Kill the Legislative Filibuster?

By Todd Lassa

Before last November’s election, Joseph R. Biden punted on the question of whether he supports killing the Senate legislative filibuster. It’s a move Senate Democrats have been considering at least since it won a majority by the slimmest of margins, with Vice President Harris the tie-breaker for when legislation is split down party lines

The issue is not the first priority with Senate Democrats, who are moving President Biden’s $1.9-trillion coronavirus relief package via the arcane reconciliation process, which requires a simple majority vote rather than the 60 votes – including 10 Republican senators – necessary when the potential of a filibuster is involved.

The question is, how much legislation can Biden’s Democratic allies in the Senate pass in the next two years without eliminating the legislative filibuster, which means most bills will require those 10 Republican votes? After January 2023, Democrats either will lose their wafer-thin Senate majority, or will build on it, though it is unlikely either party will gain at least 10 senators in the November 8, 2022 mid-terms.

Filibuster reformation seems to come up every four years with the presidential election, if not every two years.

In 2013, then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-NV, rallied Democrats to end the filibuster for federal judicial nominees and executive office appointments. Spiking the filibuster, called “the nuclear option,” requires only a simple majority vote.

Republicans warned that triggering the nuclear option on appointing federal judges would come back to bite Democrats whenever they inevitably lost the Senate majority.

And they were right. In 2017, then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-KY, led a majority of his party to end the judicial filibuster for U.S. Supreme Court nominees, paving the way for President Trump’s nomination of Neil Gorsuch as replacement for the late Justice Antonin Scalia. Adding hard-core partisanship to injury, Gorsuch’s Senate approval came the year after McConnell prevented a vote on Obama’s nominee late in his term to replace Scalia, Merrick Garland, who now is Biden’s nominee for attorney general.

In the end, Trump saw his three Supreme Court associate justice nominees get Senate approval in his four years in office, compared with Obama’s two associate justices in eight years.

The question for Democratic senators now is, how much more of Biden’s agenda could the Senate pass in the next 23 months if just 51 votes were needed? And would it be worth weathering the inevitable Senate and White House flip somewhere off in the future?

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Click on Forum for a new commentary by Stephen Macaulay
Email editors@thehustings.news with reader comments.

Not Carthage, But Important

By Stephen Macaulay

On January 26, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) tweeted, "I made clear that if Democrats ever attack the key Senate rules, it would drain the consent and comity out of the institution. A scorched-earth Senate would hardly be able to function."

He was talking about the filibuster. The Senate cloture rule calls for a supermajority, or 60 votes, to cut off debate. The Democrats, who hold a simple majority, would prefer that is all that is required to end debate; odds are, with Vice President Harris as president of the Senate, they would end all debate on subjects and get right to the voting, which they would again, as bill passage depends on a simple majority, come away as victors.

While “scorched-earth” may be a bit of an exaggeration — after all, we’re not talking the Third Punic War here and the salting of the ground upon which Carthage once stood — but a point of trying to uphold what the Senate should be about: being a deliberative body (it would be hard to put “greatest” in front of that term). To deliberate means to debate. To debate, when done properly, means to have an exchange of ideas, of opposing viewpoints.

In one regard it is somewhat ironic that I open with a tweet from McConnell in that it seems too many political issues are now being dealt with in 280 characters, rather than with an open, fulsome, spirited debate.

The Senate structure, as you know, is one where each state has equal representation. (The House, of course, has a structure predicated on population.) The point of the way the Senate is put together is to protect, in effect, the minority, meaning that California and New York can’t step on Wyoming and Vermont.

The Senate cloture rule does the same thing by requiring that there be two thirds, not one half, of the body in agreement that debate ends.

Of course, there’s the question of whether this is too high a bar, if getting cloture is some sort of impossibility. Perhaps that was once the case (or Senators just tended to be more loquacious back in the proverbial day) because from 1917 to 1968 cloture was invoked just eight times.

In 2019-2020 it was invoked 270 times (a record).

There is a feeling that we “must get things done.” A bunch of droning Senators doesn’t seem to be the way that can or will happen.

But McConnell does have a point, with the point being that before important things get done there needs to be sufficient support — by both sides — for its execution to have the positive effects anticipated by its existence.

To simply have a situation that says, in effect, “OK. We’ve had enough. Go back to your desk and put your head down,” isn’t going to be particularly beneficial.

This is not to argue that McConnell is an exemplary politician. He has proven himself over the years to be more of a tactician, a man who makes moves to benefit his, and his party’s, interests.

But there is something to be said for the ability of the minority to be heard in a fulsome manner.

And McConnell ought to know that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) is far from being Cato.

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Click on Forum for new commentary by Stephen Macaulay

Our Left Columnists Want to See a Third Party

Spoiler Alert

By Stephen Macaulay

There is something that we seem to like about binaries. For example, Coke/Pepsi. McDonalds/Burger King. Republicans/Democrats. Take your pick.

But reality isn’t like that. Or at least reality is no longer like that.

Take Coke/Pepsi. While they are admittedly number-one and number-two in the carbonated beverage market, realize that Coca-Cola, which has plenty more than Classic Coke in its portfolio, has about 44% of that market and Pepsi (ditto, number of beverages-wise) is back at about 24%. Keurig Dr. Pepper is third, at 18%, so the delta between it and Pepsi is far closer than Pepsi and Coke, and arguably all three have viability in the carbonated beverage space.

Then there’s McDonald’s and Burger King. In 2019 McDonald’s had sales of some $40.4-billion. Burger King was back at $10.3-billion. And leaving out Starbucks, which is actually number two in the fast-food market, it turns out that Chick-fil-A outsold Burger King, with sales of $11-billion.

And there are plenty more examples. Remember when in mass market audio it was Sony vs. Panasonic? Not only did the Apple iPod put the Walkman out of existence, but now the iPod is nearly extinct.

Or “American” luxury cars were either Cadillac or Lincoln. In that case one could argue that Acura is actually a U.S. brand, as that is where its models are sold and most of them made. In 2020 Lincoln sold 105,410 vehicles, Cadillac 129,495 and Acura 136,983.

