There are many who harbor this sentiment as we go into the 2022 midterm elections and anticipate the heat and smoke of 2024. Sad to say, too many of those we voters have put in positions of responsibility who are more interested in staying in positions of power have left too many voters feeling as this property owner felt six years ago.
The sign carries a message of hopelessness. The present political climate encourages that feeling.
The sign is a message of self-pity at a time when self-pity cannot be allowed.
This sign could be seen, insead, a message of opportunity. A challenge.
The proper response lies within those who think a yard sign such as this is all they can do.
Because it isn’t
Channelled, controlled anger can be a powerful force. Just make sure it’s directed at eliminating those who would leave us believing this sign is all we can do. Just make sure the mind overrules the gut in considering the people who want our votes.
And maybe a scattered few will realize they are better than those who have created this climate and they will be replaced by those who represent our better selves.
Lightbulbs and voters have one big thing in common. Both can be unscrewed.
It was one of those little mysteries that we notice that stays quietly in the backs of our minds but doesn’t nag at us. But then somebody says something and the mystery is solved although they don’t know there ever was a mystery.
This mystery is rooted in the story of one of Jefferson City’s most prominent 19th Century citizens, the donation of a building to the city, the founding of a church, and the creation of a center to help the city’s needy a century after a man’s death.
And a mausoleum.
Joseph M. Clarke, Ohio-born, Illinois newspaperman, Alabama horse trader, Osage County Missouri plantation owner, state legislator, and Jefferson City banker is at the center of the story.
He was a city developer and philanthropist and upon his death toward the end of 1889, he bequeathed Bragg Hall to the city. Bragg Hall still stands at the corner of High and Monroe Streets, on the southwest corner. For decades, the upper floors were city hall, with the city council chambers (which doubled as the Municipal Court during the daytimes) on the top floor.
One of the provisions of his will was that the city had to pay for a life-size bronze statue of Clarke to be kept in the building. Portraits of his wife, Lavinia, and of his two sons, Marcus and Junius, also were to be placed prominently in the building. All of them wound up in the council chambers, the statue in the southeast corner where it watched the council proceedings, the portraits of his sons on the east wall and the life-size portrait of his wife on the west wall. In those days, five councilmen sat on each side of the room and I always felt sorry for the councilmen on the east because Mrs. Clarke was, well, a very severe looking woman and I often wondered if any of the council members felt her withering gaze.
Bragg Hall became inadequate as a city hall in the 1970s and after negotiations with Clarke descendants, the city sold the building and moved to a new city hall. But the new building didn’t seem to have adequate space for the bronze Clarke and the canvas family members. Four years later, when the city opened a nutrition center, it was named for Clark. And today folks who have meals there do so under the watchful eyes of Mr. Clarke and his sons. And I think Lavinia is watching their table manners closely.
One of the other things Clarke did was to give the First Christian Church a lot at the corner of (then) East Main and Adams Street as the site for its first sanctuary, to which he also contributed liberally.
All four members of the Clarke family are in that mausoleum in the old cemetery. One day while I was doing some church research about Clarke, I went to the mausoleum, the interior of which was pretty dusty and cobwebby and peered through the locked door. There wasn’t much to see except for a very old chair that was slowly collapsing under the weight of dust and decades.
Why is that chair there? I wondered. Were they expecting visitors? Were they thinking someone would come in a sit with them for a while? Somebody would come in and tell them what had happened with their gifts?
That chair was the mystery that stuck in the back of my mind for several years. Since then, the mausoleum has undergone a maintenance and repair effort.
A few weeks ago I think I learned what that chair was and why it was there.
The Christian Church has been without a minister for more than a year, a situation that will be resolved this coming Sunday when our new minister preaches his first sermon. In the interim we have had “pulpit supply” ministers filling in, including three retired ministers who are members of the congregation. We’ve had sermons from two lay members. And on June 26, a young woman who was raised in our church—her parents and her grandmother are still active members—and then went on to become a minister stood in the pulpit and asked what kind of a church we would be in the future, one stuck in the old ways or “will we accept the mantles of change and embrace our own giftedness and passions?”
