LIZ

In the epilogue to Liz Cheney’s just released book ‘Oath and Honor’ she writes: “As a nation, we can endure damaging policies for a four-year term. But we cannot survive a president willing to terminate our Constitution.” It is as remarkable as it is encouraging that a die-hard conservative and life-long Republican is willing to suspend her ideological beliefs in favor of creating a (temporary and single-purpose) pro-democracy and anti-authoritarian coalition with Democrats and Independents who share her belief in the overarching necessity to preserve our constitutional Republic. I assume Liz realizes that, if she gets her way, she may have to endure ‘damaging policies’ not for a four-year term, but for a full eight years of a Democrat in the White House and yet, she does not blink. She is still wrestling with the question what she can do, other than voicing her fierce opposition against Trump and his acolytes as she has done in several capacities and in her book, to convince the public to unequivocally reject authoritarianism when they go to the voting booth in November of next year.

The first primaries, the Iowa caucus on January 15, the New Hampshire primary on January 23, the South Carolina primary on February 24, and the Super Tuesday primaries on March 5 will show if, as polling suggests, Trump will be the Republican nominee for the 2024 Presidential election. If the conventional wisdom prevails and Trump is on his way to become his party’s candidate, Liz Cheney will have to decide if she wants to oppose him directly by running against him. She has repeatedly declared that she is willing to do so if it appears that her opposition would likely help keeping Trump out of the White House for a second term. That will be a difficult calculation to make. She will not run to win. Her sole purpose would be to siphon enough electoral votes away from Trump to deny him the 270 he will need to become President for a second term. But her participation in the race, together with other independent or third-party candidates, would present a realistic possibility that none of the contenders obtain the threshold 270 electoral votes, in which case the election would be thrown to the House of Representatives, where each State would have one vote and each state delegation would vote en bloc. Currently, 26 States have a majority Republican delegation, 22 States have a majority Democratic delegation, and 2 States have an equally divided delegation. The uniquely American constitutional provision that gives each of the States only one vote when the House is called upon to elect the President places, as Liz Cheney herself has stressed, exceptional weight on the election for the House of Representatives. Little doubt that, if the current constellation holds, the vote will go in favor of the Republican nominee, but a little shift towards the Democrats in the 2024 election could alter that picture. Just like in the American system the President can be elected by a minority of the voting public, it is possible for one of the parties in Congress to have a numerical majority in the House of Representatives without having the votes to elect the President if the election is thrown to the House.

Given this uncertainty, my speculation is that Liz Cheney will not herself contest the 2024 Presidential Election but work very hard on building a coalition of Democrats, Independents, and Trump-averse Republicans to defeat Trump even if it means that the presidency is delivered to the Democratic candidate. What she will do in the unlikely case that the Republicans nominate someone else than Trump remains to be seen, but in that case, she will definitely not run for the office herself and less likely support the Democratic nominee. Although she says for now to be single focused on the 2024 race and the defeat of Trump, she has made it abundantly clear that she is done with the Republican party that has kicked her out of Congress and refused to hold Trump to account for his refusal to support the Constitution, concede defeat, and arrange a peaceful transfer of power. In several of the many book-interviews she has given since her book was published, she has informed us that, after November 2024, she will explore with other like-minded conservatives the feasibility of either taking back control of the GOP or creating a new, truly republican and truly conservative party.

At this point it is way too early to say if Liz Cheney’s crusade to preserve democracy in the USA will prevail. If we could believe current polling, she is fighting an uphill battle as poll after poll suggests that Trump is a shoo-in for the GOP nomination and a favorite over Biden in the battle states that will decide this election. But there is a lot of fight in Liz Cheney, and she will not be alone in the fight to the finish. She is capable of mobilizing a coalition for democracy from all those Republicans who already have borne witness to the threat Trump poses to the functioning of our democratic republic, Democrats, and Independents.

I am confident that when the moment of truth arrives and Americans fill out their ballots for the November 5, 2024 election, they will realize that the only choice in front of them is between a fully democratic and an autocratic form of government. A choice between the Constitution and chaos. And I’m confident that at that moment a large majority of them will unambiguously decide for democracy over autocracy. If that comes to pass, it will in no small part be thanks to the profile in courage exhibited by Liz Cheney, the rare politician who valued honor and constitutionality over her political career.

TWO HARVARD PROFESSORS

Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt are two Harvard professors of government and co-authors of two books that are addressing the causes of the ever more evident shortcomings in the American experiment in democracy. The books are “How Democracies Die” published in 2018 and “Tyranny of the Minority” published this year.

For anyone who is interested in understanding why politics in America have become so dysfunctional and why America has been sliding down the scale of the most democratically governed nations in the world, these two books are highly recommended reading. In fact, they should be mandatory reading in political science classes at the high school and college level.

The authors put much of the blame for the slide in America’s standing among the world's democracies to what they term “excessively counter-majoritarian institutions” including the fact that updates to the US Constitution have become nearly impossible to make. The authors point to many other countries where, over time, counter majoritarian elements have been removed, one after the other, from their governance structure.

While acknowledging that, just because of the existence of excessively counter-majoritarian institutions, required changes in the American public governance system are difficult to make, the authors point to the fact that America has in the past proven that it is capable of making previously considered impossible changes in the rules of its government e.g. when it abolished slavery, when it enshrined civil rights, when it established women’s right to vote, and when it transferred the right to elect the Senate from State Legislatures to the People of America.

In their book “Tyranny of the Minority” the two Harvard professors offer 15 practical suggestions for further democratization of the American political process that I quote hereunder (with only a few edits for brevity). The recommendations are grouped under three major headlines: Uphold the right to vote; Ensure that election outcomes reflect majority preferences; and Empower governing majorities.         

