Category Archives: government

The Pot Calling the Kettle—-

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Black? Indian?

It has taken no time for Donald Trump to make ethnicity an attack point in the presidential race.  There is no reason for having done it but few, at least on the Left, will accuse Trump of being reasonable anyway.  His track record of denigration of others is well-recognized but applauded by many who find his politically judgmental attitudes and actions fit their views of others who do not look, worship, or otherwise fit their guidelines for respect as fellow citizens.

A part of our political system seems unable to survive without finding others who do not deserve to be belittled or even hated, tomust be belittle and hate.

My generation remembers the pronouncements that John Kennedy would take orders from the Vatican if he became President. More recently, we were battered by those who made false claims about Barrack Obama’s birth as well as his ethnic history, including those who pointed to his middle name, Hussein, as an indication he might have had ties to Muslim terrorism.

Now, Donald Trump—-himself a mix of ancestral roots—is raising false insinuations about Kamala Harris with her emergence as a tangible threat to his dreams of absolute power. His attack made before an audience of Black journalists, no less, has underlined and bold-faced one word his critics have used many times to describe him:  Racist:

“I’ve known her a long time, indirectly, not directly very much, and she was always of Indian heritage, and she was only promoting Indian heritage. I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black, and now she wants to be known as Black. So I don’t know, is she Indian, or is she Black? I respect either one, but she obviously doesn’t. Because she was Indian all the way, and then all of a sudden, she made a turn, and she went – she became a Black person. And I think somebody should look into that, too.”

Several people DID look into it and quickly considered the comment one of Trumps most blatant lies and a clear injection of racism into the campaign.

Here’s one fact check:

Harris Has Always Identified as Indian American and Black – FactCheck.org

Trump is hardly one to question the ethnicity of others—–because he has made questionable claims about his own. In fact, he has lied about it. In print.

Natasha Frost of the New York Times has written:

Trump’s international origins make him relatively unusual among American presidents. Of the last 10 presidents, only two—Trump and Barack Obama—have had a parent born outside of the United States. Trump’s own immediate family has been similarly international: Two of his three wives were naturalized American citizens, originally from the Czech Republic and Slovenia. Only one of his five children, Tiffany, is the child of two American-born citizens, while his daughter, Ivanka, is the first Jewish member of the First Family in American history. But so far as his biographers have been able to tell, none of his international roots extends to Sweden.

A-ha.  Sweden.  Frost, who has looked at Trump’s familial roots, reports Grandpa Friedrich Trump gave up his career as a 16-year old barber in GERMANY and came here in 1885 to escape three years of required service in the German military.  But Trump denied the truth of his circumstances, maintaining for years, even in his co-written The Art of the Deal, that Friedrich came here from Scandinavia.  A family historian told the newspaper the lie was started by Trump’s father, Fred, who did not want to alienate Jewish clients and friends by acknowledging the family’s German background.

“Trump is the son, and grandson, of immigrants: German on his father’s side, and Scottish on his mother’s. None of his grandparents, and only one of his parents, was born in the United States or spoke English as their mother tongue (His mother’s parents, from the remote Scottish Outer Hebrides, lived in a majority Gaelic-speaking community.),” Frost wrote.

Donald is the grandson of Friedrich, who was not Swedish, Norwegian, or Finnish. He was one of more than about one million Germans to immigrate to the USA in 1885—seeking the same things that immigrants look for today. Their “wall” was the Atlantic Ocean.

But Trump’s family overcame that wall.  We will leave it to you to consider any irony in his story.

“Trump” as a Swede? Only if his real name was “Trumpsson.”

As for Friedrich, it is not on the list of 100 top names for Swedish boys. The top ten, by the way, are Noah, Hugo, William, Liam, Nils, Elias, Oliver, Adam. August, and Sam

The attack on Kamala Harris was uncalled for.  But what else is new when it comes from Donald Trump? And after all, wouldn’t you want to deny your German heritage if you had a running made that once wrote his college roommate, “I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical a**hole like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he’s America’s Hitler. How’s that for discouraging?”

Four years ago, reporter Ella Lee of USA TODAY reviewed 28 Trump comments deemed racist. Her conclusion: “Of the 28 listed comments, Trump said 12 of them as plainly stated. Two he said but lack context. Four comments are disputed, eight are paraphrased from similar statements and two he did not say.”

Fact check: 12 of 28 Trump comments deemed racist are direct speech (usatoday.com)

Adequate time has passed and millions of words have been spoken since then that an update is merited, including an evaluation of his claim that he is the best President that black people have had since Abraham Lincoln with no exceptions for Harry Truman’s integration of the military and Lyndon Johnson’s pushing for and signing the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts in the 1960s.

We are supposed to have some debates in September, depending on how Mr. Trump feels when he takes to Truth Social on any particular day.  We will wait to see if he can do more than call people names by then or wallow in more language that is, in the least, insensitive.

The Swede vs. the Indian.  What a match that could be.

(NOTE:  We have posted a second entry today—-a re-post of a column originally dated August 1 but was unreadable thanks to a huge blunder by your editor, We hope we do not overburden you by this double post.)

Another Bogeyman—the Chinese Farmer

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We don’t know what kind of nonsense folks in other parts of the state have been seeing and hearing in this campaign about the dangers of Chinese ownership of our farmland, but it’s been a central issue in the Third Congressional District television commercials for contenders for Blaine Luetkemeyer’s soon-to-be-vacated seat. It even has oozed into the governor’ race and the state auditor’s race.

China, like the illegal immigrant, is a campaign bogeyman this year. One congressional candidate, Bob Onder, has decided name-calling is a proper way to attack his main competitor, Kurt Schaefer—something that should not be unexpected given that Onder has the full support of Donald Trump, the nation’s leading advocate of character-assassination.

Onder has been sending out direct mail pieces charging “Shanghai Schaefer” with voting to let China have Missouri farmland.

Gubernatorial candidate Mike Kehoe faces the same criticism, without name-calling so far.  And incumbent Treasurer Vivek Malik has a commercial that assures us that no state funds are invested in anything Chinese.

Onder and Kehoe’s opponents aren’t shooting straight with the voters. But what else is new in today’s politics?   Or politics, ever, for that matter.

Here’s what really went on ten years ago, and more, on which these attack ads are based:

Missouri was among several Midwest states to pass laws in the 1970s that prohibited or restricted foreign land ownership amid concerns over Japanese investment. Missouri law completely banned foreign land ownership until 2013, when lawmakers passed a bill allowing as much as 1% of agricultural land to be sold to foreign entities. The move was an economic necessity to deal with a situation in rural north Missouri.

One of the biggest agricultural issues of the time was Corporate Agriculture, Big Ag, if you will, personified by an outfit called Premium Standard Farms that set up huge contract hog-raising and processing operations in north Missouri, a sparsely-settled part of our state that relied on agriculture for its economy.

Premium Standard revolutionized the pork industry. It had been founded in 1988 with the goal of producing premium pork and was the first pork producer in America to get into vertical integration—in other words, controlling the market from birth of the pig to the marketing of the pig’s parts after it grew up.  To accomplish that, PSF bought a lot of land and contracted with many farmers to raise pigs the company would process.  North Missouri went from being a region of independent farmers to being suppliers. But Premium Standard offered an economic stability the region had not previously had.

PSF was a huge concern in terms of environmental issues as well as generating concerns about gobbling up small family farms, an anachronistic phrase that had faded from reality many years earlier. It was the second-biggest pork producer and the sixth-biggest pork processor in the country.

In 1999, six people sued for damages, namely odors, coming from PSF’s hog farms.  The court ordered PSF to pay then $4.6 million.  In 2010, a Jackson County jury gave seven neighboring farmers $11 million in damages because of odors produced on PSF’s 43-hundred acre finishing farm—which processed about 200,000 hogs a year—near Berlin.

By then, Smithfield Foods had bought PSF for $800 million in cash, stock, and assumed debt.

At one time, Smithfield—headquartered in Princeton, Missouri with a processing plant in Milan—ran 132 company-owned farms and had 109 contract farms in Missouri. It also leased farms and eight feed mills.

When China’s biggest pork producer, Shunghui International, wanted to buy Smithfield about five years later, it ran into the state law prohibiting foreign ownership of farm land (several other Midwestern states had adopted similar laws).

As your faithful scribe recalls, the law threatened the purchase as well as the economy of a wide part of north Missouri.  So the legislature passed a new law allowing foreign interests to own one percent of Missouri farmland.  That cleared the way for Shanghai Holdings, as the United States entity for Shunghui International was known, to take over Smithfield—now known as the WH Group—and the approximately 40,000 acres Smithfield owned. At the time, few people suspected letting foreigners own one percent of Missouri’s farmland would be a major campaign issue or some kind of proclaimed major national security threat.

