, is likely to try bringing others down with him.

To be honest, I was wondering if I had things wrong. Until last week, nothing had changed. Trump was weak but it made no difference. Then everything changed.

Now his weakness matters more than ever.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2019 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 30 September 2019
Word Count: 723
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The White House released Wednesday a memo of the July 25 call between Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. That call is at the heart of the whistleblower complaint and the Democrats’ imminent impeachment proceedings. The memo, which is not a transcript, was also expected to be a snow job akin to the US attorney general’s letter to the Congress “summarizing” the Mueller Report.

It was anything but.

In it, the president asks Zelensky to work with William Barr to investigate Joe Biden. Trump said he would meet Zelensky if he promised to launch an inquiry. Trump appears addled by a conspiracy theory, too. The Washington Post: Trump “seems to suggest Hillary Clinton’s private email server is in Ukraine and asserts that special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation started with that country. He repeatedly says Zelensky should work with Attorney General William P. Barr or his personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani. Giuliani had separately pressed Ukrainian officials for a Biden inquiry.”

It’s all right there.

Violation of campaign finance law (contributions not limited to money from foreigners). Collusion as well as quid pro quo (I’ll do this if you do that). These two times two (he wants a Biden inquiry but also dirt on the Democrats from Clinton’s server.) Not to mention a suite of moral wrongs, including the violation of his oath to defend and protect the Constitution. Nancy Pelosi was right: “The actions of the Trump presidency revealed dishonorable facts of the president’s betrayal of his oath of office, betrayal of national security and betrayal of the integrity of our elections.”

Today’s revelations were so very stunning that at least one prominent commentator who had been convinced that the Senate Republicans would acquit the president no matter what had second thoughts. Michael Cohen is a columnist for the Boston Globe. Today, he said: “I can’t believe I’m going to say this but after reading this transcript I’m not sure how confident anyone should be that Trump would survive a Senate trial.”

We shouldn’t get ahead of ourselves.

After all, this is a memo, not a transcript. We also haven’t seen the whistleblower complaint, nor have we heard from the whistleblower (that person is expected to speak soon with lawmakers in the House and Senate). There’s still a lot to sort through. We have not yet seen the right-wing media’s response. And as veteran Washington watchers are wont to say, things are probably going to get much worse. Still, given how bad this one document is, it’s worth asking: what the hell was the president thinking?

What was he thinking when he authorized the release this memo after Pelosi said her caucus would launch an impeachment inquiry? He couldn’t even wait for the speaker finish before tweeting: “You will see it was a very friendly and totally appropriate call. No pressure and, unlike Joe Biden and his son, NO quid pro quo! This is nothing more than a continuation of the Greatest and most Destructive Witch Hunt of all time!”

I have a couple of theories.

One, Trump doesn’t care what the memo actually says, because what it actually says would not stop him from trying to convince you of what he wants you to believe it says. The whole truth, in other words, is not empirically independent of human consciousness. The truth is whatever he says it is. My bet is that Trump believes he can manipulate the press corps into reporting whatever he says the memo says, and, with enough repetition by the Republican Party, he can get his “truth” to stick.

Remember what I told you about the Sharpie? When Trump drew a black semi-circle on a weather map to show Hurricane Dorian’s impact on Alabama? Some said it was a sign of mental illness. No, it was a symbol illustrating everything about Trumpism. I wrote: “Being wrong, or being right for that matter, is immaterial when the authoritarian’s objective is getting you to accept what he says as the only truth. Moreover, the more ridiculous his statements — like using a Sharpie on a weather map to “prove” he was right — the more pleasure he’ll derive from its ultimate acceptance.”

That’s one theory. The other theory as to why Trump released a smoking gun is that he believes the US Department of Justice’s conclusion that there was nothing illegal or improper about asking a foreigner leader to investigate a political rival. Again, the Post: “Career prosecutors and officials in the Justice Department’s criminal division then reviewed the transcript of the call … and determined the facts ‘could not make out and cannot make out’ the appropriate basis for an investigation.” The italics are mine to suggest Barr’s hand in the process of determining that something illegal wasn’t.

