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Bernie Sanders: Why Trump must Be Defeated

By dianeravitch
March 9, 2024 //
30

I received

Earlier this week, Donald Trump swept through the Republican Super Tuesday presidential primaries (with the exception of Vermont). His one major opponent has dropped out, putting the most dangerous president in American history one step closer to returning to the White House.

The primary is over. This is it. The election will once again be between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. And, frighteningly, at this point most polls have Trump in the lead.

The question we now face is a simple one. How do we defeat Trump and his right-wing extremist allies in the House and Senate? How do we elect more Progressives to Congress?

And, frankly, the answer is complicated by the reality that the Democratic establishment is ill-prepared to do that. They have relatively little support within the working class. Their support among the Latino community is declining. And they are even seeing a drop In support from the Black community – historically the Democrats strongest base of support. Their support among young people is declining. The Democrats are also weak in terms of generating grass-roots activism or excitement. 

We have to do things differently. 

While most Democrats will focus their attention on Trump’s indictments, his insults and outrages, our job is to be laser-focused in reminding people of the fraud and pathological liar for working people we all know Trump to be.

For instance: 

This is a president, Donald Trump, who said he was going to provide health care to everyone, yet tried to throw 32 million people off of health care and has pledged to continue to try and accomplish that goal. 

This is a president who said he was going to stand up for working families and who promised to pass tax reform legislation designed to help the middle class, yet 83 percent of his tax benefits go to the top 1 percent.

This is a president who promised to take on the pharmaceutical companies. He said they were “getting away with murder.” Yet, drug prices continue to soar and he appointed a drug company executive as the Secretary of Health and Human Services.

This is a president who promised to take on the greed of Wall Street, but then proceeded to appoint more Wall Street titans to high positions than any president in history.

This is a president who appointed vehemently anti-labor members to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). 

This is a president who believes climate change is a “hoax”, and appointed agency leaders and judges who consistently undermined our ability to move toward sustainable energy and protect the environment.

This is a president who said he would do “everything in my power to protect our LGBT citizens,” yet went out of his way to attempt to deny them from getting the health care they need and allow discrimination against them in the workplace.

This is a president who brags about his role in overturning Roe v. Wade and denying reproductive rights to millions of women across the country.

This is a president who said that if he won that America would be respected again around the world, yet as a result of his anti-democratic and incompetent policies has succeeded in significantly lowering the respect that people all over the planet have for the United States, all while embracing right-wing authoritarian rulers around the world. 

This is a president who not only rejected his own defeat and attempted to incite an insurrection to stop Congress from certifying the election, but worked overtime to make it harder for people to vote and easier for billionaires to buy the outcomes of elections. I happen to believe that if Trump is elected once again this November, the 250 year old experiment of modern democracy in this country may very well come to end. 

The truth is, Donald Trump sold out the working families of this country once, and if he wins again all of the anti-worker, anti-democratic policies he pursued during his first term will only be magnified. He is a menace to working people whose rejection of climate science threatens the future of this planet. We have to appreciate how unbelievably severe the current moment is.

This is not the message most Democrats trying to defeat Trump will communicate, but it one we must relentlessly remind the working people of this country about ahead of November’s elections.

So there it is. A lot of important work ahead of us.

Categories Character, Cruelty, Democracy, Disruption, Elections, Trump

Thom Hartman: How the Monopolists Stole the U.S. Government

By dianeravitch
March 9, 2024 //
24

Thom Hartmann has written a new book titled The Hidden History of Monopolies: How Big Business Destroyed the American Dream. He has decided to offer it for free, a chapter at a time, on his blog.

He writes:

Because the Founders set up America to be resistant to the coercive and corruptive influence of monopoly and vested interest, the monopolists didn’t have any direct means of taking over the American government. So, two processes were necessary.

First, they knew that they’d have to take over the government. A large part of that involved the explicit capture of the third branch of government, the federal judiciary (and particularly the Supreme Court), which meant taking and holding the presidency (because the president appoints judges) at all costs, even if it required breaking the law; colluding with foreign governments, monopolies, and oligarchs; and engaging in massive election fraud, all issues addressed in previous Hidden History books.

Second, they knew that if they were going to succeed for any longer than a short time, they’d need popular support. This required two steps: build a monopoly-friendly intellectual and media infrastructure, and then use it to persuade people to distrust the US government.

Lewis Powell’s 1971 memo kicked off the process.

Just a few months before he was nominated by President Richard Nixon to the US Supreme Court, Powell had written a memo to his good friend Eugene Sydnor Jr., the director of the US Chamber of Commerce at the time.32 Powell’s most indelible mark on the nation was not to be his 15-year tenure as a Supreme Court justice but instead that memo, which served as a declaration of war against both democracy and what he saw as an overgrown middle class. It would be a final war, a bellum omnium contra omnes, against everything FDR’s New Deal and LBJ’s Great Society had accomplished.

It wasn’t until September 1972, 10 months after the Senate confirmed Powell, that the public first found out about the Powell memo (the actual written document had the word “Confidential” at the top—a sign that Powell himself hoped it would never see daylight outside of the rarified circles of his rich friends). By then, however, it had already found its way to the desks of CEOs all across the nation and was, with millions in corporate and billionaire money, already being turned into real actions, policies, and institutions.

