Peeling the Onion

On May 10 last year — remember last year is now 2020 — this blog posted an article that described the need for a wholly federally-directed effort to discover, produce and distribute Covid-19 vaccines on a scale comparable to the Manhattan project.

The following is from that article:

“From start to finish, from top to bottom this must be, should be a federally directed project to cause researchers to work together as they did at Los Alamos, to test and accelerate testing of suitable vaccine candidates collectively not competitively, to produce one or more vaccines with government command through the Defense Production Act over those pharmaceutical companies with the capacity to ramp up manufacturing swiftly.

“Production, allocation, and distribution of a vaccine or vaccines should be planned, coordinated and carried out with government direction but not by the market because in the market there will be price gouging, favoritism, discrimination, tampering — all the things that in George Orwell’s imagination made some animals more equal than others.

“It should be done on a scale organized by region, by state, by county and then within each county on a prescribed town by town and city by city timetable that enables local health authorities — supported by local law enforcement to maintain order at vaccination sites — to schedule your vaccination, mine, everyone’s with certainty, clarity, fairness and public calm.“

Think about the date, May 10, fully 8 months ago and think about what we are reading or hearing incessantly on the cable new shows: That the December target for vaccinations was 20 million but as of Dec. 31 the number administered was less than 3 million; that 19 million doses were shipped in December but so far only 11 million had been accounted for on arrival, that the states are in charge of distribution, largely through Walgeens, CVS, Walmart and some but not all supermarket chain pharmacies like Shoprights in New Jersey.

Governors, finding themselves charged with responsibility for this are taking different routes. In most states no one can tell you much of anything it seems. In Florida we have seen TV footage of long lines of older people waiting in line for hours and hours for vaccinations, another tribute to the incompetence of Gov. Ron DeSantis. Would you want your fate in the hands of the maskless lady, South Dakota Gov. Christy Noem?

In my state, New Jersey, a friend brought to my attention a state website describing some but not all general and particular information about the state’s plan to distribute and administer vaccines. My bad on that – I know how to get to the State of New Jersey website and thanks to her for brining it to my attention. But it does not provide key information about how to register or apply for vaccination. Where is the public information campaign that should be part of this, a vital part of it?

Lately the CDC, once the paramount health agency in the United States and admired worldwide for its knowledge and expertise– but like everything in and about the federal government hollowed out and wrecked by Donald Trump and his gang of gangsters, incompetents, knaves, fools, miscreants and malcontents – lately the CDC says the second tranch of vaccinations should be given to essential workers and those over age 75.

Who’s an essential worker? Well you can read or hear news definitions of those who are. It sure has to include all those people working in food markets. Who is and is not essential? Who decides that? Governors? The CDC? A roulette wheel?

Do you know anyone over 75 who has been notified about where and when to be to get a vaccination? Probably not because – because there is no central plan. Because this could only have been, should only have been a federal program and project from top to bottom.

Instead in so typical and usual avoidance of responsibility, Trump has thrust that job onto the states in the greatest demonstration of incompetence, cowardice, and unfitness for office in the 230-year history of the American presidency.

How would we, the United States of America, have done in WWII if that had been a 50-state project? Yes, that is exactly the right analogy.

What agency knows where everyone over the age of 75 resides and how to reach them? Answer: The Social Security Administration

In fact who knows where everyone who has a Social Security Number can be found? Again the Social Security Administration. Who knows where every legal alien resident with a Green Card or a valid visa of any kind is? The Department of State, maybe the Departent of Homeland Security (let it do some good for a change), and if non-citizens are working legally they also have Social Security numbers.

One way or another, the federal government knows more about us and how to find us than any other level of government. Some find that repellent, some find it inevitable in our data-driven world. But like it or not, it’s a fact. I didn’t ask for a draft card all those years ago. The U.S. Selective Service knew where I could be found and sent it to me.

Th right vaccination program needed and needs to be one in which all 330 million of us, in orderly turn, are notified to be at such and such a location at an appointed time on a specified day to receive the first inoculation and to be notified again for the second, since thus far all vaccines require two shots.

Where? At a Walgreens, Walmart, CVS, a Shopright pharmacy? No, no, no, no, and no. At public facilities like armories, now-empty school gyms, senior citizen centers. Innoculated by who? Not by pharmacists unless they are drafted to do so, but by public health professionals, National Guard medical personnel, qualified EMT personnel and so on and on.

Then what? Then how do we know, how will we know who has and has not been vaccinated? How will we know whether it will be safe to enter a restaurant even if vaccinated?

An official, verifiable registation card like my long ago draft card, like the Medicare card seniors carry would be one means of proof, issued on site after the second shot – not the first but the second.

How to enourage those who would refuse vaccination? Well, to be admitted, require everyone to show that card at any public facility and at optional private ones like restaurants, theaters, museums (not supermarkets, which belong to a category of essential services that also would include health facilities and health providers).

Yes, there are civil liberties issues in this but there are civil liberties issues in being told to remove your shoes at an airport security check, or to open a purse or bag at a ballpark entrance or to enter the Metropolitan Museum of Art, any museum. The lie in Libetarianism after all is that, actually, we all do stop for red lights.

We are told and see evidence that the Biden administration is preparing to take this on in a big way. Whether it can federalize this now as suggested here or if instead the best plan will be to rationalize the state-centered mess it inherits, one thing is certain: It needs to take hold of the distribution and administration (the actual shots in arms) as fast, capably and calmly as can be done.

Could that have been done in the past 8 months by a competent president and administration? History says it could have been. Can it yet be rescued?

Yes, if it’s under federal agency control — not federal political direction — with all the funding it needs and the most competent management possible; because to distribute and administer 660 million vaccine doses (two shots each) is a project on a scale unlike anything since the end of WWII. Can it yet be done through the states? Yes, but with one federally mandated set of rules, procedures and expectations, not 50.

To do all that efficiently and effectively within the next six to nine months without corruption, without infection by a black market, with price controls, federal funding, under federal command calls for capability, commitment, management, and accountability.

We haven’t had any of that for four years. It is on the way.

Patriots, who is a patriot?

John Basilone, Raritan, N.J., U. S. Marine, awarded the Medal of Honor for action at Guadalcanal in 1942; offered a safe berth the rest of the war; married July 1944; declined that safe harbor, turned down a commission, returned to the war a sargeant; died in heroic action beyond the call of duty on the first day of the invasion of Iwo Jima in February 1945 — died for democracy; died for you and for me and for all those to come; posthumously awarded the Navy Cross, the only service member awarded both the Navy Cross and the Medal of Honor in WWII.

His widow, Lena Riggi Basilone, kept him forever, never remarried. She died 44 years later in 1999.

Emily Murphy, GSA Administrator, middle-aged, pasty-complected, grossly obese, indifferent white woman of limited intellect, who has only to sign a piece of paper to preserve democracy in the United States, – but won’t.

Choose your patriot Trump America, choose your patriot.

On Sept. 19, 1796, President George Washington took a small new nation by surprise when he announced he would not seek a third term, thereby establishing a two-term precedent for the American presidency now enshrined in the twenty-second amendment to the Constitution.

