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CONGRESSIONAL ABDICATION NEEDS TO END, AND SO DOES THE FILIBUSTER

With the stroke of a pen, Joe Biden made many of us smile again.  The Muslim ban is gone. The Paris climate accord is back. The DREAMers are saved from deportation. Transgender Americans are welcomed back into the military. What a euphoric breath of fresh air after a four-year bout of Trump derangement syndrome! 

The trouble with euphoria, of course, is that it’s a temporary condition. As the late poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti wrote, “. . .even in heaven they don’t sing all the time.”  Although some of Biden’s sweet songs will keep playing for at least the next three years and nine months, at some point the music will stop, and the magic pen will be in the hands of a new president. 

Therein lies our problem. The structure of our government has become so flawed and broken that we have come to accept these massive bi-polar waves of transformation every four years. A Republican senate stonewalled Barak Obama, so he turned to executive orders to deal with immigration, climate change and human rights.  Donald Trump molded his presidency around undoing everything Obama did.  Then along comes Joe to undo what Trump did. 

The last thing the authors of our Constitution wanted was a government run by executive edict.  They’d had enough of the monarchy stuff. They saw Congress as the strongest of the three branches, and vested it with the power to enact laws through deliberation.  The president would then execute those laws.  It was the founders’ way of eliminating policy limbo, of protecting us from the vertigo of a revolving door of presidential fiat. 

And presidential fiat is precisely what we have now.  Congress, particularly the Senate, has abdicated it’s role of lawmaking. One study, for example, found that Congress has spent only a few days over the past five years even talking about the pressing issue of immigration, with no resolution.  The record is similar on other critical issues.  As a result, the president has become a one-person legislature.

The United States Senate was once touted as the world’s greatest deliberative body. Sadly, it has morphed into a dysfunctional morass. Gone are the days of scintillating debate and creative problem-solving. In their place is a dreary, vacuous rhetoric on an intellectual par with a dismissive schoolyard taunt.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer says Democrats will do whatever they have to in order to pass legislation on gun control, voting rights and infrastructure, even if it means eliminating the filibuster. That’s the rule requiring 60 votes in the 100-member chamber to pass most measures.

Comes now Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who needs to gain only one GOP senate seat in the next election to retake the majority. After hissing at Schumer’s quest to pass a liberal agenda on the heels of blowing up the filibuster, McConnell went into full toxic na-na-na-na-boo-boo mode.  If Democrats kill the filibuster, McConnell said his party, once it regains majority status, will “ram through” sweeping abortion restrictions, a hardening of the U.S.-Mexico border, nation-wide anti-union laws, defunding of Planned Parenthood and expansion of gun rights. Some of us are old enough to remember when Republican leaders designed legislative agendas based on well thought out policy concepts, rather than their value as weaponry.

We probably shouldn’t have been surprised to hear McConnell trot out the cold war trope of mutual assured destruction. In his mind, the Democrats passing voting rights protections by a one-vote majority, is a nuclear bomb, and must be met with a commensurate warhead of, say,  draconian abortion restrictions.  The strategy, of course, is to leave both sides so afraid of their opponent’s agenda that neither push the nuclear button. (See the Cuban Missile Crisis.)

At least so far, mutual assured destruction has protected us from the apocalypse by creating an absence of nuclear war.  The problem with transporting that strategy into the legislative arena, however, is that we end up with an absence of legislation.  And that is precisely the dysfunctional mess we have been in for some time.  The filibuster rule has so paralyzed the Senate that it no longer even attempts to deal with the pressing issues of the day.  

The Democrats need to call McConnell’s bluff. Drop the damn nuclear bomb already. Blow up the filibuster, pass strong voting rights protections, along with gun safety, immigration reform and a long-overdue increase in the minimum wage.   Let the legislative process play out the way the founders intended and the Constitution provides. 

