The people attacking our rights today are not trying to take America somewhere new. They are trying to drag us backward to a time when those in power decided whose freedom mattered and whose did not.
We already know where that road leads. We fought like hell to move beyond it.
Not back in time so much as back into the claws of the "same old serpent" that Lincoln was so steamed about. Just about everywhere you look, unpleasant changes are being imposed upon us by the now antidemocratically powerful.
"They are the arguments that kings have made for enslaving the people in all ages of the world. You will find that all the arguments in favor of king-craft were of this class; they always bestrode the necks of the people, not that they wanted to do it, but because the people were better off for being ridden." -- Lincoln
JL, you are right here. The enslavers told all who would listen that "their people" were better off enslaved because they were savages and through enslavement they could learn civilization. It would definitely take generations, but it could happen. They even convinced themselves that those people enjoyed their "condition." They deliberately ignored the fact that those "enslaved persons" were far more skilled than their owners at nearly everything: farming, building, sewing, cooking, and nearly every action of the "plantation." I guess the white boys and girls didn't want to think that hard or it might let them see what poor examples of humanity those white enslavers were. Can't have that!
Judge Bork was so popular among our most intelligent white supremacists and the privileged wealthy. He was an emotional fascist, a sick well educated man that was living in his time, opposed to the folks that loved Lincoln but afraid to say just that. He looked like what he was. And he was most unattractive. Thank God for Senator Edward Kennedy and our forward thinking folks that read Judge Bork accurately. Fascism continues in President Trump today. The Civil War is not over. MAGA is the ghost of our Christmas past.
Bork was responsible for the Saturday Night Massacre during the Nixon Administration, when he ordered the firing of special prosecutor Archibald Cox. He was also responsible for the current court refusal to enforce our laws against monopolies and restraints of trade, and refusing to enforce our antitrust laws. This is why we pay more for inferior internet service, cable service, and cellular service.
Bork’s influence on antitrust law is real, but I think it’s overstated to say he is “responsible” for today’s internet, cable, and cellular prices.
His book The Antitrust Paradox profoundly influenced modern antitrust doctrine by encouraging courts to focus primarily on consumer welfare—whether consumers ultimately pay higher prices or receive lower quality—rather than on market concentration alone. Critics argue that this approach made courts too reluctant to challenge mergers and dominant firms, contributing to greater corporate concentration in industries such as telecommunications and technology.
That’s a legitimate criticism and one that has gained support across much of the political spectrum. But saying Bork is personally responsible for today’s marketplace, or that courts simply “refuse to enforce” the antitrust laws, goes considerably further than the historical evidence supports. Courts continue to enforce those laws; the real debate is over how they interpret and apply them.
I think he had a larger influence than people realize. We are paying proportionally more because of local and national monopolies and restraints of trade. Bork didn’t see anything wrong with it as long as consumers weren’t harmed by price increases, but the reality is that we are seeing price increases, and refusal to enforce antimonopoly statutes does cause us to pay more
Joe Biden was the Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee that rejected Bork’s confirmation. History will be kinder to Biden than current commentators.
Well, there IS the Anita Hill testimony against Thomas which, if taken as seriously as it should have been by that very committee, would have kept creepy clarence off the Court.
Investopedia-Joe Biden's 2020 and 2024 campaigns included commitments to student debt relief, COVID-19 recovery, taxation of the wealthy, and investments in clean energy.
President Biden signed the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan into law in 2021.
Student loan relief and Federal Trade Commission proposals faced challenges.
This is what psychologists call the fundamental attribution error. We explain our own views by reference to circumstances, evidence, tradeoffs, and good intentions. We explain our opponents’ views by reference to their character. If I support a policy, it’s because I’ve thought carefully about it. If you support the opposite policy, it’s because you’re greedy, racist, authoritarian, or naïve.
Bork opposed many of the constitutional doctrines that liberals consider essential to civil rights and privacy. Critics feared his judicial philosophy would roll back those protections. That’s a legitimate debate. But it is quite different from asserting that he was secretly motivated by white supremacy or fascism. Those are claims about motive, not legal philosophy, and they require evidence. I can’t imagine Professor Richardson, as an example, making those sorts of unsupported claim.
Finally, I think there’s something deeper at work. People often divide the world into heroes and villains because stories are easier to understand that way. History is usually less accommodating. Most influential people are mixtures of admirable and objectionable qualities. Bork was, in my view, an exceptionally intelligent and influential jurist whose legal philosophy profoundly changed American law.
But I can believe that philosophy was deeply mistaken without believing he was a closet fascist.
What you conclude about Bork the individual is likely valid, but it would seem the Chicago School of Economics was the intellectual capital to grow the counter-revolution agains the post WWII liberal reforms whose major leaders were at least proto-fascists if not crypto-fascists--how else did it come to what is TODAY without those academic economists and lawyers--who might not have been either proto or crypto fascists themselves--to validate the Republicans' policies but turned a blind eye to their autocratic trajectory?
Aside from the unprovable leap to different sorts of fascism, I think there’s an interesting historical question in your comment. The Chicago School unquestionably supplied much of the intellectual framework for modern conservative economic policy. That’s a worthwhile subject for debate.
Where I hesitate is the leap from “their ideas influenced later Republican policy” to “they were proto-fascists” or knowingly enabled authoritarianism. Those are much larger historical claims that require considerably more evidence. Many people can sincerely advocate freer markets, limited government, or narrower antitrust enforcement without sharing or anticipating authoritarian politics.
Ideas have consequences, but those consequences are rarely linear. The same intellectual movement produce outcomes that many of its own founders would later applaud, regret, or even reject.
a thought that has haunted me is one of young children who surely saw slaves abused in the fields and filing it away as "this is how the world is". A few might have had some discomfort with the doublethink required to to accept other people being treated badly, but where slavery was an everyday fact of life, I would think it wound have been unusual to detect the fundamental perfidy of that. I think that one of the things that writers, leaders and citizen movement did was to shake that sense of "normalcy". History presents many examples of how "normalcy" can be sociopathic.
USian health-care: behind its innumerable lies, as [intentionally] ecogenocidal as Auschwitz -- and thus our planet's ultimate example of sociopathic "normalcy," eternally omnipotent, never to be transformed save by revolution.
You make a good point, Loren. What other than sociopathy explains doctors who allow a woman to die in pain in a hospital parking lot because they can’t perform a medically-necessary abortion? What other than sociopathy explains the MAGA cultures endorsement of allowing children to starve, or for genocide in other countries (and our own)? What other than normalized sociopathy enables people to nod their heads in agreement when peaceful protestors are shot dead in their car or in the street by ICE?
Thank you. If one believes -- as I do -- the clandestine purpose of the United States was, from its inception, the preservation of slavery, protected by what at the time was our species' most malevolently effective propaganda campaign -- the lies, promises and disinformation of the original "change-we-can-believe-in" deception -- then the horrors of ChristoNazism are merely the fulfillment of the founders' intent. With the relentless logic of Occam's Razor, this is the one hypothesis that explains literally all that has since obtained, especially the fact that [every] success by USian humanitarians is immediately attacked and eventually destroyed -- which after 250 years of repetitions is undeniably the inescapable fate of all progressive USian efforts and yet another of the innumerable proofs self-liberation is eternally impossible.
JL, some of those children never got over seeing people being beaten and otherwise abused. Among them were the Grimke sisters of South Carolina who left the plantation where they grew up and moved north and became strong abolitionists. Why some just accepted the abusive way of life of enslavement and others couldn't, is to me a mystery. No matter how one looks at it, enslavement of any kind is evil!
Ruth, thank you for your post. I was also thinking about them. In answer to your question, some enjoyed the life of privilege and having people subservient to them. Plenty of examples of that today.
Another aspect is that children, privileged children, at any rate, in those times were reared in an extreme authoritarian and patriarchal culture, enforced and reinforced by the parents' religion and corporal punishment - they really believed in heaven and hell as actual consequences for their attitudes, speech and behavior while alive. It's almost like the Stockholm Syndrome, with the children as the captives, parents and all authority figures as the captors.
And yet today, walk down any large American urban street and see homeless people that we ignore - even us Liberals. Driving in American towns you often see people with signs for “Money, Please”. In a country with an ethos to not worship or favor billionaires, but rather build a robust social safety net, you would not walk by these situations without action. J L Graham, I find myself caught between that haunted child and my grown impotent self in these situations. The haunted child asks “Why?” And my adult self asks “But how can I stop this?” I do what I can with what I have and in my sphere of influence. This is The Test.
One of the reasons we cannot do better is that real welfare kings are the wealthy. A billionaire can buy the Trail Blazers, but will not pay for the upgrade to the arena that he wants. Portland, Multnomah County, and local school districts are making huge cuts because of greeds like this. They don't pay their fare share of taxes either. With a few notable examples of charity, most of them are parasites.
I try to prioritize my spheres of focus, and for sure that is often my own personal interests, but also I noticed what H.D. Thoreau captured in one of his lesser-repeated aphorisms: “There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.”. An aphorism rarely proves anything but it can state something of importance clearly and compactly. Certain focii and discoveries greatly accelerate human understanding. For example, eons of remedies for illness, some of them materially effective, yet healing science took giant steps forward with germ theory, articulate anatomy, DNA identification, etc. I think the human traits of greed and sociopathy, a little part of it in everyone, are, as ever, in sore need of our full attention, and adult plans for management. As a society, we have been swindled into letting that go, and it's getting the better of us, Who are we, what are we, what do we want, do we really, really, want? It may seem oblique, but without that, if we don't, we are up a creek without a paddle*.
* I always thought that expression should be "down (whatever) creek", but you know the drill.
I suspect that you stop at some of the same intersections that I do, daily. (Burton St SW and US-131?)
Can you and a few of your friends visit LMCU and ask for a supply of two-dollar bills? Then, keep them handy in your vehicle. When you encounter one of those men (a few women) with the cardboard signs, give him two of them.
Keep those two-dollar bills circulating! And do it with a smile!
Professor Richardson has posted yet another "Best Ever", a veritable 2026 Federalist paper with historical roots going back centuries.
"Legislators, therefore ought not trust the government of a state entirely
to trust the government of a state to chance but, ought to provide a system of laws to regulate the administration of public affairs to the latest posterity."
-- Hume, 1.3.105.
See also, "Explaining America" by Garry Wills the author of "Inventing America."
A shadow government exists now, today, in many countries factually. It’s now autocracy, monopoly, or dictatorships. Is that not the same as slavery, supremacy- by religion/color/money? As it vacillates back to yesteryears same issues reenacted, wanna be ‘Kings’ resurface and dictate briefly ,gathering the richest moss mess by mess, with domination, lies, and temporary controllers.
The longer they reign ,the more entrenched they become , the more die, the harder progress to reality/unity becomes.
And yet the people win, rise again to progress, poverty was halved, vaccines HAD eradicated many diseases.
Will the swing back be November 2026 for America -reunifying our country …again.
This was a truly beautiful post that even stands out from the normally high level of clarity, conciseness and cutting analysis I have gotten used to in these daily letters. I think the point emerges very clearly from the comparison of the “Founder’s version” and the post civil war “amended version” of our constitution. We know which version the “originalists” want our constitution to be. The rejections of the Voting Rights Act piece by piece make that obvious. We also know that the amended version was not enough to get us to the ideal of equal rights, and further amendments were necessary. But no version is safe from a supreme court that is committed to realizing the “Founders version” and with it the tyranny that protects the few from the many. We must fight now to have a democracy in the inclusive, amended sense that winning the Civil War was to have empowered us to create, amendment by amendment moving toward a system that will protect us all, and reject those continuing to throw people under the bus.
Health care and housing should be, with education, truly public goods, and incorporating immigrants and drawing on their passion to make a better life fir themselves and their children is our national superpower that has always been how the US became “great.” If God is involved at all, it is in the encouragement thus offered to see each other as “children” equal in value and deserving of respect, and applying the demand for equal treatment “under the law” as an absolute command.
The law is king. And the amended, inclusive, and federal force of the law is now being ignored by those entrusted with the power to enforce it, from the Supreme Court 6 down to the ICE agents on our streets.
The Rule of Law is king, but the individual laws must be amended. In some cases, to make it abundantly clear that included as a foundation piece is the private right of action to enforce the law and that class action suits are also permitted. We must take control of enforcement of laws out of the exclusive hands of the DoJ and put that control back into the hands of the people. Such that if after a short, reasonable time it becomes apparent that DoJ isn't going to take appropriate enforcement action, any individual injured has standing to sue.
The election results suggest that everyone understood what the slogan meant, and a few more people were determined to go back than those who wanted to go forward.
Going forward meant having a woman – a woman of color, no less – in the White House. A majority of voters didn't want that, including the 7 million who voted for Biden, but didn't vote for Harris.
I am bemused by your certainty. Exit interviews, post-election polling, and political opinion all point to inflation, a completely mismanaged border, Gaza, and continued lying about Biden’s condition were the main reasons people either stayed home or switched their votes to Trump.
Certainly we continue to have racists and misogynists as voters, but there is no evidence, none, that they were a differential margin in the election.
I voted for Harris, but not enthusiastically. I saw her as a very poor politician. The attributes that drove her out of the 2020 primary before the first election were those that lost her the election in 24. Timidity, failure to differentiate between big and smaller issues and a bit of inauthenticity.
Yes, she was a winner in CA. But that’s where our polarized country harms us. Too many politicians grow up either in a hothouse of liberal or conservative politics. They are not tested. They can’t address the concerns of people outside their political family. Can you imagine Harris getting elected in SC? Or Lindsay Graham in CA?
I am bemused by your opinion of Harris as "a very poor politician." Most people agree that she ran a spectacular campaign hindered by inadequate time to build an overwhelming majority. Her "faults" bothered YOU, but I've seen no focus group results that indicate a majority of voters shared your priorities.
This doesn't look like a Democratic "hothouse" to me.
Registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by 50% in CA, roughly 60-40.
As for “most people” agree that she ran a spectacular campaign, where did you read that, except perhaps in a partisan column? Not any evidence-based analysis.