The profound document in which he announced his retirement is known as his Farewell Address.

Taking leave from public life Washington addressed his accomplishments, his belief in the wisdom and benefit of orderly democracy in the form of a republic with a measured governmental system, and warned against three perils to that vision and its permanence.

In the first he warned against geographic divisions and jealousies as the nation grew, urging there be no conflict or excessive competition between north and south, east and west, a caution thrown to the winds in 1861 with cultural and political consequences that reverberate in this United States in this time.

In the second he warned against foreign entanglements, against preference for or animosity toward any foreign nation. This was fitting advice at the time from the leader of a new nation, separated by an ocean from the European power centers and conflicts of the 18th Century and looking to stay so.

However, even as Washington contemplated leaving office, within a year or two of receiving that advice the United States was peripherally drawn into Europe by the political and diplomatic tailwinds from the French Revolution whipping across the Atlantic Ocean.

However fitting and sage his advice on foreign relations for a newly sovereign nation with a fragile commercial and communal life — then but a small and weak player on the international stage as it played in 1796 — Washington did not, could not foresee that the United States would rise to become what today we call a super power – necessarily engaged throughout the world.

Above all in his Farewell address, the first president warned against what he called “factions” and factionalism, against the rise of factions, of parties aligned against one another seeking to control the reigns and tools of government as they divided the public and public opinion.

In an observation expressing concern about factions/parties, most salient for Americans in this moment of this fraught presidential election in the United States, President Washington wrote (emph. added):

“The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries which result gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of public liberty.”

Of course even as he wrote the Farewell Address with assistance from Alexander Hamilton, Washington’s administration was riven by a factional dispute in which Hamilton emerged as the leader of one point of view with Thomas Jefferson leader of the other.

Their dispute centered on the reach and purpose of the federal government, with the differences defined in terms of being pro or con as to Hamilton’s national banking system and its affect on the balance of powers between the federal government and the states of the new federal union.

Then too they tangled over the right course for America in response to the first international crisis to confront the new government, the French Revolution.

Hamilton, the martial man, counseled netrality between France and England, a leading opponent of revolutionary France. Jefferson, ever the vocal armchair proponent of rebellion, sided with France. Washington, the decider as a much later president would say of himself, sided with Hamilton, his treasury secretary, on both vital matters, causing Jefferson, his secretary of state to depart the cabinet.

Anyone who did not know the character of their dispute and the general differences that accelerated them has perhaps learned its outline from the musical “Hamilton”.

Their internal policy differences in the cabinet became defined in factions aligned with Hamilton or with Jefferson in their opposition to one another. From that, the core two-party political model we know in the United States emerged.

The first two were the Democratic-Republican Party of Jefferson and the Federalist Party of Hamilton. In their opposing visions they forged fundamental political differences that come down to us today, though adapted and adaptible as times changed and the nation changed and expanded.

Jefferson’s faction in time became the Democratic Party that emerged in the age of Presdident Andrew Jackson while Hamilton’s Federalist Party, shrunk in just 20 years to a New England base, gave way to the Whig Party after 1828 when its last ostensible president, John Quincy Adams, left the White House.

Jacksonian Democrats were an insular faction, the party of the small landholder, against a system of national finance, for state supremacy in banking, indeed of state supremacy in the entirety of that notion, and above all the pro-slavery party exerting national political dominance erected on the pro-slavery architecture of the U.S. Constitution (the Electoral College, equal Senate representation, the three-fifths clause at Article I, Section 2.). The man most identified with those principles in that time? Sen. John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, the great proponent of nullification.

The Federalists and successor Whigs were the party of the frontier and expansion, of economic development, a national bank and westward settlement, a party of the merchant and financial classes that had been the backbone of the Federalists. Their platform, for the twenty odd years they served as the chief other faction was best expressed in the American System of Sen. Henry Clay of Kentucky, their leader through those decades.

The Whigs, torn by disension concerning slavery and its extension to new territories and states, imploded in the late 1840s and disappeared in the 1850s as a spate of lesser parties emerged. Chief among those, the American Party, known as Know Nothings. It embodied an enflamed, angry response to and resentment of the flood of Irish peasant immigrants fleeing starvation on their famine-struck island.

In the stagnation of the Democratic slave party and alarm at chaotic visceral Know Nothingism, remnants of the Whigs, leading political men like Abraham Lincoln of Illinois, William Seward of New York, and Salmon P. Chase of Ohio, began to search out one another with new ideas about America. They coalesced between 1854 and 1856 in a new party. They called it the Republican Party.

In the dispute over slavery which finally led to bitter sectional war, the Republicans were a free soil party. They advocated that future expansion of the nation should be in free territories and free states. Most of them were not yet abolitionists, who were still deemed radicals though among them emerged a radical faction favoring abolition, led formidably by Congressman Thadeus Stephens of Lancaster, Pa. Like the Whigs before them, these new Republicans were also pro-expansionists in favor of development of national infrastructure.

Quickly came the Civil War. Its end established the dominance of the party that led the nation through it, the Republicans.

It is an interesting historical note that their first president, Abraham Lincoln, while leading the nation in war also led his party to pass the Homestead Act, the land grant collelge law, and authorized and financially seeded construction of the Union Pacific Railroad. It is not an exaggeration to say that those three acts created the American upper Midwest and plains states as we know them – and the great Big Ten universities that today are such a dynamic and democratic force in American life, culture and education.

More than 60 years later in response to the gravest national crisis since the Civil War, the Democratic Party made a decisive turn toward liberal economics, toward Kenynsianism with programs for major public investment in both the nation’s physical and human infrastructure and new regulation of its financial system.

Franklin D. Roosevelt’s depression-bending New Deal embraced the industrial worker and, in time,the party of slavery became the party of Civil Rights, attracting to it nearly total support from Black Americans, who hitherto decisively favored Republicans, the party of their emancipation by the 13th Amendment, the party that promised them equal full citizenship and equal voting rights in the 14th and 15th Amendments.

Later in the 20th Century, a Republican President, working with a Democratic House and Senate, would continue his faction’s nation building tradition through his National Highway Defense Act of 1954 to build our Interstate Higway System. There was a time, albeit only from time to time, when the two parties cooperated as they would memorably in the 1960s to pass civil and voting rights laws over the objection of southern Democratic inheritors of the ways of the slave south.

Since then, Democrats, who worked hard in the south for 100 years to suppress the voting rights of Black people guaranteed by the 15th Amendment, have become the advocates of voting rights while, with supreme irony, Republicans, led by those converted to their party in the south in the backlash against civil and voting rights, began to obstruct those rights and ballot access.

The parties have changed and in large degree exchanged clothes. Though the two factions remain substantially divided along the broad philosophical lines on which Hamilton and Jefferson split more than 200 years ago, substantially they have moved to opposite sides on those lines.

The ever and ongoing dynamic evolution of the two parties is important because of what it tells about how major Ameircan political parties arise, change and sometimes disappear.

