Tag: Nancy Pelosi

TIME TO RID THE WHITE HOUSE OF ITS RACIST INFESTATION

With all due respect to Nancy Pelosi, there is an urgent and compelling need to impeach Donald Trump. I totally get and appreciate the speaker’s concern and pragmatism.  Wrangling for months in the nuanced weeds of the Mueller Report could give Trump a perfect platform for his victimization-by-witch-hunt narrative, and thereby boost his reelection chances. 

So forget the Mueller Report.  Instead, the articles of impeachment need to focus on what a majority of Americans are only too painfully aware of: the president’s racism. His bigotry, meanness and hatred are tearing the country apart. As conservative columnist Bret Stephens wrote in the New York Times this week, Trump “is a disgrace to his office, an insult to our dignity, a threat to our Union and a danger to our safety.” It doesn’t get much more impeachable than that. 

As a matter of fact, the Constitution’s impeachment clause was crafted in 1787 with visions of Trump dancing in the founders’ heads. One of them, Benjamin Franklin, argued that some future presidents might “render (themselves) obnoxious.”  In such a case, Franklin posited, impeachment offers a more rational alternative to assassination. (Back in those days, the assassination of Julius Caesar still weighed heavily on the minds of the ruling – and sometimes dueling – elite.)  James Madison suggested that impeachment should be used in the case of a president’s “perfidy”, meaning someone who could not be trusted.  Alexander Hamilton said the impeachment option is designed to remedy “injuries done immediately to the society itself.” 

Donald Trump is not merely obnoxious and untrustworthy, he is inflicting a level of injury on this country that escalates daily.  In another time and place, the Mueller Report’s abundant and substantial evidence of obstruction of justice would have removed any president from office.  Given the moral paralysis of the Senate’s Republican leadership, it will not remove Trump.  Through the lens of the past several painful weeks, a prolonged – and ultimately unsuccessful – impeachment battle over the legal intricacies of the Russia investigation would deflect the focus from the much larger Hamiltonian issue.   This president’s racism and toxic narcissism are creating endless “injuries done immediately to the society itself.”

The prospect of protracted legislative hearings over what the Donald said to James Comey or Donald McGahn two years ago pales in comparison to the abject damage Trump’s culture of fear and hatred has inflicted on our country.  He has made America far worse than any of us could have imagined.  For that, he needs to be impeached.  

To be sure, Senate Republicans will refuse to remove him from office.  Yet, it is far better to proceed on a basis that viscerally resonates with voters, than on one that amounts to a sequel to Robert Mueller’s congressional testimony.  Only 37 percent of voters say the Russia investigation warrants impeachment.  On the other hand, 59 percent called many of the president’s tweets “un-American”.  Six in 10 people found Trump’s actions to be bad for Hispanics and Muslims. Another poll found that 56 percent of voters believe the president has made race relations worse. Some 57 percent said Trump is a racist.

Every day of this deplorable presidency is filled with horrid moments, the likes of which no dystopian novelist could have ever conjured.  On Sunday, hours after a shooter, using Trumpian phrases like “Hispanic invasion” and “send them back”, killed 22 people in an El Paso Walmart, the president’s acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, went on television to say that the alleged mass murderer developed his anti-immigrant views before Trump was elected.  And how did Mulvaney, know that?  Turns out he lifted the line from the alleged shooter’s “manifesto”.  Another White House first:  political spin ghost written by an accused mass murderer.

Then, later in the week, Trump made the mass shooting circuit, ostensibly to comfort traumatized communities in El Paso and Dayton, where nine people were killed early Sunday. He attacked local politicians in both places, and regaled medical providers, still weary from caring for the wounded and dying, about crowd sizes at his political rallies.  When none of the still hospitalized shooting victims in El Paso would meet with him, Trump’s team had family members bring a baby who survived the shooting to the hospital for a photo op.  The two-month-old infant lost both his mother and father in the Walmart shooting. Totally oblivious to the gravity and somberness of the moment, Melania held the newly orphaned baby and beamed widely with her husband who flashed a victorious thumb’s up for the camera. For that alone, he should be impeached. 

Based on Hamilton’s standard of “injuries done immediately to the society itself”, there is overwhelming evidence supporting impeachment.  

For example, Trump:  

LAUGHED when someone at a political rally yelled that immigrants should be shot.

REBUFFED Department of Homeland Security efforts to make combating domestic terror threats, such as those from white supremacists, a greater priority.

USED the word “invasion” or “invade” to refer to migrants in tweets 10 times this year.

CUT funding for a federal program designed to undermine neo-Nazi groups and other violent domestic terrorism.

WAS named as the motivating force by countless perpetrators of hate crimes.

REPEATEDLY attacked people of color with blatantly racist tropes (here, here and here).