Her sermon was based on the story of Elijah, the prophet from the Old Testament Book of Kings where stories of his miracles are told—one of which is resurrection. Early in the message, Sarah Blosser Blackwell referred to an ancient custom that sometimes is practiced in some homes today:
An empty chair at a family gathering was likely referred to in passing as the “Elijah” chair. The idea was that since Elijah did not die an earthly death, but instead was taken up into heaven, and we should save him a space in case he returned. According to Jewish tradition, Elijah was known as the messenger of the covenant and, thus, was present at every circumcision, so a chair was left open for his arrival. Later that became the place of honor for the godfather of the child.
And there it was!
That was why the chair was in the Clarke family mausoleum—the Elijah Chair where he could sit when he returns as a harbinger of the arrival of the Messiah.
I don’t think there’s a chair in the mausoleum since the repairs were made. I could see no sign of it as I peered through the three dingy windows. It’s unknown if the chair had been put there at the request of the Clarkes or if it was just part of a tradition in 1889.
I kind of think there should be a chair in there now, though.
A strong Republican citizen asked me the other day, “What do you know about John Wood?” And at the end of our discussion, he made an interesting suggestion about him.
John Wood is running for Roy Blunt’s Senate seat as an Independent. It’s far too late for him to file as a Republican but he’s the kind of moderate Republican that former Senator John Danforth has been hoping would give GOP voters an alternative to the crowd of candidates that Danforth considers so closely tied to ex-President Trump that the GOP could lose that seat in November.
My friend thinks Wood would pull votes away from candidates of both parties but would hurt the Republican nominee the most, especially if it’s Eric Greitens.
Here’s a thumbnail description of John Wood.
(This entire discussion becomes academic if he cannot gather 10-thousand signatures of Missouri voters and present them to the Secretary of State by the close of business on August 1. Barely meeting the minimum might say something about his candidacy. Getting thousands more than necessary might say something, too.)
He’s a 52-year old lawyer and is the latest product of the “Danforth incubator.” John Danforth used his election as Missouri Attorney General in 1968 to begin cultivating bright and young Republican assistants whose success in statewide office broke the Democratic hold on Missouri politics and produced the Republican control. Before he was a lawyer, he worked for Danforth. He clerked for U. S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas who had been an Assistant Attorney General under Danforth. He also has worked at the United States Court of Appeals.
President George W. Bush appointed him the federal prosecutor for western Missouri in 2007. He served into 2009. After leaving that job he was chief of staff to Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff. When John Ashcroft was United States Attorney General, Wood was the deputy associate general counsel in that office. He also filled that job in the Bush Administration’s Office of Management and Budget.
For a time he was the Senior Vice President, Chief Legal Officer and General Counsel for the U. S. Chamber of Commerce. He joined the January 6th Committee as a senior investigator at the invitation of Representative Liz Cheney.
He calls himself “a lifelong Republican” who has told the Post-Dispatch he is not interested in being part of “a race to the bottom” and an effort “to see who can be the most divisive and the most extreme.”
He thinks Greitens will win the Republican primary on August 2 but he thinks he can win in November behind “a coalition of common-sense voters,” most particularly Republicans who won’t back Greitens as well as moderate and conservative Democrats—and independents, of course.
We won’t delve into his positions on issues in this entry except to say they are distinctly mainline Republican. He has said he would support Mitch McConnell remaining leader of the party in the Senate and that he wants to be part of a “governing coalition,” an indication that he might work better across the aisle than many other Republicans (or Democrats) in Washington.
He says he’s not a spoiler, that he’s running to win.
Simply put, he’s a wild card in a race that needs one. He’ll have Danforth money and muscle behind him. But it doesn’t take much searching to realize that John Danforth doesn’t set the philosophical tone for the party that he once did.
All of that might be true, maintains my friend. However—-
Is he really running to gain statewide name recognition so that he can challenge Josh Hawley in 2024? After all, Danforth says supporting Hawley four years ago was the biggest political mistake he’s ever made.
John Wesley had a birthday last week. He would have been 219 years old.
He was the founder of the Methodist Church.