What then is in focus is the comparison to be made to the political turmoil that took over in the 1840s and 1850s in a nation so bitterly divided that eventually it went to war with part of itself? In that turmoil a strong new party came into being just as the political and economic turmoil of the Great Depression years realigned the parties, their beliefs, policies and purposes in the next century.

The two factions descend to us today as the liberal and conservative parties we know, the one slightly left of center the other formerly but no longer slightly right of center, having taken a troubling reactonary cast. Today the factions are so divided and at odds that one wears only red, the other only blue — their colors vividly separating us on our national political map.

Today the Republican Party has moved far from near the center at which the parties have traded places for 15o years of governance from the center left or center right along the nation’s political continuum with opposing and competing visions, progams, platforms, beliefs and dynamics.

Through it all, mostly, the center held in the United States or won out in the end as it did in 1865. There is grave risk now it cannot. The factions have become tribes and as in so much that is tribal no quarter is given, no prisoners are taken and the space that is common ground vanishes.

The presidency of Donald Trump has markedly accelerated the change caused by this upheaval, pushng us toward a political realignment that congers up the fall of the Whigs, the rise of the Reublicans.

For the past two decades at least the Grand Old Party has been constricting, not keeping up with the stark and challenging change of American demographics. It has become almost exclusively a diminising white party, something you could literally see as far back as the 1970s at the national conventions of the two parties. Democratic conventions presented a rainbow of people, the Repulicans a chromatic monotone.

In this turmoil, significant figures in the Republican Party have left it this year to support the Democratic candidate for president, witness the Lincoln Project, Republicans for Biden, et. al. These folks talk of restoring the Republican Party when this is over.

But there is no evidence they can. It seems possible now they will need to gather in the year or two ahead to examine if they should replicate what their political forebearers did at mid-century 175 years ago.– form a new party.

The next great transcendent moment in American politics is about the future of the Republican Party, whether it stays in business or is succeeded by a new structure to carry the beliefs of conservatives.

They will need to ask whether they can stay Republicans and win elections if it continues as the Republican Party has become, a party of race, racial division and a diminishing white minority; a party nostalgic for discarded cultural norms of gender distinction and misgogyny from times gone by that cannot, will not and should not return.

Otherwise, the Republican Party could be on the verge of becoming a minority party for decades to come.

In 2016, 136.8 million Americans voted in the presidential election.

They represented turnout of 59% of what demographers and polsters call the Voting Eligible Population, hereafter the VEP.

This is different from the Voting Age Population, the VAP.

Both VEP and VAP refer to people of voting age, 18 years, in the United States. The difference is that the VAP includes millions who cannot vote because they are in prison, on parole or are not citizens so it is a really irrelvant category. If you are legally ineligible to vote, you are irrelvant to the numbers who are eligible, or any understanding of them.

So we will talk here in terms of the VEP, that is those who are citizens 18 years or older and eligible to vote. Of course they must register to actually vote.

(All statistics here are gleaned from various reliable sources via Internet searches.)

In 2016 the VEP numbered 233 million. Total turnout was 137 million votes. As noted, measued as a percentage of VEP, turnout was 59%. VEP has increased more than 40 million since the Year 2000 with 75% of the increase attributed to Black, Latino/Latina and Asian Americans.

The 2016 U.S. voter participation placed the United States between Luxembourg and Latvia among democratic nations in recent national elections; far down the list from Belgium, which had 87% participation in the same relevant period, indeed well below every European and Asian democracy.

In the 2018 U.S. mid-term election turnout was 118.5 million, some 49.5% of those eligible to vote. It was a startling increase over the 2014 mid-term when just 36% of the VEP cast ballots; and the highest mid-term turnout, measured as a perentage, in the more than 100 years since 1914, when 50% voted in a time in which only men could vote.

The 2018 turnout of 118.5 million voters was a 35 milion-vote or 42% increase over 83.5 million mid-term votes cast in 2014 . The surge propelled Democrats to re-take the House of Representatives.

Now we are in 2020, a year that by anyone’s memory is the most dramatic, life-changing event in the United States perhaps since Dec. 7, 1941.

It is a year that has seen more upheaval, more urgency, greater global unsettling of populations than any year in all of our lifetimes excepting perhaps for the most elderly, who yet have memory of WWII. Even then, this might well seem worse to them now. Then they were children, today they are aged and at risk.

Part of the turmoil is the U.S. presidential election, heaving and swirling, tossed, tossing and turning for more than six months now through the global pandemic with lines ever more sharply drawn over the toxic presidency of Donald Trump.

It would be consequential in steadier times, it is all the more so in the circumstances of 2020 given that the election will decide the political fate of a man more unfit, unsteady, unready and unequal to the task of being president than any who ever held the office.

The election will decide the course of the United States of America not for just the next four years but for as far as we can see into the misty future. It will, without exaggeration, decide the future of our republican form of government, our democracy and our nation’s place in the world for decades to come.

Because of the circumstances of the pandemic more people are voting early in more ways than ever in the history of the U.S., both in real numbers and in percentages of VEP perhaps more so than during the Civil War or during WWII, when 16 milion in a then U.S. population of 130 million served in uniform. Today, there are 330 million of us.

How they vote, on what schedules, where, with what varying opportunities to submit an early ballot depends on the states in which the regisestered live and are distributed.

In Mercer County, N.J. (where I live) with a population of 367,000 there are 16 official drop boxes for voters to deposit the paper ballots sent to all New Jersey registered voters.

In Harris County, Texas which includes the City of Houston and has total population of 4.4 million in a land area larger than Rhode Island, by order of the governor of Texas, by his dictate alone, there is one (1) vote deposit location. Say that again: one drop box for a county with 4.4 million people.

Without doubt this represents the single greatest, most overt and loathsome act of voter suppression in the history of the United States – and that is saying a lot.

Why would Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas have done this, why did he do it? He did it first because he could because the Roberts Supreme Court by a 5-4 decision ripped the guts out of the U.S. Voting Rights Act, the one passed in 1965 soon after the late Rep. John Lewis was beaten bloody by state troopers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala. marching to get that law passed.

But the main reason Gov. Abbott did this? Not because he cares so much about the outcome of the presidential race, though he does, as he cares about the outcome of the vote in two week for the Texas House of Representatives.

Republian control of that chamber for decades is in peril after Democratic gains in 2018. If 9 of the 150 Texas House seats turnover to Democrats they will take control and everything in Texas politics and government will be upended, including congressional redistricting. That above all is why Abbott is nakedly suppresssing the vote.

A poll released Oct. 21 shows Democrat Joe Biden tied with President Donald Trump in Texas, and generally within striking distance in most polls in the Lone Star State – polls that also show something of far greater consequence to Gov. Abbott and Texas Republicans than the presidential race – that their hold on the Texas House really is in danger.

Then what do the presidential polls show lately?

First, polls historially tighten in the final two weeks of a campaign as the undecided choose. But this year the polls show generally 5% or less of the electorate to be late deciders, at least one-half to even one-third less than usual.

Second, the public polls have been largely consistent nationally as they have also been in the so-called battleground states, and consistent within themselves. If a poll shows a 10 point Biden national advantage it has been a consistent finding of that poll over time. If it shows a 5% Biden advantage that generally has been an internally consistent finding of the same poll.

