I was raised by parents who had been physically and psychologically abused as children. They grew to adulthood with little ability to restrain themselves when frustrated and, quick to anger, took out their unbearable feelings on their children. My sister and I were blamed for all kinds of things, some of them ridiculous. I trace my need to express myself to my childhood desperation to untie the knot of the incoherent story I was expected to accept about myself, about my sister. I started writing fairly young, and before that I drew, constantly.
“Why are your drawings so scary?” my mother would sometimes ask.
“Because I can’t write yet,” I might have told her.
I had a girlfriend and her baby visit me in New York decades ago, saved up, sent them plane tickets. The child, who I loved very much, is now in her thirties, maybe forty (damn!). I last saw her on her fourth or fifth birthday. Her mother was beautiful, talented, had a great sense of humor, we got along great, I loved her, but in the end things didn’t work out between us. During the week they were my guests, the two year-old had a few temper tantrums, as two year-olds do, and her mother tried to press me into moving to California and join the community she lived in with her Indian guru, Baba Hari Dass. I felt increasingly pressured as the week went on.
After they left I found a drawing I’d done while they were in NY. It was a shapely woman’s leg, standing firmly on its lovely foot, with a leash tied to the thigh, where a garter would be. The leash was taut and straining against it was a dog with a human face, and a huge boulder on his back.
“Fuck,” I thought when I saw that drawing afterwards, “that self-portrait says it all…”
I find this unexpected revelation of my deeper feelings with writing sometimes. I read something I wrote and a phrase jumps out to clarify a complicated quandary for me. Here’s a paragraph I wrote recently that made me realize something very important about a prolonged estrangement from two of my oldest, dearest friends.
Long, deep talk with old friends recently [different ones — ed.], reminding me of the healingpower of being heard and of forcing yourself to hear things you may not like to hear. These are crucial perspectives you can’t come to on your own when you are impaired by pain. Good friends don’t always have to agree with you, though they often do, but they always treat you with care when you need care.
Simple test: did my oldest friends always treat me with care when I needed care?
Well, not always, and lately, for the last nine months or so, no care at all. In fact, the opposite of care. They insisted I was wrong to feel the way I did after one jumped ugly with me, since in their story she was only reacting to my threatening attitude. They blamed me for ruining a wonderful vacation with a flash of anger the last day, denied there was any tension at all leading up to my outburst, just a simple misunderstanding I blew up over, until seven months later one of them admitted things had been very tense, because she had been micromanaging everything to make sure it was all perfect. The other one later threatened me that he’d walked away from friendships for less than what I’d done to him. The first one had a temper tantrum, then was so shocked later that I still needed to talk about it that she went incommunicado for months, then had another temper tantrum when I dared to bring up the troubling pass our long relationship has come to.
Understanding does not lead to a clean solution to your vexations, but it is better to see the thing clearly than to have it muddily painful in your head, waking you hours too early, like a toothache. I compare this depressing impasse with my dear, old friends to having a knife stuck in my side by one of them, unintentionally, let’s say. When I pointed to it, the other pushed it in a little further. Months later, when I gestured toward the still unhealed knife wound, the first one stuck her finger deep into it and wiggled it around. I didn’t bleed out, I didn’t lose consciousness, so what am I fucking blubbering about? That’s a tiny flesh wound, asshole, I’ll give you something to blubber about!
To forgive is divine, truly, and to be slow to anger is praiseworthy. I managed not to respond to either of them with anger, but their conditional apologies turn out to be hollow, empty, without form or substance, without any change in behavior. I don’t need apologies anyway, as I explained to them, I need to be heard and understood by loved ones when I’m hurt. You know, empathy, understanding, the benefit of the doubt — basic friendship. I expect to be treated with the same care I extend to them. But that turns out to be unreasonable when the only pain the other person can truly relate to is their own.
We are all capable of casting ourselves as the victims when things get ugly, and things are ugly enough for all of us right now on this imperiled little planet, at the doorstep of climate destruction and surging worldwide fascism. There are also not always two equally compelling sides to every story. Treating friends with care is the most basic duty of friendship. Dereliction of that duty, especially if repeated over and over, is an indication that the friendship you are clinging to may already be dead.
I still have a hope that these two dear friends will have an unexpected change of heart the next time we meet, whenever that might be. I’m ready to be pleasantly surprised, delighted and relieved, by that change of heart, that deeper understanding. It’s a slim, wan, simpering hope, I know, but it is a hope and I appreciate it. Hope is always better than no hope, I believe, until the proof is irrefutable and the hope for something better is crushed by dull, heavy, merciless reality.