Lawmaking was placed in the hands of Congress principally because legislators are ultimately accountable to the people in their districts or states. By sizeable majorities, those people support Row v. Wade, union rights and sensible gun laws, and oppose anti-immigration policies and defunding Planned Parenthood. If Republicans regain control of the Senate, they would be quickly throwing it away by enacting McConnell’s punitive agenda. Call his bluff. Even if he carries out his threat, voters will have an opportunity to respond in the next election.  Either way is better than a paralyzed Congress and the revolving door of executive orders.

During the Constitutional Convention of 1787, James Madison described the Senate as a “necessary fence” to protect “the people against their rulers.”  In this aspirational vision, deliberation, shared thoughts and healthy give-and-take before a simple majority vote would serve democracy far better than the king-like whims of a president.   Unfortunately, the Senate subsequently stumbled its way into paralysis, first through the filibuster rule, and more recently by a hyper partisanship centered on playing to the party base. 

Madison’s fence is sorely needed today, more than ever. It will not be easy to get there. But all journeys begin with a single step. 

It’s time to take that first step by killing the filibuster, and returning the Senate to majority rule.  

EPILOGUE:  Out of total disrespect for the timing of this post, Senator Joe Manchin, D-West Virginia, just announced that he will never vote to kill or weaken the filibuster. To quote a former president: “Sad.”   In politics, however, “never” can have a fairly short life. (See “Read my lips: No new taxes.”) 

A BOY ON AN INNER TUBE BEFORE “ZERO TOLERANCE”

If you want to beat the political ramifications of inflicting major trauma on young children, it’s better to have thousands of victims rather than just one. That’s the lesson we’ve learned from the Trump administration’s toxic “zero tolerance” campaign. This is the border war that left toddlers bruised, battered and neglected, and forced infants, torn from their parents’ arms, to represent themselves in front of immigration judges.

Six weeks ago, the nation was transfixed by images of migrant children forcibly separated from their parents and placed in cages. A recording of screaming babies and toddlers wailing for “Mami!” and “Papá!” went viral, leaving listeners in chills and tears.

Six weeks is an eternity in our current political environment. During that span of time, our attention has been diverted to a whole string of shiny objects, including Trump’s Helsinki love fest with Putin, the failure of his imaginary peace with North Korea, his threats against Iran, audio of his plans for a Playboy model payoff, and a $12 billion bailout for farmers hurt by his trade war, among far too many others. It’s hard to keep the focus on the thousands of children torn from their parents, and emotionally maimed for life by the country that once welcomed immigrants with the words: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free . . .”

Turn the clock back 19 years, to a simpler place and time, though it didn’t seem like it then. The nation was captivated by a similar story, except that this was a single 6-year-old migrant child, a Cuban separated from his parents while politicians fought bitterly over his fate. Elián González was found stranded on an inner tube near the Fort Lauderdale shoreline in 1999. Like the Central American parents caught up in Trump’s zero tolerance nightmare, Elián’s mother had been desperately searching for a better place to raise her son when they set sail on a rickety raft to escape deteriorating economic conditions. Sadly, she drowned en route. Elián was rescued by two fishermen and eventually taken in by extended family members in Miami – Elián’s great uncles – who had themselves fled Castro’s Cuba years earlier.

That might have been the end of the story if not for two salient subplots: Elián had entered the country illegally, and he had a father in Cuba who wanted him to come home. The battle lines were drawn. On one side was Miami’s anti-Castro Cuban community, fully backed by Republicans, insisting that poor, little Elián should be lovingly embraced by the welcoming America of his mother’s dreams. On the other side was the boy’s father, backed by the Castro government and Democrats on the basis that Elián was a Cuban citizen who, by rule of law in both countries, belonged with his father.

While the court battles raged on, Elián’s story evolved into a year-long media frenzy. By the end of 2000, the tale of this one child had been given the second largest volume of television coverage in U.S. history, surpassed only by the O.J. Simpson case. There were books, films, talk radio programs, songs, t-shirts, posters, art exhibits, murals, statues, documentaries, even a South Park episode devoted to the fate of this one young child. Ultimately, the federal courts determined that the government has a duty to “(reunite) unaccompanied alien children with a parent abroad. . .” To carry out that order, armed U.S. marshals stormed into the Miami home of Elián’s relatives, and removed the boy at gunpoint. He was ultimately reunited with his father in Cuba where he was treated like royalty by Fidel Castro. Elián is now an engineer and a frequent good will ambassador for the Cuban government.