Overall generally the the steady mean average of the polls shows Biden about 8% to 9% ahead of Trump nationally, and generally holding leads ranging from 2% to 8% in several key states like Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Arizona and Nevada.

They show virtual ties in other contested states like North Carolina, Iowa and Florida, the latter being the keystone on any path to reelection for Trump. Biden can win the presidency without Florida. Trump cannot. Without Texas and its 38 electoral votes, whether now or in the future, no Republican could win the presidency.

The pundits are agog at the early voting, which as of this writing 14 days ahead of the election is at 39 million, 28% of 2016 turnout . The pundits and voting experts predict by Election Day, Nov. 3, as much as 60% of the vote is likely to be cast and the early voting is more than on pace for that.

Early voting takes three forms, by postal mail, depositing ballots in official election drop boxes, or voting at an actual polling station.

The early vote, again according to the pundits and their sources in state election offices, has split about 2-to-1 Democratic. All of which means? Absolutely nothing.

We do not know how many will actually vote early against the real final turnout. We do not know how that will break out finally between the two parties. We do not know how many will vote on Election Day the traditional way or how such in-person voting will work with pandemic social distancing.

We do not know how much interference there will be at the polls from gun loonies ginned up by Trump or thugs masquerading as poll watchers.

All that aside then, how many votes are likely to be cast when all is said and done?

How many more than the 137 million who voted in 2016 will vote, how many more than the 129.5 million who voted for Trump or Hillary Clinton that year will choose between Trump or Biden? Will the total of 7.5 million votes squandered on third party and write-in candidates in 2016 increase or decrease?

The rise in voting in the 2018 mid-term over the 2014 mid-term produced an actual increase in the number of ballots cast of 35 million – from 83 million votes cast in 2014 to 118.5 million in 2018, a stunning 42% increase.

If 2016 participation of 137 million voters increased by 42% this year it would mean a turnout over 194 million. That number might well be or could actually exceed the current total registration though, again, that figure could not be readily obtained.

Still current informed estimates of the number expected to vote range from 150 million to 160 million. VEP participation, which as noted was 59% in 2016 would rise to between 63% and 67% in either of those scenarios.

Let’s test two numbers. First, let’s use a mid-range number, 152 million turnout, which projects about a 11% vote increase over 2016.

That would make each point in the current polls and in the election itself worth 1.52 million votes.

Assuming the wasted third party vote reduces by about half from 2016 down to 4 million leaves 148 million votes to be divided between Trump and Biden, which would be 19 million more than the total for Clinton and Trump in 2016, a nearly 15% increase. That is a not a lot, it is a helluva lot.

Applying the steady Biden national polling advantage of 8 points to the projected 152 million would produce a 12 million vote advantage for Biden, translating into a 52.6% share to 44.7% for Tump with all others garnering 2.7%. Play with that, make it Biden 52%, Trump 45% and all others 3%. That becomes Biden, 79 milion votes, Trump 68.4 million votes, a 10.6 million vote difference. Reducing the Biden presumption to 50% with Trump at 47% and all others 3%, results in a national vote difference between Biden and Trump of 4.5 million votes. But again, the polls to date are running at an average 8% Biden lead.

Next test the notion of 160 million votes for president, adjusting the throw away, wasted votes to 5 million. That would mean 155 million votes cast for Biden or Trump, with each percent of the total being 1.6 million votes. Assuming wasted ballots a constant at 3%, Biden at 52% means Trump at 45%, with a Biden advantage of 11.2 million votes, 83.2 million votes to 72 million for Trump. Reducing Biden to 51% and raising Trump to 46% results in a popular vote Biden win twice that of Hillary Clinton’s 2.9 million vote spread; being 81.6 million for Biden to 75.4 million for Trump, a differenece 0f 6.2 million votes. Put Biden at 50%, Trump at 47% with the wasted vote steady at 3% results in 80 million votes for Biden to 75.2 million for Trump, a difference of 4.8 million votes.

Thus reasonable scenarios extrapolated from curent polling mean 2020 very much likely will be the 5th time the Democratic candidate for president will be the popular vote winner in 6 national elections since 2000. A Democrat has been president twice since 2000 notwithstanding being the popular vote winner in four of the five presidential contests held so far in this century.

Democrat Biden almost certainly will win the popular vote Nov. 3 by a very clear, even a very large margin, in fact almost certainly by a majority of all who vote if the vote in any way reflects the polls to date.

But that’s not how we elect presidents as witnessed by the fact that a Democrat has been elected president in only two of the five contests since and including 2000.

Any of the results proffered above contain, no matter how much weighted for the votes of California and New York in the Democratic column or Texas in the Republican column — any of those results contains a Biden electoral vote victory. It could range from the minimum 270 electoral votes required to secure the presidency to as high as 350 electoral votes or even upwards if Texs astonishes the nation – depending on the popular vote spread. The larger the popular vote, the higher the electoral vote count should go for Biden.

There is one inexorable thing in politics as elections come into view. It is numbers. They are, once their trend is established, immutable.

The 2020 presidential election is now subject to the immutability of numbers conditioned as always by the imbalance of the Electoral College. What imbalance? As simple as that every state gets two electoral votes for its membership in the Senate. That gives Wyomong, with 500,000 population the same two Senate-credited electoral votes as California with 40 million population. Wyoming’s two Senate-generated electoral votes outweigh the two belonging to California by 80 times.

This year the immutability of numbers points to overcoming the inherent bias in the Electoral College to produce a democratic result that will elect a Democrat as president.

The U.S. Population, 330,000,000.

People of Praise population, 1,650 adults.

Protestant share of the population, 49.5 percent, Roman Catholic share, 23%, non-believer share, 18%, Jewish share, 2%, Muslim share, 1%, the share of all other faiths 7.5%, People of Praise adults share, 0.000005% (five one-millionths percent of the whole).

Members of the SCOTUS, 9.

Baptized Roman Catholics on the court if Amy Coney Barrett is confirmed, 7. Jewish members of the court, 2.

People of Praise members of the court if Barrett is confirmed, 1.

Protestant members of the court, 0 (zero).

Last Protestant to serve on the court? John Paul Stevens, retired June 29, 2010.

Something wrong with all that?

Do those numbers make sense?

Do they reflect a plural democracy?

Do they reflect wisdom in a Republic with no limit on the terms of its federal judges.?

No, they do not.

To be brief and to the point. Tonight, Oct. 6, 2020 the New York Times posted a story you should find and read about then Atty. Gen. Jefferson Beuregard Sessions (yes that is the bastard’s full name) ordering the separation of children from their parents at the border on behalf of Donald J. Trump,and Stephen Miller and other gangsters serving Trump to fulfill Trump’s criminal demands.

Well, you could write reams and reams and reams about this. I will not.

I will simply observe that of the 5.8 million Jews murdered by Germany and Germans, not Nazis, that’s too easy and too accomodating – by Germany and Germans and their main accomplices, Lithuanians, Poles, Hungarians, Ukrainians — 1.2 million were childen 12 years of age or younger.

