Editorial: Supreme Power Play

Senate Republican leaders continued to insist they would put Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court despite mounting stories of his sexual misconduct in high school and college.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., told a crowd of conservatives at the Values Voters Summit Sept. 22 in Washington that the Senate was going to “plow right through” on Kavanaugh’s confirmation, dismissing the possibility that Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony about Kavanaugh’s alleged attempt to sexually assault her at a Bethesda, Md., house party in 1982 would derail the nomination.

When McConnell made his proclamation to the cheering crowd, Senate Republican staffers were aware that Deborah Ramirez was also alleging that Kavanaugh sexually abused her during a drunken dorm party at Yale University in the 1983-84 school year. Senate Republicans called to accelerate the timing of the committee vote. After The New Yorker on Sept. 24 reported her account that Kavanaugh thrust his penis in her face at the party, McConnell characterized the allegations against the judge as a “smear campaign” and, with contempt for the rising outrage of women, promised Kavanaugh would get an up-or-down vote on the Senate floor “in the near future.”

Michael Avenatti, the attorney best known for representing Stormy Daniels, also reported he was representing a third woman who had “credible information” about allegations of “gang rape” involving Kavanaugh, his friend Mark Judge and others at house parties in the Washington, D.C. area during the early 1980s.

McConnell has been draining good faith from the Senate since 2009, when, as Senate Republican leader, he led the opposition as Barack Obama became president with Democratic majorities in the House and Senate. McConnell determined to use the filibuster, which required 60 votes to move legislation, to block Obama at every turn as he sought to stimulate the economy and pull it out of the recession that started in the last year of George W. Bush’s administration.

McConnell was adamant that Republicans thwart the Democrat’s plans. Vice President Joe Biden told Michael Grunwald, in The New New Deal, the 2012 book on the making of the economic stimulus, that during the transition seven different Republican senators told Biden that “McConnell had demanded unified resistance” to make sure Obama did not succeed. In October 2010 McConnell admitted to National Journal, “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”

In 2009, Democrats had a relatively small period of time with a supermajority of 60 votes, as Sen. Ted Kennedy had a seizure during Obama’s inaugural luncheon and he never returned to vote in the Senate. Kennedy died in August 2009 and his seat was temporarily filled by Democrat Paul Kirk on Sept. 24, 2009, which finally gave Democrats 60 votes in the Senate — for all of 14 weeks, through Feb. 4, 2010, when Republican Scott Brown won Kennedy’s seat in a special election.

Under McConnell, Republicans also filibustered Obama’s judicial nominees until then-Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nevada, in 2013 was forced to eliminate the filibuster for presidential appointees and lower-court judges. The number of votes needed for presidential appointees was reduced from 60 to 51 votes, a simple majority, so bipartisanship no longer was needed on those nominations.

When Republicans gained the Senate majority in 2015, McConnell again slowed down consideration of Obama’s nominees for judicial positions. In the most notorious case, after Justice Antonin Scalia’s sudden death in Texas in February 2016, McConnell refused to allow a hearing on Obama’s nominee for the Supreme Court vacancy, Merrick Garland, the moderate chief judge of the US Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. McConnell even refused to allow Senate votes on 25 of Obama’s judicial nominees who had advanced from the Judiciary Committee with bipartisan support, as the majority leader ran out the clock with the 2016 election approaching.

Senate Republicans kept 103 judicial vacancies unfilled, including the Supreme Court seat, and handed them over to Donald Trump when he was sworn in on Jan. 20, 2017. That was nearly double the 54 openings Obama inherited from George W. Bush. Trump let the far-right Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation draw up lists of reliably right-wing candidates and McConnell removed the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees — which had been the last position requiring bipartisan approval — to speed Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch and other judicial nominees through the Senate. As of Sept. 4, Trump had appointed 26 circuit court judges, with a median age of 49. Obama appointed 55 circuit judges in eight years, with a median age of 53.

So now, with the opportunity to fill a second seat on the Supreme Court, Trump picked Kavanaugh, a partisan who worked for Kenneth Starr on the inquisition of Bill and Hillary Clinton in the late 1990s.

Kavanaugh later worked in George W. Bush’s White House, helping to push partisan judges to confirmation using documents stolen from Democrats, and he later lied under oath about the use of those stolen materials during hearings in 2004 and 2006 when he was up for his seat on the D.C. Court of Appeals.

Perhaps what appealed to Trump in his selection for the Supreme Court was Kavanaugh’s opinion that Republican presidents should not be investigated. That would put a vote on Trump’s side on the Supreme Court in what appears to be the inevitable showdown when Trump tries to shut down Robert Mueller’s investigation. The appearance that Kavanaugh also is a sexual predator just gives Trump something else in common with the purported jurist. But Kavanaugh also carries radical GOP views against healthcare protections, environmental protection, consumer protection, workers’ rights and women’s rights. He is presumed to be a fifth vote to overturn women’s right to abortion, but he also could be the fifth vote to overturn the Affordable Care Act, which would eliminate the mandate that insurance companies cover pre-existing conditions and allow insurers to reinstate limits on “lifetime” coverage, which could make your lifetime a lot shorter if you can’t pay for the difference.

