The Assassination Attempt

People consciously try to create normalcy when social events, such as an assassination attempt or any other disaster, disrupts social life.

An assassination or near assassination such as happened on the evening of the White House Correspondents Dinner is a species of a disaster, which means that there is a threat to or a partial breakdown of the procedures that allow a society to maintain itself. Chernobyl was a disaster because a large surrounding area became devoid of life and many workers died from radiation so as to cap the spread of the event. A levee may not be built high enough to protect dry land from a rising river, There are always shortcomings in planning. A disaster always means nearly being overwhelmed so that some correspondents wonder why there wasn’t a lot of TSA like doubling back lanes so as to stifle an intruder from approaching the ballroom, however inconvenient that might be for the flow of traffic..The characteristics of a disaster apply to assassinations because the general includes the particular though it has its own particular characteristics in that an assassination attempt engages with events requiring quick and expert decisionmakers to prevent the assassination to happen while those who allowed the challenger disaster had plenty of time to think that the F ring would freeze at that expected ambient temperature. But applying disasters to assassinations can illuminate what is happening to these notorious events.

People find ways to turn people into heroes even if a disaster has been, after all, a disaster, perhaps because it is the best that can be salvaged from the event. There is the legendary story of the boy who put his finger in the dike to keep part of Holland from flooding. There is the praise of the astronauts and Houston Control who allowed Apollo 15 to come back to Earth after a capsule malfunction. There is the praise of the firemen and policemen who ran up the floors in the World Trade Center before it collapsed, never mind the mistakes on preventing terrorists from getting control of planes. A notable exception is when Jesus says in advance of being taken after the Last Supper that he would be betrayed and that Peter would denounce Him three times. No compassion; only blame. Which shows just how precious Jesus is. The same praise occurred  right after the assassination attempt in Washington.  President Trump praised the Secret Service for having acted so quickly. Then he praised himself for being in a dangerous occupation but stoically accepted so that he could do good things. 

People always act surprised at the advent of a disaster. There are bad snowfalls every winter but act as if the enormity is unusual when somewhere or other there will be a bad storm that leads to a lot of snow, disabled cars and even some deaths. People were surprised to find the frozen f ring until Feynman did so, it is always surprising that something unsettling actually happens. Similarly, people were shocked at the assassinatin attempt in Washington even though there were two previous attacks on Trump in his second term. People are unnerved by any displacement of the social order even if it has already taken place, order readily restored, or maybe not, when it took a generation to recover from the disaster of the bombing of Germany in World War II.

People also find solirity with even their opponents when disaster strikes. People think they will cooperate together in the common emergency. Texans rallied with New Yorkers after 9/11 or at least said so before retreating to their mutual animosity. The preference is to think people find their common humanity, that their differences are superficial, even though we know that social class and other differences show disparate outcomes in times of disaster. Poor homes are damaged more because of shoddy construction or inauspicious places to live and better off people get better insurance coverage because of insurance experts holding out for better deals. Similarly, people after the Washington assassination attempt announced their solidarity with one another despite their political differences. Trump raised the woman who chaired the correspondents dinner for her bravery even though all she did was to sit next to Trump on the dais by being hustled out of the room. Congresspeople of all stripes point out that the assassination attempt was thwarted even though the Democrats and Republicans will soon enough be at loggerheads again, that  to me a proper recognition that assassination is a terrible and unconstitutional way to replace a President. The era of good feeling will pass.

People also find ways to find meaning from disaster. There are platitudes that suffering and survival makes you strong. Pope Leo I said about the plague in the fifth century that the Jews did it which was a reasonable and humane explanation because it meant that it was not necessary for people to blame their own shortcomings for the plague though Christians over the years have blamed their own iniquities as causing disaster. Less religious thinkers will blame the Corps of Engineers for badly planned dams or blame single crop farming for crop failures. Trump blamed the assisnation attempt on the fact that he was an effective president and only effective presidents are targeted, though Garfield was not an important reformer and Trump contradicted himself by saying the assailant was a wacko, which implied that he was beyond politics. It was a self serving explanation. 

In general, the response and function of the feelings attendant to an assasination or any disaster is to reclaim the sense of social normality through showing good works and fealties of solidarity and techniques to improve the relevant aspect of the social order and despite the disorder that remains in the social compact whereby orderliness allows for a sense of prosperity or at least succor. Disaster has to be a surprise.

Spheres of Influence

Old concepts of international relations, such as spheres of influence and regional power, still apply to the current international world.

Old fashioned ideas of international relations still hold. The war on Iran was not a war but a punitive expedition akin to Gen Pershing entering Mexico to punish Pancho Vila for having raided a New Mexico town and so did not require congressional authorization. Nor was it required by the US invading Granada to keep it from extending its airport so Soviet bombers could land there. Certainly the repeated shouts of “Death to America” and regular assaults on U. S. outposts and American allies by Iran and its own allies over many years warrants a punitive expedition. When Trump said he had won the war after the first day because the US had killed the Iranian leadership and seriously degraded Iran’s military, he should have left. Instead, the US is blockading the strait of hormuz to keep Iran from blockading the strait of Hormuz. A statesman knows when he is ahead.

The old fashioned idea of spheres of influence is also still viable as a concept  though people can disagree whose influence is dominated by a major power. A sphere of influence is an area close to a major power where the major power supervises the economics and politics of another power. All of Latin America was a sphere of influence for the United States and so regarded as such in the Versailles Treaty that ended the First World War. Finland was within Russia’s sphere of influence and sided with Germany so as to become independent of that, a goal not achieved until Finland joined NATO after Russia invaded Ukraine. The European great powers were right next to one another and so had to fight wars between them for a thousand years to see which would dominate Europe. They expressed their mutual antagonism by plundering African and Asian countries so as to give one of the other some advantage or just pride. It was an expression of war without major war.though that did not keep wars from happening within the European continent.

Ukraine had shifted from being the major figure in eastern Europe to becoming within Russia’s sphere of influence and even been incorporated into the Russian Empire by Catherine the Great. Ukraine declared its independence from Russia when the Soviet Union disintegrated. It did so in part by giving up nuclear weapons for a guarantee of its independence. It had reasons to remain antagonistic to Russia. The Kulak farmers had died of starvation because of Stalin. Sine elements of Ukraine supported Germany against the Soviet Union during the Great Patriotic War. Especially in its own western parts, Ukraine was more a part of the Austro Hungarian Empire than of Russia. But it remained part of the Russian sphere of influence, its leadership beholden to Moscow, until Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, acting through the State Department’s Wendy Sherman, advised on how Ukraine could realign itself with the West, and was successful at that so Putin thought it necessary to recapture Ukraine to Russia’s sphere of influence. Who will prevail is an open question though Ukraine has held its own because of its own tactics and drone technology and the fall of Orban may allow the European Union to send significant munitions to Ukraine. But a sphere of influence that includes Ukraine is important to Putin. He does not think of a European Ukraine as just an adjustment that came about because of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, boundary adjustments inevitable after a war, as when part of eastern Germany was transferred to Poland after the end of World War II.

Another traditional idea about international relations that remains relevant to the contemporary situation is the idea of a regional power, which means a country that is intimidating and otherwise through economic and military force over other nations in the area without challenging one of the great powers. Sweden was a regional power in the area of northern Europe in the eighteenth century until it clashed with Russia in the Northern War and Russia became the dominant nation in the area.  Argentina, Brazil and Chile vied with one another as the dominant SouthAmerican power without challenging the United States as the great power of the western hemisphere. 

Which is the regional power in the Middle East? One might think it was Iran, which has a stable regime, ninety million people and an advanced military ad scientific establishment and intimidated the suni arab powers. But the ongoing US Iran war has shifted matters. Israel backed by the US also has stable, economically and scientifically and militarily advanced institutions and has shown the ability to weaken Iran without itself incurring major casualties. The Arab states would prefer to be under the US Israel umbrella and buy Israeli software so as to diversify their economies and make them less oil dependency. The interests of the US and israel differ in that Israel sees Iran as an existential threat which would attack Israel with nuclear weapons if it had them because of its religious convictions while Iran is a nuisance to be reduced every once in a while to put it in its place, so long as the religious party there remains in power. Note that Israel is not challenging Russia as a great power. Replacing the great powers of nineteenth and twentieth century Europe are Russia, China, the United States, and also a now united Europe which has the military might and the political stability but has not yet evolved to go beyond consensus as the way to make collective decisions, as happened when the Constitution replaced the Articles of Confederation.  It did not challenge Russia when Russia brought Syria into its sphere of influence so as to gain a warm weather port there and Russian Jews are influential in Israel-Russian relationships. Russia could not sustain Syria as within its sphere of influence when Assad was defeated and Russia had to use its resources to fight its war with Ukraine.      