When that and so much more was placed on trial for judgement at the principal war crimes tribunal in Nuremberg at the close of 1945 and the start of 1946 the chief prosecutor was then United States Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had elevated Jackson to the court from his service as attorney general of the United States, ironically the office held by Sessions for 18 months under Trump.

Jackson agreed to undertake this extraordinary role at the behest of President Harry S Truman (Truman used a middle initial but did not have a middle name so, properly, there is no period after the middle initial – just a peculiar note for the grammatically meticulous).

In his lengthy, eloquent and enompassing charge to the tribunal, Justice Jackson laid down the seminal modern foundation of international criminal law, addressing plotting and planning war, war crimes and crimes against humanity.

I have read it several times over the years. It is easily found on line if you want to read the entirety.

It is necessarily a long document covering 12 years of history and national and international crimes on a gargantuan scale.

Perhaps though the most chilling, compelling and surely succinct statement from Justice Jackson’s charge to the tribunal is this – this that applies equally tonight to what was done in our name — in our name as Americans — to children from Mexico and Central America 75 years after the Holocaust.

Justice Jackson said to the tribunal, as we must say to ourselves tonight as Americans:

“The real complaining party at the bar is civilization.”

Listening to the many chatterers on cable news this evening.

They are speculating on the New York Times report about the Trump tax returns (Oh, says this one time wire and newspaper reporter, to live in the world of the New York Times where the Pentagon Papers and now Trump’s tax returns — and so much else that is revelatory — comes in over the transom or just walks in the door. Be that as it may, aren’t we glad it does? Yes, we are).

We can reduce all they are saying to these most pertinent facts as reported by the Times. Trump owes more than $300 million coming due over the next four years. But,to whom? Actually the story indicates it is over $400 million but no need to quibble as it is probably much more.

Those debts must compromise him as president but how and who can make demands on him and expect favors and forebearance becuse he owes them lots of money (which he may not have).

He paid his daughter, an employee of his company, over $700,000 as a consultant to and through her company, claiming it as an expense of the company she works for and then deducted it. Pretty neat. We don’t know how she expensed it out of Ivanka Inc. but we can guess she did and that no one named Trump or Kushner paid taxes on it.

In both 2016 and 2017 he paid $750 in total personal federal income taxes. That’s really stupid, because if you want to get away with cheating in the long run make it look more real and less preposterous (maybe like that should have been a row of red flags for the IRS? Oh, but the IRS works for him these days right? Right.)

But if there is one number — one number — most people will take away from this it is? It is $750. ‘Nough said, everyone knows what they paid last year in federal income tax – and for very much the vast majority of Americans it was way more than $750.

And they are not the president, not a one of them. Trump is. So if the only take away is that number, $750, it’s politially devastating outside Trumpzombie land.

Then, as to all of it, the nodding heads and wagging tongues of MSNBC and CNN speculate that if he loses, returns to the life of an ordinary citizen, there is a case of federal tax fraud in all this – punishable by 5 years in prison on each count.

They observe too too he is presently being investigated by the office of the Manhattan District Attorney, which has suggested tax fraud is one of the avenues the investigation is exploring.

Well, here is what the Constitution says about the presidential pardon power:

Article II, Section 2 (in pertinent part as the lawers say) – “The President … and he shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in cases of impeachment.”

That’s clear, isn’t it? It doesn’t say when he can grant pardons, just that he can. That means any time he wants as long as he holds the office of president.

It doesn’t limit who he can pardon. It does not say that a president cannot pardon himself,which means – which means Trump can pardon Trump.

Then what do you thnk Trump will do if he loses this election, after all the inevtiable sturm und drang, gnashing of teeth, threats, howls, lies that will come from him and his followers before finally, finally he concedes?

He will in one of his last acts in office or maybe for Christmas, pardon himself, Ivanka, Jared Kushner, his sons the wife of the one, the girlfriend of the other, and even his wife. No one named Trump will be left in harm’s way of federal prosecution.

Ah but what about the Manhattan D.A. and the attorney general of New York State, because he cannot pardon anyone from state crimes only federal?

That’s true, but then they can’t prosecute federal crimes, only crimes against the State of New York. Then as to federal tax fraud and evasion?

Well pardon me for saying so, but do you have any doubt whatsoever that Trump will pardon himself and his entire family before Jan 20, 2021?

I don’t.

Memory of St. Ruth of the Supreme Court now resides with her dear friend St. Antonin of the Supreme Court in the respective left and right halls of judicial Valhalla.

And so we ask what will they do, what will he do. They being the Republicans in the Senate, he being their leader, Mitch McConnell.

And the answer is yes, the convenient-for-the-moment 2016 McConnell rule be damned, if McConnell can find and hold 50 votes in his majority he will add the vote of Mike Pence to ram through confirmation of a nominee to the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) – before the election, not after it, before. Or, failing that, in the post-election lameduck time from Nov. 4 to Jan. 3.

McConnell knows as well or better than anyone his risk of losing the majority. He knows right now his party looks likely to lose the presidency.

So this is his chance, perhaps his last certain chance to assure government his way for the next 20 years with a 6-to-3 court majority now and at least a 5-to-4 majority in a longer future.

It seems reasonble that liberal Justice Stephen Breyer, 82, would take the Bader Ginsburg lesson to heart and retire promptly if Joe Biden becomes president. But if Trump wins and Breyer fails to outlive a second Trump term, the court would move to a 7-to-2 Republican majority.

Even allowing Chief Justice Roberts might, with eye on his place and reputation in history, attempt to moderate that six-justice majority, such a court will give the radical reactionaries — not conservatives, these are not conservative men on the high court, they are radicals — will give them control over American law for decades.

Then too, if McConnell gets his sixth justice it will give Clarence Thomas judicial space to die or perhaps even retire one day if another Republican wins the White House and appoints a much younger candidate to add, oh, say 30 years to Republican tenure in that seat.

Bottom line as they say, McConnell has to go for it now.

But can he get it done?

Permutations

The majority leader has 53 votes without Pence, 54 with him. He needs 51, with or without Pence, although of course it used to require 60 votes to confirm federal judges, the numerical threshold of the “filibuster”

Former Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid changed that to 51 votes for all federal judicial nominations except the Supreme Court when the then Reublican Senate minority used the filibuster to delay from one Senate session to the next, President Obama’s judicial nominations. That reached calumnous conclusion when McConnell pinned Obama’s high court nomination of Merrick Garland to the wall, keeping his nomination from even going to a hearing, much less a confirmation vote.

Finding himself in 2017 with the majority and with Trump in the White House, but lacking 60 votes, McConnell ended the filibuster on Supreme Court nominations. That is how he got Brett Kavanaugh confirmed with 51 votes in 2018. Again, with Pence McConnell again has three votes to spare. If he falls short by four he loses.

Then who among the 53 might be in the wind? Are there four?

Lisa Murkowski of Alaska has affirmed her prior declaration that no one should be confrmed to the high court before the election, fudging the McConnell rule which applies to the entire final year of a presidential term not just up to the November election. Do not assume Murkowski will not refute herself during the lame duck. Assume nothing in politics in this, the Era of Hard Feelings.