In 2020, her main issues were medicare for all (which she could not and would not answer any detail question about, and—fantastically—school busing, after she scored off Biden. A dead issue for 50 years. She was so ineffective that she dropped from “leading candidate” to last place so quickly that all her funding sources dried up.
As to 2024, read some honest analyses, if you’re that interested. She never shook the Biden shadow, she never addressed Gaza or questioned arms sales to Israel (regardless of what her opinion was, she failed to either defend Biden’s course, or define a new one), she used the same ineffective language to talk around, not about, inflation. And she never charted a new course on immigration, an issue Dems were polling 25 points down on. Ineffective and inauthentic, in my opinion.
That she got as close as she did amazes me. Had she been running against any kind of normal Republican of yesteryear, she would have lost in a landslide.
LOL! She "couldn't shake Biden's shadow," but 7 million Biden voters wouldn't vote for her. Tom, you're not the first armchair political analyst to rationalize any number of reasons to avoid acknowledging that the U.S. electorate is predominantly racist and misogynistic. Feel free to have the last word, but I'm done with this conversation. I have things to do.
Tom, Dale: Lest we forget, Biden promised to be a one term president and then his inner circle (much like with Trump now) kept him propped up despite failing memory and cognition as the only person who could defeat Trump. The late inning anointment of Harris to be the successor candidate deprived the base to democratically select a candidate of their choice, which most likely would not have been Harris. The Democrat Party still suffers from the same flaw i.e. older conservatives and uber pro-Israel officials controlling all or most of the levers of financial and political power and using those levers to determine outcomes rather than allowing the broad base at the grass roots to have their say. When Harris refused to separate herself from Biden's policies on Israel and Gaza, she lost the support of the under 55 demographic and anyone else who was sufficiently awake to notice that what Israel was doing, or sanctioning, in Gaza and the West Bank was qualitatively different from rescuing hostages or protecting its borders from Hamas' attacks.
I think a different woman of color might have done better, even won. Her stance on Gaza was unforgivable. Her failure to take more of a leadership role vis a vis Biden's hidden health issues became a problem.
Donna, I really doubt your analysis. A majority of Americans have maintained a peculiar affection for Israel since it was reconstituted as a nation in 1947. From that time to the present, Israel was a lousy neighbor and most Americans didn't care. U.S./Israel policy has always been driven by the Christian "a-frend-of-Israel-is-a-frend-of-God" belief.
Only recently has Israel's aggression beyond payback for October 7 soured some Americans' opinion of Israel. At the time of the election, Israel was still successfully playing the victim. If Harris had come out strongly in favor of Gaza, the Zionists would have lost their minds.
I'm not sure what your comment about her "failure" regarding Biden means. There's no evidence Biden's health issues were hidden; if they were, Harris wasn't doing the hiding. I don't recall that this was even mentioned during the run-up to the election.
Of course not! Nothing about him is better than anything we can say about anyone. Harris spoke against Israel's conduct but coudln't bring herself to call it genocide, as even some Jewish groups were doing by w024 (e.g. Jewish Voice for Peace).
Back to the future is their vision for America. Patriarchy and oligarchy rules us inferior fools.
Inbred rulers of the past failed. No group has dibs on human ingenuity. Science tells us that inbreeding leads to stagnation. Diversity drives innovation. The current population of the earth has traveled a long path from origins in Africa. Sorry, but backtracking is a fool’s trek. Seems to me…
Indeed, the movements out of Africa have been well documented. Also documented has been the trek of our ancestors from difficult places to mow hopeful ones. A little genealogy research would uncover immigrants galore. Some welcomed, some disparaged, but they still come. America is not poorer, but diversity has added so much. Sad for our natives but they also came from somewhere. We all have been mutts on the move…
Thank You Heather for taking the kernels of history most of us know but perhaps without the true reasons or the “why”, is just TOO close to the reason so many are such racists. If you keep “the others” at such a disadvantage they cannot be seen and welcomed as the equally educated, treated and accepted neighbors and citizens they can and should be, this will be our fate - divided by class, by color and as we are seeing & feeling by status and the resources and wealthy they are hell bent on taking for only the few. The few are by definition and reality the minority and growing. Many that are the supporters of that system are too blind to see their days are numbered as surely the “others”..
"Diversity drives innovation" - Yes! You look at how important diversity is in many aspects of life: e.g., a "diverse" financial portfolio (more able to withstand economic downturns), genetic diversity (no inbreeding, which is harmful), biological diversity (more resilient). The diverse skills, experiences, and worldviews of people in the workplace improve problem-solving. Yet these MAGA idiots see diversity as a bad thing, and want to eliminate every reference to the word!
Combined with the almost universal hope, gratitude and pride which I see immigrants bringing here. They have often fled dictatorship, war violence, and generational impoverishment and WANT to work hard and contribute and make a life here. They beam with pride at citizenship ceremonies. Why do we make it SO complicated, SO hard snd SO long to become legal? I see such complacency and entitlement among many “citizens” who did NOTHING to merit that citizenship except already have citizen parents—they are so affronted and don’t have a clue how lucky they are to happen to be born here. No humility. No gratitude. No sense of responsibility—just prejudice and scarcity and hubris.
JDinTX, I never understood the white need to prove itself superior to everyone else. As a white child, I liked all kinds of people and when I met people different from me, it was exciting. Unless someone had pronounced physical characteristics, I couldn't differentiate color too well, often not gender except by name. I could if someone had very dark skin or really blonde hair, but mostly I knew people by voice. Every single day that one of the Trumpian white supremacists opens his (sometimes her) mouth and spews their stupidity into the world, I gag. I do wonder if whiteness does freeze some white folks' brain power at a young child's level of understanding of the world where they still want to dictate to everyone around them and tantrum when they don't get what they want. When they tantrum, they harm people and their buddies are delighted and they try to expand on what happened and figure out what they can do to prove the "superiority" of their whiteness when they are really proving the opposite.
I never saw people much different from me growing up but I knew they were there and felt a curiosity. No fear but sorrow at the hatred so many spewed at what they didn’t know.
Trump's sloganeering of the MAGA acronym implies going backwards in the words themselves...
Make America great again invokes a fantasy vision of some unspecified time in the Nation's past...A history that is not great but painful to so many indigenous tribes, the actual Native Americans, and Black Americans that have slavery, oppression and systemic racism as a remembrance of going into the Nation's past.
Make America - sounds like it is by force or domineering, as Trump and the regime continue to do by steamrolling their agenda over the Nation and its Capitol and the Constitution...
Great Again - is uncertain, our Nation has been great at times, it would be great if We the People were united in being a constitutional democracy again, if we decided to keep this republic and move forward not backwards...
Like all empty-headed, right-wing slogans dear to the heart of demagogues and their followers, none of whom could even explain the slogans they march behind, “MAGA” is incoherent, trashy, and seeks to re-make a nation contemptuous in its ignorance, lacking in kindness or brains. The America they want is the village Mary Shelley described in “Frankenstein” — a mob, armed with torches and pitchforks, filled with misplaced rage and self-justification, ready to kill without remorse things it doesn’t understand.
Nothing could be further from what our Founders, despite their many flaws, had in mind.
Good breakdown of that odious MAGA acronym, particularly the idea of "making" America into something, whether or not most Americans share the MAGA vision of what "great" means.
Horhai, my relationship with my homeland is much like my relationship with my late father who was an evangelical pastor. When my mother had had enough of my boyish infractions, she referred me to my father, approximately monthly. He would send me to my bedroom, enter my room and tell me he loved me as he pulled the belt from his pants, then beat me with it. I did not love my father, but I feared him.
In his twisted, evangelical, spare-the-rod-and-spoil-the-child way, he thought he was being a loving father, but he was harming me. He was not a great father, but he tried to be.
Similarly, the U.S. has never been "great." At best, it has been aspirational. The U.S. was founded out of rebellion and bloodshed, by white European men who forcibly took land from people they regarded as "savages." We must never forget this.
Those revered "founding fathers" created a government designed to protect the assets of the aristocrats and promote their ability to increase their fortunes. And so it has, for 250 years. Gains for the peasants are merely crumbs from the table.
Our history is a continuous timeline of discrimination and violence, occasionally interrupted by brief, shining moments of progress toward a more perfect union.
The land itself, under the stewardship of Indigenous peoples, was great. It was breathtakingly beautiful. Our white European forebears have ravaged the land, exploiting it for their own enrichment. The land is no longer great; it's struggling to survive. There are still pockets of beauty, preserved by caring, thoughtful people who resisted the intentions of the majority.
There are a few great countries in the world. The common thread that runs through them is the resistance to violence, to make war on other people. Coincidentally, these are the same countries that place a high value on public education.
In my father's old age, he admitted that he made a lot of mistakes and apologized. I forgave him and loved him until he died, but it was a bruised love. When I was young and misbehaved, I would often go to my mother afterward and apologize for my bad behavior. She'd reply, "I don't want apologies. I want repentance!"
I hope that we Americans will come to the realization that we are not exceptional, that we have made a lot of mistakes. I hope we will repent.
Your upbringing sounds similar to mine, mine being under a fanatical, fundamentalist father and mother, who were members of the Plymouth Brethren. My father finally died about 18 months ago, at 93. He never wavered from his love of a violent god, nor his condemnation of family members who deviated from his private interpretation of an ancient book of myth, the Bible. I still have not shed a tear.
Dan, indeed, our circumstances must be similar. My dad died at age 90 on Thanksgiving Day 2022. I felt no loss, only sorrow for my mom. She'd had an accomplished life outside their home, but her priority was always to serve my dad's needs, no matter what, as ordained by evangelicalism. At age 90 without him, she was at loose ends for what to do with herself. I suspect this absence of purpose accelerated her descent into dementia. She died at the end of October 2024, but I lost her a year earlier. Dementia made her unable to speak or indicate that she understood anything that was said to her. I felt only relief that her suffering was over.
When my sweet, precious dog dies, I will cry inconsolably.
Make America - sounds like it is by force or domineering, as Trump and the regime continue to do by steamrolling their agenda over the Nation and its Capitol and the Constitution...
The Fourteenth Amendment was ratified in 1868 because ending slavery was not enough. The nation also had to stop former Confederates, compliant state governments, and white supremacist terrorists from rebuilding racial domination under a slightly more respectable name.
Apparently, America needs the lesson repeated.
The amendment established citizenship, due process, and equal protection because basic rights cannot depend on which state legislature happens to be feeling cruel, frightened, or politically ambitious. It empowered the federal government to intervene when states abused individuals, especially people with little local power. That was not an accidental feature. It was the point.
Yet the old machinery is grinding again. States claim sweeping authority to regulate bodies, restrict voting, deny immigrants due process, censor classrooms, marginalize LGBTQ Americans, and decide whose families, identities, and freedoms deserve legal recognition. Federal courts increasingly treat long-established rights as optional historical curiosities. Politicians invoke “states’ rights” as though the phrase has not spent generations serving as a silk handkerchief draped over organized discrimination.
We have heard this song before. The lyrics are always about local control. The chorus is always about somebody losing rights.
The Fourteenth Amendment was designed for precisely this recurring American failure: the tendency of temporary political majorities to confuse electoral power with moral permission. Democracy does not mean that those who win an election may strip others of citizenship, dignity, privacy, bodily autonomy, or equal protection under the law.
It is also worth remembering that the amendment protects persons, not only citizens, from state abuses of due process and equal protection. That language matters, especially when politicians try to place immigrants or other unpopular groups outside the circle of constitutional concern.
The answer is not to praise the amendment in speeches while allowing its protections to be hollowed out in practice. Congress must enforce it. Courts must honor it. The Justice Department must defend it. Citizens must demand that equality remain a national obligation, not a regional preference.
Reconstruction failed once because the country lost the will to finish the work. We should not be surprised that the unfinished business has returned.
History is not repeating because it lacks imagination. It is repeating because too many Americans keep refusing to learn.
Or, rather, to many Americans keep refusing to 'allow' us to learn?
A perfect example of that was something trump did almost immediately in his second term. He reversed the ruling on TikTok. Uncountable hours of captive, dead, mush brain.
donna woodward, from a small boat in the French canals during the Iraq War I learned to call US “the bad teenagers on the block,” learning “exceptionalism” had turned sour. I experienced French medicine, public transportation, hospitality, and understanding. (Putin/Trump have stretched the latter. LePen has never won a national election.)
The Supreme Court is and has dragged us back. When Ted Kennedy spoke those words, no one believed SCOTUS could or would do that. But it has. We need court reform now.
Taking rights away and removing freedoms for everyone and constantly pushing falsehoods to try and scare us into giving up even more freedoms with the (save America act)that really should be renamed the save the MAGA act
Backsliding on virtually every reform since the mid-20th century at least, yes. But they are doing it using technological tools make their outrages even more potent, and raise the specter of totalitarianism taking hold. They want us to see that part (at least on the surface) because the intimidation has value to them. Why fight back if they know our every move, have catalogued our every social media post, know the weak spots or vulnerabilities that all of us have? One wrong move and we could get disappeared, right?
The way you fight back is numbers. Too big to rig, too many to jail or shoot. We have come close to the magical 3.5% a few times during No Kings but we need to get over that hump. Once we do, our streets will start to look like those in Tirana.
I know Anne-Louise. It seems hopeless. But it is not.
Win the elections this November. Launch impeachment hearings. Make the Epstein Files front and center - endlessly. Make the stupidity and illegality of this war front and center - endlessly. Spotlight the incredible incompetence. Spotlight the "waste fraud and abuse."
Strip away healthcare and spend the money bombing? - and losing the war? Making economic and political decisions that raise the prices of everything?
Never in the history of America has an administration or a political party given so many political weapons and ammunition to the opposition.
Win the presidency, and then prosecute, prosecute and prosecute. Imprison the Stephen Millers and Pete Hegseths with life sentences for murder.
Eliminate ICE. Create a new agency that properly vets those seeking asylum. Provide a path to citizenship for anyone who has followed the law and paid taxes.
Proudly and LOudly proclaim: "Make Immigration Great Again". Young Americans are not having kids. We NEED hard working people from around the world to build houses, work in healthcare, scientists - almost every endeavor would benefit from energetic appreciative people from around the world.
"My country is the world and my religion is to do good."