Don’t feel sorry for Kavanaugh having to account for his sexual predations. Remember his recommendation, in a memo to Ken Starr, how President Clinton should be questioned regarding his past sexual behavior: “I have tried hard to bend over backwards and to be fair to him and to think of all reasonable defenses to his pattern of behavior. In the end, I am convinced that there really are none. The idea of going easy on him at the questioning is thus abhorrent to me,” Kavanaugh wrote. “He should be forced to account for all of that and to defend his actions. It may not be our job to impose sanctions on him, but it is our job to make his pattern of revolting behavior clear — piece by painful piece.”

As we go to press, Trump has reiterated his support for Kavanaugh, who is determined to go ahead with the process, no matter how many women come up with accusations against him. Of course, either the White House or Kavanaugh could decide tomorrow to withdraw and let Trump pick another right-wing judge with a cleaner record to make sure they get another “winger” confirmed to the high court before this Congress adjourns in December.

It’s still important to vote Democratic if you are in a state with a contested Senate election Nov. 6. If Democrats flip two seats held by Republicans — and at least four are in play, in Arizona, Nevada, Tennessee and Texas — and if Dems hold onto their incumbents, they will regain the Senate majority, they can shut down the flow of right-wing judges onto federal courts, possibly keep Anthony Kennedy’s old seat open, and block all sorts of damage Republicans hope to do to the Affordable Care Act, Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security to pay for the tax cuts they gave to billionaires. — JMC

Editor's Note: The headline on this was changed from "Supreme Embarrassment" in the printed edition after the Sept. 27 Judiciary Committee hearing in which the Republican majority refused to refer to the FBI Christine Blasey Ford's accusation that Kavanaugh tried to rape her, refused to allow witnesses to corroborate Dr. Blasey Ford's account and also refused to hear Deborah Ramirez's and Julie Swetnick's claims to be victims of sexual abuse by Kavanaugh, but instead proceeded to plow on through to approve Kavanaugh's nomination. But Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., forced Senate leaders to ask President Trump to order the FBI to conduct a review of the accusations against Kavanaugh lasting no more than one week, saying he would not vote to approve Kavanaugh without that review.

From The Progressive Populist, October 15, 2018

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Selections from the October 15, 2018 issue

COVER/Paul Mason
Ten years since the financial crisis we’re still getting screwed

EDITORIAL
Supreme power play

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

DON ROLLINS
Ohio officials show no grace

RURAL ROUTES/Margot McMillen
Thought for food as farmers hit the wall

DISPATCHES
Data shows little evidence tax cuts trickled down to workers.
Trump is biggest middle-class tax raiser of all time.
GOP Senate candidate vows to protect pre-existing conditions while working to end ACA.
Pharma exec claims ‘moral requirement’ to raise drug price 400%.
In crosshairs of ‘right-to-work,’ Kentucky bourbon workers strike.
Trump cuts Head Start, cancer research to fund child detention.
Trump passes 5,000 lies.
US is second-biggest lower from climate change economically.
US ambassador Haley conradicts Giuliani, says US notseeking regime change in Iran after terror attack.
Electric car batteries' 'second life' could be clean energy game changer.
Despite progressive rebranding, Nike still donates more to GOP.
Keeping Kavanaugh off court more important to Maine and Alaska than re-electing Collins and Murkowski.
Trump judges make it easier for prosecutors to convict innocents ...

JIM GOODMAN and TIFFANY FINCK-HAYNES
Monsanto-Bayer merger hurts farmers and consumers

JILL RICHARDSON
Why women don’t report sexual assault

JOHN YOUNG
Mr. Vice President, you are one big phony

ROBERT BOROSAGE
A new roadmap for getting change done

HAL CROWTHER
Cue the visigoths

BOB BURNETT
Suspicions confirmed, Woodward on Trump

MARK ANDERSON
Two pot bills pave the way for better health research, decriminalization

ART CULLEN
The view from Iowa: Where immigrants are at the heart of America’s culture war

BOOK REVIEW/Heather Seggel
Stay nasty 

PETER CERTO
Nobody in the White House is part of ‘The Resistance’

HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas
Beware The Bill

SAM URETSKY
Table manners make the candidate

WENONAH HAUTER
New legislation would put the brakes on wave of ag mega-mergers

JASON SIBERT
Who runs the police?

WAYNE O’LEARY
The rhinestone cowboy

JOHN BUELL
Men’s bodies and the politics of abortion

SETH SANDRONSKY
Brain injuries, US military and NFL

GRASSROOTS/Hank Kalet
Of course, it’s racial

JOEL D. JOSEPH
Henry Ford would fire Ford CEO Jim Hackett

FR. DONNELL KIRCHNER
Rise above the clergy scandal

ROB PATTERSON
Birth and death of joke tellers

SATIRE/Rosie Sorenson
Tell all, tell fast

MOVIE REVIEW/Ed Rampell
Michael Moore turns up the heat in Fahrenheit 11/9

Analyses of the Roman climate show government action to address climate change works

By Marc Jampole

The Spring 2018 issue of Jewish Currents had my latest “Left is right” article that uses the latest research to show that the left position on environmental issues is the correct one: that the government has a role in addressing climate change and that the best way to do so is with regulation and not market solutions.

There are no current plans to post the article on the Jewish Currents website, so I thought I would give you a taste of it in hopes that you will buy the issue to read the whole piece, and maybe even start a subscription. Jewish Currents is a leading left-wing journal of politics and the arts.