Here they are:

UPHOLD THE RIGHT TO VOTE

1.       Pass a constitutional amendment establishing a right to vote for all citizens, which would provide a solid base to litigate voting restrictions.

2.       Establish automatic registration in which all citizens are registered to vote when they turn eighteen.

3.       Expand early voting and easy mail-in voting options for citizens of all states.

4.       Make Election Day a Sunday or a national holiday, so that work responsibilities do not discourage Americans from voting.

5.       Restore voting rights (without additional fines or fees) to all ex-felons who have served time.

6.       Restore national-level voting rights protections. Reinstate federal oversight of election rules and administration.

7.       Replace the current system of partisan electoral administration with one in which state and local electoral administration is in the hands of professional, nonpartisan officials.

ENSURE THAT ELECTION OUTCOMES REFLECT MAJORITY PREFERENCES

8.       Abolish the Electoral College and replace it with a national popular vote.

9.       Reform the Senate so that the number of senators elected per state is more proportional to the population of each state.

10.   Replace “first-past-the-post” electoral rules and single member districts for the House of Representatives and state legislatures with a form of proportional representation in which voters elect multiple representatives from larger electoral districts and parties win seats in proportion to the share of vote they win. This would require repeal of the 1967 Uniform Congressional District Act, which mandates single-member districts for House elections.

11.   Eliminate partisan gerrymandering via the creation of independent redistricting commissions such as those used in California, Colorado, and Michigan.

12.   Update the Apportionment Act of 1929, which fixed the House of Representatives at 435, and return to the original design of the House that expands in line with population growth.

EMPOWER GOVERNING MAJORITIES

13.   Abolish the Senate filibuster.

14.   Establish term limits (perhaps twelve or eighteen years) for Supreme Court justices to regularize the Supreme Court appointment process so that every president has the same number of appointments per term.

15.   Make it easier to amend the Constitution by eliminating the requirement that three-quarters of state legislatures ratify any proposed amendment.

The push by two Harvard professors is not enough to break the dam. What America needs now is a nationwide popular movement, akin to the abolition movement, the suffragette movement, and the civil rights movement, insisting on democratic reform of our institutions, including the Constitution, and elimination of the remaining counter-majoritarian institutions. For America to lead the world, it cannot afford to be anything less than a model democracy. It was designed to be that model when it adopted its Constitution in 1789, it now must catch up with the rest of the world.

A YEAR FROM NOW

The date for the next national election, in which the White House, the House of Representatives, one third of the Senate, State legislatures, and many State governor seats are up for grabs is set for November 5, 2024. That is only a year from now. It is no hyperbole to label next year’s election ‘the election of the century’ even though many pundits named the 2020 election by the same label. Then, like again next year, the main issue was a popular referendum on Trump and Trumpism. Except that this time around it is even more clearly not so much a vote between nominees of the two parties as a vote between governance doctrines. 2024 is shaping up as the year in which the American voters must make up their mind if they are still intent on having a government of the People, by the People, and for the People, or if they are willing to be autocratically governed by an all-controlling executive branch.

Yes, there will also be elections this year, on the 7^th of November, but none of a national scope. Some may be bellwethers for how the 2024 elections may turn out. In my State of Ohio, for instance, the main issue, issue #1 on the ballot is a proposed constitutional amendment establishing “The Right to Reproductive Freedom with Protections for Health and Safety”. This popular driven initiative, which is opposed by the Republican DeWine administration, follows the defeat, in August, of an administration driven initiative to require a qualified majority of 60 percent and support in each of Ohio’s 80 counties for a vote to amend the Ohio Constitution. For the proposed constitutional amendment about Reproductive Freedom, a simple 51 percent of the popular vote will be enough to pass. This ballot initiative is a popular reaction to the passing in 2019 of a strict ‘heartbeat’ law by the heavily jerrymandered GOP controlled Ohio legislature (which law is currently suspended pending judicial review). In essence, the issue, in this election as in the big election of November 2024, is about the functioning of our democracy. Are we self-governing or subject to the tyranny of a controlling minority?

The campaign around Ohio issue 1 brings to the surface the frightening degree of dishonesty and deception condoned in political campaigns. Opponents of issue 1 want to make you believe that the amendment for Reproductive Freedom will lead to horrifying scenes of late term abortion butchering and unfettered access to abortion by juveniles, completely ignoring the provision in the proposed amendment that abortion may be prohibited after fetal viability and suspending belief in the high standards of conduct by medical professionals and the ethical values of the American people. On the other hand, the proponents of Ohio issue 1 are too easily papering over the legitimate rights to protection of the unborn, scaring the voters with an Orwellian ‘big brother’ government taking control of every aspect of our lives, conveniently ignoring the democratic and judicial checks on governmental excesses or abuses.

With the advent of A.I. and the dominance of social media in our lives, combined with the near boundless interpretation of our first amendment rights of free speech, it becomes very hard to determine who and what to believe anymore. Almost impossible to separate fact from fiction when all sides, enabled by previously non-existent information technology, are permitted to create their own alternative realities. How can we expect people to make the right choice at the voting booth when they can no longer determine what campaign rhetoric is false or mere propaganda and what is factually correct?

The November 2024 election will be held at the confluence of a legitimate policy debate about the management of the country’s business, its finances, its national security, its political agenda, and its role in the world and a fight for the soul of the nation fed by spurious identity politics: will it be increasingly democratic or increasingly autocratic? With a scarcity of unbiased, fact based, information on the choices on the ballot, people, particularly those who are only casually attentive to policy choices, are forced to rely on emotion, gut feel, and the voice of their preferred media channels when making their fateful ballot choices.