During its investigation into Powell as part of the nomination process, the FBI never found the memo, but investigative journalist Jack Anderson did, and he exposed it in a September 28, 1972, column in the Washington Post titled, “Powell’s Lesson to Business Aired.” Anderson wrote, “Shortly before his appointment to the Supreme Court, Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. urged business leaders in a confidential memo to use the courts as a ‘social, economic, and political’ instrument.”33

Pointing out that the memo hadn’t been discovered until after Powell was confirmed by the Senate, Anderson wrote, “Senators . . . never got a chance to ask Powell whether he might use his position on the Supreme Court to put his ideas into practice and to influence the court in behalf of business interests.”34

This was an explosive charge being leveled at the nation’s rookie Supreme Court justice, a man entrusted with interpreting the nation’s laws with complete impartiality. But Anderson was a true investigative journalist and no stranger to taking on American authority or to the consequences of his journalism. He’d exposed scandals from the Truman, Eisenhower, Johnson, Nixon, and Reagan administrations. In his report on the memo, Anderson wrote, “[Powell] recommended a militant political action program, ranging from the courts to the campuses.”35

Powell’s memo was both a direct response to Franklin Roosevelt’s battle cry decades earlier and a response to the tumult of the 1960s. He wrote, “No thoughtful person can question that the American economic system is under broad attack.”36

When Sydnor and the Chamber received the Powell memo, corporations were growing tired of their second-class status in America. The previous 40 years had been a time of great growth and strength for the American economy and America’s middle-class workers—and a time of sure and steady increases of profits for corporations—but CEOs wanted more.

If only they could find a way to wiggle back into the minds of the people (who were just beginning to forget the monopolists’ previous exploits of the 1920s), then they could get their tax cuts back; they could trash the “burdensome” regulations that were keeping the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the food we eat safe; and the banksters among them could inflate another massive economic bubble to make themselves all mind-bogglingly rich. It could, if done right, be a return to the Roaring Twenties.

But how could they do this? How could they persuade Americans to take another shot at what was widely considered a dangerous “free market” ideology and economic framework that had crashed the economy in 1929?

Lewis Powell had an answer, and he reached out to the Chamber of Commerce—the hub of corporate power in America—with a strategy. As Powell wrote, “Strength lies in organization, in careful long-range planning and implementation, in consistency of action over an indefinite period of years, in the scale of financing available only through joint effort, and in the political power available only through united action and national organizations.” Thus, Powell said, “the role of the National Chamber of Commerce is therefore vital.”37

In the nearly 6,000-word memo, Powell called on corporate leaders to launch an economic and ideological assault on college and high school campuses, the media, the courts, and Capitol Hill. The objective was simple: the revival of the royalist-controlled “free market” system. As Powell put it, “[T]he ultimate issue . . . [is the] survival of what we call the free enterprise system, and all that this means for the strength and prosperity of America and the freedom of our people.”

The first front that Powell encouraged the Chamber to focus on was the education system. “[A] priority task of business—and organizations such as the Chamber—is to address the campus origin of this hostility [to big business],” Powell wrote.38

What worried Powell was the new generation of young Americans growing up to resent corporate culture. He believed colleges were filled with “Marxist professors” and that the pro-business agenda of Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover had fallen into disrepute since the Great Depression. He knew that winning this war of economic ideology in America required spoon-feeding the next generation of leaders the doctrines of a free-market theology, from high school all the way through graduate and business school.

At the time, college campuses were rallying points for the progressive activism sweeping the nation as young people demonstrated against poverty, the Vietnam War, and in support of civil rights. Powell proposed a list of ways the Chamber could retake the higher-education system. First, create an army of corporate-friendly think tanks that could influence education. “The Chamber should consider establishing a staff of highly qualified scholars in the social sciences who do believe in the system,” he wrote.39

Then, go after the textbooks. “The staff of scholars,” Powell wrote, “should evaluate social science textbooks, especially in economics, political science and sociology. . . . This would include assurance of fair and factual treatment of our system of government and our enterprise system, its accomplishments, its basic relationship to individual rights and freedoms, and comparisons with the systems of socialism, fascism and communism.”

Powell argued that the civil rights movement and the labor movement were already in the process of rewriting textbooks. “We have seen the civil rights movement insist on re-writing many of the textbooks in our universities and schools. The labor unions likewise insist that textbooks be fair to the viewpoints of organized labor.”41 Powell was concerned that the Chamber of Commerce was not doing enough to stop this growing progressive influence and replace it with a pro-plutocratic perspective.

“Perhaps the most fundamental problem is the imbalance of many faculties,” Powell pointed out. “Correcting this is indeed a long-range and difficult project. Yet, it should be undertaken as a part of an overall program. This would mean the urging of the need for faculty balance upon university administrators and boards of trustees.” As in, the Chamber needed to infiltrate university boards in charge of hiring faculty to make sure that only corporate-friendly professors were hired.

Powell’s recommendations targeted high schools as well. “While the first priority should be at the college level, the trends mentioned above are increasingly evidenced in the high schools. Action programs, tailored to the high schools and similar to those mentioned, should be considered,” he urged.

Next, Powell turned to the media, instructing that “[r]eaching the campus and the secondary schools is vital for the long-term. Reaching the public generally may be more important for the shorter term.” Powell added, “It will . . . be essential to have staff personnel who are thoroughly familiar with the media, and how most effectively to communicate with the public.” He advocated that the same system “applies not merely to so-called educational programs . . . but to the daily ‘news analysis’ which so often includes the most insidious type of criticism of the enterprise system.”

Following Powell’s lead, in 1987 Reagan suspended the Fairness Doctrine (which required radio and TV stations to “program in the public interest,” a phrase that was interpreted by the FCC to mean hourly genuine news on radio and quality prime-time news on TV, plus a chance for “opposing points of view” rebuttals when station owners offered on-air editorials), and then in 1996 President Bill Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which eliminated most media-monopoly ownership rules. That same year, billionaire Rupert Murdoch started Fox News, an enterprise that would lose hundreds of millions in its first few years but would grow into a powerhouse on behalf of the monopolists.

