Criticizing the President

It's been enjoyable to see the criticism lately of President Biden by people who voted for him. Criticism of his bombing in Syria, of his lukewarm support of a $15 minimum wage of his border policies, that he is too liberal, that he's not liberal enough. Not because I necessarily agree with the criticism, although I do agree with some of it, but because that what's supposed to happen. 

For the past four years we have been saddled with a President who equated even mild disagreement as disloyalty, or even treason. During President Obama's administration the seeds were sown by the Republicans presenting a united front in opposing everything that Obama did, but the Republicans reached new lows, not by supporting Trump's policies, which could be expected, but by elevating Trump to the status of demi-god. Trump, according to the new Republican orthodoxy, could do no wrong. Conservatism was redefined, not as a set of core principles: small government, low taxes, balanced budgets, reduced regulation, free trade, and a strong military, but an unquestioning fealty to Trump. 

So having a President who can take criticism without having a public meltdown is refreshing. It's also refreshing to hear regular people expecting the president to adhere to a set ideology, rather than warping the ideology to conform to whatever the president is tweeting that day. 

Thinking is Hard

"I'm going to fight for you"

"I'm not one of those cocktail party circuit politicians"

"I'm going to protect your Second Amendment"

"We need someone who represents real [fill in your state]"

"I'll never support socialism" 

What do all of those quotes have in common? They're all quotes from people running for public office. What does any of it mean? Just about nothing. So why do we keep hearing those kind of quotes? Because people don't really want to think, and any specifics about what kind of policies a candidate will support bores most voters. What we end up with is vague platitudes, irrelevant "brave" stances, and elected officials who have no idea how anything works. It's how in Nebraska we end up electing Republicans year after year because most Nebraskans are convinced that the Democrats are socialists and we're against socialism even though we're not sure what specific proposals are socialistic and why they're bad. It's not a whole lot better in "blue" states. And it's not just that voters don't want to think, it's candidates who don't understand how governing works. We get candidates who believe that because they ran a business they can be a successful governor or senator; or because they're a "typical" [fill in your state] then they'd be up for the challenge of legislating. This doesn't mean that someone who was a bartender or an optometrist, or a restaurateur, or even a CEO can't be an effective legislator or governor or president, just that being a CEO or a regular Joe are not qualifications in and of themselves. 

Naïve and inexperienced people getting elected don't end up changing the institution, they end up, due to their inexperience, being led by the old hands who have been there for decades. There is a process to lawmaking. I've said before that I'd support a requirement that elected officials have some experience. Senator shouldn't be an entry-level job (nor should the presidency for that matter). I don't like Senator Deb Fischer, but she at least had some experience in our state legislature before running for Senate (not that she's done anything but toe the party line since her election). Mike Johanns was a county board member, city councilman, Lincoln Mayor, and governor before he was a senator. George W Bush and Bill Clinton were governors before being elected president. You can disagree with their policies, but they knew the process, they understood how things worked. 

But these inexperienced people get elected, and because they were elected by people who didn't think about their choice, they're forced to continue to govern, using the term loosely, by demagoguery, or as I've said before, by urban legend. We get Nebraska legislators posturing about gun rights, even though there are no efforts in the Unicameral to restrict gun ownership. We get members of the House of Representatives and the Senate spending their time propping up insane conspiracy theories instead of attempting to solve our country's many problems. 

Maybe before the next election we ask the candidates to be a bit more specific than "I'll fight for you". 