Susan Collins of Maine is in deep political doo-doo, trailing in her race for a fourth Senate term. For home consumption in Maine, decidedly blue in the polls, she says the choice of a new justice should be that of the president elected Nov. 3. But then the senator has been known to waver in a voice that quavers.

Democrats look west whistfully to Utah Sen. Mitt Romney, a man constant in his probity who is deeply, honestly conservative. What he will do is known to him and probably Mrs. Romney. He will no doubt consult with family and advisors and take the political temperature of his state that in recent polls showed a 20 point preference for Trump.

There are besides Collins other Republican senators in jeopardy, notably Cory Gardner in Colorado, who has asked everyone to slow down and honor the late justice, which actually means he knows if he says now he’ll vote to confirm he will seal his defeat.

Also, Joni Ernst in Iowa (a state where there is a strong right to life strain and she comes of that), Tom Tillis in North Carolina and, lo and behold, Lindsay Graham in South Carolina.

Tillis shut the door immediately, announcing he is with McConnell all the way. It was inevitable he would because he cannot upset his and Trump’s base at home given his dead close race against Democrat Cal Cunningham. For him the politics weigh heavily toward confirmation now. So do his beliefs so the choice was easy.

Ernst is a do or die right-to-lifer and McConnell loyalist so don’t expect anything there.

Her fellow Iowa Republian Senator Charles Grassley is on record affirming the McConnell principle that SCOTUS vacancies in the last year of a presidential term should be left to the next president. But Grassley has reneged before and he has to protect Ernst at home — which he won’t if he sticks to his previous position in Washington.

In 2016 as a member of the Judiciary Committee and McConnell ally, Graham denied Garland a hearing much less a vote. He said then to be fair he would ever after agree to leave any high court nomination in a presidential election year to the president elected in such year to fill. But unexpectedly this year, he is in a close, close election.

That comes as a surprise to everyone, including the south’s original Graham cracker himself. No more than Tillis in North Carolina can Graham afford to lose a single vote from the red base in South Carolina.

McConnell made him chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee a position in which Graham is obligated — obligated – to lead a confirmation effort and hearing when the majority leader wants it, like now, or to step aside as chair, something the always ambitious, attention seeking Graham would never do.

Who else? Lamar Alexander, former governor of Tennessee, retiring Jan. 3 at the end of this, his third Senate term. Once regarded as a traditional Republican moderate, Alexander has given Trump and McConnell every vote they needed from him. He did not disappoint, announcing he will vote to confirm now.

Likely then? A strong push by McConnell and the White House to rush through a confirmation before the election with just 43 days to Nov. 3.

If not?

Then a definite nothing-to- lose confirmation battle in November.

It has been noted that if Democrat Mark Kelly ousts Sen. Martha McSally to take over the Arizona seat to which she was appointed to fill out the term of the late John McCain, he could become a member of the Senate on or about Nov. 30. First though he has to win an election –in which the stakes are higher now than even before — and then make his way through a predictable minefield of Republican efforts to keep him from being sworn in promptly.

Permutations then within permutations if Kelly wins. Does McConnell schedule the confirmation in November while he still has McSally? Does she dare vote to confirm? Is she even a member of the Senate if she loses, Kelly wins but can’t yet take his seat? If she does vote is the confirmation challengeable and if so before what courts, federal or state?

See where this could be headed? Nifty stuff.

What’s the deadline for getting a Trump nominee confirmed, if Democrats win a Senate majority?

Jan. 3, 2021. Why? Because the Constitution sets that date to convene the new congress.

Who?

Trump announced almost immediately he will nominate a woman. That was forseeable. He has lists, he has already declared them. He announced Sept. 21 he would declare a nominee Sept. 25 or 26 following Bader Ginsburg’s funeral.

While he said he has five candidates, reports focus particularly on two women, both serving federal appellate judges, Amy Coney Barrett, 48, of Indiana, and Barbara Lagoa, 52 of Florida. Both are Trump appointees to federal appeals courts.

Lagoa was confirmed in 2017 with 80 Senate votes, Barrett the same year with just 55 votes. Lagoa like the late Justice Ginsburg is a graduate of Columbia Law School. Barrett is a graduate of the University of Notre Dame Law School. She would be the only non-Ivy League law graduate on the court. The other eight are all graduates of the Harvard or Yale University law schools.

Both are anti-choice with Barrett, a mother of seven, the more outspoken. Both are practicing Roman Catholics.

Barrett in particular is a darling of the religious right because she is so adamantly opposed to a woman’s right to choose and her overall extreme socially reactionary views. When Kavanaugh was chosen, it was reported Barrett was all but told by the White House she would be up next.

What changes that calculation is the election. She is from Indiana, same as Pence. She excites the red base but that doesn’t impact a battleground state so much as Lagoa who is from Florida. Trump cannot win without Florida’s 29 electoral votes. She would excite a key part of the Florida Republican base, Cuban Americans.

Religion and the Court

Isn’t it, shouldn’t it be offensive to talk about justices’ religions, religion and the court?

Yes it should. But it’s unavoidable and inescapable when the rawest issue the court faces is ensconced in Roe v. Wade, opposition to which is based on and in religion; notably in the particular religious doctrines and customs of Ultra-Orthodox Judaism, the Catholic Church, and fundamentalist, revivalist branches of Protestantism like Southern Baptists.

The population of the United States remains almost 50 percent Protestant, is about 23 percent Roman Catholic, 18 percent non-believing, 2 percent Jewish, 1.8 percent Momon (among the total 75 percent counted as Christian) 1 percent Moslem, and then many others.

Yet, before she died, Bader Ginsburg sat on a court with three Jews and six Catholics (albeit Neal Gorsuch attends the high Episcopal Church of his wife he was baptized Catholic). Five of the six Catholics are men, all on record as opposed to a woman’s right to choose. The sixth is Sonia Sotomayor, who is pro-choice. Without Bader Ginsbug the pro-choice contingent reduces to Breyer, Sotomayor and Justice Elena Kagan.

Counting Gorsuch in the faith in which he was baptized and raised, either Barrett or Lagoa would bring the court’s memberhip to seven Catholics, two Jews but not a single Protestant, far out of balance with the nation.

The Chief Justice this year in a key decision tempered his four arch male associates on the issue, at least as differentiating between further limitations on Roe designed to strangle choice as opposed to reversal in the entirety.

Add Barrett or Lagoa to the court, or anyone else of their ilk, and the chief justice will not be able to keep his finger in the ideologial dike and might not even want to given his core religious convictions.

With or without Roberts, have no illusions. It is the determined, expressed aim of the Republican Party Platform to overturn Roe. It is the baseline expectation of that party and the vast majority of its voters of any Supreme Court if this seat is filled by another Trump appointee.

It takes four justices to decide to hear a case. Within months of getting to a 6-to-3 Republican majority the court will find and certify a case that can result in nullification of Roe. You can make book on it. Possible even is that a red state will jump to adopt an abortion abolition law the majority can seize as the vehicle.

