LEFTOVERS

We are rapidly approaching the end of the year and there are still a few things I’d like to get off my chest. Matters that have surfaced or resurfaced this year and deserve more than a casual tweet but are not worked out enough for a full column. Here are three of them:

1.)    Consumerism

The media have for weeks, if not months, been buzzing about the supply chain problems and the tragedy that our Christmas presents might not make it from China in time to be put under the Christmas tree. I look at this a little differently. Year after year I’ve been aghast at the degeneration of a religious holiday into a celebration of American consumerism. “Are you ready for the Holiday? Oh, no, I have still to find something for my aunt Betsy and my twin cousins Jesse and Josh.” Really? What happens if you just treat them to a warm welcome at your house, for a great meal, fine spirits, and some meaningful conversation? Or maybe just go to church together or take them caroling in your neighborhood?

I have no problem with exchanging some gifts of things that, otherwise, would have been bought anyway, like clothing and other life essentials; nor do I begrudge those who want to add luster to the Holidays with special treats, delicacies or gift cards for a great restaurant, spa-service, a bookstore, or entertainment. But who needs any of the crap from China that is now still locked up in a container in one of our congested ports?

I see a challenge in the fact that our economy has become excessively dependent on consumption and our consumption disproportionally dependent on China. This is bad for America’s contest with China and, implicitly, bad for the struggle between democracy and authoritarianism, and very bad for the environment. I shudder to think of the mounds of, mostly plastic, trash that will be the visual leftover from Christmas and will add to our already overflowing garbage dumps, where ultimately all these Chinese presents will end up as well.

America is much better at meeting it ‘wants’ than at meeting its ‘needs’. Our economic health is far too dependent on consumptive spending. We can put heaps of presents, wanted or not wanted, under our Christmas trees, but we can’t offer our immigrant population a stable outlook, we can’t offer our aging population affordable, quality eldercare, we can’t offer our children of all ages the best affordable education, we can’t make insulin affordably available to all of our diabetics, and we can’t even guarantee all of our citizens that they will be fairly represented in Congress, that they can vote on these matters, and that their votes will be counted.

2.)    Abortion

It now looks likely that the Supreme Court will change the law of the land with respect to abortion and give States’ legislatures further leeway in restricting a woman’s right to an abortion than allowed under its 50 years old ‘Roe vs Wade’ ruling. On this subject, that has disproportionally and undeservedly influenced American politics, I have a few thoughts.

In the first place, it is a shame that an existential matter like abortion should be decided by the courts rather than by federal legislation. The way it is going, we will end up with widely diverging abortion rights and prohibitions between individual States. To me that looks like a very undesirable outcome.

Second, when I think about the topic of abortion, the first thing that comes to mind is the need to make sure that, if an abortion is needed and warranted, it will be performed by licensed professionals in a safe medical facility. History shows that abortions will be sought and performed, whether they are allowed by local rules or not. In a civilized world abortion should not be pushed back into the dark back alleys of a black market. Abortion, like prostitution, drugs, or alcohol, can’t be wished away or outlawed, it can and should be regulated.

Third, I look at abortion as a ‘last resort’ resolution of an unwanted situation, after the options of carrying the pregnancy to term and/or adoption have been carefully considered and turned down. That choice can ultimately only be made by the woman, but it should not be made without input from the father-to-be and professional guidance from social services.

Fourth, in the case of rape or incest the woman should have the right to terminate the pregnancy without interference from anyone.

Fifth, in Roe vs Wade, the Supreme Court established a woman’s right to an abortion up to the time of ‘viability’ of the fetus, defined as being able to survive outside of the womb. Generally, it is assumed that this occurs after 22 weeks of pregnancy. In the Dobbs vs Jackson Women’s Health case, now before the Supreme Court, a Mississippi law banning abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy is at stake. And from the oral arguments in that case and the current composition of the Supreme Court we can expect the court to let that Mississippi law stand and, in effect, reduce the time for a legal abortion from 22 to 15 weeks (a more recent Texas law, which may also come before the Supreme Court reduces the time for a legal abortion to only six weeks). The ‘viability’ threshold seems to me to make more sense than an arbitrary number of weeks. After all, the moral argument is about whether by an abortion we are snuffing out a life. My view is that, in case of an unwanted pregnancy, the law should give a woman the time to assert her pregnancy and come to grips with it and a reasonable time to determine how to deal with it. I have difficulty thinking of any situation in which these determinations could not be made before the fetus becomes viable but imposing an arbitrary time limit of six to fifteen weeks seems hard to justify if a woman’s right to an abortion is recognized at all. 

The law should also protect the woman’s physical and mental health going through this process and assure that, if it comes to abortion, it is performed by medical personnel in a safe place. If the pregnancy puts the life of the mother at risk, the law should allow the woman’s gynecological team to order an abortion at any time during her pregnancy, unless the mother has unambiguously expressed different wishes.

3.)    Melting pot.

The theory of America’s exceptional power and viability is based on the belief that the United States of America is this huge melting pot of people from all different origins, native and imported from all corners of the world. It is true that the US population consists of all these different elements, but a melting pot it is not. It is more like a layer cake. Just like oil and water don’t really mix: you can infuse one in the other, but they will layer out, if not immediately then over time. Together with American Exceptionalism we can move the construct of the melting pot to the land of fantasies. If America was a veritable melting pot, there would not be a ‘Black Caucus’ in Congress, there would be no Native American Reservations, there would be no Slavic Village in Cleveland, no Little Kabul in Fremont nor a concentration of Somalians in Minnesota, and there would be no China Town in any of the major cities. Maybe it just takes time and a hundred years from now we see a lot more assimilation, much like what happened in the 19^th and 20^th century with immigrant waves from Ireland, Italy, Germany, Scandinavia, Armenia, and Russia.

Does it matter? There is definite value in maintaining one’s ethnic identity, as long as it does not result into pitting one group of Americans against another. We already do too much of that between Democrats and Republicans. However, the layer cake model suggests that there is a ranking of inhabitants by ethnicity, which is exactly how the many white supremacists amongst us like to see it. Therein lies the danger. We are barely a United States of America, much less a United Peoples of America. What do we need to do to get to the point that being American supersedes all other identities we harbor?

WAKE UP AMERICA

My very good friend Jerry, who was born in Philadelphia, graduated from Haverford College, and worked with me in Philadelphia, just gave up his American passport and citizenship. He made a career in international trading and now lives in Geneva Switzerland, after stints in Hong Kong and Singapore. After pursuing dual citizenship and receiving his Swiss passport, he decided he had lost his affinity with what America has become and therewith his pride in being an American citizen. And he brought his belief to its ultimate conclusion. It was not for fiscal reasons that he severed ties with his country of origin, it was because he is repulsed by what he sees happening in America. He did not act on impulse, but after carefully assessing where he saw America heading. Wake up America!

America’s two-party system that has long provided the operational framework for public governance is at risk of morphing into a one-party system, not because voters want it to go that way, but because the Republican Party has patiently and inexorably rigged the system in its favor. It has been able to do so by taking advantage of the people’s reverence for the Constitution, even where it no longer serves the exigencies of the modern society or where it has been misinterpreted by the Supreme Court. By taking advantage of archaic provisions in Senate rules like the filibuster and in voting laws and the laws governing the composition of Congress like the Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929. By packing the courts with members of the Federalist Society. And by the process of gerrymandering Congressional Districts, to the effect that in many Congressional Districts the Republican primary, not the general election, decides who occupies the seat in the House of Representatives.

There are sensible, well written and well publicized, solutions to the imperfections in America’s public governance system, but today’s Republican Party has no interest in pursuing any of them, since they all would limit its inherent grip on power resulting from the fact that representation in Congress is adjudicated not on the basis of the national popular vote but on the basis of States (for the Senate) and Districts (for the House of Representatives). Don’t you see the threat to our democracy? Wake up America!

