If you don’t show, you don’t count

If you don’t show, you don’t count.

That’s true in many ways. If you don’t show up in the WAMC fund drive, you don’t count in its survival or in the quality of programming it can carry. And you leave the station’s underwriters less confident of what their efforts can do. Showing up matters.

If you aren’t planning to show up to vote, don’t fool yourself that it won’t matter. Or you might think that you’re sending a message. But the message received isn’t necessarily the same message you think you’re sending. The way politicians count no-shows is that you and those like don’t count. If you’re not likely to show up at the polls, politicians are not likely to spend much time worrying about your problems and how to convince you they are the good guys. They won’t spend much effort trying to help people like you and they won’t waste campaign time trying to explain to you and people like you why their policies matter or the other guys’ policies don’t.

And if the pollsters don’t think you’re going to show up at the polls, that changes what they tell us is likely to happen, and it deepens the discouragement of people like you. Politics won’t help you because not enough people like you show the pollsters and the politicians that you demand to be counted.

In other words, not showing up at the polls has consequences way beyond the election. It generates a vicious cycle. Who is going to care about your generation or your part of the country or your place in the economy if you don’t vote? Voting is the coin of the realm. It’s the currency from which politicians determine what to worry about. It’s what we have to pay to get attention. The other stuff, money, only matters if it can get votes. If your vote isn’t in play, you, your friends, family and others like you are not counted. That’s part of why voting is a civic duty. It’s not just something we do for ourselves, like buying a pair of socks. It’s something we do to set the scales of politics.

Even commentators like myself pay attention. Who’s out there that can get our message? Who’s out there that may run with our message? Who’s out there that needs to be or can be reached and persuaded?

Of course, understanding the issues matters. Many of us are convinced, for example, that Trump is playing for suckers lots of the people who are supporting him for economic reasons. We’re convinced that he’s covering his failures with pittances and throwing the benefits to others. But my point goes way beyond that because even if you make a mistake, the very fact that you got to the polls changes everything. Don’t stay home.

And when you get to the polls, don’t shrug off things that can go wrong at the polls – broken machines, difficulty getting the machines to reflect your choices, long lines to vote at too few voting machines, long distances to get to the polling places you are assigned. Make an objection. Go to a judge. Go to the reporters. Or get to one of the lawyers fighting to make our system cleaner and more democratic. You make a difference by being counted.

— This commentary was scheduled for broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, October 16, 2018.

 

 

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On the Middle East

Things are happening very quickly in the Middle East. For information on the significance of developments there, I would recommend following:

Informed Comment at http://www.juancole.com

Trita Parsi at https://www.tritaparsi.com/ and most recently

Is Trump’s Iran Policy Meant to Start a War?

 

 

REGISTER NOW if you haven’t already

New York registration is still open:

• The deadline to register online is Friday, October 12.
• The deadline for registering to vote by mail is Friday, October 12.
• The deadline to register to vote in person is Friday, October 12.

And see that your friends do too, especially if they are in any states where registration is still open.

For more info about registering, there is a How to Register box with multiple links when one searches for “[name of state] voter registration deadline” but there doesn’t seem to be a link to the box itself other than by using than those search terms.

And mark your calendars to vote on Nov. 6.

 

Kavanaugh on Investigating the President

Brett Kavanaugh is now supposed to be called “Justice Kavanaugh.” The Constitution refers to members of the Supreme Court as judges. Whether the term “justice” will be appropriate depends entirely on his behavior. Of that I am doubtful. I think there was no justice for Dr. Christine Blasely Ford.

There is strong evidence that Kavanaugh will solidify a majority for repealing a half century of progress on voting rights, women’s rights, gay rights, anti-discrimination law and protections against our becoming a police state.  Kavanaugh invariably parried questions about his views with recitations of prior law, showing only that Kavanaugh could explain the cases, but never denying his likely impact.

Nevertheless, Trump and his Senate sycophants would have nominated and confirmed someone equally damaging to American law. More ominous are Kavanaugh’s views about whether it is OK to investigate a sitting president.

Kavanaugh joined the investigation of President Clinton on matters stemming from his relations with Paula Jones. That suit was dismissed because it didn’t claim Clinton violated the law. It was brought, however, for purposes unrelated to the suit, namely to enable fishing expeditions on Clinton’s behavior. That’s called abuse of process.  Those questioning Clinton eventually found Monica Lewinsky. By contrast to Trump’s behavior, she was a willing participant. In those days Republicans were puritans.  Kavanaugh pursued Clinton with gusto.