The whole notion that there could be a third political party seems to be one thought of only in the context of being a spoiler. Well, Acura is certainly spoiling the sales of Cadillac and Lincoln and seems like the cow on billboards that encourage people to “Eat Mor Chikin” has done its job.

It is fairly clear that there is no longer the “brand loyalty” that once seemed to exist. So the notion that there are just two parties that matter* is a vestige that could be going away—sooner, rather than later.

And arguably, should be.

*Yes, there are more, like Libertarian, Green and Natural Law, but they lack the visibility and voice of the Republicans and Democrats. For now.

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Republicans Should Tell Us Who They Really Are

By Jim McCraw

The United States of America has a history littered with the remains of short-term, single-issue and reform political parties. It is part of who we are and what we do politically. War. Segregation. Income tax. Prohibition. Whigs. Bull Moose. Know-Nothings. Greens. Peace. Ross Perot.

Now we are faced with more new opportunities, and I think that is a very good thing. If there are enough real honest-to-God Republicans out there who, after sober reflection, have decided that Donald John Trump was a very bad idea for America and for the future of their party, then it is perhaps time to unite or reunite behind the image and the philosophy of Abraham Lincoln, the sixteenth President of the United States. This would be the new party of the real Republicans.

I think it is high time that the real Republicans come out of the dark and murky shadows created by the self-aggrandizing, power-crazy Trumplicans like Mitch McConnell, Ted Cruz, Lindsay Graham, Josh Hawley and the new kid on the block, Marjorie Taylor Greene. Even McConnell despises her.

They should tell us who they are and what they believe as 21^st Century Republicans, so the Democratic Party can fight them fair and square on real issues, not nonsense like stolen elections and Jewish space lasers. It’s time the old people, the crazies, and the Nazis were shown the door in favor of younger, saner, true Republicans. Democrats will beat them either way, but new blood would be a lot more fun to beat than these old, tired, wacky powermongers.

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Third Party Blind?

By Todd Lassa

If there was any chance that the January 6 insurrection on Capitol Hill by a pro-Trump mob would clarify the future of the Republican Party, such hopes have been smashed against the temporary gates erected around the Capitol since the inauguration.

After the attacks, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-CA, at first said the soon-to-be-ex-president “bears responsibility for the attack on Congress by mob rioters.”

But in late January, McCarthy flew to the Office of the Former President at Florida’s Mar-a-Lago, where Trump promised to stump for GOP candidates in the 2022 midterms who have been loyal toward him and help mount primary campaigns against those who have not.

Some Republican leaders are threatening impeachment of Liz Cheney, R-WY, for her January 13 vote in favor of Trump’s second impeachment. And while Democrats on Wednesday threatened removal from her committee assignments of controversial freshman Rep. Marjorie Taylor-Greene, R-GA, after Republicans declined to do so themselves, Republicans have countered by threatening to strip Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-MN, of her committee assignments because of “past inflammatory statements,” Fox News reports. Greene, who has been associated with QAnon and with social media threats against “The Squad,” including Omar, Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-NY, and Rashida Tlaib, D-MI as well as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, told Fox News last August that she has “moved on” from QAnon, the cable news outlet reports.

And so it goes.

Both sides of the GOP schism can count early victories in fundraising, Politico reports. Trump’s new leadership PAC, Save America, had raised $31.2 million by the end of 2020. Trump can’t use the cash to support any future campaign of his own, but he can use it to influence 2022 midterm campaigns, according to Politico. Meanwhile, the political news site says, Defending Democracy Together, which includes the groups, Republicans for the Rule of Law and Republican Voters Against Trump, has a $50-million ‘war chest’ for GOP incumbents to fight off primary challengers.

As we approach the week of the former impeachment trial in the Senate, the Lincoln Project has introduced billboards calling on Sens. Ted Cruz, R-TX, and Josh Hawley, R-MO, for supporting Trump in his call for the Senate to reject the Electoral College vote favoring Biden. While Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell told fellow Republicans he would not “whip” them to vote against convicting Trump of “incitement to insurrection,” he voted with the majority of his party against proceeding with the trial.

Just five Republicans voted with 50 Democrats in favor of proceeding with the trial, and a week later, 10 Republicans met with Biden at the White House to discuss a compromise on competing coronavirus relief bills. There is scant chance Democrats will convince 17 Republicans to reach the 2/3 majority needed for conviction, thus eliminating the prospects of following up with a separate, simple majority vote to bar Trump from running for any federal office again.

Which brings us full-circle to the question of the future of the GOP. The Lincoln Project, founded in 2016 by a group of traditional Republican “Never-Trumpers” are complemented by such online publications as The Dispatch, and The Bulwark, the latter a website founded by former editors at intellectual conservative icon William F. Buckley, Jr.’s National Review after it pivoted toward Trump early in his administration.

What happens to Defending Democracy Together, Republicans for the Rule of Law, Republican Voters Against Trump and the Lincoln Project if Trump maintains his stranglehold on the modern GOP? If “traditional” Republicans like McConnell find they can’t give up their fealty to Trump, where do such Republicans as Rep. Cheney go?

The answer, and the underlying implication of the formation of these groups, is a third party, spearheaded by those groups. This would be a bloodbath for two right-leaning parties, of course, potentially handing the Democrats a good deal of power in the next four years. Ex-President Trump has intimated he’d take his followers and launch a Patriot party, if he had to, but lately, that doesn’t seem necessary. As of this writing, it’s the never-Trump organizations that will have to break off into a new party.

For this debate post, The Hustings asked right-columnists Andrew Boyd and Bryan Williams, pundit-at-large Stephen Macaulay and left-columnist Jim McCraw to weigh in on whether, say, a “Lincoln Party” might be good for modern conservatism, and for the country.

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Please email comments to editors@thehustings.news

Our Right Columnists Do Not

Dedicated to the GOP, Not Any Single Candidate

By Bryan Williams

I voted for President Trump in 2020. I don't regret that vote - still. I have thought a lot about re-registering as "No Party Preference" here in California, rebuking the party I have called a home since I was 18. I stopped and thought further: There are Republicans I haven't voted for since 2012 for one reason or another. In their respective race, I just didn't vote.

