National “checks and balances” and institutions of democracy won’t save us

I began to feel my recent cold loosening its grip about ten days ago. But getting from “feeling better” to “feeling good” took about a week. Sometime during that recovery a friend listened to my litany of symptoms and suggested what I had was COVID. I do not have COVID testing kits and did not visit a doctor, so I don’t know whether that friend was correct. This may have been my second or third bout of COVID. I definitely had it in January 2022 (with medical tests to verify). I may have had it in July 2022 while attending a big handbell gathering. I kept a mask on and one night when the symptoms were bad I considered leaving the event and heading home, but the symptoms were gone in the morning. Afterward, a friend said she had tested positive when she got home. And now might have been the third time. Much praise to vaccines that lessened the severity of symptoms. The possibility that I might have had another bout of COVID, along with news that COVID cases are rising, prompted me to download Michigan’s COVID data for the first time in four months. The data was updated on Tuesday, December 12. The good news is the number of deaths per day has been in the single digits, except for one day, for seven months. There were ten deaths in that exception. The bad news is the number of new cases per day has indeed been rising. The new cases per day rose in August, crested in September below 1000 cases per day, dropped a bit in October, and has been rising since. Over the last four weeks the weekly peak has been 943, 1411, 1272, and 1245. My charting program now displays 2¾ years of data. Next time I download the data I probably should revise the program to chart only the last year. If I don’t the month designations will begin to overlap. This morning on NPR Steve Inskeep and Leila Fadel marked 50 years since the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its list of mental disorders. Before then people, especially the government, justified oppressing LGB people because they were considered mentally ill. I left the T out of the acronym because the change was about orientation, not identity. After the change the mentally ill excuse could not be used, though the government had other ways to fire or discharge LGB people, such as declaring them a possible blackmail target and thus a security risk. Religion declaring homosexuality as sinful was not a part of this discussion. This NPR segment quoted early LGB activists Barbara Gittings and Frank Kameny. But it doesn’t say anything at all about why the APA made the change. There’s nothing about the brave gay psychiatrist (alas, I don’t remember his name) who testified before an APA conference while wearing a mask and using a microphone that distorted his voice. Alas, there are still groups, mostly church groups, that still try to “cure” us. Thankfully, more states are banning “conversion” therapy that is merely an excuse for torture. NPR’s Fresh Air host Tonya Mosley had a 35 minute discussion with Charlie Savage of the New York Times about why a second nasty guy administration will be so much worse than the first one. Savage has also written a couple books on growing presidential power, one covering the Bush II years and the other covering Obama (!). This will be a strange election with the nasty guy having to make courtroom appearances between campaign events. Even so, he’s on track to be the Republican nominee. Much, likely all, of the campaigning will be about revenge, mostly against Biden, though also against Democrats and any Republicans who don’t display enough loyalty to him, but rather are loyal to the party or the country. However, the big difference is the growing infrastructure, the sophisticated policy apparatus that is growing up around him and backing him. And that makes his words more than the usual bombast. The things he says he will do: One: Change the Department of Justice from an independent part of the government with the charge to protect the weak from the strong into a driving force to protect him and punish his adversaries. He believes the DoJ has been weaponized against him, so he feels justified in weaponizing it against his opponents. In his first term the DoJ didn’t bring charges against Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, former FBI director James Comey, and others, much to his fury. Enough existing employees, even conservatives, raised legal objections to his punishing his adversaries. That infrastructure – the well-funded think tanks – have been writing legal rationale and vetting lawyers who will support, not resist, what he wants to do. All these people are actually saying this, so it isn’t a secret. One bit of that legal rationale is that the DoJ is supposed to be doing the bidding of the president and the Constitution says nothing about a president opening investigations of his opponents. Some of these think tanks, like the Heritage Foundation, are saying they’re creating all this infrastructure for whoever is the next Republican president. But a lot of this work reflects Trumpist ideology. Two: Attempt to implement the unitary executive theory, developed back in the Reagan years. It says