The American people have every right to be disenchanted with the way they are governed, or not governed. It is simply too hard to produce any significant legislation that deals with improving the lives of ordinary citizens. But do you throw the baby out with the bathwater? It is not democracy’s fault that no significant results come out of the Beltway. The fault lies with the two-party system that fails when one of the parties is hell bent on rigging the game and does not care about democracy. Under Trump, and even after losing the 2020 Presidential election, the Republican party has decided to do to democracy what Trump has done with programs, initiatives, and institutions he did not like: kill them rather than try to rework and improve on them. Cases in point: Transpacific Partnership, Paris Accord, Iran Nuclear Deal, World Health Organization, Obamacare (only saved because of one vote by John McCain).

The Republican Party (I deliberately stopped referring to them as the Grand Old Party, which it is no more) is running without a policy platform, only intent on blocking the Democratic agenda as a way of taking control of Congress in 2022 and the White House in 2024, by hook or by crook. The Republican Party is putting the great American experiment, democracy itself, in jeopardy and not by chance, but intentionally. The Atlantic Magazine is spelling it out in detail in Barton Gellman’s article ‘Trump’s Next Coup Has Already Begun’ in the January/February issue https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/01/january-6-insurrection-trump-coup-2024-election/620843/

The Atlantic Magazine is one of several media voices that are raising the alarm bell. At issue is no longer the difference in expectations of what government should deliver, which is a legitimate policy debate; it is about the functioning or dismantling of our democracy. In this struggle, the Republican Party does not want America to be leading the world in championing for democracy; rather, it is following the example of what authoritarians in Russia, Hungary, Poland, and Turkey have managed to bring about, a one-party rule in what is only a nominally democratic system. What irony would it be if democracy were to be smothered in the cradle where it came to life in the modern era! And yet, that’s exactly what we are facing. Wake up America!

My friend Jerry had seen enough. He threw in the towel and gave back his US passport. But he was already living away from the States and had found a home and citizenship in Switzerland. What about us, who are horrified by what we witness but have no choice but to stay Stateside? First, we should resist the impulse to fight fire with fire. The leftist rhetoric is as ugly and damaging as the torrent of lies, hate, and conspiracy emanating from the populist right. We can only protect democracy by exercising our democratic rights. Second, we need the remaining champions of democracy to stop fighting internally and seek common ground between the moderates on both sides of the center. It does not make sense to argue about a ‘Build Back Better’ plan, when democracy is under the gun. We need to sort out who is a (small cap) democrat and who is authoritarian and then use our votes to place or keep the true democrats in office. Democracy’s path goes through the voting booth. Wake up America!

There is a reasonably good chance that the anti-democratic, authoritarian, drift of the Republican Party will self-destruct. That the fire will burn itself out by intensity. That may happen when, with typical tyrannical abandon and hubris, the Republican Party will continue it’s ideological cleansing in the primary process. My bet is that they may go too far in putting up candidates for elective office, Statewide and National, who are unpalatable to the voters in general elections. The conventional wisdom is that the party of the incumbent President will lose the mid-term elections and the betting is that this will happen again in 2022. In a normal democracy that would not be a disaster. In America, in 2022, it would be the death knell of democracy. And yet, it will happen unless the election produces an unequivocal repudiation of authoritarianism. Wake up America and throw the insurgents out.

PIPEDREAM

How much more dysfunctional can America get? Congress finally passed a long overdue, bi-partisan, infrastructure upgrade bill and now the 13 Republican legislators who voted in favor of the bill are being crucified by their own party for lending their support to this rare act of Congressional governance. Never mind that they voted for a bill that had passed the Senate with support of 19 Republicans, including the minority leader.

There is so much wrong with the current American system of public governance, that it is exasperating.          

The biggest issue is that it has become virtually impossible to right the ship and make the systematic changes that could put the ship of state back on course. It is not for a dearth of available improvements that the current stasis exists. The only reason that America can’t get out of its own way is that in the two-party system, with the parties more or less equally balanced, it is easy to calculate if a particular systematic improvement favors one party or the other. In today’s constellation, almost every possible move to unshackle the political process and democratize the system seems to favor the Democrats and is therefore blocked by the Republicans.

At first glance, abandoning the filibuster rule of the Senate offers itself as a prime example of this reality. But think again: While dropping the filibuster rule would allow the current Democratic administration to push through its agenda during this Congressional term, it would negate and reverse that advantage the moment the Republicans regain the majority in the Senate, which is a good possibility for 2022. Worse for them, if, in 2024, the Republicans were to win the White House as well as the Congress, the Democrats would find themselves deprived of any defense of their minority control and would have to helplessly watch the Republicans undo their legislative achievements. On the other hand, abandoning the filibuster rule is one of very few things the Democrats can do on their own without Republican support, while they have the majority in the Senate. And they will undoubtedly realize that if they don’t make this move while they are in charge, the Republicans can drop the filibuster rule at any time of their choosing once they regain control of the Senate.

But what about other possible improvements to the public governance system?

The good thing is, that much can be done without requiring an amendment to the Constitution. The bad thing, that in Congress nothing can get done without 60 votes in the Senate, unless the filibuster rule is dumped, but in that case any improvement orchestrated by the party in power can be undone once the balance of power shifts again.

We must also recognize that not all systematic improvements can be made at the federal level. Democracy in the USA is in large part a matter of State control. Two State prerogatives have a particularly large bearing on the functioning of the democratic process:

·        The mapping of Congressional Districts

·        The apportionment of Electoral votes

But, at the national level, there would still be plenty of room for improvement by e.g.

·        Expansion of the House of Representatives

·        Automatic voter registration

·        Making Election Day a Federal Holiday

The Democratically controlled House of Representatives has recognized the need for improvement of access to the polls and safeguarding against disenfranchising minority groups within the voting population by passing two Voting Rights Protection bills that are now stalled because of Republican resistance in the Senate enabled by the filibuster rule.

Expansion of the House of Representatives based upon the results of the 2020 Census is not part of either Voting Rights Protection bill but would also most certainly be blocked in the Senate, as it would presumably favor the Democrats since most of the population growth since 1929 (when the current limit of 435 seats in the House of Representatives was established) has taken place in the dense urban population areas where the Democratic Party enjoys the most support. By adding to the number of Congressional Districts in the areas of the highest population growth, it would make Congress more representative of the population and make it harder for States to gerrymander their Congressional Districts. The American population has nearly tripled from the Census of 1920 on which the current count of 435 seats was based, but Congress has neglected to acknowledge that growth in its representation of the voting public.

If nothing else, two legislative initiatives could go a long way to making the US election system more representative of the population demographics and fairer to minority representation:

1.       Creating a new Permanent Apportionment Act that requires that the number of House Seats is based on the Census population divided by 500,000; and

2.       Abandoning the ‘winner takes all’ rule for the apportionment of Electoral Votes currently in place in 48 of the 50 States and replacing it with a proportional apportionment based on the popular vote for President in each State.

With the current number of 435 House seats, each House seat represented an average of 242,000 citizens under the Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929. According to the 2020 Census it represented an average of 762,000 citizens. To bring that number back to 500,000 would increase the number of House seats from 435 to 663.

The increase in the number of House seats would also result in an increase in the number of seats in the Electoral College (which is equal to the sum of the seats in the House and the Senate plus 3 seats for the District of Columbia). It would take an act of Congress to make this change.

Abandoning the ‘winner takes all rule’ would require the legislative action by the 48 States (all but Maine and Nebraska). It would eliminate the disenfranchisement of minority votes cast in a Presidential Election.