CALLED Mexican immigrants “rapists”, Syrian refugees “snakes”, and countries of black and brown people “shit holes”.

Impeachment should never be used to get rid of a merely bad president.  That’s what elections are for.  Yet, our wise founders envisioned the possibility that a day could come when the leader of the free world might be way worse than bad, so toxic, in fact, that our entire society is left in spiraling agony.  Alas, that tragic day has arrived.  

As damning as the Mueller evidence is, this no time to thread a legal needle over whether the president obstructed justice or merely obfuscated it.  All along, the smoking gun was hiding in plain sight, in the president’s tweets, his rally speeches, his everyday actions.  

Donald Trump is a disgrace to his office because he has totally failed to insure domestic tranquility, promote the general welfare and secure the blessings of liberty, in accordance with the Constitution he swore to faithfully execute.  It is hard to fathom a more compelling case for impeachment.  

FORGET CIVILITY. FIGHT TRUMP WITH WHATEVER WORKS

It seemed so clear to me when I started writing this post: tossing the president’s press secretary out of a restaurant was wrong. So were the boisterous dining disruptions that protesters foisted upon other Trump surrogates. Aren’t we supposed to go high when they go low? All this does is let the Trumsters play the victim card, right? Then a funny thing happened: I changed my mind.

Believe me, that was a painful experience. We all have our own style and approach to dealing with conflict, born of our life experiences. I spent more than 30 years as a union rep, tangling with some pretty virulent management types. The only real control I had – on a good day – was over myself. I chose civility, decency and respect, not out of a higher moral calling, but because that approach worked for me and my goal of helping union members get the best contract possible. That meant avoiding personal attacks and name-calling, and sticking to the issue at hand, while building power to make a decent deal.

So I cruised right along on my high horse, crafting this ode to civility and respect. I reread my words, searching for a pithy and righteous close. That’s when it struck me. I was wrong. This is Donald Trump’s America now, an ugly, hateful abyss that keeps turning darker and bleaker by the hour. Civility and respectfulness are not going to get our country back anytime soon.

During this past week:

A California woman screamed at a U.S. citizen of Mexican descent that Mexicans are “rapists, animals and drug dealers”, echoing one of Trump’s favorite litanies.

A Tennessee congressional candidate put up a billboard vowing to “Make America White Again”.

A South Carolina woman was charged with beating a black child and screaming racial epithets at him because he was swimming in a pool with white kids.

A North Carolina man who insists that God is a white supremacist and the Jews descended from Satan won the Republican primary for a seat in the state legislature.

Thousands of children, many in diapers, remain separated from their migrant parents as a result of Trump’s unconscionable political power play at the border.

The Supreme Court upheld Trump’s Muslim travel ban and delivered a serious blow to organized labor. With Justice Anthony Kennedy’s retirement, credible court observers predict that abortion rights will be abolished within 18 months, and that the court will tilt severely rightward for decades to come.

In other words, Donald Trump is doing precisely what he promised. He is shaking up the foundations of our country at levels totally off the Richter Scale. This isn’t a collegial debate over tax policy or farm subsidies. This is a historic existential battle for the heart and soul of America. We are in a cold civil war that is getting warmer by the day. It will take more than civility to win this one.

Earlier this week, California Congresswoman Maxine Waters was wildly cheered by a crowd of energized millennials when she told them: “If you see anybody from that cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd. You push back on them. Tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere!” By the end of the week, Waters had canceled all public appearances because of death threats. Trump called her “unhinged” with an “extraordinarily low IQ” and claimed – incorrectly – that she had threatened to harm his supporters. Then came top congressional Democrats, Sen. Chuck Schumer and Rep. Nancy Pelosi, both blasting Waters for encouraging such incivility. Said Schumer: “If you disagree with a politician . . . vote them out of office. But no one should call for the harassment of political opponents. That’s not right. That’s not American.”

Oh yes it is, Senator. The Civil Rights Act did not flow majestically from a reasoned debate by golden tongued orators. It took years of street protests and massive harassment of political opponents. As Jonathan Bernstein, a former university professor, wrote for Bloomberg this week, “From the American Revolution on, the spoils of freedom, fair treatment and equality have not gone to the patient and polite. The spoils have gone to those who are incensed and determined, unafraid and unashamed to raise more than a little hell.”

No, embarrassing cabinet members in restaurants and other direct actions are not going to end our Trumpian nightmare. But they are viable tactics in a broader strategy to do just that, by flipping at least one of the two congressional chambers in November and removing Trump from office in the 2020 election, if not before. It’s all about voter turnout, tapping into the passion of those millennials who cheered Maxine Waters’ call to action, reaching blacks, Latinos and others, disenchanted with both parties, but ready to act now against a president intent on marginalizing them. Those actions pull them in, strengthen the movement and evolve into votes.

