Category Archives: events

The Most Underrated Part of Speech

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” All my life, I have said (as to myself, and at times, by way of sarcastic prescription for others) that I never . . . talk . . . any . . . faster . . . than . . . my . . . mind . . . can . . . think.”

—Judge Michael Luttig. June 16, 2022 before the January 6th Committee.

Nancy and I had the same reaction as we listened to Judge Luttig’s testimony.  We both recalled a routine by the comedy duo of Bob Elliott and Ray Goulding, Bob & Ray, in which Ray interviewed the President of the Slow Talkers of America.

Sometimes we talk too rapidly.  We are so accustomed to talking rapidly, even before we have understood a question or a discussion point, ignoring the admonition from the Gospel of James: “Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to become angry, because human anger does not produce the righteousness that God desires”

The most underrated part of speech is the pause.

—-because pauses give listeners the chance to process what we say.

As we watched, it became apparent to us that Judge Luttig realized the gravity of his appearance before the committee, and wanted to so carefully respond to questions that there could be no lack of clarity in his responses or misunderstandings of what he said. His pauses made us listen more closely.

We were drawn into his answers not only by the pauses but by the exactness of his words.  And it was because his pauses caused us to listen so carefully that one line had an impact (at least to this listener) greater than all of the others. It came as the committee was discussing the erroneous advice given President Trump that history and law establish a precedent for the Vice-President to overturn a presidential election.  Judge Luttig, after refuting that claim, told the committee: “I would have laid my body across the road before I would have let the Vice President overturn the 2020 election on the basis of that historical precedent.”

He didn’t say that as the written transcript preserves it. Without raising his voice, the pacing of his statement carried an unmistakable power and a passion as he carefully formed his thoughts, pausing as he did so, knowing that his words became history a soon as he spoke them.*

Near the end, his carefully-delivered words carried a warning:

Today, almost two years after that fateful day in January 2021, that still Donald Trump and his allies and supporters are a clear and present danger to American democracy.

In the days since his testimony an unusual thing has happened.  The judge has explained why he spoke as he did.  Several organizations have reported his explanation.  It began with praise from a writer for Vanity Fair, Joe Hagan, who wrote on Twitter:

“I like how this guy treats every line of his testimony like he’s engraving it on a national monument. And frankly, he really *is* engraving it for history. And he seems to know it. I also respect, despite how halting he may sound, that Luttig is not setting himself up to be a mere soundbite maker. He’s speaking to history, not TV. His sobriety, his graveness, his hallowedness, is so foreign to our modern sensibilities — but that’s the point. That is the precise point.”

Judge Luttig saw what Hagan had written and responded that Hagan “almost presciently understood precisely what I was at least attempting to do…”

What you could not know, and did not know, but I will tell you now, is that I believed I had an obligation to the Select Committee and to the country, first to formulate . . . then to measure . . . and then . . . to meter out . . .every . . . single . . . word . . . that I spoke . . . , carefully . . . exactingly . . . and . . . deliberately, so that the words I spoke were pristine clear and would be heard, and therefore understood, as such.

I believed Thursday that I had that high responsibility and obligation — to myself, even if to no other. Also please bear in mind that Thursday was the first time in 68 years, to my knowledge, I had ever been on national television, let alone national television like that. And though not scared, I was concerned that I do my very best and not embarrass myself, as I think anyone who found themselves in that frightening circumstance would be.

I decided to respond to your at once astute and understanding tweet finally this afternoon, because I have been watching the tweets all day suggesting that I am recovering from a severe stroke, and my friends, out of their concern for me and my family, have been earnestly forwarding me these tweets, asking me if I am alright. Such is social media, I understand. But I profoundly believe in social media’s foundational, in fact revolutionary, value and contribution to Free Speech in our country, and for that reason I willingly accept the occasional bad that comes from social media, in return for the much more frequent good that comes from it — at least from the vastly more responsible, respectful speech on those media.

That is why, 16 years after my retirement from the Bench, even then as a very skeptical, curmudgeonly old federal judge, I created a Facebook account and then a Twitter account — slowly . . . very slowly . . . one account first . . . and then . . . followed . . . by the other. All of this said, I am not recovering from a stroke or any other malady, I promise…

I was more ready, prepared and intellectually focused (I had thought) during Thursday’s hearing than I have ever been for anything in my life. I gather my face appeared ‘too red’ for some on Twitter, betraying to them serious illness. The explanation was more innocent than that. At the last minute, I had been able during the weekend preceding my testimony to help my daughter get settled into her new home, where the temperatures were in the upper 90s, and where I was appreciatively, though unwittingly, to get just a little bit of needed suntan!

What I will say, though, is this. And I think it explains it all. All my life, I have said (as to myself, and at times, by way of sarcastic prescription for others) that I never . . . talk . . . any . . . faster . . . than . . . my . . . mind . . . can . . . think. I will proudly assure everyone on Twitter that I was riveted, laser-like as never before, on that promise to myself… beginning promptly at the hour of 1:00 pm Thursday afternoon.

What is more, as consciously as one can be aware of something subconsciously, I was…supremely conscious that, if I were chiseling words in stone that day, it was imperative that I chisel the exact words that I would want to be chiseled in stone, were I chiseling words in stone for history.

He concluded, “I can assure you that on last Thursday, June 16, I had never felt, or been, better in my life.”

Judge Luttig, in addition to contacting Politico to explain his careful presentation, shared with the political news site a reflection he wrote in February about those who were heroes on January 6.  He called the piece “the most important words to him that he has ever written” and said they are the words “that he wants remembered.”  You can find it at:

https://www.politico.com/f/?id=00000181-76c7-d970-af8d-f6cf735d0000

Writing has no pauses.  We, and many others, will remember Judge Luttig not for those words he wrote in February but the words and the pauses that he gave us on June 16, 2022.

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*National Public Radio (and others, probably) has been publishing transcripts of each day’s hearings.  We have edited the NPR transcript for that hearing to highlight Judge Luttig’s testimony.  For the full transcript, please go to https://www.npr.org/2022/06/16/1105683634/transcript-jan-6-committee

The transcript (excerpted)

LIZ CHENEY:

Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. Judge Luttig, thank you as well for being here with us today. You issued a very important statement earlier today, which I urge all Americans to read. And I’d like to ask you, Judge, about one of the sentences in your statement and ask if you could explain to us the significance of it. You say, had the Vice President of the United States obeyed the President of the United States America would immediately have been plunged into what would have been tantamount to a revolution within a paralyzing constitutional crisis.

Could you elaborate on that for us, Judge?