Another old fashioned concept of international relations is that a regime might end when a side loses a war. The German Reich ended when Germany lost the First World War. The Russian regime collapsed because the First World War was so protracted. The Soviet Union collapsed rather than was mildly reconfigured at the end of the Cold War. Surprisingly, Japan and Germany, under very enlightened tutelage, quickly, which means in a generation, to become democratic rather than authoritarian, perhaps because they were both on the way to do so except for the misadventures of Naziism and militarism.                   

It is therefore not surprising that Trump might have expected that Iran would undergo regime failure and change if it was seriously diminished militarily and economically. Regime change was listed at first as the war’s top priority but the real reason was diminishing its stockpiles of enriched uranium and other munitions which Trump did accomplish on the first day of the punitive expedition and Trump should have ended while he was way ahead. How that regime change would happen was difficult to predict but an Iranian population, already circumscribed by its religious fundamentalism, might have rebelled. That did not happen partly because of its brutal crackdown on the regime;s opponents. China also outlasted its dissidents by cracking down on Tiananmen Square. The Nazi regime remained organized until the very last when Soviet tanks were in Berlin streets. Those three regimes remained stable in that reverses and atrocities did not foment additional resistance against the regime. Nor had the English King and Constitution been unmoored by the loss of the American colonies and the southern way of life was not dismantled for a hundred years after having lost the American Civil War. Sometimes it happens and sometimes it doesn’t.                      

Here, however, is a concept of international relations that is well established in the United Nations, the Nuremberg Trials and international treaties that is arbitrary and purely rhetorical rather than descriptive and so should be eliminated. That is the idea of the rights of nations. A nation has a right to defend itself or answer an attack . But nations aren’t people even if they are corporate entities. According to Jefferson, only individuals have rights, which means inalienable activities that enhance their individuality (which is what it means to “pursue liberty” and which therefore changes over time, some nations coming to regard health care or education as a right even though those were not included by the Founding Fathers. Jefferson explained why it was prudent to sever ots ties with England, not that the colonies had a right to do so. The only measure for judging a nation’s activities is whether doing so is prudent. So Austria-Hungary didn’t have the right to punishSerbia fo the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand. It could justly calculate a balance sheet of advantages and disadvantages always taking into consideration that a war is a gamble that might go terribly wrong and that public opinion might weigh in as to whether the war was right or wrong as happened when Churchill went in the Underground to ask people if they wanted to continue the war. There might be times when it is prudent to surrender even if the allies were demanding unconditional surrender from Germany. France could have Napoleon surrender because it would soon enough rise again. Vietnam seemed irrational to insist on fighting with the power of the US given US resources, but it had been fighting its enemies for thousands of years..People in Masada chose to die rather than be conquered.                      

Metaphysics at the Supreme Court

The Supreme Court in major cases relies on matters of definition, whether some thing is another thing, to settle issues, and are therfore vacuous except in their results.

Major Supreme Court decisions are not based on arguments, They do not marshall evidence or derive logical and plausible inferences even though they may elaborate such niceties as when Brown v. Board added as a footnote that Kenneth Clark’s psychological study showed that Black children had low self esteem. Rather, what the jurists do is assert whether one category is to be included in another class. Something is or is not part of an essence. This assertion is metaphysical because it is a matter of definition, one word representing a different state of being rather than what another word indicates even though there are no significant empirical differences between them. So Plesseyv. Fergeson decided that Blacks could be segregated on railroad cars because Blacks were different from whites in race and economic and social rank while deciding in Brown v, Board that Black children could not be segregated in schools because of race even if Black children remained of a different race and remained largely inferior in social and economic standing to white children. There was a major flip flop in the way citizenship should be treated, from putative inequality to putative equality. What allowed such a change was not an argument but a matter of intellectual and cultural history. World War II had changed how people thought about race and so categories had to be dealt with categorically, which means either one or the other.

Women were also regarded in law as an exceptional class. They were barred from certain occupations because that might endanger the bearing of the young. Women were not drafted into the military.. Ruth Bader Ginsberg accomplished the same metaphysical transformation with regard to being female. Women could not be discriminated against because women were covered by the fourteenth amendment even though that was a recognized discrimination in the past even to the extent that it had not even been necessary to mention that exception. The silence had become a thing to be included with men. But there are still exceptions. Women are likely to be drafted should a draft be revived but are likely not to join at present or the future in the infantry or artillery because they cannot carry such heavy packs or projectiles and also there are rules allowing single sex bathrooms. But there is a transition between when women are excluded except for exceptions and now they are included but with exceptions. There is no empirical difference between those states, which one is either real or not, but an entirely different perception that is a matter of defamation. It is impossible to know in advance whether a category will be regarded as an exception or not until people experience the potential exception and people sense that as legitimate, such as whether transwomen are allowed into women’s bathrooms. This is a controversial matter because people disagree. Ally McBeal was in favor of single sex bathrooms and contemporary conservatives think otherwise. It is about historical and political change rather than an accurate or clarified definition of the word “woman”. 

There is no telling what people that are excluded from a category can be reclassified as inclusive. That is the nature of being an exception in that it is an example that has to be judged as inclusive of an abstraction. For example, should children of fourteen be allowed to vote because they are people and citizens and a lower age boundary on voting is a singular restriction. There is no limit on old people voting even though cardinals stop voting in picking a Pope at 75. Maybe younger than eighteen year olds should be allowed to vote if they are emancipated and can show themselves self supporting. But that goes against the idea that voting is not subject to a degree of economic wealth as was the case when only landholders or worth a certain number of pounds could vote. The real division is intellectual and cultural. A thirteen year old became an adult in ancient Judaism presumably because a person was an adult if old enough to be a shepherd. Can all people who can manage software qualify to vote? Or age out of doing technology? It is a silly question until it is raised as when women insisted they should be included into voters. 

Apply the idea that major Supreme Court decisions are based on affirming si or non-- either a category is or is not another category-- to some contemporary Supreme Court issues. The question of  birthright  citizenship is one of these and in their oral arguments it was made pretty clear that “all “ meant all. But there was some discussion about whether the two exceptions to birthright citizenship, which included indigenous Americans and children born in an area of the United States controlled by a foreign power, were the only exceptions that might exist. Actually those two exceptions are provided for by the fourteenth amendment because they are peoples who were not at the time under the jurisdiction of the united states or might become outside of the control of the jurisdiction of the United States. Not exceptions that weren’t covered. But what about other exceptions. But, as I have argued, there is no telling in advance whether a new exception arises in advance that broaches whether one thing can be separated out of the entity that is said to exist in its totality. So it is pointless to speculate about possible future exceptions whereby someone might be considered not a birthright citizen. Should sentient robots who manufacture “offspring in the United States be entitled to citizenship> Beats me. 

The Supreme Court decided recently that the Mississippi case outlawing conversion therapy, whereby patients were talked out of being gay, was illegal because it violated the constitutional guarantee of free speech. The practitioners were talking and so what they did was not to be regulated, But there are many utterances which are exceptions of free speech. You cannot threaten or libel people. Practitioners of conversion therapy are also an exception because they are engaged ina professional medical practice where talk is an intervention to alter a medical statement of being and so to be regulated by acceptable medical practice. But rather than an exception to the rule, speech in conversion therapy could be considered the alteration of a state of being. It is free speech because people can exercise their thoughts even about so controversial a topic as homosexuality. Or else it could be thought not free speech because of its effects, and so treated as an action rather than an observation., just like threatening people. When is free speech one or the other? That is metaphysical because it is a categorical definition, one or the other. In the case of free speech as an action, it is ubiquitous and so always controllable and some conservatives think it is legitimate to constrain thought expressed in ideas that are unpatriotic, like burning flags or by liberals who think that people should not say things other people find to be hurtful. The calculus concerning free speech as an idea is different and responds to a different sense of the concept of free speech. It concerns whether the speech is conveyed as one to be recognized as purely verbal. Kant thought there should be free speech in universities because people were clearly playing around with ideas. It would be rude and disorderly to curse God during a church service and the person could be expelled but not jailed at least in a democratic society. Newspapers can decide what is acceptable speech in their own pages. I notice that recently the word “fuck” was introduced into an article by the NY times in an article about the use of cussingamong politicians tough the article used the term f-word in latter parts of the article. How to change speech as a form of talk is very hard. Because it doesn’t mean a truce, as in the case of speech as an action; it is the change in a cultural usage, a matter of etiquette when you change what is or is not speech as talk.

