For the people – Three counter-maneuvers for Biden

                                                                                                                                              Jack Doppelt 

                                                                                                                                              Feb. 25, 2021 

Let me propose three interlocking stratagems for the Biden administration. They have a common imperative; designed with laser focus on “the people.” Each is a counter-maneuver needed after years of deception from the right.

Biden should start by eliminating the misconception of bipartisan cooperation. 

CNN story on GOP efforts to undermine Biden

More than half the GOP members of Congress have become such blindly partisan Trumpers that they’ve frittered away their privilege to negotiate legislation. Taking both the House and Senate into account, there are far more members of the current GOP (Gimme Only Partisans) than of any semblance of the Grand Old Party. The current GOP is easy to define and steer clear of. They are those: 

• who voted to not impeach Trump on his 2nd run-through at impeachment (either in the House on Jan. 13 or in the Senate one month later, on Feb. 13). Only 10 GOP House members and 7 Senators didn’t fall in line; 
• who voiced opposition to the electoral college certification at some point before or on Jan. 6 when the Capitol was breached; 
• who claimed by Dec. 15, after the election was six weeks over, that Biden was not lawfully elected or that the election was stolen from Trump or refused to say, according to the Washington Post, AND 
• who clung to the contrived pretext that Trump had a right to appeal his loss, though he racked up a nearly unbroken string of 61 court losses, according to USA Today. He won one in PA. 

If you think about it, that’s more than three months of time and latitude to act as a responsible lawmaker from the old Grand Old Party. Yet, of the 261 GOP lawmakers (211 in the House and 50 in the Senate), there are fewer than 30, by my casual count, whom the Biden administration should trust to do anything other than undermine his efforts as president. 

That’s a paltry 10%, at most. Looked at from the glass half-full side if you tip the glass, that’s 13 in the House and 14 in the Senate, both chambers in which the Dems have a working majority for most votes without any of them. 

That’s fortuitous because accounts from just Tuesday report that “Republican leaders in both chambers are maneuvering to keep all of their members in line against Biden’s $1.9 trillion Covid-19 relief plan.” Under the headline, “GOP begins new push against Biden’s relief plan as Republican leaders expect no defections in the ranks,” CNN framed its significance as a move that would deny Biden “a bipartisan victory.” 

Though Biden has often spoken of his desire for bipartisan cooperation, he should be taken to mean bipartisanship with those Republicans whose partisanship isn’t calcified by party hostility, knee-jerk fears of blind constituent loyalty to Trump, or their own obeisance to Trump. 

Better yet, Biden should use this opportunity to reclaim the language with which the GOP wants to hang him. What he should seek is nonpartisanship. 

Consider the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) as the model. It produces independent analyses of budgetary and economic issues to support the Congressional budget process. It’s been at it and respected since 1975. That’s through eight presidents. Now into the 9th. The CBO notes proudly on its website that it is “strictly nonpartisan.” Its employees are hired “solely on the basis of professional competence without regard to political affiliation.” About the only periodic criticisms of the CBO in nearly 50 years are that its work can be politically inconvenient. Just the attributes I’d want in a political party. 

Nonpartisan is a more accurate, inclusive and dynamic trajectory for Biden and the future. Blue and red are intrinsically divisive. They’ve become cancerously divisive. More prospective voters approaching the last election self-identified as independent than as either Democrats or Republicans. The public is driven to partisan choice by party leaders, closed party primaries, and now partisan bickering and incendiary partisanship. 

Biden’s inaugural pledge was to “be a President for all Americans. I will fight as hard for those who did not support me as for those who did.” 

From that get-go, the GOP recognized how righteously devious they can be by taking that pledge and blaming Biden for giving up on bipartisanship if he fails to urge "congressional Dems to actually negotiate with GOP,” and instead tries to “force through a leftist agenda.” Those are the tweeted words of GOP Minority Whip John Thune (R-S Dakota). 

Senator John Thune (@SenJohnThune)
Feb. 4, 2021

On Thune's official Senate website, he elaborated on what he meant by a leftist agenda. His release replaced the tweeted words with "forcing through an agenda that lacks the support of half or more of the country."