  1. MICHAEL LUTTIG:

Thank you, Madam Vice Chairman. That — that passage in my statement this morning referenced the — the most foundational concept in America, which is the rule of law. Thus, as I interpret your question, you are asking about that foundational truth of these United States, which we call America. The foundational truth is the rule of law.

That foundational truth is, for the United States of America, the profound truth, but it’s not merely the profound truth for the United States, it’s also the simple truth, the simple foundational truth of the American republic. Thus, in my view, the hearings being conducted by this select committee are examining that profound truth, namely the rule of law, in the United States of America.

The specific question of course before you and before the nation, not before me, is whether that foundational rule of law was supremely violated on January 6, 2021. Now, to the question specifically that you asked, Madam Vice Chair, I believe that had Vice President Pence obeyed the orders from his President and the President of the United States of America during the joint session of the Congress of the United States on January 6, 2021 and declared Donald Trump the next President of the United States, notwithstanding that then President Trump had lost the Electoral College vote as well as the popular vote in the 2020 Presidential election, that declaration of Donald Trump as the next President would have plunged America into what I believe would have been tantamount to a revolution within a constitutional crisis in America, which in my view, and I’m only one man, would have been the first constitutional crisis since the founding of the republic.

LIZ CHENEY:

Judge Luttig, did the Trump electors in those seven states who were not certified by any state authority have any legal significance?

  1. MICHAEL LUTTIG:

Congresswoman, there — there was no support whatsoever and either the Constitution of the United States nor the laws of the United States for the Vice President frankly ever to count alternative electoral slates from the states that had not been officially certified by the designated state official in the Electoral Count Act of 1887. I did notice in the passage from Mr. Eastman’s memorandum and I took a note on it, and correct me if I’m wrong, but he said in that passage that there was both legal authority as well as historical precedent.

I do know what Mr. Eastman was referring to when he said that there was historical precedent for doing so. He was incorrect. There was no historical precedent from the beginning of the founding in 1789 that even as mere historical precedent as distinguished from legal precedent would support the possibility of the Vice President of the United States quote, “Counting alternative electoral slates that had not been officially certified to the Congress pursuant to the Electoral Count Act of 1887.” I would be glad to explain that historical precedent if the committee wanted, but it — it would be a digression.

JOHN WOOD:

Judge Luttig, I had the incredible honor of serving as one of your law clerks. Another person who did was John Eastman. And you’ve written that Dr. Eastman’s theory that the Vice President could determine who the next President of the United States is in your words incorrect at every turn.

Could you please explain briefly your analysis?

  1. MICHAEL LUTTIG:

It was my honor, Mr. Wood, to have you serve as my law clerk. I — I could answer that question perfectly if I had at my disposal either Mr. Eastman’s tweet or my own analytical tweet of September 21st. But I don’t. But that said, let me try to remember the analysis of — of Mr. Eastman’s analysis.

JOHN WOOD:

And — and Judge, I can read to you and to the audience I think what was a really key passage from your very insightful analysis when you wrote, “I believed that Professor Eastman was incorrect at every turn of the analysis in his January 2nd memorandum beginning with his claim that there were legitimate competing slate of electors presented from seven states.”

You’ve already addressed that issue. But your next sentence said, “Continuing to his conclusion that the Vice President could unilaterally decide not to count the votes from the seven states from which competing slates were allegedly presented.” So what was your basis for concluding that Dr. Eastman was incorrect in his conclusion that the Vice President could unilaterally decide not to count the votes from these disputed states?

  1. MICHAEL LUTTIG:

I understand. As I previously stated in response to Congresswoman Cheney, the — there was no basis in the Constitution or laws of the United States at all for the theory espoused by Mr. Eastman at all. None. With all respect to my co-panelist, he said I believe in partial response to one of the select committee questions that the single sentence in the 12th Amendment was he thought [unartfully] written.

That single sentence is not [unartfully] written. It was pristine clear that the President of the Senate on January 6th, the incumbent Vice President of the United States, had little substantive constitutional authority if any at all. The 12th Amendment, the single sentence that Mr. Jacob refers to, says in substance that following the transmission of the certificates to the Congress of the United States and under the Electoral Count Act of 1887, the archivist of the United States that the presiding officer shall open the certificates in the presence of the Congress of the United States in joint session.

It then says unmistakably not even that the Vice President himself shall count the electoral votes. It clearly says merely that the electoral count votes shall then be counted. It was the Electoral Count Act of — of 1887 that — that filled in, if you will, the simple words of — of the 12th Amendment in order to construct for the country a process for the counting of the — the — the sacred process for the counting of the electoral votes from the states that neither our original Constitution nor even the 12th Amendment had done.

The irony, if you will, is that, from its founding until 1887 in — when Congress passed the Electoral Count Act, the nation had been in considerable turmoil during at least five of its presidential elections, beginning as soon thereafter from the founding as 1800. So, it wasn’t for — almost 100 years later until the Electoral Count Act was passed.

So, that’s why, in my view, that piece of legislation is not only a work in progress for the country, but at this moment in history an important work in progress that needs to take place. That was long winded. I understand.

JOHN WOOD:

Well, Judge Luttig, at the risk of oversimplifying for the non-lawyers who are watching, is it fair to say that the 12th Amendment basically says two things happen, the vice president opens the — the certificates and the electoral votes are counted. Is it that straightforward?

  1. MICHAEL LUTTIG:

I would not want that to be my testimony before the Congress of the United States. The language of the 12th Amendment is that simple.

JOHN WOOD:

Thank you, Judge.

PETE AGUILAR:

I appreciate that. In our investigation, the select committee has obtained evidence suggesting that Dr. Eastman never really believed his own theory. Let me explain. On the screen, you can see a draft letter to the President from October 2020. In this letter, an idea was proposed that the Vice President could determine which electors to count at the joint session of Congress.

But the person writing in blue eviscerates that argument. The person who wrote the comments in blue wrote, quote, “The 12th Amendment only says that the President of the Senate opens the ballots in the joint session. And then in the passive voice that the votes shall then be counted”. The comments in blue further state, “nowhere does it suggest that the President of the Senate gets to make the determination on his own”. Judge Luttig, does it surprise you that the author of those comments in blue was in fact John Eastman?

  1. MICHAEL LUTTIG:

Yes, it does Congressman. But let me — watching this unfold, let me try to unpack what was at the root of what I have called the blueprint to overturn the 2020 election. And it is this.

And I had foreshadowed this answer in my earlier testimony to Congresswoman Cheney.