Garrison Keillor’s “The Writer’s Almanac” commemorated his birth by passing along “John Wesley’s Rule,” noting that there’s no evidence he actually wrote it. But it’s a good thing to remember as we breathe the increasingly toxic political air that is being generated in these times.
You might want to print it out and post it in several places in your home.
Do all the good you can,
By all the means you can,
In all the ways you can,
In all the places you can,
At all the times you can,
To all the people you can,
As long as you ever can.
Sounds like a good platform for a candidate. A candidate adopting this standard as part of the campaign platform could certainly stand out in today’s political climate. Certainly wouldn’t hurt to see somebody try it.
Regardless of your feeling about the U. S. Supreme Court’s abortion ruling last week, here’s something to remember:
It’s not the final word.
It’s not the final word any more than the 1973 ruling in Roe was the final word. It just turns the tables on the argument. Abortion opponents have spent the last fifty years chipping away at the ruling and looking for the right legal lever to overturn the whole thing. Dozens, probably hundreds, of state laws (somebody might add up all of the ones in Missouri) have attacked the issue only to be thrown out at some level of the court system. This one finally worked.
The ruling obviously does not end here. The anti-abortion element of American society is on the defensive for the first time in almost a half-century. We will be interested to see if a pro-choice population that has watched as pro-life elements have attacked Roe will be galvanized into activism.
It is not generally a good idea to poke a dozing Tiger with a stick.
Survey after survey has indicated a general approval of Choice by Americans. The Gallup organization in early June reported, “A steady 58% majority believe that the…ruling…should stand while 35% want it to be reversed. These sentiments are essentially unchanged since 2019.”
The wording on Gallup’s poll question has changed somewhat through the years but, “Dating back to 1989, support for reversing the decision has averaged 32%, while opposition has averaged 59%.”
In the most recent poll, the question focused on the impact of an overturn and whether respondents favored letting states set their own standards. That survey, run last month, showed 63% of respondents thought it would be a “bad thing” to let states set their own policies. Those who said it will be a “good thing” were at 32%.
There has been no doubt this issue has been a partisan thing for a long time. In the most recent Gallup survey, 80% of Democrats and 62% of Independents favored the status quo. Among republicans, 58% favored what the court ultimately has decided. Only 34% of independents and 15% of Democrats favored reversal.
But the U.S. Supreme Court is not ruled by polls although its makeup might be determined by people whose political positions ARE ruled by polls.
Catholic voters, for example.
A Pew Research Center 2019 survey found 56% of Catholics felt abortion should be legal in all or most cases. Forty-two percent disagreed. The 56% is close to the 60% of non-evangelical Protestants and 64% of Black Protestants who supported legal abortion. In one of the fastest-growing demographics—people who are not religiously affiliated—83% told pollsters that abortions should be legal in all or almost all cases.
Writing in America, the Jesuit Review in 2018, Patrick T. Brown, a former government relations staffer for Catholic Charities USA, said, “Since 1973, no institution in the United States has been more firmly committed to protecting the unborn than the Catholic Church. Yet Catholics are just as likely to procure an abortion as other U.S. women. Why?
“According to the latest numbers from the Guttmacher Institute, 24 percent of women who procure abortions identify as Catholic, almost the same as 22 percent of all U.S. women who called themselves Catholic in a 2014 survey by Pew Research Center. In the same sources, evangelical Protestants made up 27 percent of all women in the United States but only 13 percent of those who underwent abortions, revealing a greater reluctance toward choosing abortion, a greater reluctance toward revealing their religion on a survey or both.”
Here’s one thing you won’t hear: Republicans who are critical of “activist” judges when discussing this ruling. You won’t hear Republicans railing against “legislating from the bench” either.
Again, this ruling tends to reverse the table.
There are fears this ruling is just the beginning of court-established national policies on contraception, LGTBQ+ rights, and gay marriage being dismantled and becoming matters of states’ rights. Roe does not mean the court’s rulings on those issues automatically will be part of the Right’s version of a cancel culture but those who want them reversed should ponder how hard they want to poke those Tigers and what the reaction will be when they have poked too hard.
