Our Human Constitution

Recently I spoke with a class of high school girls. They asked me to talk about the Constitution and we agreed I’d talk about how we interpret it. I wasn’t advocating any particular method. In fact, I referred to the late Justice John Paul Stevens, adopting an observation by the then sitting president of the Israeli Supreme Court, that a judge does best who “’seek[s] guidance from every reliable source.’”[1]

While talking with the girls, I finally realized how to encapsulate what I wanted to say: The Constitution is a human document, written by human beings for use by human beings. It is not self-executing. There’s nothing automatic about checks and balances. They work when people believe in and use them. They don’t work when people in power care only about favoring themselves and their friends.

That’s not a flaw in the document. There are flaws in the document. It still bears the marks of slavery  ̶  numerous clauses were designed to protect slave-owners even though the word slave does not appear. And it was written by men for men in 1787. But the men who wrote the Constitution referred to its prohibitions as “parchment barriers.” Parchment was an older form of fine paper, often used for formal documents. The Founders clearly understood that the document they wrote and ratified would prove as good as the people running it.

I didn’t draw conclusions for the girls, but I want to spell out some implications for you:

• When the president thinks he is an elected king and should control all the levers of government without being questioned or restrained and when a majority of Senators believe they should protect him, they’re simply making the Constitution irrelevant. The Constitution doesn’t protect the president or the senators; they do it for themselves.
• When the president is more intent on encouraging us to fight among ourselves over the color of our states and our skins than to work together for the good of the country, the Constitution hasn’t failed us. We’ve failed it.
• When the president turns us from leader of the free world to its laughing stock, the Constitution hasn’t failed us. He has.
• When the president encourages the most selfish among us to sacrifice the air, land, water and climate that sustain us, the Constitution hasn’t failed us. He has.
• When the president dithers for months after being warned of a coming health catastrophe, the Constitution hasn’t failed us. He has.
• In the days before we had antibiotics and other drugs, quarantines were the principle way that our governments tried to protect us from infectious diseases. When people carry weapons into the state Capital and threaten state governors over quarantines,[2] the Constitution hasn’t failed us. They have.

The Constitution is a parchment barrier. We have to do more than protect the document. We have to use it wisely.

— This commentary was scheduled for broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, on July 14, 2020.

[1] Judicial Discretion 62 (Y. Kaufmann transl. 1989).@ BedRoc Ltd., LLC v. United States, 541 U.S. 176, 192 (2004) (Stevens, J., dissenting).

[2] See https://www.businessinsider.com/michigan-open-carry-laws-legal-protesters-guns-at-state-capitol-2020-5 and https://www.newsweek.com/michigan-closes-down-capitol-face-death-threats-armed-protesters-against-gov-whitmer-1504241.

Disloyalty if not Treason

The U.S. was the world’s most powerful country when Trump took office. Though we couldn’t control everything, we influenced outcomes all over the world. Then Trump pulled us out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, leaving China the dominant player in the Pacific. He withdrew from the multi-power nuclear agreement with Iran, leaving Iran to reorganize its nuclear ambitions to meet its new security situation. Bizarrely he keeps claiming Iran must abide by the agreement even as the founders of our country would have explained to him that breach by one party to an agreement terminates the other’s obligations to it. He withdrew from the Paris climate agreement, not only undermining the international effort to limit global warming, but undermining other countries’ willingness to count on American promises. And he withdrew from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty with Russia, inviting Russia to restart the nuclear arms race.

He publicly questioned the value of the two major institutions formed to keep the Russians in check – the European Union which strengthened and unified Europe as a counterforce to Russia, and NATO, the military alliance between the U.S. and the European countries outside the Russian orbit, famously dubbed the “Iron Curtain” by Winston Churchill. He urged letting Russia back into the economic organization of major economies despite having been kicked out because of the Russian invasion of Crimea. He pushes Putin’s proposal that Ukraine virtually give Russia back its eastern provinces, the ones Russia had invaded until the West pushed back. And he has just invited the Russians back into Syria and a major role in the Middle East. In reality, Trump is being impeached because he keeps helping Russia.

I know there are people who call themselves super patriots who believe the US would be better off able to make its own independent decisions. What that means, of course, is that we will no longer have the trust and confidence of other countries who will no longer see us as reliable allies. When we do our best to isolate Iran, we think of it as a punishment, but when we do it to ourselves, it’s supposed to be a great advantage.

Yes, we think of ourselves as a superpower, but how much of the world can we take on alone? We didn’t win World War II alone. We certainly had the major role in the Pacific but those of us who lived through or studied the War, know that Russia did most of the fighting in Europe. So there is a large cost to isolating ourselves and convincing our allies that they can’t rely on us. If they can’t rely on us, then they can’t be reliable for us. They have to seek their own advantage.