Senators Kurt Schaefer and Mike Kehoe voted for that bill, which passed the Senate unanimously. Governor Nixon vetoed it. The Republican-dominated legislature overrode the veto.

Schaefer later lost a Republican primary election for Attorney General to Eric Schmitt and has been a lobbyist and Columbia attorney since. Kehoe was appointed Lieutenant Governor by Governor Parson, who sponsored the farmland bill in 2013. Parson is a farmer in southwest Missouri.

The MOST Policy Initiative says Missouri ranks 9th in the nation in foreign-owned acreage—but the 324,658 acres held amounts to only 0.78% of all of our farmland, ranking us 35th in that category.

Nationally, we are not under any threat of a foreign government buying our country.  The USDA put out a list in 2021 showing how much various countries own of our land. Five countries own two percent of the total land in the United States.

Here’s  the top ten as compiled by Forbes:

  1. Canada (12,845,000 acres)
  2. Netherlands (4,875,000)
  3. Italy (2,703,000)
  4. United Kingdom (2,538,000)
  5. Germany (2,269,000)
  6. Portugal (1,483,000)
  7. France (1,316,000)
  8. Denmark (856,000)
  9. Luxembourg (802,000)
  10. Ireland (760,000)

China ranks 18th on that list with 0.3 million acres.

There is some sentiment today to either reimpose the total limit or cut it back to one-half of one percent. The Center for Strategic Studies has estimated the WH Group now owns more than 146,000 acres of farmland here. Earlier this year, Governor Parson issued an executive order banning companies antagonistic to national security from owning land within ten miles of staffed military sites. No antagonistic foreign entity owns any of that land now.

We don’t know about you, but we don’t plan to vote for candidates who rely on public ignorance of an issue or its history or its significance to level distorted charges against opponents.  We’re more likely to vote for a candidate that shoots straight, doesn’t overstate his or her capabilities or the capabilities of the office, who spends less time attacking an opponent and more time outlining a realistic program that benefits the people who will cast votes.

But aiming for the gut is far easier than appealing to the intellect, so don’t expect any break from the fertilizer distribution in the days ahead

Be Thankful 

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—that we live in a state that is so safe, so protective of its citizens and their rights, so free from any legal issues linked to our laws, or any uncertainty about people we have put into public office whose behavior is not above the law—

—that we can have a fearless Attorney General who is so bored with the lack of action in his own jurisdiction that he can courageously tell other states what their responsibilities are.

What gives him the authority to stick his nose into other states’ businesses, you might ask?  We checked the Missouri Constitution, chapter 27.  He is, upon order of the governor, to help local prosecutors with cases, usually those of very serious and complicated natures that are beyond the capability of local prosecutors and their smaller staffs to handle. Local judges also can direct the Attorney General to sign indictments.

He is a legal advisor to the General Assembly who issues advisory opinions on issues before or possibly to be before the legislature. He also is a legal adviser on behalf of the state to Executive Branch officials, elected and appointed “upon any question of law relative to their respective offices or the discharge of their duties.”

The Attorney General defends the state in any appeals to the Missouri Supreme Court or the the State Courts of Appeals.

It is in Section 27.060 we find the words that let our Attorney General meddle in other states’ affairs:

 27.060.  To represent state in other cases. — The attorney general shall institute, in the name and on the behalf of the state, all civil suits and other proceedings at law or in equity requisite or necessary to protect the rights and interests of the state, and enforce any and all rights, interests or claims against any and all persons, firms or corporations in whatever court or jurisdiction such action may be necessary; and he may also appear and interplead, answer or defend, in any proceeding or tribunal in which the state’s interests are involved.

And that is why, Andrew Bailey—wanting to burnish his credentials as a loyal MAGA-ite—has a way to sue the State of New York, claiming that a jury of Donald Trump’s peers that convicted him of 34 criminal charges a few weeks ago was involved in “unconstitutional lawfare” that is a “direct attack on our democratic process.”

(“Lawfare” is a newly-created phrase designed to manipulate your gut instincts and to malign the honor of those who respect and have built, the American system of justice that has and will protect all of us.)

“It’s time to restore the rule of law,” he righteously proclaims, while using that phrase that is intended to undermine it.

It would be nice if people such as Bailey justified their Trumpist credentials with some original words instead of parroting, more or less, the bloated Trump rhetoric that his trial was “rigged and disgraceful.”

Bailey claims Trump is a victim of a “rogue prosecutor who is trying to take a presidential candidate off the campaign trail” in a way that “sabotages Missourians’ right to a free and fair election.”

One can hope that whatever document he files in this case focuses on the law and spares the judicial system another dose of MAGA hot air.

But if hot air is all he has to offer—-as we have seen in too many filings on behalf of the now-convicted felon—perhaps Missouri voters should consider whether he deserves four years as the state’s lawyer.

We have to recognize what is going on here.  What he is part of is a widespread, calculated, grinding attack designed to nationally undermine the legal system he has sworn to uphold, a legal system he might in his younger and more idealistic (and realistic) days have seen as an honorable field of service in a free country.

Does he ever wonder where that younger self has gone?  Would any of us ever have thought  that our state’s top legal officer now seeks favor from followers of one man whose insatiable hunger for power has proclaimed that he has been egregiously abused because his dreams of dominance and his tactics of intimidation could not sway a mere dozen citizens—people no different from you and me—from meeting their obligations under a two century-old world-respected system of verdicts delivered by the people, of the people, and for the people.

He chooses to hitch his wagon to someone who has no use for such a system unless he can manipulate it to serve himself.  The rationalization that is it is being done to preserve a “free and fair election” is a fiction, particularly for the state that has him as its highest legal officer.

To be fair, Bailey’s opponent in next weeks’ primary, Will Scharf, calls himself “Trump’s Attorney,” and has the distinction of having been policy director for the recent lamentable Governor Eric Greitens. He says it’s time for an outsider to be Missouri’s AG.  That’s the same thing Greitens proclaimed when he ran for and won the governorship and we remember how well that outsider’s policies went over.

Donald Trump carried Missouri in each of the last two elections and likely will carrying it again this year, despite what a jury in New York has said and despite what state and federal prosecutors  accuse him of doing in other places. Nobody has shown that Republicans cannot place Trump’s name on the Missouri ballot in November, so we are able to freely and fairly vote for or against him.

It would be nice if Andrew Bailey and Will Sharf proved they was watching out for our interests as they are watching out for Trump’s.

For instance:

Bailey is the chairman of the Governor’s Crime Commission. Has anybody heard about anything substantial that the commission has done or is doing under his leadership?  How is it working to reduce crime throughout Missouri.  We haven’t heard a peep about that commission’s work or its record.

He has divided his office into eight divisions: Litigation, Consumer Protection, Governmental Affairs, Environmental Protection, Criminal Appeals, Governmental and Financial Entities, Labor, and Public Safety.

How has he protected us consumers?  It had been a long time since we had heard anything about his supervision of the no-call list and prosecutions violators—until we got a pre-primary election brochure in our mail box the other day telling us what a splendid job his office was doing in consumer affairs.

Any companies being sued for shutting down without legally-required notifications of workers and providers?  Any polluters being located?

What has he done to protect our environment?

What has his Public Safety Division done to increase your safety and mine?

And Labor—-what does that division do?  Is it protecting those who labor?

All of us are left ignorant while Attorney General Bailey makes sure he remains an apple of the MAGA eye with self-aggrandizing huffing about the terrible things a dozen courageous and highly-responsible fellow citizens have done to underline the basic American belief that no one is above the law.

Isn’t it comforting to live in a state with so few problems that our Attorney General has time to meddle in the affairs of other states?

Why am I not therefore comfortable?

Why Speaker Johnson Wants a Fake Law

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House Speaker Mike Johnson admits he doesn’t KNOW that there is a problem with non-citizens voting but he wants a law banning them from doing it.  “We all know, intuitively, that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections. But it’s not been something that is easily provable. We don’t have that number. This legislation will allow us to do exactly that — it will prevent that from happening. And if someone tries to do it, it will now be unlawful within the states,” he said.

Intuition?

Wouldn’t you think that the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives would know this country has had a law since 1996 that bars non-citizens from voting in federal elections?

Johnson started talking about the potential law after a recent visit to Mar-a-Lago, whose resident golf course champion told Iowans heading to their caucuses in January that immigrants are Democratic political tools:

“That’s why they are allowing these people to come in — people that don’t speak our language — they are signing them up to vote.  And I believe that’s why you are having millions of people pour into our country and it could very well affect the next election. That’s why they are doing it.”

—-Which is a load of equine byproduct.

Rebecca Beitsch and Rafael Bernal, writing for The Hill political newsletter in Washington, talked to people who easily refute Speaker Johnson’s claim that “it’s not something that is easily provable. We don’t have the numbers.”  Johnson could have talked to the same people, but who needs facts when your politically-shaped intuition can be used to malign a big segment of our population and the opposing party as well?

