Filmmaker Michael Moore was on Chris Hayes’ MSNBC show on Tuesday, May 24, 2022. It was the day of another senseless mass shooting in the United States. The targets this time were once again school children. Twenty-one people in all killed in the town of Uvalde, Texas.

Moore is clearly for strong gun control legislation, but he didn’t say what so many proponents of gun control frequently say, “I believe in the Second Amendment.”

Instead, Moore pointed out how the Second Amendment has essentially given pro-gun people free license in opposing meaningful gun control. Then Moore raised a fascinating hypothetical question. “What if bullets had not been invented until fifty years after the U.S. constitution was written?”

His point was that gun rights are completely different from any other rights in the constitution. All of the other rights would have been relevant in the times of Greece, or Rome, or really any time. These non-gun rights could easily have stood alone without the Second Amendment.  This doesn’t mean that people could not have had guns once they and bullets were invented. The difference is that there would not have been a constitutional guarantee to be able to purchase and possess guns.

There are many who say that even with the Second Amendment, there is no such guarantee. The wording is thoroughly ambiguous:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

It may seem at first that this amendment guarantees people the right to bear arms, but the context is having a well regulated militia. So does the right to bear arms only apply for those who are in a militia (armed forces) or the United States, or can they own guns regardless of whether or not they are in the U.S. military?

This argument is one which America’s gun owners have won. Much as those who favor gun control want immediate new regulations, it appears that it will be years before Congress passes meaningful legislation or the Supreme Court chooses to value public safety above gun rights.

There are numerous reasons why the gun advocates are currently winning this dispute:

1. They own most of the guns, and that frightens many who want to limit gun rights.
2. The roots of the Second Amendment have a great deal to do with slave owners’ rights and needs to hunt down runaway slaves. Creating the constitution required considerable compromise to get southern states to agree to the document. Protecting their control over slaves who were already in the United States was essential to southern states’ acceptance of the constitution. In contemporary American society, many White Americans feel that they need to have guns to protect themselves against Black Americans.
3. Unlike most other democratic countries, the United States has this peculiar institution called states rights. In many cases, the rights of states supersede those of the federal government. For example, the state of Georgia can make a law stating that it is illegal to bring a glass of water to someone standing in line to vote, and currently there is nothing that the federal government can do about it. In the absence of strong federal gun controls, the states pass more “gun rights.”
4. The U.S. Senate favors small and southern states, and those are the states in which gun rights are most deeply cherished. This makes it very difficult to pass meaningful gun control legislation. It might be possible without a filibuster, but that arcane rule is cherished by senators from small states, rural states and southern states.

The United States did not come close to writing a constitution in a time before guns and bullets were invented. The first guns were invented in China in the 10^th Century. Michael Moore was not trying to point out that we almost avoided having the Second Amendment in our Constitution. What he meant is that it is significantly different than any other part of the constitution, and had guns not existed, we would have found a way to agree on the constitution.

It’s one of those “What ifs ….” that keep us thinking. It’s interesting talk, but regrettably, only academic now. Barring some sort of unforeseen circumstances, we’re going to have to live with lightly regulated guns for some time which means that we’ll have more Uvaldes and other mass shootings. The “thoughts and prayers” come easily; meaningful gun control is stymied by the oddity of having the Second Amendment in our Constitution.

The post What if Guns and Bullets Had Not Been Invented Before the Constitution Was Written? appeared first on Occasional Planet.

The Political Playbook of Tuesday, January 25, 2022 includes a lengthy description of how Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s leadership strategy has led to considerable simmering among Democrats.

Reporters Rachel Bade and Tara Palmeri spoke with a half-dozen Democratic staffers in both houses of Congress Monday night and heard frustration with how Schumer and other Democratic leaders are treating Senators Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ).

Apparently, Manchin continues to be furious at how he has been treated. Other Democrats are now upset with Schumer, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and others for having stated the obvious. For either the Build Back Better Act or the Voting Rights Acts to have passed, the votes of both Manchin and Sinema were needed. Obviously, that didn’t happen with the voting rights proposals and a Senate vote on BBB has been indefinitely postponed because of a lack of affirmative votes.

In an earlier iteration of Manchin saying that he would not vote to change the filibuster rule, he implied on Fox News Sunday that the Biden Administration was not working respectfully enough with him. It may indeed be possible that some staff members in the White House were expressing their exasperation with Manchin either to him directly or to outside sources.

Manchin and Sinema are entitled to view issues differently than the other 48 members of the Senate Democratic caucus. What they don’t have a right to do is to get upset with other Democrats who have increasingly been frustrated with them.

Had Manchin and Sinema joined the other 48:

1. Two voting rights bills would have passed and the discriminatory election and voting laws that Republicans have passed in nineteen states would either be negated, or involved in court cases, the types of which the federal government has traditionally won.
2. The Build Back Better Act would be law meaning child tax credits would be expanded, there would be child care subsidies, free universal preschool, health care subsidies, paid family leave and a host of other provisions that would help families and bring the American economic and social safety web closer to those in other industrial countries.
3. President Biden’s popularity would be much higher and the prospects for Democrats in the 2022 and 2024 elections would be much better.