Mississippi has also chimed in on this time the liberal view of mail voting. It says by law that a mail-in ballot sent postmarked by election day will be considered as a legitimate ballot even though it arrives in the counting center after election day. The federal government has challenged that state made administrative procedure even though states are supposed to set their own rules for elections, with the exception of when them state engages inracialmdiscrimination, and that is why the Voting Act of 1964 was passed.  What possible reason might justify Miossissippi’s rule? And what is the either/or definition involved? Let us say that the federal government asserts by definition that voting had to be done on election day because to allow early balloting is to prevent voters from knowing the last few days when an event or a shifting mood might change how people would vote just as a vote a few days after el;ectionday would give those voters the advantage of a few more days to ponder what might be new events. Making election day a single day puts all voters equal, just like starting a race at a single opening line and a single finish line. Only fair. In that case, under that understanding, a legitimate election essentially requires a single day vote. That might present practical difficulties. There might not be enough election precincts or centers if everyone had to vote on the same day. Otherwise lines for voting would be too long. Maybe one expedient would makeElection Day a national holiday so people could vote any time of the day and not for working class people who tend to vote after work. There might be suits yto deal with discriminatory practices but not different in quality than the findings that poll taxes and literacy tests were illegal forms of discrimination and so overcoming these Jim Crow restrictions. Maybe there might be a way to institute electronic distance voting that made sure one voter got only one ballot. But all the technicalities aside, the integrity of election day could be honored and the election process qualitatively improved so that it was a new thing.

The clearest recent case of when one thing is one thing or another by definition occurred when the Supreme Court decided that the president could not be charged with an official act while still subject to a  non-official act such as killing a president’s mistress. Conservatives who like the president have increased power thought that was a good idea because it meant an expresident would not be harassed for having made policy decisions like sending ICE to Minneapolis or starting a war without congressional authorization and so might reconsider doing things that were in the public interest. It would be like trying ex-President Truman for having taken control of part of the United States steel industry during the Korean War just because the supreme court said that was illegal. Liberals thought this distinction a bad idea because presidents would not be held accountable for their improper actions even though, before Trump, presidents had been careful of doing illegal  political actions because of the thought of the rule of law and their reputations, not a possible criminal suit. But in the brief time since that decision, the distinction becomes toothless because it can be argued that any act that is illegal is outside his official duties by definition and so any event by a president that can be regarded as a crime can be prosecuted. So there is no difference between official and private events. If he prosecutes an illegal war then it is not within his official purview. It all depends on whether something illegal can be official and that is just a matter of which word to apply. So much for trying to parse what the Supreme Court means. It does not have the linguistic dexterity to do other than stand by a word or assert the word to mean its opposite. Lawyers grapple with the meaning of words rather than with words as always having to describe something. That way, those so-called arguments get reducible to nothing.

Constitutionalism Two

The attack on the U. S. Constitution is done by ICE and new voting initiatives.

No Kings Day on Saturday, March 28th, was a great success because there were marches around the country and the globe doing the kind of demonstrations I admire: friendly, non-violent and, like MLKJr., they brought their own security to insure grandmas and grandchildren were safe. The potsters on No Kings Day were free to speak their minds and so were unlike the pro Palestinian encampments where only official spokespersons were allowed to speak to the press. Protesters assembling around a slogan that summarizes the message, which in this case is constitutionalism, the defense of the balance of power and the Bill of Rights and principles as old as the English Bill of Rights from 1689, even though organizers have added on gas prices and grocery prices and the war on Iran to take advantage of what polling numbers say are the issues of the day.. A bit of sunshine in a gloomy time. To my mind, however,the heart of “No Kings” remains constitutionalism

Many of Trump’s actions that were regarded as unconstitutional have become regarded by courts as at least illegal though often for other reasons. A court found that the new ballroom could not proceed because it required congressional authorization while I also thought it was also unconstitutional because it was an emolument because donors rather than the treasury was footing the bill, the emoluments and the purse strings amounting to the same thing. Another court found that Trump could not defund NPR and PBS while I thought any number of agencies, such as USAID could be stripped of their funds also without congressional authorization. The biggie is the court decision that allows citizens to sue Trump concerning damages about January 6th despite the Supreme Court decision that the President cannot be sued for events related to his official capacity. The loophole is that any Presidential action that is illegal is ipso facto outside his official capacity and so fomenting a riot is not a part of his discretion but subject to judicial action. Trump will be hounded to death until he dies.  

But there needs to be some elaboration of old Trump violations of constitutionalism and the description of some other ones to show just how horrendous is Trump’s assault on the Constitution. A central point is that the activities undertaken by ICE to detain residents and deport them without due process of law is not just a cudgel Democrats use to embarrass some mistakes that unfortunately died in Minneapolis and is an atrocity case that disrupts a legitimate policy. Instead, it goes to the heart of constitutionalism as that is enunciated by the first and fourth amendments and so is not just a political edge the Democrats might get. The first amendment says that freedom of speech is to be understood as observing what is happening in the public streets and protesting about that behavior so long as the protesters do not interfere with the work of officials. The protesters used whistles to let residents know that ICE was on the prowl. They are providing groceries to peo[ple afraid to go out of their houses. The protesters jeer the ICE agents. Those could be considered interference with ICE agents only if normal commerce and free speech were considered interference because of displeasure being expressed and if ICE agents arrested people for jeering for interference and grocery trips as abetting criminals. Not even ICE has gone that far. 

the fourth amendment says that all people and not just citizens are entitled to be safe in their homes unless a judge has given a warrant to go into that house.The fourth amendment does not say a judge has to do that but it is not necessary to look at what the term wartrent meant in the eighteenth century to understand its plain and clear meaning. Look at the nature of the activity. A warrant is sworn to under oath because it is an adversarial procedure. The judge is reluctant to allow people’s houses to be intruded so as to promote the sanctity of the home. The executive agency wants to intrude on the house because they think foul play is involved or the person inside the home is arrestable. The petition for the warrant on the penalty of perjury suggests that the seeker of a warrant may stretch things or just lie. Therefore, it makes sense for someone outside the executive branch will decide if the warrant is justified. Other executive agencies might rubber stamp one another as might happen if administrative warrants, which simply acknowledge that a paper trail procedures took place. So executive agencies can’t provide warrants. Neither can the legislative branch. Legislative warrants led to the execution of Charles I and the French Reign of Terror. Only an independent judiciary can be entrusted to provide warrants. That is bedrock for the rule of law.

Here are some other Trump assaults on the Constitution. Trump tries by executive order that birthright citizenship is to be abolished even though the Fourteenth Amendment says that all persons born within the confines and under the jurisdiction of the United States are citizens by birth. The exceptions at that timer were native Americans, who were not under control and so part of American jurisdiction or, prospectively, children born within a part of the United States that was occupied by a foreign power. That includes people who are tourist births, meaning people who have travelled to Guam so that a Chinese person could be born there so as to have a child who has American citizenship, as also happened when Jews returned to Germany so as to get reparations but flew to the United States so that their children would have American citizenship. You never know when you might need an American passport. The fear here is that America would be overwhelmed by their tourist children. But there are not that many and, anyway, we want the Chinese children to locate in the United States and become the next generation of American scientists. That is the way previous generations of scientists were developed: Americans trained in Europe who came back or immigrant children who stayed here. The problem for America is not whether foreigners want to come here. The problem is when people might want to leave, and that is happening for some graduate students from abroad who now find Trump immigration policy unsettling, non-citizen residents being harassed and so no longer welcome. 

