Our Undemocratic Founding Fathers, What Pitts and Will have to say, the Mueller Report (as simple as it gets) and an Airline Pilot You Don't Want in the Cockpit.

Our Undemocratic Democracy

Back in 1789, the framers of the Constitution did not trust “the people.”  While it did give those who had the right to vote (which did not mean “everybody” in those days; each State had its own rules) the ability to directly elect members of the House of Representatives, the “People’s House,” from their Congressional districts, they were not so generous in laying out how Senators and the President were elected. 

Senators were elected by a vote in State legislatures, which had been ostensibly elected by the people, but this removed the people from directly choosing who went to Washington as a Senator.  Clearly, this was undemocratic, manifesting an elitist disrespect for the people.  This was corrected in 1913, after 124 years, with the passage of the Seventeenth Amendment providing for the direct election of Senators.

Similarly, the choice of a President was left to a college of “Electors,” who usually were and continue to be political appointees representing the party which got a majority of votes in the State.  A State has an electoral vote for each of its Representatives in the House (which can be changed every ten years based on census figures) and one for each of its two Senators.  Again, this was undemocratic and represented that same distrust of the people’s wishes.  Nebraska and Maine have gotten around this by voting to allocate their electoral votes proportionately based on the popular Presidential vote in the State.  (Actually, electors are not bound to vote for any particular candidate. They can vote for anyone they wish, and courts have upheld this.)

This undemocratic mess could be remedied by a Constitutional Amendment abolishing the Electoral College and replacing it with the far more democratic process of choosing a President by the popular vote total.  Unfortunately, this would take many, many, years to implement and the question of how to determine a winner by a majority, rather than by a plurality, would have to be resolved.

An easier method of choosing the President more democratically, without bypassing the Electoral College might be one whereby a State passes legislation saying that all its Electors must vote for the candidate who received the largest number of votes nationally.  What happened in the State wouldn’t matter. This would mean that even if a State voted heavily for one candidate, but that candidate did not win the popular vote nationwide, that State’s electoral votes would go to the candidate who did win the popular vote nationally.  This would be democratic nationally, but undemocratic in terms of the individual States.  But after all, the presidency is a national, not a State, office and in 2019, States do not have the power they had in 1789.

Sixteen states are already agreeable to go this route.  Of course, there would still have to be a majority, not just a plurality, of Electoral votes needed to elect a President, as constitutionally prescribed.  If enough States to produce 270 electoral votes agreed to do this, giving their electoral votes to the popular winner, that would be sufficient to elect a President and a time-consuming Constitutional Amendment battle would not be necessary.   

At this point, the sixteen states agreeable to this approach would contribute 196 electoral votes, so this alternative is getting close to happening.  Of course, there are many challenges to this approach such as what happens if a State changes its mind later on in regard to participating in such a “compact, or if the Supreme Court invalidates such an agreement, so lawyers will be busy on this approach for a while yet.  I suspect that ultimately a Constitutional Amendment will be needed, but this method seems to be a good stop-gap way of democratically electing a President.
Jack Lippman

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George Will and Leonard Pitts Speak Out

Pitts

Last week, in discussing some of the cruel tactics carried out by our government’s immigration people on Central Americans fleeing terror in their own countries and waiting, often separated from family members, to be admitted to the United States as “asylum seekers,” the Miami Herald’s Leonard Pitts equated our toleration of such “cruel” tactics with “evil.”   In doing so, he quoted the late Hannah Arendt, and here is that excerpt from Pitts’ column:

“Consider Hannah Arendt’s famous book, ‘Eichmann in Jerusalem.’  Her report on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, architect of the Holocaust, coined a term that became controversial, if not notorious: ‘the banality of evil.’  Arendt would later explain that by it, she meant that she found no ‘diabolical or demonic profundity’ in Eichmann.  He was, she felt, a ‘desk murderer’ who, at a fundamental level, lacked the imagination to even conceive of the crime he was committing.  He just did his job.  He just followed orders.”

Many do not agree with Arendt’s excuse for Eichmann, but Pitts goes on to point out that:

“Something to bear in mind as our government of the people inflicts needless cruelty upon the vulnerable and the dispossessed.  After all, evil puts its pants on one leg at a time, just like you and I do.  Evil fixes breakfast.  Evil gets the kids off to school.  And then, evil goes to work.”

Will

Conservative mainstay George Will had a nice Washington Post column in the papers last week too.  He clearly explained the wrongheadedness of the President’s position on tariffs.  (I still doubt whether Trump ever set foot in the Wharton School of Finance.  Even the janitors there probably know more about economics than he does.)   Will is so clear that even people gullible enough to support the President ought to understand it.   Check it out by CLICKING HERE.