Who could blame Democrats for being upset that these two senators have greatly damaged their party politically, and deprived the country of perhaps the two most necessary pieces of legislation currently being considered?

Manchin could whine and pout about how he is being treated, but other Democrats were not entitled to express frustration over how two senators are using antiquated rules to hold the country hostage.

Strictly speaking, the reporting in of Bade and Palmeri is accurate. Democrats other than Manchin and Sinema are expressing their frustration with other Democrats. But the reporting is not in context, with inclusion of how Manchin and Sinema set off a chain of bad feelings within the party.

It seems that the two wayward Democratic senators have the same privilege as Mitch McConnell and essentially the entire Republican caucus. They can speak of hurt feelings as if they are righteous victims and have been unjustly attacked, while other Democrats cannot say “ouch” for fear of being called wimps. The press needs to take a leading role in not perpetuating this unfair and false equivalency.

The post Who on Capitol Hill is Allowed to Whine appeared first on Occasional Planet.

What would you rather have in America’s schools; high test scores or students who are empathetic and have strong critical thinking skills? What good is it for an individual, or for American society, if students test well but also think that Donald Trump won the 2020 presidential election? What good is it if they have no interest in providing a strong safety net so that no Americans need to live in poverty?

Today, a full three-quarters of Trump voters falsely believe the election was “rigged and stolen, according to a new Yahoo News/YouGov poll – more than ever before. Just 9 percent, meanwhile, think Biden “won fair and square” – down from 13 percent a year ago. This is clearly stinkin’ thinkin.’ High school graduates have spent more than ten thousand hours in class, and they still cannot recognize the obvious. They are so jaded that they fall for the most unlikely of conspiracy theories.

It’s been a dozen years since we first heard of the Tea Party. They were the predecessor to MAGA. One of their strategies was to expand right-wing influence over what is taught in schools by fielding more candidates to run for school boards. Pandering to voters through fear, Tea Partiers and their allies won a number of elections and began the process of censoring more of what was being taught in schools. In the wake of the January 6, 2021 insurrection, the right has greatly increased its efforts to win school board seats and further suppress free and open thinking in our schools. New books are being added to the “banned list” such as To Kill a Mockingbird and The Hate U Give.

New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg recently wrote:

There is a quote from Ralph Reed that I often return to when trying to understand how the right builds political power. “I would rather have a thousand school board members than one president and no school board members,” the former leader of the Christian Coalition said in 1996. School board elections are a great training ground for national activism. They can pull parents, particularly mothers, into politics around intensely emotional issues, building a thriving grass roots and keeping it mobilized.

Recently the right has created a straw horse in demanding that “Critical Race Theory” not be taught in our schools. First, there are hardly any schools teaching it. That does not stop people on the right from winning school board and other legislative seats because they convince many voters that white people are being denigrated. Second, what precipitated the modern opposition to teaching CRT was the 1619 Project published by the New York Times and the Pulitzer Center. The project is not about theory; it is about history. Specifically, it addresses the origins of slavery in the United States and the impact that slavery has had for over 400 years on the lives of African-Americans, and other Americans. Our history has always been heavily weighted towards teaching about white people. If we are going to become better equipped to live in the multi-cultural society that we have, it is essential for all students to learn the history of African-Americans, Hispanic-Americans, Asian- Americans, Native Americans and other minorities are included. Let us not forget that by 2045, we will be a minority-majority nation.

So, what can non-MAGA people do to support more open learning in our schools? The first thing is to recognize that our schools are in crisis, and have been for some time. The evidence is clear; more than seventy million adults voted for Donald Trump in 2020. Plainly their education was short on important values like critical thinking and empathy.

Part of the problem with our schools is that they suffer from a major problem in our body politic. I’m talking about “fake news,” which almost entirely comes from the right. Our schools unwittingly teach fake news. They do a poor job of helping students recognize fake news when they hear or see it.

Similar to our political system and our society in general, our schools are very competitive with one another. The conflicts are basically fought on two levels, substance and image. This is a central reason why so many students, and adults, have skewed views of the world.

Examples of substance being taught in schools would include teaching children how to read, providing students with opportunities to take science labs, encouraging students in social studies class to play a role in a model UN or a mock legislature, or providing students with real opportunities to be involved in school decision-making.

Unfortunately, much of school is about image and bragging rights. A big part of that is the obsession with standardized tests. Like sport contests, standardized tests are measured with numbers. Those numbers can be compared, and that means they provide platforms on which schools can compete, just like football or basketball. Students are under enormous pressure to do well on standardized tests in order to make their teachers look good, their school look good, their district look good, and their state look good.