Mr. Eastman, from the beginning, said to the President that there was both legal as well as historical precedent for the Vice President to overturn the election.

And what we’ve heard today, I believe is — is what happened within the White House and elsewhere as all of the players, led by Mr. Eastman, got wrapped around the axle by the historical evidence claim by Mr. Eastman. Let me explain very simply, this is what I said would require a digression, that I would be glad to undertake if you wished, in short, if I had been advising the Vice President of the United States on January 6th, and even if then Vice President Jefferson, and even then Vice President John Adams, and even then Vice President Richard Nixon had done exactly what the President of the United States wanted his Vice President to do, I would have laid my body across the road before I would have let the Vice President overturn the 2020 election on the basis of that historical precedent.

But what this body needs to know, and now America needs to know, is that that was the centerpiece of the plan to overturn the 2020 election. It was the historical precedent in the years — and with the Vice Presidents that I named, as Congressman Raskin understands well, and the — the effort by Mr. Eastman and others was to — to drive that historical precedent up to and under that single sentence — single pristine sentence in the 12th Amendment to the United States Constitution.

Taking advantage of, if you will, what many have said is the inartful wording of that sentence in the 12th Amendment. Scholars before 2020 would have used that historical precedent to argue, not that Vice President Pence could overturn the 2020 election by accepting non-certified state electoral votes, but they would have made arguments as to some substantive, not merely procedural, authority possessed by the Vice President of the United States on — on the statutorily prescribed day for counting the Electoral College votes.

This is — this is constitutional mischief.

BENNIE THOMPSON:

The gentlelady yields back…

Judge Luttig, I want to give you an opportunity to share your thoughts on the ongoing threat. You’ve written the clear and present danger to our democracy now is that former President Donald Trump and other political allies appear prepared to seize the presidency in 2024 if Mr. Trump or one of his anointed candidates is not elected by the American people.

What do you mean by this?

  1. MICHAEL LUTTIG:

Mr. Chairman, I’m honored beyond words by your words. I was honored on January 6th, 2021, and also honored beyond words to have been able to come to the aid of Vice President Mike Pence. I prayed that day just like the vice president prayed that day. I believe we may have prayed the — the same prayer to the same God. I prayed that same prayer with my wife this morning before I came into these hearings.

I have written, as you said, Chairman Thompson, that today, almost two years after that fateful day in January 2021, that still Donald Trump and his allies and supporters are a clear and present danger to American democracy. That’s not because of what happened on January 6th. It’s because, to this very day, the former president, his allies, and supporters pledge that, in the presidential election of 2024, if the former president or his anointed successor as the Republican Party presidential candidate were to lose that election, that they would attempt to overturn that 2024 election in the same way that they attempted to overturn the 2020 election, but succeed in 2024 where they failed in 2020. I don’t speak those words lightly.

I would have never spoken those words ever in my life, except that that’s what the former president and his allies are telling us. As I said in that New York Times op-ed, wherein I was speaking about the Electoral Count Act of 1887, the former president and his allies are executing that blueprint for 2024 in open, in plain view of the American public.

I repeat, I would have never uttered one single one of those words unless the former president and his allies were candidly and proudly speaking those exact words to America. Chairman, thank you for the opportunity to appear here today for these proceedings.

 

 

 Notes from a Quiet Street: Equal Time

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Our ex-President has been raging on his personal social media platform about the January 6th Committee hearings and their discoveries.  Last Thursday, after the third hearing explored the physical danger faced by the Vice-President during the Trump-inspired riot, Trump took to his own personal platform to complain, “It is a one-sided, highly partisan Witch Hunt, the likes of which has never been seen in Congress before.  Therefore, I am demanding EQUAL TIME to spell out the massive Voter Fraud & Dem Security Breach!”

Your faithful correspondent suggests the ex-President make a minor change in his characterizations of the committee.  It’s a small thing but precision in language is important in times of great personal and national stress.   The committee hearings do not constitute a witch hunt.   Witches are females.   Males are Warlocks.   It would improve his credibility as an intelligent individual if he referred to the perceived attacks on him with the proper term.

It’s a Warlock Hunt.

Your faithful correspondent also agrees with the ex-President that he should be allowed equal time to respond to statements made by numerous associates and advisers and played back during the hearings.

We believe his most equal time should be spent under oath.

Before the committee.

And the committee should extend to him the privilege of speaking in an open, public, widely-broadcast hearing in which he could explain at great length his thoughts, actions, and words—unlike the way the committee has handled his associates, with closed hearings and excerpts of their testimony played in the public hearings.  After all he WAS the President of the United States and he deserves that special courtesy.

He’s correct in observing that these hearings are something “which has never been seen in Congress before.”  It would REALLY be something that has never been seen before if he would explain to the committee under penalty of perjury—-as so many of his associates have done—his justifications for his words and his actions or his lack of actions.

But maybe his request should be refused because—

actually, the hearings are Democracy’s equal time to lies he told at all of the rallies he held before and after the 2020 elections.

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There’s another observation we have, uh, observed in the months since those events.

Some members of Congress deny the events constituted a violent uprising or insurrection or riot or whatever.  The people who came into the Capitol that day, they say, were just peaceful tourists.

We were peaceful tourists at the Capitol once when we took our children to Washington, D.C.  So we know about these things.

We didn’t see any of the Congressmen who say the people on January 6 were like our family greet us at their offices, as ours did.  (Our Congressman even took the children down on the House floor with him during debate that day; our son wanted to go back the next day but we told him the only way he could ever do that would be to get elected).

One of our previous Congressmen once invited us to visit him in Washington and even told us he’d take us to the House cafeteria for some of the famous bean soup that’s served there.

We didn’t see any of those Congressmen go out on the front steps of the Capitol and get their pictures taken with their peaceful constituents that day.  Ours did.  He even signed the picture.

We’re sure the peaceful visitors would have enjoyed seeing their representatives and senators. They probably had worked up a pretty good appetite by then, too, and might have enjoyed some bean soup.

What a bummer of a day that was for those visitors.  They go to all the trouble they went to to travel to Washington, to gather at the Capitol, to make a special effort to get in to see their Congress people only to find there would be no family picture and no bean soup.

No wonder they were so angry that day.

Our Weimar Moment

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Weimar, Germany is the country’s celebrated cultural city, the home of writers Friedrich Schiller and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Composer Franz Liszt lived there for a time, as did 16th century painter Lucas Cranach the Elder.  Walter Gropius founded the  Bauhaus movement and the Bahaus School of design there. It also was the home for a time of artists and architects such as Paul Klee, Lyonel Feininger, Wassily Kandinsky, and Henry van de Velde. Composer Richard Strauss and philosopher Fredreich Nietzsche also lived there briefly. It is the city where Germany’s first democratic constitution was signed. It lasted from the end of World War I to 1933, when Hitler killed the Weimar Republic.

