It’s always healthy to guard against premature optimism, but reality may be making a comeback. Cryptocurrency markets are cratering; Russia has surrendered Kherson; Elon Musk is melting down at Twitter; and President Biden and the Democrats delivered the best midterm performance since President Kennedy. I’ve been watching these trends as a single networked phenomenon, and to see them all moving in unison towards eventual collapse is quietly reassuring.

While the victory of Catherine Cortez Masto in Nevada ensures that Democrats will retain control of the Senate, the results of the Georgia Senate race will determine whether Sens. Sinema or Manchin might continue to play an outsized role there.

The House of Representatives is where we may see continued shenanigans. Kevin McCarthy is very likely to become Speaker, and is likely to reprise his 2011 standoff with Barack Obama over the debt ceiling. Then, his Tea Party caucus (a minority among House Republicans) still managed to bring the country to the brink of default — which only resulted in a lowering of the country’s credit rating, costing us billions.

This time, House Republican extremists are more likely to be in the majority, and are very likely to once again use the debt ceiling to try to extract cuts to Social Security and Medicare. Democrats are unlikely to consider any concessions on these core programs, and are also likely to reject any potential cuts to Ukraine aid, another area Republicans may target.

Relative to the larger agenda my team and I have been tracking — Russia’s use of the Ukraine war as a wedge to erode the dollar, NATO, and the EU — the threat or reality of debt default commingled with nuclear threats are the most potent weapons available to Putin and his network of right-libertarians. The perfect storm would consist of a US default (disrupting US government functions as well as increasing the cost of US debt and damaging the dollar) along with the unthinkable, a nuclear demonstration of force by Putin. Combine that with the financial and governmental chaos in the UK, and possible action by China against Taiwan (the US State Department said recently that China has moved up its timeline for the reunification of Taiwan) and you have a recipe for global chaos. And this is the scenario we’ve been hoping against hope will not materialize.

Yet this worst-case doomsday scenario seems increasingly unlikely with each passing day. The House may address the debt ceiling during the lame duck session, either by eliminating it or raising it. Nancy Pelosi is expressing support for this, even as Joe Biden has said he doesn’t support eliminating it. Either way, there is a decent chance Democrats will have the good sense to remove this cudgel from McCarthy’s hands before he can take power.

If McCarthy does try to use the debt ceiling as leverage, he will do so with a razor-thin majority in the House and without any pretense of a public mandate. Wiser voices may prevail over these “End the Fed” dead-enders, and pull McCarthy back from the brink — much as John Boehner and Mitch McConnell did in 2011. If they do go through with a default, there will be a period of weeks or months where Congress can work with the Treasury and the administration to mitigate the potentially catastrophic damage, and public opinion will be broadly mobilized against McCarthy and the radical House Members. Such a gambit could be very costly for Republicans heading into 2024. Had the election delivered a substantial majority to extremist Republicans, a more apocalyptic denouement may have ensued.

FTX, the cryptocurrency exchange run by the ironically-named Sam Bankman-Fried, has gone from a nearly $40 billion concern to zero — essentially overnight. This has in turn led to contagion throughout the sector and contributed to 20+% price drops in Bitcoin and other crypto assets. If crypto was part of a debt-default strategy to challenge the dollar, the jig may be up, as few will consider these risky next-generation assets to be even remotely trustworthy. Institutional investors are likely to be evacuating the sector in coming weeks.

Putin seems to have fully lost control of his war in Ukraine. Aleksandr Dugin, whom many cite as the primary philosophical architect of the conflict, has called for Putin to be executed because of his failure to deliver victory, with the losses of recently-annexed territories like Kherson being particularly embarrassing. While Putin may well resort to using a nuclear, experimental, or “dirty” weapon, any momentum he may have had to advance his global agenda has been lost, perhaps forever. The US elections did not go his way, and the prospects of US default are not what they might have been. Such a deployment is unlikely to deliver any battlefield advantage — even though Gen. Philip Breedlove, former Supreme Allied Commander (Europe) of NATO, recently said Putin was “more likely than not” to deploy a nuclear weapon.

Putin has also been dealt a blow by the loss of his ally Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil. And while Mr. Lula Da Silva is widely believed to be corrupt, to espouse anti-American views, and to be broadly compliant with Putin’s pay-to-play brand of oligarch politics, he at least breaks free of the right-wing strongman model which had been ascendant.

And Elon Musk is doing his best to roil the information environment by seeing just how quickly he can destroy Twitter. I believe he and his co-investors purchased Twitter to help advance the libertarian, anti-Fed, anti-dollar agenda I’ve covered previously. Musk’s takeover seemed well-timed to create chaos right before the election, and then continuing on through the anticipated debt ceiling debacle.

But the “red wave” was a trickle, and Musk’s magic chaos machine seems to be melting down with a whimper. Many of us who are tired of the drama are quietly exploring more verdant pastures; I set up a Mastodon server, a decentralized social media platform similar to but different from Twitter, for purposes of research and reporting. You are welcome to join me there (at toad.social), for community, exploration, and learning.

What if the tide has turned away from the brash duplicitousness of Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis towards a more considered decency, modeled by men like Joe Biden or Fred Rogers? It may be too much to hope for — and far too early. But we’re seeing some early sprouts of such a trend, and it couldn’t emerge a moment too soon. The American body politic remains gravely ill, but it’s reassuring to see democracy still has the will to live, and may make it to 2023 and beyond. Democracy and reality both seem to be staging a comeback — and they have a posse.

Dave Troy is an investigative journalist focused on exposing threats to democracy. He writes “The Wide Angle” column for The Washington Spectator.

Copyright ©2022 The Washington Spectator — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 23 November 2022
Word Count: 1,109
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US household debt hit a record $16.15 trillion in the second quarter of 2022. Mortgage debt accounts for 75% of the total; college debt another 10%. The rest is mainly motor vehicle and credit card debt.

Rising household debt over the past two years is worrisome, and will become a greater problem as interest rates continue to rise. What’s more worrisome, however, are its consequences. Excessive debt can force people to reduce their spending, which will slow economic growth and lead to a recession.

$16 trillion is a large number. But what really matters is debt relative to what people have to repay it. College debt exceeding $100,000 is not a big deal for doctors and lawyers making several times that amount each year. The situation is very different for teachers making half what they owe.

From this perspective, things have gotten better lately. Household debt relative to disposable income fell from 150% in 2009 to 130% in 2016, where it has since remained; and household finances improved during the coronavirus pandemic. Consumer debt payments (which excludes mortgages) relative to disposable income fell from 13% in 2007 to 8.4% in early 2021. Delinquencies (debt payments 90-plus days overdue) fell from 3% before covid to under 2% in 2020 and 2021. Covid (which kept people at home and reduced spending), low interest rates, and generous government benefits during the pandemic (stimulus checks, child tax credit, and a moratorium on repaying college debt) helped bring this about.

Furthermore, debt isn’t always bad. Mortgages let households purchase a home and gain equity when they pay it off. Borrowed money lets people attend college and buy cars. Debt also enables people to survive hard times — a layoff, gig workers getting fewer gigs and non-gig workers getting fewer hours, or any catastrophe precluding employment for some time. However, high debt levels make life stressful and difficult. People worry about eviction, utilities being shut off, putting food on the table, as well as saving for retirement.

Household debt also stimulates the economy and creates jobs. But this, too, is a double-edged sword. Even a small spending cutback due to high debt levels will have negative macroeconomic consequences. Inventories will pile up, firms will cut production, and lay off workers. Service-sector workers will receive less income, and have their gigs or hours reduced.

The main force reducing consumer spending since the 1980s has been the greater share of total income going to the rich, who save large fractions of their income. This leaves less for households struggling to maintain their standard of living. Since low- and middle-income households typically spend nearly all their income, these households have gone into debt or deeper into debt.

But households can handle only so much debt. While the actual breaking point is uncertain, the economic results can be catastrophic once this limit is reached.

In 2008, the Great Recession began when homeowners couldn’t pay their mortgages. Lehman Brothers collapsed, and many other financial institutions stood on the brink of bankruptcy. The government bailed out the financial institutions that created the problem, but then did little to help households saddled with mortgages they couldn’t possibly repay. This is one reason the economic recovery was so weak and it took nearly a decade before household income (adjusted for inflation) reached its pre-2008 level.

A similar problem led to the October 1929 stock market crash and Great Depression. During the Roaring 20s people bought stock on borrowed money. Once stock prices fell a bit, margin calls went out. Lacking sufficient savings to repay loans from stockbrokers, people had to sell stocks to get cash and repay their loans. This pushed down stock prices further, generating more margin calls, and eventually a market crash. What happened on Wall Street soon affected Main Street, as everyone became reluctant to spend money.

While household debt levels have not yet approached a tipping point, four forces will sharply increase debt-to-income ratios in the months ahead.

First, the Federal Reserve has been raising interest rates since early this year. They plan to continue doing so at least through the end of 2022. This will increase rates on credit cards, college debt, and car loans. We have already seen one consequence of this — the ratio of consumer debt payments to disposable income rose to 9.5% in the second quarter of this year (from its record low of 8.4% last year).

Second, the majority of household debt comes from housing. Home prices grew 4.5% annually from 1992 to 2019. Starting in 2020, they have soared more than 10% a year, resulting in a nearly 40% increase in home prices between 2019 and today. Homes are less affordable now than at any time since June 1989. As the Fed continues raising interest rates, housing prices will begin to fall, putting some homeowners underwater. Similar to the Great Recession, many won’t be able to repay their mortgages and will lose their homes.

Third, President Biden recently announced that the college debt moratorium would end in 2023. This moratorium is a leading reason household debt was less problematic during the covid pandemic. Income not used to repay college debt went to repay other debt and kept people from falling further into debt. When college loan repayments resume in January, many households will struggle to pay their bills and also repay their debt.

Finally, government benefits helped US households during the coronavirus pandemic. These benefits have ended. Families struggling to make ends meet must now rely on high-interest borrowing (credit cards, payday loans and auto title loans) to survive.

The good news is that financially strapped households can be helped. For starters, the Fed can stop raising interest rates before they push the economy over the edge.

A more difficult fix is meaningful bankruptcy reform, including allowing people to discharge their college debt, rather than being squeezed during their working lives and then having whatever they still owe taken from their Social Security checks.

Before the 2005 Bankruptcy Reform Act it was easy and cheap for people to reduce their debt through bankruptcy. This is no longer the case. Now people must take two credit counseling courses before having their debt reduced. Many studies have found these classes to be worthless. They don’t change behavior, but they are costly for people already drained of their financial resources. Moreover, delaying bankruptcy protection leads to abuse by creditors and possible loss of one’s home and car.

For many people, bankruptcy is the only option to escape from the crushing debt that comes from job loss, enormous medical bills, divorce, and other unanticipated events. Changing the bankruptcy code is needed. Towards this end, Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) introduced a new bankruptcy bill in the Senate in 2020. It remains stuck in Committee, lacking the votes to end a Republican filibuster.