This means that many teachers are teaching to the test. Much of that involves memorization. So, students are presumably learning how to do well on tests, both those that are standardized and those that are part of their regular classroom studies.

Teachers are also under enormous pressure to teach the state-mandated curriculum. It gets to the point where many teachers become robotic in what they present to students. Spontaneity, which is another way of saying “being tuned into the moment,” becomes more and more rare. If teachers are not questioning what they are “supposed” to do, how can students learn to peacefully question teachers, and others who are in positions of authority?

This fits right in with the right-wing agenda. Follow-orders; rarely question; and always remember that you are competing against others, particularly those from “elsewhere.”

So, how can we change schools so that students develop much more in the way of critical thinking skills and empathy? Ultimately, we need teachers who are more human, or who already are human and are not afraid to show their humanity. We need teachers who are willing to be like quarterbacks, or coaches. They need to call the right plays, and often that means calling an audible (making a last-second change). What makes teaching much more difficult than running an offense or a defense in football is that what might be a good play for one student may not be a good one for another student. Teachers need to do the best that they can at making sure that they are providing the best information and techniques for each student in their classes.

So how do we do this? Here are several suggestions:

1. Reallocate resources so that technology can do more, freeing teachers to have more time. Anyone who has taught knows that teaching is far more than a full-time job. Most teachers have several hours of work to do each evening. We need to cut back on the “make-work” that consumes many teachers, and also give teachers shorter working hours. The stress that teachers experience “trickles down” to students, sometimes like a shower. We need to reduce the amount of stress and tension in our schools.
2. If we want students to become better critical thinkers and to develop more empathy, these are two of the most important qualities that we need in our teachers. But this begs several important questions:
   1. What percentage of today’s teachers are good critical thinkers?
   2. What percentage of today’s teachers feel and express empathy to their students?
   3. If these percentages are lower than what we would want, then does it have anything to do with the ways in which we teach teachers?

So much of what teachers learn in education school is so prescribed and top-down. Over time, this squeezes some of the humanity out of students who will become teachers.

Additionally, it takes a certain type of person to decide to major in education and take classes with rigid curricula. This person is often someone who is comfortable with top-down decisions and may not value autonomy and creativity as much as others.

When they finally become teachers, combine the rigidity of their training with the pressure that parents, administrators, teachers and students all feel to achieve to the max, and you have a very oppressive environment.

We need to find ways for the nation’s best and brightest, and also most empathetic to become teachers. This means looking for individuals who will bring a maximum amount of empathy and critical thinking to the classroom, regardless of what training they have had.

This is not easy. But now is an excellent time to ramp up this movement. We have a tremendous shortage of teachers and districts are now loosening their certification requirements. If you are a person who thinks that you can humanize learning for students, and make them less likely to wind up as Tea Party or MAGA members, then it is a good time to step forward. We need teachers who are civil and civic-minded to help avoid civil war.

The post Changing Our Schools is Vital to Our National Healing appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Being a Republican in Congress is a lot easier than being a Democrat. That’s because there are very few things that Republicans have or want to do. Most Democrats have full plates in front of them as they want to reform our society so that government provides a strong and secure safety net for all of us, particularly those most at risk. If we reach a point of gridlock, of stalemate, it is the right that wins, because if nothing happens, that is exactly what they want.

In the wake of the January 6, 2021 insurrection and other rebellious acts from the right, there is increasing talk of a new American civil war. What shape it might take is open to all kinds of interpretation. It certainly would not be like America’s first civil war, or even a feared possible upcoming war between Russia and Ukraine.

That does not mean there would not be violence. The January 6 insurrection resulted in the deaths of five individuals and the injuring of hundreds. The Right certainly does not hesitate to use threats of violence against those with whom they merely disagree.

For example, Fox News anchor Jesse Watters recently told a group of conservatives to “ambush” Dr. Anthony Fauci with questions and “go in for kill shot.” Fox News has not reprimanded Watters; in fact, they have not said a word about his using their platform to threaten to kill someone. Fox did the same things with correspondent Lara Logan who compared Fauci to the Nazi doctor Joseph Mengele (also included in the clip below).

As we approach the end of 2021, the Washington Post reports “Inside the nonstop pressure campaign by Trump allies to get election officials to revisit the 2020 vote.” The Big Lie continues more than thirteen months after the 2020 safe, secure and democratic elections.

The fallout has spread from the six states where Trump sought to overturn the outcome in 2020 to deep-red places such as Idaho, where officials recently hand-recounted ballots in three counties to refute claims of vote-flipping, and Oklahoma, where state officials commissioned an investigation to counter allegations that voting machines were hacked.

The important point in the article is that the Trumpsters are continuing their efforts to intimidate Republican-controlled state legislatures to undo the past and change the future so that free and fair elections become something of the past.

A “civil war” could include numerous other acts of aggression by the right including the intimidation of teachers, vigilante forces, Congressional action to not raise the debt limit and not fund necessary programs that are the framework of our social and economic safety net.

