Month: October 2023

The current House of Representatives is the 117th in the history of the United States since the first one gathered in 1789.

It convened for the first time on April 1, 1789 with 65 members, which increased to 69 members in the next session and then continued apace as the nation added states and people. The only time in American history the House decreased in membership was during the Civil War, when the 11 states confederated in rebellion against the United States were not represented.

In the 67th Congress from 1913 to 1915 the membership (always apportioned on the basis of a population that included slaves until 1861, who until then were counted as three fifths of a human being for the purpose of representation) became fixed at 435. It marked a decision to keep the number within reason.

Thenceforth the number of people per district would increase, but not the number of districts.

Representation, ever since fixed at 435 members, is still apportioned by population. So Wyoming, though the Constitution gives it two senators like every state, gives it by constitutional apportionment just one representative in the House. That’s because with 591,000 population in 2020 Wyoming has fewer people than apportionment allows per district, 760,000 people. After all, the notion of fractional people went out of fashion in 1861.

Wyoming’s representative was Liz Cheney until this congress, when her support for the very same Constitution cost her the seat, now occupied by an extremist maga zealot, Harriet Hageman – maga having become a recognized descriptive political adjective in American English.

California by comparison also gets only two senators but under apportionment has 52 members of the House, one of whom is – at least in political terms – the late Kevin McCarthy.

The Constititon sets out in detail in Article I, the article establishing and empowering the Congress, a litany of things the Congress can do, must do or absolutely may not do like pass a bill of attainder. That’s a law assigning by legislation guilt to a person or group of people without a trial. A worst case example, maybe the worst ever? The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 in Germany.

The Constitution places initial authority for revenue bills in the House, a power that thus applies to all budget as well as appropriation bills because you can’t spend money you haven’t raised.

But as to how the House is to operate and to manage its business, the Constitution says almost nothing.

In Article I, Section 2 the 6th paragraph directs, “The House of Representatives shall chuse (choose) their Speaker and other Officers; …)

What other officers? The officers the House decides to create and empower according to Article I, Section 5, 2nd paragraph where it says, “Each house may determine the Rules of its Proceedings …”

That’s it. Sounds simple, but not so. Each session, the rules change, sometimes hardly at all sometimes more. The Republicans on taking power last January used the rules to establish a partisan inqusition they call the the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. Who chairs the subcommttee? Why Jim Jordan, who else.

Today the Rules of the 117th Session of the House of Representatives are 47 pages of dense, almost undecipherable parliamentary language. In all there are 29 such rules.

It is unlikely any outside the Office of the Parliamentarian, an office itself created by those rules, knows them. The House Parliamentarian and his staff might not even know them but do know where to look when one of them has to be consulted.

In the dense language of Rule I (worse even the rules use Roman numerals to enumerate them) concerning the power of the Speaker as those rules have evolved since 1789, the sole power to bring a bill to the floor resides in the office and thus the person of the Speaker. In the 117 Congresses of the United States only one woman – one woman – Nancy Pelosi, is among the 55 who have served as Speaker.

It doesn’t say it directly – after all that would be simple and direct – but the power to post is there and only there in the rules governing the House and the Speaker.

So what happens in the House if there no speaker?

Other than a convening prayer by the House Chaplain, another one of the officers created by the very same rules, saying the Pledge of Allegiance, a custom, and a few other ministerial functions the rules demand, the rule is that without a speaker nothing happens.

Nothing.

As we know or should know, it has been 16 days since the House removed Mr. McCarthy, who is now a political corpse, albeit one who sees himself as politically Christlike, harboring hope of resurrection in his former august political office. But in all likelihood, the Gospel of Kevin has been written unalterably by the Gaetz eight – the avenging Republican disciples.

So the press/media tells us the House is in stalemate, checkmate in fact. That it cannot move. There is no reason for any Democrat in the minority to cross the aisle to vote for a Republican, especially the likes of Jim Jordan, the Ohio wrestler without a jacket.

That is not the way of politics and legislatures and never has been except in the so rare instances when a state legislative chamber is literally tied; or when a member of a one becomes Brutus or Judas, as occurred in North Carolina earlier this year. There Rep. Tricia Cotham elected as a Democrat, crossed the aisle to become a Republican, thereby giving her new party a veto proof legislative majority as her ambition betrayed those who elected her. Either way, it is a rare, rare occasion.