What a difference two decades make. Donald Trump carried Florida in the 2016 election, in large part, with the backing of Miami’s Cuban-American immigrants who were still angry with the Clintons for supporting Elián’s return to Cuba. Brett Kavanaugh, the Republican attorney who unsuccessfully argued the case for keeping the boy in the U.S. so he could have a better life, is now the Supreme Court nominee of a president who ordered children snatched from their parents in order to keep “shithole” riffraff out of the country.

The biggest change, however, is in the numbers. Elián was a singular emblematic symbol who resonated with deep tones of empathy on both sides of the battle. His boyish face, his smiles, his tears were with us for 13 months, embedding themselves into the fabric of our lives, at a time of far fewer distractions.

We now have thousands of babies, toddlers, young children, separated from their parents and enduring forms of abuse that would trigger an immediate social service intervention in any jurisdiction. What we don’t have are their names or pictures. We don’t have anything resembling the Elián González story arc to keep this dystopian drama on the center stage of public life.

All we know is that 711 children remain in perpetual custody, with no end to their family separations in sight. One young toddler died of a respiratory illness after her release from a Texas detention center. A six-year-old girl was sexually assaulted in an Arizona lockup, and then forced to sign a form agreeing to keep her distance from her alleged assailant. Then she was molested again. A least 70 babies, all under a year old, have been hauled before immigration judges. They have no legal representation and are absurdly asked, by rules of the court, whether they understand the deportation proceedings against them.

Ivanka Trump this week called her father’s family separation plan the “low point” of his administration, as if this brutal, premeditated assault on humanity was a mere past tense blip. Hardly. The government, which was warned in advance of launching this draconian immigration offensive that separating children from their parents would cause “traumatic psychological injury”, says 460 parents of kids in federal custody have already been deported. Nobody knows what will become of their children, now languishing in unsafe and unregulated makeshift detention facilities.

Republicans once saw America as a welcoming beacon in the night to little Elián on his inner tube. No more. They are now enabling a broken and demented president, a man who, by his own admission, would rather look strong than show compassion for defenseless children. Somehow, some way, we must persevere through the daily din of Trumpian noise, and make sure that the electorate never forgets the lasting pain and trauma this man inflicted on all of those children who came looking for a better life and ended up in cages.

TRUMP RULE OF MENTAL HEALTH: IF HE LOOKS, ACTS & GOVERNS CRAZY, HE’S CRAZY

There is an intense and amusing battle raging in the psychiatric community over whether the president is nuts. Specifically the controversy is focused on whether it is ethical for a shrink to declare Donald Trump insane without having examined him. There is a growing plethora of practicing therapists who have publicly diagnosed The Donald as bonkers, albeit in more elegant and clinical prose. And they have all incurred the wrath of the American Psychiatric Association whose rules prohibit members from publicly diagnosing political figures unless they have examined them and obtained their permission to release the findings.

This is known as the “Goldwater Rule”, and it evolved from a controversial psychiatric survey taken during the 1964 presidential campaign between Barry Goldwater and Lyndon Johnson. A magazine polled more than 2,000 psychiatrists and a majority said the Republican senator from Arizona lacked the mental stability to be president. After losing the election, Goldwater sued the magazine for libel and won. Years later, the psychiatric association adopted the rule now being invoked, without much success, to keep its members from commenting on Trump’s mental state.

Dr. Allen Frances, a psychiatrist at Duke University School of Medicine and an author of the standard manual on psychiatric disorders, wrote a letter to the New York Times defending the president against the insanity label lobbed at him by some of the doctor’s colleagues. He said the commander in chief lacks the “distress and impairment required to diagnose a mental illness.” Trump might have tweeted the good doctor’s endorsement, if not for the sentence that followed: “Nevertheless,” Frances wrote, “he can and should be appropriately denounced for his ignorance, incompetence, impulsivity and pursuit of dictatorial powers.”