The Hill reporters went to Senior Counsel Eliza Sweren-Becker with the Brennan Center for Justice’s Voting Rights & Elections Program. “We actually do have the numbers, and we know that noncitizens don’t vote illegally in detectable numbers, let alone in large numbers,” she told them.  The Center has data from 42 jurisdictions. The study showed only 30 SUSPECTED BUT NOT CONFIRMED noncitizen votes in the 2016 General Election. There were 23.5 million votes cast in those jurisdictions, 0.0001 (one ten-thousandth) of a percent of the votes cast.

There are those who will dismiss these findings because they come from a center named for Supreme Court Associate Justice William Brennan, considered part of the court’s liberal wing during his 34 years on the court.

So they asked one of the experts at the Libertarian Cato Institute, who called Johnson’s intuition one of the “most frequent and less serious criticisms” about migration.

President Janet Murguia of UnidosUS, the biggest Latino civil rights organization in the United States, says Johnson’s intuition “doesn’t count for anything—doesn’t mean a lick” because Johnson admittedly has no proof.

“Many of our organizations have scoured for any signs of voting that has been irregular or done by folks who are not qualified. There just hasn’t been any evidence. So he can have intuition all he wants, but that does not mean it’s true. It does not mean there is evidence, and it does not mean it’s factual.”  She challenged Johnson and his friends to produce specifics and data.

The Chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, Nanette Diaz Barragan accuses Johnson of finding “another way…to appease the crazies on the right because he’s on the chopping block right now and he’s got to do something to feed them some red bait.”

Johnson’s proposed law would force voters to show they are citizens of the United States to get a ballot. One of the drafters of the questionably-necessary bill, Texas Congressman Chip Roy, maintains, “the most fundamental thing you can do to destroy the rule of law and to destroy our republic is to undermine faith in our elections.” He says a system to guarantee that only citizens vote in federal elections is needed despite the 1996 law doing exactly that.

Documents such as birth certificates, passports, or naturalization papers would fill that bill, but the Brennan Center has found 5-7% of Americans—millions of people—do not have what Sweren-Becker calls “the most common types of documents used to prove citizenship.”

Murguia says conservative organizations have been looking into this issue for sometime, especially voting by undocumented people, and, “they just can’t report any great number, if any at all.”

The conservative Heritage Foundation has numbers Johnson could have gathered if he wasn’t so busy listening to his intuition. The Foundation’s records dating back about forty years show only about fifty cases of voting by noncitizens, which includes visa holders or legal permanent residents, not just people here illegally.

Politifact, a political fact-checking site run by the Poynter Institute, a journalism research organization, got no response from the Trump campaign when it asked the campaign to justify his Iowa claim about Democrats loading the voter rolls with illegal immigrants.

But it, too, has numbers that Johnson doesn’t seem to think exist as well as some examples where authorities actually recruited noncitizens to register to vote. In Colorado, for instance, the Secretary of State before than 2022 midterm elections, sent postcards to about 30,000 drivers license holders encouraging them to register before learning they were non-citizens. He had to send an “oops” postcard to all of them and then worked with county clerks to make sure nobody in that group did try to register.

South Carolina federal prosecutors in 2020 charged 19 people with casting ballots they were not entitled to cast in the 2016 election.  Three cases were dismissed and sixteen people pleaded guilty.  Sixteen people out of more than 4.5 million who voted legally.

And in Georgia, one of the ex-president’s least-favorite people, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said two years ago that investigators had found all of 1,634 non-citizens had tried to register to vote during the last TWENTY-FIVE YEARS.

The Hill notes that then-Governor Rick Scott of Florida announced before the 2014 midterms that 180,000 foreign nationals were going to be purged from the voter rolls. That number was reduced to only 2,600. Then it was cut to 198.  Finally, only 85 names were eliminated. And how many prosecutions were there?   One.

One, out of the 180,000 that Scott claimed were problems. That person was Josef Sever, who faced as much as five years in prison for falsely claiming to be a citizen, or as much as one year if he cast a ballot. Convictions also can result in deportation and might preclude any later opportunities for citizenship. Sever got five months in prison, a light sentence because the judge knew Sever was going to be deported.

Forget facts.  Forget that there really are numbers that Johnson claims don’t exist. Forget that we’ve had a federal law on this subject for 38 years. Forget that we heard this one-note song from our former President and his cronies eight years ago when he claimed he would have won the popular vote were it not for three-million votes cast by illegal immigrants (not one of which apparently voted for him).

It was a bogus claim then. It’s a bogus piece of intuition now. But Johnson and other Trump sycophants are going to beat this dead horse as much as they can because our former president wants them to do it.

When Johnson and others start spouting about the need to protect voting integrity, an important question to ask is, “from whom?”

Fake Law, Part One of a Series

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(In this week before the primary election, we are reluctantly embarking on a series of daily observations of campaigns and campaign non-issues that do little to enhance public confidence in the process. We are sorry to be as pessimistic as we might seem. Perhaps the survivors of the primaries will be more responsible in their general election campaigns.

The situation seems to us be so dire that we will not have our regular Tuesday visit with the toy department of journalism—sports.)

FAKE LAW

It makes good headlines.

But it’s a fake issue.

It rallies the core.

But it’s a fake issue.

It paints a false portrait.

And it’s a fake issue.

It misleads voters.

Because it’s a fake issue.

It makes people think there’s a big problem.

But there isn’t.

It tries to capitalize on fear.

But it’s a lie.

And it’s one of the reasons Democrats in the Missouri Senate staged a record-setting filibuster in the last week of a legislative session that was characterized by filibusters from a small group of Republicans who have tried to run the chamber.

The legislation involved was a proposal making it harder to amend the state constitution. A bipartisan vote shut down debate and sent the bill to a committee that would work on compromises that might let it move forward in the last two days of the session.

The fact that Republicans and Democrats did something together put the Senate’s problem children into a tizzy.  Freedom Caucus ringleader Bill Eigel, who apparently thinks one has to disagree disagreeably to succeed in today’s politics, warned Senate colleagues that the caucus would object to any compromises that changes what the FC demands.

And what the FC demanded was passage of a bill that would become partly fake law.

If you’re keeping score, this is the proposal that says no change can be made in the state constitution, even if the statewide vote approves the change, unless voters in five of our eight congressional districts approve.  It’s a Republican effort to keep the heavy Democratic vote from the metro areas, and the Columbia area, from offsetting the conservative outstate votes.

It also contains “fake law” provisions prohibiting non-citizens from voting on constitutional amendments—-something already forbidden by Missouri and federal law.

But it sounds good in an election year.  Democrats kept the bill from going to a final Senate vote, complaining the language was included just to deceive voters. Eigel said those characterizations were “completely unfair” and the measure presented “a great opportunity” to keep non-citizens from voting.

—Except the ban already is on the books.

Democrats in the Senate, with Republican leaders refusing to take parliamentary action to shut down debate, chewed up three of the precious last five days of the session in a filibuster that lasted 51-plus hours.                    .

The demagoguery on this issue is going to be with us through November, regardless of any legislative action because MAGA Republicans, in particular, want to use it to beat Democrats—i.e. Joe Biden—over the head on immigration issues.

A few days ago in Washington, House Speaker Mike Johnson unveiled the proposed Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act. Don’t be surprised if a House committee decides to “investigate,” giving majority members of the committee opportunities to condemn the actions or inactions of the administration to keep illegal immigrants from voting.

Another new committee, in the Missouri House, is going to investigate crime by illegal immigrants, another opportunity to make sure the issue’s political value is not wasted before the election. It has been expanded to include crimes AGAINST immigrants, a fair thing to consider.

We’ve all watched this kind of political circus on other topics.

And that’s what this harping on immigrant voting is.  Political circus.

What it is NOT is an issue. We’ll tell you why in our next entry.

Decision 

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(Originally this entry was called “Discussion” because it addressed—when written last week—that President Biden might decide to pull out of the presidential race.  I didn’t post it because I was going to be out of town through the weekend and didn’t want the comments outdated before they were posted.  We’ve done some editing to account for the decision yesterday that President Biden would withdraw from the race and endorse Vice President Harris to for President.

Rather quickly the public dialogue about the Democratic ticket for November seems to have reached an important stage.

The matter of President Biden’s mental and physical health has become secondary to the DISCUSSION about his mental and physical health.

We are pretty sure that some sophisticated polling is being done about whether TALK is robbing the Democratic Presidential Campaign of its ability to focus on issues.

Republicans are no doubt relishing the distraction because they are talking about their issues, their ticket clearly assembled and aggressively spreading the GOP word regardless of its truth.  Nothing internal is stopping the Trump bandwagon at this point, certainly not Democrats.

The Democrats are limited in talking about their issues because they have one issue right now and it’s a giant one and it is completely internal. The public, including THEIR public, has nowhere to go.