A year out from the election, we can only expect that control of the White House, the House of Representatives, and the Senate will be decided by extremely narrow margins. It is the nature of the beast: the population of the United States is hopelessly divided in its partisan allegiance and kept in place by its adherence to either Fox News or MSNBC. The stalemate this political reality creates in Congress, combined with the rules that pertain to the management of the agenda of the House and the Senate, means that there is no room or incentive for a meaningful policy debate and thus, the peoples’ choice is forced back to identity politics. And the world is watching in amazement and disbelief how one of its political parties is well on its way to place its bets on a failed former President, who is twice impeached and three times indicted for crimes committed in office and against the proper functioning of our democracy.

It is an outright depressing thought that, even if democracy wins over autocracy in the 2024 election and the person who belongs in prison is kept out of the White House, the chance for meaningful policy advancement will remain stymied by a stalemate in Congress. It is not clear if and how this impasse can be cleared. And the American people will be kept waiting for fiscal responsibility on the part of its government, for a comprehensive immigration policy, for climate protection, for gun safety regulation, and for diminished inequality in income and wellness between segments of our society.

Depressing as this may be, we are well advised to accept that we can win only one battle at a time. And, as former GOP congressman and member of the January 6 Commission Adam Kinzinger recently said on a PBS interview: “I consider there to be only one issue on the ballot for 2024, do you believe in democracy or not?”

That will indeed be the challenge the American voters will have to address a year from now.

THE GOOSE AND THE GANDER

We are all familiar with the saying “What is good for the goose is good for the gander” (a gander is a male goose).  It is meant to say that if a boy is allowed to do something, a girl should be allowed to do the same thing. The saying was put in practice most notably when women were allowed to vote, when colored people were afforded the same rights as Caucasians, and when the military allowed women to serve in combat roles. It does not mean that if something is good for a certain segment of the population, it is automatically also good for everyone else (for that we use the saying that “The rising tide lifts all boats”). So, if we think of the goose and the gander in terms of the political reality of the two-party system in the United States, it is evident that what serves the interest of the Democratic Party does not serve the interest of the Republican Party as well. In our two-party system it is a zero-sum game. The national interest in a truly representative democracy is taking a backseat in this partisan contest. And herein lies the problem.

There is no denying that the current American political constellation is dysfunctional. It has been for a good while, but never more so than today, now that one of the two parties has decided not to be guided by the Constitution but by the whims of a narcissistic, populist, leader. That party is in complete disarray with House Republicans and the Speaker of the House held hostage by a handful of populist extremists and House Republicans at odds with Senate Republicans on vital issues like the funding of the government, the budget, and support for Ukraine. Almost certainly this disarray will result in another shutdown of the government when on September 30 the current fiscal year expires. This internecine squabble would not be as damaging if it was not for the additional dimension that a substantial segment of the Republican Party signals that it is ready to forego democracy as the governing principle for the nation. Republican lawmakers are making no bones about this when they say: “we are a republic, not a democracy” as if there was a contradiction in terms between the two. When saying this they are clearly echoing the sentiment of their cult leader who has repeatedly maintained that when you are the President you can call all the shots even if they are illegal or unconstitutional. L’etat c’est moi!

This dysfunction brings me back to the goose and the gander. As I have stated many times before, there is no lack of ideas about ways in which our system of government can be improved, and democracy can be protected from subversion by authoritarian impulses. Most prominently in these deliberations figure the elimination of the Electoral College and electing the President by a direct national popular vote, expanding the number of seats in the House of Representatives, putting term limits in place for members of Congress, eliminating the “filibuster Rule” in the Senate, taking money out of politics, and eliminating the practice of jerrymandering from the creation of voting districts. The problem with all these suggestions, and the reason that none of them have ever gained traction, is that implementation of any of them requires, if not amendment of the Constitution itself, amendment of established federal and State laws, procedural rules set by Congress, or abandoning age-old covenants and practices. The hurdles to fundamental improvement of the system of public governance in the United States are so high that even the most obvious ways to improve the system have no chance of getting implemented. First, the hurdle for a change in the Constitution requiring a qualified 2/3^rd majority of votes in both Houses of Congress and ratification by 75% of the legislatures of the States of the Union, is so high that it cannot be achieved without complete bi-partisan support. In effect this means that going forward only innocuous, largely symbolic, amendments will ever have a chance to pass. Under current conditions, the avenue of using amendments to the Constitution as a means of improving public governance is closed off.

The next, equally obstructive, hurdle is in the construct of a two-party system, where the parties have roughly equal support. Every measure that we can think of if we want to improve the system by enhancing both democracy and effectiveness has a calculable impact on the electoral chances for each of the two parties. It is a zero-point game. If it benefits the Democrats, it hurts Republicans and vice-versa. Take jerrymandering which has largely enabled Republican popular minorities to achieve majorities in State legislatures. Prohibiting jerrymandering will hurt Republicans and benefit Democrats. So would elimination of the Electoral College and election of the President by direct national popular vote. Similarly, expanding the number of seats in the House of Representatives will give more representation to the larger population zones and thus enhance the prospects for Democrats, hurting the Republicans. Taking money out of politics and imposing term limits on members of Congress are less predictable in their impact on electoral chances for each of the parties, but will, in the unlikely event that they will ever come up for consideration, still be judged on their deliverable for the political future of both parties. I am hard pressed finding a system improvement that would result in a clear benefit to the Republicans and a disadvantage to the Democrats and conclude from that that the current system favors the Republicans and allows them to turn popular vote deficiencies into majority representation in Congress as well as in State Legislatures. In other words, the current system turns minority protection into minority advantage.

The only way to make the American political system more democratic is by lowering the hurdles to system improvement. A voting rights bill has been languishing in Congress for years under the Trump and Biden administrations. But unless both parties rededicate themselves to making the Union a more perfect democracy it is unlikely to ever become law. In American politics, this day and age, if it is good for the goose, it is not good for the gander!