A more liberal bankruptcy law would help, but it doesn’t solve the underlying problem. People accumulating great debt, and then eliminating it in bankruptcy court every half-dozen years or so, epitomizes Einstein’s quip about insanity — it is “doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” The root cause of the household debt problem — greater inequality — needs addressing. As noted above, when more income goes to the top 1%, everyone else must pick up the slack by spending more or going into greater debt. If this doesn’t happen, economic growth slows and household debt levels become more problematic — not due to more debt but due to having less income to repay that debt. This is why higher taxes on corporations and the rich, and more generous spending programs (for example, reviving the refundable child tax credit and increasing Social Security and Medicare benefits), are needed. It is for the good of the economy and the nation.

Unless some action is taken, household debt will continue to rise. And it will threaten to rise to the point where it breaks the backs of American households and the US economy.

Steven Pressman is part-time professor of economics at the New School for Social Research, professor emeritus of economics and finance at Monmouth University and author of Fifty Major Economists, 3rd edition (Routledge, 2013).

Copyright ©2022 The Washington Spectator — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 07 November 2022
Word Count: 1,321
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The central bank of the U.S. Federal Reserve (or Fed for short) has been hiking interest rates this year to try to bring down inflation. Before addressing the economic consequences of this, a few words about central banks seems in order.

Regular retail and consumer banks do their own banking at central banks — making deposits and borrowing money. Central banks in turn regulate regular banks to ensure they remain solvent. But their most important function is changing interest rates to control inflation and unemployment.

Central banks set the rate at which they lend money to banks and control the rate that banks charge each other for loans. When inflation is high, central banks raise these rates. Banks then charge their customers more for loans. When unemployment is high, central banks cut the rates they charge banks. Banks then lower the rates they charge to businesses and consumers. Higher interest rates reduce spending and are intended to dampen inflationary pressures; lower rates increase spending, economic growth, and employment.

Currently U.S. unemployment is below 4 percent and near a 50-year low. Inflation, under 2 percent in the B.C. (before Covid) years, rose above 9 percent for the year ending in June 2022, its highest rate in four decades. Last year, the Biden administration provided many benefits to U.S. families (such as stimulus checks and a refundable tax credit) through the American Rescue Plan, helping them keep up with rising prices. These programs have now expired. As prices rise much faster than incomes, Americans struggle to pay their rent or mortgage, fill up their car with gasoline, and put food on the table.

The Fed has responded by increasing interest rates. From nearly 0 percent in January, it raised interest rates a total of 2.25 percentage points between March and July. And it expects to hike rates another percentage point before the year is out.

In hindsight, the Fed should have started raising rates last fall, when the U.S. unemployment rate was under 5 percent and declining and government spending programs were stimulating the economy. Erring on the side of keeping unemployment down, the Fed fell behind the inflation curve. Now it seeks to make up for lost time and deflect blame from the fact that it kept rates too low for too long.

Consumers are already feeling the consequences of this — higher mortgage rates, higher interest rates on auto and college loans, and higher rates on credit card balances. This is one downside of reducing inflation.

Many economists fear the Fed will push the U.S. into a recession, leading to the dreaded stagflation (high inflation and unemployment at the same time) that plagued the economy in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Frequently the Fed has gone too far when it starts raising rates. Fed Chair Paul Volcker overdid it in the late 1970s and early 1980s, leading to 10 percent unemployment. In the early 1990s, Fed Chair Alan Greenspan raised rates, creating a recession that helped end more than a decade of Republican rule in Washington. He raised rates again in 2004, which generated very slow economic growth and quickly had to be reversed.

While not a foregone conclusion, a recession is highly likely. We may be there already. The U.S. economy shrank 0.4 percent (1.6 percent at an annual rate) in the first quarter of this year and 0.2 percent in the second quarter. Furthermore, three recession indicators are flashing brightly — the stock market has fallen sharply this year; commodity prices (oil, cotton, copper, and even corn and wheat) are falling; and the yield curve has inverted (interest rates on short-term government bonds exceed interest rates on longer-term bonds).

Another problem is that while higher interest rates can control inflation caused by too much spending, the Fed can’t counteract the supply problems we currently face. Interest rate hikes won’t reduce high gas prices stemming from an embargo of Russian oil. They won’t replace the loss of Ukrainian grain on the world food market. They can’t reduce high auto and appliance prices that stem from a computer chip shortage due to a drought in Taiwan. And they can’t undo labor shortages resulting from Covid.

Even worse, higher interest rates can increase inflation. This is clearest in the case of housing, the largest spending category for most households. Interest rates on a 30-year fixed mortgage have risen from 2.8 percent last August to 5.5 percent in mid-July. For a $450,000 mortgage, this increases monthly housing costs by nearly $750. People priced out of homeownership will remain renters, adding to the demand for apartments and pushing up rents.

Although the Fed can’t solve our current inflation problem, it also didn’t create it. It didn’t invade Ukraine. It didn’t provide tax cuts to the rich during the Bush and Trump administrations or give Covid benefits to many people who didn’t really need them during the Trump and Biden administrations. And it didn’t raise tariffs sharply on imported goods, making them more expensive. President Trump did this. The Fed merely waited too long to start raising rates.

Still, the Fed is responsible for cleaning up the inflation mess. But its tools are weak and ineffective when it comes to supply-side inflation, and raising rates much further will increase unemployment sharply. The main anti-inflation alternatives are cuts in government spending and raising taxes. But politicians are loath to enact such policies because it hurts their constituents, the people they count on to get reelected. So, by default, the job of controlling inflation falls to central bankers removed from such political pressure.

Right now, our great danger is that the Fed will wait too long to stop raising rates, just as it waited too long to start raising rates. As economists are fond of saying, there are long and variable lags between changes in interest rates and when these changes impact the economy. It is about time for the Fed to hit the pause button. But the inflation problem squeezing so many lower-income and middle-class households still needs to be addressed.

The good news is that another solution to the inflation problem exists. As the Fed steps down to examine the impact of what it has done already, fiscal policy needs to take the lead in battling inflation. Unlike the Fed, President Biden and Congress have the tools to battle supply-side inflation without creating a recession. They need to use them! Besides reducing inflation, these policy actions will also take pressure off the Fed to continually raise interest rates in an attempt to tame inflation.

Here are just a few things the president and Congress can do.

The president can temporarily reduce import taxes and other trade restrictions, and temporarily suspend requirements that ships carrying goods between two U.S. ports must be built in the United States and operated by Americans. These actions would lower the cost of all imported goods. Congress and the president can increase legal immigration and the number of seasonal work visas to ameliorate labor shortages and raise income taxes on the wealthy to reduce demand-side inflationary pressures stemming from Covid relief bills that provided benefits to households that did not need the money and are now spending their windfall. This last policy is far better than having the Fed raise interest rates again, which would hurt indebted low-income and middle-class households and increase mortgage rates and housing costs that constitute a large part of monthly expenditures for those who are not wealthy.

Finally, the president and Congress can provide tax breaks to companies that allow their employees to work from home, and subsidies to state and local governments that reduce rail and bus fares for consumers. The latter policy will encourage people to use mass transit when traveling. Both policies, by reducing time behind the wheel, will help drive down the cost of gasoline.

Steven Pressman is adjunct professor of economics at the New School for Social Research, professor emeritus of economics and finance at Monmouth University, and author of Fifty Major Economists, 3rd edition (Routledge, 2013).

Copyright ©2022 The Washington Spectator — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 05 September 2022
Word Count: 1,302
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Alexander Hamilton once described the judiciary as the least dangerous branch of government. But today it is no exaggeration to say that the Supreme Court poses a greater threat to individual freedoms, to the future of the planet, and to democracy itself than any other government branch.

The Supreme Court is now a political entity masquerading as a judicial body. This has been obvious since the 2000 decision in Bush v. Gore. On December 9, 2000, Justice Antonin Scalia, speaking for four Republican court members, ordered Florida to stay its recount of votes in the presidential race. Scalia then waited until December 12 before ruling that a recount was not possible because December 12 was Florida’s “safe harbor” deadline for recording presidential votes. If not for Scalia’s stay, the recount could have been completed by December 12, something the uberpartisan Scalia did not want to happen.

Faced with identical law and facts, a real court will reach the same result regardless of the political party of the plaintiff and the defendant. We can be quite sure that the five Republican Supreme Court members who stopped the Florida recount would not have done so had Gore been slightly ahead of Bush. As we move into the 2024 election cycle, government officials must be prepared to ignore partisan decisions from an entity that is a court in name only. The future of American democracy is at stake.

Other court decisions are threatening to constitutional government. In overturning Roe v. Wade (in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization), the Supreme Court for the first time took away a previously recognized constitutional right, in this instance declaring that the previous right to an abortion no longer exists. Despite Justice Samuel Alito’s assertion that the decision should not be read as affecting other rights, there can be no doubt that the right to same-sex marriage is in the court’s crosshairs. And since overturning Roe still leaves abortion legal in large parts of the country (it is popular even in archconservative states like Kansas), the court’s next steps will likely hold up prohibitions on travel for abortions and, perhaps, ultimately outlaw abortion altogether by declaring a fetus to be a person.

Despite the passage of President Biden’s climate-control bill, the justices have already reached environmental decisions aimed at making it impossible for the United States to address the existential threat of climate change.

Next year, the court will rule on a case that involves the so-called independent state legislature doctrine. Based on the text and supposed original intent of two articles of the Constitution related to congressional and presidential elections, this once fringe doctrine asserts that legislatures are uniquely empowered to decide congressional redistricting and the method for selecting presidential electors. Under this doctrine, state legislatures can ignore state courts and constitutions on congressional redistricting and, more ominously, ignore the popular vote in their states when it comes to choosing presidential electors.

Four Republican Supreme Court members have agreed to take this case, and three (Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch) have already signaled their support for the doctrine. Their motives are obviously partisan. Republicans control both houses of 30 state legislatures, while the Democrats control just 17, and will clearly benefit from unchecked state legislature gerrymandering. Republicans control the legislatures in the five Biden states — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — where Republican members of Congress voted on January 6, 2021, to throw out the results of the popular vote. One would have to be very naive to believe that the six Republicans on the Supreme Court would have much interest in the independent state legislature doctrine if Democrats were the principal beneficiaries of unchecked gerrymandering or if Democrats controlled legislatures in states the Republican presidential candidate might carry. Had the independent state legislature doctrine been law in 2020, Donald Trump likely would be president today.

So how should the Biden administration, congressional Democrats, state governors, state judges, and lower federal courts respond to what may be a dire threat to American democracy? Alexander Hamilton described the judiciary as the least dangerous branch of government because it commands no army and no police. It has no ability to enforce its decisions except to the extent that the other branches accept the decisions as legitimate. The decisions of a court that is nakedly partisan, that is intent on taking away previously protected constitutional rights, and that is on the verge of ending free elections cannot be considered legitimate.