Add to this reform of the SCOTUS: end to lifetime appointments, expansion to 13 justices, a mandatory code of ethics that each justice must sign and reaffirm annually. Also end the electoral college once and for all, because it too, is a vestige of the slavery era. Lastly, outlaw Citizens United; this last one can be done by statute if a Democratic Congress has the courage.
All great ideas, Bill. Let's hope we can implement them, that the mid-terms yield success to the Dems running to take back our government. The alternative, especially if we end up somehow with Republicans still in charge, will be revolutionary.
Indeed; that is [the] question. Note our masters' newest horror, making AI the ultimate brain police: https://www.readtpa.com/p/trusting-chatbots-with-our-ballots? publication_id=2282&post_id=206343617&isFreemail=false&r=cb67r&triedRedirect=true
Thanks for this link. It's much worse than I thought: not only are the voting mechanisms in many states suspect (electronic voting machines from companies run by Trump supporters, connected via Starlink) but now we have that same band of oligarchs running AI companies that 'direct' our voting???? WTAF?
If Democrats regain control of Congress in 2026 and the presidency in 2028, after repeal of Citizens United and reforming the Supreme Court, states should revert to paper ballots. At lease two recent Federal elections have been compromised by electronic ballots which are controlled by private (right wing) companies. Many years ago elections for Congress (in southern states) were changed by electronic means; a vote was confirmed for the opposing candidate, seen on the screen by voters. They complained but there was no recourse.
Yikes! Thanks for the link. Indeed, it took me 2-3 hours total to research and figure out my CA ballot, but I know what I voted for. In working the election as a voter clerk, more that a few folks admitted they didn't know which judge/candidate/ballot measure to vote for, so they skipped it. And some folks were last minute researching (?) at the voting booth. Having read this article now, I shiver to think how voters may be deciding; but I'll be there in November.
Those human beings who want to make us "smaller" can forget about it!!!! We will continue to LOVE ONE ANOTHER! We have fought wars together ie "red, yellow black and white" ALL ARE PRECIOUS IN GOD'S SIGHT!.....as the song goes ....the one I learned as a little girl in Sunday School!!!!
I will stand with my fellow Americans and support the blessed freedoms we have to worship, to live and to be who we are...to care for and to respect one another.
When one of our citizens looses his or her life on the battlefield...we do not ask the persons race or sexual preference. We respect the life of the American who spilt his/her blood that someone could be free or even selfishly "protect America's interests".
I hope our military leaders and even more so....those in power who send our troops into danger realize the humanity and value of each man or woman who is surrendering their life to protect our country's interests.
Kelli, it is frightening to see the man in the Oval Office in charge of our service men and women...the one who has never received a scrap on the knee for even one single American but rather is taking all and everything he can and using money that could help those in need for "vanity " projects around the White House!!!!
Emily, I bought into that Sunday School song 100%. The fact that “all the children of the world” were potential friends was much more important to me than the color of their skin. Still is. I will vote for candidates who follow the second greatest commandment, “Love your neighbor as yourself."
AND the important emphasis today is how to construct and support a Congress and a system of laws that will never permit it to return in any form or policy or access. HCR frequently points out periods of dark history and how we overcame them then, NOT to reflect on them but to construct a means forward.
I was beginning my own statement—then saw yours—and there was no need... I was 19—and had been witness to events leading up to the ratification... and we can't let them take US back!
One important lesson Mr. Trump taught us all is that every citizen has a power to change the government and hence the country by voting. A citizen without excerising this power is contributing to the society by not commiting a crime, important but only personal.
The force to restore the South elected Trump twice. NATO nations are no longer place faith in America for this and walking away. How we can restore? The only way is to win the midterm overcoming the force of stopping it.
It's all been done before. But they think they can do it better this time because they have the technology to fool most of the people most of the time.
Everywhere you look in nature there are variations of reoccurring pattern. That is why we benefit from accurate memory. That's why "Newton's laws", relativity, and quantum mechanics yields practical results, why Shakespeare and Thucydides are still relatable. Why, with luck and logic, we can even sometimes see future combinations of events that are uniquely new, yet born of existing patterns. This is among our most fecund human capacities.
Fractal geometry contains the most common of the geometric and temporal patterns found in nature, yet it was one of the most recent branches of mathematics discovered.
For thousands of years, humans lived within this fractal world and never recognized the basic pattern of the objects surrounding them. Suddenly, when one person points out the pattern, it's no longer possible to live in this world of nature and NOT see it. Such awareness seems very punctuated.
Those who have experienced fascist governance instantly saw the pattern of where our government was taking this course of fascism. They could call a genocide "a genocide" and not be gaslighted into believing what they were seeing isn't real. It seems our Congress is taking an unusually long time for the brains occupying it to reach that punctuated "aha moment" of awareness. It took flat-Earthers a long time to internalize reality too.
Save that the criminal organization we know as "Congress" is so impenetrably barricaded by bribery and governed by graft, it will [never] "reach that...'aha moment.'"
(Which is yet another element in the litany of reasons our only [rational] hope of liberation is invasion by humanitarian allies -- itself an impossibility because our masters have made it clear they will destroy the world rather than accept defeat.)
Get the @#$%&+ gratuitous money and patronage out of politics was always essential to a free and just society, as is the prevention of monopolies of money and power. It fundamental, and implied in our founding documents, and after a period of reform after the Gilded Age, we were way too passive about stemming the growth of plain sight corruption that now threatens our whole way of life. It may be now or never that we focus on the fundamentals.
"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both” — Justice Brandeis
Thanks, Derek. The neural networks of our brains are fractal, so much of our behavior has fractal qualities.
I was a regular columnist for National Teaching and Learning and for over 15 years wrote many columns under the theme "Educating in Fractal Patterns" for how understanding fractals enhances teaching, learning and assessment of learning in higher education. Author Margaret Wheatley also wrote a couple of books on how fractal-related chaos theory affected business.
Punctuated change is a feature of our patterns of change through time--both individual and collective. America has not experienced fascism, but it appears to be in such a change toward it. Reminiscing on a history of what happened under different conditions before that change are ineffective to dealing with reversing the change. However, we can look to specific cases where punctuated change occurred in reverse. The case of Wisconsin's reversing what appeared to be a nearly hopeless situation under Governor Scott Walker's reign shows reversal is possible. Keys to their success were educational awareness of the citizens and getting a leash on their Supreme Court. A second case study lies in Hungary, which the domestic Epstein-class members consulted heavily as their model for adopting fascism and inflicting it to rule us.
For most of America;s troubles from health care to economic security to citizen gun control without authoritarian disempowerment, another nation somewhere has already solved the problem. Conditioned arrogance of "exceptionalism" and a provincial "not invented here" has allowed corrupt parties to produce a corrupted Congress that does the ruling Epstein class bidding that resists citizen demands to adapt the solutions here. Punctuated change doesn't need to be bad. We've long needed some positive punctuated change here.
Oddly enough I was thinking about the relationship of fractal geometry to nature just yesterday. I don't claim to understand genetics or mathematics very well, but I am among those who suspect a potent clue in recursive fractal geometry to the precise complexity we see in nature; but it's not:
"So, Nat'ralists observe, a Flea
Hath smaller Fleas that on him prey,
And these have smaller Fleas to bite 'em,
And so proceed ad infinitum:"
that you see in pure fractals, but rather, perhaps, is that the element of sequences in time observed in embryology, in which, if I understand correctly, there are patterns genes are being switched on and off in stages; so patterns within patterns with patterns, but not identical and within a limit. Somehow or other we see mind blowing fortuitous complexity in mind blowing precision in living organisms that is just damn hard to wrap human comprehension around, but we, or at least our experts, seem to be getting better at it.
I think psychologists call it apophenia. Being hard-wired for pattern recognition has not always served us well as the stubborn prevalence of conspiracy theories aptly demonstrates.
Our brains are wired for pattern recognition, and many "eureka" moments in which honest-to-goodness and useful patterns have been identified that have served us well, in daily life and in history.
That is a very different process than conjuring a pattern and then concocting a trail of disjointed "evidence" to resemble a rational argument, that is not grounded in reality (that is, that which, to the best of our ability, can be empirically demonstrated to be real, as, ideally, science and courtrooms are meant to do. There are real conspiracies, but many alleged come of psychosis, fraud, or lazy thinking.
Don’t forget Aristophanes’ fictional play “Lysistrata”. Maybe that would work to get Republican males to vote differently. What do males think of that idea?
Unfortunately most will not get your reference. Taken literally, on the author’s imagined scale, one might reasonably expect numerous unforeseen and unwanted outcomes. But when considered more broadly, the application to our current situation is clear. Women can have powerful voices when provoked to speak. Women also have much to lose, indeed have already lost, by virtue of Trump’s Christofascist, misogyny-riddled regime. Accepting these truths, one wonders why, in the last presidential election, considering all Caucasian women who voted, a not insignificant majority voted for Trump (~53%).
I want to believe that women could unite against the current administration in absolutely massive numbers - but the facts on the ground suggest something different and much more depressing. If, as is often said, “women have what men want”, then theoretically women could withhold sex and change the behavior of rowdy war mongering men. When I think about the potential women have to help make the world a better place for all I also think about the white women without whose support Trump would’ve lost the election! Thus I despair.
[Clearly there were other voting blocks that, if they hadn’t supported Trump, could’ve prevented a his victory. But among those groups it’s pretty clear why they went for Trump. Young Hispanic males, transactional money-grabbing capitalists and anti big-government conservatives are examples. Re white women though - I just don’t understand their thinking. Please, can you help us understand?]
I think of Sting's "I hope the Russians love their children too" because we are so easily drawn into the game of strut and fret and road rage (me too) that we can lose sight of what's "important". When all is said and done, overarchingly important.
"Where be these enemies?—Capulet, Montague,
See what a scourge is laid upon your hate,
That heaven finds means to kill your joys with love,
One of the thoughts formed during my career was in how to recognize and then to "break the cycle" of abuse that is rampant in multiple generations of families. Your essay sets a foundation.
And Anita Hill, a student of Bork would sit before the Senate Judiciary Hearing chaired by Joe Biden in 1991 and testify against Clarence Thomas. After all this we still can’t get our act together? Burnt out Mainer
Don’t be burnt out, Mainer. Of all states right now, we need your full participation if we’re at all serious about reclaiming what we’ve recently lost.
Every generation gets re-tested anew, so it would seem. Better to trip at the start of a race than stumble the end when there’s still time to fix things. We’re with you. Remember the spirit of Joshua Chamberlain and the 20th Maine Infantry at Gettysburg.
Thank you, I needed that. It’s been frustrating not being able to communicate my dusgust for Platner in every cell of my body but had to zip my lip. Many Mainers had to hold their noses as well.
In one of her videos a couple of days ago, Heather reminded listeners that Platner would have been a heavy lift indeed. In a state where any Democrat right now should be polling at +12 or +15, he was coming in at +2 at best. His whiny, self-pitying video performance yesterday made the reason for that abundantly clear. We already have one of those in the White House, thank you very much…
Maine's 77 year old former governor Paul LePage is the racist, misogynistic, xenophobic Republican candidate for CD-2 in Maine. He ran unopposed in the primary, but Susan Collins is totally backing him. After being term limited out in 2018, he moved to Florida and resurfaced in 2022 to run again for Governor. He would have fit right into Trump's first or second administration except he would never bow down to anyone.
Check out his Wikipedia page to get a feel for what he was like as governor. Keep in mind that Susan Collins has always backed LePage 100%. This is who she really is when she says that she is "concerned."
We need to remember too, those Democrats who truly have pushed the right policies for years (Warren, Sanders, et al) but who rushed to Platner's bandwagon because he sounded like a soulmate. Democrats have sometimes similarly pushed policies that sound like the next best thing but backfire against them and hurt their chances to win elections.
Just read it; it is quite the set up! I don't doubt many other politicians we believe to be what they seem to be are actually the opposite! What a sham politics has become!
This has been my forever complaint against Mr Biden. For all the good he achieved, when it came time to save his ass, he allowed Clarance Thomas in after Thomas was advised to say, “This is nothing but a high tech lynch mob.” And his history of destruction prevailed and now is fortified being part of the majority. So shameful.
While attitudes towards women remain painfully backwards, I do think that Joe Biden evolved in important ways over the years since the Thomas hearings. Hopefully we all, as humans, take opportunities to grow and change.
Agreed, Signe K. There are three connected things that I think we need to learn as human beings right now. One is a continuing commitment to accountability. The second is not judging people forever by the mistakes that they make, but being open to the possibility of growth in nearly everyone. The third is staying attentive so that one is capable of the first and second things.
But… the humongous mistake he made was overstaying his time in office thereby losing to the monster Antichrist of the ages and this I will never ever forgive Biden for. Never. Did I say never? In the end, Biden proved himself to be absolutely selfish man who wanted only one lasting accomplishment; to be president for the 250th and I shall never forgive nor forget this resultant wholesale destruction of the American experiment that he singly caused. His appointed attorney general could have charged Trump with treason and prevented him from running but didn’t. I give you permission to forgive him but I will not ever.
Rolled it all back to my youth, when I spent many hours marching and protesting war and women's rights, including to control their own body. I did not get this accomplished so that my children and their children would have to do this AGAIN!!! IT WAS SETTLED!!! Not a happy camper - don't piss off old people - we have experience in the details of revenge.
I still hope for the army of grandfathers to go to D.C. and physically remove the menace. He is the absolute worst representative of my generation. We have a duty to fix this.
I get it that the 14th Amendment was not popular with the former slave owners who thought they were superior to everyone else and couldn't imagine those Black people they used to beat up and force to do all the work the owner didn't want to have to do, being able to vote, make decisions for themselves, and live a life of freedom.
It seems civil rights legislation is the easiest to ignore while mostly white people do what they want to those not rich white and male. The white boys of that group if not rich, believe they will be some day. They believe that gives them the right to make laws that ignore the 14th Amendment and approve judges and justices who care as little as they can get away with for that amendment and whichever others they don't like.