This ruling is certain to become a significant election issue in November when we will learn if it and reactions to findings of the January 6 Committee as well as fears of the present court’s future actions will produce less of a Red Wave than many on the Right expect.
Pro-life interests have prevailed.
For now.
But a younger generation born and raised in an era of birth control, abortion, and gender recognition in its various forms might be maturing with different outlooks.
In times such as these and decision such as this, we often return to former New York Governor Al Smith, a Catholic who ran for President in 1928, a time when there was a lot of “anti” attitudes in our nation. Many think Smith’s greatest liability in the election was his religion. He warned:
“It is a confession of the weakness of our own faith in the righteousness of our cause when we attempt to suppress by law those who do not agree with us.”
We’ve had several days now to hear the reactions to Eric Greitens’ commercial for hunting RINOS.
He seems to be the only one who thinks it’s funny. “Every normal person around the state of Missouri saw that is clearly a metaphor,” he is quoted as saying, a remark that is reminiscent of the story of a man who gets a call from his wife who says, “Be careful on your way to work this morning, The radio says there’s a driver going the wrong way on the highway,” and the husband replies, “One guy? There are hundreds of them!”
Greitens says the abnormal people expressing strong misgivings about his video are expressing “faux outrage.” No, Eric, in this campaign where voters have to determine who is a friend or a faux, we know who the leader of the faux brigade is.
His primary election opponents, most of them experiencing a moment of clarity instead of telling us how much they worship at the Trump Temple, are aghast.
Aghast!! Eric Greitens is still the lovable fellow who convinced voters six years ago that he knew how to be governor by firing an automatic military-style weapon with a large magazine (necessary in case the aim isn’t too good) at something that eventually exploded.
I went back and looked at that commercial last week. I think he fired ten shots before hitting the exploding target.
Perhaps showing his sensitive side in 2022, he’s carrying a shotgun instead of that military-style automatic weapon when he humorously knocks down the door of an empty house and joins his storm trooper friends amidst the smoke of a flash-bang grenade that apparently not only has scared all of the RINOS out of the house but has scared out all of the furniture, too.
This is an impressive example of the kind of leadership we need in Washington.
—somebody willing to round up a bunch of guys pretending to be soldiers of some kind to launch an attack on an empty house. And to suggest that anyone who opposes him needs to be “bagged” and there are no limits on numbers.
Vigilantes, they are. No badges. No authority. No warrant. But they’re going to protect us from Republicans in Name Only. At least RINOS as Eric the Seal defines them. If he does this to protect us from RINOS, can we expect tactical nukes in November against DEMS?
He begins the attack with a lie within the first ten seconds. “I’m Eric Greitens, Navy Seal,” he says.
No he isn’t. He’s not even in the Navy.
He WAS a Navy Seal once. He’s not now. In fact when he fell back on the Navy after quitting his state job under a giant cloud, the Navy wouldn’t let him become a Seal again. And judging from Phil Klay’s article in The New Yorker of May 17, 2018, there were good reasons. Klay wrote:
seals have traditionally embraced a culture of quiet professionalism. Part of the seal credo reads, “I do not advertise the nature of my work, nor seek recognition for my actions.” In the last two weeks, I spoke to more than half a dozen current and former seals about the spectacular implosion of Greitens’s public image. Most chose not go on the record, but all expressed frustration that a peripheral and contentious figure in their community, one who served overseas but never served with seals in combat, became a public face of the seal community. Many complained to me that it tends to be those who are least representative of seal core values, such as Greitens, who end up trading on the group’s reputation and representing it in public, earning respect from American citizens but contempt from other seals.
Not only is he not a SEAL, as he identifies himself in the video, he’s not even in the Navy. Or even in the Navy Reserve. The Kansas City Star says he resigned his commission on May 1, 2021 after deciding to seek glory in the U. S. Senate alongside Josh Hawley.
When he fled from the governorship, he asked the Navy to be reinstated to active duty. The Navy, not jumping at the chance to do that, did nothing until Vice President Pence, who is admired by Greitens, put in a good word for him. The Navy decided he could come back as a reserve office and No, he could not be a Seal again. So he got a desk job of some kind while he lobbied to be assigned to Washington, D.C., to work with the National Security Council. That didn’t work either. Then he resigned.