(Events have rendered the original paragraph’s speculation about whether the party would go with Vice-President Harris. That speculation has been fully answered as we revise this. Now back to the original narrative.)

Who should be her running mate?  She’s about 60, about average for a President.  But an aggressive running mate in the 40s would send an interesting message to many voters who have not been entertained by two geezers calling each other liars.

Plus a running mate in the 40s could dilute whatever advantage among young voters that the Republicans have by running someone who is 39 as their Veep.

(There was some historical stuff in the original post about presidents who had decided not to seek another term but we will hold those until later.)

As we drove home from Indianapolis last night and early this morning, we spent some of that time listening to the coverage on the satellite channels for CNN, MSNBC, and FOX News.  While CNN and MSNBC had their talking heads discussing possible Harris VP choices and understanding what’s next for the Democratic Part, FOX already was Full Doberman in attacking Harris.

And we thought in those long, dark miles (we got home at 2:30 this morning) about how the complexion of this contest has suddenly changed.

Now, the old man with questionable mental health is the Republican candidate.  The shoe is on the other foot and the GOP is stuck with it.

The outlook for Democrats has changed dramatically and all of the sudden they, and Kamala Harris, have control of the spotlight and they’re suddenly gifted with a convention that can have an impact far greater than they had expected.

The immigrant issue now has a new dimension because the presumptive Democrat nominee is from a state that has been dealing with Mexican immigrants for almost 400 years, since Juan Cabrillo led an expedition into the area in 1542.  AND Harris’ mother is an immigrant from India and her father is an immigrant from Jamaica.

She would be a formidable debate opponent for Donald Trump who has given her a derogatory nickname.  But he’ll need something more than a nickname for her when he meets her on a debate stage. You can be guaranteed that a Trump-Harris debate would not degenerate into a discussion of golf scores. One does not become a federal prosecutor and then the Attorney General of California without some sharp edges.  By now, he should have some appreciation for the skills of prosecutors.

President Biden’s decision within hours awoke the sleeping Democratic Giant and now it is Mr. Trump and the Republicans who should be nervous.

And finally, this occurred early this morning.

This race will offer widely contrasting issues of character—-and when all else fails for the undecideds who might make the fractional difference in the polls and at the polling places, character might be the deciding factor.

Contrast President Biden’s response to the attempted assassination of Mr. Trump.  He called Trump, referring to him in public remarks as “Donald,” not making any dismissive and derogatory comments but only expressing sympathy and respect.

Then consider Mr. Trump’s response to the Biden withdrawal: “Crooked Joe Biden was not fit to run for President and is certainly not fit to serve—And never was!”  And he ranted on from there, showing once again a distinct lack of character.

And white nationalists who have made Mr. Trump their totem have been presented with a real quandary—The daughter of a Hindu woman born in India and a Jamaican husband, and who is married to a Jew and attends a black Baptist Church in San Francisco now look at Mr. Trump’s chosen running mate, J. D. Vance and they have a fit about Vance’s wife, Usha, who was born in India. Podcaster Nick Fuentes asked, “Do we really expect that the guy who has an Indian wife and named their kid Vivek is going to support white identity?”

Trump supporter and J6 veteran James Foxx, has complained, “JD Vance gets tapped as VP and immediately there’s a Hindu prayer at the RNC. Next we’ll see Sen. Mike Lee and JD Vance team up to convince Trump to let in 10 million Indian immigrants. Green cards on diplomas!”

A few days ago we had a competition between a couple of old coots who were about as exciting as a nursing home checkers game.  And all of the sudden, a new head nurse has roared into the parking lot in her Corvette.

Things are about to change.

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Hawley’s Christian Nation: Would You Want to Live in it?

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Our Senior Senator recently (July 11) proclaimed at the National Conservatism Conference that we live in a Christian nation:

Some will say now that I am calling America a Christian nation. And so I am. And some will say I am advocating Christian nationalism. And so I do. Is there any other kind worth having? …It has been our moral center and supplied our most cherished ideals. Just think: Those stern Puritans…gave us limited government and liberty of conscience and popular sovereignty.

Because of our Christian heritage, we protect the liberty of all to worship according to conscience. Because of our Christian tradition, we welcome people of all races and ethnic backgrounds to join a nation constituted by common loves.

Hawley claimed that Aurelius Augustinus Hipponensis, better known to us as St. Augustine, originated the idea of Christian Nationalism, “a nationalism driven not by conquest but by common love; a nation made not for the rich or for the strong, but for the ‘poor in spirit,’ the common man.”

He went on to proclaim this country was defined by Augustine’s vision—the dignity of the common man, as given to us in the Christian religion; a nation held together by the homely affections articulated in the Christian faith—love for God, love for family, love for neighbor, home, and country.”

Christian nationalism is not a threat to democracy, he claimed. In fact, it founded American democracy. “It is..the most just, the most free, the most humane and praiseworthy,” he said.

Hawley has called for the recovery of “the principles of our Christian political tradition…for the sake of our future.”

He charged “the modern left” with wanting to “destroy our common bonds and replace them with another faith, to dissolve the nation as we know it, and remake it in our image. This has been their project for 50 years and more.”

Let’s take a closer look at Hawley’s demagoguery—the appeal to, as one definition tells us, “the desires and prejudices of ordinary people rather than using rational argument.”

Note that he claimed our Christian heritage protects “the liberty of all to worship according to conscience” and leads us to “welcome people of all races and ethnic backgrounds to join our nation constituted by common loves.”

Is that the kind of Christian heritage that has motivated his close buddy, Donald Trump, to try to ban Muslims from this country and to threaten mass deportations of a scope never before seen?

Shame on “the modern left” for plotting to “dissolve the nation as we know it?”  Is he saying the “modern left” wants to make this a Muslim country?

Is Trump’s “beautiful wall” welcoming “people of all races and ethnic backgrounds” to come here?  Are his wildly untrue claims that all of the people crossing the Rio Grande are escaped mental patients, fentanyl smugglers, rapists and killers an example of “welcoming people of all races and ethnic backgrounds” to become Americans, a “nation constituted by common loves?”

Let’s take a somewhat long journey to see just how much Hawley or anybody else would like to live in the so-called Christian nation that he claims we were founded to be. He is, after all, correct in maintaining that we have drifted away from that era.

As well we should have.

History teaches us that the New Testament admonition that one should love one’s neighbor as one loves oneself was not a foundation of those pious founders.  Perhaps the most unloved people were—-

Baptists.

Professor Thomas Kidd from Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary says Baptists “were the most likely ‘well meaning’ Christians to be thrown in jail on the eve of the American Revolution.”

Our Pilgrim and Puritan founders believed in freedom of THEIR religion—and woe be unto anybody who did not embrace their interpretation of the Anglican faith such as Baptists who insisted immersion baptism was the biblical way to do it. But the Anglicans held that baptism was for  infants and, says Kidd, waiting until a person was old enough to understand the ordinance of baptism amounted to child abuse.

Baptists also refused to attend Anglican services. They refused to pay taxes to support churches.  Their preachers refused to get licenses from the government. And they wouldn’t stay put. They circulated their heretical beliefs and practices by having preachers traveling throughout the colonies performing baptisms in creeks, rivers, and lakes.

In Massachusetts, the cradle for the birth of our “Christian nation,” a law was passed in 1645 calling Baptists “the incendiaries of commonwealths” and accused them of being “the troublers of churches in all places.”

In 1651, one Obadiah Holmes was sentenced to receive thirty lashes for proselytizing among the Baptists. He told  the whipping officer, “I am now come to be baptized in affliction by your hands, that so I may have further fellowship with my Lord, and am not ashamed of his suffering, for by his stripes am I healed.” Afterward he smiled at his critics and said he had been struck “as with roses.”  Kidd’s telling of the story does not include the reaction of the Christians who ordered him whipped.

One reason James Madison wanted freedom of religion in the Constitution was because he had seen this oppression of Baptists firsthand. He wrote a friend in 1774 to complain of the “diabolical Hell conceived principle of persecution” that had landed “not less than 5 or 6 well meaning men in [jail] for publishing their religious sentiments.”  He urged his friend to “pray for liberty of conscience to revive among us.”

Quakers were enemies of the state, too.  Several missionaries were kicked out of the colony in the years after the Holmes whipping and told not to return.  Three did go back.  The Massachusetts Christians hanged them.

And THIS is the Christian heritage that Hawley says we should revere as one that protects “the liberty of all to worship according to conscience?”

The most famous exclusions from Massachusetts are Roger Williams and his wife Mary and Anne Hutchinson.  The Williamses were charged with sedition and heresy. In addition to circulating his public differences with the Church of England, Williams also publicly condemned the King’s charters for the Massachusetts colony and argued the Plymouth settlers had no right to take land from the Native Americans.