15 MONTHS

Mark the date: Election Day 2024 is November 5. That is 447 days, a little less than 15 months, away and a lot can happen in the intervening time that will determine the viability, the intrinsic strength, of the American democracy. Benjamin Franklin was prophetic when, at the conclusion of the Constitutional Convention he was asked “What have you wrought?” and he answered “a Republic if you can keep it”.

The Presidential election of 2024 will be like no other in American history because we now know that the main contender on the part of the Republican Party will have to defend against four separate criminal indictments in addition to three civil cases in which he is the defendant, all of that while campaigning for the Republican nomination at the Republican convention in mid July 2024 in Milwaukee. If he is nominated, there is a realistic chance that he will be convicted of any of the 91 felony charges now levied against him in four different jurisdictions before the voters will be asked to pass their verdict. He may even find himself in jail on Election Day.

Further uncertainty is inserted into the process by the fact that the two most likely contenders for the Presidency will be in their late seventies and early eighties respectively and neither one of them is granted eternal life. It is a whole different matter, but it should concern all of us that American public governance is in the hands of so many politicians who have very little time left to experience for themselves the far-reaching policy decisions they make while in office. We can expect a forceful rejection by the younger voters of the dominance of their grandparents’ generations in Congress and in the race for the White House. Can the same people who have been complicit in building an insurmountable mountain of public debt and have refused to address the nation’s major challenges of climate protection, entitlement reform, gun control, immigration control, inequities in healthcare and education, and, most importantly, voting rights, be trusted with the responsibility to solve these matters for the future?

The voters in the 2024 election now must wake up to the astonishing revelation that no provision in our much-revered Constitution prohibits a convicted felon from ascending to the Presidency of the United States of America. Clearly, it has been beyond the imagination of our founding fathers and the authors of our Constitution that voters would ever elect a convicted criminal to the highest office in the land or even vote for a candidate who is standing trial for conspiracy to defraud the United States. Yet, the Constitution does not leave the people of the United States entirely without protection against the risk of putting an undeserving candidate in the White House (or any other civil or military office of the United States or any State of the nation).

Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution bars any person from taking office who, having previously taken an oath to support the Constitution of the United States, has engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the United States.

In the 155-year history of the Fourteenth Amendment, Section 3 has not been invoked against any candidate running for election to the Presidency of the United States. And it is not clear who would have legal standing to sue for disqualification of a candidate on the grounds of having engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the United States. Certainly the U.S. Department of Justice as the guardian of U.S. laws, but also any contenders or the political party they represent? No doubt any pursuit of the applicability of Section 3 to a candidate for the U.S. Presidency will have to be litigated all the way to the Supreme Court. With the four indictments in place against one of the contenders for the 2024 Presidential Election, the first question to come up will be whether any of the alleged charges against the candidate amount to insurrection or rebellion against the United States. It will be intriguing to find out how the current justices on the Supreme Court, three of whom have been nominated to the court by the indicted contender, will answer that pivotal question.

Much as we may be miffed by the fact that no provision of the law, other than Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment, prevents a convicted criminal from getting elected to the Presidency, it is even more incredible that public opinion itself does not appear to disqualify the four-time indicted contender. On the contrary, his standing in the polls has gone up with each of the three earlier indictments. As of this writing it is too early to gauge if the fourth indictment will change the polls, but it does not look likely that it will keep the defendant in these indictments from prevailing in the primaries and obtaining the nomination of his Republican Party.

This alone should cause us to pause and reflect. If a good part of our population can live with the prospect of having a person accused of felonies against the republic placed in the White House, it is a good indication that those people vie for an authoritarian approach to public governance, democracy be damned. It confirms our fear and suspicion that the 2024 election will not just be a contest of personalities and parties, but a referendum on the American system of public governance, whether it should be democratic or autocratic. With the evidence we have in hand we have compelling reason to conclude that going into this election cycle we have one ‘democratic’ and one ‘autocratic’ party. As per our Constitution, the choice is up to the People, 447 days from today.

But a lot can change in 15 months. Stay tuned.

250 YEARS

Who will preside over the 250^th birthday of America on July 4, 2026? And will we still be living in the world’s leading democracy on that day? My overwhelming concern today is that too many Americans no longer care about democracy as long as the candidate of their choice comes out on top.

Like millions of Americans, I watched the pageantry of the 4^th of July celebrations on the Mall and the steps of the Capitol this week and, for an evening, felt good about America. The flags, the music, the fireworks, and, most of all, the crowd occupying the iconic spaces of Capitol Hill Parks gave the impression that America cares, that it honors its past and is eager to carry its heritage forward. On moments like that, you want to believe that what unfolds before your eyes is representative of the national mood and that democracy is alive and well, but the next day it does not exactly look that way. If anything tangible should come from these moments of euphoria, it would be that we make Election Day a national holiday and, by doing so, make it abundantly clear that there is no higher cause to celebrate than the solemn act of voting for who to represent us in government. There is never going to be a better time to make this happen than in 2026 when we celebrate 250 years of national existence.

But first we have to get there. Momentous events await us on our way to the quarter-millennial celebration. I wish it wasn’t so, but more likely than not we will be trying a former President who is also a current Presidential Candidate in criminal court and then we will have to see if the nation is ready to put that same person back into the White House. We will have to see if, despite the extreme polarization in our politics, we can find a jury of 12 people who are all willing to toss their political preference aside and pass impartial judgment on a former President some of them will have voted for and may want to vote for again in 2024. And it looks like a near certainty that, whichever way these momentous matters will be decided, half the population will feel cheated by the outcome.