And that is why, however ugly it is, religion is an inescapable subject when discussing the court. Roe exposes nakedly a question less of constitutional law than theology and theocratic dictate.

Ironic then is that McConnell’s project to fill the federal judiciary with very conservative lawyers blessed by the Federalist Society and gain an overpowering SCOTUS Republican majority, for him probably has little to do with Roe except as a vehicle to empower it politically.

For McConnell the interest is in a radical judiciary to rule across an unbounded field of commercial, environmental, civil rights, voting rights, housing, gender, campaign contribution and myriad other cases.

His objective is a judiciary to upset, reverse and gut as much of the New Deal, Fair Deal, Great Society and the Obama legacy as possible, while upholding new laws adopted by conservative state legislautres and possible Republican congresses in the future.

The Problem That Is The Court

Once again a vacancy on the SCOTUS exposes how deeply divided is the United States of America.

It is as though all the ghosts of the Civil War gather on the steps of the Supreme Court Building on Capitol Hill and in the chamber of the United States Senate.

The cause of the conundrum is the same whether you are left or right politically. It is that the court through more than 200 years since Chief Justice John Marshall set down the principle of judial review in Marbury v. Madison, has taken upon itself and conferred upon itself greater and greater authority.

Nothing in Article III of the Constitution that established the federal judiciary confers this inferred power, exalted in Marbury and expanded for two centuries.

Article III is explicit as to the kinds of cases federal courts may hear and resolve. It says absolutely nothing as to whether the courts, including of course the Supreme Court, can determine whether a statute is constitutional. The court said in 1805 it had that power and because it said it, it has it.

Then too it is the Bill of Rights that truly opened up judicial review. The amendments to the Constitution even more than the Constitution itself form a field for judicial constitutional review and determintion.

Fortunately as it turns out on balance the high court and lesser federal courts have asserted this authority and made it part of American jurisprudence because otherwise thousands of really bad state and federal laws would be on the books.

But the fact is that neither the left or the right when they don’t like the result will ever surrender the accusation that the court is a third super house of the national legislature, able to make law above and beyond the power of Congress to do so.

It only depends on which tilt the court takes and in what historic era or epoch it tilts.

Tilting has given the nation Dred Scott, Pless v. Ferguson, a raft of decisions that undermined the New Deal, notably evisceration of the Blue Eagle National Recovery Act, Buckley v. Valeo, and Citizens United. But it has also produced Brown v. Board of Education, Gideon’s trumpet, Miranda, and Obergefell v. Rogers; and on and on, good and bad, bad and bad, good and good and – oh yes – Roe v. Wade.

Thus the court is the ultmate political battleground and in becoming so its membership is a cultural, social, economic and special interest fight to the death.

Article III puts no limit on judicial terms of the courts of the United States. There is no term limit, no age limit, nothing to prevent judges from serving on and on and on until, for example, one has served 25 years and dies, frozen on the court by politics.

The Congress can change the number of justices on the high court. This has happened 10 times. While the number of justices ranged historically from 5 to 10, the 9-member court has been a fixture for more than 150 years.

When, re-elected in a landslide, FDR attempted in 1937 to add members – to pack the court in the parlance of the exercise — to overcome its decisions knocking down his laws and programs, the president lost and lost big. That outcome is something to think about now.

The Congress cannot however limit judicial tenure in any way. It can’t set a judicial retirement act because Aritcle III says as to tenure only that judges “…shall hold their Offices during good Behavior…”

So we have had too many justices serve into their eighties, even early nineties.

If seats turned over more often and more sensibly then the court would be less, far less a battleground.

In my state, New Jersey, the State Constitution provides for an appointed judiiary but sets a mandatory retirement age of 70 for judges, notably including the seven members of the New Jersey Supreme Court. Just this summer a justice who will be 70 next month stepped aside and a new justice was confirmed and seated.

Our constitution also requires all judges, inluding the seven justices, be confirmed to an initial seven-year term subject then to reappointment and reconfirmation to tenure – but only to age 70. The power to confim is held by the New Jersey Senate.

Appointments to the New Jersey Supreme Court even when there are governors and State Senates of opposite parties simply do not arouse the political fights to the death that SCOTUS nominations do. They are not for a lifetime. They are time-limited by the retirement age. It lowers tempers, reduces tensions, evens the stakes.

Would a federal judicial retirment age reduce the extreme political tension and division that goes with filling SCOTUS vacancies? Most probably, given the example of New Jersey and just plain common sense.

But that cannot happen without amendment of Article III and that plainly is not going to happen.

So we are stuck with the American body politic severely wounded each time there is nomination to fill a high court vacancy.

But this one – this one promises to be the most bitter, divisive and wounding ever.

The court is not a solution to what ails the United States of America, it is the essence of the problem, the terrible, insoluble problem of a nation at war with itself in this, America’s Era of Hard Feelings.

Lest we forget, judges wear black robes, not angels’ wings.

I play golf as those who know me know.

Golf, I say always, is a game you can only fail at — the question being only how well or badly you fail on any given day.

Ask Tiger Woods, he’d no doubt agree. It’s all a matter of perspective. He and his fellow pros hit a 9-iron 160 yards even these days. Me? I hit mine 100/105 yards.

But then they have to make their putts and I have to make mine. As the old adage in gold goes, “You drive for show, you putt for dough.”

For the pros it’s $1 million, even $2 million for a win. For me — and all the other duffers no doubt — a win is a score I never got before and probably never will again.

So, chasing that score, give or take, I have probably missed 10,000 three-foot putts.

But, so far as I know, no one ever got shot, murdered or otherwise harmed when I missed them.

I wouldn’t play the game if I thought anyone had suffered from my missed putts. Afer all, I miss a lot of them and wouldn’t want all those lives on my conscience — or my scorecard.

You know, in some ways, our consciences are the scorecards of our lives. I can’t imagine at this point what Donald Trump’s lifetime scorecard shows, never mind while he has been president, during which time I read recently he has played golf 275 times (yes, that is considerably more rounds than I’ve played while he has been president).

My guess is when he missed a three-footer he doesn’t count it on the card.

Nope, not me. When I miss those three-footers I just put a bogie or a double on the card and go on because golf, you see, is a game is self-policing and – and a game for optimists.

Optimistically, there’s always another shot, another hole, another nine, anouther round, the one when you are going to put it all together, when you are going to make all the three-foot putts.

Still, I miss my share of those.

But no one ever died on my 3-foot putts or when I missed one.

No one ever dies from a missed putt.

Me? I should put more practice into making the three-footers.

Who knows, I might save a life.

There are parts of the northeast in which directions will still guide you to the post road, maybe even specifically to the Boston Post Road.

In colonial times it ran from its namesake city through southeast Massachusetts into and across  Rhod Island and down through Connecticut to New York for interchange with the hinterland and Southlands beyond.

Why? Why do we still know of post roads?

Because post roads are enshrined in the U.S. Constitution.