CNN noted the political risks for Republicans, “with polls showing clear majorities of Americans supporting an emergency rescue package and with the economy still reeling from the coronavirus pandemic.” 

Biden shouldn’t negotiate in good faith with representatives less intent on serving their constituents than on undermining the president and ginning-up the likelihood the Democrats will be vulnerable for the 2022 election. He should ignore them. The GOP members of Congress are the people’s representatives and if they misrepresent their constituents, there’s an intrinsic time lag until the next election before the distortion becomes apparent. 

Biden should serve and pay attention to the constituents. They’re his constituents too, as he aptly said in his inaugural address. The people in red states or in red districts don’t get ignored. They don’t have vaccines diverted elsewhere. They don’t get fewer federal dollars. They shouldn’t be targeted for political retribution. They should be served fully and fairly. The GOP representatives whom the people elected will have to figure out how to claim credit for work and service done in good faith by others. 

By my count, 11 states have two out of two senators who boast of being card-carrying members of Gimme Only Partisans. The states lay fallow from meaningful and discriminating representation by their Republican senators.

Roll call: Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Iowa, Kentucky, Mississippi, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Wyoming. Eleven. 

That’s almost ¼ of all the states in the union, and my conservative estimates exclude from those 22 Gimme Only Partisan senators, some Republican senators who may be worth talking with, as Biden did with 10 of them three weeks ago to work out a COVID-19 relief package. 

The good news for the millions of people in those 11 states is that for every McConnell or Paul or Graham or Blackburn or Rubio or Lankford or Scott #1 or Scott #2, there are handfuls of public servants who are willing, able and eager to serve the people of their states. I am not referring to challenges in upcoming elections. I’m suggesting that Biden deploy a nonpartisan public service corps to ensure that the people are consulted and served, using town hall meetings to hear and discuss, and communications to report back. The GOP lawmakers are not needed for legislation to pass. Presumably, they will continue to poison the waters rhetorically and through right wing outlets. 

All you need to do is listen to Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell who told the news media after Tuesday's GOP’s private get-out-the-Biden harpoon lunch that Biden’s $1.9 trillion Covid-19 relief plan is "totally partisan,” yet a challenge for the GOP in the face of public support for Biden’s plan for the Gimme Only Partisans’ messaging campaign.

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I will post the next two installments in my three interlocking stratagems for the Biden administration over the next few days. Each focuses on “the people.” The second is on job creation offsets for green economy advances; the third is on the paths to citizenship for immigrants. 

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The advantages of earplugs and blinders

 

                                                                                                                                               Jack Doppelt 

                                                                                                                                               Feb. 12, 2021 

As the Trump impeachment trial team introduced its defense today of the former president for “inciting insurrection" by encouraging the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, maybe the GOP senators will discard their earplugs and blinders. The sensory protectors must be annoying to have to resort to. They apparently need them so they don’t hear or see what they can then deny without facing up to how utterly shameless and hypocritical they are. 

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who was one of the most vocal supporters of Trump’s incendiary “Stop the Steal” narrative and one of the 44 GOP senators who voted that the trial is unconstitutional because Trump is no longer president, said publicly yesterday that Trump shouldn’t be convicted because the House managers had not come "remotely close" to demonstrating that Trump's conduct on Jan. 6 constituted incitement. 

Kaleidoscope of dots
[Image: Part of Mandelbrot set -
Smily Kaleidoscope-
Creative Commons

I can appreciate that. If you don’t hear or see any of the statements or videos that clearly connected a kaleidoscope of dots leading up to Jan. 6, you too might think that there’s no difference between heightened, insensitive, angry or inflammatory rhetoric in political campaigns, in demonstrations or in the media on the one hand, and what happened on Jan. 6, on the other hand. 

“The right” mass produces the earplugs and blinders. Ken Starr fulfilled his consulting gig on Fox News in the morning. He characterized The House manager’s case as political theater and prepared us to anticipate that Trump’s defense team is “going to run the ‘First Amendment-free speech’ play.” 