As a personal matter of style, I will continue to choose civility. If I owned a restaurant, I’d let Sarah Huckabee Sanders eat there. On the other hand, if someone tosses her out because of the abhorrent policies she has to defend, it reminds us all that these are not ordinary times. It reminds us that the rules of political discourse have to change in order to accommodate the toxicity of an environment that threatens the values we hold dear.

We don’t have to become Trump to beat Trump, but neither should we cling blindly to an honor code of civility when dealing with a lying thug who takes children away from their parents and emboldens bigotry of every stripe. That, Senator Schumer, is what is really not American.

TRUMP’S ‘GOOD WEEK’ IS JUST MORE OF THE SAME

To hear Donald Trump tell it, he had his best week yet in Washington. The president bitch slapped his own party’s Congressional leaders. Then he hugged Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer, and even let House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi dictate a Twitter message for him. Not only that, he helped secure rare bipartisan support for a bill that will get Texas some hurricane relief and keep the government open for three more months. Could this, the Donald’s 137th reinvention, be the one that really sticks? Could it be that he has finally become presidential?

Naaaa, of course not. This was just one more iteration of Trump being Trump. When it comes to his core values, he has always been consistent. And what he really values, at his core, is himself, and how he looks to the world at any moment in time. “It’s all over the news,” the president bubbled in a call to Schumer. “The coverage is incredible; everyone is praising me. Even MSNBC is saying nice things about me.” (Here and here.)

And that’s what it takes for Donald Trump to have a very good week. There was a time he had to really work to create the public illusion of grandeur. Like when he impersonated his own press agent in order to spread lurid reports about his love life to gossip columnists. It’s so much easier now. All he has to do is make nice with a couple of Democrats he spent the last six months vilifying.

Back in the real world, North Korea is polishing its nukes, 800,000 young Americans face deportation, and there is no assurance our government will be funded past December 8. Trump’s feel-good days of early September offer no nourishment for a body politic that has been ailing since January 20. For that, we need skilled leadership, someone with credibility, vision, a sense of direction and an ability to subjugate ego needs for the sake of getting the job done. Alas, Trump is a dismal failure in all four areas. He is constitutionally incapable of getting outside of himself in order to lead others. The president’s euphoric week was packed with evidence supporting the previous sentence.

It started with the dreamers, the now young adults whose parents brought them into the country illegally as children. Through a 2012 executive order, the Obama administration protected them from deportation. Trump excoriated Obama for that action during the campaign, promising, if elected, to send them all back to the countries of their birth. Then he softened a bit, telling the dreamers not to worry because he loves them. However, as the songwriter noted, love hurts. On Tuesday the administration pulled the plug on the dreamers, announcing that they would be subject to deportation in March if Congress did not resolve the issue through legislation. That was it. The president took no position on what Congress should do – protect them or evict them. He just wanted the monkey off his back. Amazingly, the New York Times quoted White House aides saying their boss did not appear to fully understand the meaning of his announcement an hour before it was delivered.

The public response was overwhelming negative. So Trump, naturally, turned to Twitter for a mood adjustment. His message: if Congress doesn’t act, he will “revisit” the issue. For someone who fancies himself as a master negotiator, this was an incredibly insipid move. It instantly deflated the leverage he created by linking the dreamers’ deportation to a failure of Congress to act. But it made him feel better for a while.

Then came the infamous Oval Office meeting with Congressional leaders. The Republicans, Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan, wanted to raise the debt limit and keep government funded for 18 months, getting them past the mid-term elections. Schumer and Pelosi wanted only a three-month extension because it would give them leverage in a year-end funding battle. Ryan called the Democrat’s three-month proposal “ridiculous and disgusting.” Trump’s partner in the meeting, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin had just delivered a defense of the Republican’s 18-month plan when Trump shocked the room by siding with the Democrats, whose three-month deal was soon summarily passed by both houses, much to the chagrin of frustrated Republicans.

It was the news of that meeting that gave Trump his good week. He could view himself as a bipartisan deal-maker. Basking in the mania of that image, Trump upped the ante, by joining with “Chuck and Nancy” in supporting a law protecting the dreamers. A day later, he went even further and said he agreed with Schumer that Congress should end the requirement of regularly approving the government’s debt limit, a sacred conservative ritual if there ever was one.

The pundits have had a field day with it all. Some compared it to Bill Clinton’s triangulation. Some wondered if Trump was finally finding his footing. Others, noting that the president was once a Democrat, speculated he might be returning to his roots. The analysis is about as meaningful as trying to figure out why a leaf suddenly falls from a tree. That’s what a leaf does. And this is what the Donald does: grab whatever attention he can to make him look and feel good in the moment. As Poe says, “merely this and nothing more.”