Here’s the excerpt:

There are two conceptual differences between the left and the right when it comes to the environment and environmental policy. The first difference is fundamental: The left believes it is appropriate for the government to coordinate or dictate action to respond to environmental degradation and climate change, whereas the right questions the effectiveness of any governmental solution that impedes the freedom of individuals or corporations. The second difference is tactical: Once a nation or a group of nations has decided that government intervention is necessary, leftists prefer simple regulation, whereas right-wingers insist on complicated, market-based solutions like carbon trading. Readers may immediately think that I’m leaving out the fundamental issue of whether global warming is actually occurring and, if so, whether humans have caused it. In fact, that question has been decided by science.

Recent research gives us a fresh perspective on the impact of climate change on past societies, and the ways that past governments reacted to sudden modifications of weather patterns. Historians are poring over statistics from carbon dating, tree rings, ice bores, human records of harvests, food prices and plagues, population estimates and fossils to understand how weather has affected humans in the past. Although the discipline of history has only recently begun investigating the impact of climate on past civilizations, a fair amount of research already suggests that government intervention works better than denying the realities of weather.

Before the industrial revolution and the development of vaccines and advanced agricultural techniques and sanitation systems, sudden environmental change typically led to famines and epidemics. A decade of droughts or cold summers could ruin enough harvests to create widespread hunger. As classicist Kyle Harper (University of Oklahoma) details in The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease and the End of an Empire, a change in temperature could also force a carrier of disease such as rodents or mosquitos to move to a new region and infect human populations already weakened by famine.

Harper finds that weather change is implicated in the entire history of the Empire. From circa 200 [BCE] to 150 [CE], the Roman world had such good weather that climatologists call the period the “Roman Climate Optimum—warm, wet, and stable across much of the territory the Romans conquered. In an agricultural economy, these conditions were a major boost. The population swelled yet there was still enough food to feed everyone. But from the middle of the 2nd century, the climate became less reliable. The all-important annual Nile flood became erratic. Droughts and severe cold spells became more common. The Climate Optimum became much less optimal.

According to The Fate of Rome, the unrest throughout the Empire in the second half of the 2nd century is tied to cooling weather at the end of the Climate Optimum and the epidemic, probably of smallpox, that it helped to cause. Two hundred years later, a large and significant drought in the Asian steppes turned the Huns into “armed climate refugees on horseback.” In the 530s and 540s, a series of violent volcanoes, highlighted by the “year without summer” in 536, ushered in the Late Antique Little Ice Age, which saw the greatest decline in the energy the Earth receives from the sun over the past 2,000 years. This Late Antique Ice Age likely led to the first known outbreak of bubonic plague in 541. Over the next century or so, the Eastern Roman Empire’s population fell by as much as 50 percent, as the plague recurred about every ten years.

How did the Roman Empire react to these weather crises? Harper documents that the Roman governments took aggressive action to ameliorate the damaging impact of climate change on the economy and society. Because the emperors and their advisors perceived the menace of climate change as epidemics, their actions primarily related to population management: From Augustus onward, the Roman state penalized childlessness and rewarded fecundity in its policies. About 30 years after the Antonine plague of 165 to 180 CE, Caracalla took the unprecedented step of granting citizenship to all non-slave residents of the Empire, leading to an infusion of talent, growth of the imperial bureaucracy, and the dissemination of Roman laws and customs throughout imperial territory. Diocletian and Constantine’s answer to the Cyprian Plague in the 250s—which devastated the population and led to severe food shortages—was more government control of the economy and the military, producing the economic good times of the 4th century

Justinian, however, ruling from 527 to 565, could not add new peoples into the imperial system in his response to the disasters of the Late Antique Little Ice Age because there was no additional population left to integrate. Instead, writes Harper, Justinian built cisterns, aqueducts, granaries, and transport depots, reclaimed floodplains, and moved riverbeds, trying to “control the flux of nature.” But in the end, the Eastern Empire could not do enough to overcome the depopulation caused by a severe cooling of the Earth that lasted about two hundred years.

Before assuming women disgusted with GOP over handling of Kavanaugh sex allegations will vote blue in November, remember: a majority of white women voted Trump in 2016

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Editorial: Economic Royalists Remain

Democrats are rightly outraged at the rush by the slim Republican majority in the Senate to confirm Brett Kavanaugh as the fifth right-wing justice on the Supreme Court by any means necessary.

Republican Senate leaders decided Democrats were not entitled to see tens of thousands of documents from Kavanaugh’s work in George W. Bush’s White House. Before his confirmation hearings, nearly 200,000 pages of records from his time at the White House were classified as “committee confidential,” meaning senators could review them but not release them to the public. Another 100,000 pages were withheld from the Judiciary Committee altogether, because the Trump administration claimed “executive privilege.”

Democrats accused Kavanaugh of lying to the Judiciary Committee in 2004 and 2,006, when he was up for confirmation to the US Court of Appeals for D.C. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (Calif.), the top Democrat on the committee, said Kavanaugh gave answers that “were not true” when asked whether he had used materials stolen from committee Democrats when he was a White House lawyer under Bush. The Democratic Coalition, a PAC, has filed a criminal complaint with the Department of Justice against Kavanaugh for allegedly perjuring himself in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

But, barring criminal prosecution, Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the court was assured when Donald Trump was elected president in 2016 by a minority of voters, and Republicans held onto a two-seat Senate majority. There already was a vacancy on the Supreme Court after Republicans refused for nearly a year to allow a hearing on President Barack Obama’s centrist nominee for the Supreme Court, Merrick Garland, the chief judge on the US Court of Appeals for D.C. (The Democratic Coalition also filed an ethics complaint against Kavanaugh with the D.C. Court of Appeals, which would be reviewed by Chief Judge Garland.)