As for Anne Hutchinson—probably this country’s first “Uppity Woman”—she not only questioned the traditional Puritan teachings and sermons, but also held study groups of other women to discuss those differences at a time when women were to be silent and obedient to their husbands. AND her meetings became so popular that she began holding them for men, one of whom was the governor of the colony. In 1637, a provincial court convicted her—without saying specifically of what—and banished her.

The Williamses and Anne Hutchinson were among the founders of the Colony of Rhode Island and of Providence Plantation. Williams ruled the colony would not have any state religion and all who lived there would be free to practice their beliefs.

One of those Williams had corresponded with was William Penn, a Quaker who had been expelled from the Church of England and was later imprisoned in England for advocating religious pluralism, He protested against mistreatment of Quakers in Massachusetts and when King Charles II decided o pay off a debt to Penn’s father, Sir William Penn, by granting a charter to an area in the new World he called “Pennsylvania, Sir William’s son decided to create a “tolerance settlement” where persecuted Christians could take refuge. Although there was no established church, the colony’s 1776 Constitution required all government representatives to swear, “I do believe in one God, the creator and governor of the universe, the rewarder of the good and punisher of the wicked. And I do acknowledge the Scriptures of the Old and New Testament to be given by Divine inspiration.” .

Baptist historian and pastor Isaac Backus, who lived through some of those times, recalled that when Baptists in Sturbridge, Massachusetts refused to pay taxes to support the Congregationalist Church, they were imprisoned for tax evasion. One of them was Backus’s mother in 1752.  Four years before that, says contemporary Baptist historian William Lloyd Allen, “a Congregational minister convinced authorities to clear Baptist homes of cookware, tools, spinning wheels and even livestock used to make livings, among other valuable goods.”

When Backus went to the Massachusetts delegation to the 1775 Continental Congress—at a time when the phrase “no taxation without representation” was being shouted—his complaint that state church taxes on Baptists, none other than John Adams responded that Baptists “might as well expect a change in the solar system as to expect they would give up their establishment.”

In 1617, the Governor of the Virginia Colony decreed, “Every Person should go to church, Sundays and Holidays, or lye Neck and Heels that night, and be a Slave to the Colony the following Week; for the second Offence, he should be a Slave for a Month, and for the Third, a Year and a Day.”

More than thirty Baptist preachers were jailed in Virginia in the decade before Madison and Jefferson forged Virginia’s Bill for Establishing Religious Liberty in 1786 a few years before Madison’s religion clause was added to the Bill of Rights.

But state-supported religion hung around well after that. The 14th Amendment left any religious requirements for voting or holding office moot.  New Hampshire in 1875 and North Carolina in 1877 were the last states to actually remove such references from their state constitutions.

New York was “intolerantly Protestant,” as one source puts it. The Dutch Reformed Church was the established church in New Amsterdam until the English seized control in 1664. They continued the Dutch Reform policy. The 1683 New York Charter of Liberties and Privileges vowed to “guard against that spiritual oppression and intolerance wherewith the bigotry and ambition of weak and wicked priests and princes have sourced mankind,” a seeming reference to English opposition to the Catholic faith.

Maryland’s 1632 charter professed, “It is the duty of every man to worship God in such manner as he thinks most acceptable to him, and all persons professing the Christian religion, are equally entitled to protection of their religious liberty…” But the legislature had the power to “lay a general and equal tax for the support of the Christian religion.”

Mayland had begun as the only predominantly Catholic colony. Adelaide Mena wrote for the National Catholic Register that the first English Catholics fleeing persecution in England arrived in Maryland on March 25, 1684 and held the first Mass in the British colonies. Maryland passed a Toleration Act in 1649, she says, marking “the beginning of a framework of religious freedom.”

Delaware had no official religion in its 1637 Charter issued to the South Company of Sweden.

Connecticut’s1630 charter established the Congregational Church was the “onely and principall end of this plantation.”

South Carolina’s 1778 Constitution not only declared, “The Christian Protestant religion shall be deemed, and is hereby constituted and declared to be, the established religion of this State.” It also required any group wanting to form a church to meet five criteria:  That there is one eternal God, and a future state of rewards and punishments;  That God is publicly to be worshipped. That the Christian religion is the true religion; That the holy scriptures of the Old and New Testaments are of divine inspiration, and are the rule of faith and practice; That it is lawful and the duty of every man being thereunto called by those that govern, to bear witness to the truth.”

New Jersey, in its 1776 constitution, provided that ‘No Protestant inhabitant of this Colony shall be denied the enjoyment of any civil right, merely on account of his religious principles.”

Note that several of the charters specifically referred to the Protestant religion.

Catholics were a different matter.

The Georgia charter of 1732 simply banned Catholics from the colony, proclaiming, “There shall be a liberty of conscience allowed in the worship of God, to all persons inhabiting, or which shall inhabit or be resident within our said provinces and that all such persons, except papists, shall have a free exercise of their religion…”

The Georgia Historical Society says early Georgians, concerned that Spanish Florida bordered the colony, feared Catholic settlers would be Spanish sympathizers if Spain and Britain went to war.

Georgia Trustees also didn’t want Jews, but circumstances forced the issue. When summer heat and sicknesses that came with it left 60 of Savannah’s colonists in fear of their lives—with the town’s only doctor also sick—the arrival of a ship full of Jews that included Dr. Samuel Nunez, saved the day.  Nunez accepted no pay as he nursed all sixty ailing Georgians back to health. Colony founder James Oglethorpe saw that the colony’s charter allowing religious freedom for all non-Catholics meant the Jews, not being Catholics, could stay and more could settle. The nation’s third oldest Jewish congregation is in Georgia.

We have not even scratched the surface of our colonial history when we were a “Christian Nation,” as Hawley and his associates incorrectly maintain, hoping that public ignorance of our history—which these folks want to make national policy—will let them establish their theocracy.

We doubt that Hawley would want to live in the nation that he thinks we need to return to.  Of course, if he’s the Presbyterian Puritan Elder it would probably be okay with him.

Our “Christian” founders punished Baptists, Quakers, Jews, and Catholics.  They thought slavery was fine and saw fit to banish non-adherents to some other place—in their day, it was to Rhode Island.

And they also relied on the Doctrine of Discovery, which proclaimed the right of Christian nations to take possession of lands held by non-Christians. The doctrine was enacted in the 15th century, the last one after Columbus’s discoveries in the new world. Non-Christians were not considered legitimate possessors of the lands and the European discoverers were authorized to take them in order to Christianize the heathens and save their souls, thus clearing the way for Europeans to seize Native American lands, by force if necessary, a policy that produced what some call our Native American genocide.

Ironically, the doctrine used by our Christian forbears had been proclaimed by Popes whose later followers were not considered Christians by Hawley’s Christian founders.

Even today, there are those who still maintain that Catholics are not Christian—you can ask the person whose pickup truck I saw a few years ago that had “Catholics are not Christians” painted on the tailgate.  We will leave it to others to determine if there is any significance in the fact that it has been 64 years since the election of our first, and so far, only Catholic President, and the election of our first black President still has some on Hawley’s side of our politics still arguing he wasn’t (and I guess, therefore is still not) an American.

And good gracious, our southern border is a sieve that is allowing thousands of people from Catholic countries in central and South America to flood into our Christian nation where they are—as the Republican nominee for President has put it—“poisoning the blood of our country.”

We are reminded of a small orange card in the massive collections at the Smithsonian in Washington from an organization  that claimed about 1930 to be “a religious movement of American Brotherhood.”  It says it stands for “a dozen “tenents of  the Christian Religion.”

—The Upholding of the Constitution of the United States

—The Separation of Church and State

—Freedom of Speech and Press

—Closer Relationship of Pure Americanism.

—Much needed local reform.

—Closer Relationships between American Capital and American Labor

—Limitation on Foreign Immigration

—The Upholding of our States Rights

—Prevention of fires and Destruction of Property by Lawless Elements

—Preventing the Causes of Mob Violence and Lynchings

—Preventing Unwarranted Strikes  by Foreign Labor Agitators.

—Protection of Our Pure Womanhood

And the top tenant of the Christian Religion:

—White Supremacy.

The title on the card reads, “The Creed of the Ku Klux Klan.”

Christian Nationalism boiled down to a 3×5 orange card.

We must be careful whose definition of “Christian” we are told is best for us. We must be skeptical of those who twist history and religion to seek power over us.  We cannot protect our freedoms if we are comfortable being ignorant of our past—and there are those who ARE comfortable relying on that ignorance.  In fact, they are counting on it to achieve their goals.

The Bible teaches us that the greatest quality we can have is love of others as of ourselves. Those who proclaim that hate and fear of others while proclaiming to know the true definition of Christianity must be challenged.

Senator Hawley is only 400 years behind the times. Our country has been there and it wasn’t good enough to go back to. He can go ahead by himself. We’re going to stay behind, happy that our church is next to a Baptist Church and we got along fine.  We love our Catholic neighbor. And we fear Josh Hawley more than any of the Hispanic folks we meet on the street.