 JL

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The Mueller Report - As Simple As It Gets - Courtesy of Gary Trudeau

Okay, you never did read the Mueller Report, which is slowly receding into history and no longer dominating newscasts and headlines.  But nevertheless, it still provides enough information on which to base immediate impeachment proceedings in the House of Representative.  The Democrats must move to impeach President Trump without further delay.  Waiting only helps the President!  He would like any impeachment actions to be postponed forever.  

Of course, the chicken-hearted Republican cowards in the Senate will never convict the President, but what comes out in the House’s impeachment hearings should suffice to cause many of them to cower in fear of the 2020 voters and finally renounce their dependency on Trump’s “evil” base.  (See comment above from Leonard Pitts regarding what constitutes “evil.”  All 'evil doers' do not resemble satanic figures.  Many look like you and me.)   A well-conducted impeachment hearing in the House, on TV daily, ought to suffice to either return the G.O.P. to sanity or bury it in a graveyard along with the Whigs and Federalists.

  

Michael Doonesbury

But getting back to the Mueller Report (which most of you and millions of Americans did not read), here is cartoonist Gary Trudeau’s “quickie” Doonesbury version of it.  It is really all you need to know.  CLICK HERE TO READ IT.  And of course, please pass it on!  You’ll love it!

JL

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Online Voter Registration

Know any Floridians one who are NOT registered voters?   Refer them to a web site where they can complete the registration process online!    Every vote counts.  https://registertovoteflorida.gov/en/Registration/Index   

ALSO FOLKS, YOU CAN CLICK HERE TO GET THERE.

And if you are not in Florida, do the same thing wherever you live.  It’s all on the Internet somewhere!  One registered voter is worth a hundred social media messages that merely "preach to the choir."

JL

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And finally, reprinted without permission, here is a “Must Read” piece for you to digest and pass on to others.  This is why the President must be impeached.  Yesterday!

If Trump Were an Airline Pilot

By James Fallows, Senior Editor – Atlantic Magazine – August 22, 2019

Fallows

Through the 2016 campaign, I posted a series called “Trump Time Capsule” in this space. The idea was to record, in real time, what was known about Donald Trump’s fitness for office—and to do so not when people were looking back on our era but while the Republican Party was deciding whether to line up behind him and voters were preparing to make their choice.

The series reached 152 installments by election day. I argued that even then there was no doubt of Trump’s mental, emotional, civic, and ethical unfitness for national leadership. If you’re hazy on the details, the series is (once again) here.

That background has equipped me to view Trump’s performance in office as consistently shocking but rarely surprising. He lied on the campaign trail, and he lies in office. He insulted women, minorities, “the other” as a candidate, and he does it as a president. He led “lock her up!” cheers at the Republican National Convention and he smiles at “send them back!” cheers now. He did not know how the “nuclear triad” worked then, and he does not know how tariffs work now. He flared at perceived personal slights when they came from Senator John McCain, and he does so when they come from the Prime Minister of Denmark. He is who he was.

The Atlantic editorial staff, in a project I played no part in, reached a similar conclusion. Its editorial urging a vote against Trump was obviously written before the election but stands up well three years later:

He is a demagogue, a xenophobe, a sexist, a know-nothing, and a liar. He is spectacularly unfit for office, and voters—the statesmen and thinkers of the ballot box—should act in defense of American democracy and elect his opponent.

The one thing I avoided in that Time Capsule series was “medicalizing” Trump’s personality and behavior. That is, moving from description of his behavior to speculation about its cause. Was Trump’s abysmal ignorance—“Most people don’t know President Lincoln was a Republican!”—a sign of dementia, or of some other cognitive decline? Or was it just more evidence that he had never read a book? Was his braggadocio and self-centeredness a textbook case of narcissistic personality disorder? (Whose symptoms include “an exaggerated sense of self-importance” and “a sense of entitlement and require[s] constant, excessive admiration.”) Or just that he is an entitled jerk? On these and other points I didn’t, and don’t, know.

Like many people in the journalistic world, I received a steady stream of mail from mental-health professionals arguing for the “medicalized” approach. Several times I mentioned the parallel between Trump’s behavior and the check-list symptoms of narcissism. But I steered away from “this man is sick”—naming the cause rather than listing the signs—for two reasons.

The minor reason was the medical-world taboo against public speculation about people a doctor had not examined personally. There is a Catch-22 circularity to this stricture (which dates to the Goldwater-LBJ race in 1964). Doctors who have not treated a patient can’t say anything about the patient’s condition, because that would be “irresponsible”—but neither can doctors who have, because they’d be violating confidences.

Also, a flat ban on at-a-distance diagnosis doesn’t really meet the common-sense test. Medical professionals have spent decades observing symptoms, syndromes, and more-or-less probable explanations for behavior. We take it for granted that an ex-quarterback like Tony Romo can look at an offensive lineup just before the snap and say, “This is going to be a screen pass.” But it’s considered a wild overstep for a doctor or therapist to reach conclusions based on hundreds of hours of exposure to Trump on TV.