Liberals had a chance to break the conservative majority on the high court for the first time in a generation, after Associate Justice Antonin Scalia died Feb. 13, 2016. But enough liberals and blue-collar white workers in November 2016 took election day off, or decided they’d express their disenchantment with Hillary Clinton by voting for the Green candidate or the multi-bankrupt casino developer and reality TV star, while tens of thousands of black voters in Milwaukee, Detroit and Flint, Mich., were prevented from voting. It made just enough of a difference in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin to send Trump to the White House.

Republicans also kept a 51-49 majority in the Senate, narrowly winning races in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) then changed Senate rules to get rid of the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees so Republicans could put a right-winger, who turned out to be Neil Gorsuch, onto the high court for a lifetime appointment regardless of the objections of Democrats.

With Scalia on the court, and Justice Anthony Kennedy usually siding with them, Chief Justice John Roberts had the votes to gut the Voting Rights Act, campaign finance laws, environmental regulations and protections for organized labor. After Gorsuch replaced Scalia, the court upheld Trump’s ban on travelers from certain Muslim-majority countries; overturned a 41-year-old precedent that had allowed public-sector employee unions to collect fees from nonmembers; and approved a Texas redistricting plan that a lower court found discriminated against blacks and Hispanics.

Kennedy usually sided with conservatives, but he occasionally showed signs of independence. He was the deciding vote in the court upholding same-sex marriage, abortion accessibility and affirmative action.

With Kennedy stepping down, to be replaced by Kavanaugh, Roberts likely will have the votes to reconsider those liberal victories.

“Pro-life” Catholics might celebrate the Supreme Court upholding new abortion regulations. But those who believe that the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness continues after birth might have second thoughts when the new court puts further curbs on labor unions, restricts the government’s authority to regulate businesses, and gives states more leeway to limit voting rights and gerrymander districts without federal interference — and gives billionaires more power to influence elections without requiring them to disclose how much money they are contributing, or to whom.

A solid right-wing majority might return the court to judicial obstruction not seen since the Supreme Court in the 1930s blocked many of the progressive attempts to help workers and farmers during the first four years of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. The crisis nearly required an increase in the court’s size to resolve.

FDR ran for re-election in 1936 against “economic royalists” who used corporations, banks and stock dealers, agriculture, labor and capital to carve new dynasties and dominate the government. After Roosevelt won re-election with Democratic supermajorities in the House and Senate, he proposed adding as many as six new justices to the Supreme Court, which could be done by law. At least one conservative justice, Owen Roberts, buckled in March 1937, joining four centrists in approving a state minimum wage law in Washington, just a few months after invalidating a similar law in New York. Two weeks later the court sustained the National Labor Relations Act and in May it ruled the Social Security Act was constitutional. The move to expand the court was abandoned. A pundit reworked an old proverb to observe, “A switch in time saved nine.”

The economic royalists never gave up their opposition to the New Deal reforms. They redoubled their efforts after Lyndon Johnson passed his Great Society programs in 1965-66, including Medicare and Medicaid as well as civil rights and voting rights acts, federal aid to education, mass transit, rental subsidies and food assistance, environmental regulations, consumer protections and funding for the arts and public broadcasting.

In August 1971 Lewis Powell, a corporate lawyer, wrote a memo to the director of the US Chamber of Commerce outlining how business leaders could use their resources to shift public attitudes to restore corporate privileges. Two months later, Richard Nixon put Powell on the Supreme Court, and in 1978 he wrote the majority opinion in First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti that invented a First Amendment right for corporations to influence ballot questions. The right has focused on cementing control of the Supreme Court ever since.

Whether or not Kavanaugh makes it onto the court, everyone from the center to the left should put every effort toward electing Democrats to the Senate and replacing as many Republican senators as possible, so Democrats can put a stop to Trump’s judicial nominees.

Unfortunately, Republicans will be defending only 10 Senate seats they now hold while Democrats defend 25, including nine senators in states Trump carried. The embattled Dems include Sens. Bill Nelson (Fla.), Joe Donnelly (Ind.), Claire McCaskill (Mo.), Jon Tester (Mont.), Heidi Heitkamp (N.D.), Sherrod Brown (Ohio), Bob Casey Jr. (Pa.), Joe Manchin (W.V.) and Tammy Baldwin (Wis.). But Trump is a lot less popular today, and if Dems can hold onto those seats, they have a good shot at winning at least two of the vulnerable seats now held by Republicans: Sens. Jeff Flake (Ariz.) and Bob Corker (Tenn.) who are retiring, as well as Dean Heller (Nev.) and Ted Cruz (Texas), who face tough Democratic opponents.

Polls show Democrats are in a good position two months out from the election, but Republicans will have the money they need to attack the Democrats and build up their own candidates in the closing weeks.