Even if the court had the requisite constitutional authority, one branch of government cannot be allowed to destroy the democratic basis of the other two branches, nor can it be allowed to destroy the federal system by imposing illegitimate decisions on state governments. But even using the logic of the court’s Republican majority, the court does not in fact have the authority to do much of what it reaches to do.

In his decision in Dobbs, Samuel Alito asserts that there is no right to abortion in the Constitution and therefore the 50-year precedent of Roe v. Wade must be overturned. But judicial review of laws is also not in the Constitution. The Constitution says nothing that gives the Supreme Court the power to rule on the constitutionality of laws passed by Congress, on the constitutionality of executive branch actions, or on the constitutionality of state government actions. Nor is there any evidence that the Philadelphia delegates to the Constitutional Convention intended for the Supreme Court to be a constitutional court. In fact, it is not clear that they thought much about judicial power at all in that hot summer in Philadelphia, and the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court in Article 3 of the Constitution is very limited. (Later, as part of the case for ratification, Alexander Hamilton argued in Federalist 78 that, in the event of a conflict of law between the Constitution and an ordinary law, courts would have to choose the Constitution; but this is not the same as conferring on the Supreme Court the power to overturn a law.)

The Supreme Court arrogated to itself the power of constitutional review in the 1803 decision in Marbury v. Madison. In that decision, Justice John Marshall ruled that American courts have the power to strike down laws that they find violate the Constitution. While Marbury v. Madison is a longer-lasting precedent than Roe v. Wade, it has no greater constitutional authority. Neither abortion nor judicial review are in the Constitution.

The best solution to the problem of an illegitimate Supreme Court is to reform it. Ideally, there would be a nonpolitical way to choose justices (as in Europe) so that they are judges and not politicians. Short of that, there could be a system of staggered term limits so that presidents of both parties would be able to choose justices. However, these reforms can only be made by amending the Constitution, and securing the votes to do that — two-thirds of both houses of Congress and three-fourths of the state legislatures — is impossible to achieve.

There are two possible legislative solutions — increasing the court membership and stripping the court of some of its jurisdiction. Expanding the court — which might be best described as “court unpacking” to undo the Republican right’s court packing — is the simplest reform, but it requires larger Democratic majorities than currently exist in either house of Congress. Jurisdiction stripping — for example taking away the court’s power to review certain federal or state laws — is more complicated and solves only part of the problem. As with court unpacking, the congressional votes aren’t there.

Executive branch officials, state governors, and state courts can simply refuse to enforce judgments that follow from the decisions of an illegitimate court. For example, in abortion cases, they can decline to recognize civil awards pursuant to laws like the one in Texas that permits suits against anyone assisting an abortion. Where abortion is criminalized, federal and state officials can simply not extradite those criminally charged. Prosecutors in states where abortion is illegal can refuse to prosecute.

Lower federal courts and state courts can choose to ignore Supreme Court rulings that they see as partisan and illegitimate. (The history of our century might have been quite different if Florida had done so in December 2000.) Without the cooperation of state and federal officials and of state and lower federal courts, there is very little the Supreme Court can do enforce its decisions. This tactic is understandably concerning to some, as it is reminiscent of tactics white Southerners used as part of their “massive resistance” to Supreme Court desegregation decisions in the 1950s. The problem then was not the tactics but the goals for which they were used. There is a huge difference between resisting court decisions that promote equal rights and freedom and not implementing those that take away rights and end democracy.

American legal scholars and lawyers are trained to regard Supreme Court decisions the way Catholics are meant to view papal bulls. The court can be wrong, but it is better to accept a bad decision than undermine the rule of law. To the extent that it keeps social peace, this approach has merit. However, the Constitution cannot be whatever five Republican extremists say it is.

I have spent much of my career as a diplomat working on countries that fall apart — Yugoslavia, Indonesia (East Timor), Iraq, and Afghanistan. The single most important factor in the breakup of countries — and the start of civil wars — is the justified belief by a significant part of the population that the instruments of state are being used to treat them unfairly. Can anyone seriously believe that Americans would meekly accept a Supreme Court decision to overturn a future presidential election by allowing Republican legislatures to ignore the popular vote in their state?

This is a formula for massive unrest if not outright civil war. We can hope that the 2024 elections are sufficiently decisive that such a scenario does not occur. But Joe Biden won in 2020 by more than seven million votes nationally, with a three-state margin in the Electoral College, and this did not stop Donald Trump and a majority of elected Republican members of Congress from trying to overturn the election. As we approach 2024, many of the pro-democracy Republican members of Congress have retired or been purged. Next year, a partisan Supreme Court could give the anti-democracy Republican majority the tools to succeed.

Under the current circumstances, the best response to illegitimate and partisan court decisions is to ignore them. Refusing to acknowledge the most extreme decisions of this Supreme Court will no doubt cause confusion in the U.S. court system. However, delegitimizing a partisan Supreme Court may be necessary to help prepare for the all too possible situation where the court is integral to undoing the next election. And it may even lead the court to reconsider the consequences of its actions.

The Constitution is not whatever the Supreme Court says it is. The court’s partisan majority cannot be allowed to use the Constitution as a vehicle to destroy American democracy. At some point, we have to take a stand for the Constitution and for democracy.

Peter W. Galbraith, a former U.S. Ambassador to Croatia and Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations in Afghanistan, is the author of The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created a War Without End, first published in 2006.

Copyright ©2022 The Washington Spectator — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 01 September 2022
Word Count: 1,856
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In an iconic scene from the film Norma Rae, Sally Field — playing the eponymous title character — writes “UNION” on a piece of cardboard and holds it aloft in the plant that employed her. She has just been fired for copying a flyer to use as evidence of illegal actions to thwart unionization. Following a movie-appropriate period of tension, one by one each employee shuts down their workstation. The plant goes silent. Production stops. Eventually, it is unionized.

Recent events make it seem like reality is beginning to imitate Hollywood. Workers in over two dozen Starbucks stores voted to unionize earlier this year. So did employees at an Amazon warehouse in Staten Island. These victories give other workers hope that they too can organize and gain a stronger voice as well as some power in negotiating with their employer. As a result, unionization efforts are currently underway across the nation. The larger question is whether these efforts lead to a rise in the living standard of U.S. workers, which has stagnated over several decades, and improve their working conditions.

One reason for pessimism is the power large companies have to harass and fire union supporters and then request a union decertification vote. If these efforts fail, firms can refuse to negotiate in good faith. Another cause for pessimism is that government action to change business-labor dynamics is unlikely as long as Democrats lack the votes to counter Republican obstructionism in the Senate. A little background can help us understand these problems.

The 1933 National Industrial Recovery Act, part of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, gave U.S. workers the right to organize and bargain collectively for the first time. After the Supreme Court declared the act unconstitutional in May 1935 (claiming the term “fair competition” was vague and undefined in the law), the 1935 National Labor Relations Act revived some of its key provisions.

Following World War II, Americans held a positive view of unions — in no small measure because they didn’t strike during the war. But both union and nonunion workers were poorly compensated. The Great Depression, and then wage and price controls imposed during the war, kept wages low; and the end of wartime bonuses substantially reduced take-home pay. With low unemployment, unions saw an opportunity to change things.

The result was a large number of strikes, higher wages, and rising inflation. Public sentiment quickly turned against labor and Democrats. In 1947, Republicans gained control of Congress. On June 23, they passed the Taft-Hartley Act — named for Senator Robert Taft of Ohio and Congressman Fred Hartley of New Jersey, both Republicans — over President Truman’s veto. This June marks the act’s seventy-fifth anniversary.

Taft-Hartley was a conscious effort to reduce the bargaining power of labor. It allowed the U.S. attorney general to seek an injunction against strikes and enabled firms to seek union decertification. It prohibited wildcat strikes, solidarity strikes, secondary boycotts, and mass picketing. Even more important, Taft-Hartley made union membership and paying union dues voluntary. This created incentives for workers to opt out of providing the revenue the unions relied on to organize and represent their members.

Taft-Hartley also prohibited federal employees from striking. President Reagan used this provision in 1981 to fire air traffic control (PATCO) workers who struck over concerns that flying was unsafe because they were so overworked. In firing union workers, President Reagan sent a clear message that government would side with business over labor.

Businesses got it. They hired anti-unionization specialists and white-shoe management-side law firms to prevent unionization votes and, if that didn’t work, ensure the vote to unionize was defeated. Taft-Hartley aided these efforts. It enables employers to force workers to attend meetings where they are fed anti-union propaganda; at the same time, firms can prevent union organizers from communicating with workers at the workplace. Although employers in theory cannot fire workers for supporting a union or retaliate against union supporters by changing their working conditions, such practices have nonetheless proliferated. The meager penalty for violating these principles is reimbursing workers for any lost pay.

Following passage of Taft-Hartley, union membership fell steadily — from 35 percent after WWII to just 10 percent in 2021.

The nation lost more than just union members. Union workers, on average, earn 10 percent more than a worker performing similar tasks who is not a union member, and they are more likely to be covered by employer-funded health insurance. Unions ensure that labor receives a share of the gains in economic output generated by workers so that inequality does not spiral out of control. These benefits even spill over to nonunion workers as firms raise compensation rates for fear of losing employees to higher-paying unionized firms.

In addition, unions have been responsible for many workplace benefits that Americans take for granted — the 40-hour workweek, overtime pay, paid vacations, paid sick days, and paid maternity and paternity leave. They also give a collective voice to employees, preventing firms from abusing workers.

Unions also benefit employers. Union members are less likely to seek alternative employment, reducing the cost and frequency of having to hire and train new workers. And firms can negotiate pay and benefits with all workers at once rather than on an individual basis.

A failure to let workers discuss safety concerns during the Covid-19 pandemic seems to have turned the tide, especially with many firms desperately seeking employees due to retiring baby boomers and reduced labor force participation by prime-age adults. After decades of stagnant wages and worsening working conditions, workers feel they can support unionization efforts and strike if necessary. Even if their efforts fail, plentiful jobs are available at around the same wage.

In addition to the many successful unionization votes, unions are seen more favorably than at any point since the 1960s. Over two-thirds of Americans approve of unions, and more than half of nonunion workers say they would join a union if given the option.

A turning tide alone, however, won’t equalize the bargaining power between business and labor. Firms begin with many advantages. Having more wealth, they can outlast workers during a strike. Also, firms can close a unionized plant or store at will, causing severe hardship for those who lose their jobs. In contrast, workers can’t permanently shut down thousands of Starbucks stores, threatening the company with bankruptcy. Last but not least, Taft-Hartley and Republican hostility toward unions have put the laws of the land on the side of business in labor disputes.

What might level the playing field?