From Reagan’s inauguration speech in 1981 to this day, the single and consistent message heard, read, and seen on conservative media, from magazines to talk radio to Fox, is that government is the cause of our problems, not the solution. “Big government” is consistently—more consistently than any other meme or theme—said to be the very worst thing that could happen to America or its people, and after a few decades, many Americans came to believe it. Reagan scare-mongered from a presidential podium in 1986 that “the nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”

Once the bond between people and their government was broken, the next steps were straightforward: Reconfigure the economy to work largely for the corporate and rich, reconfigure the criminal justice system to give white-collar criminals a break while hyper-punishing working-class people of all backgrounds, and reconfigure the electoral systems to ensure that conservatives get reelected.

Then use all of that to push deregulation so that they can quickly consolidate into monopolies or oligopolies.

Categories Accountability, Corporate Reformers, Corruption, Democracy, Deregulation, Disruption, Economy, Elections, Ethics, For-Profit, History

Michael Podhorzer: Don’t Be Fooled by the MAGA Movement

By dianeravitch
March 9, 2024 //
13

Michael Podhorzer is a political analyst who has worked for the AFL-CIO. His is a widely respected voice thanks to the depth of his knowledge and wisdom. He maintains here that the MAGA movement is more aligned with the Confederacy than most people realize. He posted this piece soon after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that states could not remove Trump from their ballots even though he participated in an insurrection.

I am posting it in part. Open the link to read it all.

Podhorzer writes:

Note: A version of this piece was published at The Washington Monthly.  

The Supreme Court rejected Colorado’s decision to keep Trump off the ballot. Ahead of the ruling, many constitutional scholars and historians made strong legal arguments that Section 3 of the 14th Amendment disqualifies Trump from holding public office again. Others argued that if the Supreme Court upheld a Colorado high court ruling it would compromise the legitimacy of our democratic process. 

Here, I want to use this episode to show how the debate itself was really about the legitimacy of America itself. 

Since the January 6, 2021, insurrection, there has been speculation about whether America might break apart as it did in 1861. Some even fear that removing Trump from the ballot will ignite a new civil war. But when we describe what happened in the 19th century and what we fear coming now as a “Civil War,” we undermine the legitimacy of the American nation. We put the secessionists then—and the MAGA movement now—on an equal footing with the legitimate American government. By doing so, we not only mislabel the threats that Trump and MAGA represent, but also underestimate their dangers.

The original designation of the military engagement from 1861 through 1865 was the “War of Rebellion.” This wasn’t just the Union’s perspective; the Confederate States understood themselves to be seceding to form an independent “slaveholding republic.” They called themselves “rebels.” It was not a civil war in which combatants fought to control one nation. 

The leaders of what I call the Red Nation, which has 10 of the 11 Confederate states at its core, consistently reveal that they do not recognize the legitimacy of the United States. (See the Appendix of my post on “The Two Nations of America” for more on how I define Red Nation.) They continue to be in the same relationship with America today as the Confederate states were before the War of Rebellion—unwilling to acceptthe legitimacy of the federal government, even if, in most periods, they have acquiesced to its superior force.

When the 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868, it was obvious why Section 3 was included. When a nation cannot disqualify from public office those who have sought to destroy it, it casts doubt on its own legitimacy. That is especially true of the unrepentant Trump. Even Confederate generals admitted they lost by swearing allegiance to the United States. Trump still insists that he didn’t lose. Meanwhile, most Republicans dodge whether President Joe Biden won the election legitimately by grudgingly acknowledging that Biden is president. 

The MAGA faction is not “conservative,” and even calling it “extremist” misses the point dangerously. Those advocating for conservative and even extreme policies should be welcome in a democratic polity. But those acting in ways that reject legitimately constituted authority are neither conservative nor extreme. They are criminal. Thus, if we hope to be a single America, then we must acknowledge that those who claim that the 2020 election was stolen, decry the prosecution of Trump as a crime, call those convicted for their January 6 crimes “political hostages,” and claim that the Rio Grande is Texas’s to defend and not the federal government’s, do not recognize the legitimacy of the United States. They, like their Confederate ancestors, are not patriots. 

When the Constitution was ratified in 1788, the free states saw it as most of us do today—enshrining a government for a unified nation. To the enslaving states, however, the Constitution did not create a single nation. Rather, as Texas Governor Gregg Abbott and two dozen other Red States say, it is merely a “compact” among the states. Due to the gravity of threats from abroad (Britain, France, Spain) and at home (Native Americans and enslaved people), the enslaving states agreed to a mutual defense pact (the Constitution) only insofar as they were confident that it protected their “peculiar institution.” 

At Appomattox, Virginia, in 1865, the Confederates did not surrender so much as acknowledge that their best hope to preserve their “way of life” was not on the battlefield where they were badly outmatched but in a campaign of terror against Reconstruction. Once the South had made Reconstruction too costly to continue, it enacted Jim Crow Constitutions and updated its forced labor economy. This is a well-told story, for example, in Heather Cox Richardson’s How the South Won the Civil War. 

Our devotion to an “America” that strives to be a “government of the people, by the people, for the people” has never been accepted by the Confederate faction, which has always been (and remains) committed to theocracy. We believe that the warrant for government is “the consent of the governed”; they believe its legitimacy is God-given….