In the meantime, social media might help organize the Democratic resistance, but hashtags don’t win elections. Showing up and voting wins elections. And the Supreme Court is at stake. — JMC

From The Progressive Populist, October 1, 2018

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Selections from the October 1, 2018 issue

COVER/Kevin Robillard
Progressives will lead Democrats in some of 2018’s biggest contests

EDITORIAL
Economic royalists remain

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR 

DON ROLLINS
Redistricting plan changes everything (and nothing)

RURAL ROUTES/Margot McMillen p. 5
What are the Pols going to do for my town?

DISPATCHES p. 5
US split on Kavanaugh confirmation; hearings didn’t help.
Obama embraces Medicare for all.
GOP on Obama: He made us elect a racist idiot.
Trump’s lie count passes 4,713.
After blowing up deficit with tax cuts, Republicans want credit for fiscal responsibility.
Texas leads lawsuit to overturn health care for pre-existing conditions.
DACA gets win in court from judge who thinks it’s illegal.
Trump team returns EPA to Reagan-era staffing level ...

ART CULLEN
Candidate shows up early, listens carefully

JILL RICHARDSON
Imagine our economy as a game of ‘Monopoly’

JOHN YOUNG
Republicans strap on an orange suicide vest

ROBERT BOROSAGE
It’s time for progressives to raise their game

SAM PIZZIGATI
How to recognize a plutocracy: The dead giveaway

BOB BURNETT
It’s the corruption, stupid

SETH SANDRONSKY
Free and unfree labor alliance

FRANK CLEMENTE
Check your wallet: Can you find the $4k Trump promised you?

HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas
Health policy: A little good news

SAM URETSKY
Are liberals and conservatives wired differently? 

BASAY SEN
Killing for coal (literally)

WAYNE O’LEARY
The woman who would kill health care

JOHN BUELL
Race, slavery, and the politics of welfare

BOOK REVIEW/Heather Seggel
The story in the numbers

SHERRY BRENNAN
You can teach kids hard work, but feed them first

SATIRE/Barry Friedman
Annotated text of Donald Trump’s eulogy for John McCain

ROB PATTERSON
The red’s turned to gray, but Willie’s welcome to stay

SATIRE/Rosie Sorenson
And God said ...

MOVIE REVIEW/Ed Rampell
Infiltrate hate: Spike Lee’s ‘BlacKkKlansman’

GRASSROOTS/Hank Kalet
Corporate censorship is still censorship

Editorial: NAFTA 2.0: Details Bedevil

Donald Trump Aug. 27 announced a new “incredible” trade deal with Mexico that has the outlines of some positive developments, but labor and environmental leaders cautioned that details need to be finalized, and Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto, in a phone call broadcast at the White House press conference, stressed the importance that the agreement include Canada.

Trump wants to get approval for a deal to replace the 24-year-old North American Free Trade Agreement before the new Mexican President-elect, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, a progressive populist who might demand concessions, takes office Dec. 1. To beat that deadline, Trump must send the proposed deal to Congress by the end of August to give them 90 days to review it.

Trump left open the possibility of cutting Canada out of the final deal, and simply putting tariffs on Canadian cars, which would amount to a tax on American carbuyers, but US Trade Rep. Robert Lighthizer told reporters that every effort would be made to include Canada, even if it took longer for them to sign on to changes. Lighthizer said it was still unclear what the letter to Congress might say, but the agreement would run for 16 years, with an option to revisit issues in six years, and extend it for another 16 years.

The tentative deal, wich focuses on auto manufacturing, would increase the percentage of each car that must be made in the US or Mexico to 75%, from the current 62.5%, to qualify for duty-free treatment. Both sides also agreed to a provision that would require 40-45 percent of each vehicle’s content to be made by workers earning at least $16 per hour. That would appear to promise a significant increase for Mexican auto workers, who now make $4 to $8 per hour.

US labor leaders said the NAFTA rewrite was still a deal in progress. “We are aggressively engaged in pursuing an agreement that works for working people in all three countries, and we are not done yet. There is more work that needs to be done to deliver the needed, real solutions to NAFTA’s deeply ingrained flaws,” said the statement issued by Richard Trumka, AFL-CIO President; Leo Gerard, United Steelworkers (USW) International President; Gary Jones, United Automobile, Aerospace and Agricultural Implement Workers of America (UAW) President; Robert Martinez Jr., International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers International President; and Chris Shelton, Communications Workers of America President.

They added, “Any new deal must raise wages, ensure workers’ rights and freedoms, reduce outsourcing and put the interests of working families first in all three countries. And working people must be able to review the full and final text and have the confidence not only in the terms of the deal, but its implementation, monitoring and enforcement. We remain committed to working with the administration to get NAFTA right. Our members’ jobs depend on it. But, as always, the devil is in the details.”

Wenonah Hauter, executive director of Food & Water Watch, was skeptical of the bilateral agreement: “The Trump administration’s announcement that it has completed a ‘new and improved’ replacement for [NAFTA] should be taken with more than a grain of salt. A vague description of a bilateral deal with Mexico alone (the US-Mexico Trade Agreement) was announced in the White House today, with an eye toward forcing a reluctant Canada to the negotiating table. But we have no confidence that the Trump administration will truly address the many flaws in NAFTA.