Passing the Protect the Right to Organize (PRO) Act would help. PRO seeks to repeal the more egregious provisions in Taft-Hartley. It prohibits intimidating workers or questioning them about their views regarding unions. It imposes penalties on firms for retaliating against workers seeking to form a union. It prevents workers from being forced to attend anti-union meetings. It prohibits employers from permanently replacing striking workers and permits labor to engage in secondary strikes. And it overrides state “right to work” laws, which are fundamentally about weakening unions and creating lower wage environments for employers. Right to work laws prohibit unions from negotiating a contract that requires all employees to contribute to the collective bargaining effort, even though it benefits everyone. PRO passed the House with only five Republican votes. Contrary to Republican claims of being pro-union, a Republican filibuster prevents the bill from even coming to the Senate floor for a vote.

Reining in corporate power is also a priority. This includes prohibiting mergers and acquisitions, as well as breaking up monopolies and quasi-monopolies. Equally important is curbing practices that limit employee rights — such as prohibiting firms from reclassifying employees as contract workers (a simple solution to unionization efforts) and prohibiting noncompete clauses in worker contracts. Such clauses keep someone from going to work for a competitor — for example, leaving a job at Subway to take a job at another sandwich shop — for months or even years. Workers thus become indentured servants, unable to find a similar job at higher pay or do anything that puts their current job at risk.

Given repeated Republican failures to support workers, action now must come from the president through an executive order. A White House Task Force on Worker Organizing and Empowerment issued a report in February with nearly 70 recommendations for strengthening union organizing and worker rights. Its most important recommendation is that strong labor standards should be a condition for receiving government monies. If this becomes policy, firms seeking government contracts stemming, for example, from the $1 trillion infrastructure bill passed last November will have to maintain good labor relations. While this would be a big step forward, the next Republican president can reverse any changes made by President Biden — unless long-overdue legislation gets passed. This will require that Democrats hold the House in the November midterm elections, pick up at least one Senate seat (Pennsylvania and Wisconsin are both good candidates for this), and then vote to end filibusters in the Senate. We shouldn’t have to wait another 75 years before overthrowing Taft-Hartley.

Steven Pressman is professor emeritus of economics and finance at Monmouth University and author of Fifty Major Economists, 3rd edition (Routledge, 2013).

Copyright ©2022 The Washington Spectator — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 29 June 2022
Word Count: 1,503
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Inflation has reached its highest level in 40 years — 7 percent in 2021 and still rising. Concurrently, President Biden’s approval rating has dropped from 53 percent on Inauguration Day to 40 percent in late February before Russia invaded Ukraine. (By late March, it was 42 percent, and it has remained at this level through the first half of April.)

Higher inflation is not the only reason for the president’s declining popularity. The resurgent coronavirus has hurt. So has failing to pass Build Back Better, Biden’s signature economic plan. For voters, however, inflation is the primary concern. A January CBS-YouGov poll gave the president his worst results on inflation: 58 percent of those surveyed blame Biden for the problem.

This raises two questions — why is inflation rising, and what can the president do about it?

Inflation measures the price change for goods and services bought by a typical family. An annual inflation rate of 7 percent means that people are forking over 7 percent more money to buy the same things they bought a year ago; or they can buy 7 percent less, this year, with last year’s income.

But incomes are not fixed. Wages rose 4.7 percent in 2021; with 7 percent inflation, an average wage was able to purchase 2.3 percent less at the end of 2021, as compared to the end of 2020.

Income is also more than just wages. Two legislative bills boosted 2021 incomes. In late December 2020, President Trump signed a $900 billion Covid relief act, providing $600-per-person stimulus checks, among other things. In March 2021, President Biden signed the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, sending $1,400 checks to most Americans. It also provided families with six child tax credit payments of $250 or $300 per child.

For a median earner (making around $52,000), the two checks totaling $2,000 more than countered the lost purchasing power of wages due to inflation. The child tax credit ensured that families with children came out significantly ahead.

Yet Republicans talk of “Bidenflation,” conveniently ignoring President Trump’s Covid relief bill, as well as the fact that most Americans were better off in 2021 than in 2020. Many recite talking points that U.S. inflation exceeds that of other developed countries. While this claim is true, the difference has not been that great. Inflation in the European Union was 5 percent last year. In the U.K., it was 5.4 percent; in Canada 4.8 percent. None of these nations employed the aggressive Covid relief policies that we did. Inflation was around 2 percent in the United States and most other developed nations before 2021. Of the five-percentage-point rise in American inflation last year, we can attribute two points to U.S. policies; the other three points stem from global forces.

It’s worth noting that the trade sanctions imposed on Russia following its invasion of Ukraine at the end of February 2022 have led to converging inflation rates throughout the developed world, as Russia’s main export — energy — has become the most significant inflationary pressure in the world economy.

For 2021, the higher U.S. inflation, compared to other developed nations’, was due to U.S. policies that resulted in more spending. But these policies also created more jobs. Unemployment in the United States was 3.8 percent in February 2022, much lower than the 6.2 percent in Europe. The lower unemployment rate in the United States gave us four million additional jobs but also two percentage points of higher inflation.

Still, no one likes inflation. Workers believe they deserve their higher pay and that inflation robs them of their hard-earned gains. There is also a political cost to inflation — everyone suffers from inflation, while only a small fraction of the population experiences unemployment. This is why the president’s approval rating has fallen and why inflation understandably worries Democrats.

I remain skeptical that we face a future of rising inflation.

As noted earlier, the government put a good deal of money into the hands of households in 2021. These inflationary pressures have abated. The last stimulus checks went out a year ago. Expanded unemployment benefits ended last September. And the Federal Reserve began raising interest rates in March; it plans to continue raising rates throughout 2022. All this will reduce spending and exert downward pressure on prices.

This still leaves several global supply problems (which were responsible for more than half the increase in inflation in the United States last year), a health pandemic, higher energy prices, and climate change.

The coronavirus has created labor shortages. Some people retired sooner due to Covid fears. Some adults face Covid-related health problems or childcare needs that reduce their ability to work. With fewer workers, wages will rise and higher production costs will get passed on to consumers as higher prices. Two labor shortages in the United States are noteworthy, as they impact the price of many goods. Due to retirement, high quit rates, and industry growth, the United States is short 90,000 truckers. Trucks move 72 percent of parts to producers and goods to consumers. Longshoremen, who unload goods shipped from abroad, are also in short supply, leading to transportation delays, shortages of goods, and higher prices.

Rising oil prices have a number of different causes, including Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and people choosing to drive rather than take mass transportation because of Covid-19 concerns. Russian oil, which provided 10 percent of the world’s oil supply, is now largely off the world market. Another huge factor is OPEC output restrictions, which have reduced the global supply of oil by nearly three million barrels a day compared to pre-pandemic levels. Less oil production means higher energy and gas prices, which then impact the cost of transporting parts to manufacturers and finished goods to markets.

A final problem stems from climate change. Problems producing computer chips have contributed to the increased prices of cars, appliances, and many other goods requiring chips. Taiwan, which manufacturers 90 percent of advanced chips, still has a drought problem that experts attribute to climate change. This is a problem for chip production, which requires large quantities of water, and Taiwan has been rationing. The good news is that this situation has been improving recently.

Lumber is another example of how climate problems impact overall inflation. Most lumber that is used to build American homes comes from British Columbia, where the cold weather strengthens trees. Over several years, climate-related fires have destroyed forests in British Columbia, and the mountain pine beetle has destroyed additional trees as more beetles survive warmer winters. U.S. building codes require strong lumber that will bend but not break. Lacking this lumber, over the past decade new housing construction is down around six million units (relative to new household formation), according to the National Association of Realtors. Along with the Covid-related demand for more space by people working from home, home prices have soared. This price rise reverberates through the entire housing market, as people who can’t buy homes must rent, causing rents to rise.

In the months ahead, higher interest rates and the end of Covid relief policies should lead to reduced U.S. inflation. Also, Covid-induced inflation will fall as the worldwide coronavirus pandemic wanes. When this will occur remains uncertain.

The Biden administration has made a good start dealing with supply-side inflationary pressures. It has encouraged ports to maintain longer hours to reduce transportation costs for goods entering the United States from abroad and has reduced waiting times to obtain a truck driver’s license. In November, the president released oil from the strategic petroleum reserve in order to constrain gas price increases. In March, he announced that more oil would be released from U.S. reserves to counter the loss of oil from Russia and that he had persuaded other nations to release oil from their reserves. In April, President Biden announced that gasoline could be sold with a higher ethanol content, which should cut the cost of a gallon of gasoline by 10 cents.

Still, the Biden administration can and should do more. Eliminating the Trump tariffs (which the president can do without Congress) and other tariffs (President Biden, for example, has increased the Trump tariffs on Canadian lumber) would lower the cost of imports. Reducing other trade restrictions, except for sanctions on Russia (which sells little to the United States besides oil), would increase competition and lower prices. Since housing is such a large part of consumer expenditures, a temporary limit on rent increases would help reduce overall inflation, as would the elimination of tariffs on Canadian lumber.

Also, Democrats can push legislation allowing Medicare to negotiate prescription drug prices, something supported by more than 80 percent of the public and contained in the Build Back Better bill passed by the House of Representatives last year. The president should channel his inner Harry Truman and dare Senate Republicans to filibuster this. Finally, the president could announce a temporary holiday on the gas tax (currently 18.4 cents a gallon) as some Democrats have suggested. One downside of this last policy prescription is that it would contribute to the climate problems noted above that are contributing to rising prices.

Regrettably, these initiatives will have only a small impact on inflation. Much of the global supply-side inflation is beyond the power of the president to control and, as noted above, several forces will push inflation down in the months ahead without any action from the White House. Still, the president needs to pursue what he can to defeat inflationary pressures. Just as he has been blamed for rising inflation, the president will want to be able to take credit for falling inflation come November.

Steven Pressman is professor emeritus of economics and finance at Monmouth University and author of Fifty Major Economists, 3rd edition (Routledge, 2013).

Copyright ©2022 The Washington Spectator — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 18 May 2022
Word Count: 1,600
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Is it still acceptable to be fixated on Donald Trump’s iron grip on millions of Americans? While most people seem to have moved on, I’d argue that getting to a true understanding of his appeal is still of vital interest. Indeed, people’s lives may depend on it. Election officials continue to receive death threats for challenging his election lies. A large-scale violent insurrection appears plausible if he loses again in 2024.

We should not buy into simplistic explanations like “They’re all racists” or “He starred in a hit reality TV show.” Something much more profound is at work. One half of the country perceives Trump to be an incompetent and psychologically troubled man of dubious achievements. The other half sees him as the only human being on the planet who could ever solve their problems. Many of these appear ready to kill and die for him.

To understand this astonishing perceptual divide, we need to revisit what we think we know about television as a medium. When we talk about reality TV, we owe it to ourselves to investigate our conceptions of “reality” and “TV,” both of which have evolved significantly in the last decade or so. Trump’s impact on television audiences is related to profound changes in the medium itself. These changes have occurred slowly enough to escape serious notice by people who want to understand how a talented performer like Trump can gain such influence over people. While television is not the only factor that explains Trump’s grip on his supporters, it is arguably the most important, especially when assessing his early popularity with voters.