It also is four miles from the Buchenwald Nazi concentration camp.

At various times in World War II and the years leading to it, 240,000 people were imprisoned and where an estimated 56,545 died or were murdered.

And the people of Weimar claimed they did not know of what was happening there—-although slave laborers from the camp worked in its munitions industry.  When American soldiers found the camp in early April, 1945, they were stunned by the human wreckage the Nazis had left behind.  General Patton ordered the soldiers to go to Weimar and round up thousands of the “unaware” citizens and force them to tour the camp to see the atrocities being conducted in the name of their country.  A reporter for The Guardian, a British newspaper wrote:

There in groups of 100 they were conducted on a tour of the crematorium with the blackened frames of bodies still in the ovens and two piles of emaciated dead in the yard outside, through huts where living skeletons too ill or weak to rise lay packed in three-tier bunks, through the riding stables where Thuelmann, the German Communist leader, and thousands of others were shot, through the research block where doctors tried new serums on human beings with fatal consequences in 90 per cent of the cases.

It was an experience they can never forget. Most of the women and some of the men were in tears as they moved from block to block. Many were crying bitterly. Some of the women fainted and could be taken no farther.

Legendary American journalist Edward R. Murrow toured the camp three days after the Army arrived.  He was so shaken by what he saw that he waited three days to broadcast his story by short-wave radio back to CBS in New York. I believe it is the greatest broadcast in radio and television history:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlhQvPfYSXk

A few days later, the Dean in Weimar, Richard Kade, speaking for the Protestant church in Germany said, “We carry no blame for these atrocities.”  In a memorial service many years later, one of Kade’s successors, Henrich Herbst, admitted Protestant Christians had not “courageously admitted and put a name” to the “unspeakable suffering of women and children, Jews, communists, Social Democrats and Christians” at Buchenwald.

I visited Weimar on a lovely June morning when the streets near the town square were filled with singing and music by college students whose year had ended, where merchants had set up their little booths on the square selling their wares.  I bought a gold gingko leaf pin for Nancy that day. The gingko is the official tree of Weimar.

We had lunch with the mayor and after that, as a cold front had moved through the area and the afternoon was chilly and misty, we visited Buchenwald.

And we saw the ovens.

And urns filled with ashes.

And we put little stones on the outlines of the barracks that Murrow described so graphically.

And we all thought of people living four miles away who chose not to know what was happening at Buchenwald.

We are living a Weimar moment in America today.

A special Congressional Committee is taking us on a graphic tour of January 6, 2021.  But there are those who want to ignore the brutal ghastliness of that day and its attack on our democratic-republic form of government.

Murrow began his historic broadcast, “Permit me to tell you what you would have seen and heard had you been with me on Thursday.  It will not be pleasant listening. If you are at lunch or if you have no appetite to hear what Germans have done, now is a good time to switch off the radio for I propose to tell you of Buchenwald.”

Last Thursday might, Congressman Bennie Thompson sounded a 21st Century equivalent to Murrow’s introduction: “We can’t sweep what happened under the rug… So, tonight and over the next few weeks, we’re going to remind you of the reality of what happened that day, but our work must do much more than just look backwards. The cause of our democracy remains in danger. The conspiracy to thwart the will of the people is not over. There are those in this audience who thirst for power, but have no love or respect for what makes America great, devotion to the Constitution, allegiance to the rule of law, our shared journey to build a more perfect union. January 6th and the lies that led to insurrection have put two and a half centuries of constitutional democracy at risk.”

Twenty-million television viewers that night began the equivalent of the tour the citizens of Weimar were forced to take.  That night and in meetings to come, we will see what many of us have chosen not to see or to know. It will not be pleasant viewing.  If you have no appetite to hear what has been done, this is a good time to turn off the television for the committee is going to explain what happened on January 6.

Just as Wiemar residents in 1945 chose to turn away from what was right in front of them, there were many who chose to, and will choose in future hearings to, look away, to seek out channels where the work of the committee is ignored or downplayed or where they will be encouraged to think of other things. If you don’t think about what happened on January 6 and why, it didn’t happen.  You “carry no blame” for those events.

The Post-Dispatch reported the major Republican candidates for Roy Blunt’s Senate seat seem to have adopted the Weimar Defense.  They took to Twitter to attack the committee findings—even before the hearing Thursday night began.

Eric Greitens called the hearing a “show trial.” Mark McCloskey expanded on that idea by calling the hearing a “fraud show trial” and claimed it is “government abuse you expect from Soviet Russia, China or North Korea.”  Eric Schmitt called the committee “a joke.”  Vicky Hartzler wants her people to ignore what the leader of her party might have done (we’ll learn more specifically what his role in that dark day was in more detail later) and look at her perceived failures of President Biden and congressional Democrats. She called the hearing a “sham.” Billy Long said it was a “reality show” that avoided Democratic party failures on various issues.

McCloskey is dead wrong. There are no congressional hearings in Soviet Russia looking into Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, no hearings in China on that country’s repression in Hon Kong, and no investigations in North Korea about the impoverished population and the saber-rattling of the country’s leader.

A joke?

We wonder if those who think the hearings are a joke smiled as Capitol Police officer Caroline Edwards recounted when the mob moved in while she and her fellow officers tried to hold them back with nothing more than bike racks. “I felt the bike rack come on top of my head and I was pushed backwards and my foot caught on the stair behind me and I—my chin hit the handrail. And then I—at that point I had blacked out. But my—the back of my head clipped the concrete stairs behind me.”

And were they chuckling when she described regaining consciousness and went to help those trying to hold back the mob on the Lower West Terrace of the Capitol and, “more and more people, you know, started coming on to the west front?”

The arrival of Metropolitan Police officers stopped the advance so, “for a while I started decontaminating people who had gotten sprayed and treating people medically who—who needed it.”

Did the joke get funnier as she described getting back behind the next line of bike racks and being sprayed in the eyes and another officer started to take her away to get decontaminated but they never made it because they were tear gassed? “I saw, I can just remember by—my breath catching in my throat because what I saw was just a—a war zone…I couldn’t believe my eyes. There were officers on the ground…they were bleeding. They were throwing up.”

And were those saying the hearing was a joke dissolve into side-holding laughter as Edwards told the committee, “I saw friends with blood all over their faces.  I was slipping in people’s blood…Never in my wildest dreams did I think that, as a police officer, as a law enforcement officer, I would find myself in the middle of a battle.”