Starr is a former Appeals Court judge who turned legal hit man for the right when he led the impeachment prosecution of Bill Clinton in 1998 and became one of Trump’s legal team in Trump’s 2020 impeachment trial. He was also one of an even more impressive legal team in 2008 that represented Jeffrey Epstein, the politically connected billionaire and sex offender. In a revealing interview on Fox News in July 2019, Starr called it “nonsense” that any of the abused women whose cases were compromised by a cozy non-prosecution agreement with Epstein were bowled over by the influential lawyers. Starr would know, he boasted. “I was in the room.” [where it happened, with homage to Lin-Manuel Miranda and Hamilton]. Alexander Acosta, who was the then-U.S. Attorney who cut that deal, later stepped down as Trump’s Secretary of Labor because of the incident. As Starr put it, by resigning, “[Acosta] took one for the team.” A federal judge saw it differently. In Feb. 2019, Judge Kenneth Marra rebuked the phalanx of big name attorneys, including Starr, who had written Acosta at the time that it would be “wholly inappropriate” for the U.S. Attorney’s office to issue victim notification letters to the women, though failing to do so violated Florida law. 

With Starr pointing me to the play action, I listened closely to Trump’s defense team and focused on their videos. They summoned plenty of rhetoric by the likes of Maxine Waters, Kamala Harris, Chuck Schumer, Hillary Clinton, and Bernie Sanders. All Democrats, of course. Similar rhetoric can be invoked of Republicans. Of course, speech and rhetoric can be heated. 

Trump’s defense presentation was a testament, as were some of the House managers videos, to harnessing the wonders of digital video searching and to the craft of selective editing. The word “fight” repeated hundreds of time…by Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris alone. How’s that different, the point was, from Trump saying the words “fight” 20 times in the paroxysm of the Jan. 6 Capitol riots. 

Language like “fight like hell” and “don’t give up” and “you have to get your people to fight,” “punch him in the face,” “fights may need to be in Congress, in the courts and in the streets,” and “I want to tell you…you have released the whirlwind and you will pay the price.” 

The only two soundbites in the whole series of montages that pinpricked me were: CNN's Chris Cuomo: “Show me where protesters are supposed to be polite and peaceful.” Chuck Schumer: “The patriots were protesters.” 

Once Trump’s defense rested, we were left where we expected we’d be. It takes 67 votes to impeach. The votes are not there. Trump will be acquitted. Despite the expected and caricatured “he says (without listening to her), she says (without listening to him)” nature of our political landscape, the call about whether he should be convicted is a tough call, with the 1st Amendment guarding the door.  

Did Trump intend to incite his MAGAs to commit “imminent lawless action” on Jan. 6 specifically and were those actions likely to happen then and there? As I wrote the other day, that’s where the virtues and ambiguities of the videos before and on Jan. 6 matter. We shouldn’t be punishing people or impeaching a president for speaking passionately. But Trump’s speech and actions on Jan. 6 were singularly unique. 

As Justice William Brennan wrote more than 50 years ago in New York Times v. Sullivan, which is one of America’s proudest exports to the world, “debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide-open.” That freedom is defining of America. It is not absolute. People forfeit that freedom by perjuring themselves, by convincing co-conspirators to break the knees of mob victims, or by intending to incite people to commit “imminent lawless action” that is likely to happen then and there. 

Did Trump forfeit that freedom? Because if he did, he cannot avail himself of a First Amendment protection, and he should be impeached and not allowed the privilege to seek public office in the nation where I live. 

Maybe Bruce Springsteen put it best in “Dancing in the Dark”: “You can’t start a fire without a spark.” 

I believe with all the conviction of someone who sees before me not only a dangerous, unrepentant, charismatic demagogue who kicked down the 1st Amendment door, but almost half a Congress who’ve traded in their political pedigree as the Grand Old Party for membership in Gimme Only Partisans. They preserved the acronym. 

Please tell me, though, that there is hope that the 70 millions of my fellow citizens who were sycophantic believers in a con man no longer have use for earplugs and blinders. 