How much better off would we have been if, to prepare for and honor the 250^th anniversary of our republic, we had committed to critically evaluating our public governance model, decide what works and did not quite work as intended, all with an eye on perfecting our republican democratic model. We could even have decided to hold a new constitutional convention to revisit the foundational principles of a multi-state democratic republic in today’s day and age and submit to popular vote a revised Constitution that is, better than the current version, equipped to address the exigencies and realities of the world we live in today and in the foreseeable future. The harsh reality is that we are so consumed by the political acrimony of the moment that nobody’s eyes are on an opportunity to make our 250^th anniversary meaningful in our constant strive to perfect our union.

An update of the Constitution alone would not redress all the flaws that stand in the way of a functioning republican democracy. We need to ask ourselves how it is that Congress, the legislative branch of government, is incapable or unwilling to address the most pressing societal needs of a fiscally responsible management of the nation’s finances, protection against the proliferation of guns, an orderly management of immigration needs, and universal access to affordable, state of the art, healthcare, and education. We can rightfully complain about the Supreme Court doing away with affirmative action in higher education and blocking the executive branch from providing relief from a stifling student debt burden, but we need to realize that the Supreme Court only gets to rule on these matters because Congress has not made any attempt to resolve them in the legislative process. With a “do nothing” Congress it is inevitable that both the executive branch and the judicial branch of government step in to fill the void.

Patience pays off. With little fanfare and somewhat under the radar the sponsors of the right wing of the conservative movement have, over many years, filled the ranks of State Legislatures and the Judiciary with candidates of their choosing. Their patience paid off big time when, against all odds and against the popular vote, Trump got placed in the White House and three vacancies opened up at the Supreme Court during his time in office. In quick order, the Supreme Court was stacked with three adherents of the Heritage Foundation with the effect that many Supreme Court rulings have pushed the law of the land far to the right of what a functional Congress would have been able to legislate. An ineffectual Congress handcuffs a President and shifts power to the Supreme Court that has the authority to further limit the executive power of the President but is, itself, unaccountable to the public.

We have only three years to go before we reach the 250^th birthday of our republic. We should not be satisfied with the status quo. We would honor our past by dedicating ourselves to improving our public governance, our democracy, for the future. Improvement will have to start with Congress. It will help a great deal if the House of Representatives would be expanded to reflect population growth by State since 1927 when House membership was set at 435. If, at the same time gerrymandering can be outlawed and money influences can be severely limited, we could make some real progress towards a better functioning democracy. We simply must find a way to make Congress do the job it has been assigned by the Constitution: legislate us out of trouble by addressing, one by one, the significant challenges confronting our political, economic, and social lives.

Let’s make sure that on July 4, 2026 we have real reason to celebrate!

SUCCESSION

This week the American TV viewing public has watched the season finale of the HBO series Succession that, for four seasons, rendered a view of the excesses of modern-day capitalism in a story about generational succession at Waystar-Royco, a fictional family operated company in the global media business. Many elements of this show hinted at the generational transition issue our nation will have to address at the end of the first (and only?) term of the Biden administration. The patriarch in the TV series, Logan Roy, is about Biden’s age when he dies without having settled the matter of his succession. Is it coincidence that this TV series has run for four seasons, the same term as the Presidential tenure? And the series ends when Waystar’s media unit ATN prematurely declares the winner in a closely contested Presidential race in which a hapless member of the Roy tribe unsuccessfully contended.

As this drama played itself out, we witnessed in reality TV a rare moment of bi-partisanship in the governance of nation’s affairs when the President and the Speaker of the House worked out a compromise on the conditions for lifting the debt ceiling for the federal treasury and, more uniquely and importantly, got significant bi-partisan majorities in the House and the Senate to sign off on the deal and stave off a calamitous national default. The President, in a prime-time televised victory lap, presented the deal as just another bi-partisan policy success of his administration, in line with the American Rescue Plan and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, but this one was different. While his previous significant policy initiatives passed with full Democratic support and a few Republican defections, this measure was carried by majorities of both Democrats and Republicans in the House and in the Senate. What we have learned from this unique moment in American politics is that when it comes to asserting the full faith and credit of the Unites States, we still have a solid measure of unity in the Beltway. Another way of putting this is that when an existential American interest and value was at stake, majorities in both parties chose national interest over partisan preference. The question now is whether this lofty attitude adjustment can be carried over in the resolution of other items of existential national interest. Nothing more existential than the preservation of liberal democracy.

It should cause us to pause in a moment of disbelief: that we are living at a time where bedrock principles of American statecraft like the full faith and credit of the United States and the democratic underpinning of our public governance system are even put in question. And yet, it becomes clearer by the day that this is what the 2024 national election will be about. It should not be that way. In a better world we would have two indisputably democratic parties competing with diverging ideas about how to secure Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid for the future; how to reform our tax laws so that they make sure that everyone pays their fair share and that they generate enough revenue to cover the expense of a responsible government; how then to begin to whittle down the national debt that both parties have allowed to balloon to unsustainable proportion; how to stem the tide of gun killings; how to codify a common sense immigration policy that accommodates the needs of our economy, creates a path to lawful residency for the millions of undocumented aliens already residing and working in the country, and has a compassionately pragmatic and consistent approach to the embrace of refugees; and how to improve the American healthcare system in ways that brings the cost in line with similar systems in the rest of the free world and delivers outcomes that place the nation back on top of world rankings. Responsible political parties vying for the support of their constituents should compete with the best ideas they can come up with to address these challenges to America’s future. Unfortunately, the Republican Party chose not to present a platform for the 2020 election, and it looks doubtful that it will come up with one for the next succession battle. That is no way to serve a country!