I cannot bring myself to vote for a Democratic candidate because of what they stand for. I have voted for Democrats in "non-partisan" races (local city council, etc.), but that's about it.
What about splitting the GOP into two, the MAGA-loving Trumpsters or a "Lincoln Party" comprised of Never-Trumpers? I have a problem with that too.

See, I'm not a Never Trumper. I voted for him. I liked a lot of what he did. But his obvious character flaws and the events of January 6 changed my views of Trump. So again, I was let down by a person. I wasn't let down by the Republican Party or it's ideals. I imagine you can ask many Catholics how they feel about their church leaders versus what their religion stands for.

I haven't voted for several Republicans in my local elections since 2012 because I don't like them as individual persons. I still believe in Republicanism. And there are lots out there who do too -- Liz Cheney and Mitt Romney to name a few.

So no, for now I won't be joining a "Lincoln Party," or a break-away party of any other name. I am not a MAGA-Trumpster. I am not a Never-Trumper. I am a Republican.

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Chosing Conservatism Over Party

By Andrew Boyd

Every day we make decisions whose first skew is pragmatic or principled. With respect to the grifters that make up the leadership of the Lincoln Project, pragmatism wins every time. On the other, more populist, less swampy and, I’d argue, principled side of the conservative movement are those such as me, who believe the Republican establishment has long since decoupled itself from anything resembling classic conservatism, perhaps not in word but most certainly in deed.

These two factions define the ends of a spectrum that constitutes the fight for the soul of the Republican party. Having said that, I’m not one who subscribes to the notion that political parties, in the pragmatic sense, have any soul at all. That’s why I am more inclined to think of myself as a conservative than a Republican. One is a principle, the other – well, as they say, every great idea starts as a cause, becomes a business and ends up a racket.

When precisely our national political system entered into the racket phase, I’m hard pressed to pinpoint, but we’re in it for sure. There is a deep and abiding cynicism in the body politic, arguably more so on the left than on the right, because as conservatives, we’re more predisposed toward suspicion of all power centers, regardless of ideology, understanding they all tilt toward tyranny. The left, in principal, seems to me to have nothing left to offer but cheap virtue signaling, manufactured outrage, and the diminishing returns of intersectional politics. And based on the news of late, it’s every bit as on-board with crony capitalism as is the right.

Into the fray rises the notion of a third party arising from one or the other side of the conservative spectrum. There are monied interests on both sides, and insofar as a Patriot party is concerned, I completely understand the inclination, as it resides within me. On principle, I’d love to stick it to the man, to say “see, you don’t own my vote, Mitch McConnell, you, swampy old toad!” But pragmatically, we’re a two-party affair. You dance with the one that brung you. There’s no pitching around it, so far as I can see. Any conservative, on either side of the divide, who throws his or her weight behind a third-party movement has essentially decided to take that principal and light it on fire just to watch the damned thing burn, and that’s just nihilism.

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Minority Party Holds on to Power with the Electoral College

By Chase Wheaton

The Electoral College is a relic. A fossil of sorts. An outdated artifact that belongs in history books, only, and an archaic remnant of our original democracy, where the only light came from candles and news was delivered by horse-drawn carriage. And it’s about time we update our presidential election process to be aligned with the 21^st century needs of our country and its citizens.

The original reason for the Electoral College’s existence is not relevant anymore. In the late 18^th century, when the Electoral College was created, it was uncommon for the average American to be fully literate, and the means of communication that existed were much slower and more limited, making it exponentially more difficult for that common citizen to be informed and educated about the candidates running for president. Therefore, our founders deemed it appropriate to establish the Electoral College as a group of upper-class elites that were meant to use their education and knowledge to vote for who they thought to be the most qualified candidate for office. In fact, originally in presidential elections, Americans voted for an elector who was then free to debate, discuss, and vote for whichever presidential candidate they felt was most qualified for office, and it wasn’t until many decades later that Americans were able to vote directly for the presidential candidate of their choice, who then still needed to be formally voted for by the electors of that state. In the 21^st century, however, with national news media, 24/7 access to information through television, social media, and the Internet, and our current education system, it’s absurd to believe this system still has a place in modern-day democracy.

If the history behind it doesn’t convince you, mathematically speaking, the Electoral College simply isn’t fair, and it does away entirely with the principle of “one person, one vote.” Take Wyoming, California, Florida and Texas for example. By doing some quick math with populations and numbers of electoral votes, you’ll find the ratio of people per electoral vote for each state, and you’ll see quite the disparity. Wyoming, for example, gets one electoral vote for every 192,920 people, but California gets one for every 718,182 people, Florida gets one for every 740,690 people, and Texas gets one for every 763,157 people. That means that one person in Wyoming has 3.7 times more voting power than someone in California, 3.8 times more voting power than someone in Florida, and 4 times more voting power than someone in Texas. The numbers don’t lie, and these numbers show us that the Electoral College diminishes the voices of Americans that live in more populous states during presidential elections, while unfairly amplifying the voices of those living in less populated states.

Facts and history aside, even public opinion supports abolishing the Electoral College. A Gallup poll released in September 2020 shows that 61% of Americans support amending the Constitution to abolish the Electoral College and instead use the national popular vote to determine the winners of our presidential elections. Unfortunately, if you dive deeper into the results of this poll, you’ll see a deeply partisan divide that spells out a longer future for the Electoral College than most Americans would seemingly like. While an overwhelming 89% of Democrats wish to abolish the Electoral College, only 23% of Republicans would like to do the same, and sadly, the reason for that couldn’t be clearer. If we abolished the Electoral College and used the national popular vote to select our president and vice president, the current GOP would never again win another presidential election unless they realigned their values and beliefs to be more representative of those of modern-day America.

So, unless we expect the GOP to relinquish its hold on American politics in favor of progress (which seems as likely as fish learning to fly), we can expect to continue seeing the Electoral College rear its ugly head every four years. Still, we eventually transitioned from candlelight and horse-drawn-carriage to light bulbs and cars, so in time, I believe we’ll see the progress that Americans want.