Fact-Checking

Since the previous president of the United States had an arms-length relationship with the truth, self-described fact-checkers have kept very busy over the last five years. I concede that politicians often play fast and loose with the truth, exaggerating information that is beneficial to them and downplaying what goes against their agenda. Did I say "politicians", I should have said "people". Some things that a politician says are just a matter of opinion. An elected official could be pressing for a course of action where we won't know the results until we actually commit to it. Military involvement overseas is a good example of that. When we send our military into another country we don't really know what will happen. We don't know how the citizens of the other country will react, how neighboring countries will act or even how effective our military strategy will be. For other things, like economics, we have experts who have opinions based on the past, but not all the experts agree and unforeseen consequences often occur. Then there are statements that can easily be checked for veracity. If the president makes a statement about our trade imbalance, there are government statistics that can be referenced to verify the truth of that statement. If someone accuses a candidate of saying something, a video of the event at which it allegedly occurred can probably be found. Statements of fact are rather easily checked. Most of us, however, have days that are taken up by work, home life, family, community, etc and don't have the time or the resources to confirm everything a politician says. So we have people who specialize in fact-checking. 

One of the first dedicated fact-checking sites that I became aware of was Snopes.com. It started out as a site that looked into the so-called urban legends, but eventually started fact-checking other things, including statements by and accusations against, politicians. Other sites, such as Politifact, specialized in politics. Daniel Dale, now with CNN, dedicated the last four years to fact-checking virtually every statement made by the previous president. Unsurprisingly, a president who usurped the phrase "fake news", soon began to undermine his supporters' faith in independent fact-checkers, including them under his "fake news" umbrella. I'll say that it is important to consider the bias of a news organization and of a fact-checker, but just because a fact-checker debunks your pet conspiracy theory doesn't mean that it's unreliable. 

A reliable fact checker doesn't merely deny the in-dispute information, he cites sources, written, as well as audio and video records. These sources can then be verified by anyone who is interested in the truth of the matter. An example is the Electoral College margin of victory by the previous president in 2016. He repeatedly claimed that it was "historic", "a landslide", the "greatest margin of victory" and other superlatives. The New York Times ran a story showing that of 50 elections it was the 45th most decisive, (I may not have the exact numbers) not the "greatest". The New York Times cited their sources, which verified their conclusions. I decided to go one step further and found other sources, all of which confirmed the Times' fact-checking. A simple assertion is not fact-checking. An unsupported statement is not a debunking. Good fact-checkers will provide enough information for you to see how they arrived at their conclusions. 

Republicans Can Kiss My Ass

Both of our two major political parties have traditionally been "big tent" parties. Both have been the home to a range, a continuum, of political and economic views. In my voting life I have voted for Republicans, I have voted for Democrats, I have voted for Libertarians, I have voted for Independents. On many of the left-right ideological divides of the day reasonable people can disagree on the best way to address issues. Most issues cannot be simplified down to right or wrong, black or white. Economic plans that seem straightforward often have unintended consequences. Sometimes the thing you were against turns out to be not so bad and the thing you were for an unmitigated disaster. 

All of that has become moot. The modern Republican Party has become a danger to the nation. It has become inherently immoral. 

There have always been differences between the parties and there has always been bare knuckle brawling and dirty tricks. However, I trace the start of what the Republican Party has become to the nineties and the rise of Newt Gingrich. Democrats had been the majority party in Congress for most of the previous 50 years at that point. Gingrich's plan to put the Republicans in the majority mainly rested upon demonizing the Democrats and included impeaching President Clinton for lying about oral sex. The next main phase began when President Barack Obama was inaugurated. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell's stated goal (not at all implied, he said it out loud) was to make Obama a one-term president. He used every trick in the book to block virtually everything Obama tried to do. He pretended to work with Obama in crafting the PPACA, winning concessions and compromises, but no Republicans voted for it in the end. Obama was only able to get that done do to a 60 vote, filibuster-proof majority in the Senate his first two years. McConnell continued to obstruct after the Republicans gained the Senate majority, blocking confirmation of judicial nominations and stated that his proudest moment was denying Obama a Supreme Court confirmation in his final year in office. 

The next phase was during the Trump presidency. A Republican majority in both houses pushed a massive tax cut...not for ordinary Americans, but for corporations. Once the Democrats regained the majority in the House of Representatives, McConnell refused to consider any bills passed by the House, the Senate functioning merely as a judicial appointment mill. He changed his mind about confirming a Supreme Court appointment in a president's final year, rushing through a confirmation in the final month before the election, not even embarrassed about the hypocrisy. 