Cutting the Branches, Leaving the Roots

Consider Germany, which is rightly credited for taking responsibility for the Holocaust. Last summer, I visited Berlin and saw how robust these efforts have been. For example, the sidewalks in residential neighborhoods have been broken up by Stolpersteine—stumble blocks—which call attention to the homes the Nazis stole from Jews and, where known, the fate of those Jews. But it’s not as if there aren’t similar landmarks commemorating our past, including the Legacy Museum/Lynching Memorialin Montgomery, Alabama, the National Center for Civil and Human Rights in Atlanta, Georgia, and the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. 

No, the real difference is exactly the difference between conceptualizing today’s toxic politics as “civil war” or “polarization” instead of a rebellion. In Germany, the idea that there would be monuments or streets named after Adolf Hitler or his generals is unthinkable. No popular culture there valorizes those who fought for the Führer or waxes nostalgic for a lost way of life. There’s no bawdy comedy, The Dukes of Bavaria…

Please open the link to read this provocative article in full.

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Elections, Evil, Extremism, History, Justice, Trump

Ohio: Legislature Wants a Course in Capitalism, Not Financial Literacy

By dianeravitch
March 8, 2024 //
42

State legislatures these days tthjnkbthat they should pass laws telling teachers how to teach reading and what to teach in social studies. The latest example comes from Ohio, where the far-right legislature is in the midst of mandating a course on capitalism.

Denis Smith, retired educator, writes:

In case anyone hasn’t noticed, our republic is on fire. And that’s not being hyperbolic.

Incendiary language is now the norm in Congress and across the nation, further fanning the flames of overheated rhetoric in an election year. Indictments pile up against a former president, along with criminal trials looming in multiple jurisdictions. Perhaps even more ominous, jurors, judges, and election workers are being threatened with harm by extremists across our land.

But that’s only the short version of a narrative about a country at the brink, where democracy is threatened by the specter of authoritarianism.

Meanwhile, back in Ohio, the legislature has examined the state of the state and determined that in today’s volatile world, there is a pressing need to modify public school curriculum by teaching … capitalism.

That’s right. Ohio Republicans have decided that teaching about capitalism is more important in troubled times than strengthening student learning opportunities about democracy. Yes, learning about capitalism is more important for Ohio students than the critical need for media literacy and increased research and critical thinking skills in an age of artificial intelligence and fake news.

Add to that the importance of teaching about character and caring about others, a key cornerstone of character education. 

To Republicans, whose former House Speaker and former state party chair are now serving prison sentences, along with their twice-impeached presidential front runner facing 91 felony criminal counts, there appears to be no pressing need for young people to learn more about personal ethics, citizenship, and the importance of character. 

But we probably should know that when it comes to Republicans, caring about the needs of others might be tantamount to socialism.

After the passage of Ohio Senate Bill 17 by a margin of 64-26 on Feb. 7, a measure which calls for the addition of teaching about capitalism in high school financial literacy standards, one Democratic legislator told the Cincinnati Enquirer/USA Today Network that adding capitalism to carefully crafted financial literacy classes only dilutes the amount of content students can learn in this important course of study designed to prepare students for assuming adult roles and functions. 

‘This bill is one part partisan message, one part ideological warfare and one part a poor fix’ to Ohio’s financial literacy class requirement, said Rep. Joe Miller, D-Lorain, a former social studies teacher who instructed students on the principles of capitalism.

The educator and legislator, now serving his third term in the Ohio House, is quite savvy in knowing the usual lockstep behavior of Republicans, none of whom voted against the bill. An additional observation by Miller might have also been influenced by knowing the tired rhetoric of one of the bill’s co-sponsors in the Ohio Senate, Andrew Brenner, who famously said in 2014 that public education was “socialism” and should be privatized. 

The Enquirer piece continued, saying Miller worried opponents of the bill would be labeled socialists in future campaigns.

With Brenner and Senate President Matt (“we can kind of do what we want”) Huffman, it’s only a matter of time before they use the words socialism and socialist, along with other Republicans, as tired descriptors for the noun Democrat. 

Come to think of it, if the titular head of the Republican Party is constantly complaining about witch hunts, what if we soon find out that the latest supply chain issue generated by the GOP might result in a shortage of witches?  If they do run out of witches, look for socialist hunts in this election year.

Categories Citizenship, Civics, Curriculum, Democracy, Disruption, Economy, Ethics, Extremism, Ohio

Texas: Local Elections and the Fight Over Vouchers

By dianeravitch
March 6, 2024 //
4

Yesterday was a crucial election for the future of public schools in Texas. The Republican primaries pitted civic-minded Republicans against challengers committed to vouchers and endorsed by Governor Greg Abbott.

Abbott received the biggest single contribution in state history from Pennsylvania billionaire Jeff Yass. The gift came with a purpose: pass a voucher law.

Governor Abbott has been in charge since 2015 and until now, he never cared much about vouchers. But the money came pouring in from evangelical oil-and-gas billionaires like Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks, as well as out-of-state billionaires like Yass and Betsy DeVos. Suddenly, vouchers was the Governor’s top priority. He toured Christian schools around the state to promote them.

When the vote came in the Legislature, a bloc of rural Republicans in the House opposed vouchers. They said their community loved their public schools; they didn’t want to undermine them. Their public schools are the heart of their community and their local economy.

Abbott offered new money for public schools and teacher pay raises, but only if the Legislature approved vouchers. The rural Republicans (and every Democrat) said no.

Abbott said he would call special sessions until the House passed a voucher bill and he did. He called four special sessions. They said no to vouchers. He threatened to run primaries against them and to replace them with legislators who supported vouchers. They stood firm.

Yesterday some of those rural Republicans were defeated by Abbott and about $100 million in billionaire money. Some prevailed. Some are in run-offs.