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Click on “Forum” to read Stephen Macaulay’s commentary on former President Trump’s ethics policy.

The Lessons of Electoral Reform: Becoming President Should be Hard

By Nic Woods

It seems the Electoral College has no friends these days.

Whether on the left (miffed as popular vote winners have not always become president) or the right (who seem to have forgotten that this system allows them to punch well above their weight, power-wise) everyone seems to want to dump the Electoral College into the garbage and set it on fire, including members of the Electoral College themselves.

Not so fast.

The Electoral College is misunderstood, mostly because we still put so much weight on what the framers of the U.S. Constitution originally intended, but not enough weight on what those framers would not have possibly understood.

Whatever the framers intended, it may not necessarily extend to, say, electric vehicles, as even Ben Franklin had not so much as envisioned horseless carriages or enough available electricity to juice up an electric vehicle, much less a fleet of them.

They may have been brilliant men for their time, but their imaginations were limited to what they knew, so they created systems that could be changed to reflect a future they could not envision.

Americans tend to conveniently forget that.

The Constitution can be, and has been, changed. It is difficult, but not impossible. The parts of the Constitution that address the Electoral College has been changed a couple times – once with the ratification of the 12^th Amendment in 1804, and one other time since, as any book with the actual Constitution in it strikes out part of that amendment.

The first step here is to admit that the Electoral College, as envisioned and even as amended, may still be outdated. Much of the assumptions embedded into it no longer hold true – that suffrage is limited to white male landowners, there are no political parties, that the redistricting process is not gamed by one party or the other to benefit it, that only the best men run for office, and they must rely on regional publishers to promote them, as self-promotion is too gauche.

Despite all that, the Electoral College has only failed to reflect the popular vote four times in our history – 1876, 1888, 2000 and 2016 – a pretty good track record for an outdated concept.

Valid arguments say there is no reason to throw it out completely, but there are plenty reasons to drag it into the 21^st Century and make changes that reflect near-universal suffrage and gerrymandering, as well as offset greater partisanship, a national but hyper partisan media landscape, misinformation and disinformation.

While the Electoral College needs to be reformed, most of us do not understand enough about it to know where to start. The next step could point toward raising the bar to become president just a bit higher.

Any Electoral College reform should encourage a candidate to work for every vote, whether it is from an urbanite, suburbanite, or exurbanite, from a swing state or a state that solidly votes for one party or another. This would require states to eliminate gerrymandering. To date, 32 states already have “faithless elector” laws (15 of them with the teeth to punish) that prevent their electors from going off-script. The U.S. Supreme Court has declared these faithless elector laws constitutional, they should be easy to spread to the remaining 18 states.

Alexander Hamilton, in The Federalist Papers, advocated for a “vigorous” executive. One way to figure out how vigorous a future president will be is to support a system that will make him work to earn his office.

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Sources:
“Meet the Electoral College’s Biggest Critics: Some of the Electors Themselves” — The New York Times, July 6, 2020
“Supreme Court Rules State ‘Faithless Elector’ Laws Constitutional” — NPR, July 6, 2020
The U.S. Constitution Explained – Clause by Clause – for Every American Today, Annotated by Ray Raphael
The Constitution of the United States of America
The Federalist Papers No. 68
Heather Cox Richardson’s History & Politics Chat, July 7, 2020
“Beau of the Fifth Column” Let’s Talk about the electoral college, power and Jules Verne

Kill the Electoral College, but Caution with Other Voting Reforms

By Andrew Boyd

The present zeitgeist would seem to insist I tie this discussion of the Electoral College (EC) to the recent and ongoing fervor surrounding the Game Stop short squeeze and subsequent misbehavior of retail stock merchants like Robinhood that we might uncover at the behest of their governmental and institutional overlords, a.k.a the Sheriff of Nottingham (yes, AOC and Cruz, you’re right, we need hearings).

Indeed, the tale of Robinhood speaks to the metanarrative of our time: The struggle between institutional elites and the little guy. The Framers of our Constitution were, in the context of a tyrannical British Empire, the little guys, trying to bind together a fragile union of merry men with competing visions for the future of a nascent republic. Their answer to this challenge involved imperfect compromises, including the establishment of the EC.

The EC and other proposed solutions, including a president chosen by Congress, were also a reflection of their deep distrust of the mob, and associated concerns that unalloyed democracy would lead to mob rule. These men, it could be argued, were elites in their own right, holders of power and property with a real distrust of the capacities of the common man to make wise and informed decisions, held in check, theoretically, by the power of “faithless” electors, which isn’t really a thing any longer.

Lots of stuff has changed, including many things the Framers couldn’t foresee, like the dissemination of information via the internet -- the democratization of knowledge as it were -- or the attempts at oligarchical control of same by an elitist cadre of tech bros whose motivations, I fear, aren’t so much political as they are avaricious.

Just like the Framers, we, as a people, need to contend with the issues of our times with careful regard for how we reconstitute our union in order to preserve its essential and foundational constructs – individual freedom (rights) and individual accountability (responsibility to one another constituted in a law equally applied).

Down to it, then: what to make of the EC in the context of our times? On a mathematical level, the EC would seem to confer outsized power to some individuals based on their geographic location. For example, the 2016 U.S. census estimates California has 26.65 million voting-age citizens, while Nevada had 1.41 million. Dividing those voting age populations by the number of electoral votes in each state (35 and 6, respectively) states yields 716,000 (voting age people/EC vote) for California and 235,000 for Nevada. So, a Nevadan has more than three times the voting power of a Californian. That doesn’t strike me as particularly democratic.

It’s often argued that the EC exists in part to preserve the rights of the minority, which would be the thing you place on the other side of the scale. But is geography, in our age, a reasonable stand-in for minority interests? At a gut level, I don’t see it.

Am I thrilled at the possibility that abolishing the EC will lead to hegemony Democratic power, or that it will subject me to the whims of coastal elitist or worse yet, global bureaucratic, overlords? Hardly. But we stand on principal, or we stand on nothing, and principles built to achieve a desired outcome are not principles at all. On that basis, I can’t honestly mount a defense for the EC.