Unfortunately, even these relatively minor amendments of the democratic process in the US remain a pipedream, as long as the People are represented by two similarly sized parties that are at unbreakable loggerheads with each other. This makes the outlook for a better functioning political system in the USA so exasperating.

EVERYTHING ELSE CAN WAIT

When, in 2014, I finished my book ‘NEITHER HERE NOR THERE, A First-Generation Immigrant in Search of American Exceptionalism’*, I was still in limbo about America’s destiny. It was not clear to me that the political system, as it had developed over the lifetime of the republic, had the capacity to deal effectively with the intractable problems that had surfaced and accumulated after the end of the cold war. I concluded that our system does not seem to be functioning as designed in the absence of a clear and present danger from the outside. I saw a problem in the two-party system, where two parties at constant loggerheads cancelled each other out and I saw the need of the creation of a centrist third party as a possible way out of the impasse. Like a ‘white knight’ or a catalyst for breaking the logjam. At the time, it seemed that our democracy was malfunctioning, not delivering results for the people, but the unassailability of the democratic principle was not in question.

That was before the Republican Party was hijacked by Donald Trump.

Now we know better, and it is time to face the harsh reality. Democracy itself is being challenged and it is seriously imperiled, not just in Russia, Poland, Hungary, and Turkey, but in the cradle of contemporary democracy, the United States of America. American democracy is imperiled not by foreign powers, but by one of its political parties seeking power beyond the boundaries of its popular support. What once was the Grand Old Party is no more. It has morphed into an anti-democratic, populist movement bent on taking control of public governance of the United States of America regardless of the outcome of elections.

It did not come across as particularly surprising or alarming that Donald Trump, after the closing of the polls in November of last year, declared himself the winner in defiance of what the polling results were showing. Very few people seemed to believe him and he had, already long before the election, declared that only election fraud could deny him a victory at the voting booth. And in court case after court case, claims of voter fraud were refuted. Without exception. More than sixty times. It looked for a while that the Republican Party would move on from an ill-fated experiment and a loser who had cost them control of the White House and the Senate. Election officials, Republicans and Democrats alike, in battle ground States of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, and Pennsylvania held their ground in defending the fairness of their elections and the accuracy of their vote count, in many cases after multiple audits and recounts. The result of the election was certified in each of the States and the members of the Electoral College were appointed accordingly. Under these circumstances, certification of the Electoral College vote by Congress in joint session should have been a routine matter as it had been before in all Presidential elections.

Not this time. On January 6, 2021, an angry mob of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol, disrupting the counting of the Electoral Votes by the Congress and Trump supporters in Congress objected to the Electoral Vote counts in Arizona and Pennsylvania, causing the chambers to split and debate the objections. When order at the Capitol had been restored, both chambers voted to turn down the objections and certify the Electoral College vote, but 8 Republican Senators and 139 House Members supported at least one objection.

A constitutional crisis was averted this time, but the next time we may not be that lucky, because the weaknesses, vulnerabilities, and ambiguities of the Presidential transition process had surfaced for everyone to see. And Republican operatives at the State and Federal level are acting to exploit these flaws at the next opportunity.

What worries me most about this scenario is the apparent denial among democrats, independents and the few conventional republicans who have not fallen for the Trump spell, that we are facing an imminent threat to democracy itself. I detect only a handful of political commentators who warn us of the seriousness of the threat our democracy is facing. Robert Kagan, a senior fellow at the Brooking Institute and a member on the Counsel for Foreign Relations is one of them. In a September 23 article in the Washington Post he warned that we are already in a Constitutional crisis. Kagan writes: “The fact that Trump failed to overturn the 2020 election has reassured many that the American system remains secure, though it easily could have gone the other way – if Biden had not been safely ahead in all four states where the vote was close; if Trump had been more competent and more in control of the decision-makers in his administration, Congress and the states.”

Distress signals have also been given in recent books by Anne Applebaum (Twilight of Democracy), Fiona Hill (There is nothing for you here), Bob Woodward and Robert Costa (Peril) and in a well-publicized YouTube video by Bill Maher. But public sense of alarm is disturbingly missing. Even among politicians, although Republicans Christine Todd Whitman and Miles Taylor have come out publicly in a guest essay in the New York Times to exhort fellow ‘rational’ Republicans to “form an alliance with Democrats to defend American institutions, defeat far-right candidates, and elect honorable representatives next year – including a strong contingent of moderate Democrats.” They write: “We cannot tolerate Republican leaders – in 2022 or in the presidential election in 2024 – refusing to accept the results of elections or undermining the certification of those results should they lose.” Republican congressmen Lizz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger are resisting the Trump takeover of the GOP, and the insurrection movement, by their high-profile membership in the January 6 Select Committee of the House of Representatives. The next elections are not a routine choice between left or right, liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican. They will be about preserving or abandoning our constitutional democracy.

What can and must be done to stave off the looming constitutional crisis?

·        The Trump Republicans must be thoroughly defeated at the voting booth in 2022 and 2024.

·        To that end, Democrats and Independents must put up impeccably qualified candidates for elected office at the State and Federal level and push for a high voter turnout.

·        Democrats should stop quarreling internally and pass legislation, this year, to protect voting rights, to revamp our infrastructure, and to implement Biden’s ‘Build Back Better’ plan.

·        The Biden Administration needs to get the COVID-19 pandemic under complete control.

EVERYTHING ELSE CAN WAIT.

*The book is available @ http://www.amazon.com/dp/0692209778

DEATH BY 750,000 CUTS

America is on its way towards 750,000 COVID deaths by the end of this year. Think about it, this is equivalent to 250 times the 9/11 deaths that still traumatize the nation 20 years later. These deaths are not imprinted on our collective memory by searingly graphic TV pictures but take place, one by one, in the ugly isolation of ICU rooms where the silence is broken only by the hum of ventilators and cries of despair from the nursing staff. The tragic tally stands at 670,000 as of this writing, with 270,000 of these deaths occurring during the Biden Presidency. If these casualties had been the result of two years of war, Americans would be out on the streets in numbers not seen since the days of the war in Vietnam, which claimed 58,000 American military casualties. Yet, America is seemingly taking the COVID toll in stride, stubbornly refusing to be unified in taking the few simple civil defense steps required to put an end to the epidemic.

President Biden came into office, promising a quick end to the pandemic made feasible because his predecessor had made sure that a vaccine was being made available at no cost to the whole population, first to the most vulnerable and then quickly to everyone else. Between the protection provided by the vaccine and the natural immunity provided in people who have survived the infection, the epidemic appeared to be coming under control, at least in the USA. The relief was palpable, and people initially were willing to jump through hoops to get the shot. My wife and I stood in line for four hours in frigid Cleveland weather in February to get the injection. Who would have guessed at the time that taking the two steps required to slay the dragon, vaccination and mask wearing, would become a political football? The country has a history of coming together under a serious external threat, like it did for a while after the 9/11 attacks, but this time it appears to be more divided than ever, with disastrous effect. The deaths now occurring from the virus are largely, if not completely, avoidable. Not surprisingly, they befall mostly to the unvaccinated, a group that includes not just anti-vaxxers but also children under 12 years old and people who have just been dragging their heels on getting the shot.

The President of the United States swears at inauguration to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution, but the expectation is that the first line of duty for the President is the safety and security of the American people. In spite of all the good intentions and measures taken by his administration, President Biden is falling short in fulfilling this sacred duty, as the numbers painfully show. He cannot possibly be accepting of 350,000 or more COVID casualties in his first year in office. And yet, that is where we are heading with a 7 day average of almost 2,000 new COVID deaths per day. He is at risk of suffering more COVID deaths under his watch than his predecessor. 