Pastor Charles Johnson of Pastors for Texas Children (PTC) is a stalwart friend of public schools. He and his network of pastors across the state understand the importance of well-funded public schools and well-paid teachers.

PTC just released this update on the Republican primaries.

https://www.pastorsfortexaschildren.com/

Election Results

Dear Friends,

We have mixed emotions as we reflect on last night’s outcomes of the Texas House of Representatives races. While we may not have achieved the sweeping results we had hoped for, we are grateful for the victories your work and witness achieved!

 

Of the 16 House Republican primary races we focused on, we enjoyed six victories and suffered six losses. Four of our Republican friends face runoff elections.


The path to positive change is often fraught with challenges, and setbacks are an inevitable part of any endeavor. Though we may not have won every race last night, we are grateful for the re-election of six of our strongest Republican allies in the House and look forward to working hard to re-elect four more in the runoffs.


We find hope and encouragement in the upcoming May runoffs. These runoffs are crucial to fighting taxpayer-funded vouchers here in Texas. We will continue to fight to ensure that the Texas Public Schools voice we advocate for is heard loud and clear. Your continued support is crucial, and together, we will forge a brighter future for the children of Texas.

We want to express our gratitude for your unwavering support throughout this journey. We remain steadfast in our commitment to championing our Texas public schools, teachers, parents, and, of course, the 5.5 million children in our Texas public schools.

 

Let us stand united, resilient in the face of these challenges, and hopeful for the positive outcomes that the runoffs may bring. The journey may be long, but with your dedication and support, we can make a lasting impact on the lives of children and families in our beloved community.


 

Rev. Charles Foster Johnson, Executive Director

Pastors for Children

Donate to PTC

Categories Betsy DeVos, Billionaires, Budget Cuts, Cruelty, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Elections, Extremism, Funding, Rural Schools, Texas, Vouchers

Nebraska: Vouchers Will Be on the Ballot in November Unless Court Blocks Them

By dianeravitch
March 6, 2024 //
3

Nebraska will have a voucher referendum this fall unless courts keep them off the ballot. Friends of public schools gathered way more than enough signatures to get a state referendum. The top state election official certified that they met the qualifications.

But Republican leaders are desperate to kill the referendum because they know it will pass. NO VOUCHER REFERENDUM HAS EVER PASSED.

Nebraska’s top election official has ruled that voters will get to decide this year whether to repeal a law that gives taxpayer money for private school scholarships. 

But both Nebraska Secretary of State Bob Evnen and state Sen. Lou Ann Linehan, who authored the school choice law and sought to have the repeal effort kept off the ballot, acknowledge that the courts will likely ultimately decide if the repeal question makes it onto November’s ballot.

Evnen said in a news release late Thursday that he consulted state law and previous state attorney general opinions before concluding that the referendum question is legal and will appear on the November ballot “unless otherwise ordered by a court of competent jurisdiction.”

Categories Democracy, Education Industry, Nebraska, Religion, Republicans, Rural Schools, Separation of church and state, Vouchers

Peter Greene: CBS’ “60 Minutes” Confronts Moms for Liberty on Book Banning

By dianeravitch
March 6, 2024 //
7

Peter Greene highly recommends the “60 Minutes” segment about book banning and Moms for Liberty. He pins them on the essential hypocrisy at the heart of their campaign: the M4L asserts the right to deny certain books to all children in a school or a district, thus denying the “liberty” of parents who disagree with them. There is a world of difference between a parent saying “I don’t want my child to read that book” and a parent saying “ No child in that school should be allowed to read that book.”

Peter Greene writes:

If you have not seen the 60 Minutes piece on book banning, here it is. Go ahead and watch; it will be thirteen and a half minutes well spent.

There are several things on display here, not the least of which is a school district taking a sensible students-first, parents-involved approach to the issue of difficult books. 

Reporter Scott Pelley gets right to the heart of several issues. The difference between giving parents the tools to control what their own children can read (something the district also provides in spades) and trying to control what other parents can let their children read. The outrage-enhancing technique of treating isolated mistakes as proof of some widespread conspiracy.

In the midst of it all, the Moms for Liberty, with Tiffany Justice and Tina Descovich finally seen in the footage from an interview they sat for way back in October of 2023. 

The piece is tough on them. The parents that are set up to represent the district are Republican, conservative, combat veterans. Pelley in repeated voice overs points out that the Moms are evasive and avoid answering question but instead retreating to their talking points (he does not point out that they are seasoned political coms professionals, but he doesn’t portray them as cookie-baking domestics, either). Some of the talking points were so six months ago. “We don’t co-parent with the government,” said the women whose demands include forcing the government to help them with the part of parenting that involves keeping an eye on what your children read and watch. 

Their PR firm (Cavalry Strategies) was on the case this morning, emailing out the M4L transcript that includes the part that CBS didn’t include, and offering the duo for press interviews to tell their story. It’s an odd choice, because the stuff they want you to see is just more of the non-answering that CBS showed. That and they are really, really big sad that CBS chose not to air them reading the Really Dirty Parts or Certain Books. This remains one of their weirdest arguments–since this part of this book is too objectionable to read in certain situations, it must be too objectionable to be found in any situation. Like, it’s not okay for me pee on the steps of City Hall at noon, so it must not be okay for me to pee anywhere, ever.

But the question that Pelley asked was a really, really good one. The Moms led into it by saying that although they love teachers so very much, there are some “rogue teachers” out there (I can hear the ty-shirts being printed already). “Parents send their children to school to be educated, not indoctrinated into ideology.”

And so Pelley asked the obvious question– “What ideology are the children being indoctrinated into?”