The roots of today’s competing realities lie in the evolution of reality television itself and its effects on viewers’ brains. This is a story that starts in the early 1960s; a story I participated in as my career progressed from producing made-for-TV movies to serving as Social Software Evangelist at IBM.

In the summer of 1960, the French filmmaker Jean Rouch, who had spent the previous decade making documentaries about African tribes, took his portable Éclair Cameflex 16-millimeter movie camera out onto the streets of Paris to interview real people in their daily lives. The resulting film, Chronique d’un été (Chronicle of a Summer) was both a technical and artistic breakthrough. The equipment was revolutionary. No sound camera had ever been so portable. Also revolutionary was the idea of making a movie about regular people just casually talking about the issues of the day, such as the French colonial war in Algeria. It was one of the first cinema vérité films.

The whole purpose of cinema vérité was to be real. The filmmaker would always have a point of view, and there is no such thing as true objectivity, but the goal was to record reality as it was, with as little interference as possible.

This “cinema of truth” or “observational cinema” existed mostly in the realms of public television and art house documentaries, with a few breakouts like Michael Wadleigh’s Woodstock and PBS’s An American Family achieving popular success. At the same time, the vérité technique was establishing itself in the mind of the audience as a window onto reality. The effect emerged mostly from the use of the vérité style in television news, with portable cameras bringing us “film at 11.” This perception, that informal filming of real people reflected reality, would have major implications for television as a medium — and also, as we would later discover, politics.

My involvement with vérité came 25 years after Jean Rouch hit the streets of Paris with his Éclair camera. After studying with some of cinema vérité’s most celebrated practitioners, I took a job in primetime television. My mentor was Edgar Scherick, the fiery-tempered former president of ABC. In the 1950s, Edgar had created The Wide World of Sports. He went on to produce dozens of television movies and feature films like The Stepford Wivesand The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3. Later, he’d brought an unknown 19-year-old New York casting director named Scott Rudin to Hollywood.

By 1988, when I joined his production company as a cigar-fetching assistant, Scherick’s main gig was dramatizing true stories as made-for-TV movies. This was a format that, in retrospect, was a bridge between traditional, completely fictitious television and what we now consider reality TV.

Though now extinct, the true crime movie of the week was a reliable source of high ratings in the 1980s and early ’90s. Every network made it a staple of their programming schedules. No one could adequately explain why the audience was so hungry for true crime docudramas. One theory, which I am skeptical of, was that people tended to feel guilty about watching TV, so they rationalized consuming endless gore and dramatizations of depraved behavior with the excuse that they were informing themselves about the news of the world.

I suspect audiences were actually getting trained to view docudramas as inherently true. The barrier between reality and fiction, what I would call the “fifth wall” of onscreen programming, was beginning to crumble. Most films and TV shows respect the “three walls” of the stage set, with the “fourth wall” functioning as an invisible barrier between the camera and the action. Sometimes, an actor will “break the fourth wall” and speak directly to the camera. This is common in reality TV, but more and more, as time went on, the fifth wall also began to deteriorate.

Probably the first serious erosion of the fifth wall came in 1989 as the cinema vérité genre enjoyed its first major primetime hit with Cops, on the Fox Network. Scherick worked on a project with the producers of Cops. It was in this context that I learned Cops was betraying cinema vérité’s most sacred rule of not interfering in the subject’s life.

This bothered me, though it’s hilarious in retrospect that I was upset that Cops was staging confrontations between real people to get tape of entertaining arguments. What did I expect? This was hardly the Cinémathèque Française. This was TV, produced for commercial entertainment and beholden to no rules about telling the truth.

The problem was that Cops looked like pure, unaltered real life. The audience got to ride along in cop cars and see the police at home with their families. The audience learned that an exciting TV show could be about real people, taped living their everyday lives. The show was trading on the belief that unposed, poorly lit and seemingly unscripted video reflected real life. It had the “film at 11” look, so it had to be true, right?

I don’t mean to imply that TV viewers are so ignorant that they can’t tell the difference between fiction and reality. Subsequent reality programming has been transparently fake, with ordinary people set in highly contrived and obviously scripted scenarios. It’s called scripted reality programming, an oxymoron that bothers no one. The audience today knows it is watching real people staging fake scenes. At the level of brain function, however, the distinction has been blurred.

This insight is critical if you want to understand Trump’s power over his audience, especially early in his rise. If you’ve ever felt dizzy watching a car chase scene, you’ll understand that our brains tend to process events on a screen as if they were really happening to us. This is a well-documented neurological phenomenon. Jean Rouch called it the “ciné trance” a state of mind where your brain is in the scene you’re watching. You really are there, walking with him on the streets of Paris in 1960.

The vérité trend in reality television also eroded the boundaries of exploitation and voyeurism in the medium. Watching dramatizations of true crime stories whetted the audience’s appetite for voyeuristic glimpses through the curtains of their unfortunate neighbors. The reality TV movement served the main dish: a voyeuristic spectacle of sadism. Americans might have once felt guilty about enjoying a show like The Apprentice, which reveled in humiliating people, or American Idol, which glamorized the abuse of the weak. As the reality trend wore on, audiences were given permission to enjoy others’ misery as entertainment and protagonists like Trump were given a pass for being ruthless and denigrating. Trump is a true master of this art form.

Rouch’s ciné trance is a naïve notion compared with the immersion in manufactured reality that American TV audiences experience today. News channels are designed to entertain. They’re bracketed by hours of scripted reality on the programming schedule, and it’s all punctuated by commercials that feature unreal effects like talking batteries. The ciné trance has morphed into a permanent TV trance — a state of mental suspension in which the action on screen is perceived as reality, and therefore true, even if the conscious mind is aware that it’s fiction — made up and manipulative.

The experience of watching TV has also fused with reinforcing technology habits such as Twitter and Facebook. Audience members continuously trigger addictive centers in their minds with integrated loops of television programming and follow-on tweets and social media posts. YouTube and Instagram’s ubiquitous mobile phone videos compound the effect. We’re addicted to media stars we know are fake but neurochemically perceive to be real.

Trump was a force in this trend, as well as one of its main beneficiaries, as are Oprah, The Rock, and other fantasy presidential candidates who present fictional projections of themselves in the media. By 1990, Trump had become interested in being on television. Having gone bankrupt from the failure of his Atlantic City casinos, with creditors and law enforcement nipping at his heels, he needed a new way to make money. It was time for him to become rich by being famous, as he could no longer get famous from being rich.

Trump’s attorneys reached out to Scherick, then one of the highest-profile “go to” people in the industry, and struck a deal for one of Donald Trump’s first TV projects. It was to be called Trump Tower, a nighttime soap opera on NBC pitched as “Dynasty meets the Algonquin Round Table.”

We hired Clare Labine, co-creator of Ryan’s Hope, to write the pilot, which would take the form of a four-hour miniseries. The idea was to present a byzantine melodrama among sophisticated New Yorkers who lived in Trump Tower: major artists, prominent authors, tycoons… all sleeping with each other while hatching diabolical plots of sadistic revenge and schadenfreude for past betrayals.

In the background would be Donald Trump, playing a fictitious character named Donald Trump. He would be Donald Trump, the well-known real estate magnate, but with his lines written for him. He was envisioned as a sort of quiet Machiavellian character, moving the chess pieces of people’s lives around without their knowing it.

After the project began, Scherick got another call from Trump’s lawyers. There was an actress named Marla Maples who would need to have a role in the series. “The mistress,” Edgar had murmured… The lawyers hadn’t said it out loud, but their intent was clear.

The show never got on the air, but from the perspective of 2022, it’s an informative missing link in Trump’s biography. He later landed a hit with The Apprentice, which again featured him playing a fictional version of himself. This characterization of Donald Trump was of a powerful, decisive, and competent leader, a father figure who always knew the right thing to do — demonstrably the opposite of his true nature.

This is the Donald Trump his supporters admire. His characterization on The Apprentice differentiates him from other political figures who perform well on TV but simply cannot muster the audience buy-in that Trump easily commands. It’s entirely a false persona, but the audience was never fully clued in on how much of the show was fabricated versus how much of it was real. And given the TV trance that had taken effect, it apparently didn’t matter. People loved the show. They loved Trump and the tough, can-do character he played. Whatever their rational minds might have told them, their brain chemistry had them solidly believing he was the resolute, infallible master of their collective destiny. He was real, in their brains, even if they knew he was not. And he delivered the delicious helpings of sadistic voyeurism the audience so craved.

We know what happened next. Today, the country confronts a politician whose base thinks he can do no wrong. I suspect that they are to a large degree in the grip of the TV trance. Their deep brain functions are convinced that Donald Trump, the fictional TV character, is a real person with immense, unique powers, despite what observable reality might tell them.

As to what should happen now, I don’t have any clever ideas. I do think that if there is to be any effective movement against Trump, it should consider the brain connection he has with his television audiences. Screaming “you’re a racist” at his followers is not the answer. Instead, it might be more useful to engage and explore why they feel he’s real in their hearts while they know he’s not real in their heads. Such an approach would at least be moving along a path to the truth and to deconstructing the paradox of Trump’s vérité.

Hugh Taylor is a technology analyst and author of the book Digital Downfall: Technology, Cyberattacks and the End of the American Republic. Prior to working in the tech field, Hugh was a script development executive in primetime television.
He studied filmmaking at Harvard University.

Copyright ©2022 The Washington Spectator — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 09 May 2022
Word Count: 2,201
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One month ago, we lost a giant of American democracy, Bob Dole. A national hero and statesman who was seriously and permanently injured on a battlefield in Italy while protecting his country from foreign threats, Dole epitomized what it meant to be a public servant. To honor his life, we should learn from his legacy.

In the weeks following his death, Americans have read and heard much about Senator Dole’s extraordinary achievements. And all the praise has been well deserved. As a member of Congress for 36 years and as a private citizen, Bob Dole did everything he could to make democracy work and to enable all Americans to participate in the democratic process as fully as possible.

Understandably, considerable attention has been focused on Bob Dole’s leadership role in enacting the 1990 Americans With Disabilities Act, or ADA, the landmark law that prohibits discrimination against persons with disabilities. But it would be a disservice to his legacy — especially in light of the present attacks on our democracy — not to note the breadth and depth of his commitment to providing equal opportunities for all Americans.

Senator Dole was an unabashed conservative Republican whose values demanded that he work across the aisle to protect the fundamental rights of all Americans — particularly the most vulnerable. As a young congressman from Kansas, he worked with Republicans and Democrats to support the landmark civil rights laws of the 1960s, including the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the most important of all civil rights laws. In the 1970s, Senator Dole worked to expand civil rights protections for women through the enactment of Title IX and for persons with disabilities through the enactment of Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973.