For They Have Sown the Wind 

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We have come within an inch—honestly, an inch—of a terrible tragedy for our country. The attempted assassination of Donald Trump has brought solemn calls for reducing the toxic level of political discourse.

On the other hand, there is not-unexpected finger pointing that indicates those calls will be ignored soon.

Junior Trump said right afterward, “He will never stop fighting to save America, no matter what the radical left throws at him.”  House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, whose life was almost ended by an attack on a congressional baseball practice, said on FOX News that fears that a Trump victory in November would be a threat to America were “incendiary rhetoric” that could encourage “one person who is just unhinged to hear that and…think that’s the signal to go take somebody out.” He called on candidates to “focus on the issues that people care about.”

(“Unhinged” is the word we’ve heard most frequently applied to Trump’s speeches.)

The Daily Caller conservative website blamed “Liberal Media” for downplaying the assassination attempt at first. Columnist Harold Hutchinson accused “multiple corporate media outlets” of not reporting shots had been fired at the Trump campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania—as if reporters on the scene should have filed comprehensive stories about the incident when the first shot was fired.

(FYI:  He could have said the same thing about FOX News but conveniently didn’t. The first report on FOX news referred to “some kind of disturbance” and about a minute and a half after the shots were fired the anchor said, “This is happening quickly; we are trying to ascertain what’s happened.”)

Hutchinson and Florida Senator Marco Rubio placed media-bashing at the top of their priority list by urging readers to think reporters on the scene should know the entire story before the last shot was fired—before it was understood that the noises had, in fact, been gunfire, not fireworks.

Hutchinson noted NBC’s post on X, “Secret Service rushes Trump off stage after popping noises heard at his Pennsylvania rally,” and a Los Angeles Times posting, “Trump whisked off stage in Pennsylvania after loud noises rang through the crowd.”

Florida Senator Marco Rubio took CNN to task when it posted on X, “JUST IN: Donald Trump is rushed offstage by Secret Service during a campaign rally in Pennsylvania. Follow live updates.”  He wrote on his own X account, “Really? No mention of the attempt to kill him?”  And when CNN said, “Secret Service rushes Trump off stage after he falls at rally,’ Rubio wrote, “Even in a horrifying moment such as this they just can’t help themselves.”

No, it was Marco Rubio who just couldn’t help HIMself.

Reporters on the scene, in fact, knew no more than any other observer—and there were hundreds of those, many of whom talked about the instant confusion of the moment.

The reporters reported at that instant what they KNEW.  A few chaotic seconds later, updates went out—the Secret Service had covered Trump; Trump had blood on his ear; the “pop-pop-pop” was gunfire and some people in the audience had been hit; Trump was up and being escorted to a vehicle and hustled off-site.

Bill Goodykoontz, the media critic for the Arizona Republic, commented later in the day, “Cable and broadcast outlets covered the news in remarkably similar ways…they both covered it well and, for the most part, they covered in responsibly.”

“What was perhaps even more impressive was what journalists didn’t do — they didn’t jump to conclusions, whether about exactly what happened, about Trump’s condition or about motives. Being first is important in breaking news, but not as important as being right, and most networks hewed to that Saturday.”

He also said, “Neither CNN nor Fox News jumped to irresponsible conclusions. In fact, they didn’t even call it a shooting until that could be confirmed, in a show of near-miraculous restraint.”

Fox wouldn’t put up with former Congressman Jason Chaffetz when he went off on a rant: “They tried to incarcerate him; they’ve now had an assassination attempt on the president. The temperature in this country, we all need to take a deep breath. But at the same time, you know what this country we have got to make sure that we can have free fair elections.”

Goodykoontz commented, “Whether by coincidence or wise decision-making, the network drowned him out with a replay of the incident.  Good.”

Ohio Senator J. D. Vance, reportedly on Trump’s short list as a running mate, went on X and said President Biden’s rhetoric “led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination,” a totally irresponsible allegation at a time when the shooter’s name was not known and, as we write this, his motivations are unknown.

Samantha Vinograd, a former Assistant Secretary for Counterterrorism, Threat Prevention, and Law Enforcement Policy in the Homeland Security Department told CBS’s Margaret Brennan, “It is frankly unpatriotic at this moment to be stoking the flames when we know that we are sitting on a cauldron of tensions. … The counter-terrorism officials and homeland security officials that I’ve spoken to in the last few hours are deeply concerned that this event will be used as a rallying cry to launch attacks against individuals associated with the Biden campaign and lead to broader domestic distress.”

George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley, who has been an analyst on diverse media outlets, wrote for The Hill, “The assassination attempt of former President Donald Trump left a nation stunned. But the most shocking aspect was that it was not nearly as surprising as it should have been. For months, politicians, the press and pundits have escalated reckless rhetoric in this campaign on both sides.”  He called it “rage rhetoric” in castigating both the right and the left

“Rage is addictive and contagious. It is also liberating. It allows people a sense of license to take actions that would ordinarily be viewed as repulsive. As soon as Trump was elected, unhinged rage became the norm,” he said.

He spends most of his article criticizing the Left for its rhetoric, suggesting it is not reported on with the same emphasis the press gives to Trump rhetoric.  He concludes, “We have come full circle to where we began as a Republic. In the 1800 election, Federalists and Jeffersonians engaged in similar rage rhetoric.

“Federalists told citizens that, if Jefferson were elected, “Murder, robbery, rape, adultery, and incest will be openly taught and practiced, the air will be rent with the cries of the distressed, the soil will be soaked with blood, and the nation black with crimes.”

“Jeffersonians warned that, if Adams were reelected, “chains, dungeons, transportation, and perhaps the gibbet” awaited citizens and they “would instantaneously be put to death…”

“In our current age of rage, politicians have sought to use the same anger and fear to rally support at any cost. This is the cost.”

He makes an excellent set of points that support the immediate post-shooting suggestions that it is time to tone down the rhetoric.  The question now is—who goes first?

Some readers will see the following comments as indicating a bias.  It might be so.  But as we watched the events unfold, and as we were grateful that Mr. Trump escaped with his life, we nonetheless were aware that he is the one who calls people by derogatory names, who has ridiculed in some of his speeches a disabled person, who has shown disrespect to judges and the judicial system, who continues to spout outright lies on numerous fronts, who encouraged followers to show up in Washington on January 6, 2021 with the promise that “it will be wild,” who did nothing to reduce the violence later at the Capitol by so-called “innocent tourists,” who to this day censures his own Vice-President because Mike Pence followed the Constitution, and who maintains that he, himself, is above the law—

And, God help us, we could not avoid thinking of two verses from the Bible:

Paul’s letter to the Galatians, a congregation in present Turkey, in which we find, “Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he reap.”

Or an earlier observation from the Old Testament prophet Hosea: “For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind.”

Mr. Trump is not alone fulfilling these warnings but he is the most vocal representative of them.

Let us watch him as well as the people who oppose him to see if this terrible brush with tragedy really changes anything.   Or whether it’s just more post-near-apocalyptic talk.

 

The 28th Amendment

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The United States Supreme Court’s ruling on presidential immunity has scared the bejesus out of  a lot of people on both sides of the aisle because it grants Presidents immunity from prosecution for official acts but leaves the President liable for his unofficial acts. The ruling puts the first determination of what’s official and what is not into the hands of judges hearing cases accusing former President Trump of making illegal efforts to change the outcome of the 2020 election and of taking classified documents with him when he left office—among other alleged sins. Any decisions by the judges can be appealed to the Supreme Court, further delaying any final disposition of the cases.

There are some things we haven’t heard discussed much that might backfire on Trump.

Some think the ruling means that this entire issue will dog Trump’s campaign for weeks. The public discussion of what he did or didn’t do could continue, if not increase, the uncertainty about whether his party and his voters will elect a President who also is a jailbird or, under a reasonable person’s concept of proper behavior, should be one.

Presidential liability will be awfully hard to describe but right off, the amendment should provide that no President can pardon himself for any crimes, official or unofficial.

It should begin with this concept:

The President of the United States, constitutionally, must be born in this country or an area that is considered part of the United States (overseas military bases, for example).  The President, therefore is, first of all, a citizen of a country often described as “a country of laws, not of kings.”  To suggest that a citizen elevated by fellow citizens to the most important office in the land has been given powers by those citizens that go beyond the law governing all citizens except for himself or herself is absurd.

Period.

We are wondering if the nation’s top legal scholars are starting to coalesce into a working group that will draft an amendment clearly stating that a President can be held criminally liable, even for official acts. The concern that a president could legally order the assassination of a rival, while seeming extreme, is a real concern, given Trump’s boasting.