Barr, of course, has done just about everything an attorney general can do to shield an executive from constitutional accountability. (He is now entangled legally in much the way Rudy Giuliani now is.) The delicious irony, if my theory is correct, is that in telling Trump there was nothing illegal or improper about asking a foreign leader to investigate a political rival, the president ended up releasing the document showing everyone what he’d done. More ironic, again if my theory is correct, is that the man who believes he can create truth by speaking is exposed for believing his own lies.

Which is all the more reason, I think, for the Democrats to proceed with their impeachment inquiry. A liberal democracy should not, indeed cannot, tolerate for long an authoritarian executive who can’t discern fact from fiction in normal times, much less during the perpetration of treason and other high crimes in broad daylight.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2019 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 25 September 2019
Word Count: 947
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I have spent considerable time and energy defending the Speaker of the House of Representatives. I have praised her poise and her shrewd leadership, especially her permitting an impeachment inquiry by the House Judiciary Committee to move forward while shielding simultaneously the most vulnerable Democrats. I have even heralded her as the most effective member of the Trump-era resistance. But now?

I’m done.

In the past, I gushed over Nancy Pelosi’s brilliance in playing both sides of the impeachment question. I loved how she said that the House would follow the facts wherever they may lead, even if the facts led to impeachment, while at the same time saying that impeachment was divisive and, therefore, required bipartisan support. I believed her ambivalence was defensible on the grounds that it allowed the Democrats to deliberate without giving away the game. But that ambivalence has resulted in something dangerous and unacceptable: a president with no one holding him back.

Pelosi’s position can no longer be defended.

Moreover, I believe she faces a crisis of confidence if this week she fails to choose wisely. She has been exceedingly concerned about the fears of a minority of Democrats, particularly those who won Republican-leaning districts last year. She has been exceedingly unconcerned about the demands of a growing majority of Democrats who stand appalled at the sight of a president sabotaging the American people.

After Thursday, the House Speaker may end up forfeiting the moral authority she has worked hard to earn. She must understand that inaction equals action, and that if she chooses unwisely, she risks complicity in our slow-motion cataract toward autocracy.

Donald Trump is above the law. This is a fact.

This is a fact that none of us cares for, that none of us condones, and that most of us fear. But it is a fact, nonetheless, because no one with constitutional authority has been willing to check Trump’s lawlessness. He is committing crimes others would be prosecuted for. He is thus beggaring any meaning of equality before the law. He is untouchable. Recall what Stephen Miller said in 2017: “Our opponents, the media and the whole world will soon see as we begin to take further actions, that the powers of the president to protect our country are very substantial and will not be questioned.”

Trump was not protecting our country, of course, when he demanded that the new Ukrainian president help him win reelection in 2020 in exchange for millions in US aid. Trump was selling out his country. He was undermining the people’s sovereignty. He was betraying public trust and the common good. He was misusing tax-payer dollars. (His gambit was extortion after all.) He was abusing the powers of his office. And this is only what we know about. Corruption of presidential magnitude tends to be a “vampire squid.” Its tendrils go everywhere sucking the virtue out of everything.

Yet the “most effective member of the resistance” had little new to say Friday except that she hopes to pass future laws authorizing future prosecutors to be able to indict future presidents of alleged future crimes. She did draw a bright line, though.

We must hold her to it.

She said that if the president continues to obstruct the Congress in its investigation of the whistleblower complaint (which is what started all this) he then “will be entering a grave new chapter of lawlessness which will take us into a whole new stage of investigation” (my italics). The speaker said that she expected the acting National Intelligence Director Joseph Maguire to hand over the complaint when he testifies on Thursday.

What happens if he doesn’t?

If she does not escalate the conflict between the branches of government — that is, use the tools available to her, including arresting and detaining uncooperative administration officials — she risks surrendering the moral high ground. If she fails to act, in other words, she cannot continue to speak morally while acting amorally. The speaker cannot keep using, unchallenged, the language of the constitution and democratic norms if she proves unwilling to do everything in her power to stop the president’s lawlessness and to restore equilibrium to the constitutional order.