I hear voices* saying that these casualties are part of a deliberate attempt by Republicans who see vaccine resistance and mask refusal as legitimate ways to derail the Biden Presidency. That these Republicans love to see the current administration fail in its top priority of getting the COVID epidemic under control and make this failure an issue in the 2022 midterm election and the 2024 Presidential election. Whether the GOP deviousness goes this far or not, it is indisputable that virtually all the resistance against vaccination and mask wearing is coming from the extreme wings of our politics, on the right and the left side of the great political divide. The Biden administration should be much more emphatic and unapologetic in mandating vaccination as it is the only way to stem the tide of new COVID infections, hospitalizations, and deaths. It cannot allow to let the abundant domestic supply of vaccines go to waste. And it cannot allow the virus to continue to develop new and increasingly dangerous mutations.

While we see a spirit of resistance against federal control of COVID defense go insufficiently contested, we are witnessing a ‘holier than thou’ tendency among GOP operatives who want to outdo each other in fealty to their spiritual and ideological leader, the 45^th President of the United States. Without exception, these Republican ‘leaders’ reject mandated vaccinations and mask wearing and many of them still maintain that Trump won the 2020 election and that, therefore, the Biden Presidency is illegitimate and should be brought down. These ‘leaders’ characterize the January 6 attack on the Capitol as a peaceful demonstration, protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution, and are now calling for acquittal of the insurrectionists who ransacked the Capitol that day, threatened the assembled representatives and tried to keep Congress from certifying the outcome of the Presidential election of 2020.

Egged on by the right-wing media, these people are the real culprits. They are trespassing against their oath of office and have blood on their hands. They are directly responsible for the avoidable COVID deaths we continue to endure. Unfortunately, their ranks are swelling since more and more conventional Republicans are either giving up on the GOP or are being forced out by local extremist factions in their States or Districts. Latest case in point for the extremist trend in the GOP is the decision by Anthony Gonzalez, the Ohio representative for the 16^th District, which includes some of the Cleveland suburbs, not to run for office in 2022. Gonzalez, a Cuban American who starred as an Ohio State wide receiver and earned an M.B.A. at Stanford, was one of 10 Republican representatives voting to impeach Donald Trump after the January 6 Capitol insurrection. He called the former President ‘a cancer for the country’ and spoke of a ‘toxic environment’ within the Republican Party. He once was regarded, at 37 years of age, a rising star at the Republican firmament.

Maybe, just maybe, this is happening for a good reason. Maybe, just maybe, the GOP is killing itself from within by marginalizing or expelling the few remaining conventional Republicans. If this trend continues and the GOP offers the voting public a slate of Trumpists for the 2022 midterms, it may just snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

If the GOP puts up candidates like it did with Larry Elder in the gubernatorial recall contest in California, it may in effect throw the Biden administration a lifeline and allow the Democrats to keep their tenuous grip on Congress. I refuse to believe that Independents and conventional Republicans will allow the Trump movement to take control of the Congress. If the Republican primaries favor the Trump loyalists, they may earn themselves a Pyrrhus victory that will turn into defeat in the general election.

In the meantime, the Biden administration does not help its cause by ineptly handling the exit from Afghanistan, finished with a horrible, misguided drone attack on 10 innocent Afghans, including 7 children, and the lack of organization and control exhibited at handling the influx of illegal immigrants on our Southern border.

At a time that it needs to show mastery in governing competence in order to steer its ambitious platform of voting protection, infrastructure upgrade, and inequality reduction through an uncooperative Congress, it is at risk of getting waylaid by serious failings in its operative management.   It has one year left to get the COVID epidemic under control, prevent further avoidable deaths, retake control of its borders and avoid anymore operational blunders. And then, it will need help from the GOP shooting itself in the foot by presenting an unelectable slate of representatives for the midterm election if it wants to have any chance of keeping control of Congress so that it gets two more years to change public governance in a more progressive, future oriented, direction. As it stands, there is every chance that the Biden administration will suffer the fate of the nation: Death by 750,000 cuts.

* Notably Susan B. Glasser in a September 16 article in The New Yorker.

AMERICAN CULTURE

Every distinct culture is rich in untouchable topics, features, belief systems and the like, but few are richer in stringent ‘a-priori rules’ than the American norm system. I find it counterintuitive that, in a society that prides itself in championing personal freedom and individual responsibility, there are so many places ‘you just don’t go’.

You don’t show up at a friend’s or a neighbor’s house, uninvited.

You don’t talk about money, religion, or politics at social gatherings.

You don’t let your grass grow beyond a few inches and you certainly don’t allow it to be overtaken by dandelions.

You don’t kneel when the national anthem is played.

You don’t disrespect the flag (but you are allowed to wear it as a bathing suit, covering your bottom).

Note that none of these norms contribute in any way to a better understanding between people, to a more compassionate ambiance, or to better respect for diversity of opinion and heritage. How much better off would we have been if we had embraced an entirely different set of norms? Norms that would support more solidarity between people of different creed, provenance, race, sexual orientation, education level, and societal status. And norms that would provide a corner stone for a common purpose and collective ambition.

The American culture has developed from rebellion against authority (the British rule) and the frontier spirit. But the British rule was vanquished, and the frontier has been pushed back into the Pacific Ocean. Yet, it seems, we have never adjusted to the new reality. Or, at least, a vocal minority of us has refused to adjust to the new reality and has organized politically to preserve the outdated norms. And, because of peculiarities in the American system of public governance, they may very well be in control for the foreseeable future.

America is still the most prosperous and powerful country on earth, but it can’t build consensus on how to put that prosperity and power to good use. It lacks the collective will and strategic plan to apply its wealth and power to a process of improving the life of humankind, in America first, but, closely behind, all over the world.

Just in the past twenty years, America has squandered trillions of dollars on unnecessary and ill-fated wars. Think about the tremendous good that kind of money could have done, had it been applied to causes that would have improved the lot of humanity. Like redoubling efforts to cure −as yet− incurable diseases; or taking effective steps in minimizing human contributions to climate change and building defenses against the impacts of global warming; or simply reducing the inequalities (in income, access to healthcare and education, safety and security, and wellness), not resulting from personal shortcomings but merely and directly from where you were born and who your parents are.

The Biden administration is making a serious effort to redirect public spending in that direction and increase it measurably. But it is hampered by a razor thin margin of support in Congress, by a impatient and rebellious left wing of the Democratic party, and by archaic parliamentary rules of the Senate. If, in the year it has left before the next election, it fails in getting its ambitious agenda of physical and human infrastructure improvement, and voting reform past Congress and signed into law, it is unlikely to get a second chance.

No one can, in good conscience, argue that America does not have the financial strength to implement the policy initiatives of the Biden administration. It may have to be more reticent about getting entangled in unnecessary wars that it cannot win, and it may have to rethink its tax structure and tax collection system, but it certainly has the wealth generating power, the wherewithal, to address the triple threat of incurable disease, global warming, and extreme inequality. The real question is if America can muster the political will to shift away from the frontier mentality of individual responsibility to a more cosmopolitan, contemporary, mentality of collective responsibility for the wellness of society at large and all the individuals comprised within.

The 2022 and 2024 elections will show us if that political will exists. The deck is stacked against Joe Biden and the Democrats. The popular will, that largely seems to support the Biden initiatives, does not account for much in the current system of government. The gerrymandering of voting districts, limiting the House of Representatives to 435 members (a number that was reached in 1913), the disappearing political center, and the filibuster rule in the Senate have seen to that. Midterm elections are notoriously unaccommodating to incoming administrations and Joe Biden’s botching of the exit from Afghanistan is sure to take away from any residual goodwill he may had retained with Republican voters and lawmakers.