The Federalist Society method for radical social change is a page from any democracy to authoritarianism legal playbook. You need to change the laws to protect the interests of your patronsby moving power to institutions you already control. You take the legal result you want, have legal scholars create a doctrine that will support a ruling in your favor, promulgate that doctrine in the media (the “Independent State Legislature Doctrine” for example [1]) as you find the perfect legal case to apply that doctrine to and strike down a hated law or regulation. Select the ideal federal district where the carefully chosen case can be brought, ideally a place where any appeal will be heard by a panel of Federalist Society members. Preserve all arguments, no matter how far-fetched, for appeal and wind up at the Supreme Court, controlled by your members. Have numerous Federalist Society scholars submitamicus (“friend of the court”) briefs, giving legal support for the desired ruling.
If the case calls for throwing out state law to have your desired result, you have a doctrine ready (unregulated gun rights too sacred to be left to the states). If it calls for overriding federal law, use a different doctrine (Christ says life begins at fertilization, federal government has no right to contradict the Messiah, only states can do that). Heather Cox Richardson provides detail on two chilling examples (see footnotes). The rulings are often legally and logically ridiculous, but no worries, the ends justify the means, plus, we have the votes. Plus, nothing infuriates the libs like an irrational,inappealable in-your-fucking-face “fuck you”.
They are openly playing a brutal game, as they move the country toward a Christian fascist autocracy. We are to understand that no matter how popular a given position is among voters, whatever fix Congress might make, whatever the unanimous upholding of a law might say about its necessity to a free democracy, the final say is left to the Federalist Society majority on the highest court in the land. They just ruled, 6-3, that the Clean Air Act does not give the Environmental Protection Agency the right to regulate things like carbon emissions that pollute the air, presumably because that exact phrase was not used in the law creating the EPA (just a guess) [2]. Media reports this devastating anti-climate ruling as “SCOTUS hamstrings Biden’s plans to combat Climate Change,” as thoughthe 79 year-old Biden is the only victim of this criminal ruling. The only beneficiaries of the ruling are outfits like Exxon, Koch Industries and Halliburton, major drivers of “Biden inflation” as they reap record profits by raising gas prices to near-record levels.
I read Shelby County v. Holder during the 2020 election. That was the 5-4 “conservative” ruling that overruled a 98-0 Senate vote to reauthorize the Voting Rights Act and the strongly expressed support of the previous Republican president. The Federalist Society knows that their side loses any election in which there is massive voter turnout, so making voting more difficult is a big win for them. John Roberts was careful not to touch the law itself, he merely made it impossible to enforce that law, short of going to court again and again in every jurisdiction that might violate the law with new voter suppression methods. The law prevented chicanery to suppress the vote among minority populations, and required preclearance for new laws to make voting harder in jurisdictions that had previously resorted to such chicanery. Roberts waved a judicial wand to make the history of voter suppression disappear, because the Voting Rights Act had fixed it. See, no need for enforcement!
Roberts cited voting statistics from formerly openly racist districts to show that there was equal access to the polls for whites and Blacks, then voting in numbers reflecting their relative size in the population. Proof that there was no further need to enforce the Voting Rights Act. He falsely claimed that Congress had wrongly relied on forty year old data when reauthorizing the Act. There were numerous hearings and a mountain of current data presented before gigantic majorities in both houses of Congress reauthorized the law and George W. Bush held a signing ceremony where he underscored the importance of this law to our democracy.
But, you know, that all smells too much like democracy, “majoritarian tyranny,” for persecuted mega-donors like “Mr. Dark Money”, Charles Koch. So, as soon as Shelby County was decided, numerous Republican-controlled states immediately enacted laws to suppress the vote. Just as many anti-abortion “trigger laws” went into effect as soon as the Unappealable Six struck down Roe v. Wade in a masterpieceof judicial illogic.
There is only one solution to this illegitimate, inconsistent, rabidly partisan court. It, along with the rest of the federal bench, was packed with committed Federalist Society zealots by the unprincipled Mitch McConnell, using his power to obstruct Obama and the idiot Trump who kept his promise to the Council on National Policy (in return for them blessing his candidacy) to select judges only from Federalist Society lists of its top ideologues. The illegitimately packed Supreme Court must now be rebalanced and there is no constitutional reason not to expand the court. Biden has shied away from this fight, kicking the can down the road by appointing a bipartisan panel to explore the issue before letting it quietly die. Biden has many other fights on his plate, against unified Republican opposition and two bought and paid for Democratic defenders of the obstructionist filibuster. He also doesn’t have the votes, with Manchin and Sinema scrupulously “neutral” on allowing any legislation to come up for a vote in the Senate.