Thankfully, bloggers are not covered by the Goldwater Rule. That means I can go out on a limb and say publicly what most world leaders have to be thinking: President Donald J. Trump is batshit crazy.

Let’s count the ways:

• Turned the Nuclear Codes into a Facebook Moment. Since the start of the arms race, a military attaché, clutching a briefcase that can be used to launch nuclear missiles, has always been in close proximity to the commander in chief. All previous presidents have treated this sobering arrangement with well-deserved discretion. Not The Donald. He invited fellow diners at his Mar-a-Largo resort to pose with the “nuclear football” and its carrier for cute social media fodder.

• Thinks Frederick Douglas is Still Alive. Trump kicked off Black History Month with a lengthy monologue about how the “dishonest media” incorrectly reported that Martin Luther King’s bust had been removed from the Oval Office. Then, trying to think of other black people to mention, he gave a shout out to Douglas, saying the abolitionist who died 122 years ago “is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job.”

• Called for the Destruction of a Court that Ruled Against Him. Trump went to Nashville this week to deliver a carefully scripted speech in support of the Republican health insurance bill. Minutes before taking the stage, the president learned that his second attempt at an anti-immigration order had been blocked by a federal judge. So he jettisoned the insurance pitch and ranted about how he’d like to “break up” the Ninth Circuit.

• He Sees Some Holocausts as Better than Others. Asked what he learned in his first intelligence briefing, Trump said, a “nuclear holocaust would be like no other.”

• Declared Unconditional Love for Himself. In an interview with an ABC reporter, Trump said, “I don’t want to change . . . I can be the most presidential person ever, other than possibly the great Abe Lincoln, but I may not be able to do the job nearly as well if I do that.”

• Repeatedly Sticks his Foot in his Mouth. As his lawyers draft briefs supporting his second travel ban order on the basis that it substantially resolved legal objections in the original document, Trump grabs a microphone and says the new order is “just a watered down version” of the first one.

• Thinks he is the Least Racist Person Ever. Seconds after making that declaration during a news conference, Trump asked a black reporter if she could set up a meeting for him with the Congressional Black Caucus since they must be her friends.

• Comes out of his Own Little World Just Long Enough to Create International Incidents. The Obama-wiretapped-me fantasy now seems destined to have a longer life than the Iraq War. By now, Trump’s belief that the former president electronically surveilled him has been repudiated by every major Republican leader in Congress and the head of the FBI. But being The Donald means never having to say you’re sorry, or wrong. He doubled down this week and suggested that British spies planted the bugs for Obama. The Brits were enraged, but Trump wouldn’t back off, insisting he heard it on Fox News so it must be right. Fox News quickly said there was no truth to the story, but Trump kept right on mumbling about it, and even tried to drag a mystified German Chancellor Angela Merkel into the fracas late last week.

And on and on the list grows. As New York Times columnist Gail Collins noted yesterday, the insanity of the Trump administration can be measured by the fact that the new secretary of the interior rode to work on a horse named Tonto, and nobody paid much attention. Somewhere, in some afterlife, a bemused, and oh-so-very sane, Barry Goldwater is shaking his head and muttering, “And they called me crazy!”

THE TRAGEDY OF TRUMP: WINNING AN ELECTION DOESN’T CREATE AN ABILITY TO SERVE

This country’s 45th presidency is unfolding like a Shakespearian tragedy. The protagonist, King Donald, is so consumed with proving the legitimacy of his throne that he unleashes one stunt after another, each more bizarre than the last, all designed to prove himself worthy of his title. The dramatic irony, of course, is that the more the king does to create the illusion of legitimacy, the less legitimate he appears.

This diabolical storyline developed its rich texture from the backstory of the prequel, last year’s general election. Remember the third and final presidential debate when The Donald, then behind in the polls, declared that he might not accept the election results? The rarely stunned New York Times called Trump’s position “a remarkable statement that seemed to cast doubt on American democracy.” In a classic plot twist, Trump won, but his self-sowed seeds of doubt over the vote tally invaded his own psyche, haunting him like a Dickensian ghost. Hilary Clinton conceded to Trump. The Electoral College certified his election. The chief justice of the Supreme Court administered his oath of office. Throughout all of those rituals, King Donald remained angry and on edge. He was holding an “illegitimate election” card that he never had to play. His unshakable dread was that it would now be played against himself.