Unfortunately, changing the American culture and national priorities has become a purely partisan matter. We have managed to turn even sound public health policy on vaccination and mask wearing into expressions of partisan creed. It should not be that way. Societal strengthening never was and should not be a Democratic prerogative. America will have a hard time being seen by the rest of the world as the legitimate world leader, the example to emulate, if it fails to create a better, more just and sustainable, society at home.

5th of July

Today is the day America observes Independence Day to make sure we all have a day off to celebrate. The question is: “what is there to celebrate this year?” It should be unbridled, unrestrained. We have nearly beaten the virus; we are opening up our ballparks; we are gathering at our parades, fireworks displays, and backyard barbecues; and yet, it doesn’t feel all that celebratory. We have not come out of the pandemic unscathed. Not only have we lost more than 600,000 of our fellow countrymen, we appear to have also lost every sense of unity. We have managed to color every human action in political, partisan, terms: Wearing a mask, flying a flag, getting vaccinated (or not). The schism has occurred along different fault lines, mostly in search of the better argument on who the flag and the nation belong to and how the nation should be governed.

The schism is brought to the surface, in broad daylight, when the former President in a public appearance proclaims that his “successor is destroying our country, and it all started with a fake election”. Until Trump, it was unthinkable that a former President would personally criticize his successor in such terms, much less malign the security and reliability of the American electoral process. With the terrible tragedy in Surfside, Florida, we have just been painfully reminded that when cracks develop in a structure the collapse can come at any time. Did not our most celebrated President warn us that “A house divided against itself cannot stand.”?

The schism has crept into our personal lives, by pitching neighbor against neighbor, co-worker against co-worker, friend against former friend, and even family member against family member. And what is the dispute all about? It is about the kind of republic we want to live in. We may have thought that the battle had been decided when on July 4, 1776, the Second Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence with the words: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.” But we now realize that even then, we never really meant what we proudly professed; that we only accepted that all white men (not women) were created equal and endowed with the lofty unalienable rights. The “Big Lie”, that so much dominates our discourse and dispute today, was with us from the inception of the Republic. And it has remained with us ever since.

America is taking its eyes off the ball. At a time that our principles and our economic and political world leadership are being tested like never before, we stoop down in internal squabbles and partisan strife. Our politicians refuse to build a consensus on anything, and we accuse each other of selling out the peoples’ interest for control of the government. Adam Kinzinger, one of the few remaining principled GOP House Representatives, puts it frighteningly accurate in his July 2 interview with David Marchese of the New York Times Magazine: “And since we are in this political environment, I would say internal division is actually the thing that I fear the most right now. I jokingly say — but I’m not really joking — if China nuked California, a lot of Republicans would be like, “Good, we can win.” And if they nuked Texas, there might be a lot on the left saying, “Good, we can win.” I say that facetiously, but that’s how it feels at moments, and that’s a big concern.”

When will we turn back from our wayward ways, and will it be timely enough to avoid defeat and humiliation? On this 5^th of July I find it hard to be optimistic about the prospects for a miraculous recovery. The elections of 2022 and 2024 are already looming large, the sharks are smelling blood in the water, and winning, gaining control of Congress and the White House, is all that matters. Dealing with suffocating inequality, with rampant acceleration of global warming, and with the Chinese threat, can wait (will have to wait, because ‘the other party’ cannot be trusted to come up with the right solutions, so they need to be defeated first.)

This is the American version of a classical Greek tragedy. At a time of unprecedented national prosperity, economic and technological strength, America is facing existential threats, but seemingly unconcerned with a national mobilization against these threats. If there ever was a good time to mobilize all of our strengths and unite in an effort to fend off the triple threat we are facing, it is now. But, unfortunately we appear to be otherwise engaged.

What is needed in the worst way is a national strategy that spells out the threats America is facing and crafts a plan to counteract, overcome and defeat these threats. America needs a strategy that transcends administrations, because taking the edge off the scope and depth of inequality; managing the human contributions to climate change and protecting people and property from the effects of global warming; and winning, peacefully, a contest with China for world leadership, is a long-term project that can only be completed with allocation of full resources of time, funding, and – crucially important – political unity. America will not finish this century in the lead if it cannot muster all these resources. We know what the enemy is, and it is not ‘the other party’. Inequality, climate change, and China are, without doubt, the challenges to meet. There should be no dispute between Republicans and Democrats about that. They may differ of opinion on how to counter these threats, but reconciling differences is what the democratic political process is all about. Will America once more prove to be equal to the task? That is not a given and it will depend on our willingness and ability to set our petty differences and partisan interests aside, recommit us to the best of the democratic process, and put the interest of the People and the nation above all other considerations.

THE LOYAL OPPOSITION

Whatever happened to the notion of ‘the loyal opposition’? In our system of government, the loyal opposition is the opposition party in the legislature. The word loyal indicates that the non-governing party may oppose the proposals and actions of the President and his cabinet while remaining loyal to the national interest and the formal source(s) of the government's power, such as the republican form of government and the constitution.

If it were not for the fact that the next national election is only 17 months away, and that we will have another Presidential election in 2024, there is little doubt that creating and funding an independent commission to investigate the events of January 6, 2021 would have been a routine, non-controversial, matter for Congress to decide, as long as the commission would be bi-partisan and consisting of people with established authority and integrity. But there will be elections in November of 2022 and November of 2024 and the maneuvering, jockeying for position, for these elections is already in full swing. So, this commission is unlikely to ever see the light of day, at least until after the next set of elections is behind us.

The Republican minority leader, Mitch McConnell, has made no bones about it when he stated earlier this month: “One hundred percent of my focus is standing up to this administration” and “It’s not at all clear what new facts or additional investigation yet another commission could lay on top of the existing efforts by law enforcement and Congress.” Little surprise for someone who had earlier, in 2012, declared to move heaven and earth to make sure that Barack Obama would be a one-term President. This is no longer a loyal opposition.

The Republican party has seen that the existing rules of the game have not allowed them to alter the outcome of the 2021 election in the heavily contested races in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, and Pennsylvania that went against them, and the party is working hard to bend the rules in its favor. The instruments at its disposal are the gerrymandering of voting districts, the tightening of voting rules and voting access, and the freedom of State legislations to appoint members of the Electoral College in deviation of the outcome of the popular vote in States with a Republican majority. And the party leaders are hell-bent on using all these instruments to secure a more favorable outcome in the next set of elections.

They know that, typically, midterm elections favor the party that missed out on the White House, but they are not about to take any chances, so they block Congressional action on the change of any rule they like, e.g. the filibuster rule, the number of members of the House of Representatives, and the denial of Statehood to the citizens of the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and other American Territories, while, at the same time, using their dominance in the majority of State legislatures to change the rules they don’t like.

This is no longer loyal opposition. Purely partisan interest is taking precedence over the national interest and the most basic principles of democracy are being flaunted in the process. All the Republican positioning and action is directed towards denying the Biden administration to implement its, admittedly ambitious, leftist agenda in the hope that a failed administration will hand them control of Congress in 2022 and the White House in 2024.  

This is no longer a tug of war between two ideologies, both firmly rooted in fundamental democracy, one left of center and the other one right of center, both fighting for the favor of a larger share of the voting public. The party at the right has been hijacked by people who are in the game only to protect their own perceived interest and are no longer encumbered by the guardrails of democracy. For today’s Republican party, the end justifies the means, and the end is to stay in power even if it represents only a minority of the population. It follows the abhorrent path charted by the Nationalist Socialist German Workers’ Party, which grabbed power from a minority position based on lies, conspiracy theories, and racism, enforced by terror and intimidation. Here at home, an estimated 14% of Americans believe that Donald Trump won the 2020 election and is still the legitimate President of the United States. But their reach is much longer than the number suggests, because of fear and intimidation. The fear of being 'primaried' if stepping out of line with the Trumpian gospel; the fear of not winning the next election and, maybe, never winning an election again; and the intimidation of being censured, ridiculed, and threatened by hordes of delusional fanatics like on January 6, 2021.