Moreover, there is a very fundamental issue at stake as to the nature of being American. Doing so is not a matter of ethnicity. France is for the French. The Germans are in Germany. The Jews are in Israel. But the American Republic was founded on a very different principle. It had no ethnicity even though it was originally settled by British and Scottish stock. Membership in the Republic was the result of having allegiance to the Constitution. It was a voluntary contract for adults who came and granted to their children by their birthplace rather than their putative ancestry. This radical principle is chal;langed by those very much in the Right wing who think that there are legacy citizens, which means people who have been in the United States for sufficient generations to be considered true Americans, but that is a slippery slope. Blacks are heritage Americans however turbulent their history or present because they have been here a long time and Hispanics who have even arrived illegally into the United States and have been law abiding for ten or twenty years could qualify as heritage citizens even if Ice does not recognize them as having earned that status while fellow Minnesotans, for example, clearly regard these people as their own.

Another test of the constitutional framework is raised by the recent Supreme Court case concerning whether Mississippi can extend mail balloting to those ballots mailed in and postmarked by Election Day and challenged that such ballots are illegitimate. That assertion goes against the idea that the conduct of elections is under the jurisdiction of the states rather than the federal government so as to ascertain that the federal government cannot interfere with elections, manhandling elections so as to get what the incumbent administration wants. It is an arbitrary decision in that it does not preclude mail in ballots before election day and is just a way to eliminate the voters of the incumbent administration who think that the mail in ballots favor the opposing party. The idea of democracy that embellishes this states rights point of view is that the government’s aim is to make voting as easy as possible, neither insisting on travelling long distances or suffering poll taxes or literacy tests to eliminate people, and, I would suggest, providing election day as a holliday. The role of the federal government was to intrude on states only because it was shown that statues were circumventing voting on the basis of race and that allowing citizens to vote could not be curtailed by the states. A clear test of whether a voting bill is inclusive or exclusive is whether the state or the federal government provides the means whereby voting can be made easily available. Those who want voter id cards backed by a passport or a birth certificate do not provide in the legislation for an easy access number whereby the government will quickly address the necessary paperwork to get a voter  id card. The burden is on the citizen and given the fact that there are so few, some miniscule number, of illegal voters, it is clear that this is a solution with no problem, only an attempt to discourage the vote. 

Another election issue is also a threat to American constitutionalism. ICE officers are present at airports so as, supposedly, to facilitate screening of passengers, But their presence is a threat to any undocumented alien who might be travelling. Will they be picked up at the terminals? The same fear holds with elections. ICE people might be stationed at polling places. That might discourage citizens from voting because their Hispanic visage or accent leads ICE people to detain and deport them/ That creates a chilling effect on voting which is the life blood and the final resort of the citizenry, even beyond free speech and freedom of assembly. Military figures have already said that it would be illegal for the military to be posted in voting places, but the goon squad of ICE, beholden only to the President, might be told to intrude. And that way democracy, which has gone on for two hundred years, just fifty years short of the life of the republic, could become undermined.

Experiments in Regime Change

Patient diplomacy and social change are more likely than war to accomplish regime change.

President Trump is engaged in audacious efforts to bring about regime change quickly through military activity. He did it in Venezuela, is trying it in Iran, and moving towards that in Cuba. We will see the results, but that approach is very different from accomplishing regime change through long term diplomacy, which was the standard technique developed by professional diplomats in both Republican and Democratic Administrations with the exception of Clinton going to war to stop concentration camps flourishing again in Europe. Trump may not think of his ventures as experiments. He does not think that way, and neither do people of the left, who think these ventures are unplanned and doomed to fail and morally wrong, or by the right who think that any foreign intervention is wrong or applaud Trump for his decisiveness. I think of it as pursuing a different way of doing international relations, whether or not the goals are worthy. I don’t like any of thse three regimes, but the question at hand is whether his procedures can likely work, however much they are opposed to the conventional wisdom.

This Trump effort was anticipated by his attempt to bluster Canada and Greenland to join the American union. That was heartily rejected by the rest of the Free World and there was an irony in hat Germany sent troops to resist invasion, an irony of history for those who reach back three quarters of a century.

Venezuela was more [rp,ising. It had long been subject to American intervention. TR’s corollary to the Monroe Doctrine insisted that Venezuela not become beholden to European banks. For a while, Venezuela was a fiefdom of Nelson Rockefeller before he went into politics. So Trump used the military to oust Maduro and got the compliance of the rest of the regime so that the United States oil companies could control its oil reserves and make the oil fields productive though the biggest oil company balked because the political situation was too unreliable for it to make sense for  make a big investment on building Venezuelan production and refining capacities. But the real point is that, despite this coup a success, all it did was shift control of oil. There was no regime chane in that different parties or ideologies changed power, only oil control.

Trump’s most recent claim to regime change concerns Cuba, which, l;ike Iran, has been a thorne in the American side ever since the Castro regime replaced the strongman Fuljhensio Batista m who was subservient to American interests. Castro’s was a true revolution in that it brought in new cadres and ideologies and shifted allegiance to the Soviet Union. Castro was soon after taking power engaged in show trials and treating gays as illegals and so drew American liberals away from him just as American conservatives were also offended by Castro wanting to negotiate sugar quotas and other American interests. Kennedy tried a military solution for regime change. He was convinced to believe thatCuba would revoltagainst Castro as soon as the Bay of Pigs invasion was started. Nor did exploding cigars accomplish the trick of decapitating Castro. So both Democratic and Republican administrations took on the long view that the Soviet-like regime ninety miles from Florida would be embargoed until the regime collapsed from the economic strain. American leftist volunteers to harvest the Cuban sugar crop would not save Communist Cuba.But Cuba survived even if a diminished and and economically unprogressive country. It exported medical doctors and other professionals to other Latin American countries despite the United States embargo. The Clinton and Obama Administration tried to engage in more cordial relations with Cuba by allowing more visitors across the Florida Straits and allowing some foreign investment so that gradually Cuba without abandoning its authoritarian rule might become more part of the fraternity of nations. That long term endeavor, this patient gradualism, is what establishment diplomatists thought was the way to accomplish regime change: not war but modifying social structure.

Trump in his first as well as his second term was not interested in gradual accommodation. He was belligerent against Cuba’s regime and some people found his exasperation with Cuba, as in other places, exasperating. So he has put in an oil embargo without calling it that and that has led to power blackouts in Cuba and has demanded that the President of Cuba resign, apparently following the Venezuelan model to get rid of the top and have the remaining regime be compliant, which might mean Trump resorts in Cuba, it having numerous beaches. Trump may imagine that Havana would become as it was under Batista, the whorehouse for Americans. What other is Trump’s goal for Cuba other than the status quo ante after the wrong road followed from 1959 to the present? Regime change often means restoration rather than doing something new partly because something new is unlikely . A Hispanic country will likely remain that way, dominated by hierarchy and tradition rather than entrepreneurial. Mexico is only gradually changing into a westernized country in the last few generations, in no small measure because of the impact of the North American Free Trade Agreement deal constructed by President  George H. W.Bush which allowed Mexican factories to be built in great numbers on the southern side of the Rio Grande. The gradualist approach is slow but successful and might have worked with Cuba.

Just as the Castro Revolution had disrupted the expected geopolitical evolution of Hispanic America, with countries becoming more modern and capitalistic under American auspices, Cuba a sore or an evil precedent that also took over Venezuela, and was thwarted in Chile by Kissinger intervening to upend Allende, Iran was also a surprise. The fear of diplomats was that the Soviets would challenge the United States and the gradual modernization of Iran by invading IOran so that the Soviets would get warm weather ports, and so there would be tank battles on the Iranian plain just as strategists thought that there might be tank battles on the north German plain if the Soviets moved westward. Instead, the Iranian Revolution was a retrogressive and parochial one where theocracy replaced modernization and a major aim of the new regime was to destroy Israel and counter what was happening towards modernization in the Sunni, Arab nations. Therefore it had to be dispatched so as to correct the “rightful” course. Decapitation, as is usual, was an early try. Then isolation and embargos. Then a thaw whereby Obama managed to use diplomacy to accomplish a treaty that would make nuclear development very difficult, buying twenty or thirty years until, likely enough, the religious flames had quelled or been suffused. But Trump abrogated the treaty partly because Obama had made it and because Trump prefers direct confrontation. 