What I will beg and plead for my more left-leaning but still classically liberal friends to consider is whether the current trajectory of streamlining voting processes, including mass mail-in balloting and increasingly lacking security measures, might be a more pressing danger to the preservation of our republic.

I’ll state emphatically here how abhorrent I found the events in the Capitol on January 6. But the dissolution of clear, common-sense and consistently observed rules and standards for the election of a president is, I fear, the ground in which the more generalized sense of disenfranchisement now grows.

We all have within us some essential sense of what’s fair and what’s not, which is at the heart of this as well as the Game Stop saga and all the great human stories across all human existence. If winning is all, and if the rules of the game can be shaped altogether according to the desires of the victor, the inevitable outcome is a growing resentment and, ultimately, unwillingness to play the game. Proceed with all due caution.

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Click on “Forum” to read Stephen Macaulay’s commentary on former President Trump’s ethics policy.

Laws, Not Men

By Stephen Macaulay

The hand-wringing has been going on since, oh, about January 7, after Congressional Republicans, by and large, started thinking about their personal paychecks, which could be, they fear, taken away by Trump’s base. And so we begin to see the mewing about how the Trial of Donald Trump, the Sequel, will do nothing but tear the fabric of society still further.

Speaking of fabrics: that brings to mind the American flag. You know, that symbol of this country that was used by one of the insurrectionists at the Capitol on January 6 to beat a prone police officer.

MAGA, huh?

This country is predicated on principles. There is codification in the Constitution.

To paraphrase John Adams, this is a country of laws, not men.

And to quote someone who is probably more well recognized, “Don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time.”

Did the man who said, on more than one occasion, “"I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn't lose any voters, okay? It's, like, incredible," ever believe that he wasn’t above the law?

But he isn’t.

Like all presidents Trump swore to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

Article II, Section One, of the Constitution is about the Executive Branch. In it, it states, “The Congress may determine the Time of choosing the Electors, and the Day on which they shall give their Votes; which Day shall be the same throughout the United States.”

That day was January 6. The Congress was doing its Constitutional duty.

And Trump, who had been claiming for months — even before the election was held —that it would be fraudulent, claims with not a scintilla of proof before or after, wasn’t having any of it.

Article II, Section One, also states, “The Person having the greatest Number of Votes shall be the President, if such Number be a Majority of the whole Number of Electors appointed.”

So let’s see: Biden had the greatest number of popular votes. Biden had the greatest number of electoral votes.

Constitutionally he won the election.

So to go against that, didn’t Trump not “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution”?

(Let’s not enter into some hypothetical where an election could be rigged and the wrong person wrongfully elected. Again, we are a country of laws, and so were there to be evidence that that happened, then it would be addressed. Rudy Giuliani waving his arms is not proof of anything.)

According to the Fourteenth Amendment, Section 3, “No Person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.” (Emphasis added)

Clearly there was an “insurrection or rebellion” against the Constitution of the United States on January 6, given that the elected representatives were in the Capitol performing their Constitutional duties.

Trump, having whipped up the crowd on January 6, told the assembled that “After this, we’re going to walk down and I’ll be there with you.” That is walk down to the Capitol. He, of course, lied.

So they walked down. They broke into the Capitol. Some claimed that they were going to hang the Vice President of the United States.

And Trump said in a tweet (before his ability to tweet was rescinded due to his vague association with what most of us know as “truth”) to the throngs who were doing things like urinating and rubbing feces on the walls of the Capitol, “We love you, you’re very special.”

Sounds like “aid or comfort” to me.

Let’s not count the number of Republican senators who may vote to convict Trump.

Let’s count the number of elected officials who believe in the rule of law and who will uphold the Constitution of the United States.

If they give this a pass because they think it will cause more division, then isn’t that just giving in to the people who have broken the law?

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Click on News & Notes for details of the impeachment article against former President Trump.

Will Trump’s Impeachment Trial be a Waste of Time?

By Todd Lassa

Contrasting with the flurry of more than 30 executive orders being signed by President Biden in the last few days and his cabinet picks working their way through the Senate at a rapid pace, things aren't going as well between newly promoted Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-NY, and similarly demoted Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-KY, and his caucus on how, when and even if to conduct the trial of former President Trump. It appeared the Senate was headed for Trump-style deal-making that would have pit Senate Democrats’ effort to kill the legislative veto and give their 50-plus-Vice President Harris-majority more teeth against Senate Republicans’ wish to delay Trump’s impeachment trial, if not to spike it indefinitely.

Schumer has since agreed to delay Trump’s impeachment trial to the week of February 8. McConnell on Monday night gave in to Schumer’s demands for a vote to rescind the legislative filibuster that forces a 60-vote majority to pass bills, in exchange for an agreement on Senate organization. But the deal may prove empty if two centrist Democrats, Krystin Sinema of Arizona and Joe Manchin of West Virginia honor their promise to vote with Republicans and retain the filibuster.

In the middle of all this, various news outlets, regardless of alleged political leanings, reported either a.) there are nowhere near the 17 Republican Senate votes needed to accompany an assumed unanimous Democratic vote in order to reach the 2/3-majority necessary to convict; or b.) a sufficient number of Republican senators have privately, anonymously committed to help Democrats reach the 67 votes necessary.

The least Democrats can count on for now is that Sen. Mitt Romney, R-UT, appears ready and willing to vote for conviction. The editorial We might assume Schumer is also counting on Republicans Lisa Murkowski, of Alaska, Susan Collins, of Maine and Ben Sasse, of Nebraska. Throw in possibly Sen. Rob Portman, R-OH, who has just announced he will retire after three terms, and fellow 2022 retiring Republican Sens. Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania and Richard Burr of North Carolina, perhaps add in McConnell, who has already said he will not whip the Republican caucus on how to vote, count on all Democrats including two independents who caucus with them, and you may be up to 58 votes to convict, nine short of the number necessary to convict.

Some Republicans who have joined the anti-Trump and never-Trump unofficial sub-caucus and Democrats hope that a Trump conviction will be followed by a vote on whether to ban the former president from ever running for federal office again, which may only require a 51-vote majority depending on the rules set forth for the impeachment trial.