The principled, democracy loving, traditional Republicans who refuse to bend to this populist pressure have a hard choice to make. Will they put principle above power, the people above party and deny the disloyal opposition the power grab it is after? Will they go as far as creating a third party that is solidly positioned right of center and faithful to true conservatism and long-established democratic principles and rules? A tough choice to make, because it would most likely condemn both the Republican party and the third-party spin-off to minority status in Congress for a long time, even though they could viably contend for the White House with a strong and popular candidate. But a loyal opposition party could possibly find ways to reign in and contain the leftist impulses of the Democratic Party and cooperate on a bi-partisan agenda of all steps the nation so desperately needs: reduced inequality, voting right protection, social justice, economic stability, fiscal responsibility, and infrastructure enhancement.

OVER THEIR HEADS

The 46^th President of the United States has a problem, in fact several problems. He got his job, arguably the hardest job in the world, while he is 78 years old, an age at which most Americans are comfortably retired, trying to make the most out of their ‘golden years’ or what is left of those. The only reason why he took the job, in fact pursued it, is out of a sense of urgency, an urgency created by decades of benign neglect of the plight of the ordinary American citizens and the dereliction of duty by his predecessor, compounded by the worst pandemic inflicted on the nation in over a hundred years. The problem is that he is under extreme time pressure and that democracy denies him the tools to simply impose his will and agenda on a divided nation. The time pressure stems less from his advanced age than from the fact that he is at serious risk of losing his majority in Congress in the midterm elections of November next year.

President Biden has concluded that he needs to avoid losing control of Congress if he wants to have a full four years to make good on his campaign promises and he has chosen to make this happen by using the full force of the government to come to the aid of hard-pressed lower income Americans who have been disproportionally hit by decades of governmental neglect and by the devastating effects of the corona pandemic. He made his pitch Wednesday night, at the eve of his first 100 days in office, at a joint session of Congress, but really over the heads of the 200 legislators permitted in the chambers. He bets heavily on the premise that, ultimately, his Republican opposition cannot keep swimming against the tide of public opinion that heavily favors the main components of his agenda. In this he has a distinct advantage in the fact that the Republican party, under Trump, has decided to go without a platform and agenda, other than to oppose anything the Democrats want to get done.

At the heart of his pitch on Wednesday night was this appeal to his audience: “Look, we can’t be so busy competing with one another that we forget the competition that we have with the rest of the world to win the 21^st century.” Biden is keenly aware that the world, friend and foe alike, is watching to see if America can demonstrate that democracy is still the governing principle that can deliver for the people. And, in the prototypically Democratic style of FDR and Lyndon Johnson before him, he is unapologetically moving to use government as an instrument of social and economic transformation. His Republican critics are right in arguing that Covid relief and infrastructure improvements do not have to cost as much as the roughly $6 trillion that the Biden package amounts to. Calling a spade a spade, the Biden package is an ill disguised initiative to disperse the inequality cloud hanging over American society, by using the full force of the government to transform what our market economy and polarized partisan politics have not been able to correct. The economy seems to be recovering nicely with the stimulus put in place by Congress in five increments, starting under the Trump presidency, and does not require the proposed level of further spending, but restoring social equilibrium and peace does, at least in the judgment of President Biden.

He bets on the premise that if he cannot get sixty votes, sixty percent of the Senate, to agree with him on policy, he can still prevail by getting sixty percent or more of the voting public on his side. As it stands, the Monmouth University Poll indicates that with respect to his main initiatives, particularly his proposals for infrastructure investment, expanded healthcare and childcare, paid leave, and college tuition support, he garners more than 60% support from his constituents. The same poll suggests that a large majority also supports paying for these plans by raising taxes on corporations and wealthy individuals making more than $400,000/year.

The question is if this support will last and carry over into the only polls that really matter, the midterm elections of 2022. That, in turn, is likely to depend on how much of the plan can be implemented and provide tangible relief to the people who need it, before the people are called to the polls again.

Herein lies the Gordian knot that President Biden will have to unwind. I think he is right in arguing that America cannot win the competition with China, and democracy cannot win the competition with autocracy, if we continue to compete with ourselves. I also think that America cannot regain its status as the beacon of guidance to the world if it cannot demonstrate that it can overcome its own inequities, specifically its racial issues, its xenophobia, and, most of all, its rising inequality. As President Biden likes to say: “Our greatest strength is not the example of our power, but the power of our example.” He is right when he warns us that the autocrats of this day and age, and no one more that China’s president Xi, think that democracy cannot compete in the 21^st century with autocracies, because it takes too long, or proves impossible, to get consensus. We can only prove them wrong if we stop quarreling among ourselves and either vote to give one of our parties a popular mandate to govern or agree on a compromise agenda that can pass in an evenly divided congress, regardless who carries the majority.

Claiming, as President Biden does, that ‘America is back’ does not convince anyone unless we can demonstrate that we have regained control of a democratic (lower case) agenda. Otherwise, we will wonder, as world leaders do today, ‘yes, America is back, but for how long?’ Will the next election blow us off course again?

What the Biden proposals bring to the surface is that a chasm has developed between the political preferences of the members of Congress and the population at large. Not only, but mostly, on the Republican side of the aisle. This chasm is the result of primary driven moves towards the extreme wings of our two parties. The polls covering the Biden proposals bear out that the population at large is much less ideologically driven, much more practical, than its representatives in Congress would suggest. That is what Joe Biden is banking on and that is why, in his speech outlining and promoting his plan, he went over the heads of the parliamentarians, directly to the people, the people deciding who get to represent them in the legislative and executive branches of government. Will we listen? We will see the answer to that question the day after the November 2022 election.

WILL THE REAL AMERICA PLEASE STAND UP

I am old enough and have lived long enough in the USA to remember the TV show ‘To tell the truth’ and, almost 100 hundred days into the Biden administration, I keep asking myself the question that concluded every episode of the show: ‘Will the real America please stand up’?

The electoral process has put Joe Biden in the White House as the 46^th President, but the 45^th still claims that he won the election and many Americans, a large majority of Republicans, side with him. We knew that the nation was polarized, but to such extent? The President may be the titular head of the nation, but it cannot be said that the occupant of the White House is representative of the nation and what it stands for. Otherwise, how to explain the contrast in character between #45 and #46?

What will we see when the real America stands up? Will it look like a Trumpian America, an Obama-like America, a traditional establishment America, or still something else? The world, Americans included, is thoroughly confused about the true American identity.  And when the real America stands up, when will it be, and will we like what we see?

What we hope to see is a determined, tenacious America willing to assert its world leadership in every respect, economically, militarily, scientifically, democratically, and morally. Glenn Hubbard and Tim Kane, in a 2013 National Affairs article, reminded us that “Great powers are rarely brought down by outside adversaries; they destroy themselves from within. Very often, they do it by falling victim to economic imbalances and the decay of once-vibrant governing institutions that prove unable to adapt to changing circumstances.”