Dole’s most lasting civil rights legacy was forged during the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. During those 12 years, despite intense opposition from the far right, a bipartisan congressional coalition passed more than a dozen bills strengthening the nation’s civil rights laws. Working with Republican and Democratic colleagues, Senator Dole, through his gift for compromise and consensus, played a leadership role in many of those achievements.

Two of those civil rights victories in particular stand out. First, of course, was the passage of the ADA. Second, Senator Dole worked with Senator Ted Kennedy and Republican Senator Charles McC. Mathias to craft the timely and critical bipartisan compromise that ensured enactment of the 1982 Voting Rights Act Amendments. The Dole compromise provided a 25-year extension of the act and strengthened its key provisions. Twenty-five years later, Congress passed the Dole-inspired compromise by a 98–0 vote in the Senate and a 390–33 vote in the House of Representatives. President George W. Bush enthusiastically signed it into law. Regrettably, led by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Sam Alito, the conservative ideologues on the Supreme Court have since decimated the Voting Rights Act’s most important provisions. Those provisions must be restored as soon as possible.

In war and as in peace, Bob Dole defended our democracy. Yet today American democracy is under attack once again.

A year ago, the violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol was an attempt to overturn a legitimate election. Now democracy is under assault from an “unarmed insurrection.” In 19 states controlled by Republican state legislatures, lawmakers have enacted 34 different voter suppression laws that would disenfranchise millions of voters, particularly people of color, persons with disabilities, and older Americans.

Some of those states are going one step further by allowing state legislators to manipulate valid outcomes for partisan gain, an ominous leap from representative democracy to autocracy. Not since the Civil War, when Abraham Lincoln defeated secession, has there been such a threat to our democracy. Sadly, the current crop of Republicans in Washington, by their silence or inaction, enable these unarmed insurrectionists.

Indeed, Senate Republicans continue to oppose the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, two of the most important pieces of civil rights legislation in generations. These vital measures would guarantee the integrity of our electoral process by ensuring that every eligible citizen can vote and have that vote count.

The GOP’s present-day near-universal antipathy toward voting rights hasn’t always existed. The two of us worked together on Senate matters from 1978-1995 as moderate Republicans, a species that was admittedly endangered back then but is virtually extinct today. For nearly a half-century, and as recently as 2006, mainstream Republicans like Senator Dole worked across the aisle to defend and expand fundamental civil rights for all Americans. It was an era in which GOP senators embraced, not disgraced, democracy.

Ironically, the duty to uphold voting rights today falls not on moderate Republicans but on moderate Democrats — namely, Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema. This is because, except for Senator Lisa Murkowski, who supports the John Lewis bill, every Senate Republican not only opposes desperately needed voting rights protections but also refuses to allow their colleagues even to debate the measures.

Currently, the John Lewis bill and the Freedom to Vote Act appear to have the support of the entire Democratic Caucus. But for the bills to become law, Senators Manchin and Sinema need to do more than just side with the majority on voting rights. By coming out in support of limited filibuster reform that would allow for a 50-vote threshold to pass voting rights legislation, Manchin and Sinema can preserve the Senate’s bipartisan civil rights legacy — a defining achievement of American democracy, and one that Senator Dole fought tirelessly for throughout his life.

In doing so, they would be following the very example set by Dole, along with the late Senator Robert C. Byrd, who was willing, when necessary, to help reform Senate rules and precedents to advance the nation’s vital interests and preserve the integrity of the Senate. Indeed, between 1975 and 1986, Dole and many other Republicans joined Byrd on at least four occasions to change the legislative filibuster rule or establish new filibuster precedents.

As fierce partisans and passionate defenders of the filibuster, but also patriots and pragmatists, Senators Dole and Byrd knew how important it was to protect minority rights in the Senate. But they also knew that Senate rules are not a suicide pact and that sometimes new precedents must be established to enable the traditions of the Senate and the imperatives of democracy to coexist. The Senate must now adopt such a precedent, by fashioning a limited exception to the filibuster in order to defend the right to vote — the bulwark of democracy.

Finally, the two of us have been strong supporters of bipartisanship throughout our entire political careers. Indeed, we believe that pursuing bipartisanship is the best means to improving democracy. But we also know that at critical moments in our nation’s history, each party has on occasion adamantly refused to compromise and voted against essential reforms to better protect all our nation’s citizens.

For example, in the immediate wake of the Civil War, not one single Senate Democrat voted for the 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution, the essential constitutional basis for the long overdue and historic legislation of the 1960’s protecting the right to vote. In more recent times, not one single Senate Republican voted for the passage of the 2010 Affordable Care Act, perhaps the most consequential social justice reform of the past quarter century. In each of these challenging circumstances, the Senate acted in the best interests of American democracy.

And today, despite a lengthy and determined effort by Senator Manchin to convince Republicans to compromise on the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis voting rights legislation, no Senate Republican will support the former and only one the latter. Once again, our nation faces another critical moment that will decide our future. And this time it is the preservation of democracy itself that hangs in the balance.

Nearly six decades ago while delivering his “I have a dream speech” at the Lincoln Memorial, and a year or two before the enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Martin Luther King eloquently declared that “we are now confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there ‘is’ such a thing as being too late.”

The Senate cannot afford to delay. The Senate must act now to protect the right to vote – and to save our democracy.

David F. Durenberger, now an independent, was the Republican senator from Minnesota from 1978 to 1995. Ralph G. Neas, now a Democrat, was formerly the executive director of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights and currently serves as the senior counsel on voting rights at the Century Foundation.

Copyright ©2022 The Washington Spectator — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 10 January 2022
Word Count: 1,405
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After the first year of investigations into the January 6 insurrection, which the House in authorizing its Select Committee termed a “domestic terrorist attack,” there is extensive evidence that the assault was instigated and incited by then-President Donald Trump. In precipitating the mob attack on the Capitol, Trump acted in concert with key officials in the White House, the Congress, state legislatures, and the Republican Party with the goal of stopping the certification of Joe Biden as the winner of the Electoral College and preventing Biden from rightfully becoming president. Far more than mere norms and standards were willfully ignored in this plot to overturn the election result and keep Trump in office. Federal and state laws were violated with the goal of circumventing the intent of the Constitution.

Numerous identifiable concrete acts by Trump and his confederates led directly to the January 6 insurrection, which was undertaken for the purpose of seeking to overturn valid election results by the use of force. Under U.S. law, Trump and those who collaborated with him violated statutes criminalizing such attacks on federal and state voting rights, as well as a host of other federal laws.

Most fundamentally, these acts constituted a “conspiracy against rights,” as defined by the applicable federal civil rights criminal statute (Title 18, U.S. Code 241). Team Trump also perpetrated a scheme involving public officials to contravene the “one person, one vote” principle of the Fourteenth Amendment, in violation of a second federal criminal law, “deprivation of rights under color of law” (Title 18, U.S. Code 242). The term “color of law” refers to the use of governmental authority for a purpose that is unlawful. Trump and those who participated in these schemes are also culpable for incitement to commit an insurrection under a specific federal criminal law enacted during the Civil War directed at Southern secessionists and their aiders and abettors.

Both of these civil rights federal criminal statutes have extensive histories; violations of the former statute are punishable with a sentence of up to 10 years in prison and of the latter statute just one year but increased to 10 years when someone has been injured. The sentences can extend to life imprisonment or even capital punishment when someone has been killed in connection with such crimes. To that point, five people died during or as a consequence of the January 11 insurrection, including Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick, while more than 140 police suffered concussions, rib fractures, burns, and bodily mutilation.

More than 700 Americans who participated in direct physical action to “breach the Capitol” — the euphemism used by the Justice Department to describe the insurrection — have now been indicted for their roles in physically shutting down the Congress as it was engaged in its constitutionally mandated responsibility to count Electoral College votes on January 6.

Almost all of those charged were foot soldiers, prosecuted for such routine, low-level offenses as knowingly entering or remaining in any restricted building or grounds without lawful authority; disorderly and disruptive conduct in a restricted building or grounds; parading, demonstrating or picketing in a Capitol building; theft of government property; entering and remaining on the floor of Congress; and disorderly conduct in a Capitol building. A small subset of the accused, some 45 of those who participated in person in the physical attack, including members of vigilante groups like the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, have been charged with the more serious crime of conspiracy to obstruct a Congressional proceeding, through violence aimed at stopping Congress from moving forward with the process that would ratify Biden’s election as president.

But to date, except for those who were physically present at the insurrection, no one has been indicted for any of the actions that preceded and led to the mob attack on the Capitol, such as planning, scheduling, organizing, arranging, paying for, inciting, or otherwise causing the January 6 insurrection to occur.

The lack of ringleader indictments is notable. The attack on the Capitol was not spontaneous, nor was its timing a coincidence. It had a political purpose from the outset: a last-ditch effort by Trump and his supporters to immobilize the electoral vote count long enough to enable Republican state legislatures to rescind the certifications of the electoral vote count they had already submitted. Their plan in seven states was then to replace the legitimate electors with Trump electors — despite the fact that Trump had lost the vote in those states — thereby carrying out what I have previously described as a constitutional coup (see “Roadmap,” Washington Spectator, October 2021).

The drumbeat for politically motivated violence began immediately after the November 3 election. Two days later, former Trump campaign strategist and White House official Steve Bannon urged beheading FBI Director Christopher Wray and U.S. public health chief Anthony Fauci and placing their heads on pikes outside the White House. That same day, Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr., speaking at a rally in Georgia, advocated “total war over the election.” Vernon Jones, a Republican state representative addressing the rally, declared, “We’re starting now to see the white in their eyes, and we’re getting ready to start shooting.”

As the official Trial Memorandum prepared by the House of Representatives for its second impeachment of Trump explains, Trump acted as the convenor of the January 6 insurrection with his December 19, 2020, tweet, “Big Protest in D.C. on January 6. Be there, will be wild!” It was timed exactly for the date the electoral vote count was to take place. Immediately thereafter, armed far-right groups like the Proud Boys, conspiracy theorists, and white supremacists began organizing to come to Washington on the day Trump stipulated. By January 5, Bannon, in his War Room podcast, crystallized the prediction of mayhem into a new incitement that “all hell will break loose tomorrow.”

On the morning of January 6, the incitement launched with Trump’s in-person pre-insurrection speech on the Ellipse on the National Mall, when he told his supporters to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol to “fight like hell, and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, told the assembled followers it was time for “trial by combat”; and another Trump lawyer, John Eastman, one of those master-minding the effort to stop the electoral count certification, told the crowd that the vote to certify the elections for president needed to be delayed because “dead people voted.” Then Republican Congressman Mo Brooks of Alabama declared: “Today is the day American patriots start taking down names and kicking ass,” derided “weakling, cowering, wimpy Republican congressmen and senators who covet power and the prestige the swamp has to offer while groveling at the feet of the special interest masters,” and called for revolution: “Now our ancestors sacrificed their blood, their sweat, their tears, their fortunes, and sometimes their lives to give us — their descendants — an America that is the greatest nation in the world’s history. So I have a question for you: Are you willing to do the same?” North Carolina Congressman Madison Cawthorn exhorted the crowd to stop Biden’s certification, “This crowd has some fight in it.”