Now the president calls for a filibuster carve out to allow the Senate to codify Roe 51-49. As if any such law would not be quickly litigated by the Federalist Society and struck down by the Federalist Society Six — three of which were appointed by razor thin majorities after McConnell’s filibuster carve out for Supreme Court justices. Biden didn’t call for a carve out to make federal rules for federal elections, to protect voting rights as state after state made laws that would not have passed the pre-Shelby County Voting Rights Act. He didn’t call for a carve out for legislation to mitigate Climate Catastrophe. He doesn’t have the votes now, I understand, but, come on, man, part of your fucking job is inspiring confidence in people who voted for you. How are Democrats supposed to pick up Senate seats, to allow his administration to get anything done, when Mr. Biden is hesitant to speak truth to power? Power concedes nothing without a demand, as Frederick Douglass, Trump’s facebook friend, noted many moons ago.
[1] from the great Heather Cox Richardson:
The court also said today that it will consider making even greater changes to our country. It will hear Moore v. Harper, a case about whether state legislatures alone have the power to set election rules even if their laws violate state constitutions.
The case comes from North Carolina, where the state supreme court rejected a dramatically partisan gerrymander. Republicans say that the state court cannot stop the legislature’s carving up of the state because of the “independent state legislatures doctrine.” This is a new idea, based on the clause in the U.S. Constitution providing that “[t]he times, places and manner of holding elections for senators and representatives, shall be prescribed in each state by the legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations.” Those adhering to the independent state legislature theory ignore the second part of that provision.
Those advancing the independent state legislature theory also point to another clause of the Constitution. It says: “Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors.”
Until now, states have interpreted “legislatures” to mean the state’s general lawmaking processes, which include shared power and checks and balances among the three branches of state government. Now, a radical minority insists that a legislature is a legislature alone, unchecked by state courts or state constitutions that prohibit gerrymandering. This interpretation of the Constitution is radical and new. It caught on in 2015, when Republicans wanted to get rid of an independent redistricting commission in Arizona.
This doctrine is, of course, what Trump and his allies pushed for to keep him in power in 2020: Republican state legislatures throwing out the will of the people and sending electors for Trump to Congress rather than the Biden electors the majority voted for.
That doctrine would also give to state legislatures the power to control who can vote, and how and where they can do so. It would strip power from elections commissions and secretaries of state, and it would take from state courts the power to challenge gerrymandering or voter suppression. Republicans currently control 30 state legislatures, in large part thanks to the gerrymandering and voter suppression in place in a number of those states.
Revered conservative judge J. Michael Luttig has been trying for months to sound the alarm that this doctrine is a blueprint for Republicans to steal the 2024 election. In April, before the court agreed to take on the Moore v. Harper case, he wrote: “Trump and the Republicans can only be stopped from stealing the 2024 election at this point if the Supreme Court rejects the independent state legislature doctrine (thus allowing state court enforcement of state constitutional limitations on legislatively enacted election rules and elector appointments) and Congress amends the Electoral Count Act to constrain Congress’ own power to reject state electoral votes and decide the presidency.”
And yet in March, when the Supreme Court let the state supreme court’s decision against the radical map stay in place for 2022, justices Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Clarence Thomas, and Brett Kavanaugh indicated they are open to the idea that state courts have no role in overseeing the rules for federal elections.
In the one term Trump’s three justices have been on the court, they have decimated the legal landscape under which we have lived for generations, slashing power from the federal government, where Congress represents the majority, and returning it to states, where a Republican minority can impose its will. Thanks to the skewing of our electoral system, those states are now poised to take control of our federal government permanently.
Today, the court’s decision in West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency reversed almost 100 years of jurisprudence by arguing that Congress cannot delegate authority on “major questions” to agencies in the executive branch. At stake were EPA regulations that would push fossil fuel producers toward clean energy in order to combat climate change. The vote was 6 to 3, along ideological lines. That the court agreed to hear the case despite the fact that the rules being challenged had been abandoned suggested they were determined to make a point.
That point was to hamstring federal regulation of business. The argument at the heart of this decision is called the “nondelegation doctrine,” which says that Congress, which constitutes the legislative branch of the government, cannot delegate legislative authority to the executive branch. Most of the regulatory bodies in our government are housed in the executive branch. So the nondelegation doctrine would hamstring the modern regulatory state.