As if all of this isn’t enough, he’s locked in a bitter dispute with his ex-wife who seemingly is accusing him of being all of the things a husband should not be.
He still has a loyal following although several people in his party, are trying to find a way to beat him in August. But anybody who thinks a person of his qualities doesn’t represent what the Republican Party is supposed to be about is probably just a RINO and they might want to duck.
There are a lot of Republicans in that primary election and it won’t take many votes to make Greitens the winner in August, especially if some D’s cross over in hopes that he’ll be the candidate easier for a Democrat to beat in November. And that scares the socks off the party he claims.
We haven’t figured out what his solutions to the nation’s problems are. Haven’t seen or heard specifics about what policies he will advocate if he’s elected. What does he think should be national policy on inflation? What would he advocate to bring down gas prices? How would he improve healthcare? How would he end the shortage of people in the workplace? How would he solve supply line problems?
Most obviously: What does he think of the gun control legislation rushed through Congress after the Uvalde school shooting (and other mass shootings before and since)? The mere fact that he saw fit to release his video in the midst of so much national anger at firearms violence shows, if nothing else, a dismaying lack of serious concern for anything outside of himself.
He’s shooting blanks on those issues. As The Kansas City Star put it bluntly a few days ago, “He’s also a coward. He’s a tough guy with a gun on TV, but ducks every debate and every legitimate press interview.”
If he wants to show us how truly committed he is to democracy and freedom more than he is committed to himself, maybe he can find a flight to Ukraine where there’s nothing faux about doors—and everything else—being knocked down.
In early August, we’ll learn if this video SEALED his fate.
” 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:
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.
-0-
*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?
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?
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?
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?
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?
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?
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?
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.
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.
-0-
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.
It’s clear that too much of our political dialogue in this country has lost any semblance of courtesy.
I trace much of that loss to the medium that was my life for more than fifty years and to a slight degree still is. Radio.
Radio had been consigned to insignificance (again) by the early 1980s. But satellite-delivered content became more practical and with it voices that were no longer local and often no longer respective of listeners, guests or callers came into our radios. After all, the show was about them, not about the community and the residents radio stations lived with. Nationally-distributed talk radio is considered the savior of the AM band.
Now look at where we are. Not just in radio but in our political circles and even in our daily verbal intercourse with one another, even among family members. And it’s less than two months before the August primary elections and—-Oh, Lord! The flood of thirty-seconds of irrationality that will assault our eyes and ears and insult our intelligences.
The other day we found a concert by Glen Campbell with the South Dakota Symphony on YouTube. It showcased his great voice, his incredible guitar-playing, and even a solo with bagpipes.
He closed the concert, as he often did, with a song by Bobby Austin and Carl Sapaugh: Try a Little Kindness—
If you see your brother standing by the road
With a heavy load from the seeds he sowed
And if you see your sister falling by the way
Just stop and say, “You’re going the wrong way”
You’ve got to try a little kindness
Yes, show a little kindness
Just shine your light for everyone to see
And if you try a little kindness
Then you’ll overlook the blindness
Of narrow-minded people on the narrow-minded streets
Don’t walk around the down and out
Lend a helping hand instead of doubt
And the kindness that you show every day
Will help someone along their way
You got to try a little kindness
Yes, show a little kindness
Just shine your light for everyone to see
And if you try a little kindness
Then you’ll overlook the blindness
Of narrow-minded people on the narrow-minded streets
You got to try a little kindness
Yes, show a little kindness
Just shine your light for everyone to see
And if you try a little kindness
Then you’ll overlook the blindness
Of narrow-minded people on the narrow-minded streets
T.A.L.K. Kindly. We really need it these days. It’s time we got smart enough to ignore the self-centered lousy examples we have all around us and rise above them.
They don’t want us to do that. They profit if we continue to dwell in blindness, narrow-mindedness and narrow-minded streets. But we know we can be better than their examples.
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:
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.