In sum, Trump has enormously weakened America. It’s bad enough if he did it out of stupidity. But it’s disloyal if he did it for his own advantage. And since Russia can clearly be described as an enemy of the US, even though we’re not now making war against each other, we would be justified in calling that treason.

Let me suggest that you read and think about Art. III, sec. 3, of the Constitution:

Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.

Whether or not it fits the definition of treason, weakening America for the advantage of Russia and China is certainly disloyal. As Hamilton explained in The Federalist, the basis for impeachment is “the abuse or violation of some public trust.”[1] No abuse of public trust can be more serious than disloyalty to America for the benefit of a foreign power.

• Broadcast on WAMC/Northeast Public Radio on Nov. 12, 2019

[1] Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay, The Federalist, No. 65 (Hamilton) at 396 (Clinton Rossiter ed., New American Library 1961); and see Peter Charles Hoffer and N.E.H. Hull, Impeachment in America, 1635-1805 chronicling the development of impeachment from English precedents through the Founding Era in America (Yale U. Press 1984).

 

Take America Back

It is painful to see the forces of hate killing men, women and children on many continents and here in many states, in schools and public places, taking apart the work of what we have been honoring as the greatest American generation who spilt their blood for the America they loved. It is painful and frightening to see the effort of the alt-Wrong to rip apart the free world that this country took the lead in creating. It’s painful to see terrorists crediting an American president as their inspiration for murder.

When I was a small boy, American men were fighting, and dying, in the Pacific, Africa, Italy and, after the landing in Normandy, through France and Germany. They were struggling for freedom, democracy and brotherhood. As the war ended, Truman sent Franklin Roosevelt’s widow, Eleanor Roosevelt, to the UN. Truman sent her there to make clear to the world the depth of America’s commitment to building a robust and sustainable free world. She chaired the seventeen-­member UN Commission on Human Rights and led that body in the development of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights. You could have drawn much of it from our own Constitution. These were American ideals on the world stage.

In 1948, the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Vinson held racially restrictive covenants unconstitutional. Then in 1952 the NAACP brought five cases to the Supreme Court challenging segregation and seeking to overrule Plessy v. Ferguson, the case that had upheld segregation in 1896. The Truman Administration told the Court that the US was being attacked around the globe because of segregation and that segregation complicated American foreign policy. Obviously important, the case was reargued after President Eisenhower took office and Chief Justice Vinson had died. Eisenhower’s Justice Department submitted its own brief to the Court, and it underscored the arguments of the Truman Administration that this country needed to end segregation. The Supreme Court agreed; in Brown and a series of cases it made clear that American government could make no distinction of race, creed or heritage in its treatment of Americans.

Americans cheered Brown and made clear it was a popular decision. We believed what they said in the Declaration, that “all men are created equal.” Americans fought a Civil War over that principle. By the time of Brown, this country had embraced people like Jesse Owens, Marion Anderson, and Ralph Bunche among many others. With some obvious and vocal exceptions, Americans embraced the end of segregation. That is the America embraced the world over, admired for its principles and its heart. That is the America that took all of us to its heart regardless of which country our ancestors came from, which faith they brought. That is the country that our ancestors embraced with both love and pride, the America they wanted to be part of and contribute to. That is the America they wanted for us. That is the America we need to take back.

An America with neither mind nor heart clearly needs a trip to see a Wizard of Oz. An America with a man in a position of power who gloats that “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody” with impunity is an America which actually does need to deport someone, and to wall out the orange-haired imposter before he corrupts our genetic inheritance.

— A version of this commentary was broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, March 19, 2019.

The Importance of Learning from Others

Americans have been reluctant to accept the importance of studying other countries. We tend to divide them into good and evil and assume that’s all we need to know.

As a teenager I was interested in science and in classical music. For both, I thought it wise to learn some German. But few schools taught it in the wake of World War II. Germans were the enemy.  But two World Wars provided reason enough to study German. President Roosevelt understood how vile and dangerous Hitler was long before Pearl Harbor and took steps to prepare the American military because he could and did read Hitler’s Mein Kampf in the original German.

Americans, however, seem more concerned about being subverted by knowledge of foreign places than by the costs of ignorance. It’s as if many of us have an inferiority complex about our own culture. White racists bask in western European skin color even while screaming America first. America has enormous worldwide influence, but many Americans continue to fear comparison to worldwide knowledge.