To avoid this extreme conclusion, the majority on the court embraced the “major questions” doctrine, which Chief Justice Roberts used today for the first time in a majority opinion.
That doctrine says that Congress must not delegate “major” issues to an agency, saying that such major issues must be explicitly authorized by Congress. But the abuse of the Senate filibuster by Republican senators means that no such laws stand a hope of passing. So the Supreme Court has essentially stopped the federal government from responding as effectively as it must to climate change. And that will have international repercussions: the inability of the U.S. government to address the crisis means that other countries will likely fall behind as well. The decision will likely apply not just to the EPA, but to a whole host of business regulations.
As recently as 2001, the Supreme Court unanimously rejected the nondelegation argument in a decision written by Justice Antonin Scalia, who said the court must trust Congress to take care of its own power. But now it has become law.
I love that Liz Cheney anticipated Trump lickspittle Tony Ornato calling Hutchinson a liar. He came out after the hearing and claimed he never said what she quoted him as saying (that an enraged Trump tried to grab the steering wheel and head to the Capitol on Jan. 6 and lunged at a secret service guy named Engel who tried to stop him, grabbing Engel by the throat). Ornato was a secret service agent who Trump promoted to deputy chief of staff, another unprecedented move in Trump’s führer-like loyalty/promotion program.
Liz Cheney: was Engel in the room when Ornato said this?
Yes
LC: did he hear what Ornato told you?
Yes
LC: did Engel contradict Ornato?
No
Hutchinson was under oath. Ornato, who swears, on FOX and in the NY Times, that she is lying, is still loving the taste of his master’s sphincter (Trumpie broke new ground by promoting Ornato from secret service agent to a high ranking member of his administration). That was the best they had, after the damning, uncontradicted revelations about Trump wanting his armed followers waved past the f-ing magnetometers, and the complicity of his inner circle in the armed violence that was planned and carried out on January 6th.
Yes, Ornoto conceded, the president had been in a rage in the limo, but Ornato loyally stated he’d never told that lying traitor anythinglike what she swore he said!And, sadly, that’s all we’ve got for ya, Sir.
Now go say that under oath, Ornato, with fellow patriot Patsy Bologna.
A big part of the practice of writing is sitting down to think something through. You write, then you read what you wrote, then you think, then you rewrite, then you readit all again. Why are you writing? For me it’s to understand and make my thoughts and feelings as clear as possible, to myself and to the reader.
We know what we are trying to say, most of the time, but the beauty of writing is that it allows us to keep rewriting, refining, fixing flaws in our presentation, focusing our intentions as sharply as possible, so that others can hopefully grasp them in all their nuance. The writer needs to give the reader enough background for meaning and context, while keeping in mind that background can swallow everything if too detailed.
Yesterday I posted an excerpt of a piece by Jennifer Rubin in which she quoted a governor named Hutchinson giving an ostensibly thoughtful answer in support of the Supreme Court forcing women and girls in his state to give birth to their rapists’ babies. Moments later another Hutchinson, a young woman named Cassidy, assistant to Trump’s final Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, gave live testimony at an emergency hearing before the J6 Select Committee. Today the nation is abuzz over her two hours under oath. I found her testimony electrifying.
She testified that Trump, Meadows, Stone (pardoned felon), Giuliani, Flynn (pardoned felon) and others planned the march to the Capitol on January 6th. Stone and Giuliani appear to have been the point men with the white supremacist militias involved in the siege of the Capitol. Meadows told his assistant a few days beforehand that things could get really bad on January 6th. Several of these Trump loyalists, Flynn, Giuliani (Bannon — pardoned before conviction for felony, Eastman, Kerik— pardoned felon) established a command center, or war room, in a hotel near the White House. Meadows wanted to go to the war room on January 5th, asked his young assistant to order a car for him, but she urged him not to go. He phoned in instead.
Trump became angry on January 6th that his crowd was being frisked and put through magnetometers (“mags”) because many were heavily armed. He is famously obsessed with crowd size and insisted the mags be removed so his followers could fill the Ellipse, for the cameras, and march on the Capitol from there. He didn’t care that they were armed, he was certain they intended him no harm.
We know his supporters had not obtained a permit to march to the Capitol on January 6th. Now we also know that the march was planned anyway. An illegal march, with insufficient police presence, to stage a show of force to “stiffen the spines” of men like Mike Pence. Good luck stiffening that guy’s spine, by the way. The illegal march to “Stop the Steal” culminated in a deadly riot. But why keep dwelling on it?