Because the week of February 8 will mark the first-ever impeachment trial of a former president, Chief Justice John Roberts will not preside. Instead, that honor goes to President pro-tem Patrick Leahy, Democrat from Vermont.

What should happen? What will happen in this historic anomaly? Pundit-at-large Stephen Macaulay tackles those questions for the left column, and contributing pundit Bryan Williams considers the questions on the right.

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Click on News & Notes for details of the impeachment article against former President Trump

No Need for Trial, the GOP’s Mainstream is Done with Trump

By Bryan Williams

Remember when 2021 was supposed to be the year everything got better? The Year of Recovery started off more like the Year of Hell Part II. Our country witnessed an insurrection from the whackadoo Right, egged on by none other than the President of the United States and a few Republican senators and House members. Then we had the first non-traditional and arguably non-peaceful transfer in our nation’s history (unless you want to debate the election of 1800). In February, the Senate will hold the second impeachment trial of Donald Trump, who is now just a "regular" citizen.

What should we do? I think our country needs to heal and move on from the horrors of 2020 -- pandemic, divisive politics, economic upheaval -- all of it. Joe Biden claims he will unite us once again. The first 17 executive orders he signed within the first 36 hours of his administration have, in my opinion, failed to unite us, although there were some good ones in there, including halting construction of The Wall, delaying student loan payments until late September, and other pandemic-related orders.

He signed others that will only continue to divide us: Orders relating to gender identity, abortion, energy and the environment. But I am just one moderate Republican. There are about 80 million other people in this country who voted for Biden and are happy with all of these. Those 80 million, and a few of my fellow moderate Republicans want to see Trump convicted in the Senate and barred from running for office ever again.

But it's going to be a tall order to convict Trump on the slapdash impeachment charges the House voted shortly before Biden’s inauguration. The single impeachment article was a rush job, and not very well thought through. The House impeached Trump on inciting an insurrection. Although the court of public opinion would assuredly convict him of inciting that mob, it may be a tougher sell for 17 Republican senators to agree based on the evidence.

If Trump does try to run again in 2024, he will still be a couple of years younger than Joe Biden when he became president. Do rational, reflective, analytical minds really believe Trump will still be focused on the presidency four years from now, or will he return to political power via more lucrative work in talk radio and conservative television?

Let’s not forget why he won the presidency in 2016 in the first place: He wasn’t Hillary. I think he lost in ’20 because more Americans were voting against Trump rather than in favor of Biden. The latter will be true again in ’24, and any thoughts of resurrecting MAGA will frighten many of us into voting for someone safe, comfortable like old shoes, and “moderate.” Maybe 2024 will be Romney's comeback year.

After Trump inflicted himself upon our body politic and the Republican party, impeaching him twice should be enough. I do not think it’s likely, nor necessary to convict him this time, and add the punitive result of a lifetime ban from running for federal office.

The same can be said for those who have pushed for Trump’s stolen election legerdemain.

Sen. Josh Hawley, of Missouri, is the GOP’s Barack Obama. He can’t sit still in office long enough for a cup of coffee before he’s running for a higher office, and he’s remarkably inconsistent with his views. Stimulus, free speech on the Internet, you name it … Hawley flip-flops whenever it suits him politically.

Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, who barely beat Beto O’Rourke in his re-election in 2018, who was “Lyin’ Ted” when Trump trounced him in the 2016 presidential primary run, is no Ronald Reagan. Cruz won’t win a comeback second attempt for the '24 GOP nomination.

Lastly, there’s Rep. Kevin McCarthy, who wants desperately to become House speaker. His 2020 re-election was the slimmest ever in his 14-year House tenure. I live in his district, and he still has solid support from many, but a well-financed Democrat did do damage last year and can do it again in ’22. The Republican House caucus is even more of a threat. Will they back him for speaker if the GOP retakes the House in 2022? They passed on him once already, and his ability to fundraise after his vote to support Trump's crazy election shenanigans will not be forgotten by the businesses that back his campaign committees.

And what about the 10 Republicans who did vote with Democrats in favor of Trump’s second impeachment (Rep. Liz Cheney, R-WY., here's looking at you), and have been censured by their local parties for it? As a former member and delegate of the California Republican Party, I can tell you state parties are much more red meat right now than the general Republican electorate, of which I now consider myself. In California, these party apparatchiks are obsolete and ineffectual. Don't worry about calls from these types for you to step down and resign, Liz. In fact, maybe it’s time to explore a run for president in 2024! Now there's something I think should happen.

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Click on News & Notes for details on the Impeachment Article against former President Trump.

The New Boss

By Stephen Macaulay

When people get new jobs, and they happen to be at upper management or executive positions, they like to change things to make it more in line with how they do things. For example, I once had a new boss who detested paper clips and demanded that everything be stapled. While that seems like not a big deal, it surely was to those who had spent years accumulating paper clips.

So imagine what happens when you become the President of the United States and have the ability to do things somewhat more substantive than determining when breaks can be taken or expense reports filed or whether transoceanic trips can be flown in Economy Comfort rather than steerage. New bosses have lots of power.

Joe Biden is the new guy. He wants to do things his way. After all, he did win the election. (Guess I might have stuck “Spoiler Alert” at the beginning of this paragraph.) One of his biggest priorities is to reverse the Trump administration’s harsh initiatives that put restrictions on immigration.

Recently departed President Trump tried to prevent counting non-citizens in the 2020 Census. As a result, the Trump administration has delayed the census count past its Constitutionally mandated due date. While it may seem odd, not counting non-citizens violates Article 1, Section 2, Clause 3 of the Constitution. Yeah, that Constitution. The resulting delay of the count past the Census Bureau’s December 31 deadline also means state Electoral College vote numbers and House of Representative districts cannot be apportioned.

Another Biden administration executive order also ends the “Muslim” travel ban. This called for restricted travel and immigration from Syria, Iran, Iraq, Sudan, Libya, Somalia Yemen, Eritrea, Nigeria, Myanmar, Kyrgyzstan, and Tanzania. Not specifically a “Muslim” travel ban, it was one with a wink. Do you think that were there not such a restriction, people from those countries would have been at the Capitol in numbers on January 6?