America, today, is at risk of internal strife, paralysis, and decay that its adversaries and competitors, China most of all, will only be too glad to take advantage of. America finds itself in this situation because it has been lacking, for decades now, a clear national strategy and competent administrations to execute. America has put itself deep in debt, without gaining anything, without addressing and solving any of the major challenges that put its hegemony in jeopardy. Its Congress has debased itself to becoming a platform for grandstanding, and a showcase for partisanship. It has proven to be incapable of legislating in a bi-partisan manner as demonstrated by the fact that all major legislative measures of the past three administrations, the Affordable Care Act, the Trump Tax Cuts, and Biden’s American Rescue Plan, have passed with only single party support. Congress has yet to demonstrate that it can pass meaningful, substantive, legislation unless the White House, the Senate and the House of Representatives are all controlled by the same party. 

The onus is now on the Biden administration. It has until November of next year, only 17 months, to show that an effective, problem solving, administration can make a difference in the lives of ordinary Americans and fend off the traditional curse of a losing mid-term election after its first two years in office.

In the 21^st century, only George W. Bush has pulled this off, arguably only because of the afterglow of his handling of 9/11 and only in his first term.

All the political chatter today is about the Republican push to tighten voting access laws and gerrymandering voting districts as a means to enhance their electoral chances in November of 2022. The Democrats plan on countering these moves by trying to bring the HR-1 Voting Law, that has passed the House of Representatives in 2020, up for a vote in the Senate, while it still has control of the Senate and the White House. Both parties understand how crucial the outcome of the 2022 mid-term election is in determining their political fortunes and it is revealing for their current stance that they are pushing in opposite directions, for and against the widest possible access to the voting booth. The resulting stand-off cannot be resolved without congressional action, and that fact places the filibuster question front and center of the equation.

The Republicans are all too aware that the proposed changes in the voting rights laws, particularly as they relate to voting access, gerrymandering, mail-in voting, automatic voter registration, and campaign financing, will make it harder for them to compete for the White House and majority in the Senate and the House of Representatives. After all, according to the latest Gallup poll, Republicans represent only 25% of the population, versus 32% for Democrats and 41% for Independents.

This is not lost on President Biden, who has come up with a novel definition of bi-partisanship when he claims that his overly broad and expensive proposal for infrastructure is bi-partisan, because it seemingly has the support of a large majority of the population, including Republicans. This stance hints at a strategy to pursue between now and November of next year. The strategy seeks to drive a wedge between the Republican Congressional delegation and the Republican voters, claiming in effect that the Republican Congressional stance is not representatives of the preferences of Republican constituency at large. It might work if Biden’s infrastructure proposal, which he has dubbed the ‘American Jobs Plan’, can be carried through Congress under the reconciliation rule that does not require a 3/5^th majority vote in the Senate. It would still require negotiation and arm twisting to keep all Democrats, including Joe Manchin, in line. But that is a good thing, because there is little doubt that the proposal on the table is too rich and too broad to be effectively passed and implemented. If Biden manages to steer a sanitized American Jobs Plan through congress, and if it will be perceived to improve American lives, Republicans will have a hard time explaining to their constituencies why they voted against it. 

Passing a comprehensive voting rights bill is another matter. Here, Biden may have no choice but to negotiate with Joe Manchin cum suis for an exception from the filibuster rule, because this type of legislation certainly cannot pass under the reconciliation rule and there is no chance for him to pick up 10 Republican votes for the legislation on the table.

The best effort Biden can make for a win in November of 2022 is to convince the voters that the government has a role to play in improving their personal circumstances. He has done that by signing the American Rescue Plan that deals with the negative impact of the Covid19 pandemic, and he proposes to do (much) more of the same by his infrastructure proposal, dubbed the American Jobs Plan.

A Democrat loss in November of 2022 is not inevitable, if Biden manages to get the American public on his side by taking for most Americans the sting out of the Covid recession, by reducing the inequities in pay, taxation, housing, education, healthcare, and the criminal justice system, by revamping infrastructure in an environmentally conscious way, and by addressing family needs with respect to childcare and eldercare. That is a formidable task to be accomplished in very short order after decades of inaction. It will still require for the Democrats to put up strong candidates in the congressional races, candidates who wholeheartedly support the Biden agenda and appeal to the public at large. And it will require legislative discipline of not trying to do too much at once and avoiding ‘third rail’ issues like killing the filibuster rule and court packing. They may get help from the Republican party if, in their primaries, they give the upper hand to Trump fanatics. Ultimately, turn-out in response to recognition of what is at stake will be the deciding factor, much like it was in 2020. Which is why the battle about voting rights rages.

A wild card in this strategizing of domestic policy and tactics is what happens beyond our borders. Any plan can be derailed by foreign threats like China moving on Taiwan, Russia moving on Ukraine, a Middle East conflict, or a Taliban takeover in Afghanistan. All bets are off when the USA gets embroiled in yet another foreign conflict. God help us if that happens.

The truth is that America is in desperate need of domestic problem resolution. It has lost tremendous respect in the world by seriously flawed and inconsistent leadership and by failure to acknowledge and correct its societal shortcomings. One may, or may not agree, with all aspects of the Biden agenda, but denying the Biden administration a governable majority in Congress will only be a recipe for further stalemate and inaction. I hold out hope that, by the process of deliberate, targeted, government action and public response, we will see the real America stand up and reveal itself by the end of 2022. May it be an America that we can all believe in, be proud of, and stand behind.

RANDOM THOUGHTS

The midterm elections of 2022 are only 20 months away and already show up to be equally pivotal as the 2020 elections purported and proved to be. The reason is that the presidential election of 2020 produced only one determinative outcome, in that it removed a dangerously incompetent pretender and seriously flawed person from the White House. But it created, at the Congressional level, a state of parity between two internally conflicted parties that have their eyes already set on the next election in the hope that they can prevail at that time. Notwithstanding the fact that Donald Trump is now a member of a rather exclusive club of one-term Presidents, his tenure and his words, tweets, actions, and omissions, have had an outsize effect on both domestic and foreign policy for our nation. Jonathan Kirshner, professor of Political Science and International Studies at Boston University, in an article in the March/April edition of Foreign Affairs, has focused on the foreign relations aspect of this new reality and warns us that “By producing a Trump presidency and calling attention to the underlying domestic dysfunction that allowed a previously inconceivable development to occur, the United States is now looked at far differently than it once was.” And he concludes: “A second Trump administration would have done irretrievable damage to the United States as an actor in world politics. But even with Trump’s defeat, the rest of the world cannot ignore the country’s deep and disfiguring scars. They will not soon heal.” (The March/April edition of Foreign Policy is headlined: “Decline and Fall. Can America Ever Lead Again?”)

Domestically, the scene is not hugely different. Trump may have lost the election, but he has not lost the Republican Party. According to a new Quinnipiac poll, 75% of Republicans would like to see him play a prominent role in the party. This fealty to a person, rather than republican principles and policy, precludes any Congressional ‘reaching across the aisle’, particular for Republican members of Congress who are up for re-election in 2022. Biden now must make the fateful choice between playing by the established rules or pressing his tenuous advantage in Congressional seats to advance his agenda. Time is not in his favor. Given his age, he is almost certain to declare himself yet another one-term President, and−more importantly−he runs the risk of losing control of Congress in 20 months. As we all know, midterm elections are notoriously unfriendly to the ruling administration.

The fateful decision to make is, of course, pertaining to the ‘filibuster rule’ (Senate Rule XXII) that requires 60 of the 100 Senate votes to close debate and bring a law proposal to a vote. That rule stands in the way of any Biden legislative initiative that cannot be passed under the rules for ‘reconciliation’, where only 51 votes are required. With a Republican Party more interested in seeing the Biden administration fail than in addressing the urgent needs of the nation, staying with the filibuster rule means that passing any substantive legislation with respect to voting rights and other democracy reforms, immigration reform, expanding healthcare coverage, climate protection, or gun control will be out of the question.

It would force President Biden to rule, where he can, by executive order, which is politically undesirable, constitutionally questionable, and subject to reversal at the next regime change.