“The devil resides in the details of these corporate-driven free trade deals, and we expect that the fine print will include the kind of pro-polluter, pro-fossil fuel industry, pro-Wall Street deregulation that has been a hallmark of Trump’s domestic agenda. These rumored trade provisions would codify the administration’s savage attacks on environmental protection, food safety and consumer rights into trade deals that enshrine and globalize deregulation, making it harder to restore US environmental and consumer protections once this administration is shown the White House door.”

Melanie Foley of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch said, “We know progress was made between the US and Mexico on some key changes we have demanded for decades. But we also know that the enforceability of the new labor standards to which the countries agreed is still lacking, which is a serious problem that needs to be resolved.”

Canada had not participated in negotiations since May, so it’s unclear where it stands on the terms agreed to by Mexico and the United States, she noted.

Foley added, “As we’ve made clear since Day One, an acceptable deal must remove NAFTA’s job outsourcing incentives,” as almost one million American jobs have been lost due to NAFTA.

A NAFTA replacement must remove corporations’ Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) powers to attack our environmental and health laws before tribunals of three corporate lawyers and obtain unlimited sums of taxpayer awards.

And it must add strong labor and environmental standards with swift and certain enforcement to raise wages. Otherwise, US corporations will keep moving jobs to Mexico to pay workers a pittance, dump toxins and import products back for sale here.

Call Congress at 202-224-3121 to demand negotiators keep working with Mexico and Canada to get a deal worth supporting.

Trump’s Heart is Too Small

Donald Trump’s reaction to Sen. John McCain’s death due to brain cancer is emblematic of what is wrong with his presidency. We have mixed opinions about McCain’s political career. Yes, he was willing to occasionally cross party lines to work with Democrats in the Senate, but he mainly pursued conservative policies and apparently never met a military appropriation he didn’t like. Occasionally, he would do good things, such as co-sponsoring the 2002 campaign finance reform bill with then-Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis) — which was largely overturned by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision in 2010 — and his key vote in July 2017 to preserve the Affordable Care Act which helps more than 30 million Americans get health insurance with meaningful coverage, even if they have pre-existing conditions.

McCain probably voted with Trump more than 90% of the time in the past year and a half, but Trump still couldn’t shake off McCain’s vote to preserve “Obamacare,” nor the sting of McCain’s criticism of him. After McCain’s death was announced Aug. 25, Trump offered perfunctory condolences in a tweet that offered his “deepest sympathies and respect” to McCain’s family but made no mention of McCain’s service in the military or the Senate. The White House flag was lowered to half-staff that Saturday night, as the law requires for a deceased member of Congress, but the flag was raised back to full staff just after midnight Sunday. (The flag was brought back down to half-staff after an outcry from veterans’ groups.)

Trump’s disparagement of McCain, even in death, is a relatively small matter, but it displays the small heart of a man who cannot take any criticism, has neither conscience nor empathy and a negligible sense of humor, which leaves him unable to laugh at himself or admit that he makes mistakes. That, and the fact that Trump is an habitual liar (4,229 false or misleading claims as of Aug. 1, by the Washington Post Fact Checker’s count), makes him a most dangerous and unreliable president. — JMC

From The Progressive Populist, September 15, 2018

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Selections from the September 15, 2018 issue

COVER/Leo W. Gerard
Workers get scammed in the new economy — as corporations get richer and more powerful

EDITORIAL
NAFTA 2.0: Details bedevil

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR 

DON ROLLINS
A tale of two counties

KAYLA KITSON
Scoring Trump’s tax cuts so far: $280K for rich lawmakers, pennies for working people

DISPATCHES
Health care motivates voters — and physicians run as Democratic candidates;
Trump, GOP play down Obama economic gains;
Republicans predict probes if Dems take over;
Student loan watchdog quits, claiming Trump ‘failed borrowers’;
Trump lied about Paris climate deal, his own EPA confirms;
Democrats limit role of superdelegates;
Judge strikes down Trump orders in win for federal unions;
Maine's top court orders Gov. LePage to stop ignoring Medicaid mandate;
Republican staffers tied to allegedly forged signatures on petitions to spoil opponent's vote ...

ART CULLEN
Tickling Trump’s ear

JILL RICHARDSON
Here out West, ‘smoke season’ keeps getting worse

JIM VAN DER POL
Keeping farms in the economy

BOB BURNETT
Will the economy determine the midterms?

SAM PIZZIGATI
If your boss makes millions, it’s not because of the ‘market’

LIDWINA BELL
Schools need resources, not ‘school resource officers’

JASON SIBERT
Real home security includes affordable housing

MARK ANDERSON
Cancer-causing herbicide found in breakfast cereal

HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas
The dark side of paradise: Decision time

SAM URETSKY
Trump berates the ‘fake news’ that made him president

SETH SANDRONSKY
School reform lands in federal court

WAYNE O’LEARY
Losing it

JOHN BUELL
Civil War and popular memory

N. GUNASEKARAN
Former cricketer’s dream of new Pakistan and hard realities

PETER CERTO
Trump snubbed McCain. The media snubbed the rest of us.

HEATHER SEGGEL
What democracy looks like

ROB PATTERSON
Bobby Kennedy: What might have been

SATIRE/Rosie Sorenson
Oh, the injustice of it all

ED RAMPELL
Congresswoman Maxine Waters awarded at play featuring ‘slaves in epaulettes’

Before taking convention vote from super delegates, did the Dems consider that’s what the GOP did and it helped Trump win the nomination?