And the Moms wouldn’t answer. The extended answer in their email (and some tweets) suggests that they’re talking about gender and sex stuff, and their go to example is telling five year olds that genders can be changed). 

The answer remains unclear. What exactly is the objection? What is the problem? What does “gender ideology” even mean? Because the harder I stare at it, the more it seems as if the problem is acknowledging that LGNTQ persons exist.

But in the MAGA Mom playbook, that’s not it as all, which brings us Pelley’s other fruitless attempt to get the Moms to explain what they mean by all the “groomer” language that they use on their own social media. They really didn’t want to talk about that, though they did insist that they like gay folks just fine. They didn’t attempt to address the groomer question in their responses to the 60 Minutes piece. Perhaps that’s because their premise makes no sense. 

But if you boil it all down, this is what you get.

If you acknowledge that LGBTQ persons exist in front of children, then you are grooming those children to become LGBTQ.

Part of the premise for that is an old one– if you believe that nobody is born That Way, that nobody is LGBTQ by nature, then you must believe that all LGBTQ persons are recruited.

But to jump from there to the notion that simply acknowledging that LGBTQ persons exist must only be about recruiting–that’s a hell of a leap. And it leads to the worst culture panic impulse, which is to erase those persons, to treat them as if their very existence must be a dirty secret.

And because acknowledging them is equated with grooming other children, this becomes the worst brand of othering. To make it okay to attack the Other, you have to establish that the Other represents a threat, that you need to defend yourself against them. And that makes violence against them okay.

So when Ryan Walters says that he’s not playing “woke gender games,” he’s saying that he won’t acknowledge that LGBTQ persons exist, and that anyone who does acknowledge they exist is trying to attack children and groom them and so that “woke mob” is attacking, and so it’s okay to attack back. When the Lt. Governor and gubernatorial candidate calls LGBTQ persons “filth,” particularly in the context of talking about them in school at all ever, that message is pretty clear. 

Pelley’s unanswered questions point us at the nuance missing in the Moms for Liberty outrage and panic factory, the nuance that recognizes that reasonable intelligent people can disagree about the value of certain books. In the real world, there’s a huge difference between showing six year olds graphic depictions of the ways one can use a penis and a non-graphic depiction of LGBTQ persons. There’s a vast gulf between grooming some small child for sexual abuse and simply acknowledging there are some LGBTQ persons in the world (and possibly in the classroom or the homes of class members). There’s a planet-seized difference between saying “LGBTQ persons are not extraordinary or unnatural” and saying “You should become an LGBTQ person.”  And yet, in the Moms for Liberty universe, there is no difference between any of those things. 

It’s very hard to distinguish between the opportunists and the truly panicked on this issue. The Heritage Foundations Project 2025 seems like an opportunist’s political project, but it is also shot through with what seems like a sincere and extreme LGBTQ panic. The Ziegler scandal deserves attention because it suggests that one founding M4L member is not all that freaked out about non-het sex. 

But at a certain level, it doesn’t matter whether all this LGBTQ panic is sincere or not, because as the toxic sludge filters through the culture, some people feel justified, even encouraged, in violence and mistreatment of actual human beings. No amount of carefully refined talking points will change that; only the kind of nuanced, complex conversation that doesn’t get you a special seat at the MAGA table. 

The encouraging part of the 60 Minutes piece is that it shows how ordinary folks can actually have some of those conversations. Over a hundred citizens came together to have some thoughtful consideration about the list of 97 books that were marked for removal, and they kept 92 of them. Imagine that.

Categories Censorship, Democracy, Disruption, Extremism, Freedom to Read, Librarians, Libraries, Literature

George Conway: The Supreme Court Decided Based on Fear

By dianeravitch
March 5, 2024 //
29

George Conway is a constitutional lawyer and a conservative Republican who is an outspoken critic of Donald Trump. His tweets are memorable, as are his appearances on MSNBC, where he is often a guest. He also writes for The Atlantic, where he published his commentary on the Supreme Court’s latest Trump decision. Conway was initially dubious about Colorado’s case for disqualifying Trump but, upon reflection, decided that the Constitution plainly required the Supreme Court to exclude him from the ballot. In his view, the case was not decided on its merits and the legal argument was “utterly flimsy.”

In this post, he analyzes the decision and points out its inconsistencies and fallacies. I am quoting only his conclusion. If you want to read it in full, open the link or subscribe to The Atlantic:

This case wasn’t about legal reasoning; it was about fear. Fear from all the justices, conservatives and liberals, about the impact on the Court of removing Trump from the ballot. And the second paragraph of Justice Barrett’s opinion bleeds fear onto the page. “This is not the time to amplify disagreement with stridency,” she writes. Was that directed at any of her colleagues? Justice Sotomayor’s opinion is hardly strident at all, as far as Supreme Court separate opinions go, even if it makes little more sense than the majority’s. “The Court has settled a politically charged issue in the volatile season of a Presidential election,” Barrett continues. “Particularly in this circumstance, writings on the Court should turn the national temperature down, not up. For present purposes, our differences are far less important than our unanimity: All nine justices agree on the outcome of this case. That is the message Americans should take home.”

Each of these sentences is true. But why say this? Why not let the Court’s unanimity of judgment and reasoning speak for itself, including that of Sotomayor’s concurrence? Because Justice Barrett—and, I suspect, all the justices—were terrified by the case and what it actually required them to do: affirm Trump’s disqualification.