That’s really hilarious.

There was nothing funny about what happened January 6. And those who suggest that these hearings are a show or a joke or a fraud or who suggest we become like the citizens of a city known for its culture who chose not to want to know about the hideous events on their doorsteps are beneath respect.

Jesus told his followers (John 8:31-32), “If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”

Our freedom is at risk with those who think the search for the truth of what happened January 6 is a fake, a fraud, a show, or a laughing matter.

This is our Weimar moment.  If we are to be disciples of freedom, we must not be afraid to see the truth of what happened January 6 and how it came about. The committee will escort us through that camp.

If we love our country we must be unafraid of what we will see.

The difference one letter makes

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The regular consumers of these eloquent literary effusions might have noticed nothing was posted in its usual place on Monday.  That is because your loyal correspondent, in the springtime of his senility, posted the intended Monday meditation on Thursday.   He apparently was too eager to get to St. Louis for an automobile race later in the weekend that he mis-dated the time the material should be exposed to the waiting public.

The column that suggested no place is safe from a “loon with a gun and a grudge” and we should expect a mass shooting to happen wherever we are elicited two responses, nonetheless.  One suggested just doing away with the Second Amendment.

To be clear, for any who felt the column advocated such a thing:

If we did away with the Second Amendment I would have no right to own my Daisy BB gun!  Or my father’s J. C. Whitney .22 rifle or the antique 12-gauge shotgun with the crossover stock.   I’m not advocating eliminating the Second Amendment although some of the (to me) irrational defense of it might need to be dismissed—and polls indicate large numbers of Americans agree with the assessment that it is time for some social and legal parameters to be established within the amendment’s framework.

The problem is the difference made by one letter.  The letter is “L.”

Pols versus polls.

Sometimes our political figures love polls.  If they’re winning.

Sometimes our political figures hate polls.  If they’re losing.

But polls seem to mean nothing to our Pols who are deafened by an adequate number of dollar bills that they allow to be inserted into their ears.

It’s not just this issue, either.

While individual political leaders and/or candidates steadfastly deny that currency-filled campaign coffers affect their votes; that they only buy access—the additional “access” seems often to be convincing of the rightness of the donor’s position.

The dollar value of political courage has never been calculated, but in this issue there seems to be some kind of a threshold that tips the recipient away from the popular will. And there seems to be an organization among many organizations that has the biggest thumb on the scales because it has the greatest concentration of paper ear plugs. .

As long as courage is cheap and access is for sale, the polls on mass shootings will mean enough Pols will keep any significant parameters from being established within the Second Amendment.

So my BB gun is safe.

But the question is: When will things become so disastrous that “access” cannot be bought?

Underlining that rhetorical question is the results from this weekend.

People at a graduation party in Summerton, SC (a town that previously had never made any national headlines your correspondent has noticed) didn’t think it could happen there.  Nor did people at a bar in Chattanooga, TN. Or people living their lives in the moment on a busy street in Philadelphia. The 100 people at a party at a Phoenix strip mall probably hadn’t given a mass shooting a thought—until they were the middle of one. The same likely is true of a similar crowd at a graduation party at a private home in Socorro, TX.   Or the people at a bar in Mesa, AZ.  And a gas station parking lot fight in Macon, GA leaves one dead and three others hurt.

The news aggregation site AXIOS* calculates the total at 11 dead and 54 others hurt, just this weekend.

Just another weekend in America where, as The Onion has observed more than 20 times:

‘NO WAY TO PREVENT THIS,’

SAYS ONLY NATION WHERE

THIS REGUARLY HAPPENS

 

The Quick.

And the Dead.

The Pols.

The Polls.

And the dollars keep going into the ears of those who find it beneficial to be deaf.

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*The AXIOS weekend scorecard:

Summerton:  Two cars stop at a house where a graduation party is being held and shots are fired into the house. One dead. Seven wounded.

Chattanooga: Shooting near a bar. Fourteen wounded by gunshots. Three others hit by cars. Two dead by gunshot wounds. One dead when run over by a car fleeing the scene.

Philadelphia: Three dead and at least eleven others hurt when three shooters open fire on a busy street.

Phoenix: One dead, eight others hurt in altercation at a party led to shooting.  The dead person is a 14-year old girl.  Two of the wounded have life-threatening injuries.

Socorro: A fight at a high school graduation party turns into a shooting. Five teenagers wounded.

Macon: Argument in gas station parking lot leaves one dead and three hurt.

 

 

 

 

 

 

It’s Going to Happen Here

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Wherever you are when you read this you should resign yourself to the fact that somebody is going to kill a bunch of people in your town. Just pray you are not in the church, school, hospital, shopping mall, business, office—nowhere is safe from the loon with a gun and a grudge.

So just get ready to mourn.  Maybe you should get ready to die.

You just never know.

This is being written on Thursday, June 2, 2022.  Education Week calculates the Uvalde, Texas school shooting was the 27th school shooting this year, the 119th school shooting since 2018.

That’s just schools.

The Gun Violence Archive has counted 212 mass shootings in this country this year—incidents in which four or more people were killed or wounded, not counting the shooter.

Thoughts and prayers offered, or maybe somebody just thinks about thoughts and prayers because it’s easy to say.

But nothing seems likely to change.

We hear the same demands for SOMEBODY to do SOMETHING after every incident.  We hear the same claims that doing SOMETHING won’t solve ANYTHING—every time.

Truth is, our policy making system is paralyzed by fear that doing something will antagonize the most rabid supporters of gun rights, that elections might be lost, campaign funding might be switched to others, will violate the sacredness of the Second Amendment (and, by the way, spare me the BS about the First Amendment existing only because there is a Second Amendment, not after 19 children and two adults will no longer experience First Amendment rights because somebody decided to exercise his Second Amendment right.).

No part of the United States Constitution is immune from interpretation and no law is absolute. The Second Amendment is not above limits.

It is easy to be pessimistic about any kind of political effort to reduce these tragedies because there is a sickness within a political system that seems to think it proper for candidates to campaign by showing us their prowess with the kinds of weapons used to kill students and shoppers and hospital personnel, among others.

The irony of those who think they can show their defense of American values with commercials showing them shooting weapons of mass murder is that their commercials tacitly endorse phrase first uttered in 1927 by Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong: “Political Power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”

This kind of appeal for political support is abhorrent.

Unfortunately, it seems to work.

And that’s sick.

Is there a legitimate use for a weapon, or its replica, designed specifically to fire large quantities of bullets except in the military services the weapons were designed for in the first place?