Biden’s easiest EO puts a hard stop to building The Wall. According to FactCheck.org, as of late December 2020, of the 438 miles of the “border wall system” built under the Trump administration, “365 miles of it. . .is replacement for primary or secondary fencing that was dilapidated or of outdated design. In addition, 40 miles of new primary wall and 33 miles of secondary wall have been built in locations where there were no barriers before.” My math has it at 73 miles. Given the number of times that Trump mentioned The Wall you might imagine there’d be more. There isn’t. There was a lot that was said during the past four years that was Fake News. Much of it from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Spoiler alert: Trump lost Pennsylvania in 2020.

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Other first-day executive orders:

100 Days Masking Challenge. With over 403,952 dead of COVID-19—no, it didn’t “just disappear”—let’s stop making this partisan. Viruses don’t vote. So asking all Americans to wear a mask and for enforcement on federal properties, it is an acknowledgement that it is still a massive problem—a fatal, massive problem.
Create the Directorate for Global Health Security and Biodefense. Remember when Trump was whining about how Obama dealt with the 2014 Ebola epidemic? Well this position was created by Obama, and like many things done by that administration, eliminated by the Trump administration. How did that work out? See above.
Rejoin the World Health Organization. Maybe it was snowed by China. And if we’re talking about being snowed: remember the chest thumping after the U.S. China Phase One trade agreement was put into effect? According to the Peterson Institute for International Economics, through November 2020, “China’s year-to-date total imports of cover products from the United States were $86.9 billion, compared with a prorated year-to-date target of $153.8 billion. Over the same period, U.S. exports to China of covered products were $82.3 billion, compared with a year-to-date target of $141.7 billion.” That’s one hell of a dealmaker. As for the WHO specifically: viruses don’t carry passports. They get fought globally. Or they do far more damage than they otherwise would.
Extend eviction and foreclosures moratoriums. This is a multiagency lift. Had the pandemic been addressed early on, perhaps this wouldn’t be necessary. It wasn’t. This is.
Pause student loan payments until September 30. Again, see previous.
Rejoin the Paris Climate Accord. If Ford Motor Company — a major U.S. corporation that sells hundreds of thousands of pickup trucks every year—thinks climate change is real and that the Paris Accord is worthwhile, isn’t it?
End the Keystone XL pipeline. Check the price of gas at your local station. The Biden administration also wants to reverse the decisions that turned over what had been national monuments in places like Utah and Maine to development. Seriously: Once they’re developed they’re done.

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Immigration Executive Order are Only a pre-Trump ‘Reset’

By Nic Woods

President Joe Biden, in his first day in office, signed a slew of executive orders, memoranda and proclamations that included some attempts to overturn his predecessors’ immigration policy, which were, essentially, done with executive orders signed mainly to undo the work of his predecessor.

Just like the tit-for-tat, the policy signals in the immigration executive orders aren’t new. Much either resets immigration policy to where it was before Trump was inaugurated, or underscores what was the pre-Trump normal.

Unlike former President Trump, Biden is signaling that he’d prefer legislation be passed to bolster the executive orders and is currently preparing a legislative package that further codifies the policy, but key Republicans have started to balk, claiming that because he was signing executive orders already, he didn’t actually mean what he said in his inaugural address about unifying, and governing, as one nation.

But Biden’s immigration asks are not that egregious. One EO basically requires the Census Bureau to do what it is already required to do by the U.S. Constitution – count every person, citizen or not. But this differs from Trump’s efforts to carve out non-citizens from the Census count.

The main ask – a streamlined, eight-year process for an estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants to become citizens – would make the Census EO redundant, as people in the pipeline for citizenship would likely have less to fear from Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials and are more likely to be comfortable with answering a Census worker’s questions.

Many of the other immigration EOs, such as lifting the ban of travelers from Muslim nations, either returns us to “normalcy” or it brings back to the table issues Trump tried to avoid or end altogether, e.g. protection from deportation for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) or programs for refugees and asylum seekers, some of whom were in mortal danger for assisting U.S. troops in such trouble spots as Iraq.

Others overturn Trump executive orders that pushed for the aggressive deportation of unauthorized immigrants and deported Liberians who have been living in the U.S. For these, Biden has directed the State department to restart visa processing and develop ways to address the harm from having that process be in limbo for so long.

In yet another EO, Biden ends construction of Trump’s border wall in favor of bolstering the borders with new technology that does similar work at, perhaps, less cost.

What Biden isn’t doing is throwing open the U.S. borders for everyone to get in unvetted. No one wants that and, as a centrist, such an extreme position isn’t in his wheelhouse. But he seems to be making a bold move to succeed where presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush failed by finally providing a clear, legal, more humane route to U.S. citizenship.

Other Biden first day initiatives:

• A 100-day “masking challenge” that entails mask requirements in federal buildings and on federal land, as well as public transit. Biden called for mask requirements on trains, airplanes and buses, and in public airports.

• Establishment of a directorate for global health security and biodefense, with the goal of having protocols in place determined by past pandemics in order to be prepared for future pandemics.

•At first a fan of China’s early response to COVID-19, former President Trump quickly came to criticize and then pull representation from the World Health Organization for not being tougher on the country. Other critics agreed the WHO for failing to take a tough stance on China’s slow response to early outbreaks, The Washington Post says. Thanks to Chinese bureaucracy and restrictions, the Post reports, it took nearly a year for WHO to gain access to the country, which finally happened this month. But WHO helps with worldwide distribution of medical supplies and holds regular meetings on the coronavirus, which Anthony Fauci, the top infectious disease official in the U.S., attended by webinar Thursday.

• Eviction and foreclosure moratoriums that were part of the March 2020 CARES Act were extended by Trump in December, set to expire at the end of January. Biden’s EO extends the moratoriums through September 30.

• Like the eviction and foreclosure moratoriums, Trump extended to the end of January a freeze on student loan payments otherwise due to expire with the CARES Act in late December. Biden’s EO also extends the freeze, again, to September 30.