The House Trial Memorandum for Trump’s second impeachment summarized how Trump’s effort to overturn the election led directly to the insurrection. In its words: “Trump fixated on January 6, 2021 — the date of the Joint Session of Congress — as presenting his last, best hope to reverse the election results and remain in power. Even as he continued improperly to pressure state officials, DOJ, and Members of Congress to overturn the electoral outcome, he sharply escalated his public statements, using more incendiary and violent language to urge supporters to ‘stop the steal’ on January 6…. These statements turned his ‘wild’ rally on January 6 into a powder keg waiting to blow. Indeed, it was obvious and entirely foreseeable that the furious crowd assembled before President Trump at the ‘Save America Rally’ on January 6 was primed (and prepared) for violence if he lit a spark.” The House’s January 13, 2021, Article of Impeachment then expressly linked Trump’s incitement of the insurrection to his effort to “subvert and obstruct the certification of the results of the 2020 Presidential election.”

Trump’s actions not only constituted a basis for impeaching him, as found by bipartisan majorities in both the House and Senate (including 57 senators out of the 67 required for his removal from and permanent disqualification from holding federal office). They also meet the test of the federal crime of incitement: “solicitation to commit a crime of violence.” Such an indictment is not complicated to plead. The Justice Department helpfully provides a template to be filled in for such an indictment:

The federal criminal code (18 U.S. Code §2383) contains a further, separate, and special crime when a person incites others to undertake an insurrection or gives them “aid and comfort.” That crime is not only punishable by up to 10 years in prison but also includes the further penalty of making the perpetrator ineligible for ever holding any kind of public office “under the United States.” The statute, adopted originally in 1862, seems custom-made for the particular actions undertaken by Trump and other Republican public officials on January 6, in addition to those he and others undertook to bring the insurrectionists to Washington on that date in the first place. Indicting and convicting Trump for this offense, with this penalty, is especially appropriate given his actions.

(Notably, some right-wing law professors are already preemptively arguing that disbarment from office cannot constitutionally apply to elected officials — i.e., Trump — only to appointed ones. They cite Alexander Hamilton’s writings in the Federalist Papers from 1777–8 to make this case and to negate the clear intent and purpose of the drafters of the 1862 provision, which was written to apply to the supporters of the insurrection by the Confederacy against the Union in the Civil War.)

Beyond Trump, others undertook direct efforts to intimidate state election officers, including explicit death threats, especially in swing states such as Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, in the days following the November 3 elections. That reign of intimidation arose with the goal of stopping the officials from counting votes for Biden. Such acts appear to violate the federal law that makes physical threats or reprisals against election officials criminal offenses.

At the core of the conspiracy was the nationwide effort involving Trump and others, including other federal and state officials, to deprive the American people of their right to choose their president through voting. The Supreme Court has long recognized that the right to vote for federal offices is secured by Article 1, Sections 2 and 4 of the Constitution. As a result, the right to vote is specifically within the coverage of the federal law criminalizing any conspiracy to deny people the right to vote or to prevent their vote from being counted. This includes any action to prevent an official count of ballots in an election, any effort to alter votes, and any effort to omit the counting of votes and make false election returns.

Significantly, the federal crime of conspiring to prevent citizens from being able to have their votes counted does not require that the conspiracy succeed. What is required is that there be an actual agreement between two or more persons to accomplish the prohibited objective of overturning lawful election results.

Along with the violent rhetoric, attempts to throw out lawfully cast ballots in order to overturn the election results also began soon after Election Day. On November 16, 2020, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger reported that Republican Senator Lindsay Graham of South Carolina had called him to see if he could throw out mail ballots that Raffensperger had previously found to have been cast lawfully. The same day, two Republican members of an election board in Wayne County, Michigan, refused to certify Detroit’s election results, a decision they reversed only after people pointed out that 78 percent of the city’s residents were Black and that white precincts had been certified by the same board. On December 8, Trump contacted the Republican Speaker of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, asking him to take action to reverse Trump’s loss in the state, after doing the same four days earlier with Georgia Republican Governor Brian Kemp, asking him to overturn the state’s vote for Biden and replace Biden’s electors with ones for Trump.

These efforts culminated in Trump’s infamous January 2, 2021, phone call to Raffensperger, cited by the House in its January 13 Article of Impeachment, in which Trump directly asked the Georgia secretary of state “to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have because we won the state.”

Trump’s conduct in all these interventions meets each of the elements of the two federal criminal statutes covering conspiracies against voting rights and deprivation of voting rights under color of law. Throughout, he used his position as a federal official — president — for the illicit purpose of trying to overturn the election results. And in all of this, he was far from alone: the failure of the collective attempts of Trump and his co-conspirators to throw out the electoral votes for president that had been accurately determined under the applicable federal and state laws and the Constitution became the predicate for the further incitement and organization of the January 6 insurrection.

As Trump’s efforts to overturn the election became more frenzied, the Council for National Policy (CNP), an umbrella organization of highly placed conservatives supporting Trump, issued a manifesto.

As originally reported in the Spectator in February 2021 by Anne Nelson, that document, signed by a “who’s who” of right-wing Trump-aligned activists, declared that Biden’s victory was unlawful and invalid. It called on Republican-controlled legislatures in six swing states where a majority of the voters had chosen Biden to appoint alternative electors to vote for Trump in the Electoral College, and asked the House and Senate “to object to and reject any competing slates in favor of Vice President Biden from these states.” The manifesto further stated: “Conservative leaders and groups should begin mobilizing immediately to contact their state legislators, as well as their representatives in the House and Senate, to demand that clean slates of electors be appointed in the manner laid out in the U.S. Constitution.”

The CNP manifesto contained a hot link to a 21-page white paper, dated December 8, which laid out alleged election irregularities in detail. The unnamed author claimed these irregularities should justify declaring the presidential elections “null and void” in five states where the Republican party controlled both houses of the state legislatures (Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin), and called for them to be overruled. The CNP-linked white paper provided a blueprint for the activities Trump and his Republican collaborators carried out over the next four weeks to prevent the January 6 certification of the Electoral College that would confirm the Biden victory.

Based on the public record to date, Trump’s collaborators in these schemes from within the U.S. government included Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows; lieutenants in Congress, such as Jim Jordan of Ohio, Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, and Justice Department official Jeffrey Bossert Clark, who sought to turn the DOJ into a political instrument to invalidate elections in states where Republican-controlled legislatures could then flip the results and thereby keep Trump in power. They also included aiders and abettors in statehouses, such as Pennsylvania Representative Doug Mastriano, who arranged and used campaign funds to pay for a bus to transport January 6 insurrectionists to Washington, D.C.; and Arizona Representative Mark Finchem, whose tweets and text messages show him to have been at the Capitol during the insurrection and coordinating with Ali Alexander, the Trump activist who helped organize the January 6 Stop the Steal events and led pre-insurrection chants calling for “victory or death.”

These figures interacted with many others across the country to take concrete steps with the unlawful goal of overturning the results of the election. A glaring clue to the breadth and orchestration of the conspiracy is found in the fact that in each of the five states identified in the CNP white paper (as well as in two others, Nevada and New Mexico), Trump electors met synchronously on December 14, 2020, to vote for Trump and send their votes to Vice President Pence.

Unfortunately, there has been little comment on the significance of this highly concerted effort to convene “Trump electors” in swing states to join together, without a constitutional basis under federal or state law, and then to send their illegitimate ballots to Vice President Pence as if they were valid and equal to the certified electoral votes submitted from those same states for Biden.

The public record does not yet document precisely who organized the scheme for Trump electors to cast these invalid electoral votes in the seven most contested states. An investigation of this unprecedented, multistate and clearly coordinated action would expose who laid the groundwork for delaying congressional certification of Biden’s victory and provided the impetus for the mob to attack the Capitol.

There is yet another clue to the importance of this aspect of the plot. On that very day, December 14, Attorney General William Barr announced his resignation, stating he had just briefed Trump on “voter fraud allegations” and “how these allegations will continue to be pursued.” Given the ongoing conspiracies to overturn the results of a legitimate election, including the improper casting of votes by the Trump electors in the states he had lost, the timing of the Barr resignation leads to the obvious question: What did Bill Barr know, and when did he know it? And one that may be less obvious: Was Barr concerned that senior federal officials seeking to overturn the election as January 6 approached might themselves wind up with criminal liability?

The House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol has issued more than 50 subpoenas, reportedly interviewed more than 300 witnesses, and made three criminal referrals to the Justice Department for criminal contempt (Mark Randall Meadows, Jeffrey B. Clark, and Steven K. Bannon), but to date it has held only one public hearing. On December 27, The Washington Post reported that the Committee intends to hold extensive public hearings beginning early in 2022 and continuing through the summer. These hearings are said to include tracking the money that paid for the “Stop the Steal” rallies and the pressure campaigns to overturn the election results and delay the electoral certification. The hearings are also likely to provide the foundation for decisions by the committee to make criminal referrals covering the major figures, in addition to Trump, whose actions played a material role in leading to the January 6 “domestic terrorist attack.”

On the eve of the committee’s public phase, one basic truth must be recognized: there was indeed a conspiracy to invalidate a lawful presidential election. There should be no doubt that this conspiracy violated U.S. criminal laws protecting the right to vote and to have those votes counted. Nor should there be any doubt that Donald Trump personally incited the insurrection on January 6. Convicting him of that crime alone would create a significant, if not necessarily insurmountable, barrier to his holding the presidency again. Nor should any of his confederates, including members of the Congress, escape the long arm of the law.

Whatever the committee does, it is ultimately up to the Justice Department to review the facts and to apply the relevant federal criminal law impartially. There’s no sign that the Justice Department is undertaking this work, despite the extensive existing public evidence of violations of federal law by Trump and those who conspired with him. Given the scope of its investigation, it’s reasonable to assume the committee will find even more such evidence. Failure by the Justice Department to apply justice to all those whose activities contributed to the insurrection, rather than just to the foot soldiers, risks allowing impunity, rather than the law, to determine the future of our democracy.

Jonathan Winer is a Washington lawyer who previously served as the State Department’s senior official for international law enforcement, and a member of Keep Our Republic, a group focused on protecting American democracy.

Copyright ©2022 The Washington Spectator — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 05 January 2022
Word Count: 3,458
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The holiday season this year brought competing versions of reality into focus. Hallmark-lite invocations of Peace and Joy stubbornly proliferated. Bezos and Co. will likely establish new milestones for online shopping. Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas is You” (which she first released in 1994) was the number one song in the world this week. And over at Instagram, scrolling addicts in the millions replayed Tom and Zendaya’s every adorable interaction.