But technology in warfare moves forward. Warfare was pretty much what it had been from World War II through the war in Afghanistan: either tanks and air support or small action asymmetric warfare. Advances since then gave Israel, a nation of ten million people, an advantage over the ninety million in Iran. War was now about drones and countermissiles and electronic surveillance and counter-surveillance. The big guns in battleships and air forays from aircraft carriers were replaced by the burps of naval artillery that allowed the Ukrainians to take out a prized Russian battleship. {The U. S. S. Gerald R. Ford must have a remarkable defensive bubble around it that lets it go so close in on Arabian waters) The idea that Israel was a gigantic aircraft carrier with the disadvantage that its civilian population was on board was replaced by American made an Iron Dome shield so that Iran could not do much damage to Israel.. That plus decapitation put Iran at a disadvantage, but not without resources. It held itself together and so regime change through the military was unlikely. The Iranians lost their navy, and their missiles and their drones but retained economic leverage by cutting off oil supplies,. And the best prospect of Trump would be to declare victory as Sen. Akins of New Hampshire suggested during the Vietnam War and get out. But at the moment Trump is in denial. The wiser course in retrospect would have been to follow the diplomatist’s course and keep the Obama nuclear deal, as slow and tedious and pending on impending events, as it proposed.

The conclusion to be reached from looking at the long view is that military ventures do not accomplish regime change. The Roman Empire was evolving before the Sack of Rome. Englishness remained distinct after William the Conqueror. The French and British fought for hundreds of years and neither replaced their opposing regimes. Even if the British defeated the American Revolution and hung the Founding Fathers, the fact of a n American entity would have persisted and before long had fair representation in Parliament which is all Franklin wanted, though it would not have made the Declaration of Independence an essential creed. But the American Bill of Rights was modeled on the British Bill of Rights of a century before protecting civil liberties and the primacy of the legislative branch to meet regularly and authorize all expenditures. Napoleon defeated the Germans one time after another until they defeated him, The Restoration in France did not restore the French monarchy as it had been because France was industrializing and becoming a bourgeois nation even though the French monarchy was restored. The evolution of social processes went on rather than returning to the status quo ante. The Germans did not oust the French regime in 1870. It only wanted reparations and the use of Versailles to inaugurate a united Germany. Only 1940 was crucial, an exception to the rule. A German occupation of Great Britain would have destroyed Parliament and the British sense of civil liberties, though the British Isles might have been redeemed by North Americans, as Chirchill contemplated. The Vietnamese didn’t change as a result of war and neither did the Americans or the Russians as a result of the Cold War, each remaining one democratic and the other totalitarian. So regime change is a long term cultural process whereby for three quarters of a century, a unified Europe has emerged, and longer than that, indigenous Americans have become assimilated into the nation. Trump is too ignorant and impatient to see that.

A Short Post on Organizing

Prepare for the mudterms.

There is an old philosemitic joke that can be interpreted as anti-semitic. God comes to Earth and says that in three weeks there will be a new flood that covers the world. The Catholics get together and the priests say that they should use their rosaries to get God to change His mind. Protestants get together and the pastors say people should look into their souls so as to prepare to accept whatever will happen. Jews got together and the rabbis say we have three weeks to learn how to breathe under water. Point made. Be pro-active rather than passive. Seize the day. Plan and execute, The lesson applied and invented by the Civil Rights Movement was to complain less and get organized. Obama said much the same thing when he chanted “Don’t boo; vote.”

It is not necessary to look back to the Civil Rights Movement to see when a social movement was well organized or to look at the Fergeson, Missouri response to the death of Michael Brown to see how the protest movement was disorganized in that roving bands of hoodlums accompanied and interfered with the peaceful protestors. That was different from when Martin Luther King Jr. had his own cadres supervise so that none of his own protesters got unruly. You have to plan ahead for contingencies,not just let events develop.

Think of the recent protest activity in Minneapolis as one that was very well organized. Protesters used whistles to alert residents thatICE agentswere in the area. They took film on the public street pof what was going on and jeered ICE agents. All of this was protected by the First Amendment and this surveillance showed ICE was involved in Fourth Amendment violations by breaking into houses and cars without judicial warrants or probable cause. The claim of ICE that protesters were impeding ICE activities was without evidence. Protesters were pointing out that many detained people were not the worst of the worst but law abiding members of the community who had arrived in the United States a generation or two back. They should have been put on a road to citizenship or at least legal residency which is what Marco Rubio suggested in Trump;s first term but was rejected on the advice of Stephan Miller, that gray eminence, as happened after Bull Conner hosed peaceful protesters back in Civil Rights days, public opinion changed against ICE especially after two American citizen protesters were killed. ICE was withdrawn from Minneapolis, as it had been from Los Angeles and Chicago and, most recently, the Homeland Security Secretary was fired so as to distance Trump as much as from ICE before the midterm elections. Maybe the electorate will forget about ICR before then, but memories about domestic matters lasts longer than foreign adventures.  

Now organize for the battle of the November midterm elections, the most important ones since 1860 because a deeply Republican rigging of those midterms could destroy democracy..Trump has said that he wants to “nationalize” elections, which I take to mean federal interference. He has raided Georgia voting records, He wants access to voter rolls. He will not release documents about whether the military will be sent to election polls on election day. Constitutionalists have to prepare to monitor and intervene in such events.Trump wants a voter registration bill that will make it more difficult for poor voters to vote. So get ready. Bring food and water for long lines and wait while lawyers go to court to allow voting to proceed. Assign friendly observers to support voters if the military is also watching. And appeal to the military not to do that. Prepare to answer a call for emergency powers to the government, such as calling off the vote, if a Reichstag Fire happens or is rigged. Elections took place during the Civil War and G. I.s got to vote in France and the Pacific during World War II. Voting is essential and the pivotal battle rather than just a skirmish as was the Battle of Minneapolis

A Third Short Post on Iran

Nations don’t have the right to be independent.

Amazingly, and to the consternation of many of his supporters, Trump has become an internationalist, though as an impulse rather than a change in principle. Moreover Trump is particularly aggressive and has changed the canons of how statesmen of both parties engage in their prudent internationalism whereby the claim about going to war was reluctant and inevitable because all attempts at diplomacy had been exhausted. Appeasement had preceded an English ultimatum on Poland being invaded by the Nazis. Yalta was offered as a last ditch attempt to avoid a Cold War. But Trump was quickly fed up with negotiations with Iran, demanding they agree never to have nuclear weapons and going to war when they didn’t say that, while previous diplomatists took as their motto “Trust but verify”, which meant not to rely on verbal assurances but painstakingly spell out the details of surveillance and stockpiles Iran would agree to, as was the case in Obama’s agreement with the Iranians which Trump dumped in his first term. Let us see what Trump’s new foreign policy bodes, well or not.

Now that the American and Israeli millitary have been so successful in degrading Iran’ military assets and its leadership, and there have been no sleeper cells in the United States to create havoc in our homeland, the focus of anti-Trump people is to say that there is no end game of the terms under which the war will; be over. In wars of necessity, the endgame is to survive, but in wars of choice like Iran, what deal is there to be struck? A quiescent Iran still intact? A regime change> A disorganized nation? But even powerful nations can be sure how their enemies will unravel. A revolution against the Kaiser was not the plan for the Allies in World War I. The United States did not know the Soviet Union would collapse after the United States had negotiated for the end of the Cold War. Moreover, under the new dispensation by Trump, Trump still remains in charge in that he can just shift the topic away from Iran, just let it languish, while observing from above and within, should Iran become belligerent, while turning to other matters, like conquering Antarctica or finding hidden deviants. There is no end of enemies to get obsessed about when the old scapegoats tire in the imaginations of the populace.