COVID has already played a key role in dividing the nation and threatens to do so for some time to come. Samuel Goldman in The Week suggests:

I’m not the first to compare the way of thinking about the pandemic still dominant in official statements to the military disasters of the last two decades. My colleague Noah Millman and the journalist Daniel McCarthy have both noted parallels between the interminable conflicts that followed 9/11 and the “war” on COVID. “Like the old Afghan government,” Millman wrote, “those in charge of public health have little practical ability to shape events. But they speak as if they are sovereign and in control.”

It is hard to imagine what aggressive actions those on the Left may take. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, extremists far to the left of the Democratic Party engaged in bombing attacks on both public and private buildings. But there was very little coordinated about that and as it became apparent that the bombings were counter-productive, the bombings essentially ended.

Regrettably, there is very little that the Right needs to do now to win a “civil war.” The current stalemate allows those on the Right to generally get their way.

Progressive legislation will not pass. The right to safe and legal abortions will be ended in most states when Roe v. Wade is overturned, elections will be rigged to favor far-right Republicans, COVID and other infectious diseases will continue to run rampant, gun-control measures will not be passed, climate change legislation will stall and those who do not agree with those on the Right will live in fear of violence.

The only real way that progressives and others can prevent an escalated “civil war” is by winning big in elections and having protections against Republican electoral manipulation. This means that the U.S. Senate is going to have to pass the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act in order to maximize the chances of free and fair elections. Additionally, Democrats are going to have to figure out a way to elevate the popularity of Joe Biden and improve their chances of winning 2022 Congressional races. Perhaps a backlash to the Supreme Court overturning Roe v Wade would help, but that seems unlikely.

The stakes are truly high for progressives; we need to do all that we legally and non-violently can do.

The post Why A “Civil War” Would Be So Hard for Progressives to “Win” appeared first on Occasional Planet.

An important story reported earlier this month (November, 2021), features the impact of climate change on the children of southern Madagascar. This is a report primarily about famine caused by climate change, not war, economic oppression or pestilence. Regrettably, the story also includes more than a trace of self-congratulations from and by ABC News Anchor David Muir.

Those of us who don’t have a phobic distaste for modern science recognize that climate change is causing world-wide land use change. Coastal communities are threatened by rising seas. Once fertile farmland is lying fallow because insufficient rain falls. Five-hundred-year floods are occurring one a decade, not twice a millennium.

It is interesting how in the United States and most other industrialized countries, increasing emphasis is placed on rebuilding and expanding its built infrastructure. When it comes to roads and bridges, an important question is largely going unasked. Where do these ribbons of concrete take us, and do their paths take into consideration how our land is changing due to climate change.

For instance, the metropolitan area of Houston, TX has been battered over the past ten years by hurricanes. Isaac devastated Texas’ Gulf Coast in August, 2012. Hurricane Harvey struck in August, 2017 and Hurricane Laura in August, 2020. Despite some enlightened leadership in the area with County Judge [Supervisor, Harris County] Lina Hidalgo and Mayor Sylvester Turner, the private sector seems to believe that nothing bad can happen again for another 500 years, and they rebuild in the areas that have been flooded and destroyed. They are aided by state-wide science deniers like Governor Greg Abbott and Senator Ted Cruz.

People who are homeless or starving are not the only displaced people in the world. The world’s population continues to grow, and that puts people in tighter confines with one another. We like to believe that we live in nation-states, but perhaps our second tightest bond to family is our tribes. And as the global population expands and arable land compresses, more tribes are running up against other tribes – ones whose company they would prefer not to keep.

The result is more war and violence. It may be cloaked under the guise of religious differences, or political differences, or economic disparities. In any event, it is more and more difficult for peace-loving people to find areas to live where they are not threatened by other groups of humans.

When people who don’t want to be neighbors are cramped together, anthropologically we know that peaceful resolution of problems is a hard sell. More often than not, violence is the likely modus operandi of settlement. Conflict and violence lead to displacement. Necessary relocation means refugees – often millions of people moving, often by foot, to new places where they think that they will be physically safe and will be able to find gainful work.

Frequently this traffic rapidly changes directions. In the early 2000s when the U.S. invaded Iraq for no particular reason, millions of Iraqi civilians headed west to Syria where they were welcome in many small villages. But just a few years later, Iraq was more at peace while Syria was engaged in a gruesome civil war with a external counties such as the United States and Russia adding to the mayhem and destruction. By the mid two-thousand-teens, millions of Syrians were fleeing their country, often heading east to Iraq to a land that is similar to their own.

However, in both incarnations of this Middle East refugees-in-motion, many moved toward what they saw as a better life in Europe. In some places, and in cases where the numbers were not too large, the migration to Europe worked, especially since the E.U. was looking for people to fill low-paying jobs. But as the numbers jumped into the millions, the inevitable happened. Refugees were seen as foreigners who were outsiders to their staid communities, and new conflict was born.