A small number of Trump’s defenders showed up today, two loyal Secret Service men in particular, to cast doubt on Cassidy Hutchinson’s account of a few moments of that stressful day. They claim theywant to testify under oath to dispute Ms. Hutchinson’s account of Trump’s temper tantrum when his driver would not drive him to the Capitol to lead the armed protest there. Ms. Hutchinson testified that Tony Ornato (promoted by Trump from lead agent to Deputy Chief of Staff) told her (with his Secret Service colleague Engel, the other agent involved, present), that Trump had tried to grab the steering wheel of his armored limo and lunged to grab Engel by the throat when he refused to yield to the president’s command to drive to the Capitol. Engel will presumablytestify that this claim about the admittedly enraged Trump grabbing himis bullshit.
In law there’s an old maxim falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus (“false in one thing, false in everything). Presumably if the Secret Service men swear under oath that what she said is not what they told her (sworn “he said, she said” — a draw), and certainly not what happened, they have established, to some, that she is a liar whose entire testimony should be seen in that light.
There is no law against a president, or anyone else, angrily throwing his lunch against the wall, as Hutchinson reported Trump did after Bill Barr betrayed him by telling AP the truth about the absence of widespread voter fraud. Even if he did throw it, there are probably witnesses willingto testify that no ketchup dripped down the wall, and even if it did, so what?
If warnings were given to witnesses to remain loyal, or have bad things happen, like what happened to former US ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yavonovich, Colonel Alexander Vindman, Michael Cohen, so what? Loyalty is a good thing and it would be a shame if anything happened to a disloyal person who was confronted by a group of righteously angry people with guns or a noose, if you catch my drift.
The “slippery” question of Trump’s intent is not very slippery in light of his consistent behavior, and the evidence presented so far in the January 6th Select Committee hearings. He has obstructed justice since he was a young man, suckling at the hideous tit of the evil Roy Cohn, who begat ratfucker Roger Stone. He was not exonerated by Mueller for at least ten specific instances of obstruction of justice related to shutting down or obstructing the Mueller “witch hunt”.
Trump cannot lose, will not tolerate it, each of his bankruptcies were actually genius uses of the legal system to keep his untold billions. Every loss in court, a strategic victory. He surrounds himself with people ready to do whatever is necessary to protect the Big Baby.
As we wait for the next explosive revelations from the J6 investigation, the Congressman and others who asked Trump for pardons after January 6th have been mostly quiet about that. After all, the real story is a planned COMMIE takeover of the US and the godless attempt to rob from the rich to feed the unworthy poor! Biden inflation, Biden mental unfitness, Biden lies, Biden weakness!
There are two sides, at least, to most stories, but the side that claims an armed riot to stop the ceremonial finalization of Trump’s election loss is perfectly legal and fine, and nothing to see, has a much weaker story, one they’d rather avoid going into. Instead they stick to praising a radicalized Supreme Court and gearing up for a sprint in the last leg of a marathon toward American fascism.
When retired three star general, convicted perjurer, QAnon and martial law promoter Mike “Lock Her UP!” Flynn was asked, under oath, what he thought about the peaceful transfer of power, his answer was one word “fifth.”
It’s going to take a while, may come too late, may involve a Supreme Court ruling on presidential pardons to criminal co-conspirators, but several of Trump’s capos are going to be tried, convicted and locked up, at least until another Republican president can spring them with an unappealable, totally non-corrupt, pardon.
Todd: Whatever you thought of Roe, that decision never forced anybody to do anything they didn’t want to do. This decision now will force a woman to carry a pregnancy that they perhaps didn’t want to do. Does that at all make you uncomfortable, that we know — you’re forcing somebody to do something they don’t want to do? Roe didn’t do that. This ruling does.
Hutchinson: Well, no, I think it’s a very appropriate ruling. Obviously, when you’re looking at the government and the power of the government forcing someone to carry a child to term, you’ve got to think that through. And legislators are thinking that through.
“Forcing someone to carry a child to term.”
Hutchinson’s blithe attitude toward policies that will wreak havoc on women’s lives sums up the utter lack of respect for women’s autonomy and personhood that is so pervasive among Republicans. It seems as far as Hutchinson is concerned, that 13-year-old rape victim is nothing more than a vessel.
It’s all a big diversion from Biden’s many failures, weak Biden’s many impeachable high crimes and misdemeanorsincluding lying, unprovoked war in Ukraine, out of control inflation and skyrocketing gas prices…
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