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Where does "the right" get this stuff? The Impeachment edition

Jack Doppelt

 Feb. 9, 2021 

Again, I’m watching Fox News’ coverage, as I did on Jan. 6. I’m not watching to be convinced whether or not Trump should be convicted on one count of "incitement of insurrection" for encouraging the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol. That’s about Trump.

I’m watching to fathom one underlying question that will define our futures as a nation: Where does "the right" get the stuff that has them believing dangerous nonsense? Of course, the media, including social media, propel this stuff. Yet, what stuff catches fire and why? 

A primer on one place where the right gets this stuff can be found in one program that aired the day before today’s impeachment trial. It aired on Newsmax, a fellow right wing network that is giving Fox News a run for its ratings. 

Co-hosts Sean Spicer (yes, that Sean Spicer) and Lindsay Keith interviewed Alan Dershowitz, whom they welcomed as a constitutional scholar, legal professor at Harvard and “author of a million books.” Bona fides to impress. 

Newsmax-Feb. 8, 2021

Dershowitz was on the team of lawyers who represented Trump at his first Senate impeachment trial. His novel argument in that hearing was that if Trump believed he was acting both in his own political interest -- and at the same time in the country’s interest in withholding military aid to Ukraine until Ukraine announced an investigation into then-former Vice President Biden -- those actions cannot be impeachable. As he put it, "If a president does something which he believes will help him get elected in the public interest, that cannot be the kind of quid pro quo that results in impeachment," he argued. The irony was that his argument, laughably bizarre as it was, seemed to be what caught on with the GOP and the right. Bona fides enhanced. 

Spicer and Keith last night gushed over every word of Dershowitz. At the end of the interview, they thanked him for breaking things down so the audience could get the answers as they try to make sense of the impending impeachment trial. 

The simple answers Dershowitz divined were these: 

Trump can’t be impeached for speech. He claimed that Trump’s speech was no different from other speech, which of course is protected by the 1st Amendment. He went into professed con law mode by conceding at least that speech can go beyond 1st Amendment protection when it is “directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action” and is “likely to incite or produce such action.” 

The issue clearly is whether Trump’s speech in the context of the election fraud buildup he harnessed for his electoral college day rally did that. Dershowitz pointed to the 1969 Brandenburg case about a Ku Klux Klan rally in Ohio to make his distorted points. He failed to say that the landmark holding in the case was directed at an Ohio law that went too far in limiting speech. In striking down a clearly over-broad Ohio law, the case rejected a doctrine that emerged from WWI called “clear and present danger.” 

The justices in Brandenburg were struggling with the line that preserves the advocacy of abstract ideas but can punish speech that incites imminent lawless action. Justice William O. Douglas recalled the words of Oliver Wendell Holmes who wrote prophetically in 1925: “Every idea is an incitement. It offers itself for belief and if believed it is acted on unless some other belief outweighs it or some failure of energy stifles the movement at its birth.” The justices warned: “Eloquence may set fire to reason… If in the long run the beliefs expressed in proletarian dictatorship are destined to be accepted by the dominant forces of the community, the only meaning of free speech is that they should be given their chance and have their way.” 

Without needing to refer to Trump’s incitement as eloquent, it had the power to “set fire to reason.” The incited Trumpers came to DC because he had provoked them “to stop the steal.” Still, they all had time to resort to their perverted reasoning in coming to DC or attending the rally. That took time. Trump’s persuasiveness had won those days with them, as his persuasiveness had attracted 74 million votes. That’s speech, and as the justices put it, “government has no power to invade that sanctuary of belief and conscience.” 

Once in DC with Trump ranting persuasively to his MAGAs, did he incite them to commit “imminent lawless action” and was action likely to happen? 

That’s where the virtues and ambiguities of the videos of Jan. 6 leave us. That’s what makes Jan. 6 and Trump unique, as they should be. We shouldn’t be impeaching or punishing impassioned speakers? 

Dershowitz actually claimed that Trump couldn’t have intended to incite “imminent lawless action” that was likely to happen. After all, as Dershowitz conjured, “most of the people who heard the president didn’t even go to the Capitol, most of the people who went to the Capitol didn’t go inside, most of the people who went inside didn’t destroy property, and hardly anybody killed people.” 