When I read the Constitution with my 7th and 8th grade students last year, they were surprised at the things the 14th Amendment included. They liked birthright citizenship and that people who stood against our nation and our Constitution should not hold office. We do need to have more civics lessons for our children from an early age so they can see that people through history did try to make this a better place, a "more perfect union." Maybe they would be more willing to stand against those who ignore our constitution!
A sobering thought that had Kentucky Fried Voldemort and others actually done their jobs according to both the spirit and letter of the Fourteenth Amendment, the traitor who led another insurrection against Congress would have been permanently enjoined from any office in the land back in 2021, and faced disgrace, poverty and prison instead.
Where is Mitch anyway? Not in a where’s Waldo kind of way, but in a proof of life, can he actually perform the functions required of a sitting U.S. senator.
Found one article that said octogenarians have a 4% survival rate in an out of hospital cardiac arrest. Of the 4% that survive, how many are neurologically in tact? Not sure.
ETA: Therapeutic hypothermia after cardiac arrest takes at least 24hrs. Thune and Barrasso said they spoke to him the day after he was hospitalized (which we later found out was the day after cpr was done at his home..). The math isn’t mathin’
horhai, I keep hearing rumors that Moscow Mitch is either in a deep coma or is nearly brain dead. In either case, he cannot assume the duties of Senator. KY deserves an actual Senator, not the shadow of one, particularly one who was as anti-American, anti-constitutional, and evil as they come!
McConnell is still controlling the Senate by being on the rolls as a Senator when he may be brain dead at this time. The governor of KY cannot appoint an interim Senator yet.
My spouse and I, about 8 years ago, while knocking doors before an election, performed an impromptu civics lesson to a young (17 y-o) prospective first-time voter. It was shocking that we had to explain the basics of the separation of powers and the fact of how decisions made in an off year election can impact presidential and legislative developments. The learner was eager to get and have this information.
Laurie, yep, we need civics education for our children from the preschool years that involves learning to get along with all kinds of people through college with far more complex readings and discussions of our nation and our government and the responsibilities of citizens. Make it conform to a child's ability to understand, to ask questions, and to be curious about what comes next.
We should focus social studies education on civics (I love that you read the constitution with them) and resistance history. Our actual founders were those who resisted our government (which we must admit, from the perspective of a slave and indigenous person, was authoritarian from the start)
During WWII I was in a small poor public school in Virginia. We did something for the “War Effort” every day and there was history from Egypt and Assyria onward. In 8th grade I had world history. Civics teacher told us that if we did not vote in every election we were entitled to, she would come back to haunt us. No one wanted to be haunted by Maude Boulware Motley, formidable teacher of history and civics, still in our heads at 40th reunion of the class of 1951.
It was in 1952, however, that I learned that the bottom 25% of SAT scorers got education degrees and teaching certificates.
Agreed. Another “it is better to laugh than to cry.” I fight better with pen laughing than crying. The very thought of Vought and Project 2025 curdles my brain.
Yes, here we are, currently stuck with a fascist Trump-MAGA government who wants to roll our America back in time to the 1850’s. The world is not safe from this scourge, let alone American citizens at home in their residences.
Infinitely worse: the ecogenocidal resurrection of Hitler's Reich made omnipotent and everlasting by moral imbecility, bottomless wealth, zero-tolerance enforcement technology and apocalyptic weaponry against which no defense is possible.
The guardrails of the Federal Court system are beat to hell and obliterated in many places. And this supine Republican Congress has forfeited all power to Trump.
Remember his KKK father and his Papa Putin, with whom he talks for hours. Do Americans understand the KGB guy who is papa to our “president”? Are people paying attention or are they too blinded by what the Republican Party has done to their pocketbooks and their country in order to enrich the few and return to slavery of the many?
“While Washington threw temper tantrums on the summit floor, eleven NATO nations chose a Toronto-built Bombardier jet to replace Boeing. Canada is taking the reins while USA falters.
If a future American administration throws a political tantrum over trade or border policies and attempts to cut off defense hardware, spare parts, or software updates, Canada’s radar fleet keeps flying. The intellectual property, the maintenance hubs, and the physical airframes are anchored right here at home and with trusted Scandinavian partners.
We now possess an independent, Arctic-capable early warning system that tracks cruise missiles, surface vessels, and aerial threats across our northern frontier on our own terms, using technology that Washington cannot hold hostage.
And what is the actual physical aircraft underneath that advanced Swedish radar suite? It isn’t a Boeing hull, and it isn’t a Lockheed frame. It is the Bombardier Global 6500—a ultra-long-range, high-altitude executive jet manufactured at Bombardier’s flagship facility in the Greater Toronto Area. 🇨🇦 Eleven NATO nations have banded together in a joint procurement agreement to purchase up to ten of these spy planes." 🛩️
'Trump THREATENS NATO ALLIES while Canada's Bombardier wins $10B spy plane contract at Ankara.'
Dear Professor, this is certainly in your wheelhouse. We know it's your happy place, but I hear people wondering if Maine should ask YOU to take on Susan Collins, even for only one term, until things start to be straightened out. You would blow her out of the water, just looking at her on a debate stage. It would only be six years, but then, the clamorng would be for you to run for POTUS in 2032.
She’s already nipped that in the bud, for all the right reasons, too. You don’t elect “faces” to learn on the job, particularly not for the Senate, one of the most important deliberative bodies in the world.
Maine already has a would-be candidate with parallel expertise — former President of the Maine Senate, Troy Jackson, who is already actively campaigning. Whoever the Maine Democratic Party eventually selects, Heather’s already indicated will get her full support.
You’d have my vote, Professor, if I lived in Maine, but I couldn’t handle the cold. Count me in for some campaign contributions if you choose to run, though. 😎👍
Something I read in Esquire magazine many years ago: "Never give in to the cold." I've found Massachusetts to be the best place for an escaped Michigander.
Having lived in New England for 25 years, it is interesting to see how localized the weather is. If you live on the coast, the weather inland is often quite different than on the coast. For almost 15 years, I commuted to New Haven, CT from the Bar Harbor area. It's about a 400 mile drive and I often drove through 3 or 4 different weather patterns on one drive.
If I didn't live in New England, I would definitely consider living in Michigan.
I think the world would be a worse place if HCR had to give up this Substack to handle the responsibilities of office. Surely ONE of HCR's readers lives in Maine and could beat Susan Collins??
The problems are 1) We live in a world very different from the framers of the constitution. And the world we live in now provides the context in which we understand the constitution. There is no way in which we can understand the constitution as the framers understood it. True originalism is thus doomed from the start. 2) We are incapable of escaping our biases. And so we are inconsistent in our interpretation of the constitution. You can see this in supreme court rulings which sometimes take the “common sense” interpretation of a word or phrase to be the correct one and sometimes rely on a more technical interpretation, all the time claiming an originalist approach, but in fact being totally inconsistent. 3) Nobody who supports the notion of the unitary executive can claim with a straight face to be an originalist. Nor can they claim to be a logical thinker.
And ironically, it is the states' Attorneys General who have banded together to challenge the illegal executive orders of the wannabe dictator who would happily push back the clock to make his aMErica once again a nation where white, Christian men have all the power and all the wealth.
Very stark reality, having lived through Bork's nomination and the hearings. He was a ludicrous consideration, or so it seemed at the time. We've come a long way to the normalization of the greed and racism that drives this administration. Here's hoping future congressional leaders have the fortitude and vision to reinforce these 14th Amendment laws with teeth and barbed wire.
“are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word ‘citizens’ in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens.”
Where did it say that? Reminds me of some other "decisions" of the court, especially recently.
"Originalism" is slang for "we made it up". Yeah, words mean something and context helps to clarify, but it's pretty easy to put "words" or interpretations of words in dead people's mouths. I would argue that the ideals of the founders, which they installed into foundational documents were wiser that some of their behaviors. The usefulness of relevant guiding principles endures where mere instruction is wisely superseded. Newton's "laws" still pertain, while many others become archaic.
Originalism is similar to biblical literalism and it's just as absurd. You can fix it by re-writing your Constitution in modern English and doing it properly this time round.
You’d be received better if you ceased telling “other” people how they should behave. It’s not particularly welcome. If you’re an outsider (which you clearly are), encouragement always gets more points than finger-waggling. Just saying.
Who did Jesus burn at the stake? Christianity seems to have an evil twin of the same name, popular among those who want to serve themselves by putting others in peril.
Good comparison but as an atheist, I have no interest in ancient man’s quest to make sense of his accidental evolutionary stumble up the trail. In my standup, I suggest that God originally gave the tickets to travel up the trail to the Bonobos who are a matriarchal and peaceful primate group but man seeing this, grabbed the tickets and ran like hell. A Methodist church once kicked me out of their open mic when I performed that bit and I’m rather proud.
*Posting this again to encourage everyone to send protest emails to their Senators before August 24th *
🇺🇸 “An oil company leases a piece of your public land. It drills a well, pulls the oil, and posts a $10,000 bond up front as a promise to clean up the site when the well runs dry. Years later the company goes bankrupt, or it simply walks. The well stays where it is, thousands of feet deep, venting methane and leaking toxic brine into the ground. The cleanup runs north of $300,000. The company forfeits its $10,000 and disappears. You cover the rest. The math rewards walking away. Unplugged wells vent methane and benzene, a known carcinogen, and leak produced water laced with heavy metals and radioactive material into soil and groundwater. These are real holes in real ground An orphaned well is a federal term with a plain meaning. It’s a well with no company left to plug it and no bond big enough to do the job, so the responsibility lands on you.”
🇺🇸 Comment on the rule. Go to the federal docket at regulations.gov under BLM-2025-0037 and tell BLM, in your own words, that you don’t want to inherit the oil industry’s cleanup bill. Specific comments carry more weight than form letters. If a well sits near where you hunt, camp, ranch, or draw your water, say so, and name the place.
🇺🇸 Then share this. Independent public lands journalism runs on readers, not advertisers and not grants. Forward this to the person who fishes the creek downstream of a lease, and check how your members of Congress have voted on public lands at our Congressional Public Lands Scorecard.
The land is yours. So is the bill, unless enough of us say otherwise before August 24. 🇺🇸
‘Trump Admin Pushes More Public Lands Oil Cleanup Costs to Taxpayers’ MORE THAN JUST PARKS by WILL PATTIZ JUN 24 2026 | Substack
great James, I tried to paste the sample letter template from Author Will Pattiz right underneath this Substack comment, but it is within Pattiz’s Substack too.
The people attacking our rights today are not trying to take America somewhere new. They are trying to drag us backward to a time when those in power decided whose freedom mattered and whose did not.
We already know where that road leads. We fought like hell to move beyond it.
We can’t let them take us back.
Not back in time so much as back into the claws of the "same old serpent" that Lincoln was so steamed about. Just about everywhere you look, unpleasant changes are being imposed upon us by the now antidemocratically powerful.
"They are the arguments that kings have made for enslaving the people in all ages of the world. You will find that all the arguments in favor of king-craft were of this class; they always bestrode the necks of the people, not that they wanted to do it, but because the people were better off for being ridden." -- Lincoln
JL, you are right here. The enslavers told all who would listen that "their people" were better off enslaved because they were savages and through enslavement they could learn civilization. It would definitely take generations, but it could happen. They even convinced themselves that those people enjoyed their "condition." They deliberately ignored the fact that those "enslaved persons" were far more skilled than their owners at nearly everything: farming, building, sewing, cooking, and nearly every action of the "plantation." I guess the white boys and girls didn't want to think that hard or it might let them see what poor examples of humanity those white enslavers were. Can't have that!
Judge Bork was so popular among our most intelligent white supremacists and the privileged wealthy. He was an emotional fascist, a sick well educated man that was living in his time, opposed to the folks that loved Lincoln but afraid to say just that. He looked like what he was. And he was most unattractive. Thank God for Senator Edward Kennedy and our forward thinking folks that read Judge Bork accurately. Fascism continues in President Trump today. The Civil War is not over. MAGA is the ghost of our Christmas past.
Bork was responsible for the Saturday Night Massacre during the Nixon Administration, when he ordered the firing of special prosecutor Archibald Cox. He was also responsible for the current court refusal to enforce our laws against monopolies and restraints of trade, and refusing to enforce our antitrust laws. This is why we pay more for inferior internet service, cable service, and cellular service.
The Watergate special prosecutor was Archibald Cox, not Alexander Butterfield!
I’ve corrected my post. Thank you for giving me the correct information.
Yes, Butterfield was the congressional witness who initially revealed the White House taping system.
Bork’s influence on antitrust law is real, but I think it’s overstated to say he is “responsible” for today’s internet, cable, and cellular prices.
His book The Antitrust Paradox profoundly influenced modern antitrust doctrine by encouraging courts to focus primarily on consumer welfare—whether consumers ultimately pay higher prices or receive lower quality—rather than on market concentration alone. Critics argue that this approach made courts too reluctant to challenge mergers and dominant firms, contributing to greater corporate concentration in industries such as telecommunications and technology.
That’s a legitimate criticism and one that has gained support across much of the political spectrum. But saying Bork is personally responsible for today’s marketplace, or that courts simply “refuse to enforce” the antitrust laws, goes considerably further than the historical evidence supports. Courts continue to enforce those laws; the real debate is over how they interpret and apply them.
I think he had a larger influence than people realize. We are paying proportionally more because of local and national monopolies and restraints of trade. Bork didn’t see anything wrong with it as long as consumers weren’t harmed by price increases, but the reality is that we are seeing price increases, and refusal to enforce antimonopoly statutes does cause us to pay more
The "Saturday Night Massacre was just a warm up for Trump.
‘Most intelligent white supremists’ is an oxymoron!
Joe Biden was the Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee that rejected Bork’s confirmation. History will be kinder to Biden than current commentators.
Well, there IS the Anita Hill testimony against Thomas which, if taken as seriously as it should have been by that very committee, would have kept creepy clarence off the Court.
Hopefully!
Investopedia-Joe Biden's 2020 and 2024 campaigns included commitments to student debt relief, COVID-19 recovery, taxation of the wealthy, and investments in clean energy.
President Biden signed the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan into law in 2021.
Student loan relief and Federal Trade Commission proposals faced challenges.