Just as the world needs to create new ways to find homes for local, regional, or global refugees, it needs to do the same for those who are displaced by politics as well as climate. These problems become only more severe as population growth creates more crunches. So, what options to people of the world have?

There are basically two ways to find venues where displaced people can live:

1. Find existing land on our planet which currently is largely uninhabited and has the natural resources to sustain a significant number of human beings.
2. Where arable and otherwise resourceful land does not exist, humanity needs to find ways to create new land masses where refugees can move and comfortably live, at least until they are able to find another part of the planet on which to live.

China has built three man-made islands in the South China Sea for military bases against Taiwan and other potential adversaries in the Pacific Rim. Reaction to their construction has ranged from enormous fear of expansion to mockery because there are reports that the islands are falling apart and sinking into the ocean.

Regardless, humankind, under the aegis of the United Nations, needs to find largely unoccupied places for refugees to live. These new homes can be temporary; to give political or climate factors time to reverse themselves. Equally plausible is for them to become “permanent” homes so that they can be free from the strife that caused them such misery in their most recent homes.

Countries large in area such as the United States, Canada, Russia, Greenland, Australia, and others have room for refugee settlements. China is so residentially over-built that it literally has high-rise cities that are vacant and capable of housing literally millions of people.

However, virtually all land on Planet Earth is accounted for. It is either owned by a private enterprise or the government is holding it for recreation, environmental protection or future development.

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For the past year, I’ve sat through a lot of anxious liberal pearl clutching commentary about the danger of a stolen Presidential election. “This time was practice, next time they’ll get away with it” or some variation of this is usually what I run into the most. What it ignores is the fact that we don’t have to wonder what would happen if the right decided to steal a Presidential election in this country. It literally already happened, just over 20 years ago when George W. Bush was selected President. That year Bush and Vice President Al Gore contested the perpetual battleground state of Florida and though many years have passed since, the details of that campaign are still shocking to many. The Governor of Florida was John Ellis Bush (Jeb!), the brother of the Republican candidate. The Secretary of State, Florida’s Chief Election Official, was Katherine Harris who also served as campaign surrogate for Bush. Then of course there was a conveniently badly designed ballot that likely caused perhaps more than 1,000 accidental votes for Pat Buchanan that were meant for Al Gore.

This should’ve been an easy decision for the Supreme Court. The recount should have continued, and the final results honored, which several audits after the fact suggested a narrow Gore victory. However, the court stopped the recount and Bush became President not by his 537 vote margin in Florida but by a 1 vote margin in the Supreme Court. The justices who eventually sided with Bush in Bush v. Gore were either appointed by Bush’s father or another Republican President. George W. Bush went on to launch an illegal war in Iraq that killed hundreds of thousands of civilians and displaced millions more.

This week, the Supreme Court will hear arguments in Whole Women’s Health v. Jackson. This will almost inevitably decide the fate of Roe v. Wade, likely ending with the partial or complete overturning of that decision. Legal abortion will not be the only lightning rod the court touches in the next term, and if the conservative bona fides of the majority are to be believed then we are about to enter a radically more conservative judicial environment than at any point in living memory. However, that doesn’t need to be true, the solution is right in front of us: Expand the Supreme Court.

This has largely disappeared from political discourse, but it is an idea worth returning to, especially when one considers that the most prominent argument of the opposition doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.

“Republicans will pack the Court when they win again.”

This underestimates the difficulty Republicans might have winning elections in a world with full enforcement of the voting rights act, no Citizens United, and the prohibition of hyper partisan redistricting. This is a foregone conclusion in an expanded Supreme Court with a liberal majority. Can Republicans win an election on a level playing field? Not with their current coalition, in fact expanding the Supreme Court may be the only way to get the GOP to rethink its Trump orientation which has never achieved majority support. Some people might argue that there would be voter backlash to expanding the court, I would expect as much as well. However, there would perhaps be a more engaged and less apathetic voter base for Democrats, if they saw the party leave everything on the field to defend the progressive gains of the last half century instead of accepting defeat.

Furthermore, if the Democrats add 6 seats to achieve a 9-6 majority and Republicans add 4 more to get a 10-9 majority that’s a good thing. If your goal is fewer knee-jerk reactionary decisions, more judges is better. If a majority decision needs to find 10 votes instead of 5, they necessarily will end up a little more moderate to hold the coalition together. We saw this happen in the 5-4 court where a number of decisions had to become more moderate for Chief Justice Roberts or Justice Kennedy to deliver the swing vote.