If she does not take meaningful action after the administration crosses her bright line (assuming that it does), Pelosi will in effect reveal her weakness as a leader as well as her complicity in Trump’s lawlessness. She can be honest, or she can be dishonest. The speaker can say she won’t act out of fear that her party will lose its majority in the House. That would be honest. But she cannot accuse Trump of profaning the rule of law if she won’t defend it. That would be dishonest. Worse, that would be fraudulent.

The Democrats won the midterms on the promise that they would check the president’s power and hold him accountable by way of congressional oversight. If Pelosi does not appropriately counter the president’s blatant disregard for the law and for congressional authority, she may as well admit the midterms were a con, that the Democrats only said all that good stuff to get voters to put them in the majority.

Either she means it when she says the constitution must prevail or doesn’t.

The speaker is facing a crisis of confidence. I hope she chooses wisely.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2019 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 23 September 2019
Word Count: 884
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I think we need to prepare ourselves for the unthinkable: that this president is above the law. Indeed, that any Republican president is above the law. We need to prepare ourselves to cast doubt on any public official who idolizes the rule of law but who can’t or won’t hold a historically weak president accountable for his many high crimes.

I think we need to prepare ourselves to accept as fact that there are two kinds of justice in this country. This isn’t a belief. This isn’t a hunch. This isn’t a feeling. The evidence is overwhelming if you’re paying attention. There’s one kind of justice for you and for me and for everyone we know. And then there’s one kind of justice for the very rich and the very powerful. I know what I’m suggesting. And yes, it’s hard to accept. I’m suggesting that equality isn’t just fictional. I’m suggesting that equality is a con. (I don’t think I really believe that, but the evidence is so overwhelming that continuing to believe in equality before the law is starting to feel like unhealthy self-delusion.)

Our system not only fails to protect the public from billionaire pedophiles, amoral business leaders, predatory bankers, and malicious pharmaceutical firms. It fails to protect democracy itself from a nihilist executive ready to burn everything down, including his own house, if that’s what it takes to “win.” Indeed, our system not only fails to protect the innocent; it congratulates the guilty! It’s no wonder we are losing faith in ourselves. What’s an American creed when the heretics are giving the homily?

The House Democrats are trying to focus the public’s attention on the president’s crimes — at least 10 instances of obstruction of justice are outlined in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report to the Congress — but they are flailing. I’m not sure why.

The Republican Party remains united behind Donald Trump. It also had a gigantic right-wing media apparatus that keeps Trump voters in line, and that bends the press corps toward its preferred topics and perspectives. And then there’s the president himself. His vision of his office is boundaryless. So much so that he grants privilege to underlings when there’s no legal basis for granting it. But any executive’s power is limited only to the extent that other constitutional powers are willing to limit it.

Which brings me back to the Democrats. I see their struggle to hold a criminal president accountable as part of the larger struggles of liberalism. By that, I don’t mean to invoke a leftist complaint of “neoliberalism.” I don’t mean to invoke a conservative complaint of “cultural Marxism.” (Pish.) I do mean, however, to invoke a moral complaint.

The Democrats face creeping totalitarian, but are behaving as if the last thing they should do is act like it’s wrong much less offer a remedy steeped in civic virtue. Either Trump is above the law or he’s not. If not, they must act with the courage of their professed convictions or reveal themselves for the charlatans they are.

Allow me to rephrase. Half of the Democrats are behaving amorally.

The other half, including House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler, does appear to understand the imperative of moving forward with the committee’s impeachment inquiry even if it does not result in Trump’s removal from office. The other half does seem to understand the political risks of doing so, even accepting Democratic House loses to do the right thing. I think that trade-off, to the degree that it’s real, is a pivot point between the liberalism of the last century and the liberalism of this one.

Trump’s former spokesman, Corey Lewandowski, testified Wednesday with contempt not just for members of the Congress but for popular sovereignty, for equality before the law and for the common good. Lewandowski is a thug’s thug. Yet the Democrats are ready to turn the other cheek instead of kicking over the moneychangers’ tables with the fury of the righteous.