Then is there really no way out of the impasse after the Republicans so far have been unable to muster the 217 votes they need to elect a speaker notwithstaning three candidacies so far?

Well maybe there will be a 4th, or 5th, or maybe one day soon an 11th on whom they can finally agree. But as Republican impotence and anger increases that becomes exceedingly unlikely – albeit not impossible. Implausible is a word in politics. Impossible is not in the political lexicon. Nothing is. Everything is possible. Always.

There is after all the other party with 212 totally united votes and ready to deal. It would take but 5 Repuiblicans to make a deal with the Democrats. What kind of deal? Up to them to decide whatever deal they are willing to negotiate and enter for 14 months (the 118th Congress will convene Jan. 3, 2025).

Implausible? Of course. Impossible? No. Very soon to become essential? From the perspective here? Yes and not next week,, but tomorrow.

But even if there is, how does it get to the floor, how do they change the rules to accommodate the deal? Well, rules are made to be changed, especially congressional rules.

The Constitution doesn’t say you can’t change the rules, it only says make them. The House needs to do some new bipartisan rule making.

And fast.

Babies are new life, smelling of sweet spring and talc and, yes, of soiled diapers – that too.

They are tiny, pink, brown or tawny, with bright eyes that have not yet focused and arms and legs that twitch and move when least expected, who coo and cry, whose tiny hands grasp our fingers, who make us laugh and smile and wonder at the why and wonder of it all.

We bring them home and say oh my God what did we do, what do we do now? Let’s begin and watch what happens.

They have hurt no one. They know nothing, least of all anger, hate and hurt. They barely think, just respond and make us realize that we all, each and every one of us, began that way; in all ways the same way if only for a moment until life begins to sort us out and assign our destinies.

Babies never hurt anyone. They can’t because of course they could not physically but profoundly because they have not even begun to learn differences, much less learned there is hate.

Like the song says, “You’ve got to be taught, you’ve got to be carefully taught…”

Unlike us, having but just arrived they do not live in tribes, do not know there are tribes that we call nations, religions, nationalities, ethnic groups, even neighborhoods. They simply live not even knowing what there is beyond hunger, thirst, sleep, twitching, soiling, yawning, spitting up, crying, cooing, feeling being swaddled or held.

Babies do not know there are Palestinians, Israelis, whites, blacks, Jews, Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, or Zorostrians for that matter.

Babies don’t even know there are other babies. They do not hurt other babies. Other babies do not hurt them.

Babies don’t hurt grownups. Grownups hurt babies.

Grownups did those horrific, unimaginable, monstrous, wicked, evil things to babies that we have now seen in the photos from the carnage of Oct. 6.

Like everything else before and since in the 125 years since Theodore Herzl proposed what became Zionism – the call for a Jewish state, a homeland for Jews – all of this here about babies, all babies, babies everywhere, everyone’s babies, has been and is eternally so.

So too is it for every baby in Gaza.

So too is it for every dead Gazan. So too is it for every dead Israeli. Every one of them, we all of started life the same way – babies all.

Now, Israel tells the United Nations this – move 1 million Gazans south in 24 hours. That means among other things, move the babies and the little ones.

It would take what? How long? A month, at a minimum, who knows, to systematically and sanely move that many people. But move them where? To the bottom of Gaza where Egypt is the stopper in the bottle?

Even if you could safely evacuate 1 million people in one day, there is no room and literally there are no rooms for them in southern Gaza. There is hardly anything there to sustain life and Egypt won’t let them into Sinai, which itself is one of the worst, emptiest, most forbidding deserts in the world.

So this demand? It is understable in a military sense and because of the justified rage in Israel, of Jewish Israelis, but it not understandable in any other terms, in any human sense.

Sticks and stones… Or? Or the way the Bible has it? “An eye for an eye…”

Is it to be 1,000 eyes for an eye?

One violation should not beget another. One does not allow another.

If we Jews don’t know this, then who in the world can, who does, who ever will?

Does this recompense every dead Jew in the Holocaust? Never. There is no recompense equal to the crime.

Among the 6 million Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust we don’t know exactly how many were babies but we have sure estimates that between 1.2 million and 1.5 million were children below the age of 12.

Dead by untreated illnes, slavery and starvation in the ghettos. Dead by gas in the camps. Dead by bullets in the shtetls, villages, towns, and cities of Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia, Slovakia, Hungary,Romania. Dead from the Einsatzgruppen, from the complicit Wehrmacht and the local peoples.