This is what psychologists call the fundamental attribution error. We explain our own views by reference to circumstances, evidence, tradeoffs, and good intentions. We explain our opponents’ views by reference to their character. If I support a policy, it’s because I’ve thought carefully about it. If you support the opposite policy, it’s because you’re greedy, racist, authoritarian, or naïve.
Bork opposed many of the constitutional doctrines that liberals consider essential to civil rights and privacy. Critics feared his judicial philosophy would roll back those protections. That’s a legitimate debate. But it is quite different from asserting that he was secretly motivated by white supremacy or fascism. Those are claims about motive, not legal philosophy, and they require evidence. I can’t imagine Professor Richardson, as an example, making those sorts of unsupported claim.
Finally, I think there’s something deeper at work. People often divide the world into heroes and villains because stories are easier to understand that way. History is usually less accommodating. Most influential people are mixtures of admirable and objectionable qualities. Bork was, in my view, an exceptionally intelligent and influential jurist whose legal philosophy profoundly changed American law.
But I can believe that philosophy was deeply mistaken without believing he was a closet fascist.
What you conclude about Bork the individual is likely valid, but it would seem the Chicago School of Economics was the intellectual capital to grow the counter-revolution agains the post WWII liberal reforms whose major leaders were at least proto-fascists if not crypto-fascists--how else did it come to what is TODAY without those academic economists and lawyers--who might not have been either proto or crypto fascists themselves--to validate the Republicans' policies but turned a blind eye to their autocratic trajectory?
Aside from the unprovable leap to different sorts of fascism, I think there’s an interesting historical question in your comment. The Chicago School unquestionably supplied much of the intellectual framework for modern conservative economic policy. That’s a worthwhile subject for debate.
Where I hesitate is the leap from “their ideas influenced later Republican policy” to “they were proto-fascists” or knowingly enabled authoritarianism. Those are much larger historical claims that require considerably more evidence. Many people can sincerely advocate freer markets, limited government, or narrower antitrust enforcement without sharing or anticipating authoritarian politics.
Ideas have consequences, but those consequences are rarely linear. The same intellectual movement produce outcomes that many of its own founders would later applaud, regret, or even reject.
Ancient human proclivities abide to this day. Call it "the devil"; I call it the unexamined, egocentric, life.
a thought that has haunted me is one of young children who surely saw slaves abused in the fields and filing it away as "this is how the world is". A few might have had some discomfort with the doublethink required to to accept other people being treated badly, but where slavery was an everyday fact of life, I would think it wound have been unusual to detect the fundamental perfidy of that. I think that one of the things that writers, leaders and citizen movement did was to shake that sense of "normalcy". History presents many examples of how "normalcy" can be sociopathic.
USian health-care: behind its innumerable lies, as [intentionally] ecogenocidal as Auschwitz -- and thus our planet's ultimate example of sociopathic "normalcy," eternally omnipotent, never to be transformed save by revolution.
You make a good point, Loren. What other than sociopathy explains doctors who allow a woman to die in pain in a hospital parking lot because they can’t perform a medically-necessary abortion? What other than sociopathy explains the MAGA cultures endorsement of allowing children to starve, or for genocide in other countries (and our own)? What other than normalized sociopathy enables people to nod their heads in agreement when peaceful protestors are shot dead in their car or in the street by ICE?
Thank you. If one believes -- as I do -- the clandestine purpose of the United States was, from its inception, the preservation of slavery, protected by what at the time was our species' most malevolently effective propaganda campaign -- the lies, promises and disinformation of the original "change-we-can-believe-in" deception -- then the horrors of ChristoNazism are merely the fulfillment of the founders' intent. With the relentless logic of Occam's Razor, this is the one hypothesis that explains literally all that has since obtained, especially the fact that [every] success by USian humanitarians is immediately attacked and eventually destroyed -- which after 250 years of repetitions is undeniably the inescapable fate of all progressive USian efforts and yet another of the innumerable proofs self-liberation is eternally impossible.
Excellent points…
JL, some of those children never got over seeing people being beaten and otherwise abused. Among them were the Grimke sisters of South Carolina who left the plantation where they grew up and moved north and became strong abolitionists. Why some just accepted the abusive way of life of enslavement and others couldn't, is to me a mystery. No matter how one looks at it, enslavement of any kind is evil!
Ruth, thank you for your post. I was also thinking about them. In answer to your question, some enjoyed the life of privilege and having people subservient to them. Plenty of examples of that today.
Another aspect is that children, privileged children, at any rate, in those times were reared in an extreme authoritarian and patriarchal culture, enforced and reinforced by the parents' religion and corporal punishment - they really believed in heaven and hell as actual consequences for their attitudes, speech and behavior while alive. It's almost like the Stockholm Syndrome, with the children as the captives, parents and all authority figures as the captors.
And yet today, walk down any large American urban street and see homeless people that we ignore - even us Liberals. Driving in American towns you often see people with signs for “Money, Please”. In a country with an ethos to not worship or favor billionaires, but rather build a robust social safety net, you would not walk by these situations without action. J L Graham, I find myself caught between that haunted child and my grown impotent self in these situations. The haunted child asks “Why?” And my adult self asks “But how can I stop this?” I do what I can with what I have and in my sphere of influence. This is The Test.
One of the reasons we cannot do better is that real welfare kings are the wealthy. A billionaire can buy the Trail Blazers, but will not pay for the upgrade to the arena that he wants. Portland, Multnomah County, and local school districts are making huge cuts because of greeds like this. They don't pay their fare share of taxes either. With a few notable examples of charity, most of them are parasites.
I try to prioritize my spheres of focus, and for sure that is often my own personal interests, but also I noticed what H.D. Thoreau captured in one of his lesser-repeated aphorisms: “There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.”. An aphorism rarely proves anything but it can state something of importance clearly and compactly. Certain focii and discoveries greatly accelerate human understanding. For example, eons of remedies for illness, some of them materially effective, yet healing science took giant steps forward with germ theory, articulate anatomy, DNA identification, etc. I think the human traits of greed and sociopathy, a little part of it in everyone, are, as ever, in sore need of our full attention, and adult plans for management. As a society, we have been swindled into letting that go, and it's getting the better of us, Who are we, what are we, what do we want, do we really, really, want? It may seem oblique, but without that, if we don't, we are up a creek without a paddle*.
* I always thought that expression should be "down (whatever) creek", but you know the drill.
MLRGRMI:
I suspect that you stop at some of the same intersections that I do, daily. (Burton St SW and US-131?)
Can you and a few of your friends visit LMCU and ask for a supply of two-dollar bills? Then, keep them handy in your vehicle. When you encounter one of those men (a few women) with the cardboard signs, give him two of them.
Keep those two-dollar bills circulating! And do it with a smile!
That is my sphere of influence.
\Vince S
Professor Richardson has posted yet another "Best Ever", a veritable 2026 Federalist paper with historical roots going back centuries.
"Legislators, therefore ought not trust the government of a state entirely
to trust the government of a state to chance but, ought to provide a system of laws to regulate the administration of public affairs to the latest posterity."
-- Hume, 1.3.105.
See also, "Explaining America" by Garry Wills the author of "Inventing America."
And thank you Kelli, JL, Ruth & Heather.
A shadow government exists now, today, in many countries factually. It’s now autocracy, monopoly, or dictatorships. Is that not the same as slavery, supremacy- by religion/color/money? As it vacillates back to yesteryears same issues reenacted, wanna be ‘Kings’ resurface and dictate briefly ,gathering the richest moss mess by mess, with domination, lies, and temporary controllers.
The longer they reign ,the more entrenched they become , the more die, the harder progress to reality/unity becomes.
And yet the people win, rise again to progress, poverty was halved, vaccines HAD eradicated many diseases.
Will the swing back be November 2026 for America -reunifying our country …again.
Restoring world order…again?
Only if we VOTE it so…again.
Patricia:
Can you encourage your friends and colleagues to listen to Patti Smith's rousing anthem, "People Have the Power"?
See if you can find the version recorded in 2019 with Choir! Choir! Choir!
It is hard to resist.
\Vince S
Absolutely, we are a group of musicians.Patti is inspirational with this..
This was a truly beautiful post that even stands out from the normally high level of clarity, conciseness and cutting analysis I have gotten used to in these daily letters. I think the point emerges very clearly from the comparison of the “Founder’s version” and the post civil war “amended version” of our constitution. We know which version the “originalists” want our constitution to be. The rejections of the Voting Rights Act piece by piece make that obvious. We also know that the amended version was not enough to get us to the ideal of equal rights, and further amendments were necessary. But no version is safe from a supreme court that is committed to realizing the “Founders version” and with it the tyranny that protects the few from the many. We must fight now to have a democracy in the inclusive, amended sense that winning the Civil War was to have empowered us to create, amendment by amendment moving toward a system that will protect us all, and reject those continuing to throw people under the bus.
Health care and housing should be, with education, truly public goods, and incorporating immigrants and drawing on their passion to make a better life fir themselves and their children is our national superpower that has always been how the US became “great.” If God is involved at all, it is in the encouragement thus offered to see each other as “children” equal in value and deserving of respect, and applying the demand for equal treatment “under the law” as an absolute command.
The law is king. And the amended, inclusive, and federal force of the law is now being ignored by those entrusted with the power to enforce it, from the Supreme Court 6 down to the ICE agents on our streets.
The Rule of Law is king, but the individual laws must be amended. In some cases, to make it abundantly clear that included as a foundation piece is the private right of action to enforce the law and that class action suits are also permitted. We must take control of enforcement of laws out of the exclusive hands of the DoJ and put that control back into the hands of the people. Such that if after a short, reasonable time it becomes apparent that DoJ isn't going to take appropriate enforcement action, any individual injured has standing to sue.
Not all of them were J@ck@$$e$ !
One of Kamala Harris's slogans in 2024 was 'We're Not Going Back'. Not enough people understood what that meant.
The election results suggest that everyone understood what the slogan meant, and a few more people were determined to go back than those who wanted to go forward.
Going forward meant having a woman – a woman of color, no less – in the White House. A majority of voters didn't want that, including the 7 million who voted for Biden, but didn't vote for Harris.
I am bemused by your certainty. Exit interviews, post-election polling, and political opinion all point to inflation, a completely mismanaged border, Gaza, and continued lying about Biden’s condition were the main reasons people either stayed home or switched their votes to Trump.
Certainly we continue to have racists and misogynists as voters, but there is no evidence, none, that they were a differential margin in the election.
I voted for Harris, but not enthusiastically. I saw her as a very poor politician. The attributes that drove her out of the 2020 primary before the first election were those that lost her the election in 24. Timidity, failure to differentiate between big and smaller issues and a bit of inauthenticity.
Yes, she was a winner in CA. But that’s where our polarized country harms us. Too many politicians grow up either in a hothouse of liberal or conservative politics. They are not tested. They can’t address the concerns of people outside their political family. Can you imagine Harris getting elected in SC? Or Lindsay Graham in CA?
I am bemused by your opinion of Harris as "a very poor politician." Most people agree that she ran a spectacular campaign hindered by inadequate time to build an overwhelming majority. Her "faults" bothered YOU, but I've seen no focus group results that indicate a majority of voters shared your priorities.
This doesn't look like a Democratic "hothouse" to me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:2022_California_gubernatorial_election_results_map_by_county.svg
Registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by 50% in CA, roughly 60-40.
As for “most people” agree that she ran a spectacular campaign, where did you read that, except perhaps in a partisan column? Not any evidence-based analysis.
In 2020, her main issues were medicare for all (which she could not and would not answer any detail question about, and—fantastically—school busing, after she scored off Biden. A dead issue for 50 years. She was so ineffective that she dropped from “leading candidate” to last place so quickly that all her funding sources dried up.
As to 2024, read some honest analyses, if you’re that interested. She never shook the Biden shadow, she never addressed Gaza or questioned arms sales to Israel (regardless of what her opinion was, she failed to either defend Biden’s course, or define a new one), she used the same ineffective language to talk around, not about, inflation. And she never charted a new course on immigration, an issue Dems were polling 25 points down on. Ineffective and inauthentic, in my opinion.
That she got as close as she did amazes me. Had she been running against any kind of normal Republican of yesteryear, she would have lost in a landslide.
LOL! She "couldn't shake Biden's shadow," but 7 million Biden voters wouldn't vote for her. Tom, you're not the first armchair political analyst to rationalize any number of reasons to avoid acknowledging that the U.S. electorate is predominantly racist and misogynistic. Feel free to have the last word, but I'm done with this conversation. I have things to do.
Tom, Dale: Lest we forget, Biden promised to be a one term president and then his inner circle (much like with Trump now) kept him propped up despite failing memory and cognition as the only person who could defeat Trump. The late inning anointment of Harris to be the successor candidate deprived the base to democratically select a candidate of their choice, which most likely would not have been Harris. The Democrat Party still suffers from the same flaw i.e. older conservatives and uber pro-Israel officials controlling all or most of the levers of financial and political power and using those levers to determine outcomes rather than allowing the broad base at the grass roots to have their say. When Harris refused to separate herself from Biden's policies on Israel and Gaza, she lost the support of the under 55 demographic and anyone else who was sufficiently awake to notice that what Israel was doing, or sanctioning, in Gaza and the West Bank was qualitatively different from rescuing hostages or protecting its borders from Hamas' attacks.
I think a different woman of color might have done better, even won. Her stance on Gaza was unforgivable. Her failure to take more of a leadership role vis a vis Biden's hidden health issues became a problem.
Donna, I really doubt your analysis. A majority of Americans have maintained a peculiar affection for Israel since it was reconstituted as a nation in 1947. From that time to the present, Israel was a lousy neighbor and most Americans didn't care. U.S./Israel policy has always been driven by the Christian "a-frend-of-Israel-is-a-frend-of-God" belief.
Only recently has Israel's aggression beyond payback for October 7 soured some Americans' opinion of Israel. At the time of the election, Israel was still successfully playing the victim. If Harris had come out strongly in favor of Gaza, the Zionists would have lost their minds.
I'm not sure what your comment about her "failure" regarding Biden means. There's no evidence Biden's health issues were hidden; if they were, Harris wasn't doing the hiding. I don't recall that this was even mentioned during the run-up to the election.
Trump’s stance on Gaza is better?