My dad was a small-town internist and diagnostician. Back in the 1990s he saw someone I knew, on a TV interview show, and he called me to say: “I think your friend has [a neurological disease]. He should have it checked out, if he hasn’t already.” It was because my dad had seen a certain pattern—of expression, and movement, and facial detail—so many times in the past, that he saw familiar signs, and knew from experience what the cause usually was. (He was right in this case.) Similarly, he could walk down the street, or through an airline terminal, and tell by people’s gait or breathing patterns who needed to have knee or hip surgery, who had just had that surgery, who was starting to have heart problems, et cetera. (I avoided asking him what he was observing about me.)

Recognizing patterns is the heart of most professional skills, and mental health professionals usually know less about an individual patient than all of us now know about Donald Trump. And on that basis, Dr. Bandy Lee of Yale and others associated with the World Mental Health Coalition have been sounding the alarm about Trump’s mental state (including with a special analysis of the Mueller report). Another organization of mental health professionals is the “Duty to Warn” movement.

But the diagnosis-at-a-distance issue wasn’t the real reason I avoided “medicalization.” The main reason I didn’t go down this road was my assessment that it wouldn’t make a difference. People who opposed Donald Trump already opposed him, and didn’t need some medical hypothesis to dislike his behavior. And people who supported him had already shown that they would continue to swallow anything, from “Grab ‘em by … ”  to “I like people who weren’t captured.” The Vichy Republicans of the campaign dutifully lined up behind the man they had denounced during the primaries, and the Republicans of the Senate have followed in that tradition.

But now we’ve had something we didn’t see so clearly during the campaign. These are episodes of what would be called outright lunacy, if they occurred in any other setting: An actually consequential rift with a small but important NATO ally, arising from the idea that the U.S. would “buy Greenland.” Trump’s self-description as “the Chosen One,” and his embrace of a supporter’s description of him as the “second coming of God” and the “King of Israel.” His logorrhea, drift, and fantastical claims in public rallies, and his flashes of belligerence at the slightest challenge in question sessions on the White House lawn. His utter lack of affect or empathy when personally meeting the most recent shooting victims, in Dayton and El Paso. His reduction of any event, whatsoever, into what people are saying about him.

Obviously I have no standing to say what medical pattern we are seeing, and where exactly it might lead. But just from life I know this:

• If an airline learned that a pilot was talking publicly about being “the Chosen One” or “the King of Israel” (or Scotland or whatever), the airline would be looking carefully into whether this person should be in the cockpit.
• If a hospital had a senior surgeon behaving as Trump now does, other doctors and nurses would be talking with administrators and lawyers before giving that surgeon the scalpel again.
• If a public company knew that a CEO was making costly strategic decisions on personal impulse or from personal vanity or slight, and was doing so more and more frequently, the board would be starting to act. (See: Uber, management history of.)
• If a university, museum, or other public institution had a leader who routinely insulted large parts of its constituency—racial or religious minorities, immigrants or international allies, women—the board would be starting to act.
• If the U.S. Navy knew that one of its commanders was routinely lying about important operational details, plus lashing out under criticism, plus talking in “Chosen One” terms, the Navy would not want that person in charge of, say, a nuclear-missile submarine. (See: The Queeg saga in The Caine Mutiny, which would make ideal late-summer reading or viewing for members of the White House staff.)

Yet now such a  person is in charge not of one nuclear-missile submarine but all of them—and the bombers and ICBMs, and diplomatic military agreements, and the countless other ramifications of executive power.

If Donald Trump were in virtually any other position of responsibility, action would already be under way to remove him from that role. The board at a public company would have replaced him outright or arranged a discreet shift out of power. (Of course, he would never have gotten this far in a large public corporation.) The chain-of-command in the Navy or at an airline or in the hospital would at least call a time-out, and check his fitness, before putting him back on the bridge, or in the cockpit, or in the operating room. (Of course, he would never have gotten this far as a military officer, or a pilot, or a doctor.)

There are two exceptions. One is a purely family-run business, like the firm in which Trump spent his entire previous career. And the other is the U.S. presidency, where he will remain, despite more and more-manifest Queeg-like  unfitness, as long as the GOP Senate stands with him.

(Why the Senate? Because the two constitutional means for removing a president, impeachment and the 25th Amendment, both ultimately require two thirds support from the Senate. Under the 25th Amendment, a majority of the Cabinet can remove a president—but if the president disagrees, he can retain the office unless two thirds of both the House and Senate vote against him, an even tougher standard than with impeachment. Once again it all comes back to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.)

Donald Trump is who we knew him to be. But now he’s worse. The GOP Senate continues to show us what it is.

JL


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