• Trump exited the Paris Climate Agreement, which the Obama administration signed on to in 2015, calling climate change a “hoax” and claiming the international treaty was unfair to the U.S. But Biden has nominated John Kerry to a new cabinet-level position, special presidential envoy for climate, with the intention to rejoin and continue work on the treaty.

• Canada’s TC Energy’s Keystone XL pipeline has been in the works for nearly a decade, connecting Alberta’s oil sands with Montana. While some state Democrats, as well as most Republicans support the $8-billion project, Native American tribes and ecology groups have fought it since the beginning, and the U.S. achieved energy independence during the Obama administration. Biden has issued a moratorium and TC Energy has suspended its development. Biden is to meet with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau Friday.

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Same as the Old Boss — Obama

By Andrew Boyd

President Biden’s slew of executive orders and proclamations are less practical and effective than they are an apparent attempt to enhance the Democratic Party’s image. Biden is particularly bent on reversing former President Trump’s immigration policy without proposing the sort of permanent policy that has evaded both parties for decades.

Counting non-citizens in U.S. Census is a nakedly political effort to disenfranchise American citizens through reapportionment leveraged against illegals (sorry, non-citizens) by executive fiat. DACA part deux. Halftime show brought to you by SCOTUS and their denial of Trump’s authority to overturn part one. Farcical.

There is one executive order I can support, to stop building The Wall. I’ve always been dubious on the efficacy of The Wall. On that basis, I’m good. As to walls being immoral, which was the rallying cry like 20 minutes ago, I’d call that complete trash thinking. Look no further than Wednesday’s inauguration ceremony. I await some reasoned argument from anyone on how to effectively manage and monitor inflows and outflows of peeps as do all other sovereign nations. See beloved progressive Canada.

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My take on the other major executive orders …

•Masking challenge and creation of a directorate for global health security and biodefense. What the hell is a directorate? Sound like something we can neither afford nor effectively contain. Watch to see the swell of SJW agenda items that get smuggled in through this baby. A ministry of funny walks would be more to my liking. It’s at least good for a laugh. [Note: SWJ is “social justice warrior” –Ed.]

•Rejoin the World Health Organization. The WHO proved itself utterly unreliable as an honest broker of information in this pandemic, which is putting it kindly. Lapdogs of the Chinese communist party is more on the nose. You can pretend this is a nod to the primacy of science and the critical importance of global coordination, but I suspect it’s more about the Dems unrelenting desire to be loved by their EU counterparts, which is most easily achieved by kneeling to a global bureaucratic hegemony that has anything but the best interests of the American people in mind.

•Extend eviction and foreclosure moratoriums. It’s easy to be humane when you’re doing it with other people’s money. It’s also, inconveniently, immoral. In principle, no different than “stimulus” via the accumulation of public debt, a.k.a. stealing from the future, only this one is on a shorter time frame and more directly tied to a specific group of people in the present, a.k.a. property holders. It’s all theft.

•Pause student loan payments through Sept 30. Why are we so focused on the particular slice of consumer debt that applies to college? It’s regressive in many respects, and again, stealing. Then, of course, there’s the moral hazard behind the notion that the government should have the power to step in and abrogate a legally constructed agreement between two private parties. But that’s just a matter of principle, so whatever.

•Rejoin the Paris Climate Agreement. An agreement without teeth, and mostly another means of smuggling in global economic wealth transfers. Among first world nations, who reduced their total CO2 emissions the most, on an absolute basis, in 2019?. That would be the U.S., courtesy of technological innovation driven by the big, bad free market. Meanwhile, 80% of increases in global CO2 emissions in the same time period came from China, Asia and India, and future forecasts see the U.S. remaining relative stable while China, India and other developing economies will fuel their growth with ongoing increases in greenhouse gas emissions.

•End Keystone XL Pipeline. The environmental impacts of a pipeline are minimal and, to my mind, substantially outweighed by the economic and national security benefits of America’s energy independence. I know, I hate polar bears and seals and life in general. Shame on me. Oh, and Canada is not so pleased either.

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It’s the Economic Stimulus We Need Now

By: Michelle Naranjo

There is an inexorable connection between the physical health of a nation, and the well-being of its economy. In advance of his inauguration, President-elect Biden has announced an ambitious rescue plan with the intentions of healing both.

A $1.9 trillion package would surely have something for everyone: additional stimulus checks to individuals, state, and local governments, extended jobless, benefits, allocations to assist with reopening schools, fortified testing and tracing, and coordinated effort to deliver 100 million vaccines within the first 100 days of a Biden presidency.

Currently, there has been suspicion and doubt that a federal reserve of vaccinations even exists. The states have been largely left to figure out procedure and distribution for themselves, resulting in a meager number who have been successfully vaccinated in numbers that cannot keep up with the pace of new infections.

One support employee at the largest healthcare provider in one heavily infected state said that the provider’s call centers are overwhelmed with people trying to get the vaccine. One woman attempted to cancel the scheduled vaccinations of her “friends” because they were neither as “old, not as sick” as she is.

It smacks a bit too much like a real-life “Hunger Games.”

If Biden’s plan is able to be passed in its full form, Moody’s Analytics speculates that economic growth nearing 8% is possible, unemployment would fall to 4% by the end of 2022, and the entire population -- including undocumented workers -- would speed towards a herd immunity goal of having 245 million vaccinated by fall.

But, of course, even with the country in dire straights while the COVID-related deaths leap over the 400,000 count, Republicans have been quick to resist Biden’s plan.

Senator Rick Scott, R-Fla., was quick to issue a statement saying, “We cannot simply throw massive spending at this with no accountability to the current and future American taxpayer.” His biggest contention is the money that would be allocated to bailing out state and local government which saw significant loss of revenue during the last year. Aid to alleviate this burden was kept out of the December 2020 package by Republicans, much like it was partially sidelined in the earlier Heroes Act.

There will undoubtedly be concessions on the road to this next relief package. Still, the long tail of this immediate problem is that financial equity is not attempted, and containment of the virus is not sought; this winter will certainly not be our darkest.

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