Of course not! Nothing about him is better than anything we can say about anyone. Harris spoke against Israel's conduct but coudln't bring herself to call it genocide, as even some Jewish groups were doing by w024 (e.g. Jewish Voice for Peace).
And not voting for her on that account got us Trump. Not impressed with their reasoning.
Back to the future is their vision for America. Patriarchy and oligarchy rules us inferior fools.
Inbred rulers of the past failed. No group has dibs on human ingenuity. Science tells us that inbreeding leads to stagnation. Diversity drives innovation. The current population of the earth has traveled a long path from origins in Africa. Sorry, but backtracking is a fool’s trek. Seems to me…
If you go back just a little further in everyone's DNA origins, it is clear we are ALL AFRICANS.
Indeed, the movements out of Africa have been well documented. Also documented has been the trek of our ancestors from difficult places to mow hopeful ones. A little genealogy research would uncover immigrants galore. Some welcomed, some disparaged, but they still come. America is not poorer, but diversity has added so much. Sad for our natives but they also came from somewhere. We all have been mutts on the move…
Mutts On The Move.
SpaceX's new motto.
Thank You Heather for taking the kernels of history most of us know but perhaps without the true reasons or the “why”, is just TOO close to the reason so many are such racists. If you keep “the others” at such a disadvantage they cannot be seen and welcomed as the equally educated, treated and accepted neighbors and citizens they can and should be, this will be our fate - divided by class, by color and as we are seeing & feeling by status and the resources and wealthy they are hell bent on taking for only the few. The few are by definition and reality the minority and growing. Many that are the supporters of that system are too blind to see their days are numbered as surely the “others”..
Please do not bring up that old argument ! It is true but those “originalist” guys ( including Clarence Thomas) will be foaming at the mouth !
"Diversity drives innovation" - Yes! You look at how important diversity is in many aspects of life: e.g., a "diverse" financial portfolio (more able to withstand economic downturns), genetic diversity (no inbreeding, which is harmful), biological diversity (more resilient). The diverse skills, experiences, and worldviews of people in the workplace improve problem-solving. Yet these MAGA idiots see diversity as a bad thing, and want to eliminate every reference to the word!
Combined with the almost universal hope, gratitude and pride which I see immigrants bringing here. They have often fled dictatorship, war violence, and generational impoverishment and WANT to work hard and contribute and make a life here. They beam with pride at citizenship ceremonies. Why do we make it SO complicated, SO hard snd SO long to become legal? I see such complacency and entitlement among many “citizens” who did NOTHING to merit that citizenship except already have citizen parents—they are so affronted and don’t have a clue how lucky they are to happen to be born here. No humility. No gratitude. No sense of responsibility—just prejudice and scarcity and hubris.
Your comment get my vote for number 1 comment of the day. I plan to copy it onto social media along with Heather's letter. (Hope you don't mind).
I don't mind at all. Thanks for the compliment!
Agreed. Well said.
JDinTX, I never understood the white need to prove itself superior to everyone else. As a white child, I liked all kinds of people and when I met people different from me, it was exciting. Unless someone had pronounced physical characteristics, I couldn't differentiate color too well, often not gender except by name. I could if someone had very dark skin or really blonde hair, but mostly I knew people by voice. Every single day that one of the Trumpian white supremacists opens his (sometimes her) mouth and spews their stupidity into the world, I gag. I do wonder if whiteness does freeze some white folks' brain power at a young child's level of understanding of the world where they still want to dictate to everyone around them and tantrum when they don't get what they want. When they tantrum, they harm people and their buddies are delighted and they try to expand on what happened and figure out what they can do to prove the "superiority" of their whiteness when they are really proving the opposite.
"White supremacy" always disproves itself.
Always, and in chump’s case, it is a guven
I never saw people much different from me growing up but I knew they were there and felt a curiosity. No fear but sorrow at the hatred so many spewed at what they didn’t know.
Trump's sloganeering of the MAGA acronym implies going backwards in the words themselves...
Make America great again invokes a fantasy vision of some unspecified time in the Nation's past...A history that is not great but painful to so many indigenous tribes, the actual Native Americans, and Black Americans that have slavery, oppression and systemic racism as a remembrance of going into the Nation's past.
Make America - sounds like it is by force or domineering, as Trump and the regime continue to do by steamrolling their agenda over the Nation and its Capitol and the Constitution...
Great Again - is uncertain, our Nation has been great at times, it would be great if We the People were united in being a constitutional democracy again, if we decided to keep this republic and move forward not backwards...
Like all empty-headed, right-wing slogans dear to the heart of demagogues and their followers, none of whom could even explain the slogans they march behind, “MAGA” is incoherent, trashy, and seeks to re-make a nation contemptuous in its ignorance, lacking in kindness or brains. The America they want is the village Mary Shelley described in “Frankenstein” — a mob, armed with torches and pitchforks, filled with misplaced rage and self-justification, ready to kill without remorse things it doesn’t understand.
Nothing could be further from what our Founders, despite their many flaws, had in mind.
Good breakdown of that odious MAGA acronym, particularly the idea of "making" America into something, whether or not most Americans share the MAGA vision of what "great" means.
It was so trite and juvenile I was sure that thinking voters would see through the carnival barker bullschittery. Guess a sucker is born every minute
Horhai, my relationship with my homeland is much like my relationship with my late father who was an evangelical pastor. When my mother had had enough of my boyish infractions, she referred me to my father, approximately monthly. He would send me to my bedroom, enter my room and tell me he loved me as he pulled the belt from his pants, then beat me with it. I did not love my father, but I feared him.
In his twisted, evangelical, spare-the-rod-and-spoil-the-child way, he thought he was being a loving father, but he was harming me. He was not a great father, but he tried to be.
Similarly, the U.S. has never been "great." At best, it has been aspirational. The U.S. was founded out of rebellion and bloodshed, by white European men who forcibly took land from people they regarded as "savages." We must never forget this.
Those revered "founding fathers" created a government designed to protect the assets of the aristocrats and promote their ability to increase their fortunes. And so it has, for 250 years. Gains for the peasants are merely crumbs from the table.
Our history is a continuous timeline of discrimination and violence, occasionally interrupted by brief, shining moments of progress toward a more perfect union.
The land itself, under the stewardship of Indigenous peoples, was great. It was breathtakingly beautiful. Our white European forebears have ravaged the land, exploiting it for their own enrichment. The land is no longer great; it's struggling to survive. There are still pockets of beauty, preserved by caring, thoughtful people who resisted the intentions of the majority.
There are a few great countries in the world. The common thread that runs through them is the resistance to violence, to make war on other people. Coincidentally, these are the same countries that place a high value on public education.
In my father's old age, he admitted that he made a lot of mistakes and apologized. I forgave him and loved him until he died, but it was a bruised love. When I was young and misbehaved, I would often go to my mother afterward and apologize for my bad behavior. She'd reply, "I don't want apologies. I want repentance!"
I hope that we Americans will come to the realization that we are not exceptional, that we have made a lot of mistakes. I hope we will repent.
Your upbringing sounds similar to mine, mine being under a fanatical, fundamentalist father and mother, who were members of the Plymouth Brethren. My father finally died about 18 months ago, at 93. He never wavered from his love of a violent god, nor his condemnation of family members who deviated from his private interpretation of an ancient book of myth, the Bible. I still have not shed a tear.
Dan, indeed, our circumstances must be similar. My dad died at age 90 on Thanksgiving Day 2022. I felt no loss, only sorrow for my mom. She'd had an accomplished life outside their home, but her priority was always to serve my dad's needs, no matter what, as ordained by evangelicalism. At age 90 without him, she was at loose ends for what to do with herself. I suspect this absence of purpose accelerated her descent into dementia. She died at the end of October 2024, but I lost her a year earlier. Dementia made her unable to speak or indicate that she understood anything that was said to her. I felt only relief that her suffering was over.
When my sweet, precious dog dies, I will cry inconsolably.
Make America - sounds like it is by force or domineering, as Trump and the regime continue to do by steamrolling their agenda over the Nation and its Capitol and the Constitution...
that’s exactly right, rule by a minority Mitch.
''Reconstruction, Again''
The Fourteenth Amendment was ratified in 1868 because ending slavery was not enough. The nation also had to stop former Confederates, compliant state governments, and white supremacist terrorists from rebuilding racial domination under a slightly more respectable name.
Apparently, America needs the lesson repeated.
The amendment established citizenship, due process, and equal protection because basic rights cannot depend on which state legislature happens to be feeling cruel, frightened, or politically ambitious. It empowered the federal government to intervene when states abused individuals, especially people with little local power. That was not an accidental feature. It was the point.
Yet the old machinery is grinding again. States claim sweeping authority to regulate bodies, restrict voting, deny immigrants due process, censor classrooms, marginalize LGBTQ Americans, and decide whose families, identities, and freedoms deserve legal recognition. Federal courts increasingly treat long-established rights as optional historical curiosities. Politicians invoke “states’ rights” as though the phrase has not spent generations serving as a silk handkerchief draped over organized discrimination.
We have heard this song before. The lyrics are always about local control. The chorus is always about somebody losing rights.
The Fourteenth Amendment was designed for precisely this recurring American failure: the tendency of temporary political majorities to confuse electoral power with moral permission. Democracy does not mean that those who win an election may strip others of citizenship, dignity, privacy, bodily autonomy, or equal protection under the law.
It is also worth remembering that the amendment protects persons, not only citizens, from state abuses of due process and equal protection. That language matters, especially when politicians try to place immigrants or other unpopular groups outside the circle of constitutional concern.
The answer is not to praise the amendment in speeches while allowing its protections to be hollowed out in practice. Congress must enforce it. Courts must honor it. The Justice Department must defend it. Citizens must demand that equality remain a national obligation, not a regional preference.
Reconstruction failed once because the country lost the will to finish the work. We should not be surprised that the unfinished business has returned.
History is not repeating because it lacks imagination. It is repeating because too many Americans keep refusing to learn.
Michael Corthell,
Thank you for your excellent contribution ie every word. I am repeating your last sentences in honor of your total contribution of ideas.
"History is not repeating because it lacks imagination. It is repeating because too many Americans keep refusing to learn."
Or, rather, to many Americans keep refusing to 'allow' us to learn?
A perfect example of that was something trump did almost immediately in his second term. He reversed the ruling on TikTok. Uncountable hours of captive, dead, mush brain.
The trouble is that you never really moved beyond it and you have virtually sleepwalked into this crisis.
We, well some of them, were so busy patting ourselves on the back for our exceptionalism that we didn't see the truth.
donna woodward, from a small boat in the French canals during the Iraq War I learned to call US “the bad teenagers on the block,” learning “exceptionalism” had turned sour. I experienced French medicine, public transportation, hospitality, and understanding. (Putin/Trump have stretched the latter. LePen has never won a national election.)
The Supreme Court is and has dragged us back. When Ted Kennedy spoke those words, no one believed SCOTUS could or would do that. But it has. We need court reform now.
We are in the great regression
Taking rights away and removing freedoms for everyone and constantly pushing falsehoods to try and scare us into giving up even more freedoms with the (save America act)that really should be renamed the save the MAGA act
Backsliding on virtually every reform since the mid-20th century at least, yes. But they are doing it using technological tools make their outrages even more potent, and raise the specter of totalitarianism taking hold. They want us to see that part (at least on the surface) because the intimidation has value to them. Why fight back if they know our every move, have catalogued our every social media post, know the weak spots or vulnerabilities that all of us have? One wrong move and we could get disappeared, right?
The way you fight back is numbers. Too big to rig, too many to jail or shoot. We have come close to the magical 3.5% a few times during No Kings but we need to get over that hump. Once we do, our streets will start to look like those in Tirana.
So: how to stop them?
I know Anne-Louise. It seems hopeless. But it is not.
Win the elections this November. Launch impeachment hearings. Make the Epstein Files front and center - endlessly. Make the stupidity and illegality of this war front and center - endlessly. Spotlight the incredible incompetence. Spotlight the "waste fraud and abuse."
Strip away healthcare and spend the money bombing? - and losing the war? Making economic and political decisions that raise the prices of everything?
Never in the history of America has an administration or a political party given so many political weapons and ammunition to the opposition.
Win the presidency, and then prosecute, prosecute and prosecute. Imprison the Stephen Millers and Pete Hegseths with life sentences for murder.
Eliminate ICE. Create a new agency that properly vets those seeking asylum. Provide a path to citizenship for anyone who has followed the law and paid taxes.
Proudly and LOudly proclaim: "Make Immigration Great Again". Young Americans are not having kids. We NEED hard working people from around the world to build houses, work in healthcare, scientists - almost every endeavor would benefit from energetic appreciative people from around the world.
"My country is the world and my religion is to do good."
Thomas Paine
Rights of Man 1792
Add to this reform of the SCOTUS: end to lifetime appointments, expansion to 13 justices, a mandatory code of ethics that each justice must sign and reaffirm annually. Also end the electoral college once and for all, because it too, is a vestige of the slavery era. Lastly, outlaw Citizens United; this last one can be done by statute if a Democratic Congress has the courage.
All great ideas, Bill. Let's hope we can implement them, that the mid-terms yield success to the Dems running to take back our government. The alternative, especially if we end up somehow with Republicans still in charge, will be revolutionary.
Bill Alstrom, thank you for the Paine quotation. Could that go up in classrooms? That’s the Enlightenment carried to its end point.
Indeed; that is [the] question. Note our masters' newest horror, making AI the ultimate brain police: https://www.readtpa.com/p/trusting-chatbots-with-our-ballots? publication_id=2282&post_id=206343617&isFreemail=false&r=cb67r&triedRedirect=true
Thanks for this link. It's much worse than I thought: not only are the voting mechanisms in many states suspect (electronic voting machines from companies run by Trump supporters, connected via Starlink) but now we have that same band of oligarchs running AI companies that 'direct' our voting???? WTAF?
If Democrats regain control of Congress in 2026 and the presidency in 2028, after repeal of Citizens United and reforming the Supreme Court, states should revert to paper ballots. At lease two recent Federal elections have been compromised by electronic ballots which are controlled by private (right wing) companies. Many years ago elections for Congress (in southern states) were changed by electronic means; a vote was confirmed for the opposing candidate, seen on the screen by voters. They complained but there was no recourse.