By Marc Jampole

Before Democrats start patting themselves on the back for curtailing the power of super delegates at the national convention to nominate a presidential candidate, consider this: If the Republicans had super delegates in 2016, Donald Trump might never have been nominated.

Super delegates are typically high-ranking party machers who until now have been able to vote for any candidate they want at the convention, which differs from most delegates, who are obliged to vote according to the results of the primary or state convention. Just 15% of total delegates, the super delegates usually include people who have worked for the party for decades, winning elections, campaigning for other candidates and raising money for the party and other candidates. Specifically, a super delegate has to be a member of the Democratic National Committee, a current governor, senator, congressional representative or a current or former president or vice president. In a real sense, they represent the continuing party establishment and the institutional memory of the party.

Super delegates became a hot issue in the 2016 primaries, with supporters of Bernie Sanders claiming they gave Hillary Clinton an unfair advantage. The facts on the ground say differently. Hillary won a majority of both voters and delegates selected in the primaries. Bernie did garner a number of super delegates. While awareness that most super delegates wanted Hillary certainly caused other elected officials to endorse her, the idea that super delegate support of Hillary translated to more primary votes is a big stretch. Voters listened—or didn’t listen—to Al Gore, Nancy Pelosi, Bill Clinton and Elizabeth Warren not because they were super delegates, but because of their past actions and reputation.

Under the new rules, super delegates will be unable to vote for candidates during the first round of voting. Only if there is a deadlocked convention will they be able to cast a ballot. The last time that happened was in 1952, when Adlai Stevenson was nominated on the third ballot. The super delegates will likely never have a chance to cast a vote.

I would imagine that moving forward, some if not most governors, congressional reps and DNC members will wangle a way to be a regular delegate so that they can have a vote at the convention. The net effect will be that fewer of the obscure party workers at the local and statewide level will have votes. If a state has to reserve a delegate spot for a senator, there will be one less to give to a grass roots organizer. Thus, in a perversely counterintuitive way, the move to be more democratic may end up making the conventions less democratic.

The larger concern, however, is that the super delegates could serve as a bulwark against an inappropriate candidate with widespread name recognition winning a bunch of primaries in an open field with well less than 50% of the vote in any state. For the sake of argument, let’s call that candidate Donald Trump. In such a situation, the super delegates could serve as the conscience of the party and block the nominee, either at the convention or before the late primaries. Remember that, until the candidates started dropping like flies, Trump was winning early primaries with well less than 40% of the vote. He used his enormous name recognition based on his reality TV show and the false myth he was a successful business mogul to squeeze out wins over a large, fragmented field.  Super delegate support of another candidate would have changed the math and perhaps stopped the autocratic and erratic Trumpty-Dumpty.

But the super delegate remedy for someone who is either a demagogue or does not represent the basic values of the party was not available to the Republicans in 2016. The Republicans ended the super delegate option some years ago.  In the early months of the 2016 campaign, Republican super delegates would most likely have gone for Jeb Bush, and if not Jeb, for Marco Rubio or John Kasich. Let’s be clear: as president, these candidates would likely have supported lowering taxes on the wealthy, nominating ultra-right judges, loosening gun control laws, cutting social welfare programs including healthcare, increasing the military budget and reducing government regulations. But they would not have walked away from the Iran and Paris agreements, not have started a trade war with both our allies and most important trading partner, not have instituted senseless and sadistic immigration policies. They would not have overtly appealed to white supremacists. They would not have hurt and embarrassed the country by spewing out stupidities and lies day after day. I doubt we would be talking about impeachment for corruption or traitorous conspiracy with a foreign power less than two years into the administration of any other Republican candidate for president.

Super delegates strengthen a political party because they express the continuing will of the party. Not having super delegates fragments the party and puts greater power in the hands of the individuals running for office. It helps to turn parties, which are supposed to express collective agreement on broad principles, into collections of individuals who conveniently use the party label to run for office. The growth in the use of primaries over the past 50 years has democratized the process of selecting a presidential candidate, with the super delegates serving as a “check-and-balance” that can prevent a party takeover by a single individual. Essentially ending the role of super delegates is another step in the long-time trend for personalities to become more important than party and party platform, a game fixed in favor of the wealthy.

We won’t miss super delegates as long as the Bernie’s and Hillary’s are running for office. But imagine a rightwing celebrity or even a Democrat in name only like West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin with unlimited resources running against six or seven credible progressive Democrats in the primaries. Let’s say Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Sherrod Brown Kamal Harris, Ron Weyden and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez split the vote, giving Manchin all the winner take-all primaries and the biggest share of votes in the other primaries. As progressive slowly drop out, Manchin gains strength and gains the backing of the essentially centrist and right-leaning mainstream media. The Dems could end up nominating someone who does not want universal healthcare, a higher minimum wage, a foreign policy based on creating partnerships not disputes, higher taxes on the wealthy and more spending on infrastructure and education or a regulatory regime that addresses global warming. All because the primary vote is fragmented and there are no super delegates to step in to assert the party’s values.

If it happened to the Republicans, it can happen to the Democrats, as well. In the name of a little more democracy at the convention, the Democrats may have perverted their broader democracy.  