Lewandowski is a flyspeck of insignificance, but the Democrats won’t act. How can they possibly impeach this president? I don’t know. But I do know more than politics is on the line.

Our democratic faith is, too.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2019 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 19 September 2019
Word Count: 697
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I’m ambivalent about what the Democrats should do about the US Supreme Court for two reasons. One, I’m not a legal scholar. Two, I’m not a legal scholar. I repeat myself to emphasize the dearth of my authority on the matter. But honestly, I doubt anyone truly knows what to do about a high court with two illegitimate justices on it.

What I can say with confidence is that it’s good that we’re having such a debate. That we’re having such a debate indicates our national discourse has shifted from the unthinkable — for instance, “packing the court” — to the OK-let’s-think-about-it. A liberal democracy like ours must evolve with the times. But institutions can’t evolve, indeed won’t, if the public is unwilling to re-imagine what they should be and why.

The debate comes and goes, and for now, that’s all right. As we get closer to November 2020, I’d expect arguments to intensify. (At least I hope they do!) The New York Times’ Jamelle Bouie and the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent kicked off another round of debate recently, both of them reminding us that even if the Democrats win the White House and the Congress, they face a Supreme Court prepared to strike down any and all progressive legislation.

What to do? Pack the courts, Bouie said. All of them:

Bouie isn’t alone in rethinking the court. In 2014, Norm Ornstein, a conservative congressional scholar, argued that justices should have term limits. The best remedy for a polarized court, he said, is ending lifetime appointments and establishing 18-year terms. My friend Noah Berlatsky argued last year that presidents should appoint one justice per term so that nominations are tied to elections and the political will.

Samuel Moyn says term limits don’t fix the court’s anti-majoritarian nature. He suggests limiting the kinds of cases the court can decide. He told my friend Josh Holland that if a party controls both chambers of Congress and the White House, “you can basically say, under Article Three of the Constitution, what the judiciary is allowed to do.” (Doing so would entail fighting with, you guessed it, the court.)

Then there’s the most radical option — Congress stripping the court of its ability to overturn laws. “Judicial review,” as it’s called, is not in the US Constitution. The power to strike down enactments is the result of an 1803 ruling. The poli-sci textbook I have at my side says, where is it, oh yes, here it is, that judicial review is “something of a usurpation.” The court said it has that power because the court said it did. (Again, Congress would have to fight with the court over any law limiting its power.)

All of these have major up- and downsides, and like I said, I’m pretty sure no one really knows if any of these would produce desired outcomes. What we can say for sure is that something that started out as “something of a usurpation” has become over the years a timeless and indisputable principle of democracy in which the highest court in the land has the final say. And what we can also say for sure is that it’s not how it should work.

“Judicial review” was not handed down by God. The founders didn’t enshrine it. It was the product of men making decisions they believed were right and proper at the time in which they made them. These choices, in a liberal democracy, are and should be up for debate, especially when two of the Supreme Court’s nine members are illegitimate.

All of the above solutions are rooted in the presumption that the court is the ultimate constitutional authority when it’s not, according to Louis Fisher. In a new book called Reconsidering Judicial Finality, the constitutional scholar argues that the court’s power is proportional to how much power the three branches of the federal government, the states, civil society and the public are willing to give it. In his conclusion, he wrote:

I don’t know if we should pack the courts. I don’t know if any solution would work. But I do know that we must debate the question, and more importantly, that we must move the debate from the unthinkable to the OK-let’s-think-about-it. Judicial finality has become sacred, immune or untouchable. It is no such thing. We must move our national discourse so the people understand the Supreme Court isn’t the final say.