There’s also the question of “So what if they do?”. What if Republicans win, and invalidate the changes to the court and repack it? What if the court becomes a political tool? I only have two questions, how is a 10-9 conservative majority any worse than a 6-3 one and isn’t the Court already a plainly political tool? Our current reality is we lose, a lot, on issues of monumental importance. Institutionally we are fucked, to say it politely, by the Senate. There is a bias built in to favor rural representation and Democrats, partly due to their own failures and partly due to trends outside of their control, will not be competitive with white rural voters for decades save for a major realignment. Republicans appear to be at worst even money to recapture both chambers of Congress next November. Should they retake the Senate, it is more likely than not that they would expand that margin in 2024 when West Virginia, Ohio, and Montana will have their Democratic Senators for the first time face the high turnout Republican electorate of a Presidential year. This could mean a decade, but perhaps longer, of Republican dominance in Congress. If we don’t level the playing field now, the chance could be lost.

I’d refer anyone to the legal scholar Erwin Chemerinsky who wrote “The Case Against the Supreme Court”. He has said,

“Throughout history the court has overwhelmingly favored corporate power over employees, consumers, and the public, and has favored government power over individuals’ rights…I think, too, that the Court’s role has never been clearly enough defined in terms of enforcing the Constitution, protecting minorities, resisting the passions of the majority in times of crisis.”

The Warren Court was an aberration, it is not a coincidence that the vast majority of decisions that we have held up as shining examples of the wisdom of American jurisprudence are from that era. The Court traditionally has not been a friend to democracy, civil liberties, human rights, or really in a number of ways the constitution. This is all to say, the Court as an institution is something badly in need of fixing and it’s shocking that it hasn’t happened sooner.

Of course, this conversation is purely academic. There are not enough votes in the Senate to give the elderly access to dental care, it’s too expensive and after all there is a war machine that needs financing. So, it’s doubtful that there’s enough votes to even have a serious discussion on Court expansion. It’s not just Joe Manchin, it’s also President Biden and most third way types in Congress who balk at expanding the Court. Therefore, we remain on this roller coaster with the operator seemingly unaware that the ride has no brakes and no track after the fall.

The post Expand the Court appeared first on Occasional Planet.

January 20^th is just nine days from the writing of this post. That day and the inauguration of President Joe Biden and Vice-President Kamala Harris cannot come soon enough. A Democratically controlled Senate cannot come soon enough.

For now, however, take a deep breath. Try to stay calm and hope that the days between now and the inauguration won’t spew forth anything more shocking than what we’ve already experienced in the past four years. The list of shocks and insults to the American soul is long and shameful: The daily onslaught of self-serving lies that has cost America its reputation and Americans their lives and livelihoods. The lawlessness. The denials, institutional chaos, and irresponsibility in the face of a deadly pandemic. And, of course, the violent, tragically predictable result of the accumulation of all of those lies and deceptions on the never-to-be-forgotten storming on January 6 of the Capitol Building and the devastating loss of life on that day.

But the day before inauguration day, a less publicized, but equally important event, will take place. The January 19^th event is intended to begin a process to right the wrongs of the Trump administration’s depraved abdication of its solemn duty to recognize and remember those Americans who died of COVID-19 on their watch and to acknowledge the grief of their loved ones.

On January 19^th, at 5:30pm (ET), the Presidential Inaugural Committee will host a memorial for the 373,000 Americans who have lost their lives in the pandemic. In recognition of the need not just for a national memorial but also for individuals, families, and neighbors to remember together the lives lost closer to home in their own communities, the Inaugural Committee is inviting cities and towns and neighborhoods across the country to light up buildings and ring bells in “a moment of unity and remembrance.”

Here is how Presidential Inaugural Committee Communications Director Pili Tobar describes the event: “. . . in the midst of a pandemic – when so many Americans are grieving the loss of family, friends, and neighbors – it is important that we honor those who have died, reflect on what has been one of the more challenging periods in the nation’s history, and renew our commitment to coming together to end the pandemic and rebuild our nation.”

Presidential Inaugural Committee Announces Memorial and Nationwide Tribute to Remember and Honor the Lives Lost to COVID-19

01/05/2021

Today, the Presidential Inaugural Committee (PIC) announced that it will host a memorial to remember and honor the lives lost to COVID-19 in cities and towns across the country on January 19, 2021, at 5:30 p.m. ET. A Washington, D.C. ceremony will feature a lighting around the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. It will be the first-ever lighting around the Reflecting Pool to memorialize American lives lost.

PIC is inviting cities and towns around the country to join Washington, D.C. in illuminating buildings and ringing church bells at 5:30 p.m. ET in a national moment of unity and remembrance.

The post Biden announces Jan. 19, 2021 national memorial for COVID victims appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Many are familiar with Isaac Newton’s Third Law of Physics: “For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.”

Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin and three of his colleagues killed an innocent man, George Floyd, on Monday, May 25. It’s hard to find any persons besides Donald Trump and William Barr who won’t say that the officers’ acts were criminal.

Most Americans were truly pissed off and hundreds of thousands, if not millions, have taken to the streets over the past two weeks. Ninety-nine percent of them have been peaceful, and it’s understandable why the protestors have so demonstrably shown their frustration and their suggestions for change.