That may sound depressing, but I see reason to take heart. To be sure, it’s a shame, because this was one circumstance where it would have been nice for the Supreme Court justices to show the courage that some of their colleagues in the lower courts have shown when faced with Trump—judges like Lewis Kaplan, in the Carroll case; Tanya Chutkan, in the federal January 6 case; Justice Arthur Engoron in Trump’s New York civil fraud case; and Justice Juan Merchan, in the upcoming New York criminal case stemming from Trump allegedly cooking his books to pay off an adult-film star. Ultimately, though, litigation will not save us from Trump, and no one should believe that it will.  

But litigation will have done its part—even Trump v. Anderson, with its dearth of reasoning and not-quite-satisfactory result. Because there was one very important thing the Court didn’t do yesterday. It didn’t cast one word of doubt, and expressed not a hint of a disagreement with, the amply supported factual conclusion reached by the Colorado courts: Donald Trump engaged in an insurrection. Just as Trump today stands as an adjudicated sexual abuser, so too he remains an adjudicated insurrectionist. It is up to us, as voters, to make use of those findings come November.

Put another way: You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you get what you need.

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Elections, Justice, Trump

David French: The Supreme Court Just Erased Part of the Constitution

By dianeravitch
March 5, 2024 //
30

David French is a regular columnist for The New York Times. He writes here about the radical implications of the Supreme Court ruling on Trump’s eligibility to run for president.

As of Monday, March 4, 2024, Section 3 of the 14th Amendment of the Constitution is essentially a dead letter, at least as it applies to candidates for federal office. Under the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling that reversed the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision striking Donald Trump from the state’s primary ballot, even insurrectionists who’ve violated their previous oath of office can hold federal office, unless and until Congress passes specific legislation to enforce Section 3.

In the aftermath of the oral argument last month, legal observers knew with near-certainty that the Supreme Court was unlikely to apply Section 3 to Trump. None of the justices seemed willing to uphold the Colorado court’s ruling, and only Justice Sonia Sotomayor gave any meaningful indication that she might dissent. The only real question remaining was the reasoning for the court’s decision. Would the ruling be broad or narrow?

A narrow ruling for Trump might have held, for example, that Colorado didn’t provide him with enough due process when it determined that Section 3 applied. Or the court could have held that Trump, as president, was not an “officer of the United States” within the meaning of the section. Such a ruling would have kept Trump on the ballot, but it would also have kept Section 3 viable to block insurrectionists from the House or Senate and from all other federal offices.

A somewhat broader ruling might have held that Trump did not engage in insurrection or rebellion or provide aid and comfort to the enemies of the Constitution. Such a ruling would have sharply limited Section 3 to apply almost exclusively to Civil War-style conflicts, an outcome at odds with the text and original public meaning of the section. It’s worth noting that, by not taking this path, the court did not exonerate Trump from participating in an insurrection.

But instead of any of these options, the court went with arguably the broadest reasoning available: that Section 3 isn’t self-executing, and thus has no force or effect in the absence of congressional action. This argument is rooted in Section 5 of the amendment, which states that “Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.”

But Section 5, on its face, does not give Congress exclusive power to enforce the amendment. As Justices Elena Kagan, Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson pointed out in their own separate concurring opinion, “All the Reconstruction amendments (including the due process and equal protection guarantees and prohibition of slavery) ‘are self-executing,’ meaning that they do not depend on legislation.” While Congress may pass legislation to help enforce the 14th Amendment, it is not required to do so, and the 14th Amendment still binds federal, state and local governments even if Congress refuses to act.

But now Section 3 is different from other sections of the amendment. It requires federal legislation to enforce its terms, at least as applied to candidates for federal office. Through inaction alone, Congress can effectively erase part of the 14th Amendment.

It’s extremely difficult to square this ruling with the text of Section 3. The language is clearly mandatory. The first words are “No person shall be” a member of Congress or a state or federal officer if that person has engaged in insurrection or rebellion or provided aid or comfort to the enemies of the Constitution. The section then says, “But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each house, remove such disability.”

In other words, the Constitution imposes the disability, and only a supermajority of Congress can remove it. But under the Supreme Court’s reasoning, the meaning is inverted: The Constitution merely allows Congress to impose the disability, and if Congress chooses not to enact legislation enforcing the section, then the disability does not exist. The Supreme Court has effectively replaced a very high bar for allowing insurrectionists into federal office — a supermajority vote by Congress — with the lowest bar imaginable: congressional inaction.

As Kagan, Sotomayor and Jackson point out, this approach is also inconsistent with the constitutional approach to other qualifications for the presidency. We can bar individuals from holding office who are under the age limit or who don’t meet the relevant citizenship requirement without congressional enforcement legislation. We can enforce the two-term presidential term limit without congressional enforcement legislation. Section 3 now stands apart not only from the rest of the 14th Amendment, but also from the other constitutional requirements for the presidency.

In one important respect, the court’s ruling on Monday is worse and more consequential than the Senate’s decision to acquit Trump after his Jan. 6 impeachment trial in 2021. Impeachment is entirely a political process, and the actions of one Senate have no bearing on the actions of future Senates. But a Supreme Court ruling has immense precedential power. The court’s decision is now the law.

It would be clearly preferable if Congress were to pass enforcement legislation that established explicit procedures for resolving disputes under Section 3, including setting the burden of proof and creating timetables and deadlines for filing challenges and hearing appeals. Establishing a uniform process is better than living with a patchwork of state proceedings. But the fact that Congress has not acted should not effectively erase the words from the constitutional page. Chaotic enforcement of the Constitution may be suboptimal. But it’s far better than not enforcing the Constitution at all.

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Elections, Justice, Trump

Robert Hubbell: The Supreme Court’s Latest Decision Was a Disgrace: Vote!