Yikes! Thanks for the link. Indeed, it took me 2-3 hours total to research and figure out my CA ballot, but I know what I voted for. In working the election as a voter clerk, more that a few folks admitted they didn't know which judge/candidate/ballot measure to vote for, so they skipped it. And some folks were last minute researching (?) at the voting booth. Having read this article now, I shiver to think how voters may be deciding; but I'll be there in November.
Kelli Klymenko,
Those human beings who want to make us "smaller" can forget about it!!!! We will continue to LOVE ONE ANOTHER! We have fought wars together ie "red, yellow black and white" ALL ARE PRECIOUS IN GOD'S SIGHT!.....as the song goes ....the one I learned as a little girl in Sunday School!!!!
I will stand with my fellow Americans and support the blessed freedoms we have to worship, to live and to be who we are...to care for and to respect one another.
When one of our citizens looses his or her life on the battlefield...we do not ask the persons race or sexual preference. We respect the life of the American who spilt his/her blood that someone could be free or even selfishly "protect America's interests".
I hope our military leaders and even more so....those in power who send our troops into danger realize the humanity and value of each man or woman who is surrendering their life to protect our country's interests.
Kelli, it is frightening to see the man in the Oval Office in charge of our service men and women...the one who has never received a scrap on the knee for even one single American but rather is taking all and everything he can and using money that could help those in need for "vanity " projects around the White House!!!!
Emily, I bought into that Sunday School song 100%. The fact that “all the children of the world” were potential friends was much more important to me than the color of their skin. Still is. I will vote for candidates who follow the second greatest commandment, “Love your neighbor as yourself."
You're right Kelli, "If we don't learn from history, it repeats itself."
AND the important emphasis today is how to construct and support a Congress and a system of laws that will never permit it to return in any form or policy or access. HCR frequently points out periods of dark history and how we overcame them then, NOT to reflect on them but to construct a means forward.
I was beginning my own statement—then saw yours—and there was no need... I was 19—and had been witness to events leading up to the ratification... and we can't let them take US back!
One important lesson Mr. Trump taught us all is that every citizen has a power to change the government and hence the country by voting. A citizen without excerising this power is contributing to the society by not commiting a crime, important but only personal.
The force to restore the South elected Trump twice. NATO nations are no longer place faith in America for this and walking away. How we can restore? The only way is to win the midterm overcoming the force of stopping it.
It's all been done before. But they think they can do it better this time because they have the technology to fool most of the people most of the time.
Yes, here we are... but thanks to these daily history lessons, we know it. So we will, we must, fix it.
Everywhere you look in nature there are variations of reoccurring pattern. That is why we benefit from accurate memory. That's why "Newton's laws", relativity, and quantum mechanics yields practical results, why Shakespeare and Thucydides are still relatable. Why, with luck and logic, we can even sometimes see future combinations of events that are uniquely new, yet born of existing patterns. This is among our most fecund human capacities.
Fractal geometry contains the most common of the geometric and temporal patterns found in nature, yet it was one of the most recent branches of mathematics discovered.
For thousands of years, humans lived within this fractal world and never recognized the basic pattern of the objects surrounding them. Suddenly, when one person points out the pattern, it's no longer possible to live in this world of nature and NOT see it. Such awareness seems very punctuated.
Those who have experienced fascist governance instantly saw the pattern of where our government was taking this course of fascism. They could call a genocide "a genocide" and not be gaslighted into believing what they were seeing isn't real. It seems our Congress is taking an unusually long time for the brains occupying it to reach that punctuated "aha moment" of awareness. It took flat-Earthers a long time to internalize reality too.
Wonderful analogy.
Save that the criminal organization we know as "Congress" is so impenetrably barricaded by bribery and governed by graft, it will [never] "reach that...'aha moment.'"
(Which is yet another element in the litany of reasons our only [rational] hope of liberation is invasion by humanitarian allies -- itself an impossibility because our masters have made it clear they will destroy the world rather than accept defeat.)
Get the @#$%&+ gratuitous money and patronage out of politics was always essential to a free and just society, as is the prevention of monopolies of money and power. It fundamental, and implied in our founding documents, and after a period of reform after the Gilded Age, we were way too passive about stemming the growth of plain sight corruption that now threatens our whole way of life. It may be now or never that we focus on the fundamentals.
"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both” — Justice Brandeis
Thanks, Derek. The neural networks of our brains are fractal, so much of our behavior has fractal qualities.
I was a regular columnist for National Teaching and Learning and for over 15 years wrote many columns under the theme "Educating in Fractal Patterns" for how understanding fractals enhances teaching, learning and assessment of learning in higher education. Author Margaret Wheatley also wrote a couple of books on how fractal-related chaos theory affected business.
Punctuated change is a feature of our patterns of change through time--both individual and collective. America has not experienced fascism, but it appears to be in such a change toward it. Reminiscing on a history of what happened under different conditions before that change are ineffective to dealing with reversing the change. However, we can look to specific cases where punctuated change occurred in reverse. The case of Wisconsin's reversing what appeared to be a nearly hopeless situation under Governor Scott Walker's reign shows reversal is possible. Keys to their success were educational awareness of the citizens and getting a leash on their Supreme Court. A second case study lies in Hungary, which the domestic Epstein-class members consulted heavily as their model for adopting fascism and inflicting it to rule us.
For most of America;s troubles from health care to economic security to citizen gun control without authoritarian disempowerment, another nation somewhere has already solved the problem. Conditioned arrogance of "exceptionalism" and a provincial "not invented here" has allowed corrupt parties to produce a corrupted Congress that does the ruling Epstein class bidding that resists citizen demands to adapt the solutions here. Punctuated change doesn't need to be bad. We've long needed some positive punctuated change here.
Oddly enough I was thinking about the relationship of fractal geometry to nature just yesterday. I don't claim to understand genetics or mathematics very well, but I am among those who suspect a potent clue in recursive fractal geometry to the precise complexity we see in nature; but it's not:
"So, Nat'ralists observe, a Flea
Hath smaller Fleas that on him prey,
And these have smaller Fleas to bite 'em,
And so proceed ad infinitum:"
that you see in pure fractals, but rather, perhaps, is that the element of sequences in time observed in embryology, in which, if I understand correctly, there are patterns genes are being switched on and off in stages; so patterns within patterns with patterns, but not identical and within a limit. Somehow or other we see mind blowing fortuitous complexity in mind blowing precision in living organisms that is just damn hard to wrap human comprehension around, but we, or at least our experts, seem to be getting better at it.
I think psychologists call it apophenia. Being hard-wired for pattern recognition has not always served us well as the stubborn prevalence of conspiracy theories aptly demonstrates.
Our brains are wired for pattern recognition, and many "eureka" moments in which honest-to-goodness and useful patterns have been identified that have served us well, in daily life and in history.
That is a very different process than conjuring a pattern and then concocting a trail of disjointed "evidence" to resemble a rational argument, that is not grounded in reality (that is, that which, to the best of our ability, can be empirically demonstrated to be real, as, ideally, science and courtrooms are meant to do. There are real conspiracies, but many alleged come of psychosis, fraud, or lazy thinking.
Don’t forget Aristophanes’ fictional play “Lysistrata”. Maybe that would work to get Republican males to vote differently. What do males think of that idea?
Unfortunately most will not get your reference. Taken literally, on the author’s imagined scale, one might reasonably expect numerous unforeseen and unwanted outcomes. But when considered more broadly, the application to our current situation is clear. Women can have powerful voices when provoked to speak. Women also have much to lose, indeed have already lost, by virtue of Trump’s Christofascist, misogyny-riddled regime. Accepting these truths, one wonders why, in the last presidential election, considering all Caucasian women who voted, a not insignificant majority voted for Trump (~53%).
I want to believe that women could unite against the current administration in absolutely massive numbers - but the facts on the ground suggest something different and much more depressing. If, as is often said, “women have what men want”, then theoretically women could withhold sex and change the behavior of rowdy war mongering men. When I think about the potential women have to help make the world a better place for all I also think about the white women without whose support Trump would’ve lost the election! Thus I despair.
[Clearly there were other voting blocks that, if they hadn’t supported Trump, could’ve prevented a his victory. But among those groups it’s pretty clear why they went for Trump. Young Hispanic males, transactional money-grabbing capitalists and anti big-government conservatives are examples. Re white women though - I just don’t understand their thinking. Please, can you help us understand?]
I think of Sting's "I hope the Russians love their children too" because we are so easily drawn into the game of strut and fret and road rage (me too) that we can lose sight of what's "important". When all is said and done, overarchingly important.
"Where be these enemies?—Capulet, Montague,
See what a scourge is laid upon your hate,
That heaven finds means to kill your joys with love,
And I, for winking at your discords too,
Have lost a brace of kinsmen. All are punished."
Works for me.
Don’t forget Aristophanes. That’s my guide. Need all the laughs I can get to survive this mess. Sometimes Gilbert and Sullivan can cover the moment.)
Yup.
HCR's courage is inspiring. She must be very well supported, not to despair.
We do support her with appreciation and love. She gives us an example of patriotism we would do well to emulate, each as we can.
My latest Substack essay talks about how to fix it...
https://substack.com/@stevebrant/p-203644978
Read your article. Thank you. Gives me hope
Interesting assessment, Steve. Worth pondering.
One of the thoughts formed during my career was in how to recognize and then to "break the cycle" of abuse that is rampant in multiple generations of families. Your essay sets a foundation.
Here we are, and it looks like Kennedy’s prediction of Borkworld has come true.
If we didnt learn anything from history, it's gonna repeat Laurie.
Or at least we keep making the same damned mistakes.
Totally agree.
And Anita Hill, a student of Bork would sit before the Senate Judiciary Hearing chaired by Joe Biden in 1991 and testify against Clarence Thomas. After all this we still can’t get our act together? Burnt out Mainer
Don’t be burnt out, Mainer. Of all states right now, we need your full participation if we’re at all serious about reclaiming what we’ve recently lost.
Every generation gets re-tested anew, so it would seem. Better to trip at the start of a race than stumble the end when there’s still time to fix things. We’re with you. Remember the spirit of Joshua Chamberlain and the 20th Maine Infantry at Gettysburg.
Thank you, I needed that. It’s been frustrating not being able to communicate my dusgust for Platner in every cell of my body but had to zip my lip. Many Mainers had to hold their noses as well.
In one of her videos a couple of days ago, Heather reminded listeners that Platner would have been a heavy lift indeed. In a state where any Democrat right now should be polling at +12 or +15, he was coming in at +2 at best. His whiny, self-pitying video performance yesterday made the reason for that abundantly clear. We already have one of those in the White House, thank you very much…
Maine's 77 year old former governor Paul LePage is the racist, misogynistic, xenophobic Republican candidate for CD-2 in Maine. He ran unopposed in the primary, but Susan Collins is totally backing him. After being term limited out in 2018, he moved to Florida and resurfaced in 2022 to run again for Governor. He would have fit right into Trump's first or second administration except he would never bow down to anyone.
Check out his Wikipedia page to get a feel for what he was like as governor. Keep in mind that Susan Collins has always backed LePage 100%. This is who she really is when she says that she is "concerned."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_LePage
Remember when Massachusetts had to suffer Scott Brown? Glad Maine got rid of Platner.
That was so exhausting!
We need to remember too, those Democrats who truly have pushed the right policies for years (Warren, Sanders, et al) but who rushed to Platner's bandwagon because he sounded like a soulmate. Democrats have sometimes similarly pushed policies that sound like the next best thing but backfire against them and hurt their chances to win elections.
"How a Rich Kid Politician Was Spun as a Working Class 'Oysterman,'" is one article about the family origins of Platner.
https://www.danielgreenfield.org/p/how-rich-kid-politician-was-spun-as
Just read it; it is quite the set up! I don't doubt many other politicians we believe to be what they seem to be are actually the opposite! What a sham politics has become!
Totally Ligia. His Nazi tattoo was the tell for me.
Morning, Lynell, and thanks for the link!
🤯🤬
Reading about the heroism and Joshua’s lifelong commitment to service and country is a shocking reminder of what we really owe.
This has been my forever complaint against Mr Biden. For all the good he achieved, when it came time to save his ass, he allowed Clarance Thomas in after Thomas was advised to say, “This is nothing but a high tech lynch mob.” And his history of destruction prevailed and now is fortified being part of the majority. So shameful.
While attitudes towards women remain painfully backwards, I do think that Joe Biden evolved in important ways over the years since the Thomas hearings. Hopefully we all, as humans, take opportunities to grow and change.
Agreed, Signe K. There are three connected things that I think we need to learn as human beings right now. One is a continuing commitment to accountability. The second is not judging people forever by the mistakes that they make, but being open to the possibility of growth in nearly everyone. The third is staying attentive so that one is capable of the first and second things.
But… the humongous mistake he made was overstaying his time in office thereby losing to the monster Antichrist of the ages and this I will never ever forgive Biden for. Never. Did I say never? In the end, Biden proved himself to be absolutely selfish man who wanted only one lasting accomplishment; to be president for the 250th and I shall never forgive nor forget this resultant wholesale destruction of the American experiment that he singly caused. His appointed attorney general could have charged Trump with treason and prevented him from running but didn’t. I give you permission to forgive him but I will not ever.
Right. I will never forgive him for that. I do think he evolved from the Clarence Thomas presider I hated at the time it all went down.
Mike Hammer, you didn’t mention what Joe Biden learned from that attempt to replace Thurgood Marshall. Are you watching Deb Haaland? (Example.)
How did I forget that! Deb Haaland looks like someone to watch.
Closely...
Hang in there, Mike, the Mainer! From Carol, the Californian❤️🩹🤍💙
https://jessica.substack.com/p/midterms-all-about-abortion?publication_id=11153&post_id=206319866&isFreemail=false&r=cb67r&triedRedirect=true
https://open.substack.com/live-stream/272911
Rolled it all back to my youth, when I spent many hours marching and protesting war and women's rights, including to control their own body. I did not get this accomplished so that my children and their children would have to do this AGAIN!!! IT WAS SETTLED!!! Not a happy camper - don't piss off old people - we have experience in the details of revenge.