But these protests have gone on far longer than most other occasions of citizens taking to the streets, and I’m fearing that there will be an equal and opposite reaction to the fortnight of demonstrable marches. When we’re talking about human behavior, as opposed to physics, the reaction does not have to be exactly equal and opposite. But it will be characterized by significant force and will run counter to the movement that spawned it.

Over the past several days, a new demand / request / talking point, whatever you want to call it, from some of the protestors has been to defund the police. Such a contention makes emotional sense in light of what Chauvin and numerous other white police officers have done, not only recently, but through the entirety of American history, in arbitrarily dispensing violence against African-Americans, in many cases resulting in the deaths of innocent victims. Almost without exception, police officers have gotten away with their misconduct without any penalties or repercussions.

But this does not mean that we should defund police departments. Here are a few reasons why I think that would be a very counter-productive move.

1. There are many police officers who do their jobs well, serve the public well, and should not be penalized.
2. There are many police departments that have transitioned into community policing and by and large have developed practices that honor human rights.
3. Police departments are a lot like teachers in schools. You get what you pay for. We have a lot of police officers who go into the profession for the wrong reasons and are essentially clueless about what is needed if you are a frontline official connecting government with the citizenry. We need to raise the pay of police officers, perhaps double or triple it, in order to bring a whole new breed of individuals into the profession. We need to make policing attractive to individuals who are not by nature belligerent. We need men and women who know the skills of conflict resolution and do not consider the public to be their enemy.
4. It is much easier to hire “the right people” and give them necessary training than to hire those who are less than ideal and then have to spend the time, money and energy to try to train them, with questionable probability of success.
5. Some have suggested diminishing the amount of money that goes into the funding of police departments and transfer that money into providing social services. Again, this might sound right, but I doubt that it’s good policy. First, it would leave us with poorly paid police officers who would not be skilled in conflict resolution, perhaps the most important quality needed in a law enforcement officer. Second, it would set up new social service bureaucracies. That means bringing in universities, administrative agencies, professional this and thats with enormous duplication and inefficiencies. Let’s focus on bringing the best people possible into policing.

We have written before about making police officers into law-enforcement social workers. This can only happen If we get the best and the brightest into the profession. That won’t happen without paying them well. So, let’s not defund police; let’s fund law-enforcement social workers. One other thought. Every time you piss off the police, you give Donald Trump more votes. Is that what you really want?

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In 1967, President Lyndon Johnson sent the United States Army into Detroit to try to calm the streets after rioting and police conduct had resulted in the deaths of forty-three. Fifty three years later, the governmental approach to civil unrest continues to be to send in armed police officers and national guardsmen.

It did not work well in Ferguson, MO in 2014; it certainly is not working well now in Minneapolis and a host of other cities. Are there other ways to deal with citizen concerns besides massive displays of armed power?

Here are a few suggestions as to how authorities in Minneapolis could have, and hopefully still can, try to communicate an understanding of the frustration of the citizens. Beyond that, the police forces still have time to try to make amends.

1. Immediately acknowledge that the cops messed up. Police officers on the street could acknowledge this. If they really wanted to get the point across clearly, some police officers could carry signs saying, “We messed up,” or perhaps even better, “We screwed up,” or “We fucked up.” It’s not what the community would expect to see, but these are not ordinary times. As Mark Twain said, “When everything else fails, try telling the truth.”
2. Instead of having police on the front lines opposing citizens, the municipal leaders could call out other public employees who are more skilled in conflict resolution. Imagine if the city sent hundreds or thousands of public school teachers, social workers, public defenders and others to talk openly with the protesters. They could hear out what the protesters had to say, document it, and commit themselves to passing along the concerns of the citizens to “higher-ups.” In the category of “truth in advertising,” we have to acknowledge that not all teachers, social workers and public defenders are terribly skilled in conflict resolution, but they would be a good group with whom to start.
3. Find ways to organize community truth and reconciliation gatherings. These would be on-going. Minneapolis seems to have an outstanding mayor in Jacob Frey and an excellent Chief of Police in Medaria Arradondo. Begin scheduling meetings now, and be sure to include on the beat police officers. Everyone would have to follow rules of civility.
4. Being somewhat facetious, but what the hell, the Minnesota Vikings could sign Colin Kaepernick to compete with Kirk Cousins to be quarterback. At the very least, Kaepernick could teach police officers the proper way to take a knee. As silly as this may sound, it could be an act of good faith within the community and would probably give the Vikings what they need to become a Super Bowl contender.

We have previously written about police officers also being trained to be social workers. Police are often the first level of government with whom citizens come in contact when there is discord. They should be the best possible representatives of the state. Their jobs put them in positions to be the first line of justice when troubles occur within our society.