Self-defense you say. Let’s see.  A character in Buffalo, NY was defending himself against dangerous shoppers at a mall.  Another character was defending himself against threatening fourth graders in Uvalde, Texas.  And a third was defending himself against his doctor.

And those are only the latest examples as we write this.

Do you feel safer knowing that dangerous shoppers, threatening fourth graders, and a doctor widely respected for his volunteer service are no longer threatening the peace and dignity of society?

THE ONION, a satirical newspaper that often looks at the absurdities of life, has published the same story 21 times after 21 mass shootings.  It re-published all 21 of them on its web page last week. The headline is always the same:

‘NO WAY TO PREVENT THIS,’

SAYS ONLY NATION WHERE

THIS REGUARLY HAPPENS

The text is always the same except for the dateline:

TULSA—In the days following a violent rampage in Oklahoma in which a lone attacker killed four individuals in addition to himself, and seriously injured several others, citizens living in the only country where this kind of mass killing routinely occurs reportedly concluded Tuesday that there was no way to prevent the massacre from taking place. “This was a terrible tragedy, but sometimes these things just happen and there’s nothing anyone can do to stop them,” said New Mexico resident Ellen Robinson, echoing sentiments expressed by tens of millions of individuals who reside in a nation where over half of the world’s deadliest mass shootings have occurred in the past 50 years and whose citizens are 20 times more likely to die of gun violence than those of other developed nations. “It’s a shame, but what can we do? There really wasn’t anything that was going to keep this guy from snapping and killing a lot of people if that’s what he really wanted.” At press time, residents of the only economically advanced nation in the world where roughly two mass shootings have occurred every month for the past five years were referring to themselves and their situation as “helpless.”

The shame of it is that the article is true.

And that’s why all of us need to be rehearsing our statements of shock and sorrow, or our survivors should be rehearsing statements of shock and sorrow, because these incidents will not stop on their own.

And as long as they go on, we might as well consider it inevitable that it’s going to happen here, wherever “here” is to you.

—-because there’s no way to prevent it.

And your town and my town are as likely candidates for this “distinction” as any place.

It is going to happen here.

Give up.  Expect it.

Nobody’s going to stop it.

Are they?

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Hymn to the Fallen

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Originally, this was Decoration Day, a day set aside in 1868 at the suggestion of Union General John A. Logan to remember the dead of the Civil War. By 1890 all of the northern states had adopted May 30 as “Decoration Day, a day to decorate the graves of those Civil War soldiers who had died “to make men free,” as the song says.

Two world wars turned the day into a day to remember our nation’s dead from all wars.  It became “Memorial Day” in 1971 when a three-day holiday was created with the last Monday in May, regardless of the date, as the observance.

The Jefferson City Community Band is holding its annual Memorial Day Concert today at the First Christian Church, the usual venue for this concert.

The program is always patriotic music or music with a military orientation.

One of the selections this year is John Williams’ Hymn to the Fallen from the 1998 Stephen Spielberg movie “Saving Private Ryan.”

The movie is the story of a World War II Army Ranger unit’s search for a Private James Ryan, an Iowa farm boy whose three brothers have been killed in action.  The Army wants him sent home, alive, but first he must be found.

The unit is led behind enemy lines by Captain John H. Miller to find Ryan before the War Department has to send a fourth letter of profound regret to his mother.  The unit finds Ryan but pays a tragic price by losing several men to save this one.  Miller is the last, telling Ryan, “Earn this” as he dies—to live a life worthy of the cost of saving him.

The musical motif is repeated at the end of the film as we see the face of Private Ryan (played by Matt Damon) morph into the face of James Ryan (played by Harrison Young) fifty years later, visiting the cemetery at Normandy with his wife, children, and grandchildren.  He finds the simple cross that marks Miller’s grave and kneels.

Old James Ryan: “My family is with me today.  They wanted to come with me.  To be honest with you, I wasn’t sure how I’d feel coming back here.  Every day I think about what you said to me that day on the bridge. I tried to live my life the best that I could. I hope that was enough.  I hope that, at least in your eyes, I’ve earned what all of you have done for me.”

His wife approaches. “James?..”

She looks at the headstone. “Captain John H. Miller.”

Ryan stands and looks at his wife.  “Tell me I have led a good life.”

“What?”

“Tell me I’m a good man.”

“You are,” and she walks back to the family members who have been watching, quietly, as Old James Ryan straightens, and salutes the cross with Miller’s name on it.

Writer John Biguenet, in a 2014 Atlantic Magazine article about the movie concludes that “the living are called not merely to bear witness to the achievement of the fallen heroes; the living are in fact the achievement itself.  Like Private Ryan we cannot help but ask what we’ve done to deserve such sacrifice by others and beg their forgiveness for what we have cost them.  And like James Ryan, all we can do to justify that sacrifice is to live our lives as well as we are able.”

On this Memorial Day, when self-centeredness, too often further corrupted by meanness, burdens our daily discussions, perhaps we can find a moment to justify the sacrifices of those intended to be honored today by living our lives better than we are living them.

A reporter’s life

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Sometimes reporters need some cheering up.  Sometimes the public needs a view from inside the profession.   The person who wrote an editorial called, “The Life of a Newspaper Man” published in the Jefferson City Daily Democrat-Tribune more than a century ago might have been thinking along those lines when this appeared in the May 5, 1912 edition:

+++++

With the job of the newspaper man travels a silent companion. Trouble is his name and Worry is his sister.  Seven days out of six old man Trouble is on the job and the rest of the time his sister looks after his interest.  The newspaper man is between the devil and the deep blue sea during his waking hours and the chances are that his dreams are disturbed by gaunt specters of the day’s events.

If he asks questions he is impertinent, and if not he does not know his business. If he is observant, he is nosey and if not, he cannot deliver the goods.  If he hangs around he is in the way and if not something is sure to happen while he is away.  He must depend on others for information and if he does they forget to tell him.  If he honors official requests to suppress that story about Bill Jones because Bill’s first wife was a second cousin of a dear friend of Soandso, he is a good fellow, but he is not doing his duty to his paper or to the public.  He depends on the official for his information, but he depends also on the paper for his salary. If he suppresses the story he is looking for another job and if he does not he does not get the news.

A preacher in Los Angeles once delivered a violent sermon in which he denounced the newspapers and all of those connected with them as liars and crooks.  The next day they offered him the city editor’s desk of one of the great dailies in order that he might see the conditions under which a newspaper was made.  He held down the desk two hours and then made a public apology, saying that men who would work day in and day out under such a strain as did the staff of a newspaper were almost inhuman and due allowance should be made if they made mistakes.