Apparently, it can’t be intended incitement to “imminent lawless action” if not everyone is fomented to act instinctively, lawlessly, violently and murderously? Pardon? 

Imminent lawless action needn’t result in people being killed. Though it did. Invading the Capitol, threatening people, destroying property, putting lawmakers, their staffs and their families in fear of their lives will do just fine. Watch the videos. Hundreds did that. 

Many of the lawbreakers chanted: “Stop the steal.” “Treason.” Defend your Constitution.” “Fight for Trump.” Listen to the videos. 

Trump had pledged as he dispatched his followers to the Capitol: “We’re gonna walk down to the Capitol and I’ll be there with you.” He must have gotten waylaid after that. Like any ersatz movement leader, he abandoned them to march on their own. What good are lambs if they need to be accompanied to the slaughter? 

Dershowitz wants the right to believe that the impeachment trial is about run-of-the-mill speech, the kind that, as he puts it, could result in political activists from the right or left put at risk of government encroachment. 

Even more scary, Dershowitz envisions, is to allow impeachment any time an office holder leaves office. Who’s next, Nikki Haley? Be very worried, Republicans. Bill Clinton? Could happen to you, Dems. Dershowitz knows a straw man when he creates one. 

Trump is being impeached for actions he took and actions he fomented while he was president, not years before or after. 

To the credit of Democratic impeachment managers, they opened today’s proceedings by re-framing what the Dershowitzes and right wing “thinkers” call the unconstitutionality of impeaching a former official. 

What it really would be providing is a January exception that would allow a Trump-sort to do whatever he wants with impunity in the final days in office to prevent accountability because days later, he’s no longer in office. As we all know, Donald Trump would never reserve audacious acts like rampant pardonings until the final days in office. 

Dershowitz reserved his most virulent pent up anger yesterday for his legal scholar colleagues, led by his nemesis and Harvard colleague Laurence Tribe. Dershowitz seemed to hanker for a food fight with Tribe. To Dershowitz, the difference between himself and the Tribes of the legal establishment is that he, Dershowitz, is principled. 

The constitutional scholars, 144 of them of all political stripes, issued a public letter to Trump’s legal team [read it here], that, according to Dershowitz on both Newsmax and in The Hill, demanded, “in effect, that they not make arguments to the Senate regarding the First Amendment.” Dershowitz referred to the letter as blatant intimidation, as did The Hill’s headline: “Impeachment scholars are wrong to intimidate lawyers of Donald Trump.” Dershowitz characterized the letter as “threatening” in advising the Trump team that they “don’t you even dare” raise the First Amendment. “If you do, it will be unethical and subject you to disciplinary proceedings, including possibly disbarment,” he said raising his voice in emphasis, which elicited a Pavlovian snicker from Spicer. 

I don’t interpret the letter as intimidation. Moreover, I don’t find the quotes used by Dershowitz to be in the letter. What the letter says is, “No reasonable scholar or jurist could conclude that President Trump had a First Amendment right to incite a violent attack on the seat of the legislative branch, or then to sit back and watch on television as Congress was terrorized and the Capitol sacked.” 

The letter reads more like a petition, speaking of the First Amendment. 

Uncanny, though that Dershowitz would invoke the term “intimidation” when part of the argument to convict Trump of impeachment includes the lead up to the Jan. 6 events when Trump four days earlier called election officials in Georgia to convince them to find votes that would undermine Georgia’s election results. [Listen to excerpts or read a transcript from the Jan. 2 call here.] Trump had it all planned. The election was rigged, 11,780 votes need to be found, and if they’re not found and the election officials don’t report the missing votes, it’s a criminal offense and it will be incumbent on Trump to report their crime. 

Now that’s intimidation. the severity of which is being investigated by Fulton County prosecutors in Georgia.

As for Dershowitz, now that’s chutzpah (חֻצְפָּה), the attributes of which he prides himself as having.

https://www.facebook.com/jack.doppelt/posts/10159360929711098

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