From the Napoleonic wars through the Franco-Prussian and two world wars, old World European nations repeatedly attempted world dominance and took a hundred million people to their graves. This country created or supported numerous international institutions to keep Europe at peace, the Soviet Union at bay and level out the boom and bust cycle of international economics, but too many Americans fear those same international institutions as if they were the work of foreign hands designed to subvert us.

The costs of ignorance are serious. Too many American Administrations have treated Saudi Arabia as an ally though it is run as a savage and medieval country, and too many, except for Obama, couldn’t accept talking or negotiating with Iran despite repeated overtures to the U.S. and the fact that they are one of the most westernized, even Americanized, countries in the Middle East. We’ve made similar mistakes trying to control who governs in Central and South America, Vietnam, and other countries. America seemed incapable of appreciating the strategic sense and the long game behind Obama’s attempt to strengthen America’s position in the Far East. It may be too late to recover the ground lost to China.

It’s time to get over our terror of learning about and respecting other peoples. It’s an odd terror for a country made up of so many different peoples. It’s an odd terror for a country in which we can walk out of a bus or train station in cities like New York and enjoy the kindness of strangers who themselves come from all over the world. It’s an odd terror in a country where we talk with taxi drivers about their immigration to and joy at being here. It’s a terror that undermines the benefits of our universally admired university system.

Does one really have to be from somewhere else to appreciate the strengths of our own country? Must appreciating our own country rest on ignorance of others? Or can we trust ourselves to learn about others, to appreciate their strengths as well as faults, to build on and incorporate their accomplishments into our own as we have done in art, literature, music, theatre, dance and so many other arts and sciences, to learn from others as well as from each other as we build our own strengths? Or are we really afraid that recognizing the strengths of others will sap our own?

The internet attributes to many people, from Eleanor Roosevelt to Sam Levenson, a family friend of ours, that we must learn from the mistakes of others because we don’t have time to make them all ourselves. First, however, we need to encourage each other to explore and learn.

— This commentary was broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, November 27, 2018.

 

 

 

 

The Middle East, European Colonialism and the Result of Blank Checks

Steven Pinker, in The Better Angels of our Nature, argued we’ve become less bloody over the centuries. But so many issues involve life and death. For two weeks this country has been discussing how to stop school shootings. This week let’s address life and death in the Middle East. Next week, events permitting, let’s discuss two issues that threaten life worldwide.

I can count on hate mail whenever I speak about the Middle East. But let’s put some things in perspective.

The world’s refugee problem swamps most countries’ willingness to take people in. Our government wants to restrict immigration and we fight over who and why. Reaction to flows of refugees threaten democratic governments across Europe and contributed to the vote for Brexit. In addition to their own disputes, the American military footprint has aggravated war and population displacement in Libya, Syria, Iraq, and Palestine among many countries in the Middle East and elsewhere.

Stepping back historically and geographically, most countries are dominated by conquering populations. This country conquered and decimated Native Americans to create our bi-coastal America. A succession of warring populations, Huns, Visigoths, Franks, Saxons, Vikings and more, fought for Europe long before the modern wars.

This has hardly been a good way of solving problems or competition for land. But even more harm lurks in the suggestion that we undo it.

The creation of Israel was plainly the result of European refusal to accept its Jewish population. Historically, the Turks in the Ottoman Empire, and the Moors in Spain, before Ferdinand and Isabella Christianized it, were much more hospitable to Jews. The twentieth century brought the fate of the Jews to a head. Europe could have solved its integration problem. But seeing the handwriting on many walls in the 1930s, people like Justice Brandeis, then on the U.S. Supreme Court, were telling friends in Europe to get out quickly. But where to? Franklin Roosevelt, despite close personal and professional relationships with many Jews, blocked boatloads of Jewish refugees from our shores for political reasons.

So the west solved its problem by exporting it – to Palestine. Everyone was a victim in this process. Jewish refugees were uprooted and they in turn uprooted Palestinians. What to do?

At about the same time, Britain was facilitating the breakup of the Indian subcontinent into India and Pakistan. It cost something like a million lives and uprooted many times that. The two countries still find it difficult to get along, but undoing 1948 is not on the table. It cannot be.

It is not true that whatever is, is just. That was proposed by the conservative philosopher Robert Nozick and I most emphatically reject it. But redressing all the wrongs of the past comes at a cost which will involve many who themselves were neither perpetrators nor victims and sometimes both. The argument about who was right and who was wrong in Palestine is not a soluble argument. No one was treated as they should have been. But even more important, fixing those wrongs implies a fight to the death of everyone there. That I cannot wish.