+++++

That was in the days before radio and television news and certainly before the days of cable television and internet punditry.  In 1981, your correspondent was part of a group that heard Walter Cronkite, the Missouri boy who became “the most trusted man in America” tell his colleagues in the electronic journalism business:

“What a THING it is to be a journalist.  God almighty; that’s the greatest thing in the world–to be a journalist. And there’s something wrong in this damn business of ours when there are too many people coming into it not to be journalists but to be a success, whatever the devil that means.

“I think there’s only one success in life for anybody who’s got the heart, compassion and courage to be a journalist, and that’s to be a journalist.

“…It worries me that in our communications schools we’re teaching how to communicate rather than how to be newspeople.

“It takes courage to be a journalist. It takes a courage that the public doesn’t know a damn thing about.  Not the courage to go out and face bullets and rocks and stones and shards of glass and the explosions of a terrorist bomb in a civil insurrection or a war.  That’s simple courage.  That’s macho courage.  That’s foolhardy courage at times.  It’s needed, and we’re certainly not going to deny the heroes their awards for that.

“But there are a lot of other kinds of courage it takes in this business.  It takes a kind of courage to face the ostracism of one’s neighbors, one’s friends, one’s golf companions on the 19th hole; when one is willing to get out there and say what’s right, what they know is right, and what they know must be reported to that community, to that state, if the nation is to live, and they’ll tell it, no matter what the fallout in their own social arrangement may be.”

+++++

It’s not easy to be a journalist, whether print or electronic, in a time of division and an era where mistrust in our democratic institutions—including the press—is cultivated.

It is not easy for the journalist who is painted with the same broad public brush whether he or she works for a supermarket tabloid, gossip magazine, or for the New York Times and the Washington Post.

It is not easy to be a reporter in an era that encompasses Access Hollywood, The Daily Show, radio talk, 60 Minutes and the PBS Newshour and know that the public image of “the media” often lumps them together. But I’ve been in places where the journalist is not free to face the kind of public criticism or to face the limited public acclaim that American journalists face.

One of the many important penalties we have to pay as a free society is an aggressive, courageous press that is free to ask serious accountability questions to and about those to whom we have given power and to report the answers—with which we are free to disagree.  Say what you will about the press, but be grateful we live in a country that has a free one.

You could be someone hearing the Russian media version of what is happening in Ukraine.

 

 

Protest Ground Rules, Chapter Two

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Last Wednesday, we shared some observations about protestors gathering at the homes of Supreme Court Justices after the leak of a purported preliminary ruling throwing out Roe v. Wade.

Last weekend, the host of FOX News Sunday Night in America, Trey Gowdy, pointedly identified these targeted protests as more than illegal.  He argued they strike at the foundation of our nation and its liberties.

In an era where liberty and license are too easily confused—and where that confusion is often deliberately stoked by those who seek to grow their power from it to the detriment of the nation—one word seems expendable.

But Gowdy maintains that that single word is essential to our existence.

America has a rich history when it comes to protests. You can argue that our nation was formed as a protest. And the First Amendment certainly contemplated people would want to express their beliefs and assemble and petition the government. But there’s a very important word in the First Amendment that doesn’t get a lot of attention: the word “peaceably.” 

—as in the right of the people “peaceably” to assemble.

You may recall Chris Cuomo once asked, “show me where it says protestors are supposed to be police and peaceful.” Okay, Chris, it’s right there in the First Amendment, the same amendment which allows you and others to make a living on television. It requires peace, and if you’re not peaceful it’s a crime.

You are welcome to protest and you don’t have to be polite or fair or even accurate but you do have to be peaceful. 

Our next guest, Esther Salas, is a federal judge who was also the very proud parent of an outstanding young man. A little less than two years ago, they were at home enjoying each other as loving families do; the doorbell rang and her son Daniel bounded up the stairs to answer it. It was not a neighbor. It was not a deliveryman. It was a disgruntled lawyer armed with a gun and her home address and he shot her only son to death and seriously injured her husband.

This judge and her family were targeted because she was a judge. Becoming a federal judge is the pinnacle of a legal career. But it provides no insulation to the pain of losing a child to an act of violence.

And now there are people showing up at the homes of Supreme Court Justices. And to what end? For what purpose?

How does showing up at someone’s home advance your argument?

How is it persuasive to intimidate family members and neighbors? Do you really think you will change minds or change the way that judges look at cases and issues, by posing a threat? 

It’s against the law to show up at a judge’s house trying to intimidate or influence a decision. You are welcome to disagree with judges. You can take issues with their rulings, if you think a judge is wrong, you can appeal, you can defeat that judge at the ballot box or through impeachment. But you are not welcome to show up at a judge’s house to intimidate or influence that judge. 

And to that end, why are the home addresses of federal judges publicly available in the first place, especially as threats and security incidents against judges are on the rise?

Something is going on in this country and it is not good. Heckling people at restaurants, accosting them as they leave a rally or a political event, storming the Capitol, trespassing on other people’s property—to what end?

Your protest doesn’t have to be fair or accurate, although it would be much more persuasive if it was. Your protest doesn’t have to be polite although it’s ironic you are using bad behavior to complain about somebody else’s perceived bad behavior. But protests so have to be peaceful. And when they’re not, you give license on both sides of the ideological spectrum to do the same.

Protesters should be peaceful and law-abiding. Whether it is in pursuit of criminal justice reform, the counting of the electoral college, or decisions about what rights lie in the penumbra of other rights.

The law is about the only thing holding this country together right now. You are free to disagree with the law, argue against it, seek to change it.

You are not free to disregard it, because when you disregard the law, even in your pursuit of some perceived higher ideal, you weaken the law. And once it’s weakened, it is weakened forever. And you’re most assuredly not welcome to show up at a judge’s house to complain about a decision, no matter how strongly you feel. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Slouching into adjournment

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Jacques reflects on life in Shakespeare’s As You Like It:

 All the world’s a stage,

And all the men and women merely players;

They have their exits and their entrances;

And one man in his time plays many parts,

They’re gone.  They’re done.  The chambers are dark and cool.  The hearing rooms are empty and quiet.  The unpopulated rotunda echoes with the sounds of a few footsteps.

The players have departed, some to return but others now of no further use, their importance immediately extinguished because they can no longer do things for people who want things done.

Some of those who have served will never be seen again in these hallways.  Their offices soon will be occupied by some other temporary presence who will come to this time, too.