They are.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2019 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 18 September 2019
Word Count: 897
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Two days before Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed to the Supreme Court, I wrote that the Republicans were poisoning its legitimacy and the Democrats must redeem it. I said doing so required questioning the high court’s integrity, foremost the integrity of the “due process” that was installing Brett Kavanaugh. On October 4, 2018, I wrote:

There is in fact a growing nonpartisan consensus that [Kavanaugh is] not only unfit. He’s a liability for a court whose legitimacy has been increasingly in doubt. … This means the Democrats are on solid ground for any attempt to reform the court to restore its credibility. The question isn’t whether they should. The question is how.

The question of how is still very much in play, but I was more right than I could have known back then about whether the Democrats should clean up the Republican Party’s corruption of our legal system. We are now seeing the beginning of a major scandal in which the crime, as it were, is less important politically than the cover up.

The New York Times and LA Times reported over the weekend a previously unknown allegation of sexual misconduct against the new associate justice. More significance, the reporting verified the degree to which Judiciary Republicans sandbagged the FBI’s inquiry into that and other allegations. Kavanaugh, for his part, may have lied under oath. Four Democratic candidates, including Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris, are now calling not only for a new inquiry but potential impeachment hearings, too.

When I wrote that, “To save the village [SCOTUS], the Democrats have to burn it down,” I didn’t think they’d arrive with torches! But it appears at least some of the Democrats, even leading candidate Joe Biden, are ready to fight post-confirmation even if fighting leads to the undermining of the Supreme Court’s legitimacy. (Biden, to be clear, has not called for impeachment hearings. His campaign said revelations raise “profoundly troubling questions about the integrity of the confirmation process” and that “we must follow the evidence wherever it leads” to restore faith in government.)

OK, what happened?

You already knew about Christine Blasey Ford. She went to the Capitol to tell Senators in nationally televised testimony about Kavanaugh’s sexually assaulting her when they were in high school. You probably already knew about Deborah Ramirez. She and Kavanaugh were freshman at Yale together. During a night of heavy drinking, she said he shoved his penis in her face. Her account ran in the New York Times before Kavanaugh was confirmed on Oct. 6, 2018, by a vote of 50-48, the closest judicial vote in 130 years.

What no one knew, however, was that there was a second allegation from a second source who witnessed a second and separate incident that was similar to Ramirez’s. This account was revealed by two NYTimes reporters in an excerpt published Sunday of their forthcoming book about Kavanaugh. “A classmate, Max Stier, saw Mr. Kavanaugh with his pants down at a different drunken dorm party, where friends pushed his penis into the hand of a female student.” (The victim was not identified. She said she doesn’t remember the incident. She and Stier credit her intoxication for her memory lapse.)

The LA Times’ Jackie Calmes reported that Stier told Democratic Senator Chris Coons about the second penis incident. Coons then told Chris Wray, the FBI Director. The FBI, however, never contacted Stier. Indeed, the FBI took less than a week to complete its background investigation of Kavanaugh. Senate Republicans had insisted on that time frame. Moreover, they permitted FBI agents to talk to no more than 10 people.

Lawyers for Ford and Ramirez “sent letters to Wray that, together, named more than 50 individuals that the bureau’s agents should interview,” Calmes reported. “Only nine were ever contacted — all of them from the list that Republicans had submitted (my italics).

We don’t know if any of these allegations can be proven. We don’t know, as a consequence, if Brett Kavanaugh lied under oath. We do know, however, thanks to this new reporting that the Republicans sitting on the Senate Judiciary Committee went to great lengths to prevent the truth from coming to light, whatever that truth was. We know furthermore that the Republicans lied to ram Brett Kavanaugh through.

Chuck Grassley said at the time: “There is no corroboration of the allegations made by Dr. Ford and Ms. Ramirez.” Yes, because he and other Republicans made sure of that. Susan Collins, a pro-choice Republican who knew the FBI could not conduct a very thorough investigation, told reporters: “It appears to be a very thorough investigation.”

It was none of those things.

Will Kavanaugh be impeached? I have no idea. For now, what’s important is for the American people to understand what the GOP did to the rule of law, and for the Democrats to get the American people’s permission to clean up its corruption.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2019 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 16 September 2019
Word Count: 814
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You have read plenty here and elsewhere about an international trend in which democracy is in retreat. I’m going to suggest that this international trend isn’t being fueled by fascist politics so much as by elites around the world, but especially elites in the United States, who betrayed the egalitarian tenets of liberal democracy.