Yes, this includes investigating crimes and apprehending those who have broken laws, but it also involves delicate situations such as domestic disputes or daily occurrences such as truancy.  When police interact with citizens who have broken laws, or people who are in distress, they need to be able to address the immediate emotional needs of the people. Additionally, they must be equipped with a wide range of resources that can direct citizens to agencies that can help them with their areas of frustration. In the case of domestic disputes, police should be able to direct parties to effective counseling, the type that can be immediately available. If a person has an alcohol or other drug addiction, police should be able to direct them to rehab programs. If a person just lost his or her job, police know how to help citizens effectively look for new job opportunities.

But, as we all know, most of today’s police are not trained that way. This is why they are perhaps among the least equipped people in our society to deal with the current justified anger on the streets of Minneapolis and other American cities. So, while putting alternate personnel besides police officers on the streets during this current outrage over what four police officers willingly did to George Floyd, the police in Minneapolis and every other community in our country must have their jobs radically redefined. Those who are currently police officer who have to quickly learn to adapt, or they will justifiably be replaced by many others who have the requisite skills to know far more about justice than Officer Derek Chauvin and his three colleagues.

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It never occurred to me until recently that the Democrats might have a candidate who generates something akin to the blind loyalty of Trump supporters.

Yes, I knew that Bernie supporters were fervent, but I did not fully sense how many in his base follow the mantra of “Bernie or Bust.” My awareness of this increased in recent days, first when my thirty-six-year-old niece said that she had switched from Elizabeth to Bernie because she was so impressed with the energy and commitment of her peers’ support of Bernie. It was not the transitory type that Elizabeth had, but rather more of the “to-the-very-end” type that Bernie has. Later, another relative told me that much of her life was on hold while she was immersed door-knocking for Bernie in her home state of California, which wisely this year moved its primary from June up to Super Tuesday (March 3).

It is hard to imagine Joe Biden generating deep loyalty and, as good as Pete Buttigieg might be, he seems to have a knack for saying things that gratuitously piss other people off. If Amy Klobuchar gets the momentum that she has earned and deserves, then she may too develop followers who will go to the mat for her.

But as things stand now, Bernie is the one Democrat who has something akin to a cult following, one in which it is virtually impossibly to pry away supporters. Does that sound familiar? Well yes, the fact that Donald Trump’s popularity with his base actually increased during the impeachment process shows two clear things: (1) it is virtually impossible to get his base to waver, and (2) these things called facts don’t mean a whole lot, if anything, to his base.

This is where there is a fundamental difference between the Bernie Cult and the Trump Cult. There is a rational foundation to why Bernie has such a strong following. We can see it in two dynamics:

1. 1. Bernie’s policies are based on reason and empathy. Trump’s are based on insecurity and fear. Bernie wants to finish the work on the social and economic safety net for Americans that Teddy Roosevelt began, his cousin Franklin Roosevelt institutionalized, and Lyndon Johnson expanded. But the United States is unlike other industrialized democracies because there are enough Americans who resent the idea of “security for all.” For an excellent explanation why, I suggest reading Nikole Hannah-Jones’ 1619 Project in the New York Times Magazine. In a nutshell, it is that many white Americans do not favor extending equality to people of color and other minorities. It might be helpful to watch a recent guest appearance of Hannah-Jones on the Daily Show with Trevor Noah.

1. Unlike Trump supporters, Bernie supporters will not give their candidate a blank check to do whatever he wants. While Trump is all over the map, Bernie is consistent, perhaps to a fault. What you see is what you get. In fact, what you see is essentially what you’ve seen from him for the past forty years, with the one exception of gun control, where in his early years he [had to] pander to his gun-loving Vermont constituents. Bernie’s supporters’ commitment extends beyond him personally and stretches to the concept of a fair and just society. If he should waver in his commitments, his base would begin to unravel. If Bernie was one percent as corrupt as Trump, he would offend many in his base, and they would likely leave the reservation.

Last Friday evening, Bill Maher said on “Real Time” that Donald Trump had just had his finest week (in terms of popularity). Maher and others are becoming more scared that the dreaded “four more years” might happen.

The conventional wisdom is that the Democratic Party does not have a candidate who can go toe-to-toe with Trump. I don’t believe that. I think that the intensity of Bernie’s base support gives him a far stronger foundation than other Democratic candidates. Should it become likely that he will win the nomination, the fervor of his support could grow exponentially. It will have to, because the nastiness of his opponents will also multiply. While I have my reservations about Bernie (I don’t like being yelled at), I still think that he is our best bet (along with possibly Klobuchar).

Jim Jones, David Koresh, Marshall Applewhite, these are the cult leaders who can scare anyone who has the ability to engage in rational thinking. Trump may not have reached their levels, but he’s scary and unhinged. But perhaps in this unique moment of 2020, we have a leader who has a semi-cult following who wants to truly improve the quality of life for Americans and all global citizens. It’s odd that things have developed this way, but for the time being, we may want to go with our “semi-cult leader,” Bernie.

This post is cross-published on the Political Introverts blog.

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