Nearly two months into his presidency, Trump remains paralyzed over his fear of not being seen as legitimate, despite the absence of any serious and credible challenge to the election results. He spent the first 48 hours in the White House telling foolish lies about the size of his inaugural audience. Then, out of the blue and without a scintilla of evidence, he insisted that he would have won the popular vote had it not been for rampant election fraud. And then came the Russian stuff. Intelligence agencies said there was evidence that Russian spies interfered with the election in an effort to help Trump win. While the rest of the country saw that as a serious threat to our democracy, the new president imploded over the notion that he didn’t win the election on his own merit. Tragically, this president’s neurotic obsession about looking like a winner has made him the biggest loser in White House history.

The fact that Donald Trump’s presidency is lacking legitimacy has nothing to do with vote counts or Russian espionage. A legitimate president doesn’t:

• Accuse his predecessor of wiretapping him, without a shred of evidence.
• Preach “America First” and then allow the Keystone Pipeline to be built with foreign steel.
• Criticize Arnold Schwarzenegger’s television ratings at the National Prayer Breakfast.
• Place a hold on what he considers an urgent national security program (Travel Ban 2.0) in order to bask in the afterglow of the only speech he has given without looking completely unhinged.
• Call the news media the “enemy of the American people.”
• Boast about the magnitude of his Electoral College win in a phone conversation with the Australian prime minister.
• Call people names like “neurotic dope”, “clueless incompetent”, “dumb as a rock”, “sick loser”, “obnoxious”, “dumb mouthpiece”, and “total disaster”. (Recipients of presidential wrath, in order of appearance: the New York Times’ Maureen Dowd, the National Review’s Rich Lowry, CNN’s Don Lemon, George W. Bush’s political strategist Karl Rove, Sen. John McCain’s daughter Meghan, Sen. Lindsey Graham and former defense secretary Robert Gates.)

Now, add to that abbreviated list of highly un-presidential behavior, two recent episodes:

The Washington Post ran a compelling and amusing piece earlier this week that cataloged Trump’s history of staging outrageous stunts in order to divert media attention from his various messes. The article’s point was that the president’s wiretap tweet bomb was a calculated move designed to deflect attention from the Russians’ election tampering investigation and the attorney general’s recusal. As it turned out, the ruse had the design and execution of a fifth grader forging a parent’s signature on a permission slip. It produced four days of media speculation over whether the FBI might have persuaded an international court to authorize wiretaps on Trump associates based on evidence of collusion with a foreign government. It was a Keystone Cops diversion that ended up with an even deeper plunge into the Russian scandal it was created to deflect.

And then there is Trumpcare, or the lack thereof. The president spent the campaign ranting about the evils of the Affordable Care Act and how he would replace it immediately with “something wonderful”. Four days before he was inaugurated, Trump said there would soon be “insurance for everybody,” at much lower costs. House Republicans, who repealed Obamacare 725,000 times when it didn’t count, were chomping at the bit to see the new president’s plan. Turns out he didn’t have one. A week ago, The Donald had this to say on the subject: “Nobody knew that health care could be so complicated.” The Republican Congress , abandoning all hope of presidential leadership on this issue, put out its own miserly health care plan, one that would leave millions without coverage. Trump immediately tweeted his support. Yet, as soon as the bill took shots from all directions, he told people not to worry because everything is negotiable. The next day he backtracked after House GOP leaders told him they had very little room to move. The president is now prepared to go back on the rally circuit to churn up populist demand for a bill he clearly doesn’t understand.

In every way that counts, Donald J. Trump has failed to conduct himself with the honor, integrity, decency, empathy and intellectual vigor that form the soul of the presidency and give it legitimacy. It’s not about the popular vote or the Russian hacks. It’s about the human qualities this man lacks.