I’m going to suggest that this betrayal began on September 11, 2001.

As you probably know, there were about a dozen democratic governments on the planet in the aftermath of the Second World War. By the end of that bloody century, there were 87. Now, in light of the UK’s Brexit and the 2016 US presidential election, we’re more aware that democracy is more fragile than many of us ever thought.

Fascist politics, which always comes from democratic politics in crisis, has reemerged and is flourishing in countries as diverse as Turkey, Brazil, Poland, Hungary, and the Philippines. In the 2010s, the growth of democracy stopped for the first time in decades and receded, raising fears of democracy’s survival. Many argue this trend is a consequence of a backlash against globalization. I think there’s a better argument.

Democracy’s retreat is a consequence of two things: when conservative elites in America perversely and successfully married ordinary patriotism with militarism; and when liberal elites began thinking and acting more as morally relative citizens of the world than as morally grounded citizens of the United States. To the extent that there has been a “crisis of confidence” in the West — and to the extent that America is no longer the leader of a postwar international economic order — that current is deeply sourced in a volatile mixture of fascist emergency and cosmopolitan aloofness.

Over the weekend, Anne Applebaum wrote about this “crisis of confidence.” For the Washington Post, she wrote: “There is a decline in faith in liberal democracy, a loss of confidence in universal human rights, a collapse in support for all kinds of transnational projects. There is a constitutional crisis brewing in London. There is a president who defies democratic norms in Washington. There are challenges to the free press and independent judges in democracies everywhere, from Budapest to Manila.”

Case in point is “the slow, grinding, murderous endgame of the war in Syria. Right now, the Syrian government army, aided by its Russian allies, is fighting the last pockets of resistance in Idlib, the only remaining rebel province in northwest Syria. As these forces advance, they shred what remains of humanitarianism and the law of war.”

I have no doubt Applebaum is right, but I also have no doubt that America’s behavior in the wake of September 11, 2001, forever bankrupted our authority as moral leaders. Not only did the Bush administration lie about who our real enemies were; not only did it break international law to invade a country that did us no harm; not only did it torture innocents; not only did it imprison people without due process; not only did it fail to bring to justice the terrorists who murdered more than 3,000 Americans — it did all this and yet even liberal elites, which is say authoritative public figures who are supposed to help actualize self-rule, encouraged the American people to forget it.

We can’t, of course.

Americans are still fighting and dying in Afghanistan. The Iraq invasion created a massive power vacuum eventually filled by the Islamic State (ISIS), which turned to be even more murderous than Al Qaeda. ISIS vowed to create a new nation, or “Islamic caliphate,” by cutting out chunks of Iraq, Turkey and Syria. Such outside threats provided cover for Turkey’s Recep Erdoğan to roll back liberal reforms. They gave Syria’s Bashar al-Assad rationale to gas his own people to death with Russian gas. That years-long civil war has forced more than three and a half million Syrians to seek safe haven in Europe, where local racists panicked at the sight of “the invaders,” thus sparking a right-wing backlash that global elites now attribute to globalization.

Globalization did play a role but of greater significance, I think, was the class-based effort to persuade the citizenry that the disastrous outcome of a globalized economy did not require criminal accountability on the part of the elites who destroyed it. To be sure, the too-big-to-fail banks got bigger after the American people bailed them out. To be sure, the status quo still gives Wall Street incentive to do it all over again. But there was no need for justice, liberal elites told us. That would be something like mob rule, we were told. And lo, not one person was ever prosecuted. Instead, as we learned later, patriotic Americans who publicly protested Wall Street’s capture of their lives and liberty were investigated by American elites, in this case the FBI, as domestic terrorists, itself a consequence of America’s behavior after September 11, 2001.

The west’s “crisis of confidence” is real. But it’s not because of globalization.