Dead from the Germans industrialization of murder in the six killing camps, all of them in pre-war Poland.

Chelmno, Majdenak, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Auschwitz. These were the worst places ever on earth in the history of mankind, in the history of the planet, which is not a good one. There is bad. There is terrible. Then there is worse.

And then – then there are those six places, six monuments forever to maximum cruelty, to premeditated murder by an entire nation.

The animal and plants don’t make war, we do, mankind does. It has done so without end for the 7,000 years of recorded history. It is all there. It is in the history of every people and every nation in all of that recorded history.

But the most, most, most terrible places in recorded human history were the six killing camps.

Say their names again,Chelmno, Majdenak, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Auschwitz. There can never be recompense for what happened at them, in them. Gaza cannot be recompense. Does anyone want that? Do Israelis want that? Do we Jews want that as recompense?

It is all of a piece. All of it reduces to what our good president told us Golda Meir said to him in 1973, and we heard repeated on American TV by an Israeli officer when he said:

“We have nowhere else to go.”

Jews have no place else to go. Neither do Gazans. No one wants Gaza and Gaza’s 2 million people, and that certainly includes the Palestinian Authority and the West Bank.

The Arab street urged on, fomented, organized by Iran and its insufferable evil, flies the Palestinian flag as it screams with hate against Israel and Jews. But it does not want the Gazans or it would have taken them long ago as brothers and sisters. Iran certainly does not want them. It uses them and throws them away.

No one wants the Gazans, they are orphans of war. They are orphans of 1,000 years of turmoil and tribalism in the Middle East. No one anywhere wants Gaza’s babies.

This Jew, Democrat, American, American Army veteran says go ahead if you want, if you must, go ahead and hate the children of Gaza, the babies of Gaza, the mothers of Gaza.

But know that like the Jews of Israel, like all us Jews outside Israel if it came to it, they too have nowhere else to go and they did not do what happened on Oct. 6. Iran and its compatriots are responsible for that just as surely as night follows day.

Now, Gaza City has begun to look like the Warsaw Ghetto at its end. Is this what we want again? What anyojne wants? Well someone must, because that is exactly, exactly what Russia has done to Kharkiv and a hundred other Ukrainian towns and cities causing us to recoil in horror. We know what it look like. The Russians have forced us all to look.

The rage of Israel is right and righteous. But Gaza’s babies didn’t do that, their babies did not murder and mutilate Israel’s babies.

Then what?

In 20 years the babies who remain on both sides will be grown. Will they then kill one another?

The reality, the unbearable reality that must be borne is that this is utterly, utterly hopeless. Anyone who thinks or says otherwise is a liar, a fool or both. It is hopelessly, hopelessly, hopelessly without hope, an endlessly looping tunnel of war.

Is that an answer? No. Why? Because there is not and never will be one except this:

“We have nowhere else to go.”

They have nowhere else to go.

Israelis have nowhere else to go.

If it comes to it, Jews everywhere have nowhere else to go.

It has no end. It has to end, but it has no end.

There is nothing to do on either side but weep for it all and for all who will die on both sides.

But more and more death changes nothing – and still there is nowhere else, nowhere else for the babies to go.

“Stop the world, I want to Get Off”

But we can’t, can we?

Netanyahu’s statement Monday was not a Churchillian appearance, it was churlish.

In the gravest moment in Israel’s history, worse even then 1973, he is trying to use this politically, calling on the opposition to join his government.

He didn’t mention they offered coalition and a national unity government 48 hours before. He didn’t offer to purge his cabinet of the two most odious nationalist/religious maniacs in it.

He didn’t suggest Lapid should become deputy P.M. or that Bennet would step in at Defense. Both should happen as quickly as possible.

With well over 100 hostages, Netanyahu’s sturm und drang was provocative without sensible, measured purpose.

He did not appeal to the better nature and patriotism of his people, he called for vengeance. Yes, it is what is wanted and understandably what Israelies what but it is not the way a real leader speaks to his nation. Everyone understands that but a leader doesn’t say it.

And – and he did not say he would put aside his entire divisive initiative on the judiciary, which a serious man would do and do right now.

Netanyahu is a bad leader and a bad man. Israel needs better and soon, as soon as possible.