Then, with Bush in the White House before the election of President Obama, he told an audience at Minnesota Law School, that he had changed his mind. He wrote that defending against the Paula Jones litigation took Clinton’s attention off the growing threat from al Qaeda and similarly weighty matters. So Kavanaugh concluded that there were good reasons not to sue sitting presidents. He added that impeachment was always available. Left unsaid, however, was that to be more than a partisan political tool, impeachment must rest on investigating to determine what happened.

Unlike the Clinton investigation, the investigation of the Trump campaign is about the violation of multiple laws, both constitutional and statutory – whether Trump’s campaign worked with a foreign country to tamper with an American election and support that country’s interests in exchange for putting Mr. Trump in the White House. The Mueller investigation provides an independent, nonpartisan basis for considering impeachment. Without Mueller, we have only partisanship – a partisan whitewash or a partisan indictment.

So, Trump’s selection of a judge who doubts the legitimacy of investigating a sitting president strengthens his attacks on the ongoing investigation. That’s not news, given Trump’s tweets about pardons and remarks about firing Mueller. But we don’t allow people to be judge in their own cause. What we already know about the Trump campaign justifies a deeper look. And Trump’s effort to control the investigation can amount to impeachable behavior. For Democrats to take back the Court, the law and the cause of justice, they will have to defeat Kavanaugh’s senatorial supporters and elect a Congress prepared to prevent presidential abuse. In other words, the battle isn’t over and the stakes just got larger.

— This commentary was broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, October 9, 2018. This is a revised and updated version of commentary originally prepared for broadcast on September 18, 2018, pulled because of the Kavanaugh hearings, rescheduled for September 25 but pulled again at the last minute because of new developments in the Middle East. The earlier version was posted here.

 

Supreme Court Justices and the Biblical Injunction on Gleanings

During the Jewish High Holy Days, we read from the biblical book of Leviticus where God enjoins the ancient Hebrews to leave the gleanings of their fields for the poor. I began to think about the conservative members of the current Supreme Court.

Though it’s 5000 years later, stick with me. Conservative nominees, including Judge Kavanaugh, have been telling us that decisions begin and end with the words of the law, a claim we call textualism. How can a textualist obey the ancient biblical injunction about gleanings?

Gleanings are what’s left in the fields after the harvest. Are textualists absolving us from caring for the poor, and, if not, how do they suggest we accomplish it?

Most of us don’t have gleanings – we’re not farmers. Are only farmers responsible to the poor, allowing the rest of us to take comfort from their work. That would be a “strict” textual solution but it’s not very satisfying since the Bible repeatedly stresses our obligation to the poor. Then how should we do it?

Led by Scalia, textualists often point to specific examples of how it was done when the authoritative texts were laid down. Of course, that means ancient solutions become less and less relevant. Scarcer and scarcer gleanings are left for more and more of the poor and they are harder and harder for the destitute to reach. So, the textualist philosophy gradually cancels the maxim itself. The textualists’ approach means the poor can go hungry as gleanings decline in the modern world.

An obvious solution is to identify the objectives of the biblical passage about gleanings and figure out how it might most appropriately be done. Scalia fought that idea. He railed against the possibility that the principles or values that underlie legal injunctions might be interpreted by judges. Liberals might try to figure out how to care for the poor instead of declaring the injunction unworkable. In other cases, liberals might try to assure accurate trial results, not merely obedience to traditional formalities. The defendant lost but had a chance so it’s over.

The late Justice Blackmun once cringed when a father beat his son so badly that the boy’s brain was destroyed and he became almost literally a vegetable. “Poor Joshua” he wrote and was lambasted for letting his sympathy affect his judgment. You may remember that Justice Sotomayor was subjected to the same attack. Sympathy, in the textualists’ view, negates legality. Since when, however, should one be ashamed of sympathy for the unfortunate? Since when is justice defined by not caring about the impact of the rules we create on the people who have to live with them?

Textualism camouflages abuses written into the legal system by justices without principles, as if “the law,” and not the judges, were doing all the damage. It’s time to disqualify judges for lack of empathy. Does the law have no gleanings to offer? No principles of caring and just behavior with which to help fill in the gaps and the changes in legal meanings that take place over time? I have never believed that the written law is responsible for the harm done by judges who mangle it with closed hearts and eyes blind to reality.