In case you believe that the Republicans were acting this way only in Washington DC, Republican legislatures in several states voted to reduce a governor's power after a Democrat replaced a Republican in the governor's mansion, Republican governors or legislatures delayed or overrode a vote of the people in several states. In Nebraska, the Republican governor financed primary challenges of fellow Republicans who did not support his legislative proposals. Republican proposals to make it more difficult to vote proliferated. 

Back in Washington, most Republicans declined to so much as mildly criticize a President who was off the rails, even after he spent months trying to overturn the election and inspired his followers to attack the US Capitol. The Republican Party, as bad as it was before the 2016 election, has turned into a cult of personality, loyal not to the country or even conservative principles, but to one person. The few Republicans who do speak out are censured by the party and derided as "not real Republicans". 

I'll never vote for a Republicans ever again.

Republicans can kiss my ass. 

No, Trump Will NOT Be Sworn in as the 18th President on March 4th

There's an idea making the rounds that, despite having lost the election, Donald Trump will be inaugurated as president on the "real" Inauguration Day, March 4th. Believers in this assertion maintain that Washington D.C. is "foreign soil" and that President Biden's oath of office is null and void. Adherents to this view point to the District of Columbia Organic Act of 1871 to support their ideas. According to them, in 1871 the District of Columbia was organized as a corporation separate from the rest of the United States and subject to international banking laws, making the district, no longer a part of the United States of America, but a separate, foreign, entity. Related ideas, which first saw the light of day in conjunction with the "sovereign citizen" movement, further claim that the United States ceased to be a Republic at this time and the whole country was now a corporation called THE UNITED STATES CORPORATION (they apparently feel that the use of all capitals in this case is significant). This makes any Constitutional amendments passed after 1871 null and void, and any presidents who served after 1871 illegitimate. Many in the sovereign citizen movement use this rationale to assert that the government of the United States as we know it has no authority over them; QAnon Trumpers have taken this belief one step further, fantasizing that Trump will somehow reverse the supposed illegal conversion of the U.S. into a corporation and be sworn in as the eighteenth president of the United States (Grant, as the seventeenth, was the last legitimate president according to this world view).

There are a few problems with this whole scenario. 

The seat of the nascent United States government was to be a ten mile square (10 miles x 10 miles) at a site chosen by Congress. The district was created from land ceded by the states of Maryland and Virginia and initially was a square, ten miles on a side. Within this square, the cities of Georgetown, Maryland and Arlington, Virginia already existed. The new city of Washington was designated as the nation's capital city. Each of the cities maintained their own municipal governments. In 1846 the portion of the district on the Virginian side was returned to Virginia. 

There were many reorganizations that took place over the years. Before the infamous 1871 act, the city of Washington (which was incorporated in 1802 by the way) and the district area outside the city were administered separately, with several changes to the method of administration over the years. The 1871 act merged Washington, Georgetown and the unincorporated areas of the district into one territory, and appointed a territorial governor. It's at this point that the district was incorporated. This does not mean that it became an independent corporation, like General Motors or Amazon, but it was, and still is, the method by which an unorganized area becomes organized into a recognized entity. Every city, town and village in the country is a corporation. Occasionally you'll run across small towns that are unincorporated. This is not some insidious plot to move the seat of government by sleight-of-hand outside the jurisdiction of the Constitution. It's a mundane, ordinary, run-of-the-mill way of organizing a municipality. The idea that the District of Columbia is a foreign entity is a fringe idea not supported by facts. The associated idea that this 1871 Organic Act not only turned DC into a foreign entity, but abolished the United States as a Republic but turned it into a corporation that somehow is existing in some legal limbo has even less solid ground to stand on. Trumpists are grasping, not only at straws, but imaginary straws, in order to keep the hope that their savior, in the face of defeat after defeat, will prevail.