But what about a President allowing water boarding?  Dropping atomic bombs on cities?  Freeing slaves in rebelling states?  Ordering Japanese-Americans into concentration camps without due process? Closing banks in bad economic times?  Sending federal troops to cities?

Think back to historic presidential actions—-the evacuation of Native Americans from their homelands in the east and forcing them to walk to hostile land in future Oklahoma.

Buying the entire Louisiana Territory and financing it with money borrowed from a hostile country (England) without authorization from Congress.

Congressman Joe Morelle of New Jersey, the ranking Democrat on the House Administration Committee, announced the day before Independence Day that he will introduce a proposed 28th Amendment “to reverse the Supreme Court’s catastrophic decision and ensure no president is above the law. This amendment will do what they failed to do—prioritize our democracy,” He continued in a statement from his office, “The Supreme Court decision will cause a seismic shift in the powers of the presidency unless we take immediate action to ensure accountability, integrity, and justice prevail.”

He sent a letter to his colleagues saying, “This amendment will do what SCOTUS failed to do—prioritize our democracy,” urging his colleagues “to stand with me on the front line to protect our democracy.”

“Immediate action,” unfortunately, is unlikely and perhaps unlikely in the hyper-partisan Congress. The House and the Senate both must approve the resolution with two-thirds votes.  If that occurs, three-fourths of the states, 38, will have to ratify the amendment before it is added to the Constitution.  The process could take years, far more years than Donald Trump will serve if he is re-elected. But the danger Congressman Morelle sees flowing from Trump is real and it is imminent and there is precedent.

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What Trump did and said after the death five years ago of George Floyd prompted the Chicago Council of Lawyers to speak out. It’s a little long but it’s important reading in today’s climate.

The United States is a Nation Ruled by Laws, Not Kings

The Rule of Law, not the rule of kings, is a founding principle of our country. It remains a core principle that defines who we are as Americans. It allows each of us to walk down a public street without fear of being grabbed, without cause, by government police and thrown into an unmarked van. It allows us to have a peaceful potluck with friends without fear that a government official will use violence against us just for getting together. It allows us to speak our mind against government policies, without worrying that those with power will use our speech as a reason to harm us…  

The Rule of Law in the United States does not begin with the President. It does not begin with any political party. It begins with Our Constitution…The President isn’t at the top. The Constitution is…

The original Constitution is mainly about one thing: power. The Constitution’s structure for our government is borne from the core principle that a single individual should not hold all power.  It divides power between three branches of government, and it further divides power between the federal government and the States, whose laws are also subject and subordinate to the Constitution…

The U.S. Supreme Court has always ruled that none of the Bill of Rights, not even the First Amendment, is unlimited. But these Court decisions recognize that the limits on our individual rights must be constructed with care and exercised in a narrow and judicious manner. In 1969, for example, the U.S. Supreme Court (Shuttlesworth v. Birmingham) held, in protecting an American citizen’s right to protest and also allowing for certain limited restrictions, that any licensing requirement for “free expression in publicly owned places” is unconstitutional if it’s not narrowly defined and objectively applied.

The Constitution, again seeking to limit federal authority, provides that each state is empowered to establish and enforce laws protecting the welfare, safety, and health of the public within its state. The power of states is reflected in the fact that most criminal law is state law; most police forces are state police forces, not federal. While there is some federal criminal law, in comparison to state criminal laws, it is narrow and constrained.  There is no federal law giving a President the right to direct federal officers to occupy a city or a state or to dominate any part of a state, on his own accord, without an invitation from a state government that is seeking help.

Federal law gives federal authorities the right to conduct some actions within states, but these authorized acts are targeted and constrained. Federal agents are authorized to protect federal properties. Federal agents are authorized to enforce federal criminal laws, such as kidnapping, bank robbery, criminal conspiracy, human trafficking, mail fraud, and other specific laws. This all fits within our established system of laws.  These laws are all tailored to fit within the bounds of our Constitution.

Federal Officers are Doing Precisely What the Constitution Prohibits

Is the President following these laws? Is he abiding his oath to serve the Constitution? What are federal officers in Portland doing? As summarized on July 17 by Charlie Warzel, an opinion writer at large for The New York Times:

Thursday night [July 16] marked the 50th consecutive night of demonstrations in Portland, Ore. The protests began after the killing of George Floyd—tens of thousands of people took to the streets to protest police violence and racial injustice. Since then, the protests have grown smaller, but clashes between law enforcement officers and protesters have escalated—on July 12, videos circulated of a federal officer shooting a protester in the head with a nonlethal munition, resulting in a skull fracture. Coverage of the unrest has caught the attention of President Trump, who vowed to ‘dominate’ the protesters with federal law enforcement officers.

 The New York Times reported the story of Christopher David, a former Navy Civil Engineering Corps Officer and a 1988 graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy:

“I wasn’t even paying attention to the protests at all until the feds came in,” Mr. David said. “When that video came out of those two unmarked guys in camouflage abducting people and putting them in minivans, that’s when I became aware.”

He had taken a bus to the Portland courthouse and was about to leave around 10:45 p.m. when federal officers emerged and began advancing on the protesters. He said he felt the need to ask the officers, Why were they violating their oath to the Constitution?

Instead of getting an answer on Saturday, Mr. David, a 6-foot-2, 280-pound former Navy varsity wrestler, found himself being beaten with a baton by a federal officer dressed in camouflage fatigues as another doused him with pepper spray, according to video of the encounter.

 As Mr. David noted, one widely circulated video from Portland shows a group of men in camouflage military-like uniforms emerging from a van that one might see in anywhere USA, grabbing a protester walking alone on the sidewalk, not on or next to federal property, forcing him into the van without telling him who they were or why they grabbed him, and driving away.  Another video shows federal police using tear gas and flash bangs on a single line of about two dozen mothers linked arm-to-arm, wearing bike helmets, and chanting “moms are here, Feds stay clear.”

Every Oregon official that might have authority to request help from federal officers has pleaded for the federal agents to leave. Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler told NBC News that the presence of federal agents was making things worse: “…They’re not wanted here. We haven’t asked them here. In fact, we want them to leave.” Oregon Governor Kate Brown asked the President directly to withdraw these agents from her state. The Washington Post reported on July 17 that the Governor said: “I told him that the federal government should remove federal officers from our streets. I said it’s like adding gasoline to a fire.” The Post also reported that Governor Brown is convinced that “‘they are not interested in problem solving,’ and this has ‘nothing to do with public safety.’”

Oregon Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum has sued to prohibit these federal agents from making further arrests and continuing to violate the Constitutional rights of protesters and those detained. “I think every American needs to be concerned about what’s happening here in Portland. These federal agencies are operating with no transparency and against the will of just about every leader in our state,” said Rosenblum.

Federal officials claim that federal law gives their agents the authority to do what they are doing, regardless of whether proper state authorities request their presence. These claims are specious, at best. It is not even a close call…

The federal agents are not limiting their targets to the specific individuals violating federal law by damaging federal property.  They are not using their authority narrowly, when they use their weapons against mothers standing in a line chanting or when they strike and pepper spray a U.S. Navy veteran who is trying to talk with them. These federal officers are not judiciously using their authority when they grab a man walking alone on the street and take him by force into an unmarked van and drive him away to an undisclosed location – all without any probable cause or identifying themselves as federal officers.

Whatever the reason, the federal officers are making the streets of Portland more lawless, not less. These federal officers are openly and egregiously violating the rights of peaceful, law-abiding mothers, veterans, and other Americans, rather than protecting them. These federal officers are jeopardizing the safety of local law enforcement, not bolstering it…

Trump is now Primed to Attack the Rule of Law in Chicago

The President now appears to be targeting Chicago, just as he has targeted Portland – but this time, the President is not even offering the guise of protecting federal property as the reason.  The Chicago Tribune reported on July 20 that the “U.S. Department of Homeland Security is crafting plans to deploy about 150 federal agents to Chicago this week.” The paper reports that the Department has not disclosed its plan for the additional agents, and that even the Superintendent of the Chicago Police does not know why this administration is sending additional federal law enforcement.

The President has talked as recently as July 20 about sending in troops to fix the local violence problem in Chicago. It is undeniable that parts of Chicago do have a serious gun violence problem that needs to be fixed. Reasonable people have asked whether more government policing would help; other reasonable people have asked whether it might help to do policing in another way. Whatever the solution or solutions might be, the President has no legal authority —without a request from legally authorized Illinois officials—to move federal officers to Chicago for the purpose of confronting local crime issues.  Neither Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot nor Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker have requested additional federal officers for that purpose.

There have been ongoing peaceful protests on issues of anti-Black racial injustice in our town, but there has been little-to-no reported property damage from the recent demonstrations.  Further, and more to the point, we are not aware of a single report of any damage to federal properties from the recent protests…Yet, Trump has recently grouped Portland with Chicago and other American cities, such as Detroit, Philadelphia, and New York, as places of “anarchy.” For Chicago, and we expect for the other named cities too, this is less true than saying that a naked emperor is wearing the most beautiful clothes ever made from satin and silk. Chicago is dealing with modern American problems, to be sure, which now include COVID-19 – but Chicago is not a place where anarchy reigns…

Our system starts with the Rule of Law, not the rule of a king or an emperor or even a President.