There are more parallels between the succession scenarios in the HBO drama versus our political reality. In both instances there is no dearth of candidates for the top job and in both instances, it is unclear how they differentiate themselves from their competitors. In the succession battle for the White House the contest is likely not to be about any of the policy issues that for years have been begging for resolution, but instead be a referendum on democracy versus autocracy or, as David Brooks recently posited in a column in the New York Times, “a contest between an essentially moral vision and an essentially immoral one, a contest between decency and its opposite.” It has come to this, because the Republican Party has traded in a conservative agenda for identity politics to accommodate a populist imposter who has hijacked the party in 2016 and has held it hostage ever since. That party is well on its way to repeating the mistake of 2016 when so many contenders vied for the ticket that the imposter ran away with it because his opposition split the primary vote in too many meaningless pieces.

The one thing you cannot blame the imposter for is that he says one thing and does another. You can take him at his word, terrible as it is. His open admiration for autocrats like Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong Un, Xi Jing Pin, Viktor Orbán, and Recep Tayyip Erdogan and their modus operandi leave nothing to our imagination. He has openly spoken about ‘retribution’ for the people who stood in his way when he attempted to nullify his loss at the voting booth in 2020. And he has promised to pardon the Proud Boys, Oathkeepers and other deviates who participated in the January 6 insurrection. America simply cannot afford a 2024 succession resulting in his return to the White House. Fooled once, shame on him; fooled twice shame on us.

P.S. this column gets published on the 79^th anniversary of D-Day when we commemorate the nation’s preparedness to fight for a free and democratic society in the Western world.

OLD NEWS

As the improbable begins to look more and more probable, that America’s choice for the White House in 2024 is going to be between a late septuagenarian and an early octogenarian, there isn’t much new to write about, also because it is a year without national elections. While most of the time no news is good news, I don’t see it that way in this instance. Of course, there are interesting little tidbits to write about, like the ethics (or lack thereof) of justice Clarence Thomas – Anita Hill saw that in 1991 much better than Joe Biden – or the victory of Dominion Voting Systems over Fox News leading to a little bit of a bloodletting for Rupert Murdoch’s company and the unceremonious sacking of Tucker Carlson, but really nothing of consequence. As I’ve stated before, the nation and the world are kept in a state of suspense. In the meantime, the state of our democracy requires action and reinforcement that isn’t coming. America is limping along with only one functioning party and a cult-like populist movement that is harking back to the good old days of white Christian supremacy, bigotry, book banning, chauvinism, and xenophobia.

No news is bad news. What we keep waiting for is an unequivocal repudiation by the American People of the authoritarian streak that was the hallmark of Trump’s presidency and that has since metastasized all through the Republican Party. Trump and his followers are dying for a second term in office so that he can finish the work, shatter the ‘deep state’, finish the border wall, and keep all immigrants out indefinitely, deploy military power domestically against any street opposition, replace public with patriotic education, and create Mussolini style ‘Freedom Cities’ on public land.

What we are waiting for is for the special prosecutor, Jack Smith, and his team to finish their work and finally advise the Department of Justice to hold Trump criminally accountable for his attempts to subvert the democratic underpinnings of our constitutional republican system of government.

What we keep waiting for is a mandate from the American people to strengthen our democracy−and protect it from future attempts to subvert it− by simple common-sense steps like expanding the House of Representatives, automatic voter registration, banning gerrymandering, making Election Day a National Holiday, and eliminating the ‘winner takes all’ rule in the apportioning of State Electors to the Electoral College.

In sum, what we keep waiting for is a clear signal from the American People that it has no tolerance for antics that put us on a slide path towards authoritarianism of the kind that we have seen happening to the Weimar Republic, and in modern times to Russia, Belarus, Hungary, Turkey, and Poland. Odds are that this signal will come in due time, if not conclusively in 2024, over the next election cycles. The reason for this optimism is found in the peculiarity of the American election system where few people vote in the primaries and, as things stand today, GOP contenders are chanceless if they fail to capture the MAGA faithful. This forces Republicans running for office to espouse extreme populist (I deliberately don’t use the word ‘conservative’ here) positions on issues like abortion, critical race theory, book banning, and LBGTQ rights, where they will veer far away from public opinion, thus making them less electable in a general election. The youth vote, that represents an ever-increasing part of the voting public and has already shown in recent elections to be strongly averse to MAGA rhetoric, will have to save the day. Which is only appropriate since the future belongs to them even if octogenarians and septuagenarians are slugging it out in the battle for the White House and are still disproportionally represented in Congress.

It is old news, a little tired and less than uplifting, but the best chance to keep the Republic as intended by the Founding Fathers is to let the MAGA flame burn itself out by forcing Republican contenders for public office to take ever more extreme positions that are sure to alienate all but the most Trumpist fanatics in the voting public.

IN SUSPENSE

On this Ides of March America finds itself in a time and state of suspense. So many balls are up in the air, keeping the nation on pins and needles:

Winter has yet to turn into spring.

We are awaiting the outcome of the NY State grand jury investigation of the former US President in the case of the hush money paid to silence porn star Stormy Daniels.

We are awaiting the findings of the Georgia State special grand jury investigating whether the former President and his allies committed any crimes while trying to overturn his 2020 election loss.

We are awaiting the findings of special counsel Jack Smith in the Department of Justice probe into the former President’s handling of highly sensitive classified documents he retained at his Florida resort Mar-a-Lago after leaving the White House in January 2021 and his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election's results, including a plot to submit phony slates of electors to block Congress from certifying Democrat Joe Biden's victory.

The Supreme Court will decide before this summer whether the theory of ‘independent state legislature’ is supported by the US Constitution and, if it does, confer on state legislatures plenary, exclusive power to redraw congressional districts for federal elections and appoint state electors who cast the votes for President and Vice President on behalf of, but not necessarily in concert with, the voters of the states.

A US District Judge in Amarillo, TX , appointed by the former President, is expected to issue a ruling any day now that may impose a nationwide injunction on the distribution of the abortion pill mifepristone.