With Omicron tearing across the country, airlines shutting down, and intensive care units filling up disproportionately with the unvaccinated, Republicans continued to complain that Democratic efforts to protect public health and safety are an attack on personal freedom and a veiled attempt to further the interests of big government. Senator Joe Manchin went on Fox News to stymie the Biden agenda and oppose the extension of the child tax credit, making a strong case for excluding millionaires from public office and perhaps himself from the Democratic Party. Across the aisle, North Dakota’s conservative Senator Kevin Cramer went on Fox News to argue that Manchin had in fact saved the Democratic Party, estimating that Manchin had protected three to four senators by his actions. The pope gave his annual Christmas message to a socially distanced audience, calling for more dialogue.

You could argue that all this amounts to normal media fare, at least by present-day standards. But there does seem to be a significant shift in the media’s fairly recent and heated coverage of the fragility of democracy. Newsweek trumpeted that the idea that people would take up arms against an American election “is no longer farfetched.” CNN reported the findings of a CIA researcher that the United States is “close to a civil war.” Foreign Affairs argued, again, that the rise of authoritarian states and reactionary populists is the real threat to democracy.

In a widely touted article for The Atlantic, Barton Gellman cited the electoral rules changes recently put in place by state Republicans who “have been building an apparatus of election theft.” The Atlantic piece built on Jonathan Winer’s reporting in this publication on the Republicans’ use of the State Legislative Doctrine to justify consolidating control over the outcome of elections.

Gellman explores why seemingly rational people have adopted such unshakeable adherence to the false narrative of the stolen election and the illegitimacy of the current administration. (As with so many aspects of the Trump era, one feels here the sharp pang of recognition with conditions in wartime Germany, when ordinary people — neighbors and childhood friends — fell in thrall with authoritarianism and committed atrocities.)

There are many factors that explain the passion of Trump’s admirers and the alternate realities they inhabit. Gellman demonstrates more clearly than ever how right-wing, fringe, and extremist groups have successfully deployed the internet and its vast realms of conspiracy-mongering and unvetted content to bypass traditional news media and shape the hardened views of their followers.

Arguably the most influential and surely the most resilient of the internet extremists is Stephen Kevin Bannon, whose astonishing biography includes a seven-year stint in the Navy (including several years as special assistant to the chief of naval operations at the Pentagon), Georgetown (where he received a master’s in national security studies), Harvard Business School, Goldman Sachs, Hollywood film producer, co-founder of Breitbart News, CEO of Trump’s 2016 campaign, and chief strategist to POTUS. Bannon was arrested and charged with conspiracy to commit mail fraud and money laundering in connection with the We Build the Wall campaign, but Trump pardoned him before his trial. Bannon’s Twitter account was suspended after he recommended that Anthony Fauci be beheaded, and he was indicted by a federal grand jury on two criminal contempt charges after he defied a subpoena from the House select committee investigating the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6.

Bannon’s ties to white supremacist groups in the United States and far-right Catholic extremists in Europe and Latin America may make him seem easy to dismiss, but given his strong ties to Trump, the extremist drift of the Republican Party, and the uncertainties surrounding the upcoming elections, he remains a dominant figure in domestic politics.

These days, Bannon is trading cryptocurrency and presiding over two to three tapings a day of The War Room, his political talk show and top-ranked podcast, which are translated into Chinese and Japanese and carried over a mishmash of cable and streaming services since his banishment from Twitter. I listened in on Episode 1,472, recorded this past December 9, when his guest was Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz, the self-styled firebrand from the Florida panhandle.

Several themes with a direct bearing on the near-term future of democracy emerged from their exchange, but the starting point was clear. Much as these two felt the need to genuflect to the memory of Bob Dole, the Republican Party of Dole’s era — a “party that won elections and lost the country” — is dead.

Not content with burying Dole, Bannon gratuitously goes after David Brooks, whom he pictures “with the wire-rimmed glasses, crying about the end of conservatism and the end of Edmund Burke and all that.” Bannon speaks in rapid bursts, stepping on his sentences, spitting out words and phrases in a way that is sometimes hard to hear or unintelligible. Still, everything he says is carefully chosen and stems from or works toward a point in his framing.

Early in their conversation, Bannon introduces his ground strategy, in language that is sprinkled with the military metaphors he uses interchangeably when talking politics — the “little platoons” that go to the school board meetings, or “the little platoons that are becoming precinct committee men.”

“This is the rise of the American laobaixing.” Bannon embellishes his commentary with esoteric terms that send you racing to Google; this last reference is a Chinese word meaning “everyday, regular people.”

Then he lays it out, putting chilling words in Gaetz’s mouth that reflect Bannon’s overall analysis and, at the same time, signal the teacher-and-pupil hierarchy in the relationship. “If you want to control the administrative state and the apparatus, you have to engage in combat with it, right?” (There are echoes here of Trump’s public comments, in which, presumably with Bannon’s encouragement, he frequently employed the language and imagery of warfare.) Bannon turns to Gaetz, “Walk through what you’re trying to accomplish.”

Gaetz is up, and quickly runs through a litany of ineffectual attacks on Democrats, their “addled” president, and legislative leaders “that would have a hard time winning elections for block captains.” He singles out Hakeem Jeffries as the most talented Democrat, and Bannon oddly interjects that Jeffries is the next Speaker after Nancy Pelosi.

Gaetz spends a few more minutes scrambling for Bannon’s approval, while reinforcing the impression that he is self-absorbed and delusional. “Democrats have to threat-construct around a series of political villains. And I’m willing to shoulder that burden,” he continues. “If Republicans need to know how to be led. … I’ll show them how to do it, so will Marjorie Taylor Greene.” Yikes.

Then Gaetz hits his stride. “We will staff our committees with Republican leads who are not just there to engage in this theater of legislating with bills that will just be vetoed.” Bannon concurs: “Hey, I was in front of these guys. It’s all theater up there. It’s performative.”

Gaetz again.

To get a better feel for Matt Gaetz and his approach to his job in Congress, it is worth watching an episode of C-Span’s coverage of the House Judiciary Committee. He stands apart from his colleagues and disrupts the hearings to the maximum extent allowed by the rules of the committee. He reads from prepared texts on topics unrelated to the hearing underway. Chairman Nadler is unfailingly courteous in the face of these outbursts; he indulges Gaetz’s requests for rulings on minor parliamentary matters, he calms the frustrated members on both sides who are eager to proceed and embarrassed by Gaetz’s theatrics. These are the finely tuned leadership qualities the junior congressman from Florida apparently wishes to transfer to his Republican colleagues.

Returning to the podcast, Bannon takes back control of the discussion. “I want MSNBC to understand this.” He adds, “What we’re trying to explain to folks is that you have something that’s impervious to elections, and that’s this massive administrative state. And for all the limited-government conservatives, you won a ton of elections and you never got serious.”

“I think this is brilliant, and it’s never been done before. This is what Matt Gaetz says: Every committee’s an oversight committee.” Bannon finishes with a flourish: “All the apparatchiks are going to be in the dock.”

Although Bannon refers frequently to MSNBC, it feels like he is using the term to cast a wider net, a catchall that includes his adversaries not just at the liberal cable news network and Microsoft but also Twitter and Google, and the banks, and the universities — in fact all of what for these purposes and in his mind would be considered liberal capital.

Gaetz follows with another salvo, this time aimed at “the people who are imposing the vaccine mandates, who are enriching themselves and who are selling out the country.” (Can he mean the Frontline Doctors, the right-wing group of ersatz medical professionals that promotes and profits from fake cures for Covid-19? Probably not.)

Bannon then goes for the jugular. “This is a theory of governing, right? And it’s fresh and new. This is Trumpism in power . . . the 4,000 shock troops we have to have that are going to man the government, and get them ready now, right? We’re going to hit the beach. You have landing teams and beachhead teams. [Who is he talking to?] No more Trey Gowdys [the former Republican congressman from South Carolina], no more powder-puff derby. This is going to be hard-core accountability at every committee.”

The twin forces that shaped Bannon’s formative years were Catholicism and the military. He grew up in an Irish Catholic household and attended an all-male Catholic military school in Richmond, Virginia. What additional influences led him to embrace white nationalism and develop a taste for the language, imagery and tactics of the National Socialist German Worker’s Party is grist for a more ambitious biography.

Gaetz again: “And we’re going to start at the Department of Justice and the FBI. That’s the job I want. Send me over to the Judiciary Committee, and their sphincters will tighten because they’ve been doing a lot of corrupt things over there. The FBI and Department of Justice have become the enforcement wing of the Democratic Party.”

And Bannon adds: “They understand it. MSNBC understands that we’re coming for them, or that we’re going to come for this.”

Bannon — and Gaetz, too, though to a lesser extent — is saying here that the goal is not modest reform of the intelligence agencies but a wholesale revamping of the intelligence apparatus that is the Deep State. In their conversation, Bannon calls for a Church Committee-style investigation of the intelligence community, which Gaetz unguardedly dismisses, perhaps because he’s too young to recognize the implication.

Bannon then synthesizes the ground strategy with the new theory of governance. “I want everybody to understand that when you’re out there at a school board meeting, when you’re running for a county clerk, county commissioner on the elections, when you’re trying to volunteer, or you’re volunteering to be an election official or a poll watcher, or if you signed up to be a precinct committee member, we need you to do that. This is how it all ties together, OK? It ties together in a theory of governance that we are going to take on.”

Before the last segment with Gaetz begins, there’s a paid announcement that is worth citing, an ad for In Trump Time, by Peter Navarro who served in the Trump White House as assistant to the president.

That ad is followed by one that Bannon reads on the air, on behalf of MyPillow.com and its founder and CEO Mike Lindell, a right-wing activist and ardent Trump supporter. Bannon even manages to get off a homophobic shot at Pete Buttigieg during the ad. He’s talking about delivering the pillows in time for Christmas and says, “And here’s the beauty of it, Pete Buttigieg does not have to come off parental leave to make sure that your gifts, that Santa’s gifts, arrive.”

Bannon opens the last segment with a roundup of his grievances:

I.F. Stone memorably observed that you can get all the information you need to cover the seat of government simply by going to the hearings on the Hill or reading the Congressional Record. In just this one short podcast featuring the brilliant tactician and key political adviser to the Trump administration in exile, and a half-cocked but easily underestimated right-wing agitator from the Florida panhandle, you can find large swaths of the pathology and strategy of the extreme right in American politics.

It’s reactionary populism mixed with the politics of retribution: The stance is aggrieved, anti-establishment, and resentful of elites; the program is to purge the Republican Party, take over the mechanisms of democracy — from school boards to the oversight of elections — and convert the congressional committees into Star Chambers to prosecute political and cultural adversaries.

As detached from reality as the content of this program may seem, it is not some sideshow at the margins of American politics. These men and their ideas are driving a movement that is currently favored in the polls and poised to assume the reins of the Republic.

Hamilton Fish is the editor of The Washington Spectator.

Copyright ©2022 The Washington Spectator — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 03 January 2022
Word Count: 2,624
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