An objection by the Left to the war against Iran is that nations have a right to maintain their existence, even if the nations are immoral. But that is not the case even if the Nuremberg Trials and the United Nations say otherwise. Peace between nations is prudential rather than moral, nations having an armed truce so they don’t risk their sovereignty or prosperity. The British put down the Biafran Revolution in Nigeria in the Sixties because the precedent of Biafran independence might lead any number of African countries whose borders were established by Great Britain would try to rearrange configurations through local wars. Put the point more abstractly. A right is not a property of a nation, as in X has a right to exist as a nation. Rights are attributes of individuals and what nations can do is more or less recognize or enforce rights that are inherent in human nature though over time nations can recognize a right that expands the guarantee of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. So I would say universal health care and universal education have become rights because those are now recognized as required for people to grasp the possibilities of their own ambitions, which is what “the pursuit of happiness” means. So nations do not have to put up with nations so obnoxious or dangerous tyo nations that they will not put up with it. Bill Clinton bombed Belgrade because concentration camps were active in Sarajevo. And so too the United States does not have to put up with the regime which kills its own civilian protesters in great number and has engaged in war with its regional neighbors so long as the initiating nation is prudent enough not to pick on a nation, however distasteful, that is quite dangerous to the moral party. The U. S. should not attack North Korea or Russia or China. Remain more or less within the truce and engage in only proxy wars like Ukraine.

So what nation can trust other nations? The answer is cultural affinities. The English speaking nations have such an affinity and, in fact, closely collaborate militarily. That is why it is a joke to say the United States can absorb Canada. Moreover, affinities can evolve. The European Union is developing a continental sized culture based on Christianity, the Enlightenment and democracy. Germany and France will have ended the four wars between them that lasted from the early nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth. Iran is so different from the United States in religion and political structure that it is an adversary.

Another Short Post on Iran

Trump is mercurial.

Trump lies about everything. He said Haitians were eating cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio. He said Obama was not born in the United States. He implied people aged 150 and more were getting Social Security payments. And so on. But Trump is often quite truthful and candid about his own motives even if other people might think such disclosures were selfish or embarrassing or simply simple minded. That is the case with his starting the Iran War. He said, when he was not awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, that he was no longer pursuing peace. Perhaps he was aware of the plans against Iran or maybe because he was going to leave a major legacy one way or another. As is said, he follows his own instincts.

As a matter of fact, now has been a good time to attack Iran. Its forces had been considerably weakened by last year’s exchanges between Israel and the United States with Iran and the war aims of the United States and Israel are coherent rather than scattered, which is what Democrats would claim. Trump wants to rid Iran of its nuclear, missile and naval capabilities even if Iran threats would not be imminent, and now was the good time to do it especially when the Israelis had found out just when the Iranian leadership would be just where they would be. And destabilizing the regime was another goal though it is difficult to know in advance how that would play out. Recent developments suggest Kurdish forces will come into play and that might turn the trick

Moreover, the President has authority to wage this war because the overly broad mandate given by Congress after 9/11 has never been repealed and the War Powers Act is now interpreted to mean that the President is allowed to war without going to Congress for a period of time rather than the time for war authorization is simply delayed while a crisis has to be dealt with. Also, Congress always has the right to withhold funds for a war, which it did when the Boland Amendment said no money to the Contras in Nicaragua and the Congress never stopped funding Korea or Vietnam. The American military, very cognizant of constitutionalism, has had no qualms about the legitimacy of this war. 

The war so far has been going well, thanks to the US and Israeli military, however much Pete Hegseth does not seem to do much more than bluster. Early used American weapons have done their work and now the U S can use less expensive munitions. The U. S. can withstand a long war because it can manufacture weapons in greater quantities than Iran and because its own population is not at all endangered. Casualties in Israel and the Arab states have been light. Russia and China, erstwhile allies of Iran have been silent. China will think again about attacking Taiwan. NATO has united in defending against Iran incursions. Nobody in the American homeland is threatened so far while the Cold War and many Americans feared for their collective lives and the War on Terror had 3000 civilian American casualties on 9/1 .and so the war on Iran is a cheap war even if gas prices are up. It is no wonder and perfectly reasonable for Trump to have a say in who will be Iran’s leader. That would be both a symbolic and actual victory over Iran, though it is more ambitious, as Trump is now demanding, to get from Iran an unconditional surrender, but Trump uses terms loosely and so we don’t know what he means more than that the term to him, as with “tariff”, sounds mellifluous.

Democratic commentators have been looking for reasons to find the war disadvantageous for the United States. The best one was provided by General Barry Mccaffrey, who worked in the Clinton White House. He said Iran might collapse and become a failed state because Iran has so many numerous minorities. But my couch potato analysis is that Iran didn’t collapse when the United States got rid of Mossedegh so we could control Iranian oil. We brought in the shah, who was a modernizer even if he lived extravagantly.  The clerical regime has to go. But Trump is an unreliable agent of change. He is likely to overreach because of his grandiosity and thereby bring on disaster.

A Short Post on Iran

The Iran War is a personal and political  diversion.

The first point to make on the war on Iran is that, as is generally agreed, this was a war of choice rather than a choice of necessity. Nuclear enrichment and nuclear bombs were far enough away that the Israelis could have, to use the phrase they used with Hamas, “mowed the grass” every few years to keep those prospects remote. Intercontinental missiles are said to be a decade or more away. And supporting regime change always meets the problem of which authoritarian regime will you free, given that the track record in recent years, in Libya, Afghanistan and elsewhere, do not seem to make countries small d democrats. So what is the reason for war now?

Rachel Maddow thinks the Iran War is a payoff to all the Arab nations who have given lavish gifts to the Trump family. But that is to forget that the Sunnis hate the Shiites and need no encouragement only lavishing the Trumps because giving tribute is the ordinary way potentates do business even if the Constitution tried to eliminate emoluments to American leaders. Or maybe Trump is bored having accomplished his major agenda in the Big Beautiful Bill and simply wants to engage in grandiosity as in the Big Ballroom.  But Trump has always been careful about being careful to fight wars only if he can easily win or drop it as an issue when it becomes bothersome. Trump does not take on Russia or North Korea. He threatens Canada and Greenland and just drops them if they seem resistant, just moving on, as he has also done, it seems, with tariffs when the stock market thought on Liberation Day that it believed he really meant it and withdrawing ICE because of bad publicity. Trump’s virtue is only to fight wars you can easily win and that was the case with Venezuela and, apparently with Iran, who was told that the Iran missiles had been sufficiently used up in last year’s war between Iran and the combined US-Israel war that Israel would not see considerable damage and that has come to be the case. I don’t think Trump has the stature to endure a difficult war where the outcome is uncertain as was the case with Churchill. Trump is to be praised only with the minor virtue of Trump Always Chickens Out unless he can be the bully. No subtle diplomacy to wean Iran out of its isolation, but then again, earlier administrations had done that as when Obama got a nuclear deal with Iran which Trump promptly abrogated.

Look at the real reason for the war as having already accomplished its results and therefore is to be offered as motivation. Trump always changes the topic whenever he is in hot water, whether because he lacks attention span or is being sly.

The Jeffrey Epstein caper, which had a long everyday preoccupation for a long time disappeared on Saturday, as well as falling poll numbers and the prospects of the midterms. Shift the topic to foreign policy and that might mix things up so that Republicans will go back to the fold even if Republicans are adverse to foreign adventures. But the timing is everything and this ploy may be too early. Remember that George H. W. Bush was the conqueror of Kuwait but was defeated not too much later by Bill Clinton. Foreign policy is ephemeral to the public especially in a war where the American people are not endangered, which they were in WWII and the Cold War. This war doesn’t have much staying power for the public and so the persistent domestic issues will resurface.

A Short Post on Epstein

The Epstein story is not a conspiracy.

Beware of conspiracy theories, which mean secret cabals of people out to overcome established authority through their hidden stratagems. A good example was the QAnon conspiracy where Democratic leaders were thought to be engaged in pedophilia in under the guise of a pizza parlor. Obviously absurd. Why is all they would plan, and why as lowly as a pizza parlor, rather than a stately mansion? But just a few years later the shoe is on the other foot. Important Republicans have encountered and dealt with Jeffrey Epstein, even after he was a convicted pedophile, and visited with their own families to his own island and there were messages exchanged with him about the young women at his parties, only hinting, as Trump did, that the underage women entertained him. Has there been uncovered a gigantic undercover collusion to entrap and use underage girls by people who are monied and among the most powerful? I think not. Parse your categories carefully.