The civil suit issued by Dominion Voting Systems against the Fox News Channel will either come to trial in April or be settled between the parties. The suit, if it proceeds, will determine if the media channel can, with impunity, misinform the viewing public if it wants to conform its news reporting to the prevailing biases of its audience and thus protect its viewership and ratings.

The nation keeps teetering at the brink of a recession as the Federal Reserve tries to figure out if it can bring inflation under control without bringing the economy to a dead stop and exacerbating the financial crisis that torpedoed the Silicon Valley Bank and now threatens contagion.

The acrimony between the two political parties has risen to the level where it looks uncertain if Congress will be able to raise the debt ceiling as required to avoid a default on the national debt, which is predicted to happen sometime this summer if a political compromise is not enacted upon. The American public has good reasons to be on edge as the consequences of a national default are unimaginably dire.

In the meantime, the nation is gearing up for the primary campaigns for the 2024 Presidential election at least at the Republican side (with the Democrats holding their powder try until the current President decides if he will run for a second term.) For the time being, the former President is still the front runner on the Republican side, but it is very early in the game and his legal challenges may ultimately have an impact on the outcome of the primary contests which will not play out until the spring of next year.

The uncertainty caused by all of these pending matters is ‘sans pareil’, without equal. What we are watching is not simply a contest between a progressive and a conservative approach to the future governance of the nation as it has been for all of our lifetime. For the first time in recent history a populist, anti-democratic, movement, triggered and espoused by a former President, is challenging the tenets of the republican democracy and the Republican Party, so far, is refusing to deny it safe harbor.

Our democratic experiment that started in 1776 is in jeopardy of institutional breakdown by a politization of the judiciary and an errant ideology infused in one of its two parties in its legislature. America is holding its breath to find out how the crisis will unfold, and the world watches us in bewilderment and with trepidation.

What is hanging in the balance with all this uncertainty is America’s power to guide and influence world affairs. The concept of ‘America First’ is not entirely misguided. Geopolitics has not developed in a way that the world can safely afford to do without American leadership. But it will prove impossible for America to exhibit global leadership and be accepted in that role by the world community, if it cannot put its own house in order. At a time when America is still the indispensable force to guarantee the charters of the United Nations and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization it cannot fail in asserting its own republican democratic governance system. It cannot allow the ‘full faith and credit’ of its sovereign debt to be placed in doubt. And it cannot show its adversaries any internal division about its support of nations whose territorial integrity and sovereign existence is placed under attack by hostile neighbors.

The nation will be in suspense for several more months until each of these pending matters will have been decided, for better or for worse, with monumental consequences for the future of America and the world.

FROM SCRATCH

In science, technology, and business, if an experiment fails or does not deliver the expected results, it gets scratched and the process starts all over again. American republican democracy, created once the revolutionary war was won, was very much an experiment. It had not been tried anywhere in the world, with the exception, maybe, of ancient Athens, five hundred years before Christ. Democracy is a concept, a way of doing business in the political arena. It stands in contrast with autocracy. An autocracy governs from the top down, a democracy governs from the bottom up. In an autocracy the rules are set for the people by an unelected authority, in a democracy the people elect the authority to set the rules for them. All of this is theory. How well or poorly a democracy functions depends on the structure chosen for the implementation and preservation of the democracy. The base of the structure supporting democracy for the United States of America is the Constitution, which was approved by a Constitutional Convention in 1787 and took effect in 1788 when the State of New Hampshire ratified it. It has since been amended 27 times, the last time in 1992. The most important amendments of the Constitution pertain to the insertion of a ‘bill of rights’ in 1791 and the election of Senators by direct popular vote rather than appointment by State legislatures in 1913. The structure of the institutions supporting democracy in the United States of America has not changed since then.

Reverence for the Constitution is justifiably high. In the judicial branch it manifests itself in the ‘originalist’ legal theory advocated by the Federalist Society. Originalists believe that the constitutional text ought to be given the original public meaning that it would have had at the time that it became law. The originalist legal theory puts the ideas of our founding fathers on a pedestal even though some of them have since been proven misguided or untenable in today’s world. It ignores the insights and changed realities developed over time during the two and a half centuries that have passed.

The indisputable fact that our political system is proving itself to be incapable of addressing, by legislative action, the most pressing policy issues of our time like the national debt, preservation of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, immigration, tax reform, climate change, voting rights, gun control, police reform, and -in a broader sense- the untenable inequality, provides a clear signal that democracy in the United States of America is not delivering the expected results and that the great American experiment is failing. It is time to jettison any originalist approach to the codification of the structure of our democracy and review it with an eye on current conditions and the exigencies of the future. In this, we need to recognize that the Constitution, while the foundation of our political system, is only part of the structure of our democracy that is further formed by executive, congressional, and judicial action (precedents, traditions, rules and regulations) and the fact that in the US we are dealing with a two-party system with parties of roughly equal size and strength.

The question is: “If we had to do it all over again, what changes in the political system would have to be considered to enhance our democracy with an eye on producing results required for this day and age.”

There is a lot we want to preserve, because it has been serving us well; there is a lot we are better off without; and there is a lot we should put in place to improve our political system and in Benjamin Franklin’s words “keep our republic”.

What we should preserve:

·        The three co-equal branches of government.

·        The bi-cameral federal legislature.

·        Term limited Presidency.

·        The Bill of Rights, but with updated and expanded language to cover contemporary norms.

·        National election of the President, members of the House of Representatives, and Senators.

What we should get rid of:

·        The Electoral College.

·        The filibuster rule in the Senate.

·        Lifetime tenure for Supreme Court Justices.

·        The lid on the number of members of the House of Representatives.

·        The two-party system.

What we should put in place:

·        Term limits for members of Congress.