Congress cannot create an agency the president cannot control. An example is Federal Reserve – the president can appoint the leadership, but then has no more control. This theory says, for example, that the president should have control over Federal Reserve decisions on interest rates. And, in this example, a president could cut interest rates to help with reelection, no matter the economic mess it made later. Three: Revise federal civil service classifications so that a lot more jobs – any job that might touch policy – are seen as political rather than civil service. They become partisan spoils with hiring now based on loyalty rather than competence. Four: The nasty guy was able to take over the Republican Party in 2016 because of his radical opposition to immigration. His proposals were mostly thwarted in his first term. They won’t be in his second. Up to now deportations might be a few hundred thousand a year. The nasty guy is talking millions a year with all sorts of draconian policies and camps to make it happen. The think tanks believe much of what they want to do is currently legal. If not, he will have a more compliant Supreme Court and maybe a more compliant Congress. Yes, deportations on that scale will disrupt social and economic connections. Agriculture, hospitality, and many other economic sectors will face labor shortages. But Stephen Miller, an advisor and white supremacist, says that’s good. It will open more jobs to citizens and they’ll be at higher wages. Some jobs will go unfilled because Americans are not willing to do things like pick crops, no matter the pay. Five: Many policies in the nasty guy’s first term were blocked because they were badly written. He and his minions are now much better at putting policies in a form that would pass judicial muster. They have a much better understanding of how to manipulate the levers of government. Six: They have a much more compliant judiciary because he got lots of appointments to many federal courts through the Senate. Seven: The nasty guy intends to use the Insurrection Act, the one exception to the Posse Comitatus Act that prevents using the military for domestic policing. He intends to use it for such things as disrupt protests, especially Black Lives Matter protests, to support immigration agents at the southern border, and to enforce order in the “crime dens” of Democratic-run cities. In the last case he won’t wait for mayors to request assistance. Eight: There won’t be the incompetence and dysfunction of his first term. These think tanks will have rosters of competent people – not competent in performing the functions of government, but competent in carrying out an authoritarian agenda. Nine: The nasty guy “has worn down, outlasted, intimidated into submission and driven out Republican lawmakers who had independent standing and demonstrated occasional willingness to oppose him.” Those Republicans who disagree with the nasty guy privately fear violence if they oppose him publicly. Ten: There have been a parade of people in the first administration who have talked about how they restrained him from his more radical ideas and how he is unfit to be president. They and their restraint won’t be there during a second term. So the lawyers – and everyone in the second administration – will be much more likely to say yes to everything, even (especially) the cruelest things, the nasty guy will come up with. That’s ten reasons why the nasty guy will be much more successful in making himself dictator, if he ever gets back to the Oval Office. No, the national “checks and balances” and the strength of institutions of democracy won’t save us. The checks and balances have been co-opted and institutions are crumbling from attacks of claims of already being partisan. I had mentioned even vulnerable House Republicans had voted for the impeachment inquiry. These are the 17 Republicans elected from districts Biden won. So even though they are somewhat vulnerable and even though House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer, the guy who brought the inquiry approval to the floor, has become a national laughingstock because of the complete lack of evidence, they all voted for him. As Joan McCarter of Daily Kos wrote:

But this isn’t about Biden. It’s about proving loyalty to Donald Trump, and plenty of Republicans will happily admit that.

Wandrea “Shaye” Moss and her mother Ruby Freeman, were election workers in Georgia. After Georgia went to Biden in the 2020 election Rudy Giuliani accused the women of election tampering. Yes, what he said were lies. The women, who are black, received threats and harassment. It was so bad they couldn’t go out in public. So they sued Giuliani for defamation. And an Associated Press article posted on Kos reports the jury took only ten hours to award the women $148 million in damages and punitive damages. Giuliani kept repeating the lies to the press and kept saying he had evidence that would prove his position. But he never testified and that evidence was not included in the trial. His lawyer said that he was not fully responsible for the harassment the women faced. The lawyer also suggested the award could “financially ruin” his client. Good. The case will be appealed.