It’s because elites here and elsewhere betrayed liberal democracy.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2019 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 11 September 2019
Word Count: 823
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A narrative is taking shape in Washington in which it’s clear to those telling the story that Donald Trump is mentally unwell. As evidence, they point to “Sharpie-gate.” There’s no reason, the storytellers allege, why the president would lie so obviously about something so trivial if he were not experiencing rapid cognitive decline.

Business Insider magnified that view Friday. One source said: “His mood changes from one minute to the next based on some headline or tweet, and the next thing you know his entire schedule gets tossed out the window because he’s losing his s—.”

A Republican strategist went further: “He’s deteriorating in plain sight.”

Another source once close to the president’s legal team said: “There’s just no getting through to him, and you can kiss your plans for the day goodbye because you’re basically stuck looking after a 4-year-old now.”

That’s the story. I’m skeptical. For one thing, this is pretty much what we’ve all come to expect from Trump. He is, after all, the first president in our lifetimes to have told more than 12,000 documented lies and falsehoods since taking office. The Trump who ran for president and the Trump who is the president now are the same Trump.

For another, such stories pathologize Donald Trump’s sadism. They in effect prevent citizens from facing fully the ugly reality of our political moment. Moreover — and I can’t stress this enough — stories that pathologize the president’s sadism in effect prevent the rest of us from fully facing the masochism that’s animating his base. It’s not that they don’t care that he lies. It’s that they derive pleasure from being lied to.

Here’s the backstory: For days on end last week the president insisted that Alabama was among southern states likely to be affected by Hurricane Dorian. Alabama was never in its direct path, but Trump said again and again that it was, even though government scientists publicly contradicted him. The president produced a weather map Wednesday in the Oval Office on which someone, probably Trump, used a black Sharpie marker to include Alabama in the hurricane’s trajectory. He wouldn’t admit his error. He denied that he erred. And he denied it over and over … and over.

Some, like FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver said the “map controversy” was too tiresome to heed. Others, like The Atlantic’s Peter Wehner, said that “Trump’s psychological impairments are obvious to all who are not willfully blind. On a daily basis we see the president’s chaotic, unstable mind on display. Are we supposed to ignore that?”

Neither is quite right. On the one hand, Sharpie-gate (if you’ll excuse the suffix) explains everything about Trumpism and our moment. It cannot and must not be dismissed. On the other, he doesn’t have psychological impairments he didn’t already have. (He’s not getting worse. It’s more of the same. We’re just seeing it better, I hope.) Indeed, citing mental illness gives this authoritarian far too much credit. He’s not lying because he’s unhinged. Trump is lying because to him, it feels good to lie.

What began, I suspect, as mere error (misreading a map) turned into an opportunity for an authoritarian president to impose his will. He might have known he was wrong, but being wrong, or being right for that matter, is immaterial when the authoritarian’s objective is getting you to accept what he says as the only truth. Moreover, the more ridiculous his statements — like using a Sharpie on a weather map to “prove” he was right — the more pleasure he’ll derive from its ultimate acceptance. To the extent that he’s “not well,” it’s to the extent that your humiliation is to him a source of pleasure. (Later on, NOAA issued an official statement declaring that Trump was correct!)

As to masochism, I speak as someone who once inhabited an authoritarian religious environment in which the leader is the one and only source of truth. In such a climate, facts don’t matter because no truth exists outside the authority of “the father.” If he says the sky is green, it’s green. Over time, followers start feeling good being told what to think. They start feeling good believing lies, not in spite of knowing the truth, but often because they know—and yet surrender anyway. The psychic surrender of the will is, I think, an underappreciated aspect of Trumpism. For those inhabiting an authoritarian climate, which is to say for the president’s most loyal supporters, the absence of punishment for independent thinking is the presence of great pleasure.

Is sadism a mental illness? I don’t know. What I do know is if we’re talking about mental wellness that causes ridiculous, voluminous and vicious lying, we’re talking about the wrong thing. Trump isn’t imposing his will on us because he’s sick.

He’s imposing his will on us because that’s what sadists do.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2019 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 09 September 2019
Word Count: 805
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