Look for a full term for Trump. He will never resign & the stability-loving political establishment won’t have the guts to either indict or convict him

By Marc Jampole

In the 20th century, we would be entering the end game of Donald Trump’s ascendancy. His criminal conspiracy with Michael Cohen to ignore campaign financing laws would be enough to convince most voters that Trump is corrupt and has to go. Backroom negotiations between the two parties would determine whether Mike Pence would go, too, and if so, whether Trump would anoint—er ah, appoint—a traditional Republican like John Kasich or Mitt Romney as interim VP about to be president or have Nancy Pelosi or whoever is Speaker of the House take over as president. Political leaders would be relieved that they can change administrations without getting into the more destabilizing accusations regarding cooperation with the Russians to fix the 2016 election. Under extreme pressure from his closest supporters and the “wise men” (I would like to say “wise people” or “wise men and women,” but both would be inaccurate), of the Republican Party, Trump would announce his resignation.

Under normal—read: 20th century—circumstances, the resignation would occur in August because, as in 1974 when Nixon resigned in August, the Republican Party is facing a disaster in November, no matter what.  Why have the resignation affect another election cycle, when you can get all the bad stuff out of the way all at once.

But the standard model of representational democracy of the last century is not operative at the given time, for a several reasons:

• Trump’s mental illness is of the type that will make him dig in and ignore the advice of Republican elders, believing he can depend on his loyal base to impose his untruths on reality.
• Trump has helped too many people accomplish goals that go against the best interest of the country and its people, but do help either the ultra-wealthy or thin but well connected slices of the economy. The tax cut for the wealthy, increases in military spending, hardened immigration policies, dismantling of environmental regulations, backing out of the Paris Accord, Iran nuclear agreement and other international agreements, easing of regulations on for-profit schools, changing Justice Department policies that helped enforce the civil rights of minorities, encouraging white supremacy—all of these are bad policies, but most represent what the Republican Party stands for in the 21st century.
• A large portion of the mass media and a large number of very well-financed independent internet voices may continue to support Trump, spewing out misleading accounts, lies and false accusations to protect him.
• Never before has so much political discourse and policy been based on lies that go against basic proven science. Lies and disproven theories have always poisoned our political discourse, as can be quickly seen by reviewing speeches given by Southern politicians in the 19th century or by imperialists in the 1890-1920 period. From time to time, administrations have forged policies based on untruths, especially as related to the reasons to go to war or to cut taxes on the wealthy. But the quantity of lies told by this administration raises public mendacity beyond a thresh hold of decency and sustainability.

One thing that seems to remain from the pre-21st century political consensus is the idea that stability is more important than anything else. Our ruling elite has always solved constitutional crises by avoiding them—except in the case of the war in 1861-1865 between the United States and the 13 treasonous states that tried to leave the union and attack our country so that they could maintain and spread their slave regimes. Just think of what we have avoided since World War I: The ruling elite let an ailing Wilson remain president. Nixon didn’t contest the 1960 election. Nixon resigned rather than force an indictment. The ruling elite let a senile Reagan complete his term. Gore did not contest the 2000 election. We swept Bush II torture and lies about the Iraq War under the table rather than prosecute high administration officials. The demand for stability in the system made Republicans accept Trump instead of working to deny him the nomination at the convention or launching a third party bid. The quest for stability made the Electoral College voters decide not to follow their constitutional duty to prevent the election of someone representing, in the words of James Madison, “a number of citizens whether amounting to a majority or minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.”

Avoidance of instability is the reason, I think, that so many constitutional scholars assert that a sitting president cannot be indicted. Nowhere in the constitution is there anything written that says that a president is above the law. The best the experts can hope to do is tease out the idea that because the constitution mentioned impeachment that implies the founding white fathers (again, an accurate, if tragic phrase) ruled out normal due process when a president is suspected of breaking the law.

If Mueller doesn’t indict, or if a rightwing court upholds the dubiously autocratic and certainly not originalist principle that a sitting president can’t face indictment, it leaves Congress to act to end this abomination of an administration. That other government officials have been both impeached and indicted undercuts this idea.

Three times the House of Representatives has considered impeachment. Nixon resigned before Congress could act on the notion. Twice, presidents were impeached, both times for political reasons more than any legal offense they committed. Don’t get me wrong—Andrew Johnson was a despicable racist who was dragging his feet on Reconstruction, but the reason he was impeached was inherently political: because he fired Secretary of War Edwin Stanton. Clinton’s impeachment was most certainly political in nature, given seven years of investigation revealed no corruption and no law-breaking except fibbing about having an affair.

Assuming the Democrats win the House, it’s a safe bet that Trump will be impeached. But it will take 66 Senate votes to convict Trump, and the Democrats may not even win the Senate in November because of the rare oddity that they have so many candidates up for reelection. The central question may thus turn out to be how many Republicans will ignore the fact that Trump has delivered so much of their agenda and vote to convict? How much bad stuff about Trump’s active collusion with Russia and his ham-handed attempts to cover up his treason will it take for Republican Senators to find or relocate their basic decency?

My fear is that like always, the political elites will decide to resolve the issue in the way that maintains the greatest stability and illusion of continuity. Thus, if Trump refuses to resign—as he no doubt will do—the United States will likely have to live out a full four years of corruption, bad policies, increasing consolidation of power in the hands of the presidency and a severe weakening of both our economy and our standing in the world.

All for the illusion of stability.