By dianeravitch
March 5, 2024 //
47

Robert Hubbell is outraged by the Supreme Court’s latest decision regarding the insurrection clause (Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment). The conservative majority on the Court usually claim to be “originalists” who scrutinize the language in the Constitution and divine the intent of those who wrote it.

In this case, the language was crystal clear. Any officer of the federal government who swore an oath to defend the Constitution and then participated in an insurrection against the Constitution was disqualified from running again for office. But the majority said that the official who had engaged in insurrection must first be subject to a Congressional vote; that language is not in the Constitution although there is specific language about the vote needed to remove the disqualification.

Hubbell was furious that Clarence Thomas was allowed to vote in this case since his wife was an active participant in the plot to overturn the election. He should have recused himself but that would require an ethical compass that the justice lacks.

Here is an excerpt from Hubbell’s post. You should open the link and read it in full.

He writes:

The most important lesson from Monday’s disqualification ruling is that the Supreme Court is broken beyond repair. The reactionary majority made that fact abundantly clear by unilaterally amending the Constitution to remove the Insurrection Clause from the 14th Amendment. 

Those sworn to protect the Constitution are dismantling it. The protectors of the Constitution have become its adversary in order to protect a failed insurrectionist who has promised a second effort to overthrow the Constitution. (“I said I want to be a dictator for one day.”)

There are many reasons to ensure that Donald Trump is not elected to the presidency in 2024. Rehabilitating and reforming the Court is chief among them. Sadly, reforming the Court is below the radar for most voters. But the lawless reactionary majority has already denied women the full protection of the liberty clause of the 14th amendment; it is refusing to enforce the clear intent of the 14th to ensure that descendants of enslaved people have a meaningful right to vote and equal protection under law. And the logical force of the Dobbs opinion strongly suggests that the Court will withdraw existing protections for same-sex marriage, contraception, and “inter-racial” marriages.

Monday’s opinion is a clear warning to all Americans that the threat to their liberties is immediate and real. Those who seek to protect existing liberties (and reclaim those already abrogated Court) must vote as if their freedoms depend on the outcome of the 2024 election—because they do! 

The Court has abandoned the Constitution; the last line of defense is the American people exercising their most fundamental right—the right to elect their representatives, who can (in turn) enlarge the Court and limit its jurisdiction.

There is abundant evidence that many Americans are not inspired by either presidential candidate or feel betrayed, forgotten, or ignored by the political process. But one candidate will seek to defend their freedoms by preserving and enforcing the Constitution (in part, by reforming the Court). The other has promised to overturn the Constitution “for one day”—which means “overturn the Constitution” period. The duration of a suspension of the Constitution is irrelevant.

Feelings of anger and upset over Monday’s ruling are understandable and warranted. But the most appropriate response is to redouble our efforts to defeat Trump. Nothing else matters. If we achieve that goal, we can work to advance all other goals. If we do not, we will be at the mercy of a renegade majority on the Court and an out-of-control, aspiring dictator for four years.

What happened?

On Monday, the Court overruled the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision removing Trump from the Colorado primary ballot. The opinion is here: 23-719 Trump v. Anderson (03/04/2024).

The ruling was ostensibly 9-0 with three justices writing a concurring opinion that reads like a dissent and a concurrence by Amy Coney Barrett that criticized the overreach of reactionary majority. In fact, as explained below, the ruling was 5-4, meaning that Justice Thomas’s refusal to recuse himself (as required by statute and rule) was outcome-determinative. Justice Thomas’s corruption saved Donald Trump’s slot on the Colorado ballot.

Distilled to its essence, the US Supreme Court’s ruling in Trump v. Anderson removed the Insurrection Clause from Section 3 of the 14th Amendment.

How did the Court effectively remove the Insurrection Clause from the 14th Amendment?

The 14th Amendment creates a self-executing disqualification for insurrectionists who previously took an oath to support the Constitution. The self-executing nature of that disqualification is consistent with other provisions of the 14th Amendment (equal protection, due process) that are likewise self-executing—as are other qualifications on the presidency (such as age, citizenship, and tenure of residency in the US).

Despite the plain language of the 14th Amendment—which creates a bar to holding federal office based on the conduct of the insurrectionist standing alone—the Court ruled that the Insurrection Clause is ineffective unless Congress affirmatively passes legislation that conforms to narrow prescriptions of the Court’s opinion in Trump v. Anderson.

The reactionary majority ignores that Section 3 of the 14th Amendment speaks to the role of Congress in enforcing the Insurrection Clause. It says that Congress can remove an insurrectionist’s disqualification by a two-thirds vote. But under the Court’s ruling in Trump v. Anderson, Congress can prevent any disqualifications of insurrectionists by simply refusing to pass the enabling legislation prescribed by the reactionary majority.

As Justice Sotomayor wrote in her concurring opinion,

It is hard to understand why the Constitution would require a congressional supermajority to remove a disqualification if a simple majority could nullify Section 3’s operation by . . . declining to pass implementing legislation.

As George Conway noted on Monday on MSNBC, the reactionary majority arrived at its conclusion by simply ignoring the language of the Constitution. The reactionary majority regularly uses the text of the Constitution as a cudgel when they want to deny liberties embraced by the language of the Constitution. But when they seek to ensure that a failed insurrectionist and aspiring dictator remains on the ballot, they act as if the text of the Constitution does not exist.

A reader wrote to me after the issuance of the opinion and asked, “What can we do?” My answer is this:

Elect Democrats. Reform the Court. Defend the Constitution. Preserve Democracy.

Categories Accountability, Civil Rights, Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Failure, History, Justice, Trump
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