The Constitution, at Article I, Section 8:

“The Congress shall have the power…To establish Post Offices and Post Roads…”

See, our right to have an unfettered postal service is inviolate, constitutional, and was an absolute insistence of one Benjamin Franklin, a Pennsylvania delegate to the Constitutional Convention held in his city of Philadelphia in 1787.

The Founding Fathers, at least those 39 who signed the Constitution, knew all too well how much the endeavor to achieve independence from Britain, the one to which those other Founding Fathers — the signers of the Declaration of Independence, had pledged their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor — had depended on colonial Committees of Correspondence being able to exchange – via riders riding hard and fast over primitive post roads — the ideas and ideals of liberty (complex graf I grant you but read it again.).

That’s why they put it in the Constitution of the United States of America, the one that says, “We the People, in order to form a more perfect union….”

Without our post offices, we are not a perfect union, we are not one people.

We don’t hardly ever buy stamps anymore to send something down the post road. We email, we text, we attach. Small wonder the postal service is losing money. But it was constitutonally never meant to make money. It was meant to serve us, “We the people…”

So, right now,  today, go to your local post office, the one the Constitution guarantees you. Buy a lot more stamps than you need or will ever again use — knowing we’ll never use them.

Do it for “Rare ole Ben Franklin.”  Do it for the Founding Fathers. Do it for the liberty they bequeathed us. Do it for yourself. Do it for the value of being an American. Do it as an investment in your country.

Above all, do it to share the ever-constant need to commit “our lives,  our fortunes, and our sacred honor” to the American cause of liberty and democracy.

In his eulogy for John Lewis remarking on voting rights, President Obama referred to jelly beans in a jar.

The reference is real.

In many places in say, Mississippi, Georgia, Alabama, and the rest of the deep south in the bad old days of outright Jim Crow — before the 1965 Voting Rights Act that Lewis fought for, was beaten for — when Black people tried to register to vote they’d be told they had to pass a test or two or three.

One or the most notrorious was the bean jar. The prospective registrant would be shown a gallon or even 5-gallon clear glass jar filled with beans, jelly, or otherwise. The aspiring voter would be told he or she needed to give the exact number in the jar.

Of course, that’s impossible and was and is meant to be. Even if there had been an actual count of the beans and even if the person seeking to register had gotten that right, well who was to say it wasn’t wrong? But of course, no one botehred with that – that was not the point.

No, the point was to devise a test only for Black people that no one, Black or white, could have passed to be able to vote.

Having failed to guess the number of beans in the jar, the hopeful registrant would be told in demeaning racial terms “Boy (Girl), Y’all work on that and come back next year.”

No, Justices Alito, Thomas, Roberts, Kavanaugh, and Gorsuch could not pass the test either. But their rulings eviscerating the 1965 Voting Rights Act take us back to the time of the jar of beans test – making them paradigms of Jim Crow. That old crow? He’s sitting right on their shoulder.

This is true, was true, this bean jar voting registration test. So is the fact that we have had forms of voting by mail for a very long time in the United States.

Elections were changed and subverted for nearly 100 years by disabling the franchise through race. But voting by mail? No. As we’ve learned again lately, the army that fought to end slavery got to vote by mail in 1864 – even as it fought up and down Virginia in the east and through Tennessee and into Georgia in the west.

No one can say there has not ever been a misuse here and there of this means of casting a vote; but to say that it is universally untrustworthy when it is almost universally trustworthy, well that’s as bad as that jar of beans.

Next time you’re in a candy store or a market with those big self-serve bins of candy,  take a look at the ones holding the jelly beans. Ask yourself if you would have been able to register to vote in say Alabama or Mississippi or Georgia or the Florida Panhandle in1920 or, or even 1960.

Or, this year, think about that when you fill in your mail ballot, then have a jelly bean or two or ten – you don’t have to count them to vote.

John Nance Garner died in 1966 at the venerable age of 98 having spent eight of his years as vice president of the United States.

Garner held that office from 1933 to 1941 during the first two terms of the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, having agreed to accept nomination for it to drop his own presidential candidacy at the 1932 Democratic National Convention when FDR found himself short of the two-thirds delegate majority then needed to gain the presidential nomination.

Continue reading “About That Bucket”

We know from the daily drumbeat of information about the Coronavirs that fully 25% of cases in the world are right here, in the United States and that 25% of the deaths to date across the globe are in the United States.

But look behind these numbers to another number contained within them and the depth of the failure in our country beggars the imagination.

Let’s look at that number.

There are 7.6 billion people in the world.

The population of the United States is 330 million, third-largest after India and China.

In the United States, again 330 million population, over 3.4 million people, .01% of the people (one percent) have been found with Coronavirus.

In the entire rest of the world with a population comprised by the other 7.3 billion people, 9.6 million people, .00125 (one-eighth of one percent) have been found with the virus.

That makes its incidence in this country eight times higher – 8 times higher than in the entire rest of the world – than on the rest of planet Earth.

Absorb that. There are 8 times as many cases per capita of Coronavirus in this country as there is in the other 194 other nations in the world combined.

Whose fault is this?

Surely the fault of very, very, many millions of stupid, recalcitrant, angry Americans – by observation overwhelmingly white Americans, people who seem to think nobody’s life matters, no one’s life is worth wearing a facemask.

But, above all, this is the fault of the American president, his historically corrupt, incompetent, malfeasant administration, and of the political party glued to him like a fly to flypaper.

What does this mean, almost certainly mean?

What does having 8 times the incidence of cases as the rest of the world mean as long as it goes on, continues unchanged? And it has not changed an iota since this started.

It means no one is going back to school, any school.

It means restaurants are not in our foreseeable future, or theater, or movies, or spectator sports or most sports at all — or even going to the dentist.

It means the U.S. economy will continue to sputter, lose jobs, shed commercial real estate values, have less and little certainty with markets that reel up, down, this way, that on every rumor.

It means the rest of the developed world will look away, look at us with pity, horror, anger, gloating, but look elsewhere for leadership we cannot offer.

It means more isolation, separation from family and friends, ongoing, unchanging disruption to life, social interaction.

It means masks are a permanent part of our wardrobes.

It means for the foreseeable future we have a new normal, this – this is our normal.

It means this cannot begin to change unless we change presidents, obtain a competent government, and give it at least six months perhaps even a year to restore common sense, efficiency, consistency, and ability in our national governance.

Just like you, I hope this is a wrong estimate.

But the evidence is in the numbers – numbers that show a coronavirus case incidence 8 times that in the rest of the world.

That is not a cry from Cassandra.

It is an incontrovertible mathematical fact that diagnoses us right now as a nation sickening with coronavirus while sickened every day by a malevolent, malfeasant government.

 

On the same day that it issued two rulings concerning presidential legal immunity in cases involving Donald Trump – one in his favor, the other not – the U.S. Supreme Court also handed down the latest in a two-century history of cases determining the rights of Native Americans and defining and refining their legal status as independent but dependent nations in the United States of America.

In a case from Oklahoma, where five exiled Indian nations maintain their trial standing — tribes exiled in the 1830s from Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, and Louisiana –the high court effectively ruled that the eastern half of that state is tribal reservation land.

Continue reading “New Reservations about Reservations”