The problem is that moments are outlived by their consequences. Strategies are designed to build a multiplicity of moments that will get you to where you want to go, assuming you know where that is. Trump doesn’t get any of that. He’s too wrapped up in watching himself on cable news to realize that when you blindside associates – on either side, when you yank the rug out from under your treasury secretary, when you love dreamers one day and move to deport them the next, you lack the credibility, integrity and probity needed to lead. You’re just a leaf sailing through the breeze. ‘Tis the wind and nothing more.

WHERE IS THE OUTRAGE OVER RUSSIA’S THEFT OF OUR ELECTION?

The biggest guessing game in Washington right now is what it will take for the Democrats to throw a major league temper tantrum over the antics of the incoming administration. How about a conclusion by the CIA and FBI that Russian espionage helped elect Donald Trump? Wait, that actually happened, didn’t it? It was easy to miss because the reaction from the loyal opposition was more of a whimper than a wail.

House Democratic leader Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., normally no shrinking violet when it comes to pitched rhetoric, responded to the bombshell with these uncharacteristically modulated sentences: “This is not (about) overturning this election. This is about making sure it doesn’t happen again.”

In the Senate, incoming Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-NY, said the unanimous consensus by the country’s top intelligence agencies that Russia interfered in the election to help Trump win was “simultaneously stunning and not surprising.” He and Pelosi then pushed for a bipartisan congressional investigation. Watergate and 9/11 eventually had their investigations, but they were preceded by well-deserved rhetorical flourishes aimed at setting a moral tone for the country.

Obviously, such an inquiry is necessary. But from the standpoint of leveraging power and public opinion in dealing with Team Trump, particularly as a minority party, it is far from sufficient. I’ve never been an advocate of frivolously jumping into battles. Anger is not a strategy, but used sparingly and selectively, it can be an effective tactic, particularly when laced with a dose or two of righteous indignation. Given the enormity of evil associated with Russian spies pressing their fingers on the scales of our democracy, it’s hard to think of a better time to let loose with that tactic. As Rabbi Hillel so wisely and rhetorically asked, “If not now, when?”

Now is the time for Democratic leaders to fan out to the networks and cable shows, talking points in hand. Now is the time for them to scream from the rooftops about an election that was stolen from the American people. Now is the time to avoid mincing words. It’s time to call Donald Trump out as Vladimir Putin’s puppet, the candidate backed by the Kremlin’s finest chicanery. Now is the time to take to the streets, not because we don’t like Donald Trump, but because his election was rigged by the Russians and, therefore lacks legitimacy.

One of the first things I learned as a union negotiator is that if your side is suffering a power deficit, as ours always did, you have to find a way to create power. Right now, through a confluence of circumstances, Democrats, who are sorely lacking in political power, have an opportunity to gain leverage. But they have to rise above their post-election shell shock and timidity. Russian spies helped elect Donald Trump, for God’s sake. Why tiptoe around it? If nothing else, a strong offense could pull Trump off his transition game, sending him into late night Twitter defense, a play that brings a cringe to even his most ardent supporters. Better yet, it could build enough steam for the Senate to torpedo the confirmation of Putin’s buddy, Rex Tillerson for Secretary of State.

There is power in the moral high ground. It captures peoples’ hearts and minds, rallying them to a noble cause. No, it is not likely to stop a Trump presidency. But it can alter the narrative. And as we learned from this election, the right narrative delivers power. Instead of the outsider riding into Washington on his white horse to shake everything up, we can make it about Russian skullduggery producing a U.S. president who had 2.8 million fewer votes than Putin’s nemesis, Hillary Clinton. To those who say, “Get over it. Trump won; he is our president,” a reminder is in order. Barack Obama won in 2008 and 2012, by much wider electoral vote margins and without interference from a foreign adversary. Yet, the legitimacy of his presidency was challenged by Republicans from Day 1, all on the basis of utter balderdash. Every blatantly false claim imaginable – from being a Muslim to his birth in Kenya – was used to challenge the authenticity of the country’s first black president.

Although despicable, the Republican strategy was effective. It weakened his administration, particularly in the early years. Democrats may be hesitant to follow that path because it left such a stench in the political atmosphere. But there is one huge difference between then and now, namely a genuine, real life, honest-to-God basis to challenge the legitimacy of the 45th president.

FBI Director James Comey, a Republican and obviously no friend of Hillary Clinton, today joined the CIA and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper in declaring that Russia’s interference in the election was done to help Trump win. Couple those findings with Putin’s autocratic history as a dictator who has had his political opponents imprisoned and murdered, and you have a compellingly strong basis upon which to challenge the legitimacy of this president.

Unfortunately, the Democratic response has been limited to meekly calling for an investigation, as if we were dealing with some sort of bureaucratic screw up, as opposed to one of the most extraordinary events in our political history. The party’s leaders are understandably in a bit of post-election disarray right now. For the sake of the country, they need to quickly get past it. And then work up some passionate outrage over Russia’s theft of our election.