I cannot support complete and utter conquest for either side. We might once have insisted on an enforceable compromise. America once played a role as an honest broker and could have maximized the chance for peace. But we could not continue to play that role while giving Israel a blank check to violate its promises about settlements. The result, I fear, is going to be tragic. It may simply be too late to avert widespread disaster.

— This commentary was broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, February 27, 2018.

The Legacy of Barack Obama

Barack Obama has been one of our most decent and intelligent presidents. I’ll miss him. Instead of simplification and slogans, Obama explained the complexities of everything from medical treatment to foreign policy. Instead of shooting from the hip, he studied problems carefully and reached mature, intelligent decisions.

But what will stick?

Starting with foreign affairs, Obama got most of the boots off Muslim lands. When Obama took office in 2008 we had close to 200,000 soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. Now we have about 15,000 troops, combined, there and in Syria.

ISIS seems to have refocused on Europe but that’s still a problem for us. Europeans’ objectives are compatible with our own, so they are crucial allies, unlike the Russians. But Europe confronts many times more refugees than we do, with backlash and threats to democracy in several countries. American action in Syria added to the refugee flow, but much resulted from revolutions independent of us. More American militarization in the Arab world would inflame the refugee crisis and increase the terrorism directed at us.

Terrorists are fueled by militarization; nations are much more vulnerable to our military – that’s the difference between defeating Saddam Hussein, having him executed and trying to remain there. Trump may talk tough, but will he be fool enough to wade back into those trouble waters?

In Guantanamo, fewer than 60 prisoners remain of the nearly 800 who were imprisoned there.

Republicans dislike the Iran nuclear deal but so far they’ve nothing to show for their fears. Objections from the other signatories may prevent Trump from disavowing it. This may be the first real test of whether Trump has any grip on reality.

At home, Republicans have been yelling for years that they will tear Obamacare down the first chance they get. But their friends in the insurance industry will howl if they do, especially if Republicans leave features Americans like – a guarantee that you can get insurance, coverage for pre-existing conditions, tax credits for small businesses, etc. So it’s not clear what they’ll actually do. Obama took his health care plan from Mitt Romney’s Republican plan. I can think of improvements to the left of Obamacare, but not any that are more consistent with Republican free-market philosophy. Republicans are in a pickle.

Obama got a small stimulus soon after taking office. Terrified it might actually work, Republicans fought to keep it small. Obama’s stimulus worked, slowly, satisfying the cynicism of Congressional Republicans willing to hurt the country in order to make Obama look bad.

Dodd-Frank financial regulation still stands, reigning in a financial system that gambled with everyone else’s money and made a large number of us much worse off.

Obama nominated Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court. One has become the conscience of the Court, the other quieter and more conciliatory. Together, they’ve made a the Court much more fair. The future depends on how long Ginsburg lives and how long Trump is in office. The difference Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor and Kagan made could disappear in a heartbeat.

So, there’s a lot to celebrate in what Obama did or tried to accomplish. But I have real fears of what could be done in the effort to discredit him instead of making things better for the people of America.

— This commentary was broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, January 3, 2017.

Foreign Roots of the Tragedy in Florida

The tragedy in Florida is linked to issues abroad. One candidate sometimes suggests we could solve our problems by isolationism, keeping our troops home, and sometimes by wiping out our adversaries with overwhelming force. His adversary has won over American military leadership with a fairly hard-nosed approach to international politics meshed with the belief that part of America’s international strength comes from our ideological appeal and social justice. What’s going to work?

The Middle East has been getting more violent. And the U.S. has been struggling to figure out how to handle it. George H.W. Bush was careful not to unravel power relations there when he rolled Iraq back from Kuwait. George W. Bush was less cautious, eliminating the Iraqi power structure without a plan to replace it. Since then we’ve been fighting multiple wars in multiple countries. Wars with guerilla tactics like these are costly. Al Qaeda and ISIL or DAESH have learned to motivate individuals or small groups outside of traceable networks. Military forces work poorly against that kind of enemy. We may be a superpower against some obstacles, but not all. The history of warfare has been a multi-millennium cycle of upstarts defeating the super powers of prior ages with new tactics.

What if we disengaged from the Middle East? I doubt Americans have the stomach for it. Israel, our so-called “ally,” continually breaks its promises to America, so the Israeli mouse drives both American Middle Eastern policy and its consequences. America cannot be an honest broker in the Middle East while backing a government of heedless buckaroos who learn nothing from the failures and constant irritation of seven decades of war, eviction of Palestinians and indiscriminate retaliation. Still less can we be an honest broker by engaging in the same tactics that make refugees of millions and radicalize too many. Who are we to criticize the Israelis when our policies have been more and more like theirs? We too pay the price. Our removal of Premier Mossadegh and replacement with the former Shah of Iran contributed to the Revolution of 1979 and subsequent demonization of America. U.S. military moves created chaos in the Sunni world, pushed Turkey toward autocracy, and helped destabilize Europe with a flow of refugees not seen since the World Wars.