President Trump and the leaders of the officers in his administration apparently have no shame. The Trump administration started to use federal agents dressed in military gear to attack peaceful, law-abiding citizens in Portland. Now, it is moving federal officers into Chicago to possibly do the same thing in our city; it is threatening to deploy more federal officers in other cities throughout America…Whatever federal agents are now doing in Portland, we do know one thing about their actions: they are not doing them in the name of the law.

Many people fear the United States Supreme Court has blown a hole in the Constitution and has given Donald Trump Carte Blanche to do anything that he wishes to do in carrying out his stated vengeance campaign.

It is beyond urgent that this hole in the Constitution be closed. It is time to create Donald Trump’s legacy—-which he will not want—-by enacting a 28th Amendment to protect all of us from someone who believes he is greater than the country he seeks to rule.

 

The Difference 

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Tomorrow is Independence Day, the day the Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence. Only two people definitely signed it that day, The President of the Congress, John Hancock, and Secretary Charles Thompson.   Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and John Adams claimed they signed it then, too, but historians have disagreed for decades on whether they did and when the other signers added their signatures.

The course of human events had made it necessary to dissolve the political bands that had linked the colonies with Great Britain.

What of the people from whom we separated?  Are they different from us after almost 250 years?

We recently spent two weeks sharing streets, buildings, restaurants, and other places with them, people differing from us only in accent, the side of the road on which they drive, and dogs.

The people of the United Kingdom do love their dogs and they take them everywhere. It’s a rare restaurant that has a sign we are familiar with: “Service dogs only.”   We saw one sign that told us we could buy vegan ice cream for our dog inside.  One of our hotels had a kiosk with a dog menu.

We loved our exploration of their country.  We enjoyed meeting the many people we met. Our guides were incredible.  Every citizen was friendly and courteous and proud to show us things or explain things—-as we would be for those from England who visit our country. They, like us, are free people.  But our definitions of freedom are a little bit different—-which is why our country got its divorce in 1776.

But few citizens of this country likely would want to trade places with those good folks as far as government is concerned and as far as the citizen’s voice is heard in government.

Much of our system of government and laws is based on the centuries-old policies born in England starting with King John I’s acceptance of demands by several of his Barons at Runnymede in June, 1215 in the Magna Carta. The document placed the King and all the Sovereigns who have come after him within the rule of law, a concept we are arguing in this country more than 800 years later.

The document remains a symbol of freedom from government oppression. It’s philosophy was brought to our shores with the early English settlers and was a precedent for the Declaration of Independence.

But our founders took the concepts far beyond the Magna Carta, and we were surprised by how hard our differences in approach to rule hit home with us during our visits to two places within the last month.

This is the Tower of London:

And this is Edinburgh Castle in Scotland:

What is inside these two structures says much about our differing national concepts of government.

The Tower of London, among other things, is the home of The Crown Jewels.  Edinburgh Castle houses the much smaller Honours of Scotland, that country’s crown jewels that date from the days before Scotland became part of the United Kingdom. When a new monarch is coronated, these items are ceremonially donned to symbolize the monarchy’s rule over all of the UK.

We would like to show you pictures of this collection; it’s overwhelming. But photography is not allowed in the darkened rooms where spotlights illuminate the sparkling and glowing treasured regalia that is kept behind enclosures. Visitors can purchase a $10 guidebook, however.  Although it devotes fourteen of its eighty pages just to the various crowns in the collection, it cannot carry the impact of walking into dark rooms with illuminated display cases filled with large sparkling items of gold and jewels.

The guidebook to the collection at the Tower of London tells visitors:

Kings of England had a crown for everyday use, and the coronation crown that was worn rarey but was the ultimate symbol of their sacred and regal authority. The crowns were accompanied by other symbols of power: a sceptre indicating control over the realm and royal rights; a rod representing the responsibility to protect the people; a decorated sword for military strength; and an orb; a globe representing the world with a cross on top symbolizing Christ’s power over all creation

The Crown Jewels include more than 23,000 gemstones and more than 100 objects. The value of the collection is placed as much as six BILLION dollars, although officially they are considered priceless. One diamond, the Cullinan, has an estimated value of $430 million

The collection says everything about the difference between our system of government and the English system of government.

These jewel-encrusted items are symbols intended to make it clear that power is separate from and far above the people, and that it is blessed by an official national church. Only three people are permitted to handle these treasurers—the King, the Royal Jewler, and the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Contrast those museums with a museum in this country that shows us the symbols of OUR system. We have one room displaying, not jewels but a few pages of paper:

—Four pieces of paper in particular.

The National Archives Museum in Washington, D. C. has rules about cameras, too.  Take them in.  Use them. Photograph the Declaration, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights.  Don’t use flash or other supplemental lighting, selfie sticks, monopods or similar equipment. But otherwise, snap away.

If you want real detailed images of the documents, you can download free scans of them, buy facsimiles in the museum store or online, or download closeups of the documents and other features in the rotunda. You can have the symbols of our government in your own home or your office. You don’t have to go hundreds of miles, get tickets, and stand in lines to see them. They belong to YOU. You do not belong to them.

The words of the documents describe the gulf between this country and the home country we left in 1776:

“When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands….”

“We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union…..”

“The Conventions of a number of the States, having at the time of their adopting the Constitution, expressed a desire, in order to prevent misconstruction or abuse of its powers, that further declaratory and restrictive clauses should be added: and as extending the ground of public confidence in government, will best ensure the beneficent ends of its institution.”  

In darkened tight rooms of ancient buildings in London and Edinburgh are housed symbols that display the power of government OVER the people who are not allowed to even take photographs of those symbols

In the bright, light-filled rotunda of a public building in our country are the documents that describe the power of the PEOPLE over government.

We, the people of the United States, elect a President and two houses of a Congress that represents us. The people of the United Kingdom have little voice in picking those who will rule them.

The Constitutional Monarchy that is the United Kingdom considers the King, an inherited position, the head of state although not the head of government. Political decisions have been left to the government and Parliament since the Magna Carta but the people’s involvement is relatively minimal.

The top officer in the political system is the Prime Minister, who is not elected by the people. By tradition, the PM is a member of Parliament answerable to the House of Commons. The King has “Royal Prerogative powers” that include the power to appoint and dismiss the Prime Minister. However, it is customary that the Sovereign (King or Queen) appoints someone from the majority party in the House of Commons.

And the way those representatives of the people are elected seems by comparison to our elections to minimize the power of the voter.

The 650 members of the House of Commons are elected from districts in a “first past the post” system of voting that pits all candidates together regardless of party with the candidate getting the plurality, not necessarily the majority, winning the position.  The “first past the post” concept is likened to a horse race finish in a multiple horse field. Members of the House of Commons are called MPs, Members of Parliament.

The members of the House of Lords are not elected.  They are appointed and serve for life. The custom of people serving by inheritance was ended in 1999 but Lordships are determined by in-house elections. There is no fixed number of members and not all who are members are allowed to attend proceedings.  Last year there were 261 Conservative Party Lords, 185 Crossbench Lords, and 174 Labour Party members.  A year earlier, the total was 798 but only 755 could take part in the proceedings. As many as 26 members are bishops or archbishops of the national church.  The people have no voice in selecting members of the House of Lords..

We describe all of this, as far as we are capable of understanding it, given our background in our own form of government, to point out how distinctly different things are for us, and to underline how those dark rooms filled with billions of dollars of jewelry symbolize power that does NOT flow from the people but clearly reminds the people how superior the government is over them, how separate government power is from the consent of the governed.

Those rooms remind us that government of, by, and for the people is a concept that was stated in Philadelphia by traitor radicals who knew the personal danger they faced. Many have died to protect that traitorous system. Many have died in the country’s uniforms as well as in civilian attire on battlefields and in city streets to protect and expand that concept for everyone.

We left those darkened rooms in England and Scotland with even greater appreciation for being a citizen of a country that trusts the people to define governmental power. In doing so we are not criticizing the system that the people of our Mother Country have; we are only pointing out the differences with which both we Americans and our British cousins are comfortable having.

On this Independence Day, we need to ponder the power—and especially in this year the responsibility—we have to determine the kind of government we will allow and the kind of people we will choose to operate it on OUR behalf, not on THEIR behalf.

Symbolically, we are facing a choice between going to a dark place or staying in a place of light, of retaining the power of government that serves the people or giving it up to those who seek power to serve themselves.

We the people are the crown jewels of this country.

And this country is the crown jewel of freedom for the rest of the world.

Never, ever, forget that.

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