Yet, doing away with Senate Rule XXII is politically risky as well and, as it stands, not achievable, because of principled resistance inside the Democratic Party, particularly from West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin. However, there may be an ‘in between’ way out of this impasse. It was suggested by Norm Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute in an article published September 3, 2020 in The Atlantic. He proposes not to do away with the ‘filibuster rule’, but to amend it so that in stead of 60 votes required to end a filibuster, the rule would require 40 votes to continue it. It would mean that, if at any time the minority cannot muster 40 votes to sustain the filibuster, debate ends, cloture is invoked, and the bill can be passed by the votes of a simple majority. Ornstein leaves open for discussion if the threshold vote in his proposal should be 40 or 45. Will the Democrats give this creative bypass serious consideration? If they do, they should think of its effect in a certain to come situation where they would be in the minority in Congress.

Without significant Congressional action on the Biden legislative agenda and tangible positive effect of these measures on the lives of American voters, another regime change will be in the cards for 2024. Particularly, if Biden will have to deal with a Republican majority in Congress for his last two years in office. He would not be able to get anything done. That is why he cannot avoid making his fateful decision, now. But, as Ornstein has pointed out, it does not have to be an ‘all or nothing’ deal.

Whatever you may think of the merits of the Biden agenda, the country is in desperate need of policy making and effective governance. There used to be a time when foreign policy was a bipartisan arena and a change in administration had little effect on the pursuit of primary strategies. This consistency in foreign policy was driven by the presence of a universally identified adversary to American interests, whether it was the Axis in WWII, or communism during the Cold War era, and by the universally shared belief in the need for international institutions and alliances to promote democracy, peace, and development. The fall of the Soviet Union has shattered one of these two pillars of consistency and predictability and Trump, by himself and in only four years, has destroyed the last pillar, that had been holding up the structure of the democratic alliance.

As looked upon from the outside by other nations, friend or foe, America can no longer be relied upon to be consistently strategic and predictable in its foreign policy. As Mark Leonard of the European Council on Foreign Relations put it: “If you know that whatever you’re doing will at most last until the next election, you look at everything in a more contingent way.” How can America be a global leader for peace and prosperity if it cannot build internal consensus on its basic foreign policy strategies?

The same absence of consistency hampers good governance at the domestic level. Here too, the Trump interregnum has inflicted serious damage. Think of all the misguided executive orders, aimed at establishing his warped views on the environment, immigration, trade, justice, and the perceived existence of the ‘swamp’ and the ‘deep state’ that now must be reversed. And think of all the civil service professionals at the Justice Department, the State Department, the Intelligence Services, and all matter of other federal departments and agencies, who have either been replaced by political hacks or simply given up and resigned and now must be re-recruited or replaced again. What a waste of time, talent, and competency!

The nation simply cannot afford to see this whipsaw effect of changing administrations perpetuated. It needs the time and stability required to provide lasting solutions for the main challenges it faces. That is why the 2022 midterms are so crucial. The country needs stability. It needs to recover from a traumatic episode in its political history and it needs the tranquility provided by smart, effective, governance. For that reason alone, it is desirable that the Biden administration and the Senate work out an arrangement with respect to Senate Rule XXII that will allow Congress to pass legislation on the highest priority issues facing the nation.

MONEY REVISITED

(Parts of this column have appeared before in my 2014 book “Neither here nor there” and in a 2015 column titled “Money Speaks.”)

According to the Center for Responsive Politics, we spent $14 billion trying to influence the outcome of the 2020 election. What did that money get us? We got a desperately needed eviction from the White House and a Congress that is almost equally divided between the two parties that have now dominated the scene in Washington DC for well over a century. Would the outcome have been any different if no money, or only a fraction of $14 billion had been spent in the process? And what could have been done with that money, had it not been spent on campaigning?

The first question is impossible to answer with any degree of certainty, but, given the fact that both parties received billions of dollars in support of their causes and candidates, it is doubtful that money decided the outcome overall. The other question is easier to answer. We need to realize that we are talking about private, not public funds. The source of the money is campaign donors, political action committees, and special interest groups and if the money had not been spent on the political campaigns, it would have been invested elsewhere or put into savings where it would have benefitted the general economy. It could have been donated to good-cause charities, of which there is no shortage in our capitalistic system, where the role of the government in financing societal needs is limited by design.

Between the doubtful effectiveness of money in politics, given the fact that it serves all sides in roughly equal proportion, and the opportunity cost of this expenditure, it should be clear that the nearly unrestrained flow of money into our political process is one of the reasons why our political system has stopped working as intended by our founding fathers. This money is not merely supporting candidates, but also causes, policy, that should be decided by discourse rather than money. Discourse has almost entirely vanished from the halls of Congress, where our representatives have settled for making statements, grandstanding, that can be used for media coverage, which, in turn, support the case for re-election. Where money can decide policy, the need for reasoning, debate and compromise evaporates. It is very unlikely to happen with the current composition of the Supreme Court, but if, for the good of the country, any legal precedent should be reversed by SCOTUS, it should be the case of Citizens United vs FEC, that opened the floodgates for money flowing into political campaigns.

Money, not competency, is now the critical success factor for any national elected office and for most of the high-profile state and municipal elected offices. In 1950, senators could get elected by spending 100,000 dollars on their campaigns; by 1980, that number was typically several million dollars; by 2010, many senate candidates spent 20-30 million dollars to win or retain their seats. And in the 2020 election even a $106 million war chest could not buy Jaime Harrison a Senate seat for South Carolina.

Combined with the freedom of speech, which allows any interest group or political action committee (PAC) to craft any commercial, pro or con a candidate for office, without regard to truth or material content, money has taken control of the political process in the USA, starting with the election process.

Only in America! Nowhere else in the democratic realm of nations has money taken such a commanding control of the political process and its outcomes. Nicholas Stephanopoulos of the University of Chicago wrote in the 2013 Columbia Law Review: “There is near consensus in the empirical literature that politicians’ positions more accurately reflect the views of their donors than those of their constituents.” We are so far along this corrupting road that it is hard to imagine that we can free ourselves from the influence of money on the outcome of our political system. But we should try with all of our might. And the following steps would go a long way towards removing the controlling influence of money:

·        Limit the period during which the media are allowed to run political advertisements in similar ways as currently practiced in Canada and the U.K.

·        Prohibit private funding of election campaigns and replace it with a system of public funding in equal amounts for each candidate.

·        Pay members of congress an honorarium of a million dollars per year and prohibit them from earning or accepting any money (other than from existing investments) from private sources for the time of their tenure.

·        Prohibit members of congress from lobbying the government for a period of five years from leaving congress.

The voting public should be the boss, but its influence has been hijacked by individuals and institutions with pockets deep enough to buy the subservience and vote of the peoples’ representatives. The net result is that the nation’s business no longer gets done. The federal government can no longer proclaim that it sets the rules of the game by which all constituents must play. As long as money rules, Congress is prevented from creating optimum conditions for free enterprise and citizens to shape conditions for a brilliant, sustainably competitive future.

Only Congress itself can lift us out of this morass. It can do so by changing the election laws to only permit public financing of election campaigns. But that would require for the Congress to pull itself out of the morass by its own bootstraps, which—as we all know—is one of the hardest things to do. Admittedly, the hurdles for the members of Congress to effect the required change are phenomenal. First, it would have to overcome its current implacable polarization. Then it would have to muster the courage and moral fortitude to ignore what the moneymen and special interests want them to do. And, if they can pull that off, they would have to have the courage of conviction—in defiance of the Supreme Court— that cutting the moneymen out of the election process can be done without infringing upon citizens’ rights under the First Amendment.