And what have they left behind? What lasting benefit was there of their service?

The fact that they served, that they sought the responsibilities and the obligations of office, can be enough.

Some—those who will never again do anything as consequential as vote on some pages of words that establish allowable behaviors for six million people—might have time now to ponder their legacies.  Did they benefit all Missourians or just a few?  Did they protect the many or place a few ahead of them?  Will their time in the Capitol matter in the arc of history.

Or does it make any difference?

We have found ourself wondering during this session what some departing members will consider their legacy. When the last newspaper article is written about them, will one of their distinguished accomplishments be that they shut down the Senate for half of the session, for purely partisan and sometimes personal reasons?

For those who won’t be back in either the House or the Senate, will they be remembered because they almost were part of the least productive legislative session in modern history?  If the House had not approved twenty Senate-passed bills on Friday, the day after the Senate quit a day early, this session would have approved only 23 non-budget bills. The record low number in modern times is 31 in 2020, when the pandemic scrambled everything.  What scrambled everything this year was the conservative caucus in the Senate that believed its seven members should tell 17 other Republican Senators and ten Democrats how to run the place.

Our friend Rudi Keller says the average number of bills passed since 1981 was 155.

Senator Emory Melton, who served 28 years from Cassville, once opined that “it is not the bills that pass sometimes; it’s the bills that DON’T pass.”  A lot of bills didn’t pass this year, good ones and bad ones that were sentenced to death, early, by seven of 197 legislators who thought the congressional redistricting map should be about partisan politics rather than about public representation in Government.

We wonder if anyone considers whether a law they sponsored will still be on the books twenty-five years from now.

Will two legislators who talked to each other during debate almost every stay in touch even one year after leaving the capitol?

All glory is fleeting, said Patton.  All glory is fleeting but obscurity is forever, said Napoleon. How many years will elapse before one of their townsfolk is surprised to learn they once served in the Missouri General Assembly?

What’s done is done. The session will be recalled for the stalemate that froze the Senate for half the session.  It will be recalled because one chamber threw in the towel a day early and the other gave up before the statutory deadline on the last day.  Well after any memories of individual accomplishments, this session will be recalled for those things.

Grantland Rice, the dean of sportswriters in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s—–the man who described the Notre Dame backfield as “The Four Horsemen”—wrote a poem titled, The Record:

When the game is done and the players creep

One by one to the League of Sleep,

Deep in the night they may not know

The way of the fight, the fate of the foe.

The cheer that passed, the applauding hands,

Are stilled at last — but the Record stands.

 

The errors made, and the base hits wrought;

Here the race was run! There the fight was fought.

Yet the game is done when the sun sinks low

and one by one from the field they go;

Their day has passed through the Twilight Gates,

But the Scroll is cast — and the Record waits.

 

So take, my lad, what the Great Game gives,

For all men die — but the Record lives.

 

 

 

 

 

Protest Ground Rules

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There are few, apparently.

The Hill, a political newspaper in Washington, D.C., reported a couple of days ago that “Abortion rights activists in recent days have gathered outside the homes of three conservative Supreme Court justices to protest Roe v. Wade’s potential demise, taking their advocacy in an intensely personal and politically divisive direction.”

The homes are those of Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Samuel Alito and Chief Justice John Roberts. The article says the protests have “forced the White House to navigate a thorny question about the proper bounds of political discourse…” While outgoing press secretary Jen Psaki denounced threats of violence but stopped short of condemning the demonstrations—“We certainly allow for peaceful protest in a range of places in the country. None of it should violate the law,” she said.

But violating the law might be what they’re doing.  A friend of ours has pointed out Federal U.S. code 1507 that says any individual who “pickets or parades” with the “intent of interfering with, obstructing, or impeding the administration of justice, or with the intent of influencing any judge, juror, witness, or court officer” near a U.S. court or “near a building or residence occupied or used by such judge, juror, witness, or court officer” will be fined, or “imprisoned not more than one year, or both.”

We’ll wait to see if the Justice Department steps in.

These protests, while posing some liability for the participants, are not likely to be severe enough to launch a May 9th investigative committee.

But the circumstances do raise related issues about protests whether at courthouses, capitols, or street corners. Some are constitutional. Some are practical.

We have witnessed a lot of protests in a lot of years, including the storming of the local newspaper by Lincoln University students upset about an editorial highly-critical of Martin Luther King just days before his death, and disturbances on the campus (Lincoln in an HBCU, for those unfamiliar with the school) for a couple of years that resulted in a National Guard presence.

We have seen people standing quietly in front of the post office holding signs urging us to get out of Vietnam, Afghanistan, the United Nations, etc.

Many years ago when gay rights was in a much earlier stage we remember seeing members of a group called ACT-UP! Marching around the state seal in the Capitol rotunda chanting, “You say ‘don’t f—k,’ we say ‘f—k you!”’  That pretty well ended organized political protests in the Capitol.

We watched the Medicaid 23 interrupt Senate debate on Medicaid expansion one day with prayers and songs. They wound up being charged and dragged into court.

Prayers, cursing, burning, quietly holding signs are all part of our rights as American citizens to protest. It’s right there in the First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law… abridging the freedom of speech…or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

So protesting grievances is an inborn right of Americans. The accompanying responsibility for doing so in a way that does not violate the word “peaceably” belongs to the demonstrators and the subjective judgment of what is beyond propriety lies with the justice system that has the U.S. Code on one hand and the First Amendment on the other.  .

Attached to that system is another value judgment that lies with the protesters: Will the event do harm or good to the causes of the protestors?

Frankly, we doubt demonstrations at the Supreme Court building  influence the opinion-makers inside the building very much if at all.  We do find targeting the private spaces of the judges by demonstrating at their homes is an unwarranted invasion of their lives and certainly the lives of their families and their neighbors.

Your quiet observer doesn’t even like it when a car goes slowly through my neighborhood with the bass turned all the way up in the large speakers in the backseat and shakes the windows of his house.

In our fervid proclamations of our rights, it is easy to overlook the responsible, reasonable, and respectful exercise of them. Trying to use statements of our rights as bludgeons doesn’t seem from this lofty view to be a responsible action to take.

But what is left when leaders appear to be unmotivated by the responsible, the reasonable, and the respectful?

Whatever it is, it must be a principle of our freedoms that the mob cannot be allowed to rule. It can express itself.  But decisions must be made in cooler surroundings than on the passionate streets.  And the likely best decisions are most often made in the quiet regardless of whether they please us.

Decisions by the courts can be protested in the courts with better arguments than those shouted outside the fences that protect the decision-makers.