·        Limits on campaign contributions.

·        Prohibition of gerrymandering.

·        Ranked voting for Congressional seats.

·        Uniform federal rules for voting access.

·        A Constitutional requirement to balance the federal budget.

·        A Constitutional requirement for Congress to articulate a national strategy.

In my book “NEITHER HERE NOR THERE, A First-Generation Immigrant in search of American Exceptionalism”, I argue that it is time for the voters to exercise the people power to scratch the political structure that has evolved over time and bring it ‘up to code’ for the exigencies of modern times. To those who would argue that this would be too much heavy lifting, I say that this nation has dealt with tougher challenges, when it had to. Remember what Nelson Mandela said: “It always seems impossible, until it is done.”

IT IS WHAT IT IS

I cringe when people say that to me. It signals resignation, surrender, defeatism. And yet, after the deplorable Republican display at the House of Representatives last week, the inescapable conclusion I arrive at when it comes to the immediate future of the American political scene is: It is what it is. As if this isn’t bad enough, the even more scary part is that it portends to be getting much worse before we get a shot at repairing the damage and safeguarding a functioning democracy. The next election is not until November of 2024 and until then, ‘We The People’ are powerless to hold our politicians accountable.

Thanks to C-SPAN and the absence of rules governing the live TV reporting of the proceedings in the House of Representatives (these rules renew with each Congress and cannot be established until a speaker of the House has been chosen) we got a good view of the ugliness of the power struggle within the Republican caucus, the deep and prolonged humiliation Kevin McCarthy was willing to accept in order to ultimately attain the coveted speakership, but also the disciplined and dignified behavior of the House Chaplain, the Clerk of the House, and a very unified Democratic caucus. What was hidden from view was the detail of the concessions Kevin McCarthy had to make to get a hold of the gavel. What is clear though is that, whatever conservative agenda McCarthy was already planning to bring forward under his speakership will now be pushed further to the extreme right, where it will be confronted with resistance from the Democratic controlled Senate and the Presidential veto power. This means that in terms of legislative work, the main job of a legislature, the 118^th Congress will not accomplish anything.

In the battle for the speakership, Kevin McCarthy had a choice to either seek the support of the 20 MAGA fanatics who would not accept his leadership without holding it hostage to their extremist demands, in effect gutting the speakership of any authority, or seek the support of moderates on either side of the aisle who remain committed to good public governance and the tenets of democracy. Knowing that he would be ostracized by his party if he would resist the challenge from his right flank, he fatally made the wrong choice. He put party before country and that is what we will have to live with for the next two years, until we get back to the voting booth. Until then, It is what it is.

The outcome of the speakership contest has made clear what we can expect to come out of the House of Representatives during the 118^th Congress: A slate of messaging bills to assuage the MAGA constituency (which will not go anywhere in the Democratic controlled Senate), and a tidal wave of investigations into perceived misdeeds of the Biden administration, the FBI, the IRS, the CDC, Dr. Fauci and, of course and with renewed fervor, Hunter Biden. We can fully expect several impeachments, of President Biden and/or members of his administration, to result from these investigations, if for nothing else, as a tit for tat counter of the two Trump impeachments coming out of the Pelosi led 117^th Congress. All annoying and a distraction from the job of addressing the ills that plague the nation, inequality, immigration chaos, inflation, deficits, cyber insecurity, and threats to our national security from a number of foreign sources. But the real menace of the devilish alliance between Kevin McCarthy and his 20 opponents comes from the need, sometime in 2023, for Congress to raise the debt-ceiling as necessary for the US government to meet its financial obligations. Without it, the USA will default on its debt with unimaginable consequences for the credit rating of the country, the value of the dollar, the financial markets, and the national and global economy. Yet, apparently, the speaker of the House has pledged to his opponents in the GOP caucus that he will not introduce a bill to raise the debt-ceiling without extracting large spending cuts in the already approved budget for 2023, possibly including cuts in entitlement programs, military spending, and aid to Ukraine. This will set up a clash between the House Republicans and the White House and the question is who will blink first? Will Kevin McCarthy get all of his caucus to follow him to the rim of the fiscal cliff or over it, or will President Biden cave in to the demands of the speaker for the sake of sparing the country the ultimate test of creditworthiness? Will Kevin McCarthy still be speaker at decision time and will the composition of the Congress still be the same as it is today? The margins of control are so narrow that a number of deaths, resignations, or expulsions of members of Congress could quickly change the balance of power.

Bottomline is, ‘We The People’ are bystanders to what will unfold in the Beltway over the next two years. It is out of our hands, because, other than for an odd special election or primaries for the 2024 national election, we will not have a chance to turn to the voting booth to let our elected representatives know where we want them to lead us. It is what it is.

The date to focus on is Tuesday, November 5, 2024. The next national election day. Regardless of who will be the contenders in that election, it is shaping up as a contest between 1) those of us who believe that a democratically constituted government should play an active role in shaping the future of the nation and in creating a fair playing field for all of its constituents, 2) those who believe that government is the problem standing in the way of free people to express themselves and determine their own destiny and the destiny of the nation, and 3) those who believe that democracy has outlived its usefulness and should be substituted by an authoritarian rule.

I am squarely in the first camp, and I quietly hope that for the sake of the nation the House Republicans will go overboard in their zeal to undo the Biden/Pelosi agenda and punish the Democrats for their audacity to craft bipartisan support for their major legislative achievements in the 117^th Congress. The crew that delivered the gavel to Kevin McCarthy, only after extracting a steep price in concessions he initially pledged he would never make, is more than likely to comply. If the Republican focus in the 118^th Congress is retribution rather than problem solving, we will be given a clear compass for where to place our votes in 2024. In the meantime, whether we like it or not, it is what it is.