And at my age, "life in prison," doesn't sound so bad.
True here too
Our other benefit is that we've had a whole 80-odd years to perfect our trigger discipline and shooting technique.
You go girl.
I still hope for the army of grandfathers to go to D.C. and physically remove the menace. He is the absolute worst representative of my generation. We have a duty to fix this.
Grandfathers AND Grandmothers....Grandparents! :-)
Me too. Including the Million Mom March on Mother's Day 2000.
I get it that the 14th Amendment was not popular with the former slave owners who thought they were superior to everyone else and couldn't imagine those Black people they used to beat up and force to do all the work the owner didn't want to have to do, being able to vote, make decisions for themselves, and live a life of freedom.
It seems civil rights legislation is the easiest to ignore while mostly white people do what they want to those not rich white and male. The white boys of that group if not rich, believe they will be some day. They believe that gives them the right to make laws that ignore the 14th Amendment and approve judges and justices who care as little as they can get away with for that amendment and whichever others they don't like.
When I read the Constitution with my 7th and 8th grade students last year, they were surprised at the things the 14th Amendment included. They liked birthright citizenship and that people who stood against our nation and our Constitution should not hold office. We do need to have more civics lessons for our children from an early age so they can see that people through history did try to make this a better place, a "more perfect union." Maybe they would be more willing to stand against those who ignore our constitution!
A sobering thought that had Kentucky Fried Voldemort and others actually done their jobs according to both the spirit and letter of the Fourteenth Amendment, the traitor who led another insurrection against Congress would have been permanently enjoined from any office in the land back in 2021, and faced disgrace, poverty and prison instead.
Where is Mitch anyway? Not in a where’s Waldo kind of way, but in a proof of life, can he actually perform the functions required of a sitting U.S. senator.
Found one article that said octogenarians have a 4% survival rate in an out of hospital cardiac arrest. Of the 4% that survive, how many are neurologically in tact? Not sure.
ETA: Therapeutic hypothermia after cardiac arrest takes at least 24hrs. Thune and Barrasso said they spoke to him the day after he was hospitalized (which we later found out was the day after cpr was done at his home..). The math isn’t mathin’
None of their math ever does.
Right? I should say the math IS mathin’ for yet another cover up.
I suspect he is, post-CPR, brain damaged/brain dead and on a ventilator keeping him "alive" but without any possibility of recovery.
Yup, just more cruelty.
horhai, I keep hearing rumors that Moscow Mitch is either in a deep coma or is nearly brain dead. In either case, he cannot assume the duties of Senator. KY deserves an actual Senator, not the shadow of one, particularly one who was as anti-American, anti-constitutional, and evil as they come!
I note that his wife (who could make the "pull the plug" decision and is perhaps the only one who could) is reportedly out of the country.
McConnell has done his damage. Hopefully he will not be back.
McConnell is still controlling the Senate by being on the rolls as a Senator when he may be brain dead at this time. The governor of KY cannot appoint an interim Senator yet.
WEEKEND AT BERNIE’S
My spouse and I, about 8 years ago, while knocking doors before an election, performed an impromptu civics lesson to a young (17 y-o) prospective first-time voter. It was shocking that we had to explain the basics of the separation of powers and the fact of how decisions made in an off year election can impact presidential and legislative developments. The learner was eager to get and have this information.
Laurie, yep, we need civics education for our children from the preschool years that involves learning to get along with all kinds of people through college with far more complex readings and discussions of our nation and our government and the responsibilities of citizens. Make it conform to a child's ability to understand, to ask questions, and to be curious about what comes next.
We should focus social studies education on civics (I love that you read the constitution with them) and resistance history. Our actual founders were those who resisted our government (which we must admit, from the perspective of a slave and indigenous person, was authoritarian from the start)
During WWII I was in a small poor public school in Virginia. We did something for the “War Effort” every day and there was history from Egypt and Assyria onward. In 8th grade I had world history. Civics teacher told us that if we did not vote in every election we were entitled to, she would come back to haunt us. No one wanted to be haunted by Maude Boulware Motley, formidable teacher of history and civics, still in our heads at 40th reunion of the class of 1951.
It was in 1952, however, that I learned that the bottom 25% of SAT scorers got education degrees and teaching certificates.
I just googled "The Most Corrupt President in American History".
And "The Most Corrupt Supreme Court Justice in American History".
It's EXACTLY WHO YOU WOULD EXPECT!!
Our OWN 250 years of American History tells us WHO and WHAT we ARE fighting NOW!!
WE ARE NOT INTIMIDATED!!
WE ARE STRONGER TOGETHER!!
WE SHALL and MUST OVERCOME!!
SAVE AMERICA!!
SAVE DEMOCRACY!!
FIGHT BACK!!
They must not have "fixed" the AI yet.
The 1984 Project to follow the 2025 Project.
🤣🤣🤣
Yes funny, but not funny.
Agreed. Another “it is better to laugh than to cry.” I fight better with pen laughing than crying. The very thought of Vought and Project 2025 curdles my brain.
Here we are indeed.... but here we will not remain.
Yes, here we are, currently stuck with a fascist Trump-MAGA government who wants to roll our America back in time to the 1850’s. The world is not safe from this scourge, let alone American citizens at home in their residences.
I believe he is trying to take us to something even worse.
Infinitely worse: the ecogenocidal resurrection of Hitler's Reich made omnipotent and everlasting by moral imbecility, bottomless wealth, zero-tolerance enforcement technology and apocalyptic weaponry against which no defense is possible.
The guardrails of the Federal Court system are beat to hell and obliterated in many places. And this supine Republican Congress has forfeited all power to Trump.
Remember his KKK father and his Papa Putin, with whom he talks for hours. Do Americans understand the KGB guy who is papa to our “president”? Are people paying attention or are they too blinded by what the Republican Party has done to their pocketbooks and their country in order to enrich the few and return to slavery of the many?
Hear, hear!
“While Washington threw temper tantrums on the summit floor, eleven NATO nations chose a Toronto-built Bombardier jet to replace Boeing. Canada is taking the reins while USA falters.
If a future American administration throws a political tantrum over trade or border policies and attempts to cut off defense hardware, spare parts, or software updates, Canada’s radar fleet keeps flying. The intellectual property, the maintenance hubs, and the physical airframes are anchored right here at home and with trusted Scandinavian partners.
We now possess an independent, Arctic-capable early warning system that tracks cruise missiles, surface vessels, and aerial threats across our northern frontier on our own terms, using technology that Washington cannot hold hostage.
And what is the actual physical aircraft underneath that advanced Swedish radar suite? It isn’t a Boeing hull, and it isn’t a Lockheed frame. It is the Bombardier Global 6500—a ultra-long-range, high-altitude executive jet manufactured at Bombardier’s flagship facility in the Greater Toronto Area. 🇨🇦 Eleven NATO nations have banded together in a joint procurement agreement to purchase up to ten of these spy planes." 🛩️
'Trump THREATENS NATO ALLIES while Canada's Bombardier wins $10B spy plane contract at Ankara.'
The Planet Democracy
JUL 8 2026 | Substack
https://theplanetdemocracy.substack.com/p/trump-threatens-nato-allies-while?r=kxzps&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web
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Go Canada.
Says an American.
I am an Antifascist…because I AM NOT A FASCIST,!!
I am an Antifascist because I, peacefully, legally, RESIST FASCISM.
Yes
Dear Professor, this is certainly in your wheelhouse. We know it's your happy place, but I hear people wondering if Maine should ask YOU to take on Susan Collins, even for only one term, until things start to be straightened out. You would blow her out of the water, just looking at her on a debate stage. It would only be six years, but then, the clamorng would be for you to run for POTUS in 2032.
That would not be for you, for sure.
She’s already nipped that in the bud, for all the right reasons, too. You don’t elect “faces” to learn on the job, particularly not for the Senate, one of the most important deliberative bodies in the world.
Maine already has a would-be candidate with parallel expertise — former President of the Maine Senate, Troy Jackson, who is already actively campaigning. Whoever the Maine Democratic Party eventually selects, Heather’s already indicated will get her full support.
I think you missed my point, but that's OK. I've gotten five texts an hour from Bellows and Jackson.
You’d have my vote, Professor, if I lived in Maine, but I couldn’t handle the cold. Count me in for some campaign contributions if you choose to run, though. 😎👍
The cold I can handle and the snow, but the short days in December and January are a challenge.
IMO New England should be in The Atlantic Time Zone instead of the Eastern Time Zone.
Something I read in Esquire magazine many years ago: "Never give in to the cold." I've found Massachusetts to be the best place for an escaped Michigander.
Having lived in New England for 25 years, it is interesting to see how localized the weather is. If you live on the coast, the weather inland is often quite different than on the coast. For almost 15 years, I commuted to New Haven, CT from the Bar Harbor area. It's about a 400 mile drive and I often drove through 3 or 4 different weather patterns on one drive.
If I didn't live in New England, I would definitely consider living in Michigan.
I was there in October, for a 60th high school reunion. The political situation was disappointing. As Thomas Wolfe wrote, you can't go home again.
I'd have to agree with you and Wolfe. I was raised in Nebraska....
I think the world would be a worse place if HCR had to give up this Substack to handle the responsibilities of office. Surely ONE of HCR's readers lives in Maine and could beat Susan Collins??
The problems are 1) We live in a world very different from the framers of the constitution. And the world we live in now provides the context in which we understand the constitution. There is no way in which we can understand the constitution as the framers understood it. True originalism is thus doomed from the start. 2) We are incapable of escaping our biases. And so we are inconsistent in our interpretation of the constitution. You can see this in supreme court rulings which sometimes take the “common sense” interpretation of a word or phrase to be the correct one and sometimes rely on a more technical interpretation, all the time claiming an originalist approach, but in fact being totally inconsistent. 3) Nobody who supports the notion of the unitary executive can claim with a straight face to be an originalist. Nor can they claim to be a logical thinker.
And ironically, it is the states' Attorneys General who have banded together to challenge the illegal executive orders of the wannabe dictator who would happily push back the clock to make his aMErica once again a nation where white, Christian men have all the power and all the wealth.
Very stark reality, having lived through Bork's nomination and the hearings. He was a ludicrous consideration, or so it seemed at the time. We've come a long way to the normalization of the greed and racism that drives this administration. Here's hoping future congressional leaders have the fortitude and vision to reinforce these 14th Amendment laws with teeth and barbed wire.
And the current iteration of SCOTUS uses the shadow docket to overturn lower court decisions without any written decision. Fascism much?
“are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word ‘citizens’ in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens.”
Where did it say that? Reminds me of some other "decisions" of the court, especially recently.
"Originalism" is slang for "we made it up". Yeah, words mean something and context helps to clarify, but it's pretty easy to put "words" or interpretations of words in dead people's mouths. I would argue that the ideals of the founders, which they installed into foundational documents were wiser that some of their behaviors. The usefulness of relevant guiding principles endures where mere instruction is wisely superseded. Newton's "laws" still pertain, while many others become archaic.
Originalism is similar to biblical literalism and it's just as absurd. You can fix it by re-writing your Constitution in modern English and doing it properly this time round.
You’d be received better if you ceased telling “other” people how they should behave. It’s not particularly welcome. If you’re an outsider (which you clearly are), encouragement always gets more points than finger-waggling. Just saying.
That being said, he's right.
Who did Jesus burn at the stake? Christianity seems to have an evil twin of the same name, popular among those who want to serve themselves by putting others in peril.
“If Jesus was executed 25 years ago, then Christian women would be wearing miniature electric chairs around their necks.”
Lenny Bruce ( I wish I had said it)
Thanks, but in the current political climate here, a constitutional convention is not advisable.
Good comparison but as an atheist, I have no interest in ancient man’s quest to make sense of his accidental evolutionary stumble up the trail. In my standup, I suggest that God originally gave the tickets to travel up the trail to the Bonobos who are a matriarchal and peaceful primate group but man seeing this, grabbed the tickets and ran like hell. A Methodist church once kicked me out of their open mic when I performed that bit and I’m rather proud.
Excellent!!
As between your post and that of ICTT's response to you, it's his that sounds like finger-waggling.
*Posting this again to encourage everyone to send protest emails to their Senators before August 24th *
🇺🇸 “An oil company leases a piece of your public land. It drills a well, pulls the oil, and posts a $10,000 bond up front as a promise to clean up the site when the well runs dry. Years later the company goes bankrupt, or it simply walks. The well stays where it is, thousands of feet deep, venting methane and leaking toxic brine into the ground. The cleanup runs north of $300,000. The company forfeits its $10,000 and disappears. You cover the rest. The math rewards walking away. Unplugged wells vent methane and benzene, a known carcinogen, and leak produced water laced with heavy metals and radioactive material into soil and groundwater. These are real holes in real ground An orphaned well is a federal term with a plain meaning. It’s a well with no company left to plug it and no bond big enough to do the job, so the responsibility lands on you.”
🇺🇸 Comment on the rule. Go to the federal docket at regulations.gov under BLM-2025-0037 and tell BLM, in your own words, that you don’t want to inherit the oil industry’s cleanup bill. Specific comments carry more weight than form letters. If a well sits near where you hunt, camp, ranch, or draw your water, say so, and name the place.
🇺🇸 Then share this. Independent public lands journalism runs on readers, not advertisers and not grants. Forward this to the person who fishes the creek downstream of a lease, and check how your members of Congress have voted on public lands at our Congressional Public Lands Scorecard.
The land is yours. So is the bill, unless enough of us say otherwise before August 24. 🇺🇸
‘Trump Admin Pushes More Public Lands Oil Cleanup Costs to Taxpayers’ MORE THAN JUST PARKS by WILL PATTIZ JUN 24 2026 | Substack
https://morethanjustparks.substack.com/p/trump-admin-pushes-more-public-lands?r=kxzps&utm_medium=ios
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Thank you. I'll be broadcasting that to my environmentalist cohort. Much obliged.
great James, I tried to paste the sample letter template from Author Will Pattiz right underneath this Substack comment, but it is within Pattiz’s Substack too.
Thanks because this is a good cause!