The most careful view of this theory is provided in the NY Times, courtesy of Ezra Klein by Ananal Giridheradas. She says that these wealthy and prominent people are largely boring even if they have money and validate themselves by associating with one another so as to be known by their associates. They go to the same parties and restaurants and, not by the way, engage in business dealings with one another, trusting to one another on loans and investments, the go ahead of one to another allowing transactions to take place. Pedophilia is just an additional perk for those inclined, but those not inclined, still relativistic about sexual morality. To each their own.

Look at it another way, where the stratagems are not secret however devastating in the results, which is unbridled capitalism and child exploitation. The rich are just doing what the rich do. It is their class in their society that leads to their distinctive culture. Rich people are used to delegating authority. They have nannies and chauffeurs. They have travel agents to do the paperwork of getting tickets and booking hotels and so they rely on other rich people to provide them with services such as arranging bank loans and hiring escorts. Moreover, the coin of the realm is trust because any complicated deal relies on judgement rather than certainty. A banker can decide whether a farm is likely to be foreclosed. Most people have credit ratings. But should Deutsche Bank decide to give Trump a big loan considering his past bankruptcies? How high an interest will it charge? Who, maybe the Russians, will; underwrite the loan? Decisions have to be made and a circle of influentials help because big time finance is always guess rather than a calculation, some people, as in Tom Wolfe’s “The Bonfire of the Vanities”, thinking investment banking mainly the collection of the crumbs picked up from fees from the roiling of money, justified by thinking that making capital liquid is enough reason to endure a major recession every decade or so.

And as to the girls and the women? Men have been exploiting women since the time cavemen were dragging women into their lairs many an eon ago. The victims of Jeffrey Epstein, and victims they were, were probably in more complicated relations whereby poor girls got a chance to meet with the rich and famous and perhaps somehow advance themselves, as was documented by Defoe’s “Moll Flanders” who treated prostitution as a form of entrepreneurship, as was true as way back as in “Genesis”, where the rape of Tamar showed prostitution as a well established industry. The question that arises to my uneducated mind is why a billionaire or multimillionaire would have to resort to Jeffery Epstein to get girls? Aren’t there other bordellos available? Eliot Spitzer found a way. Maybe rich men feel entitled to get whatever sex they want, but all men rich and poor have urges. Only Marie Antoinette thought sex was too good a thing for the peasants to do. It is better, I t6hink, to regard the victims as beig toyed with by the rich because the woman may have gotten some marginal advantage rather than think of the Epstein circle as a kind of cult group, which is a conspiratorial group that grooves on irs secrecy. In that case, the gitrls were overwhelmed by a group frenzy, the vctims simpy deluded..

What difference to politics does it make whether the Epstein circle is a conspiracy theory or not? It means, among other things, that it is not the crucial issue however much Democrats are highly engaged with it. More important things are overt, such as ICE goons in Minneapolis trampling on civil liberties, the violation of the constitutional principle that the executive can only spend money allocated by the Congress and required to spend money Congress has established and funded, and the three trillion dollars given to the rich by the very legal beautiful bad bill. Something bigger than the exploitation of girls, however bad that may be, is at stake. It is the fate of the Republic.

Remember that Karl Marx was not a conspiracy theorist. He thought that rampant greed would be covered by the natural social processes, however embellished through government. These were patriotism, religion and ethnic strife. The poor would be distracted from their enemies and the rich could evolve a sense of entitlement and even a veneer of benevolence, deluding themselves, and so the terrible system continued on its own without any original or ever rising Iagos to spread the poison. The solution is also unconspiratorial, totally in the open. As Obama regularly said: Don’t boo; vote.

A cautionary note. During the McCarthy Era following the Second World War, there was a craze for guilt by association, which meant people were shamed or punished because of the people with whom they associated rather than for crimes they had committed. Dr. Peress was questioned for why as a dentist he was promoted to Major given that his parents were communist. People were asked to come clean about the parties they went to and some were blacklisted for refusing to name names. The same thing is happening today, this time from the left. Newscasts show pictures of the names of people who visited Jeffrey Epstein and those whose names were subpoenaed, some of these people disgraced so as to resign from their positions, even though the only people convicted so far are Epstein and Maxwell. It may well be that the Justice Department has become so corrupt that it will not prosecute criminal behavior but the previous rule was that names would not be named for people not indicted on the ground that the people never had a trial and so could not face their accuser. It is a good idea to preserve that principle even if the Justice Department is withholding indictments. That is an aspect of law that can be retained until the legitimacy of the Justice Department is restored in full. 

The Battle of Minneapolis

Is it a battle?

Minneapolis is my kind of town. The area where Renee Good was killed was middle class but just a few blocks away from where George Floyd was killed in a working class or less neighborhood. The governor of the state is an ex high school football coach. The two senators are Waspy women, one of them, Amy Klobechar, was an aide to Fritz Mondale. The councilman for the area is Hispanic. The Attorney General of the state is Black. The mayor is Jewish and the Police Chief is Irish. The local congresswoman is an articulate anti-semetic Somalian immigrant. Good herself was a lesbian with three children, which suggests a complex sexuality, though John Updike suggests all sex is complex. How much more diverse could you want?

What actually happened at what I decided was a murder because the ICE agent was standing beside the car when he shot into Good;s car while she was trying to leave, having had a friendly remark in his direction, all captured in video. But Kristi Noem insists Good was attacking the ICE agent with her car and so the scene can seem confusing. Moreover, there are such differing views of the situation as a whole that it is difficult to make particular facts critical, Noem says the Democratic political leaders are urging unrest which Mayor Frey says is not true because he has repeatedly insisted on calm and not taking the bait on ICE provocations. But what she may mean is that Frey wanting ICER to leave town is itself a provocation because what ICE is doping is legal, however munich it avoids the general principle that law enforcement in a democracy depends on the assent of the populace and that Minneapolisans regard the arrest of long law abiding neighbors as not worthy of arrest or that it is inappropriate for an American citizen to prove he is a citizen, an Hispanic visage or a Spanish accent not grounds for detention until the person is cleared. That is not American or legal. It is also illegal for ICE officers to assume the powers of police officers. They cannot arrest,  much less kill, drivers of cars that have crowded a lane in a street. They have to ask the local police to do that and the Minneapolis police department is not cooperating with them which means ICE is overridden rather than empowered to assume police authority.

But rather than quibble about misleading angles in cellphone footage, or the niceties of who can enforce which laws, I have a simple way to get to the truth.about Minneapolis and much else that is going on. If I were a congressman at a committee hearing Kristyi Noem attended, I would ask her four straightforward questions. Were Haitians eating cars and dogs in Springfield, Ohio? Was Obama born in Kenya? Were hundred and fifty year olds receiving Social Security payments? Did Trump not ask Georgia officials to rig the 2020 election? If Noem supports the President's view or equivocates, then she is a liar and nothing she says about Minneapolis can be trusted. Which makes her nothing to discuss, which is different from those cooler heads who say we should sort out our differences through talk. The current situation is that  the protests in Minneapolis to ICE incursions are the battle of Minneapolis. 

Minneapolis is a battle even though it has so far had few casualties. That is because the sides are jockeying for advantage rather than relying on principle. California gerrymandered House seats in the response to gerrymandering seats in Texas because California decided to retaliate even though it had previously passed a law to apportion seats by a commission rather than through [political enactment. Prudence trumps principle. In similar fashion, though here under the color of principle, the Trump Justice Department indicted Governor Walz and Mayor Frey and others for obstructing ICE while in recent days a Federal judge instructed ICE not to interfere with peaceful protestors and Kristi Noem on Sunday said ICEwas not using chemicals to control crowds until her staff had to recant that. The Defense Department is said to have prepared two brigades in Alaska who specialize in operating in very cold weather to deploy to Minneapolis where the temperature is around zero fahrenheit.In the early years of the war, Germany and Great Britain didn’t bomb each other’s cities and then they did. Wars escalate, and so does Minneapolis. All devices come to do what will take advantage. Even though the protesters have been very careful to be peaceful, doing things like giving food to people reluctant to leave their homes lest they be deported, MLK's protests remain peaceful partly because his own cadres were used to keep their own people from getting out of hand. Protests or counter protests can get out of hand. Remember Kent State where troopers were given live rounds and had to see through their gasmasks and so panicked and killed some students.I am waiting for the first ICE casualty. So far, only skirmishing and the lack of animus on the side of protesters, though Noem seems pretty hateful;.