Pulling out would leave a power vacuum that those we despise and sometimes fear would fill. If Russia or China were fool enough to move in, the throw weight of Islamic extremism would refocus on them. The short-run consequences, however, could be

Our policies toward the Middle East need to be rethought in light of new realities. Power relations in the Middle East have been drastically reshaped in the last fifteen years. And Saudi Arabia has been playing a double game, supporting radical Islam in return for denying the clerics the keys to governmental power, creating a Hobson’s choice for us. Obama has tried to avoid both disengagement and warfare, but his efforts to reshape thinking about the Middle East have, not surprisingly, run into a barrier of incomprehension. The U.S. should not be driven by the unreliable machinations of paranoid premiers, two-bit dictators and fractured armies in a region of declining importance to the U.S.

America accomplished a great deal in the past as a model of a fair and decent state. Foreign policy isn’t merely a contest of muscle and fire power. Its complexity requires a lot of patience. It took half of century to wait out the Soviet Union. Much as some Republicans want to credit Reagan’s grand gestures, that victory was hatched under Truman and pursued by eight presidents of both parties, without any know-it-all buckaroos upending decades of careful policy. Can we do it again? We’re going to find out.

— This commentary was broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, June 14, 2016.

 

For Whom the Bell Tolls Amid the Refugee Crisis

Wars in the Middle East are creating huge flows of refugees. If war creates refugees, we either have to have a way to stop the wars or a policy about refugees. Just saying we will or won’t let people in is a decision, not a policy. One must think past those decisions to the enormous consequences.

Countries can try to exclude refugees leaving them to fend for themselves wherever they are. Countries can also put them in camps, let them in but then leave them to fend for themselves, or help them settle. Surrounding countries can also stop them at borders, keep them in camps, or let or help them settle. The permutations produce very different results.

More than six decades ago, Arab states refused to let the Palestinians settle. Ipso facto they created a permanent Palestinian fighting force. But who would the Palestinians fight? The oppressors keeping them in the camps, or the oppressors who pushed them out of their land? Which story would they buy? Refugee issues can fester. Both Palestinians and Israelis feel their backs to the wall and feel themselves fighting for survival, with lethal results.

Incidentally at the same time, a much larger refugee crisis existed in the Indian subcontinent leading to the separate nations of India and Pakistan out of the British Raj. That land is still troubled, though neither denies the other’s right to exist. In both cases, the mass exoduses left powerful marks on the stability of the regions.

And on the US southern border what happens to the people we exclude and what happens to us because of it? Impoverished masses elsewhere are likely to do the same things that impoverished masses do here – turn to some forms of crime. I doubt, when one takes white collar crime and tax evasion into account, that crime is much more prevalent amongst the poor but it is different – mostly theft, drug dealing or prostitution for survival or quick cash.

Then there’s the effort to deport people who were brought here as small children, an effort some of the prominent Republican candidates have endorsed. Ok, what are those kids going to do when they are back in their countries of origin? Many of them will find themselves jobless because they are strangers in what Americans insist on calling their land. But those young people brought up in the United States will prove valuable to criminal enterprises abroad because they could cross the borders and pass here easily. From an American point of view, those likelihoods of crime and participation in organized crime abroad are dangerous here. Volatile borders do no one any good.

Would it be better to bring them in, settle, employ and educate them and our people too, than to insist that everyone is on their own volatile devices to deal with the cruelties of a world without mercy. And then think about the effect of refugees on the people they leave behind. Think about the letters home, and the money home. Who is the so-called Great Satan when family write back with ordinary family developments – marriages, jobs, babies – and send money.

Creating a population tsunami and then pushing people back into swirling lifeboats has consequences for all of us. “No man is an island,” wrote John Donne, “entire of itself….. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.”

— This commentary was broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, January 12, 2016.

Hostility toward Israel and hostility toward Jews

Some hostility toward Israel is just anti-Semitic. Some hostility toward Israel is Palestinian nationalism. Some is sympathy for the Palestinians generated by an enormously successful PR campaign. And some is self-inflicted. But all of us should be concerned. The policies of the Israeli government don’t represent me – nor should they. But they affect me.

Ukraine – The Limits of Power

It’s worth another look at Ukraine. Americans have taken a principled pro-democracy stand. But before we get too self-congratulatory, let’s find a little perspective.