Brett Kavanaugh, Trump’s latest nominee, continues the charade of denying that their cramped sense of justice is crucial to the decisions they make. Regardless of what the FBI finds about what happened to Dr. Ford, Kavanaugh has not justified our confidence by evasively blaming everything on his reading of past decisions.

— This commentary was broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, September 25, 2018.

 

 

Trump wants it both ways

It’s a wonder Trump hasn’t tweeted out his pride in Kavanagh’s abusive misbehavior, or is he ashamed that his nominee for the Supreme Court hasn’t been as abusive as Trump is? Clearly he wants it both ways, which is to say he has no principles about how to treat women or anyone else.

Drumbeat for More Middle East Chaos

The Ahvaz National Resistance took responsibility for an attack on a crowd watching a parade in southwest Iran over the weekend. National Security Advisor John Bolton had urged that the U.S. assist and encourage that very group. So, when Iranian President Rouhani pointed the finger at the United States, should we ignore it as nonsense from “the axis of evil” or should we take seriously the possibility that the U.S. condoned or supported the attack? Or that Saudi Arabia helped out, with American knowledge and support?

Are these deadly games conducted by people confident that the price will be paid by everyone else, soldiers and civilians, other than themselves? It certainly has all the earmarks of Middle East hawks who want to do what they did in Iraq while hoping the war would come out differently.

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates told the French Foreign Minister in 2010 that the Saudis want to “fight the Iranians to the last American.”  With a clear understanding of the politics of the Middle East, Obama refused to be drawn in. But for Trump, war would unleash patriotic fervor that might improve his approval ratings. He will not be the first president to sacrifice American and other lives to benefit his reputation, behavior that is criminal and may be treasonous.

Trita Parsi is a Swedish Middle Eastern expert whose family left Iran as refugees when Parsi was four. He now lives in America. Parsi has written an excellent analysis of what is happening in the MiddleEastEye. Saudi Arabia and the UAE, have been putting pressure on the US to bomb Iran for decades. They are now saying they will take the battle inside Iran but without the military ability to do it – they haven’t even been able to defeat the Houthis. Their real objective is to bring America into the fight, perhaps by triggering retaliation that would force this country to defend our so-called allies. Saudi Arabia has been the Middle East’s major trouble maker. Its fingerprints were all over the 9/11 attacks.

The Trump Administration is likely complicit. The day before the attacks, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo “told the Islamic Republic of Iran that using a proxy force to attack an American interest will not prevent us from responding against the prime actor.” In other words, without evidence, he is already blaming Iran for something it hasn’t done. This is reminiscent of the run up to the war in Iraq. That war to eliminate nonexistent weapons of mass destruction did a great deal of damage, unnecessarily killing American soldiers and civilians in the Middle East, unsettling the area and, instead of shutting down terrorism, laying the area open to ISIS and other terrorist groups. Facts matter. The evidence wasn’t there, and, in reality, the war did more harm than good.

A year ago, Trump’s National Security Advisor John Bolton laid out a plan for working with Saudi Arabia and Israel to pull out of the nuclear agreement with Iran and other nations and develop a more a warlike policy toward Iran, despite the international inspectors’ continued reports that Iran was complying with the restrictions in the nuclear deal, known as the JCPOA. Parsi writes that “The Trump administration’s Iran policy is following the Bolton memo almost point by point.” Bolton urged the U.S. to assist and encourage a number of groups inside Iran, including the Ahvaz National Resistance, to fight to overturn the government of Iran. In its saner moments, the American government treated some of the groups Bolton wanted to fund as terrorists, including the same group that claimed responsibility for the recent attack in Ahwaz. That puts U.S. fingerprints on the drumbeat for war.

Parsi explains:

For Saudi Arabia and the UAE, this makes strategic sense. Their ability to compete with the much larger and more cohesive Iranian state in the long run is highly questionable.

Their simple solution is to get the U.S. to fight their competitor. They can’t but we can. For good measure Trump wants Iran to pay reparations for 9/11 despite the absence of evidence of their involvement and in the face of evidence of Saudi involvement.

The Trump Administration is trying to work us up with fake claims, fake blame, fake purposes – all for the faked glory of Trump.

Instead of protecting America, this president is working to injure it for his own benefit.

—

Steve Gottlieb’s latest book is Unfit for Democracy: The Roberts Court and The Breakdown of American Politics. He is the Jay and Ruth Caplan Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Albany Law School, served on the New York Civil Liberties Union board, on the New York Advisory Committee to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, and as a US Peace Corps Volunteer in Iran. This commentary was broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, Sept. 25, 2018.