The past few days have not further unfolded perhaps because the media have been distracted by whether the farce of Greenland invasion is to be taken seriously. Is Minneapolis a distraction from Greenland or visa versa? Or as some commentators say, both are distractions from Jeffrey Epstein? It is perhaps more accurate to say all of them are part of Trump showmanship to keep multiple balls juggling so as to hide any of them falling to the floor. Remember that Trump is motivated by racial animus, greed and vanity, nothing worthy. He is asking for a billion dollars for entry into a Board of Peace not, I think, to bring peace and rebuilding for Gaza, but to enter into large contracts to spend and make money on Gaza real estate, just as Trump was offering oil companies the chance to build Venezuelan installations in the hope of long term profit, however unstable was the political situation there. Trump decides whether to get the attention of the American people in Minneapolis or somewhere else. 

Who is going to win? Maybe the Trump side will relent in Minneapolis just as it did in L. A. and Chicago. Maybe it will persist until the population in Minneapolis is intimidated and stops taking to the streets, which is what happened in Nazi occupied Paris. Hard to say. Chuck Schumer thinks, and has thought all along since Trump was inaugurated, that everything was in preparation for the midterms and that would be decisive, the Democrats at least taking the House and therefore gaining subpoena powers so as to cross examine cabinet officials about the details of what they have done. But that would still rely on popular opinion turning against Trump because of the new revelations. Perhaps it is right in a democracy for public opinion rather than the law to be the final arbiter.

Another Short Post on Race

People say the United States is on the edge of a constitutional crisis when in fact the nation has gone over the edge and it is about race. Masked government agents detain and make disappear long established as well as “criminal” people on the basis of them looking Hispanic or speaking Spanish or around places where illegal aliens might be found. The Supreme Court has decided in early September that such apprehensions are justified because the detainees can be released if they are found not to be illegals. That violates both the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments which has for hundreds of years meant that people can be detained for probable cause of a particular crime rather than general suspicion or suggestive features. I don’t know why the American people are not up in arms about this authoritarian move but life seems pretty ordinary despite this insult to the Constitution but after all the Harris campaign did not make much headway with the American people in that democracy was on the line in this election and Democrats today are going back to inflation and economic issues as the basis of their challenge to the Trump administration rather than getting to the core issue of constitutionalism. What the Supreme Court now allows can be used to stop anyone of color or race or political affiliation to be stopped and detained for any suspicion, which means most people and that is an attack on the heart ofAmerica.

Trump’s racist impulses are overt and of longstanding, back to the days when his father discriminated against Blacks in his housing developments and the federal government went after that for that. He came down the escalator to announce his candidacy for the Presidency in 2015 by excoriating Hispanics for having calves like cantaloupes because they were carrying drugs with them over the border. Trump has said that Norwegians can come to America but not Arabs or people from “Shithole” nations. He said Haitian legal immigrants were literally eating cats and dogs inSpringfield, Ohio. He treats inner cities as pestholes rather than struggling populations of the sort of areas from which white ethnics emerged. He doesn’t hate all minorities. He is more supportive of Israel than any prior President and gave the Jews the backhanded compliment when Trump was running casinos that he wanted his accountants to be wearing yamulkas, but all things considered he is the most racist President since Woodrow Wilson, who expelled Black workers from the federal civil service and does worse than Wilson in trying, as abetted by Governor Abbott of Texas and others to eliminate voting rights protections or gerrymander out minority districts. 

People are blase about the present situation and it traces back to the unwillingness of Democrats to ask Republicans again and again whether they supported Trump fomenting the insurrection on Jan. 6th, 2021. Unmasking his racism would be a worthy companion piece. Don’t be civil so as to bring down the heat when the other side undermines American principles. As the Senate hearing yesterday with Pam Bondi showed, the two sides have only contempt for one another. I don’t know how it will end.

A Short Post on the Shutdown

The shutdown is a constitutional way to  confront Trump’s unconstitutional and just very bad policies and statements.

I think I am insufficiently knowledgeable about the inside baseball of politics to know what is going on behind the shutdown, however much the significance of the shutdown is clear and everyone decides whether or not to support it. Four months ago, Chuck Schumer and some of his Democratic Senators went  over to vote with the Republicans to support a continuing resolution so as not to shut down the government on the grounds that Trump would use a shutdown to fire a lot more federal workers more easily than otherwise and his Progressive allies thought that a bad idea but this time Schumer is standing up to Trump and Trump is threatening publicly to do in a few days just what Schumer said would happen. What changed? Maybe Schumer decided that the Medicare and the Affordable Care Act cuts were so serious that he had to take a stand regardless of the consequences. Or maybe the Progressives pressed Schumer on the issue and he gave in. The Progressives think there has to be more confrontation with Trump and not wait it out until the midterm election which Schmer prefers because the Constitution might be in a shambles to wait that long and I tend to agree that Democrats should resist Trump in every way possible that is legal. Moreover, the polls, according to a thousand member focus group by the Washington Post, support the Democrats, with twice as many blaming the Republicans as the cause of the shutdown, which is what happened as well in past shutdowns.  So Schumer is reading public opinion rather than the Progressives on how to play this rather than to accommodate to keep Trump from being even worse. So the Democrats are getting a shutdown on their own issue rather than a Republican issue but the Democrats will gain politically. 

Within a few days of the shutdown, the tone of Democratic support of the shutdown has shifted. Though minority leader Jeffries still insists itis about sustaining medicare and obamacare , others, including Sen. Adam Schiff, have enlarged the confrontation. The President has refused to pay for programs already authorized. He has fired people illegally. He is punishing only democratic cities and states from getting funds for infrastructure. He says Portland is in flames, which it is not, just like saying Springfield, Ohio legal Haitians were eating cats and dogs. He tells the military to wage wat on Democratic cities and regards Democrats as full of hatred, evil and Satanic, when I think only the first two applies to Republicans for cutting off nutrition to malnourished African children even though ngos would take the supplies and distribute the aid before they expired but the State Department refused and no Republican protested. There is nothing to compromise. Jeffries should take up a sombrero and a moustache along with all the other House Democrats as a badge of honor and so to make fun of the President. I don’t want the shutdown to end before the President and the Vice President, who abets the President with his lies and misrepresentations, to resign. It is going to be a long shutdown.

The virtues of politics as an object of contemplation of what it is as a thing and as a participant is that it is clear and easy rather than secretive. It is not a Manichean world where opposing elites battle above the fray of the common man as Whittaker Chambers thought was the case because he thought the final war would be between the Communists and the ex=-Communists. To the contrary, the confrontation took place in full view during tbhe Cold War and everyone was aware of it and took sides on whether the Cuban Missile Crisis or the Vietnam was a good thing and it ended with the Reagan=-Gorbachev meeting in Iceland, though I suspect that not all of the Reykjavik Accords have all been disclosed these thirty five years later. Nor is domestic confrontation like it is in the recent very well done but fanciful movie “One Battle After the Other” where an oligarchic cabal represents white people in a war against Mexicans who are armed with secret codes and secret confederates everywhere. The oligarchs are in fact just out there buying Supreme Court Justices and giving gigantic campaign donations as are their opponents and legislation results unless taxes for the rich when the oligarchs win and gigantic campaign donations are offered to the opposition, not that the contributions don’t cancel one another off because what matters is whether the nominee is personable or not. So politics is clear in that what you need to know about it is apparent. Politics is also easy in that you need no expertise to participate not needing to know the expertise required to run a supermarket or a hardware store but relying on whatever information or rumors a voter comes across and apply whatever common sense, as it is called, or ideological framework it has to inform itself. Politics is not in the stars but in peoples selves. So an educated person can decide to rid their hands of the matter, deciding that religion or cultivating one’s garden is the way to live, but I prefer this sport and form of co;;ective interaction as a way to understand something always engaging, a never ending soap opera with new faces and struggles and carrying great moment for how a collectivity will proceed and worthy because it is not opaque but transparent. Politics in our time can muddy or cleanse and see it happen, and that will occur with the shutdown.